Remora
Remora
LI is surprised, this morning, that the Bush administration came through on an old American promise, and released documents on the 1970s Terror in Argentina.
LI has no doubt they were sifted to remove various inconvenient names -- such as Kissinger's -- but it is one of the few applaudable American actions of the past couple of months. Here are two grafs:
"One embassy dispatch, for example, cites an Argentine source who says that captured leftist fighters, known as Montoneros, were all dealt with in the same way, through "torture and summary execution."
"The security forces neither trust nor know how to use legal solutions," the dispatch quotes the source as saying. "The present methods are easier and more familiar."
Now, LI has always thought that the great mystery of the Argentina terror was whether the Monteneros weren't ultimately led by an agent provacateur. This is the thesis put forth in a great book of political reportage, "Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth of the "Dirty War," by Martin Edward Anderson. The leader of the Monteneros, the sinister Mario Firmenich, survived the military repression, and is now, we believe, languishing in jail, an odd scapegoat in the accord that basically allowed the fascist apparat in Argentina to escape, unscathed, with its crimes. According to Jorge Castaneda's history of the Latin American left, the money accrued by the Montonero's policy of systematic kidnapping went to Cuba, and thence to the Sandinistas, with Castro acting as a broker. There's a strange parallel in the course of action taken by the right and left in Argentina, with the right proceeding to install a cocaine-ish military regime in Bolivia and aiding the Contras with weapons and training, and the left helping the Sandinistas even up to training their secret police. Meanwhile, in Argentina, the guerrillas proudly proclaimed their responsibility for acts of violence some of which they certainly did not commit. Firminich seemed to have a passion for the planning and committing of acts that were, from the perspective of either damaging the regime or rousing the people, so grossly misplanned, and so criminal, that they seem congruent with the military's own on-going effort to legitimate its counter-terror to the population. And that population, of course, went about its business purposely not noticing the disapppearance of this or that person, or the body parts washing up on the banks of the La Plata. For what was special about Argentina was that the crimes were known as they were being committed.
Moral is, of course, don't think that the good middle class will necessarily rise up in revolt if some of its sons and daughters, and many of its troublemakers, are bloodied. In fact, in the U.S., how many have risen up, so far, and asked questions about the illegal detention of at least a thousand people since 9/11? Count em on your fingers. This is not even an issue going into the November election. And if these arabic named guys and gals disappear, does anybody imagine the American population drawing back in revulsion?
Now, Anderson's thesis would be absurd in the world as it is portrayed in your average daily paper. That is the newspaper, by the way, that publishes, with the utmost credulity, scare stories fomented by the Attorney General's office about the capture of terrorists with dirty bombs in the A section -- and publishes retractions of those stories months later, in the C section, if at all. But the figure of the agent provocateur is all too common in the political netherworld -- as Joseph Conrad shows in Under Western Eyes. And in Argentina, the idea that the Montonero high command could have been working on an agenda that converged with the military agenda has floated around for some time. In a memorial notice to the great Argentina journalist Rudolfo Walsh, a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald recently discussed the possibility that his ambush and assassination was a set-up:
"At the moment of his death, Walsh, disguised as an old-age pensioner, was on his way to a meeting with Jos� Salgado, the Montonero and police officer who - in July 1976 - placed in the Central Police Department the bomb which killed 20 policemen and maimed some 60 others. Strangely enough, Walsh - who was a high-ranking member of Montoneros intelligence - did not know on that fatal morning Salgado had been captured months previously, tortured beyond recognition and executed. In other words Rodolfo Walsh was set up by his own Montoneros whose leadership may have been working with and for the armed forces. The point has never been clarified, but there can be no doubt some terrorists were serving both masters and not everyone was as committed to their ideals as Rodolfo Walsh was."
That Walsh, a moralist in the tradition of Kraus and Peguy, and a journalist in the mould of Seymor Hersch, could countenance Salgado, tells us something about the state of terror then existing. Walsh's daughter, incidentally, was killed in a shootout with the cops the year before Walsh was bushwacked. Walsh's career is not known in the U.S. -- he hasn't been translated -- so for our American readers, here's a summary of his career:
"He is credited with being the father of investigative journalism in Argentina. In 1957 he published Operaci�n Masacre - based on an interview with a survivor - which tells the real story of how a group of 34 men, most of whom had no connection with a recent revolt against the Aramburu dictatorship, were taken to a garbage dump in Jos� Le�n Su�rez, a suburb of Buenos Aires, and summarily executed in a hail of machine gun fire. "All Peronists", said Per�n, "are indebted to the author of Operaci�n Masacre", but Walsh was now a marked man and anonymous death threats became part of his life.
"In 1969 he published �Qui�n Mat� a Rosendo? which tells how trade-unionist, Rosendo Garc�a, died in an Avellaneda pizzeria in a shoot-out between rival unionists, Raimundo Ongaro and Augusto �Wolf� Vandor (2). In 1973 he published �El Caso Satanovsky� which tells the sordid tale of the murder of a leading lawyer who was litigating against the military government. None of these cases were ever solved and Rodolfo Walsh became an unpopular name for many powerful people for having investigated them."
LI wonders whether the full story of what happened in the seventies in Latin America will ever be uncovered. But certain things can be uncovered by the determined individual investigator. Although I could not find a photo of Jose Salgado, I did find a picture of a kid -- Alfredo Daniel Salgado -- whose clear and present danger to the State was snuffed, no doubt by an airplane trip, or the bloody necessity of torture. The Sinolvido site, by the way, contains photos of 3,000 of the disappeared. The high school album.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Dope
LI is not posting like it used to because LI doesn't have a computer like we used to.
Instead, we are being ground to death by computer service places, who are supposedly saving the stuff we've written over the last four years.
Okay?
Sunday, LI watched Dona Flor and her two husbands with a friend, S. S. said she'd never seen it, and we thought she'd like it -- S. likes bawdy comedy. Hell, S. likes mere lechery on film, if it is done right, as any right thinking person should. Cinema has added immeasurably to the human sex life, I would imagine, but this is one of the unsung triumphs of the Arts and Sciences.
So we watched the video. LI had last seen the film many presidents ago -- in the Prytania Theater, in New Orleans. Watching a film you liked at one point in your life is sometimes a tricky proposition -- the bogus stretches that, somehow, you didn't see on first viewing stick out, and the clever bits seem less clever than sophomoric. Still, we like the divine Sonia Braga, still young, and as yet not totally advanced on her career as Brazil's answer to ... to whoever that actress was who played in the Emmanuel Films. We liked the music. No, we loved the music, still. The first husband. The Flaubertian business with the ineffably repulsive second husband, poor guy, a pharmacist of sterling character and an absolute sexual blank. This time, it was clearer that the film was referring to the novel it came out of -- in the same way the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the whole of ancient literature, seen peaking through their flaws and flippancy.
LI hates to admit this -- one of our Brazilian readers, in particular, will raise holy hell with us, we know -- but we haven't read the Amado book. In fact, we have somehow acquired this snobbish sense about Amado, that he is the Brazilian equivalent of Isabel Allende -- a writer for tourists only. But there were numerous touches in the film that implied some rich novelistic subtext over and above the merely picayune. So today we dutifully went out and found the novel, and plan on reading it.
We aren't the only ones to have this sense about Amado. His death last year was obituarized in the Guardian in ambiguous terms. After making the traditional distinction between the first phase and the second phase of Amado's career, with the first phase being serious and the second being, uh, carnival-esque, Sue Branford and David Treece write:
"By then Amado was changing the way he wrote. He had become critical of his early novels for being "too serious, too ideological, too full of rage", and became convinced that the most effective way of dealing with political enemies was to laugh at them. He had by then read the Russian critic, MM Bakhtin, who was an exponent of what he called "the subversive power of comedy". Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, with its potential to upset the hierarchies of power and turn the world upside down, had a particular relevance for Brazil, where each year the keys of cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, are handed to Rei Momo (the king of carnival) for three days of riotous living.
This perspective came to define the second major phase of Amado's writing, beginning with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (1958, Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon), but it was not without its problems. The earlier dramas of social conflict, class consciousness and collective change gave way to the carnival of cultural and ethnic promiscuity, the celebration of diversity in the indiscriminate infusion of the melting-pot. The post-war novels tended increasingly towards a formulaic recipe whose typical ingredients - the white plantation baron, the black rural worker, the tropical landscape and the mulatta seductress - were tempered with the spices of sex and magic. The result was a dish which all too easily corresponded to official Brazilian and international expectations of a prepackaged, stereotypical image of an exotic third world culture able to dance, sing and love its way out of its misery.
Fiction here became the playground in which Brazil's vast contradictions could be subverted without overflowing the constraints of individual rebellion, just as the shortlived revelry of carnival is circumscribed by the realities of the wider world, and order is ultimately restored as everyone returns home on Ash Wednesday. Amado's solution to the problem of racism - that whites and blacks should simply go to bed together - similarly failed to address the fact that a centuries-old history of miscegenation, while contributing much to the myth of a Brazilian "racial democracy", has not in any way diminished the country's profoundly racist structures. The celebration of cultural promiscuity is, instead, a recipe for a complacent resignation to the impossibility of radical social reform, which doubtless explains why Amado's work has become the centrepiece of Brazilian cultural diplomacy."
This is an example of that very British art of turning up your nose at the gaucheries of the dearly departed. We looked around for criticism of Amado that was a bit more in depth, and discovered that Dona Flor is a much book clubbed novel. We also found an outpouring of bile on the subject of Amado by one Janer Cristaldo that must hold a 20th century record for insults thrown at a man of letters. Cristaldo accuses Amado of being a Nazi, a Communist, and a tool of multi-national Capitalism. I mean, the man is in blood up to his elbows, according to Cristaldo, who has, to say the least, a spotty sense of the repressiveness of Brazilian governments.
But still -- Communist, Nazi, Capitalist Pig -- this is the kind of triple denunciation action LI envies. Although we try hard, so far, we have remained undenounced on the Web. A year of this, and nobody has accused us of rampant anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, Chomskian lunacy, phallogocentrism, nor nothin'. It discourages a man. We must be doing something wrong.
LI is not posting like it used to because LI doesn't have a computer like we used to.
Instead, we are being ground to death by computer service places, who are supposedly saving the stuff we've written over the last four years.
Okay?
Sunday, LI watched Dona Flor and her two husbands with a friend, S. S. said she'd never seen it, and we thought she'd like it -- S. likes bawdy comedy. Hell, S. likes mere lechery on film, if it is done right, as any right thinking person should. Cinema has added immeasurably to the human sex life, I would imagine, but this is one of the unsung triumphs of the Arts and Sciences.
So we watched the video. LI had last seen the film many presidents ago -- in the Prytania Theater, in New Orleans. Watching a film you liked at one point in your life is sometimes a tricky proposition -- the bogus stretches that, somehow, you didn't see on first viewing stick out, and the clever bits seem less clever than sophomoric. Still, we like the divine Sonia Braga, still young, and as yet not totally advanced on her career as Brazil's answer to ... to whoever that actress was who played in the Emmanuel Films. We liked the music. No, we loved the music, still. The first husband. The Flaubertian business with the ineffably repulsive second husband, poor guy, a pharmacist of sterling character and an absolute sexual blank. This time, it was clearer that the film was referring to the novel it came out of -- in the same way the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream refer to the whole of ancient literature, seen peaking through their flaws and flippancy.
LI hates to admit this -- one of our Brazilian readers, in particular, will raise holy hell with us, we know -- but we haven't read the Amado book. In fact, we have somehow acquired this snobbish sense about Amado, that he is the Brazilian equivalent of Isabel Allende -- a writer for tourists only. But there were numerous touches in the film that implied some rich novelistic subtext over and above the merely picayune. So today we dutifully went out and found the novel, and plan on reading it.
We aren't the only ones to have this sense about Amado. His death last year was obituarized in the Guardian in ambiguous terms. After making the traditional distinction between the first phase and the second phase of Amado's career, with the first phase being serious and the second being, uh, carnival-esque, Sue Branford and David Treece write:
"By then Amado was changing the way he wrote. He had become critical of his early novels for being "too serious, too ideological, too full of rage", and became convinced that the most effective way of dealing with political enemies was to laugh at them. He had by then read the Russian critic, MM Bakhtin, who was an exponent of what he called "the subversive power of comedy". Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, with its potential to upset the hierarchies of power and turn the world upside down, had a particular relevance for Brazil, where each year the keys of cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, are handed to Rei Momo (the king of carnival) for three days of riotous living.
This perspective came to define the second major phase of Amado's writing, beginning with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela (1958, Gabriella, Clove and Cinnamon), but it was not without its problems. The earlier dramas of social conflict, class consciousness and collective change gave way to the carnival of cultural and ethnic promiscuity, the celebration of diversity in the indiscriminate infusion of the melting-pot. The post-war novels tended increasingly towards a formulaic recipe whose typical ingredients - the white plantation baron, the black rural worker, the tropical landscape and the mulatta seductress - were tempered with the spices of sex and magic. The result was a dish which all too easily corresponded to official Brazilian and international expectations of a prepackaged, stereotypical image of an exotic third world culture able to dance, sing and love its way out of its misery.
Fiction here became the playground in which Brazil's vast contradictions could be subverted without overflowing the constraints of individual rebellion, just as the shortlived revelry of carnival is circumscribed by the realities of the wider world, and order is ultimately restored as everyone returns home on Ash Wednesday. Amado's solution to the problem of racism - that whites and blacks should simply go to bed together - similarly failed to address the fact that a centuries-old history of miscegenation, while contributing much to the myth of a Brazilian "racial democracy", has not in any way diminished the country's profoundly racist structures. The celebration of cultural promiscuity is, instead, a recipe for a complacent resignation to the impossibility of radical social reform, which doubtless explains why Amado's work has become the centrepiece of Brazilian cultural diplomacy."
This is an example of that very British art of turning up your nose at the gaucheries of the dearly departed. We looked around for criticism of Amado that was a bit more in depth, and discovered that Dona Flor is a much book clubbed novel. We also found an outpouring of bile on the subject of Amado by one Janer Cristaldo that must hold a 20th century record for insults thrown at a man of letters. Cristaldo accuses Amado of being a Nazi, a Communist, and a tool of multi-national Capitalism. I mean, the man is in blood up to his elbows, according to Cristaldo, who has, to say the least, a spotty sense of the repressiveness of Brazilian governments.
But still -- Communist, Nazi, Capitalist Pig -- this is the kind of triple denunciation action LI envies. Although we try hard, so far, we have remained undenounced on the Web. A year of this, and nobody has accused us of rampant anti-Americanism, anti-semitism, Chomskian lunacy, phallogocentrism, nor nothin'. It discourages a man. We must be doing something wrong.
Friday, August 16, 2002
Dope
LI heard from an old friend the other day, Tom S. Tom, it appears, is coming to Austin and wants to see his old drinking buddy. We immediately became soggy from nostalgia.
It was, what, twelve years ago? Fifteen? Yes, LI was as thin as a malnourished radish, an outlier in the U.T. Philosophy department. We had already decided that the academic life wasn�t for us. Or the academic life had made that decision � kicked out or quit, life�s eternal question, no? Our friend Janet Flesch, who was also in the department, was teaching an advanced philo class, and Tom was one of her students, which is how we met.
There�s that wonderful phrase of Goethe�s: elective affinities. Friendship is about alchemistry, the obscure movement of sensibilities, and the metallic symbols thereof. Right. The transmutations of base metals. Nietzsche and alcohol.
There is a certain personality that receives Nietzsche like evolution received that comet 65 million years ago � he gets rid of everything clumsy that has been crawling around, fearsome and stupid, on the planet of one�s life. LI admits, without shame, to that impact. We think Tom was undergoing something similar. Now, back then, LI was quite a sharp talker when it came to the Gotterdammerung. On the other hand, as much as we liked to drink, we were saddled with the above mentioned malnourished radish frame. We were 29, 30, and weighed 130 � and we�ve put on, on a good day, when we are soaking wet, at least ten pounds since then. So we would sit with Tom and his friends in a bar that, at the time, the University of Texas was kind enough to offer its over 21 year old students. A bar that is gone with the wind, assisted by the Puritanism of the Texas legislature, nowadays. We would drink until we were swimming on dry land. Then, in a haze in which we could actually see light make that transition from particle to wave and back � light was doing this all around us, it was actually getting to be a drag -- we would say goodbye to Tom�s table and try to make it out of the building. Usually at this point the architectural peculiarity of the building intervened � it was designed to become a maze for visionaries and drunk people, leading them to the nearest convenient bathroom. There we would stay, evacuating, at intervals, unnecessary nourishment in some beautiful stall, with informative graffiti about ethnic groups, available women, and the sexual derring do of various fraternities, all that oral ministration to random penises, illustrated with magic marker, until a university cop would knock on the door of the stall, gallantry offering assistance.
A golden age. Ah yes, I remember it welllll�
LI heard from an old friend the other day, Tom S. Tom, it appears, is coming to Austin and wants to see his old drinking buddy. We immediately became soggy from nostalgia.
It was, what, twelve years ago? Fifteen? Yes, LI was as thin as a malnourished radish, an outlier in the U.T. Philosophy department. We had already decided that the academic life wasn�t for us. Or the academic life had made that decision � kicked out or quit, life�s eternal question, no? Our friend Janet Flesch, who was also in the department, was teaching an advanced philo class, and Tom was one of her students, which is how we met.
There�s that wonderful phrase of Goethe�s: elective affinities. Friendship is about alchemistry, the obscure movement of sensibilities, and the metallic symbols thereof. Right. The transmutations of base metals. Nietzsche and alcohol.
There is a certain personality that receives Nietzsche like evolution received that comet 65 million years ago � he gets rid of everything clumsy that has been crawling around, fearsome and stupid, on the planet of one�s life. LI admits, without shame, to that impact. We think Tom was undergoing something similar. Now, back then, LI was quite a sharp talker when it came to the Gotterdammerung. On the other hand, as much as we liked to drink, we were saddled with the above mentioned malnourished radish frame. We were 29, 30, and weighed 130 � and we�ve put on, on a good day, when we are soaking wet, at least ten pounds since then. So we would sit with Tom and his friends in a bar that, at the time, the University of Texas was kind enough to offer its over 21 year old students. A bar that is gone with the wind, assisted by the Puritanism of the Texas legislature, nowadays. We would drink until we were swimming on dry land. Then, in a haze in which we could actually see light make that transition from particle to wave and back � light was doing this all around us, it was actually getting to be a drag -- we would say goodbye to Tom�s table and try to make it out of the building. Usually at this point the architectural peculiarity of the building intervened � it was designed to become a maze for visionaries and drunk people, leading them to the nearest convenient bathroom. There we would stay, evacuating, at intervals, unnecessary nourishment in some beautiful stall, with informative graffiti about ethnic groups, available women, and the sexual derring do of various fraternities, all that oral ministration to random penises, illustrated with magic marker, until a university cop would knock on the door of the stall, gallantry offering assistance.
A golden age. Ah yes, I remember it welllll�
Thursday, August 15, 2002
Remora
Time and Western Man, or Amis and his buddies
When LI sees a fly, we never grab a flyswatter; we grab an Uzi...
Or so it might seem to the always patient readers of this post. Our last post, you'll remember, started out as a scolding of Martin Amis' latest book, and then detoured, radically, through Russell's paradox of George IV and the author of Waverly.
It occured to us, after we posted our mini-treatise, that the effect of the paradox might be blunted for the contemporary reader who does not know that Walter Scott published Waverly anonymously. The resulting publicity was much like that gained by Primary Colors, which was published anonymously, and generated enough controversy that the author of it became a public issue. So one can update Russell's paradox cleverly enough this way: Bill Clinton wished to know if Joe Klein is the author of Primary Colors.
In any case, we've seen Russell's solution to his puzzle involves reforming the logical structure of description in conformity with the requirements of the truth function.
LI had an un-Russellian reason for going through Russell's paradox. The context that fills in the variable of signification, from Russell's example, has a before and after structure. It is, in other words, historical.
Now, like many English philosophers, Russell wasn't comfortable with time. He preferred to eliminate time as a determinant in the work of logical analysis. A good essay from the same era as Russell's "On Denoting" is available on the web: McTaggart's The Unreality of Time, which was published in Mind in 1908. LI can't resist alluding to McTaggart's argument -- one by which he proves the objective non-existence of time (and incidentally, announces a view of events that will later be developed by Donald Davidson). The argument is that there are two series that can be extracted from the prima facie view of time:
"Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past."
McTaggart calls the series of earlier and later the B series, and the Past Present Future series the A series. In the B series, given an event (for McTaggart, the fundamental elements of the two series), it's description, with relation to another event, will always be described as earlier or later. But in the A series, oddly enough, all three descriptions will apply. At one point an event will be present, at another point it will be future, and at one point it will be past.
McTaggart throws in another characteristic of time -- he connects it to change. A world in which nothing , including thought, changed, would, McTaggart claims, be timeless. What this means is that time is being treated two ways in McTaggarts essay -- both as a metric and as a content. His contention, really, is that time, insofar as it is a metric, is a formal device, not an objective property of reality:
Take any event -- the death of Queen Anne, for example -- and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects -- every characteristic of this sort never changes. "Before the stars saw one another plain" the event in question was a death of an English Queen. At the last moment of time -- if time has a last moment -- the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Thus we seen forced to the conclusion that all change is only a change of the characteristics imparted to events by their presence in the A series, whether those characteristics are qualities or relations.
LI is realizing, as we write this, that McTaggart is much more interesting than the mere political point we wanted to make about Amis...
Okay, the point here (sans McTaggart) is this. Given a commie sympathizer in the US in 1933, we can make the sentence, X sympathizes with Stalin. However, can we then substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the starvation of 2 million people in the Ukraine? I think not. On the other hand, given a Nazi sympathizer in 1933, could we substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the elimination of the European Jews? I think so. Of course, this is a statement that would have to be modified according to cases. Did Charles Lindbergh sympathize with Auschwitz? I'd guess no. Did he sympathize with shipping Jews to 'special work areas"? I'd guess yes. The expulsion of the Jews from Germany was in full swing by 1938. The consequences of supporting Hitler were, in other words, vividly in the Western consciousness by then. So, too, the reader might say, were Stalin's show trials. And yes, there is no excuse by that time to sympathize with Stalin. This is precisely the point made by numerous Trotskyist dissidents in the thirties -- and even the twenties. Boris Souveraine and Victor Serge are the names that come immediately to mind. Emma Goldman made her dissatisfaction known much before then. Remember, though, these folks were treated the way Naderites are treated by the flaks of the Democrat Party -- as annoying excrescenses impeding the flow of history.
Now, this isn't to exculpate the Stalinist sympathizer. It is simply to restore the historical circumstances surrounding that sympathy, which is that sometimes, to will the end isn't to will the means, and sometimes it is. To will the end, for a commie symp in the US, circa 1933, was to will the end of racial discrimination, the end of killing wealth disparities, the end of the depression, the end of a number of injustices. And guess what? These were good goals. In the same way, the commie party member in France in 1959 was willing the end of the Algerian war -- another good goal.
So, simply put: the distance between the real end of Naziism and goal one willed as a sympathizer of Naziism is much closer than the distance between the real end of Stalinism and the goal one willed as a Stalinist.
Now, real ends are mixed. As we have often emphasized on this weblog, the history of atrocities committed in the name of Western imperialism by no means ends with the elimination of the Indians and the slave trade. If you look at the history of British domination of India, pace Naipaul, you'll notice that nothing like the Bengal famine of 43 -- 44 has occured since India was taken over by Indians. The very good reason for this is that the British rulers were criminally negligent or worse when it came to the lives of Indians. But even throwing in the Bengal famine, one can sympathize even now with Churchill as against the Axis without sympathizing with the contrivances that lead to the Bengal famine.
The moral of this is that the goals willed by the commies of 1930 aren't infected by the means used to affect those goals: for the simple reason that those means didn't achieve those goals, and for the more complicated reason that those means, in their immorality, overshadowed the immoralities they were supposed to overthrow.
Time and Western Man, or Amis and his buddies
When LI sees a fly, we never grab a flyswatter; we grab an Uzi...
Or so it might seem to the always patient readers of this post. Our last post, you'll remember, started out as a scolding of Martin Amis' latest book, and then detoured, radically, through Russell's paradox of George IV and the author of Waverly.
It occured to us, after we posted our mini-treatise, that the effect of the paradox might be blunted for the contemporary reader who does not know that Walter Scott published Waverly anonymously. The resulting publicity was much like that gained by Primary Colors, which was published anonymously, and generated enough controversy that the author of it became a public issue. So one can update Russell's paradox cleverly enough this way: Bill Clinton wished to know if Joe Klein is the author of Primary Colors.
In any case, we've seen Russell's solution to his puzzle involves reforming the logical structure of description in conformity with the requirements of the truth function.
LI had an un-Russellian reason for going through Russell's paradox. The context that fills in the variable of signification, from Russell's example, has a before and after structure. It is, in other words, historical.
Now, like many English philosophers, Russell wasn't comfortable with time. He preferred to eliminate time as a determinant in the work of logical analysis. A good essay from the same era as Russell's "On Denoting" is available on the web: McTaggart's The Unreality of Time, which was published in Mind in 1908. LI can't resist alluding to McTaggart's argument -- one by which he proves the objective non-existence of time (and incidentally, announces a view of events that will later be developed by Donald Davidson). The argument is that there are two series that can be extracted from the prima facie view of time:
"Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is Earlier than some, and Later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either Past, Present, or Future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past."
McTaggart calls the series of earlier and later the B series, and the Past Present Future series the A series. In the B series, given an event (for McTaggart, the fundamental elements of the two series), it's description, with relation to another event, will always be described as earlier or later. But in the A series, oddly enough, all three descriptions will apply. At one point an event will be present, at another point it will be future, and at one point it will be past.
McTaggart throws in another characteristic of time -- he connects it to change. A world in which nothing , including thought, changed, would, McTaggart claims, be timeless. What this means is that time is being treated two ways in McTaggarts essay -- both as a metric and as a content. His contention, really, is that time, insofar as it is a metric, is a formal device, not an objective property of reality:
Take any event -- the death of Queen Anne, for example -- and consider what change can take place in its characteristics. That it is a death, that it is the death of Anne Stuart, that it has such causes, that it has such effects -- every characteristic of this sort never changes. "Before the stars saw one another plain" the event in question was a death of an English Queen. At the last moment of time -- if time has a last moment -- the event in question will still be a death of an English Queen. And in every respect but one it is equally devoid of change. But in one respect it does change. It began by being a future event. It became every moment an event in the nearer future. At last it was present. Then it became past, and will always remain so, though every moment it becomes further and further past. Thus we seen forced to the conclusion that all change is only a change of the characteristics imparted to events by their presence in the A series, whether those characteristics are qualities or relations.
LI is realizing, as we write this, that McTaggart is much more interesting than the mere political point we wanted to make about Amis...
Okay, the point here (sans McTaggart) is this. Given a commie sympathizer in the US in 1933, we can make the sentence, X sympathizes with Stalin. However, can we then substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the starvation of 2 million people in the Ukraine? I think not. On the other hand, given a Nazi sympathizer in 1933, could we substitute the phrase, X sympathizes with the leader who ordered the elimination of the European Jews? I think so. Of course, this is a statement that would have to be modified according to cases. Did Charles Lindbergh sympathize with Auschwitz? I'd guess no. Did he sympathize with shipping Jews to 'special work areas"? I'd guess yes. The expulsion of the Jews from Germany was in full swing by 1938. The consequences of supporting Hitler were, in other words, vividly in the Western consciousness by then. So, too, the reader might say, were Stalin's show trials. And yes, there is no excuse by that time to sympathize with Stalin. This is precisely the point made by numerous Trotskyist dissidents in the thirties -- and even the twenties. Boris Souveraine and Victor Serge are the names that come immediately to mind. Emma Goldman made her dissatisfaction known much before then. Remember, though, these folks were treated the way Naderites are treated by the flaks of the Democrat Party -- as annoying excrescenses impeding the flow of history.
Now, this isn't to exculpate the Stalinist sympathizer. It is simply to restore the historical circumstances surrounding that sympathy, which is that sometimes, to will the end isn't to will the means, and sometimes it is. To will the end, for a commie symp in the US, circa 1933, was to will the end of racial discrimination, the end of killing wealth disparities, the end of the depression, the end of a number of injustices. And guess what? These were good goals. In the same way, the commie party member in France in 1959 was willing the end of the Algerian war -- another good goal.
So, simply put: the distance between the real end of Naziism and goal one willed as a sympathizer of Naziism is much closer than the distance between the real end of Stalinism and the goal one willed as a Stalinist.
Now, real ends are mixed. As we have often emphasized on this weblog, the history of atrocities committed in the name of Western imperialism by no means ends with the elimination of the Indians and the slave trade. If you look at the history of British domination of India, pace Naipaul, you'll notice that nothing like the Bengal famine of 43 -- 44 has occured since India was taken over by Indians. The very good reason for this is that the British rulers were criminally negligent or worse when it came to the lives of Indians. But even throwing in the Bengal famine, one can sympathize even now with Churchill as against the Axis without sympathizing with the contrivances that lead to the Bengal famine.
The moral of this is that the goals willed by the commies of 1930 aren't infected by the means used to affect those goals: for the simple reason that those means didn't achieve those goals, and for the more complicated reason that those means, in their immorality, overshadowed the immoralities they were supposed to overthrow.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Remora
"All thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance." -- Bertrand Russell.
Limited Inc had determined to be fastidious. Limited Inc had determined not to write about Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread, which makes essentially this point:
1. Nazism and Communism are morally equivalent -- or better, immorally equivalent.
2. Followers, then, of Nazism and Communism are immorally equivalent.
However, Hitchens reviewed the book in the Atlantic with such unaccustomed gentleness, like a waiter in a ritzy restaurant leading a drunk to his favorite table, that LI felt that a few obvious points needed to be made.
However, to make these points we are going to take a detour through Bertrand Russell's essay, "On denoting."
LI's readers no doubt fondly remember that essay from school days. It was in that essay that Russell attempted to squelch Meinong once and for all, and made a devastating analysis of Frege's distinction between denotation and meaning. In the essay Russell, who always had a dose of Lewis Carroll in his soul, makes his points by way of a number of puzzles, as he calls them. They are puzzles, as Deleuze has remarked, with a geneological similarity to the puzzles of the Stoics, who were also concerned with the shortcomings of Aristotelian logic. One of Russell's puzzles concerns the author of Waverly. Here is how he introduces the topic:
"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them.
(1) If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of `Waverley', and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe."
This is an excellent puzzle, made more excellent by the substitution, for George IV's name, of the title, "the first gentleman of Europe," as a sort of tease at the end of it. The more you peer into one of Russell's puzzles, the more you see civilization peering back at you. This puzzle, LI'd like to claim, has immense bearing on both art and morality. Since we are in pursuit of the failure of Amis' sullen and thuggish moral imagination, we will leave the art out of it for this post.
After sifting through Frege's distinction between meaning and denotation with technical brio, Russell concludes the critical part of his essay:
"The proposition `Scott was the author of Waverley' has a property not possessed by `Scott was Scott', namely the property that George Iv wished to know whether it was true. Thus the two are not identical propositions; hence the meaning of `the author of Waverley' must be relevant as well as the denotation, if we adhere to the point of view to which this distinction belongs. Yet, as we have just seen, so long as we adhere to this point of view, we are compelled to hold that only the denotation is relevant. Thus the point of view in question must be abandoned."
Russell begins the constructive part of his essay with the following thesis:
"According to the view which I advocate, a denoting phrase is essentially part of a sentence, and does not, like most single words, have any significance on its own account."
What does that mean? It means that a denoting phrase gives us a variable, x, which acquires significance as x is embedded in a context. Russell goes on to give contexts for the puzzle of the author of Waverly, making a distinction between primary and secondary occurences of denoting phrases:
"When we say: `George IV wished to know whether so-and-so', or when we say `So-and-so is surprising' or `So-and-so is true', etc., the `so-and-so' must be a proposition. Suppose now that `so-and-so' contains a denoting phrase. We may either eliminate this denoting phrase from the subordinate proposition `so-and-so', or from the whole proposition in which `so-and-so' is a mere constituent. Different propositions result according to which we do. I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first seeing it, remarked, `I thought your yacht was larger than it is'; and the owner replied, `No, my yacht is not larger than it is'. What the guest meant was, `The size that I thought your yacht was is greater than the size your yacht is'; the meaning attributed to him is, `I thought the size of your yacht was greater than the size of your yacht'. To return to George IV and Waverley, when we say `George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley' we normally mean `George IV wished to know whether one and only one man wrote Waverley and Scott was that man'; but we may also mean: `One and only one man wrote Waverley, and George IV wished to know whether Scott was that man'. In the latter, `the author of Waverley' has a primary occurrence; in the former, a secondary. The latter might be expressed by `George IV wished to know, concerning the man who in fact wrote Waverley, whether he was Scott'. This would be true,. for example, if George IV had seen scott at a distance, and had asked `Is that Scott?'. A secondary occurrence of a denoting phrase may be defined as one in which the phrase occurs in a proposition p which is a mere constituent of the proposition we are considering, and the substitution for the denoting phrase is to be effected in p, and not in the whole proposition concerned. The ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences is hard to avoid in language; but it does no harm if we are on our guard against it. In symbolic logic it is of course easily avoided."
We hope our readers see where we are going with this. Amis' condemnation of the Western left relies upon a fallacy of substitution, and uses that fallacy to make points that are recognizably aligned with the kind of points made, by the fascist leaning literati, in the thirties, and their heirs, the McCarthyites of the fifties. We will return to this in our next post.
"All thinking has to start from acquaintance; but it succeeds in thinking about many things with which we have no acquaintance." -- Bertrand Russell.
Limited Inc had determined to be fastidious. Limited Inc had determined not to write about Martin Amis' new book, Koba the Dread, which makes essentially this point:
1. Nazism and Communism are morally equivalent -- or better, immorally equivalent.
2. Followers, then, of Nazism and Communism are immorally equivalent.
However, Hitchens reviewed the book in the Atlantic with such unaccustomed gentleness, like a waiter in a ritzy restaurant leading a drunk to his favorite table, that LI felt that a few obvious points needed to be made.
However, to make these points we are going to take a detour through Bertrand Russell's essay, "On denoting."
LI's readers no doubt fondly remember that essay from school days. It was in that essay that Russell attempted to squelch Meinong once and for all, and made a devastating analysis of Frege's distinction between denotation and meaning. In the essay Russell, who always had a dose of Lewis Carroll in his soul, makes his points by way of a number of puzzles, as he calls them. They are puzzles, as Deleuze has remarked, with a geneological similarity to the puzzles of the Stoics, who were also concerned with the shortcomings of Aristotelian logic. One of Russell's puzzles concerns the author of Waverly. Here is how he introduces the topic:
"A logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science. I shall therefore state three puzzles which a theory as to denoting ought to be able to solve; and I shall show later that my theory solves them.
(1) If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of `Waverley', and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe."
This is an excellent puzzle, made more excellent by the substitution, for George IV's name, of the title, "the first gentleman of Europe," as a sort of tease at the end of it. The more you peer into one of Russell's puzzles, the more you see civilization peering back at you. This puzzle, LI'd like to claim, has immense bearing on both art and morality. Since we are in pursuit of the failure of Amis' sullen and thuggish moral imagination, we will leave the art out of it for this post.
After sifting through Frege's distinction between meaning and denotation with technical brio, Russell concludes the critical part of his essay:
"The proposition `Scott was the author of Waverley' has a property not possessed by `Scott was Scott', namely the property that George Iv wished to know whether it was true. Thus the two are not identical propositions; hence the meaning of `the author of Waverley' must be relevant as well as the denotation, if we adhere to the point of view to which this distinction belongs. Yet, as we have just seen, so long as we adhere to this point of view, we are compelled to hold that only the denotation is relevant. Thus the point of view in question must be abandoned."
Russell begins the constructive part of his essay with the following thesis:
"According to the view which I advocate, a denoting phrase is essentially part of a sentence, and does not, like most single words, have any significance on its own account."
What does that mean? It means that a denoting phrase gives us a variable, x, which acquires significance as x is embedded in a context. Russell goes on to give contexts for the puzzle of the author of Waverly, making a distinction between primary and secondary occurences of denoting phrases:
"When we say: `George IV wished to know whether so-and-so', or when we say `So-and-so is surprising' or `So-and-so is true', etc., the `so-and-so' must be a proposition. Suppose now that `so-and-so' contains a denoting phrase. We may either eliminate this denoting phrase from the subordinate proposition `so-and-so', or from the whole proposition in which `so-and-so' is a mere constituent. Different propositions result according to which we do. I have heard of a touchy owner of a yacht to whom a guest, on first seeing it, remarked, `I thought your yacht was larger than it is'; and the owner replied, `No, my yacht is not larger than it is'. What the guest meant was, `The size that I thought your yacht was is greater than the size your yacht is'; the meaning attributed to him is, `I thought the size of your yacht was greater than the size of your yacht'. To return to George IV and Waverley, when we say `George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley' we normally mean `George IV wished to know whether one and only one man wrote Waverley and Scott was that man'; but we may also mean: `One and only one man wrote Waverley, and George IV wished to know whether Scott was that man'. In the latter, `the author of Waverley' has a primary occurrence; in the former, a secondary. The latter might be expressed by `George IV wished to know, concerning the man who in fact wrote Waverley, whether he was Scott'. This would be true,. for example, if George IV had seen scott at a distance, and had asked `Is that Scott?'. A secondary occurrence of a denoting phrase may be defined as one in which the phrase occurs in a proposition p which is a mere constituent of the proposition we are considering, and the substitution for the denoting phrase is to be effected in p, and not in the whole proposition concerned. The ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences is hard to avoid in language; but it does no harm if we are on our guard against it. In symbolic logic it is of course easily avoided."
We hope our readers see where we are going with this. Amis' condemnation of the Western left relies upon a fallacy of substitution, and uses that fallacy to make points that are recognizably aligned with the kind of points made, by the fascist leaning literati, in the thirties, and their heirs, the McCarthyites of the fifties. We will return to this in our next post.
Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Remora
Three Blind Mice
No. Many more blind mice than that. Herds of 'em. The WP has a funny article today about the loosening of support, among the Republicocracy, for diverting Social Security into private accounts to be run by all of us, individually, usin' our God given ingenuity. Apparently as 401(k)s come back filled with pocket lint, and retirement accounts are wiped out, the pilfering of Social Security is not the call to colors it was in the past:
"In some cases, GOP lawmakers such as Reps. George W. Gekas (Pa.) and Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (Miss.) are opposing Bush's proposal after praising it in the past. At least three Republican congressional challengers -- Rick Clayburgh (N.D.), William J. Janklow (S.D.) and Jon Porter (Nev.) -- have disavowed the idea of private accounts. Many other Republicans are playing down previous endorsements of privatizing all or part of Social Security as a way to bolster the system before it goes broke."
Tergiversation, on this issue, is spine-snapping. Witness the sullen Mark Kennedy. Kennedy, along with some 117 other legislators, signed a letter expressing max support for privatizing Social Security. It turns out he wasn't quite in his right mind that day -- like Hamlet, he was wandering distracted about D.C., construing the shapes of clouds. Wouldn't you know it? Some nefarious villain, probably a Democratic operative, obviously thrust the letter into his hands and told him it was about supporting motherhood and pledging to honor the Golden Rule.
"In Minnesota's 6th District, Rep. Mark Kennedy, a GOP freshman locked in a tough reelection fight, has tempered his support for creating private accounts. Although he signed the same letter as Pickering, he is campaigning feverishly to convince voters he has not switched his position.After initially denying to local reporters that he signed the letter, Kennedy now will only say: "I support exploring ways of strengthening Social Security. I don't know what those ways are."
Mr. Kennedy might want to explore the Argentina crisis. There was a, boldly heretical article about Argentina in the Times Sunday paper. Larry Rohter slipped through the neo-liberal police somehow. In his intro grafs, he highlights the fact that the IMF, backed by the US, has approved loans for Brasil and Uruguay, but not Argentina. Why? Well, the brunt of the article is that Argentina is in the doghouse as a deterrent. But Rohter's more subversive point is that the investing class that is punishing Argentina brought on Argentina's woes, in large part, by suggesting the "golden straightjacket" policies Argentina adopted, to such acclaim, in the nineties:
"... a growing number of independent analysts now maintain that many of Argentina's troubles stem from having followed Washington's advice in the first place and that the formula being insisted upon is only making matters worse."
The formula is, as LI readers know: cut back on social spending, achieve budget surpluses, maximize the private sector and cut the public sector to the bone. Etc. The libertarian dream. Otherwise known as the nightmare of reason.
To get back to Mr. Kennedy's voyage of exploration, one of the interesting tidbits in Rohter's article concerns the effects of privatizing social security. Argentina took the Chile route in the nineties and did just that:
"In reality, most of Argentina's deficit is simply the result of arbitrary accounting procedures and not a reflection of wastefulness. By privatizing the social security system in 1994, much in the fashion the Bush administration is now proposing in the United States, the Argentine government could no longer count social security payments as revenues and had to move them outside the budget.Had Argentina not privatized social security at the urging of the I.M.F., it would actually have shown a budget surplus in recent years. Indeed, according to another study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research early this year, government spending in Argentina has remained remarkably steady, at about 19 percent of G.D.P. throughout the 1990's."
This is all the more interesting insofar as the G.O.P., outside of its consensus advice to pee wee countries in the Southern Hemisphere, has become remarkably careless about budget deficits. LI sees nothing wrong with a budget deficit per se, but Bush's seems to have the same structure as R. Reagan's --there's no self-limiting mechanism built into it. It seems to be the start of something that is going to get worse, a lot worse, in fact, if the stock market flatlines. We do wonder what the deficit would be minus the Social security surpluses that they pop like candy up in D.C.
Three Blind Mice
No. Many more blind mice than that. Herds of 'em. The WP has a funny article today about the loosening of support, among the Republicocracy, for diverting Social Security into private accounts to be run by all of us, individually, usin' our God given ingenuity. Apparently as 401(k)s come back filled with pocket lint, and retirement accounts are wiped out, the pilfering of Social Security is not the call to colors it was in the past:
"In some cases, GOP lawmakers such as Reps. George W. Gekas (Pa.) and Charles W. "Chip" Pickering Jr. (Miss.) are opposing Bush's proposal after praising it in the past. At least three Republican congressional challengers -- Rick Clayburgh (N.D.), William J. Janklow (S.D.) and Jon Porter (Nev.) -- have disavowed the idea of private accounts. Many other Republicans are playing down previous endorsements of privatizing all or part of Social Security as a way to bolster the system before it goes broke."
Tergiversation, on this issue, is spine-snapping. Witness the sullen Mark Kennedy. Kennedy, along with some 117 other legislators, signed a letter expressing max support for privatizing Social Security. It turns out he wasn't quite in his right mind that day -- like Hamlet, he was wandering distracted about D.C., construing the shapes of clouds. Wouldn't you know it? Some nefarious villain, probably a Democratic operative, obviously thrust the letter into his hands and told him it was about supporting motherhood and pledging to honor the Golden Rule.
"In Minnesota's 6th District, Rep. Mark Kennedy, a GOP freshman locked in a tough reelection fight, has tempered his support for creating private accounts. Although he signed the same letter as Pickering, he is campaigning feverishly to convince voters he has not switched his position.After initially denying to local reporters that he signed the letter, Kennedy now will only say: "I support exploring ways of strengthening Social Security. I don't know what those ways are."
Mr. Kennedy might want to explore the Argentina crisis. There was a, boldly heretical article about Argentina in the Times Sunday paper. Larry Rohter slipped through the neo-liberal police somehow. In his intro grafs, he highlights the fact that the IMF, backed by the US, has approved loans for Brasil and Uruguay, but not Argentina. Why? Well, the brunt of the article is that Argentina is in the doghouse as a deterrent. But Rohter's more subversive point is that the investing class that is punishing Argentina brought on Argentina's woes, in large part, by suggesting the "golden straightjacket" policies Argentina adopted, to such acclaim, in the nineties:
"... a growing number of independent analysts now maintain that many of Argentina's troubles stem from having followed Washington's advice in the first place and that the formula being insisted upon is only making matters worse."
The formula is, as LI readers know: cut back on social spending, achieve budget surpluses, maximize the private sector and cut the public sector to the bone. Etc. The libertarian dream. Otherwise known as the nightmare of reason.
To get back to Mr. Kennedy's voyage of exploration, one of the interesting tidbits in Rohter's article concerns the effects of privatizing social security. Argentina took the Chile route in the nineties and did just that:
"In reality, most of Argentina's deficit is simply the result of arbitrary accounting procedures and not a reflection of wastefulness. By privatizing the social security system in 1994, much in the fashion the Bush administration is now proposing in the United States, the Argentine government could no longer count social security payments as revenues and had to move them outside the budget.Had Argentina not privatized social security at the urging of the I.M.F., it would actually have shown a budget surplus in recent years. Indeed, according to another study published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research early this year, government spending in Argentina has remained remarkably steady, at about 19 percent of G.D.P. throughout the 1990's."
This is all the more interesting insofar as the G.O.P., outside of its consensus advice to pee wee countries in the Southern Hemisphere, has become remarkably careless about budget deficits. LI sees nothing wrong with a budget deficit per se, but Bush's seems to have the same structure as R. Reagan's --there's no self-limiting mechanism built into it. It seems to be the start of something that is going to get worse, a lot worse, in fact, if the stock market flatlines. We do wonder what the deficit would be minus the Social security surpluses that they pop like candy up in D.C.
Monday, August 12, 2002
Remora
James Ridgeway, Village Voice's reliably left (if sometimes monotonous) political columnist, suggests something pretty cool in his column today. Ridgeway raps on the practical impunity surrounding the major looters of corporations. This means, rather predictably, wheeling out the very specimen and macrocosm of power used corruptly to avert justice: Ken Lay. Ridgeway hammers on this old theme. But then Ridgeway departs from merely adding his scolding to the unanimous condemnation of mankind and throws out an idea that should be embraced by some Dem, somewhere. This is the kind of idea that could really work:
"Beyond the political will to hold people like Lay accountable, we need a mechanism for going after the companies themselves, paving the way for placing them in receivership so they could be managed under public supervision until their acts were cleaned up. There is nothing unusual in this notion. Crooked unions go through it all the time. Corporations should get the same treatment. At the very least, firms with shoddy accounting and other dubious practices should be denied government business. For Enron, federal subsidies and contracts were the lifeblood that let the corrupt operation flourish. "
Ridgeway could easily have developed his idea a bit with regard to Enron. There was an interesting article last week in the Houston Chronicle about the way in which, in the last month of Enron's run, workers from the old pipeline division -- which was despised by the minions of Skilling, all of whom were New Economy rip-off artists who wanted to run an "asset-less' company, but battened like leaches on the money flow of the pipes (the only real money flow at Enron, except the continuous rain of currency into the pockets of the undeserving exec strata) --- anyway, how in a last burst of kick em in the teeth, these old reliable asset guys were cheated out of their deferred compensations in favor of the energy trader division. This division, by the way, was losing money. Anyway, according to the Chronicle article, Lawrence "Greg" Whalley, "then the chief operating officer of the company," made decisions that systematically skewed distribution of the money that was left in the deferred compensation accounts to those who, in Whalley's lawyer's rich phase, were "continuing to add value" to the company.
Now who were those people who were adding value to the company? Why, they were part of the trading group that was eventually sold to UBSWarburg -- which, coincidence of coincidences, is where Whalley ended up himself. So here we have a company, the heart of which is a money losing deal machine that is still sexy enough to be packaged and sold to another company. [note: the energy trading outfit did look enough like a moneymaker at the time, given the smoke and mirrors of Enron's accounting, to be perceived as a valuable asset -- hence its acquisition. And with the correct management, it might actually be an asset. But the real assets, what Enron sold to raise real cash, were the natural gas pipe lines. Period] Here we have people who were dispersed over the multiple trading divisions (such as the loony broadband division) who have bootstrapped their entire careers and credibility on the cash flow coming from the real assets of the company, the pipes. And we have those same usurping locusts, as the Psalmist might put it, who were systematically infiltrated into top managerial positions, reluctantly deciding that the retiring pipemen -- the guys who made real money -- are going to have to bite it, because Whalley's clique are skipping ship and want to carry home a few mill in Christmas money.
This is exactly parallel to corrupt Teamster union locals that have been taken over by the feds. The same principle of pirates at the top looting people at the bottom.
If Ridgeway's plan were put into execution, it would put a stop to self aggrandizing deals for the scum of the universe... ooops, I mean the up and coming entrepeneur types, like Greg Whalley. As for the Whalley's, one's mind drifts to ... uh, pornographic fantasies of punishment. How about having these hardballing execs prove their ability to 'add value' to their future employers by being stripped of all their assets, including their wardrobes, appropriately draped in street couture (say, urinous old trousers found abandoned under some park bench), their ATM cards and platinum credit cards sheered through, their cars long ago seized and sold, and set loose then on some mean Houston alley at three in the foggy morning. Then let these top dogs ply their ingenuity as they will.
James Ridgeway, Village Voice's reliably left (if sometimes monotonous) political columnist, suggests something pretty cool in his column today. Ridgeway raps on the practical impunity surrounding the major looters of corporations. This means, rather predictably, wheeling out the very specimen and macrocosm of power used corruptly to avert justice: Ken Lay. Ridgeway hammers on this old theme. But then Ridgeway departs from merely adding his scolding to the unanimous condemnation of mankind and throws out an idea that should be embraced by some Dem, somewhere. This is the kind of idea that could really work:
"Beyond the political will to hold people like Lay accountable, we need a mechanism for going after the companies themselves, paving the way for placing them in receivership so they could be managed under public supervision until their acts were cleaned up. There is nothing unusual in this notion. Crooked unions go through it all the time. Corporations should get the same treatment. At the very least, firms with shoddy accounting and other dubious practices should be denied government business. For Enron, federal subsidies and contracts were the lifeblood that let the corrupt operation flourish. "
Ridgeway could easily have developed his idea a bit with regard to Enron. There was an interesting article last week in the Houston Chronicle about the way in which, in the last month of Enron's run, workers from the old pipeline division -- which was despised by the minions of Skilling, all of whom were New Economy rip-off artists who wanted to run an "asset-less' company, but battened like leaches on the money flow of the pipes (the only real money flow at Enron, except the continuous rain of currency into the pockets of the undeserving exec strata) --- anyway, how in a last burst of kick em in the teeth, these old reliable asset guys were cheated out of their deferred compensations in favor of the energy trader division. This division, by the way, was losing money. Anyway, according to the Chronicle article, Lawrence "Greg" Whalley, "then the chief operating officer of the company," made decisions that systematically skewed distribution of the money that was left in the deferred compensation accounts to those who, in Whalley's lawyer's rich phase, were "continuing to add value" to the company.
Now who were those people who were adding value to the company? Why, they were part of the trading group that was eventually sold to UBSWarburg -- which, coincidence of coincidences, is where Whalley ended up himself. So here we have a company, the heart of which is a money losing deal machine that is still sexy enough to be packaged and sold to another company. [note: the energy trading outfit did look enough like a moneymaker at the time, given the smoke and mirrors of Enron's accounting, to be perceived as a valuable asset -- hence its acquisition. And with the correct management, it might actually be an asset. But the real assets, what Enron sold to raise real cash, were the natural gas pipe lines. Period] Here we have people who were dispersed over the multiple trading divisions (such as the loony broadband division) who have bootstrapped their entire careers and credibility on the cash flow coming from the real assets of the company, the pipes. And we have those same usurping locusts, as the Psalmist might put it, who were systematically infiltrated into top managerial positions, reluctantly deciding that the retiring pipemen -- the guys who made real money -- are going to have to bite it, because Whalley's clique are skipping ship and want to carry home a few mill in Christmas money.
This is exactly parallel to corrupt Teamster union locals that have been taken over by the feds. The same principle of pirates at the top looting people at the bottom.
If Ridgeway's plan were put into execution, it would put a stop to self aggrandizing deals for the scum of the universe... ooops, I mean the up and coming entrepeneur types, like Greg Whalley. As for the Whalley's, one's mind drifts to ... uh, pornographic fantasies of punishment. How about having these hardballing execs prove their ability to 'add value' to their future employers by being stripped of all their assets, including their wardrobes, appropriately draped in street couture (say, urinous old trousers found abandoned under some park bench), their ATM cards and platinum credit cards sheered through, their cars long ago seized and sold, and set loose then on some mean Houston alley at three in the foggy morning. Then let these top dogs ply their ingenuity as they will.
Friday, August 09, 2002
Remora
I've just finished reviewing a book about Haiti. Maybe for that reason, I am sensitive this morning to the more egregious gestures of little Caesar-ism to which our present benighted administration is addicted. So I read the WP story about Bush's "economic forum" with a lot of sour amusement. This forum is apparently based upon the premise that of any two or more points of view, one of them is right; the right one, of course, is Bush's. This is a law of nature in Crawford Texas, it appears. As such, it would surely be ratified by our Supreme Court -- which has always displayed a touching concern for George Bush's feelings -- should it be taken before those august vampires.
"Bush Economic Forum to Exclude Critics, Officials Say" by Mike Allen
Bush, who sounds more and more like a ventriloquist's dummy -- hearing him, for instance, commemorate the nine rescued miners, I seriously wondered if he'd been exploring the wonders of hooch that morning -- has billed this summit, at Baylor University in Waco, as a call to Americans in all walks of life. Especially favored are those whose walks have included contributions to the Republican party in amounts of 100,000 dollars or more. Just your average Joe or Jane, don't you see? It is almost Dylan-esque: "Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land/ and don't criticize what you don't understand..." Indeed, this is the message of the last graf of the story:
"A media guide says the participants on the eight panels will have "diverse points of view," but the White House official acknowledged that there are limits. "I don't think there's any point in picking someone who has the opposite point of view," the official said."
Why is it that the Bush administration always exudes this air of a cheap coup? Maybe it it because they came to power on a cheap coup.
No, that's not true. That's a cheap jab.
The coup was very, very expensive. In fact, we all seem to be paying for it.
I've just finished reviewing a book about Haiti. Maybe for that reason, I am sensitive this morning to the more egregious gestures of little Caesar-ism to which our present benighted administration is addicted. So I read the WP story about Bush's "economic forum" with a lot of sour amusement. This forum is apparently based upon the premise that of any two or more points of view, one of them is right; the right one, of course, is Bush's. This is a law of nature in Crawford Texas, it appears. As such, it would surely be ratified by our Supreme Court -- which has always displayed a touching concern for George Bush's feelings -- should it be taken before those august vampires.
"Bush Economic Forum to Exclude Critics, Officials Say" by Mike Allen
Bush, who sounds more and more like a ventriloquist's dummy -- hearing him, for instance, commemorate the nine rescued miners, I seriously wondered if he'd been exploring the wonders of hooch that morning -- has billed this summit, at Baylor University in Waco, as a call to Americans in all walks of life. Especially favored are those whose walks have included contributions to the Republican party in amounts of 100,000 dollars or more. Just your average Joe or Jane, don't you see? It is almost Dylan-esque: "Come mothers and fathers, throughout the land/ and don't criticize what you don't understand..." Indeed, this is the message of the last graf of the story:
"A media guide says the participants on the eight panels will have "diverse points of view," but the White House official acknowledged that there are limits. "I don't think there's any point in picking someone who has the opposite point of view," the official said."
Why is it that the Bush administration always exudes this air of a cheap coup? Maybe it it because they came to power on a cheap coup.
No, that's not true. That's a cheap jab.
The coup was very, very expensive. In fact, we all seem to be paying for it.
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Remora
The career of a phrase.
Suppose, reader, that you are a brain surgeon. As you come into the operating theater, you lean over your patient, who is about to go under, and you tell him that, under the circumstances, if he pays you a fee on top of the fee you are getting to operate on him -- say about 100% of that fee -- he will promise to align his interests as a doctor with yours as a patient. Or suppose that you are a fireman. You mount the ladder, you meet the hollering woman in the fourth floor apartment, the flames are licking the curtains, and you tell her that for a fee -- say 100% of your current salary -- you will align your interests with her interest in being saved up to and including the promise to try not to drop her on the way down. Or say you work in an assembly line. You go to your foreman and propose that for a fee -- say 200% of your current salary -- you promise to align your interest with that of the company's, insofar as that involves making sure all the car parts are correctly fitted into place.
If you did that, you would lose your licence, as a surgeon, be fired and sued, as a fireman, or simply be dismissed, as a factory worker.
Ah, but if you are a CEO -- if you breathe and eat in that top level strata -- ah, then you are the type who might not really do anything for your salary. You might take your 2 mil a year and go to sleep behind your desk. Or you might take information you are privy to and give it to your competitors. Who knows with you CEOs? Marvelous, god like creatures, you rain and shine on all alike according to your inscrutable will. Or at least that seems to be the theory behind that supremely dumb phrase, "aligning the interests of management with those of the shareholders." If you read the business section, or even the front page of the newspaper, nowadays, you see that phrase thrown around with the utmost airiness, as if it is the most self evident thing in the world. The CEO, or CFO, or whatever, must be given stock options. Why? To align his interest with the shareholders. Here's an example of this kind of madness. It comes from my search for the phrase on Google. It comes from 1999. I wonder if Baxter International, or Deerfield Illinois, knows that they still have this announcement up on the web:
"DEERFIELD, Ill., May 4 -- Baxter International Inc. announced today that
142 senior managers have borrowed a total of $200 million in personal loans
to purchase 3.1 million shares of Baxter stock. The shares were purchased
at Baxter's closing price yesterday of $63.625 per share under a voluntary
plan that directly aligns the management team with Baxter's shareholders.
This shared investment plan was approved by Baxter's board of directors
earlier today.
This is the second time Baxter has implemented a shared investment plan.
In 1994 Baxter became one of the first companies in the world to use this
innovative approach to directly align management's interests with Baxter
shareholders. In that plan, 63 senior managers participated. Since that time,
several companies have implemented similar plans."
I put the phrase in italics, for those of you whose eyes glaze over when perusing the PR of obscure corporations. Baxter, in the annus mirabilis of 1999, was innovating all kinds of alignments of interest between management and shareholders. Here, for instance, is what they did for outgoing CEO Vernon Locke:
"In 1999, as Baxter International Inc.'s Vernon Loucks relinquished his CEO duties after 18 years, directors handed him a special stock-option grant of 950,000 shares "for the specific purposes of motivating" him "to implement a smooth transition of his responsibilities."
Ah, Vernon's successor is a man of sterner ethical character. In a Business Week report on executive compensation for 2001, Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr, the current CEO, practically put himself on a diet of bread and water:
Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr., CEO of Baxter International (BAX ), voluntarily cut his bonus by 40%, even though his company's stock climbed by 20% in 2001. The reason: Defective Baxter dialysis machines were linked to the deaths of more than 50 people. Kraemer, who earned total cash compensation of $1.6 million plus a grant of 600,000 options, says somebody had to pay the price for the dialysis machine deaths: "Fifty people died. If you have a problem, the buck stops somewhere, and it stops here."
Cutting your bonus -- your bonus, mind you -- down by 40%, while you receive your grant of 600,000 options is practically Christ-like in the world of CEOs, apparently.
So, to sum this sad and shabby tale up: never has piracy, never has the discreet looting of publicly held entities, been so delicately handled as it was in the 90s, and as it still is today. See how Baxter -- that ambiguous entity, that ontological anomoly -- practically glows with satisfaction. Begging their execs, who are probably paid quite a bit more than I am, to borrow money from their cash reserves, no doubt at a very reduced interest rate, and no doubt with some expectation that, if things turn south, all will be forgiven these shareholder aligning managers. Isn't it great to be king? Isn't incentive a wonderful thing, and isn't it to be extolled in 2 million to 4 million dollar houses from the Long Island to the Redwood Forest, as the unfortunately dis-incentivized Woody G. once sang? AH, here at last, we have found what we have been sailing the sea for lo these many years. The thing Marx couldn't imagine. The thing that makes all the U. of Chicago econ department light up like a Christmas tree. The very reductio ad absurdam of managerial capitalism.
LI is thinking of trying to do a more extensive search for the phrase, and selling an essay on that search, to some magazine, thus aligning our interests with those of John Q. Public. If you want to loan us money in the process -- say 50 million dollars -- please write me at RGathman@aol.com.
Hey, I might just accept your loan if the terms are good enough.
The career of a phrase.
Suppose, reader, that you are a brain surgeon. As you come into the operating theater, you lean over your patient, who is about to go under, and you tell him that, under the circumstances, if he pays you a fee on top of the fee you are getting to operate on him -- say about 100% of that fee -- he will promise to align his interests as a doctor with yours as a patient. Or suppose that you are a fireman. You mount the ladder, you meet the hollering woman in the fourth floor apartment, the flames are licking the curtains, and you tell her that for a fee -- say 100% of your current salary -- you will align your interests with her interest in being saved up to and including the promise to try not to drop her on the way down. Or say you work in an assembly line. You go to your foreman and propose that for a fee -- say 200% of your current salary -- you promise to align your interest with that of the company's, insofar as that involves making sure all the car parts are correctly fitted into place.
If you did that, you would lose your licence, as a surgeon, be fired and sued, as a fireman, or simply be dismissed, as a factory worker.
Ah, but if you are a CEO -- if you breathe and eat in that top level strata -- ah, then you are the type who might not really do anything for your salary. You might take your 2 mil a year and go to sleep behind your desk. Or you might take information you are privy to and give it to your competitors. Who knows with you CEOs? Marvelous, god like creatures, you rain and shine on all alike according to your inscrutable will. Or at least that seems to be the theory behind that supremely dumb phrase, "aligning the interests of management with those of the shareholders." If you read the business section, or even the front page of the newspaper, nowadays, you see that phrase thrown around with the utmost airiness, as if it is the most self evident thing in the world. The CEO, or CFO, or whatever, must be given stock options. Why? To align his interest with the shareholders. Here's an example of this kind of madness. It comes from my search for the phrase on Google. It comes from 1999. I wonder if Baxter International, or Deerfield Illinois, knows that they still have this announcement up on the web:
"DEERFIELD, Ill., May 4 -- Baxter International Inc. announced today that
142 senior managers have borrowed a total of $200 million in personal loans
to purchase 3.1 million shares of Baxter stock. The shares were purchased
at Baxter's closing price yesterday of $63.625 per share under a voluntary
plan that directly aligns the management team with Baxter's shareholders.
This shared investment plan was approved by Baxter's board of directors
earlier today.
This is the second time Baxter has implemented a shared investment plan.
In 1994 Baxter became one of the first companies in the world to use this
innovative approach to directly align management's interests with Baxter
shareholders. In that plan, 63 senior managers participated. Since that time,
several companies have implemented similar plans."
I put the phrase in italics, for those of you whose eyes glaze over when perusing the PR of obscure corporations. Baxter, in the annus mirabilis of 1999, was innovating all kinds of alignments of interest between management and shareholders. Here, for instance, is what they did for outgoing CEO Vernon Locke:
"In 1999, as Baxter International Inc.'s Vernon Loucks relinquished his CEO duties after 18 years, directors handed him a special stock-option grant of 950,000 shares "for the specific purposes of motivating" him "to implement a smooth transition of his responsibilities."
Ah, Vernon's successor is a man of sterner ethical character. In a Business Week report on executive compensation for 2001, Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr, the current CEO, practically put himself on a diet of bread and water:
Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr., CEO of Baxter International (BAX ), voluntarily cut his bonus by 40%, even though his company's stock climbed by 20% in 2001. The reason: Defective Baxter dialysis machines were linked to the deaths of more than 50 people. Kraemer, who earned total cash compensation of $1.6 million plus a grant of 600,000 options, says somebody had to pay the price for the dialysis machine deaths: "Fifty people died. If you have a problem, the buck stops somewhere, and it stops here."
Cutting your bonus -- your bonus, mind you -- down by 40%, while you receive your grant of 600,000 options is practically Christ-like in the world of CEOs, apparently.
So, to sum this sad and shabby tale up: never has piracy, never has the discreet looting of publicly held entities, been so delicately handled as it was in the 90s, and as it still is today. See how Baxter -- that ambiguous entity, that ontological anomoly -- practically glows with satisfaction. Begging their execs, who are probably paid quite a bit more than I am, to borrow money from their cash reserves, no doubt at a very reduced interest rate, and no doubt with some expectation that, if things turn south, all will be forgiven these shareholder aligning managers. Isn't it great to be king? Isn't incentive a wonderful thing, and isn't it to be extolled in 2 million to 4 million dollar houses from the Long Island to the Redwood Forest, as the unfortunately dis-incentivized Woody G. once sang? AH, here at last, we have found what we have been sailing the sea for lo these many years. The thing Marx couldn't imagine. The thing that makes all the U. of Chicago econ department light up like a Christmas tree. The very reductio ad absurdam of managerial capitalism.
LI is thinking of trying to do a more extensive search for the phrase, and selling an essay on that search, to some magazine, thus aligning our interests with those of John Q. Public. If you want to loan us money in the process -- say 50 million dollars -- please write me at RGathman@aol.com.
Hey, I might just accept your loan if the terms are good enough.
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Remora
In the seventies, Christopher Hill published an excellent book about the Protestant radicals who provided the ideological shock troops in the overthrow of Charles I in the English Civil War. The title of the book was World Turned Upside Down, which is the refrain in this ballad of the war:
"Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.
Let's talk about Old Christmas being kickt out of Town, shall we? Or rather, let's talk about kicking the bejesus out of Old Christmas, the bill of rights, common sense, the spirit of dissent, the independence of the legislature, the standards of right action, and other assorted matters of spiritual and political import.
We've come to such a pretty pass in this country, re the warmongering attitude, the stripping away of Civil Service protections in place since Chester Allan Arthur's time, and other such trivial supports of the national polity, that LI is forced to turn to the business press for some measure of dissent. Business Week, of all papers, the old Taft Republican Business Week, publishes a column by their Washington correspondent, Howard Gleckman, that hectors congress for surrendering its perogatives, right and left, to the executive. Gleckman presents a list of abdications: the fast track legislation Bush will be signing tomorrow, for instance; or the astonishing anomolies written into the act to make Heimat security a cabinet post. The latter is a really bad piece of legislation anyway -- there is no need for this re-organization, there's no need to add this cabinet post at all, given the Department of Defense, and certainly the composition of the law is outrageous. The discussion of the provisions entitling appointed officials to hire and fire at will has remained at this low level: conservatives: this is just to get the guv'mint out of the grip of civil service unions; liberals: this is an insult to civil service unions. Without any seeming consciousness of the reason why civil service was given a measure of autonomy vis a vis the executive in the first place, i.e. corruption. That's right, when hiring and firing can be done at will by elected officials, guess what? You soon have a system in which hiriign and firing becomes a marketable service. If commentators think that Bush is too high minded, and has employed cabinet members who are too high minded, to engage in corrupt practices (oh my! not our Commander in Chief!), they might want to investigate Ken Lay's ability to get the old head of FERC replaced, in 2001, by a more Enron pliable figure of Pat Wood III -- who moved from his Texas post, the path to which had also been paved by the ubiquitous Lay, to the national post after Lay reportedly threatened the old FERC head, Curtis Herbert, over the issue of deregulating the California Electrical Power market. But this is an issue that goes beyond Bush. It goes back to U.S. Grant, and it is an endemic illness to which democracies are heir. But trust the right to have no consciousness of the political tradition going back to Montesquieu -- which used to be called, in fact, the Burkean tradition, since its font was Burke's suspicion about ideological schemes designed to improve society by way of the government. Burke would likely have been appalled at the Homeland Security re-organization, but then again -- what right winger is even aware of Burke anymore?
Ah, LI is getting into a temper. But to return to Gleckman's column. The juice in it is in the last three grafs, which are directed against the inevitable drift to war against Iraq. Here it is:
"But the real test will come in foreign affairs. The nation is already fighting an undeclared war against terrorism. Not only are U.S. forces at risk in Afghanistan, but they are also fighting in the Philippines and most likely other nations as well.
The need for formal congressional approval for such a shadow war is admittedly murky. But there should be no confusion when it comes to what the White House has led us all to believe is its next step: a war against Iraq. Congress has a responsibility to enact a declaration of war before such an operation begins. Bush's father was wise enough to seek a congressional OK for his 1991 attack on Iraq. Now, the current President Bush should do the same.
There is little sign, though, that he will do that. And, sadly, there is even less indication that Congress will insist upon it. If Bush's Iraqi invasion goes badly, we will all come to regret both the President's power grab and the Congress' acquiescence. And, like LBJ and FDR before him, Bush will learn a costly lesson about the limits of the Imperial Presidency. "
Well, he might learn a lesson. We don't care about Mr. Bush's education. It failed to make a mark on him in the impressionable years, obviously, and we doubt any imminent changes are in the offing. The man's level has been exposed for all of us to see for some time now. We are more concerned with the lack of any good reason for this war. There is no reason to think that war is the best way to accomplish disarming Saddam Hussein, if that is really what the U.S. wants to accomplish. And we are concerned about who will bear the brunt of the inevitable bad consequences of a war fought by the U.S. alone -- in spite of the American press' assurances, via no doubt unnamed sources in the administration, that Europe and several Middle Eastern allies will just be all tickled pink about the deal. We are concerned that the U.S. is following a visibly incompetent leader as he pursues a comic book foreign policy against the "axis of evil."
In the seventies, Christopher Hill published an excellent book about the Protestant radicals who provided the ideological shock troops in the overthrow of Charles I in the English Civil War. The title of the book was World Turned Upside Down, which is the refrain in this ballad of the war:
"Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.
Let's talk about Old Christmas being kickt out of Town, shall we? Or rather, let's talk about kicking the bejesus out of Old Christmas, the bill of rights, common sense, the spirit of dissent, the independence of the legislature, the standards of right action, and other assorted matters of spiritual and political import.
We've come to such a pretty pass in this country, re the warmongering attitude, the stripping away of Civil Service protections in place since Chester Allan Arthur's time, and other such trivial supports of the national polity, that LI is forced to turn to the business press for some measure of dissent. Business Week, of all papers, the old Taft Republican Business Week, publishes a column by their Washington correspondent, Howard Gleckman, that hectors congress for surrendering its perogatives, right and left, to the executive. Gleckman presents a list of abdications: the fast track legislation Bush will be signing tomorrow, for instance; or the astonishing anomolies written into the act to make Heimat security a cabinet post. The latter is a really bad piece of legislation anyway -- there is no need for this re-organization, there's no need to add this cabinet post at all, given the Department of Defense, and certainly the composition of the law is outrageous. The discussion of the provisions entitling appointed officials to hire and fire at will has remained at this low level: conservatives: this is just to get the guv'mint out of the grip of civil service unions; liberals: this is an insult to civil service unions. Without any seeming consciousness of the reason why civil service was given a measure of autonomy vis a vis the executive in the first place, i.e. corruption. That's right, when hiring and firing can be done at will by elected officials, guess what? You soon have a system in which hiriign and firing becomes a marketable service. If commentators think that Bush is too high minded, and has employed cabinet members who are too high minded, to engage in corrupt practices (oh my! not our Commander in Chief!), they might want to investigate Ken Lay's ability to get the old head of FERC replaced, in 2001, by a more Enron pliable figure of Pat Wood III -- who moved from his Texas post, the path to which had also been paved by the ubiquitous Lay, to the national post after Lay reportedly threatened the old FERC head, Curtis Herbert, over the issue of deregulating the California Electrical Power market. But this is an issue that goes beyond Bush. It goes back to U.S. Grant, and it is an endemic illness to which democracies are heir. But trust the right to have no consciousness of the political tradition going back to Montesquieu -- which used to be called, in fact, the Burkean tradition, since its font was Burke's suspicion about ideological schemes designed to improve society by way of the government. Burke would likely have been appalled at the Homeland Security re-organization, but then again -- what right winger is even aware of Burke anymore?
Ah, LI is getting into a temper. But to return to Gleckman's column. The juice in it is in the last three grafs, which are directed against the inevitable drift to war against Iraq. Here it is:
"But the real test will come in foreign affairs. The nation is already fighting an undeclared war against terrorism. Not only are U.S. forces at risk in Afghanistan, but they are also fighting in the Philippines and most likely other nations as well.
The need for formal congressional approval for such a shadow war is admittedly murky. But there should be no confusion when it comes to what the White House has led us all to believe is its next step: a war against Iraq. Congress has a responsibility to enact a declaration of war before such an operation begins. Bush's father was wise enough to seek a congressional OK for his 1991 attack on Iraq. Now, the current President Bush should do the same.
There is little sign, though, that he will do that. And, sadly, there is even less indication that Congress will insist upon it. If Bush's Iraqi invasion goes badly, we will all come to regret both the President's power grab and the Congress' acquiescence. And, like LBJ and FDR before him, Bush will learn a costly lesson about the limits of the Imperial Presidency. "
Well, he might learn a lesson. We don't care about Mr. Bush's education. It failed to make a mark on him in the impressionable years, obviously, and we doubt any imminent changes are in the offing. The man's level has been exposed for all of us to see for some time now. We are more concerned with the lack of any good reason for this war. There is no reason to think that war is the best way to accomplish disarming Saddam Hussein, if that is really what the U.S. wants to accomplish. And we are concerned about who will bear the brunt of the inevitable bad consequences of a war fought by the U.S. alone -- in spite of the American press' assurances, via no doubt unnamed sources in the administration, that Europe and several Middle Eastern allies will just be all tickled pink about the deal. We are concerned that the U.S. is following a visibly incompetent leader as he pursues a comic book foreign policy against the "axis of evil."
Sunday, August 04, 2002
Remora
We like the LA Times -- we love LA -- we don't subscribe to the dismissive La La land stereotype -- but it is difficult for defenders of Southern California seriousness (with our pistols a-blazin'!) to read about the Post-nomadic economy, as breathlessly revealed in the Sunday Times, without, uh, wondering who put the marijuana in the arugala.
First comes the bio -- which we have copied faithfully from on-line:
"Joel Kotkin, a contributing editor to Opinion, is author of "The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape." He is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Pu"
PU is what you get in Mr. Kotkin and Ms. Susanne Trimbath's take on the new new economy, the one after that recent nasty spate of nomadism -- you remember, reader. There you were, out there with your spear, your seal coat, your tatooed cattle, wandering through desert sands and ice floes and such. Well, no more! Here's what is coming up:
The post-nomadic trend reflects changes that were building up before the stock
market's current turbulence and Sept. 11. As Americans have aged and
become ever more capable of settling where they wish, because of the rise of
digital technology and the dispersal of economic activity, fewer of them than
ever are willing to pick everything up and move in pursuit of quick riches.
Fewer than 15% of Americans change addresses in any given year, down from
a high of 20% in the 1970s. Contrary to popular reporting, most baby
boomers, suggests demographer William H. Frey, "age in place." That is, they
stay where they are. This development suggests that residential property may
be the "gold" of the emerging economy because the home has become more
important to people financially. [LI remark: that homes become the "gold" of an economy as people retain them longer must be a feature of this great new post nomadic paradigm. In the old, stinky paradigm, that houses are built and sold added value to them as investments. But no longer! Mr. Kotkin has discovered that a frozen market is a golden market. Is that great or what? We are all hoping that the Davenport Institute of PU puts him up for a Nobel Prize next year. If they can extract him from his rocking chair, that is -- the man doesn't want to contravene his own paradigm by acting all nomadic, you know).
But post-nomadism is also about values that place greater emphasis on family,
faith and community. At the height of the 1990s stock boom, according to the
Zogby International poll, only one in three Americans defined their "American
dream" in spiritual, as opposed to purely material, terms. By 2000, a spiritual definition was embraced by 42% of Americans. After Sept. 11, the percentage grew to 52% of adults."
When you get poll numbers like that opting for the spiritual, the game is up! Here I'd think that after September 11th, an increasing segment of the population would be reaching for their de La Mettrie, rejecting the afterlife, spewing contempt on the intellectual bankruptcy of the concept of "soul," throwing themselves into libertine lifestyles of finite sensuality, and ever more aware that man is doomed to a brief career of organic vicissitude, after which the worms will go in, and the worms will go out. And what do you know -- Americans start doing American dreamtime as a spiritually defined thing.
We like the LA Times -- we love LA -- we don't subscribe to the dismissive La La land stereotype -- but it is difficult for defenders of Southern California seriousness (with our pistols a-blazin'!) to read about the Post-nomadic economy, as breathlessly revealed in the Sunday Times, without, uh, wondering who put the marijuana in the arugala.
First comes the bio -- which we have copied faithfully from on-line:
"Joel Kotkin, a contributing editor to Opinion, is author of "The New Geography: How the Digital Revolution Is Reshaping the American Landscape." He is a senior fellow at the Davenport Institute for Pu"
PU is what you get in Mr. Kotkin and Ms. Susanne Trimbath's take on the new new economy, the one after that recent nasty spate of nomadism -- you remember, reader. There you were, out there with your spear, your seal coat, your tatooed cattle, wandering through desert sands and ice floes and such. Well, no more! Here's what is coming up:
The post-nomadic trend reflects changes that were building up before the stock
market's current turbulence and Sept. 11. As Americans have aged and
become ever more capable of settling where they wish, because of the rise of
digital technology and the dispersal of economic activity, fewer of them than
ever are willing to pick everything up and move in pursuit of quick riches.
Fewer than 15% of Americans change addresses in any given year, down from
a high of 20% in the 1970s. Contrary to popular reporting, most baby
boomers, suggests demographer William H. Frey, "age in place." That is, they
stay where they are. This development suggests that residential property may
be the "gold" of the emerging economy because the home has become more
important to people financially. [LI remark: that homes become the "gold" of an economy as people retain them longer must be a feature of this great new post nomadic paradigm. In the old, stinky paradigm, that houses are built and sold added value to them as investments. But no longer! Mr. Kotkin has discovered that a frozen market is a golden market. Is that great or what? We are all hoping that the Davenport Institute of PU puts him up for a Nobel Prize next year. If they can extract him from his rocking chair, that is -- the man doesn't want to contravene his own paradigm by acting all nomadic, you know).
But post-nomadism is also about values that place greater emphasis on family,
faith and community. At the height of the 1990s stock boom, according to the
Zogby International poll, only one in three Americans defined their "American
dream" in spiritual, as opposed to purely material, terms. By 2000, a spiritual definition was embraced by 42% of Americans. After Sept. 11, the percentage grew to 52% of adults."
When you get poll numbers like that opting for the spiritual, the game is up! Here I'd think that after September 11th, an increasing segment of the population would be reaching for their de La Mettrie, rejecting the afterlife, spewing contempt on the intellectual bankruptcy of the concept of "soul," throwing themselves into libertine lifestyles of finite sensuality, and ever more aware that man is doomed to a brief career of organic vicissitude, after which the worms will go in, and the worms will go out. And what do you know -- Americans start doing American dreamtime as a spiritually defined thing.
Friday, August 02, 2002
Remora
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Blogging without a computer of one's own -- to change Virginia Woolf's title around a bit -- is a difficult enterprise. We come here, to this library, and we plunge into the news, and we see the stray tasty morsel -- the story from Business Week, the Nick Tosches fan site, etc. -- but trying to capture what we want from these sites is totally frustrating. Plus, we can't take off all our cloths in the library -- some screwy policy. And how can we write with cloths on? It feels unnatural.
Plus the lack of coffee.
Plus the lack of beer (after coffee).
But okay. Remember, last week, we nominated some biz journalists for the Glassman award. That prize is named after our favorite fearless forecaster, the man who co-wrote Dow 36,000 and is still ticking away, like a watch that tells the correct time once in a century, at the Washington Post. Yesterday, we were overjoyed to see this conservative pantaloon defending his thesis on the Wall Street Journal op ed page.
It takes the tiniest bit of gall to defend the ideas set forth in that 1999 book in 2002. And there's the pesky problem with the 7 to 8 trillion dollars lost in the popping of the high nineties bubble. But Glassman is having none of it. He's still forecasting that Dow 36,000, although, uh, there's no date set for it now. Rather like the launch of the starship enterprise and various of H.G. Well's scientific romances, Glassman's Dow number is set for sometime in the indeterminate future.
What is interesting is not his popcock prediction, however. It is the political coloring that he gives to investing in the stock market. With Gilder and Larry Kudlow, Glassman is a new economics conservative. Let's quote from the next to last grafs of his piece:
"If anything has changed since our book appeared, it is increasing respect for the debunked strategy of market timing. Robert Shiller, the economist whose book "Irrational Exuberance" appeared in 2000, has been celebrated as a Timer Saint. But Mr. Shiller was bearish while the market was setting new records. His theory was laid out with fanfare in 1996, when, with the Dow at 5427, he said his data "implied an expected decline in the real Standard and Poor Index over the next 10 years of 38.07 percent." But six years later, despite a long bear market, the Dow is up about 60%; the S&P, 40%.
"Our noisiest critics, Paul Krugman in the New York Times and various Slate.com scribblers, willfully distort our arguments. And no wonder. If Americans continue to embrace long-term stock investing, the role of the state as dispenser of retirement benefits will shrink or disappear. And the "war" between capital and labor will be over. Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists have a vested interest in spreading fear and chasing people out of stocks -- even though stock investing is the most reliable route to accumulating wealth."
The "war" between capital and labor is one of those Old Economics things. And it was recognized by Old Economics conservatives. That's why the stereotype of the conservative, from the thirties to the sixties, was of a Taft voting, bondholding Republican. This kind of conservative wanted to stand athwart the stream of history, with a bond paying a secure dividend, and yell halt. While the difference between bonds and stocks -- and Glassman's silliness about what the stock market is about -- has a technical aspect around which Glassman, et al weave their tales, the synbolism of stock conservativism is more important.
That symbolism goes something like this: far from standing athwart the stream of history, the stock conservative wants to surf on it, as ever more technical marvels produce prosperity for all of us. The divide of class was not just a Marxist construct -- traditionally, conservativism has recognized and embraced the governing class -- the owners. Conservatives of the Burkean variety have always believed that this class isn't defined simply by their statistically greater wealth, but by such emergent qualities as leadership, a concern for order, and the guardianship of tradition.
Stock conservatives have a different dream. In this dream, the workers on the other side of the divide take on not only some small share of ownership, but the Burkean role alloted to the owners.
For this to actually occur, the workers have to operate like the owners. For instance, they have to keep their capital in stock, aligning their interests with the interests of corporate America. If they keep their money in bonds, even corporate bonds, their interest are eventually going to be aligned with the Treasury department -- that is, with the government.
This isn't a bad thing for the Burkean school. Burkeans aren't opposed to government tout court -- rather, they claim it as the natural heirs of rule.
If, indeed, the slug of losses mount so that the working class falls away from the role of owner envisioned by the stock conservatives, there will definitely be a shift in the intellectual framework of American conservative expression. The Buckleys will once again come to the forefront.
LI doesn't think this will happen. But LI, unlike Glassman, has no crystal ball in the house...
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Blogging without a computer of one's own -- to change Virginia Woolf's title around a bit -- is a difficult enterprise. We come here, to this library, and we plunge into the news, and we see the stray tasty morsel -- the story from Business Week, the Nick Tosches fan site, etc. -- but trying to capture what we want from these sites is totally frustrating. Plus, we can't take off all our cloths in the library -- some screwy policy. And how can we write with cloths on? It feels unnatural.
Plus the lack of coffee.
Plus the lack of beer (after coffee).
But okay. Remember, last week, we nominated some biz journalists for the Glassman award. That prize is named after our favorite fearless forecaster, the man who co-wrote Dow 36,000 and is still ticking away, like a watch that tells the correct time once in a century, at the Washington Post. Yesterday, we were overjoyed to see this conservative pantaloon defending his thesis on the Wall Street Journal op ed page.
It takes the tiniest bit of gall to defend the ideas set forth in that 1999 book in 2002. And there's the pesky problem with the 7 to 8 trillion dollars lost in the popping of the high nineties bubble. But Glassman is having none of it. He's still forecasting that Dow 36,000, although, uh, there's no date set for it now. Rather like the launch of the starship enterprise and various of H.G. Well's scientific romances, Glassman's Dow number is set for sometime in the indeterminate future.
What is interesting is not his popcock prediction, however. It is the political coloring that he gives to investing in the stock market. With Gilder and Larry Kudlow, Glassman is a new economics conservative. Let's quote from the next to last grafs of his piece:
"If anything has changed since our book appeared, it is increasing respect for the debunked strategy of market timing. Robert Shiller, the economist whose book "Irrational Exuberance" appeared in 2000, has been celebrated as a Timer Saint. But Mr. Shiller was bearish while the market was setting new records. His theory was laid out with fanfare in 1996, when, with the Dow at 5427, he said his data "implied an expected decline in the real Standard and Poor Index over the next 10 years of 38.07 percent." But six years later, despite a long bear market, the Dow is up about 60%; the S&P, 40%.
"Our noisiest critics, Paul Krugman in the New York Times and various Slate.com scribblers, willfully distort our arguments. And no wonder. If Americans continue to embrace long-term stock investing, the role of the state as dispenser of retirement benefits will shrink or disappear. And the "war" between capital and labor will be over. Unfortunately, many politicians and journalists have a vested interest in spreading fear and chasing people out of stocks -- even though stock investing is the most reliable route to accumulating wealth."
The "war" between capital and labor is one of those Old Economics things. And it was recognized by Old Economics conservatives. That's why the stereotype of the conservative, from the thirties to the sixties, was of a Taft voting, bondholding Republican. This kind of conservative wanted to stand athwart the stream of history, with a bond paying a secure dividend, and yell halt. While the difference between bonds and stocks -- and Glassman's silliness about what the stock market is about -- has a technical aspect around which Glassman, et al weave their tales, the synbolism of stock conservativism is more important.
That symbolism goes something like this: far from standing athwart the stream of history, the stock conservative wants to surf on it, as ever more technical marvels produce prosperity for all of us. The divide of class was not just a Marxist construct -- traditionally, conservativism has recognized and embraced the governing class -- the owners. Conservatives of the Burkean variety have always believed that this class isn't defined simply by their statistically greater wealth, but by such emergent qualities as leadership, a concern for order, and the guardianship of tradition.
Stock conservatives have a different dream. In this dream, the workers on the other side of the divide take on not only some small share of ownership, but the Burkean role alloted to the owners.
For this to actually occur, the workers have to operate like the owners. For instance, they have to keep their capital in stock, aligning their interests with the interests of corporate America. If they keep their money in bonds, even corporate bonds, their interest are eventually going to be aligned with the Treasury department -- that is, with the government.
This isn't a bad thing for the Burkean school. Burkeans aren't opposed to government tout court -- rather, they claim it as the natural heirs of rule.
If, indeed, the slug of losses mount so that the working class falls away from the role of owner envisioned by the stock conservatives, there will definitely be a shift in the intellectual framework of American conservative expression. The Buckleys will once again come to the forefront.
LI doesn't think this will happen. But LI, unlike Glassman, has no crystal ball in the house...
Wednesday, July 31, 2002
Remora
Dave calls LI this morning to complain about our lack of posts.
What can we say? Here we sit, in the library. Our new computer is supposedly trucking to us as we write. Our old computer, with its invaluable (at least to LI) hard drive, sits at Mac Alliance like the corpse of the family's beloved pooch, with the service people gently urging us to do the needful, bury the damn thing, etc.
But let's send out a brief recommend to this Business Week article on the failed telecosm - or did the "cosm" in George Gilder's once much quoted phrase hint at a Bataille like orgy of waste, an economy of excess that we will all have to live with, now
The first two grafs present the grim picture -- or grim for some.
"Telecom has been a disaster for just about everyone.
Investors have lost some $2 trillion as stock prices
have tumbled 95% or more from their highs. Half a
million workers have lost their jobs during the past
two years. Dozens of debt-laden companies, from
Winstar Communications to Global Crossing, have
collapsed into bankruptcy. And on July 21, the
sector sank to a once-unimaginable low when
WorldCom Inc., the company that embodied the
industry's power and promise, filed the largest
bankruptcy claim in U.S. history.
"Yet a small group of CEOs and financiers managed
to save the family silver before the house burned to
the ground. Philip F. Anschutz, founder of ailing local
and long-distance upstart Qwest Communications
International Inc. (Q ), reaped $1.9 billion from
company stock sales since 1998. Former Qwest
CEO Joseph P. Nacchio sold $248 million worth of
stock before he was pushed out of the scandal-plagued company in June. Global Crossing founder Gary Winnick sold $734 million of his shares before
his company filed for bankruptcy in January. And former WorldCom CEO
Bernard J. Ebbers borrowed some $400 million from his company before he
was ousted in April--and that loan remains to be repaid."
The story connects the dots to the fall guy du jour -- Salomon Smith Barney's own analyst of the year, all around neutral observer, and general pig, Jack B. Grubman. The man with the Midas touch in 1999, although all that was glittering turned out not to be gold -- more like the stuff you pitchfork out of stables. Dross, as Freud knew, was the other side of gold -- too bad the investors Mr. Grubman sold down the river weren't conversant in Freud, in spite of his loss of stock in the last decade, eh?
As for the inventor of the Telecosm, hmm. Poor Old George Gilder is still plugging away at the spectator, and on the Telecosm lounge he purveys some recent email from believers who urge each other to keep the faith, to recognize that new paradigms sometimes take, well, hits. Big hits, in fact. Massive, tsunami size ones. I imagine less, shall we say, sanguine gamblers have abandoned the Telecosm lounge, and the Gilder Technology report, for the more secure predictions that emerge from horoscope charts, haroscopy, and other forms of divination.
Dave calls LI this morning to complain about our lack of posts.
What can we say? Here we sit, in the library. Our new computer is supposedly trucking to us as we write. Our old computer, with its invaluable (at least to LI) hard drive, sits at Mac Alliance like the corpse of the family's beloved pooch, with the service people gently urging us to do the needful, bury the damn thing, etc.
But let's send out a brief recommend to this Business Week article on the failed telecosm - or did the "cosm" in George Gilder's once much quoted phrase hint at a Bataille like orgy of waste, an economy of excess that we will all have to live with, now
The first two grafs present the grim picture -- or grim for some.
"Telecom has been a disaster for just about everyone.
Investors have lost some $2 trillion as stock prices
have tumbled 95% or more from their highs. Half a
million workers have lost their jobs during the past
two years. Dozens of debt-laden companies, from
Winstar Communications to Global Crossing, have
collapsed into bankruptcy. And on July 21, the
sector sank to a once-unimaginable low when
WorldCom Inc., the company that embodied the
industry's power and promise, filed the largest
bankruptcy claim in U.S. history.
"Yet a small group of CEOs and financiers managed
to save the family silver before the house burned to
the ground. Philip F. Anschutz, founder of ailing local
and long-distance upstart Qwest Communications
International Inc. (Q ), reaped $1.9 billion from
company stock sales since 1998. Former Qwest
CEO Joseph P. Nacchio sold $248 million worth of
stock before he was pushed out of the scandal-plagued company in June. Global Crossing founder Gary Winnick sold $734 million of his shares before
his company filed for bankruptcy in January. And former WorldCom CEO
Bernard J. Ebbers borrowed some $400 million from his company before he
was ousted in April--and that loan remains to be repaid."
The story connects the dots to the fall guy du jour -- Salomon Smith Barney's own analyst of the year, all around neutral observer, and general pig, Jack B. Grubman. The man with the Midas touch in 1999, although all that was glittering turned out not to be gold -- more like the stuff you pitchfork out of stables. Dross, as Freud knew, was the other side of gold -- too bad the investors Mr. Grubman sold down the river weren't conversant in Freud, in spite of his loss of stock in the last decade, eh?
As for the inventor of the Telecosm, hmm. Poor Old George Gilder is still plugging away at the spectator, and on the Telecosm lounge he purveys some recent email from believers who urge each other to keep the faith, to recognize that new paradigms sometimes take, well, hits. Big hits, in fact. Massive, tsunami size ones. I imagine less, shall we say, sanguine gamblers have abandoned the Telecosm lounge, and the Gilder Technology report, for the more secure predictions that emerge from horoscope charts, haroscopy, and other forms of divination.
Thursday, July 25, 2002
Remora
I want to stop. I want to be stopped. But no -- LI is addicted to this kind of stuff. Karl Marx and his buddy, Fred, have surely had been laughing like crazy in Commie Heaven. From today's Business Week, the article on Enron's board:
"There are, in fact, almost no real consequences for company directors who fail on the job. Instead of skating by with liability insurance paid for by shareholders, directors who fail to exercise at least a minimal level of oversight should be forced to pay some of the damages, just as executives should. Shareholders have a right to expect directors, who at Enron were paid as much as $350,000 a year in cash, stock options, and phantom stock, to be engaged and active."
Now, as you know, readers, you don't get much for 350 thou a year nowadays. Hell, I'd spit on that kind of compensation. But the Wendy Gramm's of the world (my fave board member, Wendy. Tough as nails when it comes to defendin' that old time private enterprise system, with her hubbie doing his part in the senate) have such a sense of noblesse oblige that they are willing to stoop for those dimes and nickels and generally help out when called upon. And Enron came calling. But just because a company comes calling doesn't mean a girl has to drop everything to, like, investigate all the itsy bitsy affairs of a great big megacorps, does it? Here's two items that slipped right past the board:
"-- In 2000, over several meetings, the board's compensation committee approved $750 million in cash bonuses to Enron executives in a year when the Houston-based company reported net income of $975 million. In other words, the directors handed over an amount equal to more than three-quarters of reported profits to salaried managers--at the expense of the shareholders. Apparently, no one on the compensation committee had ever added up the numbers.
"-- The compensation committee also approved a credit line for Chief Executive Kenneth L. Lay that eventually reached $7.5 million, and then allowed him to repay it with stock instead of cash. Lay proceeded to use the credit line as an express lane for dumping Enron stock. He repeatedly drew down the line, sometimes daily, always repaying right away with stock. Doing so allowed him to delay reporting some stock sales for more than a year. The chairman of the compensation committee, Charles A. LeMaistre, told the Senate investigators that he did not think it was the committee's responsibility to monitor Lay's use of this credit line. If the directors had bothered to look, they would have discovered that as Enron's position became more precarious in the 12 months preceding revelations of its infamous off-balance-sheet partnerships, Lay extracted $77 million in cash from the corporation that he replaced with Enron shares."
And so another day ends, the world turns, and I reach for my Karl and Fred. Supposedly, the Dems are my secret companeros for this kind of reading. David Brooks, at the Weekly Standard, issued this wee warning that all might not be well for Bush if this kind of thing keeps getting publicized. Gosh.
"Still, the Democrats seem to think that there is this organized entity called Corporate America, made up of senior executives, Republicans, white country clubbers, and people who were cheerleaders and prom kings in high school. If they can get the rest of the country to hate these people as much as they do, then they will win elections. Because they have this category in their heads, Democrats see the corporate scandals as tainting the whole Republican party.
But Americans who have not been suckled on the "Marx-Engels Reader" do not carry these categories around in their heads. They perceive no one organized entity, Corporate America, that ruthlessly exploits another, Ordinary Americans. Most people believe, rather, that there are some dishonest people who have done horrible things in corporate America. But also that George W. Bush is an admirable man who is doing his best for the country, even though he once worked for a corporation, and has friends who are in business. In other words, they see the scandals as a crisis of character, not a crisis of capitalism."
Gee, it is all a matter of character, and not a matter of their pensions going bye bye. I don't know, call LI foresighted, but here's my prediction for this election year: Republicans are not going to run on the Let's Privatize Social Security issue. Because, uh, they first have to address that character crisis out there -- whcih obviously stems from liberal sex education and the like!
I want to stop. I want to be stopped. But no -- LI is addicted to this kind of stuff. Karl Marx and his buddy, Fred, have surely had been laughing like crazy in Commie Heaven. From today's Business Week, the article on Enron's board:
"There are, in fact, almost no real consequences for company directors who fail on the job. Instead of skating by with liability insurance paid for by shareholders, directors who fail to exercise at least a minimal level of oversight should be forced to pay some of the damages, just as executives should. Shareholders have a right to expect directors, who at Enron were paid as much as $350,000 a year in cash, stock options, and phantom stock, to be engaged and active."
Now, as you know, readers, you don't get much for 350 thou a year nowadays. Hell, I'd spit on that kind of compensation. But the Wendy Gramm's of the world (my fave board member, Wendy. Tough as nails when it comes to defendin' that old time private enterprise system, with her hubbie doing his part in the senate) have such a sense of noblesse oblige that they are willing to stoop for those dimes and nickels and generally help out when called upon. And Enron came calling. But just because a company comes calling doesn't mean a girl has to drop everything to, like, investigate all the itsy bitsy affairs of a great big megacorps, does it? Here's two items that slipped right past the board:
"-- In 2000, over several meetings, the board's compensation committee approved $750 million in cash bonuses to Enron executives in a year when the Houston-based company reported net income of $975 million. In other words, the directors handed over an amount equal to more than three-quarters of reported profits to salaried managers--at the expense of the shareholders. Apparently, no one on the compensation committee had ever added up the numbers.
"-- The compensation committee also approved a credit line for Chief Executive Kenneth L. Lay that eventually reached $7.5 million, and then allowed him to repay it with stock instead of cash. Lay proceeded to use the credit line as an express lane for dumping Enron stock. He repeatedly drew down the line, sometimes daily, always repaying right away with stock. Doing so allowed him to delay reporting some stock sales for more than a year. The chairman of the compensation committee, Charles A. LeMaistre, told the Senate investigators that he did not think it was the committee's responsibility to monitor Lay's use of this credit line. If the directors had bothered to look, they would have discovered that as Enron's position became more precarious in the 12 months preceding revelations of its infamous off-balance-sheet partnerships, Lay extracted $77 million in cash from the corporation that he replaced with Enron shares."
And so another day ends, the world turns, and I reach for my Karl and Fred. Supposedly, the Dems are my secret companeros for this kind of reading. David Brooks, at the Weekly Standard, issued this wee warning that all might not be well for Bush if this kind of thing keeps getting publicized. Gosh.
"Still, the Democrats seem to think that there is this organized entity called Corporate America, made up of senior executives, Republicans, white country clubbers, and people who were cheerleaders and prom kings in high school. If they can get the rest of the country to hate these people as much as they do, then they will win elections. Because they have this category in their heads, Democrats see the corporate scandals as tainting the whole Republican party.
But Americans who have not been suckled on the "Marx-Engels Reader" do not carry these categories around in their heads. They perceive no one organized entity, Corporate America, that ruthlessly exploits another, Ordinary Americans. Most people believe, rather, that there are some dishonest people who have done horrible things in corporate America. But also that George W. Bush is an admirable man who is doing his best for the country, even though he once worked for a corporation, and has friends who are in business. In other words, they see the scandals as a crisis of character, not a crisis of capitalism."
Gee, it is all a matter of character, and not a matter of their pensions going bye bye. I don't know, call LI foresighted, but here's my prediction for this election year: Republicans are not going to run on the Let's Privatize Social Security issue. Because, uh, they first have to address that character crisis out there -- whcih obviously stems from liberal sex education and the like!
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Remora
LI can't get enough (although our readers probably have had enough) of the continuing fallout from Enron. The difference between a celebrity scandal -- you know, like O.J. murdering Condit, while Robert Blake takes pictures, or the like -- is that the corp scandal grows richer and stranger the more you look into it. That's a bit of a problem for the fast forward public. We want our National Enquirer, dammit.
But the public, upon which is gradually settling the discovery that the loss of seven trillion dollars in the market wipes out ALL of the value accrued there during the high nineties, just might stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of a number of series.
We'd recommend the Tom Paine article on Rebecca Mark, the Enron exec who lost the company, easily, a billion or two, and was rewarded with stock options to the tune of 80 million dollars -- at least by some reports. We wanted to do a Glassman award piece on her coverage, but Jeff Stein beat us to the punch fair and square. We especially like Mark's end quote:
"I'm very surprised and saddened by [what has happened at Enron]," Rebecca Mark told a reporter recently, "and I wish them all the best."
Surprised, huh?
Media is slowly coming around to criticize its own pump and pump strategy -- LI did our post yesterday, went home, turned on NPR, and listened to a program on Marketplace that actually went through the same lines we'd just typed. One interview was particularly gruesome, with some honcho at CNBC, who claimed that the journalists weren't too blame -- no, it was the greedy culture. The viewers, they were to blame.
This reminds me of something I recently read in an essay by Ricky Jay, the historian of magic. Jay says that there is a reference to loaded dice, one of the first in English, in Roger Ascham's Toxophilus -- the Tudor era treatise on archery. Ascham records a cheater's trick. If the gull is winning, the cheater insinuates loaded dice into the game, getting the gull to use them. Then the cheater claims the dice are loaded. When they prove to be loaded, it shows that the gull has been cheating.
Well, that seems to be CNBC's idea, too. The Greed is good mantra is great, as long as the greedy are people CNBC reporters can toady up to -- but greed isn't for the vulgar, you know. So it is all their fault that the info piped through the biz media in the high nineties was ninety percent garbage.
LI can't get enough (although our readers probably have had enough) of the continuing fallout from Enron. The difference between a celebrity scandal -- you know, like O.J. murdering Condit, while Robert Blake takes pictures, or the like -- is that the corp scandal grows richer and stranger the more you look into it. That's a bit of a problem for the fast forward public. We want our National Enquirer, dammit.
But the public, upon which is gradually settling the discovery that the loss of seven trillion dollars in the market wipes out ALL of the value accrued there during the high nineties, just might stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of a number of series.
We'd recommend the Tom Paine article on Rebecca Mark, the Enron exec who lost the company, easily, a billion or two, and was rewarded with stock options to the tune of 80 million dollars -- at least by some reports. We wanted to do a Glassman award piece on her coverage, but Jeff Stein beat us to the punch fair and square. We especially like Mark's end quote:
"I'm very surprised and saddened by [what has happened at Enron]," Rebecca Mark told a reporter recently, "and I wish them all the best."
Surprised, huh?
Media is slowly coming around to criticize its own pump and pump strategy -- LI did our post yesterday, went home, turned on NPR, and listened to a program on Marketplace that actually went through the same lines we'd just typed. One interview was particularly gruesome, with some honcho at CNBC, who claimed that the journalists weren't too blame -- no, it was the greedy culture. The viewers, they were to blame.
This reminds me of something I recently read in an essay by Ricky Jay, the historian of magic. Jay says that there is a reference to loaded dice, one of the first in English, in Roger Ascham's Toxophilus -- the Tudor era treatise on archery. Ascham records a cheater's trick. If the gull is winning, the cheater insinuates loaded dice into the game, getting the gull to use them. Then the cheater claims the dice are loaded. When they prove to be loaded, it shows that the gull has been cheating.
Well, that seems to be CNBC's idea, too. The Greed is good mantra is great, as long as the greedy are people CNBC reporters can toady up to -- but greed isn't for the vulgar, you know. So it is all their fault that the info piped through the biz media in the high nineties was ninety percent garbage.
Remora
In my last post, LI proposed awarding a Glassman to the worst business reporter -- the one that swallowed the most garbage, left uninvestigated the most shady sources of information, etc. After all, one of the reasons investors are leaving the market is that the press has proven to be as intellectually corrupt as the accounting firms or the upper, overpaid management of the various scam corps. To actually survey the business press over the last five years is a daunting proposition, given that LI has, uh, let's say a limited group of researchers to work with. Luckily, cyberspace gives us a vast trove of material with which to enthrall our lucky readers.
So, just at random, we chose to examine articles from Nelson Schwartz.
Schwartz, as you will doubtless not remember, was the man who wrote the article about the Enron bust last December that was entitled, Enron Fall out, wide but not deep. Ah, my cringing readers say, you are dancing on a grave there -- but sometimes I just get all jiggly when I go through the uplift and scam of biz reporting. I really do.
Schwartz, of course, was very busy during the high nineties. He dished out his "investigative" scoops, and they were indeed spectacular. As in spectacularly dumb. Here's a typical article from the May 4, 2000 issue. Entitled B2B Boom, this is what Mr. Schwartz tells us:
"Even after factoring out the hype, it's clear that e-business offers huge opportunities for the select group of companies that do manage to thrive over the long term. Banc of America Securities analyst Bob Austrian estimates that worldwide B2B electronic commerce will grow from less than $20 billion in 2000 to roughly $13 trillion in 2004--a 650-fold increase. That's an incredible growth rate, but the cost savings inherent in B2B transactions explains why it may not be far off. On average, corporations spend $100 on paperwork alone each time they make a purchase, Austrian says. Moving those transactions to the Web could slash costs by 90%, saving billions in overhead each year. Not surprisingly, traditional firms are investing heavily in hardware and software so they can do more buying and selling via the Net. A recent Goldman Sachs survey of 42 fortune 1,000 companies reveals that more than 40% plan to spend at least $500,000 each on new B2B software this year."
Now, let's contrast this with the latest figures on B2B, shall we? Here's Cyber-atlas, as of this month:
"Worldwide B2B e-commerce will total $823.4 billion by the end of 2002, eMarketer found, and the strong growth will continue through 2004.
According to eMarketer's "E-Commerce Trade and B2B Exchanges" report, Internet-based B2B trade will reach nearly $2.4 trillion by 2004. "
Mr. Nelson's source only mistook his market by, oh, 11 trillion dollars. To put Bob Austrian in perspective, perhaps Schwartz could have asked him questions like, hey, do you think it is healthy to do massive doses of LSD every day? But he didn't. Instead, he took at face value the idea -- or is it an idea? -- the fantasy that there was a 100 dollar savings in paperwork each time a business transaction was made. Hmm. So, each biz transaction that is made is equal to +100 dollars in cost? Schwartz has some story here, if this is true. The story would go something like: Capitalism is more than doomed! Marx didn't know the half of it! More at 11...
But why think, really, if you can write such pap for the nation's leading biz mag and get away with it?
Schwartz, actually, became a New Economy pentiti. He confessed, in an article published a year after his B2B extravaganza, that he might have been a wee bit credulous.
"Although I was always careful to warn readers, as well as Mom, of the risks of investing--even saying that certain stocks could lose all of their value--I too believed in the promise of the new economy. I wanted a piece of the action. And as hard as it might be to remember now, it actually seemed as if the Internet were going to change everything. So if that meant selling blue chips to buy names that could double in weeks or months, well, that was a heck of a lot more exciting than sitting on dead money. Besides, the people behind these Silicon Valley companies were a lot more exciting, even sexier, than the old economy's gray suits. Wouldn't you rather have dinner with HP's Carly Fiorina than with Phil Condit of Boeing?
As it turned out, what I thought of as dead money wasn't so bad. At least those stocks, when they go down, don't drop 80% or more like PMC-Sierra or Kana. There's something to be said for boring old blue chips that actually pay dividends, earn real profits, and maybe rise only 5% or 10% a year. And keeping cash in a money-market account may not be just for wimps and nervous Nellies."
Get the coyness of that confession -- yeah, he's bowled over by how sexy Carly Fiorina is, heh heh. When, of course, the question is making an elementary, an elementary, analysis of what you are being told. In other words, being able to smell bs. That is what journalists are supposed to do, right?
But not if their purpose is simply to pump the market. Like Bourbon Street shills, all that noise is just supposed to attract the gawkers, and strip them of their ready cash.
Oh, and now they wonder why the rubes aren't lifting the market when it has "bottomed'? Search me.
In my last post, LI proposed awarding a Glassman to the worst business reporter -- the one that swallowed the most garbage, left uninvestigated the most shady sources of information, etc. After all, one of the reasons investors are leaving the market is that the press has proven to be as intellectually corrupt as the accounting firms or the upper, overpaid management of the various scam corps. To actually survey the business press over the last five years is a daunting proposition, given that LI has, uh, let's say a limited group of researchers to work with. Luckily, cyberspace gives us a vast trove of material with which to enthrall our lucky readers.
So, just at random, we chose to examine articles from Nelson Schwartz.
Schwartz, as you will doubtless not remember, was the man who wrote the article about the Enron bust last December that was entitled, Enron Fall out, wide but not deep. Ah, my cringing readers say, you are dancing on a grave there -- but sometimes I just get all jiggly when I go through the uplift and scam of biz reporting. I really do.
Schwartz, of course, was very busy during the high nineties. He dished out his "investigative" scoops, and they were indeed spectacular. As in spectacularly dumb. Here's a typical article from the May 4, 2000 issue. Entitled B2B Boom, this is what Mr. Schwartz tells us:
"Even after factoring out the hype, it's clear that e-business offers huge opportunities for the select group of companies that do manage to thrive over the long term. Banc of America Securities analyst Bob Austrian estimates that worldwide B2B electronic commerce will grow from less than $20 billion in 2000 to roughly $13 trillion in 2004--a 650-fold increase. That's an incredible growth rate, but the cost savings inherent in B2B transactions explains why it may not be far off. On average, corporations spend $100 on paperwork alone each time they make a purchase, Austrian says. Moving those transactions to the Web could slash costs by 90%, saving billions in overhead each year. Not surprisingly, traditional firms are investing heavily in hardware and software so they can do more buying and selling via the Net. A recent Goldman Sachs survey of 42 fortune 1,000 companies reveals that more than 40% plan to spend at least $500,000 each on new B2B software this year."
Now, let's contrast this with the latest figures on B2B, shall we? Here's Cyber-atlas, as of this month:
"Worldwide B2B e-commerce will total $823.4 billion by the end of 2002, eMarketer found, and the strong growth will continue through 2004.
According to eMarketer's "E-Commerce Trade and B2B Exchanges" report, Internet-based B2B trade will reach nearly $2.4 trillion by 2004. "
Mr. Nelson's source only mistook his market by, oh, 11 trillion dollars. To put Bob Austrian in perspective, perhaps Schwartz could have asked him questions like, hey, do you think it is healthy to do massive doses of LSD every day? But he didn't. Instead, he took at face value the idea -- or is it an idea? -- the fantasy that there was a 100 dollar savings in paperwork each time a business transaction was made. Hmm. So, each biz transaction that is made is equal to +100 dollars in cost? Schwartz has some story here, if this is true. The story would go something like: Capitalism is more than doomed! Marx didn't know the half of it! More at 11...
But why think, really, if you can write such pap for the nation's leading biz mag and get away with it?
Schwartz, actually, became a New Economy pentiti. He confessed, in an article published a year after his B2B extravaganza, that he might have been a wee bit credulous.
"Although I was always careful to warn readers, as well as Mom, of the risks of investing--even saying that certain stocks could lose all of their value--I too believed in the promise of the new economy. I wanted a piece of the action. And as hard as it might be to remember now, it actually seemed as if the Internet were going to change everything. So if that meant selling blue chips to buy names that could double in weeks or months, well, that was a heck of a lot more exciting than sitting on dead money. Besides, the people behind these Silicon Valley companies were a lot more exciting, even sexier, than the old economy's gray suits. Wouldn't you rather have dinner with HP's Carly Fiorina than with Phil Condit of Boeing?
As it turned out, what I thought of as dead money wasn't so bad. At least those stocks, when they go down, don't drop 80% or more like PMC-Sierra or Kana. There's something to be said for boring old blue chips that actually pay dividends, earn real profits, and maybe rise only 5% or 10% a year. And keeping cash in a money-market account may not be just for wimps and nervous Nellies."
Get the coyness of that confession -- yeah, he's bowled over by how sexy Carly Fiorina is, heh heh. When, of course, the question is making an elementary, an elementary, analysis of what you are being told. In other words, being able to smell bs. That is what journalists are supposed to do, right?
But not if their purpose is simply to pump the market. Like Bourbon Street shills, all that noise is just supposed to attract the gawkers, and strip them of their ready cash.
Oh, and now they wonder why the rubes aren't lifting the market when it has "bottomed'? Search me.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Remora
Well, Limited Inc is going to try to write a post.
We've been thinking of extending the Bubble concept. We've mentioned the Bush Bubble. But there is another bubble that floated, in the high nineties, that has come down precipitously. That bubble was made of Media hot air. If the stock market does level out into some seventies plateau, one of the reasons will be that the business press, both mainstream and specialized, has done an incredibly poor job of reporting on business in the last ten years. Business mags popped up, got fat, got thin and died, all without questioning or in any way investigating what now appears to be incredibly easy to expose shams in major corporations. We'd like to institute some kind of prize for sheer hot air -- a prize that would go to the most intellectually corrupt reporter. Unfortunately, we don't have any bucks to do this. However, we do have a name: We'd call it the James Glassman prize in misleading reporting, after the author of Dow 36,000 -- a man who is still giving his perky advice from the pages of the Washington Post. Some would argue with this choice of name. Some would rather name it after poor George Gilder, Mr. Telecosm. But G.G. smoked his own dope, as the Enron folks used to say. He went down with his picks.
The field is vast, n'est-ce pas? and it isn't like it has been culled or corrected -- when amnesia takes away the mendacity one published yesterday, so that one can continue to make ridiculous and optimistic statements today, there's no mechanism of natural selection that would finger the unworthy. Yesterday, for example, LI was sitting in a bar. The bar TV was turned to Fox News. Now, Fox TV sit-coms are known for their appeal to the prurient puer, but compared to the intellectual level on display during the news hour, the sit coms are straight from Einstein. The hour lighted on the liberal demon act of the day, California's new standards for car emissions, and a suitable shill from Detroit, disguised as a reporter, was given the spotlight. I mean, this guy was so from Detroit he should have been wearing an SUV chassis. At one point, he made a disparaging remark about Honda's hybrid cars, to the effect that they are losing thousands per unit.
Now, Honda does seem to be losing money, right now, on their hybrids, although the figures are as yet unknown. But the gall of a Detroit shill lecturing Honda, of all companies, was enough to make me spit my vodka tonic all over the place. As everybody knows, GM is moving their mammoths not through quality improvement, but through the game of zero percent financing. They can do this because they have effectively disintermediated from financial institutions that would have refused the gimmick. Eventually, though, GM's financing department is going to have to find a way to lay that rotten egg. Talk about losing money. To lose money trying to craft a new technology is honorable, and in the long run it pays off, if the tech is any good. To lose money essentially trying to bamboozle market share for car types that haven't changed in 10 years is not only dishonorable, but eventually GM will quietly try to make the Government pay for their massive bet. Why, one might ask, does this story not attract Fortune or Forbes or Business 2.0? Because it is a story that GM does not want told. Period.
Tomorrow, if we can, we are going to start our Glassman awards with a look at the reporting on Enron. Enron, it appears, is a bigger story than even we thought a couple of months ago, because some of the effects of it are just starting to kick in globally. Todays stories about the collaboration of the banks in Enron's perpetual, perpetually disguised, deals, is not going to be good news, now that the Fed is figuring out how to cover Citibank for its WorldCom exposure.
Well, Limited Inc is going to try to write a post.
We've been thinking of extending the Bubble concept. We've mentioned the Bush Bubble. But there is another bubble that floated, in the high nineties, that has come down precipitously. That bubble was made of Media hot air. If the stock market does level out into some seventies plateau, one of the reasons will be that the business press, both mainstream and specialized, has done an incredibly poor job of reporting on business in the last ten years. Business mags popped up, got fat, got thin and died, all without questioning or in any way investigating what now appears to be incredibly easy to expose shams in major corporations. We'd like to institute some kind of prize for sheer hot air -- a prize that would go to the most intellectually corrupt reporter. Unfortunately, we don't have any bucks to do this. However, we do have a name: We'd call it the James Glassman prize in misleading reporting, after the author of Dow 36,000 -- a man who is still giving his perky advice from the pages of the Washington Post. Some would argue with this choice of name. Some would rather name it after poor George Gilder, Mr. Telecosm. But G.G. smoked his own dope, as the Enron folks used to say. He went down with his picks.
The field is vast, n'est-ce pas? and it isn't like it has been culled or corrected -- when amnesia takes away the mendacity one published yesterday, so that one can continue to make ridiculous and optimistic statements today, there's no mechanism of natural selection that would finger the unworthy. Yesterday, for example, LI was sitting in a bar. The bar TV was turned to Fox News. Now, Fox TV sit-coms are known for their appeal to the prurient puer, but compared to the intellectual level on display during the news hour, the sit coms are straight from Einstein. The hour lighted on the liberal demon act of the day, California's new standards for car emissions, and a suitable shill from Detroit, disguised as a reporter, was given the spotlight. I mean, this guy was so from Detroit he should have been wearing an SUV chassis. At one point, he made a disparaging remark about Honda's hybrid cars, to the effect that they are losing thousands per unit.
Now, Honda does seem to be losing money, right now, on their hybrids, although the figures are as yet unknown. But the gall of a Detroit shill lecturing Honda, of all companies, was enough to make me spit my vodka tonic all over the place. As everybody knows, GM is moving their mammoths not through quality improvement, but through the game of zero percent financing. They can do this because they have effectively disintermediated from financial institutions that would have refused the gimmick. Eventually, though, GM's financing department is going to have to find a way to lay that rotten egg. Talk about losing money. To lose money trying to craft a new technology is honorable, and in the long run it pays off, if the tech is any good. To lose money essentially trying to bamboozle market share for car types that haven't changed in 10 years is not only dishonorable, but eventually GM will quietly try to make the Government pay for their massive bet. Why, one might ask, does this story not attract Fortune or Forbes or Business 2.0? Because it is a story that GM does not want told. Period.
Tomorrow, if we can, we are going to start our Glassman awards with a look at the reporting on Enron. Enron, it appears, is a bigger story than even we thought a couple of months ago, because some of the effects of it are just starting to kick in globally. Todays stories about the collaboration of the banks in Enron's perpetual, perpetually disguised, deals, is not going to be good news, now that the Fed is figuring out how to cover Citibank for its WorldCom exposure.
Monday, July 22, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc lost our computer last week. The video card, or something like that, gave up the ghost. While the computer is in the shop (oh, we feel like a bee without a stinger!), we are forced to rely on library supplied internet access.
Usually, this is how we write. We pull up an empty text from File, and we go around the net, putting our links and quotes in it. Then we put our comments around those links and quotes. Then we go to Blogger, and paste in a copy of our text. Then we go to the page, and see the text. This final stage has interesting epistemological implications, since it is the seeing that helps us find mistakes in the text. It is as if some malin genie in our head was flickering rapidly between reading and seeing.
Well, our m.o. has crashed, at least for a week, and we don't know what to do about it. We want to be sitting, Thersites like, as the Bush bubble starts to collapse -- you know, the Bush bubble approval rating. We personally think that a couple of trillion dollars vanishing in thin air, and the Republican core response (Dick Cheney's nice little grumble about how you can't pass a law to make the stock market go up about captures it) is going to be fun to watch. Alas, although we'd like to preen in crow feathers, hunt and peck, and generally croak out Nevermore, we aren't able to do that right now.
Sorry.
Limited Inc lost our computer last week. The video card, or something like that, gave up the ghost. While the computer is in the shop (oh, we feel like a bee without a stinger!), we are forced to rely on library supplied internet access.
Usually, this is how we write. We pull up an empty text from File, and we go around the net, putting our links and quotes in it. Then we put our comments around those links and quotes. Then we go to Blogger, and paste in a copy of our text. Then we go to the page, and see the text. This final stage has interesting epistemological implications, since it is the seeing that helps us find mistakes in the text. It is as if some malin genie in our head was flickering rapidly between reading and seeing.
Well, our m.o. has crashed, at least for a week, and we don't know what to do about it. We want to be sitting, Thersites like, as the Bush bubble starts to collapse -- you know, the Bush bubble approval rating. We personally think that a couple of trillion dollars vanishing in thin air, and the Republican core response (Dick Cheney's nice little grumble about how you can't pass a law to make the stock market go up about captures it) is going to be fun to watch. Alas, although we'd like to preen in crow feathers, hunt and peck, and generally croak out Nevermore, we aren't able to do that right now.
Sorry.
Sunday, July 21, 2002
One hundred forty years ago, Walter Bagehot, the Victorian founder of the Economist, wrote a book, Physics and Politics, in which he addressed one of the the burning questions of the day: why do some nations progress, while others stagnate, or even go backwards? After dismissing, for the most part, the day's most popular solution (inherited racial dissimilarities), he answered his question by adducing what we would now call the cultural paradigm. The most progressive nations, he thought, were those that could implement "conservative innovation - the matching of new institutions with old ones." Of course, to a self satisfied Englishman of Bagehot's stripe, at the very zenith of the British Empire, the obvious and champeen exemplar of conservative innovation was his won sceptered isle. Granting the parochialism of Bagehot's example, his statement of the issue is very much with us. It is a strange fact that, through most of the twentieth century, the map of progressing nations - those that possess both economic power and generate new technology -- increased by one: Japan. No African nations, no Middle Eastern nations, no South American nations, deserve to be added to that list.
V.S. Naipaul, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for literature, has been among our most intrepid explorer of non-progressing nations in the last thirty years. His latest collection of essays, which includes an array of uncollected pieces, as well as literary journalism collected from three former books, does not reprint, curiously enough,"Conrad's Darkness", his most famous and intense treatment of the problems attending a writer of Naipaul's type in confronting a world that could still be described in terms consonant with Bagehot. In that essay, Naipaul coined his famous phrase about " half made societies that seemed doomed to remain half made..." Naipaul has set himself up as the scourge of the moral and intellectual corruption rampant among half made societies. He also beats with a stick the dupes of third world oppression in the West.
Naipaul's own status as the (now distant) product of one of the half made societies, Trinidad, secures his special moral position among the dupes, otherwise known as the liberal crowd who read the New York Review of Books. The grandchild of indentured Indian emigrants brought to Trinidad in the nineteenth century, during the boom years of the sugar plantations, Naipaul made his escape early, first to Oxford and then to a career as a writer of brilliant comic novels. Up until the seventies, his fame was mostly confined to England, where he still lives. In the seventies he became an internationally known writer. In novels like A Bend in the River and Guerillas, he took on the eschatological illusions of the revolutionary politics that was faddish in the sixties and seventies, showing, in the former, an African state pullulating with the decay of the old civilities and completely unable to produce an infrastructure to sustain it; in the latter, he tells the tale of bogus Black Power group in Trinidad that serves as the holiday fare for some camp followers of trendily leftist orientation, until it turns murderous.
Accompanying this output of increasingly disenchanted fiction was a series of books of literary journalism. It was probably the publication of The Return of Eva Peron with the Killings in Trinidad, in 1980, that tipped the balance in Naipaul's reputation. For the leftwing crowd, from then on, Naipaul was an arch-traitor to his race, the loyal subaltern in the Kipling mode, a Gunga Din for the age of Thatcher. For the right, he became an honorary member of the club, our man, so to speak, in the third world (although clearly and expressly a British resident), a Solzhenitsyn of the Third World, as Jane Kramer once dubbed him.
So one reads a subtext of defiance in the inclusion, in this book, of most of the 1980 book -- a challenge to the Edward Saids of the world. That note is continued in the book's postscript, Our Universal Civilization, which was originally a talk given to the conservative Manhattan Institute.
There are two essays from that period that display Naipaul's literary journalism in its best and in its worst light. Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad is an exploration of one of the lunatic dead ends of seventies radicalism. It obviously served as a template for Naipaul's subsequent novel, Guerillas. Naipaul profiles the hapless, and finally homicidal career of Michael X, born Michael de Freitas, a pimp and conman who established himself, with the help of some sympathetic lefty journalists, as a Black Power leader, first in England, and then in his native Trinidad. That heady time in the late sixties and early seventies, when John Lennon and Yoko were holding bed ins against the war, and flower children were practicing raising their fists in the international black power salute, is still worth cringing over. As Michael X began to believe his own con, he went the route of many a minor messiah before him and spilt blood -- first directing the killing of a white camp follower, 27 year old Gale Ann Benson, and then actually crushing the head of another of his followers with a stone. Naipaul recounts this story with a maximum objectivity, but the reader feels the anger behind the narrative of facts. It is an anger that, oddly enough, is aimed less at Michael X than at Gale Ann Beson. Her sin, in Naipaul's eyes, was to dress in African clothes, engage in an undignified sexual relationship with Jamal, one of Michael X's followers, and in general make herself so available to being hurt. Such availability, in Naipaul's eyes, stems, ultimately, from a security so global that Benson can't see out of it. She can throw herself into the part of fake African, white skin and all, because the world of Africans, to her, is ultimately unreal. This unconscious contempt is her corruption -- so that, Naipaul contends, "she became as corrupt as her master." You can spot the moralist by his exaggerations. Here the reader has to pause and remember that the sum total of Benson's crimes amount to dressing up in African clothes and calling herself, sometimes, by the ridiculous name of Hale Kimga. In literature, facts lead us inexhorably to symbols. The same is not true of life: while Benson might have symbolized, both to Naipaul and Michael X, the deep corruption of the colonial mentality, she was actually just a 27 year old woman who made some stupid and tasteless mistakes.
Naipaul's worst essay is probably his piece on Argentina. It is here that the methods of literary journalism do him a particular disservice. The literary journalist is looking to nail an atmospher, not a particular sequence of events. The sequence of events that span the time from Peron's return to the military dictatorship ostensibly provides the reason for Naipaul's essay, but you won't find any clear eventline here, nor even a hint as to how these things transpired. You will find, instead, scattered fragments of an interview with Borges interspersed with meditations about the Argentinian relationship to the land, the Argentinian acceptance of torture, and the prevelance of magical thinking in the country. Naipaul makes generalizations that are debateably absurd, such as his contention that more gifted men have come into the world from New Zealand than from Argentina, or poetically absurd, such as the contention that Argentina has no history, or absurdly absurd, such as Naipaul's contention that every Argentine schoolgirl knows "the brothels ... understands that she might have to go there one day to find love..."). Perhaps Naipaul's bilious portrait of the place was effected by his brief arrest. This is the longest essay in the book, with sections that have been added on in the years since it was first published. It is, however, a mess.
The global impression left by this book is that Naipaul can't really be read solely in the light of our two current political factions. One is struck again and again in this book by the teasing familiarity of Naipaul's themes: the scathing dismissal of superstition, the contempt for the placaters of power who cannot, themselves, create power, the criticism of magic, both as metaphor and social fact. Where have we seen these things before? The answer, in Western culture, is that these are old things. They constituted the program of enlightened men and women from Francis Bacon to Voltaire and Mary Wollenscraft. What drives Naipaul into a cold fury is the casual abandoment of the enlightenment program by those liberals while have enjoyed to the full the fruits of science and intellectual inquiry, who are quite content to abandon the non-progressing nations to different cultural standards of truth in the name of multi-culturalism. That abandonment, while seemingly a gesture of tolerance and generosity, actually seals the doom of half made societies, making it impossible for new institutions to match old ones. Instead, advantage goes to the despotic, the bullying, the thieves and rhetors, the Michael X-s who have actually achieved power. In his talk to the Manhattan Institute, Naipaul describes himself as a man who has gone from the periphery to the center. Oddly enough, the center, right now, is a mad scramble for the peripheries, as writers set up shop in the name of their ethnic identies, as though they were restaurants, or their sexual identities, as though they were dating services.
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Remora
LI looked forward to some raw conservative outrage over yesterday's vote in the Senate. Aren't we talking about a vast increase in the regulatory apparatus? I mean, sure, it is sweetened with some fire-eating go straight to jail legislation, which is always pap to the right-wing palate. But if that kind of legislation is actually enforced, we are talking about jailing white boys in suits.
Okay, realistically, we know the swat team approach to fraud will die very quickly on the vine. At least Alan Reynolds in the National Review has the guts to defend the potential pool of defrauders:
"I'm all for suing the pants off anyone proven guilty of fraud, barring co-conspirators from serving as corporate officers or directors, and using prison sentences when appropriate (though victims can't squeeze much reimbursement out of jailbirds). It is the uncritical rush to "reform" accounting and to encourage runaway regulation that worries me. The curiously trendy idea that investors welcome unlimited regulatory "investigations" by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seems particularly hazardous."
That kind of cautionary note is the reason the National Review exists, for God's sake. But the NRO editor has gone pink, or at least into guerilla mode. Instead of condemning the sudden flight to Naderite solutions, Larry Kudlow ladles on the "good news" gravy -- how things are looking up out there, really, folks. The economy is fundamentally sound is the message. Whenever presidents use the word fundamental in the neighborhood of economy, you know that something bad is going on -- that's been the unfortunate Bush's message lately, and it has had the effect of creeping Wall Street out. Kudlow outlines his own golden vision, which is for moderate growth. He also includes a bizarre graf:
"For those who still hold to the longer-term view of personal finance, which is the key to successful investing, today's market averages look to be nearly 40% undervalued."
What this means is anybody's guess. Let's call it the Glassman fallacy -- endemic among a certain kind of gung ho rightwinger -- which holds that the risk of holding stocks -- what, after all, makes stocks a potentially more profitable instrument than bonds, but also a riskier one -- has magically vanished. Hence, no need to look to historic P/E levels.
Perhaps Kudlow is subject to this fallacy because he is, at core, just a mark, a confidence man's happy accident. In support of this line of speculation, read the end of his column. It is a mark's prayer for sure:
"For those of you who have faith, now's the time to rely on it. Faith defeats the forces of darkness. Faith brings on the forces of good. The stock market has survived tough runs before, and it will do so again."
What makes LI sad is the apparent capture of conservative organs of thought by the Republican party. The National Review used to be a pretty independent place. I remember when they had no trouble turning on Richard Nixon. But as the conservative ground troops took over the Republican party, the Republican party also took over the conservative ground troops. Hence the inability to rise to any position above the last one adumb dumb dumb brated by our current POTUS. I mean, really, we expect a little cold blooded defense of unregulated commercial activity from our most prominent right wing journal of opinion. And damn the electoral consequences.
LI looked forward to some raw conservative outrage over yesterday's vote in the Senate. Aren't we talking about a vast increase in the regulatory apparatus? I mean, sure, it is sweetened with some fire-eating go straight to jail legislation, which is always pap to the right-wing palate. But if that kind of legislation is actually enforced, we are talking about jailing white boys in suits.
Okay, realistically, we know the swat team approach to fraud will die very quickly on the vine. At least Alan Reynolds in the National Review has the guts to defend the potential pool of defrauders:
"I'm all for suing the pants off anyone proven guilty of fraud, barring co-conspirators from serving as corporate officers or directors, and using prison sentences when appropriate (though victims can't squeeze much reimbursement out of jailbirds). It is the uncritical rush to "reform" accounting and to encourage runaway regulation that worries me. The curiously trendy idea that investors welcome unlimited regulatory "investigations" by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) seems particularly hazardous."
That kind of cautionary note is the reason the National Review exists, for God's sake. But the NRO editor has gone pink, or at least into guerilla mode. Instead of condemning the sudden flight to Naderite solutions, Larry Kudlow ladles on the "good news" gravy -- how things are looking up out there, really, folks. The economy is fundamentally sound is the message. Whenever presidents use the word fundamental in the neighborhood of economy, you know that something bad is going on -- that's been the unfortunate Bush's message lately, and it has had the effect of creeping Wall Street out. Kudlow outlines his own golden vision, which is for moderate growth. He also includes a bizarre graf:
"For those who still hold to the longer-term view of personal finance, which is the key to successful investing, today's market averages look to be nearly 40% undervalued."
What this means is anybody's guess. Let's call it the Glassman fallacy -- endemic among a certain kind of gung ho rightwinger -- which holds that the risk of holding stocks -- what, after all, makes stocks a potentially more profitable instrument than bonds, but also a riskier one -- has magically vanished. Hence, no need to look to historic P/E levels.
Perhaps Kudlow is subject to this fallacy because he is, at core, just a mark, a confidence man's happy accident. In support of this line of speculation, read the end of his column. It is a mark's prayer for sure:
"For those of you who have faith, now's the time to rely on it. Faith defeats the forces of darkness. Faith brings on the forces of good. The stock market has survived tough runs before, and it will do so again."
What makes LI sad is the apparent capture of conservative organs of thought by the Republican party. The National Review used to be a pretty independent place. I remember when they had no trouble turning on Richard Nixon. But as the conservative ground troops took over the Republican party, the Republican party also took over the conservative ground troops. Hence the inability to rise to any position above the last one adumb dumb dumb brated by our current POTUS. I mean, really, we expect a little cold blooded defense of unregulated commercial activity from our most prominent right wing journal of opinion. And damn the electoral consequences.
Monday, July 15, 2002
Remora
The celebrity interview, the celebrity face, the celebrity breath, the celebrity hair, eyes, nails, teeth, spunk, navel, birthmark -- we drink it and drink it, to quote Todesfuge in a blasphemous context. But is there a point, some magical critical point, when the sheer idiocy of it becomes too much? When the magazine reader, that slackmouthed denizen of the grocery story line, spews it from his mouth? When the factoid isn't enough, when the best fed bodies lugubriously placed in expensive toy palaces, which they systematically and noisily destroy (we call this film, we call this the block-buster) no longer support the backstory? That possibility looms in this NYT article that anatomizes the non-event of Tom Cruise errected, cruise missile like, on four major magazine covers in the last couple of weeks. Time went for him, Premiere went for him, Esquire went for him, Entertainment Weekly went for him, and they discovered, like melancholy druggies, that the high wasn't high enough.
LI's favorite comment from this sampling of mediocre America is this one, from Premiere mag:
"It may have been the most egregious example of magazine overexposure I have seen," said Peter Herbst, the editor in chief of Premiere. "And I'm not sure it was good for Tom Cruise. He may have to redevelop some mystique."
Ah, Redeveloping mystique!!! And so the key to the law and the prophets falls from the mouths of babes and editors in chief. David Carr's article is a long ponder of the obvious, which pokes a bit at the economics of the magazine distribution biz --
"But moving magazines off a newsstand has become a Sisyphean task, even for a megastar. Because of an epic consolidation, only four major magazine wholesalers remain, and they have raised the pressure on publishers to make sure their magazines sell. Overall newsstand sales have dropped 20 percent in the last four years, according to Harrington Associates, a circulation consulting business, and better than half of all magazines, many anchored by glamorous faces, go unsold and end up as pulp."
End up? No, darling, pulp was pre-figured in the very brains and fingers of the syncophantic scribes, in the very cracks and crevasses of the barely animated action figures up which editors in chief have their busy little tongues; pulp, the pulverized essence of dead trees, hangs over the entire scene, as Nature itself looks on, appalled.
The problem for LI is to develop a language apocalyptic enough to describe the sickness unto death of this trivia, this continual eroding acid rain upon American civilization. Imagine the suicide note of a cockroach... Imagine the pornographic memoirs of a housefly.
The celebrity interview, the celebrity face, the celebrity breath, the celebrity hair, eyes, nails, teeth, spunk, navel, birthmark -- we drink it and drink it, to quote Todesfuge in a blasphemous context. But is there a point, some magical critical point, when the sheer idiocy of it becomes too much? When the magazine reader, that slackmouthed denizen of the grocery story line, spews it from his mouth? When the factoid isn't enough, when the best fed bodies lugubriously placed in expensive toy palaces, which they systematically and noisily destroy (we call this film, we call this the block-buster) no longer support the backstory? That possibility looms in this NYT article that anatomizes the non-event of Tom Cruise errected, cruise missile like, on four major magazine covers in the last couple of weeks. Time went for him, Premiere went for him, Esquire went for him, Entertainment Weekly went for him, and they discovered, like melancholy druggies, that the high wasn't high enough.
LI's favorite comment from this sampling of mediocre America is this one, from Premiere mag:
"It may have been the most egregious example of magazine overexposure I have seen," said Peter Herbst, the editor in chief of Premiere. "And I'm not sure it was good for Tom Cruise. He may have to redevelop some mystique."
Ah, Redeveloping mystique!!! And so the key to the law and the prophets falls from the mouths of babes and editors in chief. David Carr's article is a long ponder of the obvious, which pokes a bit at the economics of the magazine distribution biz --
"But moving magazines off a newsstand has become a Sisyphean task, even for a megastar. Because of an epic consolidation, only four major magazine wholesalers remain, and they have raised the pressure on publishers to make sure their magazines sell. Overall newsstand sales have dropped 20 percent in the last four years, according to Harrington Associates, a circulation consulting business, and better than half of all magazines, many anchored by glamorous faces, go unsold and end up as pulp."
End up? No, darling, pulp was pre-figured in the very brains and fingers of the syncophantic scribes, in the very cracks and crevasses of the barely animated action figures up which editors in chief have their busy little tongues; pulp, the pulverized essence of dead trees, hangs over the entire scene, as Nature itself looks on, appalled.
The problem for LI is to develop a language apocalyptic enough to describe the sickness unto death of this trivia, this continual eroding acid rain upon American civilization. Imagine the suicide note of a cockroach... Imagine the pornographic memoirs of a housefly.
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