Remora
Blues for President Thieu

He dead, as they said of Kurz. Except that he was not, like Kurz, a product of
some Western power shipped out to one of the dark places of the earth, as the colonial officers put it pretentiously on their various veranda.

What he was -- an obituary can't tell us that. In fact, in his adopted home town, Boston, the obituarist in the Globe has a surprisingly distant knowledge of where Nguyen Van Thieu came from. Here's an astonishing graf:
Boston Globe Online / Obituaries / Nguyen Van Thieu, 78

"Born April 5, 1923, the youngest child of a struggling farmer, Mr. Thieu worked in rice fields as a boy and went to a French Catholic high school. At 23, he briefly joined Ho Chi Minh's anticolonial struggle, but he left the movement that would become his enemy and joined the army of South Vietnam."
Simple math should have made the Globe deadhead re-read his factsheet. How could he have briefly joined the Viet Minh in 1946, and then joined the army of South Vietnam, a nation which emphatically didn't exist until ten years later? It is, perhaps, appropriate that in his passing, America add one more white lie to the pile we graciously bestowed upon him when he was the "democratically' elected ruler of our protectorate. America suffered from short term memory loss in Vietnam. We kept forgetting the pasts of the leaders we would periodically dredge up to lead our forces against the alien Ho Chi Minh -- we had that problem with Marshal Key, our favorite for a bit, who had the embarrassing habit of praising Hitler in public; and we certainly had that problem with Thieu. Thieu didn't really have a problem with his own place in the world. He had no quarrel with democratic theory, he just didn't see how it applied to him. In another time and place, he might have made a passable dictator. He wasn't overly brutal; I'd put him in the mid-brutal range. If he disappeared political opponents, didn't the PRI, in Mexico, do the same? Hell, didn't even Mayor Daley want to? Certainly among our allies he wasn't even in the league with, say, Sukarno. He simply wasn't the knight to lead our crusade, so the American government lied about it. They lied stenuously, they lied foolishly, and they even came up with prop elections, wonderfully managed even as we were supporting the Phoenix program in the villages. The cognitive disconnect was total. He wasn't lionhearted. He was instinctively anti-communist, and he was uncomfortably allied with some of the shabbiest persons (Nixon and the ever unbearable Kissinger) to ever run an American administration, which in the end undid him.

Remora
Paul Krugman is not my favorite economist. I think of him as the Economist from Glib -- he's absorbed monetary theory into a highly attenuated Keynsianism, resulting in that sweet sleep of reason, Clintonomics.

However, his article in the NYT Magazine this Sunday
is definitely worth reading, even if its potted history of How we learned to Make Macroeconomic Policy seems pretty suspect to me. He uses a military/ sports metaphor to adumbrate our two "lines of defense" against a Depression -- which, by the way, he defines wholly in terms of consumer demand. To quote from his article:

"The first line of defense against an economic slump is monetary policy: the ability of the central bank -- the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan -- to cut interest rates. Lower interest rates are supposed to persuade businesses and consumers to borrow and spend, which creates new jobs, which encourages people to spend even more, and so on. And since the 1930's, this strategy has consistently worked. Specifically, interest-rate cuts have pulled the United States out of each of its big recessions over the past 30 years -- in 1975, 1982 and 1991. "

...
"Behind the first line of defense is a second line, fiscal policy. If cutting interest rates isn't enough to support the economy, the government can pump up demand by cutting taxes or increasing its own spending. "

Notice the dates in the first quoted paragraphs. You'll notice that they correspond with the dawning of the age of Friedman (truly the age of acquarius for neo-classical economists)-- and that Krugman is not counting the slowdown of 59-60, or even the slowdown of 73-74. Moreover, it is, to say the least, not evident that interest-rate cuts "pulled" the United States out of these recessions. Interest rate cuts are responses to economic slowdowns, certainly, but the experience of, for instance the stagflation-slowdown that started in 1980 doesn't have the electric switch characteristics Krugman wants to convey. As a corrective to Krugman's views, William Greider's The Temple, which is a journalistic account of Fed decision-making, is recommended. I recommend it the more given Krugman's notorious contempt for Greider.

The problem with his analysis is in what he takes to be the second line of defense. Notice how he confines fiscal policy, in the traditional time-honored fashion of economists, in terms of discretionary spending over a short-term time frame. What is missing, here, are long-term governmental fiscal structures - such as college loans, FHA, on-going infrastructural support for highways, R&D, the environment, and the rest of it -- which are, I would contend, the enduring vector of government intervention in the economy which, as a structure (apart from its yearly budgeting) has generated a stabilizing influence on the economy. It is upon these structures that the American economy has built an internal consumer market fueled by debt. In his whole article, Krugman never mentions consumer debt, but it is crucial to understanding how our present economy differs from the economy of the 30s, and how the dangers of recession differ, too.

However, even if I find Krugman's frame of analysis inadequate, his rehearsal of the woes to which the Japanese economy is presently heir is pretty good, even if his idea that America, unlike Japan, has a much smarter central bank is pretty funny. This idea is widespread among American economists, and it has its roots in vanity. They recognize kindred spirits on the board of the Fed -- hell, they are kindred spirits, coming from the same universities, publishing in the same journals, using the same models. This doesn't really mean they are smarter. This simply means they share the same delusions -- like the Glass family in Salinger's short stories. You can only be so smart in economics, because, pace Krugman, it is not and never will be a positive science.

Remora
Speaking of the bulletin of the atomic scientists, there is a truly brilliant bit of reportage by Jessica Stern, listening to the Muj, from January of this year.

Meeting with the Muj | The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Here's two grafs:

"As part of a research project on violent religious extremism, I have been interviewing Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim militants around the world for the last two years. Last June I returned to South Asia to visit the Line of Control, the always tense and often bloody border between Indian-held and Pakistan-held Kashmir. I wanted to meet with mujahideen and to learn more about Pakistan's radical madrisas, which churn out so many of the mujahideen, boys who court death in the name of god.
I also met with families of "martyrs," Pakistani boys who have lost their lives fighting in Kashmir. I had been communicating with a few mujahideen over the past two years, trying to understand what motivates them to become cannon fodder in what appears to be a losing battle."

Remora

Nice article in last month's Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
Surveying the nuclear cities | The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

It makes more compelling reading, now, for obvious reasons. It is amazing how careless we are about the abandoned coral reefs of the Cold War -- the chemicals, germs, nuclear weapons, the stockpiles of Apocalypse.
Here's the final Graf:

"The results of Tikhonov�s study and the apparent conditions in the cities make it all the more difficult to understand the Bush administration�s move to cut funding for the Nuclear Cities Initiative, a U.S. program designed to help create new jobs in several of Russia�s nuclear cities. The administration favors reducing last year�s already reduced budget of $25 million to a request for only $6.6 million. Experts within the program question whether this sum is sufficient to maintain operations in even one of the cities, let alone expand to new areas. While congressional supporters will try to restore the budget to this year�s level, the lack of political support within the administration could threaten the very survival of the program."

Remora

I like Christopher Hitchens, even if sometimes I think he is batty. His latest blast at the "no-brain" pacifist left has produced some small echo, and it is definitely worth reading, even if I felt it was fueled by temper working on the nerve more than by the painstaking charcuterie of H.'s analytic intelligence at its best.
Guardian Unlimited | Archive Search

Especially as he lets loose in the penultimate paragraph, he loses his grip on what he usually does very well -- making sure that his invective is undergirded by a strict sense of definition:

"But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the west", to put it in a phrase, is not what western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any observant follower of the prophet Mohammed could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings - yes, even in the Pentagon."

Falwell and Robertson have become a rhetorical convenience of the unity crowd -- you invoke them, you invoke some lefty protesting against US policy, and you say, same dif. Well, that's not really true ( - and I have to make a sidenote here: I have a theory that Pat Robertson bullies the roly-poly Falwell, making him say awful things that Falwell wouldn't say otherwise -- it is a playground dynamic widespread among first graders. I remember once being bullied by Jacky Barnhart, when I was six, to swear on a Bible. Now, I'd been told that you couldn't swear on a Bible, or you'd go to hell. Surely I wasn't told this by my mother -- I think it was some schoolkid superstition I picked up somewhere. And I definitely knew, back in those days, that hell was a lurid and awful place. I swore anyway, not because Jacky would beat me up, but in order not to lose face with Jacky and his cohorts.). Two groups can oppose one action for completely different reasons, and one of those reasons can be irrational, and one can be rational. That should be obvious to CH, since his notorious opposition to Clinton put him in the same group as the Newt Gingriches of the world, but the content of his opposition was at the other end of the political spectrum from Newt's.

Similarly, the fascism with an Islamic face line works as a jibe directed against, say, Saddam Hussein, with his oily embrace of Allah in the period of the Gulf War and the consciously fascistic structure of the Ba'athist party, but not against the hijackers. There was nothing really fascistic about their tactics or motives -- the assault upon unarmed civilians, the invocation of God, the alarmingly childish, self-hypnotic memo released by the FBI last week (apparently composed to put steel in the spines of the slackers among them), reveal a mindset that the term 'fascism' simply doesn't describe.

CH thunders about the pacifist Chomsky -- Znet axis. He's been a consistent critic of that line since the Serbian invasion of Bosnia. But Hitchens own view of the extent to which American interventionism is justified has a Wilsonian tone that is annealed against reality by the rhetorical heat of its idealism. Hitchens takes the view, practically, that American soldiers have a historical role similar to Napoleon's soldiers, spreading the enlightenment, by force, over the cobwebbed principalities of Central Europe. To make this case, he has to overlook the reality of American interests, which is a pretty big blind spot. And so every use of American soldiers is sure to produce some disappointed thunder from Hitchens.Reality betrays theory, the oppressed Albanians become the terrorist and drug-running Albanians, the American soldiers show a disconcerting carefulness about their own hides, and enlightenment is stymied once more. To be fair, if Americans consistently pay out of their pockets a premium to sustain a military in gross disproportion to their real needs, it is easy to see someone thinking, why not take that military surplus value and use it to right wrongs? but History has not annointed the Yank as today's crusaders, to be shuffled about the planet when evil rears its head, because a, there is no support for that kind of thing in this country, and b, like the reallife crusaders, the Yank is more interested in the profit motive than liberte, egalite and fraternite. This isn't really to criticize. The bright side of the profit motive is that it operates like a brake against the perils of imperialism, however idealistic. Fighting for money has a way of being a self-limiting enterprise.

Remora

The news that Excite@home filed for bankruptcy should surprise nobody who watched them in the late nineties, taking on debt as if they were a real company. But it struck a nostalgic chord in my heart, so I went back to the ante-diluvian era and dug up this article on VC star John Doerr. Those who rely on biz journalism to tell a straight story should check it out:

Forbes.com: The Best VCs
Especially pause and linger on these two grafs, balancing the usual flattery of the wealthy with, in the next paragraph, that devastating list of companies. Each one either gone belly up or seriously damaged by the way they were initially financed:

"It is no longer possible to write simply about this veteran venture capitalist named John Doerr, so wrapped is he now in the mantle of myth and fable. He has become both the sign and the signifier of high tech venture capitalism, a metaphor for success, the synecdoche of the entire e-commerce era. That's a lot of freight to carry to the office in your PalmPilot each morning. Megalomaniacs are made from a lot less. But it is to Doerr's credit that he hasn't become a grotesque or a hectoring Mother Hubbard (though, with time, all his Democratic political work bears that risk).

The list of Doerr wins is itself a touchstone, like DiMaggio's major league record hitting streak--Compaq, Cypress, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Lotus, Amazon.com, Healtheon, Intuit, Excite@Home. Even Doerr's failures, like pen computing, have an epic, Homeric quality to them."

It's ... it's an Ozymandias moment, folks.

A story in the Times Biz section today piqued my interest. Headlined Cellular Pioneer Puts Up 'For Sale' Signs and written by GERALDINE FABRIKANT and the ever insightful GRETCHEN MORGENSON, the article inventoried strange doings in the Craig McCaw kingdom -- the guy is selling his wine collection, his island, and his planes, no less.

Second and third graf:

"A believer in telecommunications who has been called a visionary, Mr. McCaw continued to invest heavily in the industry even after he sold his cellular network, McCaw Cellular Communications, to AT&T in 1994.

For a while the strategy worked. When technology stocks peaked in March of last year, Mr. McCaw's biggest investments in two public companies, Nextel Communications Inc. (news/quote) and XO Communications Inc. (news/quote), were worth $8.8 billion. Today, after selling some stock, his holdings are worth about $1 billion. Mr. McCaw declined to be interviewed about his sales. But his spokesman, Robert Ratliffe, maintained that Mr. McCaw was selling properties to raise cash to buy telecommunications assets on the cheap. "

Well, the story took me back to last year, when I was writing book reviews for Green Magazine. One of those reviews was of an exercise in bootlicking abject even by the standards of the CEO bio -- a genre in which little men in suits who have exercised the greed, caution, backstabbing, and fake friendship necessary to rise in management circles consisting of similar souls are celebrated in terms that would make Alexander the Great blush. Because Green is no more, and my reviews have been pulled, I'm gonna reprint this one, for what it is worth. I'd like to say that the skeptical tone throughout shows a certain clairvoyance on my part, in light of recent developments -- but that would be false. I was just ticked off by the guy who wrote the book.

Money From Thin Air: the story of Craig McCaw, the visionary who invented the cell phone and his next billion dollar idea

Inventions are to Americans what ballads were to Highland Scotts - a romantic expression of the popular will. Like ballads, it is hard to trace many inventions to a single author, and the geneology becomes even more confusing when we enter into the epoch of late 20th century R & D. . Who knows the names of the inventors of such everyday items as the tv, the cell phone and the Internet?

What we do know are the great diffusers: the Henry Fords and Bill Gates of the world, those who take some instrument designed to satisfy inchoate desires and put it in everybody's reach. Desire, at a certain saturation point, will take care of itself. Diffusion has become so intermingled with invention that Corr's phrase, 'the visionary who invented the cell phone industry," makes a kind of sense.

Unfortunately, visionary, when applied to a business-man, often trails hints of snake oil. This biography does have a fascinating subject - Craig McCaw, the founder of McCaw Communications, who, in the 80s, gradually cornered the market on cell phone service. That's an honorable enough thing to have accomplished, but Corr's continual genuflecting before McCaw's "brilliance" is tiresome enough to arouse the skepticism of a saint, much less yours truly. The book is filled with hagiographic passages like this one:

"An aide once walked in to find the chief executive resting his chin on his hands as he stared at Lake Washington. The aide got the feeling McCaw had been staring for a long time - perhaps working through a strategy."

Or perhaps he was daydreaming about Pamela Lee Anderson. Who knows? In any case, Corr doesn't compensate for his adulatory instinct with footwork. Although McCaw has been in business since the seventies, and has gone through a high profile, very public divorce (his first wife, Wendy, eventually received 500 million dollars in the settlement), Corr hasn't done much to follow the paper trail inevitably attendant upon so public life. Instead, Corr devotes an inordinate amount of space to quoting from an inspirational talk McCaw gave on the occasion of winning notice from the American Academy of Achievement (whatever that is). Using as a source once might be acceptable, but using it in ten different chapters is inexcusable. Award ceremony speeches are not exactly my idea of a fundamental source. Corr's excuse is that McCaw grew "bored"with being interviewed.

Craig McCaw was born to Marion and J. Elroy McCaw. Elroy sounds like a classic American figure - a glib speaker who parlayed a canny ability to float his debt into a radio station mini-empire. Elroy was also an early adapter of cable TV, which is the legacy he passed to his son. Unfortunately, by 1969, when Craig found his father dead in the master bedroom of their immense mansion in The Highlands, a suburb of Seattle, Elroy had overextended himself badly. The family fortunes did not collapse into poverty - the year after Elroy's death, his widow was still spending 7,000 dollars a month on household expenses, which, in 1970, was considerable wampum - but it was a severe and shocking setback nonetheless. Craig, a shy eighteen year old who struggled with dyslexia, was a student at Stanford. He ran one of his father's remaining businesses, a cable tv company in Centralia, Washington, out of his dorm room. After graduating he continued with it, growing it with a lot of smarts and hard work in the seventies. At the time, cable regulations were very local, requiring grassroots effort in one podunk Northwestern town after the other.

The experience with cable, which grew from a marginal to a major industry, taught McCaw a lot. He saw how seemingly peripheral industries, in communications, have a way of transforming quickly into major industries. Just as network TV lead into cable, so it seemed that wired telephones were going to lead into cell phones. Bell Labs improved its cell phone technology enough to start offering the service in 1974. The costs at first were high, but it was obvious that service cost would quickly cheapen. The major obstacle was regulatory. The phone required use of the UHF bandwidth, which was controlled by the FCC.. In 1979, McCaw attended a conference on cell phones and saw right away the marketability of the thing.

In the eighties, the cell phone industry was dominated by the quest to gain bandwidth. In 1983, the FCC stopped holding comparative hearings on the licenses, and decided to simply hold lotteries, in which every applicant would have a chit. This added a circus like dimension to the business, similar to frenzy about dot com names in the late nineties. Most of the applicants weren't serious, but merely wanted the license for a particular area's bandwidth in order to resell it. Among those who tried this strategy was the then governor of Arkansas, William Clinton.

To raise money, McCaw did three things. He sold his cable business in 1984, which earned him $755 million. He went public in 1987 with his company, McCaw Communications. And he went into serious debt. The debt was expedited, initially, by Michael Milken, who raised $225 million for McCaw. The money went to getting licenses for markets. Notably, McCaw bought out MCI's licenses for $120 million in 1985, and bought LIN Broadcasting, in 1989, as well as buying out myriad smaller fry. By 1990, McCaw was no longer merely a Northwest millionaire - he was the owner of the largest cellular phone service in the country. The down side was the amount of debt that the company had to take on to achieve this position, not counting the future costs of building all those cell phone services. In 1992, McCaw sold a third of his company to AT& T, and the next year AT&T bought out the entire McCaw family interest in a one to one trade of stock.

Given this story, is it fair to say that McCaw "invented" the cell phone industry?

It is interesting to compare McCaw to an earlier telecommunications giant, David Sarnoff. Sarnoff, who was the head of RCA from the thirties through the sixties, can indeed be said to have invented the radio and tv industry. He first proposed using radio commercially, back in the twenties, and put 50 million dollars into electric tv research during the depression, even though he knew that he wouldn't earn that money back any time soon. Sarnoff singlehandedly spun RCA off from GE and Westinghouse, and then created NBC. With his big cigar, his immigrant beginnings in a Russian shtetl, and his shameless self advertisement, Sarnoff was in the line of the great capitalist impresarios, like his comperes who ran the movie business.

McCaw, on the other hand, didn't contribute to the development of the cellular phone in quite the same way. It was, rather, his confidence that the technology and demand would converge which distinguishes his achievement. Like other 70s generation entrepreneurs, McCaw had no sympathy for the old bluff "captain of industry". With his dyslexia, his personal diffidence, his futurism, his fascination with gadgets, McCaw is the "hacker"as capitalist. Like the early phone hackers (Captain Crunch, "Mark Bernay," and the teenage Steve Jobs), the kick is in playing with the communication system, not having something to communicate over it. Getting in the medium is the message. The key to McCaw is probably in a remark he made to his FCC lawyer, in 1986, that "his dream was to someday acquire AT&T." It's his hacker side that so puzzles the straight businessmen with whom he has dealings. But the characters in Ron Rosenbaum's classic article on phone phreaking, " Secrets of the Little Blue Box," would immediately recognize McCaw's dream.