1. Meaningless Sex Can Be Transcendent

2. Republican Free-Market Madmen

3. Wall Street Panics, Ruling Class Scrambles

4. Republicans Reject Paulson's Plan

5. Another American Bank Goes Belly-Up

6. Sarkozy Wants to "Moralize" Capitalism

Desire & Death

Pornography is not, of course, the only expression of sensuality, but some extreme sorts of sensuality tend inexorably in its direction.

In its written form, pornography's only convincing conclusion is death, for ecstasy without restraint wants nothing less.

Pictorially, too, in the mortuary fixity of its imagery it is essentially morbid, refusing change of mood or flux of feeling. Either way, pornography is a trance, demeaning all parties to it, those looked at and those looking, locking them into a perpetuity of shame.

There is nowhere to run to in pornography. That makes it transcendent. It is the sheer emptiness of porn that makes it meaningful.

In its ominous nothingness, pornography familiarises us with humiliation and humiliation with despair and loss. And loss stimulates the imagination. Winning is a dead end, in sex as in everything else.

It is only out of a keen sense of loss that we tell stories, write poems, and learn to liberate ourselves from damagingly misleading optimistic fantasies of sex as purposeful and joyous.

Whether purposeful in God's sense of procreation in the divine image, or in Darwin's sense of selecting what's best of us for futurity. Sex is for nothing, pornography teaches. Unless you call ignominy something.

I feel about prostitution as I do about pornography - that a man ought to avail himself of whatever is on offer.

Paid-for sex, in all its varieties - sex stripped of responsibility and sentimentality (though even with a prostitute it will not always be so simple) - answers to imperatives which respectable courtship and marriage prefer to ignore.

Whenever I encounter a man who says he has never visited a prostitute, either because the thought appals him or, as is more commonly asserted, because he doesn't need to pay for sex, thank you very much, I believe that he is lying, or, worse, that he is a fool.

Among the many reasons for paying for sex the most salient is the wanting to pay for sex; and that "want" is not to be confused with need.

We know that from the examples of famously glamorous men who have all the women their hearts' desire but still routinely get caught - and who is to say don't hope to get caught - with a hooker in the back seat of their automobiles.

All the women one needs do not satisfy the desire to pay for a woman one does not need.

So what does drive a man to pay for sex, when paying must negate so much of the romantic baggage and vanity with which sex is laden?

Loneliness explains some of it, but the lonely are obviously needy, and we are addressing needs which are less apparent.

Feminist opponents of the institution of prostitution see paying for sex as an expression, pure and simply, of male aggression.

The man shells out to subject a woman to his will. I don't doubt that some men pay to feel in charge, though it's a paltry authority that must be bought and men of this sort will soon discover they can impose themselves more effectively (in their own eyes at least) through violence that doesn't cost a penny.

Those who go on paying do so not to assert their masculinity but to demean it. It is an ironic or self-defeating transaction, an act of mockery and submission, a species of masochism whether the man asks the prostitute to beat and degrade him or not.

Catherine Millett, author of The Sexual Life of Catherine M, says she took on promiscuity to show that sex is separable from feeling. This is nonsense.

The attempt to find feelinglessness in sex is an ambition loaded with feeling. To those who aspire not to feel in the course of a sexual encounter, the attainment of the illusion of feelinglessness is exquisite.

Thus the nothingness one goes in search of in a brothel is, by the wonderful inverse law of eroticism, not a nothingness at all.

Beyond a certain stage the stage at which many of us call time on eroticism and pour what's left of our desires into work or an allotment sex functions as an exchange of shame and power:

Merely functional procreation giving way to the longing to pass from person into thing, to be the instrument (or controller) of another's will, to be less (or more) than human.

"In the end," the great French philosopher of eroticism Georges Bataille wrote, "we resolutely desire that which imperils our life."

Not accidentally, not half-heartedly, but resolutely. I do not say we want to die (though on occasions we think we do) but we want sex to take us as close to death as life allows.

The paradox being - and this is a paradox which most sexual perversions celebrate, whereas love, sweet love does not - that we are never more alive than when we are staring into loss.

Republican Free-Market Madmen

In Washington, opposition to the bailout is coming from the right--from the "free-market fundamentalists" of the Republican Party, whose proposal to resolve the financial meltdown on Wall Street isn't more regulation, but less.

Oh yes, and--of course--cut the capital gains tax and other taxes on the tiny minority at the top of society that has grown unimaginably rich during the 2000s, not to mention the preceding two decades.

In other words, the Republicans are opposing a plan put forward by the incumbent president of their own party--and the Democrats are fronting for their supposed sworn enemies in the Bush administration, having given up on any real measures to help working people suffering through the current crisis.

No one knows what will happen next--even by the time this article appears on Friday morning. But it certainly won't be a return to stability and certainty that the politicians promised when they gathered at the White House.

Oh, and by the way. While all that stuff about what happened at the White House was emerging Thursday night.

This one other thing happened: The U.S. government seized Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan in the country, and promptly sold off the bulk of its assets to super-bank JPMorgan Chase at bargain-basement prices.

The financial press has been warning ominously about the imminent collapse of WaMu, as it's known, for weeks.

But the actual event looks destined to be the second story on a Friday morning where uncertainty about whether the financial system stands on the brink of outright collapse is that much more grave.

Wall Street Panics, Ruling Class Scrambles

As the crisis unfolded this past week, some of the realities of bourgeois rule came into sharper focus.

To begin with, while the jobs, homes, and futures of literally millions in this society are in jeopardy, what is the paramount concern of the ruling class?

It is the protection of a financial system that sits atop a global system of exploitation. It is the bailout of the owners and investor beneficiaries of that financial system.

There was no public debate over bailouts and loans for financial institutions. And the constant refrain from on-high was, “This is no time to assign blame.”

Certainly, there is never a time, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, to talk about capitalism and its exploitative and anarchic functioning.

Politically, the system operates in such a way that the masses of people are either conditioned to be passive bystanders, or mobilized under the wing of this or that bourgeois political party or bourgeois-led movement—or subject to repression when people engage in serious resistance.

And through the media, the politicians, and the official “experts,” people are trained to look at things through a certain ideological filter.

When a crisis like this one hits, the problem is never presented as the system but rather as particular flaws and malpractices that can be corrected: “excessive greed,” “Wall Street irresponsibility,” “too much regulation” or “too little regulation.”

The truth is that this crisis has deep structural causes in the very nature and workings of this global system of exploitation.

Lenin once described bourgeois parliaments (like the U.S. Congress) as “talk shops.” This time, Congress did not even get a chance to “talk” first.

It has been basically presented with an accomplished fact: a bailout program. Now the bailout will be debated around the edges, with vying bourgeois economic and political interests also being fought out.

There are key institutional mechanisms of bourgeois rule and of the imperialist state. They include the Federal Reserve Bank—which plays a decisive regulating and lubricating role in the U.S. economy and which also plays a special role in the world capitalist economy—and the Department of Treasury.

Several mainstream news stories described how the head of the Federal Reserve and of the Treasury, and major Wall Street figures, met to sort out the AIG situation, to come up with a plan to deal with this phase of the crisis, and then to act on it.

As for John McCain and Barack Obama, one of whom will be the next “commander in chief of empire,” their response to the crisis has been an amalgam of the absurd, the hypocritical, and sworn allegiance to the system.

Republicans Reject Paulson's Plan

“If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down,” President Bush declared Thursday as he watched the $700 billion bailout package fall apart before his eyes, according to one person in the room.

It was an implosion that spilled out from behind closed doors into public view in a way rarely seen in Washington.

By 10:30 p.m., after another round of talks, Congressional negotiators gave up for the night and said they would try again on Friday. Left uncertain was the fate of the bailout, which the White House says is urgently needed to fix broken financial and credit markets, as well as whether the first presidential debate would go forward as planned Friday night in Mississippi.

When Congressional leaders and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, the two major party presidential candidates, trooped to the White House on Thursday afternoon, most signs pointed toward a bipartisan agreement on a grand compromise that could be accepted by all sides and signed into law by the weekend.

It was intended to pump billions of dollars into the financial system, restoring liquidity and keeping credit flowing to businesses and consumers.

“We’re in a serious economic crisis,” Mr. Bush told reporters as the meeting began shortly before 4 p.m. in the Cabinet Room, adding, “My hope is we can reach an agreement very shortly.”

But once the doors closed, the smooth-talking House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, surprised many in the room by declaring that his caucus could not support the plan to allow the government to buy distressed mortgage assets from ailing financial companies.

Mr. Boehner pressed an alternative that involved a smaller role for the government, and Mr. McCain, whose support of the deal is critical if fellow Republicans are to sign on, declined to take a stand.

The talks broke up in angry recriminations, according to accounts provided by a participant and others who were briefed on the session, and were followed by dueling news conferences and interviews rife with partisan finger-pointing.

In the Roosevelt Room after the session, the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., literally bent down on one knee as he pleaded with Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, not to “blow it up” by withdrawing her party’s support for the package over what Ms. Pelosi derided as a Republican betrayal.

“I didn’t know you were Catholic,” Ms. Pelosi said, a wry reference to Mr. Paulson’s kneeling, according to someone who observed the exchange. She went on: “It’s not me blowing this up, it’s the Republicans.”

Mr. Paulson sighed. “I know. I know.”

Another American Bank Goes Belly-Up

JPMorgan Chase & Co. became the biggest U.S. bank by deposits, acquiring Washington Mutual Inc.'s branch network for $1.9 billion after the thrift was seized in the largest U.S. bank failure in history.

Customers of WaMu withdrew $16.7 billion from accounts since Sept. 16, leaving the Seattle-based bank ``unsound,'' the Office of Thrift Supervision said late yesterday.

WaMu's branches will open today and depositors will have full access to all their accounts, Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., said on a conference call.

WaMu is the latest casualty of a financial crisis that drove Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and IndyMac Bancorp out of business and led to the hastily arranged rescues of Merrill Lynch & Co. and Bear Stearns Cos., which was itself absorbed by JPMorgan.

WaMu in March rejected a takeover offer from JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon that the savings and loan valued at $4 a share.

This is a fabulous franchise,'' Dimon, 52, said in an interview. ``We think we got this at a price that protects us, where if we were wrong, it still protects us.''

WaMu collapsed as its credit rating was slashed to junk and its stock price tumbled. Facing $19 billion of losses on soured mortgage loans, the lender put itself up for sale last week.

WaMu fired CEO Kerry Killinger on Sept. 8 and replaced him with Alan Fishman, who was awarded a $7.5 million signing bonus and $1 million salary.

In most bank seizures, little or nothing is left for shareholders. WaMu, down 95 percent in the past year, dropped to 45 cents in extended trading following the announcement, which came after the close of regular trading.

Sarkozy Wants to "Moralize" Capitalism

PRESIDENT NICOLAS Sarkozy has vowed to transform the world economic crisis into an opportunity by reinventing capitalism with a strong dose of morality and fostering a new international regulatory system.

"Fear is the principal threat against the economy today," the French leader said in a vigorous 45-minute speech yesterday that blurred political and ideological lines.

"Telling the truth to the French means telling them the crisis isn't over," Mr Sarkozy said. France was too integrated in the world economy not to be affected.

"Telling the truth to the French means telling them that the present crisis will have consequences in the coming months on growth, unemployment and purchasing power."

This crisis was "without comparison since the 1930s" and meant the end of the "great dream of freedom and prosperity" that accompanied the end of the Cold War.

A certain idea of globalisation was ending with a financial capitalism that "that imposed its logic on the entire economy and helped distort it," Mr Sarkozy said.

"The idea of the all-powerful market which must not be constrained by any rules, by any political intervention, was mad. The idea that markets were always right was mad."

The French president blamed "the logic of short-term financial profit" and said risks were hidden "to obtain ever more exorbitant profits".

Banks were "allowed to speculate on the markets instead of doing their job, which is to mobilise savings for economic development and analyse credit risks".