ENOUGH! [BASTA][Draft/BETA][Introduction]

9 Biggest Banks' Derivative Exposure - $228.72 Trillion

ENOUGH! [BASTA][Draft/BETA][Introduction]
By Paul McLean

[NOTE]: The following text is the next installment of the series ENOUGH! - which is being developed as a resource for CO-OP/Occuburbs, an OwA production for Huntington, LI. This draft is open to revision, refinement and is introduced for the purposes of community review. 

Humanity? Yes, it's OK – some great talks, some great arts. Concrete people? No, 99% are boring idiots.

- Slavoj Žižek (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jun/10/slavoj-zizek-humanity-ok-people-boring)

The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being an object. Once understood as such, it becomes the basis for a combative lucidity in which the critique of the organization of life cannot be separated from the immediate inception of the project of living differently. Construction can begin only on the foundation of individual despair and its transcendence; the efforts made to disguise this despair and pass it off under another wrapper are proof enough of this, if proof were needed. What is the illusion which stops us seeing the disintegration of values, the ruin of the world, inauthenticity, non-totality?

- Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life ("Humiliation," p. 21)

To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh - which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.

- Michel Foucault, LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES [Trans., The Order of Things, ("Man and His Doubles," p. 343)]

Why do critics thus periodically proclaim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty...All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind. One mimics silliness in order to make the public protest in one's favour, and thus carry it along advantageously from complicity in helplessness to complicity in intelligence.

- Roland Barthes, Mythologies ("Blind and Dumb Criticism," p. 34)

Ambrose in his shop.

thank you.

I am a fan of never leaving a stone unturned.

after gluing and shaping three boards

I just couldn't in all concience finish

with glass withoutgetting the weight down.

I've got the band saw. I need to re-split the boards

had I comitted to chambering at the outset,yes,

life would be a whole lot different... and easier.

when I get more wood I will be more coherent.

no greater learning than doing things the hard way.

...ambrose...

now I will check c-list for the beam saw...

- ambrose m.curry III

ENOUGH! [BASTA!]
1
Derivatives
Illusion
Corruption
2
Origins
Truth
Innocence

Watch the whole program HERE.

[INTRODUCTION]:
When art is called "derivative" as a critique, the artwork so labeled is generally not being complimented. The term can migrate and serve as a label for an artist, again, as a pejorative. The critic is usually pointing out where in a vertical hierarchy, usually tied to chronology, an artwork or artist fits on the basis of originality. Anti-originality, keep in mind, has been a darling of the anti-art factions for nearly a century. The "traditional" art world is keen on its own version of "trickle down theory," elevating inventors and innovators to the pinnacles of a creative pyramid schema. It's a fairly pervasive formula for assigning value in crafts, like fashion. Think of the scene in "The Devil Wears Prada," when Meryl Streep's character credits herself with playing a big part in determining the outfit the young heroine of the movie is wearing. Each iteration removed from the original is thought to be corrupted by being so situated, but the architecture is holistically maintained as a given, and relies on the B, C, D+ lines for the legitimacy of the top end. Such is the realm of Style, and it is an appendix of the Courts (the regal ones, not the judicial kind).

I'd suggest that the vertical hierarchy of style derives from the Adam & Eve scenario. To review: Biting the bad apple of the Tree of Knowledge - O damn the woman-temptress & the serpent - leads to an endless distancing of mankind from Paradise and God. Innocence for a second-order divine-derivative humanity corrupted by a corrupted derivative second-order iteration (fallen angel) manifesting as an illusion, provisioning the corruption of the naif & her partner with deceptions. Producing a viral descending order corruption that infects every consequent iteration, a progression reversed only through the manifestation of a first-order divine iteration, who runs a program that erases corruption through redemption, returning mankind to a state of innocence, meaning oneness with the Divine...through God's own blood shed. Am I getting this right? Probably half-right, depending on whom one asks.

Adam and Eve - Lucas Cranach the Elder

One doesn't have to accept the precept of the Fall, this origin story with lots of gravity. I don't. For one thing, it's not very scientific. [...Maybe this precept of Original Sin is on what basis Goldman Sachs CEO rooted his now-notorious claim that his corporation is engaged in "God's work?" If so, that would involve some really complex twisted logic. We can ask him for clarification, after he testifies this week in the corruption trial of former GS board member Rajat Gupta (for alleged insider trading). Goldman Sachs is one of the most prominent and influential players in the derivatives market, by the way. GS and its employees have spent a lot of time in front of tribunals over the past few years, due to their role in the financial crash of 2007, although none of the important GS executives thus far has been successfully prosecuted...] Whatever. The creation story of man originating in the tribes of Israel is by no means humanity's only one. It's just the one with the most muscle behind it, over time.

∞

Art phenomenologically does adhere to a loose rule of origins, which has been the focus of much consideration over centuries, but art also adheres to a loose progression that can be thought of as scientific, too. But we're talking about derivatives. Copying for artists, is another practice altogether, one that artists undertake to learn technique, and maybe something ineffable, by attempting to render someone else's work as one's own. Which isn't the same as forging a painting, and doesn't even touch the new domain of the machine-enabled reproduction. So the multiples go and go and go. Suffice to say, at this point in the discussion, that derivatives, for the financial sector, are not art. In fact, they're really an anti-art.  

∞

Derivatives, meaning the derivatives market, are a civilization-destroying utility. [Art is a civilization-creating utility]. Enough data has been compiled - despite potent attempts to suppress any collective formation of clarity on derivatives and their destructive impact on society, economy and government - to make this assertion unequivocally. Derivatives are positively Biblical - as in plagues - in their proven capacity to poison the spectrum of human exchange. This is true no matter what JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon might say, before or after his company blew through billions, taking massive risks with other people's money in the derivatives market. It's important in the recent JPMC case to note that the department responsible for the huge losses (which numerically expand and compound every time another report appears) was supposed to do the work of risk *management*.

Some stories by major media in the aftermath of this most recent Too-Big-To-Fail (TBTF) bank failure suggested that a tick (a small blood-sucking, disease-carrying parasite) was behind the debacle. Really?

Lyme disease afflicts JPMC [click image].

∞

Leaving aside the theological and entomological reverse engineering of derivative markets, what do we do now that the deriva-beast is upon us? Again. Actually, it never got off us. Spain, only today, is the latest victim of Derivatism Syndrome. Once more, supposedly in order to prevent a systemic collapse of the financial sector, brought on by [? _______ MSM: fill in the blank with any ludicrous straw man], the banks get bailed out, the people get sold out, as they chant at OWS rallies. In the Washington Post, "tiny" Greece is blamed for the latest in the string of bankster FUBAR-SNAFU fuck-ups. That's absurd. The derivatives and hedge markets, and some really sick market manipulations, are behind Spain's bank woes, and Greece's, and Italy's, and Ireland's, and the United States... The whole mess, from 2006 or -7 until now is like a slow motion, (non-Act-of-God-caused) train wreck. The problem with pointing fingers at Greece or anywhere but the derivatives market, is the pattern of domino-effect fiscal calamities. Often, with patterns found in machined output, after dimensional analysis, we can spot procedural flaws in the tool's operations. At this point, there's no doubt about how we got into this mess, and why the mess continues to be a repetitive mess, a series or sequence of messes. To paraphrase Carville, it's the derivatives, stupid.

Pattern [PJM]

∞

The means to stop the damage being caused by the derivatives market(s), through political, economic and cultural interventions, are available. We, the 99% who are most dearly affected by the bloody derivatives market only have to "pull the trigger," to eradicate this financier-induced holocaust, by whatever means are most effective and quick. When the leaders of the free world refuse to correct the problem endangering our common welfare, we still have some methods for remedying the situation. What's preventing us from doing so? Is it because, as Žižek glibly asserts, 99% of us are boring idiots? Maybe. Or maybe it just seems that way to a genius philosopher from Slovenia.

By the way, art is not and never does endanger civilization. It is symptomatic of civilization. Anyway, we, the 99%, have to proclaim, "ENOUGH!" or run the risk of becoming completely derivative. Which is to say, numerical slaves to long equations serving the interests of tyrants and their bookmakers. One way to do that is through artful processes, although history demonstrates this is not the most efficient tool in the toolbox for the job at hand. Guns, guillotines and other instruments of war and capital punishment have performed better, in the past. Before we get to the bloody revolution, we ought to take one last stab at the art app.

Guillotine, Abbot Kinney Festival, 2010

∞

We can see that the consumption of civilization enabled by derivatives is itself enabled through corruption. In American politics, this is particularly spectacular, as an arc. Although systemic corruption by the 1% of the Republic (for which it isn't supposed to stand), from the Robber Barons forward at the least, has been a persistent canker on the face of Uncle Sam, the past 30 years has proven the worst blighted phase in our history. It would be myopic to suggest that the Thatchers, et al., of Europe and elsewhere have not demonstrated their obeisance to the plutocracy to the extent our corrupt leadership has, or to recall that the modern roots of plutocracy are buried deep in the putrid bowels of blood- and gore-soaked Europa and seemingly immovable. It's just that, given America's premise, our anti-tyranny origins, our fall is exceptional.

Detail from Corrupt Legislation. Mural by Elihu Vedder. Lobby to Main Reading Room, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Main figure is seated atop a pedestal saying "CORRUPT LEGISLATION". Artist's signature is dated 1896.

∞

Complicit politicians, economist fanatics, hybrid technocrats and lobbyists, and co-opted culturati and academics are the instruments perpetuating the derivatives market as it is. All bear responsibility for permitting the devastation afflicting real people, directly resulting from the day-to-day operations of the derivatives industry - some more than most, a few most of all. Those so inclined could generate a list, not unlike the President's assassination roll, marking the co-opted for their reckonings. It would be a very long list. Partly so, because the most guilty have made every effort to distribute their guilt unfairly amongst the populace. Criminals do this as modus operandi, naturally, and this is old news.

Philosophy and literature have a lot to add to the topic of corruption, and its opposite, innocence. Dostoevsky, Arendt, and lots of others. Evil and the victims of evil are embedded as a central binary in the canons, and the thematic thread ties neatly to concepts of guilt and innocence. Hell, we can trace this all the way back to Adam, Eve and the Serpent, too. Degrees of guilt are in some arenas quantifiable, like the civil courts, and can be monetized, like objects. Ask BP, EXXON, Massey, Toyota and Halliburton. For big corporations, guilt is only a matter of payoffs, for this very reason, or moral equivalency, as such. It's worth noting that a significant discussion of innocence revolves around the killing of innocents in wartime, or the legalities therof. Not to throw a curve ball: Since a preponderance of the most egregious activities in the derivatives rackets has happened while our country has been at war, our at least at a simulation of it, then should we not be coloring the conversation about derivatives in that context, as a category of war profiteering?

I don't know. I guess the real issue here is that corruption isn't just an idea, and the consequences of corruption are real. Derivative-corruption is eating away at humanity, one person, one town, one job, one nation, one history, one dream at a time. The stories of how the consumption is playing out among us don't add up to literature. These accounts comprise an indictment that our courts refuse to prosecute, because they are corrupt.

∞

With responsibility comes accountability, at least that's the democratic assumption. What's the best way to make those derivative specialists and their corrupt cronies accountable, to account for what they've done and continue to do? The courts don't seem to be up to the task. Our elected representatives generally seem clueless, or complicit, and completely disabled or unwilling collectively to fix the derivatives problem. The cops apparently know which side they're on, judging from the OWS experience. It doesn't help that the accountants are completely unreliable nowadays. Think Enron, but much, much bigger an worse, as accounting frauds go. New crackpot accounting schemes and maneuvers have to be invented daily to hide the shit sandwiches the derivatives market cooks up in its fecal kitchens and sells as gourmet platters to the rubes.

And what of the rubes, "We the People?" How many people who are suffering from derivative effects understand the causes of their difficulties, much less display the willingness to drop what they're doing (or turn off what they're watching) to make a stand?

[Art isn't ever responsible, but artists are. Every society gets the art it deserves.]

[From Jim Fisher]

∞

The Cloud. In a derivative world, cause and effect are shrouded in a cloud of plausible deniability, equivocation, rationalization and the immoral-but-legal excuses so common with recent corporate malpractice. Paralysis is almost encoded in the masses, when it comes to our actually mobilizing to directly address social ills. Do we need to pretend we don't know what's behind it, behind the algorithmic curtain of imaginary trillions in play 24/7/365 in the derivatives alt.reality? Let's get real. If you can't see what's happening, it's because there's a giant fog machine cloaking the crimes of the derivatives pros.

The top-shelf wetware engineers of stasis are mainly to be found in DC, Hollywood and Big Pharma. Next we have the guilt engines that run on self-realization and fear of Hell. They're busy praying for the Apocalypse, don't forget. I suppose we should acknowledge also the wreckage the divorce industry has wrought in destabilizing the democracy, since we have plenty of data to verify that, as a social experiment in modernity, marital break-up is as brutal a factor as any at play in the domain of cultural implosion. Divorce is not just a Kafka-esque extra-Constitutional, unaccountable judicial wing employing an army of very sick, banal and brutal individuals. Its a doomsday device that kills and maims people every minute of every day. That's a point of departure for another time.

Moving along...And maybe we might face the truth about the huge populations of non-citizens and poverty-stricken Americans who with rare exceptions play no participatory role in the democratic process, and who are ruthlessly consumed by a host of extraction and exploitation industries. Oh, yeah, and let's not forget the "broken" (quickly-being-privatized) education/healthcare systems, the public economy, the commons - it's tough to holler ENOUGH when you or your service-oriented livelihood being phased out of existence to cover for the super-rich. Jobs, schmobs, mobs. Occupational public service is being converted into service industry jobs. Instead of building futures, our steady civilian army is flipping burgers. Outsourcing: Ever notice how no mothers ever admonish their kids to finish the food on their plates anymore, calling the youngsters' attention to those starving kids someplace far away, like China, who would love a bite of that canned spaghetti?

You have to love it when a well-paid hack corporate shill/pundit, foisting the flag of Nostalgia, proclaims something like, "What has become of the free press and informed, not-to-be-trifled-with John Q. Public?" What happened to Frank Capra's America? Actually, to pretend we don't know the answer to that question now is utter bullshit. Admit it. Free society is being systematically destroyed by greedheads, who dream of living the exciting, pampered, (mediocre) life of corporate kings and queens, or at least robber barons, or, finally, warlords. More and more of these bastards are actualized in their ambitions. (Mitt Romney is on the verge.) & the demos is for the most part idling while the shitty deal goes down. The side effects and collateral damage, to use that Orwellian phrase from the Iraq invasion 2.0, are only incidental, if you're not the one suffering from them. OWS put a dent in the apathy bubble, poked a hole in the cloud, but instead of hundreds to tens of thousands in the streets, there *should* have been tens of millions on the march, if self-interest were truly a pure force for democratic recourse against injustice. Is art supposed to fix this? Come on. Sober up!

∞

In the derivatives schema, the media is instrumental to sustaining of the environment conducive for the monstrous derivative market's continuance. The media plays its part through the distortion of the actual conditions we are experiencing, as derivative effects, essentially projecting illusions that distract us from the real source of our systemic problems.

To characterize the media role as a generator of distraction is too simplistic. The media is vital to the success of the derivatives market, because the structure of the market is in fact radically fragile, and vulnerable to many forms of attack and failure. The media is consolidated to the extent that uniformity of perception can be purchased and projected by those who benefit most from derivatives profiteering. The direct links connecting the profiteers and their media agents are easy to camouflage. The monopolized media is a collaborator in the derivatives scheme. If we only had reality TV!

The derivative market's prime beneficiaries recognize that general attention must be turned away from their massively destructive praxis, or else the praxis will itself be destroyed and outlawed - which it should be. The media is needed to not only push propaganda that is conducive to the survival of the derivatives market, the media is needed to cover up or spin the endemic corruption attached to the derivatives syndicates.

Media, which as a term hardly describes the sophisticated "media" industry anymore, relies on both "hard" and "soft" science to perform its utilitarian tasks, in service to the derivatives market (and other powerful and destructive industries, too, such as the war and energy industries). The technology of pervasive reach and user management is dimensional. The wiring of networks includes satellite arrays, international and transoceanic infrastructure, hugely profitable pay-service schemes, the support of regulators and politicians, etc.

The wiring of derivative perception requires extensive complexes for producing content, evaluation of responses, and testing or recruitment programs, which contribute to the pre-determining of derived outcomes. On the back end, the data-gathering complex blurs the objectives of immensely powerful commercial interests, the info-voracious military and police agencies, and the hackers, of both "good" and "bad" persuasions. Anyone connected to the web in any significant way, unless taking measures to ensure otherwise, is being reframed, jacketed and composited as a profile (or, rather, a multitude of them) with or without one's consent. We are all media now.

The derivatives, the corruption and the illusions can be described as dimensional, because they all employ time in their processes. Effects are amplified (and/or minimized), exponentially, over time, in each aspect. Taken together, these processes have wreaked cumulative devastation on every system they contact, materially, or influence, immaterially. Each component of the derivatives matrix requires the artificial (across a spectrum of applications) to exist - a strange but true statement. Each functions in relation to other systems, and acts upon the host system, like a cancer in a body, growing beyond the host's capacity to sustain life (or its self-predation).

The derivatives market is basically a mechanized leech system for the wholesale redistribution of wealth, an extreme innovation in class warfare. It eventually corrodes economic immune systems, thrives on and encourages instability, and synthesizes market distortion in ways that benefit the interests of a few over the many. At this point, the whole "stock market" is a derivatives-based Ponzi.

The corruption-extension, for the perpetuation of the derivatives market, has engendered a wholesale redefinition or de-definition of ethics in the political, business and social sectors. In order to prevent damaged constituencies (the 99%) from shutting down the derivatives market, especially after enough evidence has aggregated illustrating how harmful derivatives are, the authorities must be on board.

In a derivative world, corruption has emerged as the new normal, and perpetual suffering by the 99% must be fashioned into a new normal, through policy, regulation or de-regulation, consistent governmental failure, and so on. The media role in this deformation of civilization cannot be underestimated.

The world and everything in it is now "owned" by the out of control derivatives market. There is not enough wealth in all the earth's economies to cover a total loss, should/when the (inevitable) collapse of the derivatives bubble occur. TBTF really doesn't apply to the big banks, so much as it does to the derivatives market they are all gambling in.

To buttress the assertions above, as symptomatic proof, one can suggest the skeptic "follow the money." Witness the astonishing estimates of the valuation of the derivatives market. Witness the money flowing into political election processes (and the near-total suspension of ethics violations and absence of corruption prosecutions among the major players) from derivatives "winners" and their allies. Witness the funds devoted to manufacturing a global media syndicate.

Finally, one must consider the element of force in this situation. Without a fully articulated police/prison/surveillance state, designed to suppress dissent and effective direct action against the derivatives scheme and the array of co-opted systems serving its interests and beneficiaries, and their allies in other industrial syndicates, the derivatives market almost certainly would already have been dismantled.

∞

Right now, we stand at a crossroads. Occupy Wall Street has done a significant service in exposing the extent to which the derivatives market is harmful to the commonwealth. Through collective action and individual efforts, the dimensional derivatives+corruption+media+force topology has been mapped and made available to the people. To a great extent the means by which the seriousness of the situation has been conveyed have been "alternative," which means they have relied on precarious and easily disrupted tools, such as protests, free internet applications and grassroots operations. Even so, the trajectory of the derivatives market has been influenced, if only accelerated by interventions and opposition, since the prime participants are fully aware of the fragility of their enterprise, and fearful of its undoing. They therefore, when pressed, as in Greece, when the popular uprising almost led to a democratic referendum on "austerity," respond desperately, blatantly disrupting democratic processes that threaten the global derivatives scheme.

In the short-term, the top-down reaction to 99% unrest has been to engage in militarization, co-optation or subversion of civilian architectures for self-governance. These reactive measures have been abetted by pervasive media blitzes. Discipline in the 1% ranks has been impressive, demonstrated in the effective coordination of programs to fend off threats arising from oppositional popular movements and individual actions.

The Obama administration, for example, applied its considerable wartime power to crush Occupy nationwide, and has also targeted whistleblowers. The "enemy," we can see, is now anyone or any group illuminating the President's role in furthering the dimensional arcs of the 1%, as they strive for global domination. It is not clear whether the relentless pressurizing forces acting constantly against Obama, since his election, have shaped the man and his Presidency, or provided him the reasons he needs to behave as he would have liked anyway. Such is the nature of corruption, power-madness, or cowardice, which in effect can seem identical.

Pissed.
∞

Those of us who have taken staunch and public positions against the derivatives/corruption/illusion/force complex are in reality only a small fraction of "the masses," which are in the modern era not staunch and public typically, or are so in relation to themselves as an individuated artificial construct (e.g., as consumers, or as a statistical corpus for third-party purposes of developing theory or conducting analysis, true or false). The masses, as Baudrillard pointed out, are for the spectacle, and, as Drucker perceived, in isolated cohabitation with various categories of mediated life, in work, worship, politics and play.

Goya, "Saturn Devouring His Son"

∞

Is this our greatness, our wee We-ness, still? A silent majority who assemble only to dissemble? We should hope not. Such is the status quo of the neo-identity regime, the mass self, the anti-demos, for its own realization in what emerges as an era of endless wartime, criminalization and recession. The dynamics of situating oneself against the derivative scheme, its corruption and illusions, as they pertain to supportive or not-supportive behavior of the silent majority, are fungible at best.

Nothing social or cultural, especially not "the masses," is ever for- or against- permanently at any moment. The circumstances of resistance on the ground therefore are subject to change day-to-day, and risk aversion is probably the most salient factor in determining whether one experiences a groundswell of support, an awful shunning or outright animus. A contemporary protester (see the TIMES cover illustration), must struggle against an ideal fomented by critics of the perfection of protest, and not just the object of one's dissent.

Entropy is a consistent problem, an enforced "fuck-it" condition, tending to accompany prolonged engagement in resistance. The catch-phrase is "activist burnout," but the reality is that all resistance encounters immediate threats of strangulation. That's nothing new. Setting aside goals and aspirations as a contributing member of high-performing society to oppose the burgeoning tyranny of the 1% is a persistent sacrifice that the macro-schema refuses to reward. Personal ambition, even if the game is a corrupt lottery or star schema, still drives the dreams of "success" of individuals reduced to a mass, even as the usual aspirations are quickly being drained of value or are being foreclosed on.  

∞   

In light of the environmental hazards, what is the upside for pursuing a life characterized by originality, innocence and truth? Anyone who does so will stick out like a sore thumb! In a society that - whether anyone cares to admit it or not - no longer protects its people, is corrupt, caters almost exclusively to falsified perception and bent desire, and rumbles forward toward dimensional cataclysm, pushed by blind greed and hubris, why undertake anything that expresses an idea like freedom? If you are living in a slave camp, does it do any good to pretend you are free?

∞

In order to push through the impediments, to arrive at an answer to that proposition, either personally or collectively, recognition of the power of "enough" is probably fundamental, at some conscious or instinctual level. Making a stand, in the face of danger, implicit or immediate, is not necessarily an intellectual exercise, an exertion of mind. In fact the action of stopping a progression may be better served by no-mind, in the Eastern metaphysical sense.

This is why art can be helpful to us. I don't mean Jeff Koons. And I don't mean whatever it is that Nato Thompson is pushing.     

Mona Lisa LoLcat (Original artist of derivative work unknown.)