Remora
A couple of days ago LI indulged in that infantile positivism that makes our fair readership grimace and pretend not to know us. We made fun, that is, of the Yale Philosophy department's "probability theory and Jesus is my fave philosopher" conference. Or whatever it was called. We might have even implied that, between the News of the World's interviews with the Alien that advised Clinton, and Yale's faculty's attempts to prove the verity of the gospels, integrity, honesty, and science are all on the News of the World's side. As a followup, we recommend Jerry Coyne's mugging of a soft focus book by Michael Ruse that attempts to meld Darwinism and Christianity into the cutest little choir of Christmas decorations you ever saw.
The first paragraph actually solves our problem with the probability argument for the resurrection. If you will recall -- or even if you won't -- the post was about a NYT story involving a man who seemingly combined all the charming physical characteristics of Santa Claus and Charles Manson -- a Mr. Swinburne -- dispensing this shaky, if not downright dishonest, argument:
"Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols � using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem � and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"
Mr. Coyne's article gives us an even better argument for Jesus' resurrection -- that is, if we are truth table freaks. Coyne reports on a recent radio interview given by some pius geneticist. The talk got around to the virgin birth. Well, the geneticist rather unhappily conceded, that is an, uh, anomoly. So where, a questioner wanted to know, did Jesus' Y chromosome come from? The geneticist dug through his bag of tricks, and came up with the answer that maybe Mary's two X chromosomes carried a piece of a Y chromosome. He didn't, according to Coyne, go any further with this fascinating discussion. But Coyne reminds us that for this to have happened, Mary would have to be a sterile man.
Well, the Light (capitalize that Light, editor) flashed before my eyes. Because but bien sur! If Mary were a sterile man, there is no Jesus. If no Jesus, no crucifixion. If we simply put this in truth table terms, we have two falses. Well, two fs make a t, as we all know. So Jesus not only resurrected, he trailed fishes and breadsticks out of that gloomy tomb! Mr. Swinburne should definitely write an article about this, making the argument that if c is true, that is Mary is a bachelor living in New York, and d is true, the Y chromosome determined Jesus' sex, there is a .97 percent chance that Giuliani is Jesus's father. No wonder the late mayor hated it when artists kept making fun of his bundle of joy!
Limited Inc is contemplating making a pitch to Yale. Surely, bearing such truths, a tenured position is waiting for us. We could definitely use the money.
Thursday, May 16, 2002
Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Remora
A Ramble
"The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls."
Exquisite Corpse does civilization and its discontents a favor, and publishes a translation of Oswaldo de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.
"I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him."
Oswaldo's works and days were spent on poetry, the libido, and communism. Or at least until, like all Latin American intellectual poobahs, he settled down into the utter fatuousness of old age, wallowing in his own lipids and lying memories. We do like his definitive refutation of the liberal principle, by the simple expedient of eating the liberal. St. Paul advises us to prove all things and hold fast that which is good.
Oswaldo simply supplements that dictum: do it with your mouth and teeth and tongue. We also like the fact that the the golden age proclaimed by America was, indeed, all about all the girls. For Oswaldo, the younger the better. This is easier to do when you have the time for it. Luckily, Oswaldo came from a wealthy family. He was not only a creator of modernism, but a creation of one of modernism's monsters: the newspapers. He became a personality in Brazilian newspapers in the twenties, traveled to Europe and discovered the Futurists, Dadaists, and pullulating other ists, and returned with the mission to create some Brazilian equivalent of what he'd seen. In some ways, the typical modernist in the Picabia mode:
"In his behavior and other features like the mania of meeting people and the insistence on seeing those that he knew, the speed with which he got sick of those whom, the previous day, he had put up in the clouds, the ingenuous search for contact with foreigners who were passing through; the experience of living in so many different environments; the familiarity with Midases and politicians, all these demonstrating an obvious quality of the nouveau riche; but also with chauffeurs and black Indians, who amused him intensely and whom he would collect. To crown all of this, the love for novelty of whatever form: ideas, books, meetings, new people, crimes. An overwhelming use of everything to reach knowledge, a notion, at least an increase in information, like someone who wished to swallow the world." CANDIDO, Antonio. "Digress�o sentimental sobre Oswald de Andrade" ("Sentimental Digression on Oswald de Andrade"). V�rios escritos (Various writings). S�o Paulo: Duas Cidades. 1970.
Limited Inc would like to put its seal of approval on cannibal poetics -- it surely is more fun than the disembodied, Jack Kerouacian Gooey Gupta school out there in Colorado. Or whatever it is called. However, being a politically minded we, we are aware that the image of the Indian, in a space that has been intentionally depopulated of same, can exert all the fascination it wants to: this is still all about the criminal's heirs pickpocketing the corpse for his one last thing thing of value -- his fame. And even getting that wrong. There is, after all, something in Nietzsche's complaint about poets: they do lie too much: or as Zarathustra, who classes himself with the poets, says, "we know too little and are bad pupils: so we are forced to lie."
Limited Inc has been reading Scott Malcomson's book on race in America, One Drop of Blood. Business Week published a nice review of the book when it came out. However, we think the reviewer, Marilyn Harris, misses at least one of Malcomson's points:
In one of the most persuasive and unnerving revelations, the writer shows that before Europeans arrived on American shores, there was no consciousness of Indian-ness among the many, highly distinct tribes; instead, identity was tribe-based. It took a while for white colonists to think of the natives as a group, as ''the other.'' It also took time for Indians to perceive that they were being defined as such. By degrees, ''colonial law and practice turned native tribal citizens into Indians,'' Malcomson notes, and into ''the still more mystifying category of people of color--a group that, in a further move, was associated by colonists with permanent slavery.''
The Native Americans' future would hold paradoxes and ironies as well as manifold miseries, and Malcomson deftly teases them from the historical record. The parallels between their story and that of both blacks and whites shackle the three groups together in an uncomfortable journey through the centuries. Some Indians were enslaved, but others held black slaves. Some Indians in the early 19th century constructed a ''theology of separation''--much as certain blacks did later on. This amounted to a fundamentalist creed that rejected white influences and culture. Those who mixed with whites and converted to Christianity entered a cultural purdah and were rejected by both sides. Still, there was intense government pressure to assimilate. Malcomson shows how the national census reflected a dwindling Indian population up until the 1950s. After that, it began increasing sharply--as racial pride grew and Indians, rather than census takers, were allowed to state their own affiliation."
Harris misses the context of Malcomson's irony. It is true that the population of Indians has been growing sharply, but there's a circular logic in thinking that it is because Indians have been allowed to state their own affiliation, if in fact the question is: who is an Indian? Rather, if we are reading Malcomson rightly, he is trying to say something about the slipperiness of racial categories. The whole racial notion of Indians went from being a unity enforced by the original, European colonialist understanding of the New World to being a category that justified, firstly, the depossession of the members of the category, and then their assimilation into the property laws and morals of white society (a category that was constructed in relationship to its others -- as any good deconstructionist would expect), and finally into being a category in which to take "pride." Why the continual evocation of pride? Because these racial categories operate on the limit of their definitional usefulness against the most puzzling of them: white. That "white blood" flows in the veins of the suddenly franchised lost nation of the Indians -- that a lost nation recovered by a change in census methodology -- shows... well, it shows what? It shows that the Indian is defined by the problem of being an Indian, rather than by some certain knowledge that makes for declaring an "affiliation." It shows that, by inference, the same is true for that not so universal solvent, white -- which can absorb Jew, Italian, and even Indian, but can never seemingly absorb black.
Perhaps we can emerge from the whiteness by way of the cannibal. But Limited Inc has his doubts about that optimistic program. At one time it looked like Rimbaud would make us free. But now we need a bulldozer.
A Ramble
"The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls."
Exquisite Corpse does civilization and its discontents a favor, and publishes a translation of Oswaldo de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto.
"I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him."
Oswaldo's works and days were spent on poetry, the libido, and communism. Or at least until, like all Latin American intellectual poobahs, he settled down into the utter fatuousness of old age, wallowing in his own lipids and lying memories. We do like his definitive refutation of the liberal principle, by the simple expedient of eating the liberal. St. Paul advises us to prove all things and hold fast that which is good.
Oswaldo simply supplements that dictum: do it with your mouth and teeth and tongue. We also like the fact that the the golden age proclaimed by America was, indeed, all about all the girls. For Oswaldo, the younger the better. This is easier to do when you have the time for it. Luckily, Oswaldo came from a wealthy family. He was not only a creator of modernism, but a creation of one of modernism's monsters: the newspapers. He became a personality in Brazilian newspapers in the twenties, traveled to Europe and discovered the Futurists, Dadaists, and pullulating other ists, and returned with the mission to create some Brazilian equivalent of what he'd seen. In some ways, the typical modernist in the Picabia mode:
"In his behavior and other features like the mania of meeting people and the insistence on seeing those that he knew, the speed with which he got sick of those whom, the previous day, he had put up in the clouds, the ingenuous search for contact with foreigners who were passing through; the experience of living in so many different environments; the familiarity with Midases and politicians, all these demonstrating an obvious quality of the nouveau riche; but also with chauffeurs and black Indians, who amused him intensely and whom he would collect. To crown all of this, the love for novelty of whatever form: ideas, books, meetings, new people, crimes. An overwhelming use of everything to reach knowledge, a notion, at least an increase in information, like someone who wished to swallow the world." CANDIDO, Antonio. "Digress�o sentimental sobre Oswald de Andrade" ("Sentimental Digression on Oswald de Andrade"). V�rios escritos (Various writings). S�o Paulo: Duas Cidades. 1970.
Limited Inc would like to put its seal of approval on cannibal poetics -- it surely is more fun than the disembodied, Jack Kerouacian Gooey Gupta school out there in Colorado. Or whatever it is called. However, being a politically minded we, we are aware that the image of the Indian, in a space that has been intentionally depopulated of same, can exert all the fascination it wants to: this is still all about the criminal's heirs pickpocketing the corpse for his one last thing thing of value -- his fame. And even getting that wrong. There is, after all, something in Nietzsche's complaint about poets: they do lie too much: or as Zarathustra, who classes himself with the poets, says, "we know too little and are bad pupils: so we are forced to lie."
Limited Inc has been reading Scott Malcomson's book on race in America, One Drop of Blood. Business Week published a nice review of the book when it came out. However, we think the reviewer, Marilyn Harris, misses at least one of Malcomson's points:
In one of the most persuasive and unnerving revelations, the writer shows that before Europeans arrived on American shores, there was no consciousness of Indian-ness among the many, highly distinct tribes; instead, identity was tribe-based. It took a while for white colonists to think of the natives as a group, as ''the other.'' It also took time for Indians to perceive that they were being defined as such. By degrees, ''colonial law and practice turned native tribal citizens into Indians,'' Malcomson notes, and into ''the still more mystifying category of people of color--a group that, in a further move, was associated by colonists with permanent slavery.''
The Native Americans' future would hold paradoxes and ironies as well as manifold miseries, and Malcomson deftly teases them from the historical record. The parallels between their story and that of both blacks and whites shackle the three groups together in an uncomfortable journey through the centuries. Some Indians were enslaved, but others held black slaves. Some Indians in the early 19th century constructed a ''theology of separation''--much as certain blacks did later on. This amounted to a fundamentalist creed that rejected white influences and culture. Those who mixed with whites and converted to Christianity entered a cultural purdah and were rejected by both sides. Still, there was intense government pressure to assimilate. Malcomson shows how the national census reflected a dwindling Indian population up until the 1950s. After that, it began increasing sharply--as racial pride grew and Indians, rather than census takers, were allowed to state their own affiliation."
Harris misses the context of Malcomson's irony. It is true that the population of Indians has been growing sharply, but there's a circular logic in thinking that it is because Indians have been allowed to state their own affiliation, if in fact the question is: who is an Indian? Rather, if we are reading Malcomson rightly, he is trying to say something about the slipperiness of racial categories. The whole racial notion of Indians went from being a unity enforced by the original, European colonialist understanding of the New World to being a category that justified, firstly, the depossession of the members of the category, and then their assimilation into the property laws and morals of white society (a category that was constructed in relationship to its others -- as any good deconstructionist would expect), and finally into being a category in which to take "pride." Why the continual evocation of pride? Because these racial categories operate on the limit of their definitional usefulness against the most puzzling of them: white. That "white blood" flows in the veins of the suddenly franchised lost nation of the Indians -- that a lost nation recovered by a change in census methodology -- shows... well, it shows what? It shows that the Indian is defined by the problem of being an Indian, rather than by some certain knowledge that makes for declaring an "affiliation." It shows that, by inference, the same is true for that not so universal solvent, white -- which can absorb Jew, Italian, and even Indian, but can never seemingly absorb black.
Perhaps we can emerge from the whiteness by way of the cannibal. But Limited Inc has his doubts about that optimistic program. At one time it looked like Rimbaud would make us free. But now we need a bulldozer.
Tuesday, May 14, 2002
Remora
Privatization is as much an ideological as a business proposition. Operating on the level of railroads or power, its ideological use is as a lever against regulation: a way of extracting things from the State. The idea that engrossing, macro projects can magically summon up the investment to make a profit in the far off future on selling to customers who have to 1. accustom themselves to the technology, and 2. justify the early adopter costs has been severely hit by the telecom meltdown -- Gilder's telecosm, like a middle aged man's orgasm, proved to be a spike of ecstatic sensation followed by the sag of deflation, and a heavy post-coital headache.
In today's NYT, there's an item by DIANA B. HENRIQUES and JACQUES STEINBERG
about the much vaunted Edison School project. Headed by Charles Whittle, the Tennessee money goon who contrived Channel One (that odious tv corporate brainwash that swept through the school systems (especially of the South) in the early 90s), Edison schools were supposed to show that education is best left to people who can grind a nice return on investment out of it. Ah, but it turns out that even if you put your tax dollars into these supposedly cost cuttin' ventures, the ventures can't make money on it. In fact, they never will, except on a scale that would, ironically, nationalize education:
"Analysts have estimated that Edison needs to raise as much as $40 million before next fall to fulfill the Philadelphia contract and to sustain the schools it already runs, which educate 75,000 children in 22 states.
The recent decline in Edison's share price from more than $20 a share in January to $2.66 at the close of the stock market yesterday makes the sale of fresh shares unlikely.Borrowing remains an option, but an expensive one. Edison had to pledge $61 million in assets last fall as collateral for a loan of only $20 million. It has paid as much as 20 percent interest on other loans, equivalent to credit card rates. It could still seek an infusion from private investors, help from government or aid from private foundations that look favorably on its mission. "
When you are borrowing at 20 percent, you are pretty much doomed. According to the article, the company's cumulative losses so far have reached 200 million dollars. And there are some questions about the revenue generated by Edison's schools -- appparently, costs are cut partly by using private donations. In other words, this for profit outfit is depending on non-profit charity.
Help might be on the way for Edison. As Mother Jones notes,, one of Edison's chief financial backers is John W. Childs. And Mr. Childs has a soft spot for the GOP:
"A graduate of Yale and Columbia universities, Childs first worked with leveraged buyouts at Prudential Insurance during the 1970s, and later moved on to manage the Boston-based buyout firm of Thomas H. Lee (No. 190, $256,800). There he helped negotiate the buyouts of Snapple Beverages and Ghirardelli Chocolate, among others. In 1995, Childs split from Lee, who remains a prominent Democratic donor, to start his own firm. Childs has since earned a reputation as a veritable ATM machine for the GOP. According to a recent study by the State Net Capitol Journal, Childs' contributions in Massachusetts accounted for 25 percent of total receipts to the national Republican Party between 1997 and 1999.
"One of Childs' most politically sensitive companies is Edison Schools, the country's largest for-profit operator of public schools. Childs and his buyout firm control 14 percent of Edison's common stock. President Bush's proposal to subsidize $3 billion in federal loans to establish new charter schools and issue private school vouchers to students in low-performing schools would certainly encourage Edison's business. As a recent Edison filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission noted: "If this business model fails to gain acceptance among the general public, educators, politicians, and school boards, we may be unable to grow our business."
One of the great myths of thrown around by Republican types is that there is a grassroots hunger for private schools in the ghetto ("in the ghetto" -- to be sung in an Elvis like tone). Now, on the one hand, that must be true -- just as there is a great hunger for any prestige item. If Andover plunks down in South Chicago and opens its doors, you can bet there'd be a line forming.
Unfortunately, most private schools aren't prestige factories. Andover isn't going to South Chicago, and if it did, it would either destroy its prestige (which depends heavily on it being the school of choice for wealthy parents), or select the same elite children.
The Philadelphia News has, of course, a more keen interest in Edison Schools than the NYT. This is a story about a request, filed by Republican Senator Arlen Spector and Dem congressman Chaka Fattah, for a good comparison of the record of Edison schools to the record of public schools. Although you can't bump into a conservative column on this subject without reading that these comparisons have already been made, and Edison come out the winner; in actual fact, Edison seems to be engaging in Enron accounting on more than one level:
"Benno C. Schmidt Jr., chairman of Edison's board of directors, who also testified, said Edison's schools overall have improved test scores by 5 or 6 percent a year, depending on the measure. He acknowledged that a small percentage of schools have slid backward."Look at it the way you would look at the record of Mike Schmidt as a third baseman," he said, referring to the former Phillies slugger. "It's not a matter of whether he struck out on occasion. It's a matter of the whole record."
One more time, for those slower readers who don't see LI's point: the conservative contradiction, here, is between ideology and mechanism. Ideologically, the grassroots right have fought to maintain local control of schools whereever they have fought. However, in the conservative dialectic, the libertarian moment is that in which public enterprises are released into private hands. What this means for schools is that, inevitably, control is wrested from the neighborhoods. As a pseudo-Marxist, I'm not sure what I think about this. I suspect a nationalized school system would accord children a more equal education. And I suspect that, to advance that kind of project, the initial takeover of local schools by a national private business would have to be the first step. Since the national private business will inevitably stumble -- according to the laws of the marketplace, and any study you want to make of the Fortune 400 companies over the last fifty years -- these schools would have to be rescued by the govenment. That, in turn, would creat a mosaic of governmentally controlled schools. And if those schools performed adequately, it would be hard to turn them back over to private enterprise.
There is a parallel here to agriculture. The Republican party included, as its most stalwart members, small farmers for most of the twentieth century. Yet the iron law of capitalism applied to those small farmers as well as to any other enterprise. The iron law, of course, was propped up, when drooping, by Congressional handouts, and a socialized water policy that benefited the wealthiest. So that today, the small farmer is as much an anachronism in the USA as he was in the former USSR. There is more than one way to collectivize, my brothers and sister.
Privatization is as much an ideological as a business proposition. Operating on the level of railroads or power, its ideological use is as a lever against regulation: a way of extracting things from the State. The idea that engrossing, macro projects can magically summon up the investment to make a profit in the far off future on selling to customers who have to 1. accustom themselves to the technology, and 2. justify the early adopter costs has been severely hit by the telecom meltdown -- Gilder's telecosm, like a middle aged man's orgasm, proved to be a spike of ecstatic sensation followed by the sag of deflation, and a heavy post-coital headache.
In today's NYT, there's an item by DIANA B. HENRIQUES and JACQUES STEINBERG
about the much vaunted Edison School project. Headed by Charles Whittle, the Tennessee money goon who contrived Channel One (that odious tv corporate brainwash that swept through the school systems (especially of the South) in the early 90s), Edison schools were supposed to show that education is best left to people who can grind a nice return on investment out of it. Ah, but it turns out that even if you put your tax dollars into these supposedly cost cuttin' ventures, the ventures can't make money on it. In fact, they never will, except on a scale that would, ironically, nationalize education:
"Analysts have estimated that Edison needs to raise as much as $40 million before next fall to fulfill the Philadelphia contract and to sustain the schools it already runs, which educate 75,000 children in 22 states.
The recent decline in Edison's share price from more than $20 a share in January to $2.66 at the close of the stock market yesterday makes the sale of fresh shares unlikely.Borrowing remains an option, but an expensive one. Edison had to pledge $61 million in assets last fall as collateral for a loan of only $20 million. It has paid as much as 20 percent interest on other loans, equivalent to credit card rates. It could still seek an infusion from private investors, help from government or aid from private foundations that look favorably on its mission. "
When you are borrowing at 20 percent, you are pretty much doomed. According to the article, the company's cumulative losses so far have reached 200 million dollars. And there are some questions about the revenue generated by Edison's schools -- appparently, costs are cut partly by using private donations. In other words, this for profit outfit is depending on non-profit charity.
Help might be on the way for Edison. As Mother Jones notes,, one of Edison's chief financial backers is John W. Childs. And Mr. Childs has a soft spot for the GOP:
"A graduate of Yale and Columbia universities, Childs first worked with leveraged buyouts at Prudential Insurance during the 1970s, and later moved on to manage the Boston-based buyout firm of Thomas H. Lee (No. 190, $256,800). There he helped negotiate the buyouts of Snapple Beverages and Ghirardelli Chocolate, among others. In 1995, Childs split from Lee, who remains a prominent Democratic donor, to start his own firm. Childs has since earned a reputation as a veritable ATM machine for the GOP. According to a recent study by the State Net Capitol Journal, Childs' contributions in Massachusetts accounted for 25 percent of total receipts to the national Republican Party between 1997 and 1999.
"One of Childs' most politically sensitive companies is Edison Schools, the country's largest for-profit operator of public schools. Childs and his buyout firm control 14 percent of Edison's common stock. President Bush's proposal to subsidize $3 billion in federal loans to establish new charter schools and issue private school vouchers to students in low-performing schools would certainly encourage Edison's business. As a recent Edison filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission noted: "If this business model fails to gain acceptance among the general public, educators, politicians, and school boards, we may be unable to grow our business."
One of the great myths of thrown around by Republican types is that there is a grassroots hunger for private schools in the ghetto ("in the ghetto" -- to be sung in an Elvis like tone). Now, on the one hand, that must be true -- just as there is a great hunger for any prestige item. If Andover plunks down in South Chicago and opens its doors, you can bet there'd be a line forming.
Unfortunately, most private schools aren't prestige factories. Andover isn't going to South Chicago, and if it did, it would either destroy its prestige (which depends heavily on it being the school of choice for wealthy parents), or select the same elite children.
The Philadelphia News has, of course, a more keen interest in Edison Schools than the NYT. This is a story about a request, filed by Republican Senator Arlen Spector and Dem congressman Chaka Fattah, for a good comparison of the record of Edison schools to the record of public schools. Although you can't bump into a conservative column on this subject without reading that these comparisons have already been made, and Edison come out the winner; in actual fact, Edison seems to be engaging in Enron accounting on more than one level:
"Benno C. Schmidt Jr., chairman of Edison's board of directors, who also testified, said Edison's schools overall have improved test scores by 5 or 6 percent a year, depending on the measure. He acknowledged that a small percentage of schools have slid backward."Look at it the way you would look at the record of Mike Schmidt as a third baseman," he said, referring to the former Phillies slugger. "It's not a matter of whether he struck out on occasion. It's a matter of the whole record."
One more time, for those slower readers who don't see LI's point: the conservative contradiction, here, is between ideology and mechanism. Ideologically, the grassroots right have fought to maintain local control of schools whereever they have fought. However, in the conservative dialectic, the libertarian moment is that in which public enterprises are released into private hands. What this means for schools is that, inevitably, control is wrested from the neighborhoods. As a pseudo-Marxist, I'm not sure what I think about this. I suspect a nationalized school system would accord children a more equal education. And I suspect that, to advance that kind of project, the initial takeover of local schools by a national private business would have to be the first step. Since the national private business will inevitably stumble -- according to the laws of the marketplace, and any study you want to make of the Fortune 400 companies over the last fifty years -- these schools would have to be rescued by the govenment. That, in turn, would creat a mosaic of governmentally controlled schools. And if those schools performed adequately, it would be hard to turn them back over to private enterprise.
There is a parallel here to agriculture. The Republican party included, as its most stalwart members, small farmers for most of the twentieth century. Yet the iron law of capitalism applied to those small farmers as well as to any other enterprise. The iron law, of course, was propped up, when drooping, by Congressional handouts, and a socialized water policy that benefited the wealthiest. So that today, the small farmer is as much an anachronism in the USA as he was in the former USSR. There is more than one way to collectivize, my brothers and sister.
Monday, May 13, 2002
"There was a law of lese-majeste against those who committed some fault against the Roman people. Tiberius grasped this law and applied it, not to those cases for which it was made, but for all those which could serve his hatred or his suspicions. Not only actions fell within the limits of the law, but words, signs, even thoughts: for what was said in the flow of the confidence of the heart between two friends can only be regarded as a species of thought. There was no liberty in celebrations, or in the confidences of parents, or in the fidelity of slaves; the dissimulation and melancholy of the prince communicated itself into all parts. Friendship was regarded as a reef, brilliance as an imprudence, virtue as an affectation which could recall, in the minds of the people, the happiness of times past."
-- Montesquieu, Considerations on the causes of the greatness and decadence of the Romans
The Observer sends its man to report from Cuba on the eve of Carter's visit. He wanders about, and picks up such gems as this, about the school system:
"The children, in pressed white shirts with red scarves tied neatly round their necks, eventually scuttle off to the call of the bell at Ruben Alvarez school - named, of course, after a revolutionary hero. ' Sin educacion no hay revolucion posible ' declares the sign at the entrance - Without education, revolution is not possible - alongside pictures of Elian Gonzalez restored to his father's loving arms. Head teacher Pilar Mejia explains that curricula are taught in strict accordance with the latest directive from the education ministry, and around five basic principles the first of which stipulates that (she reads, dutifully): 'To love our motherland should be the political goal of the educative process.'
The revolutionary catechism that began with such high hopes in Europe in the 19th century impinges itself by such low means on the children who must suffer this particular autumn of the Patriarch. Castro decays, and the country runs on liberal tourists of the Swedish variety, who can sample the delights of collectivization and still make the circuit for the prostitutes that troll through Habana -- no longer the brothel of the U.S., as it was under Batista, but a brothel with a motherland and a Che Guevara poster over the "put the quarter in the slot" bed. Remember that Pixies song?
She's a real left winger 'cause she's been down south
And held peasants in her arms
She said "I could tell you stories that could make you cry"
Well, here's some travelogue to make us all feel good:
"If there is a trinity of clich�s that brands Cuba, it is communism, cigars and libido. This third is nothing new, but it, too, has themes and variations. Sex walks the streets of Havana. Castro promised to liberate Cuba from its role as America's brothel. But by reintroducing the dollar, he has turned it into the boudoir for a new generation of clients from Europe, Canada and South America. Thousands of Havana's girls and women are for rent - by the hour, day, even by the week. Two in the morning, and the Parque Central is emptying out, but Mileydis Padrino Diaz is still on her patch, escorted by two gentlemen. One of them makes the approach, describing himself as 'a lawyer'. Milyedis, with braided hair and jeans, smiles bittersweetly. Ten dollars for the chica, plus another 10 for la casa - 12 quid the package.
The Observer's man (who, incidentally, has portrayed himself, in the best tradition of Clark Kent, resisting Mileydis' blandishments, and merely casting an objective eye over her, uh, habitus) digs up a dissident that Limited Inc can approve of (and we approve of so little, you know): Elizardo Sanchez. Apparently the Trotskyite wing of the Castro opposition. So he talks with Sanchez. But Sanchez doesn't look like a man with a lot of markers to play with in the post Castro era. Sadly enough.
Yes, the depressing thing is, Sanchez will be swept away by the deluge after the Patriarch is eaten, as is inevitably the case, by vultures. Castro has spent what? thirty, forty years? producing an island society that depends on him utterly, and will be gone, the victim of the recidivist Miami right, when he is gone.
I said, "I want to be a singer like Lou Reed."
"I like Lou Reed," she said, sticking her tongue in my ear.
"Let's go, let's sit, let's talk, politics goes so good with beer.
"And while we're at it, baby, why don't you tell me one of your biggest fears?"
I said, "Losing my penis to a whore with disease."
"Just kidding," I said. "Losing my life to a whore with disease."
She said, "Excuse me, please?"
I said, "Losing my life to a whore with disease."
She said, "Please."
Well, I'm a humble guy with healthy desire
Don't give me no shit because
I've been tired, I've been tired, I've been tired
-- Montesquieu, Considerations on the causes of the greatness and decadence of the Romans
The Observer sends its man to report from Cuba on the eve of Carter's visit. He wanders about, and picks up such gems as this, about the school system:
"The children, in pressed white shirts with red scarves tied neatly round their necks, eventually scuttle off to the call of the bell at Ruben Alvarez school - named, of course, after a revolutionary hero. ' Sin educacion no hay revolucion posible ' declares the sign at the entrance - Without education, revolution is not possible - alongside pictures of Elian Gonzalez restored to his father's loving arms. Head teacher Pilar Mejia explains that curricula are taught in strict accordance with the latest directive from the education ministry, and around five basic principles the first of which stipulates that (she reads, dutifully): 'To love our motherland should be the political goal of the educative process.'
The revolutionary catechism that began with such high hopes in Europe in the 19th century impinges itself by such low means on the children who must suffer this particular autumn of the Patriarch. Castro decays, and the country runs on liberal tourists of the Swedish variety, who can sample the delights of collectivization and still make the circuit for the prostitutes that troll through Habana -- no longer the brothel of the U.S., as it was under Batista, but a brothel with a motherland and a Che Guevara poster over the "put the quarter in the slot" bed. Remember that Pixies song?
She's a real left winger 'cause she's been down south
And held peasants in her arms
She said "I could tell you stories that could make you cry"
Well, here's some travelogue to make us all feel good:
"If there is a trinity of clich�s that brands Cuba, it is communism, cigars and libido. This third is nothing new, but it, too, has themes and variations. Sex walks the streets of Havana. Castro promised to liberate Cuba from its role as America's brothel. But by reintroducing the dollar, he has turned it into the boudoir for a new generation of clients from Europe, Canada and South America. Thousands of Havana's girls and women are for rent - by the hour, day, even by the week. Two in the morning, and the Parque Central is emptying out, but Mileydis Padrino Diaz is still on her patch, escorted by two gentlemen. One of them makes the approach, describing himself as 'a lawyer'. Milyedis, with braided hair and jeans, smiles bittersweetly. Ten dollars for the chica, plus another 10 for la casa - 12 quid the package.
The Observer's man (who, incidentally, has portrayed himself, in the best tradition of Clark Kent, resisting Mileydis' blandishments, and merely casting an objective eye over her, uh, habitus) digs up a dissident that Limited Inc can approve of (and we approve of so little, you know): Elizardo Sanchez. Apparently the Trotskyite wing of the Castro opposition. So he talks with Sanchez. But Sanchez doesn't look like a man with a lot of markers to play with in the post Castro era. Sadly enough.
Yes, the depressing thing is, Sanchez will be swept away by the deluge after the Patriarch is eaten, as is inevitably the case, by vultures. Castro has spent what? thirty, forty years? producing an island society that depends on him utterly, and will be gone, the victim of the recidivist Miami right, when he is gone.
I said, "I want to be a singer like Lou Reed."
"I like Lou Reed," she said, sticking her tongue in my ear.
"Let's go, let's sit, let's talk, politics goes so good with beer.
"And while we're at it, baby, why don't you tell me one of your biggest fears?"
I said, "Losing my penis to a whore with disease."
"Just kidding," I said. "Losing my life to a whore with disease."
She said, "Excuse me, please?"
I said, "Losing my life to a whore with disease."
She said, "Please."
Well, I'm a humble guy with healthy desire
Don't give me no shit because
I've been tired, I've been tired, I've been tired
Saturday, May 11, 2002
Remora
Carnap once complained that the talk in the philosophy lounge in the University of Chicago reminded him less of the talk of scientists than of the talk of health food cranks. Carnap, of course, had the view that philosophy, if it wasn't a science, should be ashamed of itself. Unfortunately, post Carnap, philosophy regained its shamelessness. Witness this article about faith and logic in the NYT. Emily Eakins' article reports on a conference at Yale honoring Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne. When, years ago, there was a conference at Harvard that seriously considered UFO abduction stories, the university itself came in for considerable criticism for basically condoning tripe. And it should have. But what to make of a major university sponsoring a conference that includes things like this:
"For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Mr. Swinburne told an audience of more than 100 philosophers who had convened at Yale University in April for a conference on ethics and belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate."
Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols � using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem � and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"
Given the probability that there was a Carnap, and assigning values to the probability that, in life, he would have reacted to this crapola with a violence ranging between x and z, the probability of him rolling in his grave right now must be around .993. The mindblowing nature of this mumbo-jumbo (we especially like the "factor" of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime -- does this mean Jesus was a nice guy, or that he didn't smoke?) is highlighted by the fact that that it can be tolerated at a school which, at least once upon a time, did have a respectable philosophy department. We know the glory days have long departed for Yale, but this is more than sad -- this is the sort of intellectual activity one expects to encounter at a Peshawar medresse. Alvin Plantinga is the mullah at the center of this particular intellectual decline and fall.
"More influential at the moment, however, are the "reformed epistemologists" led by Mr. Plantinga and Mr. Wolterstorff, who are Calvinists. These scholars reject the evidentialist insistence on independent proofs. After all, they point out, the ability to distinguish good evidence from bad requires reason, but why trust our ability to reason? Where's the proof that our reason is any good? For the evidentialists, reason is considered a "basic belief," one that doesn't require additional evidence to be true. But if reason can be considered a basic belief, then so, too, say the reformed epistemologists, can faith in God."
Plantinga's giant contribution to the world is a philosophical defense of intelligent design.
"Mr. Plantinga has devoted three thick volumes and the last 20 years to the effort [to distinguish between justified true belief and illegitimate belief], stressing, among other things, that for a belief to be justified, it must be held by a person whose mental faculties are functioning properly.
More aggressively, he has suggested that our capacity for true beliefs is proof that a divine creator � rather than Darwinian natural selection � is behind evolution: if human beings evolved by random process from mentally primitive creatures, how could we be sure that any of our beliefs � including our belief in evolution � are true?"
That Ms. Eakins was impressed that theologians could do math and spout nonsense at the same time is not incomprehensible -- it is a little like an idiot savant being able to simultaneoulsy play with a yoyo and multiply. In other words, there's a respectable place in traveling carnivals and Midwestern Christian academies for this kind of thing. But she is a little too, uh, tolerant at this point. Surely a reporter for the NYT who'd hotfooted back to the paper iwth news of the teachings of, say, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, would probably have to deal with some editorial collaging -- the compare and contrast editing that conditions the outrageous claims of one's source with the moderating citations of other, countering sources. LI would recommend subjecting the perfervid lucubrations of Plantinga to a similar treatment.
Carnap once complained that the talk in the philosophy lounge in the University of Chicago reminded him less of the talk of scientists than of the talk of health food cranks. Carnap, of course, had the view that philosophy, if it wasn't a science, should be ashamed of itself. Unfortunately, post Carnap, philosophy regained its shamelessness. Witness this article about faith and logic in the NYT. Emily Eakins' article reports on a conference at Yale honoring Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne. When, years ago, there was a conference at Harvard that seriously considered UFO abduction stories, the university itself came in for considerable criticism for basically condoning tripe. And it should have. But what to make of a major university sponsoring a conference that includes things like this:
"For someone dead for 36 hours to come to life again is, according to the laws of nature, extremely improbable," Mr. Swinburne told an audience of more than 100 philosophers who had convened at Yale University in April for a conference on ethics and belief. "But if there is a God of the traditional kind, natural laws only operate because he makes them operate."
Mr. Swinburne, a commanding figure with snow-white hair and piercing blue eyes, proceeded to weigh evidence for and against the Resurrection, assigning values to factors like the probability that there is a God, the nature of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime and the quality of witness testimony after his death. Then, while his audience followed along on printed lecture notes, he plugged his numbers into a dense thicket of letters and symbols � using a probability formula known as Bayes's theorem � and did the math. "Given e and k, h is true if and only if c is true," he said. "The probability of h given e and k is .97"
Given the probability that there was a Carnap, and assigning values to the probability that, in life, he would have reacted to this crapola with a violence ranging between x and z, the probability of him rolling in his grave right now must be around .993. The mindblowing nature of this mumbo-jumbo (we especially like the "factor" of Jesus' behavior during his lifetime -- does this mean Jesus was a nice guy, or that he didn't smoke?) is highlighted by the fact that that it can be tolerated at a school which, at least once upon a time, did have a respectable philosophy department. We know the glory days have long departed for Yale, but this is more than sad -- this is the sort of intellectual activity one expects to encounter at a Peshawar medresse. Alvin Plantinga is the mullah at the center of this particular intellectual decline and fall.
"More influential at the moment, however, are the "reformed epistemologists" led by Mr. Plantinga and Mr. Wolterstorff, who are Calvinists. These scholars reject the evidentialist insistence on independent proofs. After all, they point out, the ability to distinguish good evidence from bad requires reason, but why trust our ability to reason? Where's the proof that our reason is any good? For the evidentialists, reason is considered a "basic belief," one that doesn't require additional evidence to be true. But if reason can be considered a basic belief, then so, too, say the reformed epistemologists, can faith in God."
Plantinga's giant contribution to the world is a philosophical defense of intelligent design.
"Mr. Plantinga has devoted three thick volumes and the last 20 years to the effort [to distinguish between justified true belief and illegitimate belief], stressing, among other things, that for a belief to be justified, it must be held by a person whose mental faculties are functioning properly.
More aggressively, he has suggested that our capacity for true beliefs is proof that a divine creator � rather than Darwinian natural selection � is behind evolution: if human beings evolved by random process from mentally primitive creatures, how could we be sure that any of our beliefs � including our belief in evolution � are true?"
That Ms. Eakins was impressed that theologians could do math and spout nonsense at the same time is not incomprehensible -- it is a little like an idiot savant being able to simultaneoulsy play with a yoyo and multiply. In other words, there's a respectable place in traveling carnivals and Midwestern Christian academies for this kind of thing. But she is a little too, uh, tolerant at this point. Surely a reporter for the NYT who'd hotfooted back to the paper iwth news of the teachings of, say, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, would probably have to deal with some editorial collaging -- the compare and contrast editing that conditions the outrageous claims of one's source with the moderating citations of other, countering sources. LI would recommend subjecting the perfervid lucubrations of Plantinga to a similar treatment.
Remora
Terry Eagleton begins his review of Michael Moore's book -- the one about White Men, or that has White Men in the title, or something like that -- with a few choice kicks at the US of A. Now, LI enjoys kicking Uncle Sam ourselves. It is a pity that Eagelton's kicks are so lackluster and lacking, beginning with a silly exaggeration, going on to make a valid point about Saddam Hussein (although the point should be qualified, since France and the Soviet Union were Hussein's main arms suppliers), but damning it with the lukewarm phrase, "backing" (instead of specifying the real wickedness of US policy -- namely, tilt towards Iraq during the first phase of the war, supplying the country with a four hundred million dollar loan and taking it off the blacklist of terrorist states and all that jazz, and then tilting towards Iran when it appeared Iraq had reconciled with the evil empire, as this Z Mag article documents). Finally, and most pathetically, Eagelton a leftist in editorial heat, decides to ecrasez l'infame that is oppressing high school students everywhere by making them, shockingly, change their politically charged t shirts for more neutral gear. Is this swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat, or what? In his lather at such nazi like tactics, he overlooks the imprisonment without cause or trial of some 3,000 persons of middle eastern origin. This, however, is sadly typical of the left in high dudgeon. There should be courses taught, somewhere, in how to get in high dudgeon without making a fool of yourself.
It is a pity that the Land of the Free lacks a free press and media. CBS and the Wall Street Journal are not in the business of reminding their customers that Osama bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, or that the USA once backed Saddam Hussein in a war which left one million Muslims dead.They are not given to trumpeting the truth that the US is a democracy with a fraudulently elected president, or that it turned a blind eye to Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor while pummelling Iraq for moving non-genocidally into Kuwait. It is not every evening that Fox TV, in denouncing Iraqi weapons of mass slaughter, castigates in the same breath the nuclear weaponry of an increasingly state-terrorist Israel.Since September 11th, political dissent in the USA has become not only muted but positively perilous. Radical academics have been threatened with dismissal for sounding less than gung-ho about the Afghanistan adventure, while a schoolgirl who sported a T-shirt reading "Neither Bush nor Bin Laden" was ejected from her school for fear of contaminating her fellows.
It is this kind of shopping list that exasperates LI. When Marx thundered against Louis Napoleon, he did not consider Louis' oppression of lycee couture. He had a grasp of the macro features of oppression, and was able to convey them. Eagleton, on the other hand, whines like a ponce in the hands of the cops. Is it any wonder the left is becoming a sideshow cult?
We can only hope some of those radical academics are dismissed, thereby taking their anger to the street, instead of distributing it, over cheese on crackers, at the English faculty party.
Terry Eagleton begins his review of Michael Moore's book -- the one about White Men, or that has White Men in the title, or something like that -- with a few choice kicks at the US of A. Now, LI enjoys kicking Uncle Sam ourselves. It is a pity that Eagelton's kicks are so lackluster and lacking, beginning with a silly exaggeration, going on to make a valid point about Saddam Hussein (although the point should be qualified, since France and the Soviet Union were Hussein's main arms suppliers), but damning it with the lukewarm phrase, "backing" (instead of specifying the real wickedness of US policy -- namely, tilt towards Iraq during the first phase of the war, supplying the country with a four hundred million dollar loan and taking it off the blacklist of terrorist states and all that jazz, and then tilting towards Iran when it appeared Iraq had reconciled with the evil empire, as this Z Mag article documents). Finally, and most pathetically, Eagelton a leftist in editorial heat, decides to ecrasez l'infame that is oppressing high school students everywhere by making them, shockingly, change their politically charged t shirts for more neutral gear. Is this swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat, or what? In his lather at such nazi like tactics, he overlooks the imprisonment without cause or trial of some 3,000 persons of middle eastern origin. This, however, is sadly typical of the left in high dudgeon. There should be courses taught, somewhere, in how to get in high dudgeon without making a fool of yourself.
It is a pity that the Land of the Free lacks a free press and media. CBS and the Wall Street Journal are not in the business of reminding their customers that Osama bin Laden was a creation of the CIA, or that the USA once backed Saddam Hussein in a war which left one million Muslims dead.They are not given to trumpeting the truth that the US is a democracy with a fraudulently elected president, or that it turned a blind eye to Indonesia's genocidal invasion of East Timor while pummelling Iraq for moving non-genocidally into Kuwait. It is not every evening that Fox TV, in denouncing Iraqi weapons of mass slaughter, castigates in the same breath the nuclear weaponry of an increasingly state-terrorist Israel.Since September 11th, political dissent in the USA has become not only muted but positively perilous. Radical academics have been threatened with dismissal for sounding less than gung-ho about the Afghanistan adventure, while a schoolgirl who sported a T-shirt reading "Neither Bush nor Bin Laden" was ejected from her school for fear of contaminating her fellows.
It is this kind of shopping list that exasperates LI. When Marx thundered against Louis Napoleon, he did not consider Louis' oppression of lycee couture. He had a grasp of the macro features of oppression, and was able to convey them. Eagleton, on the other hand, whines like a ponce in the hands of the cops. Is it any wonder the left is becoming a sideshow cult?
We can only hope some of those radical academics are dismissed, thereby taking their anger to the street, instead of distributing it, over cheese on crackers, at the English faculty party.
Thursday, May 09, 2002
Remora
The Washington Post reports on the Colombian Civil war today. The article is very impressed with the derring do that went into its making:
"With the U.S.-backed military apparently powerless to intervene, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces staged a major battle over several days without interference from the government.
A two-day visit to this remote jungle region -- reached after six hours of river travel -- revealed a civilian population abandoned to its fate. Despite warnings that a battle was imminent, the Colombian military did not arrive in the area until Tuesday, after Mirage jets and Black Hawk helicopters fired on rebel positions on the banks of the muddy Atrato River and two of the jets dropped bombs in the jungle to clear landing zones. The army's first ground troops arrived in the town today."
Six hours of river travel! You know Scott Wilson, the man who presumably traveled down river in such exciting style, will be bragging about this in Foggy Bottom bars for the rest of his natural born days. Probably had indian scouts, too.
Of course, there is something a little suspicious about the apparent "powerlessness" of the US backed military. Because those right wing paramilitary forces, where do they come from? How are they armed?
Think: Plan Colombia. Think: how were the Contras armed?
Michelle Lescure reports, in the World Press Review , on one of the biggest arms shipments to Colombia -- biggest illegal arms shipment, I should say. Although its illegality is shrouded in beach and jungle night, just as its source is:
"The biggest illegal arms shipment known to have arrived in Colombia landed in Turbo, a port on the Gulf of Urab�, on Colombia's Atlantic coast, last November. The weapons, enough to equip a lethal paramilitary offensive, were unloaded into trucks at the port, which has been controlled for several years by the right-wing United Colombian Self-Defense (AUC) militia. What happened to the weapons after they disappeared inland is still, officially, a mystery. But an unidentified "member of the AUC high command" boasted in the April 25 edition of Bogot�s centrist El Tiempo that "we have fooled the authorities of four countries," and claimed his paramilitary force has the arms. A belated Colombian investigation into the matter has sparked a many-headed international scandal."
Later on in her article, Lescure finds hints that the arms might have originated, or at least been purchased by, some of the dribs and drabs money Congress has been shuffling to the Colombian military (that "powerless" force in the WP article):
"Investigators are following a trail of documents and financial records. According to one source close to the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the trail appears to lead directly back to the coffers of Plan Colombia, a sweeping Colombian program designed to end the civil war, curtail narcotics production and trafficking, and stimulate the economy. On July 13, 2000, former U.S. President Bill Clinton approved a US$1.3-billion assistance package for the plan. On Oct. 24, 2001, the U.S. Congress approved an additional US$698 million, US$106 million less than U.S. President George W. Bush had requested, for the Andean Regional Initiative, which seeks to prevent the conflict in Colombia from spilling over into surrounding countries.
Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso has assured journalists that "the police never arranged to acquire these arms." But the Israeli arms dealers, Oris Zoller and Uzi Kisslevich, who---acting as co-owners of the Guatemalan company Grupo Internacional de Representaciones (GIR, S.A.), allegedly on Panama's behalf---bought the weapons that eventually made it to Colombia, insist that the import license by which they acquired the weapons was authorized by Panama's Minister of Government and Justice, Alex Vergara. "We had an understanding that the document pertained to the Panamanian police," Zoller told Guatemala City�s independent Siglo XXI (April 24)."
Admittedly, the trail of these particular weapons, as Lescure uncovers it, is an obscure affair that seems to confound Lescure's ability to clarify it, as Israeli arms dealers and Nicaraguan middle men pullulate at an astonishing rate in the course of the Otterloo, the boat that was loaded with weaponry for one of Colombia's mercenary forces.
The Washington Post reports on the Colombian Civil war today. The article is very impressed with the derring do that went into its making:
"With the U.S.-backed military apparently powerless to intervene, leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary forces staged a major battle over several days without interference from the government.
A two-day visit to this remote jungle region -- reached after six hours of river travel -- revealed a civilian population abandoned to its fate. Despite warnings that a battle was imminent, the Colombian military did not arrive in the area until Tuesday, after Mirage jets and Black Hawk helicopters fired on rebel positions on the banks of the muddy Atrato River and two of the jets dropped bombs in the jungle to clear landing zones. The army's first ground troops arrived in the town today."
Six hours of river travel! You know Scott Wilson, the man who presumably traveled down river in such exciting style, will be bragging about this in Foggy Bottom bars for the rest of his natural born days. Probably had indian scouts, too.
Of course, there is something a little suspicious about the apparent "powerlessness" of the US backed military. Because those right wing paramilitary forces, where do they come from? How are they armed?
Think: Plan Colombia. Think: how were the Contras armed?
Michelle Lescure reports, in the World Press Review , on one of the biggest arms shipments to Colombia -- biggest illegal arms shipment, I should say. Although its illegality is shrouded in beach and jungle night, just as its source is:
"The biggest illegal arms shipment known to have arrived in Colombia landed in Turbo, a port on the Gulf of Urab�, on Colombia's Atlantic coast, last November. The weapons, enough to equip a lethal paramilitary offensive, were unloaded into trucks at the port, which has been controlled for several years by the right-wing United Colombian Self-Defense (AUC) militia. What happened to the weapons after they disappeared inland is still, officially, a mystery. But an unidentified "member of the AUC high command" boasted in the April 25 edition of Bogot�s centrist El Tiempo that "we have fooled the authorities of four countries," and claimed his paramilitary force has the arms. A belated Colombian investigation into the matter has sparked a many-headed international scandal."
Later on in her article, Lescure finds hints that the arms might have originated, or at least been purchased by, some of the dribs and drabs money Congress has been shuffling to the Colombian military (that "powerless" force in the WP article):
"Investigators are following a trail of documents and financial records. According to one source close to the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the trail appears to lead directly back to the coffers of Plan Colombia, a sweeping Colombian program designed to end the civil war, curtail narcotics production and trafficking, and stimulate the economy. On July 13, 2000, former U.S. President Bill Clinton approved a US$1.3-billion assistance package for the plan. On Oct. 24, 2001, the U.S. Congress approved an additional US$698 million, US$106 million less than U.S. President George W. Bush had requested, for the Andean Regional Initiative, which seeks to prevent the conflict in Colombia from spilling over into surrounding countries.
Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso has assured journalists that "the police never arranged to acquire these arms." But the Israeli arms dealers, Oris Zoller and Uzi Kisslevich, who---acting as co-owners of the Guatemalan company Grupo Internacional de Representaciones (GIR, S.A.), allegedly on Panama's behalf---bought the weapons that eventually made it to Colombia, insist that the import license by which they acquired the weapons was authorized by Panama's Minister of Government and Justice, Alex Vergara. "We had an understanding that the document pertained to the Panamanian police," Zoller told Guatemala City�s independent Siglo XXI (April 24)."
Admittedly, the trail of these particular weapons, as Lescure uncovers it, is an obscure affair that seems to confound Lescure's ability to clarify it, as Israeli arms dealers and Nicaraguan middle men pullulate at an astonishing rate in the course of the Otterloo, the boat that was loaded with weaponry for one of Colombia's mercenary forces.
Dope
The Judge�s skin
�Cambyses was a great emperor, such another as our master is. He had many lord-deputies, lord-presidents, and lieutenants under him. It is a great while ago since I read the history. It chanced he had under him, in one of his dominions, a briber, a gift-taker, a gratifier of rich men; he followed gifts as fast
as he that followed the pudding, a hand-maker in his office to make his son a great man, as the old saying is: Happy is the child whose father goeth to the devil. The cry of the poor widow came to
the emperor�s ear, and caused him to flay the judge quick, and laid his skin in the chair of judgment, that all judges that should give judgment afterwards should sit in the same skin. Surely it was a
goodly sign, a goodly monument, the sign of the judge�s skin. I pray God we may once see the skin in England.�
This is Hugh Latimer, quoted for splendid, bloody effect by Macaulay as he reaches his butcher�s hand in and takes hold of the last little sweetmeats that are left to Francis Bacon�s immortal moral character. Macaulay has a very meat eater�s joy in attacking his prey. His prose assumes this wonderful sahib drollery, which you can tell he used to roll out when some heathen was brought to his office in Calcutta and he had to �straighten the boy out.� There�s a phrase in one of Shaw�s plays, Heartbreak House, in which Lady Utterwood explains what her husband does in the colonies:
LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the country with the greatest ease.
I should say that Lady Utterword belongs to a latter period of the governing classes, when they were in decay. Still, that bamboo sometimes obviously tempts our Mac.
There must be, there is, more to say about Latimer's vivid, wild, frightening image. If Limited Inc had world and time, we would dive into the numerous literary uses of the flayed human skin � from the Nazi lampshade to this marvelous judge�s chair. Judges, of course, ask for it. Daumier saw it � how costume essentially gives them away, how the faces assume, over the years, a Polichinello cast. But to see
the sign of the skin in England � ah, that is harsh, harsh. Yet doesn�t LI wish, sometimes, to see some (not all, a select few) congressmen and Senators flayed in just this way? The insufferable Billy Tauzin, for instance, presiding right now, with appropriate outbursts of righteousness, over the Enron scandal, who previously shilled shamelessly for the auditor giants and against Levitt.
Off track, (CHARACTER WITH MOUSTACHE SAYS), we are getting off track...
Macaulay�s assault on Francis Bacon chose an object of enduring, and mysterious, interest. Francis Bacon has a knack for attracting attention -- or at least he does dead.. There is the famous McGuffin of claiming Bacon wrote Shakespeare�s plays. There are also claims that he was Queen Elizabeth�s bastard son, that he was one of the avatars, like Buddha and whoever the guru of the day is, and so on. The Macaulay attack, for these people, is a perennial source of infinite indignation. It is the devil�s view of the gospels. For a nice point by point in this direction, click this link.
Where to start with Francis Bacon? We aren't going for the whole bio. A few facts is all. Francis Bacon and his brother Anthony were born to one of the Tudor�s political families. Like the Cecils, the Bacons flourished in office, had that peculiar ability to administer. This was no mean thing � the Tudors, unlike the clan monarchs before them, or the Stuarts that succeeded them, survived by administering.
Francis Bacon rose very high in Elizabeth�s court. Lord Essex was, Macaulay points out, his patron. Elizabeth had an incredible number of very sinister figures working for her. If you read about the infighting that characterized her reign, you soon get the feeling that there was something very ... Stalinistic about the whole thing. Not that she was Stalin. Rather, it is the way the odor of the secret police seems to scent the air of her counselor's confabs.
Lord Essex is one of her great courtiers. We all associate him with Shakespeare. Macaulay emphasizes the relationship between the rising Francis B. and Essex, leaving out Anthony B., who was even more attached to the man. It is an invidious elision -- much of what went down when Essex conspired against Elizabeth, and Francis made his move against Essex, has to do with loyalties to Anthony.
But the worst is that Macaulay sentimentalizes Essex. Bacon�s most recent biographers, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, emphasize the homoerotic culture of Essex�s entourage. Macaulay doesn�t even mention Anthony Bacon, but, J and S have painstakingly discovered, Anthony was in trouble with the authorities over a little bit of sodomy... in his time. And Francis, too, was inclined to is it AC or DC? I always forget. Until, at forty, he married some thirteen year old girl.
Well, we can�t expect the Victorians to be as endlessly fascinated with sex as we are, so these are the
unmentioned in Macaulay�s essay. That doesn�t mean he is unaware of at least the rumor that Bacon was AC (or DC). Macaulay�s first accusation against Bacon is that he betrayed Essex. It is a very interesting accusation, considering how Macaulay is considered the epitome of philistinism, because it echoes something very deep in English culture � one hear�s in this boorish gentleman�s creed the distant tintinnabulation of the Bloomsbury credo, phrased, in this century, by E.M. Forster�s �if I had to betray my friend or my country, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.�
Those who defend Bacon make the point that Macaulay abbreviates episodes, distorts the meaning of the
justification of Essex�s execution that Bacon, under Elizabeth�s order, was obliged to grind out, and quotes
selectively from the trial. J. and S., however, come down gingerly on Macaulay�s side. It seems that Coke, that
idiot, was messing up the hearing on Essex, when Bacon straightened the case out with a well chosen
comparison to recent events in France. Macaulay is horrified by the coolness of Bacon�s move.
TBC
The Judge�s skin
�Cambyses was a great emperor, such another as our master is. He had many lord-deputies, lord-presidents, and lieutenants under him. It is a great while ago since I read the history. It chanced he had under him, in one of his dominions, a briber, a gift-taker, a gratifier of rich men; he followed gifts as fast
as he that followed the pudding, a hand-maker in his office to make his son a great man, as the old saying is: Happy is the child whose father goeth to the devil. The cry of the poor widow came to
the emperor�s ear, and caused him to flay the judge quick, and laid his skin in the chair of judgment, that all judges that should give judgment afterwards should sit in the same skin. Surely it was a
goodly sign, a goodly monument, the sign of the judge�s skin. I pray God we may once see the skin in England.�
This is Hugh Latimer, quoted for splendid, bloody effect by Macaulay as he reaches his butcher�s hand in and takes hold of the last little sweetmeats that are left to Francis Bacon�s immortal moral character. Macaulay has a very meat eater�s joy in attacking his prey. His prose assumes this wonderful sahib drollery, which you can tell he used to roll out when some heathen was brought to his office in Calcutta and he had to �straighten the boy out.� There�s a phrase in one of Shaw�s plays, Heartbreak House, in which Lady Utterwood explains what her husband does in the colonies:
LADY UTTERWORD. There is Hastings. Get rid of your ridiculous sham democracy; and give Hastings the necessary powers, and a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses: he will save the country with the greatest ease.
I should say that Lady Utterword belongs to a latter period of the governing classes, when they were in decay. Still, that bamboo sometimes obviously tempts our Mac.
There must be, there is, more to say about Latimer's vivid, wild, frightening image. If Limited Inc had world and time, we would dive into the numerous literary uses of the flayed human skin � from the Nazi lampshade to this marvelous judge�s chair. Judges, of course, ask for it. Daumier saw it � how costume essentially gives them away, how the faces assume, over the years, a Polichinello cast. But to see
the sign of the skin in England � ah, that is harsh, harsh. Yet doesn�t LI wish, sometimes, to see some (not all, a select few) congressmen and Senators flayed in just this way? The insufferable Billy Tauzin, for instance, presiding right now, with appropriate outbursts of righteousness, over the Enron scandal, who previously shilled shamelessly for the auditor giants and against Levitt.
Off track, (CHARACTER WITH MOUSTACHE SAYS), we are getting off track...
Macaulay�s assault on Francis Bacon chose an object of enduring, and mysterious, interest. Francis Bacon has a knack for attracting attention -- or at least he does dead.. There is the famous McGuffin of claiming Bacon wrote Shakespeare�s plays. There are also claims that he was Queen Elizabeth�s bastard son, that he was one of the avatars, like Buddha and whoever the guru of the day is, and so on. The Macaulay attack, for these people, is a perennial source of infinite indignation. It is the devil�s view of the gospels. For a nice point by point in this direction, click this link.
Where to start with Francis Bacon? We aren't going for the whole bio. A few facts is all. Francis Bacon and his brother Anthony were born to one of the Tudor�s political families. Like the Cecils, the Bacons flourished in office, had that peculiar ability to administer. This was no mean thing � the Tudors, unlike the clan monarchs before them, or the Stuarts that succeeded them, survived by administering.
Francis Bacon rose very high in Elizabeth�s court. Lord Essex was, Macaulay points out, his patron. Elizabeth had an incredible number of very sinister figures working for her. If you read about the infighting that characterized her reign, you soon get the feeling that there was something very ... Stalinistic about the whole thing. Not that she was Stalin. Rather, it is the way the odor of the secret police seems to scent the air of her counselor's confabs.
Lord Essex is one of her great courtiers. We all associate him with Shakespeare. Macaulay emphasizes the relationship between the rising Francis B. and Essex, leaving out Anthony B., who was even more attached to the man. It is an invidious elision -- much of what went down when Essex conspired against Elizabeth, and Francis made his move against Essex, has to do with loyalties to Anthony.
But the worst is that Macaulay sentimentalizes Essex. Bacon�s most recent biographers, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, emphasize the homoerotic culture of Essex�s entourage. Macaulay doesn�t even mention Anthony Bacon, but, J and S have painstakingly discovered, Anthony was in trouble with the authorities over a little bit of sodomy... in his time. And Francis, too, was inclined to is it AC or DC? I always forget. Until, at forty, he married some thirteen year old girl.
Well, we can�t expect the Victorians to be as endlessly fascinated with sex as we are, so these are the
unmentioned in Macaulay�s essay. That doesn�t mean he is unaware of at least the rumor that Bacon was AC (or DC). Macaulay�s first accusation against Bacon is that he betrayed Essex. It is a very interesting accusation, considering how Macaulay is considered the epitome of philistinism, because it echoes something very deep in English culture � one hear�s in this boorish gentleman�s creed the distant tintinnabulation of the Bloomsbury credo, phrased, in this century, by E.M. Forster�s �if I had to betray my friend or my country, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.�
Those who defend Bacon make the point that Macaulay abbreviates episodes, distorts the meaning of the
justification of Essex�s execution that Bacon, under Elizabeth�s order, was obliged to grind out, and quotes
selectively from the trial. J. and S., however, come down gingerly on Macaulay�s side. It seems that Coke, that
idiot, was messing up the hearing on Essex, when Bacon straightened the case out with a well chosen
comparison to recent events in France. Macaulay is horrified by the coolness of Bacon�s move.
TBC
Tuesday, May 07, 2002
Dope
Auguste Dupin once traced the course of his companion�s thoughts by a series of inductions that attached to the dumbshow of his companion�s expressions - the microworld of steps, frowns, glances, and furrows that, in the nineteenth century, was being explored with absurd confidence by German physiognomists -- until, interrupting that silent monologue, he made some magically relevant comment. The nineteenth century motif: detective as magician, consciousness as a rather easily demystified magic trick � we love it, we love it. LI (and the century we escaped from) has only a broken faith in the coherence and topical unity of the consciousness, even our own; still, we find it worth while (infinitely narcissistic as we are) to navigate the branches of our thought on the bateau ivre until we come to the source of our sudden interest in Macaulay.
Because in the last post we lied. Our readers haven�t been clamoring for explication de texte; they�ve been clamoring for naked pictures of Britney Spears.
But patience, one day, perhaps....
In the meantime -- our more faithful readers will remember that lately, we have been fascinated with Burke. At least, we have been quoting him a lot. And we have been reading Burke�s most ardent current defender, Conor Cruise O�Brien. O�Brien�s spirited attack on Burke�s critics prompted us to pick up Jeremy Bernstein�s biography of Warren Hastings, the East Indian company�s governor in Calcutta after Clive, and the victim of an impeachment process in the 1780s that never succeeded completely in impugning his character, but did succeed in giving Burke a reputation for madness. Even in the 18th century, when there was a patience for extended, hypoglycemic oratory that can only be compared to the curious stoner enthusiasm of the of the sixties and the seventies for 15 minute guitar solos of extreme monotony, Burke�s rants got on the nerve of the governing classes. They liked to see an orator collapse in tears and sweat, but they were less thrilled when these effects were more generally present in the audience, and the audience had gambling to do.
Bernstein convinced me that Hastings was a much better man than Burke and O�Brien painted him; there's an essay about the nostalgic imperialism of the new conservative crowd in the New Statesman that bears quoting on this point. It is by Maria Misra, and it conflates, without ironic intention, I think, the programs of Hastings and Burke:
"It would be anachronistic to identify these tolerant 18th-century attitudes to race and culture with those of modern liberal opinion. Hastings and his colleagues were certainly not bien-pensant radicals. Colour prejudice was common, not just among the British. Many Indians, then as now, favoured the "wheaten" complexion (the Indian word for caste is varna, meaning "colour").
But what made Hastings and his peers different from the pith-helmeted empire-builders of the Raj lay in their adherence to a kind of Burkean conservatism, which, with its concern for tradition, its respect for the authority of custom and practice, and hostility to the new, nurtured a kind of 18th-century cultural relativism. As Hastings himself observed: "Bengal is already a great nation and has no need of the supposedly superior wisdom of the English." It may dismay modern liberals, but this tolerant era was to be swept aside by their early Victorian avatars, the utilitarians.
For utilitarians, relativism of any kind was anathema. Good government, to them, consisted in the application of universal principles of law. From this universalising liberalism emerged the more extreme examples of Victorian imperial arrogance; 19th-century liberalism may have been liberating at home, but abroad it was a weapon in the armoury of the cultural imperialist. Without the iron-clad confidence of the ideological zealot, the utilitarian James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill), a man who had never set foot in India, could not have written a multi-volume history of the subcontinent, denouncing manners, culture and practices of which he was almost wholly ignorant. Likewise, it was the liberal polemicist and historian Thomas Macaulay who confidently claimed that a single shelf of books in a good European library was worth more than the entire written corpus of India and Arabia put together."
Misra's Macaulay is the common type, the one I have some passing acquaintance with. However, there�s a passage that intrigued me in Bernstein. Macaulay, Bernstein said, has a style like champagne, so that one sometimes forgets how bogus his points are in one�s appreciation of how he is making them.
These disjunct fragments can't be shored against Macaulay's ruin. They simply have to be sorted through.
Since Macaulay lived in Calcutta, and must have had some gossipy knowledge of Hastings himself, I wonder if Bernstein is being wholly fair. O�Brien is a fierce twit about Burke�s detractors, yet the politics of Burke�s objection to Hastings seems sound to LI. However, do we really want to turn in the gyre of the
Hastings story? No. We got more interested in the long essay on Bacon, for the reasons we gave
in the last post.
Meaning � sorry, but the next post will be about Macaulay and Bacon. Those looking for the usual trenchant missiles we hike at the NYT, or Sharonophiles, or Enron apologists, will just have to come back here in a couple of days, when we have found our mind. Right now, we simply want to lose it.
Auguste Dupin once traced the course of his companion�s thoughts by a series of inductions that attached to the dumbshow of his companion�s expressions - the microworld of steps, frowns, glances, and furrows that, in the nineteenth century, was being explored with absurd confidence by German physiognomists -- until, interrupting that silent monologue, he made some magically relevant comment. The nineteenth century motif: detective as magician, consciousness as a rather easily demystified magic trick � we love it, we love it. LI (and the century we escaped from) has only a broken faith in the coherence and topical unity of the consciousness, even our own; still, we find it worth while (infinitely narcissistic as we are) to navigate the branches of our thought on the bateau ivre until we come to the source of our sudden interest in Macaulay.
Because in the last post we lied. Our readers haven�t been clamoring for explication de texte; they�ve been clamoring for naked pictures of Britney Spears.
But patience, one day, perhaps....
In the meantime -- our more faithful readers will remember that lately, we have been fascinated with Burke. At least, we have been quoting him a lot. And we have been reading Burke�s most ardent current defender, Conor Cruise O�Brien. O�Brien�s spirited attack on Burke�s critics prompted us to pick up Jeremy Bernstein�s biography of Warren Hastings, the East Indian company�s governor in Calcutta after Clive, and the victim of an impeachment process in the 1780s that never succeeded completely in impugning his character, but did succeed in giving Burke a reputation for madness. Even in the 18th century, when there was a patience for extended, hypoglycemic oratory that can only be compared to the curious stoner enthusiasm of the of the sixties and the seventies for 15 minute guitar solos of extreme monotony, Burke�s rants got on the nerve of the governing classes. They liked to see an orator collapse in tears and sweat, but they were less thrilled when these effects were more generally present in the audience, and the audience had gambling to do.
Bernstein convinced me that Hastings was a much better man than Burke and O�Brien painted him; there's an essay about the nostalgic imperialism of the new conservative crowd in the New Statesman that bears quoting on this point. It is by Maria Misra, and it conflates, without ironic intention, I think, the programs of Hastings and Burke:
"It would be anachronistic to identify these tolerant 18th-century attitudes to race and culture with those of modern liberal opinion. Hastings and his colleagues were certainly not bien-pensant radicals. Colour prejudice was common, not just among the British. Many Indians, then as now, favoured the "wheaten" complexion (the Indian word for caste is varna, meaning "colour").
But what made Hastings and his peers different from the pith-helmeted empire-builders of the Raj lay in their adherence to a kind of Burkean conservatism, which, with its concern for tradition, its respect for the authority of custom and practice, and hostility to the new, nurtured a kind of 18th-century cultural relativism. As Hastings himself observed: "Bengal is already a great nation and has no need of the supposedly superior wisdom of the English." It may dismay modern liberals, but this tolerant era was to be swept aside by their early Victorian avatars, the utilitarians.
For utilitarians, relativism of any kind was anathema. Good government, to them, consisted in the application of universal principles of law. From this universalising liberalism emerged the more extreme examples of Victorian imperial arrogance; 19th-century liberalism may have been liberating at home, but abroad it was a weapon in the armoury of the cultural imperialist. Without the iron-clad confidence of the ideological zealot, the utilitarian James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill), a man who had never set foot in India, could not have written a multi-volume history of the subcontinent, denouncing manners, culture and practices of which he was almost wholly ignorant. Likewise, it was the liberal polemicist and historian Thomas Macaulay who confidently claimed that a single shelf of books in a good European library was worth more than the entire written corpus of India and Arabia put together."
Misra's Macaulay is the common type, the one I have some passing acquaintance with. However, there�s a passage that intrigued me in Bernstein. Macaulay, Bernstein said, has a style like champagne, so that one sometimes forgets how bogus his points are in one�s appreciation of how he is making them.
These disjunct fragments can't be shored against Macaulay's ruin. They simply have to be sorted through.
Since Macaulay lived in Calcutta, and must have had some gossipy knowledge of Hastings himself, I wonder if Bernstein is being wholly fair. O�Brien is a fierce twit about Burke�s detractors, yet the politics of Burke�s objection to Hastings seems sound to LI. However, do we really want to turn in the gyre of the
Hastings story? No. We got more interested in the long essay on Bacon, for the reasons we gave
in the last post.
Meaning � sorry, but the next post will be about Macaulay and Bacon. Those looking for the usual trenchant missiles we hike at the NYT, or Sharonophiles, or Enron apologists, will just have to come back here in a couple of days, when we have found our mind. Right now, we simply want to lose it.
Saturday, May 04, 2002
Dope
Limited Inc has been in operation for almost a year now. And we've discovered that our readers want bold stands. They want LI out there on the barricades. They want no shirking. They want LI to march, martyr-like, into the burning issues of the day -- into the very heart of the pyre. This is why so many of you have written in -- flocks of you, herds of you, you know how you congregate out there, in the darkness, a murder of readers, sometimes we wake up and feel you out there, sometimes we really do -- written in to ask us point blank: was Macauley right about Francis Bacon?
You are, of course, referring to Macaulay's hundred page "review" of Basil Montague's edition of the works of Francis Bacon. Macaulay wrote it in Calcutta, and saw it published by the Edinburgh Review in July, 1837. Like many other of Macaulay's essays, it had an electric effect after it was published. The Victorians always did things on an imperial scale: While LI is happy if we have 1000 words to tussle with a book, Macaulay was given 100 pages to review, essentially, a preface. The next editor of Bacon's works, a man named Spedding, wrote a nine hundred page refutation of Macaulay's essay. This is the same logic that conquered most of Africa and half of Asia.
In John Clive's biography of Thomas Macaulay, he devotes the last chapter, a sort of epilogue, to surveying the Victorian response to the Bacon essay (And no, no, LI has not read the refutation of Macaulay published by Spedding; we have a habit, around here, of taking nine hundred page refutations written in the 1870s on trust). Clive's point is that one can use Macaulay's essay to measure a fracture in the Victorian mind between the rampant positivism which infused the attitude of the Whig power structure, with its strong hold on the merchant and business class, and the Conservative reaction to capitalism. Marx, of course, thought that capitalism was a revolutionary force dissolving the tough integument of traditional ties, unconsciously but efficiently carrying out the labor of the the Weltgeist. Of course, by and by, when all the ties were dissolved and the key to wealth was unlocked, history's favored class, the proletariat, would sit in the faux palaces of the bourgeoisie, and we'd all become literary critics in the morning, do a little bit of steel producing in the afternoon, and some fishing on the weekends. The Conservative critique, however, was much more on the screen for the the Victorian poobahs, who only gradually realized that the working class was beginning to feel itself as a class. In the early Victorian period, that critique took its bearings from Coleridge. Clive identifies Coleridge as the third man in Macaulay's enemy, the force behind Montague. Coleridge had already promoted Bacon as the English Plato. (See this essay by Harvey Wheeler on Coleridge's claim on the constitution org site) As a Plato, Bacon could be used against the force that was transforming the traditional form of property, and the hierarchy built upon it, because that force was perceived to be against every cultural value worth keeping. The Whiggish assault on the conventions of the rural landholders, on religion, was to its professional mourners (from Carlyle to Ruskin) the Dunciad writ large -- dullness as a social force, philistinism as a cultural dominant, the rush into some vast darkness within which one could hear, faintly, the reverberation of gunfire. From Emerson to Newman to Arnold, all the 19th century poobahs agreed that the philistine attitude had a charter, a Magna Carta, and it was the Bacon essay.
Emerson, in the English Traits, is referring to that essay when he shrewdly sums up Macaulay:
"The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches, that _good_ means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on "fruit;" to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid; --this not ironically, but in good faith; -- that, "solid advantage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the civility and religion of England for a thousand years, ends, in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a sauce-pan."
So, let's sum up before the next post: the Macaulay essay was considered, on the one hand, to be a vicious caricature of Francis Bacon's character by a whole line of Bacon enthusiasts; and on the other hand, to be an extension of the unpleasantly practical side of Bacon's character by those who saw the practical turn in philosophy, and its social consequences, as the downfall of the best and the brightest. To quote a historian quoted by Clive, the essay was the "locus classicus of Victorian anti-intellectualism."
Since these forms are still with us, and these forces still rage underneath our feet, LI feels entitled to survey, at luxurious length, M.'s essay. Until the next post, children, adieu.
Limited Inc has been in operation for almost a year now. And we've discovered that our readers want bold stands. They want LI out there on the barricades. They want no shirking. They want LI to march, martyr-like, into the burning issues of the day -- into the very heart of the pyre. This is why so many of you have written in -- flocks of you, herds of you, you know how you congregate out there, in the darkness, a murder of readers, sometimes we wake up and feel you out there, sometimes we really do -- written in to ask us point blank: was Macauley right about Francis Bacon?
You are, of course, referring to Macaulay's hundred page "review" of Basil Montague's edition of the works of Francis Bacon. Macaulay wrote it in Calcutta, and saw it published by the Edinburgh Review in July, 1837. Like many other of Macaulay's essays, it had an electric effect after it was published. The Victorians always did things on an imperial scale: While LI is happy if we have 1000 words to tussle with a book, Macaulay was given 100 pages to review, essentially, a preface. The next editor of Bacon's works, a man named Spedding, wrote a nine hundred page refutation of Macaulay's essay. This is the same logic that conquered most of Africa and half of Asia.
In John Clive's biography of Thomas Macaulay, he devotes the last chapter, a sort of epilogue, to surveying the Victorian response to the Bacon essay (And no, no, LI has not read the refutation of Macaulay published by Spedding; we have a habit, around here, of taking nine hundred page refutations written in the 1870s on trust). Clive's point is that one can use Macaulay's essay to measure a fracture in the Victorian mind between the rampant positivism which infused the attitude of the Whig power structure, with its strong hold on the merchant and business class, and the Conservative reaction to capitalism. Marx, of course, thought that capitalism was a revolutionary force dissolving the tough integument of traditional ties, unconsciously but efficiently carrying out the labor of the the Weltgeist. Of course, by and by, when all the ties were dissolved and the key to wealth was unlocked, history's favored class, the proletariat, would sit in the faux palaces of the bourgeoisie, and we'd all become literary critics in the morning, do a little bit of steel producing in the afternoon, and some fishing on the weekends. The Conservative critique, however, was much more on the screen for the the Victorian poobahs, who only gradually realized that the working class was beginning to feel itself as a class. In the early Victorian period, that critique took its bearings from Coleridge. Clive identifies Coleridge as the third man in Macaulay's enemy, the force behind Montague. Coleridge had already promoted Bacon as the English Plato. (See this essay by Harvey Wheeler on Coleridge's claim on the constitution org site) As a Plato, Bacon could be used against the force that was transforming the traditional form of property, and the hierarchy built upon it, because that force was perceived to be against every cultural value worth keeping. The Whiggish assault on the conventions of the rural landholders, on religion, was to its professional mourners (from Carlyle to Ruskin) the Dunciad writ large -- dullness as a social force, philistinism as a cultural dominant, the rush into some vast darkness within which one could hear, faintly, the reverberation of gunfire. From Emerson to Newman to Arnold, all the 19th century poobahs agreed that the philistine attitude had a charter, a Magna Carta, and it was the Bacon essay.
Emerson, in the English Traits, is referring to that essay when he shrewdly sums up Macaulay:
"The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches, that _good_ means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on "fruit;" to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid; --this not ironically, but in good faith; -- that, "solid advantage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the better navigation it creates to enable the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and wine to the London grocer. It was a curious result, in which the civility and religion of England for a thousand years, ends, in denying morals, and reducing the intellect to a sauce-pan."
So, let's sum up before the next post: the Macaulay essay was considered, on the one hand, to be a vicious caricature of Francis Bacon's character by a whole line of Bacon enthusiasts; and on the other hand, to be an extension of the unpleasantly practical side of Bacon's character by those who saw the practical turn in philosophy, and its social consequences, as the downfall of the best and the brightest. To quote a historian quoted by Clive, the essay was the "locus classicus of Victorian anti-intellectualism."
Since these forms are still with us, and these forces still rage underneath our feet, LI feels entitled to survey, at luxurious length, M.'s essay. Until the next post, children, adieu.
Thursday, May 02, 2002
Remora
Among the more remarkable purveyors of nonsense about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, surprisingly, Ron Rosenbaum. His Edgy Enthusiast column in the NYObserver has gone over the edge. We'd like to remind Mr. Rosenbaum that Enthusiast was a code word, in the enlightenment, for Bigot. The underground work of connotation is slow, but apparently sure.
In two columns of invective and malignly erroneous analysis, on April 15th andApril 29th, Rosenbaum has been going on about the second holocaust, an idea he cops from that great social commentator, Philip Roth. The idea is that in Europe and the MiddleEast, the dark machinery is clanking that will be put in place to eliminate Jews wholesale. This explains the sympathy of the Europeans for the PLO, and their blindness to the David-like qualities of the present Israeli Commander inChief, Sharon (a man of peace, as our own commander in chief has admiringly opined).
Now to present a thesis like this, Rosenbaum has to overcome a few little problems. One, a big one it would seem, is that Jews per se are not being targeted en masse by any European government or faction -- immigrants are. And guess what? Those immigrants are Turks, they are Algerians, they are Africans, they are Bosnians -- in short, they are the Evil ones, the ones condemned to wallow in the cachots of American prisons as material witnesses, the ones with names like Muhammed. You know the ones I'm talking about. As for the anti-Semitism of Middle Eastern countries -- here, I believe, RR is on firmer ground. Not being a speaker of Arabic, I don't know how to judge the reports that filter in from Egypt, or from Saudi Arabia, and get distributed by right wingers like the ineffable Krauthammer -- reports that speak of widespread anti-Jewish motifs in Arabic media. However, I am inclined to think this is true. You don't have to go far on the web to find Anti-zionist sites that are really anti-Semitic.
However, it is important to note something right away about this. RR's second holocaust has already happened. In Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, and numerous other Middle Eastern countries, pogroms against the Jews broke out in the fifties, and many of these so called Oriental Jews decamped for Israel. This was a great crime, but there's been little attention paid to it. In fact, LI is so smart about these events because we've been reading a lot of books about Israel's history. Those books necessarily mentioned the influx of Yemeni, Iraqui, Syrian, and other Jews into Israel. Standard books about the fifties that don't focus on Israel, however, ignore this displacement. Why? Well, face it, America was allied with many of those places back then. And since the fifties, Israel has maintained disgraceful relations with vilely anti-semitic regimes, from South Africa to Argentina to Morocco. This strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism when it is convenient to do so has rather lessened the credit of the strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism.
What happened in the fifties wasn't, we should say, a holocaust. There is something cheap about this baker's dozen notion of the holocaust. If Mr. Rosenbaum can't distinguish the Holocaust from a pogrom, we can. We can also distinguish the Holocaust from the torching of synagogues by right wing punks; and we can distinguish it from the murder of Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers, or bombers, period.
But let's grant, for the moment, this truly disgusting degradation of the word Holocaust. Rosenbaum�s thesis is a pretty simple one. That an anti-Zionist can be anti-semitic means, in Rosenbaum's world, that an opponent of Israel, at any time, on any of its policies, is necessarily anti-Semitic. This sounds like exaggeration on LI's part. Surely nobody is that over the edgy. But read, oh read this: RR simultaneously shedding crocodile tears over the Palestinians and wishing them, well, a form of endless night. Call this the Cherokee solution, after Andrew Jackson's decisive mode of dealing with those Native American terrorists in the Southeast:
"I feel bad for the plight of the Palestinians; I believe they deserve a state.But they had a state: They were part of a state, a state called Jordan, that declared war on the state of Israel, that invaded it in order to destroy it�and lost the war. There are consequences to losing a war, and the consequences should at least in part be laid at the feet of the three nations that soughtand lost the war. One sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, but one wonders what the plight of the Israelis might have been had they lostthat war. One doesn�t envision spacious homes and ping-pong for their leaders."
It is a plight those Palestinians are in. Always a plight. Have any people been so plighted in the press before? It isn't a crime, it isn't a ghetto, it isn't civil servitude, it isn'tthe denial of the right to property, political sufferage, and all the rest ofit. It is a plight. The phrase Palestinian plight is beginning to sound like the phrase, Jewish problem, in the thirties. It is, well, disturbing.
But not so disturbing as that idyll of spacious houses. Hmm. Gaza? Are we talking about the spacious houses of Jenin? Of Hebron? The spacious houses of those wonderful Palestinian resorts in Southern Lebanon?
Far be it from me to doubt the sincerity, the aching wonder, of RR's bad feelings about the Palestinians. I'm sure it makes him lose his appetite, sometimes. I am sure that the first thing he wants to do, when he goes to Israel, is contemplate the squalor of the Gaza strip. I'm sure I have no gauge to measure RR's heart. But we do have some rough gauges to measure his hypocrisy. For instance: did you notice how cutely shedding tears over the Palestinians edges into taking a position indistinguishable from that of the most right wing of Sharon's cabinet ministers, Ephraim Eitam? Instead of simply saying, let's bus em out, no, there's the infinite pity on these losers of a war. Like our Commander in Chief, RR is a compassionate nationalist on this issue. His heart is full of love. And his advice is full of extermination. In the end, what RR is advocating is: the expulsion of all Palestinians to Jordan. It is a more in sorrow than in anger kind of thing. It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before kind of thing. It is a well, it is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it kind of thing. And to those who find it too dirty -- those hoodlums, those distributors of blood libels who dare question the great Sharon's account of the humane treatment of Jenin scum -- well, we know their motives.
But just when you thought the curtain was going down on this kind of farce, it rises again in the second column on the Second Holocaust. Here, here is the spot where RR truly takes leave of his senses, taking the position that Le Pen is campaigning chiefly against the Jews. This is rather like thinking that the KKK? You know, in the sixties, in Mississippi? They were really focused on the Jews. The stuff about the negroes? That was just, well, collateral.
It is hard to describe just how silly RR's idea is. The "'raus 'raus" in Le Pen's speeches is not, as educated readers of this post know, directed against the Jews. Le Pen is no doubt a Jew hater. Jew hating wouldn't get him the percentage that he received. No, what gets him the votes is his Arab hating. His immigrant hating. It isn't the synagogues Le Pen wants to burn, at least not at first. It is the mosques. But here's RR, going out of his mind again:
"And now Le Pen. Its seems as if the mask is coming off European anti-Semitism right and left. I don�t want to say I told you so aboutEuropean�specifically French�anti-Semitism (see my April 15 column on the rootsof the Second Holocaust). It doesn�t afford any satisfaction to have one�s darkest imaginings confirmed.
"But when I heard the news about Le Pen, I was thinking about Amos Oz, theIsraeli novelist and longtime dovish advocate of living side-by-side in peace with a Palestinian state, and how he had been driven by events of the past fewweeks to ask the question (in The Nation), "Would an end to occupationterminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?" This is, of course, the key question that the anti-Israel Euro-idiots don�t get, and here Amos Oz,peace-loving man of letters and friend of many Palestinians, says that "If, despite simplistic vision, the end of occupation will not result in peace," he favors war. "Not a war for our full occupancy of the HolyLand"�he�s against the occupation of the West Bank�"but a war for ourright to live � in part of the land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win."
RR goes on to doubt the "we will win" line -- without alluding to Israel's nuclear arsenal. I guess the fact that Israel has a greater nuclear weapon delivery capacity than, say, Britain, doesn't matter to RR, who is up there on a much higher, even a metaphysical level. Facts, as one of our great leaders once said, are stupid things. And who needs stupid things to interfere with the higher truths? Among which, for RR, is that it is high time that Jordan was for the Jordanians. Especially those nasty ones in the West Bank and Gaza. Ship em back, but don't forget to shed tears over their dispossession.
I don't know. LI feels bad, too. In general.
Among the more remarkable purveyors of nonsense about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, surprisingly, Ron Rosenbaum. His Edgy Enthusiast column in the NYObserver has gone over the edge. We'd like to remind Mr. Rosenbaum that Enthusiast was a code word, in the enlightenment, for Bigot. The underground work of connotation is slow, but apparently sure.
In two columns of invective and malignly erroneous analysis, on April 15th andApril 29th, Rosenbaum has been going on about the second holocaust, an idea he cops from that great social commentator, Philip Roth. The idea is that in Europe and the MiddleEast, the dark machinery is clanking that will be put in place to eliminate Jews wholesale. This explains the sympathy of the Europeans for the PLO, and their blindness to the David-like qualities of the present Israeli Commander inChief, Sharon (a man of peace, as our own commander in chief has admiringly opined).
Now to present a thesis like this, Rosenbaum has to overcome a few little problems. One, a big one it would seem, is that Jews per se are not being targeted en masse by any European government or faction -- immigrants are. And guess what? Those immigrants are Turks, they are Algerians, they are Africans, they are Bosnians -- in short, they are the Evil ones, the ones condemned to wallow in the cachots of American prisons as material witnesses, the ones with names like Muhammed. You know the ones I'm talking about. As for the anti-Semitism of Middle Eastern countries -- here, I believe, RR is on firmer ground. Not being a speaker of Arabic, I don't know how to judge the reports that filter in from Egypt, or from Saudi Arabia, and get distributed by right wingers like the ineffable Krauthammer -- reports that speak of widespread anti-Jewish motifs in Arabic media. However, I am inclined to think this is true. You don't have to go far on the web to find Anti-zionist sites that are really anti-Semitic.
However, it is important to note something right away about this. RR's second holocaust has already happened. In Morocco, Yemen, Iraq, and numerous other Middle Eastern countries, pogroms against the Jews broke out in the fifties, and many of these so called Oriental Jews decamped for Israel. This was a great crime, but there's been little attention paid to it. In fact, LI is so smart about these events because we've been reading a lot of books about Israel's history. Those books necessarily mentioned the influx of Yemeni, Iraqui, Syrian, and other Jews into Israel. Standard books about the fifties that don't focus on Israel, however, ignore this displacement. Why? Well, face it, America was allied with many of those places back then. And since the fifties, Israel has maintained disgraceful relations with vilely anti-semitic regimes, from South Africa to Argentina to Morocco. This strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism when it is convenient to do so has rather lessened the credit of the strategy of calling attention to anti-semitism.
What happened in the fifties wasn't, we should say, a holocaust. There is something cheap about this baker's dozen notion of the holocaust. If Mr. Rosenbaum can't distinguish the Holocaust from a pogrom, we can. We can also distinguish the Holocaust from the torching of synagogues by right wing punks; and we can distinguish it from the murder of Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers, or bombers, period.
But let's grant, for the moment, this truly disgusting degradation of the word Holocaust. Rosenbaum�s thesis is a pretty simple one. That an anti-Zionist can be anti-semitic means, in Rosenbaum's world, that an opponent of Israel, at any time, on any of its policies, is necessarily anti-Semitic. This sounds like exaggeration on LI's part. Surely nobody is that over the edgy. But read, oh read this: RR simultaneously shedding crocodile tears over the Palestinians and wishing them, well, a form of endless night. Call this the Cherokee solution, after Andrew Jackson's decisive mode of dealing with those Native American terrorists in the Southeast:
"I feel bad for the plight of the Palestinians; I believe they deserve a state.But they had a state: They were part of a state, a state called Jordan, that declared war on the state of Israel, that invaded it in order to destroy it�and lost the war. There are consequences to losing a war, and the consequences should at least in part be laid at the feet of the three nations that soughtand lost the war. One sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, but one wonders what the plight of the Israelis might have been had they lostthat war. One doesn�t envision spacious homes and ping-pong for their leaders."
It is a plight those Palestinians are in. Always a plight. Have any people been so plighted in the press before? It isn't a crime, it isn't a ghetto, it isn't civil servitude, it isn'tthe denial of the right to property, political sufferage, and all the rest ofit. It is a plight. The phrase Palestinian plight is beginning to sound like the phrase, Jewish problem, in the thirties. It is, well, disturbing.
But not so disturbing as that idyll of spacious houses. Hmm. Gaza? Are we talking about the spacious houses of Jenin? Of Hebron? The spacious houses of those wonderful Palestinian resorts in Southern Lebanon?
Far be it from me to doubt the sincerity, the aching wonder, of RR's bad feelings about the Palestinians. I'm sure it makes him lose his appetite, sometimes. I am sure that the first thing he wants to do, when he goes to Israel, is contemplate the squalor of the Gaza strip. I'm sure I have no gauge to measure RR's heart. But we do have some rough gauges to measure his hypocrisy. For instance: did you notice how cutely shedding tears over the Palestinians edges into taking a position indistinguishable from that of the most right wing of Sharon's cabinet ministers, Ephraim Eitam? Instead of simply saying, let's bus em out, no, there's the infinite pity on these losers of a war. Like our Commander in Chief, RR is a compassionate nationalist on this issue. His heart is full of love. And his advice is full of extermination. In the end, what RR is advocating is: the expulsion of all Palestinians to Jordan. It is a more in sorrow than in anger kind of thing. It is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before kind of thing. It is a well, it is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it kind of thing. And to those who find it too dirty -- those hoodlums, those distributors of blood libels who dare question the great Sharon's account of the humane treatment of Jenin scum -- well, we know their motives.
But just when you thought the curtain was going down on this kind of farce, it rises again in the second column on the Second Holocaust. Here, here is the spot where RR truly takes leave of his senses, taking the position that Le Pen is campaigning chiefly against the Jews. This is rather like thinking that the KKK? You know, in the sixties, in Mississippi? They were really focused on the Jews. The stuff about the negroes? That was just, well, collateral.
It is hard to describe just how silly RR's idea is. The "'raus 'raus" in Le Pen's speeches is not, as educated readers of this post know, directed against the Jews. Le Pen is no doubt a Jew hater. Jew hating wouldn't get him the percentage that he received. No, what gets him the votes is his Arab hating. His immigrant hating. It isn't the synagogues Le Pen wants to burn, at least not at first. It is the mosques. But here's RR, going out of his mind again:
"And now Le Pen. Its seems as if the mask is coming off European anti-Semitism right and left. I don�t want to say I told you so aboutEuropean�specifically French�anti-Semitism (see my April 15 column on the rootsof the Second Holocaust). It doesn�t afford any satisfaction to have one�s darkest imaginings confirmed.
"But when I heard the news about Le Pen, I was thinking about Amos Oz, theIsraeli novelist and longtime dovish advocate of living side-by-side in peace with a Palestinian state, and how he had been driven by events of the past fewweeks to ask the question (in The Nation), "Would an end to occupationterminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?" This is, of course, the key question that the anti-Israel Euro-idiots don�t get, and here Amos Oz,peace-loving man of letters and friend of many Palestinians, says that "If, despite simplistic vision, the end of occupation will not result in peace," he favors war. "Not a war for our full occupancy of the HolyLand"�he�s against the occupation of the West Bank�"but a war for ourright to live � in part of the land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win."
RR goes on to doubt the "we will win" line -- without alluding to Israel's nuclear arsenal. I guess the fact that Israel has a greater nuclear weapon delivery capacity than, say, Britain, doesn't matter to RR, who is up there on a much higher, even a metaphysical level. Facts, as one of our great leaders once said, are stupid things. And who needs stupid things to interfere with the higher truths? Among which, for RR, is that it is high time that Jordan was for the Jordanians. Especially those nasty ones in the West Bank and Gaza. Ship em back, but don't forget to shed tears over their dispossession.
I don't know. LI feels bad, too. In general.
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Remora
A story in the Biz section of the NYT about the conflicted interests of the banks that are presiding over the anatomy lesson taking place over Enron's corpse:
"In a Manhattan bankruptcy court, where hundreds of lawyers are trying to carve up what remains of Enron, the first order of business is finger-pointing � and many of the fingers are pointing at J. P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup.With billions of dollars at stake, many creditors question whether the two Wall Street giants can represent their interests when, they contend, the banks helped cause many of Enron's financial problems in the first place. Some are even asking that the banks be thrown off the 15-member committee responsible for determining what is owed to Enron shareholders, lenders, employees and thousands of others left in the lurch by Enron's collapse. The banks are the subject of government investigations and private lawsuits over their role in structuring off-balance-sheet partnerships that helped sink Enron. Some creditors say the banks are in hopeless conflict, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has expressed concern, as well."
Greider has a nice piece on the suit against the banks that kept investor money flowing into Enron. This is manna -- poisoned manna, granted, but what else does a critic of the corporate culture live for, nowadays?
"Win or lose, the lawsuit poses numerous embarrassments for Washington politics, and Congressional reformers should study it for a summary of the corrupted laws that need to be re-examined. Perhaps the most important one is this: The merger of commercial banks and Wall Street investment houses, ratified by Congress in 1999 and legalizing the new financial conglomerates like Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, has already reproduced the very scandals of self-dealing and swindled investors that led to the legal separation of these two realms seventy years ago in the Glass-Steagall Act. Morgan and Citigroup senior executives, for example, consulted Enron's top executives almost daily on how to solve the company's deepening financial problems, but that knowledge was never shared with investors to whom the banks sold Enron shares and debt securities or, for that matter, with other banks who took a share of syndicated loans. The banks' stockbrokers maintained "strong buy" recommendations even as Enron entered its "death spiral," as the lawsuit calls it. "
Lose is probably the way that coin is going to come up. But remember, way back, when the banking regulatory "reforms" were enacted -- remember the ardent opposition of Ralph Nader and his ilk? And the bipartisan, smily support of the Clintonites and the Repubs, all just getting along, for once?
Thank God for the impeachment. More bipartisanship would have sunk us all.
Here's an other graf from Greider's piece explaining the workings of the Enron partnerships:
"E nron's "partnerships" essentially allowed the company to sell assets to itself--a Brazilian utility, commodity trading contracts, broadband capacity--and to rig the prices and profits on both sides of the transaction, then book the sale as rising revenues for Enron and thus send the share price higher. "In order for Enron's accounting scheme to work, the parties involved had to be controlled by Enron," the lawsuit explains. "But this control and affiliation had to be concealed." The selected private investors, who received lucrative rewards for putting up front money for Jedi or Chewco or the others, understood this reality because they were assured by Enron execs managing the schemes of exclusive access to the company's charmed opportunities. If they knew, the bankers who arranged the SPEs must also have known."
Greider reaches back to Ponzi to explain this kind of scheme. But a much more relevant reference is to the daisychains of beloved memory perpetrated by Texas S & L's in the 80s. It would surprise LI if Ken Lay didn't know various of the participants in that scandal. The Enron partnerships look like the old "flips" so beloved of the consortium of S&L pirates and crafty realestatesmen in the good old days.
There's a story in D Magazine about one of the jailed in that scandal, which also, come to think of it, involved some Bush nearest and dearest. Those Bushes.
The story is authored by the fishily named Shad Rowe, and it rains down sympathy on one Wayne Pickering, who 'flipped' some land for an international "loan facilitator", an Indian named Asomull Mukesh. The S &L scandal actually puts LI in a difficult position, cliche wise, since we'd like to use the old, first time is tragedy, second time is farce phrase, but ... what about when the first time around was farce?
Well, upshot of the D story is that Wayne went to jail, yes he did, while Mukesh, incredibly, became a protected witness type. Mr. Rowe is very sympathetic to Wayne's plight, and mentions that "despite 400 letters on his behalf", our man had to go to the hoosegow. Once in prison, Wayne discovered that he was in... prison. There is a truly heartfelt graf in the piece -- don't cry after you read this, I beg you, reader. This is Wayne on what he learned in prison:
"Pickering says that in prison, if you mind your own business and keep your head down, people leave you alone. �For example,� he says, �I would not sit in the rec room with 100 guys�most of whom are minority�and try to change the TV channel from the NBA game to the Golf Channel. I would use a little common sense." Common sense kicks in when you are with minority guys, We suppose.
And so the middle class meets its prize construction. Imagine! The article is full of compassion for a guy like Wayne in meshes like that. Ah, perhaps if there were more Waynes checking out the dark side, there'd be less prisons.
A story in the Biz section of the NYT about the conflicted interests of the banks that are presiding over the anatomy lesson taking place over Enron's corpse:
"In a Manhattan bankruptcy court, where hundreds of lawyers are trying to carve up what remains of Enron, the first order of business is finger-pointing � and many of the fingers are pointing at J. P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup.With billions of dollars at stake, many creditors question whether the two Wall Street giants can represent their interests when, they contend, the banks helped cause many of Enron's financial problems in the first place. Some are even asking that the banks be thrown off the 15-member committee responsible for determining what is owed to Enron shareholders, lenders, employees and thousands of others left in the lurch by Enron's collapse. The banks are the subject of government investigations and private lawsuits over their role in structuring off-balance-sheet partnerships that helped sink Enron. Some creditors say the banks are in hopeless conflict, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has expressed concern, as well."
Greider has a nice piece on the suit against the banks that kept investor money flowing into Enron. This is manna -- poisoned manna, granted, but what else does a critic of the corporate culture live for, nowadays?
"Win or lose, the lawsuit poses numerous embarrassments for Washington politics, and Congressional reformers should study it for a summary of the corrupted laws that need to be re-examined. Perhaps the most important one is this: The merger of commercial banks and Wall Street investment houses, ratified by Congress in 1999 and legalizing the new financial conglomerates like Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, has already reproduced the very scandals of self-dealing and swindled investors that led to the legal separation of these two realms seventy years ago in the Glass-Steagall Act. Morgan and Citigroup senior executives, for example, consulted Enron's top executives almost daily on how to solve the company's deepening financial problems, but that knowledge was never shared with investors to whom the banks sold Enron shares and debt securities or, for that matter, with other banks who took a share of syndicated loans. The banks' stockbrokers maintained "strong buy" recommendations even as Enron entered its "death spiral," as the lawsuit calls it. "
Lose is probably the way that coin is going to come up. But remember, way back, when the banking regulatory "reforms" were enacted -- remember the ardent opposition of Ralph Nader and his ilk? And the bipartisan, smily support of the Clintonites and the Repubs, all just getting along, for once?
Thank God for the impeachment. More bipartisanship would have sunk us all.
Here's an other graf from Greider's piece explaining the workings of the Enron partnerships:
"E nron's "partnerships" essentially allowed the company to sell assets to itself--a Brazilian utility, commodity trading contracts, broadband capacity--and to rig the prices and profits on both sides of the transaction, then book the sale as rising revenues for Enron and thus send the share price higher. "In order for Enron's accounting scheme to work, the parties involved had to be controlled by Enron," the lawsuit explains. "But this control and affiliation had to be concealed." The selected private investors, who received lucrative rewards for putting up front money for Jedi or Chewco or the others, understood this reality because they were assured by Enron execs managing the schemes of exclusive access to the company's charmed opportunities. If they knew, the bankers who arranged the SPEs must also have known."
Greider reaches back to Ponzi to explain this kind of scheme. But a much more relevant reference is to the daisychains of beloved memory perpetrated by Texas S & L's in the 80s. It would surprise LI if Ken Lay didn't know various of the participants in that scandal. The Enron partnerships look like the old "flips" so beloved of the consortium of S&L pirates and crafty realestatesmen in the good old days.
There's a story in D Magazine about one of the jailed in that scandal, which also, come to think of it, involved some Bush nearest and dearest. Those Bushes.
The story is authored by the fishily named Shad Rowe, and it rains down sympathy on one Wayne Pickering, who 'flipped' some land for an international "loan facilitator", an Indian named Asomull Mukesh. The S &L scandal actually puts LI in a difficult position, cliche wise, since we'd like to use the old, first time is tragedy, second time is farce phrase, but ... what about when the first time around was farce?
Well, upshot of the D story is that Wayne went to jail, yes he did, while Mukesh, incredibly, became a protected witness type. Mr. Rowe is very sympathetic to Wayne's plight, and mentions that "despite 400 letters on his behalf", our man had to go to the hoosegow. Once in prison, Wayne discovered that he was in... prison. There is a truly heartfelt graf in the piece -- don't cry after you read this, I beg you, reader. This is Wayne on what he learned in prison:
"Pickering says that in prison, if you mind your own business and keep your head down, people leave you alone. �For example,� he says, �I would not sit in the rec room with 100 guys�most of whom are minority�and try to change the TV channel from the NBA game to the Golf Channel. I would use a little common sense." Common sense kicks in when you are with minority guys, We suppose.
And so the middle class meets its prize construction. Imagine! The article is full of compassion for a guy like Wayne in meshes like that. Ah, perhaps if there were more Waynes checking out the dark side, there'd be less prisons.
Monday, April 29, 2002
Dope
Burke, when speaking of the Gordon riots -- a series of London anti-Catholic riots targeting the relief of the Penal laws against Catholic property holders in Britain -- used the wonderful phrase, "the midnight chalk of incendiaries" to refer to the crude, grafitti driven style of jacquerie populism. I love the phrase partly because of the violence it both encodes and expresses -- the violence with which a higher literacy, or at least a more clerically orthodox one, meets a lower literacy, scrawling with its chalk, or spraying with its paint cans, the complaint of the day. The Gordon riots are in their way a perfect example of popular anger harnessed to the worst and most reactionary forces in history. That's the force that drives the Lepeniste, the Peronist, the Fascist, and every black shirted factotum that stalks the street, lead pipe in hand. Often, of course, the black shirt is hidden beneath the policeman's blues.
But LI also knows something else. LI is perhaps fatally addicted to knowing something else, but so it goes. The aristocratic disdain, the disdain of men like Burke, derives its own sarcasm from a privileged resentment that has never scrupled to use the midnight chalk of incendiaries for its own ends. To make an excuse for arrangements of property and caste that are inherently unjust by manipulating a thuggish and sickening discourse against any that would criticize them, and to do this in the name of populism, has become the dominant style of conservatism in our time, its own pact with the cretinous devils. We all know the drive by shooting style of talk radio hosts, right wing columnists, and Texas politicians. And we all know that grafitti artists, now, are killed by the cops, and that the cops are are simply the incendiaries in power.
Limited Inc has been mulling this politico-stylistic question since Saturday morning, when we read the NYT's Tom Shanker and David Sanger's excellent report on the administration planning for Mr. Bush's coming bully little war. It is a measure of the nihilism of the opposition in this country that LI's first reaction -- and we would bet the first reaction of most members of the scattered American left -- was indignation mixed with helplessness. Here is the machine, here are its parts, here is its objective, here are the erroneous assumptions that have gone into its design. And what words are there to oppose it? Not simply condemn it; not simply analyze it, unfolding error upon error; not simply insult the men who have compounded it, and the supposed leader (that man whose face, every day, becomes just a little bit more unendurable, don't you think?) who desires it; where are the words going to come from that will stop it?
The feeling that the words aren't going to come from anybody in the official opposition party is rather paralyzing. The feeling that there is, in the incendiaries who gathered to protest against Bush's Middle East policy in D.C. last weekend, a few too many who are anti-Semitic, and a few too few who want to extend the same rigorous standard of conduct to Israel and, say, Cuba -- this rather knocks at LI's nervous system.
Okay, for what it is worth, here is the beginning of Shanker and Sanger's story:
"WASHINGTON, April 27 � The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops.
The administration is turning to that approach after concluding that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed and that a proxy battle using local forces there would be insufficient to bring a change in power.But senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions.
These include avoiding summer combat in bulky chemical suits, preparing for a global oil price shock, and waiting until there is progress toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
There was surprisingly little stir about this story in this weekend's media. At least, the WP didn't bother to cc it with addenda, as they would with the usual scoop. I saw no reference to it in the Dallas paper site. Even the Boston Globe, owned by the Times, headlined the ongoing, ambiguous struggle of the Catholic church against
pedophilia (with the attitude of the cardinals being much like the attitude of union bosses being asked to give up a traditional rank and file perk in hard times -- a disgruntled acceptance, and a search for loopholes, about describes it).
Nevertheless, LI is preparing the midnight chalk. We will speak more, this week, about Iraq.
Burke, when speaking of the Gordon riots -- a series of London anti-Catholic riots targeting the relief of the Penal laws against Catholic property holders in Britain -- used the wonderful phrase, "the midnight chalk of incendiaries" to refer to the crude, grafitti driven style of jacquerie populism. I love the phrase partly because of the violence it both encodes and expresses -- the violence with which a higher literacy, or at least a more clerically orthodox one, meets a lower literacy, scrawling with its chalk, or spraying with its paint cans, the complaint of the day. The Gordon riots are in their way a perfect example of popular anger harnessed to the worst and most reactionary forces in history. That's the force that drives the Lepeniste, the Peronist, the Fascist, and every black shirted factotum that stalks the street, lead pipe in hand. Often, of course, the black shirt is hidden beneath the policeman's blues.
But LI also knows something else. LI is perhaps fatally addicted to knowing something else, but so it goes. The aristocratic disdain, the disdain of men like Burke, derives its own sarcasm from a privileged resentment that has never scrupled to use the midnight chalk of incendiaries for its own ends. To make an excuse for arrangements of property and caste that are inherently unjust by manipulating a thuggish and sickening discourse against any that would criticize them, and to do this in the name of populism, has become the dominant style of conservatism in our time, its own pact with the cretinous devils. We all know the drive by shooting style of talk radio hosts, right wing columnists, and Texas politicians. And we all know that grafitti artists, now, are killed by the cops, and that the cops are are simply the incendiaries in power.
Limited Inc has been mulling this politico-stylistic question since Saturday morning, when we read the NYT's Tom Shanker and David Sanger's excellent report on the administration planning for Mr. Bush's coming bully little war. It is a measure of the nihilism of the opposition in this country that LI's first reaction -- and we would bet the first reaction of most members of the scattered American left -- was indignation mixed with helplessness. Here is the machine, here are its parts, here is its objective, here are the erroneous assumptions that have gone into its design. And what words are there to oppose it? Not simply condemn it; not simply analyze it, unfolding error upon error; not simply insult the men who have compounded it, and the supposed leader (that man whose face, every day, becomes just a little bit more unendurable, don't you think?) who desires it; where are the words going to come from that will stop it?
The feeling that the words aren't going to come from anybody in the official opposition party is rather paralyzing. The feeling that there is, in the incendiaries who gathered to protest against Bush's Middle East policy in D.C. last weekend, a few too many who are anti-Semitic, and a few too few who want to extend the same rigorous standard of conduct to Israel and, say, Cuba -- this rather knocks at LI's nervous system.
Okay, for what it is worth, here is the beginning of Shanker and Sanger's story:
"WASHINGTON, April 27 � The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops.
The administration is turning to that approach after concluding that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed and that a proxy battle using local forces there would be insufficient to bring a change in power.But senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions.
These include avoiding summer combat in bulky chemical suits, preparing for a global oil price shock, and waiting until there is progress toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
There was surprisingly little stir about this story in this weekend's media. At least, the WP didn't bother to cc it with addenda, as they would with the usual scoop. I saw no reference to it in the Dallas paper site. Even the Boston Globe, owned by the Times, headlined the ongoing, ambiguous struggle of the Catholic church against
pedophilia (with the attitude of the cardinals being much like the attitude of union bosses being asked to give up a traditional rank and file perk in hard times -- a disgruntled acceptance, and a search for loopholes, about describes it).
Nevertheless, LI is preparing the midnight chalk. We will speak more, this week, about Iraq.
Friday, April 26, 2002
Remora
LI likes a hard hitting first graf. Why go to a boxing match if the fighters aren't going to mix it up? As the rounds toll by, one understands a little hanging onto the ropes, but one wants to see a little blood in the first round, at least. Similarly, we have such steak tartar tastes in news pieces -- a journalist should come out from his corner with appropriate growling, and wound up. So we liked this graf from Josh Gerstein's story about the continuing scandal of the government sponsored kidnappings of Middle Eastern men in this country:
"Last month, Colin Powell unveiled the State Department's annual report on human rights. Not surprisingly, the report faults authoritarian regimes such as China, Iraq, and North Korea for imprisoning people without charge and for holding legal proceedings in secret. What it neglects to mention is that in the past year those two practices have also become widespread in the United States."
The article rehearses the sad state of civil liberties, when it comes to men named Mohammed or, of course, Osama since 9/11. It focuses particularly on the New York City judge who is condemning many of these people to indefinite sequestration as "material witnesses" (ah, the lawyers wink, another material witness): Michael Mukasey. Mukasey sounds like a man on a mission. "Within days of the September 11 strikes, Mukasey announced that court hearings in all of the material-witness cases would be closed to the press and the public on the grounds that they were connected to a grand jury probe. (Grand juries, by law and tradition, usually carry out their business in secret.) The transcripts, dockets, and court orders in the material-witness cases remain sealed. Last fall Mukasey's secretary told The Washington Post that Mukasey wanted the cases kept secret "forever."
"
Forever is a long long time -- inaccessible to most of us, but not, perhaps, so much to Mukasey, one of whose colleagues is 95, and many of whose co-judges are over the age of 65: "Nearly 40 percent of the nation's more than 1,200 working federal judges are on senior status." Eternity, for Mukasey and his like, is less a theological issue than a tenure description.
There's a decidedly tedious news release from Human Rights Watch about conditions in the U.S. jails for these detainees, which seems designed, mainly, to show that HRW is there. It isn't doing much there, but by God, they want to see where these prisoners shower. Why this sound and lack of fury, one wonders. Touring the jails is good -- LI applauds this, and besides, our Lord Jesus Christ seems to find visiting prisoners of such high merit those who do it are conducted to the right hand of God, and ... well, live happily ever afterward. But shouldn't we be seeing jeremiads? Shouldn't human rights organizations be attacking with fire and brimstone this gross, massive abuse of judicial power? Apparently that is is off the agenda, apparently. There's an arrogance in a U.S. based Human Rights organization adopting such a tepid attitude that one wonders what is behind it. Is HRW afraid of angering some donation base? Or is it easier to condemn Albania, or Macedonia, or whatever onia, than going after the District court for the Southern District of New York?
LI likes a hard hitting first graf. Why go to a boxing match if the fighters aren't going to mix it up? As the rounds toll by, one understands a little hanging onto the ropes, but one wants to see a little blood in the first round, at least. Similarly, we have such steak tartar tastes in news pieces -- a journalist should come out from his corner with appropriate growling, and wound up. So we liked this graf from Josh Gerstein's story about the continuing scandal of the government sponsored kidnappings of Middle Eastern men in this country:
"Last month, Colin Powell unveiled the State Department's annual report on human rights. Not surprisingly, the report faults authoritarian regimes such as China, Iraq, and North Korea for imprisoning people without charge and for holding legal proceedings in secret. What it neglects to mention is that in the past year those two practices have also become widespread in the United States."
The article rehearses the sad state of civil liberties, when it comes to men named Mohammed or, of course, Osama since 9/11. It focuses particularly on the New York City judge who is condemning many of these people to indefinite sequestration as "material witnesses" (ah, the lawyers wink, another material witness): Michael Mukasey. Mukasey sounds like a man on a mission. "Within days of the September 11 strikes, Mukasey announced that court hearings in all of the material-witness cases would be closed to the press and the public on the grounds that they were connected to a grand jury probe. (Grand juries, by law and tradition, usually carry out their business in secret.) The transcripts, dockets, and court orders in the material-witness cases remain sealed. Last fall Mukasey's secretary told The Washington Post that Mukasey wanted the cases kept secret "forever."
"
Forever is a long long time -- inaccessible to most of us, but not, perhaps, so much to Mukasey, one of whose colleagues is 95, and many of whose co-judges are over the age of 65: "Nearly 40 percent of the nation's more than 1,200 working federal judges are on senior status." Eternity, for Mukasey and his like, is less a theological issue than a tenure description.
There's a decidedly tedious news release from Human Rights Watch about conditions in the U.S. jails for these detainees, which seems designed, mainly, to show that HRW is there. It isn't doing much there, but by God, they want to see where these prisoners shower. Why this sound and lack of fury, one wonders. Touring the jails is good -- LI applauds this, and besides, our Lord Jesus Christ seems to find visiting prisoners of such high merit those who do it are conducted to the right hand of God, and ... well, live happily ever afterward. But shouldn't we be seeing jeremiads? Shouldn't human rights organizations be attacking with fire and brimstone this gross, massive abuse of judicial power? Apparently that is is off the agenda, apparently. There's an arrogance in a U.S. based Human Rights organization adopting such a tepid attitude that one wonders what is behind it. Is HRW afraid of angering some donation base? Or is it easier to condemn Albania, or Macedonia, or whatever onia, than going after the District court for the Southern District of New York?
Thursday, April 25, 2002
Dope
The end of Sir Thomas Browne�s Garden of Cyrus, a meditation on the forms and meaning of the quincunx, is one of the most gorgeous ringings down of the curtain in all literature:
Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no other advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.
Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon, I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, as some conjecture all shall awake again?
LI is impressed by this on a number of levels (let me not count the ways). Take, for instance, the tacit opposition between the hunters in America and the writer and his audience in the Old World. The page that is ended is also, for the reader, the page that is turned. But the page turned in the Old World will not be turned back in the New � in the New, they hunt. In the New, action, not contemplation, occurs over the hills and dales; the old violence is renewed, the old energy revived, and who knows if the hunters will not one day set up an X on those hills again, and nail a man to it.
Opposition, the antipodes, for Browne, and for all educated Europeans, was not a thing of the mind, but in the very grain of nature, operating there much as the opponents in a chess game operate, moving pieces against each other, creating the patterns that appear and disappear on the board. This sense of opposition as a living principle, the foundation of alchemy, magic, and natural philosophy in general, was weakened by the Enlightenment and overthrown entirely by Darwinism. Opposition has retreated to a mere mode of cognition, and not, probably, a very respectable one.
All this folderol to tell you, readers, that LI has been reading Hayek's much touted and little read summa, The Constitution of Liberty -- and we have found our opposite. It is a book with whose premises we agree vehemently, and with whose conclusions we disagree with equal vehemence. More in our next post.
The end of Sir Thomas Browne�s Garden of Cyrus, a meditation on the forms and meaning of the quincunx, is one of the most gorgeous ringings down of the curtain in all literature:
Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no other advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.
Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon, I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, as some conjecture all shall awake again?
LI is impressed by this on a number of levels (let me not count the ways). Take, for instance, the tacit opposition between the hunters in America and the writer and his audience in the Old World. The page that is ended is also, for the reader, the page that is turned. But the page turned in the Old World will not be turned back in the New � in the New, they hunt. In the New, action, not contemplation, occurs over the hills and dales; the old violence is renewed, the old energy revived, and who knows if the hunters will not one day set up an X on those hills again, and nail a man to it.
Opposition, the antipodes, for Browne, and for all educated Europeans, was not a thing of the mind, but in the very grain of nature, operating there much as the opponents in a chess game operate, moving pieces against each other, creating the patterns that appear and disappear on the board. This sense of opposition as a living principle, the foundation of alchemy, magic, and natural philosophy in general, was weakened by the Enlightenment and overthrown entirely by Darwinism. Opposition has retreated to a mere mode of cognition, and not, probably, a very respectable one.
All this folderol to tell you, readers, that LI has been reading Hayek's much touted and little read summa, The Constitution of Liberty -- and we have found our opposite. It is a book with whose premises we agree vehemently, and with whose conclusions we disagree with equal vehemence. More in our next post.
Wednesday, April 24, 2002
Remora
After a night of disturbing dreams, LI awoke to find ourselves transformed into a crab... No. It isn't the dreams that have been disturbing, but the news. Merely the news. Every day, showered with evidences of universal imbecility, LI gets more crab-like -- with a crustacean's melancholy, or what we imagine to be the melancholy of an imperfectly armored creature. Yesterday, we were putting out a claw and an antenna, testing the air, and we stumbled upon, of all things, good news. Let's modify that as -- less than catastrophic news. News of the type: dam holds. Building does not collapse. Type news. Good news, in short, from, of all places, the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 ruling, the S.C. actually built a levee, at least a temporary one, against takings madness.
"The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners.The 6-to-3 decision was a sharp setback for the property rights movement, which has scored many recent successes in the Supreme Court. The ruling came in a case that sought millions of dollars in compensation for a prolonged restriction on development along the shores of Lake Tahoe."
The takings movement, which is the child of the University of Chicago Law and Economics movement, has become the right's battering ram against environmental and, in general, corporate management. It is an attempt to hotwire a coup against the New Deal behind the backs of the electorate. The coup is rather funny -- these are the same people who want to reduce social costs, which is a real cost against third parties, i.e., property-holders, into a vaguely distributed "externality." But their ardor for property is really an ardor for large property holders... Far be it from us to evoke that dread and discredited phrase, class warfare, for this instance of class warfare. But one needs an analytic category to explain systematic discrepencies in the application of a theory, and class, pace the neo-liberal crowd, certainly seems to fit the bill.
Scalia, the right's Quasimodo on the court, suffered a setback with the ruling. NYT, again:
"For Justice Scalia, the decision today in Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, No. 00-1167, must have been a particularly bitter defeat in two respects.
First, the majority rejected an expansive ruling of one of his most important opinions, a 10-year-old decision called Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council in which the court announced for the first time that a land-use regulation that, while leaving the property in the owner's hands, permanently deprived it of all economic use was a "categorical taking" that must be compensated.The Lucas decision breached what had been a doctrinal wall between a physical taking, in which the government actually takes possession of private property and for which compensation has always been required, and a "regulatory taking," in which the government restricts the owner's use of the property."
The second defeat is more technical. To paraphrase the NYT, Scalia had advocated a flat rule regarding the application of regulatory taking, which claimed that no pre-existing regulation should be considered when considering individual cases that might constitute such takings. Thus, the size of the taking would be calculated without regard to previous restrictions on the property -- an absurd attempt to inflate the cost of regulatory taking, the importance of which lies less in the individual cases to which it might apply than in scaring legislatures from considering measures that might, conceivably, be construed as regulatory takings -- measures such as protecting wetlands.
Private property is not, in itself, theft, contra Proudhon -- the phrase is in the nature of a sorites. However, given the wild eyed ideology of the Law and Economics movement, property functions as theft. The "takings" movement goes back to a case, Pennsylvania Coal Company vs. Mahon, from 1922. The Community Rights Org website has a nice summary of the case:
"Mahon sold the surface rights to land, but he reserved the right to remove the coal from under the land. The state then enacted a statute that prohibited coal mining if it threatened subsidence and damage to structures on the surface. The Court ruled that the restriction constituted a taking of Mahon's coal because the law made it commercially impractical for Mahon to mine the coal and thus had the same effect as destroying or appropriating the coal. In the first decision to hold that a land use restriction constituted a taking, the Court noted that "property may be regulated to a certain extent, [but] if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking."
Holmes wrote the following in his opinion:
"The question of whether a regulation is a valid exercise of the police power or an unconstitutional taking depends on the particular facts. The property being protected here is private property belonging to a single citizen, in which there is no public nuisance if it is destroyed. The law is not justified as a protection of personal safety. The contract itself provided notice of the risks, and the grantee still contracted. Since coal rights are worthless if the coal can not be mined, preventing their mining is a taking because it is tantamount to destroying it. If the police power of the states is allowed to abridge the contract rights of parties, it will continue until private property disappears completely. In general, while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far, it will be recognized as a taking.The loss should not fall on the coal company who provided for this very risk contractually. If the state wants more protection for its citizens,it can pay for it."
How Holmes logically juggled his argument that the slippery slope was inevitable, but that "property may be regulated to a certain extent," I leave to the psychologists. If, indeed, there are gradiants of regulation such that we can understand the phrase "a certain extent," then the force of the idea that abridging contract rights, i.e., regulation of property use, is such that "it will continue until private property disappears completely," is, to say the least, weakened.
Brandeis dissented in this case. Here's his dissent
"A restriction imposed to protect the public health, safety or morals from danger is not a taking. The restriction here is merely the prohibition of a noxious use. Just because a few private citizens are enriched does not make the law non-public. If the mining were to set free noxious gas, there would be noquestion that the state could prohibit it for the safety of the citizens, without paying the miner."
In LI's opinion, the Brandeis dissent is obvious. LI's opinion has been the opinion of the Federal Government, and of state governments, since the 1930s. The throwback position reminds us of why, originally, FDR tried to pack the court -- since the Court periodically feels called upon to play the avant garde for the reactionary cenacle among the ruling classs. Let's sum up: the robbery of the commons isn't justified by the enrichment of the property owner. And this isn't inessential robbery -- we are interested, as a society, in punishing individual robbery (instead of letting that duty devolve upon the victims as it may) because, theoretically, any robbery is an assault against a common good.
So, the court didn't do anything particularly lunatic yesterday. Good news. We are waggling our claws for joy. Dance dance dance.
After a night of disturbing dreams, LI awoke to find ourselves transformed into a crab... No. It isn't the dreams that have been disturbing, but the news. Merely the news. Every day, showered with evidences of universal imbecility, LI gets more crab-like -- with a crustacean's melancholy, or what we imagine to be the melancholy of an imperfectly armored creature. Yesterday, we were putting out a claw and an antenna, testing the air, and we stumbled upon, of all things, good news. Let's modify that as -- less than catastrophic news. News of the type: dam holds. Building does not collapse. Type news. Good news, in short, from, of all places, the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 ruling, the S.C. actually built a levee, at least a temporary one, against takings madness.
"The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners.The 6-to-3 decision was a sharp setback for the property rights movement, which has scored many recent successes in the Supreme Court. The ruling came in a case that sought millions of dollars in compensation for a prolonged restriction on development along the shores of Lake Tahoe."
The takings movement, which is the child of the University of Chicago Law and Economics movement, has become the right's battering ram against environmental and, in general, corporate management. It is an attempt to hotwire a coup against the New Deal behind the backs of the electorate. The coup is rather funny -- these are the same people who want to reduce social costs, which is a real cost against third parties, i.e., property-holders, into a vaguely distributed "externality." But their ardor for property is really an ardor for large property holders... Far be it from us to evoke that dread and discredited phrase, class warfare, for this instance of class warfare. But one needs an analytic category to explain systematic discrepencies in the application of a theory, and class, pace the neo-liberal crowd, certainly seems to fit the bill.
Scalia, the right's Quasimodo on the court, suffered a setback with the ruling. NYT, again:
"For Justice Scalia, the decision today in Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, No. 00-1167, must have been a particularly bitter defeat in two respects.
First, the majority rejected an expansive ruling of one of his most important opinions, a 10-year-old decision called Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council in which the court announced for the first time that a land-use regulation that, while leaving the property in the owner's hands, permanently deprived it of all economic use was a "categorical taking" that must be compensated.The Lucas decision breached what had been a doctrinal wall between a physical taking, in which the government actually takes possession of private property and for which compensation has always been required, and a "regulatory taking," in which the government restricts the owner's use of the property."
The second defeat is more technical. To paraphrase the NYT, Scalia had advocated a flat rule regarding the application of regulatory taking, which claimed that no pre-existing regulation should be considered when considering individual cases that might constitute such takings. Thus, the size of the taking would be calculated without regard to previous restrictions on the property -- an absurd attempt to inflate the cost of regulatory taking, the importance of which lies less in the individual cases to which it might apply than in scaring legislatures from considering measures that might, conceivably, be construed as regulatory takings -- measures such as protecting wetlands.
Private property is not, in itself, theft, contra Proudhon -- the phrase is in the nature of a sorites. However, given the wild eyed ideology of the Law and Economics movement, property functions as theft. The "takings" movement goes back to a case, Pennsylvania Coal Company vs. Mahon, from 1922. The Community Rights Org website has a nice summary of the case:
"Mahon sold the surface rights to land, but he reserved the right to remove the coal from under the land. The state then enacted a statute that prohibited coal mining if it threatened subsidence and damage to structures on the surface. The Court ruled that the restriction constituted a taking of Mahon's coal because the law made it commercially impractical for Mahon to mine the coal and thus had the same effect as destroying or appropriating the coal. In the first decision to hold that a land use restriction constituted a taking, the Court noted that "property may be regulated to a certain extent, [but] if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking."
Holmes wrote the following in his opinion:
"The question of whether a regulation is a valid exercise of the police power or an unconstitutional taking depends on the particular facts. The property being protected here is private property belonging to a single citizen, in which there is no public nuisance if it is destroyed. The law is not justified as a protection of personal safety. The contract itself provided notice of the risks, and the grantee still contracted. Since coal rights are worthless if the coal can not be mined, preventing their mining is a taking because it is tantamount to destroying it. If the police power of the states is allowed to abridge the contract rights of parties, it will continue until private property disappears completely. In general, while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far, it will be recognized as a taking.The loss should not fall on the coal company who provided for this very risk contractually. If the state wants more protection for its citizens,it can pay for it."
How Holmes logically juggled his argument that the slippery slope was inevitable, but that "property may be regulated to a certain extent," I leave to the psychologists. If, indeed, there are gradiants of regulation such that we can understand the phrase "a certain extent," then the force of the idea that abridging contract rights, i.e., regulation of property use, is such that "it will continue until private property disappears completely," is, to say the least, weakened.
Brandeis dissented in this case. Here's his dissent
"A restriction imposed to protect the public health, safety or morals from danger is not a taking. The restriction here is merely the prohibition of a noxious use. Just because a few private citizens are enriched does not make the law non-public. If the mining were to set free noxious gas, there would be noquestion that the state could prohibit it for the safety of the citizens, without paying the miner."
In LI's opinion, the Brandeis dissent is obvious. LI's opinion has been the opinion of the Federal Government, and of state governments, since the 1930s. The throwback position reminds us of why, originally, FDR tried to pack the court -- since the Court periodically feels called upon to play the avant garde for the reactionary cenacle among the ruling classs. Let's sum up: the robbery of the commons isn't justified by the enrichment of the property owner. And this isn't inessential robbery -- we are interested, as a society, in punishing individual robbery (instead of letting that duty devolve upon the victims as it may) because, theoretically, any robbery is an assault against a common good.
So, the court didn't do anything particularly lunatic yesterday. Good news. We are waggling our claws for joy. Dance dance dance.
Correspondence
LI has received, by way of a friend of a friend, a reply to our last post. Here it is:
"Where to begin...
First of all, the cretin in France would find no home in mainstream American conservative politics. Remember: today's right in America is for less government involvement and control over citizens. When confronted with a choice of citizens overcoming corporations and citizens overcoming governments (with police and armies...) they overwhelmingly choose to take their chances with corporations. A unilateralist, big government socialist like Jospin in an anethma to the mainstream American right. Quite frankly,
Gore and Daschle are the closest equivalents available in mainstream American politics. Their issues are not Jospin's (and I don't mean to slander them in that way) - but they are the politicians practicing
minority rule in America on their big issues (Environment and Taxation).
As for why The 3rd Way buried traditional leftist politics: that's easy. Their politics impoverished all who submitted to them. It happened 100% of the time to 100% of those afflicted (usually by force perpetrated by a small minority of people who chose themselves to be the government of the people afflicted...). The only variation was the rate and pace of the economic decay in the afflicted societies. France and many of EU-niks felt really good about their socialist tilt of the past 30 years while it was happening - but as a result they've (collectively) gone from the premier power on earth to an afterthought begging for attention and a voice on the world stage.
Finally: all the Enron comments are just tripe. Enron owns as many Democrats as Republicans. That's why the Dem's aren't (can't actually...) making a big issue out of it..."
LI has received, by way of a friend of a friend, a reply to our last post. Here it is:
"Where to begin...
First of all, the cretin in France would find no home in mainstream American conservative politics. Remember: today's right in America is for less government involvement and control over citizens. When confronted with a choice of citizens overcoming corporations and citizens overcoming governments (with police and armies...) they overwhelmingly choose to take their chances with corporations. A unilateralist, big government socialist like Jospin in an anethma to the mainstream American right. Quite frankly,
Gore and Daschle are the closest equivalents available in mainstream American politics. Their issues are not Jospin's (and I don't mean to slander them in that way) - but they are the politicians practicing
minority rule in America on their big issues (Environment and Taxation).
As for why The 3rd Way buried traditional leftist politics: that's easy. Their politics impoverished all who submitted to them. It happened 100% of the time to 100% of those afflicted (usually by force perpetrated by a small minority of people who chose themselves to be the government of the people afflicted...). The only variation was the rate and pace of the economic decay in the afflicted societies. France and many of EU-niks felt really good about their socialist tilt of the past 30 years while it was happening - but as a result they've (collectively) gone from the premier power on earth to an afterthought begging for attention and a voice on the world stage.
Finally: all the Enron comments are just tripe. Enron owns as many Democrats as Republicans. That's why the Dem's aren't (can't actually...) making a big issue out of it..."
Monday, April 22, 2002
Dope
In a decade, the Third Way has effectually buried every left wing party that embraced it, except for Tony Blair's Labour Party -- and for Mr. Blair, the hens, or is it the vultures, are coming home to roost. Especially in the aftermath of his poodle act for Mr. Bush. The British have traditionally, and inexplicably, imagined themselves collectively as a bull-dog -- but even the British don't necessarily want to see their leader flaunt a fetch it boy attitude, which Mr. Blair displayed in his pow-wow with his master in Crawford, Texas (not exactly Yalta. More like, Y'allta).
And now Jospin. A socialist leader who couldn't find one single issue that would distinguish him from his conservative opponent. Not that the French socialist party has accrued a lot of credit since Mitterand was elected on the promise of breaking with the logic of capitalism, and was promptly broken by the logic of capitalism. Still, there is the 35 hour working week; there is the social service sector, embattled but still funtioning; and there is the rhetorical opposition to the avatar of the logic of capitalism in our time, the USA. Not that LI approves of that rhetoric very much -- in fact, its inhuman consequence in Rwanda remains to be explored. We'd like nothing better than to see the Mitterandish clique that encouraged the genocide in Rwanda marched into court in the Hague. Still, in the Middle East, and in Russia, and in Latin America, the French hesitancy about the American model has served as a hopeful corrective to those of us who think unleashing a pure market economy upon the helpless multitudes is a recipe for disaster.
The point is this, though: even as the leaders of the left were dismantling it, they were assuring us that they were merely modernizing it. The new face of the left, for the new millenium. In the film, Brazil, there is a recurring comic gag concerning older women getting their faces lifted. The face lifts involved swathing their heads in plastic sheeting for a period, and then cutting the sheeting off. The result was an ephemeral, goggly youthfulness, a grotesque contrast with their aging bodies, followed by a period in which the face would "leak." Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon would insist on the beauty of the warped faces, the drooping cheeks, the flacid noses and weird lips -- a congery of impressively hag-like features -- he'd produced.
That plastic surgeon is Jospin. He is Blair. He is Clinton. He is Schroeder. The collective direction of the lefty parties in the West has been lost not because the rank and file are suffering a crisis of faith. No, it is because the leadership longed for that respectability that comes from betraying every one of labor's ideals to Capital. In exchange, the leadership got touted by the editorialists of the world's leading newspapers. The leaders got to hang out at Davos. And they lost all credibility with their followers. It is a nightmarish situation. How can you vote for a liberal, in the United States, for instance, when your choice is between George Bush and Al Gore? Between a man owned lock stock and oil barrel by energy companies, and a man who shilled for the defense industry in the Arabian Peninsula, and never met a corporate contributor he wouldn't do a favor for. The choice is no choice. In the end, the policy of accomodation to the right serves only ... the right.
This is from Michelet's Le Peuple
Ce qu' on remarque le mieux sur une personne
qui est nue, c' est telle ou telle partie, qui sera
d�fectueuse. Le d�faut d' abord saute aux yeux.
Que serait-ce, si une main obligeante pla�ait sur
ce d�faut m�me un verre grossissant qui le rendrait
colossal, qui l' illuminerait d' un jour terrible,
impitoyable, au point que les accidents les plus
naturels de la peau ressortiraient � l' oeil
effray� !
Voil� pr�cis�ment ce qui est arriv� � la France.
Ses d�fauts incontestables, que l' activit�
croissante, le choc des int�r�ts, des id�es,
expliquent suffisamment, ont grossi sous la main de
ses puissants �crivains, et sont devenus des
monstres. Et voil� que l' Europe tout � l' heure la
voit comme un monstre elle-m�me...
Le peuple qu' on peint ainsi, n' est-ce pas l' effroi
du monde ? Y a-t-il assez d' arm�es, de forteresses,
pour le cerner, le surveiller, jusqu' � ce qu' un
moment favorable se pr�sente pour l' accabler ?
"What one sees first about a person who is nude is that such and such a part is defective. The faults leap immediately to the eye. But when over the faulty spot, someone obligingly places a magnifying glass to make it even more colossal, illuminating it with the pitiless, terrible light of day, to the point that the most natural accidents of the skin jump out at the terrified eye, how do you think you'd feel about that?
This is precisely what has happened to France. Its incontestable faults, which economic growth, the shock of interests, of ideas, sufficiently explains, have been enlarged under the hands of its most powerful writers and have become monsters. And thus, Europe soon sees it as a monster. The people that are so depicted, aren't they the horror of the world. Are there enough armies, fortresses, to surround them and watch them up to the favorable moment for destroying them?"
Michelet is employing reactionary tropes that will later come to political fruition under Stalin -- the idea of the critic as traitor, and the people as monstrously traduced. But the Le Pen vs. Chirac contest coming up is a product of Michelet's Peuple. And guess what? That series of writers -- Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola -- they were right, they were a thousand times right: there's a monster in France, and it is stirring, stirring...
In a decade, the Third Way has effectually buried every left wing party that embraced it, except for Tony Blair's Labour Party -- and for Mr. Blair, the hens, or is it the vultures, are coming home to roost. Especially in the aftermath of his poodle act for Mr. Bush. The British have traditionally, and inexplicably, imagined themselves collectively as a bull-dog -- but even the British don't necessarily want to see their leader flaunt a fetch it boy attitude, which Mr. Blair displayed in his pow-wow with his master in Crawford, Texas (not exactly Yalta. More like, Y'allta).
And now Jospin. A socialist leader who couldn't find one single issue that would distinguish him from his conservative opponent. Not that the French socialist party has accrued a lot of credit since Mitterand was elected on the promise of breaking with the logic of capitalism, and was promptly broken by the logic of capitalism. Still, there is the 35 hour working week; there is the social service sector, embattled but still funtioning; and there is the rhetorical opposition to the avatar of the logic of capitalism in our time, the USA. Not that LI approves of that rhetoric very much -- in fact, its inhuman consequence in Rwanda remains to be explored. We'd like nothing better than to see the Mitterandish clique that encouraged the genocide in Rwanda marched into court in the Hague. Still, in the Middle East, and in Russia, and in Latin America, the French hesitancy about the American model has served as a hopeful corrective to those of us who think unleashing a pure market economy upon the helpless multitudes is a recipe for disaster.
The point is this, though: even as the leaders of the left were dismantling it, they were assuring us that they were merely modernizing it. The new face of the left, for the new millenium. In the film, Brazil, there is a recurring comic gag concerning older women getting their faces lifted. The face lifts involved swathing their heads in plastic sheeting for a period, and then cutting the sheeting off. The result was an ephemeral, goggly youthfulness, a grotesque contrast with their aging bodies, followed by a period in which the face would "leak." Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon would insist on the beauty of the warped faces, the drooping cheeks, the flacid noses and weird lips -- a congery of impressively hag-like features -- he'd produced.
That plastic surgeon is Jospin. He is Blair. He is Clinton. He is Schroeder. The collective direction of the lefty parties in the West has been lost not because the rank and file are suffering a crisis of faith. No, it is because the leadership longed for that respectability that comes from betraying every one of labor's ideals to Capital. In exchange, the leadership got touted by the editorialists of the world's leading newspapers. The leaders got to hang out at Davos. And they lost all credibility with their followers. It is a nightmarish situation. How can you vote for a liberal, in the United States, for instance, when your choice is between George Bush and Al Gore? Between a man owned lock stock and oil barrel by energy companies, and a man who shilled for the defense industry in the Arabian Peninsula, and never met a corporate contributor he wouldn't do a favor for. The choice is no choice. In the end, the policy of accomodation to the right serves only ... the right.
This is from Michelet's Le Peuple
Ce qu' on remarque le mieux sur une personne
qui est nue, c' est telle ou telle partie, qui sera
d�fectueuse. Le d�faut d' abord saute aux yeux.
Que serait-ce, si une main obligeante pla�ait sur
ce d�faut m�me un verre grossissant qui le rendrait
colossal, qui l' illuminerait d' un jour terrible,
impitoyable, au point que les accidents les plus
naturels de la peau ressortiraient � l' oeil
effray� !
Voil� pr�cis�ment ce qui est arriv� � la France.
Ses d�fauts incontestables, que l' activit�
croissante, le choc des int�r�ts, des id�es,
expliquent suffisamment, ont grossi sous la main de
ses puissants �crivains, et sont devenus des
monstres. Et voil� que l' Europe tout � l' heure la
voit comme un monstre elle-m�me...
Le peuple qu' on peint ainsi, n' est-ce pas l' effroi
du monde ? Y a-t-il assez d' arm�es, de forteresses,
pour le cerner, le surveiller, jusqu' � ce qu' un
moment favorable se pr�sente pour l' accabler ?
"What one sees first about a person who is nude is that such and such a part is defective. The faults leap immediately to the eye. But when over the faulty spot, someone obligingly places a magnifying glass to make it even more colossal, illuminating it with the pitiless, terrible light of day, to the point that the most natural accidents of the skin jump out at the terrified eye, how do you think you'd feel about that?
This is precisely what has happened to France. Its incontestable faults, which economic growth, the shock of interests, of ideas, sufficiently explains, have been enlarged under the hands of its most powerful writers and have become monsters. And thus, Europe soon sees it as a monster. The people that are so depicted, aren't they the horror of the world. Are there enough armies, fortresses, to surround them and watch them up to the favorable moment for destroying them?"
Michelet is employing reactionary tropes that will later come to political fruition under Stalin -- the idea of the critic as traitor, and the people as monstrously traduced. But the Le Pen vs. Chirac contest coming up is a product of Michelet's Peuple. And guess what? That series of writers -- Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola -- they were right, they were a thousand times right: there's a monster in France, and it is stirring, stirring...
Thursday, April 18, 2002
Remora
Washington Post headlines the Italian strike that brought a million people into the street. NYT story about the Italian paralysis...
No, just joking.
Not that there wasn't a general strike -- a magical phrase to the IWW lefties among us -- in Italy. Not that it didn't paralyse Italy. Not that it didn't bring a million people into the street. But a fact like that is much too inconvenient for American papers.
Liberation, yesterday, had the story (which has spilled into the French election, today -- Jospin accusing Chirac of being a French Berlusconi):
Here's what it looks like in French:
Contre le projet de r�forme gouvernemental de l'article 18 du statut des travailleurs, qui r�glemente les licenciements abusifs, plusieurs millions d'Italiens ont r�pondu hier � l'appel � la gr�ve g�n�rale lanc� par les syndicats. Selon les chiffres des trois grandes conf�d�rations italiennes (CGIL, CISL et UIL), plus de 13 millions de personnes ont cess� le travail, le taux de participation atteignant pr�s de 100 % dans certains secteurs.
Paralysie. A Florence, pr�s de 400 000 travailleurs sont descendus dans la rue derri�re le leader de la CGIL, Sergio Cofferati (lire ci-contre), tandis que de nombreux cort�ges ont envahi les rues de Milan (300 000 personnes), Bologne (350 000), Rome (200 000) ou Palerme (100 000).
Translation:
Against the proposed governmental "reform"[ LI Note -- we have grown tired of the abuse of "reform" to mean corrupting the old Keynsian system of protecting the countervailing power of labor by acceeding to the most outrageous demands of capital. So we are putting the scare quotes into play. And if you don't like it, find your own translator] of article 18 of the labor code concerning abusive layoffs, more than a million Italians responded to the appeal for a general strike broadcast by the unions. According to the numbers of the three big unions (CGIL, CISL, and UIL), more than 13 million people stopped working, the level of participation attaining nearly 100% in certain sectors.
Paralysis
In Florence, nearly 400,000 workers descended in the streets behind the leader of the CGIL, Sergio Cofferati, while numerous groups invaded the streets of Milan (300,000 people), Bologna (350,00), Rome (200,000) and Palermo (100,000)
The NYT did have an article on the strike yesterday, and with typical Times hauteur , (the hauteur of the true globalist), surveyed the scene and asked what the fuss was about:
"Though the actual changes he has proposed are considered minor, labor leaders see this as the first step in a government plan to undermine job security. Then, too, Mr. Cofferati, who leads the largest Italian union, is considered a rising star on the left.The unions did succeed well enough that there was no television coverage of today's demonstrations � since journalists, too, were on strike.
Much of the center of Rome became a street carnival as protesters waved huge puppets of Mr. Berlusconi dressed as Napoleon and as the pope. Roberto Benigni, the actor and film maker, told a crowd in the Piazza del Popolo that he would not speak because he, too, was on strike."
Of course, to the Times, Berlusconi's labor law is only common sense. LI searched Gibbons Decline and Fall of the R.E. for a phrase evocative of the neo-liberal attitude in these fair States. Gibbon, he never fails us! Here is his description of the foreign policy, as we'd call it now, of the Roman Empire: "Those princes [of their outer dependencies], whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had per formed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude."
Quite.
Finally, since LI is in a hormonally lefty mood this morning -- there is good news from France, where the Trotskyist candidate, Arlette Languiller, a typist, is getting 10 percent in the polls -- ahead of the Greens and the Commies. Hooray!
This year, she has turned out to be a surprisingly sharp thorn in the side of the left-wing political establishment. Polls show that this retired, Trotskyist typist may get as much as 10 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections set for Sunday.
That could mean third or fourth place in a field of 16 candidates � ahead of both the candidates for the Communist Party and the Greens, the two left-wing parties that have been junior partners in the ruling government coalition for the last five years. The likely winners of the Sunday vote, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, are expected to garner just 18 to 22 percent each."
Apparently Arlette -- as she is known -- has come under the gun, since her numbers rose. The trotskyists have been accused of being cultists. Well, duh. Of course they are cultists. Trotsky's critique of bureaucracy preceeded the irresistable plunge into roccoco parlimentarian excess, factionalism, and distemper that has been the mark of every Trotskyist part every since. Who cares? Arlette isn't going to win -- she is simply going to make the powers that be nervous. That's her job.
Washington Post headlines the Italian strike that brought a million people into the street. NYT story about the Italian paralysis...
No, just joking.
Not that there wasn't a general strike -- a magical phrase to the IWW lefties among us -- in Italy. Not that it didn't paralyse Italy. Not that it didn't bring a million people into the street. But a fact like that is much too inconvenient for American papers.
Liberation, yesterday, had the story (which has spilled into the French election, today -- Jospin accusing Chirac of being a French Berlusconi):
Here's what it looks like in French:
Contre le projet de r�forme gouvernemental de l'article 18 du statut des travailleurs, qui r�glemente les licenciements abusifs, plusieurs millions d'Italiens ont r�pondu hier � l'appel � la gr�ve g�n�rale lanc� par les syndicats. Selon les chiffres des trois grandes conf�d�rations italiennes (CGIL, CISL et UIL), plus de 13 millions de personnes ont cess� le travail, le taux de participation atteignant pr�s de 100 % dans certains secteurs.
Paralysie. A Florence, pr�s de 400 000 travailleurs sont descendus dans la rue derri�re le leader de la CGIL, Sergio Cofferati (lire ci-contre), tandis que de nombreux cort�ges ont envahi les rues de Milan (300 000 personnes), Bologne (350 000), Rome (200 000) ou Palerme (100 000).
Translation:
Against the proposed governmental "reform"[ LI Note -- we have grown tired of the abuse of "reform" to mean corrupting the old Keynsian system of protecting the countervailing power of labor by acceeding to the most outrageous demands of capital. So we are putting the scare quotes into play. And if you don't like it, find your own translator] of article 18 of the labor code concerning abusive layoffs, more than a million Italians responded to the appeal for a general strike broadcast by the unions. According to the numbers of the three big unions (CGIL, CISL, and UIL), more than 13 million people stopped working, the level of participation attaining nearly 100% in certain sectors.
Paralysis
In Florence, nearly 400,000 workers descended in the streets behind the leader of the CGIL, Sergio Cofferati, while numerous groups invaded the streets of Milan (300,000 people), Bologna (350,00), Rome (200,000) and Palermo (100,000)
The NYT did have an article on the strike yesterday, and with typical Times hauteur , (the hauteur of the true globalist), surveyed the scene and asked what the fuss was about:
"Though the actual changes he has proposed are considered minor, labor leaders see this as the first step in a government plan to undermine job security. Then, too, Mr. Cofferati, who leads the largest Italian union, is considered a rising star on the left.The unions did succeed well enough that there was no television coverage of today's demonstrations � since journalists, too, were on strike.
Much of the center of Rome became a street carnival as protesters waved huge puppets of Mr. Berlusconi dressed as Napoleon and as the pope. Roberto Benigni, the actor and film maker, told a crowd in the Piazza del Popolo that he would not speak because he, too, was on strike."
Of course, to the Times, Berlusconi's labor law is only common sense. LI searched Gibbons Decline and Fall of the R.E. for a phrase evocative of the neo-liberal attitude in these fair States. Gibbon, he never fails us! Here is his description of the foreign policy, as we'd call it now, of the Roman Empire: "Those princes [of their outer dependencies], whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had per formed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude."
Quite.
Finally, since LI is in a hormonally lefty mood this morning -- there is good news from France, where the Trotskyist candidate, Arlette Languiller, a typist, is getting 10 percent in the polls -- ahead of the Greens and the Commies. Hooray!
This year, she has turned out to be a surprisingly sharp thorn in the side of the left-wing political establishment. Polls show that this retired, Trotskyist typist may get as much as 10 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections set for Sunday.
That could mean third or fourth place in a field of 16 candidates � ahead of both the candidates for the Communist Party and the Greens, the two left-wing parties that have been junior partners in the ruling government coalition for the last five years. The likely winners of the Sunday vote, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, are expected to garner just 18 to 22 percent each."
Apparently Arlette -- as she is known -- has come under the gun, since her numbers rose. The trotskyists have been accused of being cultists. Well, duh. Of course they are cultists. Trotsky's critique of bureaucracy preceeded the irresistable plunge into roccoco parlimentarian excess, factionalism, and distemper that has been the mark of every Trotskyist part every since. Who cares? Arlette isn't going to win -- she is simply going to make the powers that be nervous. That's her job.
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