Remora
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just ground of opposition, and by kindling dispute over the spoils in the hour of success. No obstacle has been so constant, or so difficult to overcome as uncertainty and confusion touching the nature of true liberty. If hostile interests have wrought much injury, false ideas have wrought still more; and its advance is recorded in the increase of knowledge as much as in the improvement of laws. The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them; and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away. -- Lord Acton
There's a general sense on the Left that the tools of invective should be expropriated from the Right. Expropriated? It's become a common paradox, worthy of a Slate writer, that the tools of invective were invented on the Left, usually in the sixties, when the Left was fun. Although the Slate writer, in keeping with the immortal rule of journalism, coined by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop, that the truth is only worth pusuing "up to a point" (that point being determined by the prejudices of who is in charge), never seems to find Leftists like Cockburn hilarious.
However, this cause has been taken up by many on the Left. It's the vague desire that for every Rush Limbaugh, our side should have a Michael Moore. LI can understand this. Certainly, Cockburn's Counterpunch is founded on the premise that the American public will be moved more by rock em and sock em than by the dictates of pure reason. The tabloid style is in Cockburn's blood -- from his dad, Claude -- and such is the style of CP.
But LI feels that this is a misunderstanding of the sources of rightwing triumphalism. That triumphalism does, indeed, go back to the dictates of pure reason, at least as it is purveyed among the makers and shakers in conservative think tanks, and absorbed, with a decreasing amount of substance and an increasing amount of smugness, among the Right's constituencies. The phrase, endless attributed to Churchill, that if a man isn't a socialist at twenty, he has no heart, and if he isn't a conservative at forty, he has no brain,
captures the mood of this crowd exactly. (Incidentally, LI finds that little saying screamingly funny -- it is usually quoted as if we've really hunted down a zinger, here, boys. Wisdom at last! When we know the real organs in question are the penis, in the first instance, and the intestine and anus, in the second. LI prefers Leon Bloy's Exegese des lieux communs, which treats such bourgeois maxims to the acid bath of inversion, in keeping with St. Paul's verse: Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem.)
Excuse the convoluted prolegomena, ladies and germs, and on with tonight's feature presentation!
There's a nice article about pot on the Counterpunch site. It is by Ben Tripp. It scores on honesty -- Tripp is not coy about his own pot experience. We also approve of Tripp's sardonic tone. Of course, there's something peculiar about the "medical" part of the "free marijuana" campaign. There's something refreshing about demanding the end to the banning of pot on the grounds that it is a harmless and pleasurable recreation, instead of its supposed helpfulness in cases of glaucoma. However, there's an underlying rule in Tripp's piece, one endemic to both the Left and the Right in the endlessly sterile war over the Drug war. It is the premise that the main question, when discussing the banning a product, is to find out if it is immoral or harmful. As soon as you have that sorted out, you ban or you don't ban. Is pot as bad as alcohol? Is it better than cigarettes?
This, we think, is inverting the real analysis of the material conditions of banning.
We've just been in correspondance on this very topic with a friend. Our friend believes in banning guns, especially handguns, and LI doesn't. But by making LI defend that belief, our friend has refined the way LI thinks about what is involved in regulation -- in the mechanisms of governance.
Here are some various excerpts from our letters.
"What if the law prohibiting slavery resulted in locking up more people than the slave population?
I mean, the question isn't slavery so much -- and I really think that is something that can be successfully banned within a democracy, because the mechanism for banning it actually increases the domain of democracy -- as the question of what has happened to the poor and working class in this country during the last thirty years. I'm increasingly convinced that the "lockdown America" thesis has some merit. It isn't just that the prison population increased from something like 60 thou in 1970 to 1 and a half million in 1998 -- that really understates the number of people who have been cycled through the prison-court system. It is that this systematic marking, the explosion in the number of offenses that lead to prison, and their assymetrical enforcement, is the shadow Great Society program for dealing with blacks, hispanics, the unemployed, the blue collar white male, etc. It is the threat that has effectively demoralized these groups. I mean, I think there is something symbolically just in the fact that Gore lost the presidency because the Florida State Department "dis-enfranchised" black voters by going through felonies lists and delisting the appropriate (and inappropriate) names -- for this is the same Gore who advocated taking people who are found with drugs in prison and doubling their sentences.
He was, in fact, the perfect candidate for the era of punitive liberalism -- in which, behind a front of seemingly liberal concerns, like controlling the "violence" endemic in American society, the mechanisms were put in place to coerce the poor at the buttend of the policeman's Tasar. As for the real, systematic violence -- the violence of putting environmental hazards in poor neighboorhoods, the violence of allowing corporations to operate in a regulatory breakdown (or is it break dance?), the violence of allowing police to, in affect, abolish the constitution at their leisure in poor neighborhoods in NYC, in LA, in Chicago, in whereever -- that just isn't an issue. It is a joke.
What determines a successful ban is not the harm done by the product or the service, or the morality of it. Rather, it is the way the product or service is embedded in the political economy. That's it. That's the one and holy clue. Marx was right: you have to inverse the Hegelian dialectic before it comes out right -- start with the material relations of society, rather than the ideas. Or in this case, the morality. Or the harm.
So what are the signs of an unsuccessful ban? Let's just talk about one of them. An unsuccessful ban depends not on the compliance of the people in the marketplace -- the producers, dealers and users -- but on the police. The police are always the regulators of the last resort. They are the most inefficient, and do the most harm to liberty, justice and equality -- my trinity, still, after all these years. This is a rule of thumb that has some exceptions. Those exceptions depend, however, on the scale of the supply. For instance, when you look at environmental regulation, a good part of it is devoted to protecting a rare resource -- the water in a particular area, or endangered species, etc. In this case, police power can efficiently be concentrated, and can operate with a maximum respect for liberty. Even there, however, the only way a ban will be more beneficial than harmful is if it on a good or service that is amenable to other sources of cultural suasion -- this is why I think banning the trade in endangered bird feathers in this country worked at the turn of the century. The Audubon society, first of all, was able to militate against bird massacring, and there was a ready substitute available -- you could easily manufacture artificial flowers. But this point can't be gotten over in the rhetorical cloud around the 'war on drugs' because nobody wants to discuss substitutes -- they want to discuss abstinence. In other words, they don't want the market to be what it is.
So the market continues, its suppression continues, and the cops form the interface between the two. This is a disaster.
I think the number one act that can lower violence in this country is not the banning of handguns. I think that will eventually increase it. No, if we really want to eliminate gun violence -- gun homicide violence, that is, not gun suicide violence -- is the legalization of the drug trade. I think that is undoubtedly the biggest weapon used against the poor in this country -- it is where the cracks of race and class gape. Until that happens, I don't think there will ever be a real decline in gun violence -- or any violence -- as compared to other countries. And I think a debate (that will never happen) should occur about the lockdown mentality. And I think that debate would put into question what I see as the increasingly upper middle class composition of the only kind of lefty discourse that gets allowed in the media of this country, which can stage a million mom march but seems disinclined, to say the least, to stage, say, the five million, the ten million mom march of mothers whose kids, husbands, lovers and fathers have been cycled through the lockdown state. Unless, of course, that class doesn't get something -- when its candidate, Gore, loses, then they come out shrieking. Where was that shrieking when Gore and his boss were presiding over the sharpening of laws to imprison more people! Or calmly let neighborhoods slip into the maws of the penal system? When you build your house of virtue on the backs of the classe laborieuse et dangereuse, eventually it will tumble down. And before it does, a pervasive, unconscious sense of the hypocrisy of the whole exercise will become the norm -- feeding into the most reactionary currents abroad in the country, as well as demoralizing the most progressive segment.
So I guess this is my deal. I think we really are living in the Foucaultian nightmare.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
Remora
The Justice department scored another smashing triumph over that unnamed colluder of all terrorisms, your constitutional rights, today. According to the NYT, Judges Ralph B. Guy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; Edward Leavy of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; and Laurence H. Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who were all appointed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court and make up an entity grandiosely called the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, overturned the first ruling against the government's wiretap request in an 'intelligence' investigation ever by a special secret lower court, which bears the bogus moniker of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.
Now, LI's question is, how did these Kangaroo Courts come into existence? We are always ready, on this site, to bash Bush. But it turns out the Bush Justice department is merely magnifying trends that started in the previous administration, with the US PATRIOT act merely the enhanced, special effects version of Clinton's own anti-terrorism legislation. There's a fascinating review of the Kangaroo Intelligence Malarky courts by Patrick Poole here. The Courts were instituted under the Ford administration. Ford was, apparently, terribly afraid that the intelligence infrastructure was being hurt by the Church committee. In Poole's words:
"The FISA bill was a product of closed-door negotiations lasting several months between legislators and the Justice Department. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who had attempted to regulate the power of warrantless surveillance in four different sessions, sponsored the FISA legislation. The FISC concept was a compromise between legislators who wanted the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA), the only two agencies affected by the FISA statute, to follow the standard procedure for obtaining a court order required in criminal investigations and legislators. The federal agencies believed that they should be completely unfettered in conducting their foreign intelligence surveillance work inside US borders. Hence, the FISC was born."
The seventies was a regular cauldron of agencies being hatched to crawl across the American landscape in search of rights to devour. The orthodox historical account is that this was the decade in which the system of civil rights violations was unravelled, via the Church committee and several pieces of legislation mandating intelligence agencies to spill the secrets to selected congressional committees. LI has read several accounts of the era, and none mentioned FISC.
Poole, however, shows that FISC is not a monster summoned from the deep by Ashcroft in all of his evil. Rather, since the end of the Cold War -- during, that is, the administration of Clinton -- FISC went into overtime, ruling on twice the number of cases that were ruled on in Reagan's era. As always, the secret growth of some malign habit in one administration gets carried over to the next administration, regardless of party, to metastasize among the flags and desks. As for the vaunted independence of the judiciary -- a concept that can be disposed of only at the expense of all democratic processes -- forget about it! Yesterday's news! Montesquieu and all the rest of those guy never faced "pure evil," as we now like to call our opponents. Ah yes, "pure evil" calls for a whole bunch of special whoopass. So we go to FISC, which has the rigidity and integrity and independence of a wet strand of pasta. The reason FISC hit the news today was that the court, for the first time, questioned the nature of a case. That is, they decided that the over-ride of our rights in some "intelligence" case was really a criminal case. So the FISC appeals court was duly convened, and of course they trashed the idea that there are any rights that the Justice Department can't take away from us, in the name of National Security.
Where are all those Orwellites -- the Hitches and such, who are using Orwell as a prop to support an unjustifiable and unprovoked war? Perhaps they better come out of the corners. But of course -- they are too busy doing battle with such dangers to the republic, and all of Western Civ, as Susan Sontag. A few thousand dark skinned individuals being stripped of their rights by secret courts at the discretion of the Justice department doesn't really register on the list of current dangers.
The Justice department scored another smashing triumph over that unnamed colluder of all terrorisms, your constitutional rights, today. According to the NYT, Judges Ralph B. Guy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; Edward Leavy of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; and Laurence H. Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who were all appointed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist of the Supreme Court and make up an entity grandiosely called the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, overturned the first ruling against the government's wiretap request in an 'intelligence' investigation ever by a special secret lower court, which bears the bogus moniker of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.
Now, LI's question is, how did these Kangaroo Courts come into existence? We are always ready, on this site, to bash Bush. But it turns out the Bush Justice department is merely magnifying trends that started in the previous administration, with the US PATRIOT act merely the enhanced, special effects version of Clinton's own anti-terrorism legislation. There's a fascinating review of the Kangaroo Intelligence Malarky courts by Patrick Poole here. The Courts were instituted under the Ford administration. Ford was, apparently, terribly afraid that the intelligence infrastructure was being hurt by the Church committee. In Poole's words:
"The FISA bill was a product of closed-door negotiations lasting several months between legislators and the Justice Department. Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who had attempted to regulate the power of warrantless surveillance in four different sessions, sponsored the FISA legislation. The FISC concept was a compromise between legislators who wanted the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA), the only two agencies affected by the FISA statute, to follow the standard procedure for obtaining a court order required in criminal investigations and legislators. The federal agencies believed that they should be completely unfettered in conducting their foreign intelligence surveillance work inside US borders. Hence, the FISC was born."
The seventies was a regular cauldron of agencies being hatched to crawl across the American landscape in search of rights to devour. The orthodox historical account is that this was the decade in which the system of civil rights violations was unravelled, via the Church committee and several pieces of legislation mandating intelligence agencies to spill the secrets to selected congressional committees. LI has read several accounts of the era, and none mentioned FISC.
Poole, however, shows that FISC is not a monster summoned from the deep by Ashcroft in all of his evil. Rather, since the end of the Cold War -- during, that is, the administration of Clinton -- FISC went into overtime, ruling on twice the number of cases that were ruled on in Reagan's era. As always, the secret growth of some malign habit in one administration gets carried over to the next administration, regardless of party, to metastasize among the flags and desks. As for the vaunted independence of the judiciary -- a concept that can be disposed of only at the expense of all democratic processes -- forget about it! Yesterday's news! Montesquieu and all the rest of those guy never faced "pure evil," as we now like to call our opponents. Ah yes, "pure evil" calls for a whole bunch of special whoopass. So we go to FISC, which has the rigidity and integrity and independence of a wet strand of pasta. The reason FISC hit the news today was that the court, for the first time, questioned the nature of a case. That is, they decided that the over-ride of our rights in some "intelligence" case was really a criminal case. So the FISC appeals court was duly convened, and of course they trashed the idea that there are any rights that the Justice Department can't take away from us, in the name of National Security.
Where are all those Orwellites -- the Hitches and such, who are using Orwell as a prop to support an unjustifiable and unprovoked war? Perhaps they better come out of the corners. But of course -- they are too busy doing battle with such dangers to the republic, and all of Western Civ, as Susan Sontag. A few thousand dark skinned individuals being stripped of their rights by secret courts at the discretion of the Justice department doesn't really register on the list of current dangers.
Monday, November 18, 2002
Remora
Out of the American mangle
The poor you don't need to have with you always. But if you do, and you give them credit (only 19.9% compounded monthly!), why, make their life a living hell for a generation. That was, and is, the message and substance of the bankruptcy "reform" act that died, again, in the Congress this week. Here's the Friday NYT:
"With a long-stalled bill to toughen bankruptcy laws declared dead today in Congress because of abortion politics, Senate Democrats and House Republicans were left to blame each other for the collapse of a measure that otherwise had broad bipartisan support and was championed by powerful corporate lobbyists."
The New York Times is long on the Homeric epithet -- you know, those things like "wine dark sea", or "swift footed Achilles", that fill in rhythmic spaces in the epic. The 'broad bipartisan support" and "championed by powerful corporate lobbyists" is the Times standard description of the bankruptcy act. LI would suggest, perhaps, corrupt enforcement of usurious practices similar in kind to that practiced by your average loan shark," but maybe the rhythm is off. What do you think?
LI has written about that undead bill before -- don't worry, it will be back. It was killed this time due to the ineffable mysteries of legislation: it got caught in a pr abortion rights -- right to life crossfire. LI has gone into the penetralia of the bill once too often before -- the way it penalizes the working class in extraordinary ways, the way it privileges paying back credit card debt over, say, paying child support, the way it sets up one more obstacle to blue collar redemption in an age in which every clintonoid politician tells us that we have to promote "flexible" job markets.
Open Secrets has a nice little summary of the issue and the parties in play. Here's their abridged version of what the legislation is about:
HOW THE INTEREST GROUPS SEE IT
Banks, credit card companies and credit unions have been leading the drive to rewrite of the nation�s bankruptcy laws. The American Financial Services Association, the trade group that represents the major credit card companies, joined other financial industry trade associations, Visa and Mastercard in 1998 to form the National Consumer Bankruptcy Coalition. The coalition has been the leading voice in favor of bankruptcy reform, contending that more than 30 percent of those filing bankruptcy have the ability to repay significant portions of their debts. But the financial sector isn�t the only group lobbying on this issue. Gambling interests, including some of Las Vegas� biggest casinos, also are pushing for a new bankruptcy law, according to their lobbying filings. Car dealers, retail stores and even entertainment companies also have weighed in on the issue, mostly in support of reform.
Consumer groups, including the Consumer Federation of America and Public Citizen, are lobbying against the bill. They contend Congress should crack down on the financial companies, which they criticize for handing out credit cards and credit lines indiscriminately. Additionally, they contend the legislation is too far-reaching and could ultimately do more harm to indebted Americans than limit fraud and abuse.
As things go in America, there is, of course, another story about credit -- its extension and forgiveness -- that clues us in to the central moral of our skewed times. For the slackers and the lags that gamble and renege, that buy their fancy cars and thumb their noses at GM, well, their hatefulness -- and we know how bad bad bad they are -- could be washed as white as snow if only they were , well, a little higher in the food chain. There, the terms of the loan are reversed. There's a nice story about the unpaid and forgiven loans of CEOs and their immediate underlings, and the board members that "govern" them, in Business 2.0 -- happily coinciding with the vote on the the credit card company wish list act. Here's the core graf:
"Roughly three-quarters of the nation's top 1,500 companies -- 1,133, to be precise -- have disclosed loans to insiders in recent regulatory filings, according to a study due to be published in November by the Corporate Library, a firm based in Portland, Maine, that analyzes corporate data and advocates greater accountability to shareholders. Of the companies that disclosed loans, 510 made them for the purchase of stock, for a handful of other uses such as housing and tax payments, or for purposes that weren't specified at all. The average loan was about $5.5 million."
My my, 5.5 million dollars. For that money, even a slag might start biting his knuckles and wondering how, oh how he was going to repay it. But the GMs and MBNA America Banks that are weaping oceans of tears over the stray sheep lying through their sheep teeth in bankruptcy courts thoughout the land have, at least, a good heart. These are essentially Christian corporations when it comes to their highest employees. Character, you know, attracts its own redemption. That is why owing such terrific amounts of the ready has not distracted our governors from the tiller. No, they bravely shoulder those five million dollar, or fifteen million dollar, or even four hundred million dollar debts. Yes, and now we can admire them more, because it is so hard, what with yachts and depreciating stocks and such, to come up with 5.5 mil to pay back their companies! oh, could this mean the loss of invaluable personnel? These giants of industry, sucked into the industrial waste with the rest of us! Gasp!
But gentle reader, don't weap for them. This is a big country. Here's another delicious graf:
"All told, loans to insiders in recent years may have reached more than $5 billion. Hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, perhaps as much as $1 billion, have been or will be forgiven, based on Securities and Exchange Commission records and estimates by corporate compensation experts. This suggests that companies will be eating losses from insider loans for years to come. But the more damaging legacy may be that the practice -- by helping fuel the explosion in CEO pay that is at the heart of much of today's outcry over corporate behavior -- will contribute to the perception that management has all too often lined its pockets at investors' expense, and to the public's distrust of how American companies are run."
Luckily, most of these loans aren't made with interest -- that would be oh so gross. I mean, we are talking about some of america's best and brightest -- interest is something they collect, darling, not something they should be forced to pay out. But that the rate of non-payment is 20 percent -- now, that is something, ain't it?
The poster boy for corporate loans in the King article is from Microsoft. Meet Rick Belluzzo:
"Early in September, Microsoft (MSFT) had a small confession to make. Back in December 2000, the company had lent its president, Rick Belluzzo, $15 million, taking some of his stock options as collateral. Though the options were underwater and had no value at the time, Microsoft figured its stock would eventually go up. But by last August, when Belluzzo resigned, the options were even further submerged. So the software giant forgave the loan -- it had no choice under the deal Belluzzo had struck -- charged off the $15 million, and said its belated disclosure was "appropriate" because the loan was really just an "advance." "
Now, to be fair, our legislature has officially outlawed insider loans of the Belluzzo type. The Sarbanes-Oxley act definitely puts them under bar. This will call for a lot of semantic ingenuity on the part of corporate lawyers. In the meantime, the bankruptcy bill will rise again. You can MBNA bank on it!
Out of the American mangle
The poor you don't need to have with you always. But if you do, and you give them credit (only 19.9% compounded monthly!), why, make their life a living hell for a generation. That was, and is, the message and substance of the bankruptcy "reform" act that died, again, in the Congress this week. Here's the Friday NYT:
"With a long-stalled bill to toughen bankruptcy laws declared dead today in Congress because of abortion politics, Senate Democrats and House Republicans were left to blame each other for the collapse of a measure that otherwise had broad bipartisan support and was championed by powerful corporate lobbyists."
The New York Times is long on the Homeric epithet -- you know, those things like "wine dark sea", or "swift footed Achilles", that fill in rhythmic spaces in the epic. The 'broad bipartisan support" and "championed by powerful corporate lobbyists" is the Times standard description of the bankruptcy act. LI would suggest, perhaps, corrupt enforcement of usurious practices similar in kind to that practiced by your average loan shark," but maybe the rhythm is off. What do you think?
LI has written about that undead bill before -- don't worry, it will be back. It was killed this time due to the ineffable mysteries of legislation: it got caught in a pr abortion rights -- right to life crossfire. LI has gone into the penetralia of the bill once too often before -- the way it penalizes the working class in extraordinary ways, the way it privileges paying back credit card debt over, say, paying child support, the way it sets up one more obstacle to blue collar redemption in an age in which every clintonoid politician tells us that we have to promote "flexible" job markets.
Open Secrets has a nice little summary of the issue and the parties in play. Here's their abridged version of what the legislation is about:
HOW THE INTEREST GROUPS SEE IT
Banks, credit card companies and credit unions have been leading the drive to rewrite of the nation�s bankruptcy laws. The American Financial Services Association, the trade group that represents the major credit card companies, joined other financial industry trade associations, Visa and Mastercard in 1998 to form the National Consumer Bankruptcy Coalition. The coalition has been the leading voice in favor of bankruptcy reform, contending that more than 30 percent of those filing bankruptcy have the ability to repay significant portions of their debts. But the financial sector isn�t the only group lobbying on this issue. Gambling interests, including some of Las Vegas� biggest casinos, also are pushing for a new bankruptcy law, according to their lobbying filings. Car dealers, retail stores and even entertainment companies also have weighed in on the issue, mostly in support of reform.
Consumer groups, including the Consumer Federation of America and Public Citizen, are lobbying against the bill. They contend Congress should crack down on the financial companies, which they criticize for handing out credit cards and credit lines indiscriminately. Additionally, they contend the legislation is too far-reaching and could ultimately do more harm to indebted Americans than limit fraud and abuse.
As things go in America, there is, of course, another story about credit -- its extension and forgiveness -- that clues us in to the central moral of our skewed times. For the slackers and the lags that gamble and renege, that buy their fancy cars and thumb their noses at GM, well, their hatefulness -- and we know how bad bad bad they are -- could be washed as white as snow if only they were , well, a little higher in the food chain. There, the terms of the loan are reversed. There's a nice story about the unpaid and forgiven loans of CEOs and their immediate underlings, and the board members that "govern" them, in Business 2.0 -- happily coinciding with the vote on the the credit card company wish list act. Here's the core graf:
"Roughly three-quarters of the nation's top 1,500 companies -- 1,133, to be precise -- have disclosed loans to insiders in recent regulatory filings, according to a study due to be published in November by the Corporate Library, a firm based in Portland, Maine, that analyzes corporate data and advocates greater accountability to shareholders. Of the companies that disclosed loans, 510 made them for the purchase of stock, for a handful of other uses such as housing and tax payments, or for purposes that weren't specified at all. The average loan was about $5.5 million."
My my, 5.5 million dollars. For that money, even a slag might start biting his knuckles and wondering how, oh how he was going to repay it. But the GMs and MBNA America Banks that are weaping oceans of tears over the stray sheep lying through their sheep teeth in bankruptcy courts thoughout the land have, at least, a good heart. These are essentially Christian corporations when it comes to their highest employees. Character, you know, attracts its own redemption. That is why owing such terrific amounts of the ready has not distracted our governors from the tiller. No, they bravely shoulder those five million dollar, or fifteen million dollar, or even four hundred million dollar debts. Yes, and now we can admire them more, because it is so hard, what with yachts and depreciating stocks and such, to come up with 5.5 mil to pay back their companies! oh, could this mean the loss of invaluable personnel? These giants of industry, sucked into the industrial waste with the rest of us! Gasp!
But gentle reader, don't weap for them. This is a big country. Here's another delicious graf:
"All told, loans to insiders in recent years may have reached more than $5 billion. Hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, perhaps as much as $1 billion, have been or will be forgiven, based on Securities and Exchange Commission records and estimates by corporate compensation experts. This suggests that companies will be eating losses from insider loans for years to come. But the more damaging legacy may be that the practice -- by helping fuel the explosion in CEO pay that is at the heart of much of today's outcry over corporate behavior -- will contribute to the perception that management has all too often lined its pockets at investors' expense, and to the public's distrust of how American companies are run."
Luckily, most of these loans aren't made with interest -- that would be oh so gross. I mean, we are talking about some of america's best and brightest -- interest is something they collect, darling, not something they should be forced to pay out. But that the rate of non-payment is 20 percent -- now, that is something, ain't it?
The poster boy for corporate loans in the King article is from Microsoft. Meet Rick Belluzzo:
"Early in September, Microsoft (MSFT) had a small confession to make. Back in December 2000, the company had lent its president, Rick Belluzzo, $15 million, taking some of his stock options as collateral. Though the options were underwater and had no value at the time, Microsoft figured its stock would eventually go up. But by last August, when Belluzzo resigned, the options were even further submerged. So the software giant forgave the loan -- it had no choice under the deal Belluzzo had struck -- charged off the $15 million, and said its belated disclosure was "appropriate" because the loan was really just an "advance." "
Now, to be fair, our legislature has officially outlawed insider loans of the Belluzzo type. The Sarbanes-Oxley act definitely puts them under bar. This will call for a lot of semantic ingenuity on the part of corporate lawyers. In the meantime, the bankruptcy bill will rise again. You can MBNA bank on it!
Friday, November 15, 2002
Remora
LI finds discussions of "saving" the Democratic party repellent and boring. Who cares? The DC press is, of course, in hyperdrive about the elections, but that is because politics is their industry. Still, we've been following the discussion between Robert Reich and Joe Klein at Slate, partly because these two are typical DC-kabuki types. The ritual entrances. The stereotypical phrases. The rigid decorum, the predictable plot. Without, we should say, plumbing any of the deep sources of kabuki's beauty -- the body's presence to itself as a drama of obstruction and annihilation, passion as a disruption on the surface of expression, etc.
Klein, in particular, illustrates the convention of hypocrisy that makes political discourse, as it is practiced by the op ed set, so off-putting.
This is how Klein starts out:
"Some say move left. Some say move right. Both are right and both are wrong. If we're to have a vaguely interesting national debate, the Democrats have to move forward�away from the boring, tiny, and tactical issues, and language, and interest groups that the party has championed in recent years. This will mean a change in style as well as content. Above all, it will mean an extremely risky change in focus from the beloved and reliable geezers to the edgy, cynical, apathetic young people. The electorate has to be expanded. But the most valuable cache of votes isn't to be had in the poor neighborhoods�as admirable as such efforts may be�it is to be found on the college campuses, where the next generation of activists lives. We can discuss the policy details over the next few days."
So, what is the premise here? That Klein is going to give us the technique by which the Democrats can win elections. But what he is actually doing? He is trying to influence the party to represent his point of view. In DC talk, when that point of view comes from, say, a teacher's union rep, it is known as special interest. As if there were some disinterested point of view. And as if, hey, the political pundit set represents that disinterestedness. When Robert Reich replies to Klein with his prescription for the Democratic Party -- which is, basically, to represent Robert Reich's lefty point of view vigorously -- this is how Klein replies:
"You mock moderates, call them Republicans-Lite. But, to my mind --and I'm a flaming moderate - the best new ideas have come from the middle of the spectrum in recent years. In domestic policy, it was the idea that centralized, industrial-era bureaucratic systems are too rigid and too expensive (urban school districts, for example); it's better to give individuals money -�tax credits, vouchers, whatever you want to call it -and allow them to make their own choices on health care, housing, prescription drugs, day care, schooling, and so forth. You were a pioneer in the field, Bob, with your voucherized job training and retraining program at the Labor Department. The reactionary left opposes this idea (the AFL-CIO wasn't too hot for your program, if I recall). The Republicans pay lip service to "empowerment" but don't want to actually pay money for it. The progressive middle says: Fund it amply, monitor it, regulate it - but do it. (By the way, tax disincentives are a good idea, too: I'd favor a cigarette-level tax on bullets, for example; I would tax corporations on their "externalities" - the social and environmental disruptions they cause -- not their profits.)
In foreign policy, the basic idea is global citizenship: American leadership -- with lots and lots of quiet diplomacy and consultation -- in organizing collective action against terrorists and rogue governments, against environmental depredation, against the transnational efforts of corporations to escape taxation and of criminal combines to escape the law, and the free flow of goods, services, information, and, to the greatest possible extent, people."
Now, what is this discussion really about? It isn't about how Democrats can rebuild their party, it is about molding a party to one's own beliefs. LI thinks that is honorable. LI thinks the dishonor comes in the pretense that one is simply trying to "save" the Democratic party. It is this third way bull crap. LI doesn't vote for a faction just because it is a faction. Nobody does. The technicians who "analyze" politics -- the Broders, the Kleins, the Barneses, etc. -- are really just importing their ideas into politics, under the pretense that their ideas represent the 'center' -- represent the average American voter.
Well, LI is unrepresentative of the average. Our motto is: screw the average. If you look at this country and you say, hey, we are rich enough to shed six trillion dollars worth of wealth in the stock market and still buy record numbers of cars, so we are rich enough to design a national health care system, then you work for that through a number of modalities. A faction exists as one in a set of mechanisms of suasion. And who cares if you run this goal through the Republicans or the Democrats? The point is the goal.
Now, if Klein doesn't like national health insurance, fine. But there is no reason that the Democratic party should abandon national health insurance. Certainly the reason can't be that it is "unpopular" -- the whole point is to make it popular. And, contra Klein, that happens all the time, as it should. Our two big factions exist to make ideas that the guy selling cigs at the Tenneco isn't entertainng at the moment entertain-able. Look how the abolition of inheritance taxes was made popular. Or how invading Iraq was made popular. This is what factions are for. It is about struggle. So the first task of the Reichs in the Democratic party, it seems to me, is to unmask the language of consensus for what it is: the language of position taking. And deal with it as such.
LI finds discussions of "saving" the Democratic party repellent and boring. Who cares? The DC press is, of course, in hyperdrive about the elections, but that is because politics is their industry. Still, we've been following the discussion between Robert Reich and Joe Klein at Slate, partly because these two are typical DC-kabuki types. The ritual entrances. The stereotypical phrases. The rigid decorum, the predictable plot. Without, we should say, plumbing any of the deep sources of kabuki's beauty -- the body's presence to itself as a drama of obstruction and annihilation, passion as a disruption on the surface of expression, etc.
Klein, in particular, illustrates the convention of hypocrisy that makes political discourse, as it is practiced by the op ed set, so off-putting.
This is how Klein starts out:
"Some say move left. Some say move right. Both are right and both are wrong. If we're to have a vaguely interesting national debate, the Democrats have to move forward�away from the boring, tiny, and tactical issues, and language, and interest groups that the party has championed in recent years. This will mean a change in style as well as content. Above all, it will mean an extremely risky change in focus from the beloved and reliable geezers to the edgy, cynical, apathetic young people. The electorate has to be expanded. But the most valuable cache of votes isn't to be had in the poor neighborhoods�as admirable as such efforts may be�it is to be found on the college campuses, where the next generation of activists lives. We can discuss the policy details over the next few days."
So, what is the premise here? That Klein is going to give us the technique by which the Democrats can win elections. But what he is actually doing? He is trying to influence the party to represent his point of view. In DC talk, when that point of view comes from, say, a teacher's union rep, it is known as special interest. As if there were some disinterested point of view. And as if, hey, the political pundit set represents that disinterestedness. When Robert Reich replies to Klein with his prescription for the Democratic Party -- which is, basically, to represent Robert Reich's lefty point of view vigorously -- this is how Klein replies:
"You mock moderates, call them Republicans-Lite. But, to my mind --and I'm a flaming moderate - the best new ideas have come from the middle of the spectrum in recent years. In domestic policy, it was the idea that centralized, industrial-era bureaucratic systems are too rigid and too expensive (urban school districts, for example); it's better to give individuals money -�tax credits, vouchers, whatever you want to call it -and allow them to make their own choices on health care, housing, prescription drugs, day care, schooling, and so forth. You were a pioneer in the field, Bob, with your voucherized job training and retraining program at the Labor Department. The reactionary left opposes this idea (the AFL-CIO wasn't too hot for your program, if I recall). The Republicans pay lip service to "empowerment" but don't want to actually pay money for it. The progressive middle says: Fund it amply, monitor it, regulate it - but do it. (By the way, tax disincentives are a good idea, too: I'd favor a cigarette-level tax on bullets, for example; I would tax corporations on their "externalities" - the social and environmental disruptions they cause -- not their profits.)
In foreign policy, the basic idea is global citizenship: American leadership -- with lots and lots of quiet diplomacy and consultation -- in organizing collective action against terrorists and rogue governments, against environmental depredation, against the transnational efforts of corporations to escape taxation and of criminal combines to escape the law, and the free flow of goods, services, information, and, to the greatest possible extent, people."
Now, what is this discussion really about? It isn't about how Democrats can rebuild their party, it is about molding a party to one's own beliefs. LI thinks that is honorable. LI thinks the dishonor comes in the pretense that one is simply trying to "save" the Democratic party. It is this third way bull crap. LI doesn't vote for a faction just because it is a faction. Nobody does. The technicians who "analyze" politics -- the Broders, the Kleins, the Barneses, etc. -- are really just importing their ideas into politics, under the pretense that their ideas represent the 'center' -- represent the average American voter.
Well, LI is unrepresentative of the average. Our motto is: screw the average. If you look at this country and you say, hey, we are rich enough to shed six trillion dollars worth of wealth in the stock market and still buy record numbers of cars, so we are rich enough to design a national health care system, then you work for that through a number of modalities. A faction exists as one in a set of mechanisms of suasion. And who cares if you run this goal through the Republicans or the Democrats? The point is the goal.
Now, if Klein doesn't like national health insurance, fine. But there is no reason that the Democratic party should abandon national health insurance. Certainly the reason can't be that it is "unpopular" -- the whole point is to make it popular. And, contra Klein, that happens all the time, as it should. Our two big factions exist to make ideas that the guy selling cigs at the Tenneco isn't entertainng at the moment entertain-able. Look how the abolition of inheritance taxes was made popular. Or how invading Iraq was made popular. This is what factions are for. It is about struggle. So the first task of the Reichs in the Democratic party, it seems to me, is to unmask the language of consensus for what it is: the language of position taking. And deal with it as such.
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
Remora
LI, having liberally annointed our back molars with a codeine, or benzocodeine, salve, would like to do a piece on today's big news story. Sorry, the consideration of time as a component of picturing will have to be postponed -- we aren't Boethius, nor were meant to be...
Onto the big story, which as my readers will know by now, is the on-going collapse of National Century Financial Services. Oh, you thought it was the bread and circuses, or rather war games, thing going on in D.C.?
No, today we have an excellent example of why the press can calmly talk about how the "wave of corporate scandals" has broken. That's because nobody wants to talk about it. Plus, no star is involved in this scandal.
The story is in the biz section of the Times.
"The rapid collapse of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc., a large provider of cash flow financing, is sending hundreds of health care companies and their affiliates scrambling to avoid big financial trouble."
Cash flow financing means this. The thirty thousand dollars that X is paying to have his prostate operated on is out there in segments. The insurance is paying for it, but the deductible means that X has to pay for it on credit. Here comes NCF, then, offering to aggregate such debts and securitize them, much as mortgages are securitized. Beautiful, right?
"Two of National Century's largest clients have sought Chapter 11 protection from their creditors, while the dubious status of two of the company's bond deals worth $3.3 billion has set off a spate of threatened legal action against National Century, J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank One and other firms involved in the asset-backed securities. Amid the meltdown, National Century's chairman and chief executive, Lance K. Poulsen, quit both posts on Friday and left the company, which is based in Dublin, Ohio."
Ah, there's a little backstory with this Lance Poulson. And with National Century. But first, here's the fishiness in this creature from the depth. This will tell you pretty much all you need to know about the state of corporate creative financing in this "reform" period:
"This complex brew [of bonds based on hospital receivables] began to boil over in May when the Fitch rating agency warned that it might downgrade National Century bonds, which it did in July. It cited "increasing levels of defaulted and rejected receivables" and a lack of information from the company. This made it harder for National Century to issue new bonds, and the company soon ran into trouble finding the money to pay its clients.
In response, National Century began taking money from the reserve funds of two bond trusts � NPF VI and NPF XII. When J. P. Morgan, as trustee for NPF VI, asked for documentation as to how this was acceptable, National Century stopped taking money from NPF VI and eventually replaced it.
But the trustee of NPF XII, Bank One, is said to have made no such demand, so the company took about $300 million from that reserve fund, draining it to almost zero. At first, bondholders assumed the money went to buy new receivables. But in their motion filed in the Franklin County Court of Pleas in Columbus, Ohio, they say Mr. Poulsen admitted using it for other purposes."
Well, well. It turns out that junior, who flunked eighth grade mass, could have done better than bought the mortgage theory. He could have pointed out that hospital receivables are much more volatile, subject to a much higher percentage of defaults and restructurings. And traditionally, such volatility attracts, well, the loan shark -- because sharks are the type to be able to cover their bets with high interest and the threat of immediate violence following non-payment. Mr. Poulson isn't exactly a loan shark, but according to this account by Doug Noland (who writes the Credit Bubble report for Safehaven, a website for contrarian investors), the history of National Century is spotted with shady characters -- or should we say fly specked?
First, the sentence about the use of NPFXII funds in the Times story is confusing. It implies that the bondholders would be fine with the draining of the reserve fund to invest in further receivables. But of course, that is not what a reserve fund is for -- it is to serve as a barrier against the risk of defaults.
"From Dow Jones� David Feldheim: �No ratings Rx appears in sight for National Century Financial Enterprises (NCFE) amid concerns about revenue streams backing some of its securitizations. In the 11-plus years since its inception, NCFE has become the largest financier of healthcare receivables, according to its spokesman Jim Nickell. Over this period NCFE has securitized in excess of $6 billion of healthcare receivables, and it has bought substantially more than that from providers. It has also drawn recent scrutiny from the ratings agencies who rate those securitizations. Fitch Ratings said over the weekend that it has been informed by interested parties that NCFE directed the trustee to reroute certain funds intended for the NPF XII reserve accounts in order to fund the purchase of new receivables. �The company's apparent willingness to disregard the documents and commit such a serious breach, causes Fitch to question NCFE�s viability.��
Second, how did this company get so big, and why has nobody heard of it? One of the results of "restructuring" investment regulations in the eighties and nineties is that everybody gets to play investment bank. Without any pesky regulators looking at what you are doing. So anywhere cash is being transferred, somebody, somewhere, is trying to get a piece of that. Securitizing, slicing and dicing issues -- it is a wondrous way to make money, as long as you aren't on the other end when the stuff starts coming apart.
According to Noland, the company, founded in 91, has ties to a group of other companies, many of them connected to one Steven Scott. Scott ran a company called PhyAmerica Physician Group, which was delisted by the NYSE when its stock plummeted to pennies. PhyAmerica seems to be running on money loaned to it by NCF. In 2000, this became an issue, as stockholders sued Scott and Poulson for, as they put it, draining the company: "They alleged that Scott and Lance K. Poulsen, National Century�s president, had an agreement: Poulsen would fund Scott�s spending while Scott �looks the other way while Poulsen improperly diverts the company�s cash into NCFE�s coffers.� Even as the company�s finances deteriorated, PhyAmerica bought one corporate jet for $6.6 million and leased another for $848,000 -- expenses that benefited Scott because he owned the aviation company that provided the jets, shareholders said.� Also from the article: �There was a report on �60 Minutes� accusing�Dr. Steven Scott, of hiring doctors who had been disciplined or sued for malpractice.�
Forbes profiled the 'bearded" Poulson, and found him to be sanguine about NCFE -- at least in October. From Risky Business, on Friday October 11, By Seth Lubove:
"In between the court appearances Poulsen has thrived in his niche, making himself and his partners comfortably wealthy, though in ways that might raise eyebrows among traditional lenders. Poulsen, his wife and other company executives, for instance, have occasionally taken personal stakes in NCFE's borrowers. In addition to lending $107 million to something called Med Diversified as of the end of last year, NCFE also owns 6% of the company, or 5 million shares, while Poulsen personally controls another 109,000 shares of preferred stock. Med Diversified also acquired a company that was 22% owned by Donald Ayers, an NCFE cofounder and Med Diversified director. Med Diversified is dependent on NCFE in more ways than one. It derived $4 million in revenues in its 2001 fiscal year from NCFE for various "consulting services," in addition to being owed another $4.3 million in unpaid invoices from NCFE. Another $2 million in revenues during the same period came from an outfit called Millennium Healthcare, a company owned "indirectly" at the time by NCFE. Med Diversified fared badly anyway. It was delisted from the American Stock Exchange in July after losing $605 million in the past two fiscal years on sales of $296 million."
Medicine, attracting only the most sterling kind of entrepreneur! Noland's Safe Haven articule digs up some other intricate connections between NCF, Poulson, and various schemes, in twisted deals that have the involute structure of Jacobean drama, without the pretty poetry. This comes on the heels of two other medical scandals: one at Health South, and one at Tenet. Well, if hospitals start going bankrupt due to this Ohio case, the newspapers might even have to pay attention to it. We'll see.
LI, having liberally annointed our back molars with a codeine, or benzocodeine, salve, would like to do a piece on today's big news story. Sorry, the consideration of time as a component of picturing will have to be postponed -- we aren't Boethius, nor were meant to be...
Onto the big story, which as my readers will know by now, is the on-going collapse of National Century Financial Services. Oh, you thought it was the bread and circuses, or rather war games, thing going on in D.C.?
No, today we have an excellent example of why the press can calmly talk about how the "wave of corporate scandals" has broken. That's because nobody wants to talk about it. Plus, no star is involved in this scandal.
The story is in the biz section of the Times.
"The rapid collapse of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc., a large provider of cash flow financing, is sending hundreds of health care companies and their affiliates scrambling to avoid big financial trouble."
Cash flow financing means this. The thirty thousand dollars that X is paying to have his prostate operated on is out there in segments. The insurance is paying for it, but the deductible means that X has to pay for it on credit. Here comes NCF, then, offering to aggregate such debts and securitize them, much as mortgages are securitized. Beautiful, right?
"Two of National Century's largest clients have sought Chapter 11 protection from their creditors, while the dubious status of two of the company's bond deals worth $3.3 billion has set off a spate of threatened legal action against National Century, J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank One and other firms involved in the asset-backed securities. Amid the meltdown, National Century's chairman and chief executive, Lance K. Poulsen, quit both posts on Friday and left the company, which is based in Dublin, Ohio."
Ah, there's a little backstory with this Lance Poulson. And with National Century. But first, here's the fishiness in this creature from the depth. This will tell you pretty much all you need to know about the state of corporate creative financing in this "reform" period:
"This complex brew [of bonds based on hospital receivables] began to boil over in May when the Fitch rating agency warned that it might downgrade National Century bonds, which it did in July. It cited "increasing levels of defaulted and rejected receivables" and a lack of information from the company. This made it harder for National Century to issue new bonds, and the company soon ran into trouble finding the money to pay its clients.
In response, National Century began taking money from the reserve funds of two bond trusts � NPF VI and NPF XII. When J. P. Morgan, as trustee for NPF VI, asked for documentation as to how this was acceptable, National Century stopped taking money from NPF VI and eventually replaced it.
But the trustee of NPF XII, Bank One, is said to have made no such demand, so the company took about $300 million from that reserve fund, draining it to almost zero. At first, bondholders assumed the money went to buy new receivables. But in their motion filed in the Franklin County Court of Pleas in Columbus, Ohio, they say Mr. Poulsen admitted using it for other purposes."
Well, well. It turns out that junior, who flunked eighth grade mass, could have done better than bought the mortgage theory. He could have pointed out that hospital receivables are much more volatile, subject to a much higher percentage of defaults and restructurings. And traditionally, such volatility attracts, well, the loan shark -- because sharks are the type to be able to cover their bets with high interest and the threat of immediate violence following non-payment. Mr. Poulson isn't exactly a loan shark, but according to this account by Doug Noland (who writes the Credit Bubble report for Safehaven, a website for contrarian investors), the history of National Century is spotted with shady characters -- or should we say fly specked?
First, the sentence about the use of NPFXII funds in the Times story is confusing. It implies that the bondholders would be fine with the draining of the reserve fund to invest in further receivables. But of course, that is not what a reserve fund is for -- it is to serve as a barrier against the risk of defaults.
"From Dow Jones� David Feldheim: �No ratings Rx appears in sight for National Century Financial Enterprises (NCFE) amid concerns about revenue streams backing some of its securitizations. In the 11-plus years since its inception, NCFE has become the largest financier of healthcare receivables, according to its spokesman Jim Nickell. Over this period NCFE has securitized in excess of $6 billion of healthcare receivables, and it has bought substantially more than that from providers. It has also drawn recent scrutiny from the ratings agencies who rate those securitizations. Fitch Ratings said over the weekend that it has been informed by interested parties that NCFE directed the trustee to reroute certain funds intended for the NPF XII reserve accounts in order to fund the purchase of new receivables. �The company's apparent willingness to disregard the documents and commit such a serious breach, causes Fitch to question NCFE�s viability.��
Second, how did this company get so big, and why has nobody heard of it? One of the results of "restructuring" investment regulations in the eighties and nineties is that everybody gets to play investment bank. Without any pesky regulators looking at what you are doing. So anywhere cash is being transferred, somebody, somewhere, is trying to get a piece of that. Securitizing, slicing and dicing issues -- it is a wondrous way to make money, as long as you aren't on the other end when the stuff starts coming apart.
According to Noland, the company, founded in 91, has ties to a group of other companies, many of them connected to one Steven Scott. Scott ran a company called PhyAmerica Physician Group, which was delisted by the NYSE when its stock plummeted to pennies. PhyAmerica seems to be running on money loaned to it by NCF. In 2000, this became an issue, as stockholders sued Scott and Poulson for, as they put it, draining the company: "They alleged that Scott and Lance K. Poulsen, National Century�s president, had an agreement: Poulsen would fund Scott�s spending while Scott �looks the other way while Poulsen improperly diverts the company�s cash into NCFE�s coffers.� Even as the company�s finances deteriorated, PhyAmerica bought one corporate jet for $6.6 million and leased another for $848,000 -- expenses that benefited Scott because he owned the aviation company that provided the jets, shareholders said.� Also from the article: �There was a report on �60 Minutes� accusing�Dr. Steven Scott, of hiring doctors who had been disciplined or sued for malpractice.�
Forbes profiled the 'bearded" Poulson, and found him to be sanguine about NCFE -- at least in October. From Risky Business, on Friday October 11, By Seth Lubove:
"In between the court appearances Poulsen has thrived in his niche, making himself and his partners comfortably wealthy, though in ways that might raise eyebrows among traditional lenders. Poulsen, his wife and other company executives, for instance, have occasionally taken personal stakes in NCFE's borrowers. In addition to lending $107 million to something called Med Diversified as of the end of last year, NCFE also owns 6% of the company, or 5 million shares, while Poulsen personally controls another 109,000 shares of preferred stock. Med Diversified also acquired a company that was 22% owned by Donald Ayers, an NCFE cofounder and Med Diversified director. Med Diversified is dependent on NCFE in more ways than one. It derived $4 million in revenues in its 2001 fiscal year from NCFE for various "consulting services," in addition to being owed another $4.3 million in unpaid invoices from NCFE. Another $2 million in revenues during the same period came from an outfit called Millennium Healthcare, a company owned "indirectly" at the time by NCFE. Med Diversified fared badly anyway. It was delisted from the American Stock Exchange in July after losing $605 million in the past two fiscal years on sales of $296 million."
Medicine, attracting only the most sterling kind of entrepreneur! Noland's Safe Haven articule digs up some other intricate connections between NCF, Poulson, and various schemes, in twisted deals that have the involute structure of Jacobean drama, without the pretty poetry. This comes on the heels of two other medical scandals: one at Health South, and one at Tenet. Well, if hospitals start going bankrupt due to this Ohio case, the newspapers might even have to pay attention to it. We'll see.
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Notice
I am not going to be as regular in posting this week, due to a toothache. Actually, three of my back teeth are in death star mode, causing me to suffer the pangs of hell in regular cycles. Like after I eat. Alas, having no money, what is LI to do? Well, this morning we called up the Texas Dental Examiners, who referred us to Texans for Healthy Smiles, who referred us to a clinic that will supposedly process us through the dread labyrinth of paperwork so that we can actually get these teeth extracted. Whether this will work or not is hard to say. If it doesn't, we'll rob a store and give ourselves up, and enjoy the amenities of prison dentistry. Anything to get rid of these molesting molars.
In the meantime, here's a thought from our friend, Tom. He sent us a little Moby Dick like medley of quotes, except not about the great fish. Here's the joke on the board above his office desk.
"The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizacker told Heideggar the story of a man who spent all his day in a tavern. Asked why, the man replied that it was because of his wife: 'She talks and talks and talks and talks." He was asked, "What does she talk about?" He replied, "Ah, that she doesn't say." Heideggar is supposed to have said, "Yes, that is how it is."
I am not going to be as regular in posting this week, due to a toothache. Actually, three of my back teeth are in death star mode, causing me to suffer the pangs of hell in regular cycles. Like after I eat. Alas, having no money, what is LI to do? Well, this morning we called up the Texas Dental Examiners, who referred us to Texans for Healthy Smiles, who referred us to a clinic that will supposedly process us through the dread labyrinth of paperwork so that we can actually get these teeth extracted. Whether this will work or not is hard to say. If it doesn't, we'll rob a store and give ourselves up, and enjoy the amenities of prison dentistry. Anything to get rid of these molesting molars.
In the meantime, here's a thought from our friend, Tom. He sent us a little Moby Dick like medley of quotes, except not about the great fish. Here's the joke on the board above his office desk.
"The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizacker told Heideggar the story of a man who spent all his day in a tavern. Asked why, the man replied that it was because of his wife: 'She talks and talks and talks and talks." He was asked, "What does she talk about?" He replied, "Ah, that she doesn't say." Heideggar is supposed to have said, "Yes, that is how it is."
Monday, November 11, 2002
Dope
We know for certain that sight is one of the most rapid actions we can perform. In an instant we see an infinite number of forms, still we only take in thoroughly one object at a time. Supposing that you, Reader, were to glance rapidly at the whole of this written page, you would instantly perceive that it was covered with various letters; but you could not, in the time, recognise what the letters were, nor what they were meant to tell. Hence you would need to see them word by word, line by line to be able to understand the letters. -Leonardo da Vinci
Seeking some calm from the excitements of this week � the injustice meted out to Winona! the latest report on the distribution of stock options during the 90s! und so weiter -- LI has been reading Leo Steinberg�s marvelous essay, Leonardo�s Incessant Last Supper. Steinberg is, as he calls it, a Leonardista. Among the splendors of the book are the photos he has taken, over the years, of the Last Supper. These photos record the changes made to that painting as its slow, inexorable restoration moved glacially forward. Frankly, if the restoration does look like the end page fold-out � and we have no doubt it does � LI suspects that, in another twenty years, we are going to be talking about the Last Supper Disaster. One has only to compare James Major, the second figure to Christ�s left, as he has been �restored� to earlier pictures. The restoration seems to have sentimentalized the painting, and to have created a muddiness where, before, there was a decay. I agree with Jacques Franck:"Ninety per cent of the work has disappeared, and the fact that you repaint 90 per cent is to me something that has not much sense."
This is not, I think, Steinberg�s opinion.
But what interested us, among other things, about Steinberg�s essay was the comparison of readings of the Last Supper. As Steinberg demonstrates, from the eighteenth century to quite recently, a secular interpretation prevailed. The �moment� portrayed in the painting, on this interpretation, was Jesus� revelation that he was going to be betrayed. Goethe was one of the great institutors of this interpretation � although, as a dissident pointed out, in 1903, Goethe depended on a reproduction of The Last Supper by Raphael Morghen that left the wine out of the painting � the wine in the glass before Jesus� upraised right hand. This is crucial to the counter-secular reading. This is how the scene is reported in Matthew, 26:
�19: And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover.
20: Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.
21: And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
22: And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?
23: And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.
24: The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
25: Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.
26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
27: And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;
28: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
29: But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.�
which was that the consternation at the table was provoked by Jesus�s pronouncement, this is my body, take eat, this is my blood.�
Steinberg traces the rise of the secular interpretation, buoyed by the spirit of Goethe, until the early sixties. But then the second, eucharistic interpretation began to emerge and contest the secularists. The salient fact about the Last Supper is that, at both ends of the table, the disciples register some kind of shock, while, at the very center, Jesus looks preternaturally mild. So what is this contrast? The secularists think that Leonardo has painted a Shakespearian tableau. Jesus� pronouncement, which could be uttered with cunning, or with anger, is uttered, by the son of man, with a sort of shame for the traitor � while the disciples, human all too human, have fallen to debating, among themselves, the crucial question of cultic loyalty. The eucharistics, according to the secularists, can�t account for the appearance of shock among the disciples. But this is because the secularists are thinking of the eucharist as it has been normalized for the last two thousand years. The eucharistics, however, think Leonardo has transported us back to the initial, shocking moment in which a man who these twelve men regarded as the son of God said to them, in effect, this bread, here, and this wine, over here, represent my body and my blood. And I want you to eat these things in order to remember me.
This is a shocking thing to hear. It is so very sexual, so very intimate, it releases a train of wild images in the mind that are normally repressed. It goes way back, saying something like that. There are stone floors of caves, there is firelight, there are night sweats, there is struggle. It forces the person who hears it to really look at the flesh saying it , and know that flesh is the world � that we live in a fully carnal world. The cannibal�s speech is that the mouth that speaks eats other mouths that speak. Words turn flesh, and flesh turns into words, feverishly. This is the effect caught in John 6, where Jesus says:
51: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
52: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
53: Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
The effect of this speech on the disciples is remarked on in verset 60:
60: Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?
So, this is the eucharistic case. But, as the saying is, sometimes Hegel happens. That is, sometimes the thesis and antithesis really do form a synthesis. Steinberg claims that the current consensus has moved to the conjunction of the secularist and eucharistic versions � that in this instance, as the hands go out for bread and wine, as the disciples cluster, as Thomas raises a finger and James Major spreads his arms in amazement, what is happening is a dream condensation, in the classical Freudian sense, of these two events � a Verdichtung. Steinberg does not make the Freudian detour, tempting as it might appear. LI is going to avoid it too � merely referring readers to the Chapter on Dreamwork in the Interpretation of Dreams. http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/chap06a.htm
We are after a different subject, which is: how exactly do we analyze the temporal element in the pictorial? In other words, how is time constituted in the picture?
Well, more on that tomorrow.
We know for certain that sight is one of the most rapid actions we can perform. In an instant we see an infinite number of forms, still we only take in thoroughly one object at a time. Supposing that you, Reader, were to glance rapidly at the whole of this written page, you would instantly perceive that it was covered with various letters; but you could not, in the time, recognise what the letters were, nor what they were meant to tell. Hence you would need to see them word by word, line by line to be able to understand the letters. -Leonardo da Vinci
Seeking some calm from the excitements of this week � the injustice meted out to Winona! the latest report on the distribution of stock options during the 90s! und so weiter -- LI has been reading Leo Steinberg�s marvelous essay, Leonardo�s Incessant Last Supper. Steinberg is, as he calls it, a Leonardista. Among the splendors of the book are the photos he has taken, over the years, of the Last Supper. These photos record the changes made to that painting as its slow, inexorable restoration moved glacially forward. Frankly, if the restoration does look like the end page fold-out � and we have no doubt it does � LI suspects that, in another twenty years, we are going to be talking about the Last Supper Disaster. One has only to compare James Major, the second figure to Christ�s left, as he has been �restored� to earlier pictures. The restoration seems to have sentimentalized the painting, and to have created a muddiness where, before, there was a decay. I agree with Jacques Franck:"Ninety per cent of the work has disappeared, and the fact that you repaint 90 per cent is to me something that has not much sense."
This is not, I think, Steinberg�s opinion.
But what interested us, among other things, about Steinberg�s essay was the comparison of readings of the Last Supper. As Steinberg demonstrates, from the eighteenth century to quite recently, a secular interpretation prevailed. The �moment� portrayed in the painting, on this interpretation, was Jesus� revelation that he was going to be betrayed. Goethe was one of the great institutors of this interpretation � although, as a dissident pointed out, in 1903, Goethe depended on a reproduction of The Last Supper by Raphael Morghen that left the wine out of the painting � the wine in the glass before Jesus� upraised right hand. This is crucial to the counter-secular reading. This is how the scene is reported in Matthew, 26:
�19: And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover.
20: Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.
21: And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
22: And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?
23: And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.
24: The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
25: Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.
26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
27: And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;
28: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
29: But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.�
which was that the consternation at the table was provoked by Jesus�s pronouncement, this is my body, take eat, this is my blood.�
Steinberg traces the rise of the secular interpretation, buoyed by the spirit of Goethe, until the early sixties. But then the second, eucharistic interpretation began to emerge and contest the secularists. The salient fact about the Last Supper is that, at both ends of the table, the disciples register some kind of shock, while, at the very center, Jesus looks preternaturally mild. So what is this contrast? The secularists think that Leonardo has painted a Shakespearian tableau. Jesus� pronouncement, which could be uttered with cunning, or with anger, is uttered, by the son of man, with a sort of shame for the traitor � while the disciples, human all too human, have fallen to debating, among themselves, the crucial question of cultic loyalty. The eucharistics, according to the secularists, can�t account for the appearance of shock among the disciples. But this is because the secularists are thinking of the eucharist as it has been normalized for the last two thousand years. The eucharistics, however, think Leonardo has transported us back to the initial, shocking moment in which a man who these twelve men regarded as the son of God said to them, in effect, this bread, here, and this wine, over here, represent my body and my blood. And I want you to eat these things in order to remember me.
This is a shocking thing to hear. It is so very sexual, so very intimate, it releases a train of wild images in the mind that are normally repressed. It goes way back, saying something like that. There are stone floors of caves, there is firelight, there are night sweats, there is struggle. It forces the person who hears it to really look at the flesh saying it , and know that flesh is the world � that we live in a fully carnal world. The cannibal�s speech is that the mouth that speaks eats other mouths that speak. Words turn flesh, and flesh turns into words, feverishly. This is the effect caught in John 6, where Jesus says:
51: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
52: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
53: Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
The effect of this speech on the disciples is remarked on in verset 60:
60: Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?
So, this is the eucharistic case. But, as the saying is, sometimes Hegel happens. That is, sometimes the thesis and antithesis really do form a synthesis. Steinberg claims that the current consensus has moved to the conjunction of the secularist and eucharistic versions � that in this instance, as the hands go out for bread and wine, as the disciples cluster, as Thomas raises a finger and James Major spreads his arms in amazement, what is happening is a dream condensation, in the classical Freudian sense, of these two events � a Verdichtung. Steinberg does not make the Freudian detour, tempting as it might appear. LI is going to avoid it too � merely referring readers to the Chapter on Dreamwork in the Interpretation of Dreams. http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/chap06a.htm
We are after a different subject, which is: how exactly do we analyze the temporal element in the pictorial? In other words, how is time constituted in the picture?
Well, more on that tomorrow.
Friday, November 08, 2002
Remora
LI was walking up near the University yesterday when we heard our name. It was an old friend. We said, conventionally, how are you doing, and our friend said well, what did you think?
The news had depressed her utterly, she said.
We said, yeah, it sucked.
What are we going to do, she said? I want to move out of the country!
Well, we said, we don't feel that strongly about it. But we are pretty blue all the same. Damn blue.
How about the arctic wildlife refuge, she said.
Uh, we said, just because they are putting Winona in jail shouldn't effect Alaska in particular.
I'm talking about the elections! she said.
Oh, we said.
Yes, LI, with our inverted sense of historical events, was much more impressed by the railroading of Winona Ryder on a trumped up shoplifting charge than by changes in that other factory town, DC.
LI has never found Winona Ryder a fascinating femme de film. But her singling out for this ludicrous circus trial because she looked like she was going to steal items from Sachs Fifth Avenue -- this strikes us as an intolerable injustice. Or rather, it is justice with klieg lights, the justice that comes from lynching a name victim for political effect. And now she faces three years. What did Millikan serve, five? What is Ken Lay going to serve? What is Buddy Ebbers going to serve? Winona's mistake was not to have plundered systematically, with Sachs Fifth stock, rather than purloining a dress and a scarf.
The LA times gives an in-depth, and very industry perspective on the Ryder dust up:
"Actress Winona Ryder may be in for a white-knuckle ride over the next few months, but experts across Hollywood said Wednesday morning's conviction for grand theft and vandalism will not have a long-lasting impact on her career."
Here's the meat of the story:
"Alan Meyer of Sitrick & Co., one of the biggest crisis management firms in the country, said the "injury day" was emblematic of how poorly Ryder's ordeal has been handled from the beginning.
"She was only charged with shoplifting, not felony hit-and-run or child molestation. It should have been a 48-hour story, not a six-month story. Why this wasn't resolved very quickly, I don't understand," Meyer said, adding that the pair of convictions were "a real blow."
"The easiest way out of something like this is to acknowledge you did it and throw yourself on the public's mercy. Show remorse. Be contrite. People love that," he said."
People do love that. The contrition. The talk shows. Barbara. Jay. The recollection, in tranquility, of one's motives in that vague moment. The moment the cops caught one being sucked off in a car. The moment one was found with some crack rock. The moment one drove, drunkenly, in the wrong lane on the Sunset freeway for eleven miles. Those breakdowns, so helpfully glossed by the talk show host, the p.r. guy, the studio head, the compliant Vanity Fair interviewer. The return to grace.
But there are other people -- LI is one of them -- who want our Winona to be defiant. Remember Robert Mitchum. He did his time and implied, at every turn, screw the bastards. So screw Sachs! But W.R. 's Free Winona campaign, and her obvious disdain for the charges, is not going down well in the Industry. The honchos are speaking. The honchos want contrition. They want the image to be, depression, she was out of her mind, the transition between this wierd Beetlejuice girl, this vulnerable punk, the black clothes, and the woman, we've watched her grow up. That is the image. We've watched her, she's part of the family. And so she gets the kleptomania out when she is seventeen. Not thirty one. The honchos want the therapeutic talk ladled on. and this is what they are saying:
"Her publicist, Mara Buxbaum, insists business is booming, but the claim that Ryder was approached this year to star in at least one film could not be independently confirmed.
Buxbaum said Ryder will "definitely not be doing the talk show circuit" after the trial, although the actress probably will sit down at some point for the obligatory tell-all interview."
We were reminded of Zola's Au bonheur des dames, his novel about a Paris department store. If someone is smart -- if LI was smarter -- someone would do the op ed piece, or the column piece, this Sunday in the LA Times, with the potted story of kleptomania. Its origins in the 19th century, the discovery that this, like breast cancer, was a disease of upper class women, and the inference that it must be related to some vice, some decay. All the anger of which upper class women are the recipients from the great mass -- from me, from you -- and the way it forms a warp of unconscious energy, and like all energy sooner or later finds a form. In art, in the novel, in a D.A.'s brief, in a psychologist's treatise.
Au bonheur des dames -- which we can translate, approximately, as What the Ladies Like -- is Zola's novel about a department store. The manager of the store, the insufferable Mouret, has already featured as the boarding house stud in Pot-Bouille -- which outgrosses even contemporary novels. Zola saw that between matter and woman there was a suspicious relationship -- something like love. This has already been castigated in our good old Western tradition -- the horror that accrues to matter as matter was once called idolatry. The idea that a thing possesses a divinity -- the psychological roots of this anxiety aren't explored enough. We are palmed off with stories of human sacrifice, or demons, or whatever -- but didn't Jehovah himself appear in a flame? Actually, a flame, through its de-materializing power, is a brilliant vehicle for a God as schizophrenic about matter as the one in Genesis -- the world is good, but evidently, the genitals of two of his creatures, revealed in all their interesting possibilities by munching on a fruit, are another matter. There's a little pussy and dick in every thing we buy, you know.
So Zola scoped out the buying scene. His klepto is a very proper bourgeois with a name that should remind us of Madame Bovary: Madame de Boves. She has a cowlike presence, and discovering Au bonheur des dames, she is ravished -- raped -- by the material on display -- the silks, the lace, the sheets, the textures, the textiles.
Here's how Zola describes her:
Mme de Boves venait de d�passer la quarantaine. C'�tait une femme superbe, � encolure de d�esse, avec une grande face r�guli�re et de larges yeux dormants, que son mari, inspecteur g�n�ral des haras, avait �pous�e pour sa beaut�.
(Madame de Bove had just passed forty. This was a superb woman, with the mane of a goddess, a large face with regular features, and large sleepy eyes, whose husband, a general inspector of horse stables, had married her for her beauty.)
Zola was nothing if not a gross painter of signs. Boves is close to bovine. Her husband is an inspector of haras -- the stables in which horses are kept. The large sleepy eyes -- the eyes of a cow -- seal the deal: this is one of Zola's animal-people.
She can be aroused, of course. But unlike Nana, she is not a woman of mouth and ass, a woman who, superbly, leaves an odor. Rather, to come out of her animal entrancement, she needs things. It is the store that excites her. It is the department store that eventually leads to her doom. At the end of the book, she is shopping with her daughter. As a clerk goes to take apart a packet of lace, Mme de Boves's daughter turns to speak to her:
Mme de Boves ne r�pondait pas. Alors, la fille, en tournant sa face molle, vit sa m�re, les mains au milieu des dentelles, en train de faire dispara�tre, dans la manche de son manteau, des volants de point d'Alen�on. Elle ne parut pas surprise, elle s'avan�ait pour la cacher d'un mouvement instinctif, lorsque Jouve, brusquement, se dressa entre elles. Il se penchait, il murmurait � l'oreille de la comtesse, d'une voix polie:
- Madame, veuillez me suivre.
(Madame de Boves didn't reply. It was thus that her daughter, in turning her soft face, saw her mother, her hands in the middle of the laces, engaged in making them disappear into the sleave of her coat, this Alencon pattern. She didn't appear surprised, she went forward, instinctively, to hide her mother, when Jouve, brusquely, stood before them. He leaned forward and whispered politely in the ear of the countess: 'Madame, if you could please follow me.")
Those Jouves! Just doing their jobs. But there's something dirty in the whole Sachs deal. We hope, when W.R. does the "obligatory tell all interview," that she doesn't grovel. She was the victim of a put up job, and she should imply that at every turn. And damn the honchos.
LI was walking up near the University yesterday when we heard our name. It was an old friend. We said, conventionally, how are you doing, and our friend said well, what did you think?
The news had depressed her utterly, she said.
We said, yeah, it sucked.
What are we going to do, she said? I want to move out of the country!
Well, we said, we don't feel that strongly about it. But we are pretty blue all the same. Damn blue.
How about the arctic wildlife refuge, she said.
Uh, we said, just because they are putting Winona in jail shouldn't effect Alaska in particular.
I'm talking about the elections! she said.
Oh, we said.
Yes, LI, with our inverted sense of historical events, was much more impressed by the railroading of Winona Ryder on a trumped up shoplifting charge than by changes in that other factory town, DC.
LI has never found Winona Ryder a fascinating femme de film. But her singling out for this ludicrous circus trial because she looked like she was going to steal items from Sachs Fifth Avenue -- this strikes us as an intolerable injustice. Or rather, it is justice with klieg lights, the justice that comes from lynching a name victim for political effect. And now she faces three years. What did Millikan serve, five? What is Ken Lay going to serve? What is Buddy Ebbers going to serve? Winona's mistake was not to have plundered systematically, with Sachs Fifth stock, rather than purloining a dress and a scarf.
The LA times gives an in-depth, and very industry perspective on the Ryder dust up:
"Actress Winona Ryder may be in for a white-knuckle ride over the next few months, but experts across Hollywood said Wednesday morning's conviction for grand theft and vandalism will not have a long-lasting impact on her career."
Here's the meat of the story:
"Alan Meyer of Sitrick & Co., one of the biggest crisis management firms in the country, said the "injury day" was emblematic of how poorly Ryder's ordeal has been handled from the beginning.
"She was only charged with shoplifting, not felony hit-and-run or child molestation. It should have been a 48-hour story, not a six-month story. Why this wasn't resolved very quickly, I don't understand," Meyer said, adding that the pair of convictions were "a real blow."
"The easiest way out of something like this is to acknowledge you did it and throw yourself on the public's mercy. Show remorse. Be contrite. People love that," he said."
People do love that. The contrition. The talk shows. Barbara. Jay. The recollection, in tranquility, of one's motives in that vague moment. The moment the cops caught one being sucked off in a car. The moment one was found with some crack rock. The moment one drove, drunkenly, in the wrong lane on the Sunset freeway for eleven miles. Those breakdowns, so helpfully glossed by the talk show host, the p.r. guy, the studio head, the compliant Vanity Fair interviewer. The return to grace.
But there are other people -- LI is one of them -- who want our Winona to be defiant. Remember Robert Mitchum. He did his time and implied, at every turn, screw the bastards. So screw Sachs! But W.R. 's Free Winona campaign, and her obvious disdain for the charges, is not going down well in the Industry. The honchos are speaking. The honchos want contrition. They want the image to be, depression, she was out of her mind, the transition between this wierd Beetlejuice girl, this vulnerable punk, the black clothes, and the woman, we've watched her grow up. That is the image. We've watched her, she's part of the family. And so she gets the kleptomania out when she is seventeen. Not thirty one. The honchos want the therapeutic talk ladled on. and this is what they are saying:
"Her publicist, Mara Buxbaum, insists business is booming, but the claim that Ryder was approached this year to star in at least one film could not be independently confirmed.
Buxbaum said Ryder will "definitely not be doing the talk show circuit" after the trial, although the actress probably will sit down at some point for the obligatory tell-all interview."
We were reminded of Zola's Au bonheur des dames, his novel about a Paris department store. If someone is smart -- if LI was smarter -- someone would do the op ed piece, or the column piece, this Sunday in the LA Times, with the potted story of kleptomania. Its origins in the 19th century, the discovery that this, like breast cancer, was a disease of upper class women, and the inference that it must be related to some vice, some decay. All the anger of which upper class women are the recipients from the great mass -- from me, from you -- and the way it forms a warp of unconscious energy, and like all energy sooner or later finds a form. In art, in the novel, in a D.A.'s brief, in a psychologist's treatise.
Au bonheur des dames -- which we can translate, approximately, as What the Ladies Like -- is Zola's novel about a department store. The manager of the store, the insufferable Mouret, has already featured as the boarding house stud in Pot-Bouille -- which outgrosses even contemporary novels. Zola saw that between matter and woman there was a suspicious relationship -- something like love. This has already been castigated in our good old Western tradition -- the horror that accrues to matter as matter was once called idolatry. The idea that a thing possesses a divinity -- the psychological roots of this anxiety aren't explored enough. We are palmed off with stories of human sacrifice, or demons, or whatever -- but didn't Jehovah himself appear in a flame? Actually, a flame, through its de-materializing power, is a brilliant vehicle for a God as schizophrenic about matter as the one in Genesis -- the world is good, but evidently, the genitals of two of his creatures, revealed in all their interesting possibilities by munching on a fruit, are another matter. There's a little pussy and dick in every thing we buy, you know.
So Zola scoped out the buying scene. His klepto is a very proper bourgeois with a name that should remind us of Madame Bovary: Madame de Boves. She has a cowlike presence, and discovering Au bonheur des dames, she is ravished -- raped -- by the material on display -- the silks, the lace, the sheets, the textures, the textiles.
Here's how Zola describes her:
Mme de Boves venait de d�passer la quarantaine. C'�tait une femme superbe, � encolure de d�esse, avec une grande face r�guli�re et de larges yeux dormants, que son mari, inspecteur g�n�ral des haras, avait �pous�e pour sa beaut�.
(Madame de Bove had just passed forty. This was a superb woman, with the mane of a goddess, a large face with regular features, and large sleepy eyes, whose husband, a general inspector of horse stables, had married her for her beauty.)
Zola was nothing if not a gross painter of signs. Boves is close to bovine. Her husband is an inspector of haras -- the stables in which horses are kept. The large sleepy eyes -- the eyes of a cow -- seal the deal: this is one of Zola's animal-people.
She can be aroused, of course. But unlike Nana, she is not a woman of mouth and ass, a woman who, superbly, leaves an odor. Rather, to come out of her animal entrancement, she needs things. It is the store that excites her. It is the department store that eventually leads to her doom. At the end of the book, she is shopping with her daughter. As a clerk goes to take apart a packet of lace, Mme de Boves's daughter turns to speak to her:
Mme de Boves ne r�pondait pas. Alors, la fille, en tournant sa face molle, vit sa m�re, les mains au milieu des dentelles, en train de faire dispara�tre, dans la manche de son manteau, des volants de point d'Alen�on. Elle ne parut pas surprise, elle s'avan�ait pour la cacher d'un mouvement instinctif, lorsque Jouve, brusquement, se dressa entre elles. Il se penchait, il murmurait � l'oreille de la comtesse, d'une voix polie:
- Madame, veuillez me suivre.
(Madame de Boves didn't reply. It was thus that her daughter, in turning her soft face, saw her mother, her hands in the middle of the laces, engaged in making them disappear into the sleave of her coat, this Alencon pattern. She didn't appear surprised, she went forward, instinctively, to hide her mother, when Jouve, brusquely, stood before them. He leaned forward and whispered politely in the ear of the countess: 'Madame, if you could please follow me.")
Those Jouves! Just doing their jobs. But there's something dirty in the whole Sachs deal. We hope, when W.R. does the "obligatory tell all interview," that she doesn't grovel. She was the victim of a put up job, and she should imply that at every turn. And damn the honchos.
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Remora
The Election.
LI, of course, hoped that the Republicans would not triumph at the polls. At the same time, LI did not much feel like voting himself. I did. I even voted for Democrats. But I did it with a rotten feeling inside, as though I�d compromised myself. In Texas, the two big dem candidates, Kirk and Sanchez, were nearly unbearable. Kirk ran at times to the right of his opponent, and spent much time attaching himself to Bush � a sort of disavowed, mutant twin to the Commander in Chief. I actually wanted to vote against Bush. I wanted, in other words, a second party to vote for.
Perhaps that is not going to happen in my life time. LI read, on the TAP Blog, a nasty little item about how the election might hinge on the guilty conscience of those who voted for Nader. This is just the kind of DC talk that makes one think of what Napoleon said of the monarchists: they have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. Or was it Tallyrand? In any case, while Republicans do, indeed, stand for things, the very awful Democratic party got a deserved drubbing for standing for nothing.
To stand for something means that you lose for something. This, of course, seems to elude the thinking of the governing classes. The governing classes, in fact, are convinced, and have been since the seventies, that you have to slip civilization past the yahoos. That is Democratic political thought in a nutshell. The goal of a party should be to generate a set of principles of some sort, so that you can generally predict how the party will act. The goal of the Democratic party, however, has been the opposite, at least for the last twenty five years. Instead, they have pursued the image of the majority. In the pursuit, they have lost their minds. Or rather, among the Democrats, the head long ago seceded from the body. It is a party that expects its grassroots partisans to work ardently for it during election years, so it can betray those partisans the rest of the time. What grassroot Democrat wanted Tom Daschle to roll over for Bush about Iraq? To do that, and then to expect people like Limited Inc to vote for this kind of thing, is rather like inviting one into an abusive marriage, in which years of being beaten up are supposed to be compensated for by flowers on the birthdays. After a while, you drift away. You divorce.
LI thinks that the Democrats have addicted themselves to a delusion that there is a majority. There isn�t. To take positions on an array of existential topics -- and then to figure out how to persuade others to support those positions � that is all there really is to politics. In particular, if your positions are strongly inflected by your sense of justice, the pursuit of the image of the majority is fatal. The leftist party of the future should pursue, instead, its own singularity. When Paul Wellstone paraphrased Barry Goldwater�s campaign autobiography title (The Conscience of a Conservative) for his own campaign autobiography (The Conscience of a Liberal), he was acting on this insight. The whole history of the Democratic Party, however, works against the idea of singularity. The accidental identification of progressive politics and Democrats comes out of the melding together of lefty forces and the Democrats urban and rural patchwork politics under Wilson. As late as 1928, the black vote � or that bit of it allowed through the iron bars of American apartheid � was strongly Republican. The Democrats have always had the managerial, urban view � the view of compromised labor leaders and school teachers � that the important thing is to form a committee and make resolutions. The important thing, that is, is to act in a minor way. To create a little program here, to purvey pills to the elderly. To create a little program there. The incremental mindset is wholly unprepared for the charismatic act � the politics of the acte gratuit. That Bush is not a charismatic man doesn�t matter � he understands, instinctively, the charismatic nature of the times. To oppose him � for let�s be clear, the man is a disaster � requires understanding that landscape. Requires, that is, understanding how to lose. When you stand for nothing, you lose for nothing. Last night, The Democrats lost for nothing.
The Election.
LI, of course, hoped that the Republicans would not triumph at the polls. At the same time, LI did not much feel like voting himself. I did. I even voted for Democrats. But I did it with a rotten feeling inside, as though I�d compromised myself. In Texas, the two big dem candidates, Kirk and Sanchez, were nearly unbearable. Kirk ran at times to the right of his opponent, and spent much time attaching himself to Bush � a sort of disavowed, mutant twin to the Commander in Chief. I actually wanted to vote against Bush. I wanted, in other words, a second party to vote for.
Perhaps that is not going to happen in my life time. LI read, on the TAP Blog, a nasty little item about how the election might hinge on the guilty conscience of those who voted for Nader. This is just the kind of DC talk that makes one think of what Napoleon said of the monarchists: they have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. Or was it Tallyrand? In any case, while Republicans do, indeed, stand for things, the very awful Democratic party got a deserved drubbing for standing for nothing.
To stand for something means that you lose for something. This, of course, seems to elude the thinking of the governing classes. The governing classes, in fact, are convinced, and have been since the seventies, that you have to slip civilization past the yahoos. That is Democratic political thought in a nutshell. The goal of a party should be to generate a set of principles of some sort, so that you can generally predict how the party will act. The goal of the Democratic party, however, has been the opposite, at least for the last twenty five years. Instead, they have pursued the image of the majority. In the pursuit, they have lost their minds. Or rather, among the Democrats, the head long ago seceded from the body. It is a party that expects its grassroots partisans to work ardently for it during election years, so it can betray those partisans the rest of the time. What grassroot Democrat wanted Tom Daschle to roll over for Bush about Iraq? To do that, and then to expect people like Limited Inc to vote for this kind of thing, is rather like inviting one into an abusive marriage, in which years of being beaten up are supposed to be compensated for by flowers on the birthdays. After a while, you drift away. You divorce.
LI thinks that the Democrats have addicted themselves to a delusion that there is a majority. There isn�t. To take positions on an array of existential topics -- and then to figure out how to persuade others to support those positions � that is all there really is to politics. In particular, if your positions are strongly inflected by your sense of justice, the pursuit of the image of the majority is fatal. The leftist party of the future should pursue, instead, its own singularity. When Paul Wellstone paraphrased Barry Goldwater�s campaign autobiography title (The Conscience of a Conservative) for his own campaign autobiography (The Conscience of a Liberal), he was acting on this insight. The whole history of the Democratic Party, however, works against the idea of singularity. The accidental identification of progressive politics and Democrats comes out of the melding together of lefty forces and the Democrats urban and rural patchwork politics under Wilson. As late as 1928, the black vote � or that bit of it allowed through the iron bars of American apartheid � was strongly Republican. The Democrats have always had the managerial, urban view � the view of compromised labor leaders and school teachers � that the important thing is to form a committee and make resolutions. The important thing, that is, is to act in a minor way. To create a little program here, to purvey pills to the elderly. To create a little program there. The incremental mindset is wholly unprepared for the charismatic act � the politics of the acte gratuit. That Bush is not a charismatic man doesn�t matter � he understands, instinctively, the charismatic nature of the times. To oppose him � for let�s be clear, the man is a disaster � requires understanding that landscape. Requires, that is, understanding how to lose. When you stand for nothing, you lose for nothing. Last night, The Democrats lost for nothing.
Remora
Mr. H. Pitt
Harvey Pitt just resigned. And LI would like to find the proper funereal words -- a send-off to this lost soul, whose last week was spent investigating himself, much like a Flann O'Brien character in one of the antsier novels.
Pitt should never have been the head of the SEC. He was not just sponsored by Bush, although the media, painting in black and white -- Whistler's colors -- has painted him as a stooge or crony of Bushism. Actually, he is a stooge or crony of the set of interlocking vested interests that briefly got a free ride in the 90s. The Wall Street brokerage houses, elevated bucket shops all; the banks, freed from the Glass Steagall act and acting, in consequence, like the suburban couples in some Updike novel that have just recieved news of the 'sexual revolution' -- i.e., fucking everyone; and the NY establishment, represented by the ever unbearable Democrat, Senator Schumer. Pitt started out as he was programmed to: the plan was to subvert regulation, as the plan had been since the glorious eighties. Alas, he ran into the brick wall of corporate malfeasance, and had to go against his character and present himself as an advocate for stricter regulation and concentrated enforcement. Pitt's conservative allies put up a fight for the man all through the summer. That Pitt's inclination was to go easy on the Street, to back the investment banks and the brokerages against their investors, was not a trait that could be changed in a political instant. LI is firmly on the side of greater transparency and more intervention in the banks vs. investors struggle -- but this is a hard issue to color, ideologically. After all, the investors are often what Marx called rentiers, not by and large a group with which LI has a lot of sympathy. In fact, the weird thing is that the Republicans have been complacently cutting the throats of their own constituency -- a tribal habit we thought more appropriate to Dems.
What counts, for us, is that the social composition of investor capital -- where it comes from -- has changed, significantly during the last twenty years. Investors include billionaires like Buffett and Pickens -- investors include all the old LBO guys, the Kerkorians and such. But investors also include the people with 401(k)s. If we have made a sullen and provisional peace with capitalism, it is always with the codicil that the mechanisms of enrichment common to large enterprises be fair. The SEC is a small part of making those mechanisms fair.
Pitt didn't see it that way.
So farewell. No doubt, we will see you again, being grilled by some greasy suit in Congress. Soon.
Mr. H. Pitt
Harvey Pitt just resigned. And LI would like to find the proper funereal words -- a send-off to this lost soul, whose last week was spent investigating himself, much like a Flann O'Brien character in one of the antsier novels.
Pitt should never have been the head of the SEC. He was not just sponsored by Bush, although the media, painting in black and white -- Whistler's colors -- has painted him as a stooge or crony of Bushism. Actually, he is a stooge or crony of the set of interlocking vested interests that briefly got a free ride in the 90s. The Wall Street brokerage houses, elevated bucket shops all; the banks, freed from the Glass Steagall act and acting, in consequence, like the suburban couples in some Updike novel that have just recieved news of the 'sexual revolution' -- i.e., fucking everyone; and the NY establishment, represented by the ever unbearable Democrat, Senator Schumer. Pitt started out as he was programmed to: the plan was to subvert regulation, as the plan had been since the glorious eighties. Alas, he ran into the brick wall of corporate malfeasance, and had to go against his character and present himself as an advocate for stricter regulation and concentrated enforcement. Pitt's conservative allies put up a fight for the man all through the summer. That Pitt's inclination was to go easy on the Street, to back the investment banks and the brokerages against their investors, was not a trait that could be changed in a political instant. LI is firmly on the side of greater transparency and more intervention in the banks vs. investors struggle -- but this is a hard issue to color, ideologically. After all, the investors are often what Marx called rentiers, not by and large a group with which LI has a lot of sympathy. In fact, the weird thing is that the Republicans have been complacently cutting the throats of their own constituency -- a tribal habit we thought more appropriate to Dems.
What counts, for us, is that the social composition of investor capital -- where it comes from -- has changed, significantly during the last twenty years. Investors include billionaires like Buffett and Pickens -- investors include all the old LBO guys, the Kerkorians and such. But investors also include the people with 401(k)s. If we have made a sullen and provisional peace with capitalism, it is always with the codicil that the mechanisms of enrichment common to large enterprises be fair. The SEC is a small part of making those mechanisms fair.
Pitt didn't see it that way.
So farewell. No doubt, we will see you again, being grilled by some greasy suit in Congress. Soon.
Monday, November 04, 2002
Remora
LAT's Megan K. Stack reports on Arizona killings Sunday. Here's the key graf:
(you will probably have to register at the LA Times -- which is no big deal).
"Eight migrants have been shot dead since March in a desolate patch of rattlesnake holes and scraggly paloverde trees where Interstate 10 rolls west out of Phoenix. Their hands were pulled back and bound with handcuffs, duct tape or the waistband of their own jockey shorts. They were shot at close range, their bodies left to mummify in the sun."
Last week, LI wrote a review, for the Christian Science Monitor, of journalist Charles Bowden's new book about casualties of the surface in the "drug war." We couldn't really say too much about the drug war itself -- because we had too much to say. One can't absolutely overrun a review with one's own ideas. You have to operate homeopathetically...
No such restraints bind me on this site. So let's get into it.
The migrants in Phoenix, the murder rate in Tucson, the border patrols and the shadow patrol of vigilantes -- these are the stray glass bits in the kaleidoscope. You can see an image, and then it is gone. You can see a system, you can see the breakdown of a system, and then it is gone, and it is time to go to work, bury the dead, or track down their names.
But the system is insane. The bodies in Phoenix are connected, by myriad threads, to the bodies in Medillin. Here's the NYT on the latest 'crackdown' in one of Medillin's poor quarters:
"...Colombia's new law-and-order president, �lvaro Uribe, has embarked on a pacification of Comuna 13 that officials say could become a model for other big cities hard hit by a 38-year-old conflict. The operation began on Oct. 16 when 3,000 troops, in what was called the largest urban offensive in Colombia's history, launched an assault that brought Comuna 13 under control in 48 hours.
"Days later, with guerrillas striking back with car bombs here and in Bogot�, the army raided poor neighborhoods in Bogot� and in the nation's third largest city, Cali. Similar raids, searching for guns, explosives and rebels melding into the civilian population, continued here this week with the help of paid informants. The United States-backed army, which is receiving training and intelligence information from American forces, is promising future operations."
The NYT editor tries to fit this into the standard law and order framework, ending the story with the kids playing soccer in the street -- as if they hadn't been doing that during the "bad" period previous to the military incursion. But, like a fly in the soup, or rather like the monster from the Black Lagoon, the system keeps popping up:
"The attack on Comuna 13 has also cast in doubt the state's commitment to fighting paramilitary groups. Most of Medell�n's slums are controlled by the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, illegal antiguerrilla groups that often work with rogue military commanders."This army operation was not evenhanded," said Nacho Arango of the Popular Institute for Capacitation, a human rights group here. "Everybody says everything is fine. We do not see it that way."
"Indeed, high-ranking paramilitary commanders from two different groups said in interviews that they welcomed the operation. The absence of the rebels could allow the paramilitaries to control drugs, extortion rackets and corrupt politicians in Comuna 13."
What is the idea behind the drug war? Bereft of its ideological disguises, the drug war is an attempt to suppress a market that generates 400 billion dollars world wide. It is an attempt to suppress, theoretically, the whole market -- the producers, middlemen, and consumers.
LI believes that this is an example of New Deal Liberalism gone mad. The premise of liberalism is that the state can successfully regulate the market to achieve a certain set of goals. That is, the inefficiencies that might be associated with regulation are compensated by the greater social good accomplished by the regulation. Although Chicago economists are always bitching about this, there are strong reasons to think that this is, actually, how regulation works -- that is, the compliance of the regulated, while grudging, doesn't require violence on the part of the state because the regulated believe the story of regulation too. Their arguments against this or that regulation aren't that regulation creates inefficiency per se, but that this or that regulation is unfair, or doesn't serve a good purpose. Often there is an indirect reference to the inefficiency argument -- namely, that the costs of regulation are going to be passed along to the customers -- but on the whole, the arguments are couched in terms of liberalism.
That liberalism isn't a matter of the state operating with unilateral coercive power -- contra the Chicago boy toy model of it. A good example of the state using its ultimate power -- that is, to ban a product -- is given in the story of the banning of DDT. The contrast between DDT and cocaine is instructive.
The story of DDT's invention and use is detailed in this fascinating article from Hyle: the journal of the philosophy of chemistry (and have you been keeping up your subscription, camper?) DDT and the Dynamics of Risk Knowledge Production, by Stefan B�schen takes the story from the publicity surrounding DDT during WWII -- when DDT solved a grave military problem in the Pacific and Asian wars by temporarily eliminating the anepheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria -- to its widespread use in agriculture, and the gradual awareness of the risk it posed. That awareness exploded into public view when Rachel Carson (one of LI's heros) published Silent Spring. Rachel Carson is still routinely savaged by right wing publications, for whom she is the devil.
What was wrong? Among the excellencies in Boschen's article is his firm rooting of the problems associated with the bioaccumulation of toxic material in research that paralleled the chemical research of the golden age of medical and agricultural chemicals -- the thirties to the sixties.
"With regard to these insights [into the potential human toxicity of pesticides] the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had to deal with certain regulatory problems, because action was only possible at a moment of proven damage to human well-being (White 1933, p. 623).
The FDA was founded in 1927, when the old Bureau of Chemistry in the USDA was reformed. By this reorganization on the level of Bureaus, the USDA wanted to channel the conflicts of interest between the insecticide industry and farmers lobby on the one hand and the interests of the consumers on the other. The FDA was responsible only for regulations concerning the Pure Food and Drug Act � therefore the spray residue problem was one of the firsts to be solved by the FDA. Paul Dunbar, later vice president of the FDA, wrote: "Soon after it began operations, the Food and Drug Administration became involved in the spray-residue project, an activity which in varying phases claimed major attention throughout the ensuing years. (...) The project was loaded with political dynamite" (Dunbar 1959, p. 128). Therefore, the FDA attracted a lot of public attention in its first years. However, people did not really discuss the spray-residue problem before the beginning of the New Deal.
During this time, the formation of a problem-centered community began. This type of community augmented the �scientific communities� in the context of risk debates by including political and decision-related aspects. Typically, a problem-centered community emerges to analyze the different unexpected side effects arising from the evolution of technology and systems. The debates in these social places are necessary to the development of problem-solving capacities (e.g., to fix thresholds) and are oriented towards certain aims of protection. They are scientific debates that accompany regulation processes. Thus, it is not surprising that the administration frequently instigates important initiatives that are then elaborated in its regulatory units (see B�schen 2000, p. 323). The problem-centered community �Pesticide Regulation� was confronted with a particular conflict of interest between the fruit farmers, their lobby in the Congress, and the USDA on the one hand and the FDA and some physicians on the other. Furthermore, and for the first time in history, there was a great public interest in a scientific and regulatory debate (Jackson 1970, p. 108). Finally, there was a reform of the legislative foundations by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in 1938."
LI loves the Latourian beauty of "problem centered community." It expresses, exactly, the sense making mechanism that actually exists in most regulatory situations. What happened with DDT is that it suffered a drastic public relations change. From a miracle product, it became a killer. Carson documented the probable correlation of DDT use with the disappearance of a variegated bird population. From its deleterious effects on the laying of eggs, it wasn't far to go to its deleterious effects on the human body, especially as it persists with extraordinary stubborness in the human body.
"Under these conditions, the balance between the two discourses was adjusted anew. The ecological effects of DDT were now recognized as a serious problem, and new examples became part of the risk research program. Before the ban of DDT, the discourse on potential damage gained strength. At a summer school at MIT in 1970, scientists stated: "We recommend a drastic reduction in the use of DDT as soon as possible and that subsidies be furnished to developing countries to enable them to afford to use nonpersistent but more expensive pesticides as well as other pest control techniques" (SCEP 1970, p. 25; emphasis in the original). However, the more the discourse became politically influential, the more did it focus on selected research topics, with particular emphasis on cancer. Cancer research was widely compatible with many research strategies, like in molecular biology, and cancer was one of the main issues in the political arena. This reduced the problem field �chronic toxicity� in part to the issue of �cancer by pesticides�. That was also an outcome of the political debate after Silent Spring, because the topic was already dominant in Carson�s book (Marco et al. 1987, p. 195). Now the general public gained a significant impact on the definition of problems regarding environmental or health issues."
B�schen thus foregrounds William Ruckleshaus' decision in 1972 to ban DDT.
Now, the ban itself is interesting. Did the ban lead to huge illegal uses of DDT? Did the U.S. have to create a DDT Enforcement agency to fight DDT cartels world wide? In a word, no. The reason is that the problem centered community was firmly sited in the market. The makers of pesticides were not ultimately threatened by the ban because a., it at first included only the U.S., and more importantly, b., there were substitutes for DDT. DDT is an interesting pesticide because it has a rabid fan club. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as conservative groups like the American Council on Health and Science (an organization that is well quoted in right wing journals -- you can spot the ACHS speaker from the frequency of the phrase 'junk science,' which has achieved mystical authority in these venues)
are apt to write things like: the ban on DDT is equivalent to genocide. Seriously. Here's an excerpt from a Fox News transcript:
DDT Ban Is Genocidal
By Steven Milloloy
Fox News
December 1, 2000 DDT Ban Is Genocidal Friday, December 1, 2000 By Steven Milloy As First-World children eagerly anticipate the holiday season, millions of Third-World children are about to be condemned to certain death from malaria by international environmental elitists. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility and 250 other environmental groups will advocate the insecticide DDT be banned at next week's United Nations Environment Program meeting in Johannesburg. The meeting's aim is a treaty banning or restricting so-called persistent organic chemicals. Malaria control experts oppose a DDT ban, arguing that spraying DDT in houses is inexpensive and highly effective in controlling malaria � especially in sub-Saharan Africa where 1 in 20 children die from malaria. Unfortunately, the eco-elites have out-maneuvered and outgunned public health advocates.
Formally, LI's point is not that DDT should or shouldn't be banned. We should, however, make clear that the bizarre conservative crusade for DDT has a tendency to concentrate around phrases like "malaria control experts." That malaria control experts have found better malaria fighting processes goes unreported (nor the fact that more money is spent researching cures for male pattern baldness than for malaria -- one of the epiphenomena of world wealth inequality). Ann Platt McGinn, in an article in this summer's World Watch, (which can't, alas, be accessed on the Net) presents a reasonable case for banning DDT in most cases, although reserving it as a possible pesticide in emergency situations. The Milloloys of the world have no patience for real science, or they would consider the reasons that DDT was abandoned in the late sixties and early seventies outside of the US as the major pesticide in the struggle against malaria carrying mosquitoes. Here is what McGinn says about the first stages of the Global Malaria Eradication Project:
"The malaria eradication strategy was not to kill every single mosquito, but to suppress their populations and shorten the lifespans of any survivors, so that the parasite would not have time to develop within them. If the mosquitoes could be kept down long enough, the parasites would eventually disappear from the human population. In any particular area, the process was expected to take three years-time enough for all infected people either to recover or die. After that, a resurgence of mosquitoes would be merely an annoyance, rather than a threat. And initially, the strategy seemed to be working. It proved especially effective on islands-relatively small areas insulated from reinfestation. Taiwan, Jamaica, and Sardinia were soon declared malaria-free and have remained so to this day. By 1961, arguably the year at which the program had peak momentum, malaria had been eliminated or dramatically reduced in 37 countries."
So why not, on balance, keep using the DDT? Well, the ban in the US happened in 1973. Between 61 and 73, what happened was that DDT produced resistance in the mosquito:
"With the miseries of malaria in full view, the managers of the eradication campaign didn't worry much about the toxicity of DDT, but they were greatly concerned about another aspect of the pesticide's effects: resistance. Continual exposure to an insecticide tends to "breed" insect populations that are at least partially immune to the poison. Resistance to DDT had been reported as early as 1946. The campaign managers knew that in mosquitoes, regular exposure to DDT tended to produce widespread resistance in four to seven years. Since it took three years to clear malaria from a human population, that didn't leave a lot of leeway for the eradication effort. As it turned out, the logistics simply couldn't be made to work in large, heavily infested areas with high human populations, poor housing and roads, and generally minimal infrastructure. In 1969, the campaign was abandoned. Today, DDT resistance is widespread in Anopheles, as is resistance to many more recent pesticides."
That doesn't mean that DDT is completely worthless. What has prompted the recent spate of headlines about the pesticide is that it is a UN treaty, POP, which schedules a worldwide ban on the substance. As McGinn writes, there are much more successful strategies against malaria:
"And yet Africa is not a lost cause-it's simply that the key to progress does not lie in the general suppression of mosquito populations. Instead of spraying, the most promising African programs rely primarily on "bednets"-mosquito netting that is treated with an insecticide, usually a pyrethroid, and that is suspended over a person's bed. Bednets can't eliminate malaria, but they can "deflect" much of the burden. Because Anopheles species generally feed in the evening and at night, a bednet can radically reduce the number of infective bites a person receives. Such a person would probably still be infected from time to time, but would usually be able to lead a normal life.
In effect, therefore, bednets can substantially reduce the disease. Trials in the use of bednets for children have shown a decline in malaria-induced mortality by 25 to 40 percent. Infection levels and the incidence of severe anemia also declined. In Kenya, a recent study has shown that pregnant women who use bednets tend to give birth to healthier babies. In parts of Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, bednets are becoming standard household items. In the tiny west African nation of The Gambia, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the population has bednets."
LI could go on -- we've written about evolutionary medicine before, in the Austin Chronicle. Go to our site on the Auschron in the archives and look up the article, Surreal Science. The point, however, is that POP, unlike the treaties banning narcotics, will do a fair job of eliminating DDT. That is because the market has internal inducements to cooperate. The problem centered community makes sure of that. The makers of DDT, and its users, were not imprisoned, for one thing. That is, the level of regulatory enforcement was elevated above the police. This is crucial -- the police are the regulators of the last resort. They are the most ineffective regulators, for a number of reasons we won't list here.
Second, the makers, dealers and users all had a system of substitutes they could use.
Now, in effect, this is partly true with narcotics. But because the desired physiological effects of these substances are substantially different, the substitutions have never really diverted users. They won't, of course, divert hardcore users at all.
Finally, resistance to the ban was taken seriously. DDTs banning, in other words, achieved critical mass outside the problem centered community. The pro-DDT element in that community was never able to acquire the political power to counter the ban. And that element acceded to that failure -- they had no incentive to start a black market in DDT. While the Steve Milloloys of the world talk of genocide, they don't, of course, mean it -- that is, LI doubts, seriously, that Milloloy is going to finance a covert DDT making factory.
The paradox of the ban on narcotics is that it has created an unregulated market in narcotics. LI thinks this is very interesting, and relevant to the real limits of government power -- which, contrary to libertarian ideology, have no natural scale. That is, small government isn't best -- nor is large government. The scale of governmental power can't be determined beforehand, for simple, devilishly Hayeckian reasons. We will go into that in some future post.
LAT's Megan K. Stack reports on Arizona killings Sunday. Here's the key graf:
(you will probably have to register at the LA Times -- which is no big deal).
"Eight migrants have been shot dead since March in a desolate patch of rattlesnake holes and scraggly paloverde trees where Interstate 10 rolls west out of Phoenix. Their hands were pulled back and bound with handcuffs, duct tape or the waistband of their own jockey shorts. They were shot at close range, their bodies left to mummify in the sun."
Last week, LI wrote a review, for the Christian Science Monitor, of journalist Charles Bowden's new book about casualties of the surface in the "drug war." We couldn't really say too much about the drug war itself -- because we had too much to say. One can't absolutely overrun a review with one's own ideas. You have to operate homeopathetically...
No such restraints bind me on this site. So let's get into it.
The migrants in Phoenix, the murder rate in Tucson, the border patrols and the shadow patrol of vigilantes -- these are the stray glass bits in the kaleidoscope. You can see an image, and then it is gone. You can see a system, you can see the breakdown of a system, and then it is gone, and it is time to go to work, bury the dead, or track down their names.
But the system is insane. The bodies in Phoenix are connected, by myriad threads, to the bodies in Medillin. Here's the NYT on the latest 'crackdown' in one of Medillin's poor quarters:
"...Colombia's new law-and-order president, �lvaro Uribe, has embarked on a pacification of Comuna 13 that officials say could become a model for other big cities hard hit by a 38-year-old conflict. The operation began on Oct. 16 when 3,000 troops, in what was called the largest urban offensive in Colombia's history, launched an assault that brought Comuna 13 under control in 48 hours.
"Days later, with guerrillas striking back with car bombs here and in Bogot�, the army raided poor neighborhoods in Bogot� and in the nation's third largest city, Cali. Similar raids, searching for guns, explosives and rebels melding into the civilian population, continued here this week with the help of paid informants. The United States-backed army, which is receiving training and intelligence information from American forces, is promising future operations."
The NYT editor tries to fit this into the standard law and order framework, ending the story with the kids playing soccer in the street -- as if they hadn't been doing that during the "bad" period previous to the military incursion. But, like a fly in the soup, or rather like the monster from the Black Lagoon, the system keeps popping up:
"The attack on Comuna 13 has also cast in doubt the state's commitment to fighting paramilitary groups. Most of Medell�n's slums are controlled by the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, illegal antiguerrilla groups that often work with rogue military commanders."This army operation was not evenhanded," said Nacho Arango of the Popular Institute for Capacitation, a human rights group here. "Everybody says everything is fine. We do not see it that way."
"Indeed, high-ranking paramilitary commanders from two different groups said in interviews that they welcomed the operation. The absence of the rebels could allow the paramilitaries to control drugs, extortion rackets and corrupt politicians in Comuna 13."
What is the idea behind the drug war? Bereft of its ideological disguises, the drug war is an attempt to suppress a market that generates 400 billion dollars world wide. It is an attempt to suppress, theoretically, the whole market -- the producers, middlemen, and consumers.
LI believes that this is an example of New Deal Liberalism gone mad. The premise of liberalism is that the state can successfully regulate the market to achieve a certain set of goals. That is, the inefficiencies that might be associated with regulation are compensated by the greater social good accomplished by the regulation. Although Chicago economists are always bitching about this, there are strong reasons to think that this is, actually, how regulation works -- that is, the compliance of the regulated, while grudging, doesn't require violence on the part of the state because the regulated believe the story of regulation too. Their arguments against this or that regulation aren't that regulation creates inefficiency per se, but that this or that regulation is unfair, or doesn't serve a good purpose. Often there is an indirect reference to the inefficiency argument -- namely, that the costs of regulation are going to be passed along to the customers -- but on the whole, the arguments are couched in terms of liberalism.
That liberalism isn't a matter of the state operating with unilateral coercive power -- contra the Chicago boy toy model of it. A good example of the state using its ultimate power -- that is, to ban a product -- is given in the story of the banning of DDT. The contrast between DDT and cocaine is instructive.
The story of DDT's invention and use is detailed in this fascinating article from Hyle: the journal of the philosophy of chemistry (and have you been keeping up your subscription, camper?) DDT and the Dynamics of Risk Knowledge Production, by Stefan B�schen takes the story from the publicity surrounding DDT during WWII -- when DDT solved a grave military problem in the Pacific and Asian wars by temporarily eliminating the anepheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria -- to its widespread use in agriculture, and the gradual awareness of the risk it posed. That awareness exploded into public view when Rachel Carson (one of LI's heros) published Silent Spring. Rachel Carson is still routinely savaged by right wing publications, for whom she is the devil.
What was wrong? Among the excellencies in Boschen's article is his firm rooting of the problems associated with the bioaccumulation of toxic material in research that paralleled the chemical research of the golden age of medical and agricultural chemicals -- the thirties to the sixties.
"With regard to these insights [into the potential human toxicity of pesticides] the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had to deal with certain regulatory problems, because action was only possible at a moment of proven damage to human well-being (White 1933, p. 623).
The FDA was founded in 1927, when the old Bureau of Chemistry in the USDA was reformed. By this reorganization on the level of Bureaus, the USDA wanted to channel the conflicts of interest between the insecticide industry and farmers lobby on the one hand and the interests of the consumers on the other. The FDA was responsible only for regulations concerning the Pure Food and Drug Act � therefore the spray residue problem was one of the firsts to be solved by the FDA. Paul Dunbar, later vice president of the FDA, wrote: "Soon after it began operations, the Food and Drug Administration became involved in the spray-residue project, an activity which in varying phases claimed major attention throughout the ensuing years. (...) The project was loaded with political dynamite" (Dunbar 1959, p. 128). Therefore, the FDA attracted a lot of public attention in its first years. However, people did not really discuss the spray-residue problem before the beginning of the New Deal.
During this time, the formation of a problem-centered community began. This type of community augmented the �scientific communities� in the context of risk debates by including political and decision-related aspects. Typically, a problem-centered community emerges to analyze the different unexpected side effects arising from the evolution of technology and systems. The debates in these social places are necessary to the development of problem-solving capacities (e.g., to fix thresholds) and are oriented towards certain aims of protection. They are scientific debates that accompany regulation processes. Thus, it is not surprising that the administration frequently instigates important initiatives that are then elaborated in its regulatory units (see B�schen 2000, p. 323). The problem-centered community �Pesticide Regulation� was confronted with a particular conflict of interest between the fruit farmers, their lobby in the Congress, and the USDA on the one hand and the FDA and some physicians on the other. Furthermore, and for the first time in history, there was a great public interest in a scientific and regulatory debate (Jackson 1970, p. 108). Finally, there was a reform of the legislative foundations by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in 1938."
LI loves the Latourian beauty of "problem centered community." It expresses, exactly, the sense making mechanism that actually exists in most regulatory situations. What happened with DDT is that it suffered a drastic public relations change. From a miracle product, it became a killer. Carson documented the probable correlation of DDT use with the disappearance of a variegated bird population. From its deleterious effects on the laying of eggs, it wasn't far to go to its deleterious effects on the human body, especially as it persists with extraordinary stubborness in the human body.
"Under these conditions, the balance between the two discourses was adjusted anew. The ecological effects of DDT were now recognized as a serious problem, and new examples became part of the risk research program. Before the ban of DDT, the discourse on potential damage gained strength. At a summer school at MIT in 1970, scientists stated: "We recommend a drastic reduction in the use of DDT as soon as possible and that subsidies be furnished to developing countries to enable them to afford to use nonpersistent but more expensive pesticides as well as other pest control techniques" (SCEP 1970, p. 25; emphasis in the original). However, the more the discourse became politically influential, the more did it focus on selected research topics, with particular emphasis on cancer. Cancer research was widely compatible with many research strategies, like in molecular biology, and cancer was one of the main issues in the political arena. This reduced the problem field �chronic toxicity� in part to the issue of �cancer by pesticides�. That was also an outcome of the political debate after Silent Spring, because the topic was already dominant in Carson�s book (Marco et al. 1987, p. 195). Now the general public gained a significant impact on the definition of problems regarding environmental or health issues."
B�schen thus foregrounds William Ruckleshaus' decision in 1972 to ban DDT.
Now, the ban itself is interesting. Did the ban lead to huge illegal uses of DDT? Did the U.S. have to create a DDT Enforcement agency to fight DDT cartels world wide? In a word, no. The reason is that the problem centered community was firmly sited in the market. The makers of pesticides were not ultimately threatened by the ban because a., it at first included only the U.S., and more importantly, b., there were substitutes for DDT. DDT is an interesting pesticide because it has a rabid fan club. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as conservative groups like the American Council on Health and Science (an organization that is well quoted in right wing journals -- you can spot the ACHS speaker from the frequency of the phrase 'junk science,' which has achieved mystical authority in these venues)
are apt to write things like: the ban on DDT is equivalent to genocide. Seriously. Here's an excerpt from a Fox News transcript:
DDT Ban Is Genocidal
By Steven Milloloy
Fox News
December 1, 2000 DDT Ban Is Genocidal Friday, December 1, 2000 By Steven Milloy As First-World children eagerly anticipate the holiday season, millions of Third-World children are about to be condemned to certain death from malaria by international environmental elitists. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility and 250 other environmental groups will advocate the insecticide DDT be banned at next week's United Nations Environment Program meeting in Johannesburg. The meeting's aim is a treaty banning or restricting so-called persistent organic chemicals. Malaria control experts oppose a DDT ban, arguing that spraying DDT in houses is inexpensive and highly effective in controlling malaria � especially in sub-Saharan Africa where 1 in 20 children die from malaria. Unfortunately, the eco-elites have out-maneuvered and outgunned public health advocates.
Formally, LI's point is not that DDT should or shouldn't be banned. We should, however, make clear that the bizarre conservative crusade for DDT has a tendency to concentrate around phrases like "malaria control experts." That malaria control experts have found better malaria fighting processes goes unreported (nor the fact that more money is spent researching cures for male pattern baldness than for malaria -- one of the epiphenomena of world wealth inequality). Ann Platt McGinn, in an article in this summer's World Watch, (which can't, alas, be accessed on the Net) presents a reasonable case for banning DDT in most cases, although reserving it as a possible pesticide in emergency situations. The Milloloys of the world have no patience for real science, or they would consider the reasons that DDT was abandoned in the late sixties and early seventies outside of the US as the major pesticide in the struggle against malaria carrying mosquitoes. Here is what McGinn says about the first stages of the Global Malaria Eradication Project:
"The malaria eradication strategy was not to kill every single mosquito, but to suppress their populations and shorten the lifespans of any survivors, so that the parasite would not have time to develop within them. If the mosquitoes could be kept down long enough, the parasites would eventually disappear from the human population. In any particular area, the process was expected to take three years-time enough for all infected people either to recover or die. After that, a resurgence of mosquitoes would be merely an annoyance, rather than a threat. And initially, the strategy seemed to be working. It proved especially effective on islands-relatively small areas insulated from reinfestation. Taiwan, Jamaica, and Sardinia were soon declared malaria-free and have remained so to this day. By 1961, arguably the year at which the program had peak momentum, malaria had been eliminated or dramatically reduced in 37 countries."
So why not, on balance, keep using the DDT? Well, the ban in the US happened in 1973. Between 61 and 73, what happened was that DDT produced resistance in the mosquito:
"With the miseries of malaria in full view, the managers of the eradication campaign didn't worry much about the toxicity of DDT, but they were greatly concerned about another aspect of the pesticide's effects: resistance. Continual exposure to an insecticide tends to "breed" insect populations that are at least partially immune to the poison. Resistance to DDT had been reported as early as 1946. The campaign managers knew that in mosquitoes, regular exposure to DDT tended to produce widespread resistance in four to seven years. Since it took three years to clear malaria from a human population, that didn't leave a lot of leeway for the eradication effort. As it turned out, the logistics simply couldn't be made to work in large, heavily infested areas with high human populations, poor housing and roads, and generally minimal infrastructure. In 1969, the campaign was abandoned. Today, DDT resistance is widespread in Anopheles, as is resistance to many more recent pesticides."
That doesn't mean that DDT is completely worthless. What has prompted the recent spate of headlines about the pesticide is that it is a UN treaty, POP, which schedules a worldwide ban on the substance. As McGinn writes, there are much more successful strategies against malaria:
"And yet Africa is not a lost cause-it's simply that the key to progress does not lie in the general suppression of mosquito populations. Instead of spraying, the most promising African programs rely primarily on "bednets"-mosquito netting that is treated with an insecticide, usually a pyrethroid, and that is suspended over a person's bed. Bednets can't eliminate malaria, but they can "deflect" much of the burden. Because Anopheles species generally feed in the evening and at night, a bednet can radically reduce the number of infective bites a person receives. Such a person would probably still be infected from time to time, but would usually be able to lead a normal life.
In effect, therefore, bednets can substantially reduce the disease. Trials in the use of bednets for children have shown a decline in malaria-induced mortality by 25 to 40 percent. Infection levels and the incidence of severe anemia also declined. In Kenya, a recent study has shown that pregnant women who use bednets tend to give birth to healthier babies. In parts of Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, bednets are becoming standard household items. In the tiny west African nation of The Gambia, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the population has bednets."
LI could go on -- we've written about evolutionary medicine before, in the Austin Chronicle. Go to our site on the Auschron in the archives and look up the article, Surreal Science. The point, however, is that POP, unlike the treaties banning narcotics, will do a fair job of eliminating DDT. That is because the market has internal inducements to cooperate. The problem centered community makes sure of that. The makers of DDT, and its users, were not imprisoned, for one thing. That is, the level of regulatory enforcement was elevated above the police. This is crucial -- the police are the regulators of the last resort. They are the most ineffective regulators, for a number of reasons we won't list here.
Second, the makers, dealers and users all had a system of substitutes they could use.
Now, in effect, this is partly true with narcotics. But because the desired physiological effects of these substances are substantially different, the substitutions have never really diverted users. They won't, of course, divert hardcore users at all.
Finally, resistance to the ban was taken seriously. DDTs banning, in other words, achieved critical mass outside the problem centered community. The pro-DDT element in that community was never able to acquire the political power to counter the ban. And that element acceded to that failure -- they had no incentive to start a black market in DDT. While the Steve Milloloys of the world talk of genocide, they don't, of course, mean it -- that is, LI doubts, seriously, that Milloloy is going to finance a covert DDT making factory.
The paradox of the ban on narcotics is that it has created an unregulated market in narcotics. LI thinks this is very interesting, and relevant to the real limits of government power -- which, contrary to libertarian ideology, have no natural scale. That is, small government isn't best -- nor is large government. The scale of governmental power can't be determined beforehand, for simple, devilishly Hayeckian reasons. We will go into that in some future post.
Saturday, November 02, 2002
Remora
LI rather trailed off on our post before the last post -- as you might have noticed, LI is an incorrigible meanderer. This is, we suppose, a vice, but surely one of the salient differences between weblogging and real commentary, such as is published in a newspaper, is that the endings aren't so neat. The topics, too, are a bit more variegated. For instance, I imagine the local rag would not publish an op ed piece that begins with a consideration of Bishop Butler's Analogy. Yes, they are warned about such things by the marketing department.
In any case, we were talking about Diane Coyle's exhibition of the deficiencies of common sense and the excellencies of economics -- which exhibition, we claimed, was marred by a severe misconstrual of categories, and a parochial vision of economics. (Coyle's comments, on the Financial Times website, has now been closed off to non-subscribers). Ms. Coyle is a great one for tearing down tariffs and promoting the benefits of free trade. It is, in fact, her grand solution to the chronic problem of poverty. She explains this in an essay in the Guardian, the premise of which is that the anti-globalizers have it all wrong. Protestors should be out there demanding more free trade, liberalization on an international scale, rather than supporting the multitudinous corruptions of protectionism.
"If the moral outrage at the extent of poverty, hunger and disease in the world, and the political momentum for change generated by the campaign movement of recent years, are to achieve anything worthwhile, outrage will need to be informed by evidence on the economic effects of globalization. In many developing countries the best response to the problems that emerge because of globalization is hardly ever a retreat from global integration.
On the contrary, this would often harm growth and make the problems of poverty harder to solve.In our report we address the charges that command widespread support among anti-globalization protestors. A commonly held belief is that globalization has caused extensive poverty. While it is true that 1.3 billion people currently live on less than $1 a day, this number has not changed much since 1950 and has actually fallen sharply as proportion of the world population to 24% from 55%. The recent era of rapid globalization has improved the living standards of many of the poorest, not worsened it."
There are many things to say about the above paragraph. One of them is to ask about the absolute fetishization of the $1 a day standard. This is not a good standard for what the world population could live on. It skews the conversation about poverty and inequality to the cases on the bottom, and their miserable, incremental improvements, rather than to the cases on the top, and their baroque, excessive expropriation of resources.
But leaving that aside, we should note that that all the measures of world poverty are subject, at the moment, to heated debate, which tends to get very technical. The International Monetary Fund hosted a debate on the question of whether world inegality is rising between the left, middle and right which has been posted here. The neutral observer's first reaction to it is that much of the debate degenerates into much mumbo jumbo about methodologies. The right wing is represented by an Indian economist, Surjit Bhalla. Bhalla will surely be touted by rightwingers the way Bjorn Limborg achieved celebrity. Bhalla says, at one point, that the issue of inequality is basically driven by envy. This is the essence of the right wing polemical position. It is rather stupid, since the essence of the right wing polemical position about capitalism is that greed is good. The latter is a position that goes back a long way, in economic literature, to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees -- our individual vices are woven, by the mysterious work of the Invisible Hand, into public goods. Well, envy is as good an individual vice as any. More seriously, Bhalla contends that all around the world -- except for Sub-Saharan Africa -- the figures point to this conclusion:
"Essentially, regarding growth, what we find is that the developing countries grew at about one percentage point lower than the developed countries during 1960 to 1980, and the numbers are 2.1 and 3.3, respectively. But during 1980 to 2000, the developing countries far exceeded the growth rate of the industrialized West and grew at 3.6 percent rather than 2 percent for the West.So first piece of evidence, and these are national accounts data, which is what the World Bank uses, the IMF uses, the countries themselves use, that growth rates of the poor countries far exceeded the growth rates of the West during the so-called globalization period. So that's evidence number one.
"Number two, what happened to inequality? I find that inequality has been on a steady decline�world inequality has been on a steady decline, reversing almost a 200-year trend, peaking in the mid-1970s, and today inequality in the world is at its lowest level for possibly 100 years.What is the counter-evidence to that? There are two or three sets of studies, one which states that basically inequality flattened out during the last 30, 40 years, and another one from the World Bank which states that inequality increased at an absolutely unprecedented pace between 1988 and 1993. I find, as I said, just the opposite. "
Basically, Bhalla is claiming that the golden Keynsian era was a bad time for developing countries, whereas since the mid 70s -- since, that is, the beginning of the conservative rejection of Keynsian liberalism -- developing countries have been catching up. Partly, of course, as you can see from his figures, this stems from the developed countries slowing down -- the 2 percent growth rate for the West is much lower than it was in the 50s.
The transcript of the IMF debate is lively, but often veers off into incomprehensible disagreements about survey results and purchasing power comparisons. LI wants to make a simpler point about what Ms. Coyle has called living standard. I think the living standard, if properly fleshed out, gives us a sense of what is wrong with that version of globalization that emphasizes privitization and tearing down barriers to trade and capital flows.
If you will recall the post before last, we started with a quote from Adam Smith. Smith's idea has been a powerful one in economics. Here it is again:
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements." This is, by the way, from Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in Part IV, Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation
As Aristotle might put it, there's a sense in which Smith is correct, and there is a sense in which he is incorrect. What Smith meant was that dwelling in a costly pile was merely a highly ornamental way of keeping out of the rain. You can keep out of the rain, as King Lear learned, in a hovel for less cost. Similarly eating peacock's eyes and eating chicken eggs is eating; clothing yourself in silk, or in flannel, is clothing; etc.
However, this absolute way of looking at consumption was suspect even in Smith's day. From, say, the point of view of energy use, the rich consume vastly more than the poor. Smith felt that this was covered by the fact that the consumption of the rich is the employment of the poor -- which still doesn't make his precept true. What made Smith's general point plausible, however, is that, in a relatively technologically primitive society -- and the eighteenth century was still that -- the fine differences between rich and poor are evened out by the gross similarities. The rich in their Georgian mansions were apt to be as bothered by dampness and drafts as the poor in their hovels. They were apt to die of untreatable illnesses, like the poor, with only the advantage that their money hired the best chirugeons and doctors to torture them before that blessed terminal event. The food the nabob ate and the water he drank -- on those rare occasions when gin wasn't available -- was apt to be as contaminated as the beverages and victuals of the poor.
This is no longer the case. Ah, but I am going on and on, here. LI will continue this at some future point.
LI rather trailed off on our post before the last post -- as you might have noticed, LI is an incorrigible meanderer. This is, we suppose, a vice, but surely one of the salient differences between weblogging and real commentary, such as is published in a newspaper, is that the endings aren't so neat. The topics, too, are a bit more variegated. For instance, I imagine the local rag would not publish an op ed piece that begins with a consideration of Bishop Butler's Analogy. Yes, they are warned about such things by the marketing department.
In any case, we were talking about Diane Coyle's exhibition of the deficiencies of common sense and the excellencies of economics -- which exhibition, we claimed, was marred by a severe misconstrual of categories, and a parochial vision of economics. (Coyle's comments, on the Financial Times website, has now been closed off to non-subscribers). Ms. Coyle is a great one for tearing down tariffs and promoting the benefits of free trade. It is, in fact, her grand solution to the chronic problem of poverty. She explains this in an essay in the Guardian, the premise of which is that the anti-globalizers have it all wrong. Protestors should be out there demanding more free trade, liberalization on an international scale, rather than supporting the multitudinous corruptions of protectionism.
"If the moral outrage at the extent of poverty, hunger and disease in the world, and the political momentum for change generated by the campaign movement of recent years, are to achieve anything worthwhile, outrage will need to be informed by evidence on the economic effects of globalization. In many developing countries the best response to the problems that emerge because of globalization is hardly ever a retreat from global integration.
On the contrary, this would often harm growth and make the problems of poverty harder to solve.In our report we address the charges that command widespread support among anti-globalization protestors. A commonly held belief is that globalization has caused extensive poverty. While it is true that 1.3 billion people currently live on less than $1 a day, this number has not changed much since 1950 and has actually fallen sharply as proportion of the world population to 24% from 55%. The recent era of rapid globalization has improved the living standards of many of the poorest, not worsened it."
There are many things to say about the above paragraph. One of them is to ask about the absolute fetishization of the $1 a day standard. This is not a good standard for what the world population could live on. It skews the conversation about poverty and inequality to the cases on the bottom, and their miserable, incremental improvements, rather than to the cases on the top, and their baroque, excessive expropriation of resources.
But leaving that aside, we should note that that all the measures of world poverty are subject, at the moment, to heated debate, which tends to get very technical. The International Monetary Fund hosted a debate on the question of whether world inegality is rising between the left, middle and right which has been posted here. The neutral observer's first reaction to it is that much of the debate degenerates into much mumbo jumbo about methodologies. The right wing is represented by an Indian economist, Surjit Bhalla. Bhalla will surely be touted by rightwingers the way Bjorn Limborg achieved celebrity. Bhalla says, at one point, that the issue of inequality is basically driven by envy. This is the essence of the right wing polemical position. It is rather stupid, since the essence of the right wing polemical position about capitalism is that greed is good. The latter is a position that goes back a long way, in economic literature, to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees -- our individual vices are woven, by the mysterious work of the Invisible Hand, into public goods. Well, envy is as good an individual vice as any. More seriously, Bhalla contends that all around the world -- except for Sub-Saharan Africa -- the figures point to this conclusion:
"Essentially, regarding growth, what we find is that the developing countries grew at about one percentage point lower than the developed countries during 1960 to 1980, and the numbers are 2.1 and 3.3, respectively. But during 1980 to 2000, the developing countries far exceeded the growth rate of the industrialized West and grew at 3.6 percent rather than 2 percent for the West.So first piece of evidence, and these are national accounts data, which is what the World Bank uses, the IMF uses, the countries themselves use, that growth rates of the poor countries far exceeded the growth rates of the West during the so-called globalization period. So that's evidence number one.
"Number two, what happened to inequality? I find that inequality has been on a steady decline�world inequality has been on a steady decline, reversing almost a 200-year trend, peaking in the mid-1970s, and today inequality in the world is at its lowest level for possibly 100 years.What is the counter-evidence to that? There are two or three sets of studies, one which states that basically inequality flattened out during the last 30, 40 years, and another one from the World Bank which states that inequality increased at an absolutely unprecedented pace between 1988 and 1993. I find, as I said, just the opposite. "
Basically, Bhalla is claiming that the golden Keynsian era was a bad time for developing countries, whereas since the mid 70s -- since, that is, the beginning of the conservative rejection of Keynsian liberalism -- developing countries have been catching up. Partly, of course, as you can see from his figures, this stems from the developed countries slowing down -- the 2 percent growth rate for the West is much lower than it was in the 50s.
The transcript of the IMF debate is lively, but often veers off into incomprehensible disagreements about survey results and purchasing power comparisons. LI wants to make a simpler point about what Ms. Coyle has called living standard. I think the living standard, if properly fleshed out, gives us a sense of what is wrong with that version of globalization that emphasizes privitization and tearing down barriers to trade and capital flows.
If you will recall the post before last, we started with a quote from Adam Smith. Smith's idea has been a powerful one in economics. Here it is again:
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements." This is, by the way, from Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in Part IV, Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation
As Aristotle might put it, there's a sense in which Smith is correct, and there is a sense in which he is incorrect. What Smith meant was that dwelling in a costly pile was merely a highly ornamental way of keeping out of the rain. You can keep out of the rain, as King Lear learned, in a hovel for less cost. Similarly eating peacock's eyes and eating chicken eggs is eating; clothing yourself in silk, or in flannel, is clothing; etc.
However, this absolute way of looking at consumption was suspect even in Smith's day. From, say, the point of view of energy use, the rich consume vastly more than the poor. Smith felt that this was covered by the fact that the consumption of the rich is the employment of the poor -- which still doesn't make his precept true. What made Smith's general point plausible, however, is that, in a relatively technologically primitive society -- and the eighteenth century was still that -- the fine differences between rich and poor are evened out by the gross similarities. The rich in their Georgian mansions were apt to be as bothered by dampness and drafts as the poor in their hovels. They were apt to die of untreatable illnesses, like the poor, with only the advantage that their money hired the best chirugeons and doctors to torture them before that blessed terminal event. The food the nabob ate and the water he drank -- on those rare occasions when gin wasn't available -- was apt to be as contaminated as the beverages and victuals of the poor.
This is no longer the case. Ah, but I am going on and on, here. LI will continue this at some future point.
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Dope
Last night, LI's friend S. came to the door with two pumpkins. S., I think, likes the ritual of carving the pumpkin because of it seems so American to her -- and thus, slightly outlandish, the way American names are outlandish -- all those first names that don't mean anything, unlike Turkish names. It is an American habit to assume that our rituals are self-explanatory, whereas in other cultures the rituals are often all about explanation, are occasions in which memory is culturally ritualized. For Americans, a memory that is transmitted by ritual is, by its very nature, inauthentic. We mourn the lack of the individual rememberer -- we want experience to be located, and we think that location is in the individual.
For LI, carving a jack o lantern is the kind of thing associated with childhood's clumsy arts and crafts -- fitting stubby fingers into dull scissors and snipping out circles from orange construction paper (ah, the feel of construction paper! its distinct roughness, its graininess, the crayon box colors it comes in, the way tiny, curved bits of it would escape from the scissors and float down to the linoleum tile floor; the way it would darken around a drop of glue, a dab of paste; the way you sprinkled it with glitter to enliven its stubborn drabness; the way it dominated all other media of art until about the sixth grade! LI, a childless bachelor, alas, wonders if construction paper still exists, somewhere -- if, yesterday, there were third grade classrooms where boys and girls were hunched over their orange and brown and black and red paper, inexpertly scalpeling out the outline of witch's hats and broomsticks and cats and ghosts, some teacher -- there were so many for whom LI's heart, at that age, throbbed, Miss Eberhardt, Miss Smith -- making her way down the aisles, the slight smell of her perfume as she bent over you, commenting on your childish assemblage -- but LI digresses).
So, after fortifying ourselves with margaritas at a Mexican restaurant we returned to my place and fortified our fortifications with vodka, then commenced to serious surgery on the pumpkins with the four knives I was able to round up. LI created one of his wobbly eyed jacks, with a big honker nose, the jumbled mouth, and a few artistic touches -- this year, we tried to inscribe something that looked like a skull and crossbones on a cheek, as though the jack had tatooed himself. S., working on more classic lines (plenty of triangles, well wrought), made a more traditional jack. We named our pumpkins, lit candles and put them inside, and turned out the lights. S. had put on the Moulin Rouge CD, so we toasted our little creations and then sang along to the tango version of Roxanne.
And thus we ushered in another Halloween.
Last night, LI's friend S. came to the door with two pumpkins. S., I think, likes the ritual of carving the pumpkin because of it seems so American to her -- and thus, slightly outlandish, the way American names are outlandish -- all those first names that don't mean anything, unlike Turkish names. It is an American habit to assume that our rituals are self-explanatory, whereas in other cultures the rituals are often all about explanation, are occasions in which memory is culturally ritualized. For Americans, a memory that is transmitted by ritual is, by its very nature, inauthentic. We mourn the lack of the individual rememberer -- we want experience to be located, and we think that location is in the individual.
For LI, carving a jack o lantern is the kind of thing associated with childhood's clumsy arts and crafts -- fitting stubby fingers into dull scissors and snipping out circles from orange construction paper (ah, the feel of construction paper! its distinct roughness, its graininess, the crayon box colors it comes in, the way tiny, curved bits of it would escape from the scissors and float down to the linoleum tile floor; the way it would darken around a drop of glue, a dab of paste; the way you sprinkled it with glitter to enliven its stubborn drabness; the way it dominated all other media of art until about the sixth grade! LI, a childless bachelor, alas, wonders if construction paper still exists, somewhere -- if, yesterday, there were third grade classrooms where boys and girls were hunched over their orange and brown and black and red paper, inexpertly scalpeling out the outline of witch's hats and broomsticks and cats and ghosts, some teacher -- there were so many for whom LI's heart, at that age, throbbed, Miss Eberhardt, Miss Smith -- making her way down the aisles, the slight smell of her perfume as she bent over you, commenting on your childish assemblage -- but LI digresses).
So, after fortifying ourselves with margaritas at a Mexican restaurant we returned to my place and fortified our fortifications with vodka, then commenced to serious surgery on the pumpkins with the four knives I was able to round up. LI created one of his wobbly eyed jacks, with a big honker nose, the jumbled mouth, and a few artistic touches -- this year, we tried to inscribe something that looked like a skull and crossbones on a cheek, as though the jack had tatooed himself. S., working on more classic lines (plenty of triangles, well wrought), made a more traditional jack. We named our pumpkins, lit candles and put them inside, and turned out the lights. S. had put on the Moulin Rouge CD, so we toasted our little creations and then sang along to the tango version of Roxanne.
And thus we ushered in another Halloween.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
Remora
First, a note. LI begged the Enigmatic Mermaid to post about the Lula election. She did so. In Brazil, we believe, the feuilleton is called the cronica. It is a form known to Americans from the translation of Clarice Lispector's cronicas, of which a review is here. Well, we don't want to flatter the mermaid (well, maybe we do, a little), but while we sometimes find Lispector's cronicas a little, shall we say too caught up in their own sentimental intelligence? a bit too self appreciative? we feel that E.M. would rather buy a used Che Guevara bikini than aphorize hollowly.
Although perhaps we are being unfair to Lispector. Someday we are going to do a post about the influence of Jules Renard's writing, especially the journals, on the cronica/personal essay format.
And now for our feature presentation.
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species." -- Adam Smith
LI was agreeably surprised to see the Arts and Letters website back on-line, thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education. We've taken a lot of links from that site.
The one we are taking today is to Diane Coyle's column in the Financial Times, which presents a skewed and problematic defense of economics as a science. LI uses problematic in the sense that someone might say, the verticality of the Tower of Pisa is problematic. Or, the election of President Bush is problematic. There�s a telling strain, in other words, between semantics and reality. Coyle�s defense is flawed both in the main line of its attack and in its examples.
As in, primero: Coyle is defending economics against common sense. This is much like a biologist defending biology against the amorous habits of the toad. Common sense, whether deluded or not, shapes organized social behavior. This is, in fact, the whole import behind the work of Kahneman and Tversky, which we have been discussing lately. The resistance to experimental work in economics is quite hard to root out. It isn�t resistance to economics � it is the data to which economics must attend. This is how Coyle puts the issue:
First, a note. LI begged the Enigmatic Mermaid to post about the Lula election. She did so. In Brazil, we believe, the feuilleton is called the cronica. It is a form known to Americans from the translation of Clarice Lispector's cronicas, of which a review is here. Well, we don't want to flatter the mermaid (well, maybe we do, a little), but while we sometimes find Lispector's cronicas a little, shall we say too caught up in their own sentimental intelligence? a bit too self appreciative? we feel that E.M. would rather buy a used Che Guevara bikini than aphorize hollowly.
Although perhaps we are being unfair to Lispector. Someday we are going to do a post about the influence of Jules Renard's writing, especially the journals, on the cronica/personal essay format.
And now for our feature presentation.
"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species." -- Adam Smith
LI was agreeably surprised to see the Arts and Letters website back on-line, thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education. We've taken a lot of links from that site.
The one we are taking today is to Diane Coyle's column in the Financial Times, which presents a skewed and problematic defense of economics as a science. LI uses problematic in the sense that someone might say, the verticality of the Tower of Pisa is problematic. Or, the election of President Bush is problematic. There�s a telling strain, in other words, between semantics and reality. Coyle�s defense is flawed both in the main line of its attack and in its examples.
As in, primero: Coyle is defending economics against common sense. This is much like a biologist defending biology against the amorous habits of the toad. Common sense, whether deluded or not, shapes organized social behavior. This is, in fact, the whole import behind the work of Kahneman and Tversky, which we have been discussing lately. The resistance to experimental work in economics is quite hard to root out. It isn�t resistance to economics � it is the data to which economics must attend. This is how Coyle puts the issue:
"The trouble with this chasm between the economist and the ordinary person is that when economics and common sense conflict, common sense is almost always wrong. This signals a profound failure in the typical education. Most people - even, I daresay, some readers of the Financial Times - are economic illiterates. Education authorities would do a great service to future generations if they ditched woolly lessons in citizenship or even worthy ones such as geography in favour of economics."
Now, that first sentence is a disaster from every point of view. What Coyle probably means is that conventional assessments of the economic situation at various points in the business cycle are usually wrong -- or at least that is how LI read it, at first. But of course those assessments drive the expectations that create economic activity. Economists are notoriously bad predictors. The Economist annually summarizes the correctness, or lack of it, of the collective predictions of economists, and what they find, usually, is that those predictions are pretty startlingly off. It is for this reason that economics is not considered a real science by, say, your usual physicist. It has the trappings of a science -- that is, it can produce thoroughly mathematized models -- but it can't seem to produce a good model of the real system that it supposedly studies. It is as if we had a science of water that couldn�t explain ice.
However, LI's first reading of Coyle's paragraph was wrong � it isn�t the economic errors of businessmen to which Coyle is pointing, but to the opponents of free trade between nations. Let�s grant Coyle this much: there are reasons to think that this is the core of economics -- after all, Adam Smith's book was about the wealth of "nations" -- but Coyle's example shows a peculiar blindness to variability of models. It is, in fact, an excellent proof that economics, divorced from common sense, is blind.
"Take one area where common sense and economics often clash: international trade. To the economist, the point of trade is imports. The more of them, the cheaper they are, the better for the nation's welfare. Exports are simply what the country has to do to pay for imports, just as work is what the individual has to do to pay for food and clothes. Thus unilaterally reducing tariffs on imports, even if no other country reciprocates, can be a sensible policy.
To the earthling, though, the point of trade is exports: national strength rather than the welfare of citizens. As Paul Krugman has so often and so eloquently pointed out, most discussions of trade policy even fail to acknowledge that the balance of payments has to balance (so that one country cannot be simultaneously swamped with cheap imports and exporting its jobs to sweatshops abroad)."
Well, yes, reducing tariffs can be a good policy. But Coyle's argument is, I think, fundamentally flawed for a common-sensical reason -- she assumes that the economic constitution of nations is scale invariant. In other words, what works for the United States should, pari passu, work for Argentina. This simply isn't true, as any objective survey of nations would show you. No other nation could maintain both a crushing trade deficit and a high currency as the U.S. does -- and the reason for that is that the US economy is of a much larger scale than the Argentine economy, for instance. General laws still apply -- eventually, the dollar will crash in value, all things being equal -- but because general laws apply more slowly in the case of the dollar, it is always possible that the US can leverage its scale to prevent an abrupt crash of the value of the dollar, or even pre-empt it. It is hard to see how any other country at the present time could do that.
These are the factors that make the unilateral decision to drop trade barriers at all times in all places (or, its equivalent, the decision to cancel governmental supports of national industries and agriculture) a bad policy. It can lead to a quick boom and a deep 'recession" -- as we now call what we used to call, with more sense, a depression. Argentina is a wonderful example of how liberalizing an economy can lead to disaster. You will notice that no economist is urging the Argentine government to run a deficit in order to get out of its current horrible situation. You will also notice that economists of both the left and right are urging the U.S. to run a deficit in order to get out of its current pretty bad situation. The reality is, IMF strictures on the American economy, if structured along the lines of Coyle�s scale invariant model, would lead to a global depression.
So, are there positive reason to have tariffs, or to have the government support industries and agriculture? Yes, there are. The reason is similar to the reason governments allow inventors to monopolize an idea for a certain period of time. Tariffs allow indigenous industries, and agriculture, a zone of inefficiency within which they can innovate, in the same way that monopoly allows inventors a zone of inefficiency in which they can get a fair return on their investment. One has to remember that all economic events happen along some time-line. Argentina, by liberalizing the economy in the way the hotshot, neo-liberal ministers did, ignored the patterns endemic to that time-line � that is, the unavailability of deficit spending in times of business retraction, which is, after all, inevitable. Economists from America, always on hand to advise governments to privatize, consistently ignore the time-line, and the conditions inhering on small scale national economies in times of recession. In fact, they are like gamblers who think they have devised a system that will guarantee a permanent lucky streak. Which is why a pattern has been established that seems to have escaped Ms. Coyle�s attention: advisor from Harvard or MIT or Chicago goes to Third World Country x; advisor gets president of x to liberalize the economy; a boom follows liberalization, greatly increasing spending power of the top ten percent of the population; a devaluation of the currency follows, as the boom proves to be shallow and unsustainable; advisor, from tenured position at Harvard, et. al., writes op ed in Business Week or Forbes listing reasons liberalization didn�t go far enough, and blames collapse on these reasons.
Differences in scale also lead to deviations between the measure of income inequality and the measure of inequality in real purchasing power. Tomorrow, LI is going to expand on this little thought with regards to Coyle�s remarks in the Guardian.
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