The Zero Room

This image is from the photoblog of a fellow called Alan who kicked the bucket in 2008. Apparently he used to wander about Sydney photographing urban curios, which is a lovely way to spend one's twilight (or any other, for that matter) years. I don't know how I ended up at his posthumously-maintained website, but this building was a blast from the past.

The photo is a stitched (and distorted) panorama of a block of flats in Annandale, in the inner west of Sydney. When I knew it, the building was a "self storage" facility to whom my then-employer — a huge multinational corporation which I cannot name, rhyming with "Baltex Oil" — outsourced its old records archiving. We basically occupied two football-pitch-sized floors of the building which was, as Alan or the curators of his legacy note, originally a piano factory.

Access to our floors was via a wire cage manual elevator. As you'll see in old films from early last century, the controls in these things were limited to a lever which took the car up or down, and much satisfaction was to be had in succeding in drawing the floor of the car to within a centimeter or two of your destination floor.

My employer had a room there dedicated to old furniture judged too ostentatious for the 1990s. I suppose they thought efficiency and frugality was a passing fad, and these items would be needed again in the future. There were desks and cabinets that for all I know were rosewood or mahogany, and I kid you not an honest-to-goodness grand piano. Colleagues of a sufficiently advanced vintage told me that it originally graced the staff cafeteria.

Another little room held tubes of blueprints and a cabinet of index cards of retail outlets held by an Australian company which was in the 1970's (I think) subsumed into the multinational. My grandfather was one of the franchisees of that company, in the 1950s I think, after returning from Korea (where he was apparently the company barber, occasionally coming under heavy dandruff). I forget now, but I knew then, which suburb his particular outlet was in. I held the little photographic slide accompanying that index card up to the light, but there was no sign of him.

The really outstanding thing was the factory washbasin. It was a circular bath, about six feet in diameter, with a fountain maybe four foot high in the middle. Around and beneath the curved basin there was a rail you would press down on with your foot (think of the rail upon which you rest your foot at a pub bar), turning on the water which would sprinkle out in all directions around the perimeter of the bath. I wish I could find a video of this setup; I've seen it documented (I think in a music video — Trashcan Sinatras maybe?) but I've had no success in formulating the right search engine query. It's basically Taylorist hygeine; terrible for washing one pair of hands, but it gets one shift washed and out as efficiently as possible, and the next lot in. I just can't work out, in this elegant piece of engineering, where they kept the soap.

Then there was the proximity to the Annandale Hotel. Superbly ordinary decor and brilliantly indifferent staff (at the time; I'm sure it's since been gentrified), and I saw a killer gig there by Bughouse, a fantastic band who were unfortunate enough to be too late to be post-punk, and too early to be post-punk revival.

Also I'm reasonably certain that at this distance I can say, without fear of legal reprisal, that I may have on occasion left the office with two Cabcharge dockets, and not redeemed the second at the end of an afternoon's hard work swinging boxes of paper about, playing with the lift, indulging in a creepy fascination with decades-old corporate ephemera, et cetera. A spare Cabcharge docket is a useful thing if you have a lifestyle which may involve missing the last train home, or falling down a flight of stairs and being unable to limp to the train station.

So if you have a unit at 45 Trafalgar Street, would you consider taking in a lodger? I am at the moment bereft of funds, but I am a living link to the property's rich history. If the original elevator's still intact, I'm more than happy to work it. I got my margin of error down to millimetres. Millimetres! You can't buy that kind of expertise, but you can aquire it in exchange for a mad old hobo sleeping on your floor.

This week Country Rugby League announced plans to scrap the current model and replace it with an Under-23s competition.  It means the chance to represent the Northern Rivers or North Coast is effectively finished for anyone over the age of 23.

I just… I don't know how one can recover from a shock like this. So much of the North Coast culture is built around the tradition of short fat men with broken noses, cauliflower ears, and no necks groping each other in the middle of a muddy field.

From an early age I was cursed with being tall and good-looking. So I was left on the sidelines, fending off a barrage of advances from attractive women, wishing that I too could one day fully appreciate the smell of male armpits and the endless comic potential of drunken cross-dressing.

Pushing people in their prime out of ritualised violence is just a gift to the reading and thinking lobbies, who will be glad to sink their claws into these vulnerable young men. We can't let them destroy our cherished way of life. How will our health care industry survive without a steady stream of knee injuries?

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Higher Education White Paper: Euphemisms for Destruction — Will Davies in the Political Economy Research Centre blog: It is easy to moan about ‘privatization’ of higher education, but this is arguably something worse. With privatization go some of the benefits of privacy. Instead, we have a technocratic dream of perfectly calibrated ‘satisfaction’ and fees, where every ‘incentive’ is ‘aligned’. It all stems from a Benthamite fantasy that (as I explore in The Happiness Industry) money and subjective experience have a simple, stable relationship to each other. Sustaining the fantasy in an area like higher education involves regulatory complexity on a scale and cost that even Blairites might have blanched at. Technical complexity of this nature benefits one ‘stakeholder’ above all others: consultants.
• Polls Showed Sanders Had a Better Shot of Beating Trump–but Pundits Told You to Ignore Them — Adam Johnson, at Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR): There was a debate last spring, when the Sanders/Clinton race was at its most heated, as to whether Bernie Sanders’ consistently out-polling Hillary Clinton was to be taken as a serious consideration in favor of his nomination. […] Never mind, the pundits said—Clinton had been “vetted” and Sanders had not.
• Obama said Hillary will Continue his Legacy – Indeed! — Michael Hudson. Okay, academic now, but this is a very important point I've not heard expressed from anybody else. Forget superdelegates; the Democratic primary process included essentially irrelevant states in the sample that was supposed to prove Clinton's electability: Appointed as DNC head by President Obama in 2008, [Tim Kaine] dismantled Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, not bothering to fight Republicans in the South and other solid Republican states. His move let them elect governors who gerrymandered their voting districts after the 2010 census. The DNC designated these “neglected” states to come first in the presidential primaries. They were the ones that Hillary won. Sanders won most of the swing states and those likely to vote Democratic. That made him the party’s strongest nominee – obliging the DNC to maneuver to sideline him.
• Time to ditch Rawls? — Branko Milanovic: Liberal democracies do not affirm the principles of liberalism, as Rawls expected, neither domestically nor internationally. It is inconceivable for Rawls, if these societies would be working well, that they would, as in the US now, generate a third or more of “malcontent” population that clearly does not believe in liberal principles nor is willing to affirm them in their daily lives. Far from it. This, plus the pervasive role of money in electoral politics, lower tax rates for capital than labor, neglect of public education etc. imply that domestically so called liberal societies are very far from Rawls’ idea of liberalism. The difference is so great that we cannot, I think, speak of the discrepancy any longer as the expected difference between an abstract idea and what exist in reality. These societies belong to an entirely different category. Moreover, in foreign policy, as became clear with the Iraq war, they act like outlaw states since they break the fundamental rules on which the international community is founded, namely absence of wars of aggression.
• The Gig Economy — Ted Rall:
  
• Building a Progressive International — Yanis Varoufakis continues his crusade of optimism in the pages of Project Syndicate: Bernie Sanders’s “political revolution” in the US, Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the UK’s Labour Party, DiEM25 (the Democracy in Europe Movement) on the continent: these are the harbingers of an international progressive movement that can define the intellectual terrain upon which democratic politics must build. But we are at an early stage and face a remarkable backlash from the global troika: witness Sanders’ treatment by the Democratic National Committee, the run against Corbyn by a former pharmaceutical lobbyist, and the attempt to have me indicted for daring to oppose the EU’s plan for Greece.
• Why Jeremy Corbyn Matters — Richard King in 3 Quarks Daily: It's this prospect of genuine grass-roots democracy that scares the bejesus out of the establishment. The Blairites like to talk about "credibility" and to lament or decry Corbyn's lack of it. But they know as well as anyone that the public's notions of what is credible are changing faster than Donald Trump's policy positions. Boris Johnson, a man who can't comb his own hair and describes African people as "piccaninnies", has just been made British Foreign Secretary: how's that for "credibility"? No, the Blairites aren't anti-Corbyn because they think he can't beat May in a general election. They are anti-Corbyn because they're worried he will.
• Class in America and Donald Trump — Karin Kamp interviews historian Nancy Isenberg for BillMoyers.com: Donald Trump’s success is rooted in a raw, unscripted speech, outright rudeness and his ability to project anger without being constrained by the well-measured idiom of the politician. His campaign manager admits he is “projecting an image.” Who’s surprised? Our electoral politics has always countenanced con artists and has abided identity politics. An Australian observer described the phenomenon succinctly back in 1949, and it’s true today: Americans have a taste for a “democracy of manners,” he insisted, which was in fact different from real democracy. Voters accept huge disparities in wealth, he observed, while expecting their leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.”
• My Fellow Americans: We Are Fools — Margot Kidder vents on CounterPunch on the occasion of Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton's coronation as Democratic nominee: I am half Canadian, I was brought up there, with very different values than you Americans hold, and tonight — after the endless spit ups and boasts and rants about the greatness of American militarism, and praise for American military strength, and boasts about wiping out ISIS, and America being the strongest country on earth, and an utterly inane story from a woman whose son died in Obama’s war, about how she got to cry in gratitude on Obama’s shoulder — tonight I feel deeply Canadian. Every subtle lesson I was ever subliminally given about the bullies across the border and their rudeness and their lack of education and their self-given right to bomb whoever they wanted in the world for no reason other than that they wanted something the people in the other country had, and their greed, came oozing to the surface of my psyche.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Surpluses & deficits are hotly debated – but what about the currency? — Emile Woolf, Renegade Inc: When a British importer buys German goods he must pay for them in euros. For that purpose he (or his agent) will acquire euros from a German bank, and after settling the bill the German exporter (or his bank) is now a holder of British pounds. What will he do them? He can use them to buy British goods, or even UK treasury bonds, or he can exchange them for a different currency – but if, instead, he just sits on them indefinitely he will, just like the retailer who never cashes your cheque, be handing the importer a free gift!
• John McDonnell is right: we do disagree on macroeconomic policy — Richard Murphy: I said he should not agree to a fiscal charter promising a balanced budget which is wholly economically unnecessary and even destructive. But he did. I also argued against the fundamentally neoliberal concept of an independent central bank that takes control of key aspects of economic management out of democratic control and which was Ed Balls idea. But John bought into it. And as a result he backed off from People’s QE : he was advised that a central bank cannot create money to help ordinary people, job creation or the building of social housing. Instead John accepted that central banks can only use that power for the sake of saving bankers.
• The macroeconomic challenge of the twenty first century — Richard Murphy: Petrodollars created the architecture of the economies of the world that are now creaking at potential massive cost to us all. Now wise management of the fiscally created dollars, euros, pounds, yen and more can provide the alternative, costless but ultimately liberating source of the lubricant for our future economies. As a result we no longer need to burn the planet to liberate the potential in all people. The fiscal dollar can instead build the foundations for prosperity and social harmony that we all crave.
• New Paper: Demand-Side Business Dynamism — Mike Konczal and Marshall Steinbaum in Roosevelt Forward: This paper argues that the decline in mobility, dynamism, and entrepreneurship is a result of declining labor demand since 2000. When it is hard to find another job, employed workers stay at the jobs they have, impairing their ascent up the job ladder and the accompanying wage growth over careers that historically led to the middle class. Declining entrepreneurship can also be explained by workers’ reluctance to leave large, stable incumbents to start their own firm or to work at a start-up when they cannot be assured that they will have a more stable job to return to. Thus, we find that the concentration of employment in old firms and in large firms mirrors the timing of declining labor mobility due to declining demand.
• Understanding Trump — George Lakoff: Private enterprise and private life utterly depend on public resources. Have you ever said this? Elizabeth Warren has. Almost no other public figures. And stop defending “the government.” Talk about the public, the people, Americans, the American people, public servants, and good government. And take back freedom. Public resources provide for freedom in private enterprise and private life. The conservatives are committed to privatizing just about everything and to eliminating funding for most public resources. The contribution of public resources to our freedoms cannot be overstated. Start saying it.
• How Did We Get Such a Terrible Nominee? — Ted Rall:
  
• The Bank of Japan needs to introduce Overt Monetary Financing next — Bill Mitchell: When economists talk of ‘printing money’ they are referring to the process whereby the central bank adds some numbers to the treasury’s bank account to match its spending plans and in return is given treasury bonds to an equivalent value. That is where the term ‘debt monetisation’ comes from. Instead of selling debt to the private sector, the treasury simply sells it to the central bank, which then creates new funds in return. This accounting smokescreen is, of course, unnecessary. The central bank doesn’t need the offsetting asset (government debt) given that it creates the currency ‘out of thin air’. So the swapping of public debt for account credits is just an accounting convention.
• Economic change will not happen until the left understands money — Ann Pettifor in openDemocracy: The fact is that as western economies try to recover, they are sunk again by a mountain of private debt whose repayment is made less likely by austerity policies. These are policies with the ideological aim of “shrinking the state” but which, in the process contract both public and private sector investment, employment and incomes. The consequence of weak demand built on a mountain of debt is deflation: a generalized fall in prices and wages. Most economists, especially those in thrall to the finance sector, have an obsession with, and an aversion to inflation. The reason is that inflation erodes the value of debt. Deflation does the very opposite: it inflates the value of debt. Creditors are not disturbed by deflation, as it effortlessly, and silently increases the value of their most valuable asset: debt.
• Education, The Enlightenment, and the 21st-Century — Fred van Leeuwen for the RSA: There is an inherent conflict between blind faith and critical thinking. That is true whether it is religious fanaticism or the imposition of political ideologies or nationalistic or ethnic dogmas in schools. Although I am not confounding barbaric terrorism with the “values” of the market, it is a danger if one grants markets and management thinking unexamined reverence. Placing education in such a straightjacket is having a major impact on development because it is affecting the way in which communities are conceived, justice is understood, and democracy is practised.
• The DNC Email Leaks: The Gift That Keeps On Feeding Distrust — John Kiriakou in Truthdig: As my friend the State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren said recently, “People are claiming the Russian government risked something close to war to hack DNC emails to embarrass [Hillary] Clinton after her own email shenanigans and to help [Donald] Trump, who maybe would win in November and who maybe would make decisions favorable to Russia? You realize that’s what has to be true for this [Vladimir] Putin scenario to be true, right? We’re back to the 1950s, accusing politicians of being in league with the Russians.” […] The issue is that the DNC colluded and conspired to favor the Clinton campaign and deny Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination for president. The DNC’s actions were Nixonian, and they read like an account of that shamed president’s actions from a chapter of “All the President’s Men.”
• Overt Monetary Financing would flush out the ideological disdain for fiscal policy — Bill Mitchell: Monetary policy is really such a blunt and ineffective tool that it should be rendered redundant. The mainstream have never provided a convincing case that manipulating interest rates is somehow the preferable and effective option for stabilising the spending cycle. The GFC experience would suggest otherwise. All the monetary policy gymnastics have had very little impact. It would be much better to set the overnight rate at zero and leave it there and allow the longer term rates (which are impacted by inflation risk) settle as low as possible. Then, manage the spending cycle with fiscal initiatives that can be targetted, adjusted fairly quickly and which have direct impacts.
• Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit — Glenn Greenwald: Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.