CLEVELAND – A contractor who found $182,000 in Depression-era currency hidden in a bathroom wall has ended up with only a few thousand dollars, but he feels some vindication.

The windfall discovery amounted to little more than grief for contractor Bob Kitts, who couldn't agree on how to split the money with homeowner Amanda Reece.

It didn't help Reece much, either. She testified in a deposition that she was considering bankruptcy and that a bank recently foreclosed on one of her properties.

And 21 descendants of Patrick Dunne — the wealthy businessman who stashed the money that was minted in a time of bank collapses and joblessness — will each get a mere fraction of the find.

"If these two individuals had sat down and resolved their disputes and divided the money, the heirs would have had no knowledge of it," said attorney Gid Marcinkevicius, who represents the Dunne estate. "Because they were not able to sit down and divide it in a rational way, they both lost."

The nation’s retailers saw their sales plummet last month in what is likely the weakest October in decades, as the financial crisis and mounting layoffs left shoppers too scared to shop.

The drop-off from an already weak September performance is further darkening the outlook for the holiday season and dimming hopes for any industry recovery until at least the second half of next year.

As merchants reported their dismal sales figures Thursday, Wal-Mart Stores, the world’s largest retailer, proved to be among the few bright spots as it benefits from shoppers focusing on buying basics at discounters.

"Laissez-faire, c'est fini," said President Nicolas Sarkozy. "We will intervene massively whenever a strategic enterprise needs our money."

Such language can now be heard daily across Europe. It can only intensify as the fall-out from the EU's €1.8bn trillion (£1.4 trillion) bank rescue becomes clearer, and as Europe's elites discover that their own banks are the most leveraged in the world and have played their own Wagnerian part in Gotterdammerung.

Professor Hobsbawm, who spent his youth watching Hitler's rise in Berlin, has a warning for those who think this will help the Left in any recognizable form. "In the 1930s, the net political effect of the Depression was to enormously strengthen the Right," he said.

More at the Telegraph.

This is a great link to send to your friends in Arizona, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia.

UPDATE: For the record, the Tax Policy Center, which is credited for the information that created the calculator, didn't create the calculator. The Obama campaign did. The Tax Policy Center would prefer you get your information from this very boring wall of text.

I'm the "Wonkette Operative" who came upon the crazy Wall Street Bull prayer party.

I noticed you posted about it yesterday and I thought you might be interested in the video I shot of Cindy Jacobs and her friends singing "God Bless America" to the Bull.

What a strange, yet entertaining group....

Dan is my new hero.

Apparently, some Christians are on Wall Street, putting their hands on and praying over a large brass bull in the hopes that God will save the world's economy and transform the United States from a bull and bear economy to a lion (of God) economy. Do these people actually read the book they're supposed to be following?

Two large Japanese food manufacturers have found insecticide in their instant noodles, triggering a food scare.

First, Nissin - which invented the instant noodle - recalled 500,000 pots after a woman became ill. She had eaten from a cup containing insect repellent.

Now another Japanese food giant, Myojo, says it too has found the same substance in two of its own pots.

That's bad timing—a ramen panic just as global markets are "diving," "plummeting," and having a "meltdown."

Instant ramen was invented for economic depressions—during the food shortages after WWII, Nissin founder Momofuku Ando saw people lining up to buy bowls of soup from black-market street stalls. And voilà. He became a millionaire and dead last year of a heart attack at the age of 96. When I lived in Japan, my neighbors told me not to eat instant ramen because the flavor packet was poison that would kill all my sperm. It's population control, they said, to get rid of the poor people.

Ramen became popular in the west during England's economic depression in the 1970s. (In Mexico, they combine the poverty food from both hemispheres by cooking instant-ramen noodles in the orange glop you get in instant mac 'n' cheese.)

The first time I ever saw ramen was at my elementary school in a New Orleans. Justin Rambo—a tough-ass Cajun kid whose dad once came to class to give him a whupping after the teacher called to say he'd been acting up—would step on the plastic package to break up the noodles, then open it and pour in the flavor pack, then eat the little chunks. Soon, all the kids were eating ramen during recess.

...I don’t think the current crisis [in the markets] marks the end of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism. For the sole aim of all the government intervention that is happening now is precisely to restart (reboot) the currently clogged market.

Even the guru of neoliberalism, Alan Greenspan, is sobering up to this reality:

But on Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.

“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

It's not the end of the world. It's the end of a form of economic exploitation.

This neat little article convincingly corresponds the recent expansion and contraction of Starbucks with the real estate boom and bust that triggered the current economic crisis:

This recent crisis has its roots in the unhappy coupling of a frenzied nationwide real-estate market centered in California, Las Vegas, and Florida, and a nationwide credit mania centered in New York. If you could pick one brand name that personified these twin bubbles, it was Starbucks. The Seattle-based coffee chain followed new housing developments into the suburbs and exurbs, where its outlets became pit stops for real-estate brokers and their clients. It also carpet-bombed the business districts of large cities, especially the financial centers, with nearly 200 in Manhattan alone. Starbucks' frothy treats provided the fuel for the boom, the caffeine that enabled deal jockeys to stay up all hours putting together offering papers for CDOs, and helped mortgage brokers work overtime processing dubious loan documents. Starbucks strategically located many of its outlets on the ground floors of big investment banks. (The one around the corner from the former Bear Stearns headquarters has already closed.)

And:

Like American financial capitalism, Starbucks, fueled by the capital markets, took a great idea too far (quality coffee for Starbucks, securitization for Wall Street) and diluted the experience unnecessarily (subprime food such as egg-and-sausage sandwiches for Starbucks, subprime loans for Wall Street). Like so many sadder-but-wiser Miami condo developers, Starbucks operated on a "build it and they will come" philosophy. Like many of the humiliated Wall Street firms, the coffee company let algorithms and number-crunching get the better of sound judgment: If the waiting time at one Starbucks was over a certain number of minutes, Starbucks reasoned that an opposite corner could sustain a new outlet. Like the housing market, Starbucks peaked in the spring of 2006 and has since fallen precipitously.

Some mortgage broker in Los Angeles gives subprime “liar loans” to people who have no credit ratings so they can buy homes in Southern California. Those flimsy mortgages get globalized through the global banking system and, when they go sour, they eventually prompt banks to stop lending, fearful that every other bank’s assets are toxic, too. The credit crunch hits Iceland, which went on its own binge. Meanwhile, the police department of Northumbria, England, had invested some of its extra cash in Iceland, and, now that those accounts are frozen, it may have to reduce street patrols this weekend.

[O]rgies of destruction of capital, such as we are witnessing now, are part and parcel of the “creative destruction” (Schumpeter’s term, very much following Marx’s observations) that is the modus operandi of capitalism. Individual capitalists may suffer (though usually far less than the rest of us do), but these convulsions clear up the system, unclog it, so that new rounds of exploitation and capital accumulation may then take place...

At one level correspondences are resemblances, in seemingly very different specific practices, which may be shown by analysis to be both direct and directly related expressions of and responses to a general social process.

Walter Benjamin transformed (or translated, in the Latour sense--more about that in another post) the term from Baudelaire's initial use of it in his poem "Correspondences":

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

or

Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance
In a tenebrous and profound unity,
Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day,
The perfumes, the sounds, and colors correspond.

With all of this in mind, I now want to establish a new correspondence between of two seemingly dissimilar histories. The history of capitalism and the history of Dick Cheney's heart.

Sensing a problem early Wednesday, Cheney saw the White House physician, who discovered the vice president was experiencing a recurrence of the irregular heartbeat. Cheney participated in regular morning briefings with President Bush, among other duties, and remained working at the White House until he went to George Washington University Hospital in the afternoon for treatment.

The process took nearly two hours, after which Cheney went home, said Megan Mitchell, a Cheney spokeswoman.

"An electrical impulse was delivered to restore the heart to normal rhythm," she said. "The procedure went smoothly and without complication."

From another report:

Mr Cheney, 67, has had four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery and operations to clear blocked arteries.

To begin with, correspond those details with the one in Shaviro's passage:

[T]he modus operandi of capitalism.... these convulsions clear up the system, unclog it, so that new rounds of exploitation and capital accumulation may then take place.

Though one system or substance (or assemblage--more on that in another post) is social and the other organic, a diachronic (or historical) analysis of capitalism and Cheney's heart would reveal convincing commonalities. The heart as the base of Cheney's life; capitalism being the base of social life. The situation of the heart producing a certain type of person and the situation of capitalism resulting in a type of superstructure. Indeed, both went into a state of crisis at the same time, and both are treated with shocks to restore stability and confidence. Seriously, the two (the heart and mode of production) need to be examined as being expressions of some larger moment or world process.

You see, when I lived with my niece and nephew, they wanted a Chihuahua. They chanted “Chihuahua, Chihuahua!” despite my insistence that Chihuahuas were nothing but throw pillows covered in teeth and claws. But the chanters won. I fell in love with Pixel. Look at him. See?

Photo by Dawn Bustanoby.

So I went.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua is, in point of fact, the worst movie ever. Which begs the question: why—why!?—is it the top grossing movie two weeks running, selling $17.5 million in tickets just last weekend?

BHC’s sunny opulence is at odds with Americans—as of October 2008—collectively staring down the barrel of the darkest depression in 80 years. The opening scene features Chihuahuas (we’ve since moved on to Pit Bulls), Starbucks cups (currently closing stores everywhere), and a Louis Vuitton purse (now replaced with 20-cent taxed plastic bags). So its release now is A) a huge mistake, B) the result of a catastrophic production delay, or C) unfettered genius.

The story begins at the lavish mansion of a bejeweled white Chihuahua, who quickly becomes the object of affection for the gardener’s mangy, brown, slightly-more-robust Chihuahua. After being kidnapped, the rich white dog ends up in deepest, darkest Mexico. She narrowly escapes peril—thanks to her rough-and-tumble Mexican suitor and her own gumption—and makes it safely home to Beverly Hills. “Prissy? No mas,” says the six-pound protagonist.

Beverly Hills Chihuahua is the story of descent from economic security, into the jaws of poverty, and returning to grace unscathed. And that’s a story America really needs right now. Wrote StC in comments of yesterday’s Morning News: “I WENT AND SAW IT AGAIN. With four others. Oh, chihuahua!”

This is a familiar refrain. BHC evokes Shirley Temple, Good-Ship-Lollipopping her way through the Great Depression, or Little Orphan Annie escaping to the safety of Daddy Warbucks’s mansion. As America braces for poverty, it’s so much more manageable to prepare for the worst when you’re projecting your future onto the shivering frame of a six-pound dog.

To celebrate, let's savor a few of his observations:

The fundamental fact of American politics—and I've sharpened my view on this since last year and the hardcover edition of the book—is that we've got an alliance between the religious right and the accumulators of great wealth. Those are the people who are running things.

On the economic policy of the Bush administration: "There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do."

The United States in particular and the West in general should be feeling a little embarrassed about all that lecturing we did to the Third World.

On supply-side economics: "The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant—that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.

It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be.

Congratulations, you lovey old curmudgeon.