Remora
In 1812, as the wave of repression passed over England, now in its tenth year of war with France -- first with the revolution, then with Napoleon -- one Daniel Isaac Eaton published Tom Paine's notorious atheistical tract, Age of Reason, and was sentenced to an hour in the pillory, plus imprisonment, by his judge, Lord Ellenborough. Shelley responded to the Ellenborough in an open letter that began like this:
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I have waited impatiently for these last four months, in the hopes that some pen, fitter for the important task, would have spared me the perilous pleasure of becoming the champion of an innocent man.�This may serve as an excuse for delay, to those who think that I have let pass the aptest opportunity, but it is not to be supposed that in four short months the public indignation, raised by Mr. Eaton�s unmerited suffering, can have subsided.
Letter
My Lord,
As the station to which you have been called by your country is important, so much the more awful is your responsibility, so much the more does it become you to watch lest you inadvertently punish the virtuous and reward the vicious.
You preside over a court which is instituted for the suppression of crime, and to whose authority the people submit on no other conditions than that its decrees should be conformable to justice.
If it should be demonstrated that a judge had condemned an innocent man, the bare existence of laws in conformity to which the accused is punished, would but little extenuate his offence. The inquisitor when he burns an obstinate heretic may set up a similar plea, yet few are sufficiently blinded by intolerance to acknowledge its validity. It will less avail such a judge to assert the policy of punishing one who has committed no crime. Policy and morality ought to be deemed synonymous in a court of justice, and he whose conduct has been regulated by the latter principle, is not justly amenable to any penal law for a supposed violation of the former. It is true, my Lord, laws exist which suffice to screen you from the animadversions of any constituted power, in consequence of the unmerited sentence which you have passed upon Mr. Eaton; but there are no laws which screen you from the reproof of a nation�s disgust, none which ward off the just judgment of posterity, if that posterity will deign to recollect you."
Well, we doubt posterity will deign to recollect the name of the present head of the Patent Office, James Rogin (whose debt to those great lovers of free expression, Sony, Disney and co., preceded him into office) or his successor, Bruce Lehman (on whom LI is in a once in a lifetime agreement with, of all people, Phyllis Schlafly ) or the members of Congress, who have for the last twenty years been hotwiring intellectual property laws to create just the kind of monstrosity that was envisioned by opponents of the Constitution, and exorcised, in defense of the Constitution, by Jefferson, Madison, and the signers of the Constitution. Still, we recalled this exemplary case of the suppression of opinion when we read the NYT article about the speciousness of Big Pharma's claims to be churning out innovative products under the extended protection of patent law granted them by an always supine, intellectually vacant legislature, and seconded by a patent office that has taken it upon itself to extend monopolistic protection to the biggest and dullest corporations in the land. In both cases, it is a question of competition -- in one, the suppression of those enlightened expressions that could compete with the dull dead scriptures of the governing classes; in another, it is the suppression of that competition, from rival drug companies, that would lead to much lower pharmaceutical prices and, in all probability, invention and the flowering of science. Or something like that.
So, on to the NYT article. In a study done by Blue Cross of drug "innovations" during the last twenty years, it was found that, suprise -- the innovations were mainly in labeling. Yes, labeling R & D is vital in the frontline against disease..
"New Medicines Seldom Contain Anything New, Study Finds
By MELODY PETERSEN
Two-thirds of the drugs approved from 1989 to 2000 were modified versions of existing drugs or even identical to those already on the market, rather than truly new medicines, according to a new study.
"The report also said that most of the increased spending on new prescription drugs was on products that the Food and Drug Administration had determined did not provide significant benefits over those already on the market."
But how about those remarkable drug breakthroughs, the gentle reader is asking? How about the technological breakthroughs that brought us Clarinex and Sarafem? Sorry, gentle reader:
"Clarinex, an allergy drug, is a reformulation of Claritin. Sarafem, for premenstrual irritability, is the same drug as Prozac but has been renamed and repackaged in capsules of pink and lavender."
Of course, Big Pharma has a response to these outrageous allegations:
"The drug industry's trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, criticized the study yesterday, saying that it was "flawed and misguided."
"Richard I. Smith, vice president for policy and research at the group, said that even if a medicine was similar to one already on the market, it could still offer many benefits to patients. For example, he said, even though there are several similar drugs that fight depression � including Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft � many patients may not respond to one medicine but will to another."
There you go -- isn't that reason enough to protect the monopolistic hold of big pharma on all those drugs out there that they have spent their life blood, bet the farm, and sold their children in order to develop?
We mentioned Clinton's head of the Patent and Trademark commission, Bruce Lehman. Interestingly, he has followed the Clintonoid logic of selling what soul he might have had in 1968 for one brief second listening to Purple Haze in whatever vile Ivy League dorm he was rooming in to whatever vile industry would have it, founding a non-profit shill for Hollywood and the drug lords, the International Intellectual Property Institute. Here he is in heart rending testimony before Congress pleading with those bad boys to extend to Pfizer, to Merck, to all those suffering little piggies, the same, well, the same protection the computer companies (due to Lehman's stint at the Patent Office) enjoy:
"As I understand these issues, the task currently facing Congress is to find a way to regularize the process of enacting patent-specific term restoration legislation. Central to this task is to develop a system that is fair to the public and patent holders. Certainly, to shorten arbitrarily effective patent term for one of the industries whose innovations have the greatest public benefits � the pharmaceutical industry � is unfair, and discourages investment in those industries. A brief comparison of the ability of American innovation-based companies to attract funding in U.S. capital markets will underscore my point. At the present time, innovators in the computer components and software industries receive full twenty (20) year patent protection for inventions which require far less capital and involve far less risk than is the case in pharmaceutical innovation. Since most patents issue after about two years� examining time, these innovators are receiving 18 years of effective patent exclusivity. Is it no wonder that companies producing very important, but far from life saving or disease-curing products, attract market value and investment capital on a scale an order of magnitude beyond that of pharmaceutical and biotech companies? "
Ah, Bruce, this is more tear jerking than Imitation of Life! Douglas Sirk never knew, never KNEW, the sorrows of the successful pharma co -- always anxious as a debutante, wanting the best, the best for us -- wanting to cure our pattern baldness, our erectile dysfunction (and not, say, our malaria, sorry - the average malaria victim is, after all, a little dusky, as they like to say). But somehow, as we finished Bruce's testimony in a most lachrymose state, we went on to read this little disquisition, by Public Citizen, on the financial compensations accorded to the Mercks and the Pfizers, and our tears miraculously dried:
"In a year that saw a drop in employment rates, a plunge in the stock market and symbols of America s economy literally come crashing down, the pharmaceutical industry continued its reign as the most profitable industry in the annual Fortune 500 list.
While the overall profits of Fortune 500 companies declined by 53 percent the second deepest dive in profits the Fortune 500 has taken in its 47 years the top 10 U.S. drug makers increased profits by 33 percent.Collectively, the 10 drug companies in the Fortune 500 topped all three of the magazine s measures of profitability in 2001, according to Fortune magazine s annual analysis of America s largest companies."
The Public Citizen article also picks apart the rather rotten premises of a Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development study that was issued, to much fanfare, in November 2001. The study put the "average R&D cost for each new drug brought to market at $802 million." Amazing, horrendous, and no wonder the poor pharma companies are trying to make money corrupting congress with hollow intellectual shills and relabeling products, you say. But in PC's estimation, there are a few things wrong with the Tufts study.
One thing is that the study excluded, right off, any R & D that was partly funded by the government. So what we are talking about here is what Libby used to do in 1968. But sure, some pharma cos. do bypass government financing. PC also discovered that the numbers in the Tufts study are, uh, sorta theoretical. In a deliciously comic passage, done completely deadpan, PC goes after the author of the study, one Joseph A. DiMasi:
"The second major flaw of the Tufts Center study is that it exaggerates the actual R&D expenditures for its sample of drugs. Specifically, the new Tufts Center estimate of $802 million includes significant expenses that are tax deductible and theoretical costs that drug companies don t actually incur. For example, roughly half of DiMasi s estimate ($399 million) is the "opportunity cost of capital" a theoretical calculation of what R&D expenditures might be worth if they were invested elsewhere. DiMasi calculated actual out-of-pocket R&D costs for drugs in the study at $403 million per new drug."
The most interesting thing about patent law as it applies to big pharma is how big pharma has managed to gather bunches of conservative intellectuals, the ones that like to talk about the wonders of competition, to propagandize for government protected monopoly in the name of bogus "property rights." There's an old scorecard of who, within the power elite that governs us, has sucked the drug company tit, brought to us by the Consumer Project on Technology. Turns out there's a lot of little porkers on the list. Check it out! Augustan England had its rotten boroughs -- we have our power elite. Lucky England!
Thursday, May 30, 2002
Tuesday, May 28, 2002
Remora
The magic of the market place in the hands of the magicians
LI has the long, grudge-laden memory you'd expect from a disappointed loner and potential assassin. Meaning I review for a living. But nothing has tickled us so much, in the hours of bile that precede dawn, as the news about the energy markets. For if, like me, you were reading the biz press in the nineties, the Daniel Yergin crowd, the Larry Summers crowd, well it just seemed super-evident that when we give power to the power companies, a veritable cultural renaissance would ensue, a happy coordination of supply and demand that would reward stockholder and consumer alike!
It was bliss to be a free trade ideologue in those days. The epicenter is still the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a think tank associated with Daniel Yergin. The think tank has issued a report that recommends ... further deregulation! Of course, with 'structure" this time, maestro.
�The power business in the U.S. is too important to continue to restructure on a trial-and-error basis. Pragmatism should prevail over experimentation in power market design,� said Francis X. Shields, Accenture, Partner in the Competitive Energy Markets practice. �The focus should be on markets that do work, not those that do not�.
�The power industry is at the crossroads of three paths: it can continue to muddle along the path of experimental deregulation, backtrack to comprehensive regulation, or move forward to power markets that work,� Shields said. �The United States needs to avoid slipping back to the �devil it knows� � comprehensive regulation. A move forward requires accepting that power markets are complex, unlikely to evolve on their own accord, and need structure to work properly.�
And what does it mean, this "needing of structure"? We like CERA's last recommendations best:
"Coordinate wholesale and retail transitions � Big bang deregulations are too risky in an industry as complex as electric power. In moving to wholesale markets, vesting contracts that expire gradually over the first years of the market to provide time for participants to move up the learning curve. Once wholesale markets are in place (which may include large industrial and commercial customers), retail markets should be opened as quickly as possible, but in phases to reduce the technical stress on the system. The first phase can include large industrial and commercial customers participating at the opening of the wholesale market.
Minimize distortions of market price signals � Price caps have the effect of distorting economic activity in any market. If wholesale price caps exist in any form, they should be set above the highest possible incremental cost of production. Similarly, price freezes at the retail level should be thawed in order to reconnect demand to the market. Prices need to convey information clearly in order to coordinate economic activity in a market. Governmental public policy objectives -- such as fuel mix, rural cross-subsidization, obligation to serve and low income initiatives � should be kept independent of the spot and forward trading mechanisms in the wholesale market, and be clearly identified as separate charges on consumers bills in the retail market."
Those transitions can be tough, especially when dealing with large scale customers, like businesses. So you can always lay off costs on your small, atomized customers -- let's call them residences. And then, of course, it is very important not to have to deal with any price curbs that might impede this kind of gouging. We love it, we love it...
We especially love the gobbledygook about prices as information. This might be of interest to Dynegy, Reliant or CMS. The CEO of Dynegy, Chuck Watson resigned today, in light of revelations about, well, chatter on the price party line. Chuck has had a wild ride since December -- buying and then unbuying Enron, getting touted in a Forbes cover story and now getting dumped by the board:
Watson was the second CEO of an energy trading company to resign in less than a week amid federal inquiries into simultaneous power swaps between energy traders that artificially boosted trading volume and, in some cases, reported revenue. William T. McCormick Jr., chairman and chief executive of CMS Energy Corp., announced his resignation Friday, less than two weeks after the company admitted conducting energy trades it used to falsely inflate revenue by more than $4.4 billion.
The swaps, dubbed "round-trip trades," involve simultaneous swaps of electric power for the same price and have been questioned by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dynegy, a one-time suitor of bankrupt Enron Corp., disclosed earlier this month that the SEC is looking into similar trades made by the company last fall. Dynegy said it conducted the trades to test its system and that they didn't yield any profits for Dynegy or its trading partner. "
Somehow, I have a problem trusting the word of an energy trading company about what does and does not constitute profit. Dynegy had a little problem with that category itself, as well as with the preserving, with the appropriate sacred rites, the holy nature of the information-price dyad, according to a Reuters report last month:
"Dynegy used an arrangement called Project Alpha to address a growing gap between cash flow and net income and to cut its tax bill, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Dynegy officials told the Journal that Project Alpha was aimed at guaranteeing a stable source of gas.
The newspaper report said Dynegy created a partnership that entered into a five-year gas-trading contract with a special-purpose company. During the first nine months of the contract, the partnership bought gas at below-market prices, yielding profits; during the remainder of the contract, the partnership paid above-market prices, producing losses.
Dynegy used the losses to narrow the gap between its cash flow and net income and to reduce its taxes, according to the report.
The Economist, a magazine that has bought its ticket for the the privatization ideology and never looked back, has an interestingly skewed story about the appalling dishonesty -- I mean, the financial innovations -- of the power brokers and their ilk.
"EVER since Gray Davis, governor of California, locked his taxpayers into exorbitantly expensive, long-term electricity contracts at the height of California's energy crisis, his staff have worked tirelessly to pin the blame on somebody else. The collapse of Enron helped, in a general way, to divert attention. Until recently, however, the energy trader's bankruptcy had given little impetus to Mr Davis's allegations that energy traders had fleeced California by illegally manipulating energy prices. Now Mr Davis has found succour at last. Two new regulatory investigations and collapsing investor confidence have left the industry flat on its back.
On May 13th, Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer and Wolf Popper, two law firms, filed suit in San Francisco against a number of energy suppliers on behalf of Californian taxpayers. The suit alleges that long-term power contracts have forced consumers to pay $9.1 billion more for energy than they would have done at �proper� market rates, and that over the next ten years the gap will be even bigger. "
Talk about an odd way to slip in a fact inconvenient to your mindset. Or a set of facts, a whole world of facts.
Lets sum it up and get on to some real work. When the magicians are minding the magic acts, expect tricks. Or as My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult once asked, what do you do when "no one's there to spy on you?" Why, you trade gas at below market prices, mislabel the transactions for tax purposes, and make it up by trading at above market prices, thus conveniently benchmarking for further trades, that's what you do! It's just business.
The magic of the market place in the hands of the magicians
LI has the long, grudge-laden memory you'd expect from a disappointed loner and potential assassin. Meaning I review for a living. But nothing has tickled us so much, in the hours of bile that precede dawn, as the news about the energy markets. For if, like me, you were reading the biz press in the nineties, the Daniel Yergin crowd, the Larry Summers crowd, well it just seemed super-evident that when we give power to the power companies, a veritable cultural renaissance would ensue, a happy coordination of supply and demand that would reward stockholder and consumer alike!
It was bliss to be a free trade ideologue in those days. The epicenter is still the Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a think tank associated with Daniel Yergin. The think tank has issued a report that recommends ... further deregulation! Of course, with 'structure" this time, maestro.
�The power business in the U.S. is too important to continue to restructure on a trial-and-error basis. Pragmatism should prevail over experimentation in power market design,� said Francis X. Shields, Accenture, Partner in the Competitive Energy Markets practice. �The focus should be on markets that do work, not those that do not�.
�The power industry is at the crossroads of three paths: it can continue to muddle along the path of experimental deregulation, backtrack to comprehensive regulation, or move forward to power markets that work,� Shields said. �The United States needs to avoid slipping back to the �devil it knows� � comprehensive regulation. A move forward requires accepting that power markets are complex, unlikely to evolve on their own accord, and need structure to work properly.�
And what does it mean, this "needing of structure"? We like CERA's last recommendations best:
"Coordinate wholesale and retail transitions � Big bang deregulations are too risky in an industry as complex as electric power. In moving to wholesale markets, vesting contracts that expire gradually over the first years of the market to provide time for participants to move up the learning curve. Once wholesale markets are in place (which may include large industrial and commercial customers), retail markets should be opened as quickly as possible, but in phases to reduce the technical stress on the system. The first phase can include large industrial and commercial customers participating at the opening of the wholesale market.
Minimize distortions of market price signals � Price caps have the effect of distorting economic activity in any market. If wholesale price caps exist in any form, they should be set above the highest possible incremental cost of production. Similarly, price freezes at the retail level should be thawed in order to reconnect demand to the market. Prices need to convey information clearly in order to coordinate economic activity in a market. Governmental public policy objectives -- such as fuel mix, rural cross-subsidization, obligation to serve and low income initiatives � should be kept independent of the spot and forward trading mechanisms in the wholesale market, and be clearly identified as separate charges on consumers bills in the retail market."
Those transitions can be tough, especially when dealing with large scale customers, like businesses. So you can always lay off costs on your small, atomized customers -- let's call them residences. And then, of course, it is very important not to have to deal with any price curbs that might impede this kind of gouging. We love it, we love it...
We especially love the gobbledygook about prices as information. This might be of interest to Dynegy, Reliant or CMS. The CEO of Dynegy, Chuck Watson resigned today, in light of revelations about, well, chatter on the price party line. Chuck has had a wild ride since December -- buying and then unbuying Enron, getting touted in a Forbes cover story and now getting dumped by the board:
Watson was the second CEO of an energy trading company to resign in less than a week amid federal inquiries into simultaneous power swaps between energy traders that artificially boosted trading volume and, in some cases, reported revenue. William T. McCormick Jr., chairman and chief executive of CMS Energy Corp., announced his resignation Friday, less than two weeks after the company admitted conducting energy trades it used to falsely inflate revenue by more than $4.4 billion.
The swaps, dubbed "round-trip trades," involve simultaneous swaps of electric power for the same price and have been questioned by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dynegy, a one-time suitor of bankrupt Enron Corp., disclosed earlier this month that the SEC is looking into similar trades made by the company last fall. Dynegy said it conducted the trades to test its system and that they didn't yield any profits for Dynegy or its trading partner. "
Somehow, I have a problem trusting the word of an energy trading company about what does and does not constitute profit. Dynegy had a little problem with that category itself, as well as with the preserving, with the appropriate sacred rites, the holy nature of the information-price dyad, according to a Reuters report last month:
"Dynegy used an arrangement called Project Alpha to address a growing gap between cash flow and net income and to cut its tax bill, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Dynegy officials told the Journal that Project Alpha was aimed at guaranteeing a stable source of gas.
The newspaper report said Dynegy created a partnership that entered into a five-year gas-trading contract with a special-purpose company. During the first nine months of the contract, the partnership bought gas at below-market prices, yielding profits; during the remainder of the contract, the partnership paid above-market prices, producing losses.
Dynegy used the losses to narrow the gap between its cash flow and net income and to reduce its taxes, according to the report.
The Economist, a magazine that has bought its ticket for the the privatization ideology and never looked back, has an interestingly skewed story about the appalling dishonesty -- I mean, the financial innovations -- of the power brokers and their ilk.
"EVER since Gray Davis, governor of California, locked his taxpayers into exorbitantly expensive, long-term electricity contracts at the height of California's energy crisis, his staff have worked tirelessly to pin the blame on somebody else. The collapse of Enron helped, in a general way, to divert attention. Until recently, however, the energy trader's bankruptcy had given little impetus to Mr Davis's allegations that energy traders had fleeced California by illegally manipulating energy prices. Now Mr Davis has found succour at last. Two new regulatory investigations and collapsing investor confidence have left the industry flat on its back.
On May 13th, Kaplan Fox & Kilsheimer and Wolf Popper, two law firms, filed suit in San Francisco against a number of energy suppliers on behalf of Californian taxpayers. The suit alleges that long-term power contracts have forced consumers to pay $9.1 billion more for energy than they would have done at �proper� market rates, and that over the next ten years the gap will be even bigger. "
Talk about an odd way to slip in a fact inconvenient to your mindset. Or a set of facts, a whole world of facts.
Lets sum it up and get on to some real work. When the magicians are minding the magic acts, expect tricks. Or as My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult once asked, what do you do when "no one's there to spy on you?" Why, you trade gas at below market prices, mislabel the transactions for tax purposes, and make it up by trading at above market prices, thus conveniently benchmarking for further trades, that's what you do! It's just business.
Saturday, May 25, 2002
Remora
Enron's stunt fall, during that portion of the Bush administration that we will certainly know more about if Cheney's office has to release its docs, was preceded by a rise duing a portion of Clinton's administration that hasn't received a lot of scrutiny, yet. Corporate Watch has published an article by Jimmy Langman on Enron's operations in Bolivia. The interlocking interests of capital and the state are put into special relief in this instance of what Cobbett would have called 'ruffian' capitalism.
Let's put this in terms of the mission statement, or the vision committment, or whatever seedy term you want to use.
Q: How can Enron, the free enterpriser's free enterprise, suck off the government tit by running a pipeline through an environmentally threatened forest? And how can it parlay false promises to a bunch of indigineous know nothings into an incredible amount of profit, without paying for an incredible amount of environmental damage, and still cheat its partners on the deal?
First, the setting:
"The 390-mile long Cuiaba natural gas pipeline, partly owned by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, stretches from near the city of Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia to Cuiaba, Matto Grosso, Brazil. There, it fuels Enron's new 480-megawatt thermal power plant. The pipeline cuts through the 15 million-acre Chiquitano, the last, large, relatively intact tall dry forest in the world. The Chiquitano forest is "one of the world's richest, rarest and most biologically outstanding habitats on Earth" and one of the planet's 200 most sensitive eco-regions, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Approximately 90 species of mammals, birds and reptiles in the Chiquitano are listed as endangered. The adjacent Pantanal is the world's largest wetlands region, spanning 89,000 square miles and straddling the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It is one of the world's richest wildlife habitats."
Now, remember, this forest is inhabited. The inconvenient indigenes must be placated with some initial promise that will pay off the NGOs that virtuously claim to represent them. Don't worry about really representing them -- once the NGOs have satisfied themselves, and their mailing list of contributors, that they've operated with maximum virtue, they will forget about their "clients" -- or better, having bought into the enterprise, they'll defend it against any subversive dissent that might emanate from some village headman somewhere, like that guy knows anything. Enron, however, isn't Shell Oil, which would be satisfied with some such arrangement. Enron wants to hit the ball out of the park, because that is the innovative, asset light, creative destruction type of corporate culture that made the 90s so special. To really hit the ball out of the ball park, you have to simultaneously juggle your accounting in a fraudulent way, contribute as much as possible to the degredation of the wilderness described above, seduce monetary support from the taxpayer, and cheat your business partner. Enron, with the mastery that accompanied its spiking stock prices, was able to do it all, as Langman reports. What fascinated LI is the part played by another one of those obscure Federal agencies that exist to pump money, as in an artesian well, from a lower level to a higher one -- that is, lining the pockets of the porcine set with money that, as LI writes this, is going to be denied the unworthy poor in pending legislation to "reform" welfare even more.
This is the US aspect of the deal:
"The "Cuiaba Energy Integrated Project" cost an estimated $600 million to build, $200 million of which was originally to be financed by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a US government agency that helps US companies with business projects in less-developed countries."
Never let it be said that America is indifferent to less developed countries, not with OPIC around to spread our bounty from jungle to glorious jungle. Enron was OPIC's number one cause, accruing 1.7 billion dollars in much needed aid since 1992. However, in Bolivia, OPIC was hampered by constraints on lending to environmentally destructive projects. But hey presto! that's where a little teamwork from OPIC's pliant chief environmental officer, Harvey Himberg, came in. By selectively describing the project, and by picturing the Chiquitano in wholly false terms, they were able to get around the restraints written into OPIC regulations. Himberg is what you call a visionary in the Forturne-'n-Forbes speak. Here's an example:
"After fires swept parts of the Chiquitano forest in the summer of 1999, OPIC even created a video highlighting the burnt out areas in an effort to convince individuals from other government agencies that the forest was not primary. The video led one US Agency for International Development staffer to tell an environmental group that he came away with the impression that there was no forest left.
"At every step OPIC sided with Enron, finding every way possible to circumvent its primary forest policy," says Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch: "OPIC management put on an all out effort to defend its largest business client."
This sounds much like tactics used by the Bush administration to get its true clients, petro companies, oil leases in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
OPIC has a little convenient site for children set up to explain itself, with cute pictures of jungle plants and beasts (in keeping with the curious American custom of portraying, in cartoons, the happy frolicking creatures we stun, butcher, slice n dice, broil, bake, and fry -- the grinning pig at the Barbecue place, the dancing chicken who can't wait to immerse itself, breast and thigh, in boiling oil. MMM MMM Good, Kids!) and a whole buncha fun facts to know and tell. Did you know sometimes private insurance companies just are so poopy? Yeah, they simply won't underwrite those necessary ventures of American capital into the big scary world of lions and tigers and bears. Now, Uncle Sam don't want to coddle any of you or your welfare queen mamas, you hear? But if you are, say, a multi-billion dollar energy company, the bowels of our national compassion are moved:
Why Is OPIC Needed?
Private loans, loan guaranties, and political risk insurance are hard to get for companies who want to operate in less developed countries. The best way for a country to become more developed is to encourage businesses to build and operate there. Some banks refuse to do business in these countries because they think it is too risky. OPIC helps these growing nations by supporting those businesses that want to operate in these countries.
Kids will do the darndest things, and some of them might question whether Uncle Sam should leap in where angels and venture capitalists don't dare to venture. But have no fear. OPIC, you see, is good for America!
"How Does OPIC Help America?
OPIC helps American companies make investments in developing countries. When US companies make these investments they are likely to create US jobs and exports. For example, if OPIC is helping to build a power plant in a foreign country then the parts and equipment needed to build the power plant will often be supplied by other American companies. American companies may build the generator for the plant, as well as selling the cranes, bulldozers, and trucks needed to build it. Since 1971, OPIC has supported $138 billion worth of investments that will generate $63.6 billion in U.S. exports and create nearly 250,000 American jobs. OPIC does not support projects that may result in any loss of American jobs or exports.
OPIC also helps U.S. foreign policy by only doing business in countries that obey certain rules about workers� rights and human rights. OPIC will not help any country that abuses its people.
OPIC is self-sustaining , and has made money every year since it was created in 1971. Because OPIC is so successful, it contributes money to the U.S. foreign assistance account every year."
LI was a smart ass boy. And LI has grown up to be a smart ass man. And this man, reading about all those trucks and cranes and things, wonders how scared the lions and tigers and bears should be. But they are SCARY! We have zoos to put creatures like that where they belong: behind bars!
In the meantime, although OPIC is very open and touchy feely with the kiddies, it seems simply touchy when it comes to its accounting. Or at least according to the Friends of the Earth. Kids, you might want to add to OPICs fun facts page the question, how are we accounting for those projects that (zoom! zoom!) use all those like neat cranes and trucks to set up like coal burning fuel plants in Thailand and stuff.
"OPIC's Annual Reports provide Congress and taxpayers with an ambiguous and distorted picture. OPIC reports "commitments" to the public but not final signed contracts. Therefore, the public has no way of knowing whether or not a contract was actually signed, which would result in official U.S. financial exposure and could create debt for developing countries."
But lets not badmouth our friendly neighbor policy while our POTUS is with Putin. Children, after all, should be seen, and not heard -- and the same is true for citizens.
has a site for kids
Enron's stunt fall, during that portion of the Bush administration that we will certainly know more about if Cheney's office has to release its docs, was preceded by a rise duing a portion of Clinton's administration that hasn't received a lot of scrutiny, yet. Corporate Watch has published an article by Jimmy Langman on Enron's operations in Bolivia. The interlocking interests of capital and the state are put into special relief in this instance of what Cobbett would have called 'ruffian' capitalism.
Let's put this in terms of the mission statement, or the vision committment, or whatever seedy term you want to use.
Q: How can Enron, the free enterpriser's free enterprise, suck off the government tit by running a pipeline through an environmentally threatened forest? And how can it parlay false promises to a bunch of indigineous know nothings into an incredible amount of profit, without paying for an incredible amount of environmental damage, and still cheat its partners on the deal?
First, the setting:
"The 390-mile long Cuiaba natural gas pipeline, partly owned by Royal Dutch/Shell Group, stretches from near the city of Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia to Cuiaba, Matto Grosso, Brazil. There, it fuels Enron's new 480-megawatt thermal power plant. The pipeline cuts through the 15 million-acre Chiquitano, the last, large, relatively intact tall dry forest in the world. The Chiquitano forest is "one of the world's richest, rarest and most biologically outstanding habitats on Earth" and one of the planet's 200 most sensitive eco-regions, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Approximately 90 species of mammals, birds and reptiles in the Chiquitano are listed as endangered. The adjacent Pantanal is the world's largest wetlands region, spanning 89,000 square miles and straddling the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It is one of the world's richest wildlife habitats."
Now, remember, this forest is inhabited. The inconvenient indigenes must be placated with some initial promise that will pay off the NGOs that virtuously claim to represent them. Don't worry about really representing them -- once the NGOs have satisfied themselves, and their mailing list of contributors, that they've operated with maximum virtue, they will forget about their "clients" -- or better, having bought into the enterprise, they'll defend it against any subversive dissent that might emanate from some village headman somewhere, like that guy knows anything. Enron, however, isn't Shell Oil, which would be satisfied with some such arrangement. Enron wants to hit the ball out of the park, because that is the innovative, asset light, creative destruction type of corporate culture that made the 90s so special. To really hit the ball out of the ball park, you have to simultaneously juggle your accounting in a fraudulent way, contribute as much as possible to the degredation of the wilderness described above, seduce monetary support from the taxpayer, and cheat your business partner. Enron, with the mastery that accompanied its spiking stock prices, was able to do it all, as Langman reports. What fascinated LI is the part played by another one of those obscure Federal agencies that exist to pump money, as in an artesian well, from a lower level to a higher one -- that is, lining the pockets of the porcine set with money that, as LI writes this, is going to be denied the unworthy poor in pending legislation to "reform" welfare even more.
This is the US aspect of the deal:
"The "Cuiaba Energy Integrated Project" cost an estimated $600 million to build, $200 million of which was originally to be financed by the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a US government agency that helps US companies with business projects in less-developed countries."
Never let it be said that America is indifferent to less developed countries, not with OPIC around to spread our bounty from jungle to glorious jungle. Enron was OPIC's number one cause, accruing 1.7 billion dollars in much needed aid since 1992. However, in Bolivia, OPIC was hampered by constraints on lending to environmentally destructive projects. But hey presto! that's where a little teamwork from OPIC's pliant chief environmental officer, Harvey Himberg, came in. By selectively describing the project, and by picturing the Chiquitano in wholly false terms, they were able to get around the restraints written into OPIC regulations. Himberg is what you call a visionary in the Forturne-'n-Forbes speak. Here's an example:
"After fires swept parts of the Chiquitano forest in the summer of 1999, OPIC even created a video highlighting the burnt out areas in an effort to convince individuals from other government agencies that the forest was not primary. The video led one US Agency for International Development staffer to tell an environmental group that he came away with the impression that there was no forest left.
"At every step OPIC sided with Enron, finding every way possible to circumvent its primary forest policy," says Atossa Soltani, executive director of Amazon Watch: "OPIC management put on an all out effort to defend its largest business client."
This sounds much like tactics used by the Bush administration to get its true clients, petro companies, oil leases in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
OPIC has a little convenient site for children set up to explain itself, with cute pictures of jungle plants and beasts (in keeping with the curious American custom of portraying, in cartoons, the happy frolicking creatures we stun, butcher, slice n dice, broil, bake, and fry -- the grinning pig at the Barbecue place, the dancing chicken who can't wait to immerse itself, breast and thigh, in boiling oil. MMM MMM Good, Kids!) and a whole buncha fun facts to know and tell. Did you know sometimes private insurance companies just are so poopy? Yeah, they simply won't underwrite those necessary ventures of American capital into the big scary world of lions and tigers and bears. Now, Uncle Sam don't want to coddle any of you or your welfare queen mamas, you hear? But if you are, say, a multi-billion dollar energy company, the bowels of our national compassion are moved:
Why Is OPIC Needed?
Private loans, loan guaranties, and political risk insurance are hard to get for companies who want to operate in less developed countries. The best way for a country to become more developed is to encourage businesses to build and operate there. Some banks refuse to do business in these countries because they think it is too risky. OPIC helps these growing nations by supporting those businesses that want to operate in these countries.
Kids will do the darndest things, and some of them might question whether Uncle Sam should leap in where angels and venture capitalists don't dare to venture. But have no fear. OPIC, you see, is good for America!
"How Does OPIC Help America?
OPIC helps American companies make investments in developing countries. When US companies make these investments they are likely to create US jobs and exports. For example, if OPIC is helping to build a power plant in a foreign country then the parts and equipment needed to build the power plant will often be supplied by other American companies. American companies may build the generator for the plant, as well as selling the cranes, bulldozers, and trucks needed to build it. Since 1971, OPIC has supported $138 billion worth of investments that will generate $63.6 billion in U.S. exports and create nearly 250,000 American jobs. OPIC does not support projects that may result in any loss of American jobs or exports.
OPIC also helps U.S. foreign policy by only doing business in countries that obey certain rules about workers� rights and human rights. OPIC will not help any country that abuses its people.
OPIC is self-sustaining , and has made money every year since it was created in 1971. Because OPIC is so successful, it contributes money to the U.S. foreign assistance account every year."
LI was a smart ass boy. And LI has grown up to be a smart ass man. And this man, reading about all those trucks and cranes and things, wonders how scared the lions and tigers and bears should be. But they are SCARY! We have zoos to put creatures like that where they belong: behind bars!
In the meantime, although OPIC is very open and touchy feely with the kiddies, it seems simply touchy when it comes to its accounting. Or at least according to the Friends of the Earth. Kids, you might want to add to OPICs fun facts page the question, how are we accounting for those projects that (zoom! zoom!) use all those like neat cranes and trucks to set up like coal burning fuel plants in Thailand and stuff.
"OPIC's Annual Reports provide Congress and taxpayers with an ambiguous and distorted picture. OPIC reports "commitments" to the public but not final signed contracts. Therefore, the public has no way of knowing whether or not a contract was actually signed, which would result in official U.S. financial exposure and could create debt for developing countries."
But lets not badmouth our friendly neighbor policy while our POTUS is with Putin. Children, after all, should be seen, and not heard -- and the same is true for citizens.
has a site for kids
Friday, May 24, 2002
Remora
Murder
Murder is definitely not one of the fine arts for scolds in the press. We expected, as soon as poor old Chandra Levy's body showed up in the front yard of some D.C. police station... oops, we mean as soon as it was uncovered in the veritable jungle, the impenetrable wilds, near a jogging path only accessible by way of Sherpa guides, of a D.C. park --- that the scolds would be down the throat of the press for trivializing, sensationalizing, and generally not realizing that, after 9/11, everything had changed -- yes, we were no longer gawkers at traffic accidents, mongerers of bootleg execution video tapes, spectators of Jerry Springer managed slap fights between hefty adult star queens, eaters of nitrate rich bacon and wankers to home video porn, but had been transformed into discerning consumers Brookings Institute White Papers. Howard Kurz, the barometer of conventional wisdom, didn't disappoint us:
"Terrorism, threats against the Brooklyn Bridge, Middle East violence, the president's trip to Europe � all were blown off the television screen at noon yesterday by the story that became the media's leading soap opera last summer.
"The Levy tragedy burst back into the news with the discovery of skeletal remains in Rock Creek Park. No matter that it wasn't clear for hours whether this was the Washington intern who has been missing for more than a year, or that Condit, the man romantically linked to her, has long since been defeated. The media were in full-blown, this-just-in, team-coverage mode."
Just to make sure we get it, the headline writer entitled Kurz' s column: Wall-to-Wall Levy Coverage
Pre-Sept. 11 Excess Returns to TV News After Discovery of Remains.
And so, though we feel sad, experience the pang of vicarious melancholy, feel even funky, for Chandra, we do want to hear everything. In the meantime, we've been pondering the varieties of murder, on the lines of De Quincey's essay on Murder as one of the fine arts. This essay, which really transformed the Newgate narrative into the Real Crime narrative (yes, Ann Rule owes her whole career to the opium addict), is often mentioned as notorious, or infamous, or the like.
Frank Tallis, a crime fiction writer, makes the by now standard reference in his essay in Crime Times,
Original Sin: On the Importance of Creative Killing. Tallis doesn't follow De Quincey's radical path, however. Where De Quincey looked at the murder itself in terms of art, Tallis looks for creativity in the murderer's hobbies -- poetry, crafts of various sorts.
"Yet, even serial killers are guilty of not exploiting their creative powers to the full. Although they are generally very inventive with dead bodies (using them as sex aids or as a source of spare parts from which they can fashion objets d'art), they too show an unexpected conservatism when it comes to the dastardly deed itself. Nilson [see this link for an elaborate description of Nilson's career ], whose quite tolerable poetry elevates him to something of a laureate among villains (and who often spoke unambiguously about the 'art' of murder) was a boring old strangler at heart.
"Looking through one of the many millennial lists that appeared last year I came across a register of twenty titles voted the 'best ever' crime fiction. I couldn't help noticing that the authors of almost all of the genre classics opted for tried and tested methods of murder. They spurned originality. Why? Above, I mentioned that in my quest for an original methodology I was looking for something bold without being silly. And in these matters, the issue of 'silliness' is (as John Major might have said) not inconsiderable. Indeed, it seems to me that there is some kind of mathematical law in operation that enforces the co-variation of originality and silliness. That is to say, the more original the method of despatch, the more silly or ridiculous it will appear - the opposite also being true. Thus, like Icarus, the aspiring crime writer must be wary of hubris. The higher you fly the more likely it is that you will fall from the literary stratosphere."
There's a mistake here that is obvious to any literary critic -- the confounding of technological novelty with creativity. There are poems and novels that combine the two, granted. But the true poetaster of murder is as much in search of the adventure of content as the fashion of form. David Lehman, in an essay on the detective novel, quotes Gertrude Stein, of all people, on the genre. Stein delivers, as she always does, after transcending a few commas:
"Gertrude Stein, who called the detective story "the only really modern novel form," has an analysis that has always fascinated me. (You can piece it together from passages in Everybody�s Autobiography and in her lecture "What Are Masterpieces.") Stein explained that the detective story "gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins." In a detective story, she also observed, "the only person of any importance is dead" and so "there can be no beginning middle and end" in the conventional sense. Stein helps to account for why time in a detective novel flows not in a straight lines but in two directions concurrently: there is the time of the action culminating in the violent event that occurs just before the book begins, and there is the narrative time of the detective�s reconstruction of the events leading to that moment. Stein�s more important insight is that the discovery of the corpse represents the termination of an action at the same time as it initiates a new action, and since this is so, it makes sense to regard the detective as a new hero who emerges at the precise moment that his predecessor, the traditional hero of fiction, meets his violent end. The scene of the crime is the locus of the transition from a flawed hero (the victim) to one who is better equipped for survival (the detective).
"
Chandra, of course, is a heroine without a detective to vindicate her status. D.C. detectives are, indeed, better equipped for survival, as in Lehman's interpretation of Stein, but only in the way of all bureaucrats -- by assiduously avoiding real work, arresting the obvious and framing them when necessary, and generating excuses at will. Of course, Stein was thinking of real detectives, ones that quit the force and work on their own, for paying clients.
It's Chinatown, Jake. Somebody in D.C. is bound to say that at some point in this case.
Finally, LI would recommend the NYPost for leaping, a little late, into the story. The day before, the Post had been proclaiming stentorianly that all we had to fear was fear itself -- which of course was a bunch of bull, since we have to fear, really, being blown up by Al Quaeda folks. That this is what we have to fear should be obvious to even Murdoch's privileged minions. Were they out all last year or what? But today, the Post did itself proud. First the headline: It's Her. Simple, but thrusting. Then the pic of Chandra.Not the usual pic, not the way AOL clumsily promoted the story, like plastering up one of those tiresome have you seen this child posters for its forty million customers to see. The Post ain't no milk company. No, this one is of a dewier, a happier Chandra. Well, of course it is hard not to be happier than at the moment of your murder, but still. This Chandra reminded us that we didn't like it, not a bit, that she'd disappeared like that. Then, then, the Condit angle. Its a matter of tracking the camera, its the sweep, the pan that counts. The WP, of course, scratching at its girdle, provides a map for the reader to locate the skeletal remains, but how about the really important landmark in the case -- the location of Condit's apartment vis a vis the body?
"The location where the remains were found is about three miles from Levy's apartment in Dupont Circle, a little less than two miles from Condit's home, and a mile north of Pierce/Klingle Mansion Nature Center. "
If the Post doesn't get its man to traverse those two miles, timing it, and looking for broken twigs and broken bottles of Condit's favorite brandy, we will definitely lament the decline of tabloid ingenuity in this great land of ours.
Murder
Murder is definitely not one of the fine arts for scolds in the press. We expected, as soon as poor old Chandra Levy's body showed up in the front yard of some D.C. police station... oops, we mean as soon as it was uncovered in the veritable jungle, the impenetrable wilds, near a jogging path only accessible by way of Sherpa guides, of a D.C. park --- that the scolds would be down the throat of the press for trivializing, sensationalizing, and generally not realizing that, after 9/11, everything had changed -- yes, we were no longer gawkers at traffic accidents, mongerers of bootleg execution video tapes, spectators of Jerry Springer managed slap fights between hefty adult star queens, eaters of nitrate rich bacon and wankers to home video porn, but had been transformed into discerning consumers Brookings Institute White Papers. Howard Kurz, the barometer of conventional wisdom, didn't disappoint us:
"Terrorism, threats against the Brooklyn Bridge, Middle East violence, the president's trip to Europe � all were blown off the television screen at noon yesterday by the story that became the media's leading soap opera last summer.
"The Levy tragedy burst back into the news with the discovery of skeletal remains in Rock Creek Park. No matter that it wasn't clear for hours whether this was the Washington intern who has been missing for more than a year, or that Condit, the man romantically linked to her, has long since been defeated. The media were in full-blown, this-just-in, team-coverage mode."
Just to make sure we get it, the headline writer entitled Kurz' s column: Wall-to-Wall Levy Coverage
Pre-Sept. 11 Excess Returns to TV News After Discovery of Remains.
And so, though we feel sad, experience the pang of vicarious melancholy, feel even funky, for Chandra, we do want to hear everything. In the meantime, we've been pondering the varieties of murder, on the lines of De Quincey's essay on Murder as one of the fine arts. This essay, which really transformed the Newgate narrative into the Real Crime narrative (yes, Ann Rule owes her whole career to the opium addict), is often mentioned as notorious, or infamous, or the like.
Frank Tallis, a crime fiction writer, makes the by now standard reference in his essay in Crime Times,
Original Sin: On the Importance of Creative Killing. Tallis doesn't follow De Quincey's radical path, however. Where De Quincey looked at the murder itself in terms of art, Tallis looks for creativity in the murderer's hobbies -- poetry, crafts of various sorts.
"Yet, even serial killers are guilty of not exploiting their creative powers to the full. Although they are generally very inventive with dead bodies (using them as sex aids or as a source of spare parts from which they can fashion objets d'art), they too show an unexpected conservatism when it comes to the dastardly deed itself. Nilson [see this link for an elaborate description of Nilson's career ], whose quite tolerable poetry elevates him to something of a laureate among villains (and who often spoke unambiguously about the 'art' of murder) was a boring old strangler at heart.
"Looking through one of the many millennial lists that appeared last year I came across a register of twenty titles voted the 'best ever' crime fiction. I couldn't help noticing that the authors of almost all of the genre classics opted for tried and tested methods of murder. They spurned originality. Why? Above, I mentioned that in my quest for an original methodology I was looking for something bold without being silly. And in these matters, the issue of 'silliness' is (as John Major might have said) not inconsiderable. Indeed, it seems to me that there is some kind of mathematical law in operation that enforces the co-variation of originality and silliness. That is to say, the more original the method of despatch, the more silly or ridiculous it will appear - the opposite also being true. Thus, like Icarus, the aspiring crime writer must be wary of hubris. The higher you fly the more likely it is that you will fall from the literary stratosphere."
There's a mistake here that is obvious to any literary critic -- the confounding of technological novelty with creativity. There are poems and novels that combine the two, granted. But the true poetaster of murder is as much in search of the adventure of content as the fashion of form. David Lehman, in an essay on the detective novel, quotes Gertrude Stein, of all people, on the genre. Stein delivers, as she always does, after transcending a few commas:
"Gertrude Stein, who called the detective story "the only really modern novel form," has an analysis that has always fascinated me. (You can piece it together from passages in Everybody�s Autobiography and in her lecture "What Are Masterpieces.") Stein explained that the detective story "gets rid of human nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead to begin with and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the book begins." In a detective story, she also observed, "the only person of any importance is dead" and so "there can be no beginning middle and end" in the conventional sense. Stein helps to account for why time in a detective novel flows not in a straight lines but in two directions concurrently: there is the time of the action culminating in the violent event that occurs just before the book begins, and there is the narrative time of the detective�s reconstruction of the events leading to that moment. Stein�s more important insight is that the discovery of the corpse represents the termination of an action at the same time as it initiates a new action, and since this is so, it makes sense to regard the detective as a new hero who emerges at the precise moment that his predecessor, the traditional hero of fiction, meets his violent end. The scene of the crime is the locus of the transition from a flawed hero (the victim) to one who is better equipped for survival (the detective).
"
Chandra, of course, is a heroine without a detective to vindicate her status. D.C. detectives are, indeed, better equipped for survival, as in Lehman's interpretation of Stein, but only in the way of all bureaucrats -- by assiduously avoiding real work, arresting the obvious and framing them when necessary, and generating excuses at will. Of course, Stein was thinking of real detectives, ones that quit the force and work on their own, for paying clients.
It's Chinatown, Jake. Somebody in D.C. is bound to say that at some point in this case.
Finally, LI would recommend the NYPost for leaping, a little late, into the story. The day before, the Post had been proclaiming stentorianly that all we had to fear was fear itself -- which of course was a bunch of bull, since we have to fear, really, being blown up by Al Quaeda folks. That this is what we have to fear should be obvious to even Murdoch's privileged minions. Were they out all last year or what? But today, the Post did itself proud. First the headline: It's Her. Simple, but thrusting. Then the pic of Chandra.Not the usual pic, not the way AOL clumsily promoted the story, like plastering up one of those tiresome have you seen this child posters for its forty million customers to see. The Post ain't no milk company. No, this one is of a dewier, a happier Chandra. Well, of course it is hard not to be happier than at the moment of your murder, but still. This Chandra reminded us that we didn't like it, not a bit, that she'd disappeared like that. Then, then, the Condit angle. Its a matter of tracking the camera, its the sweep, the pan that counts. The WP, of course, scratching at its girdle, provides a map for the reader to locate the skeletal remains, but how about the really important landmark in the case -- the location of Condit's apartment vis a vis the body?
"The location where the remains were found is about three miles from Levy's apartment in Dupont Circle, a little less than two miles from Condit's home, and a mile north of Pierce/Klingle Mansion Nature Center. "
If the Post doesn't get its man to traverse those two miles, timing it, and looking for broken twigs and broken bottles of Condit's favorite brandy, we will definitely lament the decline of tabloid ingenuity in this great land of ours.
Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Remora
Gould's is a demise foretold -- why else would he have written in his last book of essays that they were, indeed, the last book of essays -- but LI is sad about it anyway. On first reading, we found the NYT obituary ill-tempered. On second reading, the quote from John Maynard Smith about the "uselessness" of Gould's contribution to evolutionary theory was not the poke in the eye (some emergence of the mole from the ever vigilant network around Robert Wright?) than a on the one hand, on the other hand kind of thing. Although we doubt that Richard Dawkins obituary will suffer from this rather cheap shot:
"Some charged that his theories, like punctuated equilibrium, were so malleable and difficult to pin down, that they were essentially untestable."
We don't imagine the Times repeating the complaint that Dawkins use of the term gene has stretched it way beyond any correspondence to the physical thing, the gene. In Dawkins hands, the gene becomes something like one of Quine's event zones.
Thinking of Gould leads us to recommend this review, in Ha'aretz, of a terminally silly book entitled: "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom," by one Gerald Schroeder:
"...there is the Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin that states: "The following will have no share of the Next World: Those who say that the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in the Bible." Rashi's commentary on this passage is: "Those persons who admit and believe that the dead will be resurrected, but who claim that there is no allusion to this resurrection in the Bible are heretics because they are denying that the Bible mentions the resurrection of the dead."
Gerald Schroeder, author of "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom" [the title of the original book in English, published by the Free Press, 1997] takes an even more extreme position than that of the tana (scholar) in the above-mentioned passage in the Mishna. The Mishna demands that Jews look for an allusion in the Bible to something very specific: the resurrection of the dead, an event that belongs more to the next world than to this one. Schroeder, on the other hand, appears to be determined to find - at least, for himself - allusions in the Bible to many basic theories and many scientific disciplines that are related to this world, not to the next: astronomy, paleontology, geology and cosmic and biological evolution. "
The reviewer, Elia Leibowitz, finds Schroeder to be appalling, which of course he is. The Mishna, in fact, would certainly have mentioned his appallingness if God hadn't been distracted by other matters. The Free Press, which published Schroeder's book, is an establishment, conservative press, famously edited by one of Saul Bellow's children. From Leibowitz' description of Schroeder's book, however, it seems pander without any redeeming value to the dumbest hick prejudices out there in the hinterlands. Here's an ace example, set up by Leibowitz's common sense question:
"If the Bible is a human creation, what scientific sources were at the disposal of the authors of this book, which undoubtedly was written many centuries ago? For example, Schroeder does not explain how the author who wrote the marvelous passage on God's revelation to Moses (Exodus 3) knew that there are 26 dimensions in the world. Schroeder suggests - apparently, with total seriousness - that the numerology of God's explicit name (which is not mentioned by Orthodox Jews), which is 26, alludes to the fact that the world has 26 dimensions. Four of these dimensions - the three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time - are known, while the other 22 are invisible. The hidden dimensions - the word for "hidden" in Hebrew is "alum" - give the world its name, which in Hebrew is "olam," a term that can be interpreted as semantically linked to "alum."
Schroeder gets very excited by the numerology here and from the context in which it appears because 26 is the number of dimensions with whose help the world can be described, according to the early versions of the String Theory, which presents an ultra-modern picture of the world and which occupies a position midway between hypothesis and theory in recent thinking in the world of physics. Does Schroeder think that the author of Exodus was familiar with the String Theory? Did the author know, have familiarity with, and use the mathematical concept of dimension? "
There is a certain level of pap that should properly revulse even the editors of the Free Press. Alas, nobody has ever gone broke marketing New Age books or Conservative screeds. Schroeder's low genius was simply to combine the two. It isn't enough appreciated how much the contemporary right owes to Reagan --Nancy Reagan, that is.
Gould's is a demise foretold -- why else would he have written in his last book of essays that they were, indeed, the last book of essays -- but LI is sad about it anyway. On first reading, we found the NYT obituary ill-tempered. On second reading, the quote from John Maynard Smith about the "uselessness" of Gould's contribution to evolutionary theory was not the poke in the eye (some emergence of the mole from the ever vigilant network around Robert Wright?) than a on the one hand, on the other hand kind of thing. Although we doubt that Richard Dawkins obituary will suffer from this rather cheap shot:
"Some charged that his theories, like punctuated equilibrium, were so malleable and difficult to pin down, that they were essentially untestable."
We don't imagine the Times repeating the complaint that Dawkins use of the term gene has stretched it way beyond any correspondence to the physical thing, the gene. In Dawkins hands, the gene becomes something like one of Quine's event zones.
Thinking of Gould leads us to recommend this review, in Ha'aretz, of a terminally silly book entitled: "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom," by one Gerald Schroeder:
"...there is the Mishna in Tractate Sanhedrin that states: "The following will have no share of the Next World: Those who say that the resurrection of the dead is not mentioned in the Bible." Rashi's commentary on this passage is: "Those persons who admit and believe that the dead will be resurrected, but who claim that there is no allusion to this resurrection in the Bible are heretics because they are denying that the Bible mentions the resurrection of the dead."
Gerald Schroeder, author of "The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom" [the title of the original book in English, published by the Free Press, 1997] takes an even more extreme position than that of the tana (scholar) in the above-mentioned passage in the Mishna. The Mishna demands that Jews look for an allusion in the Bible to something very specific: the resurrection of the dead, an event that belongs more to the next world than to this one. Schroeder, on the other hand, appears to be determined to find - at least, for himself - allusions in the Bible to many basic theories and many scientific disciplines that are related to this world, not to the next: astronomy, paleontology, geology and cosmic and biological evolution. "
The reviewer, Elia Leibowitz, finds Schroeder to be appalling, which of course he is. The Mishna, in fact, would certainly have mentioned his appallingness if God hadn't been distracted by other matters. The Free Press, which published Schroeder's book, is an establishment, conservative press, famously edited by one of Saul Bellow's children. From Leibowitz' description of Schroeder's book, however, it seems pander without any redeeming value to the dumbest hick prejudices out there in the hinterlands. Here's an ace example, set up by Leibowitz's common sense question:
"If the Bible is a human creation, what scientific sources were at the disposal of the authors of this book, which undoubtedly was written many centuries ago? For example, Schroeder does not explain how the author who wrote the marvelous passage on God's revelation to Moses (Exodus 3) knew that there are 26 dimensions in the world. Schroeder suggests - apparently, with total seriousness - that the numerology of God's explicit name (which is not mentioned by Orthodox Jews), which is 26, alludes to the fact that the world has 26 dimensions. Four of these dimensions - the three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time - are known, while the other 22 are invisible. The hidden dimensions - the word for "hidden" in Hebrew is "alum" - give the world its name, which in Hebrew is "olam," a term that can be interpreted as semantically linked to "alum."
Schroeder gets very excited by the numerology here and from the context in which it appears because 26 is the number of dimensions with whose help the world can be described, according to the early versions of the String Theory, which presents an ultra-modern picture of the world and which occupies a position midway between hypothesis and theory in recent thinking in the world of physics. Does Schroeder think that the author of Exodus was familiar with the String Theory? Did the author know, have familiarity with, and use the mathematical concept of dimension? "
There is a certain level of pap that should properly revulse even the editors of the Free Press. Alas, nobody has ever gone broke marketing New Age books or Conservative screeds. Schroeder's low genius was simply to combine the two. It isn't enough appreciated how much the contemporary right owes to Reagan --Nancy Reagan, that is.
Monday, May 20, 2002
Remora
Pigs
Limited Inc recently went to see Yo Mama Tambien with a friend. National origin of said friend:Turkish. Why mention the Turkish? Because this happened: on screen, after seeing a suitable amount of sex (the reason, after all, we were going to see Yo Mama etc.), a scene unrolls on a beach upon which the three main characters had pitched tents. A bunch of semi-wild, brownish looking pigs were shown rooting through these tents. To LI, a pig is a rather cute little animal making a snuffly noise, equipped with a snout. To our friend, however, as it turned out, a pig is a supremely revolting object stimulating the kind of response more usually provoked by some grotesque plumbing mishap that requires a plumber's helper, major amounts of Ajax, and a lot of Lysol.
Today's NYT has definitely put LI in the swinophobic camp. The swine in question have names: "Eugene M. Isenberg, of Nabors Industries; John M. Trani, of Stanley Works, H. John Riley Jr., of Cooper Industries; Herbert L. Henkel, of Ingersoll-Rand, and Bernard J. Duroc-Danner of Weatherford International ." These are the CEOs of companies moving their HQ, by legal legerdemain, to Bermuda, in order to pressure an always servile Congress to lower an already criminally low business tax rate. The fictitious Bermuda address will save on US taxes -- although why that should be the case is anybody's guess. David Kay Johnstone's article, if it were a movie, would show the following scene: Isenberg, an obscenely fat pig who has managed to swill 126 million dollars in the past two years, swilling "tens of millions of dollars" more by moving Nabors Industries, a maker of off shore oil drilling equipment, to Bermuda; John Trani, a gut busting porker famous already for his rudeness, his greed, and his general non-necessity to the Lebenswelt of any civilized culture, pocketing in his little pig pockets "an amount equal to 58 cents of each dollar the company would save in corporate income taxes in the first year after its proposed move to Bermuda." Etc.
The pigs in Yo M. T. "bedunged' the area, as Rabelais would say. However, face it, a little herd of swine like that is nowhere near as messy or toxic as the pigs listed in Johnstone's little piece. Those swine and their like have been trampling down a whole country, or at least doing as much damage as they could, and are even now feasting with their porky cousins on some rare, odious subcommittee up there in D.C., one of those numerous venues where the open conspiracy between the superrich and the superreactionary is cemented in handshakes and shaving cologne. The pigs in Y.M.T, we are told by the rather smug voiceover, were infected. When they were slaughtered and eaten, they gave their consumers trichonosis. Alas, chances are nobody is going to eat the pigs listed in the graf above; however, we would advise 400 degrees F. for at least three hours if, by some chance, one of them is caught and butchered, a la our previous post on Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.
Pigs
Limited Inc recently went to see Yo Mama Tambien with a friend. National origin of said friend:Turkish. Why mention the Turkish? Because this happened: on screen, after seeing a suitable amount of sex (the reason, after all, we were going to see Yo Mama etc.), a scene unrolls on a beach upon which the three main characters had pitched tents. A bunch of semi-wild, brownish looking pigs were shown rooting through these tents. To LI, a pig is a rather cute little animal making a snuffly noise, equipped with a snout. To our friend, however, as it turned out, a pig is a supremely revolting object stimulating the kind of response more usually provoked by some grotesque plumbing mishap that requires a plumber's helper, major amounts of Ajax, and a lot of Lysol.
Today's NYT has definitely put LI in the swinophobic camp. The swine in question have names: "Eugene M. Isenberg, of Nabors Industries; John M. Trani, of Stanley Works, H. John Riley Jr., of Cooper Industries; Herbert L. Henkel, of Ingersoll-Rand, and Bernard J. Duroc-Danner of Weatherford International ." These are the CEOs of companies moving their HQ, by legal legerdemain, to Bermuda, in order to pressure an always servile Congress to lower an already criminally low business tax rate. The fictitious Bermuda address will save on US taxes -- although why that should be the case is anybody's guess. David Kay Johnstone's article, if it were a movie, would show the following scene: Isenberg, an obscenely fat pig who has managed to swill 126 million dollars in the past two years, swilling "tens of millions of dollars" more by moving Nabors Industries, a maker of off shore oil drilling equipment, to Bermuda; John Trani, a gut busting porker famous already for his rudeness, his greed, and his general non-necessity to the Lebenswelt of any civilized culture, pocketing in his little pig pockets "an amount equal to 58 cents of each dollar the company would save in corporate income taxes in the first year after its proposed move to Bermuda." Etc.
The pigs in Yo M. T. "bedunged' the area, as Rabelais would say. However, face it, a little herd of swine like that is nowhere near as messy or toxic as the pigs listed in Johnstone's little piece. Those swine and their like have been trampling down a whole country, or at least doing as much damage as they could, and are even now feasting with their porky cousins on some rare, odious subcommittee up there in D.C., one of those numerous venues where the open conspiracy between the superrich and the superreactionary is cemented in handshakes and shaving cologne. The pigs in Y.M.T, we are told by the rather smug voiceover, were infected. When they were slaughtered and eaten, they gave their consumers trichonosis. Alas, chances are nobody is going to eat the pigs listed in the graf above; however, we would advise 400 degrees F. for at least three hours if, by some chance, one of them is caught and butchered, a la our previous post on Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.
Sunday, May 19, 2002
Remora
Kanan Makiya
The Times (London) reviews Kanan Makiya's new book, The Rock -- a history of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. You'll remember Israel's Charles De Gaulle and man of peace, Ariel Sharon, cemented his reputation for peace by going there to taunt Palestinians two years ago.
Long ago and far away -- in the seventh century -- Jerusalem was conquered by Caliph Umar. Ah, the civilized days of yore! The city was taken from its Christian potentate, one of those provincial ecclesiastics memorable only for scornful eloquence Gibbon devoted to them ten centuries later. For a sense of the ramified cross purposes that have marked this ground forever -- like some cross roads cursed by the devil in backwoods Mississippi -- here's a summary Caliph Umar's investment of Jerusalem:
"Once he realises Jerusalem is lost, the Patriarch Sophronius � keen to gain the best possible terms � arranges a meeting with the caliph. He ensures that this takes place on the day before Palm Sunday, so that �the Arab takeover of Jerusalem would be lost in a show of Christian pomp and pageantry headed by himself�.
"He arrives �in full ecclesiastical dress, gold chains draped over his neck and shoulders, and long silk robes trailing behind in the dust�, although his conqueror greets him in a worn-out battle tunic. And he hands over a covenant of surrender to which has been added a single clause: �No Jew will be authorised to live in Jerusalem.� The caliph asks for a pen and crosses out the offending words."
Well, we do wonder who thrust his arm into the twentieth century and came up with a "pen" for the Caliph. But we like the tenor of this graf.
Makiya is an interesting man. He's an Iraqi architect, got out of Iraq with Hussein's dogs on his tail, wrote a book, Republic of Fear, about the police state ruled over by the aforementioned Hussein, and has recently been a big delver into the theory that Islam began as a alliance between Jews and Arabs to oppose Byzantine Christianity. Nick Cohen has written a nice profile of the guy in the Observer, from which we extract these grafs:
"A consequence of the Gulf War was that Republic of Fear became a bestseller and turned Makiya from an obscure exile working for his father's architecture practice into something of a star. Makiya, who had once called himself a socialist, found new friends but was hated by many of his former comrades for insisting that America forces shouldn't leave Iraq with the worst of both worlds - bombed but with Saddam still in power - but carry on to Baghdad.
"He dates the schism between supporters of universal human rights and those on the Left and Right who regard any Western intervention as imperialism to the moment when the opponents of Saddam were denounced. Israel was built on the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages, Makiya says; Saddam destroyed at least 3,000 Kurdish villages. Makiya, like every other Iraqi democrat you meet in London, has lost patience with those who will oppose the former but not the latter and is desperate for America to support a democratic revolution. All in all, we have a man whose been on Saddam's death-list for years and has more than enough enemies. He has still found the time and courage to pierce the thin skins of religious fundamentalists."
Makiya is a nuanced supporter of the American invasion to be of Iraq. Although maybe that is unfair. Some of what he has written seems to be more in the line of, increase American support for an internal Iraqi revolution. He wrote an op ed piece last November that includes this interpretation of contemporary history:
"The cracks in this American policy toward Iraq were beginning to show in 1996, when for the first time since the gulf war, the United States let Mr. Hussein get away with invading a city � Arbil � in what used to be the safe haven of northern Iraq. That was the year when the American-backed Iraqi opposition to Mr. Hussein was rooted out of the north of the country. More than 100 members of the Iraqi opposition died in Arbil waiting for American air support that never came.
"That was a pivotal moment because the United States shrank from supporting an opposition that would have brought about deep structural change in Iraq � a change that would have included the Kurds and the Shiites in a pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime. Instead, America held back in favor of what it thought to be much safer � an officer-led coup that would replace one set of Baath Party leaders with another. But that judgment proved to be wrong."
There is a deep structural problem in that interpretation of the Iraqi opposition: what basis is there for believing that a party that, for whatever reason, commits itself to a "pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime," is a party with a hope in hell of succeeding in bringing this program to fruition?
What happened at Arbil is significant, but LI reads this incident in a somewhat different way than Makiya. A succinct rundown of the sad and dirty history of US policy towards Iraq, an epitome of redneck machiavellism, is provided by by Nicholas Arons, of the Institute for Policy Studies:
"Over the past several decades, U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition has blown hot and cold. Four months before the 1990 Gulf War, two Republican senators visited Baghdad and reassured Saddam Hussein that Voice of America broadcasts criticizing the regime�s human rights record did not necessarily reflect U.S. government policy. When the Gulf War ended, President Bush called on Iraqi dissidents to rebel, implying that the U.S. would provide air cover. The uprisings materialized, but U.S. air cover never did. When the Iraqi military retaliated, butchering thousands of rebelling Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, U.S. officials claimed that Bush favored a military coup within the regime, not a popular insurrection, which Washington feared would lead to a possible breakup of Iraq and a destabilization of the regional power balance. Internal Iraqi coups were reportedly attempted in July 1992, July 1993, and May 1995. Each ended with mass arrests, executions, and the restructuring of the ruling Ba�ath Party�s security apparatus and tribal alliances, but with Saddam Hussein�s regime intact. Most disastrous was a 1996 covert U.S. military training operation in Arbil in northern Iraq that degenerated into internecine feuds. Saddam Hussein�s forces crushed the INC, forcing its operations to come to a standstill.During the early 1990s, the U.S. spent over $100 million to aid the Iraqi opposition. Most of this money was for public relations and propaganda, not military hardware. In 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated $97 million for Pentagon training and used military equipment. But the INC has been slow to take advantage of Pentagon training, to submit proposals, or to complete audits, so most funds remain unspent.There are over seventy opposition groups within and outside Iraq, representing a diverse network of religious minorities, Iraqi monarchists, and military exiles. The U.S. has long played favorites, pitting these groups against each other. The Clinton administration selected seven for assistance, foreseeing the INC as the umbrella organization. "
So -- what are we to do? as Lenin liked to ask. LI, omniscient as ever, will supply the answer to that question after breakfast, or in some upcoming post. Stay tuned, kids.
Kanan Makiya
The Times (London) reviews Kanan Makiya's new book, The Rock -- a history of Temple Mount in Jerusalem. You'll remember Israel's Charles De Gaulle and man of peace, Ariel Sharon, cemented his reputation for peace by going there to taunt Palestinians two years ago.
Long ago and far away -- in the seventh century -- Jerusalem was conquered by Caliph Umar. Ah, the civilized days of yore! The city was taken from its Christian potentate, one of those provincial ecclesiastics memorable only for scornful eloquence Gibbon devoted to them ten centuries later. For a sense of the ramified cross purposes that have marked this ground forever -- like some cross roads cursed by the devil in backwoods Mississippi -- here's a summary Caliph Umar's investment of Jerusalem:
"Once he realises Jerusalem is lost, the Patriarch Sophronius � keen to gain the best possible terms � arranges a meeting with the caliph. He ensures that this takes place on the day before Palm Sunday, so that �the Arab takeover of Jerusalem would be lost in a show of Christian pomp and pageantry headed by himself�.
"He arrives �in full ecclesiastical dress, gold chains draped over his neck and shoulders, and long silk robes trailing behind in the dust�, although his conqueror greets him in a worn-out battle tunic. And he hands over a covenant of surrender to which has been added a single clause: �No Jew will be authorised to live in Jerusalem.� The caliph asks for a pen and crosses out the offending words."
Well, we do wonder who thrust his arm into the twentieth century and came up with a "pen" for the Caliph. But we like the tenor of this graf.
Makiya is an interesting man. He's an Iraqi architect, got out of Iraq with Hussein's dogs on his tail, wrote a book, Republic of Fear, about the police state ruled over by the aforementioned Hussein, and has recently been a big delver into the theory that Islam began as a alliance between Jews and Arabs to oppose Byzantine Christianity. Nick Cohen has written a nice profile of the guy in the Observer, from which we extract these grafs:
"A consequence of the Gulf War was that Republic of Fear became a bestseller and turned Makiya from an obscure exile working for his father's architecture practice into something of a star. Makiya, who had once called himself a socialist, found new friends but was hated by many of his former comrades for insisting that America forces shouldn't leave Iraq with the worst of both worlds - bombed but with Saddam still in power - but carry on to Baghdad.
"He dates the schism between supporters of universal human rights and those on the Left and Right who regard any Western intervention as imperialism to the moment when the opponents of Saddam were denounced. Israel was built on the destruction of 400 Palestinian villages, Makiya says; Saddam destroyed at least 3,000 Kurdish villages. Makiya, like every other Iraqi democrat you meet in London, has lost patience with those who will oppose the former but not the latter and is desperate for America to support a democratic revolution. All in all, we have a man whose been on Saddam's death-list for years and has more than enough enemies. He has still found the time and courage to pierce the thin skins of religious fundamentalists."
Makiya is a nuanced supporter of the American invasion to be of Iraq. Although maybe that is unfair. Some of what he has written seems to be more in the line of, increase American support for an internal Iraqi revolution. He wrote an op ed piece last November that includes this interpretation of contemporary history:
"The cracks in this American policy toward Iraq were beginning to show in 1996, when for the first time since the gulf war, the United States let Mr. Hussein get away with invading a city � Arbil � in what used to be the safe haven of northern Iraq. That was the year when the American-backed Iraqi opposition to Mr. Hussein was rooted out of the north of the country. More than 100 members of the Iraqi opposition died in Arbil waiting for American air support that never came.
"That was a pivotal moment because the United States shrank from supporting an opposition that would have brought about deep structural change in Iraq � a change that would have included the Kurds and the Shiites in a pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime. Instead, America held back in favor of what it thought to be much safer � an officer-led coup that would replace one set of Baath Party leaders with another. But that judgment proved to be wrong."
There is a deep structural problem in that interpretation of the Iraqi opposition: what basis is there for believing that a party that, for whatever reason, commits itself to a "pro-Western, non-nationalist, federally structured regime," is a party with a hope in hell of succeeding in bringing this program to fruition?
What happened at Arbil is significant, but LI reads this incident in a somewhat different way than Makiya. A succinct rundown of the sad and dirty history of US policy towards Iraq, an epitome of redneck machiavellism, is provided by by Nicholas Arons, of the Institute for Policy Studies:
"Over the past several decades, U.S. support for the Iraqi opposition has blown hot and cold. Four months before the 1990 Gulf War, two Republican senators visited Baghdad and reassured Saddam Hussein that Voice of America broadcasts criticizing the regime�s human rights record did not necessarily reflect U.S. government policy. When the Gulf War ended, President Bush called on Iraqi dissidents to rebel, implying that the U.S. would provide air cover. The uprisings materialized, but U.S. air cover never did. When the Iraqi military retaliated, butchering thousands of rebelling Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south, U.S. officials claimed that Bush favored a military coup within the regime, not a popular insurrection, which Washington feared would lead to a possible breakup of Iraq and a destabilization of the regional power balance. Internal Iraqi coups were reportedly attempted in July 1992, July 1993, and May 1995. Each ended with mass arrests, executions, and the restructuring of the ruling Ba�ath Party�s security apparatus and tribal alliances, but with Saddam Hussein�s regime intact. Most disastrous was a 1996 covert U.S. military training operation in Arbil in northern Iraq that degenerated into internecine feuds. Saddam Hussein�s forces crushed the INC, forcing its operations to come to a standstill.During the early 1990s, the U.S. spent over $100 million to aid the Iraqi opposition. Most of this money was for public relations and propaganda, not military hardware. In 1998, Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act, which allocated $97 million for Pentagon training and used military equipment. But the INC has been slow to take advantage of Pentagon training, to submit proposals, or to complete audits, so most funds remain unspent.There are over seventy opposition groups within and outside Iraq, representing a diverse network of religious minorities, Iraqi monarchists, and military exiles. The U.S. has long played favorites, pitting these groups against each other. The Clinton administration selected seven for assistance, foreseeing the INC as the umbrella organization. "
So -- what are we to do? as Lenin liked to ask. LI, omniscient as ever, will supply the answer to that question after breakfast, or in some upcoming post. Stay tuned, kids.
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