Remora
The Line, 2
In our last post, we made a few tentative jabs at thinking about the culture implications of a society in which the accumulation of wealth on the one side, and its absence on the other side, produces a gulf greater than that between, say, a Roman master and his slave. This is one of the great unthought ofs -- one of the unconscious features which plays its role in global culture. The promise of democracy is all hollowed out even as it is suavely announced by its spokesmen. For the Enlightenment ideal -- that one should be treated as an adult, and act like one -- depends on one being an adult human. The poor, though, are increasingly not. The suave spokesmen know it.
One of the things that should be noted about this wealth gulf, one of the reasons we are bringing up the tedious Roman reference, is that we'd like you to ponder the historical uniqueness of our status situation. Ours, our time's. Let's count it out: the Roman master could acquire other slaves, a greater amount of food, gorgeous clothing, and civil honor, and was in his way terrible. But in terms of levels of material existence, the master wasn't really going to find a better doctor, or dentist, or find more nutritious food, or even get a better education than the slave. The gulf between master and slave was in 500 a.d. as it was in Hegel's description in 1803 - they were both, in order to get the dialectic started, simply human beings. Hegel didn't talk about master and parakeet, master and deathwatch beetle.
Of course, this isn't true today. The Western dream of the lower species, that racist canard, was not, it turns out, a description, but rather a promise -- this was the vast project of the Western owners, the movers and shakers. if there really isn't an under-race, they would create an underclass. And over time, as the question of who was human became a question of who had the technology to be human, more and more of the poor simply don't have the price for that ticket, or the looks to get into that club. Since Limited Inc is one of this mass -- an ape on the planet of the apes that is being staged under your very windows, every day -- we can talk all about it. We aren't denied human rights anymore -- for human rights aren't really relevant to the non-human. We don't ride, for one thing, in cars. We don't go to dentists and have our toothaches cured. If we get AIDS, malaria, tb, or merely some cancer of a vital area, sleeping sickness, heart disease, the lot, and all our fault, drug or sex related no doubt, or due to living in some cancer gulch, living next to a refinery, living next to one of those old Monsanto chemical factories, living where they've put in all the highways so the humans can speed through the neighborhood, well, what do you expect? There is no cure. Whereas, of course, among human beings, the ardent discussions are about fertility drugs and viagra. The ardent discussions are about psychotherapy, the ardent discussions are about the safety of children. Are they attention deficit disorder children? Bring on the counselors, by all means.
There is a whole sphere not only of goods and services, but of ways of living, that are available to the masters and simply unimaginable to us apes. Of course, we vulgarly imagine it. Or rather, have it imagined for us by the humans. We have tvs -- well, LI doesn't, but that at least is a statement, not simply a factor in our ongoing immiseration -- and rent videos and there they are, the masters all adoringly imagined for us, and their childish antics, the things they blow up, the food they eat, the vehicles in which they chase each other around. This, we say, is what that species must do. Or must think they do. But for us apes, it is all a nature film, a wildlife film. They are different creatures, they move at different speeds, they eat different things, they die of different diseases, they experience their pains through different channels, and they experience their pleasures that way too.
Limited Inc is thinking about this a lot lately. We've just had a bout with the electric company -- owned and operated, supposedly, by the City of Austin -- in which the City of Austin won. Basically, they drained us of our cash. And we still don't have the money to remain in the desolate little efficiency to which we cling for another month. So we spent yesterday and today lamenting the move out to the street, which has gone from being a nightmare to being something we should plan on. We look at those weatherbeaten souls holding up the cardboard signs by the intersection of Lamar and 5th street reading, wer will mich horen, wenn ich schreie, unter dem Engeln Ordnungen, and we wonder about our own future. Although not exactly human, as LI's faithful reader know -- the ape has surely shown through, the rubbery features, the fur, the bulk, the inability to fit into shoes, pants, shirts -- we are still used to certain of the human comforts, and we contemplate their removal with dismay, and more than that, with a sort of animal panic, a paralyzing disarray. We live pretty much on a bushman's salary -- that is, on about six hundred dollars a month in US currency, supplemented by the money we beg, when the bills can no longer be put off, from friends and relatives. Every act of beggary is another descent into animality, so we have a very phased sense of what it means, we've swallowed the time release pill, the one that brings us to this level of poverty, and then to this further level, this murkier level. Descent, descent. And we know that, at forty four, this isn't going to go on forever. There are no jobs for our kind, for one thing; there's no honor in the poverty, for another thing; and neither love, which has long been forgotten, nor health awaits us in the future. The dark corner, another words, and, with our stiff little limbs in the air, being brushed into some dustpan like the cockroach in Kafka's Metamorphosis.
This is why we have been thinking about Uber die Linie, Ernst Junger's essay on nihilism. The essay takes its readings from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and makes the interesting suggestion that power, in the modern world, is promoted by something Juenger calls the nihilistic rumor -- the rumor that some force out there owns the future, from which one is excluded, and that resistance is futile. It's the No Future of the Sex Pistols, lived as the everyday experience of the apes.
Limited Inc, in other words, is talking about failure. We were moved recently by the New York article on a jazz singer, Susannah McCorkle, who jumped to her death last year from her sixteenth story apartment. But we did find it rather amusing that her death was immediately psychologized. She was, of course, depressed. The secret word -- failure -- never comes up in the article. But failure is a big external thing. It isn't generated as a mood -- it impresses itself upon one, day after day, as a state of affairs. This seeminly can't be admitted in a country that puts such stock in success -- it is as if the polar opposite doesn't exist; as if, magically, an opposition has been abolished. The piece begins with a description of a gathering of friends to honor the singer, then goes on in this graf to explain it all:
"If the gathering was upbeat, the months since McCorkle's suicide have been anything but for her friends, as the complexities of the singer's life and death have grown clearer and more painful. Hers was, in many ways, a quintessential New York story, in both its public triumphs and its private tragedy.Brainy, warm, and funny, McCorkle belonged to an exclusive coterie of American singers: She performed in the best rooms, recorded nineteen albums, and enjoyed more than two decades of acclaim from the jazz press as well as the devotion of fans around the world. But in the months before her death at 55 stunned them all, her record company, Concord, had decided to issue a compilation album instead of a new one, and the Algonquin Hotel had given her precious fall slot at the Oak Room, one of cabaret's most prestigious venues, to a younger singer. McCorkle also felt she was getting nowhere working on a memoir she'd been struggling with for years."
The article is written in the idiom that systematically disguises failure and its consequences. It is as if we were reading the account of the flailing of a woman drowning, and then were told that she the breathlessness she died of was all mental. The brain, not the lungs. I don't think so. But LI hastens to say that this is certainly not the author's fault. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of the American idiom. That the ape can, one day, grow inside you is not something you tell your nearest and dearest. Far better the word, depression.
Friday, June 07, 2002
Thursday, June 06, 2002
Remora
The line (part 1)
Paul Krugman's column about the compensation packages for top executives at top corporations is a brief but pointed overview of the last twenty five years. From the beginning of the eighties, the post-world war II corporation (best described by Galbraith in New Industrial State) was systematically de-structured. In its place was put the faux entrepeneurial organization of today -- one that rewards the CEO, and the top tier of management, in gross disproportion to their actual value to the company. The rewards include not only outright salary, but, of course, the notorious stock option packages, the loans at no interest, the loans, even, that don't have to be paid back -- as seems to have been the case at Adelphia. Krugman approaches this phenomenon from the standpoint of the economic theory that promoted it -- the standard theory, as taught in business school. After major corporations were loaded with debt in the 80s takeover frenzy, they had no choice but to cut. And the cuts were not made at the top, of course. The result, in the nineties, was supposedly a healthier, a more competitive corporation. The nineties seemed to vindicate the most hard hearted economic theory. Until now -- when the financial pages of major media are staging a mini-Last Judgement, with the books falling open. And what black hearts are so revealed? Well, we know the roll call by now, beginning with Enron. Krugman has a nicely pointed way of putting it:
And in the 1990's corporations put that theory into practice. The predators faded from the scene, because they were no longer needed; corporate America embraced its inner Gekko. Or as Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago's business school put it � approvingly � in 1998: "We are all Henry Kravis now." The new tough-mindedness was enforced, above all, with executive pay packages that offered princely rewards if stock prices rose. And until just a few months ago we thought it was working.
Now, as each day seems to bring a new business scandal, we can see the theory's fatal flaw: a system
that lavishly rewards executives for success tempts those executives, who control much of the information available to outsiders, to fabricate the appearance of success. Aggressive accounting, fictitious transactions that inflate sales, whatever it takes."
It would take an economist to be surprised by all of this.
Kevin Phillips has recently written a book about the economic composition of the New Age -- the age that has chased the goal of equalizing wealth in any way from the stage of history, like the ghost in Hamlet dispersed by the crowing of a cock. But the old mole has a tendency to rumble under the stage. In a WP piece, Phillips throws around some interesting stats:
We have just witnessed, in the spectacular growth of U.S. fortunes over the past two decades, a once-in-a-century phenomenon. Puffed up by the boom in high-technology and finance, a select group of Americans has accumulated an even larger boodle in an even shorter period of time than the titans of the Gilded Age amassed 100 years ago. The numbers almost defy belief.The 30 largest U.S. family and individual fortunes in 1999 were roughly ten times as big as the 30 largest had been in 1982, an increase greater than any comparable peacetime period during the 19th century. In 1999, the single largest U.S. fortune, the $86 billion hoard of Microsoft's Bill Gates, was 1.4 million times greater than the assets of the median U.S. household; that exceeds the ratio attained by John D. Rockefeller, whose early 1900s wealth was 1.25 million times larger than the median household of that time."
Which leads, naturally, to this question:
"If the recent accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few resembles the Gilded Age, what about the politics? The economic concentrations of the Gilded Age had great political consequences in the successive assaults of populism under William Jennings Bryan and the comeuppance meted out to big-business conservatism by the progressive movement under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. What we Republicans have to wonder, given today's parallel excesses, is whether combative reformers will reenact the politics of a century ago. Will modern Republicans be painted as courtiers of the new Robber Baronage? Is a great speculative bubble still popping from the gash of stock market bear claws? Can Sen. John McCain become a second Theodore Roosevelt?"
The answer to the third question is a definite no. As for the first question, one might ask a counter-question: why single out the Republicans? The two parties aren't divided by the question of the just distribution of wealth -- they are merely divided by who, among the wealthy, should be backed by the power of the state. The big drug companies? Hollywood entertainment empires? Is the senator from Merck, or is the senator from Microsoft?
LI wrote a review in the midst of the boom that (we like to think) posed the issue of wealth in terms that are consonant with Phillips, although less informed by American history. Green Magazine, where the review was posted, is no more. So we are going to flesh out this post with a reposting of the thing.
The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work by Joanne B. Ciulla Times Books $25.00
Reviewed by Roger Gathman
The Arnhem Land aborigines studied by the anthropologistMarshall Sahlins forage for their food for about four or five hours a day. Therest of the day they spend in various amusements, among which resting andsleeping definitely hold first place. Sahlins, rather irked at these non-go-getters, suggested that maybe there are other things in life than resting and sleeping - building a culture, for instance. But one of the bushman set him straight: "Why should we plant when there are so many mongomongonuts in the world?"
Hegel himself couldn�t have phrased the great question ofcivilization more succinctly. As JoanneCiulla, a philosophy professor at the University of Richmond, shows in this book, work was never considered such ahot idea until the coming of modernity. Not that the ancients or the medievals valued sloth - but they certainly thought that work was best done by otherpeople, slaves or serfs. The good life of the happy few could be spent in civicpursuits, or philosophical contemplation, or pillaging the infidels, dependingupon the era. Anything but a nine to five job. That concept, in fact isunintelligible in a clockless society. "Clock discipline," as Ciullacalls it, was instilled into the general populace in the 18th century, and wasa pre-requisite for the industrial age.
Although Ciulla doesn�t spend very much time upon popular culture, the wound which the Industrial Revolution dealt to thousands of yearsof conventional wisdom is still visible in our western "dreamtime," saturated as it is with movies and TV. The screen rarely shows labor, unless it involves an emergency room, acourtroom, or an arrest. Our social instinct is to distinguish work, which is "boring," from entertainment, which is fun.
Ciulla�s book moves the historical story along briskly. Sheis really trying to fill in the context, here, so we can have a deeperunderstanding of our current situation. Her analysis of work, and how we feel about it, rests upon two social facts: alienation and inequality.
Ciulla has the wide reading and the mental astuteness that can successfully juggle Aristotle and Tom Peters. She is particularly good at tracing the career of alienation as a sociological theme from Marx to David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd. Ciulla employs the thinking of Riesman, William Whyte (author of The Organization Man), and C. Wright Mills (Author of White Collar), to comment onthe various faddish management theories which have arisen and subsided in the eighties and nineties. She draws attention to the contradiction between the public ideology of corporate spokesman, who inexhaustibly advocate free market solutions (based on the profit motive) for all public policy problems, and the inter-mural, therapeutic culture which is visited, by management, upon their employees. She quotes a study which polled managers about the most efficient incentives for building employee commitment: "The researchers found that most senior managers believed that celebrations and ceremonies and non-cash recognition were the best incentives for non-managers... But for senior managers, they responded that the best incentive was cash rewards tied to quality performance."
Circuses, not bread, for the working class, and both for the managerial meta-level. Is this a big surprise? This gets us to the second force shaping work for the majority of Americans right now: the increasingly skewed distribution of mongomongo nuts. Bill Gates has, by some estimates, maybe 70 billion nuts. To pile up a comparable stash, the average temp custodian who cleans the Microsoft offices would have to work some 70,000 years - and that�s without eating. Throwin some steaks and we are talking about a couple of thousand years extra.
This gives us a rather interstellar distance between high and low in our society not so very different between slave and master in the Roman Empire, or peasant and lord in the ancien regime. The Gini co-efficient, which measures income distribution, has gotten better in the last two years, but not by much. It is no wonder that, scratching the surface of Total Quality Management, one so often meets a corrosive cynicism among the plebes, even if they are more than willing, when the boss is around, to mouth the requisite platitudes.
Ciulla�s virtues, which are her eclecticism and stock of references, are also her flaws. This is a woman who sometimes seems to feel as though no passage is complete until she has cleaned out all her index cards, making for collages of quotes from the experts. This sometimes gives the book the creaky feel of an edifying PBS documentary. Still, this is a minor complaint to make about Ciulla's book, which, with its willingness to take broad views and its nterdisciplinary reach makes not only a righteous impression, but keeps the reader from falling asleep over its virtuous intentions - which is a very rare thing, indeed.
The line (part 1)
Paul Krugman's column about the compensation packages for top executives at top corporations is a brief but pointed overview of the last twenty five years. From the beginning of the eighties, the post-world war II corporation (best described by Galbraith in New Industrial State) was systematically de-structured. In its place was put the faux entrepeneurial organization of today -- one that rewards the CEO, and the top tier of management, in gross disproportion to their actual value to the company. The rewards include not only outright salary, but, of course, the notorious stock option packages, the loans at no interest, the loans, even, that don't have to be paid back -- as seems to have been the case at Adelphia. Krugman approaches this phenomenon from the standpoint of the economic theory that promoted it -- the standard theory, as taught in business school. After major corporations were loaded with debt in the 80s takeover frenzy, they had no choice but to cut. And the cuts were not made at the top, of course. The result, in the nineties, was supposedly a healthier, a more competitive corporation. The nineties seemed to vindicate the most hard hearted economic theory. Until now -- when the financial pages of major media are staging a mini-Last Judgement, with the books falling open. And what black hearts are so revealed? Well, we know the roll call by now, beginning with Enron. Krugman has a nicely pointed way of putting it:
And in the 1990's corporations put that theory into practice. The predators faded from the scene, because they were no longer needed; corporate America embraced its inner Gekko. Or as Steven Kaplan of the University of Chicago's business school put it � approvingly � in 1998: "We are all Henry Kravis now." The new tough-mindedness was enforced, above all, with executive pay packages that offered princely rewards if stock prices rose. And until just a few months ago we thought it was working.
Now, as each day seems to bring a new business scandal, we can see the theory's fatal flaw: a system
that lavishly rewards executives for success tempts those executives, who control much of the information available to outsiders, to fabricate the appearance of success. Aggressive accounting, fictitious transactions that inflate sales, whatever it takes."
It would take an economist to be surprised by all of this.
Kevin Phillips has recently written a book about the economic composition of the New Age -- the age that has chased the goal of equalizing wealth in any way from the stage of history, like the ghost in Hamlet dispersed by the crowing of a cock. But the old mole has a tendency to rumble under the stage. In a WP piece, Phillips throws around some interesting stats:
We have just witnessed, in the spectacular growth of U.S. fortunes over the past two decades, a once-in-a-century phenomenon. Puffed up by the boom in high-technology and finance, a select group of Americans has accumulated an even larger boodle in an even shorter period of time than the titans of the Gilded Age amassed 100 years ago. The numbers almost defy belief.The 30 largest U.S. family and individual fortunes in 1999 were roughly ten times as big as the 30 largest had been in 1982, an increase greater than any comparable peacetime period during the 19th century. In 1999, the single largest U.S. fortune, the $86 billion hoard of Microsoft's Bill Gates, was 1.4 million times greater than the assets of the median U.S. household; that exceeds the ratio attained by John D. Rockefeller, whose early 1900s wealth was 1.25 million times larger than the median household of that time."
Which leads, naturally, to this question:
"If the recent accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few resembles the Gilded Age, what about the politics? The economic concentrations of the Gilded Age had great political consequences in the successive assaults of populism under William Jennings Bryan and the comeuppance meted out to big-business conservatism by the progressive movement under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. What we Republicans have to wonder, given today's parallel excesses, is whether combative reformers will reenact the politics of a century ago. Will modern Republicans be painted as courtiers of the new Robber Baronage? Is a great speculative bubble still popping from the gash of stock market bear claws? Can Sen. John McCain become a second Theodore Roosevelt?"
The answer to the third question is a definite no. As for the first question, one might ask a counter-question: why single out the Republicans? The two parties aren't divided by the question of the just distribution of wealth -- they are merely divided by who, among the wealthy, should be backed by the power of the state. The big drug companies? Hollywood entertainment empires? Is the senator from Merck, or is the senator from Microsoft?
LI wrote a review in the midst of the boom that (we like to think) posed the issue of wealth in terms that are consonant with Phillips, although less informed by American history. Green Magazine, where the review was posted, is no more. So we are going to flesh out this post with a reposting of the thing.
The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work by Joanne B. Ciulla Times Books $25.00
Reviewed by Roger Gathman
The Arnhem Land aborigines studied by the anthropologistMarshall Sahlins forage for their food for about four or five hours a day. Therest of the day they spend in various amusements, among which resting andsleeping definitely hold first place. Sahlins, rather irked at these non-go-getters, suggested that maybe there are other things in life than resting and sleeping - building a culture, for instance. But one of the bushman set him straight: "Why should we plant when there are so many mongomongonuts in the world?"
Hegel himself couldn�t have phrased the great question ofcivilization more succinctly. As JoanneCiulla, a philosophy professor at the University of Richmond, shows in this book, work was never considered such ahot idea until the coming of modernity. Not that the ancients or the medievals valued sloth - but they certainly thought that work was best done by otherpeople, slaves or serfs. The good life of the happy few could be spent in civicpursuits, or philosophical contemplation, or pillaging the infidels, dependingupon the era. Anything but a nine to five job. That concept, in fact isunintelligible in a clockless society. "Clock discipline," as Ciullacalls it, was instilled into the general populace in the 18th century, and wasa pre-requisite for the industrial age.
Although Ciulla doesn�t spend very much time upon popular culture, the wound which the Industrial Revolution dealt to thousands of yearsof conventional wisdom is still visible in our western "dreamtime," saturated as it is with movies and TV. The screen rarely shows labor, unless it involves an emergency room, acourtroom, or an arrest. Our social instinct is to distinguish work, which is "boring," from entertainment, which is fun.
Ciulla�s book moves the historical story along briskly. Sheis really trying to fill in the context, here, so we can have a deeperunderstanding of our current situation. Her analysis of work, and how we feel about it, rests upon two social facts: alienation and inequality.
Ciulla has the wide reading and the mental astuteness that can successfully juggle Aristotle and Tom Peters. She is particularly good at tracing the career of alienation as a sociological theme from Marx to David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd. Ciulla employs the thinking of Riesman, William Whyte (author of The Organization Man), and C. Wright Mills (Author of White Collar), to comment onthe various faddish management theories which have arisen and subsided in the eighties and nineties. She draws attention to the contradiction between the public ideology of corporate spokesman, who inexhaustibly advocate free market solutions (based on the profit motive) for all public policy problems, and the inter-mural, therapeutic culture which is visited, by management, upon their employees. She quotes a study which polled managers about the most efficient incentives for building employee commitment: "The researchers found that most senior managers believed that celebrations and ceremonies and non-cash recognition were the best incentives for non-managers... But for senior managers, they responded that the best incentive was cash rewards tied to quality performance."
Circuses, not bread, for the working class, and both for the managerial meta-level. Is this a big surprise? This gets us to the second force shaping work for the majority of Americans right now: the increasingly skewed distribution of mongomongo nuts. Bill Gates has, by some estimates, maybe 70 billion nuts. To pile up a comparable stash, the average temp custodian who cleans the Microsoft offices would have to work some 70,000 years - and that�s without eating. Throwin some steaks and we are talking about a couple of thousand years extra.
This gives us a rather interstellar distance between high and low in our society not so very different between slave and master in the Roman Empire, or peasant and lord in the ancien regime. The Gini co-efficient, which measures income distribution, has gotten better in the last two years, but not by much. It is no wonder that, scratching the surface of Total Quality Management, one so often meets a corrosive cynicism among the plebes, even if they are more than willing, when the boss is around, to mouth the requisite platitudes.
Ciulla�s virtues, which are her eclecticism and stock of references, are also her flaws. This is a woman who sometimes seems to feel as though no passage is complete until she has cleaned out all her index cards, making for collages of quotes from the experts. This sometimes gives the book the creaky feel of an edifying PBS documentary. Still, this is a minor complaint to make about Ciulla's book, which, with its willingness to take broad views and its nterdisciplinary reach makes not only a righteous impression, but keeps the reader from falling asleep over its virtuous intentions - which is a very rare thing, indeed.
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
Remora
"For decades he was the chief justice of the film industry�fair, tough-minded, and innovative. I feel that all of us have lost our benevolent godfather," director Steven Spielberg said.
Not many people know Lew Wasserman's name. But there is a reason that the NYT devoted more space to his obit than they did to Stephen Jay Gould's. There's also a reason Spielberg uses the term godfather, with its perilous overtone. Or so certain writers -- Nick Tosches, Dan Moldea -- think.
Among other of his contributions to the Republic, Wasserman made Ronald Reagan. It was entirely appropriate that the LA Times feature a photo of the two together. Of course, there's a backstory to that. The LATimes delicately touches on the subject -- much to my surprise, I must confess:
"MCA's far-reaching power in entertainment and politics led to its nickname, "The Octopus," and Wasserman's critics argued that he sometimes abused his power. In "Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob," author Dan Moldea described Reagan's early 1960s grand jury testimony, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Reagan, according to the book, told grand jurors probing possible antitrust violations that he could not recall details of a 1952 waiver that the Screen Actors Guild granted MCA while Reagan was the guild's president. That waiver allowed MCA to produce TV programs while representing actors, which critics said was a conflict of interest.
When he was asked if he had discussed it with Wasserman, Moldea wrote, Reagan is reported to have told the grand jury that he may have only mentioned it socially. According to Moldea's book, MCA later arranged jobs for Reagan in Las Vegas and paid him $100,000 a year as the host of its "GE Theater." Still, Reagan was cleared of any wrongdoing.
No criminal charges were filed against anyone in the probe, and an antitrust division attorney wrote at the close of the investigation, according to an Associated Press account, "It was thought at the beginning of the grand jury that SAG might have purposely favored MCA for some illegal consideration. However, the evidence does not show any such improper purpose."
Moldea has a less tempered account of the Reagan-Wasserman connection. Here's how it got started
"Ronald Reagan was an invention of the Hollywood conglomerate, MCA, which was founded in 1924 by
Jules Stein, a Chicago ophthalmologist who quickly became friendly with the local underworld. Every
facet of Reagan�s life, from his careers in acting and politics to his financial successes, were directed by
MCA, which, with the help of the Mafia, was the most powerful force in Hollywood from the mid-1940s
until the Bronfman family purchased the company in 1995.
Reagan came to Los Angeles in 1937 to make motion pictures, and, in 1940, MCA bought out his talent
agency. Lew Wasserman became Reagan's personal agent; he negotiated a million-dollar contract with
Warner Brothers on Reagan's behalf. In 1946, Wasserman became the president of MCA, and the
following year, Reagan, with his film career already in decline, became the president of the Screen
Actors Guild. By his own admission, Reagan immediately aligned himself with the corrupt Teamsters
and other mob-connected unions in an effort to combat Hollywood Reds."
Moldea's pitch depends heavily on associations and some very odd and lucrative facts in the record. For one thing, Reagan, during his time as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, did all he could to bend the rules for MCA. In 52, for example, he got SAG to waive a rule barring companies that represented actors from acting as full production companies. For another thing, Reagan himself benefited from MCA contacts, getting jobs in Las Vegas at casinos (jobs that necessarily requires rubbing shoulders with at least some mobbed up men, given the Las Vegas ecology at the time), and getting to be the producer of Death Valley days due to an MCA made deal, even as he remained on the SAG board. Then of course there is the little matter of Sid Korshak, a lawyer who operated in between SAG and MCA.
Korshak might ring a bell for you. Nick Tosches did a profile on the man in Vanity Fair that got a lot of notice. It is still the best thing on the man -- and it is unavailable on the Net. Too bad. Sidney Korshak slips in and out of history like a shadow, which is how he wanted to slip in and out of history. He's been the subject of profiles by Seymour Hersch, he's the subject of FBI innuendo, he's talked about on innumerable mob tapes, but Korshak never served time, and he managed to die peacefully. He did suffer some hits: when the Hilton tried to get a casino in Atlantic City in the seventies, they were refused because Korshak was the lawyer for their Vegas site.
Korshak started out in Chicago, and he was considered a point man for the mafia interest in Hollywood, which ran through the unions and then into the fine art of movie finance, a notorious tangle of figures that leaks under the table money like a sentimental drunk leaks tears (sorry, I couldn't help myself there).
Tom Schatz, the Chairman of the University of Texas Radio, TV and Film Department, mentions, in an interview on the movie business, the interesting role of Korshak:
MONK: Even to this day?
TS: It depends on how you define organized crime, and it changes all the time. Believe me, one way or another, you don't make a movie in this country unless you deal with the Teamsters. You can sometimes fly below the radar in terms of union and crews, which is why so many Hollywood movies are made in Texas. But at some level you're playing ball with people who are connected.
MONK: What does that mean? You have to literally pay a bribe to a union leader so that you get cooperation?
TS: No, what that meant at MCA-Universal, [for example], was that you talked to a guy named Sidney Korshak, who never was indicted, never went to jail and was rather perceived as the guy who dealt with labor problems on an incredibly sophisticated level. He was one of the richest, most important men in Los Angeles. If you're Lew Wasserman, you know who you have to call to make sure something gets done, and it gets done, you know.
MONK: Lew has to pay money to somebody?
TS: Yeah, yeah. Joe Schenck went to jail for a couple years because he was the bag man. He literally was the bag man. He was the guy that carried the money from the producers association to the guys from the union. It's been going on for a long time in various ways.
MONK: It's a factor in their success is what you're saying.
TS: Yeah, success in the movie industry and certainly at MCA-Universal. They could not have done what they did without relationships with the Teamsters, with the people that control Las Vegas, with the people that drove the trucks that move the shit that produce the films, the people that project the films in theaters. They couldn't do it and they knew it."
We love the color, guys. We love the thugs, we love the lurid pictures that spring to mind. This is the kind of history you can tell out of the side of your mouth. But is this really how power works? Are we really run by a conspiracy of handshakes in back rooms? No, only in Don Delillo's nightmares. That Wasserman got favors is certainly true, I think. That he made Reagan, in the sense of propping him up fiscally, is also true. But what was that all about, in the end? Making money making and distributing movies. And getting respect.
Well, if obituary space is any indication, Wasserman got respect. We hope he is happy with it, where ever he is.
"For decades he was the chief justice of the film industry�fair, tough-minded, and innovative. I feel that all of us have lost our benevolent godfather," director Steven Spielberg said.
Not many people know Lew Wasserman's name. But there is a reason that the NYT devoted more space to his obit than they did to Stephen Jay Gould's. There's also a reason Spielberg uses the term godfather, with its perilous overtone. Or so certain writers -- Nick Tosches, Dan Moldea -- think.
Among other of his contributions to the Republic, Wasserman made Ronald Reagan. It was entirely appropriate that the LA Times feature a photo of the two together. Of course, there's a backstory to that. The LATimes delicately touches on the subject -- much to my surprise, I must confess:
"MCA's far-reaching power in entertainment and politics led to its nickname, "The Octopus," and Wasserman's critics argued that he sometimes abused his power. In "Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA and the Mob," author Dan Moldea described Reagan's early 1960s grand jury testimony, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Reagan, according to the book, told grand jurors probing possible antitrust violations that he could not recall details of a 1952 waiver that the Screen Actors Guild granted MCA while Reagan was the guild's president. That waiver allowed MCA to produce TV programs while representing actors, which critics said was a conflict of interest.
When he was asked if he had discussed it with Wasserman, Moldea wrote, Reagan is reported to have told the grand jury that he may have only mentioned it socially. According to Moldea's book, MCA later arranged jobs for Reagan in Las Vegas and paid him $100,000 a year as the host of its "GE Theater." Still, Reagan was cleared of any wrongdoing.
No criminal charges were filed against anyone in the probe, and an antitrust division attorney wrote at the close of the investigation, according to an Associated Press account, "It was thought at the beginning of the grand jury that SAG might have purposely favored MCA for some illegal consideration. However, the evidence does not show any such improper purpose."
Moldea has a less tempered account of the Reagan-Wasserman connection. Here's how it got started
"Ronald Reagan was an invention of the Hollywood conglomerate, MCA, which was founded in 1924 by
Jules Stein, a Chicago ophthalmologist who quickly became friendly with the local underworld. Every
facet of Reagan�s life, from his careers in acting and politics to his financial successes, were directed by
MCA, which, with the help of the Mafia, was the most powerful force in Hollywood from the mid-1940s
until the Bronfman family purchased the company in 1995.
Reagan came to Los Angeles in 1937 to make motion pictures, and, in 1940, MCA bought out his talent
agency. Lew Wasserman became Reagan's personal agent; he negotiated a million-dollar contract with
Warner Brothers on Reagan's behalf. In 1946, Wasserman became the president of MCA, and the
following year, Reagan, with his film career already in decline, became the president of the Screen
Actors Guild. By his own admission, Reagan immediately aligned himself with the corrupt Teamsters
and other mob-connected unions in an effort to combat Hollywood Reds."
Moldea's pitch depends heavily on associations and some very odd and lucrative facts in the record. For one thing, Reagan, during his time as the president of the Screen Actors Guild, did all he could to bend the rules for MCA. In 52, for example, he got SAG to waive a rule barring companies that represented actors from acting as full production companies. For another thing, Reagan himself benefited from MCA contacts, getting jobs in Las Vegas at casinos (jobs that necessarily requires rubbing shoulders with at least some mobbed up men, given the Las Vegas ecology at the time), and getting to be the producer of Death Valley days due to an MCA made deal, even as he remained on the SAG board. Then of course there is the little matter of Sid Korshak, a lawyer who operated in between SAG and MCA.
Korshak might ring a bell for you. Nick Tosches did a profile on the man in Vanity Fair that got a lot of notice. It is still the best thing on the man -- and it is unavailable on the Net. Too bad. Sidney Korshak slips in and out of history like a shadow, which is how he wanted to slip in and out of history. He's been the subject of profiles by Seymour Hersch, he's the subject of FBI innuendo, he's talked about on innumerable mob tapes, but Korshak never served time, and he managed to die peacefully. He did suffer some hits: when the Hilton tried to get a casino in Atlantic City in the seventies, they were refused because Korshak was the lawyer for their Vegas site.
Korshak started out in Chicago, and he was considered a point man for the mafia interest in Hollywood, which ran through the unions and then into the fine art of movie finance, a notorious tangle of figures that leaks under the table money like a sentimental drunk leaks tears (sorry, I couldn't help myself there).
Tom Schatz, the Chairman of the University of Texas Radio, TV and Film Department, mentions, in an interview on the movie business, the interesting role of Korshak:
MONK: Even to this day?
TS: It depends on how you define organized crime, and it changes all the time. Believe me, one way or another, you don't make a movie in this country unless you deal with the Teamsters. You can sometimes fly below the radar in terms of union and crews, which is why so many Hollywood movies are made in Texas. But at some level you're playing ball with people who are connected.
MONK: What does that mean? You have to literally pay a bribe to a union leader so that you get cooperation?
TS: No, what that meant at MCA-Universal, [for example], was that you talked to a guy named Sidney Korshak, who never was indicted, never went to jail and was rather perceived as the guy who dealt with labor problems on an incredibly sophisticated level. He was one of the richest, most important men in Los Angeles. If you're Lew Wasserman, you know who you have to call to make sure something gets done, and it gets done, you know.
MONK: Lew has to pay money to somebody?
TS: Yeah, yeah. Joe Schenck went to jail for a couple years because he was the bag man. He literally was the bag man. He was the guy that carried the money from the producers association to the guys from the union. It's been going on for a long time in various ways.
MONK: It's a factor in their success is what you're saying.
TS: Yeah, success in the movie industry and certainly at MCA-Universal. They could not have done what they did without relationships with the Teamsters, with the people that control Las Vegas, with the people that drove the trucks that move the shit that produce the films, the people that project the films in theaters. They couldn't do it and they knew it."
We love the color, guys. We love the thugs, we love the lurid pictures that spring to mind. This is the kind of history you can tell out of the side of your mouth. But is this really how power works? Are we really run by a conspiracy of handshakes in back rooms? No, only in Don Delillo's nightmares. That Wasserman got favors is certainly true, I think. That he made Reagan, in the sense of propping him up fiscally, is also true. But what was that all about, in the end? Making money making and distributing movies. And getting respect.
Well, if obituary space is any indication, Wasserman got respect. We hope he is happy with it, where ever he is.
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc is a vain guy. When we walk pass shop windows, we always shoot glances at our pale accompanying reflection. We relish our wittier sallies, and we are completely depressed when the smallest typographic blot spoils our copy. Our vanity is pervasive, perverse, and even (all too often) takes the place of a conscience. Yes, sometimes, sometimes we try to generate a conscience, and then we wonder if anyone has noticed.
This, then, is the warning on the label: narcissism ahead. Because here it is: we are going to recommend a site that sometimes, when we are good, recommends us: the Enigmatic Mermaid. This site is written by an extraordinarily literate spirit. By literate, we don't mean she knows how to reference the sacred names. We mean she realizes that writing is an extension of passion, an embodiment of desire that is certainly as intense as a personal relationship because it has exactly the same characteristics of positioning yourself vis a vis a lover, a friend, an enemy, a child. The reader, the writer, the book -- how can this not be about loss, surrender, and the very stuff of the day as it is poured into your nerves every second, and as your raddled nerves forget it? When Nietzsche wrote, in that wonderful last letter to Buckhardt, I am all the names of history, he was right. Poor sod, he was right. He became, in that instant, the God of literature.
"Was unangenehm ist und meiner Bescheidenheit zusetzt, ist, dass im Grund jeder Name in der Geschichte ich bin..."
It's a harsh godhood, admittedly. Nietzsche went mad, Rimbaud went awol, and we aren't doing too well ourselves.
Anyway, the Enigmatic M. performs the same tricks for you that LI does: she throws together a bit of lecon des choses, a bit of life, and a bit of literature, all for you, anonymous reader.
Limited Inc is a vain guy. When we walk pass shop windows, we always shoot glances at our pale accompanying reflection. We relish our wittier sallies, and we are completely depressed when the smallest typographic blot spoils our copy. Our vanity is pervasive, perverse, and even (all too often) takes the place of a conscience. Yes, sometimes, sometimes we try to generate a conscience, and then we wonder if anyone has noticed.
This, then, is the warning on the label: narcissism ahead. Because here it is: we are going to recommend a site that sometimes, when we are good, recommends us: the Enigmatic Mermaid. This site is written by an extraordinarily literate spirit. By literate, we don't mean she knows how to reference the sacred names. We mean she realizes that writing is an extension of passion, an embodiment of desire that is certainly as intense as a personal relationship because it has exactly the same characteristics of positioning yourself vis a vis a lover, a friend, an enemy, a child. The reader, the writer, the book -- how can this not be about loss, surrender, and the very stuff of the day as it is poured into your nerves every second, and as your raddled nerves forget it? When Nietzsche wrote, in that wonderful last letter to Buckhardt, I am all the names of history, he was right. Poor sod, he was right. He became, in that instant, the God of literature.
"Was unangenehm ist und meiner Bescheidenheit zusetzt, ist, dass im Grund jeder Name in der Geschichte ich bin..."
It's a harsh godhood, admittedly. Nietzsche went mad, Rimbaud went awol, and we aren't doing too well ourselves.
Anyway, the Enigmatic M. performs the same tricks for you that LI does: she throws together a bit of lecon des choses, a bit of life, and a bit of literature, all for you, anonymous reader.
Monday, June 03, 2002
Remora
It has been suggested that LI prove its Turkophilic credentials by commenting on the outrageous robbery of the Turkish soccer team in the World Cup. Apparently the Korean referee made a very dumb call against Turkey, which allowed Brazil a game winning kick. LI would gladly bitch and moan, but... we not only didn't see the game, we don't fully, uh, understand the game. Especially on the intricate level of what is and what is not a penalty. You kick a ball into a net, that's what we know.
So, turning to matters of less grave import --say the impending nuclear doom of millions -- we'd recommend a few articles on Kashmir today.
The Far Eastern Economic Review has a nice background article on the Kashmir "insurgency." It runs down the list of politicians who want an independent role for Kashmir -- or an adherence to Pakistan. The latter seems to LI like a truly insane desire, rather like trying to swim from the lifeboat to the Titanic. But there it is.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Kashmir in May, and offered economic aid and real elections -- thus tacitly casting into doubt the status of past elections, as FEER notes. But the Indian tactic for pacifying Kashmir, and eventually including the state in the great Indian embrace, isn't working:
"To make matters worse for India, the murder of a popular Kashmiri leader has set back New Delhi's efforts to inject credibility into the elections by persuading some people who have long opposed Indian rule to participate. On May 21, unidentified gunmen shot dead Abdul Ghani Lone, a member of the All Party Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of 23 anti-India parties.
"Unlike most of his Hurriyat colleagues, Lone condemned not only Indian rule, but also foreign militants sent across the border from Pakistan. He was also one of the few anti-India political figures in Kashmir willing to negotiate with India without insisting on Pakistan's inclusion in the talks, which made him more acceptable to New Delhi.According to Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the Srinagar-based People's Democratic Party, Lone's killing has created a "fear psychosis" and will deter other separatists from entering the electoral fray.
"Elections without separatists will have little credibility, says Zafar Meraj, the editor of Kashmir Monitor, a newspaper published in Srinagar.With Lone dead, say Meraj, New Delhi will hope to persuade two young separatists--Shabir Shah and Umar Farooq--to enter the elections. But both are openly sceptical of Indian intentions."
Admittedly, LI knows squat about Kashmir. Ignorance has never been an obstacle to judgement around here, however. There are issues that seem to be impossible to shape into some non-partisan format for the interested bystander. To the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine, add the endless conflict over the right and wrong of Kashmir. Actually, these conflicts date from the same period -- the late forties -- and reflect the same event -- the fall of the British Empire. The UN has had observers in Kashmir since that time.
The conflict sparked up in the nineties due to two things. One was the surge in Hindu nationalism that brought about riots and mosque burnings in India. The other was the collapse of Pakistan legitimacy, and the replacement of national identity with religious. According to a story in Express India, a recent poll in Kashmir showed that 61 percent favor remaining in India -- although with what status, on what terms, is unclear. There's a helpful NGO, the Friends of Kashmir, who have a nice overview of the recent situation:
"Kashmir ..traditionally described as "Heaven-on-Earth" because of its scenic beauty, invigorating climate, clean environment, peace loving people and treasures of arts...has been reduced to a "living hell" by the on-going conflict.
In January 1990, long term dissent against Indian misrule erupted into an armed revolt in Kashmir. India's arch rival Pakistan by taking advantage of the anti-India emotion and religious sentiments of the Kashmiri youth engineered a full scale armed rebellion in Kashmir. India in response poured over 300,000 soldiers into the densely populated civilian areas of Kashmir. In their efforts to contain the militancy,Indian army and paramilitary forces have committed gross violations of human rights in Kashmir. Indian forces on many occasions have acted without regard for international human rights law and have often violated the laws of war protecting civilians in situations of armed conflict.
"Unfortunately, the first casualty of this vicious war has been uprooting of the minority Kashmiri Pandit community, who are now living in the most appalling conditions as refugees within their own homeland. Selective killings of the Kashmiri Pandits resulted into a mass exodus of this ethnic minority who have lived for centuries in peace and harmony with the majority Muslim community in Kashmir."
The causes of the Pandit exodus are as hotly disputed as the causes of the Serbian/Bosnian-Muslim conflict in the nineties. You can find sites that claim Islamic terrorists have made the Pandit valleys hell on earth, and you can find sites that claim the Indian government extended its invisible hand and encouraged violence for its own propogandistic purposes. Muzamil Jaleel, an Indian journalist with the Express, pens a nice piece in the Observer Sunday exposing the roots of the conflict with a bit more panache than the Friends of Kashmir site. As one would expect, it is about democracy thwarted, and the gradual congregation of murderous and definitely non-democratic interests around a basic injustice committed against the rule of self-government and the protection of human rights, gradually transforming that injustice into a justification for committing crimes aimed, precisely, at undermining self government and the protection of human rights -- is it ever not like this?
"The recent campaign of violence was triggered in 1989, two years after a rigged local election. The Kashmiri at the top of India's 'most wanted' list of terrorists is Syed Salahuddin, who heads United Jihad Council - an amalgam of 14 militant groups of which his Hizbul Mujahideen is the largest. His real name is Mohamed Yousuf Shah and during Kashmir's 1987 assembly elections he was a popular politician. When the votes were counted, he was winning by a massive majority. But the official results said he had been defeated.
"He lost faith in the democratic process. His campaign agents were harassed by police, locked up and tortured. Five later set up the first group of Kashmiri militants and began a violent struggle for independence. The anger and frustration of Kashmir's youth was happily exploited by Pakistan, which believed the annexation of Kashmir to be the unfinished business of partition. Pakistan gave them guns, explosives and money."
From 89, the logic of violence unrolled like this: revolt by the Kashmiris, repression by the Indian police, arming by the Pakistanis, more repression, the slow creep of Islamicist ideology, splintering between liberation groups, the submerging of the original democratic goal in favor of a goal of shari'a and annexation by Pakistan as increasingly violent factions armed by Pakistan attempted to wipe out those of their one time allies who favored a more 'moderate' position -- actually, the original position. Onto this sequence, of course, other nations and groups have imposed their own ideologies and interests. What we need, we lefties, is to return to the kind of reading Marx gave to the rise of Louis Bonaparte in France in 49 -- a broader sense of the play of interests and the transformations wrought upon objectives by the tactics that are supposed to lead to them. In Kashmir, right before our eyes, we can see history becoming a pestilence.
It has been suggested that LI prove its Turkophilic credentials by commenting on the outrageous robbery of the Turkish soccer team in the World Cup. Apparently the Korean referee made a very dumb call against Turkey, which allowed Brazil a game winning kick. LI would gladly bitch and moan, but... we not only didn't see the game, we don't fully, uh, understand the game. Especially on the intricate level of what is and what is not a penalty. You kick a ball into a net, that's what we know.
So, turning to matters of less grave import --say the impending nuclear doom of millions -- we'd recommend a few articles on Kashmir today.
The Far Eastern Economic Review has a nice background article on the Kashmir "insurgency." It runs down the list of politicians who want an independent role for Kashmir -- or an adherence to Pakistan. The latter seems to LI like a truly insane desire, rather like trying to swim from the lifeboat to the Titanic. But there it is.
Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited Kashmir in May, and offered economic aid and real elections -- thus tacitly casting into doubt the status of past elections, as FEER notes. But the Indian tactic for pacifying Kashmir, and eventually including the state in the great Indian embrace, isn't working:
"To make matters worse for India, the murder of a popular Kashmiri leader has set back New Delhi's efforts to inject credibility into the elections by persuading some people who have long opposed Indian rule to participate. On May 21, unidentified gunmen shot dead Abdul Ghani Lone, a member of the All Party Hurriyat Conference, an alliance of 23 anti-India parties.
"Unlike most of his Hurriyat colleagues, Lone condemned not only Indian rule, but also foreign militants sent across the border from Pakistan. He was also one of the few anti-India political figures in Kashmir willing to negotiate with India without insisting on Pakistan's inclusion in the talks, which made him more acceptable to New Delhi.According to Mehbooba Mufti, leader of the Srinagar-based People's Democratic Party, Lone's killing has created a "fear psychosis" and will deter other separatists from entering the electoral fray.
"Elections without separatists will have little credibility, says Zafar Meraj, the editor of Kashmir Monitor, a newspaper published in Srinagar.With Lone dead, say Meraj, New Delhi will hope to persuade two young separatists--Shabir Shah and Umar Farooq--to enter the elections. But both are openly sceptical of Indian intentions."
Admittedly, LI knows squat about Kashmir. Ignorance has never been an obstacle to judgement around here, however. There are issues that seem to be impossible to shape into some non-partisan format for the interested bystander. To the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine, add the endless conflict over the right and wrong of Kashmir. Actually, these conflicts date from the same period -- the late forties -- and reflect the same event -- the fall of the British Empire. The UN has had observers in Kashmir since that time.
The conflict sparked up in the nineties due to two things. One was the surge in Hindu nationalism that brought about riots and mosque burnings in India. The other was the collapse of Pakistan legitimacy, and the replacement of national identity with religious. According to a story in Express India, a recent poll in Kashmir showed that 61 percent favor remaining in India -- although with what status, on what terms, is unclear. There's a helpful NGO, the Friends of Kashmir, who have a nice overview of the recent situation:
"Kashmir ..traditionally described as "Heaven-on-Earth" because of its scenic beauty, invigorating climate, clean environment, peace loving people and treasures of arts...has been reduced to a "living hell" by the on-going conflict.
In January 1990, long term dissent against Indian misrule erupted into an armed revolt in Kashmir. India's arch rival Pakistan by taking advantage of the anti-India emotion and religious sentiments of the Kashmiri youth engineered a full scale armed rebellion in Kashmir. India in response poured over 300,000 soldiers into the densely populated civilian areas of Kashmir. In their efforts to contain the militancy,Indian army and paramilitary forces have committed gross violations of human rights in Kashmir. Indian forces on many occasions have acted without regard for international human rights law and have often violated the laws of war protecting civilians in situations of armed conflict.
"Unfortunately, the first casualty of this vicious war has been uprooting of the minority Kashmiri Pandit community, who are now living in the most appalling conditions as refugees within their own homeland. Selective killings of the Kashmiri Pandits resulted into a mass exodus of this ethnic minority who have lived for centuries in peace and harmony with the majority Muslim community in Kashmir."
The causes of the Pandit exodus are as hotly disputed as the causes of the Serbian/Bosnian-Muslim conflict in the nineties. You can find sites that claim Islamic terrorists have made the Pandit valleys hell on earth, and you can find sites that claim the Indian government extended its invisible hand and encouraged violence for its own propogandistic purposes. Muzamil Jaleel, an Indian journalist with the Express, pens a nice piece in the Observer Sunday exposing the roots of the conflict with a bit more panache than the Friends of Kashmir site. As one would expect, it is about democracy thwarted, and the gradual congregation of murderous and definitely non-democratic interests around a basic injustice committed against the rule of self-government and the protection of human rights, gradually transforming that injustice into a justification for committing crimes aimed, precisely, at undermining self government and the protection of human rights -- is it ever not like this?
"The recent campaign of violence was triggered in 1989, two years after a rigged local election. The Kashmiri at the top of India's 'most wanted' list of terrorists is Syed Salahuddin, who heads United Jihad Council - an amalgam of 14 militant groups of which his Hizbul Mujahideen is the largest. His real name is Mohamed Yousuf Shah and during Kashmir's 1987 assembly elections he was a popular politician. When the votes were counted, he was winning by a massive majority. But the official results said he had been defeated.
"He lost faith in the democratic process. His campaign agents were harassed by police, locked up and tortured. Five later set up the first group of Kashmiri militants and began a violent struggle for independence. The anger and frustration of Kashmir's youth was happily exploited by Pakistan, which believed the annexation of Kashmir to be the unfinished business of partition. Pakistan gave them guns, explosives and money."
From 89, the logic of violence unrolled like this: revolt by the Kashmiris, repression by the Indian police, arming by the Pakistanis, more repression, the slow creep of Islamicist ideology, splintering between liberation groups, the submerging of the original democratic goal in favor of a goal of shari'a and annexation by Pakistan as increasingly violent factions armed by Pakistan attempted to wipe out those of their one time allies who favored a more 'moderate' position -- actually, the original position. Onto this sequence, of course, other nations and groups have imposed their own ideologies and interests. What we need, we lefties, is to return to the kind of reading Marx gave to the rise of Louis Bonaparte in France in 49 -- a broader sense of the play of interests and the transformations wrought upon objectives by the tactics that are supposed to lead to them. In Kashmir, right before our eyes, we can see history becoming a pestilence.
Saturday, June 01, 2002
Remora
Alan, who has graced Limited Inc, on occassion, with controversy, (and who is wise enough to know it is spelled "occasion" -- LI can never remember the s-es and c-es in that word) has finally done it. He's finally set up his own weblog, which he is calling the Gadfly's buzz. Well, we were both in philosophy, and both our site names reflect, sadly enough, that experience. Alan is starting out with heavyweights -- throwing around Habermas' name and such. Now, LI must confess that one of the pleasures of middle age is not reading Habermas. Just the thought that I will never read Habermas again has gotten me through many a torturous moment. The man has a fatal addiction to 797 pages, plus footnotes. And we are talking about prose that resides at a level comparable to, say, the speeches at the Darmstadt Bricklayer's Union Annual May Day Festival. But he is a great codifier of the obvious, got to give him credit. Anyway, Alan is tossing around the question of the blog phenomena, going meta right out. A brave man.
Alan, who has graced Limited Inc, on occassion, with controversy, (and who is wise enough to know it is spelled "occasion" -- LI can never remember the s-es and c-es in that word) has finally done it. He's finally set up his own weblog, which he is calling the Gadfly's buzz. Well, we were both in philosophy, and both our site names reflect, sadly enough, that experience. Alan is starting out with heavyweights -- throwing around Habermas' name and such. Now, LI must confess that one of the pleasures of middle age is not reading Habermas. Just the thought that I will never read Habermas again has gotten me through many a torturous moment. The man has a fatal addiction to 797 pages, plus footnotes. And we are talking about prose that resides at a level comparable to, say, the speeches at the Darmstadt Bricklayer's Union Annual May Day Festival. But he is a great codifier of the obvious, got to give him credit. Anyway, Alan is tossing around the question of the blog phenomena, going meta right out. A brave man.
Friday, May 31, 2002
Dope
As readers of this page know, LI has taken to hanging around a very expatriated Turk named S. S. has the immigrant desire for selective amnesia, and isn't this New World just the place for that? The parts of T�rkiye she would like to select for the memory hole are many, including: the traffic jams of Istambul; Turgut �zal's grandiose, gargling pronunciation of the word Turkiye -- Ozal was the right wing prez of the country during much of the eighties; Turkish machismo; and as a subset of the last, the prevalence of black, bushy moustaches above the upper lips of her countrymen in their virile primes.
Unfortunately for S., all her talk about Turkey has only inflamed Limited Inc's Turkophilia. This curious and lonely passion (for what country has a worse press in this country? All due, I assure you, or at least I have been assured, to Greek propaganda) began when we reviewed Orhan Pamuk's latest novel for In These Times. That review required a lot of looking up of books about the Ottoman empire. And we rather fell in love with this empire: with the poetry, with the always crazy sultans having their nearest and dearest strangled, or dying in the harem during olympian bouts of sex, or carousing in disguise in the streets of Istanbul, choosing their viziers among their drinking buds. We also loved the sort of Maoism avant Mao which governed Ottoman political life. In order to thwart the entrenchment of an aristocratic class, the empire recruited Infidel children from the Sultan's European possessions and gave them governance over various satrapies appending to the empire; governance that ended with the lives of the governors.
The Ottomans, though, are well and truly dead. So the next stage in our Turkophilia was obvious. We hooked onto the music.
S. taught us the pop rudiments, which all converge on one woman: Sezen Aksu. We started with her, but have, since, explored with a little more depth the procession of modern music in Turkey. We aren't talking about the music of orchestras, here; although from an American perspective, the music of Turkey does not correspond to the classifications that come so naturally when turning the dial on the radio. Art music, folk, pop, and classical are all very much mixed together. For a nice article that outlines the folk and art background of Turkish music, we'd recommend this page from Les arts turques . For the musicologically inclined (among whom we do not count ourselves) this is a nice explanation of the Turkish differance:
"Today, Turkish music is a fusion of classical art music, folk songs, Ottoman military music, Islamic hymns and the norms of western art music. Classical Turkish music is the courtly music of the Ottoman sultans that is an offspring of the Arabic and Persian traditions. This music is not written down in scores; with only the maquam, which is a similar pattern of major-minor scale system, being marked down. Improvisation (taksim) is a traditional variation technique, featuring the form. One of the characteristics of Turkish classical and folk music, as well as the military music and the hymns, is being monophonic. There are about 24 unequal intervals and almost numberless modes.
"Aksak is the irregular meter typical to Turkish folk music. This metric pattern provides a rich texture to the doubles, triples and quadruples of time measures of the western music. The tradition of regional variations in the character of folk music prevails all around Anatolia and Thrace even today. The troubadour (singer-poets) contributed to this genre for ages anonymously.
Turkish military music of the Janissary Band influenced 18th and 19th century European music, with its percussive character, aksak rhythms and mystical tones. Inspired by the Janissary bands, both Mozart and Beethoven wrote Alla turca movements; Lully and Handel composed operas. "
Turkey, like everywhere else, was hit by the first big wave of international media culture in the twenties and thirties, when radio and movies suddenly made the globe into one big potential America. In the thirties, there was a craze for something called gazino music -- of which, I suppose, the equivalent is torch singing in America. There's a sample of songs from the famous chanteuses of yesteryear at an Italian site along with photos of the fabulous, vanished divas. However, even Zehra Bilir, billed at the time as the Turkish Edith Piaf, does not sound Billy Holiday-ish. The vector of influence is still predominantly from the East.
I'm giving you this background to get us up to Sezen. There's an English language newspaper in Istambul that produced, a couple of years ago, a potted history of Turkish pop. It is a useful scorecard to keep when trying to make your way, without knowledge of the language, through the dense thicket of Turk-pop--folk. I was delighted to run into the familiar name of Ibrahim Tatlises
, for instance. S. had told me about the man already -- a favorite of S.'s mother. The ways of cross-cultural misunderstanding are many: I had picked up the cue that somehow, it was a bit shameful that S.'s mother liked Ibo so much, but I didn't understand why. It was only reading about how he had become a hero among immigrants to Istambul that I understood the class mythology going on there. Ibrahim rose from the ranks of all the poor sods who've flocked to the cosmopolitan city to earn money putting bricks on bricks, or pulling together pre-fab and earthquake vulnerable housing. According to a dressed up legend, he was discovered at a construction site. The man is singing, a car passes, slows down, stops, and a man with sunglasses and a swift Italian suit steps out. You've seen this movie before. He asks the now silent crew, which picks up on the symbols of his wealth and has coagulated into a sullen working class unit, who was singing? Etc. You can hear Ibo wailing away about his blondie girlfriend in "H�lya.". The man now has, of all American good things, a talk show.
The Minik Serce, or little sparrow, Sezen Aksu, was the first Turkish musician I really paid attention to. My favorite of her CD's is Deliveren, which is charged with a survivor's anger -- Sezen seems to be one of those rare singers, like Dylan, who can read her own life in terms of the politics that has constituted it. The heart, after all, is a power struggle. That's all it is.
Here's a summary of Sezen's place in the pop pantheon:
"It was due to Sezen's clever judgment, or maybe lucky instinct, that she immediately started working with the best musicians in Turkey. Besides her consistent collaborations with these musicians (unlike other singers in similar positions to her), Sezen also entered into mutual relationships with them. As she would later declare, one cannot make music as if it were a business relationship only. Throughout her musical career, she even went as far as to be romantically involved with her musical partners (Uzay Hepari and Onno Tunc).
"Before Sezen the musical arrangement of pop songs was not a job that carried much respect. Many singers thought that their famous names would suffice. The talented and prominent names Sezen Aksu worked with (such as Onno Tunc, Arto Tunc and Attila Ozdemiroglu) worked with many other singers throughout their careers. But their relationship with these singers were -- as Sezen Aksu would call it -- like business relationships. Sezen signals her personal attachment and respect for her arrangers by inviting these usually background figures onto the stage with her to play songs that she feels she shared with the arrangers. Sezen has always been selective, almost to the point of perfectionism, about the people she works with.
"This resulted in two indisputable facts. The technical quality of her music developed and a minimum standard was established for her and for her competition. And secondly, the names behind the stars also came to the forefront. The emotional connection between the singer, writer and arranger was something new for the Turkish pop audience."
Now, Limited Inc would like to expand or expound on the minik serce's many virtues, but we will have to put that off until the next post. We have to earn some money today, somehow.
As readers of this page know, LI has taken to hanging around a very expatriated Turk named S. S. has the immigrant desire for selective amnesia, and isn't this New World just the place for that? The parts of T�rkiye she would like to select for the memory hole are many, including: the traffic jams of Istambul; Turgut �zal's grandiose, gargling pronunciation of the word Turkiye -- Ozal was the right wing prez of the country during much of the eighties; Turkish machismo; and as a subset of the last, the prevalence of black, bushy moustaches above the upper lips of her countrymen in their virile primes.
Unfortunately for S., all her talk about Turkey has only inflamed Limited Inc's Turkophilia. This curious and lonely passion (for what country has a worse press in this country? All due, I assure you, or at least I have been assured, to Greek propaganda) began when we reviewed Orhan Pamuk's latest novel for In These Times. That review required a lot of looking up of books about the Ottoman empire. And we rather fell in love with this empire: with the poetry, with the always crazy sultans having their nearest and dearest strangled, or dying in the harem during olympian bouts of sex, or carousing in disguise in the streets of Istanbul, choosing their viziers among their drinking buds. We also loved the sort of Maoism avant Mao which governed Ottoman political life. In order to thwart the entrenchment of an aristocratic class, the empire recruited Infidel children from the Sultan's European possessions and gave them governance over various satrapies appending to the empire; governance that ended with the lives of the governors.
The Ottomans, though, are well and truly dead. So the next stage in our Turkophilia was obvious. We hooked onto the music.
S. taught us the pop rudiments, which all converge on one woman: Sezen Aksu. We started with her, but have, since, explored with a little more depth the procession of modern music in Turkey. We aren't talking about the music of orchestras, here; although from an American perspective, the music of Turkey does not correspond to the classifications that come so naturally when turning the dial on the radio. Art music, folk, pop, and classical are all very much mixed together. For a nice article that outlines the folk and art background of Turkish music, we'd recommend this page from Les arts turques . For the musicologically inclined (among whom we do not count ourselves) this is a nice explanation of the Turkish differance:
"Today, Turkish music is a fusion of classical art music, folk songs, Ottoman military music, Islamic hymns and the norms of western art music. Classical Turkish music is the courtly music of the Ottoman sultans that is an offspring of the Arabic and Persian traditions. This music is not written down in scores; with only the maquam, which is a similar pattern of major-minor scale system, being marked down. Improvisation (taksim) is a traditional variation technique, featuring the form. One of the characteristics of Turkish classical and folk music, as well as the military music and the hymns, is being monophonic. There are about 24 unequal intervals and almost numberless modes.
"Aksak is the irregular meter typical to Turkish folk music. This metric pattern provides a rich texture to the doubles, triples and quadruples of time measures of the western music. The tradition of regional variations in the character of folk music prevails all around Anatolia and Thrace even today. The troubadour (singer-poets) contributed to this genre for ages anonymously.
Turkish military music of the Janissary Band influenced 18th and 19th century European music, with its percussive character, aksak rhythms and mystical tones. Inspired by the Janissary bands, both Mozart and Beethoven wrote Alla turca movements; Lully and Handel composed operas. "
Turkey, like everywhere else, was hit by the first big wave of international media culture in the twenties and thirties, when radio and movies suddenly made the globe into one big potential America. In the thirties, there was a craze for something called gazino music -- of which, I suppose, the equivalent is torch singing in America. There's a sample of songs from the famous chanteuses of yesteryear at an Italian site along with photos of the fabulous, vanished divas. However, even Zehra Bilir, billed at the time as the Turkish Edith Piaf, does not sound Billy Holiday-ish. The vector of influence is still predominantly from the East.
I'm giving you this background to get us up to Sezen. There's an English language newspaper in Istambul that produced, a couple of years ago, a potted history of Turkish pop. It is a useful scorecard to keep when trying to make your way, without knowledge of the language, through the dense thicket of Turk-pop--folk. I was delighted to run into the familiar name of Ibrahim Tatlises
, for instance. S. had told me about the man already -- a favorite of S.'s mother. The ways of cross-cultural misunderstanding are many: I had picked up the cue that somehow, it was a bit shameful that S.'s mother liked Ibo so much, but I didn't understand why. It was only reading about how he had become a hero among immigrants to Istambul that I understood the class mythology going on there. Ibrahim rose from the ranks of all the poor sods who've flocked to the cosmopolitan city to earn money putting bricks on bricks, or pulling together pre-fab and earthquake vulnerable housing. According to a dressed up legend, he was discovered at a construction site. The man is singing, a car passes, slows down, stops, and a man with sunglasses and a swift Italian suit steps out. You've seen this movie before. He asks the now silent crew, which picks up on the symbols of his wealth and has coagulated into a sullen working class unit, who was singing? Etc. You can hear Ibo wailing away about his blondie girlfriend in "H�lya.". The man now has, of all American good things, a talk show.
The Minik Serce, or little sparrow, Sezen Aksu, was the first Turkish musician I really paid attention to. My favorite of her CD's is Deliveren, which is charged with a survivor's anger -- Sezen seems to be one of those rare singers, like Dylan, who can read her own life in terms of the politics that has constituted it. The heart, after all, is a power struggle. That's all it is.
Here's a summary of Sezen's place in the pop pantheon:
"It was due to Sezen's clever judgment, or maybe lucky instinct, that she immediately started working with the best musicians in Turkey. Besides her consistent collaborations with these musicians (unlike other singers in similar positions to her), Sezen also entered into mutual relationships with them. As she would later declare, one cannot make music as if it were a business relationship only. Throughout her musical career, she even went as far as to be romantically involved with her musical partners (Uzay Hepari and Onno Tunc).
"Before Sezen the musical arrangement of pop songs was not a job that carried much respect. Many singers thought that their famous names would suffice. The talented and prominent names Sezen Aksu worked with (such as Onno Tunc, Arto Tunc and Attila Ozdemiroglu) worked with many other singers throughout their careers. But their relationship with these singers were -- as Sezen Aksu would call it -- like business relationships. Sezen signals her personal attachment and respect for her arrangers by inviting these usually background figures onto the stage with her to play songs that she feels she shared with the arrangers. Sezen has always been selective, almost to the point of perfectionism, about the people she works with.
"This resulted in two indisputable facts. The technical quality of her music developed and a minimum standard was established for her and for her competition. And secondly, the names behind the stars also came to the forefront. The emotional connection between the singer, writer and arranger was something new for the Turkish pop audience."
Now, Limited Inc would like to expand or expound on the minik serce's many virtues, but we will have to put that off until the next post. We have to earn some money today, somehow.
Thursday, May 30, 2002
Remora
In 1812, as the wave of repression passed over England, now in its tenth year of war with France -- first with the revolution, then with Napoleon -- one Daniel Isaac Eaton published Tom Paine's notorious atheistical tract, Age of Reason, and was sentenced to an hour in the pillory, plus imprisonment, by his judge, Lord Ellenborough. Shelley responded to the Ellenborough in an open letter that began like this:
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I have waited impatiently for these last four months, in the hopes that some pen, fitter for the important task, would have spared me the perilous pleasure of becoming the champion of an innocent man.�This may serve as an excuse for delay, to those who think that I have let pass the aptest opportunity, but it is not to be supposed that in four short months the public indignation, raised by Mr. Eaton�s unmerited suffering, can have subsided.
Letter
My Lord,
As the station to which you have been called by your country is important, so much the more awful is your responsibility, so much the more does it become you to watch lest you inadvertently punish the virtuous and reward the vicious.
You preside over a court which is instituted for the suppression of crime, and to whose authority the people submit on no other conditions than that its decrees should be conformable to justice.
If it should be demonstrated that a judge had condemned an innocent man, the bare existence of laws in conformity to which the accused is punished, would but little extenuate his offence. The inquisitor when he burns an obstinate heretic may set up a similar plea, yet few are sufficiently blinded by intolerance to acknowledge its validity. It will less avail such a judge to assert the policy of punishing one who has committed no crime. Policy and morality ought to be deemed synonymous in a court of justice, and he whose conduct has been regulated by the latter principle, is not justly amenable to any penal law for a supposed violation of the former. It is true, my Lord, laws exist which suffice to screen you from the animadversions of any constituted power, in consequence of the unmerited sentence which you have passed upon Mr. Eaton; but there are no laws which screen you from the reproof of a nation�s disgust, none which ward off the just judgment of posterity, if that posterity will deign to recollect you."
Well, we doubt posterity will deign to recollect the name of the present head of the Patent Office, James Rogin (whose debt to those great lovers of free expression, Sony, Disney and co., preceded him into office) or his successor, Bruce Lehman (on whom LI is in a once in a lifetime agreement with, of all people, Phyllis Schlafly ) or the members of Congress, who have for the last twenty years been hotwiring intellectual property laws to create just the kind of monstrosity that was envisioned by opponents of the Constitution, and exorcised, in defense of the Constitution, by Jefferson, Madison, and the signers of the Constitution. Still, we recalled this exemplary case of the suppression of opinion when we read the NYT article about the speciousness of Big Pharma's claims to be churning out innovative products under the extended protection of patent law granted them by an always supine, intellectually vacant legislature, and seconded by a patent office that has taken it upon itself to extend monopolistic protection to the biggest and dullest corporations in the land. In both cases, it is a question of competition -- in one, the suppression of those enlightened expressions that could compete with the dull dead scriptures of the governing classes; in another, it is the suppression of that competition, from rival drug companies, that would lead to much lower pharmaceutical prices and, in all probability, invention and the flowering of science. Or something like that.
So, on to the NYT article. In a study done by Blue Cross of drug "innovations" during the last twenty years, it was found that, suprise -- the innovations were mainly in labeling. Yes, labeling R & D is vital in the frontline against disease..
"New Medicines Seldom Contain Anything New, Study Finds
By MELODY PETERSEN
Two-thirds of the drugs approved from 1989 to 2000 were modified versions of existing drugs or even identical to those already on the market, rather than truly new medicines, according to a new study.
"The report also said that most of the increased spending on new prescription drugs was on products that the Food and Drug Administration had determined did not provide significant benefits over those already on the market."
But how about those remarkable drug breakthroughs, the gentle reader is asking? How about the technological breakthroughs that brought us Clarinex and Sarafem? Sorry, gentle reader:
"Clarinex, an allergy drug, is a reformulation of Claritin. Sarafem, for premenstrual irritability, is the same drug as Prozac but has been renamed and repackaged in capsules of pink and lavender."
Of course, Big Pharma has a response to these outrageous allegations:
"The drug industry's trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, criticized the study yesterday, saying that it was "flawed and misguided."
"Richard I. Smith, vice president for policy and research at the group, said that even if a medicine was similar to one already on the market, it could still offer many benefits to patients. For example, he said, even though there are several similar drugs that fight depression � including Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft � many patients may not respond to one medicine but will to another."
There you go -- isn't that reason enough to protect the monopolistic hold of big pharma on all those drugs out there that they have spent their life blood, bet the farm, and sold their children in order to develop?
We mentioned Clinton's head of the Patent and Trademark commission, Bruce Lehman. Interestingly, he has followed the Clintonoid logic of selling what soul he might have had in 1968 for one brief second listening to Purple Haze in whatever vile Ivy League dorm he was rooming in to whatever vile industry would have it, founding a non-profit shill for Hollywood and the drug lords, the International Intellectual Property Institute. Here he is in heart rending testimony before Congress pleading with those bad boys to extend to Pfizer, to Merck, to all those suffering little piggies, the same, well, the same protection the computer companies (due to Lehman's stint at the Patent Office) enjoy:
"As I understand these issues, the task currently facing Congress is to find a way to regularize the process of enacting patent-specific term restoration legislation. Central to this task is to develop a system that is fair to the public and patent holders. Certainly, to shorten arbitrarily effective patent term for one of the industries whose innovations have the greatest public benefits � the pharmaceutical industry � is unfair, and discourages investment in those industries. A brief comparison of the ability of American innovation-based companies to attract funding in U.S. capital markets will underscore my point. At the present time, innovators in the computer components and software industries receive full twenty (20) year patent protection for inventions which require far less capital and involve far less risk than is the case in pharmaceutical innovation. Since most patents issue after about two years� examining time, these innovators are receiving 18 years of effective patent exclusivity. Is it no wonder that companies producing very important, but far from life saving or disease-curing products, attract market value and investment capital on a scale an order of magnitude beyond that of pharmaceutical and biotech companies? "
Ah, Bruce, this is more tear jerking than Imitation of Life! Douglas Sirk never knew, never KNEW, the sorrows of the successful pharma co -- always anxious as a debutante, wanting the best, the best for us -- wanting to cure our pattern baldness, our erectile dysfunction (and not, say, our malaria, sorry - the average malaria victim is, after all, a little dusky, as they like to say). But somehow, as we finished Bruce's testimony in a most lachrymose state, we went on to read this little disquisition, by Public Citizen, on the financial compensations accorded to the Mercks and the Pfizers, and our tears miraculously dried:
"In a year that saw a drop in employment rates, a plunge in the stock market and symbols of America s economy literally come crashing down, the pharmaceutical industry continued its reign as the most profitable industry in the annual Fortune 500 list.
While the overall profits of Fortune 500 companies declined by 53 percent the second deepest dive in profits the Fortune 500 has taken in its 47 years the top 10 U.S. drug makers increased profits by 33 percent.Collectively, the 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 topped all three of the magazine s measures of profitability in 2001, according to Fortune magazine s annual analysis of America s largest companies."
The Public Citizen article also picks apart the rather rotten premises of a Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development study that was issued, to much fanfare, in November 2001. The study put the "average R&D cost for each new drug brought to market at $802 million." Amazing, horrendous, and no wonder the poor pharma companies are trying to make money corrupting congress with hollow intellectual shills and relabeling products, you say. But in PC's estimation, there are a few things wrong with the Tufts study.
One thing is that the study excluded, right off, any R & D that was partly funded by the government. So what we are talking about here is what Libby used to do in 1968. But sure, some pharma cos. do bypass government financing. PC also discovered that the numbers in the Tufts study are, uh, sorta theoretical. In a deliciously comic passage, done completely deadpan, PC goes after the author of the study, one Joseph A. DiMasi:
"The second major flaw of the Tufts Center study is that it exaggerates the actual R&D expenditures for its sample of drugs. Specifically, the new Tufts Center estimate of $802 million includes significant expenses that are tax deductible and theoretical costs that drug companies don t actually incur. For example, roughly half of DiMasi s estimate ($399 million) is the "opportunity cost of capital" a theoretical calculation of what R&D expenditures might be worth if they were invested elsewhere. DiMasi calculated actual out-of-pocket R&D costs for drugs in the study at $403 million per new drug."
The most interesting thing about patent law as it applies to big pharma is how big pharma has managed to gather bunches of conservative intellectuals, the ones that like to talk about the wonders of competition, to propagandize for government protected monopoly in the name of bogus "property rights." There's an old scorecard of who, within the power elite that governs us, has sucked the drug company tit, brought to us by the Consumer Project on Technology. Turns out there's a lot of little porkers on the list. Check it out! Augustan England had its rotten boroughs -- we have our power elite. Lucky England!
In 1812, as the wave of repression passed over England, now in its tenth year of war with France -- first with the revolution, then with Napoleon -- one Daniel Isaac Eaton published Tom Paine's notorious atheistical tract, Age of Reason, and was sentenced to an hour in the pillory, plus imprisonment, by his judge, Lord Ellenborough. Shelley responded to the Ellenborough in an open letter that began like this:
Advertisement
I have waited impatiently for these last four months, in the hopes that some pen, fitter for the important task, would have spared me the perilous pleasure of becoming the champion of an innocent man.�This may serve as an excuse for delay, to those who think that I have let pass the aptest opportunity, but it is not to be supposed that in four short months the public indignation, raised by Mr. Eaton�s unmerited suffering, can have subsided.
Letter
My Lord,
As the station to which you have been called by your country is important, so much the more awful is your responsibility, so much the more does it become you to watch lest you inadvertently punish the virtuous and reward the vicious.
You preside over a court which is instituted for the suppression of crime, and to whose authority the people submit on no other conditions than that its decrees should be conformable to justice.
If it should be demonstrated that a judge had condemned an innocent man, the bare existence of laws in conformity to which the accused is punished, would but little extenuate his offence. The inquisitor when he burns an obstinate heretic may set up a similar plea, yet few are sufficiently blinded by intolerance to acknowledge its validity. It will less avail such a judge to assert the policy of punishing one who has committed no crime. Policy and morality ought to be deemed synonymous in a court of justice, and he whose conduct has been regulated by the latter principle, is not justly amenable to any penal law for a supposed violation of the former. It is true, my Lord, laws exist which suffice to screen you from the animadversions of any constituted power, in consequence of the unmerited sentence which you have passed upon Mr. Eaton; but there are no laws which screen you from the reproof of a nation�s disgust, none which ward off the just judgment of posterity, if that posterity will deign to recollect you."
Well, we doubt posterity will deign to recollect the name of the present head of the Patent Office, James Rogin (whose debt to those great lovers of free expression, Sony, Disney and co., preceded him into office) or his successor, Bruce Lehman (on whom LI is in a once in a lifetime agreement with, of all people, Phyllis Schlafly ) or the members of Congress, who have for the last twenty years been hotwiring intellectual property laws to create just the kind of monstrosity that was envisioned by opponents of the Constitution, and exorcised, in defense of the Constitution, by Jefferson, Madison, and the signers of the Constitution. Still, we recalled this exemplary case of the suppression of opinion when we read the NYT article about the speciousness of Big Pharma's claims to be churning out innovative products under the extended protection of patent law granted them by an always supine, intellectually vacant legislature, and seconded by a patent office that has taken it upon itself to extend monopolistic protection to the biggest and dullest corporations in the land. In both cases, it is a question of competition -- in one, the suppression of those enlightened expressions that could compete with the dull dead scriptures of the governing classes; in another, it is the suppression of that competition, from rival drug companies, that would lead to much lower pharmaceutical prices and, in all probability, invention and the flowering of science. Or something like that.
So, on to the NYT article. In a study done by Blue Cross of drug "innovations" during the last twenty years, it was found that, suprise -- the innovations were mainly in labeling. Yes, labeling R & D is vital in the frontline against disease..
"New Medicines Seldom Contain Anything New, Study Finds
By MELODY PETERSEN
Two-thirds of the drugs approved from 1989 to 2000 were modified versions of existing drugs or even identical to those already on the market, rather than truly new medicines, according to a new study.
"The report also said that most of the increased spending on new prescription drugs was on products that the Food and Drug Administration had determined did not provide significant benefits over those already on the market."
But how about those remarkable drug breakthroughs, the gentle reader is asking? How about the technological breakthroughs that brought us Clarinex and Sarafem? Sorry, gentle reader:
"Clarinex, an allergy drug, is a reformulation of Claritin. Sarafem, for premenstrual irritability, is the same drug as Prozac but has been renamed and repackaged in capsules of pink and lavender."
Of course, Big Pharma has a response to these outrageous allegations:
"The drug industry's trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, criticized the study yesterday, saying that it was "flawed and misguided."
"Richard I. Smith, vice president for policy and research at the group, said that even if a medicine was similar to one already on the market, it could still offer many benefits to patients. For example, he said, even though there are several similar drugs that fight depression � including Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft � many patients may not respond to one medicine but will to another."
There you go -- isn't that reason enough to protect the monopolistic hold of big pharma on all those drugs out there that they have spent their life blood, bet the farm, and sold their children in order to develop?
We mentioned Clinton's head of the Patent and Trademark commission, Bruce Lehman. Interestingly, he has followed the Clintonoid logic of selling what soul he might have had in 1968 for one brief second listening to Purple Haze in whatever vile Ivy League dorm he was rooming in to whatever vile industry would have it, founding a non-profit shill for Hollywood and the drug lords, the International Intellectual Property Institute. Here he is in heart rending testimony before Congress pleading with those bad boys to extend to Pfizer, to Merck, to all those suffering little piggies, the same, well, the same protection the computer companies (due to Lehman's stint at the Patent Office) enjoy:
"As I understand these issues, the task currently facing Congress is to find a way to regularize the process of enacting patent-specific term restoration legislation. Central to this task is to develop a system that is fair to the public and patent holders. Certainly, to shorten arbitrarily effective patent term for one of the industries whose innovations have the greatest public benefits � the pharmaceutical industry � is unfair, and discourages investment in those industries. A brief comparison of the ability of American innovation-based companies to attract funding in U.S. capital markets will underscore my point. At the present time, innovators in the computer components and software industries receive full twenty (20) year patent protection for inventions which require far less capital and involve far less risk than is the case in pharmaceutical innovation. Since most patents issue after about two years� examining time, these innovators are receiving 18 years of effective patent exclusivity. Is it no wonder that companies producing very important, but far from life saving or disease-curing products, attract market value and investment capital on a scale an order of magnitude beyond that of pharmaceutical and biotech companies? "
Ah, Bruce, this is more tear jerking than Imitation of Life! Douglas Sirk never knew, never KNEW, the sorrows of the successful pharma co -- always anxious as a debutante, wanting the best, the best for us -- wanting to cure our pattern baldness, our erectile dysfunction (and not, say, our malaria, sorry - the average malaria victim is, after all, a little dusky, as they like to say). But somehow, as we finished Bruce's testimony in a most lachrymose state, we went on to read this little disquisition, by Public Citizen, on the financial compensations accorded to the Mercks and the Pfizers, and our tears miraculously dried:
"In a year that saw a drop in employment rates, a plunge in the stock market and symbols of America s economy literally come crashing down, the pharmaceutical industry continued its reign as the most profitable industry in the annual Fortune 500 list.
While the overall profits of Fortune 500 companies declined by 53 percent the second deepest dive in profits the Fortune 500 has taken in its 47 years the top 10 U.S. drug makers increased profits by 33 percent.Collectively, the 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 topped all three of the magazine s measures of profitability in 2001, according to Fortune magazine s annual analysis of America s largest companies."
The Public Citizen article also picks apart the rather rotten premises of a Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development study that was issued, to much fanfare, in November 2001. The study put the "average R&D cost for each new drug brought to market at $802 million." Amazing, horrendous, and no wonder the poor pharma companies are trying to make money corrupting congress with hollow intellectual shills and relabeling products, you say. But in PC's estimation, there are a few things wrong with the Tufts study.
One thing is that the study excluded, right off, any R & D that was partly funded by the government. So what we are talking about here is what Libby used to do in 1968. But sure, some pharma cos. do bypass government financing. PC also discovered that the numbers in the Tufts study are, uh, sorta theoretical. In a deliciously comic passage, done completely deadpan, PC goes after the author of the study, one Joseph A. DiMasi:
"The second major flaw of the Tufts Center study is that it exaggerates the actual R&D expenditures for its sample of drugs. Specifically, the new Tufts Center estimate of $802 million includes significant expenses that are tax deductible and theoretical costs that drug companies don t actually incur. For example, roughly half of DiMasi s estimate ($399 million) is the "opportunity cost of capital" a theoretical calculation of what R&D expenditures might be worth if they were invested elsewhere. DiMasi calculated actual out-of-pocket R&D costs for drugs in the study at $403 million per new drug."
The most interesting thing about patent law as it applies to big pharma is how big pharma has managed to gather bunches of conservative intellectuals, the ones that like to talk about the wonders of competition, to propagandize for government protected monopoly in the name of bogus "property rights." There's an old scorecard of who, within the power elite that governs us, has sucked the drug company tit, brought to us by the Consumer Project on Technology. Turns out there's a lot of little porkers on the list. Check it out! Augustan England had its rotten boroughs -- we have our power elite. Lucky England!
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
Remora
The magic of the market place in the hands of the magicians
LI has the long, grudge-laden memory you'd expect from a disappointed loner and potential assassin. Meaning I review for a living. But nothing has tickled us so much, in the hours of bile that precede dawn, as the news about the energy markets. For if, like me, you were reading the biz press in the nineties, the Daniel Yergin crowd, the Larry Summers crowd, well it just seemed super-evident that when we give power to the power companies, a veritable cultural renaissance would ensue, a happy coordination of supply and demand that would reward stockholder and consumer alike!
It was bliss to be a free trade ideologue in those days. The epicenter is still the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a think tank associated with Daniel Yergin. The think tank has issued a report that recommends ... further deregulation! Of course, with 'structure" this time, maestro.
�The power business in the U.S. is too important to continue to restructure on a trial-and-error basis. Pragmatism should prevail over experimentation in power market design,� said Francis X. Shields, Accenture, Partner in the Competitive Energy Markets practice. �The focus should be on markets that do work, not those that do not�.
�The power industry is at the crossroads of three paths: it can continue to muddle along the path of experimental deregulation, backtrack to comprehensive regulation, or move forward to power markets that work,� Shields said. �The United States needs to avoid slipping back to the �devil it knows� � comprehensive regulation. A move forward requires accepting that power markets are complex, unlikely to evolve on their own accord, and need structure to work properly.�
And what does it mean, this "needing of structure"? We like CERA's last recommendations best:
"Coordinate wholesale and retail transitions � Big bang deregulations are too risky in an industry as complex as electric power. In moving to wholesale markets, vesting contracts that expire gradually over the first years of the market to provide time for participants to move up the learning curve. Once wholesale markets are in place (which may include large industrial and commercial customers), retail markets should be opened as quickly as possible, but in phases to reduce the technical stress on the system. The first phase can include large industrial and commercial customers participating at the opening of the wholesale market.
Minimize distortions of market price signals � Price caps have the effect of distorting economic activity in any market. If wholesale price caps exist in any form, they should be set above the highest possible incremental cost of production. Similarly, price freezes at the retail level should be thawed in order to reconnect demand to the market. Prices need to convey information clearly in order to coordinate economic activity in a market. Governmental public policy objectives -- such as fuel mix, rural cross-subsidization, obligation to serve and low income initiatives � should be kept independent of the spot and forward trading mechanisms in the wholesale market, and be clearly identified as separate charges on consumers bills in the retail market."
Those transitions can be tough, especially when dealing with large scale customers, like businesses. So you can always lay off costs on your small, atomized customers -- let's call them residences. And then, of course, it is very important not to have to deal with any price curbs that might impede this kind of gouging. We love it, we love it...
We especially love the gobbledygook about prices as information. This might be of interest to Dynegy, Reliant or CMS. The CEO of Dynegy, Chuck Watson resigned today, in light of revelations about, well, chatter on the price party line. Chuck has had a wild ride since December -- buying and then unbuying Enron, getting touted in a Forbes cover story and now getting dumped by the board:
Watson was the second CEO of an energy trading company to resign in less than a week amid federal inquiries into simultaneous power swaps between energy traders that artificially boosted trading volume and, in some cases, reported revenue. William T. McCormick Jr., chairman and chief executive of CMS Energy Corp., announced his resignation Friday, less than two weeks after the company admitted conducting energy trades it used to falsely inflate revenue by more than $4.4 billion.
The swaps, dubbed "round-trip trades," involve simultaneous swaps of electric power for the same price and have been questioned by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dynegy, a one-time suitor of bankrupt Enron Corp., disclosed earlier this month that the SEC is looking into similar trades made by the company last fall. Dynegy said it conducted the trades to test its system and that they didn't yield any profits for Dynegy or its trading partner. "
Somehow, I have a problem trusting the word of an energy trading company about what does and does not constitute profit. Dynegy had a little problem with that category itself, as well as with the preserving, with the appropriate sacred rites, the holy nature of the information-price dyad, according to a Reuters report last month:
"Dynegy used an arrangement called Project Alpha to address a growing gap between cash flow and net income and to cut its tax bill, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Dynegy officials told the Journal that Project Alpha was aimed at guaranteeing a stable source of gas.
The newspaper report said Dynegy created a partnership that entered into a five-year gas-trading contract with a special-purpose company. During the first nine months of the contract, the partnership bought gas at below-market prices, yielding profits; during the remainder of the contract, the partnership paid above-market prices, producing losses.
Dynegy used the losses to narrow the gap between its cash flow and net income and to reduce its taxes, according to the report.
The Economist, a magazine that has bought its ticket for the the privatization ideology and never looked back, has an interestingly skewed story about the appalling dishonesty -- I mean, the financial innovations -- of the power brokers and their ilk.
"EVER since Gray Davis, governor of California, locked his taxpayers into exorbitantly expensive, long-term electricity contracts at the height of California's energy crisis, his staff have worked tirelessly to pin the blame on somebody else. The collapse of Enron helped, in a general way, to divert attention. Until recently, however, the energy trader's bankruptcy had given little impetus to Mr Davis's allegations that energy traders had fleeced California by illegally manipulating energy prices. Now Mr Davis has found succour at last. Two new regulatory investigations and collapsing investor confidence have left the industry flat on its back.
On May 13th, Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer and Wolf Popper, two law firms, filed suit in San Francisco against a number of energy suppliers on behalf of Californian taxpayers. The suit alleges that long-term power contracts have forced consumers to pay $9.1 billion more for energy than they would have done at �proper� market rates, and that over the next ten years the gap will be even bigger. "
Talk about an odd way to slip in a fact inconvenient to your mindset. Or a set of facts, a whole world of facts.
Lets sum it up and get on to some real work. When the magicians are minding the magic acts, expect tricks. Or as My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult once asked, what do you do when "no one's there to spy on you?" Why, you trade gas at below market prices, mislabel the transactions for tax purposes, and make it up by trading at above market prices, thus conveniently benchmarking for further trades, that's what you do! It's just business.
The magic of the market place in the hands of the magicians
LI has the long, grudge-laden memory you'd expect from a disappointed loner and potential assassin. Meaning I review for a living. But nothing has tickled us so much, in the hours of bile that precede dawn, as the news about the energy markets. For if, like me, you were reading the biz press in the nineties, the Daniel Yergin crowd, the Larry Summers crowd, well it just seemed super-evident that when we give power to the power companies, a veritable cultural renaissance would ensue, a happy coordination of supply and demand that would reward stockholder and consumer alike!
It was bliss to be a free trade ideologue in those days. The epicenter is still the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a think tank associated with Daniel Yergin. The think tank has issued a report that recommends ... further deregulation! Of course, with 'structure" this time, maestro.
�The power business in the U.S. is too important to continue to restructure on a trial-and-error basis. Pragmatism should prevail over experimentation in power market design,� said Francis X. Shields, Accenture, Partner in the Competitive Energy Markets practice. �The focus should be on markets that do work, not those that do not�.
�The power industry is at the crossroads of three paths: it can continue to muddle along the path of experimental deregulation, backtrack to comprehensive regulation, or move forward to power markets that work,� Shields said. �The United States needs to avoid slipping back to the �devil it knows� � comprehensive regulation. A move forward requires accepting that power markets are complex, unlikely to evolve on their own accord, and need structure to work properly.�
And what does it mean, this "needing of structure"? We like CERA's last recommendations best:
"Coordinate wholesale and retail transitions � Big bang deregulations are too risky in an industry as complex as electric power. In moving to wholesale markets, vesting contracts that expire gradually over the first years of the market to provide time for participants to move up the learning curve. Once wholesale markets are in place (which may include large industrial and commercial customers), retail markets should be opened as quickly as possible, but in phases to reduce the technical stress on the system. The first phase can include large industrial and commercial customers participating at the opening of the wholesale market.
Minimize distortions of market price signals � Price caps have the effect of distorting economic activity in any market. If wholesale price caps exist in any form, they should be set above the highest possible incremental cost of production. Similarly, price freezes at the retail level should be thawed in order to reconnect demand to the market. Prices need to convey information clearly in order to coordinate economic activity in a market. Governmental public policy objectives -- such as fuel mix, rural cross-subsidization, obligation to serve and low income initiatives � should be kept independent of the spot and forward trading mechanisms in the wholesale market, and be clearly identified as separate charges on consumers bills in the retail market."
Those transitions can be tough, especially when dealing with large scale customers, like businesses. So you can always lay off costs on your small, atomized customers -- let's call them residences. And then, of course, it is very important not to have to deal with any price curbs that might impede this kind of gouging. We love it, we love it...
We especially love the gobbledygook about prices as information. This might be of interest to Dynegy, Reliant or CMS. The CEO of Dynegy, Chuck Watson resigned today, in light of revelations about, well, chatter on the price party line. Chuck has had a wild ride since December -- buying and then unbuying Enron, getting touted in a Forbes cover story and now getting dumped by the board:
Watson was the second CEO of an energy trading company to resign in less than a week amid federal inquiries into simultaneous power swaps between energy traders that artificially boosted trading volume and, in some cases, reported revenue. William T. McCormick Jr., chairman and chief executive of CMS Energy Corp., announced his resignation Friday, less than two weeks after the company admitted conducting energy trades it used to falsely inflate revenue by more than $4.4 billion.
The swaps, dubbed "round-trip trades," involve simultaneous swaps of electric power for the same price and have been questioned by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dynegy, a one-time suitor of bankrupt Enron Corp., disclosed earlier this month that the SEC is looking into similar trades made by the company last fall. Dynegy said it conducted the trades to test its system and that they didn't yield any profits for Dynegy or its trading partner. "
Somehow, I have a problem trusting the word of an energy trading company about what does and does not constitute profit. Dynegy had a little problem with that category itself, as well as with the preserving, with the appropriate sacred rites, the holy nature of the information-price dyad, according to a Reuters report last month:
"Dynegy used an arrangement called Project Alpha to address a growing gap between cash flow and net income and to cut its tax bill, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Dynegy officials told the Journal that Project Alpha was aimed at guaranteeing a stable source of gas.
The newspaper report said Dynegy created a partnership that entered into a five-year gas-trading contract with a special-purpose company. During the first nine months of the contract, the partnership bought gas at below-market prices, yielding profits; during the remainder of the contract, the partnership paid above-market prices, producing losses.
Dynegy used the losses to narrow the gap between its cash flow and net income and to reduce its taxes, according to the report.
The Economist, a magazine that has bought its ticket for the the privatization ideology and never looked back, has an interestingly skewed story about the appalling dishonesty -- I mean, the financial innovations -- of the power brokers and their ilk.
"EVER since Gray Davis, governor of California, locked his taxpayers into exorbitantly expensive, long-term electricity contracts at the height of California's energy crisis, his staff have worked tirelessly to pin the blame on somebody else. The collapse of Enron helped, in a general way, to divert attention. Until recently, however, the energy trader's bankruptcy had given little impetus to Mr Davis's allegations that energy traders had fleeced California by illegally manipulating energy prices. Now Mr Davis has found succour at last. Two new regulatory investigations and collapsing investor confidence have left the industry flat on its back.
On May 13th, Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer and Wolf Popper, two law firms, filed suit in San Francisco against a number of energy suppliers on behalf of Californian taxpayers. The suit alleges that long-term power contracts have forced consumers to pay $9.1 billion more for energy than they would have done at �proper� market rates, and that over the next ten years the gap will be even bigger. "
Talk about an odd way to slip in a fact inconvenient to your mindset. Or a set of facts, a whole world of facts.
Lets sum it up and get on to some real work. When the magicians are minding the magic acts, expect tricks. Or as My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult once asked, what do you do when "no one's there to spy on you?" Why, you trade gas at below market prices, mislabel the transactions for tax purposes, and make it up by trading at above market prices, thus conveniently benchmarking for further trades, that's what you do! It's just business.
Saturday, May 25, 2002
Remora
Enron's stunt fall, during that portion of the Bush administration that we will certainly know more about if Cheney's office has to release its docs, was preceded by a rise duing a portion of Clinton's administration that hasn't received a lot of scrutiny, yet. Corporate Watch has published an article by Jimmy Langman on Enron's operations in Bolivia. The interlocking interests of capital and the state are put into special relief in this instance of what Cobbett would have called 'ruffian' capitalism.
Let's put this in terms of the mission statement, or the vision committment, or whatever seedy term you want to use.
Q: How can Enron, the free enterpriser's free enterprise, suck off the government tit by running a pipeline through an environmentally threatened forest? And how can it parlay false promises to a bunch of indigineous know nothings into an incredible amount of profit, without paying for an incredible amount of environmental damage, and still cheat its partners on the deal?
First, the setting:
"The 390-mile long Cuiaba natural gas pipeline, partly owned by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, stretches from near the city of Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia to Cuiaba, Matto Grosso, Brazil. There, it fuels Enron's new 480-megawatt thermal power plant. The pipeline cuts through the 15 million-acre Chiquitano, the last, large, relatively intact tall dry forest in the world. The Chiquitano forest is "one of the world's richest, rarest and most biologically outstanding habitats on Earth" and one of the planet's 200 most sensitive eco-regions, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Approximately 90 species of mammals, birds and reptiles in the Chiquitano are listed as endangered. The adjacent Pantanal is the world's largest wetlands region, spanning 89,000 square miles and straddling the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It is one of the world's richest wildlife habitats."
Now, remember, this forest is inhabited. The inconvenient indigenes must be placated with some initial promise that will pay off the NGOs that virtuously claim to represent them. Don't worry about really representing them -- once the NGOs have satisfied themselves, and their mailing list of contributors, that they've operated with maximum virtue, they will forget about their "clients" -- or better, having bought into the enterprise, they'll defend it against any subversive dissent that might emanate from some village headman somewhere, like that guy knows anything. Enron, however, isn't Shell Oil, which would be satisfied with some such arrangement. Enron wants to hit the ball out of the park, because that is the innovative, asset light, creative destruction type of corporate culture that made the 90s so special. To really hit the ball out of the ball park, you have to simultaneously juggle your accounting in a fraudulent way, contribute as much as possible to the degredation of the wilderness described above, seduce monetary support from the taxpayer, and cheat your business partner. Enron, with the mastery that accompanied its spiking stock prices, was able to do it all, as Langman reports. What fascinated LI is the part played by another one of those obscure Federal agencies that exist to pump money, as in an artesian well, from a lower level to a higher one -- that is, lining the pockets of the porcine set with money that, as LI writes this, is going to be denied the unworthy poor in pending legislation to "reform" welfare even more.
This is the US aspect of the deal:
"The "Cuiaba Energy Integrated Project" cost an estimated $600 million to build, $200 million of which was originally to be financed by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a US government agency that helps US companies with business projects in less-developed countries."
Never let it be said that America is indifferent to less developed countries, not with OPIC around to spread our bounty from jungle to glorious jungle. Enron was OPIC's number one cause, accruing 1.7 billion dollars in much needed aid since 1992. However, in Bolivia, OPIC was hampered by constraints on lending to environmentally destructive projects. But hey presto! that's where a little teamwork from OPIC's pliant chief environmental officer, Harvey Himberg, came in. By selectively describing the project, and by picturing the Chiquitano in wholly false terms, they were able to get around the restraints written into OPIC regulations. Himberg is what you call a visionary in the Forturne-'n-Forbes speak. Here's an example:
"After fires swept parts of the Chiquitano forest in the summer of 1999, OPIC even created a video highlighting the burnt out areas in an effort to convince individuals from other government agencies that the forest was not primary. The video led one US Agency for International Development staffer to tell an environmental group that he came away with the impression that there was no forest left.
"At every step OPIC sided with Enron, finding every way possible to circumvent its primary forest policy," says Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch: "OPIC management put on an all out effort to defend its largest business client."
This sounds much like tactics used by the Bush administration to get its true clients, petro companies, oil leases in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
OPIC has a little convenient site for children set up to explain itself, with cute pictures of jungle plants and beasts (in keeping with the curious American custom of portraying, in cartoons, the happy frolicking creatures we stun, butcher, slice n dice, broil, bake, and fry -- the grinning pig at the Barbecue place, the dancing chicken who can't wait to immerse itself, breast and thigh, in boiling oil. MMM MMM Good, Kids!) and a whole buncha fun facts to know and tell. Did you know sometimes private insurance companies just are so poopy? Yeah, they simply won't underwrite those necessary ventures of American capital into the big scary world of lions and tigers and bears. Now, Uncle Sam don't want to coddle any of you or your welfare queen mamas, you hear? But if you are, say, a multi-billion dollar energy company, the bowels of our national compassion are moved:
Why Is OPIC Needed?
Private loans, loan guaranties, and political risk insurance are hard to get for companies who want to operate in less developed countries. The best way for a country to become more developed is to encourage businesses to build and operate there. Some banks refuse to do business in these countries because they think it is too risky. OPIC helps these growing nations by supporting those businesses that want to operate in these countries.
Kids will do the darndest things, and some of them might question whether Uncle Sam should leap in where angels and venture capitalists don't dare to venture. But have no fear. OPIC, you see, is good for America!
"How Does OPIC Help America?
OPIC helps American companies make investments in developing countries. When US companies make these investments they are likely to create US jobs and exports. For example, if OPIC is helping to build a power plant in a foreign country then the parts and equipment needed to build the power plant will often be supplied by other American companies. American companies may build the generator for the plant, as well as selling the cranes, bulldozers, and trucks needed to build it. Since 1971, OPIC has supported $138 billion worth of investments that will generate $63.6 billion in U.S. exports and create nearly 250,000 American jobs. OPIC does not support projects that may result in any loss of American jobs or exports.
OPIC also helps U.S. foreign policy by only doing business in countries that obey certain rules about workers� rights and human rights. OPIC will not help any country that abuses its people.
OPIC is self-sustaining , and has made money every year since it was created in 1971. Because OPIC is so successful, it contributes money to the U.S. foreign assistance account every year."
LI was a smart ass boy. And LI has grown up to be a smart ass man. And this man, reading about all those trucks and cranes and things, wonders how scared the lions and tigers and bears should be. But they are SCARY! We have zoos to put creatures like that where they belong: behind bars!
In the meantime, although OPIC is very open and touchy feely with the kiddies, it seems simply touchy when it comes to its accounting. Or at least according to the Friends of the Earth. Kids, you might want to add to OPICs fun facts page the question, how are we accounting for those projects that (zoom! zoom!) use all those like neat cranes and trucks to set up like coal burning fuel plants in Thailand and stuff.
"OPIC's Annual Reports provide Congress and taxpayers with an ambiguous and distorted picture. OPIC reports "commitments" to the public but not final signed contracts. Therefore, the public has no way of knowing whether or not a contract was actually signed, which would result in official U.S. financial exposure and could create debt for developing countries."
But lets not badmouth our friendly neighbor policy while our POTUS is with Putin. Children, after all, should be seen, and not heard -- and the same is true for citizens.
has a site for kids
Enron's stunt fall, during that portion of the Bush administration that we will certainly know more about if Cheney's office has to release its docs, was preceded by a rise duing a portion of Clinton's administration that hasn't received a lot of scrutiny, yet. Corporate Watch has published an article by Jimmy Langman on Enron's operations in Bolivia. The interlocking interests of capital and the state are put into special relief in this instance of what Cobbett would have called 'ruffian' capitalism.
Let's put this in terms of the mission statement, or the vision committment, or whatever seedy term you want to use.
Q: How can Enron, the free enterpriser's free enterprise, suck off the government tit by running a pipeline through an environmentally threatened forest? And how can it parlay false promises to a bunch of indigineous know nothings into an incredible amount of profit, without paying for an incredible amount of environmental damage, and still cheat its partners on the deal?
First, the setting:
"The 390-mile long Cuiaba natural gas pipeline, partly owned by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, stretches from near the city of Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia to Cuiaba, Matto Grosso, Brazil. There, it fuels Enron's new 480-megawatt thermal power plant. The pipeline cuts through the 15 million-acre Chiquitano, the last, large, relatively intact tall dry forest in the world. The Chiquitano forest is "one of the world's richest, rarest and most biologically outstanding habitats on Earth" and one of the planet's 200 most sensitive eco-regions, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Approximately 90 species of mammals, birds and reptiles in the Chiquitano are listed as endangered. The adjacent Pantanal is the world's largest wetlands region, spanning 89,000 square miles and straddling the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It is one of the world's richest wildlife habitats."
Now, remember, this forest is inhabited. The inconvenient indigenes must be placated with some initial promise that will pay off the NGOs that virtuously claim to represent them. Don't worry about really representing them -- once the NGOs have satisfied themselves, and their mailing list of contributors, that they've operated with maximum virtue, they will forget about their "clients" -- or better, having bought into the enterprise, they'll defend it against any subversive dissent that might emanate from some village headman somewhere, like that guy knows anything. Enron, however, isn't Shell Oil, which would be satisfied with some such arrangement. Enron wants to hit the ball out of the park, because that is the innovative, asset light, creative destruction type of corporate culture that made the 90s so special. To really hit the ball out of the ball park, you have to simultaneously juggle your accounting in a fraudulent way, contribute as much as possible to the degredation of the wilderness described above, seduce monetary support from the taxpayer, and cheat your business partner. Enron, with the mastery that accompanied its spiking stock prices, was able to do it all, as Langman reports. What fascinated LI is the part played by another one of those obscure Federal agencies that exist to pump money, as in an artesian well, from a lower level to a higher one -- that is, lining the pockets of the porcine set with money that, as LI writes this, is going to be denied the unworthy poor in pending legislation to "reform" welfare even more.
This is the US aspect of the deal:
"The "Cuiaba Energy Integrated Project" cost an estimated $600 million to build, $200 million of which was originally to be financed by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a US government agency that helps US companies with business projects in less-developed countries."
Never let it be said that America is indifferent to less developed countries, not with OPIC around to spread our bounty from jungle to glorious jungle. Enron was OPIC's number one cause, accruing 1.7 billion dollars in much needed aid since 1992. However, in Bolivia, OPIC was hampered by constraints on lending to environmentally destructive projects. But hey presto! that's where a little teamwork from OPIC's pliant chief environmental officer, Harvey Himberg, came in. By selectively describing the project, and by picturing the Chiquitano in wholly false terms, they were able to get around the restraints written into OPIC regulations. Himberg is what you call a visionary in the Forturne-'n-Forbes speak. Here's an example:
"After fires swept parts of the Chiquitano forest in the summer of 1999, OPIC even created a video highlighting the burnt out areas in an effort to convince individuals from other government agencies that the forest was not primary. The video led one US Agency for International Development staffer to tell an environmental group that he came away with the impression that there was no forest left.
"At every step OPIC sided with Enron, finding every way possible to circumvent its primary forest policy," says Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch: "OPIC management put on an all out effort to defend its largest business client."
This sounds much like tactics used by the Bush administration to get its true clients, petro companies, oil leases in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
OPIC has a little convenient site for children set up to explain itself, with cute pictures of jungle plants and beasts (in keeping with the curious American custom of portraying, in cartoons, the happy frolicking creatures we stun, butcher, slice n dice, broil, bake, and fry -- the grinning pig at the Barbecue place, the dancing chicken who can't wait to immerse itself, breast and thigh, in boiling oil. MMM MMM Good, Kids!) and a whole buncha fun facts to know and tell. Did you know sometimes private insurance companies just are so poopy? Yeah, they simply won't underwrite those necessary ventures of American capital into the big scary world of lions and tigers and bears. Now, Uncle Sam don't want to coddle any of you or your welfare queen mamas, you hear? But if you are, say, a multi-billion dollar energy company, the bowels of our national compassion are moved:
Why Is OPIC Needed?
Private loans, loan guaranties, and political risk insurance are hard to get for companies who want to operate in less developed countries. The best way for a country to become more developed is to encourage businesses to build and operate there. Some banks refuse to do business in these countries because they think it is too risky. OPIC helps these growing nations by supporting those businesses that want to operate in these countries.
Kids will do the darndest things, and some of them might question whether Uncle Sam should leap in where angels and venture capitalists don't dare to venture. But have no fear. OPIC, you see, is good for America!
"How Does OPIC Help America?
OPIC helps American companies make investments in developing countries. When US companies make these investments they are likely to create US jobs and exports. For example, if OPIC is helping to build a power plant in a foreign country then the parts and equipment needed to build the power plant will often be supplied by other American companies. American companies may build the generator for the plant, as well as selling the cranes, bulldozers, and trucks needed to build it. Since 1971, OPIC has supported $138 billion worth of investments that will generate $63.6 billion in U.S. exports and create nearly 250,000 American jobs. OPIC does not support projects that may result in any loss of American jobs or exports.
OPIC also helps U.S. foreign policy by only doing business in countries that obey certain rules about workers� rights and human rights. OPIC will not help any country that abuses its people.
OPIC is self-sustaining , and has made money every year since it was created in 1971. Because OPIC is so successful, it contributes money to the U.S. foreign assistance account every year."
LI was a smart ass boy. And LI has grown up to be a smart ass man. And this man, reading about all those trucks and cranes and things, wonders how scared the lions and tigers and bears should be. But they are SCARY! We have zoos to put creatures like that where they belong: behind bars!
In the meantime, although OPIC is very open and touchy feely with the kiddies, it seems simply touchy when it comes to its accounting. Or at least according to the Friends of the Earth. Kids, you might want to add to OPICs fun facts page the question, how are we accounting for those projects that (zoom! zoom!) use all those like neat cranes and trucks to set up like coal burning fuel plants in Thailand and stuff.
"OPIC's Annual Reports provide Congress and taxpayers with an ambiguous and distorted picture. OPIC reports "commitments" to the public but not final signed contracts. Therefore, the public has no way of knowing whether or not a contract was actually signed, which would result in official U.S. financial exposure and could create debt for developing countries."
But lets not badmouth our friendly neighbor policy while our POTUS is with Putin. Children, after all, should be seen, and not heard -- and the same is true for citizens.
has a site for kids
Friday, May 24, 2002
Remora
Murder
Murder is definitely not one of the fine arts for scolds in the press. We expected, as soon as poor old Chandra Levy's body showed up in the front yard of some D.C. police station... oops, we mean as soon as it was uncovered in the veritable jungle, the impenetrable wilds, near a jogging path only accessible by way of Sherpa guides, of a D.C. park --- that the scolds would be down the throat of the press for trivializing, sensationalizing, and generally not realizing that, after 9/11, everything had changed -- yes, we were no longer gawkers at traffic accidents, mongerers of bootleg execution video tapes, spectators of Jerry Springer managed slap fights between hefty adult star queens, eaters of nitrate rich bacon and wankers to home video porn, but had been transformed into discerning consumers Brookings Institute White Papers. Howard Kurz, the barometer of conventional wisdom, didn't disappoint us:
"Terrorism, threats against the Brooklyn Bridge, Middle East violence, the president's trip to Europe � all were blown off the television screen at noon yesterday by the story that became the media's leading soap opera last summer.
"The Levy tragedy burst back into the news with the discovery of skeletal remains in Rock Creek Park. No matter that it wasn't clear for hours whether this was the Washington intern who has been missing for more than a year, or that Condit, the man romantically linked to her, has long since been defeated. The media were in full-blown, this-just-in, team-coverage mode."
Just to make sure we get it, the headline writer entitled Kurz' s column: Wall-to-Wall Levy Coverage
Pre-Sept. 11 Excess Returns to TV News After Discovery of Remains.
And so, though we feel sad, experience the pang of vicarious melancholy, feel even funky, for Chandra, we do want to hear everything. In the meantime, we've been pondering the varieties of murder, on the lines of De Quincey's essay on Murder as one of the fine arts. This essay, which really transformed the Newgate narrative into the Real Crime narrative (yes, Ann Rule owes her whole career to the opium addict), is often mentioned as notorious, or infamous, or the like.
Frank Tallis, a crime fiction writer, makes the by now standard reference in his essay in Crime Times,
Original Sin: On the Importance of Creative Killing. Tallis doesn't follow De Quincey's radical path, however. Where De Quincey looked at the murder itself in terms of art, Tallis looks for creativity in the murderer's hobbies -- poetry, crafts of various sorts.
"Yet, even serial killers are guilty of not exploiting their creative powers to the full. Although they are generally very inventive with dead bodies (using them as sex aids or as a source of spare parts from which they can fashion objets d'art), they too show an unexpected conservatism when it comes to the dastardly deed itself. Nilson [see this link for an elaborate description of Nilson's career ], whose quite tolerable poetry elevates him to something of a laureate among villains (and who often spoke unambiguously about the 'art' of murder) was a boring old strangler at heart.
"Looking through one of the many millennial lists that appeared last year I came across a register of twenty titles voted the 'best ever' crime fiction. I couldn't help noticing that the authors of almost all of the genre classics opted for tried and tested methods of murder. They spurned originality. Why? Above, I mentioned that in my quest for an original methodology I was looking for something bold without being silly. And in these matters, the issue of 'silliness' is (as John Major might have said) not inconsiderable. Indeed, it seems to me that there is some kind of mathematical law in operation that enforces the co-variation of originality and silliness. That is to say, the more original the method of despatch, the more silly or ridiculous it will appear - the opposite also being true. Thus, like Icarus, the aspiring crime writer must be wary of hubris. The higher you fly the more likely it is that you will fall from the literary stratosphere."
There's a mistake here that is obvious to any literary critic -- the confounding of technological novelty with creativity. There are poems and novels that combine the two, granted. But the true poetaster of murder is as much in search of the adventure of content as the fashion of form. David Lehman, in an essay on the detective novel, quotes Gertrude Stein, of all people, on the genre. Stein delivers, as she always does, after transcending a few commas:
"Gertrude Stein, who called the detective story "the only really modern novel form," has an analysis that has always fascinated me. (You can piece it together from passages in Everybody�s Autobiography and in her lecture "What Are Masterpieces.") Stein explained that the detective story "gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins." In a detective story, she also observed, "the only person of any importance is dead" and so "there can be no beginning middle and end" in the conventional sense. Stein helps to account for why time in a detective novel flows not in a straight lines but in two directions concurrently: there is the time of the action culminating in the violent event that occurs just before the book begins, and there is the narrative time of the detective�s reconstruction of the events leading to that moment. Stein�s more important insight is that the discovery of the corpse represents the termination of an action at the same time as it initiates a new action, and since this is so, it makes sense to regard the detective as a new hero who emerges at the precise moment that his predecessor, the traditional hero of fiction, meets his violent end. The scene of the crime is the locus of the transition from a flawed hero (the victim) to one who is better equipped for survival (the detective).
"
Chandra, of course, is a heroine without a detective to vindicate her status. D.C. detectives are, indeed, better equipped for survival, as in Lehman's interpretation of Stein, but only in the way of all bureaucrats -- by assiduously avoiding real work, arresting the obvious and framing them when necessary, and generating excuses at will. Of course, Stein was thinking of real detectives, ones that quit the force and work on their own, for paying clients.
It's Chinatown, Jake. Somebody in D.C. is bound to say that at some point in this case.
Finally, LI would recommend the NYPost for leaping, a little late, into the story. The day before, the Post had been proclaiming stentorianly that all we had to fear was fear itself -- which of course was a bunch of bull, since we have to fear, really, being blown up by Al Quaeda folks. That this is what we have to fear should be obvious to even Murdoch's privileged minions. Were they out all last year or what? But today, the Post did itself proud. First the headline: It's Her. Simple, but thrusting. Then the pic of Chandra.Not the usual pic, not the way AOL clumsily promoted the story, like plastering up one of those tiresome have you seen this child posters for its forty million customers to see. The Post ain't no milk company. No, this one is of a dewier, a happier Chandra. Well, of course it is hard not to be happier than at the moment of your murder, but still. This Chandra reminded us that we didn't like it, not a bit, that she'd disappeared like that. Then, then, the Condit angle. Its a matter of tracking the camera, its the sweep, the pan that counts. The WP, of course, scratching at its girdle, provides a map for the reader to locate the skeletal remains, but how about the really important landmark in the case -- the location of Condit's apartment vis a vis the body?
"The location where the remains were found is about three miles from Levy's apartment in Dupont Circle, a little less than two miles from Condit's home, and a mile north of Pierce/Klingle Mansion Nature Center. "
If the Post doesn't get its man to traverse those two miles, timing it, and looking for broken twigs and broken bottles of Condit's favorite brandy, we will definitely lament the decline of tabloid ingenuity in this great land of ours.
Murder
Murder is definitely not one of the fine arts for scolds in the press. We expected, as soon as poor old Chandra Levy's body showed up in the front yard of some D.C. police station... oops, we mean as soon as it was uncovered in the veritable jungle, the impenetrable wilds, near a jogging path only accessible by way of Sherpa guides, of a D.C. park --- that the scolds would be down the throat of the press for trivializing, sensationalizing, and generally not realizing that, after 9/11, everything had changed -- yes, we were no longer gawkers at traffic accidents, mongerers of bootleg execution video tapes, spectators of Jerry Springer managed slap fights between hefty adult star queens, eaters of nitrate rich bacon and wankers to home video porn, but had been transformed into discerning consumers Brookings Institute White Papers. Howard Kurz, the barometer of conventional wisdom, didn't disappoint us:
"Terrorism, threats against the Brooklyn Bridge, Middle East violence, the president's trip to Europe � all were blown off the television screen at noon yesterday by the story that became the media's leading soap opera last summer.
"The Levy tragedy burst back into the news with the discovery of skeletal remains in Rock Creek Park. No matter that it wasn't clear for hours whether this was the Washington intern who has been missing for more than a year, or that Condit, the man romantically linked to her, has long since been defeated. The media were in full-blown, this-just-in, team-coverage mode."
Just to make sure we get it, the headline writer entitled Kurz' s column: Wall-to-Wall Levy Coverage
Pre-Sept. 11 Excess Returns to TV News After Discovery of Remains.
And so, though we feel sad, experience the pang of vicarious melancholy, feel even funky, for Chandra, we do want to hear everything. In the meantime, we've been pondering the varieties of murder, on the lines of De Quincey's essay on Murder as one of the fine arts. This essay, which really transformed the Newgate narrative into the Real Crime narrative (yes, Ann Rule owes her whole career to the opium addict), is often mentioned as notorious, or infamous, or the like.
Frank Tallis, a crime fiction writer, makes the by now standard reference in his essay in Crime Times,
Original Sin: On the Importance of Creative Killing. Tallis doesn't follow De Quincey's radical path, however. Where De Quincey looked at the murder itself in terms of art, Tallis looks for creativity in the murderer's hobbies -- poetry, crafts of various sorts.
"Yet, even serial killers are guilty of not exploiting their creative powers to the full. Although they are generally very inventive with dead bodies (using them as sex aids or as a source of spare parts from which they can fashion objets d'art), they too show an unexpected conservatism when it comes to the dastardly deed itself. Nilson [see this link for an elaborate description of Nilson's career ], whose quite tolerable poetry elevates him to something of a laureate among villains (and who often spoke unambiguously about the 'art' of murder) was a boring old strangler at heart.
"Looking through one of the many millennial lists that appeared last year I came across a register of twenty titles voted the 'best ever' crime fiction. I couldn't help noticing that the authors of almost all of the genre classics opted for tried and tested methods of murder. They spurned originality. Why? Above, I mentioned that in my quest for an original methodology I was looking for something bold without being silly. And in these matters, the issue of 'silliness' is (as John Major might have said) not inconsiderable. Indeed, it seems to me that there is some kind of mathematical law in operation that enforces the co-variation of originality and silliness. That is to say, the more original the method of despatch, the more silly or ridiculous it will appear - the opposite also being true. Thus, like Icarus, the aspiring crime writer must be wary of hubris. The higher you fly the more likely it is that you will fall from the literary stratosphere."
There's a mistake here that is obvious to any literary critic -- the confounding of technological novelty with creativity. There are poems and novels that combine the two, granted. But the true poetaster of murder is as much in search of the adventure of content as the fashion of form. David Lehman, in an essay on the detective novel, quotes Gertrude Stein, of all people, on the genre. Stein delivers, as she always does, after transcending a few commas:
"Gertrude Stein, who called the detective story "the only really modern novel form," has an analysis that has always fascinated me. (You can piece it together from passages in Everybody�s Autobiography and in her lecture "What Are Masterpieces.") Stein explained that the detective story "gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins." In a detective story, she also observed, "the only person of any importance is dead" and so "there can be no beginning middle and end" in the conventional sense. Stein helps to account for why time in a detective novel flows not in a straight lines but in two directions concurrently: there is the time of the action culminating in the violent event that occurs just before the book begins, and there is the narrative time of the detective�s reconstruction of the events leading to that moment. Stein�s more important insight is that the discovery of the corpse represents the termination of an action at the same time as it initiates a new action, and since this is so, it makes sense to regard the detective as a new hero who emerges at the precise moment that his predecessor, the traditional hero of fiction, meets his violent end. The scene of the crime is the locus of the transition from a flawed hero (the victim) to one who is better equipped for survival (the detective).
"
Chandra, of course, is a heroine without a detective to vindicate her status. D.C. detectives are, indeed, better equipped for survival, as in Lehman's interpretation of Stein, but only in the way of all bureaucrats -- by assiduously avoiding real work, arresting the obvious and framing them when necessary, and generating excuses at will. Of course, Stein was thinking of real detectives, ones that quit the force and work on their own, for paying clients.
It's Chinatown, Jake. Somebody in D.C. is bound to say that at some point in this case.
Finally, LI would recommend the NYPost for leaping, a little late, into the story. The day before, the Post had been proclaiming stentorianly that all we had to fear was fear itself -- which of course was a bunch of bull, since we have to fear, really, being blown up by Al Quaeda folks. That this is what we have to fear should be obvious to even Murdoch's privileged minions. Were they out all last year or what? But today, the Post did itself proud. First the headline: It's Her. Simple, but thrusting. Then the pic of Chandra.Not the usual pic, not the way AOL clumsily promoted the story, like plastering up one of those tiresome have you seen this child posters for its forty million customers to see. The Post ain't no milk company. No, this one is of a dewier, a happier Chandra. Well, of course it is hard not to be happier than at the moment of your murder, but still. This Chandra reminded us that we didn't like it, not a bit, that she'd disappeared like that. Then, then, the Condit angle. Its a matter of tracking the camera, its the sweep, the pan that counts. The WP, of course, scratching at its girdle, provides a map for the reader to locate the skeletal remains, but how about the really important landmark in the case -- the location of Condit's apartment vis a vis the body?
"The location where the remains were found is about three miles from Levy's apartment in Dupont Circle, a little less than two miles from Condit's home, and a mile north of Pierce/Klingle Mansion Nature Center. "
If the Post doesn't get its man to traverse those two miles, timing it, and looking for broken twigs and broken bottles of Condit's favorite brandy, we will definitely lament the decline of tabloid ingenuity in this great land of ours.
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Remora
Gould's is a demise foretold -- why else would he have written in his last book of essays that they were, indeed, the last book of essays -- but LI is sad about it anyway. On first reading, we found the NYT obituary ill-tempered. On second reading, the quote from John Maynard Smith about the "uselessness" of Gould's contribution to evolutionary theory was not the poke in the eye (some emergence of the mole from the ever vigilant network around Robert Wright?) than a on the one hand, on the other hand kind of thing. Although we doubt that Richard Dawkins obituary will suffer from this rather cheap shot:
"Some charged that his theories, like punctuated equilibrium, were so malleable and difficult to pin down, that they were essentially untestable."
We don't imagine the Times repeating the complaint that Dawkins use of the term gene has stretched it way beyond any correspondence to the physical thing, the gene. In Dawkins hands, the gene becomes something like one of Quine's event zones.
Thinking of Gould leads us to recommend this review, in Ha'aretz, of a terminally silly book entitled: "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom," by one Gerald Schroeder:
"...there is the Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin that states: "The following will have no share of the Next World: Those who say that the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in the Bible." Rashi's commentary on this passage is: "Those persons who admit and believe that the dead will be resurrected, but who claim that there is no allusion to this resurrection in the Bible are heretics because they are denying that the Bible mentions the resurrection of the dead."
Gerald Schroeder, author of "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom" [the title of the original book in English, published by the Free Press, 1997] takes an even more extreme position than that of the tana (scholar) in the above-mentioned passage in the Mishna. The Mishna demands that Jews look for an allusion in the Bible to something very specific: the resurrection of the dead, an event that belongs more to the next world than to this one. Schroeder, on the other hand, appears to be determined to find - at least, for himself - allusions in the Bible to many basic theories and many scientific disciplines that are related to this world, not to the next: astronomy, paleontology, geology and cosmic and biological evolution. "
The reviewer, Elia Leibowitz, finds Schroeder to be appalling, which of course he is. The Mishna, in fact, would certainly have mentioned his appallingness if God hadn't been distracted by other matters. The Free Press, which published Schroeder's book, is an establishment, conservative press, famously edited by one of Saul Bellow's children. From Leibowitz' description of Schroeder's book, however, it seems pander without any redeeming value to the dumbest hick prejudices out there in the hinterlands. Here's an ace example, set up by Leibowitz's common sense question:
"If the Bible is a human creation, what scientific sources were at the disposal of the authors of this book, which undoubtedly was written many centuries ago? For example, Schroeder does not explain how the author who wrote the marvelous passage on God's revelation to Moses (Exodus 3) knew that there are 26 dimensions in the world. Schroeder suggests - apparently, with total seriousness - that the numerology of God's explicit name (which is not mentioned by Orthodox Jews), which is 26, alludes to the fact that the world has 26 dimensions. Four of these dimensions - the three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time - are known, while the other 22 are invisible. The hidden dimensions - the word for "hidden" in Hebrew is "alum" - give the world its name, which in Hebrew is "olam," a term that can be interpreted as semantically linked to "alum."
Schroeder gets very excited by the numerology here and from the context in which it appears because 26 is the number of dimensions with whose help the world can be described, according to the early versions of the String Theory, which presents an ultra-modern picture of the world and which occupies a position midway between hypothesis and theory in recent thinking in the world of physics. Does Schroeder think that the author of Exodus was familiar with the String Theory? Did the author know, have familiarity with, and use the mathematical concept of dimension? "
There is a certain level of pap that should properly revulse even the editors of the Free Press. Alas, nobody has ever gone broke marketing New Age books or Conservative screeds. Schroeder's low genius was simply to combine the two. It isn't enough appreciated how much the contemporary right owes to Reagan --Nancy Reagan, that is.
Gould's is a demise foretold -- why else would he have written in his last book of essays that they were, indeed, the last book of essays -- but LI is sad about it anyway. On first reading, we found the NYT obituary ill-tempered. On second reading, the quote from John Maynard Smith about the "uselessness" of Gould's contribution to evolutionary theory was not the poke in the eye (some emergence of the mole from the ever vigilant network around Robert Wright?) than a on the one hand, on the other hand kind of thing. Although we doubt that Richard Dawkins obituary will suffer from this rather cheap shot:
"Some charged that his theories, like punctuated equilibrium, were so malleable and difficult to pin down, that they were essentially untestable."
We don't imagine the Times repeating the complaint that Dawkins use of the term gene has stretched it way beyond any correspondence to the physical thing, the gene. In Dawkins hands, the gene becomes something like one of Quine's event zones.
Thinking of Gould leads us to recommend this review, in Ha'aretz, of a terminally silly book entitled: "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom," by one Gerald Schroeder:
"...there is the Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin that states: "The following will have no share of the Next World: Those who say that the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in the Bible." Rashi's commentary on this passage is: "Those persons who admit and believe that the dead will be resurrected, but who claim that there is no allusion to this resurrection in the Bible are heretics because they are denying that the Bible mentions the resurrection of the dead."
Gerald Schroeder, author of "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom" [the title of the original book in English, published by the Free Press, 1997] takes an even more extreme position than that of the tana (scholar) in the above-mentioned passage in the Mishna. The Mishna demands that Jews look for an allusion in the Bible to something very specific: the resurrection of the dead, an event that belongs more to the next world than to this one. Schroeder, on the other hand, appears to be determined to find - at least, for himself - allusions in the Bible to many basic theories and many scientific disciplines that are related to this world, not to the next: astronomy, paleontology, geology and cosmic and biological evolution. "
The reviewer, Elia Leibowitz, finds Schroeder to be appalling, which of course he is. The Mishna, in fact, would certainly have mentioned his appallingness if God hadn't been distracted by other matters. The Free Press, which published Schroeder's book, is an establishment, conservative press, famously edited by one of Saul Bellow's children. From Leibowitz' description of Schroeder's book, however, it seems pander without any redeeming value to the dumbest hick prejudices out there in the hinterlands. Here's an ace example, set up by Leibowitz's common sense question:
"If the Bible is a human creation, what scientific sources were at the disposal of the authors of this book, which undoubtedly was written many centuries ago? For example, Schroeder does not explain how the author who wrote the marvelous passage on God's revelation to Moses (Exodus 3) knew that there are 26 dimensions in the world. Schroeder suggests - apparently, with total seriousness - that the numerology of God's explicit name (which is not mentioned by Orthodox Jews), which is 26, alludes to the fact that the world has 26 dimensions. Four of these dimensions - the three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time - are known, while the other 22 are invisible. The hidden dimensions - the word for "hidden" in Hebrew is "alum" - give the world its name, which in Hebrew is "olam," a term that can be interpreted as semantically linked to "alum."
Schroeder gets very excited by the numerology here and from the context in which it appears because 26 is the number of dimensions with whose help the world can be described, according to the early versions of the String Theory, which presents an ultra-modern picture of the world and which occupies a position midway between hypothesis and theory in recent thinking in the world of physics. Does Schroeder think that the author of Exodus was familiar with the String Theory? Did the author know, have familiarity with, and use the mathematical concept of dimension? "
There is a certain level of pap that should properly revulse even the editors of the Free Press. Alas, nobody has ever gone broke marketing New Age books or Conservative screeds. Schroeder's low genius was simply to combine the two. It isn't enough appreciated how much the contemporary right owes to Reagan --Nancy Reagan, that is.
Monday, May 20, 2002
Remora
Pigs
Limited Inc recently went to see Yo Mama Tambien with a friend. National origin of said friend:Turkish. Why mention the Turkish? Because this happened: on screen, after seeing a suitable amount of sex (the reason, after all, we were going to see Yo Mama etc.), a scene unrolls on a beach upon which the three main characters had pitched tents. A bunch of semi-wild, brownish looking pigs were shown rooting through these tents. To LI, a pig is a rather cute little animal making a snuffly noise, equipped with a snout. To our friend, however, as it turned out, a pig is a supremely revolting object stimulating the kind of response more usually provoked by some grotesque plumbing mishap that requires a plumber's helper, major amounts of Ajax, and a lot of Lysol.
Today's NYT has definitely put LI in the swinophobic camp. The swine in question have names: "Eugene M. Isenberg, of Nabors Industries; John M. Trani, of Stanley Works, H. John Riley Jr., of Cooper Industries; Herbert L. Henkel, of Ingersoll-Rand, and Bernard J. Duroc-Danner of Weatherford International ." These are the CEOs of companies moving their HQ, by legal legerdemain, to Bermuda, in order to pressure an always servile Congress to lower an already criminally low business tax rate. The fictitious Bermuda address will save on US taxes -- although why that should be the case is anybody's guess. David Kay Johnstone's article, if it were a movie, would show the following scene: Isenberg, an obscenely fat pig who has managed to swill 126 million dollars in the past two years, swilling "tens of millions of dollars" more by moving Nabors Industries, a maker of off shore oil drilling equipment, to Bermuda; John Trani, a gut busting porker famous already for his rudeness, his greed, and his general non-necessity to the Lebenswelt of any civilized culture, pocketing in his little pig pockets "an amount equal to 58 cents of each dollar the company would save in corporate income taxes in the first year after its proposed move to Bermuda." Etc.
The pigs in Yo M. T. "bedunged' the area, as Rabelais would say. However, face it, a little herd of swine like that is nowhere near as messy or toxic as the pigs listed in Johnstone's little piece. Those swine and their like have been trampling down a whole country, or at least doing as much damage as they could, and are even now feasting with their porky cousins on some rare, odious subcommittee up there in D.C., one of those numerous venues where the open conspiracy between the superrich and the superreactionary is cemented in handshakes and shaving cologne. The pigs in Y.M.T, we are told by the rather smug voiceover, were infected. When they were slaughtered and eaten, they gave their consumers trichonosis. Alas, chances are nobody is going to eat the pigs listed in the graf above; however, we would advise 400 degrees F. for at least three hours if, by some chance, one of them is caught and butchered, a la our previous post on Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.
Pigs
Limited Inc recently went to see Yo Mama Tambien with a friend. National origin of said friend:Turkish. Why mention the Turkish? Because this happened: on screen, after seeing a suitable amount of sex (the reason, after all, we were going to see Yo Mama etc.), a scene unrolls on a beach upon which the three main characters had pitched tents. A bunch of semi-wild, brownish looking pigs were shown rooting through these tents. To LI, a pig is a rather cute little animal making a snuffly noise, equipped with a snout. To our friend, however, as it turned out, a pig is a supremely revolting object stimulating the kind of response more usually provoked by some grotesque plumbing mishap that requires a plumber's helper, major amounts of Ajax, and a lot of Lysol.
Today's NYT has definitely put LI in the swinophobic camp. The swine in question have names: "Eugene M. Isenberg, of Nabors Industries; John M. Trani, of Stanley Works, H. John Riley Jr., of Cooper Industries; Herbert L. Henkel, of Ingersoll-Rand, and Bernard J. Duroc-Danner of Weatherford International ." These are the CEOs of companies moving their HQ, by legal legerdemain, to Bermuda, in order to pressure an always servile Congress to lower an already criminally low business tax rate. The fictitious Bermuda address will save on US taxes -- although why that should be the case is anybody's guess. David Kay Johnstone's article, if it were a movie, would show the following scene: Isenberg, an obscenely fat pig who has managed to swill 126 million dollars in the past two years, swilling "tens of millions of dollars" more by moving Nabors Industries, a maker of off shore oil drilling equipment, to Bermuda; John Trani, a gut busting porker famous already for his rudeness, his greed, and his general non-necessity to the Lebenswelt of any civilized culture, pocketing in his little pig pockets "an amount equal to 58 cents of each dollar the company would save in corporate income taxes in the first year after its proposed move to Bermuda." Etc.
The pigs in Yo M. T. "bedunged' the area, as Rabelais would say. However, face it, a little herd of swine like that is nowhere near as messy or toxic as the pigs listed in Johnstone's little piece. Those swine and their like have been trampling down a whole country, or at least doing as much damage as they could, and are even now feasting with their porky cousins on some rare, odious subcommittee up there in D.C., one of those numerous venues where the open conspiracy between the superrich and the superreactionary is cemented in handshakes and shaving cologne. The pigs in Y.M.T, we are told by the rather smug voiceover, were infected. When they were slaughtered and eaten, they gave their consumers trichonosis. Alas, chances are nobody is going to eat the pigs listed in the graf above; however, we would advise 400 degrees F. for at least three hours if, by some chance, one of them is caught and butchered, a la our previous post on Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.
Sunday, May 19, 2002
Remora
Kanan Makiya
The Times (London) reviews Kanan Makiya's new book, The Rock -- a history of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. You'll remember Israel's Charles De Gaulle and man of peace, Ariel Sharon, cemented his reputation for peace by going there to taunt Palestinians two years ago.
Long ago and far away -- in the seventh century -- Jerusalem was conquered by Caliph Umar. Ah, the civilized days of yore! The city was taken from its Christian potentate, one of those provincial ecclesiastics memorable only for scornful eloquence Gibbon devoted to them ten centuries later. For a sense of the ramified cross purposes that have marked this ground forever -- like some cross roads cursed by the devil in backwoods Mississippi -- here's a summary Caliph Umar's investment of Jerusalem:
"Once he realises Jerusalem is lost, the Patriarch Sophronius � keen to gain the best possible terms � arranges a meeting with the caliph. He ensures that this takes place on the day before Palm Sunday, so that �the Arab takeover of Jerusalem would be lost in a show of Christian pomp and pageantry headed by himself�.
"He arrives �in full ecclesiastical dress, gold chains draped over his neck and shoulders, and long silk robes trailing behind in the dust�, although his conqueror greets him in a worn-out battle tunic. And he hands over a covenant of surrender to which has been added a single clause: �No Jew will be authorised to live in Jerusalem.� The caliph asks for a pen and crosses out the offending words."
Well, we do wonder who thrust his arm into the twentieth century and came up with a "pen" for the Caliph. But we like the tenor of this graf.
Makiya is an interesting man. He's an Iraqi architect, got out of Iraq with Hussein's dogs on his tail, wrote a book, Republic of Fear, about the police state ruled over by the aforementioned Hussein, and has recently been a big delver into the theory that Islam began as a alliance between Jews and Arabs to oppose Byzantine Christianity. Nick Cohen has written a nice profile of the guy in the Observer, from which we extract these grafs:
"A consequence of the Gulf War was that Republic of Fear became a bestseller and turned Makiya from an obscure exile working for his father's architecture practice into something of a star. Makiya, who had once called himself a socialist, found new friends but was hated by many of his former comrades for insisting that America forces shouldn't leave Iraq with the worst of both worlds - bombed but with Saddam still in power - but carry on to Baghdad.
"He dates the schism between supporters of universal human rights and those on the Left and Right who regard any Western intervention as imperialism to the moment when the opponents of Saddam were denounced. Israel was built on the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages, Makiya says; Saddam destroyed at least 3,000 Kurdish villages. Makiya, like every other Iraqi democrat you meet in London, has lost patience with those who will oppose the former but not the latter and is desperate for America to support a democratic revolution. All in all, we have a man whose been on Saddam's death-list for years and has more than enough enemies. He has still found the time and courage to pierce the thin skins of religious fundamentalists."
Makiya is a nuanced supporter of the American invasion to be of Iraq. Although maybe that is unfair. Some of what he has written seems to be more in the line of, increase American support for an internal Iraqi revolution. He wrote an op ed piece last November that includes this interpretation of contemporary history:
"The cracks in this American policy toward Iraq were beginning to show in 1996, when for the first time since the gulf war, the United States let Mr. Hussein get away with invading a city � Arbil � in what used to be the safe haven of northern Iraq. That was the year when the American-backed Iraqi opposition to Mr. Hussein was rooted out of the north of the country. More than 100 members of the Iraqi opposition died in Arbil waiting for American air support that never came.
"That was a pivotal moment because the United States shrank from supporting an opposition that would have brought about deep structural change in Iraq � a change that would have included the Kurds and the Shiites in a pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime. Instead, America held back in favor of what it thought to be much safer � an officer-led coup that would replace one set of Baath Party leaders with another. But that judgment proved to be wrong."
There is a deep structural problem in that interpretation of the Iraqi opposition: what basis is there for believing that a party that, for whatever reason, commits itself to a "pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime," is a party with a hope in hell of succeeding in bringing this program to fruition?
What happened at Arbil is significant, but LI reads this incident in a somewhat different way than Makiya. A succinct rundown of the sad and dirty history of US policy towards Iraq, an epitome of redneck machiavellism, is provided by by Nicholas Arons, of the Institute for Policy Studies:
"Over the past several decades, U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition has blown hot and cold. Four months before the 1990 Gulf War, two Republican senators visited Baghdad and reassured Saddam Hussein that Voice of America broadcasts criticizing the regime�s human rights record did not necessarily reflect U.S. government policy. When the Gulf War ended, President Bush called on Iraqi dissidents to rebel, implying that the U.S. would provide air cover. The uprisings materialized, but U.S. air cover never did. When the Iraqi military retaliated, butchering thousands of rebelling Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, U.S. officials claimed that Bush favored a military coup within the regime, not a popular insurrection, which Washington feared would lead to a possible breakup of Iraq and a destabilization of the regional power balance. Internal Iraqi coups were reportedly attempted in July 1992, July 1993, and May 1995. Each ended with mass arrests, executions, and the restructuring of the ruling Ba�ath Party�s security apparatus and tribal alliances, but with Saddam Hussein�s regime intact. Most disastrous was a 1996 covert U.S. military training operation in Arbil in northern Iraq that degenerated into internecine feuds. Saddam Hussein�s forces crushed the INC, forcing its operations to come to a standstill.During the early 1990s, the U.S. spent over $100 million to aid the Iraqi opposition. Most of this money was for public relations and propaganda, not military hardware. In 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated $97 million for Pentagon training and used military equipment. But the INC has been slow to take advantage of Pentagon training, to submit proposals, or to complete audits, so most funds remain unspent.There are over seventy opposition groups within and outside Iraq, representing a diverse network of religious minorities, Iraqi monarchists, and military exiles. The U.S. has long played favorites, pitting these groups against each other. The Clinton administration selected seven for assistance, foreseeing the INC as the umbrella organization. "
So -- what are we to do? as Lenin liked to ask. LI, omniscient as ever, will supply the answer to that question after breakfast, or in some upcoming post. Stay tuned, kids.
Kanan Makiya
The Times (London) reviews Kanan Makiya's new book, The Rock -- a history of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. You'll remember Israel's Charles De Gaulle and man of peace, Ariel Sharon, cemented his reputation for peace by going there to taunt Palestinians two years ago.
Long ago and far away -- in the seventh century -- Jerusalem was conquered by Caliph Umar. Ah, the civilized days of yore! The city was taken from its Christian potentate, one of those provincial ecclesiastics memorable only for scornful eloquence Gibbon devoted to them ten centuries later. For a sense of the ramified cross purposes that have marked this ground forever -- like some cross roads cursed by the devil in backwoods Mississippi -- here's a summary Caliph Umar's investment of Jerusalem:
"Once he realises Jerusalem is lost, the Patriarch Sophronius � keen to gain the best possible terms � arranges a meeting with the caliph. He ensures that this takes place on the day before Palm Sunday, so that �the Arab takeover of Jerusalem would be lost in a show of Christian pomp and pageantry headed by himself�.
"He arrives �in full ecclesiastical dress, gold chains draped over his neck and shoulders, and long silk robes trailing behind in the dust�, although his conqueror greets him in a worn-out battle tunic. And he hands over a covenant of surrender to which has been added a single clause: �No Jew will be authorised to live in Jerusalem.� The caliph asks for a pen and crosses out the offending words."
Well, we do wonder who thrust his arm into the twentieth century and came up with a "pen" for the Caliph. But we like the tenor of this graf.
Makiya is an interesting man. He's an Iraqi architect, got out of Iraq with Hussein's dogs on his tail, wrote a book, Republic of Fear, about the police state ruled over by the aforementioned Hussein, and has recently been a big delver into the theory that Islam began as a alliance between Jews and Arabs to oppose Byzantine Christianity. Nick Cohen has written a nice profile of the guy in the Observer, from which we extract these grafs:
"A consequence of the Gulf War was that Republic of Fear became a bestseller and turned Makiya from an obscure exile working for his father's architecture practice into something of a star. Makiya, who had once called himself a socialist, found new friends but was hated by many of his former comrades for insisting that America forces shouldn't leave Iraq with the worst of both worlds - bombed but with Saddam still in power - but carry on to Baghdad.
"He dates the schism between supporters of universal human rights and those on the Left and Right who regard any Western intervention as imperialism to the moment when the opponents of Saddam were denounced. Israel was built on the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages, Makiya says; Saddam destroyed at least 3,000 Kurdish villages. Makiya, like every other Iraqi democrat you meet in London, has lost patience with those who will oppose the former but not the latter and is desperate for America to support a democratic revolution. All in all, we have a man whose been on Saddam's death-list for years and has more than enough enemies. He has still found the time and courage to pierce the thin skins of religious fundamentalists."
Makiya is a nuanced supporter of the American invasion to be of Iraq. Although maybe that is unfair. Some of what he has written seems to be more in the line of, increase American support for an internal Iraqi revolution. He wrote an op ed piece last November that includes this interpretation of contemporary history:
"The cracks in this American policy toward Iraq were beginning to show in 1996, when for the first time since the gulf war, the United States let Mr. Hussein get away with invading a city � Arbil � in what used to be the safe haven of northern Iraq. That was the year when the American-backed Iraqi opposition to Mr. Hussein was rooted out of the north of the country. More than 100 members of the Iraqi opposition died in Arbil waiting for American air support that never came.
"That was a pivotal moment because the United States shrank from supporting an opposition that would have brought about deep structural change in Iraq � a change that would have included the Kurds and the Shiites in a pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime. Instead, America held back in favor of what it thought to be much safer � an officer-led coup that would replace one set of Baath Party leaders with another. But that judgment proved to be wrong."
There is a deep structural problem in that interpretation of the Iraqi opposition: what basis is there for believing that a party that, for whatever reason, commits itself to a "pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime," is a party with a hope in hell of succeeding in bringing this program to fruition?
What happened at Arbil is significant, but LI reads this incident in a somewhat different way than Makiya. A succinct rundown of the sad and dirty history of US policy towards Iraq, an epitome of redneck machiavellism, is provided by by Nicholas Arons, of the Institute for Policy Studies:
"Over the past several decades, U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition has blown hot and cold. Four months before the 1990 Gulf War, two Republican senators visited Baghdad and reassured Saddam Hussein that Voice of America broadcasts criticizing the regime�s human rights record did not necessarily reflect U.S. government policy. When the Gulf War ended, President Bush called on Iraqi dissidents to rebel, implying that the U.S. would provide air cover. The uprisings materialized, but U.S. air cover never did. When the Iraqi military retaliated, butchering thousands of rebelling Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, U.S. officials claimed that Bush favored a military coup within the regime, not a popular insurrection, which Washington feared would lead to a possible breakup of Iraq and a destabilization of the regional power balance. Internal Iraqi coups were reportedly attempted in July 1992, July 1993, and May 1995. Each ended with mass arrests, executions, and the restructuring of the ruling Ba�ath Party�s security apparatus and tribal alliances, but with Saddam Hussein�s regime intact. Most disastrous was a 1996 covert U.S. military training operation in Arbil in northern Iraq that degenerated into internecine feuds. Saddam Hussein�s forces crushed the INC, forcing its operations to come to a standstill.During the early 1990s, the U.S. spent over $100 million to aid the Iraqi opposition. Most of this money was for public relations and propaganda, not military hardware. In 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated $97 million for Pentagon training and used military equipment. But the INC has been slow to take advantage of Pentagon training, to submit proposals, or to complete audits, so most funds remain unspent.There are over seventy opposition groups within and outside Iraq, representing a diverse network of religious minorities, Iraqi monarchists, and military exiles. The U.S. has long played favorites, pitting these groups against each other. The Clinton administration selected seven for assistance, foreseeing the INC as the umbrella organization. "
So -- what are we to do? as Lenin liked to ask. LI, omniscient as ever, will supply the answer to that question after breakfast, or in some upcoming post. Stay tuned, kids.
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