Sam Harris

The idea, therefore, that religious faith is somehow a sacred human convention—distinguished, as it is, both by the extravagance of its claims and by the paucity of its evidence—is really too great a monstrosity to be appreciated in all its glory. Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds that it forms a kind of perverse, cultural singularity.

Gold History

Gold lost $100 on Friday last week, bringing the total losses from its 6th of September high of $1923.70 to 13% to close Friday at $1662.

For those of us who watch the gold market, its cause for excitement, and not alarm. Everytime gold loses 10% or more in a short timespan after a gain of more than 10% in an equally short timespan, it’s the precursor for a period of consolidation before the next new high is reached.

In 2008, gold lost better than 13% twice.

First was in March 08 on the Fed’s interest rate cut of .75% to 2.25%. It had touched a new high of $1033 the day before, and promptly fell back to $876. 

Then again when after hitting $936.30 on October 10th, 2008, it lost 27% of its value briefly when it touched $681 on October 24, 2008, before closing that day just under $730.

At the end of 2010, gold touched 1227.50, then lost 12.4% in a breathtaking drop to 1075.20 over a matter of two weeks.

The pattern then is that each time gold sprints to a new high, it miraculously gets kneecapped and the wind leaves it sails and for a while it muddles along until the next geo-economic oh shit moment happens and the battle hardened gold players come back.

Five year gold history

Markets got crushed last week as the main catalysts of economic collapse continued to converge and interact to eradicate risk capital appetite. Both the Fed and European Central Banks are exuding a “deer in the headlights” kind of paralysis. Their only strategy appears to be finding new ways to load up the countries wallowing in debt with more debt at lower rates but for longer durations. Meanwhile, the assets they demand as collateral are the only ones worth anything. Thus, the Greeks are getting raped,  and nothing worth anyting in Greece will be owned by Greeks.

That same fate will soon start crawling up the Euro ladder.

The S&P 500 extended the worst weekly drop for U.S. stocks since 2008, as both Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and President Obama worked hard to try and convince European leaders to attack the sovereign debt issue by printing more currency.

Thankfully, the Europeans are capable of understanding that flooding the economy with more debt through currency creation in the American style is a recipe for more disaster down the road. The banks who are the true government of the United States seems incapable of comprehending how offenisive it is to the rest of the world to have the nation upon whose currency everyone is choking wag their finger in our faces and chide us for not doing enough to mitigate the damage.

I think its safe to say the rest of the world is starting to looking beyond the looming collapse of the global economy at how we reinvent the system without the U.S. dollar and the Euro and Yen. In the meantime, the United States is going to keep trying to drag Europe into the same kind of un-repayable debt swamp the U.S. is in so that when the national defaults start happening, the misery will be shared, and every government will be on the same hot seat.

And its about to get a lot worse.

All risk capital is going to be heading for the sidelines, and its only the multi-billion dollar fixed income investors who are forced into buying flattened yield curve treasuries because they can’t afford to buy nothing.

Among metals and energy explorers and producers, the markets are in the midst of another seizure that will likely see the TSX Venture heading for below 1400 in the near term and even below 900 in the not quite-as-near term.

The hammering of commodities is a result of the same sequence of events that caused commodities to get nailed ahead of equities bottoming in 2008, as deteriorating asset values trigger margin calls and general fear on a grand scale, and so the things that still have value get sold at auction to pay for the things with no value, yet are owned on leverage.

This time, it’s the hedge funds and ETF’s that will lead the de-leveraging stampede, and at the end of the day, that’s good news for precious metals.

Gold lost $100 on Friday last week, bringing the total losses from its 6th of September high of $1923.70 to 13% to close Friday at $1662.

For those of us who watch the gold market, its cause for excitement, and not alarm. Everytime gold loses 10% or more in a short timespan after a gain of more than 10% in an equally short timespan, it’s the precursor for a period of consolidation before the next new high is reached.

In 2008, gold lost better than 13% twice.

First was in March 08 on the Fed’s interest rate cut of .75% to 2.25%. It had touched a new high of $1033 the day before, and promptly fell back to $876. 

Then again when after hitting $936.30 on October 10th, 2008, it lost 27% of its value briefly when it touched $681 on October 24, 2008, before closing that day just under $730.

At the end of 2010, gold touched 1227.50, then lost 12.4% in a breathtaking drop to 1075.20 over a matter of two weeks.

The pattern then is that each time gold sprints to a new high, it miraculously gets kneecapped and the wind leaves it sails and for a while it muddles along until the next geo-economic oh shit moment happens and the battle hardened gold players come back.

There’s a lot of people with short memories who scream gold bubble every time this pattern repeats itself, and they are the noise in the marketplace designed to frighten average investors away from gold. While its true that nothing goes up forever, gold is responding to the continuing manufacture of debt and currency that is the financial ruling classes favorite method of bankrupting ordinary working stiffs and taking away their homes cars and toys.

Gold will resume its upward march precisely until the debt and currency nations among the G7 default through hyperinflation, and when ultimately a new currency that is managed collectively by the most prosperous nations is put forward. So that time is nowhere in sight, though the continuing viability of the current system is clearly growing more doubtful.

Make no mistake. This is a resumption of the crash that started at the end of 2008. Be ready to buy gold and silver when those markets turn, which they certainly will. The next peak in the gold price should be above $2200, and if the pattern of the last decade holds, that should be within the next 12 months.

At this point, buy I’m buying no equities whatsoever, and look to gold and silver as the only long term safe haven asset class.

I’m James West, and this is the weekend edition of Midas Letter.

James West
MidasLetter.com

Faith

The interaction between dogma and practice is what religion is. But Christianity really does insist on practice as the core definition (which is why Oakeshott put religion into the "practical" category of human life, not the philosophical). The transformation of what were long deemed myths - Genesis, the Christmas stories, for example - into literal truths is a modern, neurotic development that, as time goes by, requires faith in obvious untruths (like creationism). And in the end, faith must be compatible with truth, or it is a coping mechanism, not a living, coherent belief.

So, yes, revelation matters. But not in every tiny literalist detail. And for faith to live, it must be practised. Fundamentalism, in this sense, is rationalism in religion, to purloin an Oakeshottian phrase. It has to be defeated before the real life of faith can recover and reach more people.

In addition to being banned from driving, Saudi women cannot travel without authorisation from their male guardians, and are also not allowed to vote in the municipal elections, the only public polls in the absolute monarchy.

When in public, they are obliged to cover from head to toe.

I wrote a science fiction film which I'll tell you about. It's ten after four in the afternoon, and everybody in the world mysteriously falls asleep. Just like that, they are driving cars, whatever they are doing, bang!, they got to sleep, the Russians, the Chinese, the Americans, and the whole world sleeps for exactly one hour, till ten after five, and they wake up at ten after five, and mysteriously upon awakening everybody in the world find themselves in the pants business.

Stay with us, 'cause it's brilliant.

Everybody is making cuffs and flies and cutting velvet, y'know, And a spaceship lands from another planet, and men get out with jackets and shirts and black socks - no trousers at all. They say: "Are the pants ready?" We say: "No. Could you come back thursday?". They say they must have them, 'cause they are going to a wedding, and we work dillingently and make pants constantly and they come to get them, and when they come to pick them up, they leave us with socks, hankerchiefs, pillowcases and soiled linnen, and they say: "Do it!", and the president of the United States goes on television and says that an alien superpower from outer space with superior intelligence is bringing us their laundry, and they are foiled, 'cause they travelled a hundred and seventeen million lightyears to pick it up, and they forget their ticket.

Twins

Twins and their implications are illuminated by a staff reporter for the New Yorker in this compelling, well-researched overview. Anchoring the reader in the historical mystique of twinship, Wright (Remembering Satan) documents humanity's low point in studying the special nature and possibilities of twins by recapping the horrific experiments of Josef Mengele. Wright proceeds to outline the newest research being conducted regarding twins, describing how separated-twin studies have thrown open the door on the nature-vs.-nurture debate. This is tricky ground fraught with political and social-policy land mines, but Wright does an admirable job of sorting through the differing research in a well-reasoned, clearheaded manner.

 He also provides a plethora of anecdotes of eerie similarities between twins separated at birth, such as personal habits and choices in spouses and careers. One notable British pair who were reunited later in life shared such puzzling traits and life events as frugality, marriage to men they met at local dances at age 16 and an avoidance of voting, except for a single instance when they worked as polling clerks. They even shared the habit of pushing their noses up, which they inexplicably called "squidging." Clear and compulsively readable, Wright's slim book sheds light on the allure of twinship:

 "The fantasized twin that we carry about in our minds is not only an idealized partner in the experience of being who we are, he is also a means of escape from the life we are living." Informative if brief, it shows us that even in identical lives there is no escape from the solitary experience of selfhood. For those seeking more information, Wright's extensive bibliography offers a treasure trove of leads. 
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA-Twin girls are given up for adoption. One is doted on, the center of her upper-middle-class family's existence, the other is subtly rejected by her mother, and is not the center of her lower-class family's life. Which would most likely be the one described as, "tense, demanding...clinging to her blanket...crying when left alone"? Surprisingly, the description aptly describes both girls.

 Wright presents the conflicting, and often confounding results from twin studies done primarily over the last 50 years. Most people have heard the stories of separated twins (and one well-publicized case of triplets) being reunited as adults only to find astonishing similarities in their habits and personalities.  The "nature versus nurture" debate has yet to be settled; if anything the studies add confusion to the mix.

 Wright offers summaries of research and the stories of researchers themselves; conclusions reached and discarded, and describes why twin studies fascinate us. The "shared" and "nonshared" environments of identical twins, and the differences in development that result from these experiences, offer new insight. The book serves up questions such as: "Do our genes determine our personality?" "How much, if any, effect do parents have on the personalities of their children?" These questions are not answered; readers are left to ponder the possibilities and draw their own conclusions.
Carol DeAngelo, Garcia Consulting Inc., EPA Headquarters, Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Buddhism

Those teachings today still describe a deeply personal inner journey that's spiritual, yes, but not religious. The Buddha wasn't a god -- he wasn't even a Buddhist. You're not required to have more faith in the Buddha than you do in yourself. His power lies in his teachings, which show us how to work with our minds to realize our full capacity for wakefulness and happiness. These teachings can help us satisfy our search for the truth -- our need to know who and what we really are.

Where do we find this truth? Although we can rely to some degree on the wisdom we find in books and on the advice of respected spiritual authorities, that's only the beginning. The journey to genuine truth begins when you discover a true question -- one that comes from the heart -- from your own life and experience. That question will lead to an answer that will lead to another question, and so on. That's how it goes on the spiritual path.

We start by bringing an open, inquisitive, and skeptical mind to whatever we hear, read, or see that presents itself as the truth. We examine it with reason and we put it to the test in meditation and in our lives. As we gain insight into the workings of the mind, we learn how to recognize and deal with our day-to-day experiences of thoughts and emotions. We uncover inaccurate and unhelpful habits of thinking and begin to correct them. Eventually we're able to overcome the confusion that makes it so hard to see the mind's naturally brilliant awareness. In this sense, the Buddha's teachings are a method of investigation, or a science of mind.

Religion, on the other hand, often provides us with answers to life's big questions from the start. We don't have to think about it too much. We learn what to think and believe and our job is to live up to that, not to question it. If we relate to the Buddha's teachings as final answers that don't need to be examined, then we're practicing Buddhism as a religion.

Buddhism

Mark Epstein, psychiatrist: "What he actually said was that life is blissful. There’s joy everywhere only we’re closed off to it. His teachings were actually about opening up the joyful or blissful nature of reality, but the bliss and the joy is in the transitoriness.

[Ajahn Chah said] 'Do you see this glass? I love this glass. It holds the water admirably. When I tap it, it has a lovely ring. When the sun shines on it, it reflects the light beautifully. But when the wind blows and the glass falls off the shelf and breaks or if my elbow hits it and it falls to the ground I say of course. But when I know that the glass is already broken every minute with it is precious.'"

His Holiness the Dalai Lama: "Everybody, every human being want happiness. And Buddha, he act like teacher. 'You are your own master. Future, everything depends on your own shoulder.' Buddha’s responsibility is just to show the path, that’s all"

Hirshfield: "The Buddha can shine out from the eyes of anybody. Inside the buffeting of an ordinary human life at any moment what the Buddha found, we can find"

Is Buddhism a Religion?

Sometimes it’s good to stay with a question, rather than latch onto any one answer. Is Buddhism religion? Well, it is, and it isn’t. No creator deity is mentioned here. So can there be religion without God? Theology, without theos? And since the Buddha clearly opposed the priestly caste, one might even make a case for his path being a religion of no religion.

Yet a religious dimension to the Way of the Buddha is quite real and vital. As the teachings were carried beyond the homelands, it formed the first world religion. Under King Ashoka’s reign in India, all creeds were welcome to practice side-by-side.

There’s nothing to convert to. Being a Jew, Christian, Muslim, pagan, atheist or unaffiliated doesn’t change the Buddha’s essential teaching: the nature of human suffering and liberation from needless suffering.

Union with the divine is best experienced rather than expressed through limited language. Such emphasis on first-hand experience rubs against the grain of abstract theology. So Buddhism can be seen as partaking of that broad deep river known as mysticism, which inherently undercuts any neat attempts at codification. Call it a practical mysticism, if you will. And today more and more people are becoming free-lance mystics.

Indeed, Buddhism can be seen within an open secret of the past two decades, in which its played no small part: namely, more and more people are finding personal connection to the sacred, lifted up out of and beyond the Sunday pews, made real for themselves in daily life. Sometimes this is called “spirituality” as distinct from “religion.” Yet is there a free-floating spirituality without some kind of container? Somehow the matrix of the Buddha’s teachings have remained intact for two and half millennia, to which we can thank the vehicle known as religion.

Well, then, since the religious front is not all cut and dry, might other categories be apt? Is it a philosophy? The Greeks had colonies in India since the time of the Buddha, so we can hear his voice resonating in the words of ancient Skeptic, Stoic, and Epicurean philosophers. In our time, his footprints can be traced in phenomenology (basing wisdom on the direct experience of one’s immediate lived world), with offshoots in existentialism and deconstruction.

The canon of Buddhist texts (Tripitaka) does provide a robust body of ethics, a cornerstone of classical philosophy. As for logic, Buddhist teacher Nagarjuna can run rings around Aristotle’s “either/or” — a Western template for dualism (subject vs object, self vs other). Western philosophy’s love of wisdom (philo + Sophia) thus alas often goes unrequited. The Buddha never ventured into the mind-body split which is central inWestern metaphysics (and theology). His is a physically embodied metaphysics, where body, and speech can function as one. And his concern is with practicalities, rather than free-floating metaphysical sophistries.

The Buddhist canon is also rich in teachings known as Abhidharma, with a deep, systematic psychology. Is Buddhism psychology? The popularization of psychology and Buddhism have often piggybacked upon one another in the West. Many now enjoy the psychological healing of Buddhist teachings as simply mindfulness, and emotional intelligence. But Buddhism is not self-improvement, since it’s the very nature of self which is dismantled here, not reinforced. Buddhism holds psychology to its radical origins: a suffering self won’t be healed by a better self waiting in the wings, but rather by seeing through the fiction of selfhood. (And what is this self we fear we will lose if we leave behind what was illusion?)

Then, is Buddhism science? Certainly, we invest a great deal of respect in what we callscience. Yet while the West has become adept at breaking down Nature, subdividing the bits, and putting tags on each, the East has grown very good at seeing relationships. Fortunately, new sciences are now arising with an appreciation of the Buddhist nondualist view of the universe as networks of interpenetration.

And Buddhism isn’t mechanistic: it’s qualitative rather than quantitive. The human instrument— with all our senses, feelings, mind — is itself sufficiently advanced technology. Plus, Buddhism is not only highly empirical, and first-person … but also real-time (Nirvana now, or never) as well as compassionate.

To sum up thus far, we see a religion of no religion … a nondual philosophy … a psychology of selflessness … and a science inviting the practitioner’s own mind as lab.

Consider Buddhism too as education. An historical precedent for this is the Buddhist residential college of Nalanda, India. At its peak, 2,000 teachers offered 100,000 students an array of topics all under the big umbrella of Dharma. Today too we’re discovering the riches ofintegration of meditation in higher education; a holistic education.

As Buddhadasa Bhikkhu observes, the Pali word for study, sikkha, can be seen as derived from two roots, sa (by, for, in oneself) and ikkha (to see): so, to see oneself by oneself. In this, it’s studying the nature of self by one’s self, through one’s own self. This means leaning what’s important — then training in and by such knowledge. There are no institutions, schedules, or curricula which can contain the genuine student. Being a student is a fundamental duty of all human beings for as long as they breathe. This is ultimate university without walls — the human universe.

Religion? … philosophy? … psychology? … education? The Middle Way is an alternate term for the Eightfold Path. It suggests here we see what’s common throughout all categories, without holding extreme positions in any. When all words collapse into silence, the trick is to resist branding that wonder with yet another name.

Remember, Buddhism is a made-up word — for Westerners with a thirst for packages. (Labels are good for cans, not people.) In the East, BuddhaDharma is the commonplace expression: an awakened way of living with What Is. An art of true happiness. As simple as opening your hand … or heart. 

For further reading:
Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, The Buddha Wasn’t a Buddhist, “On Faith,” at Tbe Washington Post
Norman Fischer, Buddhism’s New Pioneers, BuddhaDharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly

© 2010 Gary Gach

Gary Gach is author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism, editor of What Book!? : Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop, and translator of three books by the Korean Buddhist poetKo Un, SSN. He currently hosts Haiku Corner online. Homepage: http://word.to .

Trace Theory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In transformational grammar, a trace is an empty (phonologically null) category that occupies a position in the syntactic structure. In some theories of syntax, traces are used in the account of constructions such as wh-movement and passive. Traces are important theoretical devices in some approaches to syntax.

Contents [hide]
1 Evidence for traces
2 Principles that regulate traces
3 References
4 See also
[edit]Evidence for traces

Empirical evidence pointing to the existence of traces, independently of all theory-specific considerations, has also been presented in the literature. For example, for many English speakers, the contraction of want to to wanna is possible in some contexts, but not in others:

Which candidate does Vicky want to vote for t? → Which candidate does Vicky wanna vote for?
Which candidate does Vicky want t to win the election? → *Which candidate does Vicky wanna win the election?
One way to explain this contrast is to assume that the trace left behind by the extraction of which candidate in the second example blocks the contraction of want and to.

The statement "I want John to go" is transformed into an 'echo'-question. If "who" is moved to the beginning of the sentence, it will leave a trace. The existence of the trace will make it impossible to contract "want" and "to". Consider the following:

Vicky wants that candidate to win. ==> Vicky wants which candidate to win?
^ v
|____________|
==> Which candidate does Vicky want to win? (not "Which candidate does Vicky wanna win?")

However, the validity of this and similar arguments have been called into question by linguists favoring non-transformational approaches.[who?]

[edit]Principles that regulate traces

In government and binding theory, traces are subject to the empty category principle (ECP), which states that all traces must be "properly governed". Proper government is either theta-government or antecedent-government:

Who did John say that Mary saw t? (The verb "see" both governs and theta-marks the trace, so the trace is theta-governed.)
Who t said that? (The wh-word governs the trace and is coindexed with it, so the trace is antecedent-governed.)
However, intermediate traces are not subject to the ECP because they are deleted at LF (logical form).

[edit]References

Sag, Ivan A., and Janet Dean Fodor (1994). "Extraction without Traces". In Raul Aranovich, William Byrne, Susanne Preuss, and Martha Senturia (eds), Proceedings of the Thirteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 365–384.
[edit]See also

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The Appeal of Socialism

There is in human beings an ability to see beyond existing conditions or to always ask why they are the way that they are and to conclude that it's not because of God or nature that some people are rich and some are poor. Some are free and some are not. And believe these are very substantially manmade conditions and can be man-unmade. And, the idea therefore that the market is smarter than you is something that very many intellectual types won't accept. It can't just be that we are the objects of a blind process. So there's a will to do this, a reaction to manmade injustice. And a refusal to be consoled by the eternal argents, most of them preceding from religion that well, that's just the way things are or that's the way that human nature is.

Appeal of Socialism

In the abstract, why has socialism been so appealing to so many people over the last 150 years?
This is not in his rather beautiful essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but Oscar Wilde does say somewhere that a map of the world that doesn't have a Utopia on it isn't worth glancing at. And I don’t in fact think that that's true. And I wouldn't have thought so at the time. Utopianism was a word we used rather in disparagement. But, there is in human beings an ability to see beyond existing conditions or to always ask why they are the way that they are and to conclude that it's not because of God or nature that some people are rich and some are poor. Some are free and some are not. And believe these are very substantially manmade conditions and can be man-unmade. And, the idea therefore that the market is smarter than you is something that very many intellectual types won't accept. It can't just be that we are the objects of a blind process. So there's a will to do this, a reaction to manmade injustice. And a refusal to be consoled by the eternal argents, most of them preceding from religion that well, that's just the way things are or that's the way that human nature is.

Hitchens on Socialsim

 
Reflects on the intellectual underpinnings of socialism and discusses its evolution within the British Labour Party, from Clement Attlee’s administration following World War II, to Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power, and finally to Tony Blair’s creation of New Labour.
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What was it about socialism that first attracted you to it?
My motives, in short, would have been a dislike for the class system and for the attitudes that it instilled not in its victims but in the people who thought they benefited from it -- a suspicion of those who felt entitled to inherited privilege, of whom I was not one, and; an intense dislike for the British conservative party. That was the impulse. There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard -- it's so nice to have a French word for it -- is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s. That's the difference between myself say, and Bill Clinton, I suppose. What I was signed up for in '68 was what I thought then was the beginning of something. But I now see was the end of something. I took part in what was actually the last eruption of Marxist internationalism. We really thought that year, there was going to be a revolution. Well, indeed there was revolution everywhere from Vietnam to Czechoslovakia.

I joined a small but growing post-Trotskyite Luxembourgist sect. Well, not a sect actually. It was a faction called the international socialists. I gave a good deal of my life to that before realizing that in fact the '68 upheaval was the last flare-up, the last refulgence of this and not the beginning of a new wave.

In the abstract, why has socialism been so appealing to so many people over the last 150 years?
This is not in his rather beautiful essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but Oscar Wilde does say somewhere that a map of the world that doesn't have a Utopia on it isn't worth glancing at. And I don’t in fact think that that's true. And I wouldn't have thought so at the time. Utopianism was a word we used rather in disparagement. But, there is in human beings an ability to see beyond existing conditions or to always ask why they are the way that they are and to conclude that it's not because of God or nature that some people are rich and some are poor. Some are free and some are not. And believe these are very substantially manmade conditions and can be man-unmade. And, the idea therefore that the market is smarter than you is something that very many intellectual types won't accept. It can't just be that we are the objects of a blind process. So there's a will to do this, a reaction to manmade injustice. And a refusal to be consoled by the eternal argents, most of them preceding from religion that well, that's just the way things are or that's the way that human nature is.

It's impossible, I think, however much I'd become disillusioned politically or evolve into a post-political person, I don't think I'd ever change my view that socialism is the best political moment humans have ever come up with. So a lot of credit belongs to the socialist movement for being able to see that far and imagine that much, and to risk and dare as much as they did and we would still be living in a better world in other words if the socialists forces had won that year.

We begin our story with Robert Owen, who comes to America and founds New Harmony to create a “Heaven on Earth.” Can you tell me a bit about the intellectual history of this? When did people start talking about the idea of a “Heaven on Earth”?
Well the idea of utopian brotherhood and ideal community where there are no antagonisms between human beings, where there's nothing to fight about is a very old one and it goes back in myth or semi-myth to the slave revolt of Spartacus. English terms, which are the ones I'd suppose I know best, the peasants revolt of 1389 where the slogan was taken from the Bible, which is the only book everyone had in common, it went, "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" In other words, humans were born free and equal and thus it was decided only later and only by humans who was to be boss. The opening words of Rousseau, "man is born free but everywhere in chains"; some of the work of William Morris, the myth of a golden past; it's very common, very strong also in the Protestant revolution which becomes the English and I think eventually the American revolution, too.

Marxism rather despises that as mere idealism and says no one has to take the forces and relations of production as something that brings about progress. We don't want a vanished agricultural Eden where you have to share everything because there's very little to go around and where there's no real development in human society. No, and to the contrary, Marxism succeeded in the way it did because it thought capitalism was a brilliant idea.

So how did the ideas of the Enlightenment give fuel to the idea that one could create the things religion once promised, but in a secular sort of way, on Earth?
The enormous dynamic and creative, as well as destructive energy of capitalism which is written up with more praise and more respect by Marx and Engels in the 1848 Communist Manifesto than probably by anyone since. I mean I don't think anyone has ever said so precisely and with such awed admiration how great capitalism is, how inventive, how innovative, how dynamic, how much force of creativity it unleashes.

Well, implied in this is the view that for the first time ever in history there might actually be enough to go around. That this would be possible, that machines could replace drudgery and in the end obviate the need for exploitation at all. So, that the struggle would be not of man against man, but of man to master nature, and that this was not utopian because the actual wealth was there, being created before their eyes. That's why the socialist movement took off, as a vindication of materialism in the minds of the working class. They could see from the mansions and the empires and the great ships and railways that there was no need for them to be poor, there was no need for them to go on making things they were too poor to buy.

So to close that gap in perception was the project. And of course to leave behind such remnants of feudalism that had survived into the capitalist system, such as the monarchy, the nation-state, the church, rubbishy cobwebs from the mental attic of prehistory. As I say it now -- what a brilliant idea.

Do you believe socialism became a feasible substitute for religion somewhere along the way?
Well, there's a big argument over this and I take one side of it very firmly. Marx despised moralism very much, and used it as a term of abuse. For him, it was a matter of objective reality. You know, we ask for these things because they are feasible and because we’re entitled to them. We think the workers should take over capitalism. So that it would be capitalism but it wouldn't be privately owned. The profit of it wouldn't be appropriated by the owning class. It's a matter of the education and growth and development of the workers within the system. Morality doesn't come into it. That's how he liked to think and he liked to argue with his utopian or idealistic rivals, but of course the impulse of it is ethical. Why would you care otherwise, particularly if it's inevitable? If it's going to happen in any case, why bother to write advocating it? So there is a contradiction there. And of course it is an attempt to replace and discredit the religious impulse to show people where their yearnings really do come from, to tell them not to trust the priests or the supernatural. And also above all, not to believe in the false promise of an afterlife where wrongs will be righted and misery cured.

How would you trace the idea of science and human endeavor being able to replace religion to the Enlightenment?
The Marxist worldview has a relationship to the Enlightenment. I think that’s impossible to doubt. You can find a great deal of Marx actually in the work of John Stuart Mill. I'm not confident enough to say how much Mill Marx would have read. Some. Certainly he would have been familiar with him, but Mill had complete contempt for organized religion of course, and for faith and superstition. He had an idea that society was hierarchical by class, and that ideology, as he said, is always the ideology of the ruling class, something that Marx could easily have said. He could see many of the injustices such as the British system in the Caribbean and elsewhere were the products purely of greed and exploitation. They weren't part of the natural order. The same thought that Mill gives this expression to can be found in what I think is the last letter written by Thomas Jefferson where he says that to the contrary of monkish superstition, we are not born, some of us with saddles on our backs, and others with boots and spurs to ride us. None of these things are given.

So these thoughts of enlightenment and of course the admiration of enlightening people for science and for reason and technique in everything from medicine to navigation -- these are the precursors the Marxist, Victorian-era critique.

What is the main message of Marxism as expressed in the Communist Manifesto?
The essential contention of Marxism is that anyone who says “the economy,” is stupid. To redo a well-known recent saying “it's the economy, stupid.” If you say “the economy,” you show you're stupid. There's no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production. So, you could condense the whole of the manifesto and three volumes of Das Kapital into that - the forces and relations of production are not the same. The ability to mine coal and to use that to make iron ore into steel is something that is socially in common. It's collectively done. And the mobilization for it is social but the profit goes to a small group of people, so the product of it is not shared. Thus to speak of this as an industrial revolution or a new economy is false. It's just a refinement of old patterns of exploitation for modern purposes.

You could do without this class and the same amount of production could be done. Or indeed, more could be done because there'd be no need for scarcity.

How do you get from capitalism being this great thing that is very productive to a revolution and post-revolutionary world where socialism is on the rise?
Well, having described how the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie has destroyed feudal property relations, has made old religious superstitions redundant, has broken up with Marx called the idiocy of rural life, the millennial stagnant village existence that so many millions of people have been born into and died out of without even knowing that there was any other kind of world possible, that all this energy and excitement came at a high price - it was very exploitative. It required people perhaps to lead much less happy lives than they had before, much less secure lives, much more risky lives, with a very much higher rate of exploitation and that this, in the long run, would revenge itself upon its creators, that they, in their turn, would rather conserve their own power over the process than allow it to develop further. That having unleashed it they would try and fetter it and these fetters would be broken by educated and emancipated workers movement who would use the same techniques and the same discoveries, but adapt them for social use rather than for private enrichment.

That was the theory and it was a pretty exact-word picture of the living experience of many, many millions of people at that time. You can read it in the novels of Zola; you can, to some extent, read it in the novels of Dickens. The people are suddenly living in a much richer world but their lives are much poorer. But the solution is to hand. They must enfranchise themselves, they must demand the eight-hour day, the slowing of the pace of exploitation and they must recover the imagination necessary to seize control of it for themselves so that for the first time in history, people are the subjects and not the objects.

What would society then look like, for the ordinary people?
Well this is how you can also prove that Marx’s ostensible dislike for moralism and morality was a bit of a pose, because he had I think a rather clear idea of what a good life would be like. In essence it would be the abolition of specialization, that people wouldn't be condemned as they had been under feudalism. People were told that you have to stay with this craft or this guild all your life. That got blown apart to some extent by capitalism, and by the protestant ethic. People would have time for leisure, time for art, time for the cultivation of their minds, as well as the improvement of the health of their bodies, where they wouldn't look upon what they made or were forced to make as their enemy. In other words, they wouldn't be alienated. They wouldn’t be forced to be making things that were later used in a sense to oppress them, with a guarantee of their powerlessness. That was as far as anyone could see. I mean Marx was not a utopian in the sense he wanted to design an ideal society for you, and then try and get to it as the Jesuits did in Paraguay, for example. Because, most of the utopian community ideas actually are religious. They're based more on the idea of the monastery than the commune.

Marx didn't want to do that. He didn't want to “compose the music of the future,” as he put it. But that was what he thought would be the end of alienation.

The Communist Manifesto begins very famously by saying that the history of all previously existing human society is the history of class struggle. And it goes on to say what phases that went through. Roughly speaking, there have always been the rulers and the ruled. There have been periodic revolts but sometimes the rebels didn't have enough in common to do more than mount a brief kind of peasant insurrection and then fade back into obscurity or slave rebellions of antiquity, the names of only one of whose leaders we can even remember, Spartacus. All these other people apparently lived, worked and died of their work for nothing.

Marxism reviews this and says we're now at a stage where a revolution wouldn't just instate a new ruling class, as say the French Revolution of 1789 did but that the next ruling class will be the last because it will abolish class society all together. And this is not a dream anymore as it was in antiquity and as it is in poems and in some prayers. It's a human possibility. It involves the transcendence. Not the abolition of capitalism, but the transcendence of it by those whose solidarity and education and development the working class has created.

We interviewed a Russian journalist who said, “Socialism sounds desirable but it always leads to either failure or a concentration camp.” Do you think there is something to that?
A good friend of mine called Basil Davidson, a British officer and a leftist, also a socialist, who was involved in the Second World War in working with the European resistance in the Balkans, largely, but also in Greece and in Italy, once wrote that having seen what occurred in Nazi-occupied Europe, he no longer believed the old line that you can't change human nature. You can change it for the worse very easily. So if you can change it for the worse, why do we give up on the idea you can change it for the better?

I think the socialist movement, by removing many, many people from grinding stagnation and poverty and overwork, does enable people not just to lead better lives but to be better people. I think that the same can be said for the emancipation of the populations of the colonies from colonial rule; and yes, conditions can be created in which people are more civilized. I think the socialist movement can claim a lot of credit for that. But there is always the danger, if you proclaim the “new man,” that you will have to use an inquisition as a means of conditioning people. In other words, a state of terror, or a concentration camp. Or that you'll just create, as in Cuba for example, where the new man was very much hymned, a rather stagnant, boring, unimaginative conformist, despite the fact that the idea is everyone should, in Cuba, emulate Ché Guevara. In fact Cuba is a very backward country.

About coercion, do you think some of the literary utopias along the lines of Plato, Thomas More, Edward Bellamy anticipate the unpleasant elements of a socialist society?
The preceding utopias that we have knowledge of, Plato's Republic and Thomas More's Utopia, and later more Victorian-type era practitioners like Edward Bellamy, to some extent Robert Owen and William Morris, are all based on an idea of a very small society probably rural, not very densely populated, not much in the way of industrial or technological ability. And in the case of Plato, of course where it's not enough to live in the city to be a citizen. And there's a whole class left out, a class of slaves.

That, I think, should have tipped people off to the futility of trying to design an ideal society. Especially one that was complex and involved things like a division of labor and the mastery of machinery and the creation of new wealth and the feeling that society should always take the risk of being dynamic, organize itself to be unpredictable because new experiments and new technologies would outpace the ability of most humans to keep up with them.

That's the brilliance of capitalism in a way. It says, you know, we have an idea of which way we want it to go, but I mean we are always running the risk that a huge amount of investment in capital will have to be thrown away and liquidated. Yes, we'll take risks with the environment. Yes, we will build things that are almost too big for us to control.

As Lenin tried to transform Russia into a socialist state, did he leave any of the old government intact?
Lenin's Russia was an attempt to start from scratch. The war had already pre-destroyed a lot of the old order for him. It had destroyed the Czarist army for example, turned it into a rabble, which the strongest element, the strongest element were mutineers who already supported the Bolshevik party. It had crucially undermined the autocracy, the Romanov dynasty. And I think it had very much discredited the Russian Orthodox Church, for which he had a particular dislike. But he was very willing to finish those jobs, all three of them, to wipe out the Romanov family, to rebuild the army, and under Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army, and to seize the opportunity to confiscate church property and to dissolve, as far as possible, the influence of the church.

One of Lenin's great achievements, in my opinion, is to create a secular Russia. The power of the Russian Orthodox Church, which was an absolute warren of backwardness and evil and superstition, is probably never going to recover from what he did to it.

The difficulty was that he also inherited, and partly by his measures created, even more scarcity and economic dislocation. The Bolsheviks had studied what had happened to the French revolution and they knew there was a danger of autocracy developing in their own ranks, and they were always on the look out for another Bonaparte. And the person who most looked like Bonaparte to them was Trotsky, who had flamboyance and military genius and charisma. And so they often didn't trust him. But the person who least looked like a Bonaparte was a mediocrity from Georgia, a pockmarked, mustachioed, rather unintellectual fellow, Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, Mr. Stalin. They thought, well actually, he's probably quite a reliable guy.

Goes to show that what people learn from history is that they don't learn.

How did the people of America react to the prospects of a Bolshevik-style revolution on our soil?
In United States, well, there had been a socialist movement led by Eugene Debs, who by 1917 was in jail. He'd been imprisoned by Woodrow Wilson for making an antiwar speech and this movement which had at one point got him more than a million and a half votes in a presidential socialist campaign - it was not very many, but it wasn't bad for the time. There wasn't universal franchise quite then, either. His votes were very heavily concentrated among largely Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire, who brought a lot of the socialist ideology with them and were based very heavily in New York, Chicago, and sort of prairie-populist, agrarian-socialist types in the countryside. Because of the overwhelmingly foreign-born nature of the left, and the Marxist worker's movement, it was very easy for the American establishment to represent the Bolshevik challenge as something imported and un-American and to deal with it, to a very good extent, by rounding up and deporting a lot of these characters, representing it as something cosmopolitan and alien. Indeed, a lot of the propaganda against Bolshevism at that time, including the propaganda of Winston Churchill during his armed intervention in Russia, was exclusively anti-Semitic.

But was there a fear of Bolshevism in the U.S.?
Well it was sometimes called the Red Scare, sometimes is still, in the work of modern historians. It's mainly associated with something called the Palmer Raids, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, and his then unknown young deputy J. Edgar Hoover, who decided after a number of incidences of violence to do a round-up. They moved at dawn to arrest many, many thousands of people in their beds and to announce that a great conspiracy to bring down the United States had been aborted and to put people very much on their guard at the idea of an enemy within. And the American left never really recovered from that.

I might just add though, that if anything qualifies as an irony of history it would be this: that Marx and Engels throughout the nineteenth century wrote about America the United States as the great country of the future, of freedom and equality and a good life for the working man, and a country of revolution and emancipation, and of Russia as the great country of despotism, backwardness, savagery and superstition. Henry Adams, in his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, recalls with pleasure and admiration the work that Marx and Engels did for the Union. That when he was Lincoln's ambassador in London, he was almost isolated by the forces of British conservatism and Marx was one of the very few willing to organize real material help as well as propaganda help for the American Union. He was a huge admirer of Lincoln, who predicted and called for the Emancipation Proclamation. They don't teach you this in school. But that was what Marx thought about America as the great country of the future and of Russia as the great den and pit of the past. That gives one some sense I think of the scale of the irony and in a way also the tragedy of the failure of the socialist movement.

How did the British economy fare under Labor’s policies during the 1960s and ‘70s?
Things seemed quite prosperous. You know, suddenly young people had money to spend. There was fashion and luxury and the term “the affluent society” really caught on. And Britain had been very, very grey indeed in the years after the Second World War. I remember it myself. I was born in 1949. The cities were still recovering from being bombed and they were dull and dirty and boring and poor. And then suddenly this color and efflorescence. But what it concealed was the fact that the economy was essentially dying. That Britain that had had the first industrial revolution and the first modern empire, the one that Marx anatomized so brilliantly and it's losing both of them. The empire's falling away. There isn't enough money to keep it going. The cost of the Second World War, the hidden cost of it was enormous. The country had basically gone into debt. The pound, which used to be worth something like four dollars when I was a kid, starts to slide and we're not really producing very much anymore. We were living on the credit of the past on old, declining, rusting industries like coalmining, shipbuilding, and steel and nobody knows where the money's going to come from now on. So it was a kind of false paradise.

Was this the fault of the Attlee government?
Well, it was during the Attlee government, many of its ministers who had been an important wing of the Churchill government during the war, when most of the decisions on social welfare and the welfare state were taken, when the country had a more natural feeling of solidarity. The government seems to have decided after 1945 that the British had been through a lot. They'd been through the slump of the depression and they'd had a war, been bombed and half-starved and so on. That it was time to sort of pay back a bit and featherbed them slightly perhaps. So there's national healthcare of course, and then a lot of declining industries are taken into public ownership which conceals perhaps from the view the fact that some of these industries like digging up coal or building big ships weren’t going to last very much longer. That there's going to be a tendency to want to protect them if they're in public ownership. And then there was the failure to engage with the European common market, now called the EU. Both British political parties essentially decided to abstain from taking part in this experiment in free trade so that there was a protectionist, backward-looking element to British society in spite of these superficial, rather Americanized actually, symptoms of prosperity. There's a book by a historian called Correlli Barnett, called The Audit of War, which takes a rather stern view of this and says that all of that was the fault of postwar British Laborism. But in fact, it was a national consensus from the Churchill government that it was time that the British working class get a bigger share of the social product. More was going to be spent on distributing wealth and providing welfare than on production and innovation.

Margaret Thatcher and her allies started making arguments connecting Britain’s economic ills with Labor policies. How did she articulate her position?
Mrs. Thatcher evolved her critique of the two-party consensus in Britain, I think, originally more as a patriot than as an economist. She just couldn't bear the idea that British decline should be taken for granted. That we should just accept the fact that we were no longer a world power economically, industrially or imperially and that it was just a matter of the orderly management of this decline. She rejected that with her guts. She thought Britain should be great. Searching around for what was wrong with the unionization for example, of so much heavy industry; the domination of closed-shop trade unions and agreements with employers to keep on too many workers and all of that. She found herself being offered copies of books by F.A. Hayek, that had been tried by the Tories and dropped in 1945, and Milton Friedman, who actually came over to talk to her. She decided that what the economy needed was a dynamic shakeout, was to make people self-reliant again, and above al,l to break the power of the trade-union movement, which had been thought sacrosanct in Britain. These were the workingmen who'd been our soldiers in the war and helped to rebuild the country and should be treated with reverence. She said, "No. Let's try not doing that. Let's try making them stand on their own two feet." That's where it begins.

One of Thatcher’s contemporaries, Ronald Reagan, approached the socialist empire of the Soviet Union differently from his predecessors. How did his attitude shape the rest of the Cold War?
The accession to power of Ronald Reagan, which happened to come at around the same time as a shift to the right in other comparable societies - the Malcolm Fraser government was elected in Australia around that time and the Thatcher government in Britain certainly invigorated the American right with her victory in 1979. All of them had in common, not just Reagan but also Thatcher, the view that Soviet power, the apparently unshakable edifice of the USSR and its eastern European dependencies, needn't be taken for granted, that its survival was not a given, something that even a fairly conservative cold warrior and hawkish person like Henry Kissinger believed. In Kissinger's dealings with Brezhnev, he dealt as if for keeps. I think undoubtedly the eruption of the Solidarnosc worker's movement in Poland and other related developments in China, which seemed to be moving on its own towards a free-market system, made it easier to present this as realistic as well as principled policy. Why assume that they're going to be our rivals forever? Why not see if we can outbid them, and even subvert them? And I don't think anyone believed that it would be as easy as it turned out to be. And if one is apportioning credit, I think a great deal has to be awarded to the fact that the Soviet Union, in fact, was not as monolithic internally as it had been presented for the Cold War, and that the emergence of someone like Mikhail Gorbechev had been in the cards for a long time. Certainly, that had been predicted by Marxist and leftist critics of the Soviet Union, the two best of whom were both German. Rudolf Bahro, an East German who wrote a book called The Alternative in Eastern Europe, which came out, if I'm not wrong, in 1979, predicting the collapse of the eastern European regimes. And a wonderful essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a West German Marxist called Communism: The Highest Stage of Underdevelopment, with deliberate borrowing from a title of Lenin's, says that it could be seen that this system was a failure in its own terms, understood by its intelligentsia and by some of its managers as having totally stagnated, believed in by nobody and ripe for collapse.

So, it's quite possible, in other words, that the Soviet Union might have imploded if Jimmy Carter had been president. But it seems churlish to deny that Ronald Reagan's attitude to it hastened the demise. And also, convinced even the hardliners in the Soviet leadership, like Yuri Andropov, that the game was pretty nearly up.

 

Tax Code

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound as if there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.
"Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," Obama said Monday. "That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that."
The data tell a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.
There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. That, however, was less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.
In his White House address Monday, Obama called on Congress to increase taxes by $1.5 trillion as part of a 10-year deficit reduction package totaling more than $3 trillion. He proposed that Congress overhaul the tax code and impose what he called the "Buffett rule," named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The rule says, "People making more than $1 million a year should not pay a smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class families pay."
"Warren Buffett's secretary shouldn't pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett. There is no justification for it," Obama said. "It is wrong that in the United States of America, a teacher or a nurse or a construction worker who earns $50,000 should pay higher tax rates than somebody pulling in $50 million."
Buffett wrote in a recent piece for The New York Times that the tax rate he paid last year was lower than that paid by any of the other 20 people in his office.
This year, households making more than $1 million will pay an average of 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes, including income taxes and payroll taxes, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.
Households making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent of their income in federal taxes.
Lower-income households will pay less. For example, households making between $40,000 and $50,000 will pay an average of 12.5 percent of their income in federal taxes. Households making between $20,000 and $30,000 will pay 5.7 percent.
The latest IRS figures are a few years older — and limited to federal income taxes — but show much the same thing. In 2009, taxpayers who made $1 million or more paid on average 24.4 percent of their income in federal income taxes, according to the IRS.
Those making $100,000 to $125,000 paid on average 9.9 percent in federal income taxes. Those making $50,000 to $60,000 paid an average of 6.3 percent.
Obama's claim hinges on the fact that, for high-income families and individuals, investment income is often taxed at a lower rate than wages. The top tax rate for dividends and capital gains is 15 percent. The top marginal tax rate for wages is 35 percent, though that is reserved for taxable income above $379,150.
With tax rates that high, why do so many people pay at lower rates? Because the tax code is riddled with more than $1 trillion in deductions, exemptions and credits, and they benefit people at every income level, according to data from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress' official scorekeeper on revenue issues.
The Tax Policy Center estimates that 46 percent of households, mostly low- and medium-income households, will pay no federal income taxes this year. Most, however, will pay other taxes, including Social Security payroll taxes.
"People who are doing quite well and worry about low-income people not paying any taxes bemoan the fact that they get so many tax breaks that they are zeroed out," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. "People at the bottom of the distribution say, but all of those rich guys are getting bigger tax breaks than we're getting, which is also the case."
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was pressed at a White House briefing on the number of millionaires who pay taxes at a lower rate than middle-income families. He demurred, saying that people who make most of their money in wages pay taxes at a higher rate, while those who get most of their income from investments pay at lower rates.
"So it really depends on what is your profession, where's the source of your income, what's the specific circumstances you face, and the averages won't really capture that," Geithner said.

Class Warfare

September 15, 2011
Poverty and Income in America: The Four Lost Decades
“At some point, both parties will have to level with the voters and tell them the truth: the postwar Golden Era is gone forever, and the great prosperous working class has gone with it.

 In thirty-eight years, the annual earnings of the typical male worker, adjusted to 2010 dollars, have risen by $165, or $3.17 a week.

The latest poverty and income figures came out this week, and boy are they disturbing. It’s not so much the headline figures, which have been well covered in the Times and elsewhere: 46 million Americans living under the poverty line in 2010, the highest number since the Commerce Department started collecting the figures back in 1959. That’s a horrible statistic. (Amy Davidson responded on Tuesday.) But it’s not too surprising since we’ve been through the deepest recession since the nineteen-thirties, and getting thrown out of work is a primary cause of poverty. (Plus, the population grows every year. If the proportion of people in poverty stays the same, you’d expect the absolute numbers to grow over time.)

It’s not even the fact that median household income—the income of the American household in the middle of the income distribution—is now back to the level it was at in 1996: about $49,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars. To be sure, that is a very alarming fact. But I think most people have already cottoned on to the idea that we have been through a “lost decade.” To get the picture, you just have to look at the stock market or your last paycheck.

Also, the figures for household income need to be treated with a bit of caution, since they aren’t adjusted for changing family sizes. As time goes on, more people are getting married later or not getting married at all. This means there are more single-income households, which obviously earn less than two-income households. This biases the figures somewhat. (The story of where the poverty line came from and how it’s derived is actually pretty interesting. If you want to read more about it, I wrote an entire magazine piece about the subject back in 2006.) Still, even making the necessary adjustments, it’s pretty clear that the typical American family has made little or no progress since the late nineteen-nineties.

But let’s look at the figures for individuals, which aren’t subject to any such distortions, and to eliminate the effects of the economic cycle let’s go back further than the late nineties. (When economic historians come to look at the period from 2000 to 2011, I suspect they will view it as one elongated period of recessions and subpar growth—the end of the great asset price boom.)

To me, what is really, really alarming is this: a typical American male who works full time and still has a job is earning almost exactly the same now as his counterpart was back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, O. J. Simpson rushed a thousand yards for the Buffalo Bills, and the Eagles topped the chart with Hotel California. 



The figures, which appear in Table A-5 at the back of the Census Bureau’s report (pdf), are these. Median earnings for full-time, year-round male workers: 2010—$47,715; 1972—$47,550. That’s not a typo.  In thirty-eight years, the annual earnings of the typical male worker, adjusted to 2010 dollars, have risen by $165, or $3.17 a week. 

If you do the comparison with 1973 it is even worse. The figure for median earnings of full-time male workers in that year was $49,065. Between now and then, Archie Bunker and Willie Loman have suffered a pay cut of more than twenty-five dollars a week.

Is it any wonder Americans are not as optimistic as they used to be?

One final note: By definition, this is not a new story: it’s been going on for decades. One of the first pieces I wrote for The New Yorker, back in December, 1995, was entitled “Who Killed the Middle Class?”
IT'S THE FRIGGING WORKING CLASS DAMMIT.  STOP SAYING MIDDLE CLASS IN THE SAME BREATH AS ARCHIE BUNKER! ITS A VERY DISTURBING LIE! 

Here is how it ended: “At some point, both parties will have to level with the voters and tell them the truth: the postwar Golden Era is gone forever, and the great prosperous working class has gone with it.   Once this conclusion is accepted, maybe the political debate can move away from mutual recrimination and on to ways of governing a less homogenous and more inequitable society.”
Deliberate policy measures have certainly played a role: opening America’s markets to cheap foreign competition; attacks on trades unions and labor laws; the practical abandonment of efforts to train (and retrain) large swaths of the non-college-graduate work force. But the underlying economic trends remain the same. If anything, they are strengthening.

Income

September 15, 2011
Poverty and Income in America: The Four Lost Decades

Posted by John Cassidy


The latest poverty and income figures came out this week, and boy are they disturbing. It’s not so much the headline figures, which have been well covered in the Times and elsewhere: 46 million Americans living under the poverty line in 2010, the highest number since the Commerce Department started collecting the figures back in 1959. That’s a horrible statistic. (Amy Davidson responded on Tuesday.) But it’s not too surprising since we’ve been through the deepest recession since the nineteen-thirties, and getting thrown out of work is a primary cause of poverty. (Plus, the population grows every year. If the proportion of people in poverty stays the same, you’d expect the absolute numbers to grow over time.)

It’s not even the fact that median household income—the income of the American household in the middle of the income distribution—is now back to the level it was at in 1996: about $49,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars. To be sure, that is a very alarming fact. But I think most people have already cottoned on to the idea that we have been through a “lost decade.” To get the picture, you just have to look at the stock market or your last paycheck.

Also, the figures for household income need to be treated with a bit of caution, since they aren’t adjusted for changing family sizes. As time goes on, more people are getting married later or not getting married at all. This means there are more single-income households, which obviously earn less than two-income households. This biases the figures somewhat. (The story of where the poverty line came from and how it’s derived is actually pretty interesting. If you want to read more about it, I wrote an entire magazine piece about the subject back in 2006.) Still, even making the necessary adjustments, it’s pretty clear that the typical American family has made little or no progress since the late nineteen-nineties.

But let’s look at the figures for individuals, which aren’t subject to any such distortions, and to eliminate the effects of the economic cycle let’s go back further than the late nineties. (When economic historians come to look at the period from 2000 to 2011, I suspect they will view it as one elongated period of recessions and subpar growth—the end of the great asset price boom.)

To me, what is really, really alarming is this: a typical American male who works full time and still has a job is earning almost exactly the same now as his counterpart was back in 1972, when Richard Nixon was in the White House, O. J. Simpson rushed a thousand yards for the Buffalo Bills, and Don McLean topped the charts with “American Pie.”

The figures, which appear in Table A-5 at the back of the Census Bureau’s report (pdf), are these. Median earnings for full-time, year-round male workers: 2010—$47,715; 1972—$47,550. That’s not a typo. In thirty-eight years, the annual earnings of the typical male worker, adjusted to 2010 dollars, have risen by $165, or $3.17 a week.

If you do the comparison with 1973 it is even worse. The figure for median earnings of full-time male workers in that year (when O. J. rushed two thousand yards and Tony Orlando had a chart-topper with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree”) was $49,065. Between now and then, Archie Bunker and Willie Loman have suffered a pay cut of more than twenty-five dollars a week.

Is it any wonder Americans are not as optimistic as they used to be?

One final note: By definition, this is not a new story: it’s been going on for decades. One of the first pieces I wrote for The New Yorker, back in December, 1995, was entitled “Who Killed the Middle Class?” Here is how it ended: “At some point, both parties will have to level with the voters and tell them the truth: the postwar Golden Era is gone forever, and the great middle class has gone with it. This is nobody’s fault; it is just how capitalism has developed. Once this conclusion is accepted, maybe the political debate can move away from mutual recrimination and on to ways of governing a less homogenous and more inequitable society.”

Looking back, I’m not sure about the “nobody’s fault” line. Deliberate policy measures have certainly played a role: opening America’s markets to cheap foreign competition; attacks on trades unions and labor laws; the practical abandonment of efforts to train (and retrain) large swaths of the non-college-graduate work force. But the underlying economic trends remain the same. If anything, they are strengthening.

Illustration by Christoph Niemann.

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Andrew Jackson on bank fraud

First a quote by President Andrew Jackson:  “Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in breadstuffs of the country.  When you won, you divided the profits among yourselves, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank.  You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families.  That may be true, but that is your sin!  Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin!  You are a den of vipers and thieves.  I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out.”

During 18 of the last 22 years, gold has rallied between US Labor Day and Christmas.  Will the pattern this year follow the historical pattern?  We will analyze the fundamentals, look at some charts and try to draw a conclusion.  The charts in this report are courtesy Stockcharts.com unless indicated.

First a quote by President Andrew Jackson:  “Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time, and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in breadstuffs of the country.  When you won, you divided the profits among yourselves, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank.  You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families.  That may be true, but that is your sin!  Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin!  You are a den of vipers and thieves.  I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out.” (Spoken to a delegation of bankers requesting the extension of the 1832 Bank Renewal Act).
Several news items during the past ten days were very bullish for gold.  The first was an announcement by the Swiss National Bank that they were planning to buy Euros with Swiss Francs.  This action effectively removes the Swiss Franc as a convenient alternative to gold, and it moves the SNB into the camp of the money printers. 

The second item concerns an announcement by five major central banks (FED, ECB, SNB, BOJ and BOE), to provide dollar liquidity for a number of European banks that suffer from exposure to Greek banks.

This dollar liquidity operation will last until the end of the year and will enable dollar funding for European banks, which were struggling.  It shows that the Federal Reserve, the ECB and also British, Swiss and Japanese banks have the will and the ability to cooperate at sensitive times, whenever they feel the system needs a ‘nudge’.

Another factor that is very bullish for gold is the current ‘negative real interest rate’ environment.  Regardless of whether we believe the ‘official’ CPI numbers, or the more realistic numbers provided by Shadowstats.com, anyone with money in the bank, or holding short-term Treasury notes, is losing money to price inflation. 10-year Treasuries are paying a miserly two percent. With inflation at 4.8%, these ‘so-called investments’  are losing 2.8% of their value over 12 months According to J. M. Keynes, and many other economists, whenever ‘real interest rates’ turn negative, gold will rise.  Keynes called this “Gibson’s Paradox”, and stated that there are no exceptions.

Gold

Technical Trading: The Week Ahead - Gold Stuck In Consolidation Pattern
19 September 2011, 10:46 a.m.
By Kitco News
http://www.kitco.com/

(Kitco News) - Mon Sept 19—Comex December gold futures are pushing lower Monday as the recent consolidation and correction off the September 6 all-time high at $1923.70 an ounce continues. Daily momentum tools are trending lower from bearishly divergent positions, which means that those indicators did not confirm the September 6 new price high. The market is working off its overbought condition and remains in a sideways range near term.

"The near term rally is going to take a breather and correct," said Paul Hare, executive vice president at the Linn Group. "The market is going through a consolidation that will force more short-term liquidation," he added.

The gold market is approaching short-term moving average support from the 40-day at $1,764 on Monday. December gold futures have been trading above that moving average since early July. Hare pointed to the 40-day moving average as key near term support. "If we take that out and close below it the market could drop to the $1,700 area," Hare warned.

Overall, however, Hare said the gold market was just correcting off an interim high, there were no signs of a major top in the market.

On the downside, major support for December gold lies at the August 25 daily low at $1,705. 40. That represents major intermediate term support for the December gold contract, and must hold to keep the technical picture from deteriorating more dramatically.

In the short term, Hare's advice for gold traders was to "liquidate longs."

Shifting over the outlook for October platinum, the daily chart reveals a pattern of lower lows and lower highs in recent weeks, keeping the short-term technical bias bearish.

Platinum is also under the influence of a falling 9-period relative strength index (RSI), which is a widely watched momentum indicator. The RSI is trending lower from overbought levels, which is a traditional sell signal on that tool.

Key near term support for October platinum lies at $1,770.00, the September 16 daily low. That nearly coincides with the 61.8% Fibonnaci retracement of the August 5-August 23 rally, which comes in around $1,771. If October platinum posts a solid close below the $1,770 region, that would open  the door for a retest of the August 5 low at $1,682, according to traditional Fibonacci analysis.

The market has broken below the key 200-day moving average. Many technical traders consider this to be the key line in the sand for the longer-term trend. And, if October platinum continues to trade below the 200-day, it would be bearish for the longer-term trend outlook. On Monday, the 200-day moving average was seen at $1,788.90.

Finally, shifting over to December Nymex palladium, the technical trends are down, but the market is approaching a major longer-term support zone. There is a strong band of congestive support from the $710-701 region. The market etched major lows in that area in March, May, August and September.

Given the strength of the support the $700 region is not likely to break on a first attempt, but that is the key level that the bears will be eyeing and testing in the days ahead.

If that floor were to give way, it would open the door for a massive new wave of declines in the days and weeks ahead.



By Kitco News

Editor’s Note:

Kitco News will provide readers with comprehensive print and video coverage of three-major precious metals market events in New York, Toronto and Montreal during the next two weeks.

First, Kitco News will supply live coverage on Wednesday, Sept. 14, of the CPM Platinum Group Metals Seminar in New York. That will be followed by the Toronto Resource Investment Conference September 15-16, and then the London Bullion Marketing Association meeting in Montreal September 18-20.  

The CPM Group's Platinum Metals Group Seminar Sept. 14 will showcase presentations from some of the leading analysts and investors in the PGM sector. Register to watch the CPM Platinum Group Metals Seminar Live (Free Registration): http://cpmevents.kitco.com/

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Platinum

It is simply a matter of relative scarcity. Per the Platinum Guild International, platinum is the "most precious" of the precious metals for the following reasons:

(1) The annual supply of platinum is only about 130 tons - which is equivalent to only 6% (by weight) of the total Western World's annual mine production of gold - and less than one percent of silver's yearly mine production. Another amazing platinum trivia is the fact that more than twice as much steel is poured in the U.S. in only one day than the total world's platinum production in one year - indeed scarce!

(2) Approximately 10 tons of ore must be mined - sometimes almost a mile underground at temperatures greater than 120 degrees Fahrenheit - to produce one pure ounce of the "so-called white gold." Furthermore, the total extraction process takes six long months.

(3) All the platinum ever mined throughout history would fill a basement of less than 25 cubic feet.

(4) Although its relative weight does not contribute to its value, platinum is even heavier than gold - one cubic foot weighs a little more than 1,330 pounds, about 11% denser than gold. THAT'S WELL MORE THAN HALF A TON. Expressing platinum's weight differently, a six-inch cube of the white metal weighs about as much as an average man!

(5) Relative to volume mined, platinum has many more industrial uses than either silver or gold. In fact more than 50% of the yearly production of platinum is consumed (read destroyed) by industrial uses - unlike gold!

(6) Also unlike gold, there are no large inventories of above-ground platinum. Therefore, any breakdown in the two major supply sources would catapult the price of platinum into orbit.

Boxing still toxic

It's now being called "The Cheap Shot." In controversial fashion, Floyd Mayweather, Jr., knocked out Victor Ortiz in a welterweight title fight in Las Vegas Saturday night. Mayweather was dominating the bout when in the fourth round Ortiz intentionally head-butted Mayweather. Ortiz then embraced and kissed Mayweather in a gesture of apology, and the referee separated the two and docked Ortiz a point for the head butt. When the fight resumed, Ortiz again embraced Mayweather in the center of the ring when Mayweather cold-cocked him with a fierce left and a right that knocked Ortiz out, ending things early. It was ruled a legal punch. Watch the video here, and don't miss Mayweather's post-match tirade against 80-year-old HBO announcer Larry Merchant. "I wish I was 50 years younger and I'd kick your ass," Merchant told him.

The Wasteland part 1

April is the cruelest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.


In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. 
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?Son of man, 

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;


I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind 31
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?


'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer. 
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, 
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 

The Wastteland part 1

April is the cruelest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.


In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. 
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?Son of man, 

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;


I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind 31
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?


'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer. 
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, 
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 

T.S. Elliot. The Wasteland

I. The Burial of the Dead


April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 12
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. 18
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?Son of man, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 23
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind 31
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind
Wo weilest du?
'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer. 42
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,43
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, 46
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, The Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City, 60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many. 63
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, 64
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. 68
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: 'Stetson! 69
'You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, 74
'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
'You! Hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!' 76
Title Page

II. A Game of Chess


The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, 77
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion.
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid - troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia, 92
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene 98
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king 99
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale 100
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
I think we are in rats' alley 115
Where the dead men lost their bones.
'What it that noise?'
The wind under the door. 118
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
Nothing again nothing.
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?' 126
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag - 128
It's so elegant
So intelligent
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'
'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
'With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
'What shall we ever do?'
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess, 138
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said -
I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart.
He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get herself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you.
And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert,
He's been in the army for four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.
Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said.
Others can pick and choose if you can't.
But if Albert makes off, it won't be for a lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said.
Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot -
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. 172
Title Page
III. The Fire Sermon


The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. 176
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept ...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother's wreck
And on the king my father's death before him. 192
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear 196
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring 197
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter 199
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! 202
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd.
Tereu
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight, 210
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, 218
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, 221
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which are still unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...
She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
'Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over.'
When lovely woman stoops to folly and 253
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
'This music crept by me upon the waters' 257
And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street.
O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold 264
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
The river sweats 266
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester 279
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leialala
'Trams and dusty trees.
Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew 293
Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees
Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.'
'My feet are at Moorgate and my heart
Under my feet. After the event
He wept. He promised "a new start."
I made no comment. What should I resent?'
'On Margate Sands. 301
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.'
la la
To Carthage then I came 307
Burning burning burning burning 308
O Lord Thou pluckest me out 309
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
Title Page
IV. Death by Water


Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passes the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Title Page
V. What the Thunder Said


After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand not lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop 357
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together 360
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air 366
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico 392
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given? 401
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider 407
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only 411
We think of the key, each in his prison
thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me 424
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina 427
Quando fiam uti chelidon - O swallow swallow 428
Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie 429
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. 431
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. 401
Shantih shantih shantih 433