LI is desperately trying to make money this week -- if any LI readers know of anyone who wants editing, send them to us, please! so we might not be so garrulous on this site.
...
Those who want to read something that gets to the heart of the heart of the court mindset in D.C. should really check out this Stuart Rothenberg post. Rothenberg is a professional political person -- it is his job, by analysing, consulting and advising, to help politicians sit on the collective face of America. But the Coonnecticut Democratic convention that allowed Lieberman to be challenged by Ned Lamont has disturbed him greatly. The people have a function, and that function, which defines them, is to overwhelmingly re-elect the Politburo. When the people violate their function, are they even people at all? It is the great cry of the rulers throughout the ages: Are there no workhouses, no prisons, in which to store these wretches? If this is what democracy is, perhaps we should have a system where the loser in an election – if he has the Right Stuff – should be proclaimed the Winner. It worked in 2000, didn’t it?
The passion in this post is moving. It would take a reader with a heart of stone not to shed copious tears for Joe Lieberman-as-Galileo-Bruno-n-John Brown:
“Lieberman’s crime is that he hasn’t always toed the party line. He’s decided for himself what’s right and wrong, even — and here is the most shocking thing — used his own values, judgment and intellect to decide where he stands on issues and how he’ll vote.
Lamont’s criticism has resonated with some Democrats around the state and online. The war is unpopular with Democrats in Connecticut, as it is elsewhere, and many voters are unhappy with Lieberman’s general support of President Bush’s Iraq policy.
It doesn’t seem to matter to those angry Democrats, or to Lamont, that Lieberman is widely respected for his thoughtfulness, integrity, civility and intellect. Or his overall voting record.”
My god. That respect, which echoes from Georgetown to K street, has been all over Fox News, and dances like sugarplums in the heads of the great thinkers at the Pentagon, is being trampled by a buncha fucking mugwumps in Connecticut who somehow got past the guards. Rothenberg's instincts -- as a father, a patriot, and a bouncer -- are charged:
“It isn’t just that Lieberman is a centrist, however, that makes the primary challenge to him unseemly. Not all centrists deserve to be re-elected any more than all liberals or all conservatives do. Rather, it’s the Connecticut Democrat’s stature and character that, in another day, would make a primary challenge to him by a former Greenwich selectman laughable.”
Yes, it isn't a belief system -- Rothenberg is so right. A belief system is to be trotted out only during the short time when one has to appear before the peasants and get their applause. Then, centrist, rightist and leftists can like down with the corporate lambs, with the wise old heads in foreign policy, with journalists who have established reputations, probity, and decide to do what is good for the country. Into this company wander a pinhead from Greenwich? Laughable - or disgusting. Why can’t we change the law the teensiest bit so these flies and maggots can’t challenge the stature and character, the deep, deep thinking of such as Senator – or shall I say Senator for Life? Joe Lieberman.
Rothenberg - a hero of democracy in our time.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Sunday, May 21, 2006
turns
Because it seems to me that the things in Cooper that make one so savage, when one compares them with actuality, are perhaps, when one considers them as presentations of a deep subjective desire, real in their way, and almost prophetic. – D.H. Lawrence
Lawrence was right to pick out the killer motif in his book on Classic American Literature right to find some deep subjective desire there. It is the hunter plot – hunting deer, hunting the great white whale, hunting bear, hunting, above all, Indians – that has such large and prophetic effects on the American imago that Americans are still enthralled by the elements of that primitive story. However, it is LI’s contention that the story is now in its decadence – and that its decadence is part of the larger debauching of the narrative intelligence in these here states – and that the site of its decadence is the action movie. All of these thoughts derive from a trivial and stupid occasion – as some long suffering readers know, LI is trying to put together a graphic novel. To that end, we’ve not only been reading them, we’ve been watching movies made from them. Which is how we explain wasting an hour and ten minutes on The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.
Lawrence doesn’t mention Robinson Crusoe in the context of the American hunter, but – borrowing from Marx’s notion of Crusoe as the legitimating myth of the classical economists – surely Natty Bumppo, or Daniel Boone, play the same role in the American climate, are the heroes of methodological individualism American style. As always, of course, history discretely precedes pre-history – these self-made hunters use weapons that represent the cutting edge of the factory and distribution system. Even in the deepest woods of the Six Nations, they are parasitic, in a crucial sense, on the world economy – going in with the gun, coming out with the pelts, or the scalps – whatever sells. And, as Olson points out about Moby Dick, hunting and the factory system combine in the whaling ship. By taking the ship and making it into the vessel of his own vengeance, Ahab departs from the hunter’s program, the telos of the pelt or whale oil that is brought back, and this is a mark of his madness. There’s a nice story about this parasitical situation in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. An expriest tells the kid a story about the Judge over the scalphunters fire one evening. In the story, the expriest and a band of other hunter/desperados are being chased by savages into the malpais, the great salt and quartz wastelands in Sonora or southern Arizona. The band has run out of gunpowder. And then they come upon the judge – just like that. The judge scales flakes of silicon and sulphur from the rocks about with his knife, and mixes it up, and then has the whole company piss on it (“He’d took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with a great vengeance”) and kneads the mixture and lets it dry, and the band uses that powder to fight off the surprised savages. This is self-sufficiency, but it is also a parody of gunpowder manufacture, a reminder of the factories and mines behind the Daniel Boones. But even if the hero of methodological individualism ends up pissing into a pile of mineral flakes to survive, you can’t entirely take the aura away from Daniel Boone. Literature happens because myths don’t hold – and so it is with Ahab and, much later, with the boy in Faulkner’s The Bear – but the myths are also fight back.
Then there is the woods themselves – and the ocean and the malpais, other forms of wilderness, easily transformed, by metaphor, into a woods, and vice versa. When the Boy goes into the woods for the first time in Faulkner’s story, the sensation of moving among the immensity of trees is compared to a sensation the boy has much later – the first time he goes onto an ocean going ship. The woods, though, are European as well. After all, Dante as well as Daniel Boone found himself in a forest, and Ortega y Gasset begins the Meditation on Quixote with an essay on the forest. In America, the hunter maps the woods, and the map kills the hunter – for of course he is followed by the world system, the farms and manufactures. In Europe, Ortega y Gasset’s forest is also inhabited by what used to be there: “When we arrive at a small clearing in the verdure, it seems as if a man had been sitting there on a stone, with his elbows on his knees, his hands on his temples, and that just as we were arriving he got up and left…. The forest is always a little beyond where we are. It has just gone away from where we are and all that remains is its still fresh traces. The ancients, who projected their emotions into corporeal and living forms, peopled the forests with fugitive nymphs.” In America, of course, the man was there when the Americans got there – and he was gone by the second, the third, the fourth generation, ‘vanished’ – as it used to be said in the old educational films of my sixth grade. The ‘vanishing’ American Indian. The ‘vanishing’ buffalo. In truth, the hunter’s last real moment in American culture was in the 1870s, when factory, hunting, and ethnic cleansing were put together as the army contracted out the extinction of the buffalo. Here, the peculiar genius of General Sherman showed itself:
“In a letter on May 10, 1868, Sherman mentioned a sardonic method of resolving the conflict, writing to Sheridan that "I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England & America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffaloes & consequent(ly) the Indians are out from between the Roads we will have collisions & trouble." On June 17, 1868, Sherman wrote his brother John about the buffalo and the railroad: "The commission for present peace had to concede a right to hunt buffaloes as long as they last, and they may lead to collisions, but it will not be long before all the buffaloes are extinct near and between the railroads, after which the Indians will have no reason to approach either railroad..." (Sherman, 1894, p. 320)”
This was the end of the hunter as the classic American hero, the myth inside methodological individualism. It was the end, too, of the hunter’s forest – the American forests of turns, where hunter and prey could switch places. The hunter as a hand is the cowboy -- an entirely different figure.
All of which is a pretty heavy intro to a few remarks about watching a shitty movie. But hey, LI paid 3.50 to rent it, and we do want to get some value for our money. So, next post will be about the action movie.
ps - I was reading last night in Fintan O'Tooles biography of Richard Sheridan, The Traitor's Kiss, and came across this marvelous anecdote:
"On March 6, 1786, the American Company's production of Robinson Crusoe or Helequin Friday was performed in New York 'For the entertainment of the Indian Chiefs of the Oneida nation, now in this city." Probably devised by Elizabeth Sheridan with assistance from her husband, this pantomime seems, from surving accounts, to have been itself a strange fantasy of meetings between European travellers and New World natives. The first half follows the outline of Daniel Defoe's novel. But in the secnd, set in Spain, Crusoe disappears back to England, leaving the black man Friday - played by one of the first black face performers to appear on the American stage - in the arms a white Columbine. The lovers are rescued from various distresses by a black magician and transported back to the island, where "the Piece concludes with a Grand dance of Savages."
And so Robinson Crusoe and the Prospero myth are unfurled before the Indian nation that will provide Cooper with his enemy/models for Natty Bumppo. Oh, how our symbols turn into events and our events turn into symbols in this strange new world! And -- strange little LI world, for those who have read some of our more bizarre posts -- Crusoe was played, in the London debut of the pantomime, by Joe Grimaldi's father. The forest of turns possesses all travelers who enter into it.
Lawrence was right to pick out the killer motif in his book on Classic American Literature right to find some deep subjective desire there. It is the hunter plot – hunting deer, hunting the great white whale, hunting bear, hunting, above all, Indians – that has such large and prophetic effects on the American imago that Americans are still enthralled by the elements of that primitive story. However, it is LI’s contention that the story is now in its decadence – and that its decadence is part of the larger debauching of the narrative intelligence in these here states – and that the site of its decadence is the action movie. All of these thoughts derive from a trivial and stupid occasion – as some long suffering readers know, LI is trying to put together a graphic novel. To that end, we’ve not only been reading them, we’ve been watching movies made from them. Which is how we explain wasting an hour and ten minutes on The League of Extraordinary Gentleman.
Lawrence doesn’t mention Robinson Crusoe in the context of the American hunter, but – borrowing from Marx’s notion of Crusoe as the legitimating myth of the classical economists – surely Natty Bumppo, or Daniel Boone, play the same role in the American climate, are the heroes of methodological individualism American style. As always, of course, history discretely precedes pre-history – these self-made hunters use weapons that represent the cutting edge of the factory and distribution system. Even in the deepest woods of the Six Nations, they are parasitic, in a crucial sense, on the world economy – going in with the gun, coming out with the pelts, or the scalps – whatever sells. And, as Olson points out about Moby Dick, hunting and the factory system combine in the whaling ship. By taking the ship and making it into the vessel of his own vengeance, Ahab departs from the hunter’s program, the telos of the pelt or whale oil that is brought back, and this is a mark of his madness. There’s a nice story about this parasitical situation in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. An expriest tells the kid a story about the Judge over the scalphunters fire one evening. In the story, the expriest and a band of other hunter/desperados are being chased by savages into the malpais, the great salt and quartz wastelands in Sonora or southern Arizona. The band has run out of gunpowder. And then they come upon the judge – just like that. The judge scales flakes of silicon and sulphur from the rocks about with his knife, and mixes it up, and then has the whole company piss on it (“He’d took out his pizzle and he was pissin into the mixture, pissin with a great vengeance”) and kneads the mixture and lets it dry, and the band uses that powder to fight off the surprised savages. This is self-sufficiency, but it is also a parody of gunpowder manufacture, a reminder of the factories and mines behind the Daniel Boones. But even if the hero of methodological individualism ends up pissing into a pile of mineral flakes to survive, you can’t entirely take the aura away from Daniel Boone. Literature happens because myths don’t hold – and so it is with Ahab and, much later, with the boy in Faulkner’s The Bear – but the myths are also fight back.
Then there is the woods themselves – and the ocean and the malpais, other forms of wilderness, easily transformed, by metaphor, into a woods, and vice versa. When the Boy goes into the woods for the first time in Faulkner’s story, the sensation of moving among the immensity of trees is compared to a sensation the boy has much later – the first time he goes onto an ocean going ship. The woods, though, are European as well. After all, Dante as well as Daniel Boone found himself in a forest, and Ortega y Gasset begins the Meditation on Quixote with an essay on the forest. In America, the hunter maps the woods, and the map kills the hunter – for of course he is followed by the world system, the farms and manufactures. In Europe, Ortega y Gasset’s forest is also inhabited by what used to be there: “When we arrive at a small clearing in the verdure, it seems as if a man had been sitting there on a stone, with his elbows on his knees, his hands on his temples, and that just as we were arriving he got up and left…. The forest is always a little beyond where we are. It has just gone away from where we are and all that remains is its still fresh traces. The ancients, who projected their emotions into corporeal and living forms, peopled the forests with fugitive nymphs.” In America, of course, the man was there when the Americans got there – and he was gone by the second, the third, the fourth generation, ‘vanished’ – as it used to be said in the old educational films of my sixth grade. The ‘vanishing’ American Indian. The ‘vanishing’ buffalo. In truth, the hunter’s last real moment in American culture was in the 1870s, when factory, hunting, and ethnic cleansing were put together as the army contracted out the extinction of the buffalo. Here, the peculiar genius of General Sherman showed itself:
“In a letter on May 10, 1868, Sherman mentioned a sardonic method of resolving the conflict, writing to Sheridan that "I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England & America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffaloes & consequent(ly) the Indians are out from between the Roads we will have collisions & trouble." On June 17, 1868, Sherman wrote his brother John about the buffalo and the railroad: "The commission for present peace had to concede a right to hunt buffaloes as long as they last, and they may lead to collisions, but it will not be long before all the buffaloes are extinct near and between the railroads, after which the Indians will have no reason to approach either railroad..." (Sherman, 1894, p. 320)”
This was the end of the hunter as the classic American hero, the myth inside methodological individualism. It was the end, too, of the hunter’s forest – the American forests of turns, where hunter and prey could switch places. The hunter as a hand is the cowboy -- an entirely different figure.
All of which is a pretty heavy intro to a few remarks about watching a shitty movie. But hey, LI paid 3.50 to rent it, and we do want to get some value for our money. So, next post will be about the action movie.
ps - I was reading last night in Fintan O'Tooles biography of Richard Sheridan, The Traitor's Kiss, and came across this marvelous anecdote:
"On March 6, 1786, the American Company's production of Robinson Crusoe or Helequin Friday was performed in New York 'For the entertainment of the Indian Chiefs of the Oneida nation, now in this city." Probably devised by Elizabeth Sheridan with assistance from her husband, this pantomime seems, from surving accounts, to have been itself a strange fantasy of meetings between European travellers and New World natives. The first half follows the outline of Daniel Defoe's novel. But in the secnd, set in Spain, Crusoe disappears back to England, leaving the black man Friday - played by one of the first black face performers to appear on the American stage - in the arms a white Columbine. The lovers are rescued from various distresses by a black magician and transported back to the island, where "the Piece concludes with a Grand dance of Savages."
And so Robinson Crusoe and the Prospero myth are unfurled before the Indian nation that will provide Cooper with his enemy/models for Natty Bumppo. Oh, how our symbols turn into events and our events turn into symbols in this strange new world! And -- strange little LI world, for those who have read some of our more bizarre posts -- Crusoe was played, in the London debut of the pantomime, by Joe Grimaldi's father. The forest of turns possesses all travelers who enter into it.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
kammist hijinks
Oliver Kamm is a joke, but I like to read him to find out what bad faith is doing today. His post about Chavez, however, is beyond his usual stunning work. The disinformation conveyed by every lovely sentence (this is a man who loves the plummy sound of his own pomposity) is a work of neo-con kitsch that even Hitchens would have a hard time matching. I'm talking about golden age Hitchens, the one defending Chalabi, not the bare ruined choirs of the unreadable recent screeds in Slate. For instance, here is what Kamm says about Venezuela at the time that Chavez instigated a coup attempt, in 1992. This is in response to Johann Hari’s positive Independence interview with Chavez:
"Another point undermining Johann's morality tale is that the structural reforms, so far from being the acts of a despised regime, steadily gained support. Javier Corrales, in Presidents Without Parties: The Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s (2002, p. 55) notes that from the first quarter of 1989 (when the riots took place) to the first quarter of 1991, the number of people who wished the government to persevere with the reforms rose from 29 per cent to 45 per cent, while the economy performed strongly (a growth rate of 9.7 per cent in 1991 and a rise in investment of 81 per cent). The number of labour disputes rose in that period, but the number of actual strikes (authorised and unauthorised) declined. Mass opposition to the government's reform programme, so far from driving Chavez's failed coup attempt, was in fact driven by it. Chavez shattered a fragile consensus by showing the potential for a different form of politics, namely populist demagoguery and violence (nearly 100 people were killed in his failed coup attempt, the great majority of them civilians)."
Well, is this the same Javier Corrales who writes, in the Political Science Quarterly, 1997, comparing the Argentine and Venezuelan responses to economic crisis:
"These points will be demonstrated by referring to some cases where reforms have been implemented, successfully and otherwise. Special reference is made to the cases of Argentina (1989-1994) and Venezuela (1989-1994), which constitute clear-cut dichotomies of divergent outcomes in processes of economic reforms. After launching similar programs of economic reforms, these countries undertook different political paths. In Argentina, both the reforms and the reformers acquired unimaginable political momentum and prestige. In Venezuela, they became amply repudiated by society in general.”
Huh, Kamm does seem to have a bit of a problem with his specs, reading “amply repudiated by society in general” as “was widely acclaimed like Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.”
And here’s how Corrales describes the period in general:
“[In 1991] Venezuela plunged into its most serious political crisis since the 1960s: uncontained civic protests, two military coup attempts in 1992, intense cabinet changes, interruption of most ESSA reforms, presidential impeachment in 1993, urban terrorism, and a devastating financial crack at the end of 1993.”
Now, the heart of the deception in Kamm's little post stems from a man he, oddly, doesn't mention. Just who was that president who was impeached in 1993? Why, it seems to be a man well known for having stolen a quantity of money, Carlos A. Perez – although, as Kamm might put it, to call it stealing money is demagogic, since it was a part of a structural reform implementing a “put Venezuela’s money in Perez’s Swiss bank account” that was surely only unpopular because it was so misunderstood, Perez instituting an ultramodern CEO system of payment for Venezuela’s spanking brand new leadership. And of course his mistress, Cecilia Matos, also received a couple of million here and there, as was only right and fair. All part of a sort of New Labour before New Labour kind of thing, which Kamm so rightly beams upon. The 13 million in the Swiss bank account was all an incentive scheme..
In any case, Kamm's odd statistics for support of reform seem to be contradicted by the fact that Perez was elected on a statist platform -- and once elected, turned about and repudiated the very economic policies he represented in his campaign. Here's a May 2, 1988 Wall Street Journal article reporting on a typical Perez speech:
"Of 15 candidates standing for the December 4 election, the two front-runners are former President Carlos Andres Perez, the 65-year-old candidate of the ruling Democratic Action party, and Eduardo Fernandez, 47, who leads the main opposition party.
Both of them have pledged to fight to soften the terms for repayment of Venezuela's 30 billion dollar foreign debt, the fifth biggest in the developing world.
The country has one of the best repayment records in Latin America, repaying more principal on its debt than any other, but the leading candidates have vowed to change this.
In a newspaper interview published on Monday, Perez said Venezuela should repay its debt at a rate of around 20 per cent of its export earnings. Last year, it paid 46.5 per cent.
"We can not pay under the conditions imposed by the industrialised world," Perez, Venezuela's president from 1974 to 1979, told El Nacional. "The situation is becoming intolerable."
On the basis of such rodomontade, the man was elected, only to impose every condition asked by the 'industrialized world' and then some. Surprise surprise. It is as if George Bush had run on a platform of smaller government, only to balloon the size of the government... Oh, bad example. Well, it is as if Tony Blair had assured the British people that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in spite of knowning that the intelligence was iffy or non-existent... Oops, another bad example. Well, it is as if the Venezuelan people are supposed to swallow the lies and bad faith of their elected leaders without complaint, as they do in the U.S. and the U.K. There, that's better.
Anyway, the comedy of Kamm writing propaganda for the regime of a ex-crook who was put under house arrest twice for his crimes (and protected from worse by his buddies on the Venezuelan Supreme Court) is pretty good. One looks forward to his defense of the Salinas family next. But there is still more from this one little post. Two points, actually. One has to do with the figures that Kamm quotes, pointing to them as if the early nineties was a time of sound economic policies. Now, the background here is important, This is how Corrales puts it:
“Nevertheless, comparing numbers alone tends to ignore issues of diachronic relativity. Venezuela in January 1989 was in the midst of its most severe economic crisis since the 1930s. Venezuela's GNP was expanding but only as a result of deficit spending, growing indebtedness, and reserve burning. Artificial aggregate-demand boosting was a deliberate state strategy to hide the severity of the economic crisis for electoral purposes. But the severity of the crisis was real--very high and accelerating inflation for the first time ever, large trade and budget deficits, declining revenues, severe foreign reserve shortage (unusual for oil exporters), consumer goods scarcity, and growing social unrest. And yet, this was only the tip of the iceberg of a chronic, decade-old economic deterioration. Since the 1970s, Venezuela's economic competitiveness and living standards declined steadily. Despite the growth of GNP between 1984 and 1988, there is little evidence of any trickle-down effect. (See Table 1.) After peaking in 1982 at US $4,980, the GNP per capita declined to US $3,190 in 1988, roughly the same level as in 1977. Few countries experience such a dramatic (35 percent) decline in such a short period of time. Argentina certainly did not: its GDP per capita actually increased 32.9 percent during this period.[25] Venezuelan real wages between 1980 and 1988 also exhibit a dismal record (34 percent decline compared to 2.7 percent for Argentina). In 1988 alone, real wages declined 11.3 percent compared to 5.5 percent in Argentina.”
But how about the good times to which Kamm refers -- that strong 9 percent growth? How about those the privatizations, the austerity, the price liberalization, all of the stuff “promoting sound economic policies through so-called structural adjustment programmes.” Well, here we must leave Coralles, who has a soft spot for the Washington concensus, and ask about the way the neo-liberal policies in Venezuela, and Mexico, and Argentina go round and round in the same cycle of boom and bust, with the busts being those times when the government kindly extends itself to the neediest -- owners of banks and telephone companies and such --and bails them out.
In 1996, the Economist gave a soft focus view of what happened:
"During Venezuela's most recent boom, in the early 1990s, its banks grew like topsy. Lax supervision allowed lenders to run wild, and there were too many soft loans to bank insiders. The boom ended in January 1994 when Banco Latino, then the second-largest bank, was taken over by the government. As panicked depositors pulled out their money, seven other banks also failed. Standard & Poor's, a credit-rating agency, reckons the bank bailout has cost 1.8 trillion bolivars ($12 billion), equal to 22% of GDP in 1994. The crisis helped drive the inflation rate above 60%. That led to a sharp devaluation of the bolivar. In 1993, 106 bolivars could buy one American dollar. Today, it takes 474.
Officials see privatisation as one way to recover some of the costs of the continuing bank bail-out. Two other banks now in government hands, Banco Republica and Banco Latino, will go on the block early next year. Esther de Margulis, head of Fogade, the deposit-guarantee agency, expects to receive over $1 billion from the sale of banks and related assets."
The typical cycle -- tax money bails out banks that fail due to the lax regulation that is ignored by "structural adjustments" that encourage privatization. Using the state as a piggy bank, the banks are nursed back to health and sold, often to the same people who bankrupted them in the first place or their friends. To really get a sense of what happened in Venezuela, read the Funny Money chapter in The Blood Bankers by Henry S. James. Kamm's notion that the structural adjustments were sound is as bogus as is his careful non-disclosure of what happened, economically, after the reforms were put into place.
The other point, on which we will take Corrales' word, is that, far from Chavez destabilizing Perez, Corrales claims his own party did:
"In Venezuela, the ruling party virtually rebelled against the executive and his reforms at the end of 1991." And here:
"AD [Accion Democratica] felt increasingly threatened. It soon began to attack the reforms and reformers, disparaging most economic initiatives and belittling every economic accomplishment. Never in Venezuela's democratic history were executive-ruling party relations so distant and discordant. A vicious cycle developed: the party grew increasingly resentful, in turn, further persuading the executive of the need to supersede the party.
By 1991, AD was in a virtual state of war against the executive, even though this was the "best" economic year of the reforms in terms of macroeconomic indicators. This war culminated in AD's internal elections of September-October 1991 in which the orthodox sectors captured the top positions in the party. From this moment on, the balance in executive-ruling party relations shifted toward the party, now under the control of the most recalcitrant critics of the reforms."
Finally, a word about Corrales. Three years after the 1997 article, the much praised Argentine economy, which Corrales regards as a model of instituting sound economic policies, collapsed. By coincidence (I guess I should put heh here) the reformist Argentinian president, Menem, was accused of massive corruption himself. The neo-cons do love their leader/swindlers.
There are days when Kamm is just an average punter, and then there are days when he is absolutely golden – attaining scores that are almost near the legendary Melanie Phillips. This post was one of the latter.
PS: – for Bush corruption -‘n-incompetence junkies who just can’t get enough, this article in the NYT is the place to go. The usual complaints about the “good news from Iraq’ being a pack of lies served up by right wing talking heads and relayed dutifully by a cowed press doesn’t really get to the function of the lies. If you are going to pick a country apart, if you are going to pursue unilateral power in the Middle East, and if you are going to disgorge tax money to your campaign contributor – all at the same time - you need to operate like cartoon villains in Sin City, you need a bunch of zombies constantly relaying ‘good news’ and you need to baptize the whole thing with an inspiring name. Democracy, freedom, the rest of it. And that is what 2003 and 2004 were all about.
"Another point undermining Johann's morality tale is that the structural reforms, so far from being the acts of a despised regime, steadily gained support. Javier Corrales, in Presidents Without Parties: The Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s (2002, p. 55) notes that from the first quarter of 1989 (when the riots took place) to the first quarter of 1991, the number of people who wished the government to persevere with the reforms rose from 29 per cent to 45 per cent, while the economy performed strongly (a growth rate of 9.7 per cent in 1991 and a rise in investment of 81 per cent). The number of labour disputes rose in that period, but the number of actual strikes (authorised and unauthorised) declined. Mass opposition to the government's reform programme, so far from driving Chavez's failed coup attempt, was in fact driven by it. Chavez shattered a fragile consensus by showing the potential for a different form of politics, namely populist demagoguery and violence (nearly 100 people were killed in his failed coup attempt, the great majority of them civilians)."
Well, is this the same Javier Corrales who writes, in the Political Science Quarterly, 1997, comparing the Argentine and Venezuelan responses to economic crisis:
"These points will be demonstrated by referring to some cases where reforms have been implemented, successfully and otherwise. Special reference is made to the cases of Argentina (1989-1994) and Venezuela (1989-1994), which constitute clear-cut dichotomies of divergent outcomes in processes of economic reforms. After launching similar programs of economic reforms, these countries undertook different political paths. In Argentina, both the reforms and the reformers acquired unimaginable political momentum and prestige. In Venezuela, they became amply repudiated by society in general.”
Huh, Kamm does seem to have a bit of a problem with his specs, reading “amply repudiated by society in general” as “was widely acclaimed like Mickey Mouse at Disneyland.”
And here’s how Corrales describes the period in general:
“[In 1991] Venezuela plunged into its most serious political crisis since the 1960s: uncontained civic protests, two military coup attempts in 1992, intense cabinet changes, interruption of most ESSA reforms, presidential impeachment in 1993, urban terrorism, and a devastating financial crack at the end of 1993.”
Now, the heart of the deception in Kamm's little post stems from a man he, oddly, doesn't mention. Just who was that president who was impeached in 1993? Why, it seems to be a man well known for having stolen a quantity of money, Carlos A. Perez – although, as Kamm might put it, to call it stealing money is demagogic, since it was a part of a structural reform implementing a “put Venezuela’s money in Perez’s Swiss bank account” that was surely only unpopular because it was so misunderstood, Perez instituting an ultramodern CEO system of payment for Venezuela’s spanking brand new leadership. And of course his mistress, Cecilia Matos, also received a couple of million here and there, as was only right and fair. All part of a sort of New Labour before New Labour kind of thing, which Kamm so rightly beams upon. The 13 million in the Swiss bank account was all an incentive scheme..
In any case, Kamm's odd statistics for support of reform seem to be contradicted by the fact that Perez was elected on a statist platform -- and once elected, turned about and repudiated the very economic policies he represented in his campaign. Here's a May 2, 1988 Wall Street Journal article reporting on a typical Perez speech:
"Of 15 candidates standing for the December 4 election, the two front-runners are former President Carlos Andres Perez, the 65-year-old candidate of the ruling Democratic Action party, and Eduardo Fernandez, 47, who leads the main opposition party.
Both of them have pledged to fight to soften the terms for repayment of Venezuela's 30 billion dollar foreign debt, the fifth biggest in the developing world.
The country has one of the best repayment records in Latin America, repaying more principal on its debt than any other, but the leading candidates have vowed to change this.
In a newspaper interview published on Monday, Perez said Venezuela should repay its debt at a rate of around 20 per cent of its export earnings. Last year, it paid 46.5 per cent.
"We can not pay under the conditions imposed by the industrialised world," Perez, Venezuela's president from 1974 to 1979, told El Nacional. "The situation is becoming intolerable."
On the basis of such rodomontade, the man was elected, only to impose every condition asked by the 'industrialized world' and then some. Surprise surprise. It is as if George Bush had run on a platform of smaller government, only to balloon the size of the government... Oh, bad example. Well, it is as if Tony Blair had assured the British people that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in spite of knowning that the intelligence was iffy or non-existent... Oops, another bad example. Well, it is as if the Venezuelan people are supposed to swallow the lies and bad faith of their elected leaders without complaint, as they do in the U.S. and the U.K. There, that's better.
Anyway, the comedy of Kamm writing propaganda for the regime of a ex-crook who was put under house arrest twice for his crimes (and protected from worse by his buddies on the Venezuelan Supreme Court) is pretty good. One looks forward to his defense of the Salinas family next. But there is still more from this one little post. Two points, actually. One has to do with the figures that Kamm quotes, pointing to them as if the early nineties was a time of sound economic policies. Now, the background here is important, This is how Corrales puts it:
“Nevertheless, comparing numbers alone tends to ignore issues of diachronic relativity. Venezuela in January 1989 was in the midst of its most severe economic crisis since the 1930s. Venezuela's GNP was expanding but only as a result of deficit spending, growing indebtedness, and reserve burning. Artificial aggregate-demand boosting was a deliberate state strategy to hide the severity of the economic crisis for electoral purposes. But the severity of the crisis was real--very high and accelerating inflation for the first time ever, large trade and budget deficits, declining revenues, severe foreign reserve shortage (unusual for oil exporters), consumer goods scarcity, and growing social unrest. And yet, this was only the tip of the iceberg of a chronic, decade-old economic deterioration. Since the 1970s, Venezuela's economic competitiveness and living standards declined steadily. Despite the growth of GNP between 1984 and 1988, there is little evidence of any trickle-down effect. (See Table 1.) After peaking in 1982 at US $4,980, the GNP per capita declined to US $3,190 in 1988, roughly the same level as in 1977. Few countries experience such a dramatic (35 percent) decline in such a short period of time. Argentina certainly did not: its GDP per capita actually increased 32.9 percent during this period.[25] Venezuelan real wages between 1980 and 1988 also exhibit a dismal record (34 percent decline compared to 2.7 percent for Argentina). In 1988 alone, real wages declined 11.3 percent compared to 5.5 percent in Argentina.”
But how about the good times to which Kamm refers -- that strong 9 percent growth? How about those the privatizations, the austerity, the price liberalization, all of the stuff “promoting sound economic policies through so-called structural adjustment programmes.” Well, here we must leave Coralles, who has a soft spot for the Washington concensus, and ask about the way the neo-liberal policies in Venezuela, and Mexico, and Argentina go round and round in the same cycle of boom and bust, with the busts being those times when the government kindly extends itself to the neediest -- owners of banks and telephone companies and such --and bails them out.
In 1996, the Economist gave a soft focus view of what happened:
"During Venezuela's most recent boom, in the early 1990s, its banks grew like topsy. Lax supervision allowed lenders to run wild, and there were too many soft loans to bank insiders. The boom ended in January 1994 when Banco Latino, then the second-largest bank, was taken over by the government. As panicked depositors pulled out their money, seven other banks also failed. Standard & Poor's, a credit-rating agency, reckons the bank bailout has cost 1.8 trillion bolivars ($12 billion), equal to 22% of GDP in 1994. The crisis helped drive the inflation rate above 60%. That led to a sharp devaluation of the bolivar. In 1993, 106 bolivars could buy one American dollar. Today, it takes 474.
Officials see privatisation as one way to recover some of the costs of the continuing bank bail-out. Two other banks now in government hands, Banco Republica and Banco Latino, will go on the block early next year. Esther de Margulis, head of Fogade, the deposit-guarantee agency, expects to receive over $1 billion from the sale of banks and related assets."
The typical cycle -- tax money bails out banks that fail due to the lax regulation that is ignored by "structural adjustments" that encourage privatization. Using the state as a piggy bank, the banks are nursed back to health and sold, often to the same people who bankrupted them in the first place or their friends. To really get a sense of what happened in Venezuela, read the Funny Money chapter in The Blood Bankers by Henry S. James. Kamm's notion that the structural adjustments were sound is as bogus as is his careful non-disclosure of what happened, economically, after the reforms were put into place.
The other point, on which we will take Corrales' word, is that, far from Chavez destabilizing Perez, Corrales claims his own party did:
"In Venezuela, the ruling party virtually rebelled against the executive and his reforms at the end of 1991." And here:
"AD [Accion Democratica] felt increasingly threatened. It soon began to attack the reforms and reformers, disparaging most economic initiatives and belittling every economic accomplishment. Never in Venezuela's democratic history were executive-ruling party relations so distant and discordant. A vicious cycle developed: the party grew increasingly resentful, in turn, further persuading the executive of the need to supersede the party.
By 1991, AD was in a virtual state of war against the executive, even though this was the "best" economic year of the reforms in terms of macroeconomic indicators. This war culminated in AD's internal elections of September-October 1991 in which the orthodox sectors captured the top positions in the party. From this moment on, the balance in executive-ruling party relations shifted toward the party, now under the control of the most recalcitrant critics of the reforms."
Finally, a word about Corrales. Three years after the 1997 article, the much praised Argentine economy, which Corrales regards as a model of instituting sound economic policies, collapsed. By coincidence (I guess I should put heh here) the reformist Argentinian president, Menem, was accused of massive corruption himself. The neo-cons do love their leader/swindlers.
There are days when Kamm is just an average punter, and then there are days when he is absolutely golden – attaining scores that are almost near the legendary Melanie Phillips. This post was one of the latter.
PS: – for Bush corruption -‘n-incompetence junkies who just can’t get enough, this article in the NYT is the place to go. The usual complaints about the “good news from Iraq’ being a pack of lies served up by right wing talking heads and relayed dutifully by a cowed press doesn’t really get to the function of the lies. If you are going to pick a country apart, if you are going to pursue unilateral power in the Middle East, and if you are going to disgorge tax money to your campaign contributor – all at the same time - you need to operate like cartoon villains in Sin City, you need a bunch of zombies constantly relaying ‘good news’ and you need to baptize the whole thing with an inspiring name. Democracy, freedom, the rest of it. And that is what 2003 and 2004 were all about.
Friday, May 19, 2006
freedom
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
And the news about the one man manning our America is that he has appointed a court spy jester who, we are told in tones of syncophant’s awe, will – well, like the WAPO headline say it all: “Nominee Has Ability To Bear Bad News”.
In the town of the wealthy think tanker, where Kissing Ass is the major growth industry, this is like a major thing. The WAPO knew to headline it, since as we all know, it is rare to find a really good babysitter. So often the babysitters just sit around playing poker with pimps! Which, to tell the truth, is what I would like my CIA head to be doing. But no – Hayden, this marvel, we are told, while changing the royal diapers and rubbing vaseline onto the royal bottom, will be able to say things like, this excellent war that you, destroyer of worlds, most Christian of all Christians, the only anointed one, the cock of cocks and cocaine of cocaine, holy and sacred and better than Daddy, initiated out of your great and good mind, is grinding people into small little pieces for no discernable reason, your highness, except of course that they really really appreciate it, the freedom and the liberty and the light that you have shown upon them, but there are these tiny, tiny problems. And then give baby a playful spank.
“Will Hayden convey the agency's deep concern about Iraq to Bush? "Yes, I think he will," said a senior CIA official who has seen Hayden in high-level meetings. "I think he'll be professional about it, though. He won't jump on the table. But he'll make the point."
In the past year, the CIA station in Baghdad has told headquarters that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating dangerously, according to a senior CIA official familiar with the station's view and with Hayden. The assessment has only gotten worse, the official said.”
Deep concern - wow. Those are such grave words that they are topped with moussed gray hair. Oh, this kind of thing will surely get a two thumbs up in the WAPO editorial even now being metastasized in Fred Hiatt's head.
Typical of the media badmouthing of our great and good war, isn’t it? For instance, the news that people are moving to Baghdad, supposedly in such a shambles, should be suitably cherrypicked and played over the instaborg for all to see, I think:
“Although the killings of foreign and Iraqi journalists in Basra have limited coverage in the city, residents describe political violence that leaves corpses on the streets daily. Iraqi newspapers this week reported Basra residents fleeing to comparative safety abroad or even in Baghdad.
The governor of Basra province, a member of the Islamic Virtue Party, last week demanded the removal of Basra's police chief and local military leader, accusing them of failing to rein in political and sectarian killings. Since then, the unrest has included an attack on a police station; burning of offices of Iraq's most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and marches Wednesday that drew thousands of participants.”
It is the Pottery Barn principle: once you break it, then break dozens of it, break it all, burn the place down, blow it up and sprinkle the ground with salt and call it: Freedom.
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery ;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee !
And the news about the one man manning our America is that he has appointed a court spy jester who, we are told in tones of syncophant’s awe, will – well, like the WAPO headline say it all: “Nominee Has Ability To Bear Bad News”.
In the town of the wealthy think tanker, where Kissing Ass is the major growth industry, this is like a major thing. The WAPO knew to headline it, since as we all know, it is rare to find a really good babysitter. So often the babysitters just sit around playing poker with pimps! Which, to tell the truth, is what I would like my CIA head to be doing. But no – Hayden, this marvel, we are told, while changing the royal diapers and rubbing vaseline onto the royal bottom, will be able to say things like, this excellent war that you, destroyer of worlds, most Christian of all Christians, the only anointed one, the cock of cocks and cocaine of cocaine, holy and sacred and better than Daddy, initiated out of your great and good mind, is grinding people into small little pieces for no discernable reason, your highness, except of course that they really really appreciate it, the freedom and the liberty and the light that you have shown upon them, but there are these tiny, tiny problems. And then give baby a playful spank.
“Will Hayden convey the agency's deep concern about Iraq to Bush? "Yes, I think he will," said a senior CIA official who has seen Hayden in high-level meetings. "I think he'll be professional about it, though. He won't jump on the table. But he'll make the point."
In the past year, the CIA station in Baghdad has told headquarters that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating dangerously, according to a senior CIA official familiar with the station's view and with Hayden. The assessment has only gotten worse, the official said.”
Deep concern - wow. Those are such grave words that they are topped with moussed gray hair. Oh, this kind of thing will surely get a two thumbs up in the WAPO editorial even now being metastasized in Fred Hiatt's head.
Typical of the media badmouthing of our great and good war, isn’t it? For instance, the news that people are moving to Baghdad, supposedly in such a shambles, should be suitably cherrypicked and played over the instaborg for all to see, I think:
“Although the killings of foreign and Iraqi journalists in Basra have limited coverage in the city, residents describe political violence that leaves corpses on the streets daily. Iraqi newspapers this week reported Basra residents fleeing to comparative safety abroad or even in Baghdad.
The governor of Basra province, a member of the Islamic Virtue Party, last week demanded the removal of Basra's police chief and local military leader, accusing them of failing to rein in political and sectarian killings. Since then, the unrest has included an attack on a police station; burning of offices of Iraq's most powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq; and marches Wednesday that drew thousands of participants.”
It is the Pottery Barn principle: once you break it, then break dozens of it, break it all, burn the place down, blow it up and sprinkle the ground with salt and call it: Freedom.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
low toppers, anyone?
The political talking heads may be right – it might be that this year’s elections will be all about Iraq and Iran. LI, however, thinks this discounts what might well be on the minds of voters in November – the series of storms that are going to be rolling across the Gulf like huge bowling balls this hurricane season.
Of course, there are always variables that could kick in. There is no certainty that we have so fucked with the Gulf and the weather that the one two combination is going to be hammering at our door this year. There is a certainty that, if it isn’t this year, it will be next, or next. For five years we have done nothing but pour more shit into the ocean and more CO2 into the atmosphere, and in between driving the forty miles daily in the SUV, watched scintillating specials on PBS entitled Cheating Housewives on Shrinking Glaciers, or whatever.
It is funny how the news item that beeped a few weeks ago – the one about the extent of damage to the Gulf oil extraction biz from last year’s storm – went into the memory hole. In fact, the U.S. depends on offshore Gulf fields that are right in the storm path – and it isn’t as if it is even possible to build offshore rigs that will resist the kind of damage the Katrinas dish up.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting to today’s topic. LI has a suspicion of those who indulge in flamboyant apocalypses, when apocalypse is a household thing, a matter of humble accidents accumulating before our eyes. The peak oil people have always struck us as way too fevered, but – doing our duty – we have been reading The Empty Tank, by Jeremy Leggett, who is a peak oil person – or as he calls it, a Low Topper, which has a nice erotic ring about it. Of course, we are reading The Empty Tank in intervals between the account of Edmond Dantés imprisonment on the Chateau D’If. The latter is much more riveting.
Still, Leggett’s book does give both a history of the Low Topper movement and the sources of its concern. Basically, the Low and High Toppers aren’t that far apart. The former think that the world’s cheap oil supply will top out this decade, and the latter think it will be in 2030. Leggett makes a good case for mistrusting the BP’s review of oil reserves – the foundation of the orthodoxy – by pointing out that the figures BP is relying on have been mysteriously tweaked by the big oil suppliers – the Saudis, the Kuwaitis – who have upped their estimate of their oil reserves without presenting a lot of evidence that the new, inflated numbers are correct. Leggett’s notion is that we are going to experience the first wave of panic over the low topping point in the next two years, and that this is going to drive some very bad things – including pressure to use coal much more extensively. Coal is a real CO2 menace. In Leggett’s opinion, the hype about using, say, shale oil or tar sands ignores the startling costs of extraction – starting with the enormous energy costs, and including the water use.
The nightmare scenario is that we start to look for really deep sea deposits. The reason this is a nightmare scenario is that we one of the sure ways to end life on this planet is to release enormous volumes of methane underseas – what he calls methane hydrate destabilization. The USGS estimates that there is more than 10,000 billion metric tons of carbon in methane hydrate deposits. And the USGS actually and insanely is optimistic about mining the stuff. As Leggett says: “This despite knowing, presumably, that methane is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, molecule for molecule, and that much methane would escape into the atmosphere during any mining process...’ Which is a rather calm way of saying that mining would turn Earth into Venus.
On the other hand, it is unlikely that any company is going to start trying to draw up the methane hydrate, since the expense would simply be too great. Otherwise, of course, the buzzards would be busy doing it.
At the back of any discussion of the depletion of a natural resource is the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, which has become a economists’ myth, to be trotted out whenever an economists meets an environmentalist. Wired, which in the 90s became athe Johnny Appleseed of the techno cargo cult still popular on the right published a pretty good portrait of Simon. This is the wager:
“The battle lines now drawn, it was not long before Ehrlich and Simon met for a duel in the sun. The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with - Simon countered with "a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run."
You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted - copper, tin, whatever - and select any date in the future, "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.
"How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come, first served."
In California, Paul Ehrlich stepped right up - and why not? He'd been repeating the Malthusian argument for years; he was sure that things were running out, that resources were getting scarcer - "nearing depletion," as he'd said - and therefore would have to become more expensive. A public wager would be the chance to demonstrate the shrewdness of his forecasts, draw attention to the catastrophic state of the world situation, and, not least, force this Julian Simon character to eat his words. So he jumped at the chance: "I and my colleagues, John P. Holdren (University of California, Berkeley) and John Harte (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), jointly accept Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in."
Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et alia would pay Simon.”
Simon, of course, triumphed. All of those metals went down in price – as did oil. In the 80s and 90s, the boom times were on the back of a primary product glut. Ehrlich reportedly refused to bet again in 1990. Too bad. If he had set the terms at twelve years, he would have cleaned up. And if Simon and Ehrlich were old Dean (k)yK and Qfwfq, it is good money that Qfwfq (Ehrlich) would lose at first and then win. The Simonian libertarians are betting on the bell curve never having a down side. It was Simon’s ghost in 2004 assuring us that the future’s market in petroleum had it wrong – a rare bout of irrationality in the market.
Still, the Simon-Ehrlich bet’s larger story is that one shouldn’t dismiss three hundred years of history like it was yesterday’s garbage. The triumph of technology over scarcity that is the essence of the treadmill of production is not something you can understand the way a biologist can understand, say, the population density of some fish having only its ability to reproduce standing between it and environmental accidents.
Of course, there are always variables that could kick in. There is no certainty that we have so fucked with the Gulf and the weather that the one two combination is going to be hammering at our door this year. There is a certainty that, if it isn’t this year, it will be next, or next. For five years we have done nothing but pour more shit into the ocean and more CO2 into the atmosphere, and in between driving the forty miles daily in the SUV, watched scintillating specials on PBS entitled Cheating Housewives on Shrinking Glaciers, or whatever.
It is funny how the news item that beeped a few weeks ago – the one about the extent of damage to the Gulf oil extraction biz from last year’s storm – went into the memory hole. In fact, the U.S. depends on offshore Gulf fields that are right in the storm path – and it isn’t as if it is even possible to build offshore rigs that will resist the kind of damage the Katrinas dish up.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting to today’s topic. LI has a suspicion of those who indulge in flamboyant apocalypses, when apocalypse is a household thing, a matter of humble accidents accumulating before our eyes. The peak oil people have always struck us as way too fevered, but – doing our duty – we have been reading The Empty Tank, by Jeremy Leggett, who is a peak oil person – or as he calls it, a Low Topper, which has a nice erotic ring about it. Of course, we are reading The Empty Tank in intervals between the account of Edmond Dantés imprisonment on the Chateau D’If. The latter is much more riveting.
Still, Leggett’s book does give both a history of the Low Topper movement and the sources of its concern. Basically, the Low and High Toppers aren’t that far apart. The former think that the world’s cheap oil supply will top out this decade, and the latter think it will be in 2030. Leggett makes a good case for mistrusting the BP’s review of oil reserves – the foundation of the orthodoxy – by pointing out that the figures BP is relying on have been mysteriously tweaked by the big oil suppliers – the Saudis, the Kuwaitis – who have upped their estimate of their oil reserves without presenting a lot of evidence that the new, inflated numbers are correct. Leggett’s notion is that we are going to experience the first wave of panic over the low topping point in the next two years, and that this is going to drive some very bad things – including pressure to use coal much more extensively. Coal is a real CO2 menace. In Leggett’s opinion, the hype about using, say, shale oil or tar sands ignores the startling costs of extraction – starting with the enormous energy costs, and including the water use.
The nightmare scenario is that we start to look for really deep sea deposits. The reason this is a nightmare scenario is that we one of the sure ways to end life on this planet is to release enormous volumes of methane underseas – what he calls methane hydrate destabilization. The USGS estimates that there is more than 10,000 billion metric tons of carbon in methane hydrate deposits. And the USGS actually and insanely is optimistic about mining the stuff. As Leggett says: “This despite knowing, presumably, that methane is many times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, molecule for molecule, and that much methane would escape into the atmosphere during any mining process...’ Which is a rather calm way of saying that mining would turn Earth into Venus.
On the other hand, it is unlikely that any company is going to start trying to draw up the methane hydrate, since the expense would simply be too great. Otherwise, of course, the buzzards would be busy doing it.
At the back of any discussion of the depletion of a natural resource is the bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, which has become a economists’ myth, to be trotted out whenever an economists meets an environmentalist. Wired, which in the 90s became athe Johnny Appleseed of the techno cargo cult still popular on the right published a pretty good portrait of Simon. This is the wager:
“The battle lines now drawn, it was not long before Ehrlich and Simon met for a duel in the sun. The face-off occurred in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" - a proposition Simon regarded as too silly to bother with - Simon countered with "a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run."
You could name your own terms: select any raw material you wanted - copper, tin, whatever - and select any date in the future, "any date more than a year away," and Simon would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it was at the time of the wager.
"How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come, first served."
In California, Paul Ehrlich stepped right up - and why not? He'd been repeating the Malthusian argument for years; he was sure that things were running out, that resources were getting scarcer - "nearing depletion," as he'd said - and therefore would have to become more expensive. A public wager would be the chance to demonstrate the shrewdness of his forecasts, draw attention to the catastrophic state of the world situation, and, not least, force this Julian Simon character to eat his words. So he jumped at the chance: "I and my colleagues, John P. Holdren (University of California, Berkeley) and John Harte (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), jointly accept Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in."
Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et alia would pay Simon.”
Simon, of course, triumphed. All of those metals went down in price – as did oil. In the 80s and 90s, the boom times were on the back of a primary product glut. Ehrlich reportedly refused to bet again in 1990. Too bad. If he had set the terms at twelve years, he would have cleaned up. And if Simon and Ehrlich were old Dean (k)yK and Qfwfq, it is good money that Qfwfq (Ehrlich) would lose at first and then win. The Simonian libertarians are betting on the bell curve never having a down side. It was Simon’s ghost in 2004 assuring us that the future’s market in petroleum had it wrong – a rare bout of irrationality in the market.
Still, the Simon-Ehrlich bet’s larger story is that one shouldn’t dismiss three hundred years of history like it was yesterday’s garbage. The triumph of technology over scarcity that is the essence of the treadmill of production is not something you can understand the way a biologist can understand, say, the population density of some fish having only its ability to reproduce standing between it and environmental accidents.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
dear ayatollah k, we both like sweets...
LI has read many commentaries on the loopy letter sent by Iran’s president, Ahmadinejad. But oddly enough, the last exchange of letters, this time from the American side, is hardly referred to at all. I am talking, of course, of the incomparable mission, undertaken by Bud McFarlane and Oliver North, in May, 1986, to Teheran. Our oh so sane president at the time, Reagan, sent a signed copy of the Bible (sometimes, as we know, Reagan suffered from hallucinations – the Bible signing resulted from the hallucination that he was really Charleton Heston, who, as we know, wrote the Bible) and a cake. I don’t know if Nancy baked the cake. I have a feeling that is one of the things that Nancy didn’t do. Before the trip, North had been advised by Casey to take along some poison pills. You never know, they might not like German Chocolate.
Actually, according to the times, it was a kosher cake:
“On May 25, Mr. McFarlane and his group brought a kosher chocolate cake from Israel for the Iranians in Teheran. In a report back to the White House from Teheran, he interrupted his narrative to describe a watermelon break. At another point, Mr. McFarlane said he distinctly remembered telling President Reagan in the hospital about the arms shipments ''because the President was wearing pajamas.''
And this is the NYT article from January 30, 1987, which should make us all breathe easier about how, well, sane American leaders are compared to those clownish Iranians:
“The White House confirmed today that President Reagan had sent a signed Bible to Iranian leaders.
The confirmation came in remarks by Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, three months after Iran first disclosed the Bible's existence.
The book, with a signed inscription by Mr. Reagan, was displayed Wednesday at a news conference in Teheran by Iran's Speaker of Parliament, Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Today Mr. Speakes said the Bible, with Mr. Reagan's signature and the date of Oct. 3, 1986, under a handwritten quotation, had been given by American emissaries to an intermediary in Frankfurt to be passed on to Iranian leaders.
''It was a gesture to indicate that those who were there were truly representing the President, and that the President, too, was a man of God,'' he said.
On Wednesday, after the Teheran news conference, Mr. Speakes said that he knew nothing about the matter and would not ask Mr. Reagan about it.
The existence of the Bible was first disclosed by Hojatolislam Rafsanjani in November. At that time, the Iranian leader said the United States had sent the Bible and a cake shaped like a key, reportedly in an allusion to the possible opening of relations.
The Iranian leader spoke after a Beirut magazine had revealed the secret sale of arms to Iran by reporting a trip to Teheran by Robert C. McFarlane, former national security adviser.
After the disclosure, Mr. Reagan said on television on Nov. 13, ''Don't believe all these wild stories.''
Today Mr. Speakes said the handwritten passage in the Bible, from Galatians, had been suggested to Mr. Reagan by Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, then the national security adviser.
The White House spokesman said details about the Bible had been uncovered in a review of documents left by Admiral Poindexter and his aide, Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North. Mr. Speakes said that Colonel North was almost certainly the emissary at the Frankfurt meeting, which occurred a few days after Mr. Reagan had signed the Bible. Mr. Speakes said he did not know the identity of the Iranian intermediary.
According to Mr. Speakes, the sending of a signed Bible had been suggested by Colonel North ''because there had been discussions about the common religious heritage that existed between Moslem and Christian and Jewish religions.''
The handwritten quotation read: ''And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the nations shall be blessed in you.' Galatians 3:8. Ronald Reagan. Oct 3, 1986.''
When Mr. Speakes was asked why he had not acknowledged the Bible episode in the first place, he said the White House wanted to be sure of its facts.”
Actually, according to the times, it was a kosher cake:
“On May 25, Mr. McFarlane and his group brought a kosher chocolate cake from Israel for the Iranians in Teheran. In a report back to the White House from Teheran, he interrupted his narrative to describe a watermelon break. At another point, Mr. McFarlane said he distinctly remembered telling President Reagan in the hospital about the arms shipments ''because the President was wearing pajamas.''
And this is the NYT article from January 30, 1987, which should make us all breathe easier about how, well, sane American leaders are compared to those clownish Iranians:
“The White House confirmed today that President Reagan had sent a signed Bible to Iranian leaders.
The confirmation came in remarks by Larry Speakes, the White House spokesman, three months after Iran first disclosed the Bible's existence.
The book, with a signed inscription by Mr. Reagan, was displayed Wednesday at a news conference in Teheran by Iran's Speaker of Parliament, Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Today Mr. Speakes said the Bible, with Mr. Reagan's signature and the date of Oct. 3, 1986, under a handwritten quotation, had been given by American emissaries to an intermediary in Frankfurt to be passed on to Iranian leaders.
''It was a gesture to indicate that those who were there were truly representing the President, and that the President, too, was a man of God,'' he said.
On Wednesday, after the Teheran news conference, Mr. Speakes said that he knew nothing about the matter and would not ask Mr. Reagan about it.
The existence of the Bible was first disclosed by Hojatolislam Rafsanjani in November. At that time, the Iranian leader said the United States had sent the Bible and a cake shaped like a key, reportedly in an allusion to the possible opening of relations.
The Iranian leader spoke after a Beirut magazine had revealed the secret sale of arms to Iran by reporting a trip to Teheran by Robert C. McFarlane, former national security adviser.
After the disclosure, Mr. Reagan said on television on Nov. 13, ''Don't believe all these wild stories.''
Today Mr. Speakes said the handwritten passage in the Bible, from Galatians, had been suggested to Mr. Reagan by Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, then the national security adviser.
The White House spokesman said details about the Bible had been uncovered in a review of documents left by Admiral Poindexter and his aide, Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North. Mr. Speakes said that Colonel North was almost certainly the emissary at the Frankfurt meeting, which occurred a few days after Mr. Reagan had signed the Bible. Mr. Speakes said he did not know the identity of the Iranian intermediary.
According to Mr. Speakes, the sending of a signed Bible had been suggested by Colonel North ''because there had been discussions about the common religious heritage that existed between Moslem and Christian and Jewish religions.''
The handwritten quotation read: ''And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'All the nations shall be blessed in you.' Galatians 3:8. Ronald Reagan. Oct 3, 1986.''
When Mr. Speakes was asked why he had not acknowledged the Bible episode in the first place, he said the White House wanted to be sure of its facts.”
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
hot air and circumstances
Harper’s has a review of some recent Churchill books. Churchill has become the bloated Macy’s balloon of the neo-con legions. In some ways that is appropriate: the neo-cons are invariably attracted to frauds and swindlers (re the Chalabi romance) and Churchill was often fraudulent. The funniest thing about the review is the raking over of Churchill’s sham Augustan prose – as Evelyn Waugh labeled it. In the fifties, Churchill’s history of the Second World War was received with awe – one reviewer speaks of the hush of greatness – but in actuality, this was committee work on a scale that would have embarrassed Dumas:
“In fact, Churchill had long used ghostwriters. He was paid enormous sums by newspapers and there was nothing he wouldn't stoop to if the money was right, in a way that a professional journalist must find endearing. At one point in the 1930s, he wrote a series of "Great Stories of the World Retold," potted versions of everything from The Count of Monte Cristo to Uncle Tom's Cabin-except that "wrote" meant he would farm out the actual work to someone like Sir Edward Marsh, his sometime private secretary and a fastidious man of letters, who would be paid rather less than 10 percent of Churchill's fee. Since Churchill collected the modern equivalent of $17,500 for each piece and Marsh received $1,300, everyone was happy.
With The Second World War, this principle operated on a far larger scale. The Syndicate, as Churchill's team of researchers and writers was called, was headed by William Deakin, an Oxford don who had been Churchill's wartime emissary to Tito (Deakin died in great old age in January of last year), and Sir Henry Pownall, a former senior army officer. They would draft whole chapters, using the first person, to which Churchill would then apply his finishing touches, some in that shamAugustan prose, some inimitable-whether it's the laconic ending that marks the departure from London in 1938 of the German ambassador, "This was the last time I saw Herr von Ribbentrop before he was hanged," or the delightful admission, "All I wanted was compliance with my wishes after a reasonable period of discussion." No member of the Syndicate could have written those.
Nor would they have contributed the tendentious slant. ... many more pages are devoted to the North African campaign than to the Eastern Front, where the Germans had about fifty times as many divisions engaged and where the war against the Third Reich was in reality decided. The treatment of the other great and historically decisive conflict of 1941-45, between the United States and Japan, is just as cursory, and secondhand at that.
This also led to a most embarrassing charge of plagiarism. The cursory account of the Pacific war was cobbled together by the Syndicate; Churchill scarcely looked at it. When the eminent American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who had written the classic History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, read these chapters he felt "a keen sense of déjà vu and then mounting indignation" at the wholesale purloining of his work. But he did not want to be seen taking the great hero to court, and the matter was smoothed over with the addition of a fulsome tribute to Morison's work.”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the reviewer, also quotes a moving tribute to Neville Chamberlain, who – in the cartoon version of history beloved by conservatives – gets to play to appeasing wimp compared to Churchill’s Cato like warnings about Nazi Germany (although, alas, I don’t think such warnings were supposed to allow Britain to intervene on the Republican side in Spain. That, after all, would be premature anti-Fascism). Appeasement, we are meant to think, is always the same – it is always a Hitler being appeased. Hitlers are, in reality, extremely rare. Most nations that have suffered losses in the millions in a war are not eager to start new ones. Stalin, as much of a murdering tyrant as Hitler ever was, tried to keep the Soviet Union out of any major war -- and failed. He tried to keep the Soviet Union out of a major war because he remembered vividly World War I. At the end of which, as you will recall, Russia's supreme leader, the Czar, was shot in a basement. In fact, the implausibility of the here a Hitler, there a Hitler stance of the pro-war party in this country would be funny, if it weren't so utterly successful as a propaganda ploy. Here’s what Churchill said at Chamberlain’s funeral:
“It is not given to human beings, happily for them for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days.
...It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was the faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.”
The sham Augustan is certainly there, but Churchill’s judgment of the Chamberlain’s motives is surely just. And the idea that the most highly armed and dangerous nation in the world, the U.S., which spends a trillion dollars on the military every three or four years, is in any danger of falling into appeasing anybody (instead of finding outlets for its addiction to the political economy of war) is one of the funnier delusions of our time.
“In fact, Churchill had long used ghostwriters. He was paid enormous sums by newspapers and there was nothing he wouldn't stoop to if the money was right, in a way that a professional journalist must find endearing. At one point in the 1930s, he wrote a series of "Great Stories of the World Retold," potted versions of everything from The Count of Monte Cristo to Uncle Tom's Cabin-except that "wrote" meant he would farm out the actual work to someone like Sir Edward Marsh, his sometime private secretary and a fastidious man of letters, who would be paid rather less than 10 percent of Churchill's fee. Since Churchill collected the modern equivalent of $17,500 for each piece and Marsh received $1,300, everyone was happy.
With The Second World War, this principle operated on a far larger scale. The Syndicate, as Churchill's team of researchers and writers was called, was headed by William Deakin, an Oxford don who had been Churchill's wartime emissary to Tito (Deakin died in great old age in January of last year), and Sir Henry Pownall, a former senior army officer. They would draft whole chapters, using the first person, to which Churchill would then apply his finishing touches, some in that shamAugustan prose, some inimitable-whether it's the laconic ending that marks the departure from London in 1938 of the German ambassador, "This was the last time I saw Herr von Ribbentrop before he was hanged," or the delightful admission, "All I wanted was compliance with my wishes after a reasonable period of discussion." No member of the Syndicate could have written those.
Nor would they have contributed the tendentious slant. ... many more pages are devoted to the North African campaign than to the Eastern Front, where the Germans had about fifty times as many divisions engaged and where the war against the Third Reich was in reality decided. The treatment of the other great and historically decisive conflict of 1941-45, between the United States and Japan, is just as cursory, and secondhand at that.
This also led to a most embarrassing charge of plagiarism. The cursory account of the Pacific war was cobbled together by the Syndicate; Churchill scarcely looked at it. When the eminent American historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who had written the classic History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, read these chapters he felt "a keen sense of déjà vu and then mounting indignation" at the wholesale purloining of his work. But he did not want to be seen taking the great hero to court, and the matter was smoothed over with the addition of a fulsome tribute to Morison's work.”
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the reviewer, also quotes a moving tribute to Neville Chamberlain, who – in the cartoon version of history beloved by conservatives – gets to play to appeasing wimp compared to Churchill’s Cato like warnings about Nazi Germany (although, alas, I don’t think such warnings were supposed to allow Britain to intervene on the Republican side in Spain. That, after all, would be premature anti-Fascism). Appeasement, we are meant to think, is always the same – it is always a Hitler being appeased. Hitlers are, in reality, extremely rare. Most nations that have suffered losses in the millions in a war are not eager to start new ones. Stalin, as much of a murdering tyrant as Hitler ever was, tried to keep the Soviet Union out of any major war -- and failed. He tried to keep the Soviet Union out of a major war because he remembered vividly World War I. At the end of which, as you will recall, Russia's supreme leader, the Czar, was shot in a basement. In fact, the implausibility of the here a Hitler, there a Hitler stance of the pro-war party in this country would be funny, if it weren't so utterly successful as a propaganda ploy. Here’s what Churchill said at Chamberlain’s funeral:
“It is not given to human beings, happily for them for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passions of former days.
...It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was the faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.”
The sham Augustan is certainly there, but Churchill’s judgment of the Chamberlain’s motives is surely just. And the idea that the most highly armed and dangerous nation in the world, the U.S., which spends a trillion dollars on the military every three or four years, is in any danger of falling into appeasing anybody (instead of finding outlets for its addiction to the political economy of war) is one of the funnier delusions of our time.
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