on the way down to the bottom

LI heartily recommends this article for the hilarious sidelight it throws on our funniest, most corrupt administration.

It seems that the White House, with the compassion of twenty Buddhas, realizes that its nomination of wacko rightwingers to various posts can do said rightwingers some financial harm – because sometimes Congress doesn’t kiss ass fast enough. It’s a training problem. But it is no problem for the clever Bushies! Not when you have a whole goldbricking pseudo-charity around to which the Gov can shovel tax free dollars!

Invention, as Joseph Schumpeter pointed out long ago, is the dynamic of capitalism, and what is more inventive than Commonwealth Research Institute? It’s a charity. It’s a faith based organization. It’s a way to pay Republicans $13,400 a month for doing zip work. And it’s a Merchant of Death – all in one!

“Commonwealth Research and its parent company, Concurrent Technologies, are registered with the Internal Revenue Service as tax-exempt charities, even though their primary work is for the Pentagon and other government agencies. In a recent report Concurrent, also based in Johnstown, Pa., said it was among the Defense Department's top 200 contractors, with a focus on intelligence, surveillance, force readiness and advanced materials.
Concurrent's top three executives each earn an average of $462,000. The company reported lobbying expenditures of $302,000 for the year ending in June 2006, more than double what it spent on lobbying four years earlier.
Concurrent and its subsidiaries receive grants and contracts for an eclectic variety of other activities, including support of faith-based initiatives and specialized welding work. Last year, Commonwealth Research got a $45 million sole-source arrangement to provide reports to the National Security Agency, CIA and other intelligence agencies.”

If you love the smell of Empire decaying in the morning, you will love the smell of CRI - a scrumptious odor, much like highway kill in the noonday Texas sun. But such things are bound to happen when your income distribution skew makes Brazil look like Sweden. Hate the way the country is headed? Tough shit. The wealthy will block every avenue of change, until of course they are expropriated by the chain of events they have put in place, as their skankiness is – oh, Mother Nature is so hard – completely and thoroughly punished – which, of course, is a punishment in which we will all share.

the Sunday sickness unto death rant

LI was looking up info on Blackwater, yesterday, and we came across the Virginian-Pilot profile of the company. That profile included little bios of the guys at the top of America’s Funniest Mercenary Company. It was the bio of the COO that stuck with me. Isn’t this man a posterboy of the Bush culture. I can see my face, I can see the face of 350 million of my fellow Americans, slug-like somnambulists heading towards the cliffs but with the finest of accessories … contributing another sweet 300 million dollars today, as on all days, to the mass murder of Iraqis (it is always Christmas in Iraq) … reflected in this man’s record, from the Virginian-Pilot:

“JOSEPH SCHMITZ, 49, became chief operating officer and general counsel of the Prince Group in September 2005 after a stint as inspector general at the Defense Department.
Schmitz was the senior Pentagon official responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse. Now he faces a congressional inquiry into accusations that he quashed two criminal investigations of senior Bush administration officials. The inquiry is continuing, according to a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Schmitz was a special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese III in the Reagan administration. He was awarded the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Public Service on his retirement from the Pentagon.

Schmitz’s father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman from California and a prominent member of the John Birch Society, an ultra-conservative group that flowered during the Cold War. He ran for president in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party after its founder, George Wallace, was paralyzed by a would-be assassin.

John Schmitz’s political career ended with the revelation that he had a mistress who bore two of his children. He then moved to Washington, where he bought a house once owned by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Joseph Schmitz’s sister, Mary Kay LeTourneau, also became embroiled in a scandal. As a married teacher in Washington state, she went to prison after being convicted of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student with whom she ultimately had two children. The two have since married.”

Could you make things like this up? If you did in a novel, you would be denounced for creating Leftist caricatures. That Schmitz’s father’s career ended not because he was a racist and crazed semi-fascist, but because he had an affair with a younger student, speaks to the fact that there are congressional districts in which lunacy equals electability. So Joseph Schmitz was obviously set up to be an early achiever in the Great Bushian Post 9/11 Orgy. And party he did.

David Sirota and Judd Legum wrote a piece about Schmitz back when he was the Pentagon’s inspector general:

“Fact: Halliburton has overcharged taxpayers for food, accepted kickbacks for oil subcontracts, and spent taxpayer money renting rooms at five-star resorts in Kuwait.
But instead of expressing outrage the government's top watchdog, Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, last week parroted the company line, saying he believes Halliburton's problems "are not out of line with the size and scope of their contracts." He then accused the press of overemphasizing the connections between the company and its former CEO Dick Cheney, even though Vice President Cheney still collects hundreds of thousands of dollars in deferred compensation, owns company stock options, and had his office "coordinate" Halliburton contracts in Iraq.
Why is the government's top independent watchdog deliberately sugarcoating taxpayer ripoffs? Because he, like other Bush administration officials charged with overseeing expenditures in Iraq, is anything but independent.

Instead of filling the various inspector general, comptroller, and budget officer positions in Iraq with skilled, non-partisan public servants, President Bush has packed them with partisans and cronies like Schmitz. Many of these individuals have longstanding political ties with the administration and ties to the very industries and companies that they are supposed to oversee. Here are the dirty details:

Joseph Schmitz: Defense Department Inspector General

Defense Department Inspector General Joseph Schmitz was appointed to his post by President Bush in 2001 after the Associated Press reported the office "was caught cheating" and destroying internal documents. His office has broad jurisdiction to investigate all Pentagon contracts, both in Iraq and elsewhere. But judging by Schmitz's qualifications, the White House had one thing in mind when it appointed him: political loyalty.

According to National Journal, Schmitz is the son of former California Rep. John G. Schmitz, who was a John Birch Society director. As a member of the archconservative Washington Legal Foundation, Joseph Schmitz made a name for himself as "a conservative activist" and as a lawyer for House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a court case attempting to outlaw forms of taxation. In 1992, he authored a letter to The Washington Times insinuating that the Democratic presidential nominee had connections to Russian intelligence, writing, "The KGB apparently knows more about the shady side of Bill Clinton than the American people ever will."

His short tenure at the Pentagon has been marked not only by defending Halliburton, but also by defending the administration he is supposed to be overseeing. For instance, in 2002, Schmitz refused congressional entreaties to declassify a report detailing how the administration was providing inadequate training and protective gear to troops in the event of a bio-chemical attack.”

That was in 2004. In 2005, Sirota resigned. The LA Times had a story about the two cases that were being ‘investigated’ by Congress - which is a form of euthanasia for criminal conduct, popular in the omni-corrupt precincts of D.C. Look like you are punishing the guilty, and take contributions from them for your next campaign, the yacht that you’ve always wanted, and a paint job for your house – it’s the D.C. mantra. In any case, this is what the Times reported:

“The first of the criminal investigations in which Schmitz allegedly intervened involved John A. "Jack" Shaw, the former deputy undersecretary of Defense for international technology security.

Shaw, who was the subject of a series of articles in The Times last year, tried to manipulate a lucrative contract in Iraq in 2004 to favor a telecommunications company whose board included a close friend, according to whistle-blowers who worked for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

Shaw had signed an unusual agreement with Schmitz that gave him some investigative authority. Shaw told U.S. officials in Iraq that he was conducting investigations under that agreement during a trip to Iraq in December 2003. The results of those investigations were later used in his effort to push for contracts of firms tied to his friends and their clients, according to the whistle-blowers.

Shaw, who was forced out of office last year after refusing to resign, has denied any wrongdoing.

Schmitz referred the whistle-blowers' accusations to the FBI, despite the protests of senior criminal investigators in his office who had already found "specific and credible evidence" of wrongdoing by Shaw, according to Grassley's letter.

The FBI has not placed a high priority on the investigation, which has since stalled, according to one person with knowledge of the case.”

I think this was one of the most beautiful of the numberless small crimes committed under the Bush administration by a Bushie. It is so clever! And there is a certain John Birchy sadism to it – take the goody goody procedure and use it to line the pockets of your regular nosepickin’ goldbrickin’ chum, with whom you can discuss the latest from Rush and lament the good old days of Jim Crow – who could resist? Certainly not a man whose elevation to the post of ‘inspector general’ gives new meaning to the phrase, you are doing a heckuva job.

And it is no surprise, given the way the mesh has been woven, that this man is now on the margins of the Blackwater massacre, as the very Zelig of far right mania. Vanity Fair has published a new investigative report on the ‘loss’ of about 9 billion dollars by the CPA during the period that Schmitz was inspector general. Here are some excerpts:

“To be fair, the C.P.A. really did need money desperately, and it really did need to start spreading it among the traumatized Iraqi population. It also needed to jump-start Iraq's basic services. As the C.P.A. demanded ever greater amounts of cash, the pallets of $1, $5, and $10 bills were soon replaced by bundles of $100 bills. During the C.P.A.'s little more than a year of life, the New York Federal Reserve Bank made 21 shipments of currency to Iraq totaling $11,981,531,000. All told, the Fed would ship 281 million individual banknotes, in bricks weighing a total of 363 tons.

After arriving in Baghdad, some of the cash was shipped to outlying regions, but most of it stayed in the capital, where it was delivered to Iraqi banks, to installations such as Camp Victory, the mammoth U.S. Army facility adjacent to the Baghdad airport, and to Saddam's former presidential palace, in the Green Zone, which had become the home of Bremer's C.P.A. and the makeshift Iraqi government. At the palace the cash disappeared into a vault in the basement. Few people ever saw the vault, but the word was that during one short period it held as much as $3 billion. Whatever the figure, it was a major repository of the banknotes from America during the brief time the cash was under the care of the C.P.A. The money flowed in and out rapidly. When someone needed cash, a unit called the Program Review Board, composed of senior C.P.A. officials, reviewed the request and decided whether to recommend a disbursement. A military officer would then present that authorization to personnel at the vault.”

And there is this:

"There was corruption everywhere," said one former military officer who worked with the C.P.A. in Baghdad in the months after the invasion. Some of the Iraqis who were put in charge of ministries after Saddam's fall had never run a government agency before. Their inexperience aside, he said, they lived in constant fear of losing their jobs or their lives. All many cared about, he added, was taking care of themselves. "You could see that a lot of them were trying their best to get a quick retirement fund before they were ousted or killed," he added. "You just get what you can while you're in that position of power. Instead of trying to build the nation, you build yourself."

Did any withdrawals from the vault pay for secret activities by government personnel? It is an obvious possibility. Much of the cash was clearly destined for American contractors or Iraqi subcontractors. Sometimes the Iraqis came to the palace to collect their cash; other times, when they were reluctant to show up at the American compound, U.S. military personnel had to deliver it themselves. One of the riskier jobs for some U.S. military men was to fill up a car with bags of cash and drive the money to contractors in Baghdad neighborhoods, handing it over like a postal worker delivering mail.

"Fraud" was simply another word for "business as usual." Of 8,206 "guards" drawing paychecks courtesy of the C.P.A., only 602 warm bodies could in fact be found; the other 7,604 were ghost employees. Halliburton , the government contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, charged the C.P.A. for 42,000 daily meals for soldiers while in fact serving only 14,000 of them. Cash was handed out from the backs of pickup trucks. On one occasion a C.P.A. official received $6.75 million in cash with the expectation he would shell it out in one week. Another time, the C.P.A. decided to spend $500 million on "security." No specifics, just a half-billion dollars for security, with this cryptic explanation: "Composition TBD"--that is, "to be determined."

The pervasiveness of this Why-should-I-care? attitude was driven home in an exchange with retired admiral David Oliver, the C.P.A.'s director of management and budget. Oliver was asked by a BBC reporter what had happened to all the cash airlifted to Baghdad:

Oliver: "I have no idea--I can't tell you whether or not the money went to the right things or didn't--nor do I actually think it's important."

Q: "Not important?"

Oliver: "No. The coalition--and I think it was between 300 and 600 people, civilians--and you want to bring in 3,000 auditors to make sure money's being spent?"

Q: "Yes, but the fact is that billions of dollars have disappeared without a trace."

Oliver: "Of their money. Billions of dollars of their money, yeah, I understand. I'm saying what difference does it make?"

And here is a beautiful story of what a difference a little hundred million or so can make. Ask not what you can do for your government, but what it can do for you – and have faith. And feel faith in your heart. And know that Jesus is Lord. And remember that, when asked, the creeps and morons – the merchants of death group – will attribute their good fortunes to – themselves. Their hard work. Their self reliance. Always. It was hard work. It was brains. These are, in the hushed words of the Heritage Foundation type, the "successful". Usually accompanied by Uriah Heeplike hand gestures. So it is with Custer and Battles:

“The name was derived not from Little Big Horn but from the names of the company's owners, Scott K. Custer and Michael J. Battles. Both were former army rangers in their mid-30s, and Battles also had once been a C.I.A. operative. The pair showed up on the streets of Baghdad with the blessing of the White House at invasion's end, looking for a way to do business. At the time, the only American civilians who could gain access to the city were those approved by President Bush's staff.

The Battles half of the team brought the White House access, secured when Michael Battles became the G.O.P.-backed candidate in the 2002 Rhode Island congressional primary for the privilege of losing to the Democratic incumbent, Patrick Kennedy. Battles not only lost the primary but was fined by the Federal Election Commission for misrepresenting campaign contributions. Nevertheless, he forged important political connections. His contributors included Haley Barbour, the longtime Washington power broker and former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who is now governor of Mississippi, and Frederic V. Malek, a former special assistant to President Nixon, who survived the Watergate scandal and went on to become an insider in the Reagan administration and both Bush administrations.

The C.P.A. awarded Custer and Battles one of its first no-bid contracts--$16.5 million to protect civilian aircraft flights, of which at the time there were few, into Baghdad International Airport. The company faced immediate obstacles: Custer and Battles didn't have any money, they didn't have a viable business, and they didn't have any employees. Bremer's C.P.A. had overlooked these shortcomings and forked over $2 million anyway, in cash, to get them started, simply ignoring long-standing requirements that the government certify that a contractor has the capacity to fulfill a contract. That first $2 million cash infusion was followed shortly by a second. Over the next year Custer Battles would secure more than $100 million in Iraq contracts. The company even set up an internal Office of Corporate Integrity. "Integrity is a core principle of Custer Battles' corporate values," Scott Custer stated in a press release.”

And so it goes. Will there be a reckoning? In truth, after 60 years of intense war culture, democracy is bound to fray, to be fatally attracted to that quarter of the country that ardently wishes its dick was a Glock 18c. Even though that quarter of the country spends its life getting well out of the way of any real encounter with danger. Still, the presence of such masses of money does insure that D.C. stays reliably corrupt, and will continue to fight with itself until, exhausted, it gives up - and no Blackwater thug is charged with murder, no ex-Pentagon millionaire with theft. It is a different world. And a worse one.

From a wierd wedding to a minefield

“Let us return to what we have called the double movement. It can be personified as the action of two organizing principles in society, each of them setting itself specific institutional aims, having the support of definite social forces and using its own distinctive methods. The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the market - primarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classes - and using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods.” – Karl Polanyi

I have just finished Gregory Clark’s much lauded A Farewell to Alms, which weirdly weds the New Growth apercu – that knowledge, unlike other resources, gives us increasing returns, which is why there is no upward bound to growth – to Malthus – who is, if anything, known for having the very fierce view that the upward bound to growth is determined by the iron relationship between population and subsistence. Imagine, if you will, the bride of Frankenstein marrying Dracula. I won’t go into all the ins and outs of Clark’s view – I’m saving that for my Austin Statesman review – but I did find the attack on the institutionalists a little weird. Clark goes after the founders of the school for setting the beginning point of the industrial revolution at 1688. For the institutionalists, the pre-conditions for capitalism were institutions that preserved property rights, secured social stability, and produced, however modestly, a political feedback system between the rulers and the ruled.
Polanyi’s name is never mentioned in Clark’s text, partly because orthodox economist despise Karl Polanyi. But it should have been. Polanyi unpacks that notion of a feedback much more aggressively than it was later to be unpacked by Douglass North.
My ultimate goal, in tracing the rise of a particular happiness ethos and the ruin of all previous systems of emotional custom and charactermaking, is to embed this process in the Great Transformation. This is why the early nineteenth century – when the lineaments of heaven and hell on earth become, suddenly, much clearer – is so important to my thesis. And this is why it opens the thesis up to show the ‘esoteric’ contribution to psychology made by animal magnetism in creating the polar affect model, since this, too, is clearly marked by the double movement – at once aligning itself with the need for an administrative psychology and registering a deep discontent with the system that requires that psychology. We fight the enemy within, who fights his own enemy within, who is – us. It is a war of mental telepaths, I’m telling you! Or, to put it in other terms – it exactly outlines the epistemological problem of the realistic novel.

My next move is to take one of the men of 1789, Carl Gustav Carus – actually born in 1789 – and show how he used polarity, by way of Schelling, to produce a psychology now known, if at all, for the fact that it foreshadowed Freud’s notion of the unconscious – but known to use connoisseurs of PAM for the straightforward introduction of magnetic terms. Carus was not just a psychologist, he was a painter, a friend of Caspar David Friedrich. Which is, of course, almost too perfect, like discovering that your fieldwork is set in a minefield.

An austin day

Mostly, I think Austin is becoming your average urban professional car park. But sometimes you get pleasant glimpses of the older city. Today, for instance: first, I am drinking coffee at Whole Foods and a woman sits down and I notice, with admiration, that she has writing in Chinese, I think, of some sort tattooed on her back – and when I ask her about it, she explains that it is a poem from the fifth master, which, translated into English, makes for a pretty lousy poem. But a nice idea! Then a man stops by my table to inform me that Paul Simon wrote a song about numbers in 1982 – he does this, I realize, because the book I am reading David Boyle’s The Sum of our Discontent: why numbers make us irrational. Then I go to the post office and what do I see but a man who had tattooed not only his face, but his entire head. After depositing my letter, I was riding back up sixth street and passed by a man who was ambling along with nothing more on than a pretty green ribbon, tied in a little bow around his penis. And no, it wasn’t the town’s show off and mascot transvestite, Leslie. However, more impressive perhaps than the penis was the bare feet. On a sixth street sidewalk! Goddamn, I’ve had numerous flat tires from broken glass along this stretch of road, so I could only think that not only had he found a harmless outlet for displaying his gear, but he must have tough padded skin on his feet.

If only he had been marching down fifth street, lowering the property values of the yuppie towers of Babel.

the collective temperament

In Stendhal’s On Love, he takes six temperaments – the sanguine, the bilious, the melancholic, the phlegmatic, the nervous, and the athletic – and pairs them with six political situations – asian despotism, absolute monarchy, constitutional aristocracy a la Britain, republicanism a la the U.S., constitutional monarchy, and revolution – and from that pairing comes up with different regimes of love. Notice that the athletic and the revolutionary are paired.

Here’s what he says about the revolutionary – this is the myth that still has that fatal attraction for certain esprits, of which LI counts himself, reluctantly, one:

A state in revolution, like Spain [this is 1830], Portugal, France. This situation of a country, giving a lively passion to everybody, puts nature in the moeurs, destroys the stupidities, the convenient virtues, the stupid conventional wisdom, gives seriousness to youth, and makes him despise the love of vanity and neglect gallantry.

This state can endure for a long time and form the habits of a generation. In France, it began in 1788, was interrupted in 1802, and recommenced in 1815, to finish God knows when.”

The idea that peoples have a temperament was familiar to the Greeks. The idea that generations have a temperament, though – that is a product of the Enlightenment discovery of progress. Surely, if there is progress in the arts and sciences, if civilization is becoming ever more civilized, than today’s children must be bearers of tomorrow’s higher degree of civilization. So it makes sense to speak of the children of 1789 or 1815 – although, for Stendhal, this observation doesn’t have the systematic weight it will later have for someone like Dilthey.

This is just the kind of observation that should please a novelist, or at least the new kind of novelist of the Balzacian or Stendhalian type. This is the man who proposes to grasp the spiritual essence of his culture within the confines of some sufficiently rich and connected narrative. Instead of allegory, this narrative will be an epitome – a sample illuminating the whole. A nice, statistical thing – and of course, when Stendhal wrote this, nice statistical ways of thinking were finally taking off.

Interestingly – I get this from reading James Simpson’s Burning to Read, which I am reviewing – Luther, in his introduction to his translation of the New Testament, tells his readers that the essential books are the Gospel of John, Paul’s epistles, and the first epistle of Peter. Why? Because the other gospels were full of stories. Luther liked John’s gnostical pontifications and Paul’s theorizing – o, Paul is a causuistical little spider – which wrapped around a metaphysical being, Jesus, who Paul evidently knew little about. Stories, on the other hand, are so… contingent. What do they mean? What is the point? That Lutheran skepticism takes up residence in the head of every novelist, of course, who must at one point or another ask him or herself – why am I spending my life daydreaming about imaginary people? Stendhal, however, has both the moraliste tradition and his materialism – out of Helvetius, recognizing in Bentham a sort of kinship – to underwrite his narrative ambitions, and he can laugh at the German transcendentalists, with their anxious search for new allegories.

Another thing we should see here – and we should see all over Stendhal’s On Love – is how the temperament of a people and the temperament of a generation point us to sex as one of the keys of the age. The relationship between the novelist’s larger task – the grasping of the culture’s essence – and sex is obvious from the novelist’s point of view, and troubling for those outside it. I love Norman Mailer for having taken up this burden in the most showy of ways possible, and going through every novelistic station, from the vilest sexism to the most superstitious of sexual takes. Stendhal, of course, is less ‘metaphysical’, but like Mailer, is an egotist – long before Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself there was Stendhal’s Memoirs of an Egotist.

Enough for today.

in the american grain

When the news reached London of General Burgoyne’s defeat at Saratoga in 1778, Lord Chatham made a speech in the House of Commons, the like of which will never be made by any of the senatorial scum who currently prod the American Republic down the slope to hell. Here’s part of what he said:

“No man thinks more highly than I of the virtue and valour of British troops; I know they can achieve anything except impossibilities; and the conquest of English America is an impossibility… You cannot conquer America… You may swell every expense and every effort still more extravagantly… traffic and barter with every pitiful Geram prince that sells his subjects to the shambles of a foreign power; your efforts are forever vain and impotent, doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely, for it irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies… If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms, never – never – never!”

A good jumping off point for discussing the recent Blackwater massacre in Baghdad, and the American response. It is hard to respond when you are either brain dead or in deep freeze, so the American response has been, of course, a big lukewarm zilch. We can’t disturb the drift as we float ever closer to the Niagara, no matter how much faith we have put in short term memory loss and attention deficit disorder – this country’s favorite hobbies – to get us through the dark night of our Britneyized soul, another possum superpower hoping to avoid the broken mirror’s curse that comes from massacring the innocents. And there’s always Christmas. .

That America will never conquer Iraq, and seems intent on destroying the supports that all power must rely on – the intangible and presumptive threat of efficient force, rationally directed – has been a given at LI since 2003. We’ve ceased to write much about it – for who, among the lobotomized zombies of the electorate, the tranquilized slugs of the opposition, with the miles of bacon fat wrapped around the moral indignation or any morality whatsoever, who cares? So watching these ghouls maintain, at one and the same time, that we have to attack Iran and that we also don’t have one thousand American soldiers to replace a security force with the mores and moves of your average prison gang – I mean Blackwater – is a matter for House of Usher comedy, pedaled B movie laughter, the big fuck you in the closing moments as the hero takes out his cock and wiggles it. I can feel, every day, the corruption and filthiness of the chords that bind me, in thousands of ways, to this sickened country and its toxic momentum, but these chords are like those that bound Doctor Jekyll to Mr. Hyde – you can’t dissolve them without dissolving the motherfucking whole. Still, occasionally a mockingbird will whistle and jeer just for the pleasure of cussing, and LI will kick out with the spasmodic motion of a hanged man, crap running down our legs. So here’s the windup and here’s the pitch…

Way back when we started this blog, we wrote several posts about Angola – the alliance between the Marxist president of Angola and the Bush administration which led to the gunning down of Reagan’s favorite freedom fighter, Jonas Savimbi, struck us as an almost perfect post-Cold War fable… oh the synergies… On the one side, the always disgusting and corrupt ‘Marxist’ left, historically on the side of the slave traders, but with piped in neo-folk music. On the other side, the paymaster right, which of course the Marxy crowd could appreciate – after all, wasn’t profit and loss the be-all and end all of the dialectic? and thus both parties happily thriving on blood diamonds, blood oil, and blood ballots. A marriage truly made in hell, and to put a corpse on top of the wedding cake, apartheid South Africa’s old friend ambushed by ‘Angolan’ forces. Two excerpts from posts we made about this back on June 17 and June 21, 2002:

“A scandal identi-kit.

It works like this. The detective parks his car across the street from the warehouse, he gets out his camera, he takes pictures of men carrying briefcases meeting and exchanging them. The detective follows cars, he takes pictures of meetings in parks and under bridges.

We've seen this, right? The pictures, the movie, the implied plot. So here are a few pictures.

One would show Jacques Chirac meeting with George Bush on December 18, 2000 in Washington, DC at the French Embassy. One would show a former US supported "Freedom fighter," Jonas Savimbi, with fifteen bullets in him, gripping a gun. One would show Eduardo Dos Santos, the president of Angola and former hardline Marxist foe of Savimbo, being feted at a White House dinner shortly after Savimbo's assassination. And one would show an arms dealer named Pierre Falcone (whose wife Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, is Laura Bush's friend) getting together $20,.000 to contribute to Bush's presidential campaign through his wife's beauty products corporation, Essante. In all, $100,000 was contributed during the campaign, and then, in 2001, returned when Falcone went to jail.

Falcone is not unknown to Chirac -- or to his old rival, Mitterand. In fact, he is one of the central figures in one of those simmering French scandals that would destroy the regime in another country: the arms trafficing scandal that involved Mitterand's son, Jean-Christophe, and huge, unaccounted for sums, as well as a mafioso style Russian arms dealer, Arkadi Gaydamak.

This isn't a story we've seen covered in the NYT. It runs through Angola and traces the surprising fault lines of the New World Order. How new worldish it is can be gauged by what happened to Jonas Savimba.

In the old days -- the eighties -- Savimbi was a right wing hero. Probably the only black man Jesse Helms ever willingly ate with, he was praised by Reagan as a George Washington type figure. His UNITA guerrillas were fed with American money, trained (as far as they had any training) by the CIA, and armed by the CIA, too.

But when the Soviet threat dissolved, Savimbi was undone by the economic facts on the ground. Those facts were about oil. The suddenly capitalistic dos Santos could deliver the oil. Savimbi, the loser of the first post-communist election, could only deliver his mad dog personality. And suddenly that personality wasn't in demand. The invites to the Helms house were on permanent hold. Savimbi retires with his guys to the bocage, of course, and forays out to attack airliners, murder villagers, rape women, and do all the stuff that made him George Washington in the first place. Well, how inconvenient. So he is tracked down -- perhaps with American help -- and killed:

"Fifteen bullets in all -- one in the neck, two in the head, the others in the chest, legs and arms -- finally overcame the boss of UNITA, who is dead at 67 years of age, Friday at 3 p.m. on the banks of the Luvuie River at Moxico." So read the announcement of his unhappy death this February. Another old cold warrior bites the dust, gangster style."

The way American intelligence agencies leave their assets around -- Savimbi in Angola, bin Laden in Afghanistan -- it is like some drunk Texas trucker throwing beer cans out the cab. Human litter, but somebody has to pick it up.

However, never let it be said that Savimbi's less glorious years had no function or meaning. With UNITA threatening him, dos Santos, backed by various American petro-chemical companies, such as Dick Cheney's Haliburton, needed arms. The desire for arms and drugs is the only unlimited desire known to mankind. Luckily, in this world, an embattled dictator can always find somebody to sell him a few hundred million dollars worth of weaponry; this is where Falcone, with his buddy Gaydamak, and his connections with Chirac and his faithful friend, Jean-Christophe Mitterand, fits in. As does ( scumbags of the world display the most touching solidarity) Clinton's good friend, Marc Rich, the on the run moneybags whose company, Glencore, deals in oil.”

Angola (part 2)

I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter
I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters
I know the names of the summit that manipulated
I know the names of those who ran
I know the names of the powerful group who
I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who
I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who
I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of
- Pier Paolo Pasolini

This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies - the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered - is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasolini, Robb says, went on to explain that he knew, but he didn't have proof. He knew, however, because "I am a writer and an intellectual who tries to follow what goes on, to imagine what is known and what is kept quiet, who pieces together the disorganized fragments of a whole and coherent political picture, who restores logic where arbitrariness, mystery and madness seem to prevail."

The American writer, burdened with a less active imagination, and a set of cliches that tend either to Hollywood or to the pisspoor identity kit politics that has narcotized academia for the past ten years, usually pieces together nothing but a homemade prejudice, a narcissistic grievance.

And LI is an American writer, all right? So don't ask me to rise to the heights.

Still, the quote seems appropriate as LI pulls back, these days,. Have you been getting the full heady rush of the world of blowback in your nostrils, your skin, your nerves, your blood, reader? …
…

Yes, that's the basic gripe, the root of the anti-corporate movement: the fear that the globalizing world is returning us to the calm regard of the beast. We would no longer ask how it works -- just as we accept any of the improbable crap we see in typical Hollywood action flicks. The discontinuity, the shallowness, or non-existence, of character, the one note motives. Those films, the malls, the traffic, the talk radio -- all of it is about culture sinking to its lowest, dumbest level. It is the debauched image of the romantic ideal, life without questions, except for the unfortunate few -- okay, the vast majority -- who have been left outside of the all the golden gated communities.

…

For instance, we think that the story of what happened, and has been happening, in Angola, has something ghoulishly exemplary about it. The events that flow into and out of the death of Jonas Savimbi, madman and murder that he was, the George Washington of dirty diamonds, the strong right arm of evangelical Christians (2)(some of whose leaders, like Pat Robertson (3), have strong and secret ties in this region of the world with diamond dealers, arms merchants, and some of the bloodiest tyrants of recent history), show that once again, Africa is where the white man lets down his pants, as Celine once wrote, and takes a dump. It seems to have been little remarked that Cheney is the first Vice President ever to have hired a mercenary army in a foreign land. Is this the Oliver North syndrome or what? Yes, as head of Haliburton, which includes the giant engineering firm, Brown and Root, Cheney was involved, no doubt at a distance, with a South African company named Executive Outcomes. Executive Outcomes -- which has dissolved, and reformed under a different name, last year -- was a PMC -- a private military company. Oh, it wasn't anything as tawdry as a group of hired killers. There's a rather laudatory article about EO in the magazine of the College of the Army, Parameters. Here's a list of such PMCs:

"A 1997 study by the private Center for Defense Information lists dozens of such organizations with international operations. South Africa has been the leading home of international security companies, including Executive Outcomes, Combat Force, Investments Surveys, Honey Badger Arms and Ammunition, Shield Security, Kas Enterprises, Saracen International, and Longreach Security. International military firms based in other parts of the world include Alpha Five, Corporate Trading International, Omega Support Ltd., Parasec Strategic Concept, Jardine Securicor Gurkha Services (Hong Kong), Gurkha Security Guards (Isle of Man, UK), Special Project Service Ltd. (UK), Defence Systems Ltd. (UK), Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Vinnell Corporation (US), and Military Professional Resources Inc. (US). Executive Outcomes (South Africa) has been described as "the world's first fully equipped corporate army."

Isn't that something? a fully equipped corporate army. Press on the pedals, bring out the irony. Savimbi's UNITA army was undone by dos Santos by these guys, with Heritage Oil being, apparently, the middleman. The EO guys once fought for UNITA -- back in the days when dos Santos was a Marxist threat. Now, of course, dos Santos is merely a highly corrupt billionaire, and EO is happy to do the dirty in his employ. Heritage Oil meanwhile maintains its own little connections with the Bush family. There's an article in the Observatoire de Afrique Centrale this week that fingers Tony Buckingham, a Canadian diamond merchant and soldier of fortune, as the man behind Heritage's African explorations in petrowealth. Heritage also holds stock in one of the PMC's that murdered protestors at a mine in Papua New Guinea in 1997. Cheney's associates, in other words, happen to have a little blood on their cuffs, but that's all right. Who's going to ask any questions about it? It 's a matter of keeping the natives under control, and lately isn't the mood changing? Isn't imperialism the new new thing?

I know the names. We all know the names. But do we really give a fuck?”

Since 2002, innocent days, the milk not even dry in our mouths, we have learned a lot. For instance, we know that the fix is in re the thugs. We know that they are keepers – the House likes them, the ever in the background House, by which I mean the owners of the casino, the Bosses. Just as their great great grandfathers loved the thugs

One should remember the anti-union police of the turn of the century, and their police friends, for these are the spiritual ancestors of Blackwater. The same mix of sadism and righteousness went into these para-militaries: the ones that were hired by Republic Steel to break strikes in the 1930s, the Baldwin-Felts detective force, made famous in Sayers film, Matewan. This is from Robert Michael Smith’s From Blackjacks to Briefcases: A history of commercialized strikebreaking:

One of the largest mine operators in this part of the state [of West Virginia], Justus Collins, first turned to this agency for guards to protect his property in 1893. Less than ten years later, he utilized these same men to break a UMWA-sponsored strike. After joining his fellow operators, who agreed to enfoce a thirty-day lockout, in June of 1902 he broke ranks by bringin in one hundred and fifty scab workers. Protected by forty Baldwin-Felts men, who guarded the iron gates to themine and manned searchlights and a machine gun mounted upon the coal tipple, he reaped a fortune…

Found in nearly every mining community in the sounthern part of West Virginia by 1930, Baldwin-Felts guards provided the mine owners with a feudal like control over their workers. Under the order of the mine operators these men policed the remote mining camps, guarded the payroll, collected rents, and often determined access to company towns… Once able to move freely around the state – after 1907 – Baldwin Felts thugs harassed union organizers from the time they stepped off the train until they left.”

As with Blackwater and Co. in Iraq, the Baldwin Felts people signaled their dominance and contempt for the miners and people of West Virginia, by drive by shootings. In a congressional inquiry, … senators heard that one night in early February 1913 the local sheriff, a coal operator, and fourteen guards machine gunned a striker’s tent colony at Holly Grove from an armored train known as the Bull Moose Special.”
...

That long and twisty authoritarian American character, the scab and the strikebreaking cop - just as the twenties returned everywhere in the nineties, so too did the characters from the twenties. The return of the repressed has been formidable, and the repressed characters only got more grotesque and psychotic from their stays in the underworld - hence, a bug like Cheney. And hence the industry cops and their media mouthpieces - among whom, of course, is Ted Koppel, well known for his copcrush on Blackwater. Koppel's op ed piece was pointed to, in 2006, as a kind of unconscious satire. But it is a deadly one. This is how the establishment thinks:

"There is something terribly seductive about the notion of a mercenary army. Perhaps it is the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems.

Consider only a partial list of factors that would make a force of latter-day Hessians seem attractive. Among them are these:

• Growing public disenchantment with the war in Iraq;

• The prospect of an endless campaign against global terrorism;

• An over-extended military backed by an exhausted, even depleted force of reservists and National Guardsmen;

• The unwillingness or inability of the United Nations or other multinational organizations to dispatch adequate forces to deal quickly with hideous, large-scale atrocities (see Darfur and Congo);

• The expansion of American corporations into more remote, fractious and potentially hostile settings.

Just as the all-volunteer military relieved the government of much of the political pressure that had accompanied the draft, so a rent-a-force, harnessing the privilege of every putative warrior to hire himself out for more than he could ever make in the direct service of Uncle Sam, might relieve us of an array of current political pressures."

Here's the genuine voice of D.C., the consensus of the policymakers centered around the likes of George Bush and Hilary Clinton. Here's the voice of William Tyndale, four hundred years ago, explaining God's punishment on the wicked:

"… as soon as the word is once openly preached, and testified or witnessed, unto the world, and when he hath given them a season to repent, is ready at once to take vengeance of his enemies, and shooteth arrows with heads dipt in deadly poison at them; and poureth his plague from heaven down upon them; and sendeth the murrain and pestilence among them; and sinketh the cities of them; and maketh the earth swallow them, and compasseth them in their wiles, and taketh them in their own traps and snares, and casteth them into the pits which they digged for other men; and sendeth them a dazing in the head; and utterly destroyeth them with their own subtle counsel."

Which, saving the deity, is pretty much my conviction as to what will happen to a country that turns its prison system into a 'solution' to the political pressures coming from the collapse of Jim Crow - apartheid by Jena-like jury - that sends violent psychopaths into other countries to mow down the innocent, and that elects the crookedest and the stupidest of tyrants.

Another quote, and I'm done here:

he good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black.

The judge smiled, his face shining with grease. What right man would have it any other way? he said.

The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there's many a bloody tale of war inside it.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way. - Blood Meridian

Two euphorics: Mr. T and Stephanie's Id

I am feeling grim about the mouth lately. A sickness I caught in Georgia has left behind a persistent, puzzling headache and cough - and then of course there is the day to day living in Blackwater’s USA, Bush’s America, which is a puling, putrid kind of thing to do.

So I’ve been looking around for things to cheer me up. Here are two of them.

the first is my friend T., his wife Kiyoko, and his baby Takeo-chan here:


The second is this band, Stephanie’s ID. Just some kids in Asheville, NC making music – great garage music - instead of trying to make celebrity industry vampire music, eventually to be glued to some monster and useless product to make the joyless little suicide of a life enjoyed by the viewing audience that much more cluttered. This band is pure, and I love the voice of this woman, Stephanie Morgan.