Remora.
The addict returns to the needle. The pyromaniac returns to the flame. And LI returns, every Saturday, to Edward Rothstein's column in the Times -- a column in which erudition and ignorance perpetually arm-wrestle, with ignorance, in the end, generally getting the best of it.
So it is with his column, today, which makes a self-referential detour through his column of September 22, 01. In that column, Rothstein, deciding that 9/11 was unprecedented in the whole wide world and seeking to bring this to the attention of the educated public, used the attack as a stick to attack post-modernism and relativism. Relativists, apparently, had never heard of Bosnia, Rwanda, the slaughter of millions in Sudan, Bangla Desh, the Iran-Iraqi war, Eritrea, Biafra, Cambodia, the Great Leap forward, South Africa, the dirty war in Argentina, the military takeover of Brazil, El Salvador, and other of the various blots of the last thirty years. But the destruction of 3,000 lives in the World Trade Center, maybe they would look up from their relativizing and remark on that. Is generally the idea, I guess. So, seeing an opening, the ever eager Stanley Fish jumped to the defense of postmodernism. In all the venues, lately, from NYT Op Eds to Atlantic magazine. Prompting Rothstein to go back to the topic.
LI watches with the usual mixture of awe and abhorrence as Rothstein�s fashions his points. Rothstein is not the man to go to for an account of 20th century philosophy, since he is apparently ignorant of the debate over truth in the 20th century that enlisted such figures as Carnap and Tarski. That this debate long preceeded post-modernism also seems unclear to the guy. The problem, as Rothstein puts it in one of his ursine phrases -- watching the man struggle with philosophical concepts is like watching a bear juggle fireworks -- is that postmodernists don't believe in the "existence" of objective truth.
Now, this view of truth as an existent was challenged a little earlier than 1966. It was, for instance, challenged by Kant. It was challenged when Aristotle objected to Platonic forms. And the objections have generally carried the day. Truth, as the logical positivists like to put it, was a function of the truth table. There isn't a further thing, "truth," which mixes in with a statement like "Roses are red" to make roses red. If this is really Rothenstein's position, he is welcome to it -- but I don't believe he has the philosophical tools to defend it, and I don�t believe he knows how much ground has been covered since Socrates was a pup.
What he means, no doubt, is that "Roses really are red." His opponent, the relativist, is an unclear beast in Rothstein's eyes, but Rothstein thinks that's the guy who says, you only think Roses are red. But X thinks roses are blue. And there's no way of deciding between the two of you. So can�t we all just get along?
Rothstein immediately ties this together with the idea that there is a transcendental ethical point of view. In other words, the truth is not only an existent, in his view, but is morally buttressed. Well, this is a possible point of view, but it seems to deviate from the usage of truth in such cases as �Roses are red is true.� Just as that usage doesn�t make the truth horticultural, there�s no reason to think that �thou shalt not commit adultery is true� makes the truth moral. Rather, it asserts a true claim for a moral judgment. Perhaps Rothstein is thinking that the moral judgment, you should tell the truth, makes the truth some part of his transcendental ethical point of view. Now, being more generous to the guy, I could see how you could make the case that between saying, there is such a thing as objective truth and saying, there is such a thing as transcendental ethical values value, this is a community of vision, a world view, if you will. Being a relativist myself, however, I think that what Rothstein really should want to do is preserve truth from being a moral value, period. Otherwise, I think we can generate what I�d call a vulgar relativistic world view. I won�t do that here, but it would involve taking the collapse of ought statements into is statements as a basis for saying that, since we find a plurality of ought statements on the ground, this should mean that in culture X, we can generate Roses aren�t red, and thus roses aren�t really red. To make �roses are red� logically dependent on such statements as �homosexuality is wrong� is the high road to vulgar relativism: when we decide that �homosexuality isn�t wrong,� that is definitely going to effect our gardening. There is a reason, after all, why positivists have striven so hard to adopt a functional neutrality as their default position. See Max Weber for details.
Rothstein's assumption, here, is that relativism entails a sort of wierd communal solipsism. This assumption, I think, rests on one of the tacit premises of American newspaper and academic culture � that there can be perfectly isolated standards, cultures, and subjects, and that respect for them means not engaging in dispute with them. Relativism, however, doesn�t necessarily entail anything like that suburban ethos. The form of relativism I embrace is not that criteria of truth, ex nihilo, exist, but that the construction and destruction of criteria of truth is much like speciation � a process of conflict, provisional collaborations, extinctions, and arm races. It is, in other words, a modification of the Dewey position. And far from being a defense of Western values, the kind of absolute truths Rothstein holds to be self-evident are just those the U.S., in its formative phase, rejected � for the idea that there are two realms, one in which the form of truths are preserved, has historically gone along with a politics of truth preservers that is allergic to the Open Society. Far from being in the American grain, Rothstein�s is an import from Leo Strauss-land � the Eurogrumbling cohort that arose on the right after WWI, but distinguished itself from the vulgarity of fascism as well as the eschatology of leftism. The American grain runs through Emerson and Whitman, rather than Xenophanes and Machiavelli.
Rothstein attack on post-modernism is rather far from the original core idea of post-modernism, which was the claim that the culture � Western culture, if you will, or the culture of globalization � was undergoing a crisis of meta-narratives. Postmodernism started out not as a position to take, but an observation about what was happening in the culture itself. True, it has become a position to take. Rothstein takes it, however, as simply an ideological special interest, one that could be corrected by a few thwacks in the NYT.
LI believes that, contra R., what 9/11 and the current Enronitis indicate is that another meta-narrative � call it globalization � is breaking up. The idea that there is no alternative, which was grooving and moving in the high nineties, looks to be in pretty bad shape, currently. We can distinguish that, as an observation, from the idea that all the alternatives to globo are to be commended. And we can even say, we don�t need a foundation in the absolute for our moral claims, or our truth claims. Wow. In fact, going with the Dewey theme for a second, we�d further claim that the one position left blank in the relativism we advocate is the null set � the idea that we can make no claims about truth or value.
Saturday, July 13, 2002
Dope
It is late. I've eaten (pork tenderloin, potatoes, veggie). I've drunk (Shiner Bock). I'm listening to Sari Odalar, which begins with a solitary trumpet, an emblematic jazz flourish calling up every dive from the great Spion days in Istanbul, 42, 52, the Germans, wasn't Ribbentrop the Nazi ambassador there, or was it Franz von Pappen? the Americans, Kim Philby himself for a while, the coupling of that tango culture which was imported in the thirties and notes from way away, black New York, cool jazz of California, those unimaginable shores --and then the trumpet breaks off, Sezen Aksu's voice swells, those marvelous, hypnotic vocals, gramaphone nostalgia for that mythic scene becoming, as she goes on, sad with its own irony, as real and unreal as Turkey was, historically, a marginal site on the border of all that great apocalyptic dread, those slaughterhouse movements of peoples, weapons, wealth. Istambul, where the wires crossed, where the man in silk pajamas in Room no. 8, just down the dark hall, smoked a cigarette and extracted the pieces of a listening device from his battered traveller's bag.
And I'm ready -- Limited Inc is ready -- to return to the ultra-tedious issue of regulation.
In, was it Monday's post? -- one of those posts, we outlined a way of thinking of drugs, guns, murder, washing the car and other goods and services as potential market acts - acts that comprise formal and informal markets. This is of course not the only aspect of them that counts, but for LI, this aspect is the way that liberal democracy hooks into society, so to speak. This is not to buy into the myth that free markets produce liberal democracy -- market economies can coexist with monarchies, dictatorships, and even official Communism -- but liberal democracy has, so far, required markets.
We were trying to get a point across. Before we contemplate bannings, as of guns or heroin or euthanasia, for that matter, we have to understand how the market in these things works. The way the good or service is integrated into a sector of the economy (for instance, is it a good, like asbestos, with mainly industrial uses?), the amount of the good that is potentially available (is it feathers from an endangered bird? or an easily grown plant?), the composition of the market for the good in terms of supply (do suppliers have an incentive to comply with the banning? is the banning such that the suppliers can sell the good to a certain market -- for instance, alcohol to adults -- or sell substitutes? Is there a large demand for the good? Is there a hardcore group within that demand pool who will take extraordinary risks to procure the good?) and finally, whether the enforcement of the banning is going to fall on the police.
It is the last named factor which strikes LI as the most neglected of all in the study of regulation. How good are the police as regulators? How good are they at enforcing bannings?
LI's contention is that they are very bad. There are reasons for this that are classically rooted in the literature on regulation. One of the objections to regulation of an industry on the part of the state is that the agents of the industry have more knowledge of their business than are available to the state. While this knowledge assymetry argument has some holes in it, there is also something to it. In the case of the police, we obviously don't want the police to be good at organizing murder -- but this outside status is going to work against their efficiency in enforcing the ban on murder. We accept a large margin of inefficiency here because the harm of murder outweighs the harm of the inefficiency -- the injury, for instance, to the civil rights of innocent citizens that often ensues in the course of a murder investigation. So if the police are our regulators of last resort, we don't want to abolish them all together. It does mean that before we want to ban a good or service, we should consider whether the police, if the onus of enforcement falls upon the police, are going to be good or bad at doing this regulatory task. And if they are going to be bad at it, whether that harm might not multiply harms in such a way that we are worse off than we were before the ban.
LI claims that this is the case of the total banning of a popular product like marijuana or handguns. And we will at some point attempt to prove our case --well, no, we will merely attempt to make our case plausible. But for tonight, this is enough.
It is late. I've eaten (pork tenderloin, potatoes, veggie). I've drunk (Shiner Bock). I'm listening to Sari Odalar, which begins with a solitary trumpet, an emblematic jazz flourish calling up every dive from the great Spion days in Istanbul, 42, 52, the Germans, wasn't Ribbentrop the Nazi ambassador there, or was it Franz von Pappen? the Americans, Kim Philby himself for a while, the coupling of that tango culture which was imported in the thirties and notes from way away, black New York, cool jazz of California, those unimaginable shores --and then the trumpet breaks off, Sezen Aksu's voice swells, those marvelous, hypnotic vocals, gramaphone nostalgia for that mythic scene becoming, as she goes on, sad with its own irony, as real and unreal as Turkey was, historically, a marginal site on the border of all that great apocalyptic dread, those slaughterhouse movements of peoples, weapons, wealth. Istambul, where the wires crossed, where the man in silk pajamas in Room no. 8, just down the dark hall, smoked a cigarette and extracted the pieces of a listening device from his battered traveller's bag.
And I'm ready -- Limited Inc is ready -- to return to the ultra-tedious issue of regulation.
In, was it Monday's post? -- one of those posts, we outlined a way of thinking of drugs, guns, murder, washing the car and other goods and services as potential market acts - acts that comprise formal and informal markets. This is of course not the only aspect of them that counts, but for LI, this aspect is the way that liberal democracy hooks into society, so to speak. This is not to buy into the myth that free markets produce liberal democracy -- market economies can coexist with monarchies, dictatorships, and even official Communism -- but liberal democracy has, so far, required markets.
We were trying to get a point across. Before we contemplate bannings, as of guns or heroin or euthanasia, for that matter, we have to understand how the market in these things works. The way the good or service is integrated into a sector of the economy (for instance, is it a good, like asbestos, with mainly industrial uses?), the amount of the good that is potentially available (is it feathers from an endangered bird? or an easily grown plant?), the composition of the market for the good in terms of supply (do suppliers have an incentive to comply with the banning? is the banning such that the suppliers can sell the good to a certain market -- for instance, alcohol to adults -- or sell substitutes? Is there a large demand for the good? Is there a hardcore group within that demand pool who will take extraordinary risks to procure the good?) and finally, whether the enforcement of the banning is going to fall on the police.
It is the last named factor which strikes LI as the most neglected of all in the study of regulation. How good are the police as regulators? How good are they at enforcing bannings?
LI's contention is that they are very bad. There are reasons for this that are classically rooted in the literature on regulation. One of the objections to regulation of an industry on the part of the state is that the agents of the industry have more knowledge of their business than are available to the state. While this knowledge assymetry argument has some holes in it, there is also something to it. In the case of the police, we obviously don't want the police to be good at organizing murder -- but this outside status is going to work against their efficiency in enforcing the ban on murder. We accept a large margin of inefficiency here because the harm of murder outweighs the harm of the inefficiency -- the injury, for instance, to the civil rights of innocent citizens that often ensues in the course of a murder investigation. So if the police are our regulators of last resort, we don't want to abolish them all together. It does mean that before we want to ban a good or service, we should consider whether the police, if the onus of enforcement falls upon the police, are going to be good or bad at doing this regulatory task. And if they are going to be bad at it, whether that harm might not multiply harms in such a way that we are worse off than we were before the ban.
LI claims that this is the case of the total banning of a popular product like marijuana or handguns. And we will at some point attempt to prove our case --well, no, we will merely attempt to make our case plausible. But for tonight, this is enough.
Thursday, July 11, 2002
Remora
There is not a single bon-mot, a single sentence in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If any thing is ever quoted from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname. He is an excellent hand at invention in that way, and has 'damnable iteration in him.' What could be better than his pestering Erskine year after year with his second title of Baron Clackmarman? -- William Hazlitt
Alan, to whose website, the Gadfly's Buzz, we have referred in a previous post, recently published extracts from another weblogger, Jane Galt, which admonished webloggers to embrace a form of controversial decorum based on reason, not rhetoric. Galt's advice is couched in an irritating, faux motherly tone, like Diamond Li'l collecting charity for out of work girls in a saloon. We object both to the tone and to the advice. Moderation in defense of liberty is no virtue, as Barry Goldwater (or Stephen Hess, his ghostwriter) once said, and we are definitely with Barry on this one. Vituperation, insult, maligning reputations, demagoguery, insinuation, and other of the arts of politics should not be abandoned because they often fall into the hands of amateurs. A.J. Liebling, in his book Earl of Louisiana, was right to prefer Earl Long to his opponents because old Earl was a master of derogation; and right, also, to bemoan the decay of that art. When Earl eviscerated his opponent for being a high dresser and then said, can you imagine those expensive clothes on Uncle Earl? Why, it'd be like puttin' silk socks on a rooster -- we know we are close to the very heart of American politics. Mildness and meakness, reasonableness and politeness, well, this may be the kind of thing that most un-Greek of Greeks, Socrates, went in for, and maybe Walter Lippman too -- but Limited Inc has always been firmly on the side of the rhetors, the sophists, the dealers in paradox, the franc-tireurs of slander, and we see no reason to change sides now.
In fact, this dispute about modes of dispute, and their political effects, is found at the beginning of the modern era of politics. In an ill-written but beautifully informative article published in Studies in Romanticism, Cobbett, Coleridge and the Queen Caroline affair, Tim Fulford (who later integrated this article into a book on masculinity and romanticism) shows how Coleridge and Cobbett, between them, politicized the very styles of argument in the affair of King George IV's divorce. Cobbett had the genius idea of yoking his radical ideas to a Burkean sympathy for Queen Caroline, George IV's poor, put upon wife. Coleridge, however, considered himself the heir to the Burkean rhetorical tradition. In Fulford's view, the contrasting styles reflected authorial decisions about both the referential reach of the audiences that received their writings (in Cobbett's case, massively; in Coleridge's case, punily -- Coleridge was continually stumbling over the hard fact that nobody really wanted to read his Friend, his Lay Sermons, his criticism, they all went tramping back to that damned Ancient Mariner) and the presumed passional composition of the audience --with Cobbett's poorer readers, artisans and the types that liked to throw stones at the windows of Parliment, presumably moved by the "cheap sensationalism" of his writing, and the obviousness and obnoxiousness of his insults; Coleridge's more reasonable high minded audience pondering his quotations of the Greeks in the original Greek -- never mind that the average establishment backbencher was much more likely to appreciate tag end Latin as applied to animal husbandry and underground porn, what, than he was likely to be able to decipher passages from Sophocles over his mulled cider.
But first, long suffering reader -- what is all this about George IV's divorce? Well, George III's heir was a randy bastard. As Fulford explains, "Prince George had married Caroline of Brunswick in 1795, despite having previously married Mrs. Fitzherbert in a private ceremony. After less than a year, he separated from Caroline and never lived with her again. In I 806 he had his wife's sexual propriety examined in what became known as the "delicate investigation." Caroline was cleared by a secret tribunal and their report, despite George's attempts to suppress it, was pirated in "the Book"-to the embarrassment of ministry and Regent."
As always, the British establishment simply bucked its embarrassment and went on it way -- in this case, given the need for the Regent (Prince George was regent due to the madness of his father) to support the war against Napoleon, the establishment tried to get forget that Caroline and her daughter existed. In 1814, she left England. She returned in 1820:
"When George III died... Caroline decided to return to England to claim [her] rights and privileges. Refusing government offers of L50,000 to remain abroad and give up her claim, Caroline landed to popular demonstrations of support. Determined not to allow her access to his coronation or the title "Queen," George had her name removed from the litany of the Church of England. He then caused a reluctant ministry to have Caroline "tried," seeking both to deprive her of her rights as Queen and to divorce her. A jury trial was impossible: George as an adulterer himself had no chance of obtaining a divorce and the country had been outraged when the ministry's offer of :50,000 to the woman they suggested was guilty was published in the press by her supporters. A Bill of Pains and Penalties was brought in the Lords on 5 July, to examine the evidence contained in green bags, supplied by the ministry. The bags contained evidence, gathered by the government's spies, of Caroline's infidelity and immorality. The ministry's case against Caroline hinged upon her supposed "adulterous intercourse" with her courier, Bartolomeo Bergami, to whom she had awarded the title of Knight of the Bath."
Fulford, who is hot on the trail of masculinism and not to be deterred, lets us know, in an aside, that Caroline did not exactly pine chastely for her erring hubbie. The point here, however, is that Cobbett, in a burst of genius, realized that Caroline, scorned, could do for the radical cause what Marie Antoinette, suitably wept over by Burke, did for the anti-Jacobin cause -- it could forge a sentiment to a political scheme. Cobbett, who was a bundle of energy, used his self written weekly paper, the Political Register, to build support for this Regency Princess Diana. He wrote letters in her name to her hubbie, which were published. He organized demonstrations in her favor. He roused up the folk. And he did it by way of scurrilous libels, vile nicknames, and all the tricks of the rhetors trade.
Alas, Cobbett is singularly unrepresented on the Net. To get a taste of him, anyway, you have to accept a lot of Hazlitt's damned iteration -- he makes himself stick by never letting up. The child's trick of repeating his opponents words, making fun of his looks and name, and impugning his parents, are, magnified by Cobbett's command of the English tongue, his principle tools -- weapons against what he called the System. The System was the thing that killed the workers at Peterloo, refused to reinstate habeus corpus (annulled for the duration of the European war), oppressed with onerous taxes the poor landholder and the small businessman, and was always doing vicious things. Cobbett, we should emphasize, is no model liberal -- he was anti-Semitic, he had prejudices against Quakers that are more than a little over the top, and his insults sometimes seem, even now, closer to Eninem than Burke.
I'll continue this post tomorrow.
There is not a single bon-mot, a single sentence in Cobbett that has ever been quoted again. If any thing is ever quoted from him, it is an epithet of abuse or a nickname. He is an excellent hand at invention in that way, and has 'damnable iteration in him.' What could be better than his pestering Erskine year after year with his second title of Baron Clackmarman? -- William Hazlitt
Alan, to whose website, the Gadfly's Buzz, we have referred in a previous post, recently published extracts from another weblogger, Jane Galt, which admonished webloggers to embrace a form of controversial decorum based on reason, not rhetoric. Galt's advice is couched in an irritating, faux motherly tone, like Diamond Li'l collecting charity for out of work girls in a saloon. We object both to the tone and to the advice. Moderation in defense of liberty is no virtue, as Barry Goldwater (or Stephen Hess, his ghostwriter) once said, and we are definitely with Barry on this one. Vituperation, insult, maligning reputations, demagoguery, insinuation, and other of the arts of politics should not be abandoned because they often fall into the hands of amateurs. A.J. Liebling, in his book Earl of Louisiana, was right to prefer Earl Long to his opponents because old Earl was a master of derogation; and right, also, to bemoan the decay of that art. When Earl eviscerated his opponent for being a high dresser and then said, can you imagine those expensive clothes on Uncle Earl? Why, it'd be like puttin' silk socks on a rooster -- we know we are close to the very heart of American politics. Mildness and meakness, reasonableness and politeness, well, this may be the kind of thing that most un-Greek of Greeks, Socrates, went in for, and maybe Walter Lippman too -- but Limited Inc has always been firmly on the side of the rhetors, the sophists, the dealers in paradox, the franc-tireurs of slander, and we see no reason to change sides now.
In fact, this dispute about modes of dispute, and their political effects, is found at the beginning of the modern era of politics. In an ill-written but beautifully informative article published in Studies in Romanticism, Cobbett, Coleridge and the Queen Caroline affair, Tim Fulford (who later integrated this article into a book on masculinity and romanticism) shows how Coleridge and Cobbett, between them, politicized the very styles of argument in the affair of King George IV's divorce. Cobbett had the genius idea of yoking his radical ideas to a Burkean sympathy for Queen Caroline, George IV's poor, put upon wife. Coleridge, however, considered himself the heir to the Burkean rhetorical tradition. In Fulford's view, the contrasting styles reflected authorial decisions about both the referential reach of the audiences that received their writings (in Cobbett's case, massively; in Coleridge's case, punily -- Coleridge was continually stumbling over the hard fact that nobody really wanted to read his Friend, his Lay Sermons, his criticism, they all went tramping back to that damned Ancient Mariner) and the presumed passional composition of the audience --with Cobbett's poorer readers, artisans and the types that liked to throw stones at the windows of Parliment, presumably moved by the "cheap sensationalism" of his writing, and the obviousness and obnoxiousness of his insults; Coleridge's more reasonable high minded audience pondering his quotations of the Greeks in the original Greek -- never mind that the average establishment backbencher was much more likely to appreciate tag end Latin as applied to animal husbandry and underground porn, what, than he was likely to be able to decipher passages from Sophocles over his mulled cider.
But first, long suffering reader -- what is all this about George IV's divorce? Well, George III's heir was a randy bastard. As Fulford explains, "Prince George had married Caroline of Brunswick in 1795, despite having previously married Mrs. Fitzherbert in a private ceremony. After less than a year, he separated from Caroline and never lived with her again. In I 806 he had his wife's sexual propriety examined in what became known as the "delicate investigation." Caroline was cleared by a secret tribunal and their report, despite George's attempts to suppress it, was pirated in "the Book"-to the embarrassment of ministry and Regent."
As always, the British establishment simply bucked its embarrassment and went on it way -- in this case, given the need for the Regent (Prince George was regent due to the madness of his father) to support the war against Napoleon, the establishment tried to get forget that Caroline and her daughter existed. In 1814, she left England. She returned in 1820:
"When George III died... Caroline decided to return to England to claim [her] rights and privileges. Refusing government offers of L50,000 to remain abroad and give up her claim, Caroline landed to popular demonstrations of support. Determined not to allow her access to his coronation or the title "Queen," George had her name removed from the litany of the Church of England. He then caused a reluctant ministry to have Caroline "tried," seeking both to deprive her of her rights as Queen and to divorce her. A jury trial was impossible: George as an adulterer himself had no chance of obtaining a divorce and the country had been outraged when the ministry's offer of :50,000 to the woman they suggested was guilty was published in the press by her supporters. A Bill of Pains and Penalties was brought in the Lords on 5 July, to examine the evidence contained in green bags, supplied by the ministry. The bags contained evidence, gathered by the government's spies, of Caroline's infidelity and immorality. The ministry's case against Caroline hinged upon her supposed "adulterous intercourse" with her courier, Bartolomeo Bergami, to whom she had awarded the title of Knight of the Bath."
Fulford, who is hot on the trail of masculinism and not to be deterred, lets us know, in an aside, that Caroline did not exactly pine chastely for her erring hubbie. The point here, however, is that Cobbett, in a burst of genius, realized that Caroline, scorned, could do for the radical cause what Marie Antoinette, suitably wept over by Burke, did for the anti-Jacobin cause -- it could forge a sentiment to a political scheme. Cobbett, who was a bundle of energy, used his self written weekly paper, the Political Register, to build support for this Regency Princess Diana. He wrote letters in her name to her hubbie, which were published. He organized demonstrations in her favor. He roused up the folk. And he did it by way of scurrilous libels, vile nicknames, and all the tricks of the rhetors trade.
Alas, Cobbett is singularly unrepresented on the Net. To get a taste of him, anyway, you have to accept a lot of Hazlitt's damned iteration -- he makes himself stick by never letting up. The child's trick of repeating his opponents words, making fun of his looks and name, and impugning his parents, are, magnified by Cobbett's command of the English tongue, his principle tools -- weapons against what he called the System. The System was the thing that killed the workers at Peterloo, refused to reinstate habeus corpus (annulled for the duration of the European war), oppressed with onerous taxes the poor landholder and the small businessman, and was always doing vicious things. Cobbett, we should emphasize, is no model liberal -- he was anti-Semitic, he had prejudices against Quakers that are more than a little over the top, and his insults sometimes seem, even now, closer to Eninem than Burke.
I'll continue this post tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 09, 2002
Remora
Casus Belly-flop
Yes, so far the drums of war, about Iraq, have lacked one of those petty, European features -- namely, a cause. A reason that the U.S. should, at this moment, as Al Qaeda people are oozing between the Pakistani-Afghan border, decide to invade Iraq. The best the Bushite right can do is contained in this op-ed piece by Richard Brookhiser. Brookhiser's argument consists of this:
1. Al Qaeda, by itself, couldn't organize 19 hijackers in the U.S.
2. Thus, another entity organized those hijackers.
3. What entity hates the U.S.
4. Iraq
5. So, the U.S. is quite justified in attacking Iraq.
Wow. The incoherence of this argument makes me dizzy. If, indeed, Al Qaeda couldn't organize the 19 hijackers (organize, here, doesn't mean, well, train these guys in flying. It doesn't even mean any intensive training time. It means getting the hijackers the money to take flying lessons in the U.S., and then getting them to take boxcutters past airport security. That is what it means. Period), then, uh, why did we attack Afghanistan? Or was it the moral support offered by Iraq that gives us cause to make the invasion, and the attack on Afghanistan was a decoy? Brookhiser's explanations of this have to achieve two goals in the Bush apologetic. It has to explain, one, why Bush has so far shown an almost criminal negligence in going after the man, Osama bin Laden (who, according to our peerless leader, isn't, after all, that important. Tell that to the casualties of the WTC. Are these people for real? at least we didn't elect this chucklehead. that's about the best I can say). And then it has to explain why we should sacrifice American casualties going after Saddam Hussein. Here is Brookhiser's fantasy -- a fantasy shared, apparently, by the GOP leadership:
"But all the talk of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda will probably turn out to be a polite fiction. The notion that a fanatical son of a Saudi construction magnate could run a worldwide terror enterprise from Afghanistan or the Sudan, completely unassisted by professionals, is fantastic, isn�t it? If Donald Trump had a bloodthirsty crusader nephew, could he set himself up in the Yukon and successfully plot to destroy the most impressive buildings in Riyadh, if there are any? To be less whimsical: Could the Irish Republican Army blow up Big Ben? Are the Ulster Protestant terrorists capable of torching the Vatican?
Osama bin Laden has imagination and charisma, if you find dream interpretation and Koranic midrash charismatic. But isn�t it likely that he and his network have profited from the help of a government�and not the dirt-poor kakistocrats of Khartoum and Kabul? Who is the obvious candidate, in terms of both resources and grudges? Our intelligence agents have dismissed the report that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, but the Czechs have not backed down from it. At home, we are looking for a rogue American scientist as the source of last fall�s anthrax letters. But then came the story that one of the 9/11 hijackers checked into a hospital emergency room with lesions that the attending physician now says were consistent with exposure to anthrax. If that is true, where then did Osama bin Laden get his stash? If Saddam Hussein had been living a monk�s life, he would still be a danger, because he�s manufacturing nukes and germs to incinerate and poison Israelis and whoever else displeases him. But his vows of peace may already have been broken."
This is the type of logic used by people who think that Israel was behind the WTC attack. It amazes me that Brookhiser thinks he can get away with, well, this much distortion - this complete distortion -- of everything we have so far assembled about Mohammed Atta and his unmerry men. I'm amazed, I'm amazed... Will Bush' s incompetence in the end-game really be put across with this sham of a narrative? If so, we will certainly pay for it when that silly Osama guy, who it turns out we don't care about any way (uh, yes Mr. President!) or another grass-roots terrorist organization, decides to strike.
Casus Belly-flop
Yes, so far the drums of war, about Iraq, have lacked one of those petty, European features -- namely, a cause. A reason that the U.S. should, at this moment, as Al Qaeda people are oozing between the Pakistani-Afghan border, decide to invade Iraq. The best the Bushite right can do is contained in this op-ed piece by Richard Brookhiser. Brookhiser's argument consists of this:
1. Al Qaeda, by itself, couldn't organize 19 hijackers in the U.S.
2. Thus, another entity organized those hijackers.
3. What entity hates the U.S.
4. Iraq
5. So, the U.S. is quite justified in attacking Iraq.
Wow. The incoherence of this argument makes me dizzy. If, indeed, Al Qaeda couldn't organize the 19 hijackers (organize, here, doesn't mean, well, train these guys in flying. It doesn't even mean any intensive training time. It means getting the hijackers the money to take flying lessons in the U.S., and then getting them to take boxcutters past airport security. That is what it means. Period), then, uh, why did we attack Afghanistan? Or was it the moral support offered by Iraq that gives us cause to make the invasion, and the attack on Afghanistan was a decoy? Brookhiser's explanations of this have to achieve two goals in the Bush apologetic. It has to explain, one, why Bush has so far shown an almost criminal negligence in going after the man, Osama bin Laden (who, according to our peerless leader, isn't, after all, that important. Tell that to the casualties of the WTC. Are these people for real? at least we didn't elect this chucklehead. that's about the best I can say). And then it has to explain why we should sacrifice American casualties going after Saddam Hussein. Here is Brookhiser's fantasy -- a fantasy shared, apparently, by the GOP leadership:
"But all the talk of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda will probably turn out to be a polite fiction. The notion that a fanatical son of a Saudi construction magnate could run a worldwide terror enterprise from Afghanistan or the Sudan, completely unassisted by professionals, is fantastic, isn�t it? If Donald Trump had a bloodthirsty crusader nephew, could he set himself up in the Yukon and successfully plot to destroy the most impressive buildings in Riyadh, if there are any? To be less whimsical: Could the Irish Republican Army blow up Big Ben? Are the Ulster Protestant terrorists capable of torching the Vatican?
Osama bin Laden has imagination and charisma, if you find dream interpretation and Koranic midrash charismatic. But isn�t it likely that he and his network have profited from the help of a government�and not the dirt-poor kakistocrats of Khartoum and Kabul? Who is the obvious candidate, in terms of both resources and grudges? Our intelligence agents have dismissed the report that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, but the Czechs have not backed down from it. At home, we are looking for a rogue American scientist as the source of last fall�s anthrax letters. But then came the story that one of the 9/11 hijackers checked into a hospital emergency room with lesions that the attending physician now says were consistent with exposure to anthrax. If that is true, where then did Osama bin Laden get his stash? If Saddam Hussein had been living a monk�s life, he would still be a danger, because he�s manufacturing nukes and germs to incinerate and poison Israelis and whoever else displeases him. But his vows of peace may already have been broken."
This is the type of logic used by people who think that Israel was behind the WTC attack. It amazes me that Brookhiser thinks he can get away with, well, this much distortion - this complete distortion -- of everything we have so far assembled about Mohammed Atta and his unmerry men. I'm amazed, I'm amazed... Will Bush' s incompetence in the end-game really be put across with this sham of a narrative? If so, we will certainly pay for it when that silly Osama guy, who it turns out we don't care about any way (uh, yes Mr. President!) or another grass-roots terrorist organization, decides to strike.
Saturday, July 06, 2002
Remora
Burn the rich or steal from the poor? You decide.
The bias towards one class or another in public discourse is usually simply a presumption, but an experiment by two British economists, which attempted to give a concrete measure of envy, has produced another result, one that allows us to quantify, to a certain extent, the bias of reporting.
Here is how Mindpixel reported on the experiment:
"The researchers, Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick and Dr. Daniel Zizzo of Oxford, designed a new kind of experiment, played with real cash, in which subjects could anonymously burn away other people's money -- but only at the cost of giving up some of their own.
Despite this cost to themselves, and contrary to economists usual assumptions, 62% of those tested chose to destroy part of other test subjects' cash. In the experiment, half of all the laboratory earnings were deliberately destroyed by fellow subjects. "
Mindpixel's final graf contains this summing up of the burners:
"The researchers found that those who gained the most additional money at the betting stage burned poor and rich alike, while disadvantaged laboratory subjects mainly targeted those subjects they saw getting what they perceived as undeserved financial windfalls."
Reason picked up on Oswald and Zizzo's article, too. It's science reporter, Ronald Bayley, reported on it under the headline, Burn the Rich. Since, of course, the experiment reports that both the rich (in terms of the experiment) and the poor burned each other's money, one wonders why the rich are singled out as the victims in the headline. Interesting, no? Even in Bayley's own column (which insinuates that here, at last, is the explanation for the opposition to the abolition of the death tax in Congress), the fact that the rich and the poor alike burned each other's money is clearly stated:
"Zizzo and Oswald found that nearly two-thirds of players happily paid for the privilege of impoverishing their fellow participants. Even as the price of burning went up, the percentage of people who chose to burn other players did not fall substantially."
Now, what the phrase fall substantially means is unclear. Did it fall at all? That the poor might resent the rich is a part of common sense wisdom. That the rich burn the poor is part of the common sense wisdom of the poor. And that Reason would only see the rich being victimized by the resentful (read liberals, Democrats, and left wing lowlifes) is also part of common sense wisdom. It is nice that all this common sense wisdom is vindicated.
Here is the article itself. (be careful. It is a PDF file). Zizzo and Oswald have labels for two classes of burnings, depending on the rank of the burner. One they call rank egalitarianism. Most of the burners who were poorer sacrificed to burn the rich. The other they call reciprocity. Their thesis is that the rich burners were simply responding to being burned.
"In the case of our money burning experiment, advantaged and disadvantaged subjects may,
because of the existence of the advantage, perceive the game differently. This different game
perception implies that subjects prime differently two social categories, one based on deservingness
and one on reciprocity. For disadvantaged subjects, what matters is the fact that advantaged subjects
got the advantage undeservedly, and they did not. Advantaged subjects may think not only in terms
of deservingness, but also in a different light, namely, in the light of the fact that disadvantaged
subjects will burn them. They may then want to reciprocate the �favour.'"
But how does this explain their earlier result, that the rich burn the rich? Moreover, hidden in the paper is an interesting paragraph about the behavior of the "undeserving" rich -- those who accrued money arbitrarily (in the experiment, money could be made by betting, but money was also randomly allocated at intervals, thus randomly favoring certain individuals). This paragraph is certainly not discussed in Reason:
"In the twin experiment run in Oxford, Zizzo (1999) crossed advantage and deservingness in a factorial design, and found that deservingness mattered. More specifically, he found significantly more negative
interdependent preferences in sessions where the advantage was induced unfairly than when it was
induced according to a relatively fair procedure. Moreover, in one condition of that experiment,
stealing was possible. Zizzo then found that there was substantially more stealing by advantaged
subjects if they had got the advantage undeservedly. One possible interpretation of this interaction
effect was that undeservedly advantaged subjects expected themselves to be stolen or burnt
significantly more, and behaved using a reciprocity logic, in defending their own gains significantly
more."
Ah, I wonder, oh I wonder, why this paragaph was ignored by Mssrs. the editors of Reason. Maybe the headline should have read, the Undeserving Rich will burn you. But of course, of course, those heirs 'deserve" their money, don't they? After all, they did make the effort to be born.
One final note: the reciprocity hypothesis seems, to us, a desperate maneauver to deny the evidence of the experiment itself. Oswald and Zizzo accord the egalitarian strategy a sequential primacy that exists psychologically, even if it doesn't exist empirically. That is, the rich could be striking in the expectation that they will be struck. However, one should notice -- or an old deconstructive veteran like myself notices -- the binary which is operating here. While the rich are operating on "intention" -- that is cognitively -- the poor are operating on "passion" -- the envy aroused by riches. Why, actually, don't we think that the poor are striking pre-emptively, like the rich? Especially as Zizzo's earlier experiment shows that the perception of the "unfair" accrual of wealth, which is prevelant among its benificiaries as well as among its victims, prompts further "unfair" action among its benificiaries. I.e., the undeserving rich steal. The unconscious bias of the experimenter consists in this: poverty denies one a full sense of self-interest. Thus, we interpret the actions of the poor, sacrificing to burn the rich, as envy, while we accord a sense of intellectual strategy to the wealthy who do the same thing. Oswald and Zizzo show themselves to be the worthy heirs of those nineteenth century economists who saw the laboring classes as so much betail, so much dangerous animality. An entity to be organized by the police, always liable to filch from the fortunate.
To put this another way -- we think the reciprocal thesis explains too much, is bounded by a circular definition, and is ultimately inseperable from passion itself. This passion expresses itself in the wealthy burning the wealthy -- surely, here, we aren't seeing a response to rank egalitarianism, but the play of pure power. Let's suggest to O. and A. a most non-Anglo explanation for their findings, one explored by Mauss in his classic essai sur la don: one of the attributes of being rich is the ability to destroy. Destruction is the ultimate luxury. This is as true among Manhattanites as among the Kwaikutl. Zizzo and Oswald might want to reference such classics, in this vein, as various Beverly Hillbilly episodes, the tv show Dallas, and the dot com parties of 1999.
Burn the rich or steal from the poor? You decide.
The bias towards one class or another in public discourse is usually simply a presumption, but an experiment by two British economists, which attempted to give a concrete measure of envy, has produced another result, one that allows us to quantify, to a certain extent, the bias of reporting.
Here is how Mindpixel reported on the experiment:
"The researchers, Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick and Dr. Daniel Zizzo of Oxford, designed a new kind of experiment, played with real cash, in which subjects could anonymously burn away other people's money -- but only at the cost of giving up some of their own.
Despite this cost to themselves, and contrary to economists usual assumptions, 62% of those tested chose to destroy part of other test subjects' cash. In the experiment, half of all the laboratory earnings were deliberately destroyed by fellow subjects. "
Mindpixel's final graf contains this summing up of the burners:
"The researchers found that those who gained the most additional money at the betting stage burned poor and rich alike, while disadvantaged laboratory subjects mainly targeted those subjects they saw getting what they perceived as undeserved financial windfalls."
Reason picked up on Oswald and Zizzo's article, too. It's science reporter, Ronald Bayley, reported on it under the headline, Burn the Rich. Since, of course, the experiment reports that both the rich (in terms of the experiment) and the poor burned each other's money, one wonders why the rich are singled out as the victims in the headline. Interesting, no? Even in Bayley's own column (which insinuates that here, at last, is the explanation for the opposition to the abolition of the death tax in Congress), the fact that the rich and the poor alike burned each other's money is clearly stated:
"Zizzo and Oswald found that nearly two-thirds of players happily paid for the privilege of impoverishing their fellow participants. Even as the price of burning went up, the percentage of people who chose to burn other players did not fall substantially."
Now, what the phrase fall substantially means is unclear. Did it fall at all? That the poor might resent the rich is a part of common sense wisdom. That the rich burn the poor is part of the common sense wisdom of the poor. And that Reason would only see the rich being victimized by the resentful (read liberals, Democrats, and left wing lowlifes) is also part of common sense wisdom. It is nice that all this common sense wisdom is vindicated.
Here is the article itself. (be careful. It is a PDF file). Zizzo and Oswald have labels for two classes of burnings, depending on the rank of the burner. One they call rank egalitarianism. Most of the burners who were poorer sacrificed to burn the rich. The other they call reciprocity. Their thesis is that the rich burners were simply responding to being burned.
"In the case of our money burning experiment, advantaged and disadvantaged subjects may,
because of the existence of the advantage, perceive the game differently. This different game
perception implies that subjects prime differently two social categories, one based on deservingness
and one on reciprocity. For disadvantaged subjects, what matters is the fact that advantaged subjects
got the advantage undeservedly, and they did not. Advantaged subjects may think not only in terms
of deservingness, but also in a different light, namely, in the light of the fact that disadvantaged
subjects will burn them. They may then want to reciprocate the �favour.'"
But how does this explain their earlier result, that the rich burn the rich? Moreover, hidden in the paper is an interesting paragraph about the behavior of the "undeserving" rich -- those who accrued money arbitrarily (in the experiment, money could be made by betting, but money was also randomly allocated at intervals, thus randomly favoring certain individuals). This paragraph is certainly not discussed in Reason:
"In the twin experiment run in Oxford, Zizzo (1999) crossed advantage and deservingness in a factorial design, and found that deservingness mattered. More specifically, he found significantly more negative
interdependent preferences in sessions where the advantage was induced unfairly than when it was
induced according to a relatively fair procedure. Moreover, in one condition of that experiment,
stealing was possible. Zizzo then found that there was substantially more stealing by advantaged
subjects if they had got the advantage undeservedly. One possible interpretation of this interaction
effect was that undeservedly advantaged subjects expected themselves to be stolen or burnt
significantly more, and behaved using a reciprocity logic, in defending their own gains significantly
more."
Ah, I wonder, oh I wonder, why this paragaph was ignored by Mssrs. the editors of Reason. Maybe the headline should have read, the Undeserving Rich will burn you. But of course, of course, those heirs 'deserve" their money, don't they? After all, they did make the effort to be born.
One final note: the reciprocity hypothesis seems, to us, a desperate maneauver to deny the evidence of the experiment itself. Oswald and Zizzo accord the egalitarian strategy a sequential primacy that exists psychologically, even if it doesn't exist empirically. That is, the rich could be striking in the expectation that they will be struck. However, one should notice -- or an old deconstructive veteran like myself notices -- the binary which is operating here. While the rich are operating on "intention" -- that is cognitively -- the poor are operating on "passion" -- the envy aroused by riches. Why, actually, don't we think that the poor are striking pre-emptively, like the rich? Especially as Zizzo's earlier experiment shows that the perception of the "unfair" accrual of wealth, which is prevelant among its benificiaries as well as among its victims, prompts further "unfair" action among its benificiaries. I.e., the undeserving rich steal. The unconscious bias of the experimenter consists in this: poverty denies one a full sense of self-interest. Thus, we interpret the actions of the poor, sacrificing to burn the rich, as envy, while we accord a sense of intellectual strategy to the wealthy who do the same thing. Oswald and Zizzo show themselves to be the worthy heirs of those nineteenth century economists who saw the laboring classes as so much betail, so much dangerous animality. An entity to be organized by the police, always liable to filch from the fortunate.
To put this another way -- we think the reciprocal thesis explains too much, is bounded by a circular definition, and is ultimately inseperable from passion itself. This passion expresses itself in the wealthy burning the wealthy -- surely, here, we aren't seeing a response to rank egalitarianism, but the play of pure power. Let's suggest to O. and A. a most non-Anglo explanation for their findings, one explored by Mauss in his classic essai sur la don: one of the attributes of being rich is the ability to destroy. Destruction is the ultimate luxury. This is as true among Manhattanites as among the Kwaikutl. Zizzo and Oswald might want to reference such classics, in this vein, as various Beverly Hillbilly episodes, the tv show Dallas, and the dot com parties of 1999.
Friday, July 05, 2002
Dope
"...the rise of capitalism involved the disembedding of production and distribution from all extra-economic institutions , led to the growth of an autonomous market economy that operated in terms of profit-maximisation, and even required the adaptation of essentially non-economic social relations and institutions to the demands of economic reproduction. Polanyi expressed this as follows:
"Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social
relations are embedded in the economic system. The vital importance
of the economic factor to the existence of society precludes
any other result. For once the economic system is organized in
separate institutions , based on specific motives and conferring a
special status, society must be shaped in such a manner as to
allow that system to function according to its own laws. This is
the meaning of the familiar assertion that a market economy can
function only in a market society."
-- Bob Jessup, Regulationist and Autopoieticist
Reflections on Polanyi�s Account of
Market Economies and the Market
Society, New Political Economy, July, 2001
The rather long citation is issued as a warning: LI is not contending that the market nexus is the essence of society. Even though Polanyi's contention that there are economies without markets is, in our view, rather doubtful. Perhaps, as a cautionary measure, we should just maintain agnosticism on this perspective. At least, the conservative critique of this view, mounted by Douglass North and reprised in this essay about Polanyi seems to point to large empirical holes in the thesis that the market system arose only in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, and that before that time there were ecomomies in which distribution had no market aspect.
The reader might say: the likelihood that Polanyi fanatics are going to flood your e-mail is about a million to one, so just relax, buddy. But we always operate on the prudent side, around here...
So, okay, LI has thought long and hard about regulation. Which speaks volumes about the vacuum in LI's head. Sexual fantasies eventually fail and fade, and we all lose our charms in the end, so: I've taken to thinking about regulation and governance. So sue me.
To speak of regulation is to speak of associations, institutions, and markets as the sites in which regulation is effective. It is not necessarily to speak of the state -- all associations, institutions and markets require some ordering, and this ordering is achieved by regulation enforced by some medium of governance. So, that's clear, I hope. We are going to speak of specifically state sanctioned regulation, because this post is supposed to be continuous with the last one, in which, you may remember, I laid out my disagreements with my friend X. about gun control. The aim, here, is to give some sense of the determining factors in the successful or unsuccessful state regulation of markets.
I'm going to use the term markets in an expanded sense -- markets, in my terms, will be taken to exist when a good or a service is possibly commoditized. That is, it can be exchanged. This makes it possible to talk of such things as the market in homicide, which is a service. That doesn't mean that all services or goods are marketed. Your kids could wash your car, because that is a family chore, or you can take your car to a car wash and have it washed. In one case, the act of washing the car is an extra-market operation, and in the other case it is a fully marketed service.
Given this expanded sense of markets, I'm going to use regulation as a term designating all acts by which the way in which goods or services are composed and offered are modified by the state. Traditionally, regulatory scholars, like Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, have concentrated on the state's regulatory role in allocating goods and services, with less attention paid to the state's role in enforcing transparency, for example. We are going to leave the categories of regulation up in the air in this post, since our concern is with the general factors that impinge on the regulation of goods or services generally. Our parochial point, re gun control or the drug trade, is to show how these factors lead to successful bannings, or mitigate against bannings. Our thesis is simple: if the state tries to ban a good or a service without consideration of its popularity, abundance, and the existence of networks that facilitate the good or services production and distribution, the ban has a high chance of being will inefficient, or pernicious to the preservation of civil rights, or counter-productive. We don't think that efficiency itself provides a metric that should determine absolutely the state's use of banning -- for instance, we think banning murder is probably inefficient, but we think the state should ban murder. However, when the ban is ineffective, injurious to civil liberty, and counter-productive (i.e, the objective of the banning is actually negated by the mechanism of the bannning), we think that banning shouldn't occur.
Oh oh. This is truly turbid prose. Soon I am going to reduce the readership of this site to one: myself. But I am going to do one more post on this topic, and then, I promise, we will return to our regularly scheduled progam, nude pictures of Britney Spears Live!
"...the rise of capitalism involved the disembedding of production and distribution from all extra-economic institutions , led to the growth of an autonomous market economy that operated in terms of profit-maximisation, and even required the adaptation of essentially non-economic social relations and institutions to the demands of economic reproduction. Polanyi expressed this as follows:
"Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social
relations are embedded in the economic system. The vital importance
of the economic factor to the existence of society precludes
any other result. For once the economic system is organized in
separate institutions , based on specific motives and conferring a
special status, society must be shaped in such a manner as to
allow that system to function according to its own laws. This is
the meaning of the familiar assertion that a market economy can
function only in a market society."
-- Bob Jessup, Regulationist and Autopoieticist
Reflections on Polanyi�s Account of
Market Economies and the Market
Society, New Political Economy, July, 2001
The rather long citation is issued as a warning: LI is not contending that the market nexus is the essence of society. Even though Polanyi's contention that there are economies without markets is, in our view, rather doubtful. Perhaps, as a cautionary measure, we should just maintain agnosticism on this perspective. At least, the conservative critique of this view, mounted by Douglass North and reprised in this essay about Polanyi seems to point to large empirical holes in the thesis that the market system arose only in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, and that before that time there were ecomomies in which distribution had no market aspect.
The reader might say: the likelihood that Polanyi fanatics are going to flood your e-mail is about a million to one, so just relax, buddy. But we always operate on the prudent side, around here...
So, okay, LI has thought long and hard about regulation. Which speaks volumes about the vacuum in LI's head. Sexual fantasies eventually fail and fade, and we all lose our charms in the end, so: I've taken to thinking about regulation and governance. So sue me.
To speak of regulation is to speak of associations, institutions, and markets as the sites in which regulation is effective. It is not necessarily to speak of the state -- all associations, institutions and markets require some ordering, and this ordering is achieved by regulation enforced by some medium of governance. So, that's clear, I hope. We are going to speak of specifically state sanctioned regulation, because this post is supposed to be continuous with the last one, in which, you may remember, I laid out my disagreements with my friend X. about gun control. The aim, here, is to give some sense of the determining factors in the successful or unsuccessful state regulation of markets.
I'm going to use the term markets in an expanded sense -- markets, in my terms, will be taken to exist when a good or a service is possibly commoditized. That is, it can be exchanged. This makes it possible to talk of such things as the market in homicide, which is a service. That doesn't mean that all services or goods are marketed. Your kids could wash your car, because that is a family chore, or you can take your car to a car wash and have it washed. In one case, the act of washing the car is an extra-market operation, and in the other case it is a fully marketed service.
Given this expanded sense of markets, I'm going to use regulation as a term designating all acts by which the way in which goods or services are composed and offered are modified by the state. Traditionally, regulatory scholars, like Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, have concentrated on the state's regulatory role in allocating goods and services, with less attention paid to the state's role in enforcing transparency, for example. We are going to leave the categories of regulation up in the air in this post, since our concern is with the general factors that impinge on the regulation of goods or services generally. Our parochial point, re gun control or the drug trade, is to show how these factors lead to successful bannings, or mitigate against bannings. Our thesis is simple: if the state tries to ban a good or a service without consideration of its popularity, abundance, and the existence of networks that facilitate the good or services production and distribution, the ban has a high chance of being will inefficient, or pernicious to the preservation of civil rights, or counter-productive. We don't think that efficiency itself provides a metric that should determine absolutely the state's use of banning -- for instance, we think banning murder is probably inefficient, but we think the state should ban murder. However, when the ban is ineffective, injurious to civil liberty, and counter-productive (i.e, the objective of the banning is actually negated by the mechanism of the bannning), we think that banning shouldn't occur.
Oh oh. This is truly turbid prose. Soon I am going to reduce the readership of this site to one: myself. But I am going to do one more post on this topic, and then, I promise, we will return to our regularly scheduled progam, nude pictures of Britney Spears Live!
Wednesday, July 03, 2002
Dope
My friend X., who lives in Memphis, is a tireless proponent of gun control. Actually, that understates her passion -- she believes in the most draconian form of gun control in the case of hand guns, namely making handguns the new Desaparecidos of the body politic, although she concedes some gun ownership to hunters. Now, as readers of this page know, LI has a jaundiced view of gun control, especially as it edges into gun banning. X. has been stirred up by recent events in Memphis. This year has beeen, to quote the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a "murderous year for children." Here's a list of "children shot:"
"Damien Woodard, 10, was killed by a stray bullet in gang-related shooting at 1267 S. Willett on April 14. Five men have been charged: Herman A. Parham, 17, Rodricus A. Johnson, 18, and Patrick J. Brown, 20, with first-degree murder; Patrick Parham, 18, and Jeremy Parham, 19, with facilitation to commit first-degree murder.
Marrqutte Mason, 9, was killed by a stray bullet May 26 at Deadrick and Bradley in Orange Mound in a gang- and drug-related shooting. Brian Keith Young, 24, was charged with first-degree murder.
Amber Jiles, 10, was fatally shot at 2473 Boyle on April 25. Joe Nathan Williams, 74, angry with Amber's mother, killed the child and wounded her mother, Michele Hopkins, 36. A police officer shot and killed Williams."
This is shotgun blast America, an endless movie of domestic brawls ending in shots through the head, blood splatter in junkie hallways, gang versus gang exchanges of fire, and so on. Pictures are rarely worth a thousand words -- why waste the words on em? -- but this site has a nice photo of what a bullet can do to your average stomach which will do more than LI can do to help you visualize the yaw, thrust and expansion of a missile displacing the tissue in its track. If you want the thousand words anyway, here's a nice little site to explore the effects on the corpore sanus (if not the mens sane) of that essential equation in criminal forensics, "KE = WV2/2g, where: W=bullet weight, V=velocity, g=gravitational acceleration."
LI recognizes X.'s disgust and anger about gunshot deaths, wounds, and threats. We disagree with her about gun control on both rational and irrational grounds. Let's get the irrational grounds out of the way first: we think that an armed population, whatever the price in gutshot and baby wounds, is a bulwark against tyranny. We have an intuition on this -- which is philosopher speak for saying, we believe this but fuck if we know why -- that our freedoms have a systematic cast that makes it the case that the elimination of one of them injures others of them. Now, if there is a compelling reason to eliminate one of them, so be it -- but by our standard, the harm done by eliminating the right to bear arms isn't made up for by the healthful effects ensuing from the disarming of a population. And plus, to balance the Memphis stories of civilian deaths, there is always the issue of the armed policia. As in the tendency of the cops to use unnecessary force and then need for some counterforce to vividly work against this tendency. X. concedes her disarmament strategy should apply to the police, but we think that is the most unlikely outcome of gun control as she envisions it.
These may simply be our manias. Let's get on to the more interesting, the more rational reason we oppose extreme gun control.
One way of putting it is this: X.'s perspective on gun ownership is that it is ultimately a question of public health. Given an epidemic of gunshot related deaths, we do the epidemiological work of looking for causes. Since the correlation between gunshot related deaths and guns is, uh, pretty irrefutable, we eliminate the cause -- the guns -- and so eliminate the deaths. It is an issue, in this perspective, much like typhoid, or AIDS, or influenza. A disease that spreads by contagion is contained by containing its carriers. Gunshot deaths are spread by gun possessors.
LI has a different perspective. Our claim is that gun control is an issue like that of heroin, abortion, and the perservation of endangered species -- that it has to do with the forms of regulation that can efficiently shape those behaviors that are expressed in the market, and those forms that grotesquely misapply to market behaviors by delivering regulation to structurally incompetent officers, or misunderstanding the demand side for a good or a service, or by blindly pursuing a particular agenda in spite of the fact that it is not working. And this is where our ideas about the wickedness of banning marijuana, or most drugs, and imprisoning the users and sellers of it, hook up with our ideas about the impracticality of banning guns.
In our next post, we will present a picture of regulation that, we modestly think, is globally unique, even if it is composed of elements that have already been mulled over by economists and lawyers. Unfortunately, both groups seem to believe that theory should start over at every moment, rather like the short term memory loss guy in Memento. Our perspective is that we've learned a lot about regulation in the last eighty years, and we should throw out those parts of regulatory theory that don't apply. But ... we are stepping on our next post.
So, readers (this should squelch our readership for the rest of the week), tomorrow and maybe the next day, look for a super-exciting discussion of Coase's theorem and the paradox of organizational knowledge on this station. Oh, and for those of you looking for Britney Spears naked (a phrase which will now enter the search machine mafia), you are in the wrong place.
My friend X., who lives in Memphis, is a tireless proponent of gun control. Actually, that understates her passion -- she believes in the most draconian form of gun control in the case of hand guns, namely making handguns the new Desaparecidos of the body politic, although she concedes some gun ownership to hunters. Now, as readers of this page know, LI has a jaundiced view of gun control, especially as it edges into gun banning. X. has been stirred up by recent events in Memphis. This year has beeen, to quote the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a "murderous year for children." Here's a list of "children shot:"
"Damien Woodard, 10, was killed by a stray bullet in gang-related shooting at 1267 S. Willett on April 14. Five men have been charged: Herman A. Parham, 17, Rodricus A. Johnson, 18, and Patrick J. Brown, 20, with first-degree murder; Patrick Parham, 18, and Jeremy Parham, 19, with facilitation to commit first-degree murder.
Marrqutte Mason, 9, was killed by a stray bullet May 26 at Deadrick and Bradley in Orange Mound in a gang- and drug-related shooting. Brian Keith Young, 24, was charged with first-degree murder.
Amber Jiles, 10, was fatally shot at 2473 Boyle on April 25. Joe Nathan Williams, 74, angry with Amber's mother, killed the child and wounded her mother, Michele Hopkins, 36. A police officer shot and killed Williams."
This is shotgun blast America, an endless movie of domestic brawls ending in shots through the head, blood splatter in junkie hallways, gang versus gang exchanges of fire, and so on. Pictures are rarely worth a thousand words -- why waste the words on em? -- but this site has a nice photo of what a bullet can do to your average stomach which will do more than LI can do to help you visualize the yaw, thrust and expansion of a missile displacing the tissue in its track. If you want the thousand words anyway, here's a nice little site to explore the effects on the corpore sanus (if not the mens sane) of that essential equation in criminal forensics, "KE = WV2/2g, where: W=bullet weight, V=velocity, g=gravitational acceleration."
LI recognizes X.'s disgust and anger about gunshot deaths, wounds, and threats. We disagree with her about gun control on both rational and irrational grounds. Let's get the irrational grounds out of the way first: we think that an armed population, whatever the price in gutshot and baby wounds, is a bulwark against tyranny. We have an intuition on this -- which is philosopher speak for saying, we believe this but fuck if we know why -- that our freedoms have a systematic cast that makes it the case that the elimination of one of them injures others of them. Now, if there is a compelling reason to eliminate one of them, so be it -- but by our standard, the harm done by eliminating the right to bear arms isn't made up for by the healthful effects ensuing from the disarming of a population. And plus, to balance the Memphis stories of civilian deaths, there is always the issue of the armed policia. As in the tendency of the cops to use unnecessary force and then need for some counterforce to vividly work against this tendency. X. concedes her disarmament strategy should apply to the police, but we think that is the most unlikely outcome of gun control as she envisions it.
These may simply be our manias. Let's get on to the more interesting, the more rational reason we oppose extreme gun control.
One way of putting it is this: X.'s perspective on gun ownership is that it is ultimately a question of public health. Given an epidemic of gunshot related deaths, we do the epidemiological work of looking for causes. Since the correlation between gunshot related deaths and guns is, uh, pretty irrefutable, we eliminate the cause -- the guns -- and so eliminate the deaths. It is an issue, in this perspective, much like typhoid, or AIDS, or influenza. A disease that spreads by contagion is contained by containing its carriers. Gunshot deaths are spread by gun possessors.
LI has a different perspective. Our claim is that gun control is an issue like that of heroin, abortion, and the perservation of endangered species -- that it has to do with the forms of regulation that can efficiently shape those behaviors that are expressed in the market, and those forms that grotesquely misapply to market behaviors by delivering regulation to structurally incompetent officers, or misunderstanding the demand side for a good or a service, or by blindly pursuing a particular agenda in spite of the fact that it is not working. And this is where our ideas about the wickedness of banning marijuana, or most drugs, and imprisoning the users and sellers of it, hook up with our ideas about the impracticality of banning guns.
In our next post, we will present a picture of regulation that, we modestly think, is globally unique, even if it is composed of elements that have already been mulled over by economists and lawyers. Unfortunately, both groups seem to believe that theory should start over at every moment, rather like the short term memory loss guy in Memento. Our perspective is that we've learned a lot about regulation in the last eighty years, and we should throw out those parts of regulatory theory that don't apply. But ... we are stepping on our next post.
So, readers (this should squelch our readership for the rest of the week), tomorrow and maybe the next day, look for a super-exciting discussion of Coase's theorem and the paradox of organizational knowledge on this station. Oh, and for those of you looking for Britney Spears naked (a phrase which will now enter the search machine mafia), you are in the wrong place.
Sunday, June 30, 2002
Remora
Burning down the house.
Everybody knows that modernism's over, everybody knows the good guys lost -- to cite, with a small change in wording, Leonard Cohen. The abstract expressionists, and their successors, were willing and eager to do what they did for the price of the paint. The adventure, the beauty of it, the reason you'd hock your body, the reason you'd let yourself become a laughingstock at the family reunions, was that painting was dearer to you, as a painter, than heroin is to a junky. It was the stuff. Then the money came down, and at first that was all right. But money comes attached by a million spiderweb-like strings to money-men, and that isn't all right. Not eventually. American art would have been better off, in the last twenty years, if it had been traded by crack-heads and curated by homeless alkies. Alas, it was traded by Saatchi's and housed by such confidence men as 'Tom' Krens, the Guggenheim's director. Deborah Soloman's NYT Magazine story about Krens would do Hans Haacke himself proud. Unfortunately, Haacke has no sense of humor. About Solomon, one should be cautious -- her byline says that she is working on a bio of Norman Rockwell, about which LI's views are pretty clear: I would rather look at the toilet paper hanging on the roll in my bathroom than anything Norman Rockwell ever, uh, what is the word? created? And her let's-all-be-populists now ending is pretty insane -- she has just spent the entire article buzzing among money men from Cleveland, but suddenly they represent vox populi? I don't think so. But to LI's ears, the quotes in this piece are priceless. This is one of the trustees giving us his very raison d'etre:
''People who want to be socially established are attracted to the Met board, but people who want to have fun are attracted to the Guggenheim,'' says Stephen Swid, chairman of Knoll International furniture and a longtime Guggenheim trustee. ''The Museum of Modern Art has David Rockefeller, who sits down with the trustees -- $5 million, $20 million, that's what they give. You have to understand that David Rockefeller is an American icon. But we're like from the shtetl.''
Here's Peter Lewis, the chairman of the Guggenheim, in all his beefy glory:
''I buy pictures,'' Lewis protested. ''Don't call me a collector. I really don't know about art. I love creativity. I love artists, their lifestyle and attitude. How does a businessperson from Cleveland who doesn't want to read books about art connect with the art scene?'' Suddenly, with a quick apology, he removed his artificial leg and placed it across his lap, explaining he felt more comfortable that way. Asked how he lost a limb, he replied dismissively, ''Oh, just doing stupid macho things.''
Here is another wondrous quote from Lewis, explaining why Guggenheim has become, as Solomon says elsewhere in the article, parodying Malraux, a Museum with Walls only. Lewis forces us to ask: are these people real?
" 'Tom resonates more with buildings than with pictures,'' Peter Lewis told me."
Resonance should be confined to the viewing of porn, where it is appropriate. If only LI could find a similar way to fast forward through the endless reel of truly disgusting capitalists, in this, the age of the Jurrassic plutocrat!
Burning down the house.
Everybody knows that modernism's over, everybody knows the good guys lost -- to cite, with a small change in wording, Leonard Cohen. The abstract expressionists, and their successors, were willing and eager to do what they did for the price of the paint. The adventure, the beauty of it, the reason you'd hock your body, the reason you'd let yourself become a laughingstock at the family reunions, was that painting was dearer to you, as a painter, than heroin is to a junky. It was the stuff. Then the money came down, and at first that was all right. But money comes attached by a million spiderweb-like strings to money-men, and that isn't all right. Not eventually. American art would have been better off, in the last twenty years, if it had been traded by crack-heads and curated by homeless alkies. Alas, it was traded by Saatchi's and housed by such confidence men as 'Tom' Krens, the Guggenheim's director. Deborah Soloman's NYT Magazine story about Krens would do Hans Haacke himself proud. Unfortunately, Haacke has no sense of humor. About Solomon, one should be cautious -- her byline says that she is working on a bio of Norman Rockwell, about which LI's views are pretty clear: I would rather look at the toilet paper hanging on the roll in my bathroom than anything Norman Rockwell ever, uh, what is the word? created? And her let's-all-be-populists now ending is pretty insane -- she has just spent the entire article buzzing among money men from Cleveland, but suddenly they represent vox populi? I don't think so. But to LI's ears, the quotes in this piece are priceless. This is one of the trustees giving us his very raison d'etre:
''People who want to be socially established are attracted to the Met board, but people who want to have fun are attracted to the Guggenheim,'' says Stephen Swid, chairman of Knoll International furniture and a longtime Guggenheim trustee. ''The Museum of Modern Art has David Rockefeller, who sits down with the trustees -- $5 million, $20 million, that's what they give. You have to understand that David Rockefeller is an American icon. But we're like from the shtetl.''
Here's Peter Lewis, the chairman of the Guggenheim, in all his beefy glory:
''I buy pictures,'' Lewis protested. ''Don't call me a collector. I really don't know about art. I love creativity. I love artists, their lifestyle and attitude. How does a businessperson from Cleveland who doesn't want to read books about art connect with the art scene?'' Suddenly, with a quick apology, he removed his artificial leg and placed it across his lap, explaining he felt more comfortable that way. Asked how he lost a limb, he replied dismissively, ''Oh, just doing stupid macho things.''
Here is another wondrous quote from Lewis, explaining why Guggenheim has become, as Solomon says elsewhere in the article, parodying Malraux, a Museum with Walls only. Lewis forces us to ask: are these people real?
" 'Tom resonates more with buildings than with pictures,'' Peter Lewis told me."
Resonance should be confined to the viewing of porn, where it is appropriate. If only LI could find a similar way to fast forward through the endless reel of truly disgusting capitalists, in this, the age of the Jurrassic plutocrat!
Friday, June 28, 2002
Remora
"...the faces change back to black and white cartoon old men, obscure members of the cosmopolitan night." -- Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
Unfortunately, the cartoon old men and one woman LI has to talk about this morning are less obscure than they should be. The cosmopolitan night they belong to is called the Supreme Court, and they are called judges. These sad-sacks are up to their usual tricks -- allowing, on the one hand, the state to practice its most egregious tyrannies on the subaltern population of the young, the poor, and the feckless, the clipped angels among the faceless many, while on the other hand chipping away at the limitations placed, however imperfectly, on the natural malefactors of great wealth, aka entrenched corporate power.
A ruling yesterday is typical of the Court's absolute decrepitude. The court ruled that schools could arbitrarily order drug tests -- in other words, have access to the bodily chemical infrastructure of -- students. And so, a right that inheres in the governance of the modern nation-state -- the right to be educated -- is turned into a gun against the educated. Here's a couple of grafs in the NYT:
"In emphasizing the "custodial responsibilities" of a public school system toward its students, rather than the details of how the program was organized, the majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to encompass random drug testing of an entire student population.
But one member of the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote a concurring opinion while also signing Justice Thomas's, said it was significant that the program in the Tecumseh, Okla., school district "preserves an option for a conscientious objector" by limiting the scope to students in extracurricular activities. A student "can refuse testing while paying a price (nonparticipation) that is serious, but less severe than expulsion," Justice Breyer said.Students who are found to be using drugs at Tecumseh High School are barred from their activities and referred for counseling, but are not otherwise disciplined or reported to the police. The policy was challenged by Lindsay Earls, an honor student active in several activities who is now attending Dartmouth College."
There is the outrage, this band of carcasses with their martinis at home, their drinks for dinner, pissing on the kids, and there is its conjunction with the greater outrage, the continuing war on drugs. There seems to be a misperception out there that the war has moderated on, at least, the most common of those drugs, marijuana. Wrong, captain. Drugwar lists some very interesting stats on its site:
"In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. This is an increase over 1999, when a total of 704,812 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses, of which 620,541 were for possession alone."
LI must admit, the left is not the counterforce it should be to this incredible and sick machinery. The best arguments against the day, the year, the decade, the two decades, the half century of infamy encoded in 704,812 marijuana arrests have been flung out by libertarians. James Bovard has a nice article on the Future of Freedom site. He is especially acidic about the current administration's cute idea of linking one losing war -- on drugs -- to its current idee fixe -- a permanent war on terrorism. Bovard points out that the war on drugs, unlike the war on terrorism, is a war on the laws of the market:
"But how will the DEA change the laws of agricultural economics that encourage farmers to grow crops disapproved by the U.S. government? Afghan farmers can easily earn ten times more from growing opium than from growing wheat or other crops. The effort to persuade Third World farmers to abandon illicit crops will be about as successful as trying to persuade stockbrokers and law-firm partners to abandon their high-paid jobs, move to Mexico, and scratch out a livelihood assembling toilet brushes for sale at Wal-Mart.
"If the Bush administration is really serious about defunding terrorist groups, it should summon the courage to look at drug laws themselves. The falling price of cocaine and heroin in recent decades is proof of the failure of drug warriors to close the borders. Federal officials have admitted that the government fails to interdict up to 90 percent of the drugs being smuggled into the United States. This failure rate is absolutely intolerable when illicit drugs finance terrorism. "
LI has a theory about how to look at state actions like banning products (marijuana, or handguns) or services (euthenasia, robbery, murder) should be seen within the framework of effective and ineffective regulation of markets. We should post that theory one of these days -- as far as we know, it is our original contribution to political philosophy.
"...the faces change back to black and white cartoon old men, obscure members of the cosmopolitan night." -- Jim Carroll, The Basketball Diaries
Unfortunately, the cartoon old men and one woman LI has to talk about this morning are less obscure than they should be. The cosmopolitan night they belong to is called the Supreme Court, and they are called judges. These sad-sacks are up to their usual tricks -- allowing, on the one hand, the state to practice its most egregious tyrannies on the subaltern population of the young, the poor, and the feckless, the clipped angels among the faceless many, while on the other hand chipping away at the limitations placed, however imperfectly, on the natural malefactors of great wealth, aka entrenched corporate power.
A ruling yesterday is typical of the Court's absolute decrepitude. The court ruled that schools could arbitrarily order drug tests -- in other words, have access to the bodily chemical infrastructure of -- students. And so, a right that inheres in the governance of the modern nation-state -- the right to be educated -- is turned into a gun against the educated. Here's a couple of grafs in the NYT:
"In emphasizing the "custodial responsibilities" of a public school system toward its students, rather than the details of how the program was organized, the majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas appeared to encompass random drug testing of an entire student population.
But one member of the majority, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who wrote a concurring opinion while also signing Justice Thomas's, said it was significant that the program in the Tecumseh, Okla., school district "preserves an option for a conscientious objector" by limiting the scope to students in extracurricular activities. A student "can refuse testing while paying a price (nonparticipation) that is serious, but less severe than expulsion," Justice Breyer said.Students who are found to be using drugs at Tecumseh High School are barred from their activities and referred for counseling, but are not otherwise disciplined or reported to the police. The policy was challenged by Lindsay Earls, an honor student active in several activities who is now attending Dartmouth College."
There is the outrage, this band of carcasses with their martinis at home, their drinks for dinner, pissing on the kids, and there is its conjunction with the greater outrage, the continuing war on drugs. There seems to be a misperception out there that the war has moderated on, at least, the most common of those drugs, marijuana. Wrong, captain. Drugwar lists some very interesting stats on its site:
"In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. This is an increase over 1999, when a total of 704,812 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses, of which 620,541 were for possession alone."
LI must admit, the left is not the counterforce it should be to this incredible and sick machinery. The best arguments against the day, the year, the decade, the two decades, the half century of infamy encoded in 704,812 marijuana arrests have been flung out by libertarians. James Bovard has a nice article on the Future of Freedom site. He is especially acidic about the current administration's cute idea of linking one losing war -- on drugs -- to its current idee fixe -- a permanent war on terrorism. Bovard points out that the war on drugs, unlike the war on terrorism, is a war on the laws of the market:
"But how will the DEA change the laws of agricultural economics that encourage farmers to grow crops disapproved by the U.S. government? Afghan farmers can easily earn ten times more from growing opium than from growing wheat or other crops. The effort to persuade Third World farmers to abandon illicit crops will be about as successful as trying to persuade stockbrokers and law-firm partners to abandon their high-paid jobs, move to Mexico, and scratch out a livelihood assembling toilet brushes for sale at Wal-Mart.
"If the Bush administration is really serious about defunding terrorist groups, it should summon the courage to look at drug laws themselves. The falling price of cocaine and heroin in recent decades is proof of the failure of drug warriors to close the borders. Federal officials have admitted that the government fails to interdict up to 90 percent of the drugs being smuggled into the United States. This failure rate is absolutely intolerable when illicit drugs finance terrorism. "
LI has a theory about how to look at state actions like banning products (marijuana, or handguns) or services (euthenasia, robbery, murder) should be seen within the framework of effective and ineffective regulation of markets. We should post that theory one of these days -- as far as we know, it is our original contribution to political philosophy.
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
Remora
Poor Business Week chose the wrong day to headline an optimistic forecast by a Morgan Stanley Investment "Strategist" Barton Biggs. As WorldCom basically takes itself off the field, here's what Briggs -- a man BW bills as usually "dour," in order to give credence to his pap - has to say:
"Since its 2000 peak, the Nasdaq has fallen as much as the Dow did from 1929 to 1932, notes Biggs. And it has dropped more than Japan's Nikkei index has since its high in 1989, he adds. "The pattern of the equity markets since last summer has been classic," says Biggs, in foretelling that a double bottom is about to happen -- or has already begun.
A VIGOROUS RALLY. Given all these, "we have increased our exposure to equities," says Biggs. Assuming the September lows hold, as he expects, rallies of 15% to 20% are conceivable in the broad indexes in the U.S. and Europe, predicts Biggs.
In the U.S., he forecasts that over the short term, the Dow will climb to between 10,800 and 11,000, from 9,380 currently."
Biggs, and others of his ilk, gain income "strategizing' by doing such dumb and dumber things as bringing up comparisons between the Nasdaq and the Nikkei, as if these comparisons were some kind of argument. There might or might not be reasons to think, hey, these are comparable situations. But comparison itself, without analysis, is blind, deaf and dumb. And so would be any investor who listened to someone like Biggs. One could easily envision the Dow hitting 10,800, but not for any of the reasons given by Biggs. And, right now, one can as easily envision the stockmarket version of the gutter ball -- a constant trough, between 9 and 10 thou.
Here's the Washington Post, quoting a less dour, and more paniced, investment "strategist" about the current market:
"At Merrill Lynch, meanwhile, Bernstein has warned clients of a "considerable near term risk" that could see a further 10 to 15 percent decline in the major stock indexes. With the stocks of the S&P 500 still selling at 24 times their expected earnings next year, he said, "our view is that the market, even at this level, is still quite speculative." The historic average is around 15.
"The implications of further declines in stock prices are anything but positive for the broader economy. Although this doesn't suggest the economy will slip back into recession again, forecaster Sinai sees little hope that the economy can grow at the 5 and 6 percent annual rates normally associated with economic recoveries. His forecasts calls for growth rates at half that."
Business magazine circulation is way off this year. And headlines like BW's are the reason. As the biz media became a pipeline for the uplifting crap diffused by glorified bucket shop salesmen, they lost credibility with their readers. Until they take a tougher approach, who is going to read them? A shrinking pool of suckers and pr men, that's who.
Poor Business Week chose the wrong day to headline an optimistic forecast by a Morgan Stanley Investment "Strategist" Barton Biggs. As WorldCom basically takes itself off the field, here's what Briggs -- a man BW bills as usually "dour," in order to give credence to his pap - has to say:
"Since its 2000 peak, the Nasdaq has fallen as much as the Dow did from 1929 to 1932, notes Biggs. And it has dropped more than Japan's Nikkei index has since its high in 1989, he adds. "The pattern of the equity markets since last summer has been classic," says Biggs, in foretelling that a double bottom is about to happen -- or has already begun.
A VIGOROUS RALLY. Given all these, "we have increased our exposure to equities," says Biggs. Assuming the September lows hold, as he expects, rallies of 15% to 20% are conceivable in the broad indexes in the U.S. and Europe, predicts Biggs.
In the U.S., he forecasts that over the short term, the Dow will climb to between 10,800 and 11,000, from 9,380 currently."
Biggs, and others of his ilk, gain income "strategizing' by doing such dumb and dumber things as bringing up comparisons between the Nasdaq and the Nikkei, as if these comparisons were some kind of argument. There might or might not be reasons to think, hey, these are comparable situations. But comparison itself, without analysis, is blind, deaf and dumb. And so would be any investor who listened to someone like Biggs. One could easily envision the Dow hitting 10,800, but not for any of the reasons given by Biggs. And, right now, one can as easily envision the stockmarket version of the gutter ball -- a constant trough, between 9 and 10 thou.
Here's the Washington Post, quoting a less dour, and more paniced, investment "strategist" about the current market:
"At Merrill Lynch, meanwhile, Bernstein has warned clients of a "considerable near term risk" that could see a further 10 to 15 percent decline in the major stock indexes. With the stocks of the S&P 500 still selling at 24 times their expected earnings next year, he said, "our view is that the market, even at this level, is still quite speculative." The historic average is around 15.
"The implications of further declines in stock prices are anything but positive for the broader economy. Although this doesn't suggest the economy will slip back into recession again, forecaster Sinai sees little hope that the economy can grow at the 5 and 6 percent annual rates normally associated with economic recoveries. His forecasts calls for growth rates at half that."
Business magazine circulation is way off this year. And headlines like BW's are the reason. As the biz media became a pipeline for the uplifting crap diffused by glorified bucket shop salesmen, they lost credibility with their readers. Until they take a tougher approach, who is going to read them? A shrinking pool of suckers and pr men, that's who.
Remora
Reader's mirage
Limited Inc was alerted to Bradford DeLong's weblog site today, when we came upon some comment about comment De Long had made about a recent William Greider article. Here are De Long's remarks about Greider:
"William Greider, writing in the Nation, hopes for a depression in the United States--for this would "deflate" the "smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy" and be "a good thing for world affairs, since Washington couldn't run roughshod over others. He believes that such a depression could be triggered by "... financial scandals" which would lead "overseas investors... to take their money home... the declining dollar... [to] fall sharply... credit... [to] become suddenly scarce, since our debtor-nation economy relies heavily on capital borrowed from abroad, and... trigger an ugly downdraft in the U.S. economy." And then "the fashionable boastfulness about America... would implode."
Going to the article, however, one quickly finds that Greider is not "hoping" for a depression in the United States. He does, however, hope that the smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy is deflated. His point is that economic policies that Greider thinks are taking us to the brink of depression will have the ironic effect of making America look inward, as so deflate the etc., etc. But noting that one expects an unexpected outcome from a bad thing isn't the same as hoping for the bad thing. In fact, Greider clearly describes his hopes, which are what they have been for some time: a populist economic policy that would strenghten the regulation of the financial industry, aim at ameliorating the inequality of incomes in the country, and would rid the private sector of its current problems with corrupt accounting and bloated CEO salaries.
Now, Limited Inc thinks that Greider's goals are good. We do think he is missing the boat on the effects of depression: the idea that nation's turn inward when their economies collapse isn't borne out by anything in recent history. But De Long's reading of Greider is so outrageous that we were tempted to dismiss the man completely. That, however, would be a mistake. De Long has an excellent analysis of stock valuations on his site, pointing out (as LI has pointed out long ago, somewhere -- was it a review? or one of these damn posts?) that the stock market, by traditional standards, is still overvalued.
"-Few people recognize how far out of whack the stock market still is today.
-There is still a large disconnect between current stock-market values and traditional valuation ratios relative to measures like earnings and dividends.
...
-Typically, over the last fifty years, stocks sell for about 30 times annual dividends and for about 18 times annual earnings.
-Today, however, stocks are selling for more than 30 times earnings, and more than 60 times dividends."
Usually, writers who notice this fact then become all alchemical about technical analysis, the bogus but influential school of analyzing stocks used by a certain truly reactionary species of contrarians. Actually, the traditional standard isn't the expression of natural law: it is rather the expression of accumulated expectations, given a history of productivity gains, inflation, competition with other investment instruments, etc. The New Economy model basically boiled down to the argument that current valuations are rational. The rationality goes something like this: the technologically abetted gains in productivity, and the instances of metastizing growth (for instance, among tech companies from the eighties to the late nineties) has made the 30 times earnings, and 60 times dividend metric more reasonable. This argument also includes, as a subargument, the sub voce dismissal of dividends as an archaic remnant of an earlier era of stock investment. This argument points to the increasing tendency of investors to buy stocks specifically to sell them in the short term, rather than benefit from splits and dividends in the long term.
While De long doesn't go into the ins and outs, here, I have to give him credit for laying out the issue. So -- I can't totally dismiss him as a reactionary slug. He's too smart a reactionary slug to really believe what he wrote about Greider -- it was, I think, an immediate reaction to his impression of the article. LI knows that situation: sometimes, the impression of what one reads is different than what one has really read. Call it: reader's mirage.
Reader's mirage
Limited Inc was alerted to Bradford DeLong's weblog site today, when we came upon some comment about comment De Long had made about a recent William Greider article. Here are De Long's remarks about Greider:
"William Greider, writing in the Nation, hopes for a depression in the United States--for this would "deflate" the "smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy" and be "a good thing for world affairs, since Washington couldn't run roughshod over others. He believes that such a depression could be triggered by "... financial scandals" which would lead "overseas investors... to take their money home... the declining dollar... [to] fall sharply... credit... [to] become suddenly scarce, since our debtor-nation economy relies heavily on capital borrowed from abroad, and... trigger an ugly downdraft in the U.S. economy." And then "the fashionable boastfulness about America... would implode."
Going to the article, however, one quickly finds that Greider is not "hoping" for a depression in the United States. He does, however, hope that the smug triumphalism of Bush's unilateralist war policy is deflated. His point is that economic policies that Greider thinks are taking us to the brink of depression will have the ironic effect of making America look inward, as so deflate the etc., etc. But noting that one expects an unexpected outcome from a bad thing isn't the same as hoping for the bad thing. In fact, Greider clearly describes his hopes, which are what they have been for some time: a populist economic policy that would strenghten the regulation of the financial industry, aim at ameliorating the inequality of incomes in the country, and would rid the private sector of its current problems with corrupt accounting and bloated CEO salaries.
Now, Limited Inc thinks that Greider's goals are good. We do think he is missing the boat on the effects of depression: the idea that nation's turn inward when their economies collapse isn't borne out by anything in recent history. But De Long's reading of Greider is so outrageous that we were tempted to dismiss the man completely. That, however, would be a mistake. De Long has an excellent analysis of stock valuations on his site, pointing out (as LI has pointed out long ago, somewhere -- was it a review? or one of these damn posts?) that the stock market, by traditional standards, is still overvalued.
"-Few people recognize how far out of whack the stock market still is today.
-There is still a large disconnect between current stock-market values and traditional valuation ratios relative to measures like earnings and dividends.
...
-Typically, over the last fifty years, stocks sell for about 30 times annual dividends and for about 18 times annual earnings.
-Today, however, stocks are selling for more than 30 times earnings, and more than 60 times dividends."
Usually, writers who notice this fact then become all alchemical about technical analysis, the bogus but influential school of analyzing stocks used by a certain truly reactionary species of contrarians. Actually, the traditional standard isn't the expression of natural law: it is rather the expression of accumulated expectations, given a history of productivity gains, inflation, competition with other investment instruments, etc. The New Economy model basically boiled down to the argument that current valuations are rational. The rationality goes something like this: the technologically abetted gains in productivity, and the instances of metastizing growth (for instance, among tech companies from the eighties to the late nineties) has made the 30 times earnings, and 60 times dividend metric more reasonable. This argument also includes, as a subargument, the sub voce dismissal of dividends as an archaic remnant of an earlier era of stock investment. This argument points to the increasing tendency of investors to buy stocks specifically to sell them in the short term, rather than benefit from splits and dividends in the long term.
While De long doesn't go into the ins and outs, here, I have to give him credit for laying out the issue. So -- I can't totally dismiss him as a reactionary slug. He's too smart a reactionary slug to really believe what he wrote about Greider -- it was, I think, an immediate reaction to his impression of the article. LI knows that situation: sometimes, the impression of what one reads is different than what one has really read. Call it: reader's mirage.
Monday, June 24, 2002
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote that the various schools of philosophy can be reduced, in the end, to the �blind and involuntary memoire� of certain philosophers � thus, in one of the great ironies of intellectual history, surrendering the discipline to the corruptions of vulgarity. The leveling impulse, of which Nietzsche made himself the greatest foe, insinuated itself into his method at its moment of greatest acuteness. And, after all, what is this vulgarity, this personalization of the abstract, but one of the masks of nihilism?
Granting our disagreement with Nietzsche�s disingenuous equation between �the life� and �the thought�, LI thinks it has a certain pertinence, transposed to the the mystery story. A mystery, from our perspective, is nothing more than the hidden autobiography of its investigator.
And this, reader, gets us to the self-infatuated self who is writing to you here. LI has a habit, at least on this site, of transforming every text we reference into a mystery. Under every text we discern -- whether due to our paranoia or our acuteness - the hidden labyrinth in which motive, like the Minotaur, lurks. This is how we hook up with Nietzsche -- because we take that motive to be death drive of nihilism, the leveling impulse to which, eventually, all that is beautiful and alive is sacrificed. We take this personally. We know why we are alone in this culture. We know that solitude is a process of attrition. We know that LI is becoming, daily, a little more lunar.
Yet still we venture into it: the news, the think piece, the movie, the web site. Our own implication in the labyrinth is a performative act � by entering it, we co-create it. We connive at it. If we could leave it, if we weren�t continually wasted in the center, we would destroy it. If mystery is autobiography, its solution is the transcendence of the self. So far, this is not a stage we've ever achieved. Narcissism, narcissism every day.
So: these are the rules of the site. The irrepressible autobiographical impulse rules here, and the reader knows to watch for the silvery, ephemeral flash of experience, which ultimately governs the supposedly neutral instrumentation of argument.
Everything, however, depends on our ability to play this game with a modicum of competence. Lately, we have more and more reason to suspect that we have lost that ability. While our writing becomes more and more convoluted, its justification becomes more and more remote. Why are we doing this? We�ve been reminded of this by M., a friend of ours who lives in Mexico. M. is a highly intelligent, well read woman. If we have an ideal reader in mind when we write, it has to be M., or someone like her. Our last posts were written with a certain joy. We�ve become so bitter that there is a liberation in it: the acte gratuit of the court jester hanging himself. We thought M. would appreciate this, so we put together the two posts on Angola and sent it to her.
Her reply was crushing. We aren�t going to reprint the entire thing, but here is how M. begins:
�Who are the readers of your posts? Do they all have PhD's in international relations? I am afraid I'm more like the beast with the calm regard... I don't know the names, I don't know the people... I'm glad to read your posts but they send my head reeling.�
Our failures have ceased to amuse. Why are we writing this?
I can�t go on. I�ll go on.
Granting our disagreement with Nietzsche�s disingenuous equation between �the life� and �the thought�, LI thinks it has a certain pertinence, transposed to the the mystery story. A mystery, from our perspective, is nothing more than the hidden autobiography of its investigator.
And this, reader, gets us to the self-infatuated self who is writing to you here. LI has a habit, at least on this site, of transforming every text we reference into a mystery. Under every text we discern -- whether due to our paranoia or our acuteness - the hidden labyrinth in which motive, like the Minotaur, lurks. This is how we hook up with Nietzsche -- because we take that motive to be death drive of nihilism, the leveling impulse to which, eventually, all that is beautiful and alive is sacrificed. We take this personally. We know why we are alone in this culture. We know that solitude is a process of attrition. We know that LI is becoming, daily, a little more lunar.
Yet still we venture into it: the news, the think piece, the movie, the web site. Our own implication in the labyrinth is a performative act � by entering it, we co-create it. We connive at it. If we could leave it, if we weren�t continually wasted in the center, we would destroy it. If mystery is autobiography, its solution is the transcendence of the self. So far, this is not a stage we've ever achieved. Narcissism, narcissism every day.
So: these are the rules of the site. The irrepressible autobiographical impulse rules here, and the reader knows to watch for the silvery, ephemeral flash of experience, which ultimately governs the supposedly neutral instrumentation of argument.
Everything, however, depends on our ability to play this game with a modicum of competence. Lately, we have more and more reason to suspect that we have lost that ability. While our writing becomes more and more convoluted, its justification becomes more and more remote. Why are we doing this? We�ve been reminded of this by M., a friend of ours who lives in Mexico. M. is a highly intelligent, well read woman. If we have an ideal reader in mind when we write, it has to be M., or someone like her. Our last posts were written with a certain joy. We�ve become so bitter that there is a liberation in it: the acte gratuit of the court jester hanging himself. We thought M. would appreciate this, so we put together the two posts on Angola and sent it to her.
Her reply was crushing. We aren�t going to reprint the entire thing, but here is how M. begins:
�Who are the readers of your posts? Do they all have PhD's in international relations? I am afraid I'm more like the beast with the calm regard... I don't know the names, I don't know the people... I'm glad to read your posts but they send my head reeling.�
Our failures have ceased to amuse. Why are we writing this?
I can�t go on. I�ll go on.
Saturday, June 22, 2002
Angola (part 2)
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter�
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters�
I know the names of the summit that manipulated�
I know the names of those who ran�
I know the names of the powerful group who�
I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who�
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of�
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies � the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered � is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasolini, Robb says, went on to explain that he knew, but he didn't have proof. He knew, however, because "I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."
The American writer, burdened with a less active imagination, and a set of clich�s that tend either to Hollywood or to the pisspoor identity kit politics that has narcotized academia for the past ten years, usually pieces together nothing but a homemade prejudice, a narcissistic grievance.
And LI is an American writer, all right? So don't ask me to rise to the heights.
Still, the quote seems appropriate as LI pulls back, these days,. Have you been getting the full heady rush of the world of blowback in your nostrils, your skin, your nerves, your blood, reader? The American jitters since 9/11. Tick it off, one, two.
- There's the odd paralysis that keeps American troops from sealing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to actually capture AlQaeda operatives, in contrast with the troop heavy plans to invade a country that happens not to have attacked the US, Iraq.
-There's the unfelt, as yet, paralysis of civil liberties, as if the systematic weakening of our civil freedoms (of speech, of association, of purchase, of due process) was happening somewhere else, at a great distance. It is death by spider bite, death by Ashcroft, and the poison travels in subdermal channels, it operates as the vague threat of power, of something coming down, of a constraint one doesn't know how to name or give a face to.
--There are the truly brain dead, there are the tests that show, in a thousand subtle ways, who the zombies were all along. Like Steven Spielberg, who tells the NYT that he is magnanimously willing to give up his civil liberties to stop "9/11 from ever happening again."(1)
-There are the "organs"� the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all the intelligence agencies that should never have existed in the first place, the state's version of polymorphous perversity. The organs upon which we are dumping money and power to protect the Heimat, while at the same time investigating the multiple incompetencies that demonstrate their structural inability to protect the Heimat. And no, it isn't because the terrorists are terribly clever. This is the new era, the era of terrorism as a hobby. If you can build a model plane, you can hijack a plane. And the FBI's newly expanded ability to penetrate chat rooms won't make a damn bit of difference.
So this is the state of play twelve years after the Fall of the Wall. After the fall of the utopia of rust in Eastern Europe. After the decade of global commercial nihilism, when the plan was... the end of history plan was... draining away what Schopenhauer called the Metphysical Need of Mankind:
'Excepting mankind, no other being wonders about its own existence; to the other creatures, existence is understood of itself so much that it isn't even noticed. Out of the calm regard of the beast the wisdom of nature speaks; because in them the will and the intellect aren't yet far enough apart that their mutual collisions against one another to cause them any curiosity. So the whole of phenomena still hangs from the branch of nature on which it budded, and is at one with the unconscious omniscience of the great mother. Only after the inner essence of nature (the will to life objectified) ascends through both realms of consciousless being and then through the long and broad series of beasts, cunning and amiable, does it finally arrive, with the entrance of reason, at Man, and so for the first time at reflection. Because at that moment it begins to wonder about its own works and asks itself, what it is...With this reflection and this astonishment there arises, in humankind alone, the peculiar need for a metaphysics..."
Yes, that's the basic gripe, the root of the anti-corporate movement: the fear that the globalizing world is returning us to the calm regard of the beast. We would no longer ask how it works -- just as we accept any of the improbable crap we see in typical Hollywood action flicks. The discontinuity, the shallowness, or non-existence, of character, the one note motives. Those films, the malls, the traffic, the talk radio -- all of it is about culture sinking to its lowest, dumbest level. It is the debauched image of the romantic ideal, life without questions, except for the unfortunate few -- okay, the vast majority -- who have been left outside of the all the golden gated communities.
No culture, no questions, no worries. But the peculiar need for metaphysics pops up in the most curious places, doesn't it? It popped up at Enron. It is popping up about the days and ways of Heimat security, back in the pre 9/11 idyll.
So: LI refuses. We refuse the end of history, we refuse the surrender of the need for metaphysics. You know we are a bunch of resentful failures around here, so what do you expect? But from the perspective of that refusal, we pick up on little stories, we make our trivial little connections.
For instance, we think that the story of what happened, and has been happening, in Angola, has something ghoulishly exemplary about it. The events that flow into and out of the death of Jonas Savimba, madman and murder that he was, the George Washington of dirty diamonds, the strong right arm of evangelical Christians (2)(some of whose leaders, like Pat Robertson (3), have strong and secret ties in this region of the world with diamond dealers, arms merchants, and some of the bloodiest tyrants of recent history), show that once again, Africa is where the white man lets down his pants, as Celine once wrote, and takes a dump. It seems to have been little remarked that Cheney is the first Vice President ever to have hired a mercenary army in a foreign land. Is this the Oliver North syndrome or what? Yes, as head of Haliburton, which includes the giant engineering firm, Brown and Root, Cheney was involved, no doubt at a distance, with a South African company named Executive Outcomes. Executive Outcomes -- which has dissolved, and reformed under a different name, last year -- was a PMC -- a private military company. Oh, it wasn't anything as tawdry as a group of hired killers. There's a rather laudatory article about EO in the magazine of the College of the Army, Parameters. Here's a list of such PMCs:
"A 1997 study by the private Center for Defense Information lists dozens of such organizations with international operations. South Africa has been the leading home of international security companies, including Executive Outcomes, Combat Force, Investments Surveys, Honey Badger Arms and Ammunition, Shield Security, Kas Enterprises, Saracen International, and Longreach Security. International military firms based in other parts of the world include Alpha Five, Corporate Trading International, Omega Support Ltd., Parasec Strategic Concept, Jardine Securicor Gurkha Services (Hong Kong), Gurkha Security Guards (Isle of Man, UK), Special Project Service Ltd. (UK), Defence Systems Ltd. (UK), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Vinnell Corporation (US), and Military Professional Resources Inc. (US). Executive Outcomes (South Africa) has been described as "the world's first fully equipped corporate army."
Isn't that something? a fully equipped corporate army. Press on the pedals, bring out the irony. Savimbi's UNITA army was undone by dos Santos by these guys, with Heritage Oil being, apparently, the middleman. The EO guys once fought for UNITA -- back in the days when dos Santos was a Marxist threat. Now, of course, dos Santos is merely a highly corrupt billionaire, and EO is happy to do the dirty in his employ. Heritage Oil meanwhile maintains its own little connections with the Bush family. There's an article in the Observatoire de Afrique Centrale this week that fingers Tony Buckingham, a canadian diamond merchant and soldier of fortune, as the man behind Heritage's african explorations in petrowealth. Heritage also holds stock in one of the PMC's that murdered protestors at a mine in Papua New Guinea in 1997. Cheney's associates, in other words, happen to have a little blood on their cuffs, but that's all right. Who's going to ask any questions about it? It 's a matter of keeping the natives under control, and lately isn't the mood changing? Isn't imperialism the new new thing?
I know the names. We all know the names. But do we really give a fuck?
Notes
1. "Right now, people are willing to give away a lot of their freedoms in order to feel safe. They're willing to give the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. far-reaching powers to, as George W. Bush often says, root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living. I am on the president's side in this instance. I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9/11 from ever happening again." NYT
2. See, for instance, the hilarious obituary of that Christian parfait knight on the NewsMax site. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/26/01047.shtml. De mortuis nil nisi bonum
etc., but still -- I have never read an obituary that congregated so many lies in so little space. It makes me giddy.
3. For a brief summing up of Robertson's interest, and general sleeziness, see this story, by Greg Palast, on his site. Here are three interesting grafs from it:
"Neil Volder, president of Robertson Financial and director of the new bank venture, emphasises that Robertson selflessly donated between 65 and 75 per cent of his salary as head of International Family Entertainment. But that amounted to only a few hundred thousand dollars a year - pocket change for a man of Robertson's means.
There was also, says Volder, the $7m he gave to 'Operation Blessing' to alleviate the woes of refugees fleeing genocide in Rwanda. Robertson's press operation puts the sum at only $1.2m. More interesting is the way the Operation Blessing funds were used in Africa. Through an emotional fundraising drive on his TV station, Robertson raised several million dollars for the tax-free charitable trust. Operation Blessing bought planes to shuttle medical supplies in and out of the refugee camp in Goma, Congo (then Zaire).
But investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian Pilot discovered that over a six-month period - except for one medical flight - the planes were used to haul equipment for something called African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation a long way from Goma. African Development is owned by Pat Robertson."
4. See this Washington Post piece by Jon Jeter. The election of 1994, which legitimated dos Santos, was dubbed the choice between the Killers and the Robbers by the electorate. Jeter quotes estimates that put dos Santos' fortune in the 2 billion dollar range.
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter�
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters�
I know the names of the summit that manipulated�
I know the names of those who ran�
I know the names of the powerful group who�
I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who�
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who�
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of�
- Pier Paolo Pasolini
This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies � the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered � is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasolini, Robb says, went on to explain that he knew, but he didn't have proof. He knew, however, because "I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."
The American writer, burdened with a less active imagination, and a set of clich�s that tend either to Hollywood or to the pisspoor identity kit politics that has narcotized academia for the past ten years, usually pieces together nothing but a homemade prejudice, a narcissistic grievance.
And LI is an American writer, all right? So don't ask me to rise to the heights.
Still, the quote seems appropriate as LI pulls back, these days,. Have you been getting the full heady rush of the world of blowback in your nostrils, your skin, your nerves, your blood, reader? The American jitters since 9/11. Tick it off, one, two.
- There's the odd paralysis that keeps American troops from sealing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to actually capture AlQaeda operatives, in contrast with the troop heavy plans to invade a country that happens not to have attacked the US, Iraq.
-There's the unfelt, as yet, paralysis of civil liberties, as if the systematic weakening of our civil freedoms (of speech, of association, of purchase, of due process) was happening somewhere else, at a great distance. It is death by spider bite, death by Ashcroft, and the poison travels in subdermal channels, it operates as the vague threat of power, of something coming down, of a constraint one doesn't know how to name or give a face to.
--There are the truly brain dead, there are the tests that show, in a thousand subtle ways, who the zombies were all along. Like Steven Spielberg, who tells the NYT that he is magnanimously willing to give up his civil liberties to stop "9/11 from ever happening again."(1)
-There are the "organs"� the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, all the intelligence agencies that should never have existed in the first place, the state's version of polymorphous perversity. The organs upon which we are dumping money and power to protect the Heimat, while at the same time investigating the multiple incompetencies that demonstrate their structural inability to protect the Heimat. And no, it isn't because the terrorists are terribly clever. This is the new era, the era of terrorism as a hobby. If you can build a model plane, you can hijack a plane. And the FBI's newly expanded ability to penetrate chat rooms won't make a damn bit of difference.
So this is the state of play twelve years after the Fall of the Wall. After the fall of the utopia of rust in Eastern Europe. After the decade of global commercial nihilism, when the plan was... the end of history plan was... draining away what Schopenhauer called the Metphysical Need of Mankind:
'Excepting mankind, no other being wonders about its own existence; to the other creatures, existence is understood of itself so much that it isn't even noticed. Out of the calm regard of the beast the wisdom of nature speaks; because in them the will and the intellect aren't yet far enough apart that their mutual collisions against one another to cause them any curiosity. So the whole of phenomena still hangs from the branch of nature on which it budded, and is at one with the unconscious omniscience of the great mother. Only after the inner essence of nature (the will to life objectified) ascends through both realms of consciousless being and then through the long and broad series of beasts, cunning and amiable, does it finally arrive, with the entrance of reason, at Man, and so for the first time at reflection. Because at that moment it begins to wonder about its own works and asks itself, what it is...With this reflection and this astonishment there arises, in humankind alone, the peculiar need for a metaphysics..."
Yes, that's the basic gripe, the root of the anti-corporate movement: the fear that the globalizing world is returning us to the calm regard of the beast. We would no longer ask how it works -- just as we accept any of the improbable crap we see in typical Hollywood action flicks. The discontinuity, the shallowness, or non-existence, of character, the one note motives. Those films, the malls, the traffic, the talk radio -- all of it is about culture sinking to its lowest, dumbest level. It is the debauched image of the romantic ideal, life without questions, except for the unfortunate few -- okay, the vast majority -- who have been left outside of the all the golden gated communities.
No culture, no questions, no worries. But the peculiar need for metaphysics pops up in the most curious places, doesn't it? It popped up at Enron. It is popping up about the days and ways of Heimat security, back in the pre 9/11 idyll.
So: LI refuses. We refuse the end of history, we refuse the surrender of the need for metaphysics. You know we are a bunch of resentful failures around here, so what do you expect? But from the perspective of that refusal, we pick up on little stories, we make our trivial little connections.
For instance, we think that the story of what happened, and has been happening, in Angola, has something ghoulishly exemplary about it. The events that flow into and out of the death of Jonas Savimba, madman and murder that he was, the George Washington of dirty diamonds, the strong right arm of evangelical Christians (2)(some of whose leaders, like Pat Robertson (3), have strong and secret ties in this region of the world with diamond dealers, arms merchants, and some of the bloodiest tyrants of recent history), show that once again, Africa is where the white man lets down his pants, as Celine once wrote, and takes a dump. It seems to have been little remarked that Cheney is the first Vice President ever to have hired a mercenary army in a foreign land. Is this the Oliver North syndrome or what? Yes, as head of Haliburton, which includes the giant engineering firm, Brown and Root, Cheney was involved, no doubt at a distance, with a South African company named Executive Outcomes. Executive Outcomes -- which has dissolved, and reformed under a different name, last year -- was a PMC -- a private military company. Oh, it wasn't anything as tawdry as a group of hired killers. There's a rather laudatory article about EO in the magazine of the College of the Army, Parameters. Here's a list of such PMCs:
"A 1997 study by the private Center for Defense Information lists dozens of such organizations with international operations. South Africa has been the leading home of international security companies, including Executive Outcomes, Combat Force, Investments Surveys, Honey Badger Arms and Ammunition, Shield Security, Kas Enterprises, Saracen International, and Longreach Security. International military firms based in other parts of the world include Alpha Five, Corporate Trading International, Omega Support Ltd., Parasec Strategic Concept, Jardine Securicor Gurkha Services (Hong Kong), Gurkha Security Guards (Isle of Man, UK), Special Project Service Ltd. (UK), Defence Systems Ltd. (UK), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Vinnell Corporation (US), and Military Professional Resources Inc. (US). Executive Outcomes (South Africa) has been described as "the world's first fully equipped corporate army."
Isn't that something? a fully equipped corporate army. Press on the pedals, bring out the irony. Savimbi's UNITA army was undone by dos Santos by these guys, with Heritage Oil being, apparently, the middleman. The EO guys once fought for UNITA -- back in the days when dos Santos was a Marxist threat. Now, of course, dos Santos is merely a highly corrupt billionaire, and EO is happy to do the dirty in his employ. Heritage Oil meanwhile maintains its own little connections with the Bush family. There's an article in the Observatoire de Afrique Centrale this week that fingers Tony Buckingham, a canadian diamond merchant and soldier of fortune, as the man behind Heritage's african explorations in petrowealth. Heritage also holds stock in one of the PMC's that murdered protestors at a mine in Papua New Guinea in 1997. Cheney's associates, in other words, happen to have a little blood on their cuffs, but that's all right. Who's going to ask any questions about it? It 's a matter of keeping the natives under control, and lately isn't the mood changing? Isn't imperialism the new new thing?
I know the names. We all know the names. But do we really give a fuck?
Notes
1. "Right now, people are willing to give away a lot of their freedoms in order to feel safe. They're willing to give the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. far-reaching powers to, as George W. Bush often says, root out those individuals who are a danger to our way of living. I am on the president's side in this instance. I am willing to give up some of my personal freedoms in order to stop 9/11 from ever happening again." NYT
2. See, for instance, the hilarious obituary of that Christian parfait knight on the NewsMax site. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/26/01047.shtml. De mortuis nil nisi bonum
etc., but still -- I have never read an obituary that congregated so many lies in so little space. It makes me giddy.
3. For a brief summing up of Robertson's interest, and general sleeziness, see this story, by Greg Palast, on his site. Here are three interesting grafs from it:
"Neil Volder, president of Robertson Financial and director of the new bank venture, emphasises that Robertson selflessly donated between 65 and 75 per cent of his salary as head of International Family Entertainment. But that amounted to only a few hundred thousand dollars a year - pocket change for a man of Robertson's means.
There was also, says Volder, the $7m he gave to 'Operation Blessing' to alleviate the woes of refugees fleeing genocide in Rwanda. Robertson's press operation puts the sum at only $1.2m. More interesting is the way the Operation Blessing funds were used in Africa. Through an emotional fundraising drive on his TV station, Robertson raised several million dollars for the tax-free charitable trust. Operation Blessing bought planes to shuttle medical supplies in and out of the refugee camp in Goma, Congo (then Zaire).
But investigative reporter Bill Sizemore of the Virginian Pilot discovered that over a six-month period - except for one medical flight - the planes were used to haul equipment for something called African Development Corporation, a diamond mining operation a long way from Goma. African Development is owned by Pat Robertson."
4. See this Washington Post piece by Jon Jeter. The election of 1994, which legitimated dos Santos, was dubbed the choice between the Killers and the Robbers by the electorate. Jeter quotes estimates that put dos Santos' fortune in the 2 billion dollar range.
Thursday, June 20, 2002
Remora
Kenneth Minogue is a conservative economist of some sort at the London School of Economics. Limited Inc knows him solely as the author of a screamingly funny article in the New Criterion about the fall of Western Civilization. The jew, this time, isn't at the root of it all -- yes, times have changed, and now right wingers are proclaiming themselves the most philo of philosemites. No, at the root it turns out is the radical feminist. Taking leaps and making rhetorical pirouttes rather in the style of one of the Chansons de Maldoror (which so enthralled the surrealists), Minogue concocted, in this essay, one of those fanciful dreamscapes that makes the Scaife foundation crowd cream in their Bill Blass slacks. He overviews the enemies of the west from Islam to Stalin, and then -- drumroll please -- he finds the nasty fifth column in the kitchen:
"In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan�s radical feminists."
This is the caliber of character chosen by the TLS to review Will Hutton's latest lefty screed, The World We are In.Limited Inc wants to express our deepest respect for the Minogue's piece, Back to the future, in the June seventh issue. Minogue, in a mere two pages, manages to sound every rightwing shibboleth he could think of. The result is like the MIDI version of the Eroica -- grandeur reduced to tinniness.
M. starts from the refreshing premises that there are two possible political positions -- after, of course, ritually bashing Hutton for believing that there are only two possible political positions. On the one side, there is the "brutish and unconstrained state," and their ombudsmen. Hutton, who as an advocate of the 'stakeholder society" -(a school of thought that holds that the firm should be guided as much by the interests of its stakeholders -- customers, employees, and community -- as by its shareholders) is clearly on the Shadow side. Or shall we say his is the politics of steak tartare -- it looks normal on the outside, but it is bloody pink on the inside. His shareholder idea is nothing more than "backdoor socialism." And one knows from Minogue's previous writing about feminism that backdoor carries a heavy metaphorical burden for him, a sexual aura. Let's just say that Hutton's is the kind of politics you'd expect to appeal to a sodomite, begging your pardon and casting no animadversions on the man himself.
As we said, there are two sides in this struggle, however. Fighting the good fight against these latterday gremlins from the Kremlin are the advocates of "market freedom."
"Freedom" is practically the mating call of your average right winger. And like the mating call of the cuckoo, the bandicoot, and the Cactus Wren, it means something different to its own species than it means to someone like, well, Limited Inc. Because LI doesn't understand the aphrodisiacal qualities of glueing together freedom and market. Freedom and love, for instance, we like that. But freedom and market has never stirred the blood, what? And further, we don't understand to what agent the quality of freedom is being ascribed. Is it the freedom of the marketeer? Is it the freedom of the buyer? Are they both the same kind of freedoms? And how about the producers, and the service infrastructure? Are they agents? Surely, within these categories are social entities, sometimes on a vast scale, which extend over a collective of workers that are not quite represented (except as ... dread word ... stakeholders) by their organizational representatives in the market. The Sears salesman is not Sears --which is why Sears can fire him without committing suicide. But bien sur, he is marketing himself -- since every market contains a market. Scrooge knew this, and so does Minogue. You are your brand. LI has always had a more romantic vision of what freedom is all about. As in striking off the mind forged manacles of man. But no -- freedom here has been reduced to a shell of itself, a cultural nullity, an invitation to conformity on a large scale. We can't get with the program.
And then, of course, there is a whole set of questions about how the freedoms are secured. By, uh, the state? So let me get this straight, the brute state is enforcing freedom of contract, and other great stuff, like a central bank to help prop up the stock market in a dull season, and the state is enforcing the freedom to monetize what was formerly common (under the name of Intellectual property), and so you can't just be a Mexican farmer and go out and plant corn anymore cause Monsanto bought your corn gene, like, and so Monsanto can bring you into court for that, which is a state institution, but this is all in the name of market freedom, right, and and.. this state activity is entirely neutral, right, and in fact virtuous? This is where the plot gets all confused for a guy like me. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys again? I think it is like this. The state plays the role of Igor, here, to Minogue's mad economic scientist. Minogue says things like, bring in the spurious extension of our patent for that pharmaceutical, and Igor scurries off, and then comes back and hands it to him. And things like that. This is called Freedom of the Marketplace, and it is coming soon, to a theater near you.
And, well, and then LI starts getting all childish, and pulling on professor Minogue's trousers, and pestering him with questions. Such as, what's the metric here, anyway? We have one to suggest, since we are speaking in terms of the marketplace. Maybe freedom is purchasing power. But of course, the rightwing goes all romantic and vague when you mention things like this, and they start muttering about how terrible equality is, and the like. Because the unpleasant fact is that purchasing power is unequal in the market, and if the market is the arena of freedom, then surely the unequal power of the market's agents has some bearing on how that freedom is enacted.
We still don't like Minogue's game. We still think this isn't the essence of freedom, this isn't all there is to having the option to do one thing or the other (which I imagine must be bundled, somehow, into the notion of freedom). But what we like about the notion of comparable purchasing powers, or the comparison of resources one brings to the market, or accrues in the market, is that it makes freedom a measurable quality. Here, then, is the paradox: the Freedom of the marketplace, where it has been unleashed in all its glory, seems to result in a startling disproportion of wealth -- or ability to do one thing (travel, eat, get educated) instead of another. So that it is possible that the agregate freedom of the agents in the marketplace actually diminishes as the market is given more freedom. More options, less ability to make choices. That is, it is possible that more and more financial power, and thus freedom, accrues to fewer and fewer. And those endowed with this greater freedom, using the scale of their market power (for anything that can be quantified can be marketed -- that's a simple rule), will operate within the structures of power as Market makers, turning legislative power into a market. Hey, welcome to reality. This, in fact, is what happens. The elected, the bureaucrats, the minions of the state in the Western system, ally with these freer agents in the market to do battle with each other, given the interests each private entity has. Meanwhile, the state tumbles into the market, dissolving its tangible services into those that are traded for tangible awards (as policies are designed in order to please contributers) and intangible ones (for instance, in the trust felt by the regulators of, say, the Power industry, that they will be hired by said industry when they retire from their various posts).
This is the kind of problem that vexed Montesquieu -- and it was the kind of problem that made Enlightenment thinkers very subtle about what, exactly, constitutes state power, how it is embodied, how its branches conflict, etc., and how the limits it imposed on the market actually promoted the greater freedom of the agents in the market. All lost on such as Minogue. His is a resolutely Thatcherian conservativism -- tied to the holy scriptures a la Hayek, and without much sense for what the labels mean anymore. Which might be why he throws around conservative pejoratives without thinking much about them. For instance, he talks of the 'brutish" state. That is the kind of talk that confuses LI. We are in the good old lefty tradition that is always suspicious of the state's brutish tendencies, too. But for us, brutish means, well, things like bombing unarmed civilians, or mobilizing ethnic hatred, or criminalizing drugs and incarcerating at a wholly mad level an unacceptable percentage of ethnic minorities, or what have you. But for Minogue, all this is mere piffle. Mere breaking of eggs. Of course, the stray tear for the victims of Stalin and Mao must be allowed to course down the weathered cheek, maybe at the next meeting of the Oxford Tory Association. But brutish, in Minogue's vocabulary, refers to one dread and deadly thing, one curse above all others, one plague that is much more important than that pesky thing going around Africa, what'chamacallit, the one afflicting sodomites in Amsterdam and San Francisco, so he's heard: yes, friends and brothers, we are talking about a tax rate on the top percentile income bracket that exceeds, say, 15 percent. The killing fields are one thing, but to force a man to hide, with the utmost indignity, his income in some offshore shell company in the Bermudas, why, there are limits. It's, it's... it is the fall of civilization, no doubt about it.
Kenneth Minogue is a conservative economist of some sort at the London School of Economics. Limited Inc knows him solely as the author of a screamingly funny article in the New Criterion about the fall of Western Civilization. The jew, this time, isn't at the root of it all -- yes, times have changed, and now right wingers are proclaiming themselves the most philo of philosemites. No, at the root it turns out is the radical feminist. Taking leaps and making rhetorical pirouttes rather in the style of one of the Chansons de Maldoror (which so enthralled the surrealists), Minogue concocted, in this essay, one of those fanciful dreamscapes that makes the Scaife foundation crowd cream in their Bill Blass slacks. He overviews the enemies of the west from Islam to Stalin, and then -- drumroll please -- he finds the nasty fifth column in the kitchen:
"In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan�s radical feminists."
This is the caliber of character chosen by the TLS to review Will Hutton's latest lefty screed, The World We are In.Limited Inc wants to express our deepest respect for the Minogue's piece, Back to the future, in the June seventh issue. Minogue, in a mere two pages, manages to sound every rightwing shibboleth he could think of. The result is like the MIDI version of the Eroica -- grandeur reduced to tinniness.
M. starts from the refreshing premises that there are two possible political positions -- after, of course, ritually bashing Hutton for believing that there are only two possible political positions. On the one side, there is the "brutish and unconstrained state," and their ombudsmen. Hutton, who as an advocate of the 'stakeholder society" -(a school of thought that holds that the firm should be guided as much by the interests of its stakeholders -- customers, employees, and community -- as by its shareholders) is clearly on the Shadow side. Or shall we say his is the politics of steak tartare -- it looks normal on the outside, but it is bloody pink on the inside. His shareholder idea is nothing more than "backdoor socialism." And one knows from Minogue's previous writing about feminism that backdoor carries a heavy metaphorical burden for him, a sexual aura. Let's just say that Hutton's is the kind of politics you'd expect to appeal to a sodomite, begging your pardon and casting no animadversions on the man himself.
As we said, there are two sides in this struggle, however. Fighting the good fight against these latterday gremlins from the Kremlin are the advocates of "market freedom."
"Freedom" is practically the mating call of your average right winger. And like the mating call of the cuckoo, the bandicoot, and the Cactus Wren, it means something different to its own species than it means to someone like, well, Limited Inc. Because LI doesn't understand the aphrodisiacal qualities of glueing together freedom and market. Freedom and love, for instance, we like that. But freedom and market has never stirred the blood, what? And further, we don't understand to what agent the quality of freedom is being ascribed. Is it the freedom of the marketeer? Is it the freedom of the buyer? Are they both the same kind of freedoms? And how about the producers, and the service infrastructure? Are they agents? Surely, within these categories are social entities, sometimes on a vast scale, which extend over a collective of workers that are not quite represented (except as ... dread word ... stakeholders) by their organizational representatives in the market. The Sears salesman is not Sears --which is why Sears can fire him without committing suicide. But bien sur, he is marketing himself -- since every market contains a market. Scrooge knew this, and so does Minogue. You are your brand. LI has always had a more romantic vision of what freedom is all about. As in striking off the mind forged manacles of man. But no -- freedom here has been reduced to a shell of itself, a cultural nullity, an invitation to conformity on a large scale. We can't get with the program.
And then, of course, there is a whole set of questions about how the freedoms are secured. By, uh, the state? So let me get this straight, the brute state is enforcing freedom of contract, and other great stuff, like a central bank to help prop up the stock market in a dull season, and the state is enforcing the freedom to monetize what was formerly common (under the name of Intellectual property), and so you can't just be a Mexican farmer and go out and plant corn anymore cause Monsanto bought your corn gene, like, and so Monsanto can bring you into court for that, which is a state institution, but this is all in the name of market freedom, right, and and.. this state activity is entirely neutral, right, and in fact virtuous? This is where the plot gets all confused for a guy like me. Who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys again? I think it is like this. The state plays the role of Igor, here, to Minogue's mad economic scientist. Minogue says things like, bring in the spurious extension of our patent for that pharmaceutical, and Igor scurries off, and then comes back and hands it to him. And things like that. This is called Freedom of the Marketplace, and it is coming soon, to a theater near you.
And, well, and then LI starts getting all childish, and pulling on professor Minogue's trousers, and pestering him with questions. Such as, what's the metric here, anyway? We have one to suggest, since we are speaking in terms of the marketplace. Maybe freedom is purchasing power. But of course, the rightwing goes all romantic and vague when you mention things like this, and they start muttering about how terrible equality is, and the like. Because the unpleasant fact is that purchasing power is unequal in the market, and if the market is the arena of freedom, then surely the unequal power of the market's agents has some bearing on how that freedom is enacted.
We still don't like Minogue's game. We still think this isn't the essence of freedom, this isn't all there is to having the option to do one thing or the other (which I imagine must be bundled, somehow, into the notion of freedom). But what we like about the notion of comparable purchasing powers, or the comparison of resources one brings to the market, or accrues in the market, is that it makes freedom a measurable quality. Here, then, is the paradox: the Freedom of the marketplace, where it has been unleashed in all its glory, seems to result in a startling disproportion of wealth -- or ability to do one thing (travel, eat, get educated) instead of another. So that it is possible that the agregate freedom of the agents in the marketplace actually diminishes as the market is given more freedom. More options, less ability to make choices. That is, it is possible that more and more financial power, and thus freedom, accrues to fewer and fewer. And those endowed with this greater freedom, using the scale of their market power (for anything that can be quantified can be marketed -- that's a simple rule), will operate within the structures of power as Market makers, turning legislative power into a market. Hey, welcome to reality. This, in fact, is what happens. The elected, the bureaucrats, the minions of the state in the Western system, ally with these freer agents in the market to do battle with each other, given the interests each private entity has. Meanwhile, the state tumbles into the market, dissolving its tangible services into those that are traded for tangible awards (as policies are designed in order to please contributers) and intangible ones (for instance, in the trust felt by the regulators of, say, the Power industry, that they will be hired by said industry when they retire from their various posts).
This is the kind of problem that vexed Montesquieu -- and it was the kind of problem that made Enlightenment thinkers very subtle about what, exactly, constitutes state power, how it is embodied, how its branches conflict, etc., and how the limits it imposed on the market actually promoted the greater freedom of the agents in the market. All lost on such as Minogue. His is a resolutely Thatcherian conservativism -- tied to the holy scriptures a la Hayek, and without much sense for what the labels mean anymore. Which might be why he throws around conservative pejoratives without thinking much about them. For instance, he talks of the 'brutish" state. That is the kind of talk that confuses LI. We are in the good old lefty tradition that is always suspicious of the state's brutish tendencies, too. But for us, brutish means, well, things like bombing unarmed civilians, or mobilizing ethnic hatred, or criminalizing drugs and incarcerating at a wholly mad level an unacceptable percentage of ethnic minorities, or what have you. But for Minogue, all this is mere piffle. Mere breaking of eggs. Of course, the stray tear for the victims of Stalin and Mao must be allowed to course down the weathered cheek, maybe at the next meeting of the Oxford Tory Association. But brutish, in Minogue's vocabulary, refers to one dread and deadly thing, one curse above all others, one plague that is much more important than that pesky thing going around Africa, what'chamacallit, the one afflicting sodomites in Amsterdam and San Francisco, so he's heard: yes, friends and brothers, we are talking about a tax rate on the top percentile income bracket that exceeds, say, 15 percent. The killing fields are one thing, but to force a man to hide, with the utmost indignity, his income in some offshore shell company in the Bermudas, why, there are limits. It's, it's... it is the fall of civilization, no doubt about it.
Wednesday, June 19, 2002
Remora
A scandal identi-kit.
It works like this. The detective parks his car across the street from the warehouse, he gets out his camera, he takes pictures of men carrying briefcases meeting and exchanging them. The detective follows cars, he takes pictures of meetings in parks and under bridges.
We've seen this, right? The pictures, the movie, the implied plot. So here are a few pictures.
One would show Jacques Chirac meeting with George Bush on December 18, 2000 in Washington, DC at the French Embassy. One would show a former US supported "Freedom fighter," Jonas Savimbo, with seven bullets in him, holding onto a gun. One would show Eduardo Dos Santos, the president of Angola and former hardline Marxist foe of Savimbo, being feted at a White House dinner shortly after Savimbo's assassination. And one would show an arms dealer named Pierre Falcone (whose wife Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, is Laura Bush's friend) getting together $20,.000 to contribute to Bush's presidential campaign through his wife's beauty products corporation, Essante. In all, $100,000 was contributed during the campaign, and then, in 2001, returned when Falcone went to jail.
Falcone is not unknown to Chirac -- or to his old rival, Mitterand. In fact, he is one of the central figures in one of those simmering French scandals that would destroy the regime in another country: the arms trafficing scandal that involved Mitterand's son, Jean-Christophe, and huge, unaccounted for sums, as well as a mafioso style Russian arms dealer, Arkadi Gaydamak.
This isn't a story we've seen covered in the NYT. It runs through Angola and traces the surprising fault lines of the New World Order. How new worldish it is can be gauged by what happened to Jonas Savimba.
In the old days -- the eighties -- Savimba was a right wing hero. Probably the only black man Jesse Helms ever willingly ate with, he was praised by Reagan as a George Washington type figure. His UNITA guerrillas were fed with American money, trained (as far as they had any training) by the CIA, and armed by the CIA, too.
But when the Soviet threat dissolved, Savimba was undone by the economic facts on the ground. Those facts were about oil. The suddenly capitalistic dos Santos could deliver the oil. Savimba, the loser of the first post-communist election, could only deliver his mad dog personality. And suddenly that personality wasn't in demand. The invites to the Helms house were on permanent hold. Savimba retires with his guys to the bocage, of course, and forays out to attack airliners, murder villagers, rape women, and do all the stuff that made him George Washington in the first place. Well, how inconvenient. So he is tracked down -- perhaps with American help -- and killed:
"Fifteen bullets in all -- one in the neck, two in the head, the others in the chest, legs and arms -- finally overcame the boss of UNITA, who is dead at 67 years of age, Friday at 3 p.m. on the banks of the Luvuie River at Moxico." So read the announcement of his unhappy death this February. Another old cold warrior bites the dust, gangster style."
The way American intelligence agencies leave their assets around -- Savimba in Angola, bin Laden in Afghanistan -- it is like some drunk Texas trucker throwing beer cans out the cab. Human litter, but somebody has to pick it up.
However, never let it be said that Savimba's less glorious years had no function or meaning. With UNITA threatening him, dos Santos, backed by various American petro-chemical companies, such as Dick Cheney's Haliburton, needed arms. The desire for arms and drugs is the only unlimited desire known to mankind. Luckily, in this world, an embattled dictator can always find somebody to sell him a few hundred million dollars worth of weaponry; this is where Falcone, with his buddy Gaydamak, and his connections with Chirac and his faithful friend, Jean-Christophe Mitterand, fits in. As does ( scumbags of the world display the most touching solidarity) Clinton's good friend, Marc Rich, the on the run moneybags whose company, Glencore, deals in oil.
A scandal identi-kit.
It works like this. The detective parks his car across the street from the warehouse, he gets out his camera, he takes pictures of men carrying briefcases meeting and exchanging them. The detective follows cars, he takes pictures of meetings in parks and under bridges.
We've seen this, right? The pictures, the movie, the implied plot. So here are a few pictures.
One would show Jacques Chirac meeting with George Bush on December 18, 2000 in Washington, DC at the French Embassy. One would show a former US supported "Freedom fighter," Jonas Savimbo, with seven bullets in him, holding onto a gun. One would show Eduardo Dos Santos, the president of Angola and former hardline Marxist foe of Savimbo, being feted at a White House dinner shortly after Savimbo's assassination. And one would show an arms dealer named Pierre Falcone (whose wife Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, is Laura Bush's friend) getting together $20,.000 to contribute to Bush's presidential campaign through his wife's beauty products corporation, Essante. In all, $100,000 was contributed during the campaign, and then, in 2001, returned when Falcone went to jail.
Falcone is not unknown to Chirac -- or to his old rival, Mitterand. In fact, he is one of the central figures in one of those simmering French scandals that would destroy the regime in another country: the arms trafficing scandal that involved Mitterand's son, Jean-Christophe, and huge, unaccounted for sums, as well as a mafioso style Russian arms dealer, Arkadi Gaydamak.
This isn't a story we've seen covered in the NYT. It runs through Angola and traces the surprising fault lines of the New World Order. How new worldish it is can be gauged by what happened to Jonas Savimba.
In the old days -- the eighties -- Savimba was a right wing hero. Probably the only black man Jesse Helms ever willingly ate with, he was praised by Reagan as a George Washington type figure. His UNITA guerrillas were fed with American money, trained (as far as they had any training) by the CIA, and armed by the CIA, too.
But when the Soviet threat dissolved, Savimba was undone by the economic facts on the ground. Those facts were about oil. The suddenly capitalistic dos Santos could deliver the oil. Savimba, the loser of the first post-communist election, could only deliver his mad dog personality. And suddenly that personality wasn't in demand. The invites to the Helms house were on permanent hold. Savimba retires with his guys to the bocage, of course, and forays out to attack airliners, murder villagers, rape women, and do all the stuff that made him George Washington in the first place. Well, how inconvenient. So he is tracked down -- perhaps with American help -- and killed:
"Fifteen bullets in all -- one in the neck, two in the head, the others in the chest, legs and arms -- finally overcame the boss of UNITA, who is dead at 67 years of age, Friday at 3 p.m. on the banks of the Luvuie River at Moxico." So read the announcement of his unhappy death this February. Another old cold warrior bites the dust, gangster style."
The way American intelligence agencies leave their assets around -- Savimba in Angola, bin Laden in Afghanistan -- it is like some drunk Texas trucker throwing beer cans out the cab. Human litter, but somebody has to pick it up.
However, never let it be said that Savimba's less glorious years had no function or meaning. With UNITA threatening him, dos Santos, backed by various American petro-chemical companies, such as Dick Cheney's Haliburton, needed arms. The desire for arms and drugs is the only unlimited desire known to mankind. Luckily, in this world, an embattled dictator can always find somebody to sell him a few hundred million dollars worth of weaponry; this is where Falcone, with his buddy Gaydamak, and his connections with Chirac and his faithful friend, Jean-Christophe Mitterand, fits in. As does ( scumbags of the world display the most touching solidarity) Clinton's good friend, Marc Rich, the on the run moneybags whose company, Glencore, deals in oil.
Monday, June 17, 2002
Remora
Depth charges
We received, over the weekend, a heartening email from M. She responded to the criticism that LI is shallow and vapid -- the criticism we'd conveyed in a previous post, transmitted to us by the friend of a friend -- with the beautiful phrase, "you exceed the average depth by a very large measure."
That's a difficult compliment to live up to. Limited Inc has the distinct feeling, lately, that we are crawling on our belly. That we are approaching some terrible financial and social abyss in this prone and stupid position. That verbal facility is a death curse. That our desperation, stupidity, and a forked tongue are doing us in. That it is no accident that, reading Baudelaire's Journals, we keep getting that Ecce Homo feeling -- except that the man who is ecce is the man writing this sentence, a man who's shot his wad, the spent cracker, the layed off fool.
But trying to keep up our end, trying frankly to feel deep again, we searched for topics: And then we came across this interview with Rodolphe Gasch� in Eurozine, and we thought we'd begin the week with some tribute to Derrida -- after all, he's the step father of this misbegotten site -- he's named us.
When Limited Inc. was a mere snakelet of a graduate student in Philosophy, deconstruction was just building to its peak. This was back in the late eighties. The school was popular enough that, to our dismay, its terms began to take on alchemical overtones. Any resentful attack on politically correct targets became a deconstruction of them. Usually, the attack turned out to be some crude mixture of formalism and the most vulgar kind of Marxist reduction.
Well, at the time we thought there was a certain recognizable irony at work here. This happened with Leibnitz -- followed by the ever tedious Christian Wolf. This happened to Kant -- he was followed by the ever more mystical Schelling and Co. To propose a system is to be systematically misunderstood. And to propose an anti-system is to be immediately systematized. The clown follows the hero.
Begin with a philosophical technique that explained identity as the strategic disposition of forces within the text, and that futher extends to the term, text, a meaning which encompasses both the game of sense and the continual immersion of language in its material embodiment, and its eternal denial (ecriture begins with pronunciation, don't you know, and philosophy begins with a systematic recoil from that fact ). Then throw in a whole other thematic -- the politics of identity that is pointed to by the word phallogocentrism. And then sieve this through an academic class that is deeply conscious of its own economic and social displacement in the world, as universities become mere addenda to business schools. Mix, and you get the awful deconstructive "readings" that flourished in the eighties and nineties.
Gasche, who wrote a good book about Derrida, Tain of the Mirror, makes several moves in this interview that fill us with dismay for our side. First, he disses analytic philosophy. In response to the question of philosophy's existence in departments of literature (as in, what's a discipline like you doing in a place like this?) he responds:
"Undoubtedly, some departments of comparative literature, but certainly not all, have increasingly turned philosophical, with some including straightforward instruction in the discipline "philosophy." But I think it is safe to say that with some exceptions, of course, such instruction remains framed by the requirements and expectations specific to students whose main concerns are literary. I should add, however, that with the inclusion of a number of subspecialties in the literary curriculum such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and so forth, the spectrum of the issues that philosophy can and must address in comparative literature has expanded dramatically. With this, new opportunities have arisen for anchoring philosophy in comparative literature departments. Evidently, if the philosophy taught in these departments is 'continental' it is for good reasons. The students are literary students, and analytical philosophy has nothing to offer them."
Now, if we were feeling our deconstructive oats, we would make much of the exchange between analytic philosophy and these literary students. It is a null exchange -- "analytic philosophy has nothing to offer them." And it is an exchange based, apparently, on offers -- philosophy is offering a thing. The thing it is offering, it turns out, is absolute -- it is the thing itself. If continental philosophy can offer something to these students, it is also absolute -- it also offers all it has.
Limited inc believes the offer of the absolute is obviously a con. Ah, we could go on and on about the con of continental philosophy. Instead, we will go into normal speak, and protest, like the merchant of theory that we once aspired to be. Far from offering nothing, analytic philosophy can 'offer" the event -- the event thematized, the event as the moment in which analytic philosophy both breaks down and advances. Deconstruction joins analytic philosophy in that moment, joins as a disenchanted party. Deconstruction will no longer con the student - that is its promise.
But time marches on, and we realize that we have reached a point in this post where we have totally lost our audience. Nothing does it quicker than writing about philosophy. Sorry. One other long quote, however, from the Gasche article for the one person left who might actually be reading this sentence:
"The deconstructive literary criticism that I targeted in "Deconstruction and Criticism," and which critique also frames my exposition of Derrida's thought in The Tain of the Mirror, rests, or rather rested, on the assumption that the literary text is constituted by an integral, and flawless, mirror play on all levels of the text ranging from the thematic to the one of the signifier. The critical operation of bringing the text's self-reflection to light, this is what this criticism understood by deconstruction. No doubt the Yale School and its disciples were the prime representative of this conception of literariness. However, and ironically, de Man, many of whose students adopted the deconstructive literary theory, does not easily - rather, does not fit at all - into this scheme, as I have argued in my last book. But the Yale School was not the only spokesman for this approach to the literary text. Deconstructive literary criticism was a much broader phenomenon, it diffused easily, whether as the result of a progressive dilution of the tenets of the Yale School, or as the specific form in which New Criticism became capable of survival. From my criticism of deconstructive literary criticism it is clear that I do not buy its conception of the text, nor its understanding of the task of criticism. It is a reductive approach to textuality. But in order to demonstrate that any literary text worth the name, achieves full, all inclusive specularity, this kind of criticism had to draw on aspects of language - established by linguistics, semiotics, and pragmatics - neglected by the traditional thematic, humanist, historical criticisms, but also formalist poetics. Its objections against the traditional modes of criticisms are well founded, and need to be recognised as such. In many ways, deconstructive literary criticism had a sobering effect on literary studies. I would add, however, that deconstruction in literary studies based itself on a conception of the text that is as narrow, and as questionable as the ones at the foundation of the more traditional conceptions of criticism. Let me explain myself. Since what counts in deconstructive literary criticism is the demonstration that in a text everything mirrors everything, and, hence, that no single position, statement, theme, or truth, can prevail, its criticism of other positions is limited to the accusation of disregarding certain aspects of the text which when brought into play, would debunk the claims made by singling out one of its items, or levels. Its conception of the text is speculative in essence even though the absolute speculation that animates it, serves to demonstrate that there is no absolute knowledge."
Ah, with what feelings of luxury I once plunged into this kind of argument! The delirium of all the brave young grad students! and their subsequent detoxification, drying out in every college and junior college and land grant U. from here to Bakersfield, California! And how the world goes on!
Depth charges
We received, over the weekend, a heartening email from M. She responded to the criticism that LI is shallow and vapid -- the criticism we'd conveyed in a previous post, transmitted to us by the friend of a friend -- with the beautiful phrase, "you exceed the average depth by a very large measure."
That's a difficult compliment to live up to. Limited Inc has the distinct feeling, lately, that we are crawling on our belly. That we are approaching some terrible financial and social abyss in this prone and stupid position. That verbal facility is a death curse. That our desperation, stupidity, and a forked tongue are doing us in. That it is no accident that, reading Baudelaire's Journals, we keep getting that Ecce Homo feeling -- except that the man who is ecce is the man writing this sentence, a man who's shot his wad, the spent cracker, the layed off fool.
But trying to keep up our end, trying frankly to feel deep again, we searched for topics: And then we came across this interview with Rodolphe Gasch� in Eurozine, and we thought we'd begin the week with some tribute to Derrida -- after all, he's the step father of this misbegotten site -- he's named us.
When Limited Inc. was a mere snakelet of a graduate student in Philosophy, deconstruction was just building to its peak. This was back in the late eighties. The school was popular enough that, to our dismay, its terms began to take on alchemical overtones. Any resentful attack on politically correct targets became a deconstruction of them. Usually, the attack turned out to be some crude mixture of formalism and the most vulgar kind of Marxist reduction.
Well, at the time we thought there was a certain recognizable irony at work here. This happened with Leibnitz -- followed by the ever tedious Christian Wolf. This happened to Kant -- he was followed by the ever more mystical Schelling and Co. To propose a system is to be systematically misunderstood. And to propose an anti-system is to be immediately systematized. The clown follows the hero.
Begin with a philosophical technique that explained identity as the strategic disposition of forces within the text, and that futher extends to the term, text, a meaning which encompasses both the game of sense and the continual immersion of language in its material embodiment, and its eternal denial (ecriture begins with pronunciation, don't you know, and philosophy begins with a systematic recoil from that fact ). Then throw in a whole other thematic -- the politics of identity that is pointed to by the word phallogocentrism. And then sieve this through an academic class that is deeply conscious of its own economic and social displacement in the world, as universities become mere addenda to business schools. Mix, and you get the awful deconstructive "readings" that flourished in the eighties and nineties.
Gasche, who wrote a good book about Derrida, Tain of the Mirror, makes several moves in this interview that fill us with dismay for our side. First, he disses analytic philosophy. In response to the question of philosophy's existence in departments of literature (as in, what's a discipline like you doing in a place like this?) he responds:
"Undoubtedly, some departments of comparative literature, but certainly not all, have increasingly turned philosophical, with some including straightforward instruction in the discipline "philosophy." But I think it is safe to say that with some exceptions, of course, such instruction remains framed by the requirements and expectations specific to students whose main concerns are literary. I should add, however, that with the inclusion of a number of subspecialties in the literary curriculum such as gender studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and so forth, the spectrum of the issues that philosophy can and must address in comparative literature has expanded dramatically. With this, new opportunities have arisen for anchoring philosophy in comparative literature departments. Evidently, if the philosophy taught in these departments is 'continental' it is for good reasons. The students are literary students, and analytical philosophy has nothing to offer them."
Now, if we were feeling our deconstructive oats, we would make much of the exchange between analytic philosophy and these literary students. It is a null exchange -- "analytic philosophy has nothing to offer them." And it is an exchange based, apparently, on offers -- philosophy is offering a thing. The thing it is offering, it turns out, is absolute -- it is the thing itself. If continental philosophy can offer something to these students, it is also absolute -- it also offers all it has.
Limited inc believes the offer of the absolute is obviously a con. Ah, we could go on and on about the con of continental philosophy. Instead, we will go into normal speak, and protest, like the merchant of theory that we once aspired to be. Far from offering nothing, analytic philosophy can 'offer" the event -- the event thematized, the event as the moment in which analytic philosophy both breaks down and advances. Deconstruction joins analytic philosophy in that moment, joins as a disenchanted party. Deconstruction will no longer con the student - that is its promise.
But time marches on, and we realize that we have reached a point in this post where we have totally lost our audience. Nothing does it quicker than writing about philosophy. Sorry. One other long quote, however, from the Gasche article for the one person left who might actually be reading this sentence:
"The deconstructive literary criticism that I targeted in "Deconstruction and Criticism," and which critique also frames my exposition of Derrida's thought in The Tain of the Mirror, rests, or rather rested, on the assumption that the literary text is constituted by an integral, and flawless, mirror play on all levels of the text ranging from the thematic to the one of the signifier. The critical operation of bringing the text's self-reflection to light, this is what this criticism understood by deconstruction. No doubt the Yale School and its disciples were the prime representative of this conception of literariness. However, and ironically, de Man, many of whose students adopted the deconstructive literary theory, does not easily - rather, does not fit at all - into this scheme, as I have argued in my last book. But the Yale School was not the only spokesman for this approach to the literary text. Deconstructive literary criticism was a much broader phenomenon, it diffused easily, whether as the result of a progressive dilution of the tenets of the Yale School, or as the specific form in which New Criticism became capable of survival. From my criticism of deconstructive literary criticism it is clear that I do not buy its conception of the text, nor its understanding of the task of criticism. It is a reductive approach to textuality. But in order to demonstrate that any literary text worth the name, achieves full, all inclusive specularity, this kind of criticism had to draw on aspects of language - established by linguistics, semiotics, and pragmatics - neglected by the traditional thematic, humanist, historical criticisms, but also formalist poetics. Its objections against the traditional modes of criticisms are well founded, and need to be recognised as such. In many ways, deconstructive literary criticism had a sobering effect on literary studies. I would add, however, that deconstruction in literary studies based itself on a conception of the text that is as narrow, and as questionable as the ones at the foundation of the more traditional conceptions of criticism. Let me explain myself. Since what counts in deconstructive literary criticism is the demonstration that in a text everything mirrors everything, and, hence, that no single position, statement, theme, or truth, can prevail, its criticism of other positions is limited to the accusation of disregarding certain aspects of the text which when brought into play, would debunk the claims made by singling out one of its items, or levels. Its conception of the text is speculative in essence even though the absolute speculation that animates it, serves to demonstrate that there is no absolute knowledge."
Ah, with what feelings of luxury I once plunged into this kind of argument! The delirium of all the brave young grad students! and their subsequent detoxification, drying out in every college and junior college and land grant U. from here to Bakersfield, California! And how the world goes on!
Thursday, June 13, 2002
Remora
The exchange between Annie Applebaum and the always odious Strobe Talbott in Slate is a little treasure trove of Clintonia -- remember that magic time when the White House was inviting crooked Chinese and Indonesian money into the coffers of the Democratic Party, while palling around with the Mafia, uh, I mean government of Boris Yeltsin and his shifty-fingered ilk?
Applebaum is less scoriating on this subject than I'd like her to be, but she does put the bite on Strobe's Gray Flannel trousers act. Here's a nice graf:
You are arguing, essentially, that in order to destroy something bad (communism), we had to let something less bad (oligarchic noncapitalism) grow in its place. Well, maybe we didn't have much influence over this change anyway (despite the fact that U.S. policy�and U.S. rhetoric�often implied that we did).
Yet you are also arguing that it was OK for us to give our tacit approval to this change because we got some political concessions in exchange. Here I disagree: I would argue that Russia made most of the political concessions (agreeing to NATO expansion, getting troops out of the Baltics) because it is weak and because it had no other choice, not because Yeltsin and Clinton were friends. We didn't have to look on, smiling, while a handful of people stole the Soviet Union's assets, and we didn't have to lend the Russian government the money that it was no longer able to collect in taxes and oil revenue.
To my mind, the crucial thing is to stop thinking about Russia as exceptional and to stop treating the country as if it were always a special case. In the 1990s, the IMF created special loans, just for Russia, with special rules�thanks, largely, to political pressure from the United States. Instead of that, we should offer Russia fair rules, free trade�that is, not make up reasons to exclude Russian products�and insist that Russia join the WTO on the same terms as anybody else. Loans to Russia should be made on the same terms that loans are made to Bolivia. Russia should be allowed to remain a member of the Council of Europe only if it abides by the Council of Europe's rules, which means no human rights abuses in Chechnya.
Strobey gets a bit ruffled by the barking and biting. He brings out, as our ace in the hole, Gore's friendship with Chermonydryn:
"Go back and take a look at the sections in the book (at the end of Chapter 2, for example) on what we did, through technical assistance and exchange programs, to promote civil society. This was also a major theme of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission�which I believe would have accomplished a lot more if Chernomyrdin had lasted longer (but that gets me into the tricky territory of counterfactual history, and we've got our work cut out for us on the solid ground of the factual)."
Yes, I bet Chernoblyn wishes he'd lasted longer too -- he was making out like a bandit. Here's an old NYT story about Strobe's buddy:
"When the CIA uncovered what its analysts considered to be conclusive evidence of the personal corruption of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia in 1995, they sent it to the White House, expecting Clinton administration officials to be impressed with their work," reports James Risen of the New York Times. "Instead, when the secret CIA report on Chernomyrdin arrived in the office of Vice President Al Gore, it was rejected and sent back to the CIA with a barnyard epithet scrawled across its cover, according to several intelligence officials familiar with the incident."
"At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.," Risen continues, "the message seemed clear: The vice president did not want to hear allegations that Chernomyrdin was corrupt and was not interested in further intelligence reports on the matter. As a result, CIA analysts say they are now censoring themselves. When, for instance, the agency found that it cost a German business executive $1 million just to get a meeting with Chernomyrdin to discuss deals in Russia, it decided not to circulate the report outside the CIA, officials said."
But Chernobobin found soul mates at the Clinton White House, no doubt about that. Here's a background report by Ann Williamson that goes back to the voucher program (a Bush senior era program that was sanctified by all the free enterprising poobahs, and that was evidently an invitation to corruption) and up to the stropping up of the always drunk Yeltsin as a viable candidate for capitan of the Titanic in 1995. Williamson includes such gloriously tawdry details of the Clinton Administration's dealings with Yeltsin as the Tyson factor:
"Following the Russian Communists� success in the December 1995 parliamentary elections, the Fund proceeded into even dodgier territory with the 1996 $10.2 billion loan, which came front-loaded with a billion dollars meant for Yeltsin�s re-election. Tape recordings of conversations between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin made public demonstrate that in return longtime Clinton supporter and campaign donor Tyson Chicken�s exports to Russia � a $700 million annual business � were protected from a threatened 20 percent tariff increase."
In the words of my favorite punk Asian american duo, Cibo Matto:
I know my chicken...
Or -- I'm still glad I voted for Nader.
The exchange between Annie Applebaum and the always odious Strobe Talbott in Slate is a little treasure trove of Clintonia -- remember that magic time when the White House was inviting crooked Chinese and Indonesian money into the coffers of the Democratic Party, while palling around with the Mafia, uh, I mean government of Boris Yeltsin and his shifty-fingered ilk?
Applebaum is less scoriating on this subject than I'd like her to be, but she does put the bite on Strobe's Gray Flannel trousers act. Here's a nice graf:
You are arguing, essentially, that in order to destroy something bad (communism), we had to let something less bad (oligarchic noncapitalism) grow in its place. Well, maybe we didn't have much influence over this change anyway (despite the fact that U.S. policy�and U.S. rhetoric�often implied that we did).
Yet you are also arguing that it was OK for us to give our tacit approval to this change because we got some political concessions in exchange. Here I disagree: I would argue that Russia made most of the political concessions (agreeing to NATO expansion, getting troops out of the Baltics) because it is weak and because it had no other choice, not because Yeltsin and Clinton were friends. We didn't have to look on, smiling, while a handful of people stole the Soviet Union's assets, and we didn't have to lend the Russian government the money that it was no longer able to collect in taxes and oil revenue.
To my mind, the crucial thing is to stop thinking about Russia as exceptional and to stop treating the country as if it were always a special case. In the 1990s, the IMF created special loans, just for Russia, with special rules�thanks, largely, to political pressure from the United States. Instead of that, we should offer Russia fair rules, free trade�that is, not make up reasons to exclude Russian products�and insist that Russia join the WTO on the same terms as anybody else. Loans to Russia should be made on the same terms that loans are made to Bolivia. Russia should be allowed to remain a member of the Council of Europe only if it abides by the Council of Europe's rules, which means no human rights abuses in Chechnya.
Strobey gets a bit ruffled by the barking and biting. He brings out, as our ace in the hole, Gore's friendship with Chermonydryn:
"Go back and take a look at the sections in the book (at the end of Chapter 2, for example) on what we did, through technical assistance and exchange programs, to promote civil society. This was also a major theme of the Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission�which I believe would have accomplished a lot more if Chernomyrdin had lasted longer (but that gets me into the tricky territory of counterfactual history, and we've got our work cut out for us on the solid ground of the factual)."
Yes, I bet Chernoblyn wishes he'd lasted longer too -- he was making out like a bandit. Here's an old NYT story about Strobe's buddy:
"When the CIA uncovered what its analysts considered to be conclusive evidence of the personal corruption of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin of Russia in 1995, they sent it to the White House, expecting Clinton administration officials to be impressed with their work," reports James Risen of the New York Times. "Instead, when the secret CIA report on Chernomyrdin arrived in the office of Vice President Al Gore, it was rejected and sent back to the CIA with a barnyard epithet scrawled across its cover, according to several intelligence officials familiar with the incident."
"At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.," Risen continues, "the message seemed clear: The vice president did not want to hear allegations that Chernomyrdin was corrupt and was not interested in further intelligence reports on the matter. As a result, CIA analysts say they are now censoring themselves. When, for instance, the agency found that it cost a German business executive $1 million just to get a meeting with Chernomyrdin to discuss deals in Russia, it decided not to circulate the report outside the CIA, officials said."
But Chernobobin found soul mates at the Clinton White House, no doubt about that. Here's a background report by Ann Williamson that goes back to the voucher program (a Bush senior era program that was sanctified by all the free enterprising poobahs, and that was evidently an invitation to corruption) and up to the stropping up of the always drunk Yeltsin as a viable candidate for capitan of the Titanic in 1995. Williamson includes such gloriously tawdry details of the Clinton Administration's dealings with Yeltsin as the Tyson factor:
"Following the Russian Communists� success in the December 1995 parliamentary elections, the Fund proceeded into even dodgier territory with the 1996 $10.2 billion loan, which came front-loaded with a billion dollars meant for Yeltsin�s re-election. Tape recordings of conversations between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Yeltsin made public demonstrate that in return longtime Clinton supporter and campaign donor Tyson Chicken�s exports to Russia � a $700 million annual business � were protected from a threatened 20 percent tariff increase."
In the words of my favorite punk Asian american duo, Cibo Matto:
I know my chicken...
Or -- I'm still glad I voted for Nader.
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