Bollettino

Social history has, to a great extent, failed in its proclaimed and relatively simple task of writing history �from the bottom up,� according to historian Sigurdur Magnusson in the Spring, 03�s issue of Social History. LI recommends his article, The Singularization of History, which examines the proliferation of micro-histories and the collapse of the radical impulse that generated them. According to Magnusson, the social history in the seventies and eighties underwent a crisis of confidence in the Annales theory that underlay it. The old school, building on sociology, and Marx, counseled the historian to find episodes demonstrating time, to find these episodes on a significant scale, to subject his matter to categories that could be quantified, and to look for causal explanations that could link up to grander schemes. In the late eighties, under the assault of deconstruction and Foucaultian archaeology, the macro view could no longer be supported. But Magnusson thinks that this only has meant that discredited categories have been imported into microhistories, where one finds, compulsively, the same patterns that used to be adduced in macrohistory. Of course, the Italian historians like Ginzburg who pioneered microhistory were after something different � developing the local according to its own autonomous rules. Which meant a sort of Hegelian immersion in the mindset of the local.

Magnusson is distressed by a general retreat from the assertion of microhistorical autonomy � from, in fact, the vanguard attack of the parts against the whole � to the conservative contemporary atmosphere, which silent accedes to the positivistic values of showing a progress, measuring it with those measures that are generated from thinking of the now as that towards which history moves, and imposing upon the internal structure of microhistory those connections to macro-history that make it comprehensible to us. In other words, the steam has gone out of the left historicist project. Magnusson places himself in the camp of those who view micro-history as requiring other techniques � such as the techniques of the novelist. And he sadly surveys the comrades who have moved on, like Lynn Hunt. At one time Lynn Hunt was a Foucauldian � or a feminist version of one � and now she has become a mild positivist. �Modern,� he quotes her as saying, �is better.� And in a recent essay on gender history, she admonishes feminists to hook up to the macro train about tying �the stories [of women] into much more general narratives of long term social changes�� The fragments are glued together; the urn is as good as new.

Under the influence of our friend, S., we�ve been reading about complex adaptation theory. In particular, we�ve just been perusing a very interesting tome by Frank T. Vertosick, The Genius Within, which argues for a broader conception of intelligence than that which centers intelligence on the brain. Vertosick is arguing for an idea that was entertained by Spinoza and Diderot, and that has a lot of attraction for LI.

There�s a passage on the genotype and phenotype which, I think, might serve as a model for how macro-history and micro-history can be separated and at the same time connected. I�m not sure Magnusson would approve of an organic metaphor. Still, here it is. After talking about what it means that an organism can be cloned from a cell and an ovum, Vertosick makes this comment: �These findings prove beyond all doubt that the mammoth differences between a muscle cell and a neuron are neither genetic nor permanent. Muscle cells and nerve cells are, quite literally, simply the same cell, each temporarily portraying a different role in that elaborate stage production known as the body. The chromosomal makeup of a cell defines its genotype, while the actual appearance and function of a cell defines its phenotype. A cardiac muscle cell and a nerve cell taken from my body are of one genotype, but express very different phenotypes. Differentiation is a quantum thing. In the mature organism, a cell can be a muscle cell or a bone cell, but not something in between. Differentiation has no shades of gray. Moreover, once a cell commits to being a muscle cell, it usually stays a muscle cell forever.�

Of course, the analogy is imperfect, but it seems to me that the autonomy of the local is not an autonomy that is compounded from gender, class, race, etc., but is phenotypic � it expresses the macro-historical genotype in such a differentiated way as to justify the idea that it is an immersive whole, without justifying a nihilistic attitude towards higher, emergent historical structures.

Bollettino

We have not bathed Paul Bremer in our usual appellations, because we can't think what to call him. Alan kidded us about our Smilin' Jay phrase -- he noted that it had not spread over the Internet. In fact, we not only originated it, we were its sole adopters. By some accident, the phrase did fit -- as courtiers in the State and Pentagon continue their gladiatorial leaking contests, we are learning that Garner, with what one report describes as a 'backslapping' style , was as alien to the Iraqi expectation of leadership as Bambi would have been,

J.Paul, however, is more of a Reaganaut. We are assured that his authoritarian style is more to the liking of the masses. While Smilin' Jay imitated Saddam by essentially vanishing into the presidential palaces, Bremer seems intent on imitating Saddam's press secretary, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, by subordinating the standard of veracity to the enthusiasm of the pronouncement. Thus he has dissolved the Iraqi army, suggested that the interim government start on smaller things -- like judging quilting contests or something -- and is continually elaborating the every day in every way, life is getting better and better message. In today's Washington Post, he allows himself the standard rhetorical wallow in the joys of free enterprise. Joys that are being experienced on the street corners of Baghdad, apparently, where looted goods and weaponry are being sold with the kind of pedlar's vigor that once made the Yankee a proverbial figure of fun. There's something a little heart sick about this eloge of commerce among the smoking ruins of the country. The American media has decided to finesse the evident disaster in Iraq by resorting to schizophrenia; they issue one article from their embeds that consists pretty much of occupation p.r. -- then they issue color pieces that are more in the tone of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. No attempt is made to make these p-s.o.v. cohere.

Bollettino

LI has hammered home a theme for a long time on this site. The theme is that talk about U.S. foreign policy has to take into account, firstly, what kind of country the U.S. is. Usually such discussions go on and on about democracy. Well, democracy is important, but it is subordinate to one great constant in U.S. history: the vast indifference of Americans to the rest of the world.

There are subgroups who are very involved with one or another country. The Irish in the last century were ardent about Ireland, the Germans before WWII were ardent about Germany, and the Jews, now, are ardent about Israel. But these are exceptions to the rule. Americans like to think of themselves as generous donors -- but that stopped long ago, by general consent. The Marshall plan was fifty years ago; the last really big flow of foreign aid petered out around the end of the Vietnam war. Both of those generous moments were connected to domestic politics: the Marshall Plan is inconceivable without the Roosevelt's New Deal, which preceded it and established the idea of government spending for big projects; and the foreign aid of the Vietnam era was connected just as intimately to the Great Society.

Those eras are deader than Uncle Sam's generosity to the poor.

This is the essential paralogism of Bush's foreign policy. It aims at establishing American imperial hegemony; but it only funds American military contractors. Contra leftists and rightists, that isn't the same thing. Nor has Bush shown any inclination to spend his political capital by trying to really effect a "Marshall plan" for Afghanistan; Afghanistan is the last thing on his agenda. It's been crossed out.

Meanwhile, the plan for Iraq depends, crucially, on taking money from Iraq and recirculating it back to Iraq. It depends, in other words, on magic. Voodoo economics is rational compared to the American dream of both exploiting and enriching Iraq. It's a pyramid scheme for retards.

What this means, in terms of security, is that the U.S., after much bombing, is reverting to the pre-9/11 situation with regard to such places as Afghanistan; and is going to be tied down, in such places as Iraq, until we decide to blink and go away.

Afghanistan is one of the more interesting studies in how an empire is not built. After the war was canceled on tv (since it was, supposedly, won), it was lost to American vision in the subsequent blackout. Nobody protested. We went elsewhere; the Afghanis, naturally, stayed. There's a very lengthy piece about the aftermath in Afghanistan in the Guardian this Sunday by Peter Oborn. Here's a middle graf that gets into the magical intersection of money and amnesia:

"We interviewed the interim President on the day Baghdad fell. Karzai is tall, good-looking and articulate. He dresses in immaculately pressed shalwar kameez and waistcoat - sheer Afghan chic. The awesome task of creating a modern, democratic Afghan state - and in the process turning 3,000 years of historical development on its head - devolves on him. He is a friend of the West, and that is what makes his criticisms, when they come, so much more devastating. I ask him whether the $5 billion pledged to Afghanistan at the Tokyo donors' conference of 2002 was enough to rebuild his country. 'Definitely not,' says Karzai. 'We believe Afghanistan needs $15-20bn to reach the stage we were in 1979.'

He complains, too, that the money has gone to the wrong places. Rather than make over funds to Karzai's central government, Western donors have preferred to act through outside agencies. 'Last year,' says Karzai, 'we had no control over how this money was spent.' He warns that this lack of trust 'does weaken the presence of the central government in the provinces of Afghanistan'. It is hard to disagree. Even the niggardly World Bank accepts that Afghan reconstruction requires $10bn rather than the $5bn made available at Tokyo, while US Senator Joseph Biden argues that $20bn would be nearer the mark. Earlier this year the aid organization Care International produced a devastating study which contrasted Afghanistan to other post-conflict zones. In a table of aid per person donated by the West, Bosnia came up top, receiving $326 per head. Kosovans received an average $288 while citizens of East Timor got $195 each. Afghans are scheduled to receive just $42 per head over the next five years. This is despite the fact that Afghanistan is almost, as Karzai says, 'the poorest country in the world' and in a far worse state than either Bosnia or Kosovo."

There is something truly curious about the current American situation. Has any empire of comparable military superiority wasted its time more thoroughly than the U.S. has, in the last year? The firefight about connecting Al qaeda to Saddam is typical. Whether you think there is a connection or not -- and we don't think there is -- it is not an important connection, as everybody on both sides knows.

We know quite a bit now about how A-Q operated. We know they moved East after Sudan. We know that Malaysia was a much more important meeting ground for the redoubtable A-Q than Iraq. And yet, I'd guess that not one American in one thousand knows that Malaysia even figures in A-Q's timeline.

Anyway, what Oborn doesn't say is that one of the unexpected results of collapsing the Taliban has been a bumper crop of poppies. The hills are alive with them. And if you want to fund guerrilla activity, nothing is finer than a bumper crop of poppies, or of coca leaf. We figure that money will be reinvigorate A-Q next year, much more than the reaction to the occupation of Iraq.

Bollettino

The swing set

Ah, so the 600 billion dollar -- Krugman prices it out at 800 billion - tax cut has been passed. The price tag in the headlines is, as everybody knows, a joke. We are in an extremely bizarre time. As the deficit piles up, we get a tax cut that is thinly justified as an attempt to bootstrap the market. Yep, get those equities flyin' again.

At the same time, the Bush administration is gambling with the dollar. This is, perhaps, all they can really do -- the brain-dead people in Bush's Treasury have no other options. So the race is on to press the dollar downward.

Now, LI is a simple country hayseed -- shucks, we just tried to buy the Brooklyn bridge from a passin' stranger yesterday. Yet even we noticed a curious disparity between the two strategies. Like, ain't it true, like they teach in the one room schoolhouse in the Hollow, that when you devalue the dollar, money flows to assets tied to other currencies? And don't that promote a flow out of US Markets and into other markets? And ain't that flow going to accelerate, as the wealthy, who benefit most from the tax cuts, seek a higher ROI than is going to be given by investing in dollar based instruments?

Of course, LI knows we don't have the rocket science of the fiscal system down, like our hero president -- well known fighter pilot and all -- but gee, won't the flight from dollars accelerate as the deficit grows, forcing interest rates upward, and shutting down business borrowing -- thus shuttin' down plant and other investment -- and thus upping cost cutting measures, such as shedding jobs?

So, what is happening here? A conservative Republican government is basically stoking the fires of inflation, in the hopes that we will get the system of production moving -- thus taxing the poor, basically, and the middle class, who are already facing the continuing inflation in housing, education and medicine -- and all of this supposedly in the era of "limited" government. Of course, since no Republican really has the guts to limit government -- they are throwing money hand over fist at Defense, and they absent mindedly voted in various medical benefits last year that add 300 billion dollars to that -- we are faced with pressures all along the financial dams.

Krugman is worried about a deflationary spiral. We personally think that this underestimates the integration of the American economy on other economies. Unlike Japan, we outsourced our manufacturing base long ago. Having depended for a long time on the absurdly low wages of foreign workers to underwrite our service sector economy, we think we are going to feel the effects of that soon.

Incompetent in war, disastrous in peace -- our administration. You gotta love em!

Bollettino

The Illusory Empire

One of the great problems with political scientists is that they base so much of what they think on analogies that are carefully plucked of all annoying dissimilarities. Take the great Empire boom spawned by the neo-con set. This has been going on for a while now, since one of the Kaplans wrote an article in Foreign Policy about the U.S. as a benign empire. This Kaplan went on to compare the U.S. with Britain in the 19th century. As in all such comparisons, a surface verisimilitude is achieved by comparing military force, and interventions over the globe. What Kaplan didn't mention was that 20 million some Britons left the U.K. to settle all over the globe. He also didn't mention British investment in the colonial enterprise. Both of which are very unlikely to happen to the U.S. any time soon. The U.S. Empire is defined by the fifty states, plus some commonwealths.

Iraq and Afghanistan are test cases of the imperial proposition. So far, what has happened in Afghanistan? The U.S. beat the Taliban and scattered its real foe, Al qaeda. Then we pretty much forwarded a minimum amount of money to the government we installed in Kabul, left a minimum contingent of soldiers there, and watched, with supreme indifference, as the center didn't hold. It is a good bet that some terrorist Rotary club is meeting, once again, between Peshawar and Kabul.

The British sometimes advanced and then abandoned and then re-inserted themselves in territories. The history of what is now Nigeria was full of that kind of thing. But if London had been attacked by a group from Nigeria in 1889, the British would have invaded in force and stayed.

We aren't saying this is a good or a bad thing -- it is a different thing. The Marshalll Plan response was an exception in American history, not the rule. It does not look like Iraq is going to be different. If this Financial Times story is to be believed -- and it is pretty standard for the Biz press view -- Iraq is going to need around one hundred billion dollars in investment in the next couple of years:


"Iraq's reconstruction is routinely costed at as much as $100bn (?86bn, �61bn), making it the largest such project since the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after the second world war.

Companies from all over the world have been clamouring for a piece of the work. Iraq is particularly appealing to them because it sits astride the world's second-largest oil reserves. There are also hopes that it could give rise to a robust consumer market."

Well, hope springs eternal, even in a nut house. But the reconstruction projects we have seen so far are coming out at about a billion bucks. And those bucks aren't an investment in Iraq, really -- they are things like starting a tv station for Iraqis, which is really a way of getting some US tax dollars to SAIC. When the money from Iraq's frozen assets runs out, what is the US going to do for the other 99 billion dollars? Take it out of the budget? The scheme to pay for things via Iraq's oil rather misses that, well, if we pay big fat US corporations with that money, nothing will be left for the Iraqis. They won't be able to afford those tv sets to watch SAIC TV. It is what you call a paradox. Or an empty piggy bank.

There's no plan for that whatsoever. There should be. Since the U.S. got into this war, we owe them. You know, for wrecking the cities and all. Things like that. Colonialism would be a step up, actually. Moral responsibility, things like that. So far, we simply have a country eyeing the little money left in a country it is occupying, and thinking of making a dash for it. On the other hand, the Bush-ites are stuck. If they treat Iraq like Afghanistan, the country will surely slip into a virulently anti-American mode. If we try to chintz on reconstruction, we are going to literally starve Iraqis. There's only one source of money left -- U.S. taxpayers.

Of course, there's also the little problem that Iraq, since the prosperous days of the late seventies, has gotten a lot more populous and a lot poorer. That consumer revolution is going to need a lot of very long range credit cards, because these people, like the Saudis, and the Libyans, aren't going to see those days again. The inheritance has been pissed away, mostly on weapons. Saddam or House of Saud, same song and dance.

At the moment, though, the thought is this: We broke it -- we pay for it. Isn't that the rule in this celestial toy shop?

Bollettino

Chalabi is, reportedly, a man who likes to play close to the edge. He has a habit of going over it without a parachute. Perhaps he did it again when he attacked Al - Jazeera and the Jordan government with papers the INC had gathered from Saddam's files.

Saddam's files are truly amazing things. They pop up here, labelled in big magic marker, George Galloway bribery papers; they pop up there labelled Al -Jazeera, our contacts in. But where, pray tell, is the folder entitled, Donald Rumsfeld, talks with, 1984; or George Herbert Walker Bush, covert aid supplied by, 1932-1989? I guess those papers just incinerated. And guess what? Neither the Times of London or New York, neither the Daily Telegraph nor the Washington Post, are looking very hard for them.

Although I'd guess, just guess, that the US Military did look for those state secrets.

Well, Chalabi's problem is that he depends too much on the kindness of strangers -- who he then rips off. So, mistaking himself for Donald Rumsfeld, he paper rattled in the direction of Amman. He forgot that Amman can paper rattle back. The Wall Street Journal just got a look at some documents released by the Jordanians in re the case of Petra Bank.


The WSJ report does not show Chalabi as a corrupt man -- rather, he was a businessman in a hurry. And like many such businessmen, he succumbed to the temptation to inflate his business, which required doing an increasing amount of shady legwork inside the business. Plus, he seems to have smuggled money to his family. Two point six million dollars that the bank earned for instance, for snagging a loan to Sudan would be diverted to the Chalabi brothers' pockets. Arthur Anderson audited the bank after Chalabi fled:

"Now in control of Petra Bank, Jordanian authorities asked for an audit. Four months later, Arthur Andersen accountants declared the bank insolvent. Shareholder equity wasn't $50 million as reported, their 267-page report said, but a negative $268 million. They said an additional, hard-to-explain $158 million had flowed out but not come back. Much of that involved "transactions with parties related to the former management of the bank," it said."

Oh my. We do wonder how Chris Hitchens, Chalabi's main press supporter in this country, is going to explain this. In his last column on this subject, Hitchens let slip the fact that Iraq was a partner in the bank. Wow. If this is true, Chalabi, like his friend, Donald Rumsfeld, was working with Saddam in the nerve gas eighties. Since Hitchens didn't footnote his source, we don't know if he learned this from Chalabi himself, but it is a promising clue to Chalabi's sudden interest in overthrowing Saddam.

Bollettino

Blood business

Douglas Starr wrote an essential book about the trade of blood, entitled, no doubt by an agent, Blood: the Epic History of Medicine and Commerce. . One of the book's major concerns was the way the blood industry accidentally spread AIDS to hemophiliacs. There's a chapter excerpt from the book on a PBS site. We have to quote this graf, which explains how the blood business became a moneymaker after new techniques allowed companies to extract plasma, and thus made it possible to up the amount of blood a donor could give dramatically:


"New classes of people became involved -- shadier buyers, more desperate sellers. Experts had warned about the potential for abuse. During a 1966 conference at Cohn's Protein Foundation, Dr. Tibor Greenwalt, a leader in nonprofit blood banking, cautioned against "exploiting for its proteins a population which is least able to donate them" -- yet that gave little pause to commercial entrepreneurs. Tom Asher, a fifty-year veteran of the plasma industry who worked as a manager for the Hyland division of Baxter Laboratories, ruefully recalled that his company set up its first center at Fourth and Town streets in Los Angeles -- "absolute dead center, Skid Row. We'd immunize donors with tetanus to increase their antibodies for tetanus gamma globulin. When hurried, our doctor, who was also the bouncer, would occasionally give them shots of tetanus antigen right through their trousers." Later the company took to "bankrolling all sorts of characters" to meet the booming demand for source plasma, many with questionable ethics. Another Los Angeles center, called Doctors Blood Bank and run by two local pathologists, paid donors in chits redeemable at a local liquor store."

Starr points out that blood became a major third world industry. Nicarauga, under the malign vampire, Somoza, became a major blood and plasma supplier, for instance -- an industry that Somoza took a big cut from -- and in fact it became a major political factor in the Somoza overthrow. The owner of Plasmaferesis assassinated the editor of La Prensa, apparently on Somoza's orders, after the paper investigated the "House of Dracula. More importantly, the hemophilliac medicines that required compounding thousands of different donations of plasma together was starting to circulate in the First World. Factor VIII was a standard, profitable medical instrument. And it was a loaded gun. As Starr shows, AIDS among hemophiliac's was, perhaps, the first neo-liberal epidemic: it came from unregulated free trade, it came out of the principles of that trade (the cost of labor and the cost of raw materials should be lowered to its lowest level), and it carried a social cost that was supposed to be cheerfully borne by third parties.

Well, we are going on about this because the NYT has fingered Bayer today. This should be a major story, although in today's atmosphere, who cares if companies kill?

Here are the first two grafs:

" A division of the pharmaceutical company Bayer sold millions of dollars of blood-clotting medicine for hemophiliacs � medicine that carried a high risk of transmitting AIDS � to Asia and Latin America in the mid-1980's while selling a new, safer product in the West, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The Bayer unit, Cutter Biological, introduced its safer medicine in late February 1984 as evidence mounted that the earlier version was infecting hemophiliacs with H.I.V. Yet for over a year, the company continued to sell the old medicine overseas, prompting a United States regulator to accuse Cutter of breaking its promise to stop selling the product."

Remember that this took place in the gogo Reagan years. The Feds knew and disapproved of the Cutter sales. They called in Bayer officials. This is what happened:

"Federal regulators helped keep the overseas sales out of the public eye, the documents indicate. In May of 1985, believing that the companies had broken a voluntary agreement to withdraw the old medicine from the market, the Food and Drug Administration's regulator of blood products, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr., summoned officials of the companies to a meeting and ordered them to comply. "It was unacceptable for them to ship that material overseas," he said later in legal papers.

Even so, Dr. Meyer asked that the issue be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public," according to Cutter's account of the 1985 meeting. Dr. Meyer said later that he could not recall making that statement, but another blood-product company's summary of the meeting also noted that the F.D.A. wanted the matter settled "quickly and quietly." Dr. Meyer died in 2001."

Ah, the sweet, deadly smell of money! Undoubtedly Meyer was also thinking that the Reagan administration would reverse itself if it publicly looked like it was doing something unfriendly to a corp bud. Meanwhile, Cutter, acting, according to the latest Bayer broadside, was considering the ethics of lining its pockets by selling a majorly dangerous product to uninformed suckers in Asia. Hmm, what should a company that wants to make money in the dirtiest way possible do?

"The new product [heat treated plasma compound], meanwhile, was selling briskly, leaving Cutter with a problem: "There is excess nonheated inventory," the company noted in minutes of a meeting on Nov. 15, 1984.

"They needed to get the return for what they invested," explained Michael Baum, a Los Angeles lawyer who has represented dozens of United States hemophiliacs in suits against blood-product companies. "They paid the donors. They had processed the plasma, put it into vials, kept it in warehouses � and all that expense had already been incurred." (One vial is roughly equivalent to a small dose, though more may be needed to stop severe bleeding.)

At the November meeting, the minutes show, Cutter said it planned to "review international markets again to determine if more of this product can be sold." And in the months that followed, it had some success, exporting more than 5 million units (a typical vial might contain 250 units) in the first three months of 1985, documents show."

A saga of entrepreneurship that we can all be proud of.

P.S.



Forbes quotes a "London based" analyst with this remark about the story:

"You can never entirely rule out upsets, but this looks like a rather old story and will probably not affect Bayer's financials."

Marx himself couldn't come up with a more deadpan line about the moral bankruptcy of capitalism.