Okay, I finally made the Dopamine Cowboy Movement button link to the cafepress.com/limitedinc site. These things aren't easy for LI -since we put up our first webzine, Calumny and Art, a long time ago, the software has proliferated but to do certain, intermediate work cheaply has gotten harder.
Or so it seems to us. So remember, if you enjoy Freshly Released Air, or the Newshour with Atilla the Hun, which you can only get on LI, send us 10 to 50 bucks. And if you are a Department of Education official looking for some shill to push that great leap backwards, the No Child Left Behind act, think about 200,000 bucks. Or if you are a Russian kleptomillionaire with tax problems and you think you need pliable mouthpieces in the West, a small oilfield in Siberia would be nice. Whatever level you can accommodate for whatever corruption we can manufacture, you can trust us at LI to be rooting, tooting, garrulous, and full of controversial p.o.v.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Monday, October 31, 2005
How do I make this last a lifetime?
The perils, the perils! LI, like a frostbitten salt on a ghost ship, wants to ring a little leper bell for the excellent 8000 word article by Roger Lowenstein (one of my favorite business journalists – both When Genius Failed and The Origins of the Crash keep up the best traditions of the mandarin muckraker, rather like Chapters of Erie or The Robber Barons) on the end of the pension in the NYT Mag. In my clippings about the evitable decline of the guarantor state, this article will definitely have pride of place.
Lowenstein’s article touches on an area LI avoided, in sketching out the large scale picture of the rivalry between two models of the social welfare state that deepened in the Reagan era. One of the characteristics of that era was the capture of foreign investment by American firms, which then floated the re-structuring of those firms. This, of course, happened within another re-structuring, as manufacturing finally sought the low labor costs of the third world. These two movements were in tandem. It would probably surprise a lot of Americans that the Reagan commerce department sponsored seminars for companies to show them how to move operations to Mexico. It isn’t something one expects of an American government. But of course they did.
I avoided, however, a domestic source of the transformation of investment. As Lowenstein acutely puts it:
“During most of the 90's the decline in pension coverage was barely lamented. It was not that big companies were folding up their plans (for the most part, they were not) but that newer, smaller companies weren't offering them. As the small companies grew into big ones (think Dell, or Starbucks, or Home Depot), traditional pensions covered less of the private-sector landscape. This did not seem like a very big deal. Younger workers envisioned mobile careers for themselves and many did not want pension strings tying them to a single employer. And most were able to put money aside in 401(k)'s, often matched by an employer contribution.
It happened that 401(k)'s, which were authorized by a change in the tax code in 1978 and which began to blossom in the early 1980's, coincided with a great upswing in the stock market. It is possible that they helped to cause the upswing.”
The new range of financial instruments open to people in the middle class who had pretty much forgotten their parents’ stock buying craze of the twenties might have inflated the amount of money seeking return, but the rate of return also responded to a new aggressiveness on the part of union pension fund managers. Although it seems counter-intuitive, union pension fund managers were demanding return that could only come about by making company’s much more efficient. And that could most easily be achieved by … cutting labor costs. One of the paradoxes of the Keynesian economy is that harmonizing the interests of the socially upward trending working class with the governing class could mean, in the long term, that the working class profited from its own demise. This is one of the reasons class, as a category of social analysis, is not a great predictor – there is no homogenous class interest at any one point.
But I digress into idle chatter. One of the arguments of the rightwing drive to terminate the government’s direct role in social welfare in favor of the indirect role of the guarantor state is an old neo-classical chestnut – while in the short term, certain people in the working class might be hurt by investments dependent on the higher rate of return that comes from cutting labor costs, in the long run they will benefit from the efficiencies such “reforms” will bring. This ignores a number of problems:
a, the fact that the system has formed around a market in social goods that has hyper-inflated. The causes of that hyper-inflation – in medicine and in education, for example – have been curiously neglected. It is as if it were natural that, while computers get more high tech and cheaper, medicine gets more high tech and expensive.
b, the notion of a mobilized, job switching population innovating to keep out of the poverty trap benefits a certain few. There’s really no benefit to switching jobs if you are a fireman, or a teacher, etc., etc. In other words, the amount of social return on human capital is wildly exaggerated in the pure guarantor state ideology. To encourage job switching made a certain sense in an economy liquidating its manufacturing base. But it doesn't make sense for the vast amount of the working population.
and finally, a problem absent Lowenstein’s excellent article,
c, the shift towards guaranteed benefits, which made possible the acceptance of a much lower increase in the average wage for workers, occurred at the same time that the compensations for the upper management class exploded. There is a huge cost to the increase in the share of wealth by the upper percentiles, but that cost is only visible over time – that is, the cost starts showing up as the long term guaranteed benefits devolve from the virtual to the actual. And, at this point, the concentration is entirely on analyzing that line of development that led to auto workers having to work merely thirty years on the assembly line and retiring with a lordly 18 thou per year – etc.
Lowenstein is good about comparing the supposed superiority of the benefits of the guarantor state, with its 401(k)s, against the “socialism”, as the George Will types like to put it, of the traditional pension plan. As one expected, the old rule applies: the richer we are, the poorer we are.
“A 401(k), on the other hand, promises nothing. It's merely a license to defer taxes -- an individual savings plan. The employer might contribute some money, which is why 401(k)'s are known as ''defined contribution'' plans. Or it might not. Even if the company does contribute, it offers no assurance that the money will be enough to retire on, nor does it get involved with managing the account; that's up to the worker. These disadvantages were, in the 90's, somehow perceived (with the help of exuberant marketing pitches by mutual-fund firms) to be advantages: 401(k)'s let workers manage their own assets; they were a road map to economic freedom.
Post-bubble, the picture looks different. Various people have studied how investors perform in their 401(k)'s. According to Alicia Munnell, a pension expert at Boston College and previously a White House economist, pension funds over the long haul earn slightly more than the average 401(k) holder. Among the latter, those who do worse than average, of course, have no protection. Moreover, pensions typically annuitize -- that is, they convert a worker's retirement assets into an annual stipend. They impose a budget, based on actuarial probabilities. This might seem a trivial service (some pensioners might not even realize that it is a service). But if you asked a 65-year-old man who lacked a pension but did have, say, $100,000 in savings, how much he could live on, he likely would not have the vaguest idea. The answer is $654 a month: this is the annuity that $100,000 would purchase in the private market. It is the amount (after deducting the annuity provider's costs and profit) that the average person could live on so as to exhaust his savings at the very moment that he draws his final breath.
So the question arises: what if he lives longer than average? This is the beauty of a pension or of any collectivized savings pool. The pension plan can afford to support people who live to 90, because some of its members will expire at 66. It subsidizes its more robust members from the resources of those who die young. This is why a 401(k) is not a true substitute. Jeffrey Brown, an associate finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a staff member of the president's Social Security commission, notes that as baby boomers who have nest eggs in place of pensions begin to retire, they will be faced with a daunting question: ''How do I make this last a lifetime?''”
By a happy coincidence, you can compare Lowenstein’s article with a solid conservative ideologue’s sense that the nation has to gird up its loins to sacrifice retirement (except, of course, for the golden parachute crowd): Sebastian Mallaby’s “Why do the dirty old vecks need more than a pot to piss in, oh my droogs” – oops, I got the title wrong. Curiously, Mallaby’s article about the decline of savings entirely neglects mentioning that, since 1980, we have been living within the heady framework of Reaganomics – hence setting up the cardboard leftwing analysis, giving us weasel statistics about the upward climb of “household income” (a nice way of disguising the fact that household’s now are putting two breadwinners, instead of one, in the labor market), etc., etc. Such low level mendacities are necessary to promote a counterfeit vision of poverty as the nation itself becomes wealthier. It is rather like the hypnotists pendulum, which you are supposed to concentrate on, forgetting all other contexts and sensory inputs. Amazing how it works. One should always remember that the Washington Post is the happy hunting ground of James Glassman, a man whose prophecies of 36000 Dow were so touted on the right partly because the pure guarantor state, with each man an "owner," only benefits a few if you don't postulate an increase in the value of equities that can only be achieved by a combination of the Ubermensch and Warren Buffett.
Lowenstein’s article touches on an area LI avoided, in sketching out the large scale picture of the rivalry between two models of the social welfare state that deepened in the Reagan era. One of the characteristics of that era was the capture of foreign investment by American firms, which then floated the re-structuring of those firms. This, of course, happened within another re-structuring, as manufacturing finally sought the low labor costs of the third world. These two movements were in tandem. It would probably surprise a lot of Americans that the Reagan commerce department sponsored seminars for companies to show them how to move operations to Mexico. It isn’t something one expects of an American government. But of course they did.
I avoided, however, a domestic source of the transformation of investment. As Lowenstein acutely puts it:
“During most of the 90's the decline in pension coverage was barely lamented. It was not that big companies were folding up their plans (for the most part, they were not) but that newer, smaller companies weren't offering them. As the small companies grew into big ones (think Dell, or Starbucks, or Home Depot), traditional pensions covered less of the private-sector landscape. This did not seem like a very big deal. Younger workers envisioned mobile careers for themselves and many did not want pension strings tying them to a single employer. And most were able to put money aside in 401(k)'s, often matched by an employer contribution.
It happened that 401(k)'s, which were authorized by a change in the tax code in 1978 and which began to blossom in the early 1980's, coincided with a great upswing in the stock market. It is possible that they helped to cause the upswing.”
The new range of financial instruments open to people in the middle class who had pretty much forgotten their parents’ stock buying craze of the twenties might have inflated the amount of money seeking return, but the rate of return also responded to a new aggressiveness on the part of union pension fund managers. Although it seems counter-intuitive, union pension fund managers were demanding return that could only come about by making company’s much more efficient. And that could most easily be achieved by … cutting labor costs. One of the paradoxes of the Keynesian economy is that harmonizing the interests of the socially upward trending working class with the governing class could mean, in the long term, that the working class profited from its own demise. This is one of the reasons class, as a category of social analysis, is not a great predictor – there is no homogenous class interest at any one point.
But I digress into idle chatter. One of the arguments of the rightwing drive to terminate the government’s direct role in social welfare in favor of the indirect role of the guarantor state is an old neo-classical chestnut – while in the short term, certain people in the working class might be hurt by investments dependent on the higher rate of return that comes from cutting labor costs, in the long run they will benefit from the efficiencies such “reforms” will bring. This ignores a number of problems:
a, the fact that the system has formed around a market in social goods that has hyper-inflated. The causes of that hyper-inflation – in medicine and in education, for example – have been curiously neglected. It is as if it were natural that, while computers get more high tech and cheaper, medicine gets more high tech and expensive.
b, the notion of a mobilized, job switching population innovating to keep out of the poverty trap benefits a certain few. There’s really no benefit to switching jobs if you are a fireman, or a teacher, etc., etc. In other words, the amount of social return on human capital is wildly exaggerated in the pure guarantor state ideology. To encourage job switching made a certain sense in an economy liquidating its manufacturing base. But it doesn't make sense for the vast amount of the working population.
and finally, a problem absent Lowenstein’s excellent article,
c, the shift towards guaranteed benefits, which made possible the acceptance of a much lower increase in the average wage for workers, occurred at the same time that the compensations for the upper management class exploded. There is a huge cost to the increase in the share of wealth by the upper percentiles, but that cost is only visible over time – that is, the cost starts showing up as the long term guaranteed benefits devolve from the virtual to the actual. And, at this point, the concentration is entirely on analyzing that line of development that led to auto workers having to work merely thirty years on the assembly line and retiring with a lordly 18 thou per year – etc.
Lowenstein is good about comparing the supposed superiority of the benefits of the guarantor state, with its 401(k)s, against the “socialism”, as the George Will types like to put it, of the traditional pension plan. As one expected, the old rule applies: the richer we are, the poorer we are.
“A 401(k), on the other hand, promises nothing. It's merely a license to defer taxes -- an individual savings plan. The employer might contribute some money, which is why 401(k)'s are known as ''defined contribution'' plans. Or it might not. Even if the company does contribute, it offers no assurance that the money will be enough to retire on, nor does it get involved with managing the account; that's up to the worker. These disadvantages were, in the 90's, somehow perceived (with the help of exuberant marketing pitches by mutual-fund firms) to be advantages: 401(k)'s let workers manage their own assets; they were a road map to economic freedom.
Post-bubble, the picture looks different. Various people have studied how investors perform in their 401(k)'s. According to Alicia Munnell, a pension expert at Boston College and previously a White House economist, pension funds over the long haul earn slightly more than the average 401(k) holder. Among the latter, those who do worse than average, of course, have no protection. Moreover, pensions typically annuitize -- that is, they convert a worker's retirement assets into an annual stipend. They impose a budget, based on actuarial probabilities. This might seem a trivial service (some pensioners might not even realize that it is a service). But if you asked a 65-year-old man who lacked a pension but did have, say, $100,000 in savings, how much he could live on, he likely would not have the vaguest idea. The answer is $654 a month: this is the annuity that $100,000 would purchase in the private market. It is the amount (after deducting the annuity provider's costs and profit) that the average person could live on so as to exhaust his savings at the very moment that he draws his final breath.
So the question arises: what if he lives longer than average? This is the beauty of a pension or of any collectivized savings pool. The pension plan can afford to support people who live to 90, because some of its members will expire at 66. It subsidizes its more robust members from the resources of those who die young. This is why a 401(k) is not a true substitute. Jeffrey Brown, an associate finance professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a staff member of the president's Social Security commission, notes that as baby boomers who have nest eggs in place of pensions begin to retire, they will be faced with a daunting question: ''How do I make this last a lifetime?''”
By a happy coincidence, you can compare Lowenstein’s article with a solid conservative ideologue’s sense that the nation has to gird up its loins to sacrifice retirement (except, of course, for the golden parachute crowd): Sebastian Mallaby’s “Why do the dirty old vecks need more than a pot to piss in, oh my droogs” – oops, I got the title wrong. Curiously, Mallaby’s article about the decline of savings entirely neglects mentioning that, since 1980, we have been living within the heady framework of Reaganomics – hence setting up the cardboard leftwing analysis, giving us weasel statistics about the upward climb of “household income” (a nice way of disguising the fact that household’s now are putting two breadwinners, instead of one, in the labor market), etc., etc. Such low level mendacities are necessary to promote a counterfeit vision of poverty as the nation itself becomes wealthier. It is rather like the hypnotists pendulum, which you are supposed to concentrate on, forgetting all other contexts and sensory inputs. Amazing how it works. One should always remember that the Washington Post is the happy hunting ground of James Glassman, a man whose prophecies of 36000 Dow were so touted on the right partly because the pure guarantor state, with each man an "owner," only benefits a few if you don't postulate an increase in the value of equities that can only be achieved by a combination of the Ubermensch and Warren Buffett.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Chapter 10 – Party of the Jealous God
LI’s far flung correspondent and part time hitman, Mr. T. in NYC, thinks this is the worst chapter in the book so far. He might be right. Certainly it is… facile comes to mind. A little too facile. But I need these characters, I need the sound of their voices, and I think I know why.
Anyway, please comment.
Chapter 10 – Party of the Jealous God (first three pages)
Alexander Stitching’s first intimation of fame reached him in 1974, when he led the neutralist side in a debate at Oxford (“Resolved: A Curse on both their Houses”). The debate was televised. Stitch’s team narrowly lost, which led to much shedding of admonitory and horrified ink in the Tory tabloids (“A Generation of Vipers”), and an editorial in the Times. Stitch had ventured the opinion that Harold Wilson, the Labor Prime Minister, was a “wart on the big bare bottom of capitalism,” which was, as he hoped it would be, much repeated. This remark was all the more newsworthy in that Stitching’s father had served in the cabinet of Wilson’s first administration, back in the sixties. Stitching’s father had been the minister of some very worthy office – transportation, nutrition, something very infrastructural. Since being ennobled in 1968, he’d retired to the scummy pond, crumbling house, and various quantities of moony sheep (the result of a complicated system of grazing leases held by neighboring farmers that the minister could somehow never break) on the clovered hillsides that constituted the family estate in the South of Ireland.
When Joan met Stitch, he’d been out of college for five years. He’d invested that time in writing essays for British journals in a style that derived its absurdities from Waugh, and its politics from Trotsky. It was all very exciting. When not radicalizing in the privileged and dulcet tones of the propertied classes, he was off reporting on places in the Third World where guerilla warfare seemed likely to break out at any moment. Joan met him a couple of days after he’d disembarked from a plane taking him back from the Philippines. How were the Philippines, Joan had wanted to know on the morning after (which she had not even wanted to avoid), and he’d said, “you never quite know what’s goin’ on.” He was using the voice of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Joan laughed. “Really,” he resumed in his own more rounded vocables, “the question is whether Marcos is going to simply flee with his piles of loot, or whether he is going to go the way of the dictatorial death star – the collapse inward, the soldiers amassed in the street firing upon the unarmed protestors day one, the soldiery turning the weapons on the officers week two, police stations blazing brightly in the night as the center does not hold, and of course the old standby of some final flight out on your Yankee issue Huey helicopter. That, my dear, is the Philippines.”
“I want to be there for the Huey.”
”Good girl. Here’s something: what the idle rich do, and that includes a bunch of men who’ve made their piles in that beautiful Laotian H during the Great Imperialist venture in Southeast Asia, is they literally rent units of the army. For a party, say, they will pay off some captain who will commandeer a passage through the streets for the cars of the guests, line up his men with their guns, and will literally shoot interlopers. That is, your average Filipino trying to trot home by the usual route, or some such. Quite fantastically corrupt.”
Sex and drugs were mostly good the first year. The optimum, Joan thought at the time, was finding a man who was consistent about sex and drugs. And that was hard. Mostly the drugs/drinking – Joan didn’t distinguish between the two -- was one thing, and the sex was another. Mostly the man got stoned and then got unbearably talkative and egotistical. Or the man went down on her and his tongue started to wear her out, like an over-energetic puppy greeting its mistress. Or he took tit time like she was some kind of wet nurse. The man clambered aboard her and his dick turned to an industrial product, and he was off plumbing on some plumbing expedition, thinking that if he wacked hard enough, and Joan moaned loud enough (usually at the frustration of it all), a sweet would drop out of the machine. Or the man was too liberal. The man would say, sex isn’t dirty, mama, sex is natural. Joan would silently comment on the oddity of thinking that there was some opposition being stated here, as though the dirty were not the recoil from the natural. She wanted to preserve dirty, dirty was good. But Stitch made her come more than anyone had, in mewling, shameful joy, he had a dick of flesh and blood and nicely proportioned, and very sweet, vulnerable testicles -- with the left one sagging below the right one, and himself rather conflicted about that asymmetry. So fucking was good, mostly, he payed proper attention to her equipment instead of thinking of it as some kind of uncomplicated sheath God created for his own, and it was very socialable. They talked afterwards, drowsily. He made her laugh, he was articulate through the stresses of alcohol and the varying focuses of pot, and the one time they dropped acid together he said, I’m not doing this anymore with you, and he was right. He was surefooted, she thought.
Anyway, please comment.
Chapter 10 – Party of the Jealous God (first three pages)
Alexander Stitching’s first intimation of fame reached him in 1974, when he led the neutralist side in a debate at Oxford (“Resolved: A Curse on both their Houses”). The debate was televised. Stitch’s team narrowly lost, which led to much shedding of admonitory and horrified ink in the Tory tabloids (“A Generation of Vipers”), and an editorial in the Times. Stitch had ventured the opinion that Harold Wilson, the Labor Prime Minister, was a “wart on the big bare bottom of capitalism,” which was, as he hoped it would be, much repeated. This remark was all the more newsworthy in that Stitching’s father had served in the cabinet of Wilson’s first administration, back in the sixties. Stitching’s father had been the minister of some very worthy office – transportation, nutrition, something very infrastructural. Since being ennobled in 1968, he’d retired to the scummy pond, crumbling house, and various quantities of moony sheep (the result of a complicated system of grazing leases held by neighboring farmers that the minister could somehow never break) on the clovered hillsides that constituted the family estate in the South of Ireland.
When Joan met Stitch, he’d been out of college for five years. He’d invested that time in writing essays for British journals in a style that derived its absurdities from Waugh, and its politics from Trotsky. It was all very exciting. When not radicalizing in the privileged and dulcet tones of the propertied classes, he was off reporting on places in the Third World where guerilla warfare seemed likely to break out at any moment. Joan met him a couple of days after he’d disembarked from a plane taking him back from the Philippines. How were the Philippines, Joan had wanted to know on the morning after (which she had not even wanted to avoid), and he’d said, “you never quite know what’s goin’ on.” He was using the voice of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Joan laughed. “Really,” he resumed in his own more rounded vocables, “the question is whether Marcos is going to simply flee with his piles of loot, or whether he is going to go the way of the dictatorial death star – the collapse inward, the soldiers amassed in the street firing upon the unarmed protestors day one, the soldiery turning the weapons on the officers week two, police stations blazing brightly in the night as the center does not hold, and of course the old standby of some final flight out on your Yankee issue Huey helicopter. That, my dear, is the Philippines.”
“I want to be there for the Huey.”
”Good girl. Here’s something: what the idle rich do, and that includes a bunch of men who’ve made their piles in that beautiful Laotian H during the Great Imperialist venture in Southeast Asia, is they literally rent units of the army. For a party, say, they will pay off some captain who will commandeer a passage through the streets for the cars of the guests, line up his men with their guns, and will literally shoot interlopers. That is, your average Filipino trying to trot home by the usual route, or some such. Quite fantastically corrupt.”
Sex and drugs were mostly good the first year. The optimum, Joan thought at the time, was finding a man who was consistent about sex and drugs. And that was hard. Mostly the drugs/drinking – Joan didn’t distinguish between the two -- was one thing, and the sex was another. Mostly the man got stoned and then got unbearably talkative and egotistical. Or the man went down on her and his tongue started to wear her out, like an over-energetic puppy greeting its mistress. Or he took tit time like she was some kind of wet nurse. The man clambered aboard her and his dick turned to an industrial product, and he was off plumbing on some plumbing expedition, thinking that if he wacked hard enough, and Joan moaned loud enough (usually at the frustration of it all), a sweet would drop out of the machine. Or the man was too liberal. The man would say, sex isn’t dirty, mama, sex is natural. Joan would silently comment on the oddity of thinking that there was some opposition being stated here, as though the dirty were not the recoil from the natural. She wanted to preserve dirty, dirty was good. But Stitch made her come more than anyone had, in mewling, shameful joy, he had a dick of flesh and blood and nicely proportioned, and very sweet, vulnerable testicles -- with the left one sagging below the right one, and himself rather conflicted about that asymmetry. So fucking was good, mostly, he payed proper attention to her equipment instead of thinking of it as some kind of uncomplicated sheath God created for his own, and it was very socialable. They talked afterwards, drowsily. He made her laugh, he was articulate through the stresses of alcohol and the varying focuses of pot, and the one time they dropped acid together he said, I’m not doing this anymore with you, and he was right. He was surefooted, she thought.
the gods come down to earth, a high ranking official said
One would have hoped that the Plame case would be a wake up call… to the press. Alas, business goes on as usual. The D.C. journalism that pours out is of such poor quality that one’s only hope is in the declining numbers reading this gruel.
Two examples, one merely of idiocy – Adam Nagourney’s specialty – and the other of D.C. cliquespeak, punctuating an otherwise comprehensive article in the Washington Post.
Nagourney is almost on LI’s informal list of people not to make fun of or pay attention to – people like Ann Coulter and the like. But his political analysis of the Republican Party’s problems is such a typical paste whatever job, the usual stuff he turns in, that one wants to wring some kind of example from it, if only to compensate for the minimal degradation reading it brings to the old retina.
So notice, first the article gives us a banal overview of the Bush and Rove plan to “overhaul the nation’s political architecture.” This is a use of language in which language has faded to blanks; otherwise a writer would ask himself what overhauling architecture could possibly mean. What, in fact, is overhauling, and has Nagourney ever been in its neighborhood? Most dictionaries – my webster’s, for instance – defines it as making needed repairs. This is of course not what Nagourney means – he means, pretty simply, change. They came to Washington to change the relation between the Republican and Democratic party. But change is, of course, not fleshy enough, doesn’t have a journalistic bite. It is simply butter, and what Nagourney is trying to do is pour sugar over his graf. Hence the awkward and senseless overhauling of political architecture that is going on – as if Rove and Bush are out there with their rulers, measuring the Lincoln memorial.
The second paragraph contains the journalistic “some” – which is the way a journalist can emit his own view and pretend like he is reporting somebody else’s: “… some Republicans were suggesting this White House would be lucky to revive the ambitious legislative agenda Mr. Bush presented 10 months ago…” Surely, the some means some Republicans are suggesting something else. This little Republican went to the fair, this little Republican went wee wee wee all the way home.
Then we come to a quote from a Republican, Richard A. Viguerie. Viguerie thinks that Bush hasn’t been confrontational enough. Fair enough, that is what Viguerie thinks. But why the hell should we care? The comment is plastered into the piece with all the logic of an amateur surrealist gluing a picture of his cat to a painting of a triangle. There’s no attempt to see if the comment even makes any sense. Is it true that the Bush administration has been non-confrontational? To LI’s mind, that comment is wrong on many points, but surely, the one salient point is that Naguerney is writing this article in the wake of the Libby indictment. That indictment is not about a can’t we all get along attitude that has been dogging our friendly commander in chief. However, to confront Viguerie would require, well, non-triangulation. Or at least intelligent triangulation…
So okay, let’s waste no more time on AN. Turn, instead, to a really good reporter: Barton Gellman. His Washington Post piece is perhaps the best summary of all the currents in the case so far. I emailed it to a usually non-political friend, who doesn’t really want to wade through a lot of detritus to find out what is happening.
But the piece is riddled with anonymous citations even as it gives us the infamous Miller episode in which she agrees to allow Libby to anonymously comment as a House Staffer. Somehow, it has not yet sunk in: we simply can’t be confident that this isn’t happening all the time. For instance, this:
“The chain of events that led to Friday's indictment can be traced as far back as 1991, when an unremarkable burglary took place at the embassy of Niger in Rome. All that turned up missing was a quantity of official letterhead with "Republique du Niger" at its top.
More than 10 years later, according to a retired high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, a businessman named Rocco Martino approached the CIA station chief in Rome. An occasional informant for U.S., British, French and Italian intelligence services, Martino brought documents on Niger government letterhead describing secret plans for the sale of uranium to Iraq.”
What is this retired high-ranking U.S. intelligence official doing here? What is the purpose of this cut out? Does it really tell us that something happened 10 years later? Why not quote the Italian paper La Repubblica about this? Or why not demand that the high ranking retired U.S. intelligence official give his name? Why should we believe him at all? What does high-ranking mean? The whole thing stinks of what the Washington press has become – a venue for D.C. cliques to battle each other. That would be fine with me, if only the power of these cliques was proportionate to their intelligence. They would all be dog catching, if this were true, and we would all be better off. But unfortunately, they can cause great mischief in the Republic and the world. For instance, they can collectively cause the death of 35 to 60 thousand Iraqis in three years.
So LI went and counted the anonymous sources. There’s the retired spook. There’s the “top official, a longtime ally of Libby's.” There’s the “senior official who worked with [Libby].” There’s the “senior intelligence officer who knew of Libby's inquiries about Wilson and Plame.” There’s the slothful “Republican officials expressed the hope at that time that Ashcroft's recusal would provide political cover for the White House if no indictment resulted. One said the move would "depoliticize" the case on the eve of presidential campaign season.” The latter is particularly funny – a quote from a “one” who is a “Republican official” – in other words, a quote from a something that isn’t even clear what it is. A Republican politician? A lobbyist? A what? Gellman obviously wanted to simply say that Bush tried to depoliticize the investigation, but to say that and satisfy the compulsive habits of the journalist, he had to find a way of saying it "objectively" -- but it was fine to use a fictitious personage to satisfy that need. These are the kind of paradoxes that are shot through the current state of American journalism.
In essence, the newspaper business is giving us cut-outs who have less reality than the gods who would materialize in the Iliad, aiding or hindering the Greeks. They do this, they say, to put a brake on government abuses. Really? What abuses are those? Like, say, going to war as a vanity project for a dimwitted president? Right, they really put a brake on that one. The lifeless, meaningless language, the inability to explain anything clearly, since all explanations have to be triangulated – and not a clue, in the news business, that anything is wrong.
Amazing.
Two examples, one merely of idiocy – Adam Nagourney’s specialty – and the other of D.C. cliquespeak, punctuating an otherwise comprehensive article in the Washington Post.
Nagourney is almost on LI’s informal list of people not to make fun of or pay attention to – people like Ann Coulter and the like. But his political analysis of the Republican Party’s problems is such a typical paste whatever job, the usual stuff he turns in, that one wants to wring some kind of example from it, if only to compensate for the minimal degradation reading it brings to the old retina.
So notice, first the article gives us a banal overview of the Bush and Rove plan to “overhaul the nation’s political architecture.” This is a use of language in which language has faded to blanks; otherwise a writer would ask himself what overhauling architecture could possibly mean. What, in fact, is overhauling, and has Nagourney ever been in its neighborhood? Most dictionaries – my webster’s, for instance – defines it as making needed repairs. This is of course not what Nagourney means – he means, pretty simply, change. They came to Washington to change the relation between the Republican and Democratic party. But change is, of course, not fleshy enough, doesn’t have a journalistic bite. It is simply butter, and what Nagourney is trying to do is pour sugar over his graf. Hence the awkward and senseless overhauling of political architecture that is going on – as if Rove and Bush are out there with their rulers, measuring the Lincoln memorial.
The second paragraph contains the journalistic “some” – which is the way a journalist can emit his own view and pretend like he is reporting somebody else’s: “… some Republicans were suggesting this White House would be lucky to revive the ambitious legislative agenda Mr. Bush presented 10 months ago…” Surely, the some means some Republicans are suggesting something else. This little Republican went to the fair, this little Republican went wee wee wee all the way home.
Then we come to a quote from a Republican, Richard A. Viguerie. Viguerie thinks that Bush hasn’t been confrontational enough. Fair enough, that is what Viguerie thinks. But why the hell should we care? The comment is plastered into the piece with all the logic of an amateur surrealist gluing a picture of his cat to a painting of a triangle. There’s no attempt to see if the comment even makes any sense. Is it true that the Bush administration has been non-confrontational? To LI’s mind, that comment is wrong on many points, but surely, the one salient point is that Naguerney is writing this article in the wake of the Libby indictment. That indictment is not about a can’t we all get along attitude that has been dogging our friendly commander in chief. However, to confront Viguerie would require, well, non-triangulation. Or at least intelligent triangulation…
So okay, let’s waste no more time on AN. Turn, instead, to a really good reporter: Barton Gellman. His Washington Post piece is perhaps the best summary of all the currents in the case so far. I emailed it to a usually non-political friend, who doesn’t really want to wade through a lot of detritus to find out what is happening.
But the piece is riddled with anonymous citations even as it gives us the infamous Miller episode in which she agrees to allow Libby to anonymously comment as a House Staffer. Somehow, it has not yet sunk in: we simply can’t be confident that this isn’t happening all the time. For instance, this:
“The chain of events that led to Friday's indictment can be traced as far back as 1991, when an unremarkable burglary took place at the embassy of Niger in Rome. All that turned up missing was a quantity of official letterhead with "Republique du Niger" at its top.
More than 10 years later, according to a retired high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, a businessman named Rocco Martino approached the CIA station chief in Rome. An occasional informant for U.S., British, French and Italian intelligence services, Martino brought documents on Niger government letterhead describing secret plans for the sale of uranium to Iraq.”
What is this retired high-ranking U.S. intelligence official doing here? What is the purpose of this cut out? Does it really tell us that something happened 10 years later? Why not quote the Italian paper La Repubblica about this? Or why not demand that the high ranking retired U.S. intelligence official give his name? Why should we believe him at all? What does high-ranking mean? The whole thing stinks of what the Washington press has become – a venue for D.C. cliques to battle each other. That would be fine with me, if only the power of these cliques was proportionate to their intelligence. They would all be dog catching, if this were true, and we would all be better off. But unfortunately, they can cause great mischief in the Republic and the world. For instance, they can collectively cause the death of 35 to 60 thousand Iraqis in three years.
So LI went and counted the anonymous sources. There’s the retired spook. There’s the “top official, a longtime ally of Libby's.” There’s the “senior official who worked with [Libby].” There’s the “senior intelligence officer who knew of Libby's inquiries about Wilson and Plame.” There’s the slothful “Republican officials expressed the hope at that time that Ashcroft's recusal would provide political cover for the White House if no indictment resulted. One said the move would "depoliticize" the case on the eve of presidential campaign season.” The latter is particularly funny – a quote from a “one” who is a “Republican official” – in other words, a quote from a something that isn’t even clear what it is. A Republican politician? A lobbyist? A what? Gellman obviously wanted to simply say that Bush tried to depoliticize the investigation, but to say that and satisfy the compulsive habits of the journalist, he had to find a way of saying it "objectively" -- but it was fine to use a fictitious personage to satisfy that need. These are the kind of paradoxes that are shot through the current state of American journalism.
In essence, the newspaper business is giving us cut-outs who have less reality than the gods who would materialize in the Iliad, aiding or hindering the Greeks. They do this, they say, to put a brake on government abuses. Really? What abuses are those? Like, say, going to war as a vanity project for a dimwitted president? Right, they really put a brake on that one. The lifeless, meaningless language, the inability to explain anything clearly, since all explanations have to be triangulated – and not a clue, in the news business, that anything is wrong.
Amazing.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
turning thoreau on his head
LI likes to find out things that challenge what we thought we knew – especially if the challenge comes from the direction of what we think makes the most sense. Lately, there has been a lot of bustle made about Jared Diamond’s theories of the biological and material constraints on civilization. For those interested in such things, we’d urge you to pick up Charles Mann’s 1491. Mann is a journalist who has worked for Science and other magazines. His book is a great sweeping up of the new Americanist school that has emerged since the late fifties. This school takes its bearings from a demographic theory: the American continents were much, much more populous than the early 20th century anthropologists ever thought. The corollary is that the continents were de-populated. While the Americanist estimates of just how many people existed in the world Christopher Columbus bumped into, the old estimate of 10 million tops has long been trashed, and the new controversy is really about where to put the population between 40 and one hundred million. In other words, the New World was more populous than Europe.
This change in demographic perspective has been accompanied by a lot of archaeological, bio-historical and other work, all of it progressing in a sort of gamut of academic fire, as sides pepper each other with counter-evidence and withering put-downs of competence, ideology and the like.
The chapter that truly fascinated us in Mann’s book was about the Amazon. It presents a picture of the Amazon so different to what we are accustomed to that we had to check it out.
Mann presents the thesis held by more and more researchers that, far from being a thinly populated wilderness, the Amazon jungle is, in many ways, the result of human “terraforming.” That is, the composition of the jungle, and the odd emergence of a soil type that occurs nowhere else – terra preta – testifies to massive and continuous human ‘interference.” The Amazonian primitives, the slash and burn tribes – these are cultures that formed after the great dying. Far from being a people without history, the Yanomami, for instance, are a people who fled from the history bearing down on them, and adopted a nomadic life in the seventeenth and eighteenth century partly because their old agricultural lifestyle was no longer an option, and partly because the introduction of metal chopping implements meant that the forest would be used in a different way.
In a recent article by Raffles and Winkler-Prins, “FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON AMAZONIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: Transformations of Rivers and Streams,”in the Latin American Research Review (2003) there is a nice summary of the point Mann presents at length in his book:
In this research report, we present both new and previously published material on the manipulation of Amazonian landscapes by local populations. We understand these data as contributing to an emergent body of work in Amazonianist social scientific scholarship that rejects the notion of a pristine rain forest and the associated ineffectuality of local populations, and instead proposes a more hybrid conception of a "natural-cultural" regional landscape (e.g., Balee 1989, 1998; Denevan 1992, 2001, n.d.; Hecht and Posey 1989; Raffles 1999, 2002; Roosevelt 1980, 1991; Smith 1995; cf. Demerritt 1994; Haraway 1997; Latour 1993). Part
of this argument is the claim that nature is socially constructed as a discursive practice and that the contemporary opposition between nature and culture is historically and culturally specific to post-Enlighterunent European thought (Latour 1993; Strathem 1981; Williams 1980). More
specifically, however, this body of research insists on the biophysical materiality of Amazonian nature, arguing for the recogrution of these landscapes as cultural in an older sense of embodying social labor, of being worked and transformed by humans (cf. Sauer [1925] 1963; Williams
1973; Doolittle 1984). It is this realist aspect of the argument that we build on and expand in this paper.
Recent empirical research suggests that the forests of the Amazon basin have undergone substantial manipulation and management since long before modem development of the region and, indeed, prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World. Researchers have documented
in detail the long-term manipulation of forest composition and species density (e.g., Balee 1994; Moran 1996; Roosevelt 1999,2000), with Balee, AMAZONIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 167
for example, estimating that 12 percent of Amazonian forest is currently of "biocultural" origin (Balee 1989,14). In building a convincing account of region-wide, landscape-scale manipulation and transformation, scholars point to anthropogenic forests managed for the extraction of particular tree crops (Balee 1994), to trails planted with useful foods by traveling or semi-nomadic people (Hecht and Posey 1989; Posey 1985), to managed forest islands amidst a dominant savannah landscape (Posey1985,1992), and to the long-term use of what were once thought to be abandoned swiddens (Denevan and Padoch 1987; Irvine 1989). In addition,
studies of the anthropogenic origins of the extensive areas of black or dark earth soils known as terra preta do indio have revealed a sigruficant human contribution to pedogenesis (Smith 1980; Woods and McCann 1999; McCann, Woods, and Meyer 2001; Glaser et al. 2001; Petersen, Neves, and Heckenberger 2001) and researchers have also identified other types of soil management, including concentric ring agriculture and in-field burning (Hecht and Posey 1989), sediment trapping in the floodplain (Padoch and Pinedo-Vasquez 1999), and organic matter
harvesting (WinklerPrins).”
It is interesting, to us, that Derrida’s first challenge to what he called logocentrism is an analysis of the “writing lesson” in Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques that occurred in an Amazon Indian village. Levi-Strauss was certainly the mid-century’s representative of the idea that the Indians were people without history – instead, they were the people of structured myth. Myths being autonomous things, in Levi-Strauss’ ethnography, the search for historical linkage between myths and the historic existence of Amerindian cultures was one of those fatal quests, like looking for the Fountain of Youth, in which the researcher would simply get lost. Keeping nature and culture conceptually separate provided the basis for understanding culture itself – or rather, culture was the infinite task of making that separation. Mann’s mindblowing idea is that the wilderness was not just an “ideological” formation justifying the European conquest – it was, rather, a partial vision of the ecological reality left behind when a keystone species is knocked out of the system. The species, in this case, was the Indian, debilitated in a culturally annihilating way by sickness and mortality. The accounts of early settlers on the Eastern Seabord all pointed out that the land that they were settling seemed parklike – rather than overgrown forest, they encountered forests that had obviously been maintained, through culling fires, and cultivated farmland on the milpas principle of planting maize, beans and squash. But these early accounts were discounted as the decades went by, and the myth of the nomadic, hunter gatherer Indian was formed. Not so much a myth, one should say – rather, the hunter gatherer social form was a logical retraction to an economically efficient form of living in a landscape in which you are suddenly and horribly shrunk. Living like a remnant.
Mann uses two examples to make his case that the North American wilderness experienced by colonizers in the 17th and 18th century was a very different place from the one encountered by De Soto in the 16th century. One is the bison. When Lasalle came into the Southern Mississippi in the late 17th century, he recorded immense herds of Bison. Indeed, the Buffalo was reported from New York to Georgia in 17th and 18th century accounts.
This is in odd contrast to the chronicle of the Spanish explorers in the 16th century, particularly De Soto. In the same area that Lasalle found, one hundred years later, to be practically empty of humans and full of bison, De Soto found just the reverse. There were Indian villages all over the place, but his chronicler mentions not one bison, although he mentions other animals.
Similarly, in the 18th century, we have plenty of accounts of passenger pigeons. The passenger pigeons seem dominant, and incredibly plentiful. Yet in archaelogical digs in Illinois and in Ohio that turn up plenty of bird bones in settlements in the 14th and 15th century – bones of birds that were eaten – there are relatively few passenger pigeon bones. Mann speculates that the bison and the passenger pigeon populations exploded as the Indian population crashed. This would turn the way we think of the 18th century upside down – the settlement of the colonies was coincident with the growth of the wilderness, not vice versa.
This, to LI’s mind, is definitely a mindblowing thing. It would definitely turn that notion of pristine America, which we get from Thoreau, on its head.
This change in demographic perspective has been accompanied by a lot of archaeological, bio-historical and other work, all of it progressing in a sort of gamut of academic fire, as sides pepper each other with counter-evidence and withering put-downs of competence, ideology and the like.
The chapter that truly fascinated us in Mann’s book was about the Amazon. It presents a picture of the Amazon so different to what we are accustomed to that we had to check it out.
Mann presents the thesis held by more and more researchers that, far from being a thinly populated wilderness, the Amazon jungle is, in many ways, the result of human “terraforming.” That is, the composition of the jungle, and the odd emergence of a soil type that occurs nowhere else – terra preta – testifies to massive and continuous human ‘interference.” The Amazonian primitives, the slash and burn tribes – these are cultures that formed after the great dying. Far from being a people without history, the Yanomami, for instance, are a people who fled from the history bearing down on them, and adopted a nomadic life in the seventeenth and eighteenth century partly because their old agricultural lifestyle was no longer an option, and partly because the introduction of metal chopping implements meant that the forest would be used in a different way.
In a recent article by Raffles and Winkler-Prins, “FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON AMAZONIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: Transformations of Rivers and Streams,”in the Latin American Research Review (2003) there is a nice summary of the point Mann presents at length in his book:
In this research report, we present both new and previously published material on the manipulation of Amazonian landscapes by local populations. We understand these data as contributing to an emergent body of work in Amazonianist social scientific scholarship that rejects the notion of a pristine rain forest and the associated ineffectuality of local populations, and instead proposes a more hybrid conception of a "natural-cultural" regional landscape (e.g., Balee 1989, 1998; Denevan 1992, 2001, n.d.; Hecht and Posey 1989; Raffles 1999, 2002; Roosevelt 1980, 1991; Smith 1995; cf. Demerritt 1994; Haraway 1997; Latour 1993). Part
of this argument is the claim that nature is socially constructed as a discursive practice and that the contemporary opposition between nature and culture is historically and culturally specific to post-Enlighterunent European thought (Latour 1993; Strathem 1981; Williams 1980). More
specifically, however, this body of research insists on the biophysical materiality of Amazonian nature, arguing for the recogrution of these landscapes as cultural in an older sense of embodying social labor, of being worked and transformed by humans (cf. Sauer [1925] 1963; Williams
1973; Doolittle 1984). It is this realist aspect of the argument that we build on and expand in this paper.
Recent empirical research suggests that the forests of the Amazon basin have undergone substantial manipulation and management since long before modem development of the region and, indeed, prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World. Researchers have documented
in detail the long-term manipulation of forest composition and species density (e.g., Balee 1994; Moran 1996; Roosevelt 1999,2000), with Balee, AMAZONIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 167
for example, estimating that 12 percent of Amazonian forest is currently of "biocultural" origin (Balee 1989,14). In building a convincing account of region-wide, landscape-scale manipulation and transformation, scholars point to anthropogenic forests managed for the extraction of particular tree crops (Balee 1994), to trails planted with useful foods by traveling or semi-nomadic people (Hecht and Posey 1989; Posey 1985), to managed forest islands amidst a dominant savannah landscape (Posey1985,1992), and to the long-term use of what were once thought to be abandoned swiddens (Denevan and Padoch 1987; Irvine 1989). In addition,
studies of the anthropogenic origins of the extensive areas of black or dark earth soils known as terra preta do indio have revealed a sigruficant human contribution to pedogenesis (Smith 1980; Woods and McCann 1999; McCann, Woods, and Meyer 2001; Glaser et al. 2001; Petersen, Neves, and Heckenberger 2001) and researchers have also identified other types of soil management, including concentric ring agriculture and in-field burning (Hecht and Posey 1989), sediment trapping in the floodplain (Padoch and Pinedo-Vasquez 1999), and organic matter
harvesting (WinklerPrins).”
It is interesting, to us, that Derrida’s first challenge to what he called logocentrism is an analysis of the “writing lesson” in Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques that occurred in an Amazon Indian village. Levi-Strauss was certainly the mid-century’s representative of the idea that the Indians were people without history – instead, they were the people of structured myth. Myths being autonomous things, in Levi-Strauss’ ethnography, the search for historical linkage between myths and the historic existence of Amerindian cultures was one of those fatal quests, like looking for the Fountain of Youth, in which the researcher would simply get lost. Keeping nature and culture conceptually separate provided the basis for understanding culture itself – or rather, culture was the infinite task of making that separation. Mann’s mindblowing idea is that the wilderness was not just an “ideological” formation justifying the European conquest – it was, rather, a partial vision of the ecological reality left behind when a keystone species is knocked out of the system. The species, in this case, was the Indian, debilitated in a culturally annihilating way by sickness and mortality. The accounts of early settlers on the Eastern Seabord all pointed out that the land that they were settling seemed parklike – rather than overgrown forest, they encountered forests that had obviously been maintained, through culling fires, and cultivated farmland on the milpas principle of planting maize, beans and squash. But these early accounts were discounted as the decades went by, and the myth of the nomadic, hunter gatherer Indian was formed. Not so much a myth, one should say – rather, the hunter gatherer social form was a logical retraction to an economically efficient form of living in a landscape in which you are suddenly and horribly shrunk. Living like a remnant.
Mann uses two examples to make his case that the North American wilderness experienced by colonizers in the 17th and 18th century was a very different place from the one encountered by De Soto in the 16th century. One is the bison. When Lasalle came into the Southern Mississippi in the late 17th century, he recorded immense herds of Bison. Indeed, the Buffalo was reported from New York to Georgia in 17th and 18th century accounts.
This is in odd contrast to the chronicle of the Spanish explorers in the 16th century, particularly De Soto. In the same area that Lasalle found, one hundred years later, to be practically empty of humans and full of bison, De Soto found just the reverse. There were Indian villages all over the place, but his chronicler mentions not one bison, although he mentions other animals.
Similarly, in the 18th century, we have plenty of accounts of passenger pigeons. The passenger pigeons seem dominant, and incredibly plentiful. Yet in archaelogical digs in Illinois and in Ohio that turn up plenty of bird bones in settlements in the 14th and 15th century – bones of birds that were eaten – there are relatively few passenger pigeon bones. Mann speculates that the bison and the passenger pigeon populations exploded as the Indian population crashed. This would turn the way we think of the 18th century upside down – the settlement of the colonies was coincident with the growth of the wilderness, not vice versa.
This, to LI’s mind, is definitely a mindblowing thing. It would definitely turn that notion of pristine America, which we get from Thoreau, on its head.
Friday, October 28, 2005
post coital, after the press conference post
Fitzgerald’s interview was a pretty impressive performance.
With the spotlight on Cheney’s office, we hope some reporters will take a look at the Oil-for-food investigation that wrapped up this week. The headlines, of course, packaged the report in terms of nationalities – the dirty French, the dirty Russians. But that kind of packaging is a joke. Corporations involved in selling oil related equipment or buying oil from Iraq are necessarily of the scale to be multinationals. Our interest, really, is in the subsidiaries of Haliburton. We already know that, contrary to what Cheney claimed in the 2000 campaign, Haliburton companies Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Pump did business with Iraq. And we know that after the Clinton administration blocked Haliburton from dealing with Iraq from its American base, Haliburton did an end run through France. The dirty officials in France have never properly suffered, but the corporations involved in propping up Saddam haven’t either.
According to a WSJ summary in the April 28, 2004 edition:
“Halliburton, which has won business in the Gulf country since the war, did tens of millions of dollars of business with Iraq in the late 1990s, when it still was led by the current U.S. vice president, Dick Cheney. Much of that business was done through French units.
Halliburton won more than $30 million of deals with Mr. Hussein's Iraq in the 1990s, U.N. documents show.
The largest part came when Mr. Cheney led the company from 1996 to 2000. Mr. Cheney said during the 2000 election campaign that Halliburton had a policy against trading with Iraq. The Halliburton contracts mentioned in the U.N. documents involved units and joint ventures that came with the purchase of Dresser Inc. in 1998. Those units were sold from December 1999 to April 2001. "Contracts were initiated prior to the merger," a spokeswoman for Halliburton said.
At least one French unit, Dresser-Rand SA, part of a joint venture in which Halliburton had a 51% stake, registered $6 million of oil spare-parts sales with the U.N. oil-for-food program from 1998 to 2000, after Halliburton acquired Dresser, U.N. documents show.
Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., the French unit of another joint venture, signed about $25 million of Iraqi contracts at a time when Halliburton owned 49%, documents show.”
The article also makes the point that French companies, blocked by the Bush’s for bidding on Iraqi contracts, simply use their U.S. subsidiaries to do the bidding.
What is weird about the Halliburton business is that Cheney felt so comfortable simply lying about it in the 2000 election. Lying is Cheney hallmark – not the statement that can later be parsed apart into some miserable combination of half truths. Often, Bush’s statements come down to that – or come down to reneging on promises. This is the bottled water of politics – politicians are always experimenting with the unique relationship between the promise and the truth, that no man’s land of the performative. Cheney will actually make categorical statements that are simply untrue, bald as a baby lies. In this, he is a unique D.C. figure. And we hope that his being called to testify in the Libby trial, which seems inevitable, will up the ante on that unpleasant character trait.
PS – the best background story on the Fitzgerald investigation, we think, is Chris Lehman’s at the NY Obs. He quotes the right people (Bramford, Powers) who preserve a sense of the intelligence communities' histories. This is a traditional Republican scandal. They always have to do with some covert military aggression. They always have to do with erasing the boundary between intelligence and politics. And they are always peopled with brain dead enthusiasts and pipesmokers – the supposed gray eminences who are keeping control of things, the John Mitchells, the Poindexters, the Cheneys. I don’t think the article is yet online, more’s the pity
Douglas Feith looks more and more like the man who filled Oliver North’s shoes:
“The C.I.A. kept looking and saying, ‘We’re not finding any evidence,’” said James Bamford, the author of A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. “And the Pentagon was angry that this was coming out of the agency. And so that’s why they had this special unit. That’s why [David] Wurmser was in there—to become the anti-C.I.A.”
Mr. Wurmser, Vice President Cheney’s Middle East advisor, was recruited by Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith to create the Office of Special Plans, a policy group in the Pentagon formed to cherry-pick information that would provide the casus belli for invading Iraq. Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, famously referred to the unit’s handiwork as “a Chinese menu,” offering a readymade connoisseur’s choice of reasons to topple the Hussein regime in Iraq.
“It started within Feith’s Special Plans group,” said a former senior White House official who requested not to be named. “That’s where you first see this business of taking one’s animosity toward Langley and the agency and finding intelligence that would support one’s own position.”
This is so déjà vu, to those with the eyes to see it. And the background of these people have brushed against Republican scandals before. Remember, Cheney was Ford’s staffer advising on intelligence during the Church commission.
“The Plame leak is in itself evidence of how Bush administration officials failed to apprehend the most basic operations of intelligence. “I’ve talked with a number of people who knew [Valerie Plame Wilson] and worked with her,” said Burton Hersh, the author of The Old Boys, the groundbreaking study of the C.I.A.’s Cold War career. “And the whole idea that she [or] her undercover status was not that important is ridiculous. She was key to the effort to contain nuclear proliferation in the Third World. Once she’s taken out, her whole network of people can be exposed. That shows you a disconnect across the board. This was a network trying to keep jihadists from acquiring nuclear weapons …. You know, it’s hard enough to keep these people undercover. To lift that cover for short-term political advantage—that’s indefensible. And to punish Joe Wilson like this—it’s suicidal.”
...
Now for some fundraising news:
We had two more contributors yesterday. That makes a total of five for those t shirts. LI wants to get to that all important number of fifteen (all important because the Café Press then allows us to buy in bulk). So remember us when you are out there scoring that nickel bag and you think, I should throw an equal amount of money to a good cause – or at least a cause – or at least some public nuisance. That’s where LIMITED INC comes in: a public nuisance since 2001! With our famous motto (sic semper tyrannosaurus rex), we’ve provided high quality tips on wars, earthquakes and exactas, putting each reader a neck ahead of the maddening crowd.
So please, look at the cafepress site, and stuff that little paypal dealie with bread.
With the spotlight on Cheney’s office, we hope some reporters will take a look at the Oil-for-food investigation that wrapped up this week. The headlines, of course, packaged the report in terms of nationalities – the dirty French, the dirty Russians. But that kind of packaging is a joke. Corporations involved in selling oil related equipment or buying oil from Iraq are necessarily of the scale to be multinationals. Our interest, really, is in the subsidiaries of Haliburton. We already know that, contrary to what Cheney claimed in the 2000 campaign, Haliburton companies Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Pump did business with Iraq. And we know that after the Clinton administration blocked Haliburton from dealing with Iraq from its American base, Haliburton did an end run through France. The dirty officials in France have never properly suffered, but the corporations involved in propping up Saddam haven’t either.
According to a WSJ summary in the April 28, 2004 edition:
“Halliburton, which has won business in the Gulf country since the war, did tens of millions of dollars of business with Iraq in the late 1990s, when it still was led by the current U.S. vice president, Dick Cheney. Much of that business was done through French units.
Halliburton won more than $30 million of deals with Mr. Hussein's Iraq in the 1990s, U.N. documents show.
The largest part came when Mr. Cheney led the company from 1996 to 2000. Mr. Cheney said during the 2000 election campaign that Halliburton had a policy against trading with Iraq. The Halliburton contracts mentioned in the U.N. documents involved units and joint ventures that came with the purchase of Dresser Inc. in 1998. Those units were sold from December 1999 to April 2001. "Contracts were initiated prior to the merger," a spokeswoman for Halliburton said.
At least one French unit, Dresser-Rand SA, part of a joint venture in which Halliburton had a 51% stake, registered $6 million of oil spare-parts sales with the U.N. oil-for-food program from 1998 to 2000, after Halliburton acquired Dresser, U.N. documents show.
Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., the French unit of another joint venture, signed about $25 million of Iraqi contracts at a time when Halliburton owned 49%, documents show.”
The article also makes the point that French companies, blocked by the Bush’s for bidding on Iraqi contracts, simply use their U.S. subsidiaries to do the bidding.
What is weird about the Halliburton business is that Cheney felt so comfortable simply lying about it in the 2000 election. Lying is Cheney hallmark – not the statement that can later be parsed apart into some miserable combination of half truths. Often, Bush’s statements come down to that – or come down to reneging on promises. This is the bottled water of politics – politicians are always experimenting with the unique relationship between the promise and the truth, that no man’s land of the performative. Cheney will actually make categorical statements that are simply untrue, bald as a baby lies. In this, he is a unique D.C. figure. And we hope that his being called to testify in the Libby trial, which seems inevitable, will up the ante on that unpleasant character trait.
PS – the best background story on the Fitzgerald investigation, we think, is Chris Lehman’s at the NY Obs. He quotes the right people (Bramford, Powers) who preserve a sense of the intelligence communities' histories. This is a traditional Republican scandal. They always have to do with some covert military aggression. They always have to do with erasing the boundary between intelligence and politics. And they are always peopled with brain dead enthusiasts and pipesmokers – the supposed gray eminences who are keeping control of things, the John Mitchells, the Poindexters, the Cheneys. I don’t think the article is yet online, more’s the pity
Douglas Feith looks more and more like the man who filled Oliver North’s shoes:
“The C.I.A. kept looking and saying, ‘We’re not finding any evidence,’” said James Bamford, the author of A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. “And the Pentagon was angry that this was coming out of the agency. And so that’s why they had this special unit. That’s why [David] Wurmser was in there—to become the anti-C.I.A.”
Mr. Wurmser, Vice President Cheney’s Middle East advisor, was recruited by Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith to create the Office of Special Plans, a policy group in the Pentagon formed to cherry-pick information that would provide the casus belli for invading Iraq. Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, famously referred to the unit’s handiwork as “a Chinese menu,” offering a readymade connoisseur’s choice of reasons to topple the Hussein regime in Iraq.
“It started within Feith’s Special Plans group,” said a former senior White House official who requested not to be named. “That’s where you first see this business of taking one’s animosity toward Langley and the agency and finding intelligence that would support one’s own position.”
This is so déjà vu, to those with the eyes to see it. And the background of these people have brushed against Republican scandals before. Remember, Cheney was Ford’s staffer advising on intelligence during the Church commission.
“The Plame leak is in itself evidence of how Bush administration officials failed to apprehend the most basic operations of intelligence. “I’ve talked with a number of people who knew [Valerie Plame Wilson] and worked with her,” said Burton Hersh, the author of The Old Boys, the groundbreaking study of the C.I.A.’s Cold War career. “And the whole idea that she [or] her undercover status was not that important is ridiculous. She was key to the effort to contain nuclear proliferation in the Third World. Once she’s taken out, her whole network of people can be exposed. That shows you a disconnect across the board. This was a network trying to keep jihadists from acquiring nuclear weapons …. You know, it’s hard enough to keep these people undercover. To lift that cover for short-term political advantage—that’s indefensible. And to punish Joe Wilson like this—it’s suicidal.”
...
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Hephaestus, from Ida on Libby and Rove
When Clytemnestra announces the news that the city of Troy has been sacked to the chorus, who have been waiting uneasily for news, the chorus, a bunch of codgers, wants to know the source of her information. Was it a dream? These vieux garcons are a distrustful bunch, and obviously the intelligence systems have more than once spit out misleading omens and instructions. Then of course, there is the old festering scandal of the event that occurred right before the invasion of Troy, the sacrifice of Iphegenia, engineered by a technician of the divine, an early think tanker. Clytemnestra, like many a leader of many a coalition of the willing since, has obviously crucified her credibility on the power of back channel chatter and the self dealing of her hard to read heart.
Here’s the Q and A between the Chorus and Clytamnestra:
“Chorus
But at what time was the city destroyed?
Clytaemestra
In the night, I say, that has but now given birth to this day here.
Chorus
And what messenger could reach here with such speed?
Clytaemestra
“Hephaestus, from Ida speeding forth his brilliant blaze. Beacon passed beacon on to us by courier-flame: Ida, to the Hermaean crag in Lemnos; to the mighty blaze upon the island succeeded, third, the summit of Athos sacred to Zeus; and, soaring high aloft so as to leap across the sea, the flame, travelling joyously onward in its strength the pinewood torch, its golden-beamed light, as another sun, passing the message on to the watchtowers of Macistus. He, delaying not nor carelessly overcome by sleep, did not neglect his part as messenger. Far over Euripus' stream came the beacon-light and signalled to the watchmen on Messapion. They, kindling a heap of withered heather, lit up their answering blaze and sped the message on. The flame, now gathering strength and in no way dimmed, like a radiant moon overleaped the plain of Asopus to Cithaeron's ridges, and roused another relay of missive fire. [300] Nor did the warders there disdain the far-flung light, but made a blaze higher than their commands. Across Gorgopus' water shot the light, reached the mount of Aegiplanctus, and urged the ordinance of fire to make no delay. Kindling high with unstinted force a mighty beard of flame, they sped it forward so that, as it blazed, it passed even the headland that looks upon the Saronic gulf; until it swooped down when it reached the lookout, near to our city, upon the peak of Arachnaeus; and next upon this roof of the Atreidae it leapt, this very fire not undescended from the Idaean flame.”
All state of the art, this homeland security system of pyre on mountain-top. The vision of flames lit one after the other was in my head this morning when I woke up, since similar signals were flicking on in my own body. The equivalent of the Idean flame was passing from node to node in the immune system as the body reacted to the Austin air, laden with pollens and mold this crisp October morning, the hints of cedar on the outlying hills, of dust, of sun soaked motes. Those tiny chemical fires I could imagine being reflected in the red of my blood stream, sadly low on anti-histamines, and even in those streams the struggle continued. And so the news was finally flashed to my nose, where one messenger and then another took up their places to coordinate that first, that preliminary and preemptive sneeze, which gathered terrific force and… there I was, awake and thinking: “benadryll”.
My second thought was, of course: Fitzmas Day! Yesterday in my post, I realized from a comment by Brian, seemed to delineate such a broad vision of politics and secrecy that I excluded fun. Any time fun is excluded from politics, you know that the analysis is screwed. Entertainment is a goodly part of politics. I don’t question this. Moralists limber up by denouncing gawkers, tabloids, curiosity mongers, and the destroyers of the monuments when it comes to politics, as if politics had some serious, innocent essence stumbling towards the marble city on the hill. I cordially detest that seriousness. Much of politics is entertainment. It is simply a question of who is organizing the entertainment, and who is being lead in chains in the triumph. Eager to see if the fires from mountain to mountain had signaled “Rove” (oh let it be Rove!), I went to the computer and checked out the Times.
As the Chorus puts it: “But even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, drips over the mind in sleep, so wisdom comes to men, whether they want it or not. Harsh, it seems to me, is the grace of gods enthroned upon their awful seats.”
Harsh indeed, as it looks like the knives are going to spare Rove this morning. Of course, this is not going to keep me from raising a vodka martini, tonight, at the Elephant Lounge to the indictment of Libby; still, we wished for a more complete smash.
Here’s the Q and A between the Chorus and Clytamnestra:
“Chorus
But at what time was the city destroyed?
Clytaemestra
In the night, I say, that has but now given birth to this day here.
Chorus
And what messenger could reach here with such speed?
Clytaemestra
“Hephaestus, from Ida speeding forth his brilliant blaze. Beacon passed beacon on to us by courier-flame: Ida, to the Hermaean crag in Lemnos; to the mighty blaze upon the island succeeded, third, the summit of Athos sacred to Zeus; and, soaring high aloft so as to leap across the sea, the flame, travelling joyously onward in its strength the pinewood torch, its golden-beamed light, as another sun, passing the message on to the watchtowers of Macistus. He, delaying not nor carelessly overcome by sleep, did not neglect his part as messenger. Far over Euripus' stream came the beacon-light and signalled to the watchmen on Messapion. They, kindling a heap of withered heather, lit up their answering blaze and sped the message on. The flame, now gathering strength and in no way dimmed, like a radiant moon overleaped the plain of Asopus to Cithaeron's ridges, and roused another relay of missive fire. [300] Nor did the warders there disdain the far-flung light, but made a blaze higher than their commands. Across Gorgopus' water shot the light, reached the mount of Aegiplanctus, and urged the ordinance of fire to make no delay. Kindling high with unstinted force a mighty beard of flame, they sped it forward so that, as it blazed, it passed even the headland that looks upon the Saronic gulf; until it swooped down when it reached the lookout, near to our city, upon the peak of Arachnaeus; and next upon this roof of the Atreidae it leapt, this very fire not undescended from the Idaean flame.”
All state of the art, this homeland security system of pyre on mountain-top. The vision of flames lit one after the other was in my head this morning when I woke up, since similar signals were flicking on in my own body. The equivalent of the Idean flame was passing from node to node in the immune system as the body reacted to the Austin air, laden with pollens and mold this crisp October morning, the hints of cedar on the outlying hills, of dust, of sun soaked motes. Those tiny chemical fires I could imagine being reflected in the red of my blood stream, sadly low on anti-histamines, and even in those streams the struggle continued. And so the news was finally flashed to my nose, where one messenger and then another took up their places to coordinate that first, that preliminary and preemptive sneeze, which gathered terrific force and… there I was, awake and thinking: “benadryll”.
My second thought was, of course: Fitzmas Day! Yesterday in my post, I realized from a comment by Brian, seemed to delineate such a broad vision of politics and secrecy that I excluded fun. Any time fun is excluded from politics, you know that the analysis is screwed. Entertainment is a goodly part of politics. I don’t question this. Moralists limber up by denouncing gawkers, tabloids, curiosity mongers, and the destroyers of the monuments when it comes to politics, as if politics had some serious, innocent essence stumbling towards the marble city on the hill. I cordially detest that seriousness. Much of politics is entertainment. It is simply a question of who is organizing the entertainment, and who is being lead in chains in the triumph. Eager to see if the fires from mountain to mountain had signaled “Rove” (oh let it be Rove!), I went to the computer and checked out the Times.
As the Chorus puts it: “But even as trouble, bringing memory of pain, drips over the mind in sleep, so wisdom comes to men, whether they want it or not. Harsh, it seems to me, is the grace of gods enthroned upon their awful seats.”
Harsh indeed, as it looks like the knives are going to spare Rove this morning. Of course, this is not going to keep me from raising a vodka martini, tonight, at the Elephant Lounge to the indictment of Libby; still, we wished for a more complete smash.
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