Special mention

Pichação is described in today’s New York Times as an “alphabet designed for urban invasion.”

It nearly envelops some of São Paulo’s government buildings, residential high-rises, even public monuments, with lettering eerily reminiscent of Scandinavia’s ancient runic writing.

The most daring practitioners risk their lives, scaling building facades at night to paint their script at the crests of smog-darkened skyscrapers. Some have fallen to their death from terrifying heights.

Their graffiti, called pichação, from the Portuguese verb “pichar,” or cover with tar, reflects the urban decay and deep class divisions that still define much of São Paulo, a city with a metropolitan population approaching 20 million. It is just one reminder of the social ills that Brazil’s economic boom has so far failed to resolve, and may perhaps even be accentuating, despite recent strides in reducing income inequality.

According to François Chastenet,

Only few original alternative models exist independently to the now global New York experience/aesthetic—the São Paulo pixação scene and Cholo writing in Los Angeles are two pretty rare examples and constitute geographical aesthetical particularities. We can observe the emergence of a genuine “urban efficiency” in (illegal) architectural lettering, the illegal and hand-crafted context bringing new formal solutions. The fact that these letterings are illegal is essential; pixações from São Paulo can be seen as an alphabet designed for urban invasion, a beautiful “total coverage” writing system. So both the pixações and Cholo letters can be seen as an expression of the consequences of the 21st-century megalopolis conditions on the drawing of letterforms, as an unexpected evolution of the Latin alphabet. São Paulo and Los Angeles Cholo writers were able to create their own original identity through letter-forms, this fact being pretty unique in the visual communication of subcultures. As an architect interested in urban planning, and a graphic designer and typographer by academic training, it was hard not to be interested be this.

And here’s my translation of the distinction between graffiti and pichação made on the Wikepedia site in Portuguese:

In Brazil, there’s a difference between graffiti and pichação. Both tend to feed discussions concerning the limits of art, over free art or commodity-art, freedom of expression, over Pollock, Rothko, and Basquiat.

Graffiti, in principle, is much more elaborate and of more aesthetic interest, being socially accepted as a form of expression of contemporary art, respected and even supported by the public sector. Pichação is considered essentially transgressive, predatory, visually aggressive, contributing to the degradation of the scenery, a form of vandalism without any artistic or communicative value. What is generally included in this category are repetitive inscriptions, which are very simplified and quickly executed, basically symbols or characters similar to hieroglyphics, of one color, which cover the walls of cities. Pichação is, by definition, made in prohibited places and at night, in rapid operations, treated as an attack on the public or private patrimony. Therefore, its authors are subject to prison sentences and fines. Today, graffiti is either done in permitted locales or in locales especially designed for it.

In general, the coexistence between graffiti artists and pichadores is peaceful. Many graffiti artists were pichadores in the past, and pichadores don’t work on walls that have graffiti.

After reading the news from Davos, ask yourself why we should listen to the Siren song of the financial elite. After all, the people who steered our financial ship into dangerous waters in the first place were at the very top of this group. We should listen more to those will suffer from austerity budgets: children who only get one chance at an education, the sick and disabled unable to support themselves and seniors too old to work.

David Cay Johnston, “The siren call of austerity”

Special mention

Felix Salmon has posted the video of the entire interview, in which Summers denies having anything to do with the deregulation of markets during the Clinton administration and Krishnan Guru-Murthy pushes him in a way few if any interviewers ever have.

Here’s the link to the text of the booklet published with the same title (and a link to images of the original publication).

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

By the same token, isn’t the current economic crisis also a racket? If so, who is the Major General Smedley Butler of our time?

Simon Wren-Lewis waxes nostalgic for the days before things fell apart, when macroeconomists agree on the framework of analysis.

He provides a good summary of what it looked like before:

Goodfriend and King coined the term ‘New Neoclassical Synthesis’ (call it ‘synthesis’ for short), and other authors wrote along similar lines. So, even as recently as five years ago, I told masters students starting a macro course to forget anything they might have been told about alternative schools of thought: they were going to learn a unified framework that most macroeconomists – the mainstream – would sign up to. It was like the first half of David Romer’s popular textbook: start with Solow, but quickly replace a fixed savings propensity by an optimising intertemporal consumer to get the basic Ramsey model. Add endogenous labour supply to get RBC. Probably talk a bit about overlapping generations. Hopefully add to what was in Romer by doing some open economy stuff. Then add New Keynesian theory built around sticky prices. If the student went on to work in a central bank, they would probably encounter this framework as a central part of that institution’s forecasting and policy analysis.

Now, in the midst of the Second Great Depression, Wren-Lewis laments the fact that the consensus has fallen apart and we’re back to contending schools of thought.

The problem Wren-Lewis misses is the fact that the range of discussion within the mainstream—the synthesis then and the contending perspectives now—has narrowly limited the theoretical perspectives and policy options within the macroeconomic debate. It’s why mainstream economists didn’t admit of the possibility of capitalists crises before and why they can’t figure out what to do now.

My sense is the debate won’t improve until things really do fall apart within macroeconomics.

Occupying the World Economic Forum in Davos, while CEOs defend capitalism.

Special mention

source

Who cares about the rules governing CEO compensation during bankruptcy?

Both MSNBC [ht: ja] and the Wall Street Journal are now documenting the fact that corporations are finding ways around congressional regulations governing compensation to Chief Executive Officers during bankruptcy proceedings.

Under Chapter 11, corporations are able to close offices and factories, cut jobs, and wipe out shareholders. But they’re finding ways of offering generous compensation to the CEOs who preside over the reorganizations.

From the Journal:

By examining court documents and regulatory filings, The Wall Street Journal was able to determine the pay of executives at 21 of the 100 largest companies that recently went through bankruptcy. Together, the chief executives of those firms earned more than $350 million in salary, bonuses, stock grants and severance for the periods their companies were under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection or just afterward.

Of the 21 chief executives, seven had either been hired during a bankruptcy case or been with a company less than a year before its Chapter 11 filing. Some of the 21 CEOs, including Lear’s, received bigger bonuses during bankruptcy protection than in previous years.

And from MSNBC:

“There seems to be no sense of accountability at this level,” said Steven Kropp, a professor at Roger Williams University School of Law. “In most of these cases, the unsecured creditors aren’t being paid back in full, employees are being laid off, and in addition, they’re finding their health insurance and pensions diminished.”

Clearly, under contemporary capitalism, CEOs are finding new and ingenious ways of bankrupting the bankrupters.