White Fungus Releases Issue 10

White Fungus is about to release its 10th issue with launches at Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, Friday, March 6 and ARTSPACE in Auckland, Wednesday, March 11.Both launches will run from 6-9pm.

The Adam Art Gallery event will feature performances by Aotearoa Hip Hop pioneers Upper Hutt Posse, Our Love Will Destroy the World(Campbell Kneale), Peter Wright (recently returned from the UK) and Tao Wells. At ARTSPACE local band Evil Ocean will perform along with Empirical, Tao Wells and poet Iain Britton.

Number 10 is White Fungus’ biggest issue to date with 24 more pages. The new issue includes a new short story, Sewer Rat Debacle, by Duncan Sarkies and in an in-depth history article by Tim Bollinger, The Bone Collectors: Walter Mantel and the early days of New Zealand zoological discovery. It also includes a colour comic by Auckland artist Barry Linton and a reflection on the life of Diogenes by Richard Meros.

White Fungus has the pleasure of re-publishing, in this issue, classic artworks by Auckland iconoclastic feminist Judy Darragh along with work by Nick Austin from his 2006 show at ARTSPACE, On appetitb. There are articles on Brisbane artist Richard Bell, Berlin-based Marcin Cienski and Hong Kong artist Lee Kit. There is work by Andrew McLeod accompanied by two stories by Chris Cudby.

Music features include articles on Detroit Noise group Wolf Eyes, New York ‘hyperrealist’ composer Noah Creshevsky and interviews with musician Cristian Amigo and Australian sound artist Jodi Rose. Plus White Fungus talks to Te Kupu of Upper Hutt Posse about the group 20 years on from producing the first-ever Rap record in New Zealand, E Tu in 1988.

Simon Wickham-Smith writes about Mongolia’s most subversive poet, Baatarin Galsansuh. And the issue features poems by Cyril Wong, winner of the 2006 Singapore Literature Prize and the epic Jena: An Other Cartography by enigmatic Washington DC poet Francis Raven.

Based in Wellington, New Zealand White Fungus was started by the Hanson brothers Ron and Mark after a four-year sojourn in Taiwan. “’White Fungus’ says exciting cultural confusion to us,” Mark Hanson says. The name comes from a canned foodstuff found at a local supermarket in the industrial zone of Taichung City.

White Fungus is distributed by Disticor in the US and Canada. White Fungus is the New Zealand media partner to this year’s international magazine symposium Colophon2009 in Luxembourg. It has been selected for MOOH – The Magazine of Omotesando Hills Library in Tokyo.

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Former chief economist of the IMF Simon Johnson talks about taking on the banking elites





High Noon: Geithner v. The American Oligarchs
By Simon Johnson

There comes a time in every economic crisis or, more specifically, in every struggle to recover from a crisis, when someone steps up to the podium to promise the policies that - they say - will deliver you back to growth. The person has political support, a strong track record, and every incentive to enter the history books. But one nagging question remains.

Can this person, your new economic strategist, really break with the vested elites that got you into this much trouble? The form of these vested interests, of course, varies substantially across situations, but they are always still strong, despite the downward spiral which they did so much to bring about. And fully escaping the grip of crisis really means breaking their power.

Not only is this a standard way of thinking about crisis resolution in many developing and post-communist countries, it also turns out to be a good guide to thinking about the US today. We have a powerful banking industry that has mismanaged its way into deep trouble. Yet these banks obtained an initial bailout - the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP - on generous terms, and have consistently failed to use the opportunity provided by this government support to turn their operations around. Not only that, but they have flaunted their power - and their arrogance - through paying themselves large and largely inappropriate bonuses.

We come now, this week, to the podium. And Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner takes the stand (on Tuesday), to tell us how he proposes to use the remainder of the TARP funds, support from the Federal Reserve, and other policies to turn around the financial system and pull us out of recession. We previously posed relevant technical questions for this week; answers (or lack of answers) to these should determine if Geithner’s approach is likely to succeed. Think of that as a framework for reasonable technocratic assessment. But there is also the key political dimension to emphasize.

The elites who run the US banking industry have had a great run of economic good fortune. They used this wealth to further strengthen their political power, both through donations to politicians of almost all stripes and more broadly through taking positions of formal and informal influence throughout the executive and legislative branches.

Our unsustainable debt-fuelled boom, in other words, produced both the conditions for a major global financial disaster, and a political strengthening of the people who benefited most from the risk-taking and associated compensation packages that made this disaster possible. Ending the financial crisis is relatively straightforward - a forced recapitalization and change of ownership/management in the banking system - although this will not immediately lead to an economic recovery (more on that here). But seen in deeper political terms, decisive action to restructure large banks is almost impossible. Such action would require overcoming perhaps the single strongest interest group in the United States today.

How can you do it? The answer must be by splitting this powerful interest group into competing factions, and taking them on one by one. Can this be done? Definitely, yes. In particular, bank recapitalization - if implemented right - can use private equity interests against the powerful large bank insiders. Then you need to force the new private equity owners of banks to break them up so they are no longer too big to fail. And then… there is always more to do to contain the power of a lobby that is boosted by any boom and which, the more it succeeds, the more likely it is to ruin us all.

From The Baseline Scenario: http://baselinescenario.com/2009/02/08/high-noon-geithner-v-the-american-oligarchs/

Paul Jay challenges The Nation Editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel on not being critical enough of Obama and his foreign policy.

Obama and Liberals: A Counter-Productive Relationship

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.

There's a lot of harm that comes from a political faction being beholden to a leader rather than to any actual ideas or political principles.

The New Republic's John Judis today has an excellent analysis of the politics behind the stimulus package -- one which applies equally to most other political controversies. Judis argues that the stimulus package ended up being far inferior to what it could have been and points to this reason why that happened:

But I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry. Instead, what exists of a popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama's pocket. . . .

A member of one liberal group, Campaign for America's Future, pronounced the stimulus bill "a darn good first step." MoveOn -- as far as I can tell -- has attacked conservative Republicans for opposing the bill, while lamely urging Democrats to back it. Of course, all these groups may have thought the stimulus bill and the bailout were ideal, but I doubt it. I bet they had the same criticisms of these measures that Krugman or The American Prospect's Ezra Klein or my own colleagues had, but they made the mistake that political groups often make: subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the party and its leading politician.

By extremely stark contrast, Paul Krugman today explains why Republicans are so unified in their opposition to this bill and their willingness to uphold the principles of their supporters:
One might have expected Republicans to act at least slightly chastened in these early days of the Obama administration, given both their drubbing in the last two elections and the economic debacle of the past eight years. But it's now clear that the party's commitment to deep voodoo - enforced, in part, by pressure groups that stand ready to run primary challengers against heretics - is as strong as ever.

[Though I agree with Krugman's principal point here, I dislike his use of the word "heretics" here. It invokes one of the worst myths in our political discourse: the idea that there's something wrong, intolerant or "Stalinist" about pressuring or even campaigning against incumbents "from one's own party" who advocate positions that you think are bad and wrong. That activity happens to be the essence of democracy, and we need more, not less, of it. If anything is Stalinist, it's the sky-high incumbent re-election rates and the sense of entitlement in our political class that incumbents should not ever face primary challenges even if they support policies which the base of the party reviles. Why shouldn't GOP voters who love tax cuts and hate government domestic spending, regardless of whether they're right or wrong, demand that their elected representatives support those views (in exactly the same way that Democratic incumbents who supported the Iraq war and/or Bush's lawless surveillance state should have been targeted for defeat)?]

But Krugman's larger point is correct: Republican groups demand from politicians support for their beliefs. By contrast, as Judis describes, Democratic groups -- including (perhaps especially) liberal activist groups -- now (with some exceptions) lend their allegiance to the party and its leader regardless of how faithful the party leadership is to their beliefs. That disparity means that there is often great popular agitation and political pressure exerted from the Right, but almost none from the Left (I'm using the terms "Left" and "Right" here in their conventional sense: "Right" being the core of the GOP and "Left" being those who most consistently and vigorously opposed Bush's foreign and domestic policies).

Read the rest at Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/126867/obama_and_liberals%3A_a_counter-productive_relationship/

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Justice Yeldham and Toecutter Hit Wellington

Two of Sydney’s most experimental and ferocious musicians - Justice Yeldham and the Dynamic Ribbon Device and Toecutter – are about to grace our shores culminating in a performance this Thursday, February 5 at Happy in Wellington. The night will also be an opportunity to catch a final gig by The Stumps before Antony Milton takes off for South America.



Formerly a turntablist – "in the loosest sense" -Justice Yeldham, aka Lucas Abela, is known world wide for his miced-up performances of triangular sheets of glass - wired to a super utility belt of effects pedals - which he plays with his mouth, hyperventilating and getting some of the freakiest industrial sounds you’ll hear in modern music, which, despite their nightmarish variety, Yeldham plays with practiced precision. Performances are intensely physical or ‘neo-brutalist’ and not for the faint-hearted.



Also a wayward turntablist, Toecutter joins Yeldham in his first trip to New Zealand. A veteran of the Sydney underground, Toecutter splices together unpredictable and hyperactive dance music as a euphoric yet oddball foil to the bloody savagery of Yeldham. Also playing will be Public Toilet, DJ Powerfull and The Lost Weekend. Installation by Tao.