The Greatest Recession

Coexistent with the global rise of financial insolvency has been the equal, and yet less heralded loss of cultural capital. Urban dwellers will be familiar with the term “networking.” Prior to the Great Recession, finding a “good job” required on some level to “know someone.” Older friends, peers, and family members all could in theory use their existing employment status as a vector by which someone lacking known experience or credentials could enter their industry or specific company. (Concurrently, the necessity of networking almost certainly prefigured the rise of the intern, for those whose working contacts were either ineffectual or unrelated to a chosen field.)

The collapse of global markets and the attendant hemorrhaging of jobs from across business changed all of this. On one level, the financial ruin of certain companies and industries represented the loss of the Network itself, for if there is no Network for which to aspire to, any attempt to do so is a null and fruitless undertaking. In a different sense, such collapses prefigured the dissolution of networking because as industries shed workers, less and less were in a position for which they could approach, or be approached, about a foothold in the Network.

Under normal employment termination, one should, without much undue stress, be able to turn around and refocus on his or her network of contacts, then re-enter the workforce. In the best of scenarios, such a person’s acquired experience might even obviate the very need for networking. This is no longer the case however. As more and more lost (and continue to lose) their jobs, there were more unemployed workers networking in order to find their next employment opportunity. Unique, however, was that as each new unemployed worker was shed from the Network, their relationship to it was further diminished by every other worker thus shed–for each new unemployed worker is one less person with whom contact can increase a chance at returning to meaningful employment. It is the law of diminishing returns. One works harder for for less and less probability of a successful outcome–in this case, a job.

The unemployed person, thus stripped of financial capital which resulted from his or her loss of wage-earning employment, is now also devoid of a distinct level of cultural capital. Their existence matters less. Under normal conditions, all individuals maintain a basic cache of social worth which is invariably tied up in their concept of self-worth. Stripped of the ability to network or be networked entails a significant demotion in both measures–one inexorably entwined with the other.

The notion need not be abstracted: Individuals unknown to each other will at social events almost invariably ask three questions of one another prior to engaging in lengthier conversation. 1.) What is your name? 2.) Why are you here? (Often, How do you know so-and-so?) and 3.) What do you do? The latter is obviously the question to which we are concerned. It is one of the most uncomfortable and terrifying questions.

Any one person can “do” a number of things, but the question is obviously geared towards ascertaining what someone does professionally, invariably for wages. For the unemployed, there is no answer to this question, and therefore, there is typically no further discussion of it in our hypothetical scenario. Nothing is to be had from the unemployed person. There is no Network from which to entreat or even gossip about. In employment’s place is a void. If both of the parties are unemployed, the effect is no different, only the depth of the insolvency. Instead of one lost soul, there are two. Their worth to the wider social structure diminishes in correlation with their increasing disconnection to the Network. Concurrently, they rapidly lose worth to themselves.

Analyzing the effect of inflation on the individual, the great Bulgarian-born novelist and social theorist Elias Canetti understood the matter thus:

The individual feels depreciated because the unit on which he relied, and with which he had equated himself, starts sliding; and the crowd feels depreciated because the million is…. Together people are worth as little as each is worth alone. As the millions mount up, a whole people, numbered in millions, becomes nothing. [emphasis in the original]

In May, the US Department of Labor estimated the number of unemployed to be 15 million people. When numbers reach such fantastical heights, the resulting social stigma of being without work ceases to be and transmogrifies into an incontrovertible diminution of social value.

The long and winding road

For my faithful, few readers, I apologize for neglecting you. But I have news! Or rather, I’ve been writing news. A review too. Where did we last leave off? 

Ages ago, it seems, I was tracking the imminent demise of San Francisco’s Mission District cultural life, with another aside on (tangentially) related developments in SOMA.

I’ve also attempted to catalog the trials of those privy to the death of California public education, an experience, I’d add, that has been especially troubling since I grew up in South Carolina, at one time (no longer!) the laughing stock of American public education.

For a brief moment, I like to think I single-handedly influenced the Police Commission’s decision to deny the SFPD the use of tasers. Oh, zap!

In addition, my sleuthing on the increasingly labyrinthine scandal involving the SF public utility’s attempt to greenwash compost made of human poo and industrial pollutants has been well documented.

But lest one think I’ve abandoned all pursuits not related to the the doings of Downtown or sourced from smoking guns in underground parking lots, I found time to pen a review of the fun little firecracker of an art show at CCA’s Wattis Institute for the Arts.  

And all month, beneath my nom de plume “BW,” I can be read hyping the certifiably hypable events going down at NYC’s Thirty Days Gallery. I know not from where these people’s money and connections come from, but they have managed to corral Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Gary Panter, Art Speigelman, Will Oldham, and an arc-load of other cultural and artistic icons under one roof for the entire month of April, and then some.

Extra, Extra!

This is not a picture of me, but rather one of the most generic images to be found on the Interweb. However, it is a visual representation of what I will be up to for the next four months. That’s right. I’m a journalist! Temporarily, at this point, but hopefully that doesn’t detract from my ace reporting, a recent example of which, came out today. Read here!

Keep yrself tuned to the San Francisco Bay Guardian (and politics blog) for more, and soon.

Roll Over Beethoven

I’ve been thinking about how to move YrDoingAGreatJob away from the whole blog as just re-posted smorgasbord of cool stuff you think your (invariably tiny) group of readers will dig; but dadgummit, along comes this monumentally astute knowledge bomb from Matt Bai over at the New York Times Magazine.

In light of yesterday’s “shocking” defeat of Democrat Martha Coakey by Republican Scott Brown for Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, Bai discusses the increasingly antiquated notion of partisan political alignment. Now, if that term sounds unfamiliar, you’re probably young and it might as well remain unfamiliar. But basically, it’s the idea that because one year ago voters ushered in the Liberal Jesus Barack Obama and technical Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, the nation’s voters would stop watching crappy cable news and listening to even crappier talk radio and go back to work and forget about guns and butter and trust the Democratic Party they just elected and keep voting them back into power each time because, well, Washington and politics and especially, reform, move at about the pace of a garden slug.

Of course, all that is about as relevant now as a rotary phone. Here’s Matt (worth quoting at length):

On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night…

It isn’t only majority parties that will have to recalibrate their ideas of longevity in this new environment. It’s the individual politicians, too. Only in Washington, where changing social attitudes from the rest of the country generally arrive with all the speed of a Pilgrim vessel, is protracted incumbency still considered some kind of ace-in-the-hole selling point. Americans who rotate through a series of jobs or even careers every decade are far less likely to want to pull the lever for the same graying senator — or the same graying party — for the duration of their natural lives, which means the politician-as-local-institution is probably headed for the history books. It doesn’t seem likely that Scott Brown, the newest Massachusetts senator, or any of the energetic and unwrinkled senators who have recently arrived in Washington will ever be memorialized the way Ted Kennedy was, or have the chance to treat the Senate as a kind of surrogate nursing home, in the manner of a Strom Thurmond or a Robert Byrd.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

In light of renewed calls to give the Federal Reserve more regulatory powers, a new report by Neil M. Barofsky, special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP, or the taxpayer-financed financial bailout) lays out some startling, if not altogether unsurprising, curiosities. From the Times:

The Fed, under Mr. Geithner’s direction, caved in to A.I.G.’s counterparties, giving them 100 cents on the dollar for positions that would have been worth far less if A.I.G. had defaulted. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Société Générale and other banks were in the group that got full value for their contracts when many others were accepting fire-sale prices. On the question of whether this payout was what the report describes as a “backdoor bailout” of A.I.G.’s counterparties, Mr. Barofsky concluded: “The very design of the federal assistance to A.I.G. was that tens of billions of dollars of government money was funneled inexorably and directly to A.I.G.’s counterparties.” The report noted that this was money the banks might not otherwise have received had A.I.G. gone belly-up.

Goldman Sachs, we all should know, was led from 1998 to 2006 by none other than the Bush administration’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, who had actually worked for the company in some capacity since 1974. Now, you don’t devote over thirty years to a company and then forget who your friends are. Especially when your compensation package in 2005 was upwards of $37 million. Noting the above, what Barofsky terms a “backdoor bailout,” I am more inclined to call a multi-billion dollar “reach around.”

I have not yet read the entirety of the report, but I plan to (as you should too). It can be found here.