calling back the dawgs of war

LI believes in détente with Iran. My friend, the Brooding Persian, doesn’t. Now, my friend, Mr. B.P., has the advantage of Persian birth, an infinitely greater knowledge of the history, culture, and politics of Iran, and all of the tacit knowledge brought by recent and prolonged immersion in the country, while LI sits on his ass in Texas and reads newspapers. So the advantage is all to Mr. B.P.

However, we are still unconvinced. We are also unconvinced that the evident belief of some in the Bush administration that we should start the bombing of Iran any day now is actually going to be realized. It is easy to get hysterical about how incompetent the Bushies are and how bloodthirsty they are, but it is best to put this in context: the thing about history is that it operates by thens. Those who think it is the year 2002 all over again fail to reckon with the consequences of the year 2002, or the year 2004. The war in Iraq, for one thing, seemed like, and was, a short term economic winner. The excuse to mount a policy of extreme military Keynesianism in 2002, after a debilitating market crash and a pretty soft demand landscape, fit into the general Bush governing policy. But the war in Iran looks like a short term economic loser – just for starters. Plus, of course, the soldiers in Iraq are hostages to fortune, and any Cambodia invasion ploy now would simply lead to both Iran and Iraq as lead and dead weights around the President’s party. Those who have been through a war hysteria are, of course, going to be impressed by it enough to suspect that it lies latent in the population like some flue virus. They ignore the other side of war – war fatigue. War fatigue about the war in Iraq has come with remarkable swiftness – see our post about legitimacy for one (partial) explanation of it. In moments of stress, we sometimes buy into the underground comix version of America as a land of redneck Neanderthals. Exaggeration in caricature does not, however, point to statistical truth – it is best at pointing to existential and particular truths. I could easily go out into the streets of Austin and find some guy whose opinion would be that the Middle East should be nuked. But to really judge this guy, I would have to know how much that opinion weighs in his life. I would have a much harder time finding a guy who really devotes a lot of time to such questions. And even my imaginary Mr. Blowhard would probably back down (if he didn’t have one for the road in his belly) to a more moderate position. One of the things I do not like about blogs is that, all too often, one feels the blogger is writing with some caricature opponent leaning over his shoulder – this leads to a Flintstone version of politics, and you just have to put in your villain – a righwinger can put in Jane Fonda and John Kerry, a lefty can put in George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Myself, I’m of the lefty tribe, and I find George Bush and Dick Cheney villainous. But I don’t think they are unhuman – they largely share a set of motives with myself. When I lose my grip on that fact, I devalue any analysis I make of what is going on in D.C.

Which brings me to this Q and A in the post with the president of the American/Iranian council, Hooshang Amirahmadi, a professor at Rutgers. I highly recommend the piece. While Dr. Amirahmadi has an academically naïve realism about states – to say that states have interests rather than allies sounds realistic, but actually presupposes more clarity within a state about its interest than is ever, or could be ever, the case – I am generally impressed by his grasp, a, of the political reality in Iran, in which President Ahmadinejad is struggling for internal power rather than invested with it, and b., his grasp of the wider situation.

First, a,: “Mr Ahmadinejad is a calculative man. He is also an ambitious person that have to run a country dominated by powerful clergies. His reference to Twelve Imam is directed at nuetralizing that power and gain legitimacy from it. In really, and as the experience in the last 7 months show, he has not been more religiously strict then his predecessors. No new religious restrictions have been imposed and the population does not feel that a major change in that direrction has taken place. Note also that he does not any more speak about imams but about nuclear techonology and other mundane issues.”

And … this should be soooo emphasized:
“On Ahmadinejad, his statements are to be condemned, but I must also note that the man is not the one who makes war and peace decisions for Iran, and strategic policies like ones toward the US and Israel are not determined at his level. Those bigger decisions, including the nuclear matter, are decided by the Leader, the Expediancy Council, and the National Security Council of the country. Iran has a 20-year "Vision Plan" that has set directions for the President to follow. He has some degree of autonomy but cannot disregard those directives.”
And on b, which is where Mr. B.P. and I disagree:

"Waldorf, Md.: Why are we assuming that these people are not telling the truth? Has the U.S. given them some kind of bomb making materials in the past and that is why we are so adamant about this? To me the U.S. is coming across as bullying these people. Why don't we back off a little bit. Or is there a hidden agenda that only certain people know and the public, of course, is the last to know?
Hooshang Amirahmadi: There is no hidden agenda! The US and Iran have had serious difficulty in the last 26 years. It all started with the revolution (which was made against past US interventions in Iran and against "its" dictator in Tehran). The nuclear matter is only one among such problems. There are issues of terrorism, peace in the Middle East and human rights/democracy. Over time, the situation has become even more complicated (e.g. the US situation in Iraq). Please note that nations have neither enemies nor friends; they have interests. It is only unfortunate that the governments in Tehran and Washington (as well as in Tel Aviv) have not looked deeper into the tremendous common interests that exist here and have instead focused on differences. This must change for the situation to normalize. [misspellings corrected]"

LI thinks that one of the roots of the Iraqi invasion was retaining a policy of double sanctions against Iraq and Iran in the nineties, when it should have been adjusted – there should have been a definite tilt towards Iran. Not only would this recognize reality, but Iran’s incorporation into the world system would, we think, work towards strengthening civil society in Iran by making palpable the everyday advantages of eroding the power of the mullahs. It seems to be the case – and I may be totally off base – that Iran’s majority working class population has been economically stagnant while its ownership class has prospered. Since the appeal of civil society freedoms is mixed up with economic policies that seem to reward the already prosperous ownership class, however, that appeal is justly subject to the suspicion that the price of freedom is continuing economic misery. The Cold War interpretive scrim, which the neo-cons like to drag out, is particularly distorting here: the Islamicist politico can well combine that position with the neo-liberal ultra – hence the American affection, at the moment, for a SCIRI leader who is also a free trader maximus, privatize the oil fields kind of guy.

Given what I am saying, however, I can imagine an easy objection: what you are saying, Mr. LI, contradicts itself. You are advocating normalizing Iran – integrating it into a neo-liberal world system – while analyzing the internal political situation in terms that posit the neo-liberal system as a standing evil that incites a nationalism that would interfere with any normalizing process.

I’ll slip out of that strait jacket, and doing amazing other Houdini like feats, in another post.

Here’s a news item that will be well hidden in the NYT or WAPO.

The president of Colombia, the strongest American ally in South America, is making moves that would be hyper-criticized if they were made by the greatest American devil figure in South America, Chavez. This is from Global Insight Daily Analysis:

“Incumbent Colombian consul to Italy and former head of the South American country's intelligence service, Jorge Noguera, has denied involvement in an alleged plot to kill Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. Colombian counterpart Alvaro Uribe has recalled the one-time Administrative Department of Security (DAS) chief from his current post in the European country to answer allegations that were published recently by two magazines in Colombia. Noguera is accused of overseeing the plot in conjunction with Colombian paramilitaries. Claims that the DAS had been infiltrated by paramilitary groups brought about Noguera's resignation in late October last year (see Colombia: 26 October 2006: Director of Colombia's Intelligence Service Resigns). Reports stem from former DAS employee Rafael Enrique García, who accused the Uribe administration of acting in an authoritarian manner similar to that of the disgraced former Alberto Fujimori government of Peru (1990-2000).

García described Noguera as the Vladimiro Montesinos of the Uribe government, referring to the imprisoned Peruvian one-time intelligence chief who helped Fujimori control his political opponents through a spying network.”

Venezuela has done nothing, really, to harm American interests – the interests of the international lenders, perhaps. But our greatest ally, as is the way of rightwing allies, is a ticking bomb of black market money, connected to the bogus, ongoing drug war. The drug war is noxious both in what it purports to do – restraining people from medicating themselves in order to allow big pharma and the medical industry to charge us more for doing the same thing – and what it really does, creating a huge secret source of funds that America’s intelligence agencies and their clients eagerly fasten themselves to. Not surprisingly, the supposedly “disarmed” rightwing paramilitaries, who claim to have 35 percent of the Colombian legislature in their pocket and who have certainly merged their interests with Uribe, are also involved with Noguera:

“Colombia's intelligence chief has quit amid allegations that his security agency was infiltrated by the main right-wing paramilitary group. President Uribe accepted the resignation of Jorge Noguera, the head of the Administrative Security Department (DAS). President Uribe also dismissed the agency's deputy director, Jose Narvaez. The daily El Tiempo reported that DAS officers were secretly taped while discussing alleged plans by a close aide to Mr Noguera to sell intelligence information to Colombia's paramilitaries. The newspaper also claimed that Mr Narvaez asked for the recording to be made to ensnare his boss in the scandal, revealing deep divisions within the agency, Reuters reports.”

Meanwhile, according to Gary Leech, the Bush administration has indicted the leadership of Farc as the masterminds of the drug trade. FARC is the hardcore leftist group that divides atrocities with the paramilitaries in the countryside:

“The indictment of the FARC leaders further illustrates the Bush administration’s strategy to portray the FARC as the greatest perpetrator of violence and drug trafficking in Colombia. The reality, however, is very different from the Bush White House’s fictitious portrayal. The U.S. indictment provided no evidence to support its claim that FARC leaders have earned $25 billion from drug trafficking and are responsible for 60 percent of the cocaine shipped to the United States.
Meanwhile, most Colombia experts agree that the country’s right-wing paramilitaries are far more deeply involved in drug trafficking than the rebels, a fact supported by the numerous drug busts in which the seized cocaine was traced back to paramilitary groups. In fact, former associates of Pablo Escobar, the notorious leader of the now-defunct Medellín cartel, established some of Colombia’s most prominent paramilitary groups.

At the same time that the Bush administration is making the FARC the focus of its drug war propaganda, it is becoming increasingly evident that the U.S.-backed paramilitary demobilization is nothing more than a charade. Last week, demobilized paramilitary leader Ivan Roberto Duque confirmed publicly on Caracol Radio what Amnesty International, the United Nations and many analysts had been alleging for more than a year: that demobilized paramilitaries are taking up arms again. According to Duque, ex-militia fighters are offering their services to drug traffickers or “private justice” groups, also known as paramilitaries. As a result, the number of killings by paramilitaries in 2005 more than doubled that of the previous year.”

Meanwhile, how about those honest American narcs fighting away in Colombia? The Narco News has been running a nice series on those guys via reporter Bill Conroy:

“A document obtained recently by Narco News makes those questions more than hypothetical queries. In this document, Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs. (The DEA is part of the larger Justice Department.)

The information in that document is also corroborated by a number of other sources that spoke directly to Narco News, including former government officials who are familiar with the DEA’s Bogotá operations

Kent’s memorandum contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”

Since this definitely doesn’t fit into the narrative American papers prefer, it won’t be coming out any time soon. Since Conroy’s report in this January, Kent, the whistleblower, you will be happy to know, has been transferred.

the double face of illegitimacy

In the run up to the invasion of Iraq, LI quoted a phrase of Benjamin Constant’s that seems to haunt the whole misadventure: “When villains violate the forms against honest men, one knows that this is just one more crime. One is attached to the forms exactly insofar as they are violated; one learns, in silence, and by misfortune, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and preservers of the social order. But when the honest men violate the forms against the villains, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves now as obstacles to justice.”

Constant was active in the French revolution, and he saw the price paid by violating the “forms.” Unlike Burke, he was on the side of the revolution. Young as he was, he saw, as Burke did not, that the French monarchical system had decayed past the point of salvage. But he also appreciated, as Ste Just never did, that the republic is built on forms. As Paine once put it, while monarchy is based on will, the Republic is based on justice. Not on the guillotine, and not on God.

LI has persistently pointed out that the scandal at the heart of this war, and the reason the conversation about it in this country compulsively returns to its origin is that its origin was a brutal violation of the forms by the “honest men” against the villains. The French phrase “hommes honnêtes” is not an assessment of private moral character, but of social position – and in this case, the Bush administration plays the role of honest men. The more modern term for the forms, stemming from Weber, is legitimacy. The illegitimacy of this war has been, from the start, the thing within it which has worked against it, silently unraveling every plan and every defense of this war.

The crime against legitimacy has a double face:

On the one hand, the illegitimacy of the tactics used to promote the war, from cherrypicked intelligence reports to slander to half truths to the contemplation of open frauds, such as Bush’s suggestion that a U.N. plane be shot down over Iraq by the U.S. military disguised as Iraqis. The followers of the Bush administration in the press, the whole tribe of belligeranti, carried into the argument a foul atmosphere of libel, of derision, and of disguise. The latter was particularly important. The war’s very dimensions were disguised. From the disgracing of Shinseki to Wolfowitz’ painful testimony about the cost of the war to the refusal to even discuss the occupation, the war’s press followers existed largely to block any inquiry into what the war would entail.

On the other hand, there was the ragged band of adventurers, half Garibaldi, half Lucky Luciano, that the American government evidently intended to put in place as the native Iraqi government. The most prominent of this band, Ahmed Chalabi, is a notorious thief. And indeed, from the reports of the massive defrauding of the Iraqi people, both directly, in terms of the funds seized from Saddam’s government after Baghdad collapsed, and indirectly, from the use of American reconstruction money, it is apparent that the spirit of Chalabi like thievery has presided over every move the American’s made in “reconstructing” Iraq, right down to the military’s publication of false and unchecked numbers about schools repaired (in which the money for the repairing vanished, and the school’s employees are using the same, unreconstructed structures) to the libraries and monument restored. As importantly, the cohort of exiles, save for some of the SCIRI and DAWA politicians, had no roots in Iraq and quickly became unpopular there. A country that had seen Saddam Hussein was in no mood to support another set of thieves.

Interestingly, Constant’s dictum is so correct that support for the war, collapsing in tandem with the supposed American plan for “victory” in the war, is simply a response to the initial violation of forms. For that initial violation requires infinite covering work, thus perpetuating the violence. And this, in itself, points to a constitutional neglect which we have inherited from the Cold War. Among other things, the Cold War suspended the constitutional duty of the legislature to validate American military action. This duty wasn’t an arbitrary whim of the founding fathers. They knew too well that an executive can use a nation’s resources, its taxes and fighting men, to wage wars to its own personal advantage – in effect, making the military the mercenary force of the executive. George III’s use of Hessian soldiers was a vivid instance. The pretence that an elected executive would have more legitimacy doing the same thing was scotched by the Constitutional Convention’s skeptics. They were right. There’s been an argument – well propounded by Paul Craddick – that the U.S. was already at war with Iraq in March of 2003. That war was the result of legislative resolutions passed in 1998, as well as resolutions passed at the U.N. in 1991. In a sense, this is true – but this simply shows, in a bold way, how the forms for war have fallen into disrepair. Your average American citizen was so unaware that he lived in a nation at war in 2000 that the issue never even surfaced in the election. In fact, it was not a war so much as a sporadic hampering action. The Bush administration knew that it did not have political carte blanche to invade Iraq because of some obscure legislation passed in 1998. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if they did – surely the rotten fabric of post-constitutional warmongering would have been brought down with a resounding crash. This would have been, all things considered, a good thing. That the U.S. Congress couldn’t even formally declare war on the government of Afghanistan after 9/11 shows how fearful both the executive and legislative branch are of resurrecting the old Constitutional curb on military action. Its use would call into question future military actions, not so legitimized.

One consequence, of course, of the failure to declare war on the Taliban and the failure to officially enact a policy that called explicitly for the capture or death of Osama bin Laden is that the outrageously negligent military campaign against OBL, culminating with Tora Bora (which, given a competent administration, would certainly have resulted in Rumsfeld’s resignation, since OBL’s escape was the direct result of Rumsfeldian policies in Afghanistan), was allowed to go forward with no ending, and to turn into a campaign in Iraq, as though all wars desired by the President are connected.

It is puzzling that supposedly sharp political reporters and commentators – the tribe of the belligeranti –were so blind to the consequences of violating, repeatedly, the forms – of advocating actions that were, on the surface, illegitimate. The puzzle is that no long war can be fought in this way. The conviction that a war is legitimate is a necessary condition for pursuing a long war. There is no way of whistling around this. As the invasion was being mounted, the belligeranti mouthpieces were still mouthing the credo that the war would be short, and were still covering up questions about the occupation with fantasies about flower strewing natives. From their own point of view, this was really suicidal behavior. A long war or a long occupation would inevitably be compared to their rhetoric, and found wanting. As the means were rotten, so would the reaction be violent.

And so it has come to pass that the crisis in Iraq is a double crisis. The group of American proxies in Iraq has been on a continuous retreat, mitigated, perhaps, by the untold wealth that said proxies have deposited in banks in England and America and Switzerland. American strength in the country now depends, oddly enough, on an alliance with an increasingly theocratic Shi’ite majority. And though American papers and politicians look hopefully at “free market” theocrats, like the NYT favorite, Mahdi, it is hard to imagine that the looting of Iraq’s oilfields by opening them up to foreign ownership could really be contrived by any party. The Americans can fall back on the warlords in Kurdistan, but this, too, looks infinitely riskier than it did in 2003. Meanwhile, of course, the Bush administration and its press followers are sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of evasions that materially weaken support for continuing this war – already a minority position, according to most polls, for more than six months now.

Yet also peculiar to this war is the passivity and foolishness of the organized anti-war faction. In LI's opinion, this is also an interesting sign. Much of the opposition to the war seems to come not from liberals, but from leftists. This is problematic. How can leftists complain about the neglect of the forms and at the same time blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeois ideology? It makes the opposition seem either childish or Machiavellian.

This should, then, be the hour of liberalism. Liberals do not blast all forms as manifestations of bourgeouis self interest. At the same time, liberals do not believe that the orienting points of legitimacy are absolute and unchanging. In fact, the illegitimacy of this war results from lies that were acceptable means of promoting wars at other times. The war of 1898 was promoted exactly the way the war in Iraq was promoted. But 1898 is not 2003. The difference in civil rights, in the ower of the state, in our expectations about justice and equity, is considerable. It is the liberal idea that one can push those expectations, and thus reorient what is and what is not "good form." This seems to be a good time for pushing -- alas, just as there seems to be an absense of prominent liberals, save for the mayor of New York City.

Which simply means, to LI -- grassroots work. As Paine said, We have it in our power to make the world anew.

gone to houston

Going to Houston, me buckos. So don't look for anything new here. However, I have to bitch - for some reason, last week, my readership numbers collapsed just as I was putting together some assez cool posts, especially the little one about Marx, Elizabeth Kolbert, and global warming. Or at least I thought that LI was hot, there. (It is an alarming sign for a writer when his hottest stuff falls stillborn from the press, as Davy Hume said about his first book. But vanity forbids me to think that I stink as much as the numbers suggest -- so I press onwards for the good of humanity!)(or at least to appease the chokehold of my evident graphomania!)(and I am using the ! because I like the quivering, tail wagging quality of that punctuation mark. An exclamation mark is the equivalent of a writer jumping up on your pants leg and peeing on your shoe, he's so happy to see you. Take it as a compliment!)

After making the round of Houston's finest stripjoints with my friend David, deconstructing the male gaze, of course, I'll be back. Hey, that was a joke about the stripjoints ... Houston's finest is a little too expensive for either Dave or me. Cheap bars, however, (and Houston is abundantly blessed with them) are another story.

censure

LI needs to do some advertising today – we’ve not had a lot of client activity lately. And we’ve set up a new, streamlined site for our writing service. It is at this site: RWG Communications. So if you know someone who is looking for editing, translating, or general writing help, direct them to that site. Please!

…
And now, for today’s bombshell. LI has made it clear in the past that we don’t approve of impeachment except in extraordinary cases. To us, impeachment shortcircuits one of the Pavlovian advantages of democracy. Voters who elect incompetent, immoral people to public office should suffer from that choice. Not because of some Calvinistic doctrine, but simply from the old chestnut that a burnt child learns not to plunge into fires, lie on hot coals, or put his face over a gas fired burner and turn the thing to on. Democracy is not only about benefiting from good choices, but suffering from bad ones. The reason that suffering is good is that it fully explores those bad choices, which usually extend beyond particular persons to whole domains of policy and character.

For this reason, we have never joined in the chorus of impeach Bush – we hope. Maybe a hasty, angry post here and there. But today’s news, if true – that Bush approved of the campaign of leaks against Wilson – is close to a limit. That limit is best expressed in censure. If the Democrats can’t get around a measure of censure for this president, they … we were going to say something like, they will never get it together. But what is the use? Slamming the crash test dummies one more time affords us no satisfaction. So we simply hope, without putting too much energy into it, that one of the crash test dummies will blink, the Hans Christian Anderson magic will cause a focusing of those painted eyes, and convey a message to the other dummies – something like, isn’t it good to be alive? If this happens, they will censure our criminal president.

what the coup was for

From David Kay Johnston’s excellent article in today’s NYT, an analysis of the last round of Bush tax cuts found:

Among taxpayers with incomes greater than $10 million, the amount by which their investment tax bill was reduced averaged about $500,000 in 2003, and total tax savings, which included the two Bush tax cuts on compensation, nearly doubled, to slightly more than $1 million.

These taxpayers, whose average income was $26 million, paid about the same share of their income in income taxes as those making $200,000 to $500,000 because of the lowered rates on investment income.

Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each. By comparison, these same Americans received less than 10 percent of the savings from the other Bush tax cuts, which applied primarily to wages, though that share is expected to grow in coming years. “

The conservative reaction to this is hilarious:

“The Times showed the new numbers to people on various sides of the debate over tax cuts. Stephen J. Entin, president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, a Washington organization, and other supporters of the cuts said they did not go far enough because the more money the wealthiest had to invest, the more would go to investments that produce jobs. For investment income, Mr. Entin said, "the proper tax rate would be zero."

As the beast slouches towards Bethlehem, it is nice to know that it has handlers like Mr. Entin, who claim that the beast is hungry, and needs more of the planet to process through its delicate bowels. Or, in Maria Antoinette speak: let them eat shit.

Of course, the proper response is not just to close down the Bush giveaway, but to take that money back – raising tax rates on the wealthy by twenty to thirty percent to start with. Tax rates aren’t only about revenue, but they counter the Matthew effect - that is, the mechanism of cumulative advantage, defined by Robert K. Merton in a famous paper like this:

“…cumulative advantage, applied to the domain of science, refers to the social processes through which various kinds of opportunities for scientific inquiry as well as the subsequent symbolic and material rewards for the results of that inquiry tend to accumulate for individual practitioners of science, as they do also for organizations engaged in scientific work. The concept of cumulative advantage directs our attention to the ways in which initial comparative advantages of trained capacity, structural location, and available resources make for successive increments of advantage such that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots in science (as in other domains of social life) widen until dampened by countervailing processes.” Merton named this the Matthew effect after the passage in the Gospel in which our Lord said: “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

In a footnote, Merton quotes a Bible scholar who says that Jesus was showing his usual Tolstoy peasant shrewdness here:

“Most recently, I am indebted to M. de Jonge, professor of theology at the University of Leyden, … He notes further that “it is highly likely that [Jesus] took over a general saying, current in Jewish (and/or Hellenistic) Wisdom circles - see, e.g., Proverbs 9:9, Daniel 2:21, or Martialis, Epigr. V 81: ‘Semper pauper ens, si pauper es, Aemiliane. Dantur opes nullis [nunc] nisi divitibus.’ “And de Jonge concludes: “The use made of this sentence [in Matthew] by modern authors neglects the eschatological thrust inherent in the saying in all versions, and (in all probability) in Jesus’s own version of it. It links up, however, with the Wisdom-saying taken over by Jesus: ‘Look around you and see what happens: If you have something, you get more; if you have not a penny, they will take from you the little you have.’” M. de Jonge, summary of lecture, “The Matthew Effect,” 24 July 1987.”

As the rich get richer, opportunities to get rich, or to advance socially in general, get filled in; in a democracy, countervailing processes must be cyclically reactivated in order to break up entrenched momentary structures of advantage, lest these structures harden into chronic anti-democratic tendencies. In the U.S., the countervailing process has generally been growth – yet we have seen years, now, of productivity gains that have gone almost wholly to the top income level. This is definitely a flashing red light. And as we have seen with Katerina, the bankruptcy bill, the looting of Iraq, and the string of criminal capers for which the Bush gang will live in infamy, if you have not a penny, they will indeed take from you what little you have. Greed, in the Bush system, is not a vice but a systematic necessity – for the concentration of wealth in a period in which the Matthew effect is fed by a corrupt and compliant government means that you have to pick the pockets of the very poorest to keep up. The government is the best instrument to do that. Thus, the alliance of big business and big government produces round after round of oppressive, expropriative laws aimed at the working class.

ps Also see David Leonhart on the end of “fordism” – the NYT Biz section today is kicking. Here are the nut grafs.

"One's own employees ought to be one's own best customers," Mr. Ford said years later. "Paying high wages," he concluded, "is behind the prosperity of this country."
This turned into a pillar of 20th-century economic wisdom. It's time to ask, though, whether Mr. Ford's big idea is as ill suited to this century as his car company seems to be.

By any reasonable standard, the last few years have been bad ones for most people's paychecks. The average hourly wage of rank-and-file workers — a group that makes up 80 percent of the work force — is slightly lower than it was four years ago, once inflation is taken into account. That's right: Most Americans have taken a pay cut since 2002.

But you would never know it by looking at the headline numbers on economic growth. From the standpoint of the broad national economy — the value of the goods and services the country produces — the last few years have been stellar. Despite two wars, soaring oil prices and business scandals, the economy has been growing more than 3 percent a year.

planetary alienation

Though I have used a shovel more than once, I am neither a shovelist nor a ditchdigger. I have the same relationship to Marx – the man himself would recognize me, right away, as a liberal humanist (I’m amused by how that word, bandied about on Marxist leaning sites, always calls out the Raid. As if Liberal humanists were looming on the horizon like so many godzillas, trampling through the bidonvilles!). However, I find Marx infinitely useable, even when, as in The German Ideology, I also find him infinitely boring. (I sometimes fear that much of Derrida’s work, a hundred years hence, will read like the German Ideology – heavy irony in pursuit of long forgotten targets, and all that rich wordplay turned as incomprehensible as the dog latin Rabelais puts in the mouth of the students he mocks in Gargantua). The section on Feuerbach there, as we all know, is extremely pretty and eloquent and just. From it, these two grafs jump out at me this morning:

“Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.”

How individuals “express” – aussern – their lives is, at the moment, melting the permafrost. That is one of the many dire facts that strewed Elizabeth Kolbert’s three part series (first part here) (second part here) in the New Yorker last year. Now that series has grown a book, which I noticed, with a bit of a sinking heart, is being reviewed in tandem with Timothy Flannery’s book. The sinking heart comes from the fact that no author likes to be lassoed all over the place with another author’s work. But apparently, if we are going to have book reviews touching on the topic of the ecological crisis we are diligently preparing for ourselves, we are going to have to have them do two for the price of one. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, or very many books about global warming, especially when humankind has to get out there and buy those SUVs.
Back to the permafrost. In one of those scary passages that gives us facts that we have to immediately forget, Kolbert – in the first article of her New Yorker series – writes:

“When you walk around in the Arctic, you are stepping not on permafrost but on something called the "active layer." The active layer, which can be anywhere from a few inches to a few feet deep, freezes in the winter but thaws over the summer, and it is what supports the growth of plants - large spruce trees in places where conditions are favorable enough and, where they aren't, shrubs and, finally, just lichen. Life in the active layer proceeds much as it does in more temperate regions, with one critical difference. Temperatures are so low that when trees and grasses die they do not fully decompose. New plants grow out of the half-rotted old ones, and when these plants die the same thing happens all over again. Eventually, through a process known as cryoturbation, organic matter is pushed down beneath the active layer into the permafrost, where it can sit for thousands of years in a botanical version of suspended animation. (In Fairbanks, grass that is still green has been found in permafrost dating back to the middle of the last ice age.) In this way, much like a peat bog or, for that matter, a coal deposit, permafrost acts as a storage unit for accumulated carbon.

One of the risks of rising temperatures is that this storage process can start to run in reverse. Under the right conditions, organic material that has been frozen for millennia will break down, giving off carbon dioxide or methane, which is an even more powerful greenhouse gas. In parts of the Arctic, this is already happening. Researchers in Sweden, for example, have been measuring the methane output of a bog known as the Stordalen mire, near the town of Abisko, for almost thirty-five years. As the permafrost in the area has warmed, methane releases have increased, in some spots by up to sixty per cent. Thawing permafrost could make the active layer more hospitable to plants, which are a sink for carbon. Even this, though, probably wouldn't offset the release of greenhouse gases. No one knows exactly how much carbon is stored in the world's permafrost, but estimates run as high as four hundred and fifty billion metric tons.

"It's like ready-use mix - just a little heat, and it will start cooking," Romanovsky told me. It was the day after we had arrived in Deadhorse, and we were driving through a steady drizzle out to another monitoring site. "I think it's just a time bomb, just waiting for a little warmer conditions." Romanovsky was wearing a rain suit over his canvas work clothes. I put on a rain suit that he had brought along for me. He pulled a tarp out of the back of the truck.”

The refusal to take that kind of planetary wide damage seriously is going to be the real legacy of the Bush administration. The key to this time is the rush to create major policy out of minor opportunities, while major crises are waived away or postponed on the premise that the future takes care of itself. This is a misreading of Bush’s fave book, the New Testament, where we are told that it is the dead who take care of themselves. Treating the future as if we were all dead there is, in fact, the mark of the morally dead, the living dead, or –as we like to call them on this site – the zombies. For a nice review of Kolbert’s book (surprisingly), go to Slate this week. Instead of having their usual infinitely smarmy rightwing economic hacks do a bunch of coughing about that obvious fraud, Global warming, they chose a scholar on Rachel Carson, our hero here, to do the review. Rob Nixon, the scholar, does both books (sigh). Here is how he begins:

“The political climate has shifted, too. Kolbert, a suddenly ubiquitous American science reporter, and Flannery, a prolific Australian evolutionary biologist, are emissaries of sanity from the only two sizable industrialized nations that refused to sign the Kyoto protocol capping carbon emissions. The United States, responsible for 25 percent of the planet's greenhouse gases, and Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, are both ruled by conservative governments with a strong fossil-fuel bias. Indeed, the Bush administration has turned foot-dragging over climate change into a veritable performance art—a bamboozling ballet of dissimulation and denial.”

That the U.S. has appropriated the atmosphere for depositing a hugely disproportionate amount of waste isn’t surprising – one of the keys to understanding pollution in capitalism is that capitalism is not, despite the first grade propaganda, based on private property. It is based, rather, on larger property owners seizing the private property of smaller owners. It is all about social costs, and renting your body for zero cents and zero dollars to lodge their corporate chemicals in. Marx had a shrewd idea that the progress of capitalism was the inverse of what the proponents of capitalism claimed - that captilism progressively abolished private property by concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands. At the end of this process, Marx thought, the bargaining power of the working class would have to be expressed politically, in a revolution that would establish a new order founded on that capitalist accomplishment. As a liberal, I look at that prospect with horror, and would much rather fight to establish a better equilibrium between the concentration of wealth of the owners and the average householder, and the key front is the environment.

Beyond the playground of ideology, the important point here is that the melting of the permafrost is a collective crime against the planet. And that crime shouldn’t be happening. This is planetary alienation of a species extinguishing sort.

“Kolbert and Flannery write with a shared urgency, but they approach their vexing subject in radically different ways. The brilliance of Field Notes From a Catastrophe flows from Kolbert's gift for making the violence of climate change feel vast yet intimate. She clearly intuits that "global," as in "global warming," is a bland, unpeopled, world-weary word. So she shapes her argument around a series of excursions to talk with scientists in the field (often in the Arctic), many of whom become memorable characters. These aren't braying talk-show "experts" but men and women who have spent patient years, decades sometimes, calibrating shrinking sea ice, dwindling glaciers, and permafrost that has started to thaw. Kolbert works alongside them, getting snowmelt in her boots.
Her field-journal format adroitly bridges the gulf between professionals and amateurs, giving the writing a conversational tone without compromising the science. Kolbert grounds her quiet anecdotal advocacy in the sensory world of local inhabitants. She speaks to Inuits, who have many words for ice and must now find one for the robin, a previously unimagined bird driven north by warming. She speaks to a Dutchman who is developing amphibious homes to cope with the anticipated flooding of one-quarter of the Netherlands. She speaks to an Icelandic glaciologist whose models predict an Iceland stripped of ice by the end the next century. ("Glacial" as a metaphor should be retired from the language: When almost every glacier on the planet is beating a hasty retreat, "glacial progress" now means something else entirely.) In parts of Alaska, the average temperatures have risen 6 degrees since the early 1980s.”