the seventies show

LI was going to write about an important issue today: the American Idol election. According to the Washington Post, all America voted for whoever it was that won the contest. And this puzzled me – since it is clear evidence that I’ve been sleepwalking again. Damn. My enjoyment of America’s show, a show that is American as idolatry with less calories, but more filling, with four on the floor, Ram tough, built to last, I’m lovin’ it, is a bit baffled by the fact that I can’t watch it – my tv being so sensitive to the many waves and follies that float invisibly through the air that I can only watch one channel – Fox – and every show looks like a heavy blizzard having an epileptic seizure.

This puts the keebash to the only show I really want to watch – the Simpsons – and definitely would make viewing American idol, which depends, I believe, on sound, a little boring. Of course, I could get the DVDs of American idols past and see what I voted for. I also could slit my wrists with the kitchen scissors. Life is full of possibilities.

Instead, I’ll go back to my own previously interrupted show, your favorite and mine, Philosophe idol. The seventies show – the 1770s. Or, Condillac and expectation.

As I wrote in the last post, Condillac starts not with Robinson Crusoe, but with Crusoe’s island, so to speak. That is, a small group of people who grow their own food. Marx criticized the economists fatal penchant for methodological individualism by jeering at the notion of Robinson Crusoe as a starting point for explaining a social phenomenon like exchange. However, Marx ignored something that is interesting about Condillac’s Commerce and Government – which is that Condillac embedded exchange and use in the framework of expectation. In Condillac’s version of little people on the prairie, an islanded group growing its food, over time, learns how much it needs to plant and how much it needs to store. And that learning is related to its desires and fears. In other words, the superfluity of the product does not begin as a judgment about an objective quantity, but begins as a judgment about risk and uncertainty:

“Let’s suppose that after having picked out the grain necessary for sowing the land again, there remains one hundred bushelweight (muids – about 2 and a half bushels); and with this quantity, they could expect a second harvest without fear of lack.”

After reconstructing a little narrative about harvests, Condillac comes to the main point:

“It is thus in opinion that one has quantities, rather than in the quantities themselves; it is where abundance, surabundance, or shortage (disette) is discovered: but they are found in opinion only because they are supposed in the quantities.”

This may seem upside down (Marx will invariably use figures of topsy turviness or things being upside down when he comes upon ‘ideology’ – like St. Paul, he thinks we see now, as through a glass, darkly, but unlike St. Paul, he prescribes an astringent and earthly corrective for this problem), since after all disette is marked by more than opinion – it is marked by sickness and death. But this, which is the objective, corporal basis of fear, does not of itself make opinion “objective.”

This is where Condillac is more sophisticated than one might think at first. For C., the little people does not exist as the individual times x, but has a separate existence that emerges and animates the group. This grounds economics in two things –physical need and opinion – and allows Condillac to posit, at the beginning of his story, a bifurcation in need.

“We have two sorts of needs. One are entailed by our physical disposition: we are disposed to have need of nourishment – we cannot live without food. The other is entailed by our habits. Such and such a thing, of which we can do without, since our physical disposition does not make it a need, become necessary to us by usage, and sometimes as necessary as if we were physically disposed to need it.

I call natural those needs entailed by our physical disposition, and factitious (factice) the needs we owe to the habit contracted by the usage of things.”

That distinction ramifies into a whole history of civilization in Condillac – for whom the political economy is just one way of telling that history. Adam Smith, of course, has the same notion of the political economy, but he is, as we know from our little textbooks, wedded to the classical ideal of objective values – and in particular, labor. Condillac’s conventionalism is often discussed in terms of use and exchange – Jessica Riskin, a marvelous historian, in her essay The Spirit of the System and the fortunes of Physiocracy, writes:

“Condillac… rooted value, not in nature, but in social convention. He opposed the tendency to “regard value as an absolute quality, inherent in things independently of the judgments we make.” The value of a thing, Condillac said, arose primarily from assessments of its “utility”, the needs and uses people had for it. He therefore argued for free trade on the basis of the social, rather than natural, origins of value. Condillac’s conventional origin of value implied that commerce was not sterile, despite the claims of the physiocrats; exchanges between people who valued what they received over what they traded always maximized value. Taxes would inhibit such exchanges, and it was for this reason, and not the sterility of commerce, that Condillac opposed them.”

Now, the history of expectation in economics is a convoluted one. Currently, the neo-classicals rejoice in a theory, rational expectation, in which government activity is so thoroughly encoded in the expectations of the market that there is no need for it – in fact, the government acting is, by definition, an upsetting of the equilibrium posited by rational expectation. Government is the drunken daddy, the market is the sleeping baby, and drunken daddy will just stumble in the nursery and make the baby cry. This is so obviously ridiculous that it has been unanimously embraced by the conservative ideologues as the perfect explanation of the bad state theory of economics (otherwise known as, one hundred and one excuses why absentee owners should be allowed to ruin the planet and enslave the working class), and awarded nobel prizes in economics, and extended to explain why, for instance, the stock market is perfectly rational (which got rather hit on the head after 2001 – no matter. The ideologues then explain why the market is perfectly irrational. In any case, bad daddy state can’t wake up the baby.)

Of course, it should be pointed out that the ideological windowdressing only operates to prevent the state from exerting itself on behalf of the working class. When the governing class needs help, economic theory is quietly stashed in a closet and the government spends like a drunken sailor, most notably on some convenient war that it discovers that it has to wage.

However, the Keynesian notion of adaptive expectation, the realistic explanation of expectation, would seem to have its origins in Condillac. So – we shall return once more to the Abbe, but I don’t know when.

d. 2001

All the liberal blogs, lately, revel in the President’s falling poll numbers. LI doesn’t. LI finds those numbers extremely depressing. They map the incredible political impotence of any opposition to Bushist politics, rather than the reverse. The extension of tax giveaways to the wealthy today are the latest sign of the absolute victory of Bush’s values. Another, more familiar sign, one that every American can warm himself with: the murder of seven American soldiers in Iraq, yesterday, in the bloody farce of the Iraq vanity project. Then there is the dispossession of most of New Orleans, the lack of any attempt to deal with global warming. Yada yada yada. That depressed personal approval rating of the man whose policies are opposed by an utter vacuum shows how utterly Bushist culture has triumphed, not the opposite. Whenever I read a progressive site touting, say, Bush’s popularity being down to 31 percent, it seems to me I’m seeing a corpse crawl out of his grave to point proudly at his death date.

addenda

First things first. LI says: SUPPORT THE TEN.
As a long time supporter of breaking the American military, LI has been heartened by the lack of enlistment, and the Army’s quiet desperation as it eyes various dire thresholds in Iraq. So this story in WAPO caught our eye:

“The Army Reserve, taxed by recruiting shortfalls and war-zone duty, has adopted a policy barring officers from leaving the service if their field is undermanned or they have not been deployed to Iraq, to Afghanistan or for homeland defense missions.
The reserve has used the unpublicized policy, first adopted in 2004 and strengthened in a May 2005 memo signed by Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, its commander, to disapprove the resignations of at least 400 reserve officers, according to Army figures

"I don't think during a time of war you would want to let people go when you have a shortage of people," Army Reserve spokesman Steve Stromvall said when asked to comment on the memo, which surfaced during litigation over the policy. At least 10 reserve officers have sued the Army, saying they should be allowed to get out because they have finished their mandatory eight years of service.”

In the longer term, the crucial job is to wrest the military away from its use by an out of control executive branch. This is a struggle that will, really, decide what form of government rules this country. We already have a gerrymandered map for the house, and a relic of slave days ensuring white supremacy in the Senate – the way the Senate seats are distributed would shame Iran’s mullahs. I often read conservative bloggers go on about how the U.S. is a Republic, not a democracy – which doesn’t prevent said bloggers from totally supporting the supposed Bush effort to bring democracy to the Middle East. LI is for bringing democracy to the U.S. You can contribute by talking up the horrors of a military that is the plaything of the President’s vanity. Remember, every potential recruit you divert from the military brings us that much closer to taking back the country.

…

And this just in, as an addendum to our Myth post of yesterday on the strange rebirth of socialism in Latin America. Readers will remember that John Harris cast about for some way to explain the irrationality of the wave of nationalizations in Latin America. Today’s Independent has a fine story that will bring a tear of joy to the eye of the libertarians among us, a story of capitalism in the classical mode, a story that echoes with New World motifs that reach back to when Caliban was a pup…

A. first, it involves the original, divinely ordained mineral that started it all. The El Dorado square on that monopoly board, the Periodic table. Gold.
B. There’s the discovery. The original discoverer is a native, Luis Arteaga, who went into the hills near his village of Palo Ralo twenty five years ago and found the stuff. Palo Ralo is in Honduras. We know the next step in the story, of course. The foundation of a society of property law depends on stealing the property of natives, and this was done in due course. The Honduran courts are still hearing his case:
“… in 1998, in the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Mitch and with the help of a new mining code designed to attract foreign investment, Entre Mares was awarded the lease to San Martin and Mr Arteaga's claims were ignored. To add to the insult, the villagers claim they were coerced into agreeing to move from their homes and relocate to is now the new village of Palo Ralo.
The company insist the move was done on the basis of "willing buyer, willing seller".

Despite the resources ranged against them, Mr Avila has fought ferociously for his client and for his claim of millions of dollars. Remarkably it seems he may even have won. The lawyer was able to show legal documents that appeared to show not only his clients' legal stake for discovery of the gold but also rulings from two lower courts upholding his claim to 5 per cent of Entre Mares profits. He said the case was now with the Honduran Supreme Court. "The court has ruled in our favour twice," he said.”

C. Entre Mares is a wholly owned subsidiary of Glamis, a gold mining company in the old fashioned style. Not one to bow to newfangled, socialistic ideas about the environment or fair pay or any of that crap. Fighting the good Randian fight. Prospero’s distant breed, American branch hq-ed in Nevada:

"We were happy, super happy. We thought we were going to uncover riches and wealth," he said, sitting outside his house in the newly created village of Palo Ralo, his eyes sunk deep in tobacco-brown skin. "But if I knew what I know now I would have never have accepted [what has happened]." Mr Arteaga is just one of many outspoken critics of the sprawling San Martin goldmine, operated by Glamis Gold, a mining company with headquarters in Nevada. Some locals say the company's behaviour is so exploitative they have likened it to a new form of "colonialism" while the Honduran public prosecutor has filed an action accusing the multinational of deforestation, pollution of streams and illegally altering the course of water-ways and roads.”

Now here’s the kind of thing that any country would embrace. Glamis has a special way of finding that precious metal: “Meanwhile, internationally the company's activities have been seized on by campaigners who say the growing dispute in Honduras un-derlines the need for wide-ranging changes in the way mining leases are awarded and the need to ensure full consultation with local people. The controversy also highlights how - with the world's most accessible gold reserves having already been taken - mining companies are now using highly destructive and toxic methods in the developing world to feed our enduring demand for this precious metal.
Such methods, which produce up to 30 tons of toxic waste for each ounce of gold produced, have been banned elsewhere.” Nimbys, you know. Happily, paying that four dollars and two bits per day and using massive amounts of cyanide has been very good to all concerned. Oh, some villagers complain about hair loss, and there will be the decades after the operation closes down of misbirths, poverty, and the uselessness of the land. On the other hand:

“… Local environmental activists say the mine has created huge problems, has taken up precious water resources and caused cyanide pollution in local streams as a result of its heap leeching techniques, in which diluted cyanide is sprayed over huge piles of quarried rock to separate the microscopic flecks of gold. They believe such pollution may be the cause of skin problems and hair loss suffered by local people.

That's an allegation that Joe Danni, the vice-president of Corporate Relations at Glamis disputes. "There was a significant shortage of water locally already. It's famine or feast in Honduras, mud and water or dust."
Campaigners have questioned whether the mine should be operating in a drought-prone area but Mr Danni argues that Glamis has improved the year-round supply of potable water to residents by drilling wells.”

Drill the well, use the cyanide, drill the well, use the cyanide. A company like Glamis, as you can imagine, by doing good is doing well. So very well:

“This week, while shareholders met in Toronto, the company revealed that first-quarter profits had soared by 668 per cent, largely as a result of higher prices for metals and a full quarter of commercial production at the new mine in Guatemala. The Guatemala operation was established with the help of a controversial $45m loan from the World Bank despite the fact that the mine is only expected to create 160 long-term jobs.”

Imagine: side by side we have a picture of irrational communists, banded together in a religious mass, and we have the happy shareholders of Glamis, going home in their SUVs. I think the Tech Central people could point to the side they want to be on.

Of course, the World Bank loan should clue us in that there are limits to the free market. In fact, Glamis has been an outstanding global corporate citizen, willing to reach across international lines even in the U.S. – the company’s Canadian branch has sued under NAFTA for a fair compensation for its Imperial valley project. The simply proposed a mile wide, open pit, cyanide heavy gold mining operation in Imperial county, California. They proposed to process 400 tons of rock and soil for every ounce of gold. They would use up to 389 million gallons of water annually. Shockingly, one of the last things Clinton’s Interior department did was deny the Imperial a permit. Of course, that had to change once friendly, friendly George Bush came into office, and friendly, friendly Gale Norton couldn’t see the big deal. Permit granted, and go where the spirit of Rand leads you. That’s when the California Mining and Geology board stepped in, with pesky filings about back filling. Can you imagine? More government on our backs. We need that gold!
Ah, and you will remember that little fight a year ago, over CAFTA – the Central American version of Nafta. You might wonder why on earth it would matter. Was Bush just trying to fight poverty in Central America?

No way. The fight – and the CAFTA’s successful passage – is insurance for companies like Glamis. In the case some future government in Honduras wanted Glamis to, say, stop massively poisoning the land, Glamis could use CAFTA rules and the State department simply to ride over that weak assertion of sovereignty.

a little justice for condillac

Condillac

In 1776, the Abbe de Condillac made the mistake of publishing his thoughts about the political economy, Commerce and Government. He should have chosen 1777, or 1778, since his book came out at the same time as the book from a Scottish philosophe, Adam Smith. Piss poor timing has undone many a man. Overshadowed by the Wealth of Nations, it took two hundred some years for Condillac’s book to be translated into English. Not that he was totally ignored. Menger, that semi-founder of the marginalist school, liked him – and subsequently, Condillac, as the founder of the subjectivist school of economics, has been held in warm regard by the Austrians. Marx, on the other hand, reserved one of his minor thunderbolts for the man. Quoting Condillac in Das Kapital, Marx remarks:

“We see how Condillac not only throws together use value and exchange value, but childishly foists upon a society with developed commodity production a state in which the producers produce their own means of subsistence and only throws into circulation the surplus (Uberschuss) over their own needs, the superfluity. Yet Condillac arguments is often repeated by modern economists….”

Recently, the scary free trader, Jagdish Baghwati , claimed that Condillac understood trade better than Smith. And then, of course, there is Derrida’s stunning essay on Condillac which uses one of his great economic ideas – les besoins factices, or factitious needs – to analyze the frivolous.

LI just started reading the book. As we have mentioned, we are translated a book on economics, which has stuffed us to the very gills with talk about money.

Marx was wrong to be so dismissive. Condillac was not a writer of what Marx called Robinsonades – the myth at the heart of methodological individualism that we begin with man, the bare forked thing, on his island. He does, in a sense, begin with islands however. Or the separation of one people from another.

SUPPOSONS une petite peuplade, qui vient de s’établir, qui a fait sa première récolte, et, qui étant isolée, ne peut subsister que du produit des champs qu’elle cultive.

(Let’s suppose the following situation: there is a small group of people, just established, which makes its first harvest and, being isolated, is forced to subsist on the product of the fields they cultivate.)

As in all histories of beginnings, the history is supplemented with a beginning before the beginning. But that criticism shouldn’t blind us to what Condillac was doing, which – pace Marx – was to ask about excess. That is, what is an excess, a surplus? How would a petite peuplade decide this question? And what would it mean?

I'll return to this in the next post.

myths about myths

Lee Harris’s article about socialism at Tech Central says some smart things – and puts them at the service of a very dumb thesis.

First, let’s go to the dumb thesis. Harris poses the question: why, almost twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, is there a resurgence of nationalizations in Latin America? One answer would go like this: neo-liberalism, or the Washington consensus, encoded a contradiction at its heart: at the same time that it encouraged massive consumer spending through loans and the selling off of nationalized industries, it stripped the state of its abilities to institute counter-cyclical economic policy. In effect, it speeded up and deepened the effects of the business cycle while attacking the immune system that could mitigate its harsh effects. All of this among nations with pervasive inequality, stagnate working wages, and entrenched poverty. The effect was to systematically de-legitimate capitalism when the bottom fell out of the boom.

Now, this answer is arguable. It is certainly not irrational. But Harris dismisses the petty stats in favor of the grand historic sweep (a sweep that ignores how much twentieth century capitalism has incorporated socialist ideas, and how the U.S., surely one of the purest “capitalist” states, supports its internal economy on a state guarantor structure), and comes up with an answer that was a ringer in 1947, and is a ringer today: Socialism is a religion, depending on a revolutionary myth, a la Georges Sorel:

“… in the introduction to Reflections on Violence, Sorel says that the French thinker Renan "was very surprised to discover that Socialists are beyond discouragement." He then quotes Renan's comment about the indefatigable perseverance of socialists: "After each abortive experiment they recommence their work: the solution is not yet found, but it will be. The idea that no solution exists never occurs to them, and in this lies their strength." (Italics mine.)

"Sorel's response to Renan's comment is not to say, "Renan is wrong; there is a socialist solution, and one day we will find it." Instead, he focuses on the fact that socialists gain their strength precisely from their refusal to recognize that no socialist solution exists. "No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution); if they are checked, it merely proves that their apprenticeship has been insufficient; they must set to work again with more courage, persistence, and confidence than before...." But what is the point for Sorel of this refusal to accept the repeated historical failure of socialism? Here again, Sorel refuses to embrace the orthodox position of socialist optimism; he does not say, "Try, try, try again, for one day socialism will succeed." Instead, he argues that it is only by refusing to accept the failure of socialism that one can become a "true revolutionary." Indeed, for Sorel, the whole point of the myth of the socialist revolution is not that the human societies will be transformed in the distant future, but that the individuals who dedicate their lives to this myth will be transformed into comrades and revolutionaries in the present. In short, revolution is not a means to achieve socialism; rather, the myth of socialism is a useful illusion that turns ordinary men into comrades and revolutionaries united in a common struggle -- a band of brothers, so to speak.”

Harris is engaging in a tactic that is almost universal in the social sciences, right or left. The interpretation of social phenonomena is always bumping up against social phenomena that seems either nakedly counter-productive, or immoral, or both. Social science has a vested interest in the rational agent, and so it is important to have a story at hand. The common story is this: on the left, to speak of the fetishism of commodities and false consciousness; on the right, to speak of brainwashing or – as with Harris – an exploitation of the worshipful part of human nature. In fact, the revolutionary ethos that did hold together bands of communists in the 20th century was a wonderful and strange thing. For the conservative, it is natural that the managerial class hold together – its self interest is served by preserving a system in which it can accrue more. (I should say that the rationality of this is only rational from the point of view that takes the getting of more to be the very center of rationality). But the band of brothers, the revolutionary cadre, what are they getting out of it? In the cold war, the answer, at first, was much like Harris’ – partly because the answer was given by intellectuals who were once part of the Communist movement. The Burnhams and Koestlers. The dramas in their own lives they projected upon the history of Communism itself. A longer tradition, one going back to Burke, claimed that the set of motives were purely about power – the theoretician confused justice with those tactics that would put him in power, and so fought for justice as he saw it and gained such power as was unchecked by traditional limits.

If Harris’ explanation for why socialism is not dead seems, in the end, a non-starter, along the way he does say some interesting things. For instance, he takes Marx seriously about creating scientific socialism – which, oddly enough, has been pretty much ignored by Marx’s academic followers. It is as though the latter are ashamed of the claim to science. LI thinks that if Marx was not doing science, in Das Kapital, than no economist or social “scientist” has ever done science. That he might be wrong about this or that is irrelevant – one expects scientific work to be in continual need of revision.

Harris, of course, thinks Marx failed, but he does trace, with as much neutrality as he can muster, the Marxian tradition in socialism:

“For Marx, scientific socialism had nothing to do with what Marx called utopian socialism; indeed, it was Marx's boast that he was the first socialist thinker to escape from the lure of fantasy thinking that had previously passed for socialist thought. Utopian socialists love to dream up ideal schemes for organizing human life; they engage in wishful politics, and design all sorts of utterly impractical but theoretically perfect social systems, none of which has the slightest chance of ever being actualized in concrete reality. For Marx, on the other hand, socialism had to be taken down from the clouds, and set firmly on the ground. Thus Marx, instead of spending his time writing about imaginary utopias, dedicated his life in trying to prove -- scientifically no less -- that socialism was not merely desirable, but historically inevitable. Capitalism, he argued, had been a good thing; a necessary step that mankind had to take to advance forward; but, according to Marx, capitalism would eventually suffer from an internal breakdown. It would simply stop producing the goods. Like feudalism before it, capitalism was inevitably bound to pass away as a viable system of social organization, and then, and only then, would socialism triumph.

But in this case, what was the role of the revolutionary? For Marx, it made no sense for revolutionaries to overthrow capitalism before it had fulfilled its historical destiny; on the contrary, to overthrow capitalism before it collapsed internally would be counter-productive: the precondition of viable socialism was, after all, a fully matured capitalist system that had already revolutionized the world through its amazing ability to organize labor, to make the best use of natural resources, to internationalize commerce and industry, and to create enormous wealth. Therefore, for Marx, there was no point in revolution for the sake of revolution…”

The “inevitable” is one of those hotly contested questions – it depends on what you think Marx thought about the role of the political, and whether he was giving an ideal model of capitalism in Das Capital or outlining a logic to which all real manifestations of capitalism must succumb. Harris’ point, however, is to drive a wedge between the economist Marx and the “revolutionary myth”, which he is sure is the way socialism culturally reproduces itself.

However, even though Harris doesn’t mention the business cycle or inequality in his essay – an odd gap when talking about Bolivia and Venezuela, one big enough to drive an army of socialists through – he does have to acknowledge the poverty. Which is how he lights upon Latin America’s rational man:

“The Peruvian economist, Hernando de Soto, has argued in his book, The Mystery of Capital, that the failure of the various socialist experiments of the twentieth century has left mankind with only one rational choice about which economic system to go with, namely, capitalism. Socialism, he maintained, has been so discredited that any further attempt to revive it would be sheer irrationality. But if this is the case, which I personally think it is, then why are we witnessing what certainly appears to be a revival of socialist rhetoric and even socialist pseudo-solutions, such as the nationalization of foreign companies?

It should be stressed that de Soto is not arguing that, after the many socialist failures of the twentieth century, capitalism has became historically inevitable and that its expansion would occur according to some imaginary iron clad laws without any need for active intervention. On the contrary, de Soto is fully aware of the enormous obstacles to the expansion of capitalism, especially in regions like South America, and his book is full of dismal statistics that demonstrate the uphill battle against bureaucratic red-tape that is involved in getting a business license or even buying a house in many third world countries. But, here again, the question arises, If capitalism is mankind's only rational alternative, why do so many of the governments of third world nations make it so extraordinarily difficult for ordinary people to take the first small steps on the path of free enterprise?”

Here, it is hard to keep from laughing out loud. Morales was elected precisely because a first world country, out of an irrational fear of markets, has interfered majorly with Bolivian entrepreneurs – the country being the U.S., the market being in coca, and the interference being the wiping out and making illegal of a crop grown for thousands of years, and a mainstay of just those small entrepreneurs so dear to De Soto’s heart.

Hmm, banning a plant that leads to a drug that kills perhaps one hundred times fewer people than alcohol, and two hundred times less than automobile driving. Irrational? Religious? You be the judge.

PS
For a good time, LI urges readers to go to this WAPO discussion with a CIA analyst about the promotion of Michael Hayden from officer in charge of breaking the 4TH amendment at the NSA to officer in charge of breaking the 4TH amendment at the CIA. The CIA analyst in question seems to be a machine programmed to say outstanding things about the outstanding Hayden at intervals of every four sentences or so:

“…Kappes [the deputy director} and Hayden are outstanding intelligence professionals…”

“That is why having experienced intelligence professionals like Mike Hayden and Steve Kappes take the helm of CIA is so important at this time of transformation …”

“Mike Hayden is an outstanding intelligence professional, and he has demonstrated over the years that he is willing to stand up to the SecDef on intelligence matters.”

“Mike Hayden made a number of very important changes at the Fort.[NSA} Did he make everyone happy in the process? No. But strong and innovative leaders never do.”

“I believe he [Mike “Jesus” Hayden] is the right person at the right time. he probably has a better sense of HUMINT than virtually anyone else who has been appointed to head up the CIA “

“Mike’s NSA experience and his experience as DDNI gives him outstanding insight to the HUMINT world and the role that the CIA needs to play in the future.”

“The combination of Hayden and Kappes, in my view, will be a home run for the Agency and for the country.”

And this is only half way through the discussion. It is an outstanding discussion, a home run for the Washington Post and for the nation. I’ve never read answers that fit the high professional level of beyond the call of duty like these highly intelligent answers. High intelligence is always needed to talk about intelligence in an intelligent way, and these strong and innovative answers not only answered all my present questions, but all questions I will ever have about our strength and going into the futureness of our strength in these perilous times.

the masque of castlereagh

The British are used to lunatic leaders. Castlereagh, the emblem of odiousness in the Masque of Anarchy, committed suicide in 1822. Shelley wasn’t alive to hear the glad tidings:


”I met Murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh--
Very smooth he look'd yet grim;
Seven bloodhounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them humanhearts to chew,
Which from his wide cloak he drew.”

Castlereagh was, of course, a relentless pursuer of native radicals spawned by the French Revolution, and the proto-chartists who were beginning to respond to the horrors of the new industrial system. But even Castlereagh might have hesitated to propose the Blairist blasphemy acts.

Then of course there was Anthony Eden, who, after Suez in 1956 and the realization, among the English political elite, that they were no longer independent of America – basically, the Americans told the English, get a new p.m. – retired with a nervous breakdown. Churchill finally went senile in office. Thatcher, of course, came into office senile, but her senility was ideological. And then there is the mad Blair.

Simon Hogarth’s sketch in the Guardian captures the inheritor of Castlereagh’s mask, the mullah of the third way, in all his seedy, lunatic glory. This is Hogarth’s report on the Blair press conference – the one after the reports were out that Blair had demoted his foreign secretary due to Jack Straw’s slight hesitation to endorse the Bush doctrine of tossing about nuclear weapons to win popularity and power the winds of democracy. Well, you have to stay with the Americans, after all, to moderate their line:

“He {Blair) also showed - unusually - signs of suffering from secondary Prescott, the verbal disorder that afflicts anyone who has dealings with the deputy PM, like the lasagne that laid waste Spurs. Of Charles Clarke's dismissal, he said: "There was no one I less wanted to make the decision in respect of."
And through it all we were hypnotised by the eye, the one gleaming, bulging eye that tells us so much about what is really going on inside the Blair brain. It seems to act independently of the other, often wider, sometimes hooded. Occasionally, even while he is grinning, the eye focuses balefully on a tormentor. It resembles a special branch officer, who, while the politician glads hands and slaps backs, scans the crowd for concealed weaponry.
The amazing thing is that the eye has changed sides, twice! I checked with my colleague Steve Bell, who first spotted the staring orb, and he said it was the left one.

But just a year ago, while he was defending himself over Iraq, it was the right eye that resembled Sir Roderick Spode's, capable of opening an oyster at 60 paces.”
Well, LI can only see this as the realization of the curse. The throngs of the dead haunt the “coalition” leaders, lying scoundrels every one. It is true that LI’s often expressed wish that the dead of Falluja surround the bed of the President and his “caliente” wife every night seems, as of yet, not to have come true. On the other hand, Bush’s soullessness, the path upward from failure to failure and promotion to promotion, that makes it hard to pinch the man under all that Pavlovian conditioning. The self made Manchurian candidate.

snopes, revisited

Snopes, revisited

In the aftermath of the election of Bush (not the coup in 2000, but his real election in 2004), LI wrote a series of slamming posts directed at a silly meme in the progresso-sphere. This meme crudely separated the cultural from the economic, and was postulated on the idea that the working class folks in the red states just didn’t understand their economic self interest.

LI thought this was bullshit. The Snopes well understood their short term interest, which was to substitute, for wage increases, tax cuts; and to further substitute heavy borrowing, at reduced interest, in both the private and public spheres, for real time increases in wealth. What the progs thought was some mystical kind of false consciousness was nothing of the sort – it was classical Free Ride behavior.

At the time, we made such angry comments as:

“We want to pick up on our freerider thesis. Some readers might think that we have gone nihilistic. We haven’t. Really, our point is simple. From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1970s, progressive thought in America was all about instituting progressive legislation at the national level. It so happens that this extended benefits for the working class to a whole region of the country, the South, which generated no autonomous progressive organizations. Between the Revolutionary War and today, I can think of only one Southern generated progressive movement: the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement, led by middle class blacks and peopled by working class and agrarian blacks, broke the back of the South’s pseudo-feudal system and opened it up to the world market. The South owes its prosperity to this act; and so, in gratitude, throughout the Snopesian South, from South Carolina to Mississippi, the Confederate colors were sewn into the state flag, where they remain today. Reminders that the Snopes leave no act of generosity unpunished.”

And:

Dems have taken on the role of both Herbert Hoover and Roosevelt, reigning in the deficit through paying for it while trying to preserve national progressive programs, like social security. The Snopes hate the Hoover thing – hate the idea of paying for something when they have figured out how to get it free. And of course they hate the Roosevelt thing of tolerance and enlightenment and blacks moving in next door and marrying their kids. But what they hate most is the idea that the progressives they are conning don't understand what is happening. The progressive harping on the ignorance or bad consciousness or brainwashing of the Snopes class has to stop. Far from being ignorant or unaware of their self advantage, they have had a free ride that has given them the luxury of being able to indulge in reactionary hate while being bankrolled by progressive legislation and opened up to the world through Civil Rights. Everything they hate has supported everything they love: credit cards, big trucks, big motor boats leaking oil over various federally funded dammed lakes, etc., etc. It is no wonder they feel like God's remnant on earth. They have the satisfaction of knowing who is conning who in the great progressive deal, and what they really can't stand is that the liberals that are being suckered don't know who is suckering them. This is the Snopes version of class consciousness. It is that resentment which is at the bottom of the conservative complaint that the liberals are “snobby”. What they mean is: we are screwing you, and you think you are so smart!”

Well, out there in Snopes land, there are intimations of a free rider meltdown. And it isn’t going over well for Bush. LI misjudged the timing, here – the world market continues to support Bush’s economic policy, which is much like the steroid use he so deplores among athletes – inject a hundred billion borrowed bucks here, a hundred billion tax break there, and presto chango – the economy is hitting home runs! Except, after a while, the runs are all being made by the wealthy.

This is from the NYT story surveying the Snopesian landscape:

“Wayne Toomey and Nancy Tuttle, who live in Parrish, Fla., and co-own a vending machine business, have gotten smaller cars and cut some household costs because of high gasoline and insurance prices.

But many Americans now say they are feeling squeezed in the absence of these factors. Their concerns are instead centered on a combination of high gasoline prices, creeping insurance costs and the pressure of a large number of adjustable-rate mortgages, now jumping to market rates, that helped to fuel one of the largest housing booms in American history.”

Well, well, it seems that there is a puzzling sour taste in the mouths of the parents – and the chillen’s tooths are bein’ set on edge no less. And hurricane season is around the corner - which has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with the warming of the ocean.

"We're really worried about a lot of things," said Nancy Tuttle, co-owner of a vending machine business in the suburbs here. "The cost of gas, the cost of house insurance, the cost of medical insurance, it's just everything."

The increase in prices, particularly of gasoline, is taking a political toll on President Bush, even in a Republican area like these suburbs. A recent nationwide CBS News poll found that only 33 percent of those surveyed approved of Mr. Bush's job performance and that 74 percent disapproved of his handling of the gasoline issue.

"We went from totally believing in Bush to really having our doubts," said Wayne Toomey, who owns a house with Ms. Tuttle in the nearby suburb of Parrish. "It comes down to his lack of care about gas prices."

That lack of care about the gas prices is a killer. I mean, he was doing good there for a while – the torture thing, he was for that; the dozing at the wheel while NYC was attacked, check; and the persecuting homos thing was so very sweet. It was like everything was becoming cool and Christian again. But now, how about taking care of our SUVs, motherfucker?

I love, oh I love love love good old fashioned American values. That’s what I like about the South.

a small theory

Once again, the liberal press, the naysayers, the blame America first crowd, the Politically Correct a-holes, the academic jerkoffs, the ones who say happy holidays, the Islamofascists, the useful idiots, the Marxo-anti-semitic-stopper supporters of Saddam are refusing to publicize the good news from Iraq. Oh, they say, look at all declining stats – fucking electricity, fucking petroleum. Oh, like we are supposed to shit in our pants. Well, here’s something that shows Iraq is on course, steady as she goes:

“Kidnapping has flourished here since the fall of Saddam Hussein, as insurgents, militias and criminal gangs have taken advantage of the breakdown in social order. Iraq has caught up with the traditional world leaders in kidnapping — like Colombia, Mexico and Brazil — and may have surpassed them. The vast majority of victims are Iraqis. Between 5 and 30 are abducted every day, according to figures maintained by the American Embassy in Baghdad, though Iraqi and American officials acknowledge that any estimate is merely guesswork, since most kidnappings go unreported.’

So, they thought they would hold Iraq down below Mexico, eh? And Brazil – it is such a coup about Brazil! Brazil is like twice as big as Iraq, but the brave, liberated Iraqis have actually surpassed their kidnapping stats like it was nothing. Rumor is that Tony Snow’s first day on the job will concentrate exclusively on this statistic, and that generals are to be made available to explain that kidnappers imply money, money implies wealth, hence, Iraq is getting wealthier every day! The problem, of course, is a little security problem. Some say it isn’t there at all – as is well known, the AEI, Mark Steyn, and the Weekly Standard now sponsor cookouts in Samarra with Girls go Wild and tequila, without a care in the world! Most of what we see on tv is old Soviet Afghanistani clips redubbed by the well known communists who run the media. But I think we have to be honest here: we have killed every insurgent three or four times – since, of course, there were only about 2,000 deadenders to begin with, I believe. I think that was the secretary of War’s estimate. And the department of war has claimed to have killed, now, around 24,000 insurgents, give or take a corpse. So what gives?

My theory is that Iran has developed a special undead medicine which it has distributed to its worldwide network of terror – Iran being the world’s number one financer of terrorism – and that they are using this Iranian medicine (did I mention that Iran is the world’s number one financer of terrorism?) in Iraq to terrorize. Flagrantly. Also, Iran is the world’s number on financer of terrorism. The merciful way to handle this – the thing that the youth of Iran cry out for – is for us to lob numerous atom bombs, or as we like to call them, bunker n house n yard n dog n cat n baby n man n woman n car n tv n telephone pole n street n yard n restaurant n tower n office building busters, to break up the nefarious mullah ring. Since Iran is the world’s number one financer of terrorism. This solution will make us totally popular in the Middle East, since Middle Easterners like a strong hand. They like to be justly punished for what they did wrong. If they did something wrong, they hang around and say, I wish someone would irradiate me and my immediate family, striking me down for generations to come. That’s what they say.

Wolfowitz for CIA Director!

LI is sad, today, about the resignation of Porter Goss. For years our opinion of the CIA has been like Cato's opinion of Carthage: Delenda est CIA. Destroy the fucking place lock stock and barrel. Birthed by a clearly illegal extension of executive authority -- the very decree by which Truman founded the CIA was secret for years - the CIA has been one of the great anti-communist machines, its purpose being to manufacture paranoia in order to keep the perpetual war ethos alive.

Goss was, if anything, a product of that. But he was something more. He was a product of the Bush culture. High idealism, in the Bush culture, is yoked to that pure strain of incompetence which brings a smile to Three Stooges fans everywhere. And thus, upon an agency that has long outlived its usefulness, Bush sicced a man destined, in a mere two years, to gut the place.

According to Dana Milbank's post mortem story:

"In public, Goss once acknowledged being "amazed at the workload." Within headquarters, "he never bonded with the workforce," said John O. Brennan, a former senior CIA official and interim director of the National Counterterrorism Center until last July.

"Now there's a decline in morale, its capability has not been optimized and there's a hemorrhaging of very good officers," Brennan said. "Turf battles continue" with other parts of the recently reorganized U.S. intelligence community "because there's a lack of clarity and he had no vision or strategy about the CIA's future." Brennan added: "Porter's a dedicated public servant. He was ill-suited for the job.""

Now, anyone who trawls through the Net knows that the rumored understory is that it was Porter's dedication to pussy in the limo and call girl scandal that completed his downfall. The WAPO, a company town paper that has no desire to insult the Bush Court, headed by a genuinely likeable, and funny, oh so funny king, doesn't entertain these rumors... at least yet. But the story of Goss's tenure, from his attempt to transform the CIA into a retirement haven for Republicans to his own brand of isolationism, cutting off America's intelligence interaction with foreign intelligence agencies, brought the rare hurray to our lips. If the CIA can't simply be destroyed by Congressional writ -- after all, in Bush's America, Congress is a mere advisory board, delegated to the lesser job of larding the wealthy with tax dollars -- the second best thing is to have it commit hari-kari. Putting Goss and his minions (with their incredible, frat boy names -- that a man named Dusty Foggo was his close friend and fellow limo user shows something about the culture. I'm just not exactly sure what. Are we merely the dream of Thomas Pynchon?)operated upon the place the way termites treat a Stativarius.

Thus, we are completely saddened by Goss' departure. Surely, there is only one man out there who can complete Goss' valuable work. One man out there whose career shows an almost mystical level of incompetence. One man out there with the idealism to mistreat and mutilate experience in the quest for his own personal contact high.

Paul Wolfowitz, come home!

wolf to wolf, wolf to man, man to wolf

...
This post attaches to yesterday's post, where I meant to draw a dance diagram with three positions – hating – being hated – being hated for hating – in order to choreograph the romance of hatred...

Bringing me to Richard Bessel’s article, Hatred after War, in the Winter History and Memory.

“This essay is a brief, admittedly speculative, attempt to suggest that examining hatred after war, and viewing public and political behavior as an expression of that hatred, may offer insights into what occurred in both the public and the private spheres in post-1945 East Germany. The suggestion is that hatred, arising from the violence and brutality of war and Nazism, was a major factor motivating both the leaders and the led in East Germany after World War II. Not just their rational calculations of how to deal with the challenges they faced and the political commitment that framed their actions, but also their emotional responses to what had occurred determined how Germans behaved in the physical and psychological rubble left behind by war and Nazism. This essay, therefore, is a tentative attempt to approach the history of Germany after World War II as a history of sentiments and emotions.”

Brief the essay is, but full of interesting and, to LI, startling observations. The first and most startling observation is this: after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Germany was swept by a wave of mass suicides. It is part of the racist code in which our history is given to us that this fact is, I think, pretty much unknown in the U.S. – and, actually, it seems pretty repressed in Europe as well – while the fact that Japan was swept by mass suicide is very well known in the U.S. In fact, the politics of suicide in war is a strange thing. Thus, the condemnation of suicide bombers is pretty much a standard editorial gesture nowadays – but that condemnation remains outside of the fact that the defense posture of the U.S., for fifty years, has depended on our potential for suicide bombing. SAC pilots and crews knew that they had little chance to survive delivering to their targets. In essence, they were asked to be suicide bombers on a much bigger scale. The risk of dropping an bomb on Moscow is undoubtedly close to the risk of being killed delivering a rigged car to be exploded in front of an embassy. But the higher American morality, here, apparently rests on the fact that the bomber has a perhaps 5 percent chance of getting away unharmed from delivering a nuclear holocaust.

The inability to accept that war is an equal opportunity barbarizer goes along with the strange colonial mindset that attributes atrocities to those barbarians one aims at exterminating – that part of the romance of hatred in which hating is a cause for being-hated. So the Japanese, being Asians, set a different value on life – that was the kind of thing that was said, even in the sixties, about Asians (i.e. – the Vietnamese) by American military men. Meanwhile, back back back in Deutschland:

“One of the most remarkable features of the collapse of Nazi Germany is the huge wave of suicides that accompanied it. This surge of suicides included not only much of the regime’s political leadership—Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Thierack and Ley—but also dozens of Wehrmacht generals and many lesser Nazis and lower-level functionaries, as well as thousands of civilians who killed themselves as Allied forces pushed their way into Germany and occupied the country. Already in early 1945, as the roof was caving in on the Third Reich, many Germans contemplated killing themselves; according to a report of the German security service about popular morale in the dying days of Nazi Germany, “many are getting used
to the idea of making an end of it all. Everywhere there is great demand for poison, for a pistol and other means for ending one’s life. Suicides due to genuine depression about the catastrophe which certainly is expected are an everyday occurrence.”10 The gruesome sight that greeted American soldiers when they arrived at the Neues Rathaus in Leipzig—littered with the bodies of Nazi officials who had killed themselves and their families— was but a spectacular example of a widespread phenomenon.”

And:

“After the German military collapse, the atmosphere in entire communities was colored by such events, as suicide became almost a mass phenomenon. A particularly extreme example is that of the Pomeranian
district town of Demmin, where roughly five percent of the entire population killed themselves in 1945;13 when the Landrat, who had been installed by the Soviet authorities in May 1945, surveyed conditions in Demmin in a report for the Interior Administration of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in November 1945, he noted: “365 houses, roughly 70 percent of the city, lay in ruins, over 700 inhabitants had ended their lives through suicide.”14 In Teterow, a town in Mecklenburg numbering fewer than ten thousand inhabitants in 1946, the burial register included a “Continuation of the Appendix for the Suicide Period (Selbstmordperiode) Early May 1945,” containing details of 120 suicide cases, listing how the act had been carried out: people shot themselves, hanged themselves, drowned themselves, poisoned themselves; frequent reports noted how fathers killed their entire families and then themselves.15 After years when they had been able to aim massive violence against other people, Germans now turned violence on themselves.”

Then, of course, there was the phenomena following the mass rapes of 44 and 45. The soviet army’s advance, as we now know, was accompanied by the greatest concentration of raping that we know of – the estimates go as high as 2 million women raped. The Western advance had a lower number of rapes – but this is due less to the higher moral standards of the Allied army, and more to the “opportunity”, under capitalism, to exchange sex for money. Prostitution was the Western allies answer to rape.

Here’s Bessel again:

“No less emotionally charged were the abortions carried out on women who had been raped by Soviet soldiers in 1945. Some idea of the emotional consequences may be gained from the account of Heinz Voigtländer, who had been a consultant surgeon at the Stift Bethlehem hospital in Ludwigslust, of the turmoil that the hospital staff faced in 1945:

It was particularly dreadful ... with the pregnancies that dated from the first half of 1945.... I remember a figure of 150 to 180 abortions that we had to carry out at that time. Frequently this was a matter of pregnancies in the fourth, fifth and even in the sixth month....Sometimes, in the seventh or eighth month, this help no longer was possible. Then the nurses promised to look after the child after the birth. But once we observed that a woman left the hospital after the birth and drowned her child in the brook that flowed right by the hospital. We spoke as little as possible about these matters.”

Bessel’s notion is that we should pay more attention to the literal truth Goebbels enunciated:

“Germany’s war was fought, as Goebbels boasted in a radio speech on 28 February 1945, not long before his own suicide, “with a hatred that knows no bounds.””

Simmel, in his Sociology, modeled sociological processes on what he took to be the fundamental elements of society – on the one hand, the individual, and on the other hand, the universal. In some ways, this is a dubious translation of medieval logic, that eternal game of the particular and the universal. One wants some meso-level between the I and the community. In Simmel’s schema, however, the third entity is conflict. It is neither a quality of the individual or a property of the universal, but a third thing – a socializing process. The thirdness of violence has been taken up by other thinkers – notably, Rene Girard – and given other directions. The important thing is that it lifts hatred out of its supposedly privileged and limited place as a wholly private and interior affair. Unlike Girard, however, I don’t think the endpoint of the logic of hatred is Christ on the Cross, but the Werewolf – the wolf as the hunter of men becoming inhabited by a man. The wolf image was peculiarly important in Nazi Germany. But the soldier of any army almost instinctively drifts to the imago of the predator.

This is my own drift, my own Nazi like fugue. At the moment, I too, dream of being a were wolf – of exacting some infinite revenge on my enemies. Bessel talks about the violent intention encoded in suicide, its use as an instrument to hurt “the important other.” This is an old cliché – and it covers up how the other is already eaten by the suicide. The suicide eating his victim, the wolf eating the man, the werewolf living in and on the wolf that lives on people.

the path of the pins or the path of the needles

“Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going. "To grandmother's house," she replied. "Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?" "The path of the needles." So the wolf took the path of the pins and arrived first at the house. “

He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed. "Knock, knock." "Come in, my dear." "Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk." "Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry." So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

The wolf said, "Undress and get into bed with me." "Where shall I put my apron?" "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more." For each garment--bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings--the girl asked the same questions; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more." When the girl got in bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!" "It's to keep me warmer, my dear." "Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!" "It's for better carrying firewood, my dear" "Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!" "It's for scratching myself better, my dear." "Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!" "It's for eating you better, my dear." And he ate her.

- From Little Red Riding Hood: Werewolf and prostitute, by David Teasely and Richard Chase.

In the emotional pattern of LI’s life, the big change, in the last five years, has been the importance of hatred. Indeed, if it is possible for hatred to be at the center of any life – that center which is the field of affection, insofar as affection has gotten down among the tropisms, is the first human response, antedating consciousness – hatred has crept into the command of mine. Hatred for the governing class; hatred for the onward rushing into what I see as the destruction of, indeed, the world, the physical globe; hatred of a self perpetuating order of violence in which I seem condemned to live. Hatred every day.

And this isn’t uncommon. Mine isn’t an unusual case. Which is why it is odd, when one comes to think of it, that the consideration of hatred as a social fact so quickly dissipates into consideration of hatred's effects. And those effects, in turn, are quickly distanced from the emotion -- quickly structuralized. There is a journal now dedicated to hatred – the muses have been replaced by the academic journals, and their domains are infinitely sub-divided – but hatred, conflict, the configuration of the enemy, are all still mercury to the touch of the intellect.

So, I thought I'd start with Little Red Riding Hood.

Teasely and Chase’s article about Little Red Riding Hood, which applies close reading to the tale in the tradition of Darnton (and, though not mentioned, of Febvre), mentions an interesting fact:

“Two folklorists have analyzed Red Riding Hood to demonstrate that a nineteenth-century source, despite being altered from its original and unrecoverable earlier versions, can provide credible insights into an earlier period. Moreover, the variants reveal remarkable consistency. Folklorists have argued that a tale's symbolic features are retained and transmitted through the centuries because they remain meaningful to their users and because they refer to features of the real world as experienced by the members of the storytelling communities. If this were not the case, tales would have no function and would be forgotten.(3)

Paul Delarue, in analyzing the variants of the story, has found that the greatest consistency occurs in French tales that originated in a region encompassing the Loire basin, the northern Alps, northern Italy, and the Tyrol. In this area where the greatest number of werewolf trials occurred during the period of witch persecution, three symbolic features of the tale were frequently repeated: the choice of the path that the wolf and the girl selected, the cannibalism that occurs when the girl eats her grandmother, and the savage ending when the wolf eats the girl.”

If LI were going to do a “history” of hatred in the Western World, we’d certainly make a long excursus to consider the wolf and the werewolf. In Teasley and Chase’s telling, the story’s giveaway (in a version they prefer to the one in which we are happily delivered by the woodsman) is given to us by the enigmatic path of pins and path of needles. The path of needles, according to T and C, goes back to the needle worn as an emblem of the prostitute; the path of pins – by a much more obscure act of exegesis – is associated with the werewolf. The werewolf is, of course, the wolf times two – the intentional wolf, the man become wolf. The werewolf in the movies is such usually be accident – the disease model takes over from an older tradition, in which the werewolf is such by pact with the devil.

“The issue of the paths alerts the reader to the presence of a false choice: between the path of the pins and the path of the needles. The girl defies the social order by selecting prostitution, a non-procreative act. Explicit in the wolf's choice of the path of the pins is a similar threat to creation through the attacks of witches on children either born or unborn. By choosing similar paths, the wolf and the girl enter into an unnatural pact from whence the rest of the story, including cannibalism, unfolds.”

Elizabeth Lawrence, making a survey of the werewolf in literature and cinema, begins with the first literary werewolf tale, which is in the Satyricon. A servant goes out of a lodging house to visit his girlfriend. One of the lodgers, a soldier, accompanies him. Halfway there, they both stop in a cemetery to rest. The soldier then peels off all his clothes, pisses in a circle around them, and turns into a wolf. He goes off howling. As Lawrence remarks, taking off the clothes is taking off humanity – the human being the private animal, the one that hides or distorts its privates in various and sundry ways. And of course the doglike peeing, the marking of territory, is another threshold feature – the movement towards being something else – and not Rimbaud’s autre, not someone else.

Lawrence considers what that something else is:

"In order to understand the werewolf and the emotions it evokes, one must take a close look at the extraordinary history of human relationships with the wolf and the crusade of annihilation. The species was long ago extirpated in the British Isles and Scandinavia and wolf populations were decimated in its former range throughout the world (Lopez 13-14). As one wolf researcher points out, the destruction of that animal represents "the first time in the history of the planet [that] one species made a deliberate organized attempt to exterminate a fellow species." Ingrained hatred of the wolf was brought with the colonists to the New World. The American war against the species was "one of the most successful programs ever carried out by the federal government." The original wolf population in what is now the lower forty-eight states before the arrival of European settlers is estimated to have been two million. "By the 1950s, except for isolated populations of a few hundred wolves in the Upper Midwest, the gray wolf had been exterminated in those areas" (Mcintyre 69, 77).

"Ironically, at least "since the advent of death certificates, there have been no verifiable records of unprovoked attack on humans by [healthy] wolves in the North American continent" (Thiel 35). Yet countless injuries and deaths attributable to wolves have been recorded from the Old World. A partial explanation may be that these attacks were related to rabies epidemics. There is also the plausible theory that some of the aggressive encounters involved wolfdog hybrids, which are much less wary of humans than wolves. In particular, the eighteenth century attacks in southern France by the so-called "Beast of Gevaudan" can likely be traced to a wolf-dog cross (Trotti 126). Another factor is that wolves can tell when a person is armed. Modern wolves have had many generations' experience with firearms, and thus are much more cautious than their ancestors (Russell and Russell 158). Numerous causes underlie the hatred that motivated brutal wolf-exterminating campaigns throughout the animal's range. Culturally ingrained superstitions imbued the animal with mysterious frightfulness. Anti-wolf sentiment was inspired by the desire to protect vulnerable livestock and also to preserve the species preyed upon by the wolf, such as deer and elk, for human sport-hunting purposes. But ignorance of the actual ecological role of the wolf, and its value, also accounts for much of the tragedy. Overall, the issue at stake has always been a lack of knowledge about humankind's relationship to the universe, the age-old dilemma relating to determining "man's place in nature." “

Lawrence is right. That is an extraordinary history. It charges the whole notion of the desire to be a wolf, which is also inscribed in that history. Lawrence points out that the when the Boy Scouts came to the Lapp part of Finland, “… the Boy Scout movement was resisted by the children, who "objected strongly to being called Wolf-cubs."

All of this is simply an animalistic preliminary to what this post is really supposed to be about -- Richard Bessel’s extraordinary article, in last winter’s History and Memory, Hatred After War: Emotion and the post war history of East Germany. However, it looks like this post has gone on long enough. We’ll return to that article in our next post.

oedipus jr. and the paper tigers!

The dustup between Christopher Hitchens and Juan Cole would be worth commenting on if Hitchens were still worth commenting on. At one time, LI was fascinated with him as, at least, the most articulate of the belligerents. But now he is taking his stylistic cues from old Evans and Novak columns. Style to Hitchens is what Dorien Gray’s portrait was to Dorian Gray – it is where the damage shows up.

But – there is a bit in Cole’s defense upon which I’d like to hook this post.

“As for the matter at issue, Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives.”

I wonder whether that isn’t a huge underestimation of Ahmadinejad. I wonder because of the article in this Spring’s National Interest by Ray Takeyh: “Being Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The National Interest used to be a beehive of neo-conservatives, so it is interesting, now that the Nixonian realists have cleaned them out – with much clucking all around – that the Spring issue practically coos. The consensus among the authors of four articles about Iran is that the U.S. is fucked. And being fucked, the sensible thing is to initiate détente – although the word isn’t thrown out there. Takeyh’s article, however, made me think that things are going to get worse between the U.S. and Iran because Ahmadinejad is not only not a non-entity, but represents a certain recognizable current in Iran. The same rightwing current that emerged in the U.S. when the Vietnam vets started taking political office – the Top Gun boys, the Duke Cunninghams:

“AFTER 27 years, the complexion of the Iranian regime is changing. An ascetic "war generation" is assuming power with a determination to rekindle revolutionary fires long extinguished.

For Ahmadinejad and his allies, the 1980-88 war with Iraq defined their experiences, and it conditions their political assumptions. The Iran-Iraq War was unusual in many respects, as it was not merely an interstate conflict designed to achieve specific territorial or even political objectives. This was a war waged for the triumph of ideas, with Ba'athi secular pan-Arabism contesting Iran's Islamic fundamentalism. As such, for those who went to the front, the war came to embody their revolutionary identity. Themes of solidarity, sacrifice, self-reliance and commitment not only allowed the regime to consolidate its power, they also made the defeat of Saddam the ultimate test of theocratic legitimacy. War and revolution had somehow fused in the clerical cosmology. To wage a determined war was to validate one's revolutionary ardor and spiritual fidelity--the notions of compromise and a "ceasefire" were anathema to this point of view.

Suddenly, in August 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the conflict to be over. After eight years of brutal struggle and clerical exhortations of the inevitability of the triumph of the armies of God, the war ended without achieving any of its pledged objectives. For veterans like Ahmadinejad, not unlike post-World War I German veterans, there was a ready explanation for this turn of events. It was not the inadequacy of Iran's military planning or the miscalculations of its commanders, but the West's machinations and its tolerance of Saddam's use of chemical weapons that had turned the tide of the battle.”

Whether this analysis is true or not, it is certainly true that Iran lies under the shadow of a war that killed 500 thousand to a million people. It is not that long ago that missiles were coming down in Teheran. And surely memories of that experience are being prodded by all of those heavy handed American threats.
Happily, Takeyh’s tack is not to keep up the World War I analogy, but to point out that, after thirty years of having no relations with the U.S., people in Ahmadinejad’s circle don’t really see the need. In fact, they dismiss the U.S. as an irrelevance.

“For the aging mullahs such as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the more pragmatic head of the Expediency Council, Hashemi Rafsanjani, America remained the dominant actor in Iran's melodrama. For those hardliners, the United States was the source of all of Iran's problems, while for the older generation of more pragmatist conservatives it was the solution to the theocracy's mounting dilemmas. In either depiction, America was central to Iran's affairs. Given that this cohort came into political maturity during the reign of the shah and his close alliance with the United States, was engaged in a revolutionary struggle that was defined by its opposition to America, and then led a state often in conflict with Washington, it was natural that they were obsessed with the United States.

In terms of their international perspective, Ahmadinejad's generation of conservatives does not share its elders' preoccupation with America. Their insularity and their ideology-laden assumptions about America as a pernicious, imperial power lessen their enthusiasm for coming to terms with a country long depicted as the "Great Satan." Even a cursory examination of the younger hardliners' speeches reveals much about their view of international relations: that power in the international system is flowing eastward. As Ali Larijani, the head of the Supreme National Security Council, noted, "There are certain big states in the Eastern Hemisphere such as Russia, China and India. These states can play a balancing role in today's world." In a similar vein, another stalwart of the new conservatives, the current mayor of Tehran, Muhammad Qalibaf, declared, "In the current international arena we see the emergence of South Asia. And if we do not take advantage of that, we will lose." From the perspective of the new Right, globalization does not imply capitulating to the United States but cultivating relations with emerging power centers on the global landscape. It is hoped that such an "eastern orientation" might just obviate the need to come to terms with the United States.”

That is a terrible delusion, but an understandable one. As LI has been saying over and over again, there is a price for being a paper tiger. American irrelevance in Iraq, combined with the apparent carelessness about Al Qaeda, (so reminiscent of the aborted Carter era rescue of the hostages) combine to make American power seem not only defiable, but on a downhill slope. The Iranians can see every day who pays and who gains in Iraq. The Americans can loot the place, but they can’t even repair the fucking oil pipelines. And while the American papers always like to trumpet comments from their favorite Iraqi leaders that are anti-Iranian, that is window dressing. Oddly enough, Americans believe their own bullshit on these kinds of issues. Infinite are the paths of gullibility. In any case, instead of using Europe as the proxy for talking with Iran, we should surely be using China. Alas, Bush’s rude and frankly stupid behavior during the visit of the guy who has been paying our bills, the Chinese president Hu Jintao is a bad sign. It is always a bad sign when the neo-con agenda (China is the rising enemy!) converges with Bush’s bad Oedipal problems (Dad liked China!). Our royal nonesuch has a tendency to act out, then, when rationally, he should be heavily medicated and stored in a hangar somewhere at -10 degrees fahrenheit.

peak privatization

The Wall Street Journal’s David Luhnow and Jose de Cordoba turn in a good article on Bolivia’s nationalization – it puts it in the broad picture of the global trend away from privatization. The least LI can say about this is that we wrote an article for the Austin American Statesman a long time ago – in November, 2001 – predicting that the tide had turned on privatization. It is nice to be proven right. And Daniel Yergin can eat his hat.

However, while it makes sense from the standpoint of a country that depends on a primary product export to make as much off that export as possible, there are various problems with doing so. The Gulf states long ago nationalized their major export, and nobody calls the Gulf states hotbeds of communism – it is, in fact, a mistake to take the ideological tenor of nationalization too seriously. Whether Bolivia’s nationalization will just be a passing affair, or whether it will take, will depend on whether Morales’ government can attract the capital to build up a supervisory structure. And the time really is fortunate, insofar as Venezuela, if it was so inclined, could be a source of seed money.

"Chavez and Morales are both playing a game of chicken with foreign oil companies," said David Mares, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego who studies the regional oil industry.
It remains to be seen whether the moves by Messrs. Chavez and Morales will lead to a broader regional backlash against foreign oil companies and further complicate the global energy market. "Obviously there are concerns" about a ripple effect, "but we don't know what the future impact is going to be," said Bob Davis, an Exxon Mobil Corp. spokesman.”

Interestingly, Ecuador, mistaking itself for a free and autonomous country, has recently tried to put a surplus tax on oil companies sucking out Ecuador’s petroleum wealth. Of course, the Bush White House has decided that decision just won’t stand:
“Proposed legislation will increase the Ecuadorean government’s income from oil revenues by some US$600m a year at current prices, but could ruin the chances of a bilateral trade agreement with the US, which must be initialled by a May 15th deadline. Negotiations between the two countries have been in abeyance since March.
As have other oil-producing countries, Ecuador has moved to capture a greater share of the windfall earnings arising from a tripling of oil prices since 2002. Talks on a free-trade agreement (FTA) deal with the US began two years ago, at the same time as Andean neighbours Peru and Colombia. The latter two have both now signed agreements, which must now be ratified by their respective legislatures (as well as by the US Congress).

In all three countries there has been substantial domestic opposition to freer trade with the US, largely from producers such as farmers who see it as prejudicial to their interests but also from a vociferous nationalist lobby that considers it a capitulation to US pressure. In Ecuador, however, indigenous groups form the backbone of opposition to the trade accord. They have proven to be a potent force of protest in the recent past, contributing to direct action that has given rise to successive bouts of extreme political instability.
…
Although the US government is not bound to interfere in the foreign dealings of its domestic companies, the issue is closely tied to FTA negotiations because rules guaranteeing the enforceability of contracts are a central part of bilateral trade deals. FTA talks were suspended when the oil plans were first announced, and are yet to resume. Unless a comprise solution can be worked out by mid-May, a trade deal is unlikely to be brought before the US Congress for ratification before the mid-term elections later this year. Manuel Chiriboga, Ecuador’s chief trade negotiator, denies Ecuador is reneging on its commitment to investment protection clauses in established contracts, but has acknowledged that completing the trade deal on time is now a remote possibility.”

The Bush White House position is simple. In order to become independent of foreign oil, we have to start thinking of companies where American hq-ed oil companies work as secretly American. That way, it isn’t foreign anymore. And as American hq-ed companies do a lot for America – they lower the taxes they pay, they cycle money through offshore banks, and they send American legislators on very fun junkets – it is all to the good of your average American citizen.

One does have to laugh a bit, though. Here the biggest collection of senile cold warriors in the world sit on their asses in the Executive branch, losing a war in Iraq, while under their noses Latin America has tilted so far to the left that it makes the late seventies, when Carter was president, look like reactionary heaven. Plus, even Mexico has recently passed a reasonable law decriminalizing private possession, within reasonable limits, of most drugs.

All of the seams are coming out of the baseball.

hurray for the swinish multitude

For who can tell but the Millennium
May take its rise from my poor Cranium?..


LI has been reading a lot about the English radicals around Tom Paine in the 1790s. Interesting lot of characters, and very a propos for May Day. One of them, Thomas Spence, was a refugee from the North of England, coming to London after being expelled from a Dissenter congregation for publishing a pamphlet proposing that land itself was common – land, like air, could not be bought. A proposition that John Stuart Mill entertained, later, and that made up the bulk of Henry George’s radicalism. In London, Spence continued to emit his radical views through a wonderfully named weekly journal:

“Edmund Burke's reference to "the swinish multitude" provided Spence with a title for his greatest publishing venture. Between 1793 and 1796, he issued a weekly paper called "Pigs' Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude," consisting of excerpts from many writings on liberty, attacks on despotism, and frequent verse. These papers were later issued as complete volumes; there were three in all, each with an engraved frontispiece by Spence's son.

The frontispiece for Volume I depicts a well-fed missionary and three graceful Indians. The missionary says: "God has enjoined you to be Christians, to pay rent and tythes, and become a Civilized People." One Indian replies: "If Rent we once consent to pay, Taxes next you'll on us lay, And then our Freedom's poured away;" at which the Indians chorus: "With the Beasts of the Wood We'll ramble for Food, And live in wild deserts and Caves; And live poor as Job, On the Skirts of the Globe, Before we'll consent to be Slaves, My Brave Boys, Before We'll consent to be Slaves!"

The frontispiece for Volume II has two Indians gazing at an unhappy donkey. One Indian says: "Behold the civilized Ass, Two pairs of Panyers on his Back; the First with Rents a heavy mass; With Taxes next his bones do crack." To which the donkey brays in response: "I'm doomed to endless Toil and Care-I was an Ass to bear the first Pair."

Spence apparently grew rather disgusted, at times, with the swinish multitude. While pigs “squeal most seditiously,” Spence found the people much too passive and compliant to live up to the piggish standard. Well, here’s to a May Day of squealing seditiously. Here’s Spence in a more satiric and bitter mood (from Carl Fisher’s essay on Politics and Porcine Representation):

“Ye swinish multitude who prate,

What know ye `bout the matter?'

Misterious are the ways of state,

Of which you should not chatter.

Our church and state, like man and wife,

Together kindly cuddle;

Together share the sweets of life

Together feast and fuddle.

Then hence ye swine nor make a rout,

Forbearance but relaxes;

We'll clap the muzzle on your snout,

Go work, and pay your taxes.”

galbraith, RIP

Loneliness. John Kenneth Galbraith is dead.

In the NYT obituary, which is generous (as it should be), there are two paragraphs on the matter of Galbraith’s isolation from the economic community which cast a broad light on why Galbraith is generally right, and the mass of economists, drudges of rightwing ideology, are generally living in outer space:

“Mr. Galbraith argued that technology mandated long-term contracts to diminish high-stakes uncertainty. He said companies used advertising to induce consumers to buy things they had never dreamed they needed.

Other economists, like Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler, both Nobel Prize winners, countered with proofs showing that advertising is essentially informative rather than manipulative.”

Adorno and Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, said that De Sade’s vision of a world of universal prostitution is a dystopian version of capitalism. Gary S. Becker’s neo-classical analysis of the family unit as essentially a matter of efficient transaction costs cast the world as a matter of universal prostitution and pronounced it good, and in doing so founded the Law and Economics field that has swallowed the justice system. Galbraith never liked the idea that we should live in a world of universal prostitution. For this, he got rocks thrown at him by the economics professors.

Not all, however:

“Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, maintains that Mr. Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Mr. Parker's book recounts, Mr. Sen said the influence of "The Affluent Society" was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted.
"It's like reading 'Hamlet' and deciding it's full of quotations," he said.”
Well, LI searched for the proper poem to commemorate JKG. Here is Donald Davies’ Obiter Dicta,

Trying to understand myself, I fetch
My father's image to me. There he is, augmenting
The treasury of his prudence with a clutch
Of those cold eggs, Great Truths---his scrivener's hand
Confiding apopthegms to his pocket book.
Does mine do more than snap the elastic band
Of rhyme about them? In an age that teaches
How pearls of wisdom only look like eggs,
The tide, afflatus, still piles up on the beaches
Pearls that he prizes, stones that he retrieves
Misguidedly from poetry's undertow,
Deaf to the harsh retraction that achieves
Its scuttering backwash, ironies. And yet,
Recalling his garrulity, I see
There's method in it. Seeming to forget


The point at issue, the palmer tells his beads,
Strung by connections nonchalantly weak
Upon the thread of argument he needs
To bring them through his fingers, round and round,
Tasting of gristle, savoury; and he hears,
Like rubbing stones, their dry conclusive sound.

Himself an actor (He can play the clown),
He knows the poet's a man of parts; the sage
Is one of them, buffoonery like his own,
Means to an end. So, if he loves the page
That grows sententious with a terse distinction,
Yet lapidary moralists are dumb
About the precepts that he acts upon,
Brown with tobacco from his rule of thumb.

'Not bread but a stone!'---the deep-sea fishermen
Denounce our findings, father. Pebbles, beads,
Perspicuous dicta, gems from Emerson,
Whatever stands when all about it slides,
Whatever in the oceanic welter
Puts period to unpunctuated tides,
These, that we like, they hate. And after all, for you,
To take but with a pinch of salt to take
The maxims of the sages is the true
Great Truth of all. To keep, as you would say,
A sense of proportion, I should portion out
The archipelago across the bay,
One island to so much sea. Assorted
Poetic pleasures come in bundles then,
Strapped up by rhyme, not otherwise supported?

Turning about his various gems to take
Each other's lustre by a temperate rule,
He walks the graveyard where I have to make
Not centos but inscriptions, and a whole
That's moved from inward, dancing. Yet I trace
Among his shored-up epitaphs my own:
Art, as he hints, turns on a commonplace,
And Death is a tune to dance to, cut in stone.

the state is already lost...

Je suis le véritable père Duchesne, foutre !

“Not a lot of probity is required by a monarchic or despotic government in order for it to sustain and maintain itself. The force of the law in the one, the arm of the prince, forever lifted, in the other rules or contains everything. But in a popular government, we require another resource, which is virtue.

What I am saying is confirmed by the entire body of history, and is very conformable to the nature of things. For it is clear that in a monarchy, where he who has the laws executed judges himself above the law, one has need less of virtue than in a popular government, where he who has the laws executed feels he himself subject to them, so that he bears their burden.

It is, again, clear that the monarch who, by bad counsel or negligence, ceases to have the laws executied, can easily repair the injury: he has only to change the counsel, or correct his negligences. But when, in a popular government, the laws cease to be executed, like that there can only come the corruption of the republic – the state is already lost. “

Well said, Montesquieu. Bringing us to the intermittent series of Bush’s crimes, of which Jonathan Schwartz, at Tiny Revolution, is making an account. He noticed, as of course the whole of the opposition hasn’t (the willfully blind, still fretting about framing a national security policy bloody enough to garner a good percentage of the lyncher vote. Hilary C.’s proposal of a lottery bombing, in which average citizens can reach into a tub full of billets with the names of countries written on them, and we bomb that country for a day, has apparently received the endorsement of the New Republic crowd), LI, too, is compiling a small history of how a great republic crawled through a small time, and gave up the ghost. This would be a sad story, if one could tell it in Montesquieu’s language, a classical, hard tone deriving from a lifelong acquaintance with the Latin historians. However, LI can only tell it, has only been responding to it, in the vulgar tones of street worm made victim by some hit and run frat car, careening crazily down the street. We wave our empties at it, spit, zip down our zipper and piss in its general direction. More Père Duchêne than Montesquieu, I’m afraid.

Still, it is a spectacle, no? The usurpation of tyrannical power by an executive branch which, after failing completely to protect the citizenry, after allowing America to be attacked by a bunch of pikers, and after failing systematically even to punish the relative handful of people who made that happen, now uses the bloody results of that failure as the grounds for usurping ever more illegal power, which it concentrates in ever more incompetent and fraudulent hands.

Schwartz has been citing outrageous bits from Bush’s favorite constitutional theorist, John Yoo, the man who never saw a torture he didn’t like – that is, if the torturer is an American. Yoo, basically, holds that the executive branch can conduct wars with its – America’s – army as he sees fit, with the only brake upon this power being the Congressional power over the purse strings. There is a latin legal phrase for Yoo’s position. It translates, roughly, as: Í’m pulling this out of my ass. In Policy Review, which is as conservative a journal as you can get, Yoo’s reviewer, Eugene Kontorovich, couldn’t quite go the whole route of claiming that the president is a king:

When the Constitution was ratified, the federal army numbered fewer than 700 men; there was no naval establishment. The state militias accounted for the bulk of the nation's military capability.

The Constitution makes clear that Congress, rather than the president, controls the "calling forth of the militia." Thus, the commander in chief, at the time of the founding, had no means with which to start a war without prior action by Congress. It would be odd if the decision about whether to wage war were placed solely on the shoulders of an official so ill-suited to
ensuring its success. … In Yoo's model.Congress's decision to create a military ready to meet any contingency allows the president to do what he will with it.”

The Policy reviewer also points out another flaw in Yoo’s position: one that, actually, reaches to the heart of the monster created by the crossing of the corporate power and warmaking under the aegis of the Cold War:

“Today, a hard-pressed president might seek out contributions or, worse, loans from other nations. This is not so far-fetched — the Gulf War was financed in part with foreign contributions, and much of the Iran-contra scandal was about the White House's efforts to obtain alternative funding from foreign nations after Congress cut off support for the Latin American freedom fighters.

“Or the president could pay for the war from its own proceeds — for example, by selling assets of a defeated enemy (Iraqi oil, for example). Or perhaps he could sell U.S. military hardware to other nations — he is, after all, commander in chief of the armed forces.”

That these are actually imaginable courses of action tells us something about the structural madness of giving the President this kind of power. So: let’s take it away from him.

Strangle the military. Support your anti-recruiter. Be a patriot.

the treadmill of production

LI finds the shenanigans over oil recently extremely funny and sad. To question the oil-chemical complex in any way is to invite massive retaliation – remember, conservatism in this country has nothing to do with conservative ideas. It has everything to do with well financed expression of the industry’s interests. The G.O.P., and much of the Democratic party, simply exist to forward their interests. The parties are allowed to take up hobbies, in the spirit of Junior League – the Dems going out for reproductive choice and home decorating, for instance, and the G.O.P. taking up preserving the brain dead and biking. So, even when, for instance, a pundit like Michael Kinsley comes out for a windfall tax, he hedges himself about – for instance, by saying that taxes should never, ever be used as punishment. Heavens no. In the world of pundit economics, taxes can only be used as rewards – everybody must get prizes, you see. Why punish an industry for gorging on limited resources, spending progressively less on R and D (actually, this is one of the big effects of the Bush tax giveaways – why spend on R & D when it is now more profitable to distribute your profits via dividends? And especially when the tax regime for the upper management is so favorable that those ethically challenged parasites move heaven and earth to take as much of a bite as they can from the enterprises they run, now) because who ever heard of a Republic limiting the power of the most powerful? It has occurred to Tacitus, Montesquieu, John Locke, Tom Paine and the like – but that’s a bunch of losers, as we well know.

So – since this is Chernobyl week, and since we’ve been thinking of the question of value posed during the recent Spivak to-do – we thought this would be a good post to talk about Allan Schnaiberg.

Schaiberg is an economist at Northwestern. In the early eighties, he published an influential book in the field of environmental economics. Not a field people have heard of, right? But it is an influential field. The big controversy in the field is about ecological modernization. Briefly: a German sociologist, Peter Huber, proposed that the offloading of costs onto the environment during the twentieth century was caused by the State. If we just took the state out of the equation, private enterprise would develop ways of being greener. The thought was – greener is more efficient.

Schaiberg’s thesis was different. He coined the phrase, the treadmill of production, to talk about the network effects of industrialization – whereever the ultimate control over industry lay. In a recent essay, The treadmill of production and the environmental state, he revisits his thesis. We are going to try to comment on the treadmill of production part, which articulates a thesis about the economy for which we have tons of sympathy. But the environmental state part is equally interesting.

“From a conceptual perspective, we might characterize an "environmental state" as encompassing the following feature: whenever it engaged in economic decision-making, considerations of ecological impacts would have equal weight with any considerations of private sector profits and state sector taxes. Put this way, most industrialized nation-states fall far short of this standard. Indeed, it is increasingly true that any environmental policy-making is subject to more intensive economic scrutiny, while economic policies are subject to less and less environmental assessment (Daynes 1999; Soden and Steel
1999).”

Schaiberg’s paper includes a case study of the recycling industry in Chicago. It is a study about the structural changes that came about in that industry as it was turned into a regular private sector industry, with the goal of making a profit. LI found this interesting as a case just because we remember the old recycling movement in the seventies and eighties. My brothers worked, at that time, heading up maintenance for some apartment complexes. They were both enthusiastic about recycling. They sponsored a cleanup of litter, for instance, along a highway leading into Stone Mountain Georgia. They got their complexes in touch with recycling services. For a couple of years, they devised a mass pick up of Christmas trees – the trees were, I think, going to be used by fish hatcheries or something. My brothers are enthusiasts, and they turned out the family, including my mother, my father, and me – in the Christmas tree deal – to do the various recycling projects.

However, as recycling became simply profit based, the air went out of volunteering. And as they became profit based, instead of applying the private sector efficiency in taking care of the whole spectrum of waste, the spectrum was cherry picked.

Schaiberg writes:

First, treadmill organizations [those in the treadmill of increasing consumer demand and cutting production cost by leveraging part of that cost onto the commons, or other people’s property] generally resist environmental regulation with all the substantial means at their disposal. For example, prior to the advent of recycling regulations and programs, container firms fought all forms of
"bottle bills", spending perhaps US$50 million opposing such bills, and succeeding in about 2/3 of the states. Yet even these bottle bills were only indirectly constraining firms. Legislation did not directly mandate a refillable container, but only the imposition of a deposit on all containers. Even in this limited regulation, the refunding mechanisms for the deposit put some cost burdens on non-refillable container manufacturers and/or users. Thus, in recent years in New York state, bottlers have refused to repurchase stockpiled
refunded containers. They have let these accumulate at brokers and large retailers, seeking thereby to mobilize opposition to the bottle bill system. For the remaining 2/3 of states, container manufacturers and bottlers have simply encouraged recycling, and have kept feedstock prices low, and avoided paying labor costs for refilling containers.

Second, where direct resistance against any environmental legislation becomes
infeasible, under pressures from environmental NGOs, firms first dilute the legislation to minimize its impacts on their operations. Then they wait for opportunities to further lighten their regulatory load, whenever the political climate shifts and/or NGOs are elsewhere engaged. In the recycling arena, this has been commonplace. Affected industries have continuously shifted their campaigns to avoid mandatory direct controls on their production and distribution activities. All U.S. government regulations have avoided mandating firms with a "life cycle" responsibility for their own generation of post-consumer wastes, as has
occurred in some European states. Instead, governments had introduced fairly weak mandates for firms, requiring higher "recycled content" of their production. Firms have responded by including post-production waste recycling (a standard economic practice for decades) as part of post-consumption recycling.”

The treadmill aim of weakening the impetus for even voluntary environmental action seems odd, at first, until you take into account what the companies take into account – such behavior leads to an enlarged sense of the interaction between the economy and the environment. It is not just to make more money that the great energy monsters convened by Cheney in 2001 agreed to put the keebosh on conservation – it is because conservation countervails an insane consumerist ethos. If people are allowed, for a second, to fall in love with the planet to the extent of wanting to spare that tree or ice floe, the virus will spread. Questions about the justice of exhausting our resources will emerge. Fundamental questions about ownership and its limits. In fact, people will begin to think that politics doesn’t begin or end with what dumb party you vote for or the latest outrage that we must rush to have opinions on – should we sing the National Anthem in Spanish? Is the book by the guy who runs the Daily Kos doing better than the book written by the guy who runs instapundit? but we will think about why, if Americans (for instance) are so happy, they are so indebted, so unable to stop buying the stupidest things, so unwilling to look at, say, the environmental horrors being perpetrated, for the last five years, by coal mining companies in West Virginia.

When you have no control over your mind or attention span, you are fucking owned. And that is the resource they are extracting with every hot air soundbyte and fake crisis.