the path of the pins or the path of the needles

“Once a little girl was told by her mother to bring some bread and milk to her grandmother As the girl was walking through the forest, a wolf came up to her and asked where she was going. "To grandmother's house," she replied. "Which path are you taking, the path of the pins or the path of the needles?" "The path of the needles." So the wolf took the path of the pins and arrived first at the house. “

He killed grandmother, poured her blood into a bottle, and sliced her flesh onto a platter. Then he got into her nightclothes and waited in bed. "Knock, knock." "Come in, my dear." "Hello, grandmother. I've brought you some bread and milk." "Have something yourself, my dear. There is meat and wine in the pantry." So the little girl ate what was offered; and as she did, a little cat said, "Slut! To eat the flesh and drink the blood of your grandmother!"

The wolf said, "Undress and get into bed with me." "Where shall I put my apron?" "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more." For each garment--bodice, skirt, petticoat, and stockings--the girl asked the same questions; and each time the wolf answered, "Throw it on the fire; you won't need it any more." When the girl got in bed, she said, "Oh, grandmother! How hairy you are!" "It's to keep me warmer, my dear." "Oh, grandmother! What big shoulders you have!" "It's for better carrying firewood, my dear" "Oh, grandmother! What long nails you have!" "It's for scratching myself better, my dear." "Oh, grandmother! What big teeth you have!" "It's for eating you better, my dear." And he ate her.

- From Little Red Riding Hood: Werewolf and prostitute, by David Teasely and Richard Chase.

In the emotional pattern of LI’s life, the big change, in the last five years, has been the importance of hatred. Indeed, if it is possible for hatred to be at the center of any life – that center which is the field of affection, insofar as affection has gotten down among the tropisms, is the first human response, antedating consciousness – hatred has crept into the command of mine. Hatred for the governing class; hatred for the onward rushing into what I see as the destruction of, indeed, the world, the physical globe; hatred of a self perpetuating order of violence in which I seem condemned to live. Hatred every day.

And this isn’t uncommon. Mine isn’t an unusual case. Which is why it is odd, when one comes to think of it, that the consideration of hatred as a social fact so quickly dissipates into consideration of hatred's effects. And those effects, in turn, are quickly distanced from the emotion -- quickly structuralized. There is a journal now dedicated to hatred – the muses have been replaced by the academic journals, and their domains are infinitely sub-divided – but hatred, conflict, the configuration of the enemy, are all still mercury to the touch of the intellect.

So, I thought I'd start with Little Red Riding Hood.

Teasely and Chase’s article about Little Red Riding Hood, which applies close reading to the tale in the tradition of Darnton (and, though not mentioned, of Febvre), mentions an interesting fact:

“Two folklorists have analyzed Red Riding Hood to demonstrate that a nineteenth-century source, despite being altered from its original and unrecoverable earlier versions, can provide credible insights into an earlier period. Moreover, the variants reveal remarkable consistency. Folklorists have argued that a tale's symbolic features are retained and transmitted through the centuries because they remain meaningful to their users and because they refer to features of the real world as experienced by the members of the storytelling communities. If this were not the case, tales would have no function and would be forgotten.(3)

Paul Delarue, in analyzing the variants of the story, has found that the greatest consistency occurs in French tales that originated in a region encompassing the Loire basin, the northern Alps, northern Italy, and the Tyrol. In this area where the greatest number of werewolf trials occurred during the period of witch persecution, three symbolic features of the tale were frequently repeated: the choice of the path that the wolf and the girl selected, the cannibalism that occurs when the girl eats her grandmother, and the savage ending when the wolf eats the girl.”

If LI were going to do a “history” of hatred in the Western World, we’d certainly make a long excursus to consider the wolf and the werewolf. In Teasley and Chase’s telling, the story’s giveaway (in a version they prefer to the one in which we are happily delivered by the woodsman) is given to us by the enigmatic path of pins and path of needles. The path of needles, according to T and C, goes back to the needle worn as an emblem of the prostitute; the path of pins – by a much more obscure act of exegesis – is associated with the werewolf. The werewolf is, of course, the wolf times two – the intentional wolf, the man become wolf. The werewolf in the movies is such usually be accident – the disease model takes over from an older tradition, in which the werewolf is such by pact with the devil.

“The issue of the paths alerts the reader to the presence of a false choice: between the path of the pins and the path of the needles. The girl defies the social order by selecting prostitution, a non-procreative act. Explicit in the wolf's choice of the path of the pins is a similar threat to creation through the attacks of witches on children either born or unborn. By choosing similar paths, the wolf and the girl enter into an unnatural pact from whence the rest of the story, including cannibalism, unfolds.”

Elizabeth Lawrence, making a survey of the werewolf in literature and cinema, begins with the first literary werewolf tale, which is in the Satyricon. A servant goes out of a lodging house to visit his girlfriend. One of the lodgers, a soldier, accompanies him. Halfway there, they both stop in a cemetery to rest. The soldier then peels off all his clothes, pisses in a circle around them, and turns into a wolf. He goes off howling. As Lawrence remarks, taking off the clothes is taking off humanity – the human being the private animal, the one that hides or distorts its privates in various and sundry ways. And of course the doglike peeing, the marking of territory, is another threshold feature – the movement towards being something else – and not Rimbaud’s autre, not someone else.

Lawrence considers what that something else is:

"In order to understand the werewolf and the emotions it evokes, one must take a close look at the extraordinary history of human relationships with the wolf and the crusade of annihilation. The species was long ago extirpated in the British Isles and Scandinavia and wolf populations were decimated in its former range throughout the world (Lopez 13-14). As one wolf researcher points out, the destruction of that animal represents "the first time in the history of the planet [that] one species made a deliberate organized attempt to exterminate a fellow species." Ingrained hatred of the wolf was brought with the colonists to the New World. The American war against the species was "one of the most successful programs ever carried out by the federal government." The original wolf population in what is now the lower forty-eight states before the arrival of European settlers is estimated to have been two million. "By the 1950s, except for isolated populations of a few hundred wolves in the Upper Midwest, the gray wolf had been exterminated in those areas" (Mcintyre 69, 77).

"Ironically, at least "since the advent of death certificates, there have been no verifiable records of unprovoked attack on humans by [healthy] wolves in the North American continent" (Thiel 35). Yet countless injuries and deaths attributable to wolves have been recorded from the Old World. A partial explanation may be that these attacks were related to rabies epidemics. There is also the plausible theory that some of the aggressive encounters involved wolfdog hybrids, which are much less wary of humans than wolves. In particular, the eighteenth century attacks in southern France by the so-called "Beast of Gevaudan" can likely be traced to a wolf-dog cross (Trotti 126). Another factor is that wolves can tell when a person is armed. Modern wolves have had many generations' experience with firearms, and thus are much more cautious than their ancestors (Russell and Russell 158). Numerous causes underlie the hatred that motivated brutal wolf-exterminating campaigns throughout the animal's range. Culturally ingrained superstitions imbued the animal with mysterious frightfulness. Anti-wolf sentiment was inspired by the desire to protect vulnerable livestock and also to preserve the species preyed upon by the wolf, such as deer and elk, for human sport-hunting purposes. But ignorance of the actual ecological role of the wolf, and its value, also accounts for much of the tragedy. Overall, the issue at stake has always been a lack of knowledge about humankind's relationship to the universe, the age-old dilemma relating to determining "man's place in nature." “

Lawrence is right. That is an extraordinary history. It charges the whole notion of the desire to be a wolf, which is also inscribed in that history. Lawrence points out that the when the Boy Scouts came to the Lapp part of Finland, “… the Boy Scout movement was resisted by the children, who "objected strongly to being called Wolf-cubs."

All of this is simply an animalistic preliminary to what this post is really supposed to be about -- Richard Bessel’s extraordinary article, in last winter’s History and Memory, Hatred After War: Emotion and the post war history of East Germany. However, it looks like this post has gone on long enough. We’ll return to that article in our next post.

oedipus jr. and the paper tigers!

The dustup between Christopher Hitchens and Juan Cole would be worth commenting on if Hitchens were still worth commenting on. At one time, LI was fascinated with him as, at least, the most articulate of the belligerents. But now he is taking his stylistic cues from old Evans and Novak columns. Style to Hitchens is what Dorien Gray’s portrait was to Dorian Gray – it is where the damage shows up.

But – there is a bit in Cole’s defense upon which I’d like to hook this post.

“As for the matter at issue, Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives.”

I wonder whether that isn’t a huge underestimation of Ahmadinejad. I wonder because of the article in this Spring’s National Interest by Ray Takeyh: “Being Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The National Interest used to be a beehive of neo-conservatives, so it is interesting, now that the Nixonian realists have cleaned them out – with much clucking all around – that the Spring issue practically coos. The consensus among the authors of four articles about Iran is that the U.S. is fucked. And being fucked, the sensible thing is to initiate détente – although the word isn’t thrown out there. Takeyh’s article, however, made me think that things are going to get worse between the U.S. and Iran because Ahmadinejad is not only not a non-entity, but represents a certain recognizable current in Iran. The same rightwing current that emerged in the U.S. when the Vietnam vets started taking political office – the Top Gun boys, the Duke Cunninghams:

“AFTER 27 years, the complexion of the Iranian regime is changing. An ascetic "war generation" is assuming power with a determination to rekindle revolutionary fires long extinguished.

For Ahmadinejad and his allies, the 1980-88 war with Iraq defined their experiences, and it conditions their political assumptions. The Iran-Iraq War was unusual in many respects, as it was not merely an interstate conflict designed to achieve specific territorial or even political objectives. This was a war waged for the triumph of ideas, with Ba'athi secular pan-Arabism contesting Iran's Islamic fundamentalism. As such, for those who went to the front, the war came to embody their revolutionary identity. Themes of solidarity, sacrifice, self-reliance and commitment not only allowed the regime to consolidate its power, they also made the defeat of Saddam the ultimate test of theocratic legitimacy. War and revolution had somehow fused in the clerical cosmology. To wage a determined war was to validate one's revolutionary ardor and spiritual fidelity--the notions of compromise and a "ceasefire" were anathema to this point of view.

Suddenly, in August 1988, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared the conflict to be over. After eight years of brutal struggle and clerical exhortations of the inevitability of the triumph of the armies of God, the war ended without achieving any of its pledged objectives. For veterans like Ahmadinejad, not unlike post-World War I German veterans, there was a ready explanation for this turn of events. It was not the inadequacy of Iran's military planning or the miscalculations of its commanders, but the West's machinations and its tolerance of Saddam's use of chemical weapons that had turned the tide of the battle.”

Whether this analysis is true or not, it is certainly true that Iran lies under the shadow of a war that killed 500 thousand to a million people. It is not that long ago that missiles were coming down in Teheran. And surely memories of that experience are being prodded by all of those heavy handed American threats.
Happily, Takeyh’s tack is not to keep up the World War I analogy, but to point out that, after thirty years of having no relations with the U.S., people in Ahmadinejad’s circle don’t really see the need. In fact, they dismiss the U.S. as an irrelevance.

“For the aging mullahs such as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the more pragmatic head of the Expediency Council, Hashemi Rafsanjani, America remained the dominant actor in Iran's melodrama. For those hardliners, the United States was the source of all of Iran's problems, while for the older generation of more pragmatist conservatives it was the solution to the theocracy's mounting dilemmas. In either depiction, America was central to Iran's affairs. Given that this cohort came into political maturity during the reign of the shah and his close alliance with the United States, was engaged in a revolutionary struggle that was defined by its opposition to America, and then led a state often in conflict with Washington, it was natural that they were obsessed with the United States.

In terms of their international perspective, Ahmadinejad's generation of conservatives does not share its elders' preoccupation with America. Their insularity and their ideology-laden assumptions about America as a pernicious, imperial power lessen their enthusiasm for coming to terms with a country long depicted as the "Great Satan." Even a cursory examination of the younger hardliners' speeches reveals much about their view of international relations: that power in the international system is flowing eastward. As Ali Larijani, the head of the Supreme National Security Council, noted, "There are certain big states in the Eastern Hemisphere such as Russia, China and India. These states can play a balancing role in today's world." In a similar vein, another stalwart of the new conservatives, the current mayor of Tehran, Muhammad Qalibaf, declared, "In the current international arena we see the emergence of South Asia. And if we do not take advantage of that, we will lose." From the perspective of the new Right, globalization does not imply capitulating to the United States but cultivating relations with emerging power centers on the global landscape. It is hoped that such an "eastern orientation" might just obviate the need to come to terms with the United States.”

That is a terrible delusion, but an understandable one. As LI has been saying over and over again, there is a price for being a paper tiger. American irrelevance in Iraq, combined with the apparent carelessness about Al Qaeda, (so reminiscent of the aborted Carter era rescue of the hostages) combine to make American power seem not only defiable, but on a downhill slope. The Iranians can see every day who pays and who gains in Iraq. The Americans can loot the place, but they can’t even repair the fucking oil pipelines. And while the American papers always like to trumpet comments from their favorite Iraqi leaders that are anti-Iranian, that is window dressing. Oddly enough, Americans believe their own bullshit on these kinds of issues. Infinite are the paths of gullibility. In any case, instead of using Europe as the proxy for talking with Iran, we should surely be using China. Alas, Bush’s rude and frankly stupid behavior during the visit of the guy who has been paying our bills, the Chinese president Hu Jintao is a bad sign. It is always a bad sign when the neo-con agenda (China is the rising enemy!) converges with Bush’s bad Oedipal problems (Dad liked China!). Our royal nonesuch has a tendency to act out, then, when rationally, he should be heavily medicated and stored in a hangar somewhere at -10 degrees fahrenheit.

peak privatization

The Wall Street Journal’s David Luhnow and Jose de Cordoba turn in a good article on Bolivia’s nationalization – it puts it in the broad picture of the global trend away from privatization. The least LI can say about this is that we wrote an article for the Austin American Statesman a long time ago – in November, 2001 – predicting that the tide had turned on privatization. It is nice to be proven right. And Daniel Yergin can eat his hat.

However, while it makes sense from the standpoint of a country that depends on a primary product export to make as much off that export as possible, there are various problems with doing so. The Gulf states long ago nationalized their major export, and nobody calls the Gulf states hotbeds of communism – it is, in fact, a mistake to take the ideological tenor of nationalization too seriously. Whether Bolivia’s nationalization will just be a passing affair, or whether it will take, will depend on whether Morales’ government can attract the capital to build up a supervisory structure. And the time really is fortunate, insofar as Venezuela, if it was so inclined, could be a source of seed money.

"Chavez and Morales are both playing a game of chicken with foreign oil companies," said David Mares, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego who studies the regional oil industry.
It remains to be seen whether the moves by Messrs. Chavez and Morales will lead to a broader regional backlash against foreign oil companies and further complicate the global energy market. "Obviously there are concerns" about a ripple effect, "but we don't know what the future impact is going to be," said Bob Davis, an Exxon Mobil Corp. spokesman.”

Interestingly, Ecuador, mistaking itself for a free and autonomous country, has recently tried to put a surplus tax on oil companies sucking out Ecuador’s petroleum wealth. Of course, the Bush White House has decided that decision just won’t stand:
“Proposed legislation will increase the Ecuadorean government’s income from oil revenues by some US$600m a year at current prices, but could ruin the chances of a bilateral trade agreement with the US, which must be initialled by a May 15th deadline. Negotiations between the two countries have been in abeyance since March.
As have other oil-producing countries, Ecuador has moved to capture a greater share of the windfall earnings arising from a tripling of oil prices since 2002. Talks on a free-trade agreement (FTA) deal with the US began two years ago, at the same time as Andean neighbours Peru and Colombia. The latter two have both now signed agreements, which must now be ratified by their respective legislatures (as well as by the US Congress).

In all three countries there has been substantial domestic opposition to freer trade with the US, largely from producers such as farmers who see it as prejudicial to their interests but also from a vociferous nationalist lobby that considers it a capitulation to US pressure. In Ecuador, however, indigenous groups form the backbone of opposition to the trade accord. They have proven to be a potent force of protest in the recent past, contributing to direct action that has given rise to successive bouts of extreme political instability.
…
Although the US government is not bound to interfere in the foreign dealings of its domestic companies, the issue is closely tied to FTA negotiations because rules guaranteeing the enforceability of contracts are a central part of bilateral trade deals. FTA talks were suspended when the oil plans were first announced, and are yet to resume. Unless a comprise solution can be worked out by mid-May, a trade deal is unlikely to be brought before the US Congress for ratification before the mid-term elections later this year. Manuel Chiriboga, Ecuador’s chief trade negotiator, denies Ecuador is reneging on its commitment to investment protection clauses in established contracts, but has acknowledged that completing the trade deal on time is now a remote possibility.”

The Bush White House position is simple. In order to become independent of foreign oil, we have to start thinking of companies where American hq-ed oil companies work as secretly American. That way, it isn’t foreign anymore. And as American hq-ed companies do a lot for America – they lower the taxes they pay, they cycle money through offshore banks, and they send American legislators on very fun junkets – it is all to the good of your average American citizen.

One does have to laugh a bit, though. Here the biggest collection of senile cold warriors in the world sit on their asses in the Executive branch, losing a war in Iraq, while under their noses Latin America has tilted so far to the left that it makes the late seventies, when Carter was president, look like reactionary heaven. Plus, even Mexico has recently passed a reasonable law decriminalizing private possession, within reasonable limits, of most drugs.

All of the seams are coming out of the baseball.

hurray for the swinish multitude

For who can tell but the Millennium
May take its rise from my poor Cranium?..


LI has been reading a lot about the English radicals around Tom Paine in the 1790s. Interesting lot of characters, and very a propos for May Day. One of them, Thomas Spence, was a refugee from the North of England, coming to London after being expelled from a Dissenter congregation for publishing a pamphlet proposing that land itself was common – land, like air, could not be bought. A proposition that John Stuart Mill entertained, later, and that made up the bulk of Henry George’s radicalism. In London, Spence continued to emit his radical views through a wonderfully named weekly journal:

“Edmund Burke's reference to "the swinish multitude" provided Spence with a title for his greatest publishing venture. Between 1793 and 1796, he issued a weekly paper called "Pigs' Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude," consisting of excerpts from many writings on liberty, attacks on despotism, and frequent verse. These papers were later issued as complete volumes; there were three in all, each with an engraved frontispiece by Spence's son.

The frontispiece for Volume I depicts a well-fed missionary and three graceful Indians. The missionary says: "God has enjoined you to be Christians, to pay rent and tythes, and become a Civilized People." One Indian replies: "If Rent we once consent to pay, Taxes next you'll on us lay, And then our Freedom's poured away;" at which the Indians chorus: "With the Beasts of the Wood We'll ramble for Food, And live in wild deserts and Caves; And live poor as Job, On the Skirts of the Globe, Before we'll consent to be Slaves, My Brave Boys, Before We'll consent to be Slaves!"

The frontispiece for Volume II has two Indians gazing at an unhappy donkey. One Indian says: "Behold the civilized Ass, Two pairs of Panyers on his Back; the First with Rents a heavy mass; With Taxes next his bones do crack." To which the donkey brays in response: "I'm doomed to endless Toil and Care-I was an Ass to bear the first Pair."

Spence apparently grew rather disgusted, at times, with the swinish multitude. While pigs “squeal most seditiously,” Spence found the people much too passive and compliant to live up to the piggish standard. Well, here’s to a May Day of squealing seditiously. Here’s Spence in a more satiric and bitter mood (from Carl Fisher’s essay on Politics and Porcine Representation):

“Ye swinish multitude who prate,

What know ye `bout the matter?'

Misterious are the ways of state,

Of which you should not chatter.

Our church and state, like man and wife,

Together kindly cuddle;

Together share the sweets of life

Together feast and fuddle.

Then hence ye swine nor make a rout,

Forbearance but relaxes;

We'll clap the muzzle on your snout,

Go work, and pay your taxes.”

galbraith, RIP

Loneliness. John Kenneth Galbraith is dead.

In the NYT obituary, which is generous (as it should be), there are two paragraphs on the matter of Galbraith’s isolation from the economic community which cast a broad light on why Galbraith is generally right, and the mass of economists, drudges of rightwing ideology, are generally living in outer space:

“Mr. Galbraith argued that technology mandated long-term contracts to diminish high-stakes uncertainty. He said companies used advertising to induce consumers to buy things they had never dreamed they needed.

Other economists, like Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler, both Nobel Prize winners, countered with proofs showing that advertising is essentially informative rather than manipulative.”

Adorno and Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, said that De Sade’s vision of a world of universal prostitution is a dystopian version of capitalism. Gary S. Becker’s neo-classical analysis of the family unit as essentially a matter of efficient transaction costs cast the world as a matter of universal prostitution and pronounced it good, and in doing so founded the Law and Economics field that has swallowed the justice system. Galbraith never liked the idea that we should live in a world of universal prostitution. For this, he got rocks thrown at him by the economics professors.

Not all, however:

“Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, maintains that Mr. Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Mr. Parker's book recounts, Mr. Sen said the influence of "The Affluent Society" was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted.
"It's like reading 'Hamlet' and deciding it's full of quotations," he said.”
Well, LI searched for the proper poem to commemorate JKG. Here is Donald Davies’ Obiter Dicta,

Trying to understand myself, I fetch
My father's image to me. There he is, augmenting
The treasury of his prudence with a clutch
Of those cold eggs, Great Truths---his scrivener's hand
Confiding apopthegms to his pocket book.
Does mine do more than snap the elastic band
Of rhyme about them? In an age that teaches
How pearls of wisdom only look like eggs,
The tide, afflatus, still piles up on the beaches
Pearls that he prizes, stones that he retrieves
Misguidedly from poetry's undertow,
Deaf to the harsh retraction that achieves
Its scuttering backwash, ironies. And yet,
Recalling his garrulity, I see
There's method in it. Seeming to forget


The point at issue, the palmer tells his beads,
Strung by connections nonchalantly weak
Upon the thread of argument he needs
To bring them through his fingers, round and round,
Tasting of gristle, savoury; and he hears,
Like rubbing stones, their dry conclusive sound.

Himself an actor (He can play the clown),
He knows the poet's a man of parts; the sage
Is one of them, buffoonery like his own,
Means to an end. So, if he loves the page
That grows sententious with a terse distinction,
Yet lapidary moralists are dumb
About the precepts that he acts upon,
Brown with tobacco from his rule of thumb.

'Not bread but a stone!'---the deep-sea fishermen
Denounce our findings, father. Pebbles, beads,
Perspicuous dicta, gems from Emerson,
Whatever stands when all about it slides,
Whatever in the oceanic welter
Puts period to unpunctuated tides,
These, that we like, they hate. And after all, for you,
To take but with a pinch of salt to take
The maxims of the sages is the true
Great Truth of all. To keep, as you would say,
A sense of proportion, I should portion out
The archipelago across the bay,
One island to so much sea. Assorted
Poetic pleasures come in bundles then,
Strapped up by rhyme, not otherwise supported?

Turning about his various gems to take
Each other's lustre by a temperate rule,
He walks the graveyard where I have to make
Not centos but inscriptions, and a whole
That's moved from inward, dancing. Yet I trace
Among his shored-up epitaphs my own:
Art, as he hints, turns on a commonplace,
And Death is a tune to dance to, cut in stone.

the state is already lost...

Je suis le véritable père Duchesne, foutre !

“Not a lot of probity is required by a monarchic or despotic government in order for it to sustain and maintain itself. The force of the law in the one, the arm of the prince, forever lifted, in the other rules or contains everything. But in a popular government, we require another resource, which is virtue.

What I am saying is confirmed by the entire body of history, and is very conformable to the nature of things. For it is clear that in a monarchy, where he who has the laws executed judges himself above the law, one has need less of virtue than in a popular government, where he who has the laws executed feels he himself subject to them, so that he bears their burden.

It is, again, clear that the monarch who, by bad counsel or negligence, ceases to have the laws executied, can easily repair the injury: he has only to change the counsel, or correct his negligences. But when, in a popular government, the laws cease to be executed, like that there can only come the corruption of the republic – the state is already lost. “

Well said, Montesquieu. Bringing us to the intermittent series of Bush’s crimes, of which Jonathan Schwartz, at Tiny Revolution, is making an account. He noticed, as of course the whole of the opposition hasn’t (the willfully blind, still fretting about framing a national security policy bloody enough to garner a good percentage of the lyncher vote. Hilary C.’s proposal of a lottery bombing, in which average citizens can reach into a tub full of billets with the names of countries written on them, and we bomb that country for a day, has apparently received the endorsement of the New Republic crowd), LI, too, is compiling a small history of how a great republic crawled through a small time, and gave up the ghost. This would be a sad story, if one could tell it in Montesquieu’s language, a classical, hard tone deriving from a lifelong acquaintance with the Latin historians. However, LI can only tell it, has only been responding to it, in the vulgar tones of street worm made victim by some hit and run frat car, careening crazily down the street. We wave our empties at it, spit, zip down our zipper and piss in its general direction. More Père Duchêne than Montesquieu, I’m afraid.

Still, it is a spectacle, no? The usurpation of tyrannical power by an executive branch which, after failing completely to protect the citizenry, after allowing America to be attacked by a bunch of pikers, and after failing systematically even to punish the relative handful of people who made that happen, now uses the bloody results of that failure as the grounds for usurping ever more illegal power, which it concentrates in ever more incompetent and fraudulent hands.

Schwartz has been citing outrageous bits from Bush’s favorite constitutional theorist, John Yoo, the man who never saw a torture he didn’t like – that is, if the torturer is an American. Yoo, basically, holds that the executive branch can conduct wars with its – America’s – army as he sees fit, with the only brake upon this power being the Congressional power over the purse strings. There is a latin legal phrase for Yoo’s position. It translates, roughly, as: Í’m pulling this out of my ass. In Policy Review, which is as conservative a journal as you can get, Yoo’s reviewer, Eugene Kontorovich, couldn’t quite go the whole route of claiming that the president is a king:

When the Constitution was ratified, the federal army numbered fewer than 700 men; there was no naval establishment. The state militias accounted for the bulk of the nation's military capability.

The Constitution makes clear that Congress, rather than the president, controls the "calling forth of the militia." Thus, the commander in chief, at the time of the founding, had no means with which to start a war without prior action by Congress. It would be odd if the decision about whether to wage war were placed solely on the shoulders of an official so ill-suited to
ensuring its success. … In Yoo's model.Congress's decision to create a military ready to meet any contingency allows the president to do what he will with it.”

The Policy reviewer also points out another flaw in Yoo’s position: one that, actually, reaches to the heart of the monster created by the crossing of the corporate power and warmaking under the aegis of the Cold War:

“Today, a hard-pressed president might seek out contributions or, worse, loans from other nations. This is not so far-fetched — the Gulf War was financed in part with foreign contributions, and much of the Iran-contra scandal was about the White House's efforts to obtain alternative funding from foreign nations after Congress cut off support for the Latin American freedom fighters.

“Or the president could pay for the war from its own proceeds — for example, by selling assets of a defeated enemy (Iraqi oil, for example). Or perhaps he could sell U.S. military hardware to other nations — he is, after all, commander in chief of the armed forces.”

That these are actually imaginable courses of action tells us something about the structural madness of giving the President this kind of power. So: let’s take it away from him.

Strangle the military. Support your anti-recruiter. Be a patriot.

the treadmill of production

LI finds the shenanigans over oil recently extremely funny and sad. To question the oil-chemical complex in any way is to invite massive retaliation – remember, conservatism in this country has nothing to do with conservative ideas. It has everything to do with well financed expression of the industry’s interests. The G.O.P., and much of the Democratic party, simply exist to forward their interests. The parties are allowed to take up hobbies, in the spirit of Junior League – the Dems going out for reproductive choice and home decorating, for instance, and the G.O.P. taking up preserving the brain dead and biking. So, even when, for instance, a pundit like Michael Kinsley comes out for a windfall tax, he hedges himself about – for instance, by saying that taxes should never, ever be used as punishment. Heavens no. In the world of pundit economics, taxes can only be used as rewards – everybody must get prizes, you see. Why punish an industry for gorging on limited resources, spending progressively less on R and D (actually, this is one of the big effects of the Bush tax giveaways – why spend on R & D when it is now more profitable to distribute your profits via dividends? And especially when the tax regime for the upper management is so favorable that those ethically challenged parasites move heaven and earth to take as much of a bite as they can from the enterprises they run, now) because who ever heard of a Republic limiting the power of the most powerful? It has occurred to Tacitus, Montesquieu, John Locke, Tom Paine and the like – but that’s a bunch of losers, as we well know.

So – since this is Chernobyl week, and since we’ve been thinking of the question of value posed during the recent Spivak to-do – we thought this would be a good post to talk about Allan Schnaiberg.

Schaiberg is an economist at Northwestern. In the early eighties, he published an influential book in the field of environmental economics. Not a field people have heard of, right? But it is an influential field. The big controversy in the field is about ecological modernization. Briefly: a German sociologist, Peter Huber, proposed that the offloading of costs onto the environment during the twentieth century was caused by the State. If we just took the state out of the equation, private enterprise would develop ways of being greener. The thought was – greener is more efficient.

Schaiberg’s thesis was different. He coined the phrase, the treadmill of production, to talk about the network effects of industrialization – whereever the ultimate control over industry lay. In a recent essay, The treadmill of production and the environmental state, he revisits his thesis. We are going to try to comment on the treadmill of production part, which articulates a thesis about the economy for which we have tons of sympathy. But the environmental state part is equally interesting.

“From a conceptual perspective, we might characterize an "environmental state" as encompassing the following feature: whenever it engaged in economic decision-making, considerations of ecological impacts would have equal weight with any considerations of private sector profits and state sector taxes. Put this way, most industrialized nation-states fall far short of this standard. Indeed, it is increasingly true that any environmental policy-making is subject to more intensive economic scrutiny, while economic policies are subject to less and less environmental assessment (Daynes 1999; Soden and Steel
1999).”

Schaiberg’s paper includes a case study of the recycling industry in Chicago. It is a study about the structural changes that came about in that industry as it was turned into a regular private sector industry, with the goal of making a profit. LI found this interesting as a case just because we remember the old recycling movement in the seventies and eighties. My brothers worked, at that time, heading up maintenance for some apartment complexes. They were both enthusiastic about recycling. They sponsored a cleanup of litter, for instance, along a highway leading into Stone Mountain Georgia. They got their complexes in touch with recycling services. For a couple of years, they devised a mass pick up of Christmas trees – the trees were, I think, going to be used by fish hatcheries or something. My brothers are enthusiasts, and they turned out the family, including my mother, my father, and me – in the Christmas tree deal – to do the various recycling projects.

However, as recycling became simply profit based, the air went out of volunteering. And as they became profit based, instead of applying the private sector efficiency in taking care of the whole spectrum of waste, the spectrum was cherry picked.

Schaiberg writes:

First, treadmill organizations [those in the treadmill of increasing consumer demand and cutting production cost by leveraging part of that cost onto the commons, or other people’s property] generally resist environmental regulation with all the substantial means at their disposal. For example, prior to the advent of recycling regulations and programs, container firms fought all forms of
"bottle bills", spending perhaps US$50 million opposing such bills, and succeeding in about 2/3 of the states. Yet even these bottle bills were only indirectly constraining firms. Legislation did not directly mandate a refillable container, but only the imposition of a deposit on all containers. Even in this limited regulation, the refunding mechanisms for the deposit put some cost burdens on non-refillable container manufacturers and/or users. Thus, in recent years in New York state, bottlers have refused to repurchase stockpiled
refunded containers. They have let these accumulate at brokers and large retailers, seeking thereby to mobilize opposition to the bottle bill system. For the remaining 2/3 of states, container manufacturers and bottlers have simply encouraged recycling, and have kept feedstock prices low, and avoided paying labor costs for refilling containers.

Second, where direct resistance against any environmental legislation becomes
infeasible, under pressures from environmental NGOs, firms first dilute the legislation to minimize its impacts on their operations. Then they wait for opportunities to further lighten their regulatory load, whenever the political climate shifts and/or NGOs are elsewhere engaged. In the recycling arena, this has been commonplace. Affected industries have continuously shifted their campaigns to avoid mandatory direct controls on their production and distribution activities. All U.S. government regulations have avoided mandating firms with a "life cycle" responsibility for their own generation of post-consumer wastes, as has
occurred in some European states. Instead, governments had introduced fairly weak mandates for firms, requiring higher "recycled content" of their production. Firms have responded by including post-production waste recycling (a standard economic practice for decades) as part of post-consumption recycling.”

The treadmill aim of weakening the impetus for even voluntary environmental action seems odd, at first, until you take into account what the companies take into account – such behavior leads to an enlarged sense of the interaction between the economy and the environment. It is not just to make more money that the great energy monsters convened by Cheney in 2001 agreed to put the keebosh on conservation – it is because conservation countervails an insane consumerist ethos. If people are allowed, for a second, to fall in love with the planet to the extent of wanting to spare that tree or ice floe, the virus will spread. Questions about the justice of exhausting our resources will emerge. Fundamental questions about ownership and its limits. In fact, people will begin to think that politics doesn’t begin or end with what dumb party you vote for or the latest outrage that we must rush to have opinions on – should we sing the National Anthem in Spanish? Is the book by the guy who runs the Daily Kos doing better than the book written by the guy who runs instapundit? but we will think about why, if Americans (for instance) are so happy, they are so indebted, so unable to stop buying the stupidest things, so unwilling to look at, say, the environmental horrors being perpetrated, for the last five years, by coal mining companies in West Virginia.

When you have no control over your mind or attention span, you are fucking owned. And that is the resource they are extracting with every hot air soundbyte and fake crisis.