I did not get much of a sense of the poetry of Kim Nam-ju. It was, of course, unavailable. The few poems I did see were unpublished English translations of what seemed like youthful work. There was a description of a field, I remember, seen from a prison train, a sense of homesickness. Another poet who was in jail had been imprisoned for a violation of the publishing law because he’d printed a book-length poem about a farmers’ revolt in 1947 on an island on the southern tip of Korea. It was a sensitive subject. Korea, as you know, was occupied by the Japanese from 1905 to 1945, and no society is ruled by an invading power for that long without a lot of collaboration and bad conscience. I helped translate the peroration of his long poem, working in a hotel room between convention sessions with a very brave and intelligent Korean poet. “And so,” it began, as I recall, “the authorities who were the running dogs of Japanese imperialism / changed their uniforms and became the running dogs of American imperialism / I write this down in 1986 when the blood of Korea cries out / and the tears of Korea burst forth.” The language of the literal translation sounded to me like the slogans one saw on the banners at student demonstrations. My cotranslator had expressed no opinion about the quality of the poem. I asked him if its language was interesting in Korean. He smiled at me, nodding, as if he had an amused, distant recollection of the state of mind in which one might ask such a question, and then shrugged and said that the language had a certain vigor.
i love the way he writes this
Sugar is not native to North America. It’s indigenous to South Asia. The Arabs took it from India to the East and Spain in the eighth century and Christopher Columbus brought it from Spain to Hispaniola on his second voyage, where, as he thought it might, it flourished and quickly became a cash crop so valuable it made the settlement of the Americas a desirable proposition and brought the slave trade into being. The first slaves to arrive in the New World from the West African coast arrived in 1505 and they were brought here to work in sugarcane fields.
So there is a reason why one of the first great works of African-American nature writing is called Cane. Consider the working of the Atlantic trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ships set sail for the rich towns of West Africa with manufactured goods to sell or trade for slaves, and then sailed to the West Indies to sell or trade the slaves for sugar and molasses and rum, which they brought back to Europe and sold at an enormous profit. Consider this: sugar was such a valuable commodity that the French did not hesitate to trade all of French Canada to the English (the French foreign minister called it “a few acres of snow”) for the islands of Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia (whose later principal export was Derek Walcott), and Martinique (which in its turn exported Aimé Césaire to France). The first distillery of rum was built in Barbados in 1627, the first in Boston in 1667. Between 1870 and 1917, according to one economic historian, the most profitable industry in New York City was the refining of sugar. The Jesuits brought sugarcane to Louisiana in 1751. Today sugar contributes $2 billion a year to the Louisiana economy. Growers took cane to the Georgia wilderness, where some years later Jean Toomer had a job in the summer of 1921 at a segregated black school in a city called Sparta. The town got its name, according to the local story, because one of the Scots-Irish settlers said that the Creek people whom they drove from their lands in order to take possession of the place had fought like Spartans. Sparta throve as a center for cotton growing, but when the boll weevil came in 1910 and destroyed the cotton (one of the reasons for the urbanization of African-Americans), Sparta went broke and reverted to sugarcane, which is why Jean Toomer could write one poem that began “Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter is cold,” and another that begins “Wind is in the cane. Come along.” Well, here is all of it:
[...]
Consider this: in 1898 the United States, by seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, acquired control of one half of the world’s total sugarcane production. At that time the U.S. was also the world’s largest consumer of sugar, after Great Britain. It consumed two million tons of sugar a year and produced only three hundred thousand tons domestically in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia. The cost to the United States of its sugar imports was $80 million a year. Reason enough to spend fourteen years from 1899 to 1913 suppressing the Philippine independence movement, which resisted our best efforts to bring them democratic institutions. Wind is in the cane. Come along.
damn
I am sure the natural world gave some pleasure to the people who worked the land for those four hundred years. But we will not find in the written record what sunlight looked like to them in the leaves of trees along the Rappahannock River in the spring, or what the sky looked like when tens of thousands of migrating passenger pigeons flew over, or how woods sounded when pileated woodpeckers were as common as wild turkeys, or how the land had been altered by centuries of European agricultural practices. I’m sure that there was an immense practical and aesthetic, biological and pharmaceutical and ecological lore passed down in the oral tradition, from farmer to farmer, naturalist to naturalist, by people who were outdoors every day and observed the world as a respite from backbreaking labor, but it is invisible to us. There may have been an Emersonian nature out there or a Thoreauvian nature, of the kind that those New Englanders learned to see from reading English and German Romantic poetry, but in the tradition of the spirituals, “black nature” is slavery:
Don’t care where you bury my body,
My soul is going to shine.
So, of course, they show up in poetry. “I do not know much about gods,” wrote T. S. Eliot, who grew up along the Mississippi in Saint Louis, “but I think that the river is a strong brown god.” “Under various names,” wrote Czeslaw Milosz, who grew up in Lithuania along the Neman, “I have praised only you, rivers. You are milk and honey and love and death and dance.” I take this to be the first stirrings, even as our civilization did its damming and polluting, of the recognition of what we have lost and need to recover. When human populations were small enough, the cleansing flow of rivers and their fierce floods could create the illusion that our acts did not have consequences, that they vanished downstream. Now that is no longer true, and we are being compelled to reconsider the work of our hands. And, of course, we are too dependent on our own geographical origins to have lost our connection with them entirely.
[...] Through bailouts of one kind or another, ranging from bank rescues to central bank bond-buying programs, crisis managers have not only stabilized the system; they have exposed its unending dependence on state intervention. In doing so, they have fatally undermined the ideological premises of post–Cold War capitalism.
Almost twenty years ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the bard of neoliberalism, waxed lyrically about what he called “the Golden Straitjacket” — the “defining political-economic garment of this globalization era,” whose “original seamstress,” Margaret Thatcher, would “go down in history as one of the great revolutionaries of the second half of the twentieth century.” For a country to fit into the Golden Straitjacket required following the “golden rules”:
making the private sector the primary engine of its economic growth, maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability, shrinking the size of its state bureaucracy, maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus, eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods, removing restrictions on foreign investment, getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies, increasing exports, privatizing state-owned industries and utilities, deregulating capital markets, making its currency convertible, opening its industries, stock and bond markets to direct foreign ownership and investment, deregulating its economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible, eliminating government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks as much as possible, opening its banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition and allowing its citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension and mutual funds.
[...] They were right that prices were necessary, but wrong that this required inequality or private ownership of the means of production. In fact, socialism could do prices better.
The competitive equilibrium of the textbooks was a fantasy so far as capitalism was concerned. In actually existing capitalism, firms were not price-takers, but occupied positions of greater or lesser market power, which they sought to defend and exploit. The happy results of welfare economics could only be reached in a socialist economy, where prices were set directly as if perfect competition prevailed.
Instead of profit-maximizing firms groping their way blindly towards minimum average cost while aiming at profit maximization, socialist managers would be directed to aim directly at cost minimization, taking prices as parameters. Planners would raise or lower prices according to the balance between supply and demand. The imaginary auctioneer of Walrasian general equilibrium economics — entirely unrealistic as a description of real market processes — would be made real.
Polish economist Oskar Lange
[...] Where Keynes in the 1930s concentrated on dysfunctions of unemployment, Minsky in the 1970s focused on dysfunctions of inflation and asset price bubbles.
The underlying point is the same. There is no reason that the rational pursuit of individual self-interest on financial markets will generate a rational outcome for the system as a whole. There is no financial invisible hand.
But for Minsky in 1975, a stabilized capitalism would not be enough: the market also failed “in that it leads to a socially oppressive distribution of wealth.” A stable market may allocate efficiently, but efficiently much to the rich and efficiently little to the poor. “Acceptance of the market mechanism as the determinant of the direction of employment may rest upon a prior short-circuiting of the market distribution of income.”
Minsky’s Keynes saw this too and looked forward to the “euthanasia of the rentier,” but thought it would be all too easy. Keynes believed that returns to capital would diminish as wealth became abundant — in other words, there was a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Rewards for mere wealth-holding would dwindle away. In fact, this was what would call for the “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment”: the profit motive would dwindle away with it.
Alas, said Minsky, it was not so simple. Keynes thought capital would reach a saturation point because he mistakenly believed people would eventually be sated with commodities, at least commodities produced with substantial investments of capital. Rather than “philosophy and culture,” the rich continued to find new capital-intensive bundles of goods to desire and “their example filtered down to the not so rich.” Wave after wave of technological novelties hit the shops in the decades after World War II, while state contracts for capital-intensive weaponry continued to mount. There was no guarantee that capital would ever become abundant enough to wipe out returns from holding wealth. (This point, incidentally, was straight from Lange.)
Minsky thought that preferences might evolve in the direction of leisure and culture over gadgets and energy, but that this would be much more likely to happen in a society that was already egalitarian.
idk, might be useful
[...] For poor countries to access global institutional investors, they would need to reengineer their financial systems around securities markets on the terms of those investors, a Trojan horse for shadow banking and financial globalization.
On its 2017 launch, the World Bank euphemistically termed this strategy “Maximizing Finance for Development” (MFD). Its promotional video starts with simple arithmetic: ending extreme poverty and meeting the SDGs will cost $4 trillion a year; development aid is only $380 million a year, while remittances and philanthropy can generate another $1 trillion annually, leaving the world about $2.6 trillion short. Cue sad music and a bright solution outlined by an enthusiastic millennial voice: developing countries can offer $12 trillion in market opportunities to global institutional investors. These market opportunities include “transportation, infrastructure, health, welfare, education — everything actually.” Everything can become an asset class, as development is recast as an exercise in the privatization of public services to generate returns for global finance, and a “changed mindset” means abandoning any future hope for developmental states.
The World Bank video explains the process — formally termed the Cascade Approach — for turning everything into an asset class. The Cascade Approach offers a sequence of steps to diagnose why global investors are reluctant to finance development projects: first, identify reforms (regulatory or other policies) that improve the risk-return profile; if reforms are insufficient, then identify subsidies and guarantees to de-risk the project; if reforms, subsidies, and guarantees are still not enough, then opt for a fully public solution. This is a blueprint for promoting shadow markets in which bankable projects can be transformed into liquid securities ready for global institutional investors.
aaaahhh
California is also, however, the site of real people's homes. Real people's lives. Real lives begun as dreams and perhaps dribbled into boredom. Or unraveled into nightmares. Or fabulously, miraculously achieved. This schism - between what California represents in popular imagination and what it is, what it means to live there, to be from there - means Californians collide constantly with the rupture of existence.
How to dream the life we are already living.
the first para is kinda irrelevant but i like the subject
[...] Paradise is burning at the heart of the largest wildfires in California's long and storied history of fires. The thick smoke, which blankets the entire region for hundreds of miles, contains the particulate remains of Paradise. It occurs to me that in unison, millions of us are inhaling the sofas and ottomans of Paradise, the cars and gas stations of it, the trees and lawns, the clothes and detergent, the wedding pictures and divorce papers, the cadavers. [...]