Gift Hub

HeteroTextuality on the Margins of Philanthropy

I don't want to take anything away from Phil Cubeta, the Master of Revels here. He is the kind of middle brow straightman that Candidia always picks to act as her feckless flunky and foil. Behind his back she calls him "totally pathetic," and who am I to disagree with she who rules us all. What I do want to protest, though, is my being confined to this Blue Box which always already circumscribes (i.e., from the Latin to "inscribe around") my discourse, reducing its credibility and putting all I write under suspicion, in my case totally undeserved, given my lifelong pursuit of excellence.  I would also like to point out in my official capacity as Senior Wealth Bondage Fellow in Charge of Hermeneutics with special reference to Hidden Meanings, is that these Blue Boxes produce a kind hernia or involution or rupture in  the sensitive membranes of our shared textuality. It both limns and violates what - yes, following Derrida - I can only call the Hymen separating Gifthub from Wealth Bondage, or Philanthropy in General, from Wealth Systems in General! That being said, I do not find this particular aporia stimulating or productive. No jouissance to speak of, really. It is all a bit too labored. You call call it post-post-modern if you wish, but it strikes me as Ancient, in fact a throw back to Menippius himself, the Cynic poet who work descends to us via Seneca the Younger, Diogenes, Sterne, Swift, and Wilde, to name a few. Beyond that, beyond the whole question of Origins (and Origin-ality) this Blue Box forces into the foreground the whole question of Authorial Intent.  Phil is not "inside the Blue Box," nor is the content here subject to his control. I kiss no one's hand and fawn upon no man, least of all Phil. Thus, what is inside the box exceeds the boundaries of the text that is Gifthub, both inside it and outside it, thereby producing its own heteroglossollalia, if I may be permitted to coin that striking term.  Who then will stop the endless play of signifiers set in motion by the Blue Box? What Author Function will wrap all within the Horizon of His/Her/Its Intentionality? Beats me, really. You know what this is like, Tom, it is as if you were reading along in Finnegans Wake and all of a sudden you stumble on a biographical write up on Richard Ellman, Joyce's profound critic, but one who would not write about Joyce until many years later. Now, if Joyce had quoted (proleptically, to be sure) his unborn critic, and had included that quotation inside some kind of Blue Box, would that tend to still the free play of the Signifier, or only make its motions ever more catastrophic to our readerly readings of that writerly text, if you know what I mean? (c.f., Roland Barthes).    Anyway, as I averred above, it beats me. I hope others will devote their life to this mystery. I have my hands full deciphering the chatter coming in through the phone tap on Gunderson. I am supposed to frame him for the Valerie Plame deal and get him to Gitmo after the hit men on the Freedom Team cut off his clothes, give him a drugged enema, and throw him in chains onto a plane bound for Cuba.  So far, all I have on him is a bunch of  repetititive verbiage about Vision in Philanthropy. But he sounds guilty.  What the hell, under torture, I am sure he will confess to something. I think I will just doctor the evidence and be done with it. The trial will be secret. It will never come back to bite me. I get paid by the job. Every prisoner in the Freedom Gulag raises the stock price of Wealth Bondage Prisons International by $500,000 and I get options. So, Gunderson, kiss Council on Foundations goodbye. - Dr. Amrit Chadwallah, Adjunct in Charge of Forensic Hermeneutics in Wealth Bondage

Who Has Your Control File, Sweetie?

My my, as Proprietress of Wealth Bondage, and as the Generous Patron whose Passionate Philanthropy makes Gifthub possible, I did find the piece on blackmail for government purposes, cited below quite, interesting and very practical at that.  My, yes, control files on all my little kingpins and queenpins. All the heads of government agencies. CEOs. Media Impressarios. Heads of the Big Charities. The biggest donors. The auditors. The police down to the block level. After what they do in Wealth Bondage, loving each other up, beating each into screaming joy, they had better hope that "what happens in Wealth Bondage stays in Wealth Bondage."  O! Yes. Why do I  tap all the phones, and monitor all the scene rooms, Sweetie? Because Momma wants to protect you against Terrorists! They might get you, if Momma doesn't keep all your secrets in her little book.  O my God, you have to laugh.  Congress couldn't be happier passing whatever enabling legislation I want. Plunder is good for America. I am the new Oligarchy! A one woman Russian Mob, but with a fucking Harvard MBA.  Why should Congress  balk, when I have the videos of their trysts with lobbyists in the Wealth Bondage? Well, what goes around comes around. We are all givers here. I give your Elected Represenatives a little freedom to commit their high crimes and misdeamors, and their petty acts of self-dealing, and get laid a lot, and the bigshots in return pledge me absolute fealty. Maybe Momma will auction her little book of secrets off for charity? Now that would be Transformational Philanthropy for Social change. Ha, ha, ha! O my God. What well-meaning little morons read Gifthub? Let me clue you in. Gifthub is a load of crap. It is a headfake, stupid! I fund it to mislead you and get you working on projects that are totally hopeless and irrelevant!  Sweetie, Gifthub cites only public sources and the official stories provided by public sources.  Trust me on this: If information is public it is not worth shit. The private information is what matters and it is strictly on a need to know basis. And you don't need to know, 'cuz you are a loser who has no chips to play in the big game. Sorry, little ones. You do your pathetic little gifts and Momma will rule the world. You even think of changing my Ownership Society and I will turn you over to The Forces of Freedom and they will feed your body inch by inch to the piranna is some South American Hell Hole.You think your friends will say word one? Why would they start now, when they have eaten shit since 2001 and said nothing? Now back to the puppet show you morons mistake for the real world. Gifthub, Gifthub, rah, rah, rah. The world we want. Yada. Yada.You think I am a sockpuppet? And your elected representatives are "real? OMG! (LOL). -  Candidia Cruikshanks, CEO of Wealth Bondage: Where America Works and Plays

From Blackmail as a Tool of State Domination: Ukraine under Kuchma by Keith A. Darden, a professor at Yale and Harvard

Blackmail as an informal mechanism of control
Blackmail, as an instrument of state control, relies on three basic elements. The first is a permissive attitude of state leaders toward corruption. In Ukraine, corruption and illegality among the elite were accepted, condoned, and even encouraged by the top leadership, resulting in a general atmosphere of impunity. The second element is extensive state surveillance. Even as the violation of the law is encouraged, the state-or rather the surveillance organs under the control of the president (including the tax ministry, interior ministry, and secret police)-continues to monitor such illegal activities. Using the surveillance organs, the state amasses a stockpile of files and criminal cases that document wrongdoing on the part of officeholders as well as private actors. When compliance with state directives is required, this information is used to blackmail the elite, with payment exacted not in cash but in obedience. The representatives of the power organs are able to present each member of the elite with a file containing compromising materials (kompromat) or evidence of wrongdoing-with the implicit or explicit threat that a sudden decision to enforce the law would lead to the imprisonment of the individual in question. Thus is compliance secured.

If blackmail is insufficient, individuals or groups that openly oppose the policies of the state or seek to usurp the existing leadership suddenly find that the veil of impunity has been lifted. The kompromat files or zagotovki are then made public, and recalcitrant individuals and their organizations immediately find themselves under close scrutiny or prosecution by the tax inspector, the law enforcement bodies, or other state institutions. But as long as consistent compliance with state directives is maintained, the state's role amounts to no more than surveillance, blackmail, and, in some cases, a cut of the proceeds. The mere threat of exposure and prosecution serves to keep the elite firmly under control.

In-Cubicle Terrorist Monitors

In cubicle monitors could foil negative attitudes in the work place before they affect productivity.

CCTV cameras are bringing more and more public places under surveillance – and corporate cubicles could be next.

A prototype European system uses multiple cameras and "Big Brother" software to try and automatically detect negative attitudes, theft of time, or other sabotage caused by employees.

The European Union's Security of  The Cubicle in the Future Corporate Environment project uses a camera in every cubicle, with six wide-angle cameras to survey the aisles. Software then analyses the footage to detect developing negativism or "cubicle rage" incidents, by tracking employee' facial expressions.

Poetic license taken with the above quotation. There is nothing to fear, unless you have something to hide. Keep smiling.

                                                                                                                                                     

Ethics of the Eye

"What is going on?," per Niebuhr, is the first question of ethics. Now what is interesting is that he did not say it is the first question of,

• ontology
• epistemology
• semantics
• hermeneutics
• metaphysics
• theory of interpretation
• grammatology

How can knowing what is going on be an ethical question when we have so many questions about theory of meaning? We don't even know whether anything at all exists. We don't know how words latch onto the world. So how can we get to the question of what is going on? Maybe that is Niebuhr's point, that we have to cut past our jouissance and deal with the reality of our own malfeasance. We don't know what is going on because, in part, we prefer not to. It would get us on the wrong list.

The Plague

"What is going on?" per Niebuhr is the first ethical question.

"We cannot know what is really going on" is the first observation of deconstruction, for signs merely slip and slide on the passing scene. Hermeneutics ends in free play.

It is notable to me that deconstruction followed existentialism and demolishes the possibility of ethics. We cannot even get as far as seeing what is going on in Occupied France, so how can we be responsible for our being stooges? Don't blame Paul de Man, he did not know what was going on. So his collaboration, however muted, was not an ethical lapse. He did not know; he could not know. Blindness and Insight, or what Sarte called, "bad faith," or "false consciousness."

We are no better. It is only worth diagnosing de Man because what he suffered from was what Camus called The Plague, and we ourselves are in the midst of a new epidemic. The symptoms are blind eyes, shaky hands, and a tongue that palters with ever more conspicuous evils. 

Totalitarian Capitalism in China

Naomi Klein on how China delivers Capitalism with Totalitarianism:

Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

Via Hullabaloo.

Angry Renters

Center for Media and Democracy:

"AngryRenter.com looks a bit like a digital ransom note, with irregular fonts, exclamation points and big red arrows -- all emphasizing prudent renters' outrage over a proposed government bailout for irresponsible homeowners," writes Michael M. Phillips. In fact, however, "the people behind AngryRenter.com are certainly not renters. Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It's a fake grass-roots effort -- what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign -- that provides a window into the sleight-of-hand ways of Washington."

Message Force Multipliers

Center for Media and Democracy:

David Barstow of the New York Times has written the first installment in what is already a stunning exposé of the Bush Administration's most powerful propaganda weapon used to sell and manage the war on Iraq: the embedding of military propagandists directly into the TV networks as on-air commentators. We and others have long criticized the widespread TV network practice of hiring former military officials to serve as analysts, but even in our most cynical moments we did not anticipate how bad it was. As Barstow has painstakingly documented, these analysts, most of them military industry consultants and lobbyists, were directly chosen, managed, coordinated and given their talking points by the Pentagon's ministers of propaganda.

Will any of the mechanics of managed democracy change whomever is elected, I wonder, or is this how things work now? What theory of social change makes us citizens again, in more than name?

Solari is Better than Philanthropy?

I stand corrected. Catherine Austin Fitts, apropos of this post, wrote me to clarify her position on philanthropy.

Catherine Austin Fitts promotes the Solari investment model which aligns financial wealth and natural wealth and encourages diversified ownership and creation of  wealth. She is uncomfortable with the use of philanthropy as part of a  comprehensive strategy of financial warfare to centralize and consolidate ownership and control of global resources. As a weapon of centralization, philanthropy has been used to cleanse dirty money and promote the brand of numerous individuals and organizations engaged in a wide variety of covert and criminal enterprises. Philanthropy has been used to encourage people most interested in solutions to embrace not-for-profit models that are financially dependent on large governments and corporations. By doing so, the practice of philanthropy ensures that people who are committed to real solutions are not in a position to address root causes and will have little or no ability to build or attract financial wealth while the process of starving small business, small farms and a broad based diversified economy and centralizing capital into large corporations and banks continues.

From Catherine's blog I took these links to our rapid loss of Constitutional protections. How, I wonder, can "the Solari investment model which aligns financial and natural wealth and encourages diversified ownership and creation of wealth" restore the rule of law? Maybe there is a secret connection between owning a successful closely held business, or a farm, and being independent enough to push back when pushed into a corner? But, still, doesn't restoring the rule of law require citizen organizing and outcry? (As opposed to merely investing, producing and consuming within a social capital market.) Not that philanthropy tends to promote activism, to conserve our republic, but still, some givers do promote such ends. Those dollars are few and precious. 

Mr. Yoo benefited from the dollars givers invested in the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society. Where you find resistance to the deterioration of our rights you find, for example, the ACLU. So it is a battle in part of giver against giver for the soul of this nation? Can we avoid that conclusion, whatever other benefits we might also draw from decentralized, community-based, social investing?

Philanthropy in the Slow Burn Scenario

Catherine Austin Fitts assesses the risks to the economy, democratic society, and the planet under what she calls "the slow burn" scenario:

The “slow burn” is a political culture and economy managed through principles of economic warfare in which insiders systematically protect themselves and centralize control and ownership of resources by using:

• Central banks
• Currency and lending systems
• Taxation
• Regulatory and enforcement policies
• Controlled media and entertainment

How philanthropy plays under the slow burn scenario has yet to be seen. Is it most often an instrumentality of power in which glory is accorded to those who run things? Is it a way to clean up a few of the many messes, as many are left behind, or outside the Green Zones? Or, is it the seed capital for social change from the bottom up? No doubt, each giver will have his or her own approach. It is hard to see how philanthropy can create a better world for us all, unless it somehow unmasks and overcomes the few who, from behind a screen of silence and misdirection and secrecy would consolidate a better world for themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens. 

Catherine promotes social investment (in food, water, small businesses, local banks) at the small town community level. Her goal is to create sustainable personal wealth and thriving communities less and less dependent on central powers subject to capture, collusion and corruption. Generous herself, she tends to discount philanthropy as a lever of social change. In time I hope she from her Christian libertarian grassroots perspective and progressive social change philanthropists can unite to promote realistic, sustainable and resiliant citizen solutions. Mission-aligned investing by community foundations in protecting the local supply chains, food supply, water, business ecosystem, schools, health system, and media?

The disconnect in current discussions of philanthropy is the assumption of good will all around. In truth, not all with concentrated power are full of alruistic concern for the well being of ordinary people, the worker bees, the couch potatoes, the ditto heads. Some with insider privileges would, given a choice, rather that their own children prosper, even if yours do not survive in what looks increasingly like a bad time coming. The market will provide, of course, and a rising tide raises all boats, of course, but the market, like government, may be rigged, or gamed. Philanthropy can always go to think tanks or pundits who will put a good face on the intolerable.

With so much insider knowledge, and so much wealth, concentrated behind firewalls and "safe places," in so few hands, how could the game not be rigged for the benefit of those with knowledge, connections, favors, and preferment to barter at the highest levels? Take the resumes of top government officials and count the ways good gummint pays, and repays in the revolving door that connects our three sectors. Only angels could handle so much unnacountable power without becoming - well, human, as Swift understood humanity, as an animal driven by appetite and capable of reason. Opting out of the broken system and investing time, money, energy and love locally is the option Catherine adds to the mix. With the corpus of a few big foundations behind such a project it might be a potent counterpoise to the slow burn.