Dust Storm, Stratford, TX
Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures

“One can say that all we know, that is, all we have the power to do, has finally turned against what we are.”
–paul valÉry







image courtesy of Trevor Paglen & Metro Pictures, NYC,
Altmann-Siegel, SF, & Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne

Muddling Towards the Next
Crisis: in conversation with
James Kenneth Galbraith

If I were designing the boilerplate rhetoric of a popular movement, I would take a blue pencil to these statistical formulations. I don't like the stagnant median wage argument—I think it obscures what actually happened. And I don't particularly care for the “one percent” argument. I understand it has a certain power, but one can be much more precise about what it is you want to attack, and what it is you want to preserve and to build. I would cut to the chase: we need to tear down the financial sector and rebuild it from scratch in a very different way.

winter2013


From The Straddler Archives
summer2011

“These Illegals”: Immigrants as
Criminals and Commodities
in the American Free Market
“Labor exploitation does not require hatred or racism, but it does thrive in their presence.” 		fall2010

Resource and Remedy
“Where there is administration there must also exist a system for accountability and responsibility—and this system, in turn, requires administration.”		 springsummer2008

The Crime You Need
when the Mob is not Enough
“The American gangster movie is both wish fulfillment and a celebration of the very system it purports to critique.”		 summer2012

Democracy is Troublemaking:
in conversation with Lewis Lapham
“Knowledge of...history prevents you from attacking the present, and therefore not engaging with the present, and therefore not enjoying the present.”