This time is [not] different, but where's that Wile E. Coyote Moment?

[Mark Kohut]

 Are the Chums flying toward a Grace away from Earth? It can't be. The Earth is
our Grace, our Free Will, scatterbrained though she may be, she is the
Orphic Song in our Hearts. Could it be that Pynchon has lossed his
harp?
 
No. This is one glorious reading, imho.


________________________________
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2012 7:45 AM
Subject: Re: This time is [not] different, but where's that Wile E. Coyote Moment?

And the punch line? When we look deep into theose Pynchonian novels,
under all the paving stones of postmodernism, there where Benny and
Angel labor, we find both the promise and the demise of the
counterforces, at work, too often wasting their labor fighting
eachopther or fucking eachother up, turning on eachother, turning to
power, drawn like moths to flame, like victims in a vacuum.

But....that essay on the Earth bothers me. I can't abide that idea,
that Pynchon is so cynical in his last great labor novel as to say
that the the Earth must be abandoned. This is a misreading. Are the
Chums flying toward a Grace away from Earth? It can't be. The Earth is
our Grace, our Free Will, scatterbrained though she may be, she is the
Orphic Song in our Hearts. Could it be that Pynchon has lossed his
harp?
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 8:28 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Right now, in the US, the key trade-off is a fundamental one:
> inflation or employment. One of the reasons I like Bernanke is that he
> has put emphasis on employment. The Fed mandate has three parts, but
> for decades, and especially after Volker,  the Fed has focused on
> inflation or price stability and ignored employment and interest rate
> stability. The US has a below average natural unemployment rate
> ((5.9%) when compared with OECD, where the average is around 7%.  In
> Spain this rate is 11.85 and in Poland it is 14.5%. The rate is higher
> in Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Sweeden, Ireland, lower in Mexico,
> Korea, Luxemberg, Austraila and the UK. Some economists, including
> Krugman and Benernake, think that the persistantly higher European
> rates are caused by government policies and unions, together these
> cause higher structural unemployment, that is, unemployment, even
> during peaks in the business cycle, remains high in specific labor
> markets because there are not enough jobs at the current wage rate.
> Organized labor, through collective bargaining, acts like a high
> minimum wage, and leads to structural unemployment. In the US,
> however, where Labor is nearly dead, this influence is less than in
> Europe. Moreover, what is called the natural rate of employment has
> shifted in dramatic ways here in the US, and this has kept
> unemployment low. So, before the Great Contraction, the US had a 4.6%
> unemployment rate. This rate includes a 16% unemployment rate for
> teens, an 8% rate for those under 25. And, a 10% unemployment for
> African Americans. Women comprise a steadily increasing percentage of
> the labor force, and are more skilled and educated, more productive
> than their sisters in the 70s and 80s, and, they work for lower wages,
> the workforce is also aging, so low skilled youth labor is also a
> smaller percentage of the labor force. Thus, the natural rate of
> unemployment in the US is and has been declining post-Vietnam. From
> this alone, and there are other factors, like the fact that the
> demographic shifts here in the US are not only taking place in the age
> of workers, in the sex of workers, but also in the skill and
> education, and race and ethnicity of workers, and all these work to
> weaken labor. Of course, capital is quite powerful and can influence
> government policies, at the State and National level, and, while it
> still has to fight labor in some States, labor is losing the battle,
> has no party to protect it. Look at teachers in Chicago, where, of
> course, the President and his man are weakening labor with race to the
> top and laws that prevent strikes and all the rest. CTU is a test case
> for American Labor, and although it seems to have taken a small
> victory, in the near future it will be crushed. So, how do workers get
> their share? Not the old fashioned way: organize and strike or occupy.
> These won't work. There is, unfortunately, no solution, no counter to
> the force of American Capital. Sorry.
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