Elite Limited Liability Company

CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy. I note in passing that Seligman, the guy who wrote about learned helplessness and now happiness has this to say about the CIA's use of his material. Happiness, said Aristotle, is a life of virtue lived in a just society. What we have is pretty close, I guess. Look on the bright side.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

In certain contexts, Seligman could be considered the horse's ass.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

I have a basic question. Why is the limited liability corporation necessary? I suspect it is only necessary for predatory capitalism, but what are the arguments that they trot out for it? For that matter, why does the government always exempt itself from liability? The ultimate LLC, Uncle Sam.

Also, how does this related to corporate personhood? Law must have a foundation or the idea that no one is above the law is to have any substance. If legislation creates a basic contradiction at the core, it is like accepting a false proposition in logic. The system breaks down and you can prove any statement true of false. It seems to me the legal framework for the world is broken at this fundamental level.

What is the genre in which we can really speak truth? As you have claimed, plain language is not enough, but satire can only teach so much.

[jr]

No fair pointing at the foundation. Reemember, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

[jr]

(Hey, Phil, that's fucking *Voltaire*, in case ya missed it.)

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Without foundation, you have nothing but castles in the air. Without a foundation approximation, much less perfection, is impossible.

Because I've been reading more Peirce to give myself a better grounding in semiotics. In the satiric frame, an academic like Peirce can only be a dupe or a fool, and he in neither.

So I ask again: What is the genre and venue for speaking plain truth and not becoming a target or a dupe?

[Phil Cubeta]

Plain speaking moral truth is parrhesia. Its costs and benefits were assessed here by Foucault of Discipline and Punish fame. http://foucault.info/documents/parrhesia/

Every genre has its rules. The problem with parrhesia, though, is it gets you killed. ("Shoot the messenger.")

You could dig deeper by considering Habermas as one who holds we should all be parrhesiasts in the public square, candid and transparent. That game works if all play it. The game does not work when some in the public square work for Elite, LLC, for example.

Think about it. Truth by indirection is a strategy around with a huge literature has grown up (fable, allegory, parable, irony, jest, feigned madness, satire, innuendo, deniable statements, and on and on.) Why? Because speaking truth to power when the truth is unwelcome can be fatal, literally.

[Phil Cubeta]

LLCs protect investors and managers from the liabilities created by the busienss venture. A normal partnership does not. So if you form an entity with partners, if might make sense to do a corporatio, or an LLC.
http://www.morrislawpartners.com/morris-law-content/preserving-liability-protections.html

[Edward Stentorian]

LLC's extend the "limited liability" that big corporations enjoy without the requirement that you have a board, quarterly meetings and the other trappings of large companies. There is no stock issue. The "corporate person" formalized in an LLC is a front for what is often actually a person.

[Edward Stentorian]

I neglected to mention that the CIA would prefer an LLC for front due to the above reasons - it leaves less of a paper trail and does not have the collaborative constraints that corporations do. The LLC, among other things, is meant to make it easier for sole proprietors to legitimate their businesses; if you regard a necessarily asocial torturing spook as a sole proprietor, the choice of an LLC makes great sense!

[Edward Stentorian]

Or as the tagline for Sam Peckinpah's 1975 CIA thriller "The Killer Elite" put it:

"MEN WANTED. Private company with C.I.A. contract seeks men willing to risk life. Perfect physical condition. Experience with weaponry, incendiaries, Karate/Judo. No loyalties. No dependents. Long career doubtful."

Gallows humor on the part of the creators of Elite, LLC?

[Kia]

What is the genre and venue for speaking plain truth and not becoming a target or a dupe?

What are you doing and where are you now? That's the genre and that's where.

If you think we need to fear becoming a target for some kind of extrajudicial government action for speaking up, well, is it East Germany here yet? And if it is, then what? Otherwise what is at risk? Becoming the target of being thought a crank, a fool, a hippie, an insufficiently Serious Person? Job? Social embarrassment? Being wrong? Feeling lonely? Having people, friends even, not comfortable with what you do? I have already experienced all these things, most of the time not even in a good cause. And yet I live.

The young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet? 21 Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. 22 But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.

Why speak up? To enjoy the proverbial wrestling bout with a pig? No, for me it looks like the expression of my free imagination, my creative will if you'll pardon my language, so it can move towards wisdom and goodness and delight. I want to live and act in consciousness of the greater, but I have to find it in my experience, I have to pick the moment and the place out of the chaos of reality, it's a creative act and these we do alone and in some degree of uncertainty, ultimately.

The rich man has trouble getting into heaven not because he's got lots of money but because he won't risk anything: comfort, certainties, status, possessions, standing, reputation, safety, identity in so far as it is constituted by those things. He leads that whole exchange with Jesus, and it's funny, because what does he want? I think he wants to be special. Jesus says, "Oh, well, if you want to be perfect..." and then tells him how. It's like the Grimm's fairy tale of the Fisherman and His Wife. Basically the guy, like the fisherman's wife, is back in the piss-pot again, never, in effect, having left it.

[Jon Husband]

Becoming the target of being thought a crank, a fool, a hippie, an insufficiently Serious Person? Job? Social embarrassment? Being wrong? Feeling lonely? Having people, friends even, not comfortable with what you do? I have already experienced all these things, most of the time not even in a good cause. And yet I live.

I have that t-shirt and all the schwag too.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

I'm not questioning the logic of speaking up, I'm asking for a renewed public space of discourse where particularly the Knaves and Courtiers can be identified and excluded from access to speaking and public decision processes.

In order to have free dialog among friends, you have to stop the Knaves from fleecing the Dupes and the Courtiers from preening and taking up space. You have to create safe spaces, safe public spaces. My friends know that I am no Dupe, and I am willing to play the Fool for effect, but that isn't authentic dialog either.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

And WRT LLC, my mistake on terminology. I'm getting at the limitation of liability that is characteristic of most legal corporate forms. It seems to me that this limitation of liability is the source of the corporate form's power to corrupt systems of government, markets and more. Are these not simply legal frameworks that enable corruption? Corporations can go bankrupt at will and externalize any liability that can be compartmentalized to the bankrupted entity. It also leads to the too big to fail "suicide bankers" now holding the whole world hostage.

My question is really whether there is any purpose to the protection afforded through various types of corporate charter? Is there any value created for "all of us". Why should we allow it?

Even completely sane insiders who do speak with authority and issued a clear warning from a position of authority in these matter are sidelined.

[Kia]

I'm asking for a renewed public space of discourse where particularly the Knaves and Courtiers can be identified and excluded from access to speaking and public decision processes.

And I'm answering that you don't create the space and then have the discourse. The discourse creates the space when people know that in the circle that you draw round yourself things will be called by their proper names--a Knave a Knave, etc. I'm saying that speaking up creates the space, by making it harder for crookedness and meanness to occupy it. If there is goodness in that space it will attract people who are drawn to goodness, who want to share the freedom that you create for yourself. This has happened to me enough times, even in my complete personal insignificance, that I know how powerful it is. When I've spoken up in public it has drawn people to me. That's the only way in this universe that space is "created"--when I create space on my desk I move some stuff out of the way. Created space is only reclaimed space, and its purpose should not be to exclude the wrong sort of people but to nurture, strengthen, and celebrate the good; what do you suppose the excluded Knaves and Courtiers will be doing with themselves while all the Worthy and Right-Thinking People are holding their hootenannies or symposia or fashion shows or mass rallies or whatever? They'll do what they have always done: build their parallel associations of Right-Thinking People and then wage a war for legitimacy, which they regard as another useful asset to which they are entitled, and if they happen to find that they have to destroy actual legitimacy to win they will destroy it. There is plenty of world to fight over and they can get along perfectly well without legitimacy, because power gives them, among other things, the means to create facsimiles of it should they find themselves in need of such a convenience. So what creates and sustains legitimacy? A lot of blood has been shed over that question. It is not simply wished into existence. Wishing or proclaiming it into existence like a sign advertising "The World's Largest Truck Stop In Iowa." That's part of the problem with self-proclaimed legitimacy, that it can only pretend to this claim by ignoring the narrowness of its actual capacity to represent anything. What works is work: to act, to speak as if the first thing to do is the work--work, endurance, faithfulness of purpose, a record of sacrifice, in uncertainty, in time. All, ironically, imaging the actual human condition.

[Phil Cubeta]

Kia, the conversation you recalled in an earlier thread between you and your well intended supervisor is a case in point. A moment of truth. Upshot: job gone. The question is whether (in my view) indirect strategies drawn from parable, fable, poetry, allegory, etc can get the job done without undue loss of job, blood, or access. "Tell the truth and tell it slant, all success in circuit lies." The Fool is only a Fool in good standing if allowed access to the Court and King. To speak truth to Power when Power is out of earshot is ineffective and self-serving. To retain access while speaking truth is what Horace, I believe, and Dryden and Swift, I believe, showed us how to do. "Hold the mirror up to nature." "Delight and instruct." "Pill coated with honey." "Poet as surgeon." "Our noble trade." All of this is about how to remain poet laureate speak moral truth to power. Thersistes rails without effect. Jesus got his people not only broke but crucified. I do not recommend him as a model, and God Forbid, I be called to follow in his footsteps, the way of the Cross. Even he regretted his own decision - "May this cup pass from me.... Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?" Unless you believe in the Resurrection, my suggestion is, "Fit in or F off." The Happy Tutor lives in a Dumpster. Works for him. I prefer a down bed.

[Phil Cubeta]

"a war for legitimacy." When we celebrate Folly we confound it. We simply cheer more loudly, Fools among Fools espousing Folly seriously. How can we be criticized for that? That is the brilliance of Erasmus's Praise of Folly or of Dryden's MacFleckno. The plain truth is far less fun, or effective. The Importance of Being Earnest cannot be overstated.

[Phil Cubeta]

If I could be Diogenes naked in a barrel, living to a fine old age, or Christ nailed to a cross, counting on the Resurrection, I would choose Diogenes. And even Jesus spoke in parables for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Speaking truth to power and getting fired does not require a PhD in English or Philosophy. You can do that right out of High School. What have we learned from our fine educations that will allow us to create social change, from the inside out, without being outcasts?

Good luck, says, Tutor, and I only wish I had his courage.

[DeeDee Durango]

When I've spoken up in public it has drawn people to me. That's the only way in this universe that space is "created"--when I create space on my desk I move some stuff out of the way.

Brilliant.

[Edward Stentorian]

Gerry said:

It seems to me that this limitation of liability is the source of the corporate form's power to corrupt systems of government, markets and more. Are these not simply legal frameworks that enable corruption?

Depends if you credit a bankrupt dilettante like Jefferson or a banking genius like Hamilton.

[jr]

Depends if you credit a bankrupt dilettante like Jefferson or a banking genius like Hamilton.

Unpack this, please.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

I suspect that Jefferson would have raised similar questions to my own. I'm sure corporate personhood would have been a horror from his viewpoint.

But yes, please unpack further.

And I second DD's "brilliant" for that quote. To clarify my use of "exclude" with respect to Knaves and such. Bad turn of phrase, I meant to exclude or at least make unimportant the behaviors, not the persons.

[Phil Cubeta]

Habermassian public discourse presupposes rational, collegial conversationalists, who operate without coercion, from each other or from above. We can behave "as if," such were the case, as so create such a space, but it is insolent, insubordinate, risky. Hence the allegory of the Dumpster, abutting the Habermassian public square of liberal political theory and the lived reality of Wealth Bondage, where it is Fit in or F off. Those who read your blog may be employers, potential clients, customers, etc. Best to be bland. Least said soonest mended. The internet never forgets.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

The question isn't whether one exists or has ever, but whether we can construct one. Note that the software people created commons licensing ideas like GPL when we discovered that "public domain" did not protect a commons from further enclosure.

All attempts made to date have ended in chaos, more or less. We know of some good tools like democracy and "rules of order", but most of these systems assume good faith. We need systems that are robust in the face of attack from forces that want the system dissolved for their own reasons or are simply parasites.

We have many examples of collaborative spaces that do work pretty well. The disciplines of the academies do have ways of coming closer to the truth and creating open debates. True even here top-down institutional pressures do distort, but there was never the same disagreement on climate change among scientists as is claimed by the vested interests.

[Kia]

Standing comes at a price. Also some of us do not have any standing, we have nothing that power wants, nothing that would attract their attention, and we don't look like power's sort of people. We're out in the weeds and gopher holes out beyond the sidelines.

[Kia]

The truth is rarely plain.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

I like it out with the "weeds and gopher holes", but I like it back in town too. I want a kind of standing that means something that I care about. That's part of why I'm working on the metacurrency project where we are creating the HTML/HTTP of flow, and we will be able to design systems where standing is more like "street cred in my discipline" than any artificial ranking system.

We do have what power wants, but has no idea how to cultivate: creativity.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Though deceptively simple. When I'm feeling philosophical (which is often), I suspect that there is one simple truth at the heart of everything. So simple it takes many lifetimes to learn for most of us.

[Phil Cubeta]

Agreed. Standing comes at a price. Given our shared interest in Dryen, isn't he one who paid that price, as poet laureate, yet also formed around himself in the coffee houses and theaters a congenial space for the candid "honest citizen." Yet he also wrote about, translated, and revived the arts of satire, consciously emulating another insider, Horace. He had standing, had plenty power wanted, attracted their attention, did look like power's sort of person, and lived in London, at the heart of things. So, that makes me wonder - could you be a fine satirist, and be poet Laureate too, or even get a gummint pension, like Horace and his Sabine farm? In other words, is thinking like that cowardly, defeatest, or necessarily a moral falling off from plain speaking in isolatuion?

[Phil Cubeta]

Right, so plain speaking is a bit of a simplification. A rhetorical strategy among others, cultivated for certain purposes of self presentation. "Proper words in proper places," wrote Swift, "is the true definition of style." He wrote it in an essay under an alias on sermon oratory, a piece whose most memorable moments are virulent satire of enthusiasts preachers who get the old woman "agroaning in the aisles."

The prose of the honest man, the candid plain dealer, presupposes an entire civilization.

Christians in the Catacombs. When required to throw incense on the alter of the deified emperor, they would refuse, and die in the arena. Yet they lived in the Catacombs and rehearsed parables. The moment of truth is sometimes best postponed. We can always get thrown to lions tomorrow, if the occasion arises. Even Jesus answered direct questions in riddles.

[Phil Cubeta]

"All attempts made to date have ended in chaos, more or less. We know of some good tools like democracy and "rules of order", but most of these systems assume good faith. We need systems that are robust in the face of attack from forces that want the system dissolved for their own reasons or are simply parasites." Elite LLC's staff will smile induldgently at the fruits of freedom, the unguarded transparent open spaces maintained by, well, dupes. One way transparency is delicious. To see without being seen, to manipulate without accountability. To compile files in secret. To torture in secret. To draw upon bank accounts that are off the books. So, yes, we can and should make a point of speaking loudly in public truths that others know and are diffident about speaking. We prove by our getting along that way that things are not so bad after all. And if the example spreads, it might catch on, even now, the way slot machines have, or crack, or alcohol. Conviviality and openness too can be a hard habit to break.

[Edward Stentorian]

I would UNPACK this were it not for my fear of adding to a HEAP already needing compaction.

My WORK for the advancement of SOCIAL PROGRESS, and the production of new MEMES and emerging PARADIGMS of a NOVELTY yet to be APPRECIATED or UNDERSTOOD in which the underlying CODE of our ASSOCIATIONS is sufficiently ABSTRACTED to RENDER and to cast ASUNDER the twin ANTAGONISTS known to us under the labels ARTIFICIAL and ORGANIC has not driven me INSANE despite the repeated and tiresome protestations of my erstwhile former COLLEAGUES no matter how hard they TRY for reasons known only to them, reasons of a dubious and PARAGUAYAN origin, CIRCA 1955, when the TWIN CITIES of MONTEVIDEO and MONTEVIDEO, MN were the sites of the SIMULTANEOUS SIMULATED appearance of two EFFIGIES purporting to be HUBERT HUMPHREY. Obviously there is a lot going on here. Voices are best kept low, syllables mono, comments short.

[Kia]

Yes, Phil, but to get where Dryden got to--Poet Laureate, Grand Old Man in his special seat at the coffee shop--and to be the kind of poet Dryden was, you had to be as mean as a skunk--which he was. I don't judge him for this at all, by the way. I wouldn't judge anyone for playing hardball in the 17th century. I think everybody understood then that that was how you had to play; those were very wild times.

I don't say that an authentic artist necessarily must be utterly uninterested in power or the comforts of life. Artists also need to get their work into the world. I don't believe that anybody should starve or be crucified or fade away in obscurity. Go for whatever you want and fight for it as hard as you can. Especially when what you want is to make the art that Dryden made. Art is worth fighting very dirty for. Those people who came to gaze at him late in his life were looking not only at a monumental poet, they were also looking at a battler, a survivor, the undefeated champ of vicious public battles of words at a time when words could kill.

In our time, survival for a writer or an artist could well come in the form of a gummint job. Have you seen those Harvey Pekar graphic novels and short stories? They are written by a guy who spent a large part of his working life as a file clerk in the Veterans' Administration. They make me wish all writers had government jobs.

But for me the purposes should not be confused. If Dryden and Pope hadn't written poetry that gave intelligent pleasure, who would care what they said to the rich and powerful? It's not what you say to power, it's what you say, period, wherever you are. I mean, Dryden crafted his poetry with an uncanny sense of what people wanted in his time. He picked up something that started with Jonson and Van Dyck, the revisioning of contemporary life in a heroic and classic mode, an ennobling of his contemporaries' images of themselves. It was--if you want a cheap and low comparison--like the Ralph Lauren of poetry. Dryden created the image of a dignified age in which allegorical people reasoned and soberly and earnestly argued their way through controversies that in real life were probably more like a free-for-all among alley cats. You bet they went for it! And they were quite right, and so was he. Life imitates art. Life desperately wants to imitate art. So he smartly read his times and wrote the poetry it needed and did it better than anybody and he was the boss, the ruling deity, of English literary high culture for the next 100 years, which were some of its most glorious. Some falling off! This was a good working relationship between the power of art and the power of power. Such relationships have a long history.

And I don't hold up my own personal isolation as any kind of virtue to emulate. That's just circumstances that resulted from perhaps other personal choices. But as those circumstances are where I happen to be, that's the experience I happen to have. I am not setting up an opposition here between virtuous isolation and "selling out". I'd be thrilled if my life were such that I was jetting about from one eager audience to another and meeting with people who want to exchange ideas and experiences with me, and we were all making interesting things happen as a result. But no, I live in an apartment in Takoma Park with my Dad and two dogs, hanging on for dear life. So I learn and observe where I am, as I hope I will do, whatever happens next, and hope I'm fighting smart but it's hard to tell.

In journalism school they used that phrase a lot--"speaking truth to power"--alas, without a trace of irony, which, at that particular institution, was rather rich. There is a difference between having the ear of power and having power. Artists have power. That's why power goes looking for them. When I talk about speaking up and taking risks I will only note that great artists do this not to whisper into power's ear but out of the force of their own creative and reflective impulses. Just by existing they challenge anyone's claim to a monopoly on truth. I like to see the originality of a spirit boldly blossoming forth, strange and true and simple in its uniqueness, like William Blake. Mozart never had a thing to say about power or to power--only about the power of art. But that's really another subject.

[jr]

Yes, I suppose that were a bit like a customs man tapping on a suitcase; comment withdrawn. (Interesting underwear, though, striped... ;-)

[jr]

Hey, Phil, where's the fucking smilies, how'm I s'posed'ta make friends without some proper smilies? (I know, I know, as long as YOUR needs are met, the thread will progress; just a thought, though, less stuffy guests might like some SMILIES...)

[jr]

PETITION TO FORCE SMILIES UPON GIFT HUB

Sign here.

_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________
_______________________

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Oh dear, I don't think we needed you to unpack all that baggage. We're not the customs office, you know.

Just friends who want to help, though your original comment suggested you may have something interesting to share about J&H rather than the tip of some pathology. Your private horrors are safe with us.

[Phil Cubeta]

I am in your debt. Wish I had you for a teacher in a more extended format. I have been not corrected by you but educated. Thank you.

[Phil Cubeta]

jr, what have you got against an earnest defense of frivolity?

[Edward Stentorian]

HA! I wash my HANDS and upwards of TDIRTY times per DAY. Your FANTASY bears no relation to REALTY! The only STRIPES in my collection are WHITE.

[jr]

Is there anything more tenuous than control? Isn't that why the bondo people curl their toes around it? :-)

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Control is one of those interesting qualities that is more tenuous the more tightly you grasp it. The more you strive for it, the more it eludes.

Surfs up! Hang ten, baby, let's ride this monster.

[Phil Cubeta]

Now where we build the park where Gerry comes to surf? All that uncontrolled energy inside the theme park where google can sell the ads.

[jr]

Be like the squirrel?

[jr]

Is it true that when a small plane is in a spin the pilot must relinquish control?

[Phil Cubeta]

Say prayers, pull eject lever, then ripcord.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Well, yes, bailing out is one way to relinquish control, but only after all other possibilities are exhausted. Either way, you have to know your support systems, in this case the airplane. There are procedures for re-establishing control, for putting the system controls in a state the makes the emergence of controlled flight likely or guaranteed if the core structures are not broken and failing, but as jr said, first you have to let go of control of the current situation.

[Phil Cubeta]

Satire puts the plane into a spin, the more the reader fights it, the tighter the spin, the steeper the angle of descent. Satire forces us to let go, and in that moment, we may accept the simple truth, and when we do we regain control but at the expense of the slogans, jingles, happy talk, and absurdities that are central to our present identity as Consumers.

[twitter.com/ddenizen]

Yes, satire as flight instructor puts the plane into a spin, then gives the student an opportunity to "solve the problem". If you bailed out, you failed the test. Likewise the interlocutor who gives up on the possibility of controlling the situation, just bails out by escaping the situation without learning. Let go and give it a laugh and the world gets stable again. Your ego may take a little hit, but this is a good thing.

[Phil Cubeta]

Done right, satires shows you that you are easily duped, and how. It helps you see that more commonly than not you are played, and very dexterously so.