the myths of the labor "market"

 John Quiggin, the Australian economist, haswritten a post about the business cycle over at Crooked Timber, and in it herings my chimes – or he makes me mount on my hobbyhorse, to use an older cliché.Specifically, he defines recessions in terms of unemployment, mostly, which I think is a good thing – but he defines employment, implicitly, in terms of a labour market analysis, which is a normal thing, but I think is fundamentally misleading. In a footnote, this is how he defines full employment:

“Full employment doesn’t mean zero unemployment, since some people are always changing jobs, or are in the process of leaving the labor market. Roughly speaking, the employment is at full employment in the sense required here when any additional job creation in one sector of the economy is feasible only by attracting workers away from other sectors.”

Implicitly, what is happening here is a vision of laborers as sovereign consumers in a market place, chosing this or that place to work. Or, in times of lesser employment, consumers without the full freedoms that endow the sovereign consumer. Of course, at the same time, these choosers are also vendors. The neo-classical model allows for this double aspect, but doesn’t ask any questions about it that would lead to some nasty dialectical thinking. That way lies madness and Marxism!

Myself, though, I think that this is a way of looking at the labor force that dissolves extremely pertinent sociological and economic distinctions. For instance, we know that around 30 percent of American workers – to stick with America – work in credentialed, or guild like, professions. Not just doctors and lawyers, but accountants, nurses, plumbers and air conditioning men – given this fact, it does seem like the definition of full employment here is, to say the least, not comprehensive.

Interestingly, when the “market” was first being conceptualized, in the 18^th century, it was conceptualized as a ‘natural’ phenomenon against an artificial phenomenon – state sponsored or regulated activity. There is a famous and defining text, Turgot’s entry in the Encyclopedie on the Foire, or fair, that provides an exemplary instance of a discourse we have all become familiar with, in which the workings of the market are ‘distorted’ or “interfered with” by non-market, and hence, vicious, factors. Turgot used this distinction to analyse fairs as opposed to markets:

“Fair and a marketare therefore both a gathering of merchants and customers at a set time andplace. But in the case of markets the merchants and buyers are brought together by the mutual interest they have in seeking each other, while in the case of fairs it is the desire to enjoy certain privileges — from which it follows that this gathering is inevitably much more numerous and solemn at fairs. Although the natural course of commerce is sufficient to establish markets, as a result of the unfortunate principle which in nearly all governments has infected the administration of commerce — I mean, the mania of directing all, regulating all, and of never relying on the self-interest of man — it has happened, in order to establish markets, that the police1 has been made to interfere; that the number of markets has been limited on the pretext of preventing them from becoming harmful to each other; that the sale of certain goods has been prohibited except at certain appointed places, either for the convenience of the clerks charged with receiving the duty with which they are burdened, or because the goods were required to be subjected to the formalities of testing and marking…”

Given Turgot’s definition, one should speak, then, of the labor “market” as, actually, a hybrid of a market and a fair, for certainly many, if not most of those jobs we associate with the upper middle class are fair-like in their composition.

But there is more to the picture than that. I think Quiggens might be more aware than most economists that governments also employ people. But still, it seems to me that he underestimates  employment by the state. In other words, full employment is supposed to be something sustained by private enterprise in which the state plays only a marketmaker role, by using its powers to tax, borrow, and raise and lower interest rates to create optimum conditions of demand in the private sector.. But – to use the US as an example – full employment in the sense of the private sector absorbing all but a small portion of the working population has never been the case since the great depression. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about 13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. In 2009, for instance, according to the Bureau of Labor, there are around 22 million Americans employed by local, state and federal governments.

This means, at first glance, that the private sector employs on average about 82-84 percent of the work force. In actuality, given a very rough average of unemployment of 5 percent, which is really generous, the private sector ends up employing closer to 78 to 80 percent of the work force.

You can look elsewhere in the developed world and find similar statistics. The OECD has published a comparison across countries of the percentage of the work force employed in the public sector. The scandinavian countries rank high – in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, over 30 percent of the workforce works in the public sector. The UK is 21.5 percent in 2015. In Australia, the public sector grew in the past four years – an exception to the OECD norm – to 18.9 percent of the employed population.

So the first thing one can safely say about full employment, even before brandishing the market metaphor,  is that under modern capitalism, it doesn’t ever happen if we rely solely on the private sector. In a sense, the unemployed mass of the Great Depression was dissolved into the state, and has remained there ever since.

sick humor, State department style

I think Americans who have some moral sense should be outraged at the American foreign policy that has supported a civil war in Syria based on the premise that Assad is a dictator who slaughters civilians while providing logistical support for Saudi Arabia as it bombs and starves civilians in Yemen. As this article shows, it is a joke, officially supported by the Obama State department, that the Saudis are fighting for democracy in Yemen. Although this is a joke that is so sickening that even the State Department doesn't push too hard on this line. They did, of course, congratulate the Saudis when they were elevated, in another of those sick jokes, to the head of the UN Human Rights commission. An endless line of sick humor, death and destruction - there you have the Clinton-Bush-Obama Middle Eastern policy in a nutshell.

the view from 1968: the moral and practical problem of encouraging police to shoot to kill

In 1968, Ramsey Clark, at that time the Attorney General, made a speech in response to Mayor Daley’s remark, about rioters in Chicago, that the police should shoot to kill looters. The speech is relevant now, when the head of the FBI and the DEA have expressed support for police responding immediately and lethally in situations that would formerly have been handled with the finesse police should be trained in. Oh, they didn’t express that support directly – the FBI head and the DEA head were sneakier than that, saying that the emphasis on police killings was contributing to a rise in crime.

Here’s a graf from Clark’s speech.

“A reverence for life is the sure way of reducing violent death. There are few acts more likely to cause guerilla warfare in our cities and division and hatred among our people than to encourage police to shoot looters or other persons caught committing property crimes. How many dead twelve year old boys will it take for us to learn this simple lesson?”

Thousands, it turns out, and we still haven’t learned it. The police poobahs think they are making their case by showing how shooting at the police has increased dramatically; what they are really showing is that police methods which visit lethal injuries on numbers of people who have done little or nothing more than crossed a lane without turning on a signal or the like produce an atmosphere where the cops become the target themselves. 

the mythological struggle between the hard and the soft

Ideology deals with concepts like power and order. Mythology deals with percepts, like the hard and the soft. Of course, the story is more complicated than that.  They are a duality, and like many dualities, they love to dress up in each other’s clothes. Ideological concepts disguise themselves in percepts, and mythology’s percepts disguise themselves as arguments.

I’ve just read a fantastically detailed biography of Wyndham Lewis. By the end of it, the reader will have a good sense of Lewis’s bank account balance, year by year. And yet, the reader won’t know why Lewis painted the way he did, thought the way he did, or wrote the way he did.

After Lewis’s death, many critics, following Hugh Kenner’s lead, swallowed Lewis’s version of modernism. It was a modernism that kicked out the Bloomsbury group, and in particular Virginia Woolf. It is as if they caught Lewis’s allergy to Woolf . Now, Woolf, it seems to me, was a much greater artist than Lewis, and her novels can’t be kicked to the curve as somehow not in the modernist spirit – on the contrary, they are modernist in the most cosmopolitan sense. They link up to Bely, to Joyce, and to Faulkner in the genius with which they slant plot, character, description, and the event of reading itself.

Nevertheless, Lewis is a fascinating writer. I’ve never been able to finish Apes of God, with its impossible mannerism, or Self Condemned, with its rather mysterious gloom, So I’ve decided to repair this by reading Tarr. Tarr is the essential Lewis book, where the material that became The Art of Being Ruled or Time and the Western Man is put to the test of being lived – that is, of being contested. Walter Allen, in an essay on Lewis, made the suggestion that Lewis wrote in the tradition of the Victorian sage – Carlyle, Ruskin, etc. What distinguishes the sage, Allen says, quoting  John Holloway on Carlyle, is a rather disquieting feature:

“One of the things that most disturbs a modern reader of his work is constant dogmatism. Through Carlyle’s work the nerve of proof – in the redily understood and familiar sense of straightforward argument – simply cannot be traced; and the sucession of arbitrary and unproved assertions tends to forfeit our attention. Yet this is only a subordinate difficulty, because although proof is clearly missing it is by no means clear  what would supply this lack, as it is by no means clear what needs proof. The general principles which would summarize Carlyle’s ‘system’ are broad and sweeping gestures, hints thrown out, suggestions which leave us quite uncertain about their detailed import. And what is clearly true of his work is also true of the others. “

It is the lack of proof – which I would interpret as an indissoluble overlapping of the mythological and ideological levels of the text - that makes Lewis’s politics difficult. He obviously flirts with fascism, but he is not a party member like Pound. Rather, I feel his fascism is expressed in his mythology, in which the hard struggles against the soft. The soft, for Lewis, is always disgusting, whereas the hard is always an admirable achievement. In a way, this mirrors the way, in the 21^st century, the American establishment mythologizes. Toughness is always good, weakness is always bad. America’s horrendous foreign policy is based on this seemingly infantile binary – in fact, one could say that the foreign policy, tout court, is a case of homosexual panic. Uncle Sam must always present his butch side to the world.

In artistic terms, Lewis’s flight from the soft is what connects his entire career as a polemicist, satirist, painter, and novelist.  He associated the hard with vision. In a sort of primitive physicalism, the eye becomes a projector of rays – not the soft receiver that it actually is and has to be. What is truly seen is truly seen in hard lines.  The fetish of the hard is the fetish of the machine, which, in Lewis’s mythology, is never oiled, never uses weakness, the spring, the buffer, the tampon, but is always in a maximum state of hardness.  Such machinery is so strong, in fact, that it is always in peril of crashing. It can’t last. It is a machine that is built not to function, but to express the mythological state  of hardness.

to the GOP candidates: let's show some love to Carson today!

I don't see what is wrong with this. Carson is no different from all the rest of the GOP candidates. He turned down a scholarship to west point in his head. Rubio was a poor boy who climbed the social ladder through entrepreneurship and pluck in his head. Fiorina, in her head, saw bodysnatchers using their alien vehicle, Planned Parenthood, to make soup out of fetuses, And Trump has dreamt up a whole country named the USA which ranks, militarily and economically, with Albania, but, after a quick fixer upper, will rank with alexander the great's empire, and the Roman one too, In the most classical sense, the Republicans are running as idealists. I'm hoping they will show some love to Carson, who is just being attacked by the liberal press, After all. It isn't a lie if you can believe it just before going to sleep!

Dexter Filkens very poor, sham defense of Chalabi.

In the New Yorker, the old interventionist fellow traveler, Dexter Filkins, performs a pretty worn out magic trick, exonerating Chalabi for the lies and propaganda he spread in Iraq, and leaving the man's career at that. 

Of course, Chalabi was no seducer of innocents. The Bush administration was crowded with chickenhawks, anxious to "liberate" Iraq, reap a bountiful political score in the US, and Chili-ize the occupied country in the best shock doctrine fashion. Of course, they were afraid to risk the political capital that would come from really occupying the country, and they could hide behind Rumsfeld's screwy military science which told him that you could pacify Iraq with about five hundred thousand less soldiers than it would actually take to even begin. No Vietnams please, we are chickenhawks was the motto.
However, by trotting out the usual I interviewed Chalabi nonsense, and focusing all attention on the run up to the war, Filkins conveniently forgets Chalabis role in the occupation in 2003. Here, Chalabi was key. Because he was one of the main players to press for de-Baathification, which was realized by Paul Bremer's decision to unilaterally disband the army and ban Ba'athists from state positions. In one stroke, Iraq lost its governance. Imagine having half a million too few soldiers to actually continue the civic and social life of a territory and then stripping out the government that had served that territory for the last thirty years.
Sadly, Filkins, a terrible war correspondent, was chosen by the New Yorker as their man in the Middle East. This isn't surprising - Remnick, after all, published the wild tales of the 9.11 - Saddam Hussein connection, as designed by Jeffrey Goldberg, to turn up the pro-war heat back in the day. But I think that the readership of the New Yorker is probably much out of synch with the pap being fed it by such as Filkins.
For the story of Chalabi and the occupiers, a much better source is Aram Rosten's biography of Chalabi. Here, I'll quote from the pages devoted to Bremer's de-Ba'athification edicts.

As much as L. Paul Bremer and Ahmad Chalabi would come to
hate and despise each other, Bremer, who replaced Jay Garner as
America’s overseer in Iraq, danced unwittingly to Chalabi’s tune when
he issued the de-Baathification order on May 16, 2003. He carried out
Chalabi’s policy, although, he explained later, it was merely adapted
from a law handed to him directly by Doug Feith.

And then Bremer quickly installed Ahmad Chalabi as the head of
the commission to “de-Baathify” Iraq. On the top floor of the Iraqi
government building, in the Green Zone, Chalabi entrenched his De-
Baathification Commission, which assumed the aura and reputation
of an Inquisition. “They had tons of money,” explained one Iraqi involved
with the commission. “Their fortunes have risen and fallen
many times, but when they were first created, they were a much-feared
organization that occupied one of the floors of the building the government
used.And I know people quaked even going there. If your file
entered there, God knows what they would do to you.”

Chalabi had the extraordinary power now to end anyone’s employment,
strip away his pension even, leave him destitute. If Chalabi chose
to paint someone as a leading Baathist, that would mean his prospects of
government employment were over.And of course it left him open to arrest
by the Americans, who barely monitored the committee’s methods.

It was immediately clear to anyone who cared to know that not all
Baathists had blood on their hands and that patriotic Iraqis were being
pushed out of their jobs and turned into beggars because of the
process led by Chalabi. “It was like ‘de-Sunnification,’” said one diplomat.
The most competent administrators, who had been forced to be
Baath Party members, were banned from working in government
jobs. “De-Baathification appears to have gone some way toward dismantling
a state that had been left largely intact by the unexpectedly
swift war,” as The Economist put it."

As I wrote constantly at the time, you cannot separate the run up to the war and the occupation. To do so gives one an absurd picture of what went on - a picture that gives cover to incompetents, criminals, and, by no accident, their abettors in the press.
So why does Dexter Filkins still have a career explaining Iraq?

chalabi is deader than dick cheney's heart

I've often written about Chalabi. He was a character who seemed to embody the madness of the first stage of the Bush era - the second stage, in which we live, is characterized by opoid addiction and suicide, which is another story. 

Anyway, he tires me. So I'm reprinting a post I wrote when the NYT Magazine did their postmortem on Chalabi after his party was wiped out in the first Iraqi election.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

The horrendous Dexter Filkins is at it again. The NYT Magazine profile of Chalabi is an indulgence verging on an impudence – after all, why not devote that space to a basically meaningless story about Filkins fave guy? Here’s one of our favorite passages in this extended exercise in bosculating Chalabi’s golden fanny:

“When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.

But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free.”

To set them free! Doesn’t it make you feel all Country and Western?

Having cast my lot with the black magicians, I've been trying to come up with a spell to launch a meme from this tiny blog. The meme would be about the failure of the MSM, from the beginning, to comprehend Iraq. The evidence for that failure would be the incredibly exaggerated role assumed by Chalabi in reports about Iraq after the invasion that kept appearing in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other major media. At the same time, the way Chalabi himself was perceived in Iraq didn't even figure in those reports. For instance: for years, LI has maintained that the legitimacy of the supposed American project of bringing 'democracy' to Iraq, still hailed by the belligeranti, was undermined from the beginning by trying to set up a notorious thief as our proxy in Iraq. Filkins remarks, sort of as an afterthought in one place, that he was amazed at how the Iraqis all seemed to know that Chalabi was convicted in Jordan of stealing up to 40 million dollars from the bank he founded. Now, this isn't a small and insignificant piece of information - even though Filkins treats it as such, devoting a total of four sentences to it. This is a huge piece of information. It is about how the Iraqis were seeing things. If the MSM were really curious about the supposed American project, this kind of information was vital feedback for Americans.

In fact, however, the MSM is simply an adjunct of the conventional wisdom of whatever court faction wants to bamboozle us this time. And so in all those stories about Chalabi, none of them were about the perception current in Iraq from the beginning that he was a huge thief. It is also true that he is a huge thief, but the perception was more important. You can't conduct an occupation that is legitimated on helping the occupied and then try to elevate a thief to the position of ruler.

Well, we were reminded by the sorry ass stroy of this post, filed after the Iraqi election, 1/26/06. I totally regret the severe underestimate of Iraqi casualties:

the shame of the press
Imagine that the entertainment sections of the NYT, the Washington Post, and the LA Times had all devoted most of their coverage to the choice of Jessica Simpson as best actress in the run up to the Oscars. Suppose that they did this in spite of the fact that there was abundant evidence that Jessica Simpson was not considered even an outlying candidate for best actress by insiders. Suppose that she got not a single vote.

If this had happened, it would be a major media scandal. There would be questions about the honesty of the critics involved, and whether there had been some kind of quid pro quo with Simpson’s PR people, or some studio. Certainly there would be, at least, some comment to explain the bizarre behavior of the critics.

Now consider the Iraqi elections. Again. The results are now, semi-officially, in. In the run up to the election, did we have American papers running big profiles of, say, Abdul Aziz Hakim? He is the head of SCIRI. Or how about Ibrahim Jaafari? The head of Dawa. No. As has been the case for three years, the overwhelming amount of media in this country went to … Ahmed Chalabi. A man whose party did not earn enough votes to even give him a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Enter Chalabi’s name in the Factiva database, and you get 27, 925 entries. Enter Hakim’s name in the database, you get 1232 entries. The 27 to 1 disproportion between the man who couldn’t even gain a seat with the votes of the exiles and the man who the Washington Post calls “the most powerful Shiite politician” is an accurate reflection of the delusiveness of the media, which not only bought the Bush administration’s illusions and lies at the beginning of the war but has added to it their own so that Americans trying to understand what is happening in Iraq have as much chance of getting good information from, say, the U.S. Defense department – which is, remember, run by the worst and most mendacious Secretary of Defense in our history, and staffed with his appointees -- as from the NYT.

Let’s take a look, for comedy’s sake, at Dexter Filkins, the NYT’s Iraq reporter who is bad enough to surely merit some kindly nickname by our prez. Here, before the elections, is a typical Filkins lede. On December 12, 2005, under the headline, Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister, Filkins wrote:

“The three Iraqi political leaders considered most likely to end up as prime minister after nationwide elections this week -- Ayad Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi and Adel Abdul Mahdi -- were schoolmates at the all-boys English-language school in the late 1950's, fortunate members of the Baghdad elite that governed Iraq until successive waves of revolution and terror swept it away.”

Imagine someone including, in a story about the three most likely Democratic presidential candidates, the name Dennis Kucenich. You get the picture. Filkins is the clown prince of the Iraqi reporting team for the NYT. Edward Wong is a better reporter – one doesn’t feel like he takes massive doses of acid before he files his stories. But his story before the election, with the headline Iraq’s Powerful Shiite Coalition shows Signs of Stress before the Election (9 December) goes on for ten grafs before we get the inevitable:

“This time, though, the rivalries have grown more heated and the potential for an irreparable split is greater, Iraqi and Western officials say. Many coalition members have broken away and started their own parties, and there has been a palpable drop in support among moderate voters and the leading ayatollahs, who are disenchanted with the performance of the current Shiite government.

“A fracturing of the conservative coalition could set the conditions for a realignment of Iraq's political spectrum, creating an opening for a more secular Shiite candidate like the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, or even Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, to assemble enough allies to claim the top spot in the new government.”

On November 30, 2005, ABC’s Nightline did its duty to inform its audience of the impending election in Iraq by doing a whole show entitled: “THE POWER BROKER A LOOK AT AHMED CHALABI.” Of course, the advantage of this is you don’t have to hire a translator – translating is so boring on TV, and it might give the viewing audience the idea that Iraqis don’t normally speak English.

Here is a typical snippet from that show:
“CYNTHIA MCFADDEN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Terry, you've been spending lots of time with one of the more controversial and powerful figures in Iraq. And you have his story tonight.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Ahmed Chalabi, Cynthia. He is quite a character. He was in exile from this country for more than 40 years. Saddam Hussein's archenemy. He's now a candidate. It is election season here. You sense it in the air. People talk about it in cafes. There's posters and banners. And Chalabi wants to run the country he left for 40 years. No matter what you think of him, he's a man to be reckoned with.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(VO) There is no one else in Iraq like him. And that may be a good thing. Ahmed Chalabi is the canniest, wiliest, most effective, most elusive political player in the new Iraq. And he just might be the man best-positioned to help the US achieve its goal of a stable, secular, democratic government here. Or maybe not. You never know what Ahmed Chalabi could do next.”

Actually, to give a little credit where credit is due, John Burns, the pro-war NYT correspondent, did appear and say reasonable things on the Charlie Rose show – things that were entirely unreflected in the coverage of the election by his paper:

“CHARLIE ROSE: How does the election look today, and how do you measure that this new parliament or assembly, whatever they`re going to call it, might elect Chalabi?
JOHN BURNS: No, I don`t think. Personally, I don`t think that there`s the remotest chance of that. Mr. Chalabi`s party, I would think, would be lucky to get two seats.
What he will do with those two seats and with his own good self after that I don`t know. He envisages himself as a compromise candidate for prime minister. I think that`s probably beyond the reach of even so canny a politician as Mr. Chalabi.
I think that this election is likely to produce an unsurprising result. I think we`ve seen it before.”

The Washington Post, meanwhile, focused on an unlikely pro-Israel candidate running in Basra (wow, how about that for giving us a feeling about the country) and unleashed their no. 1 Iraqi expert and all around Middle Eastern savant – I am talking, of course, about the ever repugnant Sally Quinn – to do a 2000+ word profile of Chalabi on November 17, 2005. Quinn famously did a profile of Chalabi in 2003 in which he the varieties of his silky genius were highlighted, and contrasted, comically, with the boobish Iraqi pols that he brought with them – many didn’t speak English or possess table manners! And the grease in their hair! My how we laughed. 30-50, 000 Iraqi deaths later, we return to this always risible subject.

This is Quinn, speaking with the collective wisdom of D.C.:

“Spending time with Ahmed Chalabi is like disappearing down the rabbit hole. People are either throwing him tea parties or crying "off with his head."

Normally in Washington, people ask not to be identified when they have something negative to say about a person in the news. With Chalabi, it's the opposite. On the heels of his week-long visit to the United States, few want to be quoted by name saying anything positive. Yet suddenly many have positive things to say.
It was only a year and a half ago that his Baghdad office and home were raided and trashed by U.S. and Iraqi forces. He had gone from being the darling of the neo-cons to a pariah. Many thought he was dead politically.

But today he is a strong contender for prime minister in next month's elections, and highly placed sources say he has become the choice of many U.S. officials to lead the country. He has managed to resurrect himself because he is seen as the one person who can get U.S. troops out of Iraq, and Washington is pragmatic enough to recognize that.”

Can one love enough that last sentence? I don’t think so. Quinn is a rare human being: she is the local genius of the Washington Post, the very distillation of its editorial and journalistic attitude. Shameless, hubristic, triumphantly bigoted, privileged, and convinced that insider knowledge = real knowledge. Of course, insider knowledge is really a pack of the delusions and panics that make the governing class at this particular point in time a thing for the angels to both weep and laugh over.

Now, here’s LI’s bet. Our bet is that not once, not once in the next week or month will there be any discussion whatsoever of the curiously distorted coverage of the Iraqi election going into it, and the more than curious inflation of stories about a man whose main achievement seems to be to have gotten to know American journalists. Nobody will ask, why is it that there are not 2,000 word portraits of Hakim in the WP style section? Why isn’t there a series in the NYT, the men who run Iraq? The obvious answer is that the American public can’t bear too much reality – at least, that is what our guardians think. So much better to make up the country of Iraq lock stock and barrel and present it, a steaming pile of horseshit, to the American citizenry – just so we don’t get too worried about what we are sending Americans to die for, or to be head injured for, or to be legless for, or to have their spines broken for, or to be permanently traumatized for.