Bollettino

So Creative Associates International landed the big job of shipping American made schoolbooks to the schoolkids of Iraq. Just as they had previously landed the contract with Afghanistan. One wonders if Smilin' Jay Garner will be celebrated in the spirit to which Iraq's previous despots have become accustomed. But NO!!! These will be American style textbooks, so they will presumably induce the instant amnesia on all things historical and geographic so endearingly characteristic of American education.

Americans are, apparently, old hands with textbooks. In Afghanistan, in the pre-9/11 days, Americans produced textbooks that even the Taliban approved of. An old Wash Post story about this, on the Emperors-clothes site, begins like this:

"In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.

As Afghan schools reopen today, the United States is back in the business of providing schoolbooks. But now it is wrestling with the unintended consequences of its successful strategy of stirring Islamic fervor to fight communism. What seemed like a good idea in the context of the Cold War is being criticized by humanitarian workers as a crude tool that steeped a generation in violence."

Being a turn on a dime nation, we have now decided that history is no good. History now has a new, friendlier face, in which we have always, always been opposed to Islamofascism, man. We wonder who contracted to ship the old, jihadist textbooks to Afghanistan. At least we know who created those books -- the University of Nebraska. Here's a description of what the US taxpayer paid for:

"Published in the dominant Afghan languages of Dari and Pashtu, the textbooks were developed in the early 1980s under an AID grant to the University of Nebraska-Omaha and its Center for Afghanistan Studies. The agency spent $51 million on the university's education programs in Afghanistan from 1984 to 1994. During that time of Soviet occupation, regional military leaders in Afghanistan helped the U.S. smuggle books into the country. They demanded that the primers contain anti-Soviet passages. Children were taught to count with illustrations showing tanks, missiles and land mines, agency officials said. They acknowledged that at the time it also suited U.S. interests to stoke hatred of foreign invaders."

Well, let's just forget that, shall we? If we forget it hard enough, we can deny it ever happened. Of course, the same group that produced textbooks that taught six year olds the adorable and enriching arts of planting land mines have moved on, and are now producing the NEW textbooks.

Apparently about four to nine million books have gone off the presses. But we do wonder -- where do those books end up? The Kabul government, by all accounts, has a difficult enough time sending soldiers out into the provinces -- so do they send school teachers? An article about the problems of reconstruction in the The WashPost today indicates that the school teachers are reading the textbooks, whatever their content, to each other in Kabul, if they are being read at all:

"Afghanistan showed the essential need for security and accountability. Administrators of AID programs in Kabul are barred from leaving their compound without high-level approval and a heavily armed military escort, the inspector general's report noted. Even then, bandits, landmines and fractured roads make travel difficult or impossible.

One consultant recently wrote in a private assessment, obtained by The Washington Post, that security issues have made it "almost impossible" for U.S.-backed education officials to work in 24 of the nation's 34 provinces. An International Red Cross worker was stopped along a roadway March 26 and shot 20 times, becoming the first foreign aid worker killed since the Taliban's fall. Continuing attacks have forced some humanitarian groups to withdraw altogether."

However, for those who worry that the printing presses in Omaha will shut down -- don't: from the point of view of ROI, there's no bad news. Since it is the government, and since the American government has every inducement to enrich its subalterns, the textbook makers will get paid, and get their over-runs paid. Everything's still good in Omaha.

Bollettino

Du cote de chez Hitchens

Et sans doute, en se rappelant ainsi leurs entretiens, en pensant ainsi a elle quand il etait seul, il faisait seulement jouer son image entre beaucoup d'autres images de femmes dans des reveries romanesques; mais si, grace a une circonstance quelconque (ou meme peut-etre sans que ce fut grace a elle, la circonstance qui sepresente au moment ou un etat, latent jusque-la, se declare, pouvantn'avoir influe en rien sur lui) l'image d'Odette de Crecy venait a absorber toutes ces reveries, si celles-ci n'etaient plus separables de son souvenir, alors l'imperfection de son corps ne garderait plus aucune importance, ni qu'il eut ete, plus ou moins qu'un autre corps,selon le gout de Swann, puisque devenu le corps de celle qu'il aimait,il serait desormais le seul qui fut capable de lui causer des joies et des tourments. -- Proust

The first volume of Proust's novel tells the story (imperfectly nested, as is Proust's habit, among other stories) of the downfall of Swann. Swann, a man of perfect, even painfully perfect taste, falls in love with an ignorant slut, Odette, and sacrifices to her his supreme things -- his social connections, his taste, and finally his honor. While he does this, he tries to enthuse his friends about Odette -- thus further distancing them from him.

The story has an irresistable bearing on the recent embrace, by Christopher Hitchens, of the most brutal and the most venal right wing groups in this country. Those groups operate, of course, under the aegis of the Bush administration. They are in direct line of descent from the groups that helped create the cold war, and directed it, in all its bloody splendor, for almost fifty years, in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and whereever a dictator was to be propped up, or a union representative was to be stuffed into the trunk of a black car and unceremoniously dumped on a garbage heap. With that history in mind, it is pretty easy to see what is happening in Iraq, from the multi-year contracts being signed with the usual crew of Republican contributors -- Bechtel, Haliburtan, Fluor -- to the sinister paramilitary group crystallizing around Ahmad Chalabi. The choice narrowed, in the Cold War, between the indigestible petit totalitarianism of kleptocratic generals and the bloodthirsty dreams of Communist party offshoots. The choice is narrowing, in Iraq, to that between the disastrous dream of theocracy, on the one side, and the openly corrupt violence of pro-American groups, on the other side. Comic overtones are supplied by the numerous Americans in Iraq who are warning that third parties -- heavens, imagine third parties -- are subverting the critical path of American-Iraqi amity.

Hitchens, having propagandized for the war from his own peculiar angle -- he simply refused to recognize Bush's war, and replaced it with his own dream of Bush's war -- is now confronted with the fruits of the war that really happened. So he has manfully taken up the task of apologizing for crony capitalists and for Chalabi's Pentagon supported stormtroopers . The defense of crony capitalism is expressed by the usual casuistry of defending the indefensible. First, you break the indefensible down into alternatives -- being careful to exclude the alternative that will upset your case. Next, you invest your analysis with a grave air of necessity -- these are the sides that try men's souls, etc. So those who oppose, for instance, the US contracting with Haliburton in a closed door process that is adjudged by an American agency, pledges an amount of money extending over three years for a project that is supposedly going to be done on foreign soil, and is rewarded to a company that just happens to have gone from a couple of bad years, under Dick Cheney, CEO, to some very good years, with a plethora of fat government contracts, under Dick Cheney, VP -- anyone who criticizes such things is an oleaginous defender of Saddam Hussein. Hitchens arguments seem themselves to be written in polyunsaturated fats, and such other fats as enlarge the liver from the breakdown of alcohol in the bloodstream. However, just when you think he can't top this particular exercize in intellectual corruption, he comes up with a weepy column on Chalabi, in the course of which he gets very mournful over criticisms heaped on Chalabi in the American press. He makes a very big deal out of Chalabi's leadership of a paramilitary group in the nineties in Northern Iraq -- which, according to Hitchens, was the greatest return of a man to his roots since Alex Hailey visited Nigeria. No, this is not a man unconnected with Iraq -- he is a patriot in the line of Napoleon II and, uh, Garibaldi. Hitchens also tells us that his man's paramilitaries were collected in response to the death threats of the Saddamites. Now, we do have to give Chalabi credit for bravery. The man has been tempered, as steel is in the furnace, by the drama of haribreadth escapes -- starting with his unwilling flight from Baghdad at twelve, and going on to the humiliation of being stuffed in the boot of a car to escape being sentenced to prison for embezzlement in Jordan in 1989. The latter incident, Chalabi's partisans have assured us, was all Saddam's fault, too.

We imagine it actually gave him cred with the tough boy D.C. crowd. Imagine, Garibaldi with the soul of a Ken Lay! By that act alone he showed that he was made of the same stuff as the CEOs of Enron, or Halliburton, of General Dynamics -- he was a man willing to go to any length to avoid the penalties attached to peculation. That, of course, is the one consistent theme that unifies our present Bush-ite order. So he does seem peculiarly matched to the hour -- an hour that is marked by the movement of corporate giants into the "humanitarian reconstruction" of Iraq, and an amour of C. Hitchens for the right.

This was not, once, selon le gout de Hitchens -- but now it is indeed capable of causing him the most extreme joys and torments.

Bollettino

Richard Reeves breathes a little hellfire in an editorial that seems to be exclusive to Yahoo News. He makes the brilliant point that the military coup d'etat, in dollar amounts, already happened in this country. 400 billion dollars is being spent by the defense department, and 25 billion is earmarked for the subversive State. Our parody of the fight between the Pentagon and the State as parallel to the fight between the US and Iraq is, actually, a real parallel in terms of amounts available to the entities sitting in the corners.

A lesser point -- and one that LI was unaware of -- the military paid for the embedded journalists. Iraq, in other words, was a big advertising junket for Bush Imperialism. The funny thing is that this was never mentioned on the radio, or in newspapers, that were very careful to point out that the Iraqi's censored newsbroadcasts from Baghdad.

Well, well. As the US News editor, Brian Duffy, says

"With embeds, you have no costs. They're traveling with military personnel, so there are no traveling costs, and they're eating MREs. We're going to be talking about embedding as a concept for a long time. The fact that costs were so much lower is probably an afterthought. But it's not unwelcome."

And as Reeve concludes: "Money talks. And what it is saying is that the military is now first among equals in the governing of both Iraq and the United States."

Bollettino

Keeping Alan around

Tom Paine's business commentator, Dean Baker, is a grouch. LI likes business grouches -- although you can always tell when the sap is rising to their heads from their shrivelled hearts -- they start calling themselves contrarians and mistake a keen sense of impending disaster for the divine gift of prophecy. Our favorite lefty grouch is Doug Henwood; our favorite bonds grouch is James Grant. Dean Baker is a different kind of grouch. For instance, he regularly punches holes in stories that grow hysterical about impending Social Security deficits -- and we think he is right, there.

At the moment, he is the sole mourner at the Greenspan fiesta. When Bush announced that Greenspan would be re-appointed, there was a general round of Huzzas from all the usual suspects on Wall Street. Baker, however, compared Bush's announcement to keeping the captain of the Titanic around for another cruise. The meet of his Greenspanophobia is that Greenspan, basically, committed himself to a big time moral hazard by helping blow up the late nineties bubble :


"If he had consistently berated the markets with "irrational exuberance" comments and supported his case with charts and graphs, it is unlikely the market would have reached the dizzying heights of 1999 and 2000. If talk proved insufficient, he could have raised the margin requirement (which restricts borrowing to buy stock), and if necessary, he could have raised interest rates. But he didn't do any of that -- and arguably, he even may have promoted expansion of the bubble with his "new economy" rhetoric. The economy will suffer for years to come as a result.

"The bad news is not all behind us. Greenspan continues to ignore a housing bubble, the collapse of which is likely to have even larger repercussions for the economy and the retirement security of millions of Americans. People are currently buying homes in the bubble-infected markets (mostly on the east and west coasts), which could lose 30 to 40 percent of their value in a drop. For most families, their home is their biggest investment. Tens of millions of baby boomers are counting on equity in their home to support them in retirement now that their 401(k) plans have suffered so drastically from the stock market retreat. Instead of warning of a housing bubble, Greenspan testified before Congress last summer that there is no such thing."

Baker is also pretty aghast at the malign neglect of America's current trade account deficit.

Now, we are not sure if we wholly buy the bubble argument. We don't believe, for sure, that Greenspan was responsible for it. We do think it could have been curbed, somewhat, by the timely raising of margin requirements. But we also think Baker neglects the good side of irrational exuberance. Why did income inequality dip for the first time in twenty years after 1996? We think, in part, it was just the big IE - promoting somewhat hazardous economic activity, promoting the irrational allocation of resources -- that did it. And that might be a good thing in a cyclical system over a specific short run. We fault Greenspan less on the bubble than on the aftershock. Surely giving away the surplus to the high end of the wealth scale was a huge mistake. It isn't just that it provided insufficient stimulus to the economy -- it blocked alternatives that would have been possible, and much more constructive. Foir instance, there was a window of opportunity for creating a really viable reform of health care. There was a structure for revamping the complex ways in which states and the federal government both raise and divvy up money. And given that it was rather obvious, by the end of 2001, that the stock market boom was over, there was at least the obvious alternative of doing minor corrective work, so that in 2003 we did not face an overhang of some 100 billion dollars in separate state debts. The reason the latter was never addressed has to do with a dirty little secret of our government -- it is way overweighted to represent less populous, poorer states. California's budget miseries are California's business precisely because California is an economic generator -- unlike, say, Mississippi. But Mississippi, you will notice, and Tennessee, and the rest of them are much more represented on the national level. In tax terms, more money flows into Mississippi from the Federal government than flows out of it -- as is the case with Texas. But the reverse is the case with New York and California. Whenever those two states have financial difficulties, however, the poorer states stick it to them.

There are a host of reasons for this -- the culture of bad faith vis a vis the government in the South being one of the most prominent. It is true that Bush's tax cuts, especially the dividend tax cut, will grossly and inordinately benefit certain citizens of California and New York -- ie, the rich. And the richest one percent tend to settle in the richer states. For every billionaire in Mississippi, there are five in Sillicon Valley.

But the reparative work of the tax cut is most likely to vanish into high yielding investments in such things as derivatives -- which have no home, and bring no benefit to the wealthy states themselves. So the median person in those states, in bad times, has to live with the collateral effects of wealth -- for instance, higher rents and housing prices -- and the skew against those states on the national level -- which has to be made up for by higher state taxes. In a sense, the cause of the income tax in New York State is the lack of one in Texas.

Well, we could go on. But do you really want us to?

Bollettino

The tree of liberty is sprinkled with the blood of bouncers -- this is what Jefferson might have said about the latest news out of NYC. LI was so riveted by the news in Iraq that we ignored the warnings: our friend, T., wrote us a bitter screed about the banning of smoking in NYC bars, but we thought that he was suffering from a mild hallucination -- nothing so uncommon among LI's friends. But it turns out that T. was simply throwing invective on a legal fact.

Here's a CBS report on the latest atrocity to hit Gotham city:

"The worst did happen just two weeks into the ban. A bouncer was killed after asking a smoker to leave a downtown club. That's one reason why Rabin [a bar owner] wants a police presence outside the city's clubs.

"We're trying to follow your law," says Rabin. "We've asked the people to step outside to smoke, now we have a noise problem that's bothering our neighbors. Help us one way or the other."

The critics say everybody knows smoking is bad for you, but aren't bars and clubs where people are supposed to drink, smoke and carry on? Is the city that never sleeps turning in early?

"This is New York, get used to it," says Michael Musto, who covers New York's nightlife.

Musto says there are too many rules.

"New York used to be a place without a lot of rules," he says. "It had a seediness to it, but it also had an edge. Suddenly, you can't smoke in a bar. What's next? You can't eat in a restaurant?"



Only one bouncer? My God, has the spirit of the minutemen, the spirit of Grant's Army, the spirit of Patrick Henry and Patton, been so extinguished that only one, out of the innumerable bouncers of the city, been forced to pay for actually enforcing that insane rule? King James I, who has been quietly retired, in the history books, as a despotic masturbator, condemned smoking and wrote against it: but even he couldn't ban it among the bravos of that time What next indeed -- the imperialism of the lungs apparently rules, with this little man, Bloomberg, triumphant. We can drill holes in our brain and put that crucial fat on our livers, but we can't put an ashy coating on our trachea, eh?

Now, LI witnessed the Disneyfication of Times Square. It was sad. But one felt that really, the plastic and the bright lights will eventually collect dust and sputter sporadically out, slowly strangled by the taxes and the costs of maintenance and the whore and the adult video place will once again take root -- yes, Minnie and Mickie will again do the beast with two backs before a paying, horny audience until four in the morning. Love will grow in the place of excrement, as Swift put it -- disapprovingly. We think, on the contrary, that this is one of the most hopeful of human traits. Times Square's spirit will definitely triumph over the hypocritical Babbitry in evidence at present. But the ban on smoking is an absolutely bad sign -- as is the current lazy custom of suing tobacco companies because they didn't warn one and all, in the past fifty years, that their products caused cancer. This is a little like suing airplane companies because they didn't warn their customers about gravity. Obviously, state governments, having exhausted the lottery gambit, are pitching for other revenue sources -- avoiding tapping the obvious, who are the rich and the undertaxed one percentile.

Now Austin, our city, is considering some insane version of NYC's law. This is the site of the do-gooders, none of whom, I would bet, go to many bars in Austin -- they are probably too busy watching tv in their big Round Rock encomienda, the jerks. . But this is... Texas. We do carry guns here. We will not go gentle into that good night of the servile state. Here's a group dedicated to fighting the poison: Go to the site, sign a petition, don't allow this to happen.

It is one thing to be herded, like sheep, into an illegal war. Or to be herded, like sheep, into accepting an illegal president. But to be herded like sheep into accepting smokeless bars?

Bollettino

Murmurs and crimes


The NYT reports that Zubaidi, the lord high mayor of Baghdad, and the Scarlet Pimpernel of the Palestine Hotel, has been stripped of his authority by Smilin' Jay Garner, as always the embodiment of the Iraqi will:

"Mr. Zobeidi, who says his qualifications for running Baghdad include participation in a disaster control management course arranged by the State Department, has also proposed sending a delegation to represent Iraq's interest at an OPEC meeting.

"American officials said today that it was Mr. Zobeidi's efforts to expand his powers that prompted the Americans to crack down.Mr. Zobeidi was given a copy of General McKiernan's proclamation, American official said, and he was informed by the American military today that he had no authority to appoint anybody."

The Times also reports that military men are casting dark glances at Chalabi's paramilitary. Yesterday, some of Chalabi's men were arrested for looting:


"Fighters of the group have been caught repeatedly while looting homes in an enclave in Baghdad where members of Saddam's Baath Party lived, said Army Staff Sgt. Bryce Ivings, of Sarasota, Fla.On Tuesday, soldiers from A Company, 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment detained four suspected looters dressed in the group's desert camouflage uniforms and carrying rocket-propelled grenades, Ivings said. The men, who did not speak English, were taken to a prisoner-of-war detention center.

"Less than an hour later, another patrol found four other fighters - in uniform, but unarmed - carrying away china, glassware and clothing from empty houses, said Sgt. Jason Letterman of Marshfield, Mo., said. They were not held, but were told to cease looting, Letterman said."They said they were only stealing from houses belonging to Saddam's bodyguards," Letterman said. "We told them we can't let them steal stuff from anyone."

All the papers are pondering theocracy, today, as the Shiites imams have started to grow restive under the benevolent yoke of our liberation, while the average American ponders the murder suspect in the Laci case. We think the Laci murder is typical of a vast prejudice in the Press. California murders always get top billing. When Bush gets finished revamping the Constitution, he needs to check into this. Liberal bias in the press is one thing that's being squeezed out right now; anti-Texas bias is quite something else. Californians have amped things up by throwing in the charge against Laci's unborn child, but I'm sorry -- Laci's killing would get the ho hum back page treatment in the Houston Chronicle. In Austin, lately, we've had the murder-by-obsessed-manipulated-lesbian-lover-slash-psycho case, the Yogurt Shop possible satanic cult overtones murder case, and the shooting-of-crazed-woman-by-cops case just in the last four months. And Austin is one of the more peaceful places in Texas.

Just to check our intuition, we went to the Houston Chronicle and searched for murder. Sure enough, there's a triple homicide on the bill down there right now, with one of the victims being a pregnant woman, and with the defense offering this defense: the gun went off accidentally. The sawed off shotgun gun held in the hands of one of the defendents, who accidentally injured one of his confederates as it unexpectedly discharged. This is quite a defense.

Then -- this is just today, mind -- there is an item about a murder suicide, the man having killed his wife over his suspicion that she was unfaithful; there's a dispute over whether the Houston crime laboratory 'accidentally' skewed results in the conviction for murder of a man who allegedly killed an EPA agent; and other murder trials are hung up, like aircraft circling an overcrowded airport on a stormy day, because the Crime lab is having trouble with its DNA testers.

So: enough of these California crimes. !Basta! Let's shine a little light down here in Texas. If Chicago was once 'hog butcher to the world," we've dealt in enough abraded human flesh (shotgunned, stabbed, burned, poisoned, strung up, strangled, raped and toasted, randomly splattered with bullets) to deserve the title, human butcher to some of the world. A little consideration on the part of the national media would be nice.

Bollettino

This just in, from the Washington Times:

Al Qaeda (toys) linked to State Department
By Odaiah Scallywag
THE WASHINGTON TIMES


Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today accused State Department leader Colin Powell of harboring al Qaeda terrorist (toys) and aiding their quest for (toy) weapons of mass destruction. Top S


His charges, based on "evolving" intelligence reports, marked the Pentagon's most detailed account of frivolousness at the State Department.
"We do have solid evidence of the presence in the State Department of little al Qaeda action figures, including some that look to have been manufactured by slave labor in Baghdad," the defense secretary said. "We have what we consider to be credible contacts in the Department who could help them acquire the whole set of weapons of mass destruction, plus Hotwheels, and plus, where is the respect, heaven's sake, for the good old GI Joe dolls?"
Mr. Rumsfeld's presentation at a Pentagon news conference was illustrated with two custom-made GI Joe dolls -- GI Wolfowitz and GI Perle. The Perle doll is a real beauty -it comes equipped with a string that you can pull, but only for $600,000. The charges came the day after White House National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice disclosed for the first time an intelligence report that said Undersecretary "Secret Liberal" Immerhof helped train al Qaeda dolls in the use of chemical weapons, i.e. cans of Right Guard.
Her words were reiterated yesterday by White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. "At a sit-down in the Pentagon, yesterday, in which Undersecretary of Nucular Defense Smitty "Neandrathal" Neandrathal pulled out the special GI Wolfowitz doll, Immerhof bombed him good with four direct squirts of Right Guard. You know how cheap that stuff smells! Secretary Neandrathal was latter unable to get a window seat at the Quatre Saisons, and thus missed seeing Ann Coulter pass by with a pet monkey."
The back-to-back disclosures were part of a new White House push to tie Powell's regime to some pennyante middle eastern milquetoast, instead of Chalabi, a man whom even a battalion of steroid inflamed heathens could not destroy. If the Pentagon can convince the public that Powell's department desecrates the GI Joe doll, especially in favor of dolls that represent the group that attacked America and killed more than 3,000 persons, the link would strengthen the case for a Rumsfeld-led attack on Powell.
Until the past two days, the White House, and chief ally Great Britain, have focused on State's arsenal of the gag gifts of mass destruction (whoopy cushions, stringy goo, old recordings of Tiny Tim) as justification for a pre-emptive attack and the establishment of a new State Department infrastructure.
President Bush is contemplating a Pentagon and State M & A but has not yet made a decision or approved a specific plan, his aides say.
Since shortly after September 11, Pentagon civilian hard-liners have pushed the CIA and other intelligence agencies to find and document all the damn toys that make fun of Pentagon civilian hard liners. The "linkage" issue was resisted at first by some in the CIA. But Mr. Rumsfeld's aides persisted, and intelligence reports were produced establishing that there is a dart board with Rumsfeld's head on it in the basement of the State Department. Colin Powell has refused to comment about reports that he may play darts down there on alternate Wednesdays.