From MSNBC:

Black History Month is an occasion for looking back at the past achievements of African-Americans – including the discoveries made by George Washington Carver and Benjamin Banneker. But it's also an occasion for looking ahead to future achievements – and that's what TheGrio is doing this month with its list of “100 History Makers in the Making.” The list includes 10 scientists, engineers and environmentalists who are making an impact even now. The newsiest name has to be NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, the first African-American to be named head of the space agency. Bolden is presiding over what is arguably NASA's most dramatic transition in a quarter-century. TheGrio cites the racial challenges that faced Bolden in his youth, when he was denied an appointment to the Naval Academy by lawmakers from his home state of South Carolina. He didn't just shrug his shoulders at the rejection, but instead appealed to President Lyndon Johnson. Bolden eventually won the appointment instead from a black congressman from Chicago.

Bolden went on to a 34-year military career in the Marines – including a 14-year stint as an astronaut. He flew on four shuttle missions, including the deployment flight for the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990 and the first joint U.S.-Russian shuttle mission in 1994. Bolden returned to NASA after retiring from the Marines as a major general. No matter what you think of NASA or its future, there's no question that Bolden has brought a different tone to America's space effort. His predecessor, rocket scientist Mike Griffin, once acknowledged that “I don't do feelings.” Bolden, in contrast, sometimes wears his emotions on his sleeve. That's been particularly true in the past few days, when he's had to speak out about the space program's past tragedies and the difficult times ahead. “I am a big person for passion,” the 63-year-old told reporters in Washington this week. “I am here because I am passionate about space and exploration. Otherwise I'd be sitting in Houston, Texas, or I'd be in San Diego with my three granddaughters. I am here because I am passionate about this. I cry about it some times – so what?”

If you think that's an inspirational story for Black History Month, check out these nine others from TheGrio:

More here.

From The Telegraph:

In The Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever before. This sensational novel – her first since the Orange Prize-winning Small Island, recently adapted for the BBC – tells the life story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as emancipation is juddering into action. Levy’s handling of slavery is characteristically authentic, resonant and imaginative. She never sermonises. She doesn’t need to — the events and characters speak loud and clear for themselves.

The story is expertly fashioned around a metafictional conceit. The “editor”, Thomas Kinsman, explains in his foreword that the book was written by his mother. It’s a well-worn device, but here it has such conviction and idiosyncrasy that it feels irresistibly fresh. His mother, it transpires, is July herself, and so intimate is she with her “reader” that she might be leading them around the plantation by the hand. Her Jamaican lilt, which despite her son’s careful Anglicising retains the rhythm and syntax of her dialect, is unfaltering and immersive. And her seemingly artless testimony, which scorns “ornate invention”, is a masterclass in storytelling and self-presentation.

She begins with her conception — the casual molestation of her mother Kitty by the plantation’s vile Scottish overseer. It’s an “indelicate” way to open a novel, as her son argues in one of their endearing squabbles, but it’s indicative of her petulant, assertive style that she will not apologise for it. She is a woman “possessed of a forthright tongue and little ink”, and tells the reader plainly that if we don’t like her story, we can go elsewhere.

More here.

Kristin Johnson in American Scientist:

Our ambivalent responses to the rise of modern science and technology are among the most fascinating things to study in the history of science. From Margaret Cavendish’s criticism of the experimental method in the 17th century to the rebellion of the so-called Romantics against the notion of objectivity, our culture has had a complex love-hate relationship with science. Champions of feeling, emotion and subjective knowledge as a path toward understanding the natural world have proved especially persistent critics of science.

Naming Nature, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon, is a thought-provoking text that plays a new and fascinating tune on the old theme of objectivity versus subjectivity. Its subject is the history of biological systematics—the description, ordering and explanation of biological diversity.

In Yoon’s rendition, subjectivity is rooted firmly in our instinct. She explains that neuroscience, anthropology and evolutionary biology now tell us that we are born with the remnants of an instinctive perspective on the living world, which she calls the “human umwelt,” a vision “molded during our species’ days as hunter-gatherers.” This vision of a natural order is “thoroughly sensuous and wildly subjective,” Yoon says, and she maintains that the history of scientific taxonomy is really a “two-hundred-year-long battle against the human umwelt.” In modern times, we have given up this instinctive perception of the order of nature in favor of letting scientists find a more objective, evolutionary order, with the result that we are now disconnected from nature: “We are so used to someone else being in charge of the living world that we have begun not to even see the life around us.”

More here.

Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.

Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

Taking its name from a now-extinct tribe, Bo is one of the 10 Great Andamanese languages, which are thought to date back to pre-Neolithic human settlement of south-east Asia.

Though the language has been closely studied by researchers of linguistic history, Boa Sr spent the last few years of her life unable to converse with anyone in her mother tongue.

Even members of inter-related tribes were unable to comprehend the repertoire of Bo songs and stories uttered by the woman in her 80s, who also spoke Hindi and another local language.

More here.

Lawrence Lessig in The Nation:

At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, Americans' faith in the Supreme Court remains extraordinarily high–76 percent have a fair or great deal of “trust and confidence” in the Court. Their faith in the presidency is also high–61 percent.

But consistently and increasingly over the past decade, faith in Congress has collapsed–slowly, and then all at once. Today it is at a record low. Just 45 percent of Americans have “trust and confidence” in Congress; just 25 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job. A higher percentage of Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today.

The source of America's cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn't) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn't) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution “dependent on the People,” the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers–as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered–not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.

This is corruption.

More here. And here's more:

Professor Lawrence Lessig has known Barack Obama for 20 years, and supported all his campaigns. In this video produced for The Nation and FixCongressFirst.org, Lessig outlines his concern over President Obama's limited approach to truly “changing Washington,” and his view that Congress is a deeply broken institution in need of need reform:

Via Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber, a profile of Samuel Bowles in The Santa Fe Reporter:

“In the wake of what happened in the last year, it’s much easier for an economist to describe himself as being liberal, maybe even Social Democratic,” Henry Farrell, a political science associate professor at George Washington University, tells SFR. “Sam Bowles is still unashamedly and unabashedly a radical—God bless him.”

However, Farrell says, Bowles’ radicalism kept him from finding a wider audience.

Now it’s the free marketeers who have a hard time being taken seriously. Last month, The New Yorker described defections and “turmoil” within the Chicago School. Even former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a hero to free marketeers, admits that his way of understanding the world was wrong.

Bowles is keenly aware that this crisis presents an opportunity. “It’s not just that the Chicago School is on the ropes—it’s that people are much more sympathetic to people who have less income,” Bowles says. “That attitude—‘Hey, it could happen to me’—is something the Great Depression taught us.”

Sympathy was forgotten in the boom times. But thanks to the hardships of today, “it’s coming back with a vengeance,” Bowles says.

With it, the influence of what Farrell calls “the Santa Fe approach to economics” may also be growing.

Last year, Indiana University professor Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. “She’s not a radical by any stretch of the imagination but, in terms of the methods she uses and the questions she’s interested in, she’s closer to Bowles than anybody. She is probably the only Nobel Prize winner in the last 20 years to have cited Bowles extensively and to be genuinely influenced by him,” Farrell says.

Ostrom doesn’t distance herself from that assessment. “I have great respect for professor Samuel Bowles,” she writes in an email to SFR. “I have worked with several of his PhDs who do simply outstanding experimental research.”

If Bowles has a following among people who think for a living, the people who actually make decisions have some catching up to do.

And so here, in plain English, is the implication of Bowles’ basic ideas: The US and New Mexico will keep falling behind until they learn to share the wealth.

………………..
Walt Whitman At Bear Mountain

…life which does not give preference to any other life,
of any previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence…
— Ortega y Gasset

Neither on horseback nor seated,
But like himself, squarely on two feet,
The poet of death and lilacs
Loafs by the footpath. Even the bronze looks alive
Where it is folded like cloth. And he seems friendly.

“Where is the Mississippi panorama
And the girl who played the piano?
Where are you, Walt?
The Open Road goes to the used car lot.

“Where is the nation you promised?
These houses built of wood sustain
Colossal snows,
And the light above the street is sick to death.

“As for the people—see how they neglect you!
Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.”

“I am here,” he answered.
“It seems you have found me out.
Yet, did I not warn you it was Myself
I advertized? Were my words not sufficiently plain?

“I gave no prescriptions,
And those who have taken my moods for prophecies
Mistake the matter.”
Then, vastly amused—“Why do you reproach me?
I freely confess I am wholly disreputable.
Yet I am happy, because you have found me out.”

A crocodile in wrinkled metal loafing . . .

Then all the realtors,
Pickpockets, salesmen, and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted
American dreams.

But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she’s dumb,
And the earth are relieved.

All that gave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . .

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras.
The Bay mists clearing;
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.

by Louis Simpson

from Poet’s Choice; Time Life Books, 1962

The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories. In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

more from Chris Anderson at Wired here.

Sir Frank Kermode’s career is a wonder. More than forty volumes have appeared since he began to publish in the 1950s, together with a wealth of articles and reviews. He has held senior posts in universities up and down the land, including a notable term of office as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature in Cambridge. Retirement has done nothing to slow his publication rate. Now there are two new works, a thoughtful study of E. M. Forster and Bury Place Papers, a selection of some of the best essays he has written for the London Review of Books. Kermode’s learning and insight seem indestructible. His recent ninetieth birthday has been marked with affectionate tributes, and these books show how much there is to celebrate. Despite these claims to distinction, it is not easy to pin down Kermode’s contribution to literary culture. His turn of mind is brilliantly agile rather than polemical, and no identifiable Kermode school has emerged. This is not because his criticism is bland. The writing frequently crackles with hostility, or glows with admiration. Nor is he afraid of a row. He played a vigorous part in the convulsions of the early 1980s, when the Faculty of English at Cambridge tore itself apart over the merits of literary theory. Kermode was a defender of Colin McCabe, at that time a beleaguered young theorist denied promotion by traditionalists. Nevertheless, he refused to be identified with a theoretical approach to literature, either in general or in particular. He is an interpreter, not an evangelist. One of his most perceptive books, The Genesis of Secrecy (1979), speaks of Hermes as the patron of hermeneutics: “He is the god of going-between: between the dead and the living, but also between the latent and the manifest . . . and between the text and the dying generations of its readers”. The spirit of Hermes, subtle and stealthy, is never far from Kermode’s work.

more from Dinah Birch at the TLS here.

From Science:

When a brain injury leaves a person unresponsive and unable to communicate, doctors and nurses must provide care without input from their patient, and families agonize over whether their loved one might still have–or someday recover–a flicker of consciousness. A new study provides hope that technology might open a line of communication with some such patients. Researchers report that a man with a severe brain injury can, by controlling his thoughts, influence scans of his brain activity and thereby answer simple questions. The work builds on a 2006 Science paper by Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, U.K., and colleagues. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they tested a young woman diagnosed as being in a vegetative state following a car accident. Although she was unresponsive and apparently unaware of her surroundings, she exhibited distinct patterns of brain activity when asked to imagine herself playing tennis or walking through the rooms of her house. As in healthy volunteers, imagining tennis activated motor planning regions in the woman's brain, whereas picturing her house activated a brain region involved in recognizing familiar scenes.

In the new study, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, Owen and several colleagues used similar methods to examine 53 additional people who were in a vegetative state or in the slightly less severe minimally conscious state, in which patients show occasional flashes of responsiveness. In four of these patients, the researchers found distinct patterns of brain activity during the tennis versus house imagination task, hinting at some level of awareness that could not be detected by observing their behavior, says co-author Steven Laureys, a neurologist at the University of Liège in Belgium.

More here.

This is a major blow to anti-vaccine nutters. David Rose in the Times of London:

A leading medical journal has officially retracted the discredited study which sparked a health scare over the MMR vaccine.

The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers which linked MMR to bowel disorders and autism, were “false”.

It comes after Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher in the 1998 paper, was ruled last week to have been irresponsible and dishonest in carrying out the original study on 12 children.

MMR is the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine which was introduced in 1988. The fall-out from the research, first published in February 1998, caused vaccination rates to plummet and has been blamed for a resurgence of measles in Britain.

The General Medical Council (GMC) ruled last week that Wakefield showed a “callous disregard” for the suffering of children and that two fellow authors of the paper also “failed in their duties” as responsible doctors in carrying out the study.

More here. And see also Peter Lipson in Forbes:

Yesterday, Matthew Herper discussed the latest watermark in the Andrew Wakefield Affair. Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, ran a small, unethical study which ignited the modern anti-vaccination movement. Vaccines, which have done more for public health than anything besides clean water and good sewers, have been under attack from activists such as Jenny McCarthy (with her degree from Google U), and by some medical and scientific professionals, such as Wakefield and others, many of whom also promote and sell “alternative” vaccine programs and dangerous and disproved autism treatments, such as chelation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Wakefield's disgrace will do little to stop the hardcore believers in the failed vaccine-autism hypothesis, but while the denialists at Age of Autism, Huffington Post, and other outlets whine to each other about the evils of vaccines, real scientists are helping real people.

More here.

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

Is the Green Movement finished? That is what the Iranian government wants the world to believe. And it has recently been trumpeting a few pieces of evidence to make its case.

First came a statement by Mir Hossein Mousavi on New Year’s Eve, which offered five conditions for ending the current impasse. But because it did not directly repeat Mousavi’s oft-quoted notion that the June elections were rigged, Kayhan and Rajanews—the two news outlets closest to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad—tried to claim the statement as a major victory for the regime.

Then in late January came reports of a “confidential” letter of repentance written by former Iranian president (and leading reformer) Mohammad Khatami, addressed to Khamenei. The letter supposedly recognizes the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s presidency. Again, Kayhan and Rajanews reported on the letter, construing it as a sure sign of the Green Movement’s defeat.

Finally, there was the alleged coup de grace: a statement reported by Fars News Agency, the government-run Iranian news service, from Mehdi Karroubi—known as an uncompromising and defiant leader of the reform movement.

More here.

Joanna Smith Rakoff in Slate:

On my first day of work at Harold Ober Associates—one of New York's oldest and most storied literary agencies—I was shown the enormous, outmoded IBM Selectric on which I would type letters for my boss, the clunky Dictaphone that would provide me with the content of those letters, and the vast metal cabinets in which I would file all correspondence with authors. I was then escorted into the dimly lit corner office occupied by Phyllis Westberg, the company's president, whom I would be assisting.

“Sit down, sit down,” said Phyllis. “We need,” she said, as I arranged myself in the chair across from her large wooden desk, “to talk about Jerry.” I nodded in an attempt to mask the fact that I had no idea what she was talking about. This was 1996, and the first “Jerry” to come to mind was Seinfeld. It was only later, when I noticed a wall of books opposite my new desk—all with plain spines, in maroon, yellow, and white—that I realized the Jerry in question was Jerome David Salinger.

“Now, his address and his phone number are in the Rolodex on your desk,” Phyllis explained. “People are going to call and ask for his number. You think it won't happen, but it will.” She paused to light another cigarette. “Grad students. Reporters. Just … people. They may try to trick you or manipulate you. They may give you some song-and-dance routine.” She laughed a throaty laugh, then fixed me sharply in her pale blue eyes. “But you can never, ever give out that address. Or that phone number. NEVER. OK?”

More here.

From The New York Times:

The best book blurb I’m aware of came from Roy Blount Jr., who said about Pete Dexter’s 1988 novel, “Paris Trout”: “I put it down once to wipe off the sweat.” I’m not sure I know what that means. Was the sweat on Mr. Blount’s forehead? On the dust jacket? On the inside of his fogged-up reading glasses? But I like it. I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.

A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” also floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of “Erin Brockovich,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Andromeda Strain.” More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent. The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Ruchira Paul)

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

“Mannerism” sounds stupid. One immediately associates it with manners. And “manners” are not in the highest regard these days. Mannerism would seem to be a movement of affected and empty gestures, of style over substance.

That's what many do mean when they use the term. Mannerism has come to refer, primarily, to the group of Italian artists working just after the close of the High Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci died in May 1519; you could say, then, that Mannerism started in early June of that same year. The Mannerists, left with nowhere to go by the transcendent greatness of the High Renaissance artists, had no choice but to become decadent and unhinged.

Mannerist artists like Jacopo da Pontormo thus wasted little time in screwing up the Renaissance. Pontormo painted his figures in crazy contorted poses that would have made Leonardo revisit his lunch. Pontormo also went nuts with color. Many of the scenes he painted have an otherworldly luminosity that is hard to describe. You almost want to call it DayGlo. His compositions veer toward the “jumbly.” What, exactly, is happening in “Joseph in Egypt”? The staircase to nowhere dominates the canvas and it looks like Pontormo simply forgot to finish the landscape in the background. A cherub vamps atop a random column stuck on the far right side of the scene. This, gentlemen, is not Michelangelo.

It is for all these reasons and more that I have come to love Mannerism.

More here.

Len Burman, James K. Galbraith, Robert Greenstein, John S. Irons, Grover Norquist, and Alice Rivlin respond in the National Journal. Galbriath:

At the peak at the end of FY 1946, gross US national debt was 121.7 percent of GDP. Today the number is just under 70 percent. In 1946 the debt held by the American public – including by the Federal Reserve System – was 108.6 per cent of GDP. The comparable figure for 2009 is just under 60 percent of GDP. As of the 2010 budget it was expected to rise to 70 percent in FY 2011, and to decline thereafter.

After 1945, the debt/GDP ratio declined gradually. Levels comparable to the present were seen throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s. They were lower in the 1970s – an economic period marked by inflation, which reduced the debt/GDP ratio – and higher again in the 1980s, as the economy recovered from the sharp slumps of 1980-82. That's the record.

Those high public debt levels of 1946 were completely benign. Long-term interest rates were pegged at two percent. Series E bonds — Victory bonds — formed a very large part of the financial wealth of the American middle class at that moment. In fact, they created the American middle class — a working population that had never before enjoyed any financial security at all. Their existence, as claims on future purchasing power, gave businesses confidence to invest, and so helped avert a relapse to the Great Depression.

Comparatively, US public debt in relation to GDP today is well within the normal range for advanced and solvent countries, including Germany, Canada, France and Austria. It is lower than many, including Italy or Greece — a small, vulnerable country whose bond offerings just last week were nevertheless 3:1 oversubscribed. The US position is obviously stronger than most, because of the dollar's international role. So there is no basis, whether in history or cross-country comparison, for the current panic over public deficits and debt.

Yes, conditions are different today. The American public no longer holds the American public debt directly. Some of it is held abroad, where interest payments just pile up, with no good effects on financial wealth or spending here. Much of it is held by banks, who are doing nothing to promote economic recovery. The middle class, which holds housing, stocks and cash, is hurting on all fronts. These are problems. But they are not problems of too much public debt, rather of its distribution.

In this interview with Zizek in the Times of India, he says something that seems patently stupid (via Crooked Timber, which has an interesting conversation going on).

You have also been critical of Gandhi. You have called him violent. Why?

It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

A lot of people will find it ridiculous to even imagine that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler? Are you serious when you say that?

Yes. Though Gandhi didn’t support killing, his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here. For me, that is a problem.

Kuhu Tanvir, who was present at the interview, states that this is a misquote:

I read this interview on Sunday and I am sorry to report that the journalist has taken some serious liberties with Zizek’s responses. I can say this because I was present for the interview. While I understand the constraints of newspaper journalism and their problems with space, the journalist has here presented Zizek’s answers in such a way that they seem arbitrary and silly. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but I want to clarify that this was not the case. Zizek, though controversial and provocative, gave a detailed response to each question, explaining all his comments, contextualizing them. More importantly, if memory serves me right, the answer about Gandhi and Hitler has been completely misquoted. Zizek said, (at more than one event in New Delhi) the exact opposite of what this report has printed. He DID NOT say “his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here,” he in fact said the opposite, that the paradigm shift that Gandhi wanted required an inherent violence.

Doug Henwood in the Left Business Observer:

Few pieces in the 23-year history of LBO have attracted as much hostile correspondence as “Web of nonsense” in #119. It was a critique of the mode of thought, almost foundational to a brand of populism on both the left and the right, “that sees the problems of capitalism—like the polarization of rich and poor and the system’s vulnerability to periodic crises—as primarily financial in origin.” While this tendency has a long history, and pervades a lot of the pseudo-radical tradition in the U.S., it always achieves special prominence at the time of financial crises.

To reprise for a moment before taking on a fresh eruption of the syndrome: capitalism is a system organized around money. Almost nothing is undertaken in the realm of production for reasons other than the accumulation of money. As the money accumulates, something must be done with it, which is why financial wealth expands over time. But even though that financial wealth often seems to inhabit a world of its own, it is ultimately connected to what Wall Street calls the “real” sector. For example, all the mortgage securities that caused the recent mischief were ultimately connected to one of the most basic needs of all, shelter. There is no way to separate neatly the monetary from the real. The social problem emanating from the securitization of mortgages isn’t only the increasingly baroque development of financial assets but also the commodification of the house and its transformation into a speculative asset. Which is why populist financial reforms can’t take you very far: they address symptoms, not pathogens.

But that never stops people from trying. The latest populist spasm is Arianna Huffington’s “Move Your Money” campaign, which would have those of us with money in large banks move it to small ones. This touches on another foundational populist fantasy: that virtue and size are inversely related. Her website, which thrives on the unpaid labor of hundreds of eager contributors, even provides a helpful list of convenient local banks if you enter your zip code.

What’s wrong with this scheme? Several things.

More here.