Remora

"We are a humane army."

"I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not." -- Edmund Burke

I've extracted this quote from a letter Edmund Burke wrote in defense of his prosecution of Warren Hastings to the painter Joshua Reynold's niece. She'd written Burke on behalf of a friend to ask him, politely, if he knew what he was doing. It's a nice example of the way pressure is exerted to destroy dissent -- you don't need a police force when there is a steady supply of Miss Palmers, generation after generation, to imply that, well, the dissenter is embarrassing himself among her sort.

From the Guardian:

The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, denies the Palestinian claims that a 'massacre' took place. Their version is that those who died were combatants in very heavy fighting. Shlein believes few civilians were killed, despite the claims of those at the hospital and the evidence of the dead and wounded we see there. Shlein believes too that the Israeli army showed restraint while operating in Jenin. 'There would have been no problem completing the operation immediately,' he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on Friday. 'But we are a humane army.

"Whether the white people like it or not." The pathos of the conditional rings down the ages, at least for LI, sitting here in our isolation, impotent critic of all we survey. For surely one of Miss Palmer's questions -- not the one she put into words, but the one underneath all the ones she put into words -- was how a man like Burke could make himself an advocate of, well, a lower, duskier race. One that was certainly not Christian. One whose deaths couldn't be measured in the same proportion as good White deaths. And certainly Burke lived among the set of "the white people", the whitest, in fact, in the land. The Whig Aristocracy, Lord Rockingham's coterie, the London coffeehouse intellectuals. Yet Burke was too Irish not to know he had a secret sharer as he moved among these groups; it was not Conrad's secret sharer, that Blond Uber-Englishman in which the slav was at last washed away; no, this was the Catholic mother, this was Dublin, this was the sometimes over-excited (some would say affected) speech. This was a line within himself, creating zones. And definitely there was a zone to be crossed into, and out of which, in raids on the inexplicable, came that famous talent for indignation in elevated language. The banned zone within himself.


From the LA Times:
But also Saturday, rescuers discovered two other members of the family still alive. The rescuers plucked the couple--Abdullah Shobi and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt.

The recoveries seemed to bolster allegations that the Israeli army--as it invaded towns and cities across the West Bank and met stiff resistance--bulldozed homes with people still in them. Similar tales have emerged from the Jenin refugee camp, site of the most widespread destruction and highest death toll in any of the fighting.

An army spokeswoman said Saturday that efforts are always made to notify the residents of a home that is to be demolished. She said the army destroys only buildings that have been used as explosives factories or sniper positions.

The Shobis' neighbors gave a different account. Although fighting, gunfire and explosions had raged for days, the family was not involved. The neighbors said the bulldozer approached from the plaza in front of the Shobi home and began attacking. The building collapsed, with the family inside.

We appeal to Burke sane -- where to his Tory fans he appeared most mad -- from Burke mad, the Burke who, as the enemy of "theory in politics," was eventually driven to an excess of theory, theory as the perennial policing of theory. Burke's reactionary philosophy centers around the sort of paralogism that, in another context, would be sorted out by Godel: the idea that a meta-theory of politics that found theory in politics to be illegitimate was not, itself, a theory, and not itself subject to the fanaticism Burke felt was consequent upon the application of theory to human affairs. It was a paralogism that called upon the same apocalyptic language, the same world wide militancy, as its opponents.

"As for me, I was always steadily of the opinion that this disorder [the French Revolution] is not intermittent. I conceived that the contest once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought we could make peace with the system, because it is not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself we were at war."

From the New York Times:

For Israeli forces, it is also an especially dangerous mission. This is not an American-style military campaign that uses airstrikes for weeks or even months before ground troops are deployed.It is urban warfare, with soldiers moving alley to alley, house to house, searching for militants amid booby-trapped homes. Twenty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed and 124 wounded since the operation began on March 28.

The raids have also led to charges by Palestinians that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, which the Israeli Army says is one of the main sanctuaries for the militants. The Israelis have adamantly rejected allegations that their troops have attacked civilians.

And so this is the tone of the "white people's" newspaper of note -- a paper which holds that bullets can kill an Israeli soldier, but Israeli bullets can only lead to "charges", a social condition in which, for psycho-pathological reasons, the hate America crowd, parlor politicians of Europe, and other assorted malcontents have some kind of problem with the program. They hear the "let's roll," and they don't want to roll, these people. The inherent humanity of Israeli weaponry must be one of the wonders of the world. In today's paper, the IDF, which was quite happy to report one hundred to two hundred Palestinian deaths, for domestic consumption, last week, is now claiming that the dead number in the dozens. A change that will no doubt be echoed in further stories about Jenin, and contrasted with the especially dangerous missions mounted by the government of Sharon. And LI is ready to concede that there is something mystical about the transfiguration of Palestinian flesh, properly shredded, or crushed in a house, into so many words, mere words. First comes the righteous act, then the "charges." We are watching white people's history unfold before us, entranced and horrified by the spectacle, readers.

In the book LI mentioned in the last post � The Siege, by Conor Cruise O�Brien � there�s a
quotation from a critic, Edward Alexander, that is much on our mind today. Alexander, glossing
a poem, exudes a telling phrase: �... the Jewish people finds itself caught in a conflict between
the covenant and the historic necessity to survive within history...�

Indeed. But we are living, just as the evangelists say, in the end time -- the time when this kind of talk, this pattern of thinking, this use of a coy theology to justify the regretable theft, the imperial murder, has collapsed in on itself, corrupted by its own sentimentality. The covenant and the historic necessity have converged; the messianism of one coincident at all points with the irrationality of the other. Covenant and historic necessity are hauled out by thugs, ultras, gunmen, and news personalities to rhetorically drape any wretched activity whatsoever that can be enforced on one set of skin and bones by another, favored set. So watch: History wrenches concrete from concrete in Jenin; history blows itself up in the marketplace in Jerusalem, and survives; then it is ambushed on the West Bank, eleven dead, and
it survives. It whispers to soldiers that wouldn�t it be a good idea to use civilians as shields to advance on terrorist nests? Its spokesman come on the radio and admire themselves and their government for sparing life and limb by not carpet bombing encampments of refugees. With malice towards none, and a few missiles towards all, here we have a perfect moral stance for our times. It is a morality that dances on its own immoral means and jeers at critics.

Well. What did we go out in the killing fields to see, kiddies? A reed broken in the wind? Or
this:

Powell was only about a mile away when today's blast happened, about to board a helicopter for
a tour of Israel's volatile Northern border region with Lebanon. His helicopter did a turn in the sky to allow the secretary to survey firsthand the bombing site, where glass and metal mixed with body parts and a severed head across a wide area of asphalt.

Or this:


JENIN, West Bank, April 11 -- There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them.
There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home
with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her.

And there is Khadra Samara, 33, who said she shepherded more than a dozen children as she fled from house to house to house in the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, under repeated assault from Israeli bulldozers and missiles that, house by house, nearly toppled the walls on top of them

Well, those are definitely some stories we could have gone out to see. But they aren't stories of much interest to, say, the New Republic. This week the magazine runs two stories on the Jenin operation, and both of the stories are pumped. The smell of massacre in the morning agrees with these guys. However, in the tumult of emotions attendent on seeing the enemy and his wife smashed by the finest American weaponry, the writers come to two completely opposite conclusions: one that Hamas� infrastructure has escaped the Israeli sweep,the other that it has been destroyed by it.

Both, however, conclude that the Palestinian will and ability to retaliate has been severely impeded. Both were written before the bus bombing, and before yesterdays return of the repressed bombing in Jerusalem.

To everything, there is a spin, it says in Ecclesiastes. The spin in preparation was that Sharon, in spite of petty criticism, launched an absolute operation that worked. The new justification will be that the Palestinians haven't been tamed yet. Robert Wright, with whom LI usually has no truck, had a sensible column about this in Slate last week which predicted, wrongly it turned out, that Sharon's hardcore strategy would pay off in the short run, and diminish the likelihood of suicide bombing. The two final grafs in his piece,consonant with that prediction, and with the puppylike excitement of the TNR reporters, makes a very LI-like point:

"And we shouldn't be beguiled by short-run success. If terrorist bombings indeed abate after the current incursion, prepare yourself for the inevitable Charles Krauthammer column touting the success of Sharon's iron-fist policy. It's a natural sequel to Krauthammer's column belittling the significance of the "Arab Street" after the Street failed to boil over and depose any Arab regimes in the wake of the Afghanistan war. In both cases, the fallacy is the same: failing to see 1) that metastasizing hatred can work slowly, beneath the surface; 2) that, increasingly, hatred needn't be mediated by a regime (or a quasi-regime, like the Palestinian Authority) to be lethal; and 3) that the lethal leveraging of hatred�the hatred-death conversion factor�will probably grow exponentially over the next five to 10 years, as lethal technologies advance and spread. (Hamas recently moved from crude fertilizer bombs to sophisticated plastic explosives.)

Unfortunately, Krauthammer's time horizons mirror those of many politicians in a democracy. If your goal is to keep your poll numbers up for a few months or even years, it may pay to be crudely, crowd-pleasingly tough on terrorists while avoiding the messy and frustrating spectacle of addressing terrorism's causes: Just do the immediately popular things and hope that the long-run cost of your negligence doesn't show up until your successor takes office. If that is your ambition, Ariel Sharon is a fine role model."

Remora
Okay, LI is obsessed. You are tired of the Middle East. You want things the way they used to be around here. The eccentric flights into biz-olect. The homey essays about encyclopedias.
Well, forget it.

David Remnick's Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker is a bouquet of Cold War flowers of rhetoric. It exudes a sweet, poisonous smell. He even writes of the "parlor politicians" in Europe -- is this derived from the phrase, parlor pinks? Surely it is. I suppose the contrast is between those effete guys enjoying teas in roccoco-ish chambers and speaking French to each other (yuck!) while on the other side of the world, in the New World, our politicians are up at the crack of dawn, donning grease stained t shirts, smoking marlboros, roping and wrangling and squinting into the sun and getting long and tall and philosophical. Our politicians are like our usurping Potus. They are like Trent Lott. They are as honest and funloving a bunch of guys as you'd want to take out on patrol. And smart! Not in that parlor sense, not with a bunch of book larnin.' No siree, they was all trained at their grandmas knee on the good book and Horatio Alger, and has forsaken the word since then, since what is the point?

But the more interesting part of Remnicks' demagogery is another McCarthy-ite trope: moral equivalency. Remember the second Cold War, the Reagan phase, when we were hammered with that phrase? It has been a while since we saw it last. But here it comes again. We particularly enjoyed this passage:


"There is no moral equivalence between Arafat and Sharon: the first thrives on the idealization of martyrdom; the other now blunders while trying to stifle him. Nevertheless, history has seldom conjured two leaders less fit for their historical moment than Arafat and Sharon. (And those who stand in waiting�a murderer's row of Palestinian security chiefs and Benjamin Netanyahu�are no more promising.) Another party is needed, and this moment, like September 11th, demands American diplomacy, imagination, and intervention. President Bush was, at first, slow to engage at anywhere near the level needed. His actions, and the actions of his agencies, were contradictory and confused. One day early last week, when Bush was asked about criticism that he had not done enough to bring an end to the confrontation, he complained that in fact he had been making calls all morning. The President sounded put out; it was a tone familiar not from his best speeches after the September attacks but, rather, from his more feckless moments during the 2000 campaign."

We vote for "moral equivalence" as our favorite phrase in Remnick's piece, because unlike parlor politician, it is not mere vituperation. It supposedly means something, something deep. Demagogery is not mere ornament. It has to provide a content, however ersatz. So here we are in the Cold War again, with an 'us' -- see above, re squinting into sun politicos on ranches -- and a 'them'. There's evil Arafat, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a figure out of the Flintstones -- blundering, but no doubt decent and humane Ariel Sharon.

Well, all talk about the Middle East eventually gets around to history -- which is why, perhaps, the place seems so enigmatic and maddening to Americans, who officially believe history is something that comes in marble, with columns and a statue, that you visit on your D.C. vacation -- but that is otherwise irrelevant to anybody's life.

Yet because Remnick's Fred Flintstone is leading a party that actually has a history -- and because that history, with its roots in the Irgun, exhibits pattern that are on display in every one of Sharon's acts and speeches, and in the acts and speeches of his rightwing cabinet ministers -- LI would think that the New Yorker editor would have some feel for the past, here, as that force that portends the future. LI has been boning up on the Middle East himself, kiddies. We are reading Conor Cruise O'brien's book about Israel, The Siege. Though we are far from finished with that book, one thing clearly emerges from the history of Israel's founding. The PLO's model for statehood is not Algeria, it is Israel.

The Israel, that is, that countenanced a double track policy in its early years. The Israel that knew that its very existence depended on provisionally defying the world, or at least the Free World. On the one hand, the official Zionist line of peaceful coexistence, promulgated by David Ben-Gurion. On the other hand, the unofficial Irgun line of "by whatever means necessary." The Irgun line involved massive covert shipments of arms, assassination (as of the UN's mediator at the time, Count Bernadotte), and the deaths of as many Palestinian Arabs as was necessary to create the critical fright that leads to wholesale flight.

Since this history is a mere fifty years ago and less, burying it is still difficult. But les gens bien-pensants like Remnick, who have otherwise exhibited a ravenous thirst for information about, say, Stalin's crimes -- which stretch back sixty years and more -- seem to be satiated on a tepid version of Israel's founding, development, and present state. It is all in the heroic mode, a la Leon Uris, and bloodshed is what the Israelis suffered, instead of caused.

So we have this version of Arafat the terrorist, which is a top ten number for right wing pundits and moderates alike. How can the man actual debase the peace process by competing with more radical Palestinian factions? Such behavior would never be allowed in Israeli politics, right?

Come on. Are we serious here? Of course not. That's why, out of the ruins of the camps, the newspapers will be extracting, in the next few days, evidence from the IDF, the most neutral and kindly of armies. As the mounds of the Palestinian dead are buried, the papers will instead focus, with their eternal vigilance over right and wrong, on documents and weaponry.

As for the hand-wringing in Remnick's article about the settlements on the West Bank -- like every other American journalist, he assures us that the vast majority of the Israelis don't want them, don't need them, etc., etc. But by some magical force, some national impotence a la the Fisher King, they just can't seem to prevent them from happening. They just can't seem to connect, say, electing Ariel Sharon prime minister and the continuing support given to the West Bank settlements.

For a much more specific article about the politics of those settlements, go to Anthony Lewis' article in the NYRB.
. LI has been planning to comment on this surprising and slendid article for a couple of days, but we don't have time to right now. Look for it in the future, kiddies.

Remora

Headline politics

At least 8 killed in Bus Bombing in Israel (NYT)
Toll Rises as Israel Presses on: 13 soldiers die; bus explosion kills 8, hurts 14; Sharon resolute (Boston Globe)


8 killed after Passenger Bus attacked in Israel (Washington Post)

Ambush in West Bank Kills 13 Israeli Soldiers (San Jose Mercury Mercury)


That much gone from the world, of skin,tissue, the delicate, fine optic nerve, the hands, the genitals, thought (thethinker dying), bad moods, bad relationships, love, the taste of coffee, hair. Burned, battered, bloody, done. Bad news.

But somehow, the headlines never seem to read: 150 dead inJenin; or, Israeli Troops Kill 150 in Camp. Somehow the headline writers neverget around to Palestinian dead except as the sort of cortege of Israeli dead.Somehow Palestinian dead never make the grade, never deserve the caps.Something about them, no doubt. They are, after all, living in a camp. And look at what they are finding in those camps! Weapons! Documents! My god, for all the world like, well, like a sovereign state, instead of the dependents that they were made to be by nature and art. Better than the beasts of the field, let's be human here -- but with no right of self determination. Rather, endowed with the right to wait, eternally.

Now, if by some miracle tanks rolled intoSharon�s compound, what interesting papers they would find. What weapons. Andof course those tanks would, as an iron semantic rule, be manned by terrorists.No two ways around that. Still, the publication of those documents and the exhibition of those weapons � including, in Israel�s case, surely, atom bombs �would be interesting, n�est-ce pas?

Let's scatter a few caveats.

Here is the thing. There are those who believe Israel is an illegitimate state. There are those who are anti-Semites, and simply want Jews killed or persecuted. There are those who mourn for the displaced Palestinians, and have no time for, say, the 150,000 Jews that were driven out of Iraq, or the comparable numbers driven out of a number of Arab nations in the fifties and sixties. Charles Krauthammer, our convenient devil doll, into whose prose LI likes to stick pins, had a point in a column he published a month ago:much of the Palestinian and Arab press is filled with ridiculous, immoral,sickening anti-jewish crap.

"This indoctrination goes far beyond expunging Israel, literally, from Palestinian maps. It goes far beyond denying, indeed ridiculing, the Holocaust as a Jewish fantasy. It consists of the rawest incitement to murder, as in this sermon by Arafat-appointed and Arafat-funded Ahmad Abu Halabiya broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television early in the Intifada. The subject is "the Jews." (Note: not the Israelis, but the Jews.) "They must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.' . . . Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them."



The tropes unchanged since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first manufactured by the Czar�s secret police (the Czar in question, Czar Nicholas II, was recently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church,to the world�s thunderous silence).

LI suspects that there are leftists whose flaming hatred for Israel overlaps with a not so latent anti-jewish bias.

But LI also knows that in the ecology of chauvinisms, one prejudice can exist quite nicely behind another prejudice � that the victims of a bias can themselves be biased. Victimhood confers no honor. In the best of cases it extends the imagination. If I suffer, I can imagine that my neighbor might suffer. That, at least, is one possible outcome of suffering. I wouldn�t bet the house on it, however.

All this to introduce one Effi Eitam, the man Sharon just inducted into his Cabinet, as a sort of fuck you to the Labor party.

Eitam is the head of the National Religious Party. Here's one summing up of the guy, from Ha'aretz:


Eitam's aim is to turn the national religious camp into a kind of bridgehead, a national avant-garde movement. According to Eitam, the Zionism of normality has run its course. So the mission of religious Zionism now is to lead the entire country toward a new horizon, a new purpose: to establish the Temple.

The thoughts of Eitam are instructive. Here, for instance, is his version of Eretz Israel:

"What has to be done with regard to the Palestinians?

"The immediate solution consists of three elements. First, get rid of this leadership. Second, to enter Area A [under full Palestinian control] and uproot the military terrorist capability. Third, to make it clear that there will be no foreign sovereignty west of the Jordan River. I am not sure that this is the time to organize what will happen east of the Jordan. But as for the area west of the Jordan, we have to state that no sovereignty will be established there other than that of the State of Israel."

And here are his thoughts on the means to that greater state;

And what will become of the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza?

"They will be residents without the right to vote. We have to obtain an interim settlement regarding their status. Not on the status of the territory - on their status. They have to be given a choice between enlightened residency with us or dark citizenship in the Arab states. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria will be able to make a free choice between a situation in which they will be Palestinian citizens who are residents of Israel, or citizens of their country who reside in the Palestinian state in Jordan and Sinai."

And what will induce them to cross to the other side of the Jordan? To emigrate?

"I don't want to be hypocritical. But I will put it like this: We do not need a declared emigration policy that encourages the emigration of Arabs. I think that we have to sincerely offer them an alternative of residency. Of course, whoever does not accept will have to be told: Your place is not with us. In a case like that, not even a wink is needed."

Yes, not even a wink, when a bullet will do. This isn't a man of muted views. Palestinians can read, oddly enough. They hear Powell say that the Bush administration is behind a Palestinian state. And they see that the Bush administration is very much behind the Sharon government, which includes Eitam. And they know that, in headline math, 150 palestinians do not equal 8 israelis. So they go for bombs instead.

It isn't hard to foresee where this is going.

Remora

Museum or Masoleum

According to a story in the Ha'aretz,

thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush in Jenin this morning.

"Thirteen IDF soldiers were killed following a series of clashes in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on Tuesday morning. In addition, an officer with the paratrooper brigade was killed during gunfights in the Nablus casbah.

Also Tuesday, in Dura, south of Hebron, another paratroop brigade officer was critically wounded after the IDF thrust into the village.

All of the casualties in Jenin were reserve soldiers. Nine other soldiers, also predominately reservists, were hurt in the clashes, two moderately and seven lightly. They were taken to Afula's Emek Hospital for treatment. "

According to the paper, there are a dozen Palestinian dead, at least, scattered through the camp. According to the Washington Post, Palestinians estimate that there are many more dead: "more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in battles inside the camp over the last week. Before the latest ambush, nine Israeli soldiers had been killed inside the camp and the neighbouring town."

This, according to the Economist, is how the battle went down in Jenin:

"But the real carnage on Monday and Tuesday occurred in Jenin refugee camp and in Nablus�s Old City, hitherto impenetrable bastions of the Palestinian militias. In Jenin, Israeli army bulldozers ploughed through flimsy shelters in pursuit of Palestinian fighters; helicopters pitched rocket after rocket into mosques; and Israeli and Palestinian machine-gun fire raked the alleys of a camp that is home to 13,000 refugees. No one has any idea of the Palestinian death toll. But the conservative estimate is �dozens�, says a doctor at Jenin hospital. He cannot be sure, because his ambulances are fired on when they try to cover the 200 metres to the camp. It is the same in Nablus, as soldiers and fighters fight house-to-house�and sometimes hand-to-hand�through the Old City�s warren of cobbled streets. The avowed aim of the Israeli incursions is to root out the �terrorist infrastructure� which has underpinned so many suicide bombings, including, most bloodily, the one on March 27th, in Netanya that killed 27 people. That was the immediate provocation for the latest Israeli offensive, which has certainly dealt grievous blows to the Palestinian militias and police forces: dozens have been killed, hundreds arrested and arms, equipment and buildings seized. But the result is not going to be surrender. It will almost certainly mean radicalisation."

As the Economist points out, Sharon has succeeded in destroying the Palestinian authority. One of Sharon's advisors said that the only place for Arafat was in a museum or a masoleum. Well, there are a lot of Palestinian corpses to put in a masoleum, aren't there? Luckily they didn't get there through the messy and barbaric acts of suicide bombers, but the rational, nay, compassionate method of raking alleys between dwellings with machine gun fire. It is the clash of civilizations, after all; and we know the terrorism taught by those Koran shaking Palestinians. So we just have to deal with it, although of course in our hearts, our compendious hearts (heart of Cheney, heart of Bush, heart of Peres, heart of Sharon, heart of Daschle, heart of Powell, heart of Zinni, heart of Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz, heart of Blair -- oh, the parade of hearts on display! all these honorable men dealing, hand to hand, frankly, with animals!) we are deeply, deeply grieved. But we have to remember that though the bodies in the alleys of Jenin look human, -- they are beyond are compassion. We might pity the kicked dog, but our duty is to put him down, put him manfully down, if he turns on his master. So the Sharon-Bush strategy now is to find a kicked dog that doesn't turn. One of the canine sort that you can kick again and again.

Good luck, boys.

Remora

LI has previously sighed over the marvelous Gretchen Morgenson. She is a beacon among financial writers, a reporter who has never churned out fatuous praise, or bogus analysis, or ideological pap, or any of the 101 flavors usual to biz journalism. Gratifyingly, ours is not a minority opinion. GM won a Pulitzer prize for, as the NYT puts it, beat reporting, with the citation praising her "for her trenchant and incisive Wall Street coverage."

So, reader, we aren't always out of the loop. We aren't always out of the mainstream. We aren't always the stray from the herd, the doggie that won't get along. So there.

Remora

Sharon

The Financial Times commences its portrait of Ariel Sharon with an unlikely comparison to Charles De Gaulle.

"A few weeks ago, an Israeli newspaper columnist revealed that Ariel Sharon's latest bedside reading was a history of France's Algerian war. It may turn out to be useful study for a leader who, despite his warrior history, was billed by some as Israel's Charles de Gaulle, a strongman who would ultimately understand his adversary's yearning for statehood and deliver peace."

Luckily, the portrait doesn't pursue that fantasy very far, because as we say in Texas (and as is infinitely repeated in the press, which can never let go of a faux folksy phrase), that dog don't hunt. You can't go through Sharon's life and find glorious moments of defiance in the face of implacable odds. You can't find a sense of nationhood in the modern sense (vague yearnings for the return of King David don't count). You can't find a coherent vision of the economy. And you certainly can't find the non-gambler's instinct for cutting your losses (the gambler's instinct, unfortunately, is to compulsively renew his stake. Usually the cliche is that a professional gambler has that sixth sense of imminent loss, that magic ability to fold em at just the critical instant, but nothing in the history of gambling, or the various biographies of gamblers, leads us to think this is true). No, you simply find a man who has one strategy. That strategy is to kill Arabs. And to kill Arabs. Until Arabs surrender.

There cannot be a worse strategy, even from the point of view of Israel's interests. Of course, in the American press, the heat is always on Arafat. That Arafat walked from peace talks two years ago is repeated over and over as a mark of his insincerity. As the mark of the beast, really, on his forehead. That Sharon opposed the Oslo accords is, on the other hand, simply not mentioned. That he has done all he could do to disrupt the peace process doesn't figure in the op-ed huffing and puffing of the right. The FT ends its portrait with a glimpse into the great man's prophetic dream:


"He now officially acknowledges the possibility of Palestinian statehood, having shelved his past thesis that Jordan is Palestine. Over the past year, he has spoken repeatedly of his willingness to make painful concessions to achieve peace on the basis of two states. What he has not done, in 12 months during which the conflict has escalated, is to present a peace plan of his own that might stand a chance of meeting Palestinian aspirations.

"From the interviews he has given, a vision has nevertheless emerged of a demilitarised state on some of the occupied territories. The Jordan valley would remain in Israeli hands and an expanded Jerusalem would remain Israel's undivided capital. Many of the Jewish settlements, built on Arab land, would remain; and there would be no right of return for more than 3m Palestinian refugees.

"It is a formula that the Palestinians would be certain to reject, even as a starting-point for negotiations. But Mr Sharon believes that he understands the Arabs among whom he grew up. He believes that military power can force them back to the negotiating table and to a settlement on Israel's terms. "

So, let's get this straight. The Palestinians would have no army whatsoever. Israel would retain its army, which happens to be one of the biggest in the region. The Palestinians would receive no compensation for land that was seized from them, although Israel has been (quite rightly) adamant about, say, accounts in Switzerland seized during the Holocaust. The Jordan would be an Israeli river. I suppose the Palestinians could pay for some use of it, although not too much. A quota has to be set up for the lesser races. An "expanded" Jerusalem would remain Israel's capital. The Palestinian capital could, perhaps, be located in an outhouse in Bethlehem.

Take away place names, and this is South Africa's homeland policy. It didn't work then, it won't work now. Of course, the American press is mulling the funny idea that they can find some Palestinian figurehead to replace Arafat. On the principle, I suppose, that it worked with the Indians. Starve em enough, drive em from their homelands, and attack em fiercely, and eventually they sign on to the cultural death of the reservation.

In 1890, that was fine with your average Caucasian American male. And it probably still is, but sufferage and time has eroded that male's influence. I don't think the majority of Americans will stand for that for very long. I think that the right wing is about to spring another suprise on the Republicans with this issue. Like the Clinton impeachment, it will become one of those hardliner mantras that the party goes down with. Meanwhile, Israel is plunged into an unsustainable, permanent war, and the Palestinian situation -- the slum state -- gets worse. Because everything can get worse.
Limited Inc's motto for the day: Everything can get worse. Watch.

Remora

Limited Inc is boiling with indignation about the Middle East, and Bush, and Tony Blair (the Daily Mirror supposedly headlined their story about Blair's visit to Bush's ranch, Howdy, Poodle), but what the hell? We don't write well in the boiling mood. Ice, we prefer lots of ice in the veins. Besides, any piker with a clicker can move around the Web and compose an editorial view for himself, re the multifarious failures of US foreign policy this week. We will add our tinsel thunder to the obvious, soon enough, but not every day is a good day to go all red in the face.

Limited Inc, instead, wants our readers to head over to a very nicely put together site about Dublin history put together by a Ken Finlay. We haven't explored the entire site (which seems to be a huge enterprise with links to a couple of very hard to acquire texts of Dubliniana) since we don't have that much time -- after all, there are only 200 more shopping days to Christmas. But we did take a look at Letters and Leaders of My Day, a book of reminiscences by Tim Healy. We love the way Healy begins his story on a cheerful note:



In 1862 (when I was seven) my father left Bantry, Co. Cork, on being appointed Clerk of Union at Lismore, Co. Waterford. The retiring clerk, J. C. Hennessy, had been promoted to Waterford Union because of a tragedy which afterwards became the plot of a novel. In outline the story ran that the wife of Richard Burke, Clerk of Waterford Union, sickened and died about 1960. Her burial at the family graveyard, Kilsheelan, Co. Tipperary, was attended by the husband, who in apparent sorrow stayed that evening with her sister. Their converse meanwhile was friendly, yet in the"dead waste and middle of the night "the sister thundered at his door, "Get up, you murderer, you poisoned my sister! Get up! Get out!"

A dream, according to the whispers of the village, had inspired her. Burke tried to pacify the woman, but the only answer she made was: "Get out of my house! You killed my sister!" Then without giving him time to dress, she bundled him into the street.

In his night-shirt Burke made his way to the police-barracks, and was there accommodated till day broke. Then the sister accused him to the police of the murder of his wife, and demanded that the body should be exhumed. This was duly reported to Dublin Castle, but Burke was not arrested. Inquiries, however, were set afoot, and the Government gave permission to open the grave so that an inquest might be held. The husband nonchalantly attended the Coroner's inquiry. He drove to it from Waterford in a hired car, and the driver related that, where a view of the River Suir met his eyes, he declaimed, "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain," at full length.

At the inquest the doctor declared his suspicions, but medical knowledge as to poisons was not then exact. As he was unable to pronounce positively on the cause of death, the stomach was removed and sent in a jar to the Cork Queen's College. There the analyst put the jar into the laboratory, but before he could examine it, the place was burnt down. To rebuild the laboratory a vote of
Parliament was necessary, and the British Treasury was not to be hurried. When the delay in providing money ended, workmen set about clearing the foundations, and a pickaxe struck a jar in the d�bris which emitted a peculiar sound. It was lifted out, unbroken, and the analyst identified it as the jar sent to him the year before containing the stomach of Mrs. Burke.

On examining the contents he certified that arsenic was present in the stomach in fatal quantities, and after a long delay the Tipperary coroner reassembled the jury

Meanwhile the police learnt that Burke had been friendly with a nurse in Waterford Union. They also heard from a pauper-assistant there that he had been seen to take a white powder from a vessel on the shelves of the pharmacy. So the Coroner's jury brought in a verdict of wilful murder against him, and Burke was arrested and put on trial before Baron Deasy at Clonmel Assizes in 1862. Confident of acquittal, he issued invitations to his friends to dine with him at an hotel in Waterford after the trial. Nevertheless, Burke was found guilty. Thousands flocked to see him hanged. His execution made the vacancy in the clerkship of the Waterford Union to which the Lismore Clerk, Hennessy, was elected. The coming of my father from Bantry to take the latter's place brought me as a child to Co. Waterford."

Limited Inc has some colorful stories about our father. But, well, when we were seven our father moved down to Atlanta to work on Carrier HVAC equipment. As far as we know, the way to his advancement was not preceded by poisoning, stabbing, adultery, or fraud. We feel left out.

�Someone left the cake out in the rain��

Do you feel it? That auld MacArthur Park melancholy. In the spring of 1980, or was it 1981? In any case, Limited Inc remembers manning the paint counter at a Shreveport hardware store listening to Donna Summer dirging for this enigmatic gateau, since the radio station that was piped in for our customers� shopping pleasure was very big on Donna Summer. Is it an illusion, or is that same sweet sadness abroad in the US press? a feeling that the splendid little war our commander in chief, bless his 80 percent in the polls, has been all set to spring on Iraq, is now being derailed by a bunch of wankers over there in the Holy Land. I mean, the NYT, and in the Washington Post haven�t quite been open about it � rather, it�s the little asides, the way Tony Blair, for instance, seems to be abandoning ship at the very time we need him to buck us up, or the way the cartoon cutups at the Arab Summit mainstreamed the odious little Iraqis. And Kuwait, my God, what podunk little speed-trap in that whole damn sandbox owes us more? And here they are, closing off the pool, so sorry, boss, find some other place to stage your troops from.

I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again�

Here�s atypical analysis in the WP from a couple of days ago:


�In the past few days, the president has defended himself against the sharpest criticism of his conduct of foreign policy since the attacks of Sept. 11. He and his advisers now must reckon with the prospect that the Middle East conflict will force a delay in, or substantial changes to, the next phase of the war on terrorism -- apparently aimed at Iraq -- that they have been planning for months.�

For months, folks! All that brain power � and George W. can�t really afford to waste too much brain power � and now the bastards are screwing everything up. The problem is that there are so many of them. We�d love Sharon to make the area Palestinian-rein, but it would be hard to hide the deaths of 2 million. And there are a lot of bleeding hearts out there, lefties and pinkos who will be in the streets, unappreciative that this genocide�s for you.

Yes, for months. The maps, the mock deployment of soldiers (all crafted in plastic and standing 1 ��� high, no doubt, for the president to, um, manipulate at his leisure late at night in the White House basement), the tough talk. It is so unfair!


And here�s the Times way of describing the trip of Tony Blair, who as late as last week was our well beloved sycophant, to the Crawford ranch:


Britain has scuttled plans to publish an intelligence dossier on Iraq's secret arms programs that it had planned to release on Washington's behalf. And Mr. Blair, traveling to Crawford, Tex. on Friday in his favorite role as the bridge between Europe and the United States, is confronting a gap so wide that it now prevents him from openly backing an American attack on Iraq.

"I think so far Blair has gotten away with being pro-American and a loyal European and not having to choose because America has not done something that is so awful that, if he supports the U.S., he will lose Europe," said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. "But the Middle East is possibly more dangerous for him now than Iraq, because public opinion across Europe is very, very anti-Israeli, and people all think the U.S. can do something about it. It's the time for Tony Blair to be constructively critical, to be a candid friend."

Yes, our commander in chief, mistaking his office for another episode in that quiz show, Family Feud, has really, really been looking forward to some kind of fall theater in Iraq. Like football, it would have been. His heroic stature in the polls, and the Democrats, the same old numbnuts, kowtowing to any expression of American imperial power we were crazy enough to come up with: yes, Peter, Tom, Dan, we are solidly behind the President�s decision to massacre Iraqi prisoners of war in order to avoid future American casualties.

It�s all a big dilemma, as Laura would put it � my God, that woman�s vocabulary! On the one hand, Sharon is clearly insane. As in, at some point that man was clearly bitten by a rabid dog. Hasn�t anybody noticed? His idea of peace has been, consistently, the peace of the grave, on which he could dance, while somebody else wrote the epitaph for the Palestinian �savages.� On the other hand, Mr. Sharon is backed by a powerful, although equally insane, contingent in the Republican party. Powerful, that is, in D.C. The truth is, the main body of the GOP could care less. But the clique around the Weekly Standard, which has become, by the weird alchemistry of betrayal (remember their early embrace of McCain?), the press chorus of the Bushie crowd � and this is of some importance, these people being heavily networked � are all set on killing that Arafat. They have no endgame. Implicitly, they would like the genocide option for the Palestinians mulled over. Perhaps they could be sold into slavery? Ashcroft of course would approve of that: talk about making those genuine reconstructions of Civil War battles even more genuine! But because of the climate of moral looseness since the sixties, the slide in family values, feminism, enviro-nazis, and squishy pinks, we know that isn�t going to happen. So really, the counsels of such bozos as William Krystol are singularly short of an endgame. At least George Will, in a recent column, came out foresquare for the only one consistent with the Sharon plan: the conquest of the West Bank and its annexation to Israel.

Well, our commander in chief isn�t the smartest boy in the class, but even he knows that is stupid. History is not going to rewind, suddenly, to the glorious colonial period when we kept wogs in their places, no matter what Will thinks, sitting in his little Virginia faux plantation. And then there is the little matter of oil. Today, a story from the AP that assures us that the possibility of an oil embargo is remote. And Limited Inc agrees that an oil embargo on the scale of the one that followed Nixon�s weird all points surrender to Israel�s demands in 1973 is unlikely to happen. For one thing, since then, the sheiks have so mismanaged their money that they would be hurt by any downturn in the EU and the USA�s economic indicators. Still, they would certainly do it to save themselves from the Shah�s fate.

And that fate, whether Bush likes it or not, is looming, as he simplemindedly cuts off every Middle East ally the US ever bribed into compliance with our provincial interests. (As a side observation: if Egypt blows up, does anybody really think Israel is going to benefit? Only that Masada strain in the Likud, which Sharon rather likes: toughen up the youth, or something like that.) God loves fools, and who knows, with an idiot at the wheel, we might avoid collisions that a more experienced, a more intelligent leader could not avoid. But the cosmic license that fools enjoy isn�t guaranteed. Bush is definitely on a political holiday, right now, especially for a man who slunk into office illegitimately, and has ruled like a corrupt CEO ever since. His opposition has all the backbone of a wet sand castle, which definitely helps him. Right now, with the emotion that still roils the American populace in the wake of 9/11, Bush can get away with things that in normal times would make his credit plummet in this country. He has, of course, blown it in other countries. But here�s a cruel fact: American interests aren�t the same as Israeli interests. The blowing up of caf�s in Jerusalem, like the blowing up of parlimentarians in New Delhi, is criminal; as, actually, is the assassination of Palestinian youth by the Israeli military (collateral casualties, alas, as the boys in Foreign Service say, going down to the lounge for their scotches). The US interest here, is partly moral, and partly structural: it is time to figure out how to establish institutions that will satisfy both the Israeli and the Palestinian thirst for justice (or, more vulgarly, revenge). This isn�t going to happen if the US doesn�t lean fairly heavily on Sharon. And if, instead of continually, self righteously, calling for Arafat to stop the suicide bombers, the American pitch was also for guaranteeing Palestinian rights �as in property rights, rights to be free from search and seizure of property, etc., etc. That would probably require setting up some kind of intra-state judicial system � in other words, some independent judiciary that could punish aberrant Israeli soldiers and Palestinian franc-tireurs alike.

LI makes this suggestion in the full realization that the sensible thing isn�t going to happen. The situation has really spiraled beyond the point at which liberal, Montesquieu like gestures are going to work. But somebody has to be out there, promoting whacky, stupid, sensible things. One obvious fact about the Israel-Palestine conflict is that, left wholly to the mechanism of the blood feud, it will never stop.

Remora



Well, well. Limited Inc loves capitalism -- sometimes. The bottom line graphs, in its sphere, the very heartbeat of reason (though,as a proper lefty, we don't like to admit this too often). A Financial Times editorial sums up what is happening in Israel with admirable perspicacity. That means, companeros, that it adumbrates the essence of the 'wet' position, as Maggie Thatcher might have put it. Thatcher, of course, before she was the iron lady, was very much the dry lady. Dry down to the grayish bone. Acidulous, even.

Well, here is the first killer graf. This reads like something from Limited Inc.

"Ariel Sharon has embarked on a military folly that bears disturbing resemblance to his ill-fated 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The US, which was seen by many at the time to have given Israel at least an amber light to pursue its destructive Lebanon war, should not repeat the same mistake. For Israel's sake, Washington must intervene to halt Mr Sharon's widening reoccupation of territories under Palestinian control."

Now -- why is it that not a single major American paper can see that? Is it some collective blindness, some 9/11 side effect? To ram home FT's point, and our own, let's throw in the last three grafs. As FT gets going, the City's apologist for an optimal level of profit makes an unusual amount of sense. In fact, LI is a little puzzled -- is this a major financial newspaper, or Liberation?

"The inconsistencies of the US approach are owed to a merging of the Middle East crisis into the global war against terrorism. Yet the current conflict is part of a more-than-50-year dispute that, by the US's own admission, must end with the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

Moreover, in the past 18 months of bloodshed and violence, tragic human rights violations have been perpetrated by both sides, with Palestinians bearing the brunt of the killings. Washington's friends in Europe should press for a wiser US approach and for immediate US pressure on Israel.

This is the most helpful message Tony Blair could carry to his meeting with Mr Bush in Texas later this week. The best way to help Israel today is to stop Mr Sharon from pursuing another senseless war."

Aaaahhhhhh. Precisely. How depressing that the obvious is, in these troubled times, also the subversive.

Remora

McDonald's, McDonald's.

Do read the story of the bad burger in the NYT today. A Chilean woman named Carmen Calderon went into a McDonald's to complain that her son had gotten sick after eating some Mickey D special. Some employee said look, it is cleaner here than in your house. Calderon then went to the municipal health agency, got them to make a sweep of the place. And Mickey D's responded by suing Ms. Calderon for 1.25 million dollars.

Is this typical or what?

"Because one of the icons of globalization is involved, the dispute has become a cause c�l�bre in Chile. McDonald's says it is merely trying to defend its reputation against a slander, but consumer advocates see sinister motives at work.

"McDonald's doesn't have a prayer of collecting this money, so it is clear that what they really want is to send a message to every consumer in Chile," said Luis J�rez, legal director of the National Consumer Service, a government agency. "What they are saying to consumers is this: watch your step, be careful, think twice before you criticize us, because you'll get in trouble with the law."

McDonald's loves to do this kind of thing. Remember the McLibel suit? When Mickey D for Devil spent 38 million dollars going after two unemployed, pamphleteering activists in court in Britain? It was a circus: the two activists ran circles around the big corp, even going so far as to dig up a repentent Ronald McDonald. The guy in the clown suit wept for the slaughter of bovine innocents, of which he'd been the tool, as well as subtly directing the fragile infantile libido to alluring images of a bunch of animated dead animal sandwiches, fetishs the young tikes will take years to get over, if ever. Yes, tears, gentle tears, folks. The two activists now run a website, the Mcspotlight, which hoards anti-McDonald's news, along with the exhaustive and exhausting trial transcript of the whole bloody trial, which lasted years, and supposedly cost McDonald's 38 million dollars. Sad thing about the site is that you get the feeling, this was it for those two. The high point. The thing they can't get over. And the exploitation of it, even for the goodly purpose of throwing rocks at this mega-corps -- well, it isn't like this is Gandhi in India, exactly. To be an activist and to hit the exacta like that -- and then the life afterwards, in the guttering light of that thrill...

Years ago, my friend D. surreptitiously took a job at a Mickey D's. His junk food gig coincided with my arrival in town. I'd made the long trek from Santa Fe to New Haven. D. had promised me that when I arrived, we'd both get jobs as garbage men. This turned out to be rank optimism, on D.'s part, since the township of West Haven, as a matter of fact, was not keeping slots warm for us on one of their primo garbage trucks. Just as well, I guess. So there I was, Limited Inc., staying at D.'s place, which was the downstairs part of a house owned by a German ex-maid. Because D. was afraid that the maid didn't want me in his quarters -- I don't know, her paranoia, his rent, some concantenation of bad circs and money troubles -- he encouraged me to sort of hide by day. For instance, remaining in a closet might be a good idea, he hinted. Or had I thought of wandering aimlessly between the hours of dawn and sunset through the friendly streets of West Haven? Then he'd annouce that he had to do some task he couldn't talk about, and disappear. Eventually I wormed it out of him. He said that it was a pretty cool job. The employees value added to the pittances they were making, hourly, by boosting boxes of patties and buns. Easy way to do this was to hoist one of the boxes into the dumpster out back, then retrieve it and go home with it. Although I thought, theoretically, that the company should be bled in this way, given their adamant resistance to paying a living wage, on a more practical level I couldn't help but worry that diffusing the patties among the kids at home might not be the healthiest thing a parent can do.

Remora


Literally hundreds of my readers have been writing in demanding that I compare, point for point, Edmund Spenser's A Veue of the Present State of Ireland with the current discourse in the press about the 'terroristic" Palestinians.

Okay, okay, maybe not literally hundreds. Maybe LI doesn't even have hundreds of readers.

But still, if hundreds had written in to suggest this idea, it would have made sense to me. Since many of the rhetorical arguments rehearsed, in Spenser's text, to justify the English occupation of Irish territory and the abridgment of Irish rights, under common law, up to and including seizure of property, imprisonment, and death, resurface periodically like a chronic neural disease in the Western body. LI was thinking about this while perusing the bloodier effusions of the Washington Posts marching corps of conservative apologists, especially Michael Kelly and the always delightful Charles Krauthammer. For instance, here is Chalie me darlin' talking about the kvetching bolshies and the war:

"Just five days into the war, for example, Mary Robinson, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, demanded that U.S. bombing stop so she and her indispensable cohort could feed the hungry. Had we listened to them, tens of thousands of Afghans would have died. As it was, the bombing defeated the Taliban -- whose cruel and catastrophic misrule was the source of the famine -- and thus saved the Afghans from starvation.

By year's end, with Afghanistan liberated and the Bill of Rights still intact, the opposition moved on. To military tribunals.Alas, no luck. And no legs. Americans have not much appetite for giving al Qaeda the run of a massive judicial apparatus designed for those who live by the American Constitution. They sensibly want to keep the number of years-long, jury-endangering, media-circus civilian trials for terrorists down to the bare minimum. Already three -- John Walker Lindh, American Taliban; Zacarias Moussaoui, "20th hijacker"; and Richard Reid, shoe bomber -- will enjoy O.J. levels of media coverage."

This is amazingly good stuff. I love the moral outrage about the Taliban's cruelty to the Afghans -- a cruelty rediscovered, with alacrity, after 9/11, by the same people who were, well, a little blind to it before. Before then, of course, there was, shall we admit it? a bit of softness for the Taliban on the right. A bit of admiration for this offshoot of the one good war, the Gippers war in Afghanistan. This article in Counterpunch quotes a 1997 London Telegraph story about Texas hospitality and the Taliban, at that time the legitimate guv, or so it seemed, sitting on a strategic area that Unocol in particular would like to put an oil pipeline through. According to that article, the "Taliban was learning how the "other half lives," and according to The Telegraph, "stayed in a five-star hotel and were chauffeured in a company minibus." The Taliban representatives "...were amazed by the luxurious homes of Texan oil barons. Invited to dinner at the palatial home of Martin Miller, a vice-president of Unocal, they marveled at his swimming pool, views of the golf course and six bathrooms." Mr. Miller, said he hoped that UNOCAL had clinched the deal.

Dick Cheney was then CEO of Haliburton Corporation, a pipeline services vendor based in Texas. Gushed Cheney in 1998, "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight. The good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is."

As the Good Lord's son said, though, the wind blows where it listeth. Or time and tide wait for no man. Or something like that. In any case, we shouldn't underestimate the revelation that Krauthammer is four square against mass starvation. This is a distinct softening of the Bush's favorite organ, the heart-- it is even, dare I say it, compassionate conservativism at work. That Krauthammer now believes that the mass starvation of those without the law is, well, plumb wicked, is a step up the moral ladder. Isn't that Maslow's term? Soon, who knows, he might come out with some aberrant position against taking the bread from the mouths of orphans. I doubt it, however. There's a coloring, in that phrase, of the dread welfare state. Don't want that back, do we?

But this is mere icing on the cake. What we really, really love is CK's irritated assent to the jury tradition in common law. He of course knows that it is a bad thing, an encouragement to minorities to get uppity, and an impediment to throwing people in jail without having them get all that publicity. The Argentine military had a way of handling these things that, in grave times, one has to admire. It causes a guy like Krauthammer extreme pain to see the guilty being accorded rights. Rights, of course, are for the non-guilty. Silly. All the fault of the Warren court. But goddamn it, let's not start giving everybody rights. That would definitely be the decline of civilization, or the triumph of the wogs, one. Incidentally, we love the 20th hijacker label too, especially since the guy inconveniently didn't hijack anything. Luckily, in the current climate in America, a middle eastern sympathizer with Satan isn't going to get away with not hijacking an airplane -- he's obviously guilty, in his dreams, and so let's hang him high. That the death penalty is shirked at for people who, uh, haven't hijacked planes but wanted to is the kind of lily livered thing lefties are famous for. Along with their well known affection for sher'ia. How this coheres with their other affections (for lesbians and gays and environazis and degenerate art) is a question for the psychoanalyst more than for poor CK. He's a simple guy, who knows perversion when he smells it.

Ah, and this takes us back to our man Spenser: compare the rantings of Krauthammer with this oaken appeal to sophistry in the service of imperial power in VPSI. The Speakers in this dialogue are colloquying together about the Irish, and in the course of this dialogue an astonishing number of the myths that have justified occupations, imperialism, and the unequal treatment of peoples in their own Heimat are, if not shaped for the first time, at least collected together. In particular, Spenser comes up with a mythical history about the English ownership of Ireland, which was apparently conceded to the English long ago, and the craft of the natives, who hied to the hills in the fourteenth century and waited until the War of the Roses distracted the noble Brits. Then, you know it, bingo, like white on rice, the so called natives are all over the true possessors of the land. There is much in this story that corresponds to the Israeli myth that the Palestinians just picked up and fled in '48, without the stimulus of the Israeli militia. And in the same way that myth relies on two natural characteristics of the native -- cowardice and craftiness -- so, too, it feeds into the justification for inequity in the justice system. A la our man Krauthammer.

"Iren: The comon law is, as I before said, of it selfe most rightfull and verie convenient, I suppose, for the kingdom for which it was first devized; for this, I thinke, as yt seemes reasonable, that out of the manners of the people, and abuses of the countrie, for which they were invented, they tooke theire first begynninge, for else they should be most unjust: for no lawes of man, accordinge to the straight rule of right, are just, but as in regard of the evills which they prevent, and the safetie of the common weale which they provide for. As for example, in the true ballancinge of Justice, it is a flatt wrong to punishe the thought or purpose of any, before it be enacted: for true justice punisheth nothing but the evill acte or wycked worde, yet by the lawes of all kingdomes it is a capitall cryme, to devise or purpose the death of the King: the reason is, for that when such a purpose is effected, it should be too late to devise of the punishment therof, and should turne that common-weale to more hurt by suche losse of theire Prince, then suche punishment of the malefactors. And therefore the lawe in that case punishes his thought: for better is a mischief, then an inconvenience. So that jus polliticum, though it be not of it selfe just, yet by applicacon, or rather necessitie, it is made just; and this only respect maketh all lawe just. Nowe then, if these lawes of Ireland be not likewise applied and fitted for that Realme, they are sure verie inconvenient.

Eudox: You reason stronglie; but what unfitness doe you fynde in them for that Realme? shewe us some
particulers.

Iren: The common lawe appointeth that all trialls, aswel of crymes as titles and ryghtes, shall be made
by verdict of Jurye, chosen out of the honestist and most substancal free-holders: Nowe all the ffree-holders of that Realme are Irishe, which when the cause shall fall betwene an Irishe man and an Englyshe, or betwene the Quene and any ffreeholder of that countrye, they make no more scruple to passe against the Englisheman or the Quene, though it bee to strain theire oaths, then to drinke milke unstrayned. So that before the jury goe togeather, it is all to nothing what theire verdict will be. The tryall thereof have I so often sene, that I dare confidentlie avouche the abuse thereof: Yet is the lawe of it selfe, as I said, good; and the first institucon thereof being given to all Englishemen verie rightfull, but nowe that the Yrishe have stepped in to the rowmes of the Englishe, who are nowe become so hedefull and provident to keepe them forth from thensforth, that they make no scruple of conscience to passe against them, it is good reason that either that corse of the Lawe for trialls be altered, or that other provision for juries be made.

In other words -- by all means have trials, if the guilty verdicts are assured. Otherwise, trialls must be altered. So let's have some tribunal action, or fix the juries. Otherwise Krauthammer is going to be looking for lefties under his bed. .

Remora

LI gives way to nobody in his utter contempt for the Bush administration. But you have to give them credit for moving the Middle East a giant step closer to peace. Sending Dick Cheney on his '002 Let's Roll tour apparently so alarmed the governments he visited (there's nothing like madness in a great power to make the satraps nervous) that the Saudis, of all people, have cemented a little peace, love and understanding between the monstrous minions of Hussein and the cold blooded plutocrats of Kuwait:


Attempts to reconcile Iraq and Kuwait at previous Arab summits failed � from the 1990 meeting immediately after the Iraqi invasion when a Kuwaiti sheik famously hurled plates at the Iraqi delegation to last year's summit in Amman, Jordan, when talks again collapsed. The annual gatherings of Arab heads of state were suspended throughout the 1990's because of the sour relations between Iraq and Kuwait. The Beirut meeting showed all the signs of following the usual pattern, with the Kuwaiti minister of state for foreign affairs summoning the press to his suite Monday to declare that Iraq was up to its old tricks.

But the existence of two major regional disputes � the Israeli-Palestinian turmoil and a looming conflict over Iraq � seems to have pushed through a compromise.

In order to avoid being attacked, the Iraqis were willing to be more flexible on Kuwaiti and other Arab demands. The other Arab states were eager to find a way to express their discontent over their perception that the United States is so little involved in the region that it could not even ensure the presence of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, at the summit."

Remember all those stories about the competence, ah, the admirable competence, of the crew around Bush, in the wake of 9/11? Let's add up the bill: Israel looks like Algeria, circa 1957; Iraq, led by one of the biggest mass murderers of our time, is now being welcomed into the fold of the former plate hurling alliance; the insane missile defense system, which has shown its irrelevance to the current world posture of threats for all to see, is being generously funded once again by the incorrigible folks in the White House (no doubt we would find, if we looked, long cozy meetings between the guys at General Dynamics and Donald Rumsfield's people before the Bushies fired up their Star Wars Defense propaganda machine); Pakistan and India look, more than ever, like two nations on the verge of nuclear war; and Br'er Rabbit, ie Osama Bin Laden, has apparently gone back into the briar patch -- notwithstanding the mythical ability of the US armed forces to see, hear, and know everything. And of course there's the little matter of the out standing anthrax monster, who all the king's horses and all the king's men can't seem to find. Instead, we get the FBI pressing some klutz who treated one of the hijackers for some infection on his leg until the man says, gee, that musta been anthrax. Yeah, right.

LI is a believer in the Reality principle, hard as that faith is to maintain in our present perilous times. So this is what we think: the sheer incompetence of the Coupsters is eventually going to leak through our shining victory over the Taliban. That is, unless they do something right. Like, for instance, catching Br'er Rabbit. Or catching the anthrax guy. Or coming up with some magic in Israel - the longest shot of all. Chance favors nobody in the short term-- and in the long term, to paraphrase Pasteur, "dans les champs de battaille, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits pr�par�s
."

Remora
This just in from the Times.

Washington, March 27 -- Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced today that the Energy Department is renaming itself. "From now on, we will be the Energy Company Department," Mr. Abraham said in a conference call with business journalists. A consortium of energy industries, lead by Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former top executives of the Enron Corporation, will oversee a tightening of the newly renamed department. Abrahams conference call was interspersed with his trademark gutsy humor. "Christ," he said, "we weren't even elected. We have to work fast to make sure you guys get some of that ROI in our coup." Abrahams was referring to the offer made by a SATANSPAWN, a limited liability corporation, to swap policy options with the Republican party. In a surprising use of this so far barely tested financial instrument, SATANSPAWN (consisting, reportedly, of 18 top energy CEOS) optioned a "put" on the so called "American energy policy" for $16.6 million, in return for a Stripped Mortgage-Backed Florida Election Security, or SMBFES (commonly called SMURF BALL FESTS by traders). These mortgage backed issues are indexed to two election market options: the value of non-felons erased "accidentally" from Florida voting rolls, and the amortized value of deteriorations among voting machines in the Miami metro area. Guaranteed by the Florida government, Smurf Ball Fests have not been as popular among hedge funds as was first hoped when they were issued in November, 2000.

The decision to rename the department is a welcome clarification of the Bush administration's end of the year projections. The pressure to speed up the Department's restructuring has increased as energy equities have languished this quarter. Analyst Dick Scheiner of Killemandsellem Consulting, said the announcement was expected, but welcome. "Since the coup, the Department has been re-configured away from any long term Eco concerns, but it has not been doing the big things the industry wants. Drags on the overall profit picture during the last five years have included forcing oil companies to pay taxes, to pay at least 5% of the tab on major oil spills, and protecting so called "environmental areas," such as the coast of the US, national parks, and even rain forests. What we are seeing now is a welcome signal that the administration is pushing the "rape of the earth scenario," which has been carefully worked out with more than 100 energy industry executives, trade association leaders and lobbyists, into high gear."

In a related development, Dick Cheney released his first single, "Blow-off da stratosphere, what you say?," on his four CD contract with Interscope records. His spokesman, Orah Reilly, said, 'with all the downtime in the cellar, when like the terrorists were getting all bitchy, DC started scratchin his Lawrence Welks. And it just like totally converged."

Mr Abrahams was credited as a turnround expert when first appointed by Commandante Bush, but since the rocky start of his tenure, many analysts have complained about the pace of change. "What we look at is the rate of species extinction," Mr. Scheiner explained. 'We were looking for a big bounce there. But so far, it has been pitiful -- a bird here, a mammal there. We were hoping for some robust SE in this quarter, frankly." Although the renaming to Energy Company Department is not a major policy change, it does send a signal that the Bush administration is serious about environmental degradation. Still, there are questions over the speed at which Bush can completely overturn democracy and all it stands for, which have depressed the Republican Party's share of energy company contributions to around 85% compared with a 12-month high of 100% in January last year. Democratic spokeswoman Jill Coleburn said that the Democratic Party would consider renaming other departments in a bid to remain competitive in the Policy option market. "We pioneered the Lincoln's bedroom thing, and I don't think the Republicans have anything to tell us about marketing," Ms. Coleburn claimed. "How about this? The Bill Gates Attorney Generals Office? We think it puts a more human face on oppressing the vast majority of the electorate in favor of enriching a few plutocrats, don't you?"

Remora

Are the hard times over for Burger King? Actually, LI doesn't care. We just wanted to write that sentence, which has a vaguely biz-o-lect sound. Apparently Burger King is suffering the pangs and arrows of outrageous customer dissatisfaction. They've turned against the whopper. Those bastards. Turns out BK is run by a giant British conglomerate -- you never know who owns the toys nowadays -- that also puts out the Smirnoff vodka. The Brits, showing rare good sense, have decided to concentrate on their intoxicant, and find a buyer for the ailing King.

When Limited Inc was a dewy youth, he preferred Burger King to McDonalds and especially to Dairy Queen. The royalty of cheap food -- how it studs the American highways and byways! Basically, LI's preference was swayed by the paper crowns you sometimes got at Burger King. And the shakes. As I remember it, the shakes were better than those plastic-y tasting concoctions you'd get at MacDonalds.

Time has not been kind enough to marry LI off ... Having no children to watch, wide eyed, as the tv shows grotesquely magnified burgers being whisked off grills, thus activating the Pavlovian impulse in the little dears, LI has no reason to return to the foods of yesteryear. Oh, now and then the rare visit to Schlotzky's, but besides that, fast food just isn't in our orbit. Nothing, though, conjures up repulsion like the thought of going into one of those boites and chowing down on the burgers. The LA Times, which has several unintentionally funny stories today (one about a "smear campaign" re Beautiful Mind, accusing the movie of covering up some of the facts about its subject, was particularly amusing -- it quotes Neal Gabler, a Hollywood intellectual whose brain stretches from Variety all the way to the spiritual heights of, say, Alan Toffler -- a giant, in other words, in every way, and a true credit to the industry -- as saying that the campaign, and Russell Crowe's failure to secure an Oscar, was -- well, I must quote the graf:

"I think, in the future, when people are thinking about using biopics, they'll be more cautious on how they use the facts," Gabler said. "I happen to think this is a tragedy. To think we have this new chilling effect. That artists are going to have to be bound by facts. ... Imagine if Shakespeare was bound to the real character in 'Richard III'? If he were alive today, would Shakespeare be called upon to revise that play?"

LI will not gild this lily with comment ), but the BK saga is tops. Here, for your dining and dancing pleasure, are the grafs that particularly amused LI:

"In recent months, Burger King has made its shakes creamier and thicker by adding ice cream. It dressed up the Whopper with larger pieces of lettuce, thicker slices of tomatoes and pickles with a stronger dill flavor.

Mike Aldredge, 36, a Burger King regular for the last 15 years, has noticed the difference. The Costa Mesa resident, who eats at Burger King twice a week, said he liked the new and improved food so much he might easily double his visits.

"This is the best fast food I've ever had," he said, clutching a double Whopper with cheese. "And it's getting better."

However, new products and variety might not be the sales drivers Burger King executives expect. McDonald's much-hyped New Tastes Menu, which rotates new products year-round, has failed to attract hordes of new customers. In a recent national survey, Villa Park restaurant consultant Robert L. Sandelman found fast-food customers ranked cleanliness, taste and food flavor ahead of choice, which placed 11th out of 12 categories."

Question: where did that Mike Aldredge, 36, come from? Was there some kind of casting call? Second question: how much does he weigh? The vision of him, clutching his double whopper with cheese, is going to remain with LI the rest of the day. Sadly enough.

Dope

Is it only Limited Inc's imagination, or should economists take more of an interest in "small-world" theory, associated with Duncan Watts and Stephen Strogatz?

Yes, my readers roar, in numbers too big to ignore. Read your Watts and Strogantz and sin no more! or something like that.

Well, to explain...

These two wrote a paper a few years ago, in which they tried to find the minimum path length for an undeterminately large network. They called these networks, with their improbably small dimensions, small worlds, after the Milgram experiment that supposedly showed that there are six degrees of separation or less between any two randomly selected people in the world (well, the experiment didn't make a claim that vast, but it has been made since then). The problem, from the perspective of networks, was that most individuals are connected to a cluster of individuals, in which each individual has a high chance of sharing acquaintances. So how do you break out of the cluster to connect to random, unfamiliar individuals? Here's a quote about the system set up by Watts and Duncan from a September, 1998 Physics Today article

"This result is actually quite general," says Watts (who will shortly be moving to the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico), "and does not depend on the choice of a ring substrate used in the model. All that is required to generate the small-world phenomenon is a network that is locally ordered (which means simply that two nodes with a mutual 'friend' are significantly more likely to be connected than two randomly selected nodes), and which has a small fraction of long-range shortcuts. The effect also does not depend on the specific nature of the network nodes or connections--only their topology--so the small-world phenomenon ought to arise in all sorts of large, sparse networks."

To check this, Watts and Strogatz examine the length and clustering properties of three real networks: the collaboration graph of movie actors (including approximately 225 000 actors of all nationalities since the start of motion pictures); the power-transmission grid of the western US; and the neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (the only organism whose neural network is completely known).

As Watts explains, they show that, in each case, the characteristic path length of the network is close to its theoretical minimum (that of an equivalent random graph), yet the clustering coefficient is far from minimal, indicating the presence of significant local order. So all three networks exhibit the small-world phenomenon. "

There is a book coming out in May from Mark Buchanan, Nexus, that not only explains Watts and Strogatz' work, but expands on it, explaining that Watts and Strogatz had stumbled on one form of small world network, and that there is at least one other possible form of small world network. This other form is related to the principle of "the rich get richer" -- that certain individuals are more connected, and by that very fact will become more connected. There is a network form for the fact that wealth is unequally distributed. Among network people, this is known as preferential attachment.

Now here's the question. One of the big rightwing pushes right now is to promote the idea that poverty in the third world is rather a mirage. Or, if not a mirage, caused by ... as you might have guessed, big government. The idea comes from Hernando de Soto, and it isn't quite as silly as it sounds. In two books he has promoted the idea that small, informal vendors and makers and homeowners need a system that recognizes them as free economic agents with capital. That is, if we strip away the onerous bureaucracy and government thievery, we could unleash, in the third world, value that is already there. This, after all, is partly what happened in the French Revolution. Anybody who reads Le Rouge et le Noir is going to have some sympathy with de Soto's point, because Stendhal is very conscious of the effect of liberalism, ie stripping away big guv and its thievish attachments, on the French landscape.

Is the rightwing idea going against the rule of preferential attachment, or seeding it?

Hernando de Soto is being presented to the American public as some kind of third world guru. The NYTimes magazine, last year, presented him as the answer to our dreams (insofar as our dreams involve giving up none of our stuff and not feeling guilty about it). But the earlier image of de Soto wasn't so heroic. Tina Rosenberg wrote a review of The Other Path in the New Republic, in 1991, that pretty much blasted de Soto as an egomaniac and a crony of Fujimori. Here is what she said about de Soto's grand vision:

"To Reaganites, however, the most marketable aspect of The Other Path is what it does not say. It does not talk about helping small businessmen acquire the infrastructure, technical assistance, or capital they need. It does not propose improving education, health care, or other programs that could get Peru's poor off to a better start in life. It does not address discrimination against Indians, which has shut Peru's poor out of many opportunities. Most informals are one rung above beggars. Redefining them as entrepreneurs doesn't cure what made them poor, especially in an economy that has experienced one of the worst declines in modern history. (The informal sector exploded in part because traditional jobs dried up; only 9 percent of workers in Lima earn a salary they can live on.) Not even legal businesses can get credit. But the book asserts that legal reforms alone will suffice to unlock the informal sector's engine of growth. De Soto compared the state to a dying emergency-room patient and told me, "I want to burn down the hospital."

The burning down the hospital phrase has been toned down, lately, and there is a little bit more heed being paid to infusing capital. There is an organization, Trickle Up, which just announced its association with the ubiquitous De Soto. Trickle Up is dedicated to making micro grants to the third world street neediest. Because it promotes the solid virtues of entrepeneurship and self reliance, Trickle Up has become a favorite for conservatives trying to summon up a little chic compassion.


"Grants are made by TUP to selected groups of five or more people after a business plan is reviewed for them by unpaid TUP project coordinators. The maximum grant is $100, and recipients must pledge to reinvest at least 20 percent of their profits in their businesses. In the past ten years, more than 90,000 individuals have participated, 15,000 businesses have been started in 86 countries, and over $7.5 million in profits have been generated from TUP-funded businesses. All of this has been achieved without the involvement of governments, large staffs, or social researchers. By now, you probably see why it's called the "Trickle Up Program." Funds aren't lavished upon government entities in poor countries with the hope that a small portion will somehow "trickle down" to the very poor. The grants go directly to the cagey entrepreneurs of the streets, including those in Port-au--Prince, Haiti.

Now, LI is fascinated with the project here: can beggars become choosers? It all looks very much like... like the 1966 War on Poverty project. One of the oddities of contemporary conservativism is this adoption of sixties forms, from classical rock to agit-prop. Hmm. In any case, LI is going to go further into this issue, this grassroots wealth issue, in another post soon.

Remora

William Easterly. As in, who is William Easterly?

Right now, Easterly is on the screen as the World Bank economist who came in from the cold. He's written a book that points out (for those who haven't seen it) that the World Bank has failed to stave off poverty in the third world. He's being touted in conservative circles as the man who wants to cut aid, and make those third world slacker nations pay their debts on time. His article in Foreign Policy, which supposedly got him in dutch with his bosses (along with the book that came out of it, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics) is about the second of those two concerns. In it, he makes three of claims:
1. That debt relief is already happening, and in fact has been inscribed in the world system since the early eighties.
2. That the refusal of a nation that has a legitimate "democratic" government to pay back debts incurred by previous military or corrupt governments is a perverse incentive, insofar as the money loaned, at the same time, to "good governments" must be paid back. In effect, we are rewarding bad behavior.
3. That making debt relief conditional on a nation's having a democratic government, or the beginnings of a civil society, creates incentives to make the World Bank and the international lender entities more, rather than less, intrusive in the internal affairs of third world countries.

Now about these claims. Readers know that LI loves nothing better than setting up claims, like ninepins, and bowling them over. Arguing in the oxygen tent -- we take up all the air, you get the fun result.

But seriously, folks. All three of the claims are actually valid only insofar as debt relief is viewed from one side only: that is, from the side of the debtors. Take point 2. To claim that debt relief will send a perverse incentive, insofar as it will tip the parity between the debts of good nations and of 'bad" nations to the side of bad nations, is to ignore the disincentive sent to lender agencies if, in fact, the debts of military dictatorships and the like are voided. The perverse incentives in place, pace Easterly, have really been the other way: given the lack of discussion, or the lack of the organs necessary for discussion, in a military dictatorship, in fact lending agencies have a perverse incentive to loan to these nations. They can better negotiate terms with juntas than with democratically elected governments, and they can better envision the objectives of those loans -- say some unnecessary dam -- rather than the other type of loans -- a medical infrastructure, say. Meanwhile, there is, as we all know, an immense system of kickbacks in place, a system Easterly doesn't even touch on. Take Nigeria. We know that the loans that went to the rebarbative Abacha government. Here's a press release from, of all places, the American embassy to Nigeria:


"Jack A. Blum, an attorney who specializes in controlling bank fraud, government corruption and money laundering, said May 25 that "solving" Nigeria's long-term debt and corruption problem "will take a lot more than conferences on civil society and how to make people more honest."

To solve the problem, he told the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy in the U.S. House of Representatives, "You have to bring criminal justice and recovery of money into play. That is absolutely essential." That, he said, means "getting at the proceeds of corruption, going after the billions (thousands of millions of dollars) that (Former Nigerian Head of State, General Sani) Abacha took and the billions more that prior governments looted from the country."

Blum, who was called to testify on the Nigerian debt and corruption situation, said "Many of those people (who took those public funds) are sitting in London as some of the wealthiest people in England. Those assets cannot be overlooked.... Four billion (four thousand million dollars) with Abacha, $40 billion ($40,000 million) at least since independence," with some estimates running as high as $90 billion."

As a matter of fact, LI has talked to Jack Blum about this issue. We did a piece on money laundering for a magazine, the Globalist, which went funny on us and never paid for the piece. Blum's point is that the experience of Nigeria has been repeated over and over again. It isn't just that a place like Nigeria doesn't have infrastructural projects supposedly justifying the loans that were earmarked for them -- it is that the lending agencies knew, even as they were making the loans, that a significant portion of the money was being kicked back to the West, in the form of transfers to Western banks.

This is an area Easterly, supposedly the boldest and the baddest economist ever to walk away from the World Bank, doesn't even discuss.

Since his book was published eight months ago, one might wonder why he is being profiled, now, in the press. The reason is, he is dear to the Bush administration's heart, endorsing their position on foreign aid. Here are two grafs from his profile in the Washington Post:

"From 1988 to 2001, he was senior adviser to the World Bank's Development Research Group, the in-house brain trust charged with gauging the success or failure of the bank's development efforts around the world. In the process, he's trekked through slums from Karachi to Cairo and wears the good-humored but weary resignation of a lifetime idealist mugged at last by reality.

"He rejects the notion that he's any kind of whistle-blower. He still believes in both the World Bank ("there are a lot of really smart, really committed people there") and aid to developing nations, which he would like to see increased from the current level of $56 billion. In fact, foreign aid has been declining in recent years after peaking at $64 billion in 1991. Although private capital has taken up some of that slack, Wolfensohn has been calling for a $10 billion increase from the bank's member countries in each of the next five years."

Get the "mugged by reality line" -- was it William Krystal who said a neo-conservative was a liberal mugged by reality? Reality, you can be sure, is operating behind this metaphor in a very sooty skin. The American dilemma is, as it has always been, that no matter how elevated the supposed issue of the debate, it is always just one step away from a minstrel show. LI is infinitely depressed about that.

Remora

The romantic hero degenerates into a mere bundle of boorshness in Dostoevsky's Pere Karamazov. Having gone through the Byronic geste of having no limits, Pere Karamazov really does live without limits -- except those fears generated by the police and superstition. We thought of that dissolute father of four, today, reading another story about the ideological and fiscal corruption of the Bush administration -- surely, Bush is ushering in the age of Gall, the age of limitless affronts to democracy, honesty, and good taste. Pere Karamazov was moved to act by his capacity for lust. Dick Cheney is moved to act by his taste for collusion, something that develops in those who find positions in the higher echelons of the power industry. The story in the NYT, today about Exelon Corporation (Ex-es and En-s are seemingly Texas Greek), the controller of 20% of the nuclear power in this country, details how by a gosh almighty fortuitous circumstance, the Bush folk and Exelon's management rehabilitated of one of their dead in the water schemes to get nuke power rolling again. The age of Gall is particularly galling because it is presided over by a man who, every day and in every way, demonstrates the wisdom of the American people in not electing him. Exelon, according to the Times, cast its bread on the Republican waters, and just as in the Bible, got back threefold. Cheney for reasons that have to be protected by executive privilege saw pebble bed reactors as worthy recipients fo American bucks. And guess what? Exelon has the world monopoly on pebble bed reactors. Wow, is that lucky or what?

Is LI being unfari? Exelon has an explanation:

"Don Kirchoffner, a spokesman for Exelon, said campaign contributions had nothing to do with the pebble-bed reactor's mention in the report. "We didn't influence anybody," Mr. Kirchoffner said. For Exelon, the paragraph [in Cheney's report, extolling pebble bed nuke reactors] was seen as "a good thing," Mr. Kirchoffner said, but he insisted that the mention of the reactor's design did not necessarily represent a boon for the corporation.

"A good thing for the industry and the country was the fact that the administration came out with a recommendation for new forms of nuclear power, and our pebble-bed modular reactor is a byproduct of that," Mr. Kirchoffner said. "We just happened to have it. They took a look at what we gave them and they said this kind of makes sense."

Exelon owns and operates about 20 percent of the nation's nuclear capacity. Its co-chief executives, John W. Rowe and Corbin A. McNeill Jr., who has since retired, were among a group of about 75 energy executives who met with Mr. Cheney in March 2001. Along with other participants of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group, Mr. McNeill also met that month with Karl Rove, President Bush's chief strategist, and Lawrence B. Lindsey, the president's top economic adviser. "

However, far be it from LI to suspect that the half a million diverted into Republican pockets by Kirchoffner's employer had anything to do with the Cheney report. While companies are expected to cough up the dough in our pirate democracy, still, let's get real. These are people who have to restrain themselves from recommending nuke reactors in all the national parks. These are people who itch to see the global climate raised just to see if they can do it. Hell, buy a bunch of a/c stock and you are sitting pretty. This was a decision in line with the century long conservative policy of socialism for the rich -- especially if the rich have reactors. Cindy Folkers of the Nuclear information and resources service has produced a nice comparison of our government investment in different energy technologies. There is a canard that is sometimes heard on the WSJ editorial page -- which is where canard come home to roost -- that somehow, the energy biz was forced by the government to fork over incredible billions to create worthless green energy sources, like ethanol. But that isn't the truth. The truth is, nuke money comes from the government, goes into the energy industry, and in return the industry builds vast, costly behemoths that reinforce a dying grid idea -- that power will be generated from these expensive hubs and that end users will simply, passively recieve it. So here is what happens on the subsidy scene when the pretence is made that deregulation is going to give us consumer choice. There is this thing called stranded costs. These costs are for things like, well, pebble bed nuke plants. Stranded as in help me, I'm an old energy company too weak to get up myself. And our compassion is poured out upon them -- part of the deal of deregulation is taxpayers doling out sums to power companies of up to 25 billion dollars, in the case of California, for all that overbuilding, or ill planned building, they did in the seventies, eighties and nineties. It is only fair, of course. As in fair return on investment, the only justice Bush's people seem to recognize. It is interesting -- the conservative outcry about restitution that is owed to black americans for slavery is now standard boilerplate on the chicken wing circuit, but there's an awful lot of silence about the restitution owed to energy companies. The one isn't real, the other is all too real. So guess which one gets discussed most on the talk radio shows?

Anyway, thus speaks Folkers:

When comparing U.S. government subsidies for nuclear, solar, and wind, the nuclear power industry has received the majority (96.3%) of $150 billion in investments since 1947; that�s $145 billion for nuclear reactors and $5 billion for wind and solar. Nuclear subsidies have cost the average household a total amount of $1,411 [1998 dollars] compared to $11 for wind. The more money we spend on nuclear power, the less greenhouse gas reduction benefit we receive, while we hurt sustainable technology investment.