Ah, Fascism. Two stories this morning about the fallout from the G8 summit - which has been abundantly underreported, as in not at all, in the US. Der Spiegel has a pretty shocking story:Genua: Wer ist verantwortlich f�r die Pr�gelorgien? - Politik - SPIEGEL ONLINE that, in the end, dovetails with what one suspects about the Berlusconi crowd - I mean, these people have deep roots in the culture of White terror. Certainly in the seventies, right wing groups used the tactics of the agent provacateur, as well as committing acts of terror - notoriously the bombing of the Milan train station - which they hoped would be blamed on the left. Genoa seems, more and more, like old home week - notice, in the Spiegel article, the references to Pinochet, a much admired old man in Euro right circles. Italian culture seems to have a talent for magnifying conflicts which are given a more discrete instantiation in other cultures. The second story about this is in today's New York Times. The Times story doesn't have the bite about Berlusconi, but does have an interesting bit about the arrest of an Austrian theater troupe.

Very nice essay by Walter Johnson -Common-place: Re-readings: Roll, Jordan, Roll. Eugene Genovese, the historian of slavery in question, is one of those odd American figures, like Sydney Hook, who advanced, by a somnabulistic logic, from left to right without ever seeming to notice where he was heading - which is why he can consort with Confederate revivalists today without a qualm.

Johnson is sharp about two of Genovese's controverted themes in Roll, Jordon, Roll - paternalism and hegemony. Here's a quote:

"The notion of slaveholders fabricating themselves for an audience of their own slaves in a kind of Hegelian dialectic is an extraordinarily powerful one, and it illuminates countless aspects of American slavery. It does not, however, quite capture the quicksilver slipperiness with which slaveholders could reformulate the nominally beneficent promises of paternalism into self-serving regrets, reactionary nostalgia, and flat-out threats. Can it be mere coincidence that so many examples of planters expressing ostensibly "paternalist" sentiments refer to slaves who have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing?"

I'd like to quote more, since the theme of paternalism is endlessly suggestive of the rhetorical structure to which the American ruling class seems to instinctively turn when it is justifying its position. Johnson doesn't mention the obvious similarity between the rhetoric of factory owners in New England and the slaveholding class, although they obviously emerge at the same time. This isn't to equate the two, that persistant trope of Southern apologists - it is merely to point out that the rhetorical apparatus can be applied to quite different objects.

Yesterday I wrote two long pieces about the need to raise CAFE standards. I wasn't nice to the auto companies in those posts. I feel like continuing my mean streak by linking to the main story at Commercial Alert :

Nader Criticizes Smithsonian Head For Proposed Naming Rights Deal With General Motors.

First graf is in R.N.'s best meateatin' style:

"Following a news report that the Smithsonian Institution has offered General Motors the right to name the museum's new transportation hall for $10 million, Ralph Nader said that Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small "seems to recognize no limits to the commercialization of this historic, non-profit, taxpayer-supported institution. To let GM pay for, be associated with and influential over a transportation exhibit, given its decades long record of criminal convictions, buying up and displacing mass transit systems, producing unsafe and polluting cars, is to confess to a complete abdication of any standards of museum integrity and independence."

But I do think Nader shouldn't be so upset at the GM deal - word is that Zurich Banks are going to be funding a funfilled Smithsonian exhibit on Swiss resistance to the holocaust in the Autumn season - followed of course by an Exxon funded exhibit, You are my sunshine: climate change and progress! in the spring. Remember to bring the kids - the motto of this latter is, inevitably, the future's so bright, you gotta wear shades!

Chubby Checker (Biography)has written a letter to the world in which he makes a dignified plea to the Nobel Committee to finally give it up and give him his prize. The key graf is this:

"Chubby Checker gave birth to aerobics.

He gave to music a movement that could not be found unless you were trained at some studio learning something other than dancing apart to the beat. It's easy. It's fun. The "Twist" [is] the only song, since time began, to become number one twice by the same artist. Oh yes, we're talking about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. But lets face the truth. This is Nobel Prize Territory."
Mr Checker, you'll notice, talks about himself in the third person, imitating Henry Adams.

Well, let's compare Mr. Checker to Mr. Henry (the butcher) Kissinger, who did get a Nobel Prize, for peace no less.
On the one side you have The Twist, the invention of aerobics, and an eponymous brand of beef jerky, which you can buy from his site.

On the other side, you have the bombing of Cambodia, the Tilt towards Pakistan, the support of the Military regimes in Argentina, Indonesia, Chile, and Greece, the unnecessary extension of American military engagement in Vietnam for six years, and - oh, just throw in various slimy actions in Africa, culminating in the co-support, with the South African government of so-called Liberation fronts in Angola,and the propping up of such dictators as Mobuto in Zaire.

Okay. Judges, have you decided? Write down your answers on a piece of paper and give them to my lovely assistant. The clock is ticking away. One .... two.... three....
And now let's tally the vote, shall we. Silence, please ----
YES! IT IS UNANIMOUS! TAKE HENRY KISSINGER'S NOBEL PRIZE AND GIVE IT TO CHUBBY CHECKER! THE JUDGES HAVE SPOKEN.
Could there possibly be a better cause?
Contact me at - rgathman@aol.com. Let's make this cause a party.

This week saw the House, in a typical display of cowardice, greed, and ideology, pass an energy bill that would mandate drilling in the Arctic refuge, license more coalburning and nuclear power plants, and (oh acme of corporate happiness! Oh Tom Delay�s toupee! Oh American satanic mills, asleep in every garage! � to get all Allen Ginsburg about it) block raising the CAFE (corporate average fuel economy) standard, and in particular the notoriously lower CAFE for what are comically called light trucks, officially defined as those having a �gross vehicle weight rating� of 6000 pounds or less. This action comes on the heels of our latest amnesia � that is, the announcement in the spring, when fuel prices were high, by the Big Three that they were voluntarily going to raise the miles per gallon for both passenger and light truck. Yeah, right. Because amnesia leads to repetition � memory loss being one thing, and habit, or addiction, being quite another, this the double track of human nature � nobody remembers that the same noise came rolling out of Detroit, like a sadly safety challenged Pinto, in the seventies, and thereafter has been issued whenever legislation looked like it was going to force Detroit to actually move its more than 6000 pound metal behind.

The history of Detroit�s callous attitude towards clean cars has been detailed by Jack Doyle in a book entitled Taken for a Ride, put out by Four Walls Four Windows press (which, incidentally, puts out some killer investigative journalism). Doyle was interviewed about the book by EVWorld. Doyle discusses an argument made by the UAW to nudge enough Dems loose to support continuing the CAFE freeze � that the standards would lead to job cuts. The thinking is, it is so expensive to institute the technology that would be necessary to achieve fuel efficiency that the companies would have to shut down factory lines. As Doyle points out, quite correctly, the auto companies seem to have no problem throwing the truly astonishing wads of money they have amassed in the past ten to fifteen years � veddy veddy good years for Detroit�s profit picture, and enough to make the whole of the computer industry look like yokels vending home made pie recipes � to buy diverse non-auto-related companies (did anybody say Hughes Electronics) and revamp, at exorbitant cost, factories with up to date robotics and computers. The odious Roger Smith, former CEO of GM, was particularly gaga about robotics, and spent enormous sums on them without getting a corresponding return. One study concluded about Smith�s leadership of GM in the eighties:
�GM ended up spending tens of billions of dollars for little or no reward. Despite the high-tech, GM became less, not more, efficient.� So one can only conclude that money spent making cars and light trucks more fuel efficient is magic money, peculiarly cursed from the labor perspective.

Another argument about CAF� that has become popular among the auto hacks and their political allies is that fuel efficiency is dangerous. When the House voted on raising CAFE standards for SUVS, the Times quoted Billy Tauzin, the petro point man in the house, as saying "This amendment will end up killing Americans." The argument goes like this: since the automakers have unleashed a flood of heavier �light trucks� on the roads, small cars are less safe. And so any attempt to reduce the throw weight of a car, now, is a sort of unilateral disarmament in the arms race. Of course, this argument is in itself a little screwy. In fact, it is the logic of power Detroit always, in the last resort, relies upon. It is as if a bankrobber were to argue that since he now is in effective possession of the bank�s money, there�s no sense in preventing him from investing it. USA today published a canonical, and influential, version of this script in an article by their automobile journalist, James Healy, Death by the Gallon, in 1999.
. The article�s point is summed up like this:
�� in the 24 years since a landmark law to conserve fuel, big cars have shrunk to less-safe sizes and small cars have poured onto roads. As a result, 46,000 people have died in crashes they would have survived in bigger, heavier cars, according to USA TODAY's analysis of crash data since 1975, when the Energy Policy and Conservation Act was passed. �
Small cars �pouring� onto the roads? And big cars shrinking to �less safe sizes�? I suppose one should parse this sentence the way one parses Clinton�s court testimony. Big cars aren�t the equivalent of �light trucks,� so possibly the throw weight of your average Mercury Lincoln has been modified, although isn�t there something, well, pre-formed about describing downsizing as shrinking it to a �less safe size?�

The sensational news in the USA piece, widely quoted, is that there are �roughly 7,700 deaths for every mile per gallon gained, the analysis shows.�

Notice, of course, the assumption that auto emissions are harmless � that the increase in emissions from cars cause no loss of life to be measured against the 7,700 deaths. Air pollution, subtext is, is a airy fairy issue � I mean, who dies from ingesting a few thousand pounds more CO2 every year?
As for that number and its link to CAFE standards � even Healy is a little nervous about the direct correlation, since it implies
1. the only way to make a car more fuel efficient is to downsize it.
and
2. that materials technology has not advanced a whit from 1975.
In fact, outside of the Auto industry, it certainly has. Bill Lovens, who has been working on the clean car for years, has advocated using carbon fiber technology, instead of moving to aluminum alloys � Detroit�s favorite way to shave car weight. Instead of spending billions on robotic factories that don�t make money, GM could have spent the equivalent sum re-designing smaller cars with safer and lighter materials.
But Detroit has always played a passive aggressive game when it comes to auto manufacture. When the California Air Resource Board, in the early nineties, mandated a certain percentage of zero emission vehicles, Detroit grumblingly created some Evs, which they then priced exorbitantly and closed down as soon as they could � the latest victim being a GM EV that it claims was not selling, although it refuses to back up that claim by showing any records. Similarly, it is due to Detroit that we play this game of trading off fuel efficiency against safety.
Healy�s article goes on to make a curiously schizophrenic point � that small cars are no match for large cars, or trucks, so that they are unsafe by physical law - but that the majority of small car fatalities don�t involve crashing into large SUVs, or trucks. After all, point one leads to asking about point two � where did these large vehicles come from? Since the article�s premise is that there has been a general downsizing of �cars,� it renders the real composition of the road unintelligible. But the reality principle demands that you admit that, yes Virginia, the real question isn�t larger �automobiles� � it is the monstrous �large trucks� which have infested the road and made driving in a smaller vehicle more hazardous.
The report�s odd logic when it comes to the safety of small cars becomes positively bizarre when it lays out the case againt CAF�. It notes that �CAFE and its small cars have not reduced overall U.S. gasoline and diesel fuel consumption as hoped. A strong economy and growing population have increased consumption. The U.S. imports more oil now than when the standards were imposed.� Really? You freeze a standard for twenty years, you make a loophole for the largest percentage of vehicle sold, and you don�t reduce oil consumption? My god, call the presses!

As for USA�s statistical analysis, it is disputed. Paul Rauber of Sierra Magazine responded to Healey�s article:

�The General Accounting Office studied the same basic data as USA Today and declared that "it is not true that cars become more dangerous simply by becoming lighter." Nor is that the main reason they're becoming more fuel efficient; rather, 86 percent of fuel-efficiency improvement is the result of technological innovation." CAFE does not dictate vehicle size, weight, or safety," says Dan Becker, head of the Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy campaign. "Automakers do." Cars have become twice as fuel efficient since CAFE was instituted, he points out, but automobile death rates have been cut in half�

With all the demos against the WTO and the G8 - demos that I heartily approve of - its the phalanxes of the auto industry that really determine what is going to be done about our atmospheric deterioration. Instead of to the barricades, may I suggest: to the auto-lot?

read the second to last post first, then the last one. Sorry, I somehow screwed up the order.