Remora
The terrorists are the ones eating mango mousse.
Two reports in the Village Voice today on the plutocrat's ball, otherwise known as the World Economic Forum. Usually this enclave of the disgustingly wealthy and unintelligently powerful meets at Davos. Unfortunately, we live in a world where loopholes in environmental regulations sometimes allow the importation of alien species -- the tiger mussel has invaded the Great Lakes Ecosystem, and the WEF has migrated to NYC. Anarcho protesters are going to try to make the place hot for them -- mais alors, there is the problem that in the USA, right now, dissent is automatically equated to terrorism. Prepare to read about anarchos vandalizing Starbucks and such; the word vandalize won't be used about the police use of water cannons and nightsticks on the fragile skeletal structure of protestors, since presumably one skeletal structure can be replaced with another, while the destruction of a Starbucks is an attack on a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
An article entitled, appropriately, Schmooze operator, contains a report by one Sasha Frere-Jones about attending the Davos confab, and fab it was to the participants:
"Accompanying my wife (invited by the WEF to attend because of her work to level the playing field for women in corporate America), I attended Davos in January of 2001. For a week, the approximately 2000 assembled players participated in panel discussions and schmoozed over mango mousse. Attendees were issued "smart" name tags and wireless iPaq computers. African nationals often outnumbered Americans in the conference hall lobby, English was not the default language for small talk, and people were unfailingly warm.
The point of being there, if you average out the participant testimonials and official press releases, is to be Somebody With a Good Idea for the World, Somebody With Money, or both."
It must be nice to be leveling the playing field and playing in a field so manifestly unlevel -- but of course, you have to be inside the establishment to change it, as the Clinton era liberal would say. But Limited Inc locks onto the mango mousse. Yes indeed, reader, here, here we surely have stumbled upon the master-sign, much as jungle explorers, in some old Tarzan flick, immediately recognize the shed panties on the forest floor and look up in anguish, exclaiming Jane!. Coding third world fruit and first world cuisine, but hedging against a too exotic third world culinary vernacular (termite mousse would have been, I suppose, outre, and Sperm Whale mousse would have given away, well, the fact that these are the inheritors of the biggest killers on the planet... and they still are) and, at the same time, against anything too, well, ancien regime for the American pups -- this is where the anarcho element really starts. People throwing mango mousse have bankrupted Argentina, contrived a system of derivatives trading that will eventually blow up national economies, as it is now blowing up corporations, and systematically promote an economic system in which they are awarded in such disproportion as to make the slave owners of the ancient world blush.
So, who do you think we are going to arrest? Well, another VV article reports on the expected cop crackdown on the protestors:
"In the post-9-11 world of law enforcement, cops see these brick throwers and car burners as almost Al Qaeda-like, down to their transnational wandering, their leaders' wealthy backgrounds, and their fundamentalist message. The anti-globalization movement objects to the unfettered migration of capital in search of the best deal on labor, and holds the not-unreasonable paranoia of a global corporate oligarchy.
Of course, that same migrating capital�as with arms maker Krupp, explosives king Nobel, and yellow-journalism baron Hearst�is what fuels its yang. By 1996, one of the movement's funding organizations had banked more than $34 million to fuel its agenda, according to Internet versions of a Left Business Observer essay. The publication goes on to report that the founder of this group has an Ivy League M.B.A., a track record at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and money provided by well-heeled parents from the retail trade. "
Life, baby. Sometimes I can't stand it.
Thursday, January 31, 2002
Wednesday, January 30, 2002
Dope
My friend was, indeed, dissatisfied with yesterday's post (and if you don't know what I mean, lunkhead, see yesterday's post). Limited Inc, like Coolidge's secretary of state, Henry Stimson, believes that gentlemen don't open other gentleman's mail -- so we aren't going to quote our friend's animadversions about our post, except to sum them up as the observation that we ramble on entertainingly, but to little point. However, we we will quote our own email reply:
"... I have a pretty straightforward view that the Middle East is not that exotic, or incomprehensible, vis a vis the West; and that the necessary framework for a civil society is missing in most Middle Eastern countries because of the convergence of two seemingly opposing interests: on the one hand, the theocratic, and on the other hand, the Western. While the theocratic impulse gets its strength, I think, from a false sense of nostalgia that becomes politically powerful when both the rural class and the educated, urban middle feel disempowered, the Western influence is directed, pretty consistently, at one goal: keep the oil flowing cheaply. This simple rule entails a complex politics, because sometimes it seems like the West is willing to forego cheap oil -- such as the petro from Iraq -- for more urgent political reasons. But I think the Iraq business basically stems from a fear that the Saudis will be displaced by an expansionist state, not by any feeling for the oppression of the Iraqis by the mad megalo Hussein. So that the pretence, which was floating about when the Gulf War was fought, that the Western alliance wanted democracy was a surface excuse that lost its force when the West achieved its real objective of making Iraq less threatening.
Does this mean I think the West is evil? No. The West is composed of opposing forces, too, temporary alliances, ephemeral idealisms. Certainly I hope I am a small part of the force that is secular, democratic, egalitarian, liberty loving. And that force basically thinks that a just society requires that the force of the rulers be modified by the power of the ruled to replace them; that minorities be protected systematically -- which means guaranteeing rights, and generating an independent judiciary to enforce those rights; that the political economy not be wholly controlled by an elite. Etc. These are pretty simple things to me. The logical mistake, I think, that is often made by Westerners is to think, okay, we encourage the secular, humanist state and then all of our interests are coordinated. That's simply false. If the Sauds, or the Iraqis, became democratic in the deep sense tomorrow, their interests would still not correspond to the interests of, say, America. Some of the interests would be similar, some dissimilar. I think the advantage of civil society is that, in the end, diverging interests don't require mortal hostility. In that sense, American idealists, since Wilson (who opposed the French and British plan to carve up the Middle East into protectorates with odd, stupid territories with absurd names like Iraq) are almost always right in the long run."
Now, those who know and love Limited Inc (alas, how few!) know that we are ultra relativists. And so they may want to know how we reconcile our relativism with the seemingly universal claims we are making here for human rights.
This doesn't really seem problematic to me. It is simply a part of saying, if there is a state, there needs to be human rights in order to limit that state. If there is governance of another sort, such as tribal governance, that, too, produces limits. Those limits will be attached weakly to the rights accorded to all. You have no right to say what you will in your average Pentecostal church -- meaning that you can kicked out of that church without recourse. Limiting the ability of the church, or the state, to punish you is allowing the process of relativism to work -- because relativism necessarily needs differences to relativize. Does this mean that human rights discourse is universal? No, it means that a progressive politics attachs it to cultures and states, if and when they exist. In fact, if relativism has anything substantial to say about culture and human beings, it consists in this: 1. that cultural diversity is unavoidable, an essential part of what culture is -- cultures arise and form themselves with regard to their differences; 2. the value of culture, and of the human beings who become bearers of culture, can't be abstracted from the formation of culture and human beings as culture bearers. 3. These insights are bound to perspectives that we have in this age and space and culture. This doesn't mean that we have to respect other perspectives in this age and culture -- such as one that would say there is no human right to speech attaching to state dominance. Relativism isn't the same as tolerance for any position. It is odd that this jump is commonly made, as if that were self-evident. Relativisms can come in different types, from those that counsel tolerance like some Buddhist monk sunk in an ultimate trance to those that promote a robust struggle for survival among different points of view, like some Nietzsche freak. Count me among the Nietzsche freaks. My relativism comes out of the idea that any point of view is formed by struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
There will be those who do not recognize, in what I'm saying, the relativism they heard attacked in Philosophy 101. Sorry. Limited Inc.'s relativism can accomodate Lord Acton's definition:
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. The state is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its own immediate sphere." The question of whether this liberty is too individualistic doesn't seem sociologically relevant to us. Most men and women will only do their duty as custom and opinion, authority and majorities, defines it. To form other authorities, majorities, customs and opinions -- to have, in other words, an openess to difference - is the very use and function of human rights. And this is where we stand, so help us deity - or non-deity, or nature, or as you like it.
My friend was, indeed, dissatisfied with yesterday's post (and if you don't know what I mean, lunkhead, see yesterday's post). Limited Inc, like Coolidge's secretary of state, Henry Stimson, believes that gentlemen don't open other gentleman's mail -- so we aren't going to quote our friend's animadversions about our post, except to sum them up as the observation that we ramble on entertainingly, but to little point. However, we we will quote our own email reply:
"... I have a pretty straightforward view that the Middle East is not that exotic, or incomprehensible, vis a vis the West; and that the necessary framework for a civil society is missing in most Middle Eastern countries because of the convergence of two seemingly opposing interests: on the one hand, the theocratic, and on the other hand, the Western. While the theocratic impulse gets its strength, I think, from a false sense of nostalgia that becomes politically powerful when both the rural class and the educated, urban middle feel disempowered, the Western influence is directed, pretty consistently, at one goal: keep the oil flowing cheaply. This simple rule entails a complex politics, because sometimes it seems like the West is willing to forego cheap oil -- such as the petro from Iraq -- for more urgent political reasons. But I think the Iraq business basically stems from a fear that the Saudis will be displaced by an expansionist state, not by any feeling for the oppression of the Iraqis by the mad megalo Hussein. So that the pretence, which was floating about when the Gulf War was fought, that the Western alliance wanted democracy was a surface excuse that lost its force when the West achieved its real objective of making Iraq less threatening.
Does this mean I think the West is evil? No. The West is composed of opposing forces, too, temporary alliances, ephemeral idealisms. Certainly I hope I am a small part of the force that is secular, democratic, egalitarian, liberty loving. And that force basically thinks that a just society requires that the force of the rulers be modified by the power of the ruled to replace them; that minorities be protected systematically -- which means guaranteeing rights, and generating an independent judiciary to enforce those rights; that the political economy not be wholly controlled by an elite. Etc. These are pretty simple things to me. The logical mistake, I think, that is often made by Westerners is to think, okay, we encourage the secular, humanist state and then all of our interests are coordinated. That's simply false. If the Sauds, or the Iraqis, became democratic in the deep sense tomorrow, their interests would still not correspond to the interests of, say, America. Some of the interests would be similar, some dissimilar. I think the advantage of civil society is that, in the end, diverging interests don't require mortal hostility. In that sense, American idealists, since Wilson (who opposed the French and British plan to carve up the Middle East into protectorates with odd, stupid territories with absurd names like Iraq) are almost always right in the long run."
Now, those who know and love Limited Inc (alas, how few!) know that we are ultra relativists. And so they may want to know how we reconcile our relativism with the seemingly universal claims we are making here for human rights.
This doesn't really seem problematic to me. It is simply a part of saying, if there is a state, there needs to be human rights in order to limit that state. If there is governance of another sort, such as tribal governance, that, too, produces limits. Those limits will be attached weakly to the rights accorded to all. You have no right to say what you will in your average Pentecostal church -- meaning that you can kicked out of that church without recourse. Limiting the ability of the church, or the state, to punish you is allowing the process of relativism to work -- because relativism necessarily needs differences to relativize. Does this mean that human rights discourse is universal? No, it means that a progressive politics attachs it to cultures and states, if and when they exist. In fact, if relativism has anything substantial to say about culture and human beings, it consists in this: 1. that cultural diversity is unavoidable, an essential part of what culture is -- cultures arise and form themselves with regard to their differences; 2. the value of culture, and of the human beings who become bearers of culture, can't be abstracted from the formation of culture and human beings as culture bearers. 3. These insights are bound to perspectives that we have in this age and space and culture. This doesn't mean that we have to respect other perspectives in this age and culture -- such as one that would say there is no human right to speech attaching to state dominance. Relativism isn't the same as tolerance for any position. It is odd that this jump is commonly made, as if that were self-evident. Relativisms can come in different types, from those that counsel tolerance like some Buddhist monk sunk in an ultimate trance to those that promote a robust struggle for survival among different points of view, like some Nietzsche freak. Count me among the Nietzsche freaks. My relativism comes out of the idea that any point of view is formed by struggle against other points of view -- it isn't given to us, ab nihilo.
There will be those who do not recognize, in what I'm saying, the relativism they heard attacked in Philosophy 101. Sorry. Limited Inc.'s relativism can accomodate Lord Acton's definition:
"By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion. The state is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its own immediate sphere." The question of whether this liberty is too individualistic doesn't seem sociologically relevant to us. Most men and women will only do their duty as custom and opinion, authority and majorities, defines it. To form other authorities, majorities, customs and opinions -- to have, in other words, an openess to difference - is the very use and function of human rights. And this is where we stand, so help us deity - or non-deity, or nature, or as you like it.
Tuesday, January 29, 2002
Remora
Unwisely, Limited Inc pledged to write about Bernard Lewis yesterday. A friend sent us a Paul Kennedy's review of B.L.'s latest book. This friend remarked on the last graf of that review, which reads:
"What, then, is to be done? At the end of the day, Lewis
argues, the answer lies within the Muslim world itself.
Either its societies, especially those in the Middle East,
will continue in ''a downward spiral of hate and spite,
rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that
implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can
abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences
and join their talents, energies and resources in a common
creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the
rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a
bit, though probably not much. ''For the time being, the
choice is their own.'' With this final sentence, and all
that precedes it, Lewis has done us all -- Muslim and
non-Muslim alike -- a remarkable service."
Well, there seems to be two choices outlined here -- things can get worse, or things can get better. To which Limited Inc would add, things can stay the same. This pretty much completes the futures open to all God's creatures. What is interesting is the crash of all that nineties globalization confidence. Remember, the end of history, and the iron path to capitalist nirvana? Seemingly, that has hit the dustbin. Now we have whole regions that can only influence themselves. Still, Limited Inc, with our youthful infatuation with Marxist internationalism, thinks that the globalist slant shouldn't be thrown out entirely. Surely the idea that the outside world can "help a bit" significantly underplays the position of the "outside world" -- which is the world, presumably, that uses oil and is lubricated regularly with Arabic money, invested in the intricate business of equities, bonds and derivatives. Where else are Pakistani generals going to hide their mega-bucks? Mr. Kennedy's seems to think that the Middle East can be wholly disconnected from the outside world -- but if the last two centuries have shown us anything, they've shown us that the outside world definitely wants things from the Middle East, and means to get them come hell or high water.
Okay, okay, Kennedy's teeter-totter ending is not Lewis' fault. Hell, Limited Inc has ended many a review in a platitudinous antithesis -- it is a remarkable fact about reviewing that one almost invariably runs out of things to say at the end of a review. Or, to put it more truthfully, things to say that sound like closure -- usually, there are plenty of things to say that would overleap the bounds of the review, but inspiration has to be reigned in if you are going to get a check in the mail from your publication.
So here is a better example of Lewis's over-generalizing. It comes from a New Yorker article entitled, typically, the Rage of Islam. In Lewis' world, Islam is a uniform thing that is always as splenetic as a crack addled gangbuster. The essay lifts off with this analysis of one of bin Laden's Unplugged vids:
"In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October 7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American�and, no doubt, European�observers of the Middle Eastern scene began an anxious search for something that had happened "more than eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners�the people he was addressing�picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires, was finally defeated�its capital, Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a secular nationalist movement."
Lewis' confidence that Pakistani and Egyptian and Iraqi listeners were signifying along with bin L. is odd. Personally, I doubt that there is a lot of moping in Pakistan about the fate of Mehmet VI. And there is something really wierd about the phrase "bin Laden's Muslim listeners" -- so odd that Lewis adds the opaque modifier, the people he was addressing. Because the implication, one congenial to Lewis' mindset, is that all Muslims were grooving on this kind of message. Lewis, however, knows he would be in trouble if he let that cat out of the bag. That bin L.'s intended audience was Muslim, as opposed to Buddhist, Hindu, or Satanist seems certain. Jim Jones' audience, in long ago Guyana, was Christian. Point is, the difference between set and subset, here, is considerable. Now, one might make the argument that it is in the extremes that we see the hidden essence. Sometimes Limited Inc is up for that kind of argument. But it has to be made in order to be made plausible. It is never made by Bernard L.
It is this kind of sloppy extapolating, this hanky panky with generalizations, that drives Bernard L.'s opponent (in heaven and hell and the New York Review of Books), Edward Said, fairly batty. Said counters with a sometimes ineffectual nominalism, saying that Islam isn't one thing. That seems obvious. The deeper problem is that Bernard L.'s generalizations seem to go down so well with his Christian/neo-liberal listeners -- the people he is addressing. So they tranquilly swallow things like this:
"In current American usage, the phrase "that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target audiences�even by the large proportion of that audience that was illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it may be�indeed, often is�slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant."
Now, Bernie L. might be so far out of the petit bourgeois lifestyle (the one in which Limited Inc was nourished) that he's never gone to church, but if he had, he'd be amazed that Americans are continually refering to things that happened 2000 years ago. Worse, the one trope that Americans recognize from history, that can be used by every evangelist with confidence, has to do with the fall of the Roman empire -- which happened before the seventh century. It is referred to in rapid, incomplete allusions, but the empire is always thought to have fallen because of some special depravity of the Romans that the Americans are repeating. You don't, however, hear a lot of American commentators making much of our vivid and revanchist sense of this history, and what it says about our culture. In the same way that these thinkers don't often allude to the anti-scientific attitude that consistently shows up in polls -- only a minority of Americans believe in evolution, and stadiums full of them believe we all arrived on this planet six thousand years ago. If we took our survey of what America was like from your average AM radio sunday sermon, it would be a misconceived image indeed. Cultures contain contradictions. Lewis, however, thrives off describing Islam as if it were all one thing -- one horrid consistency, slice through it how you will. And this is what makes me rather avoid the man.
Well, I imagine the friend who asked for this post will not be happy with it. Limited Inc does try to please, but so often we simply... fail.
Unwisely, Limited Inc pledged to write about Bernard Lewis yesterday. A friend sent us a Paul Kennedy's review of B.L.'s latest book. This friend remarked on the last graf of that review, which reads:
"What, then, is to be done? At the end of the day, Lewis
argues, the answer lies within the Muslim world itself.
Either its societies, especially those in the Middle East,
will continue in ''a downward spiral of hate and spite,
rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression,'' with all that
implies for a horrible and troubled future; or ''they can
abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences
and join their talents, energies and resources in a common
creative endeavor'' to the benefit of themselves and the
rest of our planet. Perhaps the outside world can help a
bit, though probably not much. ''For the time being, the
choice is their own.'' With this final sentence, and all
that precedes it, Lewis has done us all -- Muslim and
non-Muslim alike -- a remarkable service."
Well, there seems to be two choices outlined here -- things can get worse, or things can get better. To which Limited Inc would add, things can stay the same. This pretty much completes the futures open to all God's creatures. What is interesting is the crash of all that nineties globalization confidence. Remember, the end of history, and the iron path to capitalist nirvana? Seemingly, that has hit the dustbin. Now we have whole regions that can only influence themselves. Still, Limited Inc, with our youthful infatuation with Marxist internationalism, thinks that the globalist slant shouldn't be thrown out entirely. Surely the idea that the outside world can "help a bit" significantly underplays the position of the "outside world" -- which is the world, presumably, that uses oil and is lubricated regularly with Arabic money, invested in the intricate business of equities, bonds and derivatives. Where else are Pakistani generals going to hide their mega-bucks? Mr. Kennedy's seems to think that the Middle East can be wholly disconnected from the outside world -- but if the last two centuries have shown us anything, they've shown us that the outside world definitely wants things from the Middle East, and means to get them come hell or high water.
Okay, okay, Kennedy's teeter-totter ending is not Lewis' fault. Hell, Limited Inc has ended many a review in a platitudinous antithesis -- it is a remarkable fact about reviewing that one almost invariably runs out of things to say at the end of a review. Or, to put it more truthfully, things to say that sound like closure -- usually, there are plenty of things to say that would overleap the bounds of the review, but inspiration has to be reigned in if you are going to get a check in the mail from your publication.
So here is a better example of Lewis's over-generalizing. It comes from a New Yorker article entitled, typically, the Rage of Islam. In Lewis' world, Islam is a uniform thing that is always as splenetic as a crack addled gangbuster. The essay lifts off with this analysis of one of bin Laden's Unplugged vids:
"In his pronouncements, bin Laden makes frequent references to history. One of the most dramatic was his mention, in the October 7th videotape, of the "humiliation and disgrace" that Islam has suffered for "more than eighty years." Most American�and, no doubt, European�observers of the Middle Eastern scene began an anxious search for something that had happened "more than eighty years" ago, and came up with various answers. We can be fairly sure that bin Laden's Muslim listeners�the people he was addressing�picked up the allusion immediately and appreciated its significance. In 1918, the Ottoman sultanate, the last of the great Muslim empires, was finally defeated�its capital, Constantinople, occupied, its sovereign held captive, and much of its territory partitioned between the victorious British and French Empires. The Turks eventually succeeded in liberating their homeland, but they did so not in the name of Islam but through a secular nationalist movement."
Lewis' confidence that Pakistani and Egyptian and Iraqi listeners were signifying along with bin L. is odd. Personally, I doubt that there is a lot of moping in Pakistan about the fate of Mehmet VI. And there is something really wierd about the phrase "bin Laden's Muslim listeners" -- so odd that Lewis adds the opaque modifier, the people he was addressing. Because the implication, one congenial to Lewis' mindset, is that all Muslims were grooving on this kind of message. Lewis, however, knows he would be in trouble if he let that cat out of the bag. That bin L.'s intended audience was Muslim, as opposed to Buddhist, Hindu, or Satanist seems certain. Jim Jones' audience, in long ago Guyana, was Christian. Point is, the difference between set and subset, here, is considerable. Now, one might make the argument that it is in the extremes that we see the hidden essence. Sometimes Limited Inc is up for that kind of argument. But it has to be made in order to be made plausible. It is never made by Bernard L.
It is this kind of sloppy extapolating, this hanky panky with generalizations, that drives Bernard L.'s opponent (in heaven and hell and the New York Review of Books), Edward Said, fairly batty. Said counters with a sometimes ineffectual nominalism, saying that Islam isn't one thing. That seems obvious. The deeper problem is that Bernard L.'s generalizations seem to go down so well with his Christian/neo-liberal listeners -- the people he is addressing. So they tranquilly swallow things like this:
"In current American usage, the phrase "that's history" is commonly used to dismiss something as unimportant, of no relevance to current concerns, and, despite an immense investment in the teaching and writing of history, the general level of historical knowledge in our society is abysmally low. The Muslim peoples, like everyone else in the world, are shaped by their history, but, unlike some others, they are keenly aware of it. In the nineteen-eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century. These were not detailed narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, and yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be understood by their target audiences�even by the large proportion of that audience that was illiterate. Middle Easterners' perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, by the schools, and by the media, and, although it may be�indeed, often is�slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant."
Now, Bernie L. might be so far out of the petit bourgeois lifestyle (the one in which Limited Inc was nourished) that he's never gone to church, but if he had, he'd be amazed that Americans are continually refering to things that happened 2000 years ago. Worse, the one trope that Americans recognize from history, that can be used by every evangelist with confidence, has to do with the fall of the Roman empire -- which happened before the seventh century. It is referred to in rapid, incomplete allusions, but the empire is always thought to have fallen because of some special depravity of the Romans that the Americans are repeating. You don't, however, hear a lot of American commentators making much of our vivid and revanchist sense of this history, and what it says about our culture. In the same way that these thinkers don't often allude to the anti-scientific attitude that consistently shows up in polls -- only a minority of Americans believe in evolution, and stadiums full of them believe we all arrived on this planet six thousand years ago. If we took our survey of what America was like from your average AM radio sunday sermon, it would be a misconceived image indeed. Cultures contain contradictions. Lewis, however, thrives off describing Islam as if it were all one thing -- one horrid consistency, slice through it how you will. And this is what makes me rather avoid the man.
Well, I imagine the friend who asked for this post will not be happy with it. Limited Inc does try to please, but so often we simply... fail.
Remora
Fame and consequences
Limited Inc doesn't understand celebrity, but we suspect that celebrity culture and modern forms of tyranny -- the personality cult, the panopticon corporation, the junta with the franchise torture chambers -- are related to each other in numerous unmentionable ways, joined in dark hallways and needle strewn toilet stalls. Obviously, at this site we are doing our best to remain obscure, so that we don't have this problem.
The Observer, Sunday, had a series of articles about modern celebrity. Some were trite -- for instance, this idea that Lord Byron was the first modern celebrity, which gets bandied about like a truism, just doesn't seem to be true. Marie Antoinette, who figured as a woman of capacious orifices and voracious sexual appetite in innumerable little street pamphlets in the 1780s, was a celebrity of the Britney Spears type. And what about Werther? Although a fictional character, he was a celebrity of the Harry Potter type -- that is, becoming known for being known. I've never read, and will never read, a Harry Potter book, yet I recognize the little boy face and the glasses instantly.
But to get to the dirty, Stalinistic heart of the star maker machinery, read this piece in the Observer by Lynn Barber.
Here are a couple grafs:
"The commonest demand is for copy approval - which means they want to see the article before publication and delete anything they don't like. In other words, power of censorship. Then there is picture approval - same idea, where the celebs get to choose which photos can be published and which can't. Robert Redford's press office used to put out 'instructions to picture editors' about where his photographs should be retouched - 'the wrinkled area between his lower lip and chin', 'the veins on his nose', 'the area around the throat and neck'.
Then there is 'writer approval' - the chosen weapon of top Hollywood PR Pat Kingsley. She simply bans any writers who ever write anything nasty about one of her clients from ever interviewing any of her clients again. I got the black spot from Kingsley years ago when I interviewed Nick Nolte for Vanity Fair. He didn't like the tone of my questions and Kingsley pulled the plug, before I'd even written a word. Of course, Vanity Fair could have defied her and published my interview anyway - but then where would it have got its future cover stars? (Kingsley's power increased further still last year when her company PMK merged with Huvane Baum Halls, previously a rival outfit in entertainment publicity. The resulting merger now means that one firm controls access to many of the A-list in Hollywood and Britain, including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.)"
Of course, this is all silly, right, mein Herr? Except that if you look around you, you will find that newspapers and magazines are full of this stuff -- these celeb stories -- which are admittedly censored. And this censoring is one small part of the culture machinery. To find out why movies mostly stink, check out how they are publicized, and who owns the media of publicity. Check out how Time advertises -- by "reporting' -- entertainment that AOL-Time-Warner-Godzilla owns. Monopoly debases, PR cretinizes. The implication for the way we live our lives is dire. Every time Gwyneth Paltrow is interviewed in Vanity Fair, every time Tom Hanks pronounces mindlessly on World War II for an HBO behind the scenes special, a little part of all of us dies. Our only hope is in stalkers and madmen.
Fame and consequences
Limited Inc doesn't understand celebrity, but we suspect that celebrity culture and modern forms of tyranny -- the personality cult, the panopticon corporation, the junta with the franchise torture chambers -- are related to each other in numerous unmentionable ways, joined in dark hallways and needle strewn toilet stalls. Obviously, at this site we are doing our best to remain obscure, so that we don't have this problem.
The Observer, Sunday, had a series of articles about modern celebrity. Some were trite -- for instance, this idea that Lord Byron was the first modern celebrity, which gets bandied about like a truism, just doesn't seem to be true. Marie Antoinette, who figured as a woman of capacious orifices and voracious sexual appetite in innumerable little street pamphlets in the 1780s, was a celebrity of the Britney Spears type. And what about Werther? Although a fictional character, he was a celebrity of the Harry Potter type -- that is, becoming known for being known. I've never read, and will never read, a Harry Potter book, yet I recognize the little boy face and the glasses instantly.
But to get to the dirty, Stalinistic heart of the star maker machinery, read this piece in the Observer by Lynn Barber.
Here are a couple grafs:
"The commonest demand is for copy approval - which means they want to see the article before publication and delete anything they don't like. In other words, power of censorship. Then there is picture approval - same idea, where the celebs get to choose which photos can be published and which can't. Robert Redford's press office used to put out 'instructions to picture editors' about where his photographs should be retouched - 'the wrinkled area between his lower lip and chin', 'the veins on his nose', 'the area around the throat and neck'.
Then there is 'writer approval' - the chosen weapon of top Hollywood PR Pat Kingsley. She simply bans any writers who ever write anything nasty about one of her clients from ever interviewing any of her clients again. I got the black spot from Kingsley years ago when I interviewed Nick Nolte for Vanity Fair. He didn't like the tone of my questions and Kingsley pulled the plug, before I'd even written a word. Of course, Vanity Fair could have defied her and published my interview anyway - but then where would it have got its future cover stars? (Kingsley's power increased further still last year when her company PMK merged with Huvane Baum Halls, previously a rival outfit in entertainment publicity. The resulting merger now means that one firm controls access to many of the A-list in Hollywood and Britain, including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.)"
Of course, this is all silly, right, mein Herr? Except that if you look around you, you will find that newspapers and magazines are full of this stuff -- these celeb stories -- which are admittedly censored. And this censoring is one small part of the culture machinery. To find out why movies mostly stink, check out how they are publicized, and who owns the media of publicity. Check out how Time advertises -- by "reporting' -- entertainment that AOL-Time-Warner-Godzilla owns. Monopoly debases, PR cretinizes. The implication for the way we live our lives is dire. Every time Gwyneth Paltrow is interviewed in Vanity Fair, every time Tom Hanks pronounces mindlessly on World War II for an HBO behind the scenes special, a little part of all of us dies. Our only hope is in stalkers and madmen.
Monday, January 28, 2002
Remora
According to a NYT article today, Cayman Island hosts more than 400 banks and 47,000 partnerships.
Not to fear, however, upscale reader. The NYT is infinitely understanding of the necessity, in the hot to trot global economy, of such multitudinous activity:
"Although Enron's multitude of partnerships have raised suspicions, officials and executives here said such companies are legitimately used by major corporations to defer taxes, maximize profits or provide a tax-neutral setting for deals involving businesses in two countries with different tax rates. Aircraft deals have become popular here, for example, because the island's stability is acceptable to manufacturers and insurers who worry about the political climate or legal protections of some Third World clients."
Ah, we understand now. If it is about Maximizing profits -- words that issue in thunder from the American exec's lips -- and we must, as the Nine Inch Nails song advises, bow down. One imagines the NYT about building the pyramids: Although Pharaoh Khufu's importation of slaves has raised suspicions of depopulating the Sudan, officials and executives here said that the Sudan was legitimately resourced in order to defer divine wrath, maximize the ruler's ability to proceed efficiently into the afterlife, and provide a working force capability for dangerous tasks unsuited to the court's own, more highly trained servants.
As though to emphasize the essential toothlessness of the criticism of Enron (mustn't let this spill over into criticizing deregulation itself, my god. The mantra must be defended), there's a story on the business page in which many a former consultant for Enron is quoted as to the essential soundness of the Enron business model
"According to experts who consulted for Enron in the field of finance, the company did not necessarily come up with a lot of powerful new ideas. Its strength was in synthesizing existing ideas, which sometimes led to innovative methods.
"They took a lot of finance theory and applied it in the context of their business," said Ramesh K. S. Rao, a professor of finance at the University of Texas who once consulted for Enron. "There was no magic to what they were doing."
Robert L. McDonald, a professor of finance at Northwestern, advised Enron on the use of derivatives from 1993 to 1995. He said the company needed advanced financial tools to price its derivatives, which specified energy products to be delivered at various times and sites while demand was uncertain. "That's a hard problem, so they were probably breaking some new ground trying to deal with that," he said. "It's the kind of thing that's easy to describe and may be hard to do."
Now, Limited Inc is a simple yokel, but isn't the question of expertise rather begged, here? Perhaps the experts that consulted for Enron displayed, in their spectacular bad judgment about what constitutes a good corporation, something like, well, in-expertise. It is a little like quoting professors of Marxist-Leninism who 'consulted' for the Soviet Union. And perhaps the interest of this group in maintaining an unregulated derivatives market should, uh, make us wonder whether this is the group of experts we want to turn to about Enron. The old excuse for the absense of oversight with regard to derivatives, hedge funds, and the like, is that these are games played by the rich exclusively for the rich. Why regulate, the story goes, when we are talking about multi-millionaires, who can take care of themselves? The problem with that argument is that it makes a bogus assumption: the money of the super-rich does not effect the rest of us. Well, it does. When the hedge fund of the super-rich borrows money from a bank, it automatically effects the clientele of the bank. When a trading company engages in rash energy derivatives trading that, for a brief time, brings about sharp increases in energy prices (California), it effects all the end users of energy. The excuse that somehow, high risk derivatives are separate from the rest of the economy, is threadbare. My brother told me that he listened to some Frontline last year, in which Kenny Boy Lay was interviewed, and that his impression was that Enron was pure evil. Limited Inc mentions this because we've talked to a person who works in the business school at UT who essentially said the same thing about listening to a talk given by some Enron exec about 'commodifying' water. These visceral responses register something important about the violation of a communal sense of decency -- a violation that expert consultants encourage, numb to this communal sense, which they dismiss as Luddite, or as out-group primitivism. Well, Limited Inc takes its stand with the hold-outs, the last adapters, the ones who resist. So there.
According to a NYT article today, Cayman Island hosts more than 400 banks and 47,000 partnerships.
Not to fear, however, upscale reader. The NYT is infinitely understanding of the necessity, in the hot to trot global economy, of such multitudinous activity:
"Although Enron's multitude of partnerships have raised suspicions, officials and executives here said such companies are legitimately used by major corporations to defer taxes, maximize profits or provide a tax-neutral setting for deals involving businesses in two countries with different tax rates. Aircraft deals have become popular here, for example, because the island's stability is acceptable to manufacturers and insurers who worry about the political climate or legal protections of some Third World clients."
Ah, we understand now. If it is about Maximizing profits -- words that issue in thunder from the American exec's lips -- and we must, as the Nine Inch Nails song advises, bow down. One imagines the NYT about building the pyramids: Although Pharaoh Khufu's importation of slaves has raised suspicions of depopulating the Sudan, officials and executives here said that the Sudan was legitimately resourced in order to defer divine wrath, maximize the ruler's ability to proceed efficiently into the afterlife, and provide a working force capability for dangerous tasks unsuited to the court's own, more highly trained servants.
As though to emphasize the essential toothlessness of the criticism of Enron (mustn't let this spill over into criticizing deregulation itself, my god. The mantra must be defended), there's a story on the business page in which many a former consultant for Enron is quoted as to the essential soundness of the Enron business model
"According to experts who consulted for Enron in the field of finance, the company did not necessarily come up with a lot of powerful new ideas. Its strength was in synthesizing existing ideas, which sometimes led to innovative methods.
"They took a lot of finance theory and applied it in the context of their business," said Ramesh K. S. Rao, a professor of finance at the University of Texas who once consulted for Enron. "There was no magic to what they were doing."
Robert L. McDonald, a professor of finance at Northwestern, advised Enron on the use of derivatives from 1993 to 1995. He said the company needed advanced financial tools to price its derivatives, which specified energy products to be delivered at various times and sites while demand was uncertain. "That's a hard problem, so they were probably breaking some new ground trying to deal with that," he said. "It's the kind of thing that's easy to describe and may be hard to do."
Now, Limited Inc is a simple yokel, but isn't the question of expertise rather begged, here? Perhaps the experts that consulted for Enron displayed, in their spectacular bad judgment about what constitutes a good corporation, something like, well, in-expertise. It is a little like quoting professors of Marxist-Leninism who 'consulted' for the Soviet Union. And perhaps the interest of this group in maintaining an unregulated derivatives market should, uh, make us wonder whether this is the group of experts we want to turn to about Enron. The old excuse for the absense of oversight with regard to derivatives, hedge funds, and the like, is that these are games played by the rich exclusively for the rich. Why regulate, the story goes, when we are talking about multi-millionaires, who can take care of themselves? The problem with that argument is that it makes a bogus assumption: the money of the super-rich does not effect the rest of us. Well, it does. When the hedge fund of the super-rich borrows money from a bank, it automatically effects the clientele of the bank. When a trading company engages in rash energy derivatives trading that, for a brief time, brings about sharp increases in energy prices (California), it effects all the end users of energy. The excuse that somehow, high risk derivatives are separate from the rest of the economy, is threadbare. My brother told me that he listened to some Frontline last year, in which Kenny Boy Lay was interviewed, and that his impression was that Enron was pure evil. Limited Inc mentions this because we've talked to a person who works in the business school at UT who essentially said the same thing about listening to a talk given by some Enron exec about 'commodifying' water. These visceral responses register something important about the violation of a communal sense of decency -- a violation that expert consultants encourage, numb to this communal sense, which they dismiss as Luddite, or as out-group primitivism. Well, Limited Inc takes its stand with the hold-outs, the last adapters, the ones who resist. So there.
Sunday, January 27, 2002
Remora
"There is a sense in which, if you chafe at the present complacently 'liberal' consensus, the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path," wrote Christopher Hitchens in an almost perfect takedown of that reputation a couple of years ago in The London Review. Sadly, the essay is unavailable on the Net, so I am quoting from Ignatieff's refutation in the Guardian. There's a recent demonstration of Berlin's general mediocrity in the New Republic -- a letter to George Kennan, no less, mandarin to mandarin communication, which we acolytes and students tremble in our boots to hear. Words of the mighty, man. Shall I excerpt, reader? Here is an example of country and western music masquerading as philosophy:
"...you say (and I am not quoting) that every man possesses a point of weakness, an Achilles' heel, and by exploiting this a man may be made a hero or a martyr or a rag. Again, if I understand you correctly, you think that Western civilisation has rested upon the principle that, whatever else was permitted or forbidden, the one heinous act which would destroy the world was to do precisely this--the deliberate act of tampering with human beings so as to make them behave in a way which, if they knew what they were doing, or what its consequences were likely to be, would make them recoil with horror and disgust. The whole of the Kantian morality (and I don't know about Catholics, but Protestants, Jews, Muslims and high-minded atheists believe it) lies in this; the mysterious phrase about men being "ends in themselves," to which much lip-service has been paid, with not much attempt to explain it, seems to lie in this: that every human being is assumed to possess the capacity to choose what to do, and what to be, however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie, however hemmed in by circumstances beyond his control; that all human love and respect rests upon the attribution of conscious motives in this sense; that all the categories, the concepts, in terms of which we think about and act towards one another--goodness, badness, integrity and lack of it, the attribution of dignity or honour to others which we must not insult or exploit, the entire cluster of ideas such as honesty, purity of motive, courage, sense of truth, sensibility, compassion, justice; and, on the other side, brutality, falseness, wickedness, ruthlessness, lack of scruple, corruption, lack of feelings, emptiness--all these notions in terms of which we think of others and ourselves, in terms of which conduct is assessed, purposes adopted--all this becomes meaningless unless we think of human beings as capable of pursuing ends for their own sakes by deliberate acts of choice--which alone makes nobility noble and sacrifices sacrifices. "
This sounds better on the jukebox than as an argument. The capacity to choose what to do, followed by the modifying "however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie," has that nice yodeling affect, like the honking of a truck going down the foggy road, leaving a diner. But if you are the coldhearted type (stick a thermometer in Limited Inc's heart and register that 32 degrees fahrenheit, baby), you might wonder what on earth this is supposed to mean. Where are those limits coming from, for one thing? Other choices? and the phrase about all human love and respect -- really? Love seems to me to be, to say the least, a problematic emotion to link to the capacity for choice -- are determinists really bad lovers? in fact, in the vocabulary of love, fate has featured for a long time, at least since the Troubadors, as a figure, an intensifier appropriate to the headiness of the sensual flow. Love obviously has a broader definition than is encompassed by describing Abelard's passion for Heloise - there's love of country, there's love of one's kids, etc. Still, Berlin's phrase has that coercive aura -- not a truth, but whatever it is, don't disagree with it, at the risk of being considered a bastard.
But Berlin gets more lachrymose, and more incoherent, as he goes on. Here he is commenting on Hegel and Marx:
"All this [the praise of our choicemaking volk] may seem an enormous platitude, but, if it is true, this is, of course, what ultimately refutes utilitarianism and what makes Hegel and Marx such monstrous traitors to our civilisation. When, in the famous passage, Ivan Karamazov rejects the worlds upon worlds of happiness which may be bought at the price of the torture to death of one innocent child, what can utilitarians, even the most civilised and humane, say to him? After all, it is in a sense unreasonable to throw away so much human bliss purchased at so small a price as one--only one--innocent victim, done to death however horribly--what after all is one soul against the happiness of so many? Nevertheless, when Ivan says he would rather return the ticket, no reader of Dostoevsky thinks this cold-hearted or mad or irresponsible; and although a long course of Bentham or Hegel might turn one into a supporter of the Grand Inquisitor, qualms remain."
This reading of Hegel is ludicrous, and derives more from Bertrand Russell's caricature of the guy in his History of Philosophy than any coming to grips with the passages re Antigone in the Phenomenology of Mind. And a closer reading of Ivan would rather complicate Berlin's scenario, since Ivan in the end simply holds the ticket, so to speak, chosing not to act when Karamazov pere is murdered. Of course, the father is no innocent, and that for the Berlin type, always transmitting sentimentality into necessity and the law of human nature, makes all the difference. It shouldn't for grown-ups.
"There is a sense in which, if you chafe at the present complacently 'liberal' consensus, the reputation of Isaiah Berlin stands like a lion in your path," wrote Christopher Hitchens in an almost perfect takedown of that reputation a couple of years ago in The London Review. Sadly, the essay is unavailable on the Net, so I am quoting from Ignatieff's refutation in the Guardian. There's a recent demonstration of Berlin's general mediocrity in the New Republic -- a letter to George Kennan, no less, mandarin to mandarin communication, which we acolytes and students tremble in our boots to hear. Words of the mighty, man. Shall I excerpt, reader? Here is an example of country and western music masquerading as philosophy:
"...you say (and I am not quoting) that every man possesses a point of weakness, an Achilles' heel, and by exploiting this a man may be made a hero or a martyr or a rag. Again, if I understand you correctly, you think that Western civilisation has rested upon the principle that, whatever else was permitted or forbidden, the one heinous act which would destroy the world was to do precisely this--the deliberate act of tampering with human beings so as to make them behave in a way which, if they knew what they were doing, or what its consequences were likely to be, would make them recoil with horror and disgust. The whole of the Kantian morality (and I don't know about Catholics, but Protestants, Jews, Muslims and high-minded atheists believe it) lies in this; the mysterious phrase about men being "ends in themselves," to which much lip-service has been paid, with not much attempt to explain it, seems to lie in this: that every human being is assumed to possess the capacity to choose what to do, and what to be, however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie, however hemmed in by circumstances beyond his control; that all human love and respect rests upon the attribution of conscious motives in this sense; that all the categories, the concepts, in terms of which we think about and act towards one another--goodness, badness, integrity and lack of it, the attribution of dignity or honour to others which we must not insult or exploit, the entire cluster of ideas such as honesty, purity of motive, courage, sense of truth, sensibility, compassion, justice; and, on the other side, brutality, falseness, wickedness, ruthlessness, lack of scruple, corruption, lack of feelings, emptiness--all these notions in terms of which we think of others and ourselves, in terms of which conduct is assessed, purposes adopted--all this becomes meaningless unless we think of human beings as capable of pursuing ends for their own sakes by deliberate acts of choice--which alone makes nobility noble and sacrifices sacrifices. "
This sounds better on the jukebox than as an argument. The capacity to choose what to do, followed by the modifying "however narrow the limits within which his choice may lie," has that nice yodeling affect, like the honking of a truck going down the foggy road, leaving a diner. But if you are the coldhearted type (stick a thermometer in Limited Inc's heart and register that 32 degrees fahrenheit, baby), you might wonder what on earth this is supposed to mean. Where are those limits coming from, for one thing? Other choices? and the phrase about all human love and respect -- really? Love seems to me to be, to say the least, a problematic emotion to link to the capacity for choice -- are determinists really bad lovers? in fact, in the vocabulary of love, fate has featured for a long time, at least since the Troubadors, as a figure, an intensifier appropriate to the headiness of the sensual flow. Love obviously has a broader definition than is encompassed by describing Abelard's passion for Heloise - there's love of country, there's love of one's kids, etc. Still, Berlin's phrase has that coercive aura -- not a truth, but whatever it is, don't disagree with it, at the risk of being considered a bastard.
But Berlin gets more lachrymose, and more incoherent, as he goes on. Here he is commenting on Hegel and Marx:
"All this [the praise of our choicemaking volk] may seem an enormous platitude, but, if it is true, this is, of course, what ultimately refutes utilitarianism and what makes Hegel and Marx such monstrous traitors to our civilisation. When, in the famous passage, Ivan Karamazov rejects the worlds upon worlds of happiness which may be bought at the price of the torture to death of one innocent child, what can utilitarians, even the most civilised and humane, say to him? After all, it is in a sense unreasonable to throw away so much human bliss purchased at so small a price as one--only one--innocent victim, done to death however horribly--what after all is one soul against the happiness of so many? Nevertheless, when Ivan says he would rather return the ticket, no reader of Dostoevsky thinks this cold-hearted or mad or irresponsible; and although a long course of Bentham or Hegel might turn one into a supporter of the Grand Inquisitor, qualms remain."
This reading of Hegel is ludicrous, and derives more from Bertrand Russell's caricature of the guy in his History of Philosophy than any coming to grips with the passages re Antigone in the Phenomenology of Mind. And a closer reading of Ivan would rather complicate Berlin's scenario, since Ivan in the end simply holds the ticket, so to speak, chosing not to act when Karamazov pere is murdered. Of course, the father is no innocent, and that for the Berlin type, always transmitting sentimentality into necessity and the law of human nature, makes all the difference. It shouldn't for grown-ups.
Remora
Campaign finance reform. Lives there a man with heart so dead, that to himself he has not said, I don't give a good goddamn about campaign reform? It is the kind of issue favored by newspaper editors, and the H.L. Mencken part of my heart already finds that suspicious or, what is worse, laughable. On the other hand, my hero, Ralph Nader, loves it. So why does Limited Inc feel mal de mer every time the subject comes around?
It isn't that we think campaigns can't be regulated. Politics is a market, and markets are necessarily subject to regulation of one kind or another, as previous posts have abundantly announced. Our idea is that, before we talk about amounts of money, we talk transparency. Transparency is a condition for understanding just how the market works -- and that primitive condition is still not met in politics. We think that disclosure laws that would force politicians who vote for, say, softening laws on tax havens, to list those contributors to their campaigns who might benefit from such votes would be a nice start. This is easier to do now than every before -- computers could easily match lists of contributors to votes which effect contributors. The kind of accounting Enron encouraged is the kind that goes on in D.C. every day -- with lobbyists acting as secret partners, and the trades being in bill writing, an art that exists at one remove from pick pocketing.
And another thing. There should definitely be firewalls between working for the guv and working for lobbying groups. That Wendy Gramm could quit heading the Commodity futures trade commission and blithely skip to a job at Enron should, obviously, be illegal. Corporations do this all the time -- they hire their head management honchos with clauses in their contracts specifying that the person hired is not allowed to work for a competitor for a certain period if the person quits. Government contracts for people who have the power that Ms. Gramm had should simply have the same wording.
But as for thinking that campaign finance reform will produce less bribed executive, legislative and judicial branches -- the politics of bribery begins with the composition of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. These folks have been ideologically bribed long before they fill their pockets with lucre. Who do they know? Who do they talk to? They know and talk to the most privileged. Most politicos, in their mothers' wombs, were already stewing in the greed, the overbearing self-righteousness, the hypocrisy, the slickness, that makes them what they are to mankind -- a species of Cain somehow come among us to rule over us with cliches, windiness, and that vile slogan in their hearts, am I my brother's keeper?
Okay, Limited Inc is going too far. Invective is one vector into fascism, and we have noted that, lately, we have tended to the intemperate. A-and we certainly prefer yahoos to Houyhnhnms when it comes to picking masters. But the point is: in politics as in any other area of life, rules are no substitute for content. The alienation of the great middle mass of Americans, struggling with credit cards, love, family, hope, labor and all the rest of it, has been built up from over two decades of the state's relentless war against its weakest members, and to do something about that, we need, well, the politics of content, not the politics of process.
That said, there is comic potential in the upcoming house fight about campaign reform. Common Cause, a sturdy soldier in this endless war, has published a nice survey of upcoming legislative follies. Here, for instance, is an addendum to the campaign finance bill sponsored by some Ohio republican named Ney:
The Ney bill purports to cap, rather than ban, soft money at $75,000 per corporate, union, or individual donor per party committee per year. Because both of the political parties have three national committees, a single donor could give $225,000 in soft money to the party of their choice each year. The same donor could, as many donors do, decide to give to both parties - and Ney-Wynn would allow one donor to give $450,000 if they spread their contributions around in $75,000 increments to the six national party committees. In a two-year cycle then, any corporation, labor union, or wealthy individual could give $900,000 in soft money in an election cycle.
But the Ney bill only proposes this so-called "cap" for the national party committees, and would encourage donors to give unlimited amounts of soft money to state party committees which would be free, under Ney, to launder this money into any federal election.
Under Ney-Wynn bill, a single donor could give $900,000 to the parties in an election cycle, and then give unlimited amounts to a state party committees if allowed by state law. By encouraging donors to steer excess soft money to state party committees, Ney-Wynn has the added negative effect of making it harder to have full disclosure of exactly who is funding a particular candidate's campaign. And unlike Shays-Meehan, the Ney bill would let federal officials - like the President, Vice President, or any Member of Congress - solicit any of this soft money personally."
Campaign finance reform. Lives there a man with heart so dead, that to himself he has not said, I don't give a good goddamn about campaign reform? It is the kind of issue favored by newspaper editors, and the H.L. Mencken part of my heart already finds that suspicious or, what is worse, laughable. On the other hand, my hero, Ralph Nader, loves it. So why does Limited Inc feel mal de mer every time the subject comes around?
It isn't that we think campaigns can't be regulated. Politics is a market, and markets are necessarily subject to regulation of one kind or another, as previous posts have abundantly announced. Our idea is that, before we talk about amounts of money, we talk transparency. Transparency is a condition for understanding just how the market works -- and that primitive condition is still not met in politics. We think that disclosure laws that would force politicians who vote for, say, softening laws on tax havens, to list those contributors to their campaigns who might benefit from such votes would be a nice start. This is easier to do now than every before -- computers could easily match lists of contributors to votes which effect contributors. The kind of accounting Enron encouraged is the kind that goes on in D.C. every day -- with lobbyists acting as secret partners, and the trades being in bill writing, an art that exists at one remove from pick pocketing.
And another thing. There should definitely be firewalls between working for the guv and working for lobbying groups. That Wendy Gramm could quit heading the Commodity futures trade commission and blithely skip to a job at Enron should, obviously, be illegal. Corporations do this all the time -- they hire their head management honchos with clauses in their contracts specifying that the person hired is not allowed to work for a competitor for a certain period if the person quits. Government contracts for people who have the power that Ms. Gramm had should simply have the same wording.
But as for thinking that campaign finance reform will produce less bribed executive, legislative and judicial branches -- the politics of bribery begins with the composition of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. These folks have been ideologically bribed long before they fill their pockets with lucre. Who do they know? Who do they talk to? They know and talk to the most privileged. Most politicos, in their mothers' wombs, were already stewing in the greed, the overbearing self-righteousness, the hypocrisy, the slickness, that makes them what they are to mankind -- a species of Cain somehow come among us to rule over us with cliches, windiness, and that vile slogan in their hearts, am I my brother's keeper?
Okay, Limited Inc is going too far. Invective is one vector into fascism, and we have noted that, lately, we have tended to the intemperate. A-and we certainly prefer yahoos to Houyhnhnms when it comes to picking masters. But the point is: in politics as in any other area of life, rules are no substitute for content. The alienation of the great middle mass of Americans, struggling with credit cards, love, family, hope, labor and all the rest of it, has been built up from over two decades of the state's relentless war against its weakest members, and to do something about that, we need, well, the politics of content, not the politics of process.
That said, there is comic potential in the upcoming house fight about campaign reform. Common Cause, a sturdy soldier in this endless war, has published a nice survey of upcoming legislative follies. Here, for instance, is an addendum to the campaign finance bill sponsored by some Ohio republican named Ney:
The Ney bill purports to cap, rather than ban, soft money at $75,000 per corporate, union, or individual donor per party committee per year. Because both of the political parties have three national committees, a single donor could give $225,000 in soft money to the party of their choice each year. The same donor could, as many donors do, decide to give to both parties - and Ney-Wynn would allow one donor to give $450,000 if they spread their contributions around in $75,000 increments to the six national party committees. In a two-year cycle then, any corporation, labor union, or wealthy individual could give $900,000 in soft money in an election cycle.
But the Ney bill only proposes this so-called "cap" for the national party committees, and would encourage donors to give unlimited amounts of soft money to state party committees which would be free, under Ney, to launder this money into any federal election.
Under Ney-Wynn bill, a single donor could give $900,000 to the parties in an election cycle, and then give unlimited amounts to a state party committees if allowed by state law. By encouraging donors to steer excess soft money to state party committees, Ney-Wynn has the added negative effect of making it harder to have full disclosure of exactly who is funding a particular candidate's campaign. And unlike Shays-Meehan, the Ney bill would let federal officials - like the President, Vice President, or any Member of Congress - solicit any of this soft money personally."
Saturday, January 26, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc had beer last night with a faithful reader, who made comments about Limited Inc's Enron obsession. The hint over the table was that we are becoming, shall we say, a little tedious on the subject. Without, this reader also implied, being particularly acute.
Well, that hurts. We are drawn to this story for the same reason a shark is drawn onward by the thrashing of the wounded swimmer -- it is the frenzy of instinct, against which man and beast strive in vain. We are, after all, caught in the net of our blood before we are caught in any other net, God help us all. Given our limited resources, we can't sift through documents given to us late at night by anonymous sources, but we have hoped to develop, for our readers, a sense of the connections between politics and the liberalized financial markets that are sometimes not adumbrated in the daily paper. The daily paper, after all, has to have room for the funnies, and often seems to pitch its prose to the level of your average reader of Beetle Bailey, and the precincts of the night in which oil forwards are traded between punks in highrises might disturb such a reader -- worse, might cause his eyes to glaze over.
Turn to James Ridgeway's column in the Village Voice this week. Here's a trail which surely needs scouting down:
"One unexplored approach to unraveling the Enron scandal may lie in the company's use of offshore tax havens, which have scant banking-disclosure laws. The company had over 2800 subsidiaries, some 800 of which were headquartered in nations officially designated as tax havens, including the Cayman Islands. In its lengthy study of Enron, the watchdog Public Citizen argues that by stashing money in this myriad of subsidiaries, Enron could conceivably hide from a growing list of creditors as well as U.S. tax investigators. Indeed, Enron appears not only to have paid no taxes for four of the past five years, but also may have been eligible for hundreds of millions in refunds."
[-- next graf: The Clinton administration tired to pressure the tax havens}
"With Bush, everything changed. Less than a month after his inauguration last year, his Treasury announced the Clinton deals had been placed under review. Last spring the administration told OECD that it wouldn't be going along with the Clinton agreements. Instead, on November 27 of last year, in the midst of the gathering Enron scandal and a few days before the company formally filed for bankruptcy, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said the Cayman Islands had agreed to start cooperating with U.S. investigators in 2004. That might sound tough, but it actually gives Enron and other companies a 25-month breather to clear the decks and find somewhere else to stash their money. Even then, as Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau charged, the Cayman Islands could back out of an agreement with three months' notice and suffer no repercussions."
The Bushies must be aware that the Cayman deal could blow up in their face. Here's a typical ass covering story from that front:
It isn't clear if Enron Corp.'s use of Caribbean tax havens is linked to the illicit financial activities that the U.S. is seeking to crack down on through tax treaties with offshore financial havens, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Friday.
"It's not clear that it's related in any way to the issue of illicit financial activities," O'Neill told reporters when asked whether he was worried about the use of offshore subsidiaries by bankrupt energy-trading giant Enron
What isn't clear to O'Neill could be clarified, with high resolution intensity, by a congressional investigation with teeth.
Limited Inc had beer last night with a faithful reader, who made comments about Limited Inc's Enron obsession. The hint over the table was that we are becoming, shall we say, a little tedious on the subject. Without, this reader also implied, being particularly acute.
Well, that hurts. We are drawn to this story for the same reason a shark is drawn onward by the thrashing of the wounded swimmer -- it is the frenzy of instinct, against which man and beast strive in vain. We are, after all, caught in the net of our blood before we are caught in any other net, God help us all. Given our limited resources, we can't sift through documents given to us late at night by anonymous sources, but we have hoped to develop, for our readers, a sense of the connections between politics and the liberalized financial markets that are sometimes not adumbrated in the daily paper. The daily paper, after all, has to have room for the funnies, and often seems to pitch its prose to the level of your average reader of Beetle Bailey, and the precincts of the night in which oil forwards are traded between punks in highrises might disturb such a reader -- worse, might cause his eyes to glaze over.
Turn to James Ridgeway's column in the Village Voice this week. Here's a trail which surely needs scouting down:
"One unexplored approach to unraveling the Enron scandal may lie in the company's use of offshore tax havens, which have scant banking-disclosure laws. The company had over 2800 subsidiaries, some 800 of which were headquartered in nations officially designated as tax havens, including the Cayman Islands. In its lengthy study of Enron, the watchdog Public Citizen argues that by stashing money in this myriad of subsidiaries, Enron could conceivably hide from a growing list of creditors as well as U.S. tax investigators. Indeed, Enron appears not only to have paid no taxes for four of the past five years, but also may have been eligible for hundreds of millions in refunds."
[-- next graf: The Clinton administration tired to pressure the tax havens}
"With Bush, everything changed. Less than a month after his inauguration last year, his Treasury announced the Clinton deals had been placed under review. Last spring the administration told OECD that it wouldn't be going along with the Clinton agreements. Instead, on November 27 of last year, in the midst of the gathering Enron scandal and a few days before the company formally filed for bankruptcy, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said the Cayman Islands had agreed to start cooperating with U.S. investigators in 2004. That might sound tough, but it actually gives Enron and other companies a 25-month breather to clear the decks and find somewhere else to stash their money. Even then, as Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau charged, the Cayman Islands could back out of an agreement with three months' notice and suffer no repercussions."
The Bushies must be aware that the Cayman deal could blow up in their face. Here's a typical ass covering story from that front:
It isn't clear if Enron Corp.'s use of Caribbean tax havens is linked to the illicit financial activities that the U.S. is seeking to crack down on through tax treaties with offshore financial havens, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Friday.
"It's not clear that it's related in any way to the issue of illicit financial activities," O'Neill told reporters when asked whether he was worried about the use of offshore subsidiaries by bankrupt energy-trading giant Enron
What isn't clear to O'Neill could be clarified, with high resolution intensity, by a congressional investigation with teeth.
Friday, January 25, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc can't remember - was it T.S. Eliot who said that every strong writer creates the tradition he follows? By which he meant that literature is not sequential, even if its chronology, by mundane necessity, is. A writer picks out, from the vantage point of those instincts found in his prose, those of his predecessors who tended towards him. Blake thought the same thing - Milton dreamed of Blake, and then Blake dreamed of Milton. Mixing memory and desire indeed.
Well, the same can be said for �. economic history. When bubbles are blowing, the historians turn a revisionist eye on previously dissed speculators. In the nineties, there was an outpouring of sympathy for, of all people, J.P. Morgan. So cultured! So right, so often! This acquisitive weasel, this man whose name was rightly cursed by every farmer and Pullman porter in the 1890s, the classic photograph of whom, stick raised, WC Fields proboscis burning, pig like eyes shining with malice and outrage, was muckraking enough. There's a nice review of the Strouse bio in the TNR which takes the reasonable tack that the rich are rare, and that their interests might not be the interests of their servants and others not so gifted with the Midas touch. Upstairs is not downstairs. For Strouse, and for her readers no doubt, dear Pierpont turns out to be less ogre than Clinton Democrat avant la letter, managing us into the tiered prosperity we so knew and loved during the boom and boomer years.
It has been the same story with the flood of dreary CEO autobiographies, a nineties genre to which any decent man would prefer seventies porn. This mass of self congratulation culminated with Jack Welch's this year. These CEOs believe their ghostwriters and pr men - they believe that leadership is a secret, yes, that it exist behind door number one in their ever so sharp minds. To read them, one would think that they all possess the magnetism of Rasputin, and the chess playing skills of Morphy. The deluded leading the manic - isn't this what irrational exuberance is all about? Give your leadership stock options and watch your accounting standards become all mysterious. Because the thing is - when you depend on those options, you are going to make the prices jump come hell or high water. And then you can refer fondly to those numbers in your book - proof positive that your secret skills were ace!
Jack Beatty has a little review in the Atlantic of a book about an earlier kind of titan - guys who made their money leading corporations that made things. Not financial innovators of Morgan's type. Yes, I know, curious as that sounds in our asset-lite corporate era. Curious as that sounds when the punchline is - you are in the business of selling information. This earlier group was a nasty bunch. Some of them were clearly bonkers. But they were all much more interesting than a dozen Jack Welches. Their very cruelty was spacious.
Here's a beautiful story about Henry Ford.
"Henry Ford persecuted initiative. Returning from a trip to Europe he discovered that his engineers had made small improvements to the Model T. "It was a better, smoother-riding vehicle, and his associates hoped to surprise and please him," David Halberstam writes in The Reckoning.
Ford walked around it several times. Finally he approached the left-hand door and ripped it off. Then he ripped off the other door. Then he bashed the windshield. Then he threw out the back seat and bashed the roof of the car with his shoe. During all this time he said nothing. There was no doubt whose car the T was and no doubt who was the only man permitted to change it."
Limited Inc can't remember - was it T.S. Eliot who said that every strong writer creates the tradition he follows? By which he meant that literature is not sequential, even if its chronology, by mundane necessity, is. A writer picks out, from the vantage point of those instincts found in his prose, those of his predecessors who tended towards him. Blake thought the same thing - Milton dreamed of Blake, and then Blake dreamed of Milton. Mixing memory and desire indeed.
Well, the same can be said for �. economic history. When bubbles are blowing, the historians turn a revisionist eye on previously dissed speculators. In the nineties, there was an outpouring of sympathy for, of all people, J.P. Morgan. So cultured! So right, so often! This acquisitive weasel, this man whose name was rightly cursed by every farmer and Pullman porter in the 1890s, the classic photograph of whom, stick raised, WC Fields proboscis burning, pig like eyes shining with malice and outrage, was muckraking enough. There's a nice review of the Strouse bio in the TNR which takes the reasonable tack that the rich are rare, and that their interests might not be the interests of their servants and others not so gifted with the Midas touch. Upstairs is not downstairs. For Strouse, and for her readers no doubt, dear Pierpont turns out to be less ogre than Clinton Democrat avant la letter, managing us into the tiered prosperity we so knew and loved during the boom and boomer years.
It has been the same story with the flood of dreary CEO autobiographies, a nineties genre to which any decent man would prefer seventies porn. This mass of self congratulation culminated with Jack Welch's this year. These CEOs believe their ghostwriters and pr men - they believe that leadership is a secret, yes, that it exist behind door number one in their ever so sharp minds. To read them, one would think that they all possess the magnetism of Rasputin, and the chess playing skills of Morphy. The deluded leading the manic - isn't this what irrational exuberance is all about? Give your leadership stock options and watch your accounting standards become all mysterious. Because the thing is - when you depend on those options, you are going to make the prices jump come hell or high water. And then you can refer fondly to those numbers in your book - proof positive that your secret skills were ace!
Jack Beatty has a little review in the Atlantic of a book about an earlier kind of titan - guys who made their money leading corporations that made things. Not financial innovators of Morgan's type. Yes, I know, curious as that sounds in our asset-lite corporate era. Curious as that sounds when the punchline is - you are in the business of selling information. This earlier group was a nasty bunch. Some of them were clearly bonkers. But they were all much more interesting than a dozen Jack Welches. Their very cruelty was spacious.
Here's a beautiful story about Henry Ford.
"Henry Ford persecuted initiative. Returning from a trip to Europe he discovered that his engineers had made small improvements to the Model T. "It was a better, smoother-riding vehicle, and his associates hoped to surprise and please him," David Halberstam writes in The Reckoning.
Ford walked around it several times. Finally he approached the left-hand door and ripped it off. Then he ripped off the other door. Then he bashed the windshield. Then he threw out the back seat and bashed the roof of the car with his shoe. During all this time he said nothing. There was no doubt whose car the T was and no doubt who was the only man permitted to change it."
Thursday, January 24, 2002
Remora
The Financial Times is pleased that Joe Lieberman is leading the Senate investigation into Enron. He will lead it quickly, sensibly, painlessly ... nowhere. Lieberman is a centrist, or perhaps it is better to say self-centrist, Democrat. Supposedly, he sees himself as the next president. His philosophy is to the right of Nelson Rockefeller -- which is why you can bet that nothing he uncovers with the Enron probe is going to rock his support for deregulation. The FT comments that many were dismayed to see him tugged leftward as Al Gore's vp -- yes, all that radical mouthing on maintaining the surplus. Emma Goldman returns, talking them fiscal prudence blues. Or was this Herbert Hoover in his itchier hours? Emma, to tell the truth, might have spit. Anyway, the FT is confidant that Lieberman will sink the Enron inquiry under so many fathoms of technicalities, long winded spiels, and his trademark rebarbative moralizing, that it will do minimum harm to Bush. Limited Inc agrees. Here's the final three grafs:
"But since then [the election of 2000], the pro-free-trade, pro-business message of New Democrats has again become one of Mr Lieberman's main calling cards.
For that reason, many Democrats hope Mr Lieberman gives them the patina of credibility that a more leftist, business-bashing member of their ranks would not. "Joe is the best possible person to have in the lead slot," says one senior Democratic policy adviser. "He will not conduct a witch-hunt."
To some Democrats, who would like to see a little more Republican blood on the floor, that is not ideal. But, with both parties feeling the political heat from the bankruptcy, it may be the most sensible approach."
The Financial Times is pleased that Joe Lieberman is leading the Senate investigation into Enron. He will lead it quickly, sensibly, painlessly ... nowhere. Lieberman is a centrist, or perhaps it is better to say self-centrist, Democrat. Supposedly, he sees himself as the next president. His philosophy is to the right of Nelson Rockefeller -- which is why you can bet that nothing he uncovers with the Enron probe is going to rock his support for deregulation. The FT comments that many were dismayed to see him tugged leftward as Al Gore's vp -- yes, all that radical mouthing on maintaining the surplus. Emma Goldman returns, talking them fiscal prudence blues. Or was this Herbert Hoover in his itchier hours? Emma, to tell the truth, might have spit. Anyway, the FT is confidant that Lieberman will sink the Enron inquiry under so many fathoms of technicalities, long winded spiels, and his trademark rebarbative moralizing, that it will do minimum harm to Bush. Limited Inc agrees. Here's the final three grafs:
"But since then [the election of 2000], the pro-free-trade, pro-business message of New Democrats has again become one of Mr Lieberman's main calling cards.
For that reason, many Democrats hope Mr Lieberman gives them the patina of credibility that a more leftist, business-bashing member of their ranks would not. "Joe is the best possible person to have in the lead slot," says one senior Democratic policy adviser. "He will not conduct a witch-hunt."
To some Democrats, who would like to see a little more Republican blood on the floor, that is not ideal. But, with both parties feeling the political heat from the bankruptcy, it may be the most sensible approach."
Wednesday, January 23, 2002
Remora
The nineties have yet to earn a definitive moniker as a decade. Limited Inc. suggest that it be called the New Math decade. Remember, a few years ago, the dispute over metrics? Okay, those of you who weren't swept up in the Net biz bubble might not remember the dispute over metrics, or care, but for a while, the argument, made by highly paid stock analysts, was that the metric that counted was not quarterly earnings, which had the mildewy, moth ball scent of Old Economics. No, we were another generation, and we wanted the more intangible numbers associated with number of hits, or expected number of hits, or the amount of energy, in watts, given off by the synergies and efficiencies the disintermediation of commodities effected in Seattle on an average Wednesday. Etc. Numbers suddenly became ineffable. They were so impressive, the new numbers - the sudden spike in productivity if you jiggered the way you measured it, the trickle down that was finally sticking in the average household, the wondrous surpluses. Here, finally, was the justification for every gutted social service. Ah those numbers ... too bad they were so, uh, wrong. The homework was turned in, and now we are turning it back with red marks scrawled across it. Listen to the sound of tumbling dice in this story from the AP:
"Federal surpluses over the next decade have plunged 71 percent from last year's estimates and annual deficits are back for the next two years, says a new congressional forecast that heralds a budget squeeze sure to color this fall's elections.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated on Wednesday a 10-year surplus of $1.6 trillion, a staggering $4 trillion less than the $5.6 trillion the office estimated only a year ago. Both projections by CBO, Congress' official budget analyst, are for 2002 through 2011, and assume no changes in current tax or spending programs."
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities issued a report a few days ago foreshadowing the CBO report. It analyzes what happened. Here's a long three grafs from that report:
"A tax cut reduces federal revenues and thus reduces projected budget surpluses. Similarly, increases in funding for federal programs boost federal expenditures and thereby reduce the surpluses. The decreases in revenues and increases in expenditures that occur as a result of a recession also shrink the surplus. In each of these cases, the reduction in the surplus results in an increase in the federal debt, compared with the level of debt that CBO had assumed in its previous budget projections. This increase in the debt automatically causes federal interest payments to rise, since interest must be paid on a higher level of debt. Moreover, the increase in the amount the federal government must pay in interest itself causes the surplus to shrink further. The new CBO estimates are likely to show that interest payments on the debt will cost the government roughly $1 trillion more between 2002 and 2011 than CBO projected just one year ago.
These increases in interest payments are a major factor in the deterioration of the surplus. To measure accurately the budgetary consequences of a tax cut, a spending increase, or any other change in the budget, one must include the resulting increase in interest payments caused by the tax cut, spending increase, or change in economic or other conditions.
The third trap that can lead to misuse of the CBO numbers occurs when someone includes the resulting increase in interest payments when measuring the effect on the surplus of some budget changes � such as the reduction in revenues and increase in expenditures that has occurred because of the recession � but then excludes the resulting interest increases when measuring the effects of other budgetary changes such as the tax cut. Such inconsistent treatment of interest payments leads to apples-to-oranges comparisons when assessing the relative impact of various factors on the change in the surplus."
Well, the CBPP, being properly wonkish, doesn't go for the jugular about the CBO projections. We will. Being 71 percent wrong on your projections gives you, what, a D? no, surely an F, here. It's one of those who-flicked-the-switch-on-the-Chernobyl- control-board kind of mistakes. In a more rational world, the admission that one's projections were that far off should lead to peremptory firing. At the very least, we should pack up the CBO, lock stock and barrel, and send it to Houston, to work with their confreres in the Arthur Andersen office. This is what comes of having a politics in total disconnect with reality: a presidential election fought over prescription drug prices for the Floridian elderly, an issue that burned out December 17, 2000; a tax cut using figures so wildly off that they are more like dreams of a madman; and a President who has decided that his best strategy, as the economy continues sour, is to remind people that there's a war on. But like all disconnects, there's a purpose to the politics of illusion -- the purpose is to reward the haves, at no matter what cost to the country.
The nineties have yet to earn a definitive moniker as a decade. Limited Inc. suggest that it be called the New Math decade. Remember, a few years ago, the dispute over metrics? Okay, those of you who weren't swept up in the Net biz bubble might not remember the dispute over metrics, or care, but for a while, the argument, made by highly paid stock analysts, was that the metric that counted was not quarterly earnings, which had the mildewy, moth ball scent of Old Economics. No, we were another generation, and we wanted the more intangible numbers associated with number of hits, or expected number of hits, or the amount of energy, in watts, given off by the synergies and efficiencies the disintermediation of commodities effected in Seattle on an average Wednesday. Etc. Numbers suddenly became ineffable. They were so impressive, the new numbers - the sudden spike in productivity if you jiggered the way you measured it, the trickle down that was finally sticking in the average household, the wondrous surpluses. Here, finally, was the justification for every gutted social service. Ah those numbers ... too bad they were so, uh, wrong. The homework was turned in, and now we are turning it back with red marks scrawled across it. Listen to the sound of tumbling dice in this story from the AP:
"Federal surpluses over the next decade have plunged 71 percent from last year's estimates and annual deficits are back for the next two years, says a new congressional forecast that heralds a budget squeeze sure to color this fall's elections.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated on Wednesday a 10-year surplus of $1.6 trillion, a staggering $4 trillion less than the $5.6 trillion the office estimated only a year ago. Both projections by CBO, Congress' official budget analyst, are for 2002 through 2011, and assume no changes in current tax or spending programs."
The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities issued a report a few days ago foreshadowing the CBO report. It analyzes what happened. Here's a long three grafs from that report:
"A tax cut reduces federal revenues and thus reduces projected budget surpluses. Similarly, increases in funding for federal programs boost federal expenditures and thereby reduce the surpluses. The decreases in revenues and increases in expenditures that occur as a result of a recession also shrink the surplus. In each of these cases, the reduction in the surplus results in an increase in the federal debt, compared with the level of debt that CBO had assumed in its previous budget projections. This increase in the debt automatically causes federal interest payments to rise, since interest must be paid on a higher level of debt. Moreover, the increase in the amount the federal government must pay in interest itself causes the surplus to shrink further. The new CBO estimates are likely to show that interest payments on the debt will cost the government roughly $1 trillion more between 2002 and 2011 than CBO projected just one year ago.
These increases in interest payments are a major factor in the deterioration of the surplus. To measure accurately the budgetary consequences of a tax cut, a spending increase, or any other change in the budget, one must include the resulting increase in interest payments caused by the tax cut, spending increase, or change in economic or other conditions.
The third trap that can lead to misuse of the CBO numbers occurs when someone includes the resulting increase in interest payments when measuring the effect on the surplus of some budget changes � such as the reduction in revenues and increase in expenditures that has occurred because of the recession � but then excludes the resulting interest increases when measuring the effects of other budgetary changes such as the tax cut. Such inconsistent treatment of interest payments leads to apples-to-oranges comparisons when assessing the relative impact of various factors on the change in the surplus."
Well, the CBPP, being properly wonkish, doesn't go for the jugular about the CBO projections. We will. Being 71 percent wrong on your projections gives you, what, a D? no, surely an F, here. It's one of those who-flicked-the-switch-on-the-Chernobyl- control-board kind of mistakes. In a more rational world, the admission that one's projections were that far off should lead to peremptory firing. At the very least, we should pack up the CBO, lock stock and barrel, and send it to Houston, to work with their confreres in the Arthur Andersen office. This is what comes of having a politics in total disconnect with reality: a presidential election fought over prescription drug prices for the Floridian elderly, an issue that burned out December 17, 2000; a tax cut using figures so wildly off that they are more like dreams of a madman; and a President who has decided that his best strategy, as the economy continues sour, is to remind people that there's a war on. But like all disconnects, there's a purpose to the politics of illusion -- the purpose is to reward the haves, at no matter what cost to the country.
Monday, January 21, 2002
Remora
The prophets of Baal.
Elijah was one of the more sensible prophets in the Old Testament, combining Houdini's magic tricks and Commandante Marcos' light show of manifestos and media bravado. Plus he had an experimental attitude rare among the credulous prestidigitator set, dimly foreshadowing Bacon's aphorism: : "...in the true course of experiment, and in extending it to new effects, we should imitate the Divine foresight and order. For God, on the first day, only created light, and assigned a whole day to that work, without creating any material substance thereon. In like manner, we must first, by every kind of experiment, elicit the discovery of causes and true axioms, and seek for experiments which may afford light rather than profit."
It was in this spirit Elijah devised the first consumer comparison test. Here's the passage from Kings 1: 18:
19: Now therefore send, and gather to me all Israel unto mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the prophets of the groves four hundred, which eat at Jezebel's table.
20 So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together unto mount Carmel.
21 And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between 1two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.
22 Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men.
23 Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under:
24 And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the 1name of the LORD: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, It is well spoken.
25 And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under.
26 And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.
27 And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.
28 And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.
29 And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.
Now, readers, you know that Jehovah was on point that day. The Lord of Hosts rose to the experimental task, and sent flame down to the altar. The conclusion of the story is this:
"And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there."
Why is Limited Inc delivering this sermon? Trust me, reader, to have an (eventual) point. The prophets of Baal are still with us, and still calling for the sacrifice of the children. But they have a different name today: they are called, for instance, Chicago School Economists. And they are also averse to experiment, when it conflicts with theory. They would as easily explain the failure of divine conflagration as they explained the debacle of energy deregulation in California: it is always a matter of not having deregulated enough. And their numerous failures aren't succeeded by a healthy hacking up on the shores of the brook Kishon, but by commentary on Fox TV stuffing the worship of Baal down the people's throats. In numerous forums the Jezebels of the right would attack all Elijahs as essentially treasonous liberals, and King Ahab, no bright bulb he, appoints, as ocassion arises, commissions made up of prophets of Baal to investigate the bankruptcy of Baal.
Bringing us to Larry Eliot's column in the Guardian. It begins with a nice graf about the current state of inequality :
"Everybody knows that the world isn't fair. Inequality is part of the human condition. Always has been, always will be. What has never really been clear is just how unequal life is. Now, thanks to an economist at the World Bank, it is clear. The richest 50m people, huddled in Europe and North America, have the same income as 2.7bn poor people. The slice of the cake taken by 1% is the same size as that handed to the poorest 57%."
Ah, the prophets of Baal squeak, just think what would happen if those 50m people didn't have their wealth! Why, the poorest 57% would be getting no drippings at all!
In light of the recent plummeting of Argentina (a paradise of Baal theory) and Enron (a company that "got it"), the Baalistas should be on the defensive. They aren't, however, having the utopist's immunity to the evidence of the senses. Eliot's column goes on to compare Australia and New Zealand. Although it isn't well known in this country, New Zealand experienced the shock therapy of Thatcherism in the most thorough manner in the 80s:
"Starting in 1984, the country's Labour government said that this all had to change. It started by deregulating interest rates, removing international capital restrictions, floating the currency and removing agricultural subsidies.
Having got the taste for change, it then scrapped regulations on business, abolished import quotas, enshrined price stability in law as the sole object of monetary policy, forced workers into individual contracts, announced that budget deficits would eventually be banned, cut income taxes and slashed welfare benefits. This was not a detox regime: it was cold turkey."
Australia, on the other hand, didn't get it. It lumbered around in the Old Economy. It cut a little bit from its welfare state, it mouthed the usual claptrap about market solutions rather than government interference, and in the usual 80s manner the unions were undermined -- but not totally.
Well, children of Israel, guess what:
"The latest edition of Political Economy (Volume 14 number 1) contains a fascinating comparison of the track records of the two Australasian nations by Paul Dalziel, a New Zealand academic. His first conclusion is that New Zealand's living standards have suffered badly when compared to those in Australia." Dalziel quantifies "badly" like this: "... had output in New Zealand matched that in Australia, per capita incomes in New Zealand would have been almost NZ$5,000 (�1,473) higher by 1998 than they actually were. The cumulative loss to each individual was NZ$30,000 and the cost to the country was a chunky NZ$114bn."
And so it goes. Although we are supposed to be beyond all that crass class warfare stuff in the 21st century, class was never really abolished in the last twenty years. When we are asked to pursue economic policies that systematically benefit one class and systematically injure another class, we should recognize this advice for what it is: an old strategem in the old war of the ruling class against its subjects. It is a conflict that is not going to abate any time soon. I should point out that the parallel between the prophets of Baal and economists is not perfect. While the old style prophets "cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them," the new style prophets prefer to practice their bloodletting upon entirely other bodies: preferably the work force.
The prophets of Baal.
Elijah was one of the more sensible prophets in the Old Testament, combining Houdini's magic tricks and Commandante Marcos' light show of manifestos and media bravado. Plus he had an experimental attitude rare among the credulous prestidigitator set, dimly foreshadowing Bacon's aphorism: : "...in the true course of experiment, and in extending it to new effects, we should imitate the Divine foresight and order. For God, on the first day, only created light, and assigned a whole day to that work, without creating any material substance thereon. In like manner, we must first, by every kind of experiment, elicit the discovery of causes and true axioms, and seek for experiments which may afford light rather than profit."
It was in this spirit Elijah devised the first consumer comparison test. Here's the passage from Kings 1: 18:
19: Now therefore send, and gather to me all Israel unto mount Carmel, and the prophets of Baal four hundred and fifty, and the prophets of the groves four hundred, which eat at Jezebel's table.
20 So Ahab sent unto all the children of Israel, and gathered the prophets together unto mount Carmel.
21 And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between 1two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.
22 Then said Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the LORD; but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men.
23 Let them therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under: and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood, and put no fire under:
24 And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the 1name of the LORD: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, It is well spoken.
25 And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many; and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under.
26 And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called on the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they leaped upon the altar which was made.
27 And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.
28 And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them.
29 And it came to pass, when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded.
Now, readers, you know that Jehovah was on point that day. The Lord of Hosts rose to the experimental task, and sent flame down to the altar. The conclusion of the story is this:
"And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there."
Why is Limited Inc delivering this sermon? Trust me, reader, to have an (eventual) point. The prophets of Baal are still with us, and still calling for the sacrifice of the children. But they have a different name today: they are called, for instance, Chicago School Economists. And they are also averse to experiment, when it conflicts with theory. They would as easily explain the failure of divine conflagration as they explained the debacle of energy deregulation in California: it is always a matter of not having deregulated enough. And their numerous failures aren't succeeded by a healthy hacking up on the shores of the brook Kishon, but by commentary on Fox TV stuffing the worship of Baal down the people's throats. In numerous forums the Jezebels of the right would attack all Elijahs as essentially treasonous liberals, and King Ahab, no bright bulb he, appoints, as ocassion arises, commissions made up of prophets of Baal to investigate the bankruptcy of Baal.
Bringing us to Larry Eliot's column in the Guardian. It begins with a nice graf about the current state of inequality :
"Everybody knows that the world isn't fair. Inequality is part of the human condition. Always has been, always will be. What has never really been clear is just how unequal life is. Now, thanks to an economist at the World Bank, it is clear. The richest 50m people, huddled in Europe and North America, have the same income as 2.7bn poor people. The slice of the cake taken by 1% is the same size as that handed to the poorest 57%."
Ah, the prophets of Baal squeak, just think what would happen if those 50m people didn't have their wealth! Why, the poorest 57% would be getting no drippings at all!
In light of the recent plummeting of Argentina (a paradise of Baal theory) and Enron (a company that "got it"), the Baalistas should be on the defensive. They aren't, however, having the utopist's immunity to the evidence of the senses. Eliot's column goes on to compare Australia and New Zealand. Although it isn't well known in this country, New Zealand experienced the shock therapy of Thatcherism in the most thorough manner in the 80s:
"Starting in 1984, the country's Labour government said that this all had to change. It started by deregulating interest rates, removing international capital restrictions, floating the currency and removing agricultural subsidies.
Having got the taste for change, it then scrapped regulations on business, abolished import quotas, enshrined price stability in law as the sole object of monetary policy, forced workers into individual contracts, announced that budget deficits would eventually be banned, cut income taxes and slashed welfare benefits. This was not a detox regime: it was cold turkey."
Australia, on the other hand, didn't get it. It lumbered around in the Old Economy. It cut a little bit from its welfare state, it mouthed the usual claptrap about market solutions rather than government interference, and in the usual 80s manner the unions were undermined -- but not totally.
Well, children of Israel, guess what:
"The latest edition of Political Economy (Volume 14 number 1) contains a fascinating comparison of the track records of the two Australasian nations by Paul Dalziel, a New Zealand academic. His first conclusion is that New Zealand's living standards have suffered badly when compared to those in Australia." Dalziel quantifies "badly" like this: "... had output in New Zealand matched that in Australia, per capita incomes in New Zealand would have been almost NZ$5,000 (�1,473) higher by 1998 than they actually were. The cumulative loss to each individual was NZ$30,000 and the cost to the country was a chunky NZ$114bn."
And so it goes. Although we are supposed to be beyond all that crass class warfare stuff in the 21st century, class was never really abolished in the last twenty years. When we are asked to pursue economic policies that systematically benefit one class and systematically injure another class, we should recognize this advice for what it is: an old strategem in the old war of the ruling class against its subjects. It is a conflict that is not going to abate any time soon. I should point out that the parallel between the prophets of Baal and economists is not perfect. While the old style prophets "cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them," the new style prophets prefer to practice their bloodletting upon entirely other bodies: preferably the work force.
Remora
Black and conservative...
There's a story in the NYT Magazine about Glenn Loury, the economist and former totem black conservative -- a position that has now fallen to Shelby Steele (and no, Limited Inc. means totem, not token). Almost all stories about Glenn Loury begin by a cursory survey of his ideas before jettisoning them for a more gossipy, and perhaps interesting, survey of his life. It is a life that Ellison, or Leon Forrest, might have written, literature loose in the wild hinterlands of America -- or perhaps not so wild, since Loury's lifeline goes from the working class South Side of Chicago to the Reaganite high of the 80s. Recently, Loury has defected from the conservative movement, even resigning from the American Enterprise Institute after they sponsored Dinesh D'Souza's book on race. Fair has this appraisal of the D'Souza book:
"... D�Souza advocates legalizing racial discrimination. "What we need is a long-term strategy that holds the government to a rigorous standard of race neutrality," he wrote in The End of Racism, "while allowing private actors to be free to discriminate as they wish." In D�Souza�s vision, "individuals and companies would be allowed to discriminate in private transactions such as renting an apartment or hiring for a job." Lest there be any doubt as to his intent, D�Souza states: "Am I calling for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes."
Here's a graf from the the NYT Mag article that shows Columbus discovering the world is round:
"In a column called ''What's Wrong With the Right,'' published in the January-February 1996 issue of The American Enterprise journal, Loury wrote that while ''liberal methods'' on questions of race were certainly flawed, ''liberals sought to heal the rift in our body politic engendered by the institution of chattel slavery, and their goal of securing racial justice in America was, and is, a noble one. I cannot say with confidence that conservatism as a movement is much concerned to pursue that goal.''
When the Loury-D'Souza thrilla in D.C. was playing out, Paul Krugman wrote a sympathetic column about Loury in Slate. Krugman describes it thusly:
"But at some point Loury made the discovery that eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over again."
There is something very funny about the idea that intellectuals are above a loyalty test. Of course they aren't. Krugman, an exemplary Ivy League herd man who once had the audacity to question the free trade orthodoxy and retreated, precipitantly, from his own work once it got denounced by the right people, should know better. But the Krugman article does adumbrate Loury's original thesis better than the NYT Mag article, and that thesis is definitely interesting. Robert Sobel, the business history writer, made a point similar to Loury's in his last book, The Great Boom, when he described the foundations of the great American middle class in the post WWII period. The wealth of the great middle is founded, Sobel claims, in large part on property -- namely, housing. This is as true today as it was in 1952, despite 401K plans and other investments -- when you strip the wealth of your average bourgois down to its skivvies, you find an asset -- the great American home. Well, for thirty some years, that market was simply denied to blacks. Loury's original point, if Krugman is to be believed, is that past descrimination has effects on the present racial composition of wealth. Loury's sub-point is that the limit to Afro-American achievement is currently found in black behavior, rather than white racism. This point doesn't really follow, however, from his main thesis. It defines racism too narrowly, as merely a moral fact. It can't be emphasized enough that racism isn't simply unmotivated malevolence, a wallowing in hatred done by white men in KKK regalia. Rather, it plays a social function. It operates to give a definite economic lift to a certain segment of the populace. When that populace has incorporated its advantage over time, the advantage of overt racism diminishes. What guarded the white middle class in 1950 from competition can be cast off, as an unnecessary luxury, by that class' descendents, because the competitive edge has already been won. And of course I'm not even going to talk about the upper 5 percentile, the racial composition of which can be studied by looking at the pictures in Forbes magazines. If you see a picture of a black man or woman, it is almost always either a., an ad, or b., a picture of a grateful worker or manager posed with an indulgent CEO. What can't be questioned, once the hegemony of anti-racism as a feeling, rather than an economic factor, has been achieved, is the legitimacy of present gains, even though it has been admitted that those gains were the results of illegitimate means. In essence, you get the best of both worlds -- having renounced the devil of racism, one can feel that equal opportunity reigns, while at the same time one can enjoy the devil's bounty, in the form of ten generations of greater opportunity. As a game theoretical device, White America has played an unconsciously brilliant strategy. One even Krugman should appreciate.
Black and conservative...
There's a story in the NYT Magazine about Glenn Loury, the economist and former totem black conservative -- a position that has now fallen to Shelby Steele (and no, Limited Inc. means totem, not token). Almost all stories about Glenn Loury begin by a cursory survey of his ideas before jettisoning them for a more gossipy, and perhaps interesting, survey of his life. It is a life that Ellison, or Leon Forrest, might have written, literature loose in the wild hinterlands of America -- or perhaps not so wild, since Loury's lifeline goes from the working class South Side of Chicago to the Reaganite high of the 80s. Recently, Loury has defected from the conservative movement, even resigning from the American Enterprise Institute after they sponsored Dinesh D'Souza's book on race. Fair has this appraisal of the D'Souza book:
"... D�Souza advocates legalizing racial discrimination. "What we need is a long-term strategy that holds the government to a rigorous standard of race neutrality," he wrote in The End of Racism, "while allowing private actors to be free to discriminate as they wish." In D�Souza�s vision, "individuals and companies would be allowed to discriminate in private transactions such as renting an apartment or hiring for a job." Lest there be any doubt as to his intent, D�Souza states: "Am I calling for the repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Actually, yes."
Here's a graf from the the NYT Mag article that shows Columbus discovering the world is round:
"In a column called ''What's Wrong With the Right,'' published in the January-February 1996 issue of The American Enterprise journal, Loury wrote that while ''liberal methods'' on questions of race were certainly flawed, ''liberals sought to heal the rift in our body politic engendered by the institution of chattel slavery, and their goal of securing racial justice in America was, and is, a noble one. I cannot say with confidence that conservatism as a movement is much concerned to pursue that goal.''
When the Loury-D'Souza thrilla in D.C. was playing out, Paul Krugman wrote a sympathetic column about Loury in Slate. Krugman describes it thusly:
"But at some point Loury made the discovery that eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over again."
There is something very funny about the idea that intellectuals are above a loyalty test. Of course they aren't. Krugman, an exemplary Ivy League herd man who once had the audacity to question the free trade orthodoxy and retreated, precipitantly, from his own work once it got denounced by the right people, should know better. But the Krugman article does adumbrate Loury's original thesis better than the NYT Mag article, and that thesis is definitely interesting. Robert Sobel, the business history writer, made a point similar to Loury's in his last book, The Great Boom, when he described the foundations of the great American middle class in the post WWII period. The wealth of the great middle is founded, Sobel claims, in large part on property -- namely, housing. This is as true today as it was in 1952, despite 401K plans and other investments -- when you strip the wealth of your average bourgois down to its skivvies, you find an asset -- the great American home. Well, for thirty some years, that market was simply denied to blacks. Loury's original point, if Krugman is to be believed, is that past descrimination has effects on the present racial composition of wealth. Loury's sub-point is that the limit to Afro-American achievement is currently found in black behavior, rather than white racism. This point doesn't really follow, however, from his main thesis. It defines racism too narrowly, as merely a moral fact. It can't be emphasized enough that racism isn't simply unmotivated malevolence, a wallowing in hatred done by white men in KKK regalia. Rather, it plays a social function. It operates to give a definite economic lift to a certain segment of the populace. When that populace has incorporated its advantage over time, the advantage of overt racism diminishes. What guarded the white middle class in 1950 from competition can be cast off, as an unnecessary luxury, by that class' descendents, because the competitive edge has already been won. And of course I'm not even going to talk about the upper 5 percentile, the racial composition of which can be studied by looking at the pictures in Forbes magazines. If you see a picture of a black man or woman, it is almost always either a., an ad, or b., a picture of a grateful worker or manager posed with an indulgent CEO. What can't be questioned, once the hegemony of anti-racism as a feeling, rather than an economic factor, has been achieved, is the legitimacy of present gains, even though it has been admitted that those gains were the results of illegitimate means. In essence, you get the best of both worlds -- having renounced the devil of racism, one can feel that equal opportunity reigns, while at the same time one can enjoy the devil's bounty, in the form of ten generations of greater opportunity. As a game theoretical device, White America has played an unconsciously brilliant strategy. One even Krugman should appreciate.
Saturday, January 19, 2002
Remora
Adam Smith has presciently analyzed the peculiar psychological defects of Limited Inc. in this passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, concerning passions that derive from the imagination:
"Even of the passions derived from the imagination, those which take their origin from a peculiar turn or habit it has acquired, though they may be acknowledged to be perfectly natural, are, however, but little sympathized with. The imaginations of mankind, not having acquired that particular turn, cannot enter into them; and such passions, though they may be allowed to be almost unavoidable in some part of life, are always, in some measure, ridiculous. This is the case with that strong attachment which naturally grows up between two persons of different sexes, who have long fixed their thoughts upon one another. Our imagination not having run in the same channel with that of the lover, we cannot enter into the eagerness of his emotions. If our friend has been injured, we readily sympathize with his resentment, and grow angry with the very person with whom he is angry. If he has received a benefit, we readily enter into his gratitude, and have a very high sense of the merit of his benefactor. But if he is in love, though we may think his passion just as reasonable as any of the kind, yet we never think ourselves bound to conceive a passion of the same kind, and for the same person for whom he has conceived it. The passion appears to every body, but the man who feels it, entirely disproportioned to the value of the object; and love, though it is pardoned in a certain age because we know it is natural, is always laughed at, because we cannot enter into it. All serious and strong expressions of it appear ridiculous to a third person; and though a lover may be good company to his mistress, he is so to nobody else."
This must explain Limited Inc.'s obsession with the Enron story, which has engrossed our mind to the detriment of our pocketbook this week. Instead of seeking the easy money of book reviewing -- ah, reader, you can't imagine the veritable Golconda awaiting the lucky reviewer of Blah Blah Blah, the novel -- Limited Inc has been morosely pursuing an article about Enron's business press fan club, and the myth of efficiency. This article, once finished, will be shopped around hopefully to such outlets as Mother Jones, only to be rejected out of hand -- we foresee this already. But, in entire disproportion to the value of our contribution to the national culture (which consists entirely in summarizing forgettable plot lines), we are going to run in the channel of our obsession with with the same grim vigor Ahab once devoted to revenging his lost leg.
In any case, Andersen Accounting is becoming the (hopefully first) collateral casualty in this affair. In much the same way the Taliban fell when the US took action against Al Quaeda, Andersen is being rocked by its long collusion with Kenny Lay's grand scheme to make Enron, in effect, a giant energy derivatives hedge fund. Since Enron was a public corporation, such a scheme is illegal. But illegality, as any respectable contributor to political parties know, is in the eye of the beholder. Or rather, a particular set of eyes -- those belonging to the lowest stratum of our society. Of course, you know who I mean. I mean Congressmen, Senators, and members of the Executive branch. The Times this morning has an article about Anderson's reach in Washington:
Auditing Firms Gaining Muscle in Washington
By STEPHEN LABATON
Here are two grafs:
At the height of the fight between the industry and Mr. Levitt in the second half of 2000, all the Big Five accounting firms sharply increased their political donations and spending on lobbying. Andersen doubled its lobbying budget, to $1.6 million.
The investment paid off.
Among other proposals, Mr. Levitt sought to prohibit an accounting firm from performing both accounting functions and consulting services for the same company. That proposal threatened billions of dollars in revenues at the Big Five firms, and their defeat of the proposals in 2000 illustrated the industry's growing influence in Washington. Had the Levitt proposals been in place, it would not have been possible for
Andersen to bill Enron $27 million for consulting services last year while also billing $25 million for audits
There is also an article about Andersen's largess on the Public I site. This article names names.
"Last year, SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, Jr. proposed a rule that would have restricted the amount of non-audit-related consulting work that companies like Arthur Andersen and other Big Five accounting firms could do for their audit clients. Andersen opposed the rule, and hired the powerful lobby shop of Clark & Weinstock to argue its case.
Among the Clark & Weinstock lobbyists working Capitol Hill on behalf of Andersen were former congressman Vic Fazio (D-Calif.); Jim Matthews, former chief of staff to Rep. Thomas Manton (D-N.Y.); and Anne Urban, formerly Sen. Robert Kerrey's (D-Neb.) legislative director.
Under pressure from the Big Five, the Commission ultimately adopted a weak version of the rule that favored the accounting industry and left their consulting services virtually untouched. The rule required only the disclosure of how much money the accounting firm earned for consulting services from each company it audited. No limits were placed on the amount of money an audit firm could earn.'
Both Public I and the NYT share the idea that campaign finance reform would cure us of a corrupt legislature; a legislature that was forced to forego bribery would then tackle reforming the regulation of the auditing industry with its eyes righteously peeled for the the public good alone.
Limited Inc grants the argument against legalized bribery. But we have strong doubts about the political reach of campaign finance reform. The reason the big five auditing firms can basically run over the SEC is that there is no political base for reigning in the big five, or for reigning in Enron. Populism has abandoned its war against Wall Street. A feature of the American political scene since the 1870s, it dried up in the 1980s. It is now the common wisdom that Americans don't get 'excited' about such things as regulating auditors. No, Americans supposedly get more excited about the list of Airline hostesses in Gary Condit's little black book.
But this consensus is oddly ahistorical. If the farmers of Nebraska, in 1900, could get passionate about specie and the intricacy of gold-backed, versus silver-backed, currency, are their descendents, in Southern California, really so degenerate as to not understand or care about financial markets? On the contrary, I think they understand very well, when they want to. Certainly they are as affected by the allowance of gross corporate corruption as their great-grandpas were by manipulation of railroad stock. But the stomach for class warfare -- and make no mistake, reader, Wall Street has never been reformed without a strong whiff of gunpowder in the air -- has gone out of both parties. Does anybody seriously see the pitiable Joseph Lieberman, who is currently leading the charge against Enron in the Senate, as a potential Danton? He is the most piddling William Jennings Bryan ever thrown up by the centrist Democrats, making Limited Inc nostalgic for Dukakis, for Christ's sake.
The last sad remnant of populism, in fact, resides in the Republican party's intermittent appeals to Christian fundamentalism. I could imagine an opponent of Billy Tauzin making a good case with the voters that the man is owned by the companies he is supposedly investigating. I could imagine such a case catching on. But the case would have to overcome two formidable obstacles. One, the media is resolutely opposed to class warfare. Except for the tepid admonitions of editorialists to remember the neediest on December 25th, the press and tv aren't simply bribed -- they are literally owned and run by corporations, and the law among them is, do not stir up class warfare. Period. The other obstacle is that facing any group which has suffered a string of defeats. The audience for populism is defeatist. Street realism very wisely counsels cutting your losses -- for pursuing your losses very quickly takes you over the edge. It is that realism that keeps most people from the ballot box. Apathy is a wise choice when there are no real choices.
Adam Smith has presciently analyzed the peculiar psychological defects of Limited Inc. in this passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, concerning passions that derive from the imagination:
"Even of the passions derived from the imagination, those which take their origin from a peculiar turn or habit it has acquired, though they may be acknowledged to be perfectly natural, are, however, but little sympathized with. The imaginations of mankind, not having acquired that particular turn, cannot enter into them; and such passions, though they may be allowed to be almost unavoidable in some part of life, are always, in some measure, ridiculous. This is the case with that strong attachment which naturally grows up between two persons of different sexes, who have long fixed their thoughts upon one another. Our imagination not having run in the same channel with that of the lover, we cannot enter into the eagerness of his emotions. If our friend has been injured, we readily sympathize with his resentment, and grow angry with the very person with whom he is angry. If he has received a benefit, we readily enter into his gratitude, and have a very high sense of the merit of his benefactor. But if he is in love, though we may think his passion just as reasonable as any of the kind, yet we never think ourselves bound to conceive a passion of the same kind, and for the same person for whom he has conceived it. The passion appears to every body, but the man who feels it, entirely disproportioned to the value of the object; and love, though it is pardoned in a certain age because we know it is natural, is always laughed at, because we cannot enter into it. All serious and strong expressions of it appear ridiculous to a third person; and though a lover may be good company to his mistress, he is so to nobody else."
This must explain Limited Inc.'s obsession with the Enron story, which has engrossed our mind to the detriment of our pocketbook this week. Instead of seeking the easy money of book reviewing -- ah, reader, you can't imagine the veritable Golconda awaiting the lucky reviewer of Blah Blah Blah, the novel -- Limited Inc has been morosely pursuing an article about Enron's business press fan club, and the myth of efficiency. This article, once finished, will be shopped around hopefully to such outlets as Mother Jones, only to be rejected out of hand -- we foresee this already. But, in entire disproportion to the value of our contribution to the national culture (which consists entirely in summarizing forgettable plot lines), we are going to run in the channel of our obsession with with the same grim vigor Ahab once devoted to revenging his lost leg.
In any case, Andersen Accounting is becoming the (hopefully first) collateral casualty in this affair. In much the same way the Taliban fell when the US took action against Al Quaeda, Andersen is being rocked by its long collusion with Kenny Lay's grand scheme to make Enron, in effect, a giant energy derivatives hedge fund. Since Enron was a public corporation, such a scheme is illegal. But illegality, as any respectable contributor to political parties know, is in the eye of the beholder. Or rather, a particular set of eyes -- those belonging to the lowest stratum of our society. Of course, you know who I mean. I mean Congressmen, Senators, and members of the Executive branch. The Times this morning has an article about Anderson's reach in Washington:
Auditing Firms Gaining Muscle in Washington
By STEPHEN LABATON
Here are two grafs:
At the height of the fight between the industry and Mr. Levitt in the second half of 2000, all the Big Five accounting firms sharply increased their political donations and spending on lobbying. Andersen doubled its lobbying budget, to $1.6 million.
The investment paid off.
Among other proposals, Mr. Levitt sought to prohibit an accounting firm from performing both accounting functions and consulting services for the same company. That proposal threatened billions of dollars in revenues at the Big Five firms, and their defeat of the proposals in 2000 illustrated the industry's growing influence in Washington. Had the Levitt proposals been in place, it would not have been possible for
Andersen to bill Enron $27 million for consulting services last year while also billing $25 million for audits
There is also an article about Andersen's largess on the Public I site. This article names names.
"Last year, SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, Jr. proposed a rule that would have restricted the amount of non-audit-related consulting work that companies like Arthur Andersen and other Big Five accounting firms could do for their audit clients. Andersen opposed the rule, and hired the powerful lobby shop of Clark & Weinstock to argue its case.
Among the Clark & Weinstock lobbyists working Capitol Hill on behalf of Andersen were former congressman Vic Fazio (D-Calif.); Jim Matthews, former chief of staff to Rep. Thomas Manton (D-N.Y.); and Anne Urban, formerly Sen. Robert Kerrey's (D-Neb.) legislative director.
Under pressure from the Big Five, the Commission ultimately adopted a weak version of the rule that favored the accounting industry and left their consulting services virtually untouched. The rule required only the disclosure of how much money the accounting firm earned for consulting services from each company it audited. No limits were placed on the amount of money an audit firm could earn.'
Both Public I and the NYT share the idea that campaign finance reform would cure us of a corrupt legislature; a legislature that was forced to forego bribery would then tackle reforming the regulation of the auditing industry with its eyes righteously peeled for the the public good alone.
Limited Inc grants the argument against legalized bribery. But we have strong doubts about the political reach of campaign finance reform. The reason the big five auditing firms can basically run over the SEC is that there is no political base for reigning in the big five, or for reigning in Enron. Populism has abandoned its war against Wall Street. A feature of the American political scene since the 1870s, it dried up in the 1980s. It is now the common wisdom that Americans don't get 'excited' about such things as regulating auditors. No, Americans supposedly get more excited about the list of Airline hostesses in Gary Condit's little black book.
But this consensus is oddly ahistorical. If the farmers of Nebraska, in 1900, could get passionate about specie and the intricacy of gold-backed, versus silver-backed, currency, are their descendents, in Southern California, really so degenerate as to not understand or care about financial markets? On the contrary, I think they understand very well, when they want to. Certainly they are as affected by the allowance of gross corporate corruption as their great-grandpas were by manipulation of railroad stock. But the stomach for class warfare -- and make no mistake, reader, Wall Street has never been reformed without a strong whiff of gunpowder in the air -- has gone out of both parties. Does anybody seriously see the pitiable Joseph Lieberman, who is currently leading the charge against Enron in the Senate, as a potential Danton? He is the most piddling William Jennings Bryan ever thrown up by the centrist Democrats, making Limited Inc nostalgic for Dukakis, for Christ's sake.
The last sad remnant of populism, in fact, resides in the Republican party's intermittent appeals to Christian fundamentalism. I could imagine an opponent of Billy Tauzin making a good case with the voters that the man is owned by the companies he is supposedly investigating. I could imagine such a case catching on. But the case would have to overcome two formidable obstacles. One, the media is resolutely opposed to class warfare. Except for the tepid admonitions of editorialists to remember the neediest on December 25th, the press and tv aren't simply bribed -- they are literally owned and run by corporations, and the law among them is, do not stir up class warfare. Period. The other obstacle is that facing any group which has suffered a string of defeats. The audience for populism is defeatist. Street realism very wisely counsels cutting your losses -- for pursuing your losses very quickly takes you over the edge. It is that realism that keeps most people from the ballot box. Apathy is a wise choice when there are no real choices.
Friday, January 18, 2002
Remora
In a previous post, Limited Inc had speculated about the triangle between point a, the provision of a bill passed in December, 2000, that exempted energy trading from oversite by the commodity futures commission, b., the Gramms (Mr. and Mrs.) support for the bill, and c., Senator Gramm's retirement.
Limited Inc. stands corrected by an article in the Times this morning. Doing the calculus of sleeziness in the Clinton era, one should always include the Clinton variable: that if something looks reactionary, pandering, against the public interest, and connected to big money, Clinton will probably be behind it. And so it turns out on this bill, which set in motion the events that blacked out California while the bandits made out like energy companies... uh, I mean, while the energy companies made out like bandits. Two explicatory grafs:
"...in the latter months of 2000, both Gramms were frustrating the company's Washington lobbyists. Senator Gramm, for reasons unrelated to Enron, was single- handedly blocking a futures trading bill the company had dearly prized. And Dr. Gramm had complicated the bill's prospects with a scathing critique of some rules being prepared by her former agency.
The issue was eventually resolved in the company's favor; Senator Gramm lifted his objections to the bill after calls from Clinton administration officials and industry executives, including Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's chief executive, according to company officials and people involved in the bill. Once the bill became law the rules that Dr. Gramm opposed became unnecessary and were dropped."
In a previous post, Limited Inc had speculated about the triangle between point a, the provision of a bill passed in December, 2000, that exempted energy trading from oversite by the commodity futures commission, b., the Gramms (Mr. and Mrs.) support for the bill, and c., Senator Gramm's retirement.
Limited Inc. stands corrected by an article in the Times this morning. Doing the calculus of sleeziness in the Clinton era, one should always include the Clinton variable: that if something looks reactionary, pandering, against the public interest, and connected to big money, Clinton will probably be behind it. And so it turns out on this bill, which set in motion the events that blacked out California while the bandits made out like energy companies... uh, I mean, while the energy companies made out like bandits. Two explicatory grafs:
"...in the latter months of 2000, both Gramms were frustrating the company's Washington lobbyists. Senator Gramm, for reasons unrelated to Enron, was single- handedly blocking a futures trading bill the company had dearly prized. And Dr. Gramm had complicated the bill's prospects with a scathing critique of some rules being prepared by her former agency.
The issue was eventually resolved in the company's favor; Senator Gramm lifted his objections to the bill after calls from Clinton administration officials and industry executives, including Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's chief executive, according to company officials and people involved in the bill. Once the bill became law the rules that Dr. Gramm opposed became unnecessary and were dropped."
Thursday, January 17, 2002
Remora
Go when the going's good department
Perhaps now that Bushypoo has established himself as this generation's FDR, he should resign. That way, he'd not suffer the inevitable debilitating fall in polls and status that happens to all Bushes in office. The reason for that fall is that Bushes can only exist in a rare environment, one in which the air is constantly perfumed by millions of dollars. Usually that is no problem in the White House, where you can secretly confab with Ken Boy and co. on global warming and such, but sometimes a Bush is thrust out into the normal atmosphere -- especially when the Bush has to campaign, or meet with (ugh) environmentalists and those civil rights leaders -- and eventually the Bush starts to wilt and get all cranky.
As a monument to Bush idiocy, the NYT has a profile of SEC chairman Harvey Pitt today.
Here we have a fairly common specimen of the higher idiocy so typical of the nineties, when the word deregulation began to be confused with the word abracadabra. It should be said at the outset: regulation, or rules and norms, are going to emerge in any market situation. The question is who is going to make them, and how are they going to be enforced. If they are made by market makers -- if, for instance, Enron makes the rules about energy derivatives -- other market members are going to have to apply those rules, try to get around those rules, or cease existing in the market. The advantage of being a market maker consists in being able to make the rules. These rules can be formal, as in the rules the NYSE makes, or informal, as in the rules that emerge when banks invest in X company on the premise that X company will copy the rules of some successful Y company.
Now, deregulation as it applies to accounting entails ignoring that the rules are going to be made, and claiming that only the government makes rules. Error one. Error two consists of the ideological claim that government is always bad. This claim has become theological. In spite of the evidence that, for instance, publicly run power companies do a comparable or better job than private power companies (compare LA's public power company to Southern Edison, if you want immediate support for this claim), this is the conservative mantra. It has the same relationship to reality as the doctrine of original sin has to psychology: it magnifies an insight into an untruth. Combine these two errors and you get Harvey Pitt.
Lets say some exciting things about accounting, shall we?
Since accounting on the Ernst and Young level is not heavily competitive, this means that the five market makers basically decide what the rules are. And they obviously suck at it, for the good reason that rules that promote transparency are not necessarily rules that all of their clients want to see followed. Gresham's law, which says that bad money drives out good, applies to rules as well. So hey, guess what? This is where a neutral party, ie the gov, has a role. It establishes the ground rules for all parties. This is elementary Locke, but seems to have escaped the attention of the greedy deregulatory crowd.
Here are three grafs from the NYT article. Reading them, it is easy to see that the Bush years are going to be studded with Enrons. These people have that deadhead Texas wealth mindset, the kind that the Hunt brothers used to embody:
"Since his return to the agency last September, Mr. Pitt has articulated a broadly deregulatory agenda that he says is now more relevant than ever, but which his critics say may now be overshadowed by what is quickly turning into a major accounting and corporate scandal.
If anything, the critics say, in light of more than $60 billion that Enron shareholders lost, it is time not to reduce the liabilities of auditors and corporations, but to increase them.
The S.E.C. for months has been woefully short of staff at its senior level and now has only two commissioners, including Mr. Pitt, because the White House has failed to nominate other replacements. The other commissioner, Laura S. Unger, who is also a Republican, is serving even though her term has expired and she has announced her intention to leave shortly."
Go when the going's good department
Perhaps now that Bushypoo has established himself as this generation's FDR, he should resign. That way, he'd not suffer the inevitable debilitating fall in polls and status that happens to all Bushes in office. The reason for that fall is that Bushes can only exist in a rare environment, one in which the air is constantly perfumed by millions of dollars. Usually that is no problem in the White House, where you can secretly confab with Ken Boy and co. on global warming and such, but sometimes a Bush is thrust out into the normal atmosphere -- especially when the Bush has to campaign, or meet with (ugh) environmentalists and those civil rights leaders -- and eventually the Bush starts to wilt and get all cranky.
As a monument to Bush idiocy, the NYT has a profile of SEC chairman Harvey Pitt today.
Here we have a fairly common specimen of the higher idiocy so typical of the nineties, when the word deregulation began to be confused with the word abracadabra. It should be said at the outset: regulation, or rules and norms, are going to emerge in any market situation. The question is who is going to make them, and how are they going to be enforced. If they are made by market makers -- if, for instance, Enron makes the rules about energy derivatives -- other market members are going to have to apply those rules, try to get around those rules, or cease existing in the market. The advantage of being a market maker consists in being able to make the rules. These rules can be formal, as in the rules the NYSE makes, or informal, as in the rules that emerge when banks invest in X company on the premise that X company will copy the rules of some successful Y company.
Now, deregulation as it applies to accounting entails ignoring that the rules are going to be made, and claiming that only the government makes rules. Error one. Error two consists of the ideological claim that government is always bad. This claim has become theological. In spite of the evidence that, for instance, publicly run power companies do a comparable or better job than private power companies (compare LA's public power company to Southern Edison, if you want immediate support for this claim), this is the conservative mantra. It has the same relationship to reality as the doctrine of original sin has to psychology: it magnifies an insight into an untruth. Combine these two errors and you get Harvey Pitt.
Lets say some exciting things about accounting, shall we?
Since accounting on the Ernst and Young level is not heavily competitive, this means that the five market makers basically decide what the rules are. And they obviously suck at it, for the good reason that rules that promote transparency are not necessarily rules that all of their clients want to see followed. Gresham's law, which says that bad money drives out good, applies to rules as well. So hey, guess what? This is where a neutral party, ie the gov, has a role. It establishes the ground rules for all parties. This is elementary Locke, but seems to have escaped the attention of the greedy deregulatory crowd.
Here are three grafs from the NYT article. Reading them, it is easy to see that the Bush years are going to be studded with Enrons. These people have that deadhead Texas wealth mindset, the kind that the Hunt brothers used to embody:
"Since his return to the agency last September, Mr. Pitt has articulated a broadly deregulatory agenda that he says is now more relevant than ever, but which his critics say may now be overshadowed by what is quickly turning into a major accounting and corporate scandal.
If anything, the critics say, in light of more than $60 billion that Enron shareholders lost, it is time not to reduce the liabilities of auditors and corporations, but to increase them.
The S.E.C. for months has been woefully short of staff at its senior level and now has only two commissioners, including Mr. Pitt, because the White House has failed to nominate other replacements. The other commissioner, Laura S. Unger, who is also a Republican, is serving even though her term has expired and she has announced her intention to leave shortly."
Wednesday, January 16, 2002
Remora
Griboyedov.
Limited Inc imbibed Dostoevsky with our mother's milk, and have contemplated, for years, a sequel to the Underground Man entitled the Upside Down man (autobiographical, of course); Tolstoy was an event in our spiritual life that took two good years (20-22) to get out of the system, two years we will never get back, mind you; we've been a fan of Sologub's Petty Demon forever, The Master and the Margarita is one of the ur-texts in our inner cranial library, we've taken a prose style, down to dashes and parentheses, from Bely, we've read all the Nabokov one mortal could stand, Babel is a hero, Mandelstam and his wife are heroes -- what we are saying is that we are Russian out the ass. Always have been. But Griboyedov is pretty much a new one for us. So we enjoyed this Financial Times review of his biography. Griboyedov is known for one play. Apparently, that play is the Russian equivalent of Moliere's Misanthrope. But the review necessarily can't linger over the joys of a play that all seem to agree is inaccessible in English, so it quickly passes on to Griboyedov's very active life, spent as bon vivant, duelist, revolutionary of a sort, Arabist and Persianist, and diplomat. A full bill, this guy. We especially like knowing that, far from being an aberration, hostage crises at embassies in Teheran are folklore, like spelling bees and recitations of epic poetry. It seems that in 1829, a mob of angry Persians attacked the Russian embassy because, well, they were Russians, the stealth empire -- moving then, as it will always move, discretely in all directions. Our Griboyedov, Minister Plenipotentiary of the delegation there (and who knows what that meant, given the European propensity for scheming) was stabbed to death, his body paraded through the streets, members of the general public invited to do their patriotic duty and spit upon it. Another artist bites the dust.
A pity. Griboyedov is definitely my sort of guy. Here's two grafs from the article, which explain how he ended up in Teheran in the first place:
"Although his work in the theatre was increasingly successful, and he began serious study of Arabic and Persian, he paid a high price for his friendships with those richer and sillier than he. The scandal involving two young toffs from smart regiments, one 18-year-old ballerina and our subject sounds like something from light opera, but its consequences were deadly serious: Griboyedov was forced to take part in a partie carree, or four- sided duel, that left one of the challengers dead in the snow and the other participants exiled in disgrace by the Tsar.
His particular punishment - despite his pleadings that an artist such as he could not exist without "enlightened people, and sympathetic women" - was to be sent as attache to the first permanent Russian mission in Tehran."
Enlightened people and sympathetic women -- boil the bones off civilization, and this is what you have left --the base and bones of it. Griboyedov, mon frere, we salute you, who cry out for a few enlightened people, and a sympathetic woman or two!
Griboyedov.
Limited Inc imbibed Dostoevsky with our mother's milk, and have contemplated, for years, a sequel to the Underground Man entitled the Upside Down man (autobiographical, of course); Tolstoy was an event in our spiritual life that took two good years (20-22) to get out of the system, two years we will never get back, mind you; we've been a fan of Sologub's Petty Demon forever, The Master and the Margarita is one of the ur-texts in our inner cranial library, we've taken a prose style, down to dashes and parentheses, from Bely, we've read all the Nabokov one mortal could stand, Babel is a hero, Mandelstam and his wife are heroes -- what we are saying is that we are Russian out the ass. Always have been. But Griboyedov is pretty much a new one for us. So we enjoyed this Financial Times review of his biography. Griboyedov is known for one play. Apparently, that play is the Russian equivalent of Moliere's Misanthrope. But the review necessarily can't linger over the joys of a play that all seem to agree is inaccessible in English, so it quickly passes on to Griboyedov's very active life, spent as bon vivant, duelist, revolutionary of a sort, Arabist and Persianist, and diplomat. A full bill, this guy. We especially like knowing that, far from being an aberration, hostage crises at embassies in Teheran are folklore, like spelling bees and recitations of epic poetry. It seems that in 1829, a mob of angry Persians attacked the Russian embassy because, well, they were Russians, the stealth empire -- moving then, as it will always move, discretely in all directions. Our Griboyedov, Minister Plenipotentiary of the delegation there (and who knows what that meant, given the European propensity for scheming) was stabbed to death, his body paraded through the streets, members of the general public invited to do their patriotic duty and spit upon it. Another artist bites the dust.
A pity. Griboyedov is definitely my sort of guy. Here's two grafs from the article, which explain how he ended up in Teheran in the first place:
"Although his work in the theatre was increasingly successful, and he began serious study of Arabic and Persian, he paid a high price for his friendships with those richer and sillier than he. The scandal involving two young toffs from smart regiments, one 18-year-old ballerina and our subject sounds like something from light opera, but its consequences were deadly serious: Griboyedov was forced to take part in a partie carree, or four- sided duel, that left one of the challengers dead in the snow and the other participants exiled in disgrace by the Tsar.
His particular punishment - despite his pleadings that an artist such as he could not exist without "enlightened people, and sympathetic women" - was to be sent as attache to the first permanent Russian mission in Tehran."
Enlightened people and sympathetic women -- boil the bones off civilization, and this is what you have left --the base and bones of it. Griboyedov, mon frere, we salute you, who cry out for a few enlightened people, and a sympathetic woman or two!
Tuesday, January 15, 2002
Remora
Why do they hate us department.
Limited Inc means the CEOs of major corporations. And the us in question are the poor sweating masses who labor, pay taxes like suckers, and regularly get shellacked on both ends -- corporations who claim that utter faith in the market should prevent any government interference in spreading their costs to third parties (witness revelations about Monsanto's pollution fiesta in a small Alabaman town in the WP:
In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic.") or going about their financial actions with riotous abandon of pirates on board a ship full of nuns, as in the case of 'Ken Boy''s company; and then, when downside time hits, those same corporations racing for the government tit, in a scramble that makes old Gipper Reagan's legendary welfare queen look like a piker.
Paul Krugman's op ed in the NYT this morning can be summarized in the words of that old Beatles standard: have you seen the little piggies/in their starched white shirts... In the last administration, the donors list revolved through the Lincoln bedroom as though Mr. and Miz Clinton were running a bed and breakfast for cheesy tv producers on federal time; in this administration, forget the bedroom. Give em a cabinet post, give em offices, give em lax or no enforcement of anti-trust regulation, give em the store, the keys, the ear of every policy maker cranked out by some crackpot rightwing thinktank. With so many friends in high places -- like Cheney, who believes an energy crisis means power company equities aren't achieving the cap levels his broker tells him they should be -- this country is being run openly as a country club for the rich, with tax breaks to fatten up the portfolios of the undeserving upper 5% in a public policy version of some Scrooge's wet dream.
Here are one and a half grafs:
"The real questions about Enron's relationship with the administration involve what happened before the energy trader hit the skids. That's when Mr. Lay allegedly told the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that he should be more cooperative if he wanted to keep his job. (He wasn't, and he didn't.) And it's when Enron helped Dick Cheney devise an energy plan that certainly looks as if it was written by and for the companies that advised his task force. Mr. Cheney, in clear defiance of the law, has refused to release any information about his task force's deliberations; what is he hiding?
"And while Enron has imploded, other energy companies retain the administration's ear. Just days before the latest Enron revelations, the administration signaled its intention to weaken pollution rules on power plants; late last week it announced its decision to proceed with a controversial plan to store radioactive waste in Nevada. Each of these decisions was worth billions to companies with very strong connections to Mr. Bush."
Why do they hate us department.
Limited Inc means the CEOs of major corporations. And the us in question are the poor sweating masses who labor, pay taxes like suckers, and regularly get shellacked on both ends -- corporations who claim that utter faith in the market should prevent any government interference in spreading their costs to third parties (witness revelations about Monsanto's pollution fiesta in a small Alabaman town in the WP:
In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges." In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic.") or going about their financial actions with riotous abandon of pirates on board a ship full of nuns, as in the case of 'Ken Boy''s company; and then, when downside time hits, those same corporations racing for the government tit, in a scramble that makes old Gipper Reagan's legendary welfare queen look like a piker.
Paul Krugman's op ed in the NYT this morning can be summarized in the words of that old Beatles standard: have you seen the little piggies/in their starched white shirts... In the last administration, the donors list revolved through the Lincoln bedroom as though Mr. and Miz Clinton were running a bed and breakfast for cheesy tv producers on federal time; in this administration, forget the bedroom. Give em a cabinet post, give em offices, give em lax or no enforcement of anti-trust regulation, give em the store, the keys, the ear of every policy maker cranked out by some crackpot rightwing thinktank. With so many friends in high places -- like Cheney, who believes an energy crisis means power company equities aren't achieving the cap levels his broker tells him they should be -- this country is being run openly as a country club for the rich, with tax breaks to fatten up the portfolios of the undeserving upper 5% in a public policy version of some Scrooge's wet dream.
Here are one and a half grafs:
"The real questions about Enron's relationship with the administration involve what happened before the energy trader hit the skids. That's when Mr. Lay allegedly told the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission that he should be more cooperative if he wanted to keep his job. (He wasn't, and he didn't.) And it's when Enron helped Dick Cheney devise an energy plan that certainly looks as if it was written by and for the companies that advised his task force. Mr. Cheney, in clear defiance of the law, has refused to release any information about his task force's deliberations; what is he hiding?
"And while Enron has imploded, other energy companies retain the administration's ear. Just days before the latest Enron revelations, the administration signaled its intention to weaken pollution rules on power plants; late last week it announced its decision to proceed with a controversial plan to store radioactive waste in Nevada. Each of these decisions was worth billions to companies with very strong connections to Mr. Bush."
Sunday, January 13, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc. was temporarily out of our gourds, this morning. Look, once you settle on a term, it sticks -- like a bad tattoo, maybe, but so it goes. So we apologize to our many constant, passionate readers for this aberration, and hope we haven't harmed our brand. We are going to focus group about that, later.
Will Hutton has a very enjoyable time knocking around that old corrupt mushball, Enron, in his Guardian column. Most startling graf in the column is not in the bludgeoning of America's political culture, but in the dissing of American productivity. Could this be true?
"... Enron could not have made the progress it did without the intellectual backdrop that all regulation and taxation is bad - and that the more the US deregulated, the better its economy performed. This was, and is, balderdash. Recent work by economists, notably at investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston, shows that after making the necessary accounting adjustments and including downward revisions, productivity growth in the US has done no more than match that in Europe. Indeed, countries like France and Germany have higher absolute productivity and faster rates of growth than the Americans, despite their approach to regulation and taxation. The deregulation philosophy that enriches Ken Lay and his cronies does not necessarily enrich anybody else. "
Well, we know last year was a spectacular for accounting revisions -- the capitalist version of redoing history, for which the Soviets used to be so reviled by right thinking rightwingers. Where's Trotsky, these rightwingers would cackle at the pap turned out by USSR history hacks that put Stalin in the catbird seat right next to his old buddy Lenin, and quietly whiteinked the more photogenic (and vastly more important) T. Increasingly, though, Soviet historiography looks like a method ahead of its time, especially for the clever accounting firm -- consulting with its right hand, and doing its books with its left hand. Erasing figures from photographs is one thing, but you need real skill to strip and recombine figures until they don't add up to themselves anymore -- yes, millions of dollars like Cheshire cats, appearing one year as four legged, tail twitching profit, and the next year as merely a fading smile.
Still, Europe has never been known for its accounting transparency. Steinherr, in his book on Derivatives (isn't tout le monde reading that adorable tome? right up there with Harry Potter in most homes), gives the example of Daimler Benz, which when it came to the states (had to, since it was swallowing Chrysler), had to comply with the US GAAP requirements, which is how we do numbers in the New World. German numbers showed a moderate profit, but sieved through GAAP, the company showed an immoderate loss.
So I'd love to know where this Credit Suisse study comes from. I'm not doubting Hutton, just wondering how to face this kind of revisionism.
Limited Inc. was temporarily out of our gourds, this morning. Look, once you settle on a term, it sticks -- like a bad tattoo, maybe, but so it goes. So we apologize to our many constant, passionate readers for this aberration, and hope we haven't harmed our brand. We are going to focus group about that, later.
Will Hutton has a very enjoyable time knocking around that old corrupt mushball, Enron, in his Guardian column. Most startling graf in the column is not in the bludgeoning of America's political culture, but in the dissing of American productivity. Could this be true?
"... Enron could not have made the progress it did without the intellectual backdrop that all regulation and taxation is bad - and that the more the US deregulated, the better its economy performed. This was, and is, balderdash. Recent work by economists, notably at investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston, shows that after making the necessary accounting adjustments and including downward revisions, productivity growth in the US has done no more than match that in Europe. Indeed, countries like France and Germany have higher absolute productivity and faster rates of growth than the Americans, despite their approach to regulation and taxation. The deregulation philosophy that enriches Ken Lay and his cronies does not necessarily enrich anybody else. "
Well, we know last year was a spectacular for accounting revisions -- the capitalist version of redoing history, for which the Soviets used to be so reviled by right thinking rightwingers. Where's Trotsky, these rightwingers would cackle at the pap turned out by USSR history hacks that put Stalin in the catbird seat right next to his old buddy Lenin, and quietly whiteinked the more photogenic (and vastly more important) T. Increasingly, though, Soviet historiography looks like a method ahead of its time, especially for the clever accounting firm -- consulting with its right hand, and doing its books with its left hand. Erasing figures from photographs is one thing, but you need real skill to strip and recombine figures until they don't add up to themselves anymore -- yes, millions of dollars like Cheshire cats, appearing one year as four legged, tail twitching profit, and the next year as merely a fading smile.
Still, Europe has never been known for its accounting transparency. Steinherr, in his book on Derivatives (isn't tout le monde reading that adorable tome? right up there with Harry Potter in most homes), gives the example of Daimler Benz, which when it came to the states (had to, since it was swallowing Chrysler), had to comply with the US GAAP requirements, which is how we do numbers in the New World. German numbers showed a moderate profit, but sieved through GAAP, the company showed an immoderate loss.
So I'd love to know where this Credit Suisse study comes from. I'm not doubting Hutton, just wondering how to face this kind of revisionism.
Acoustic shadows
This is the new name Limited Inc has chosen to head media-linked posts, instead of Remora. It isn't poetry, reader. If you will dig through the Echos newsletters in your closet -- you know, the ones the Acoustic Society of America sends you -- you will find an explanation in the winter, 1999 issue:
"Unusual acoustics due to atmospheric conditions or to terrain are sometimes given the catch-all name "acoustic shadows." The first recorded incidence of the phenomenon occurred during the Four-Day Battle in 1666. The naval battle was fought between the coasts of England and Holland, and sounds of the battle were heard clearly at many points throughout England but not at intervening points. Passengers on a yacht positioned between the battle and England heard nothing. A number of other examples have been recorded since that time. Guns fired at the funeral of Queen Victoria in London in 1901 were heard in Scotland, but not across a wide region in between. The German bombardment of Antwerp in World War I was heard clearly for a 30-mile radius, then beyond 60 miles from the Belgian city, but not in between."
Well, we at Limited Inc are always firing guns at funerals, in a manner of speaking. And we like to think that our absolute lack of effect in the immediate area simply means we are being picked up in Scotland, in a manner of speaking. Actually, a friend from Barcelona called us yesterday and claimed that our posts are being used as fodder for idea starved Catalonian columnists. This is Scotland, indeed.
Meanwhile, we had to borrow some change yesterday because we are down to pennies. As in, for instance, not being able to afford a stick of deodorant. Luckily, we found a lender willing to supply us with the necessary for the next couple days. After that, well, c'est le deluge. Life, for Limited Inc., is gonna be tough.
This is the new name Limited Inc has chosen to head media-linked posts, instead of Remora. It isn't poetry, reader. If you will dig through the Echos newsletters in your closet -- you know, the ones the Acoustic Society of America sends you -- you will find an explanation in the winter, 1999 issue:
"Unusual acoustics due to atmospheric conditions or to terrain are sometimes given the catch-all name "acoustic shadows." The first recorded incidence of the phenomenon occurred during the Four-Day Battle in 1666. The naval battle was fought between the coasts of England and Holland, and sounds of the battle were heard clearly at many points throughout England but not at intervening points. Passengers on a yacht positioned between the battle and England heard nothing. A number of other examples have been recorded since that time. Guns fired at the funeral of Queen Victoria in London in 1901 were heard in Scotland, but not across a wide region in between. The German bombardment of Antwerp in World War I was heard clearly for a 30-mile radius, then beyond 60 miles from the Belgian city, but not in between."
Well, we at Limited Inc are always firing guns at funerals, in a manner of speaking. And we like to think that our absolute lack of effect in the immediate area simply means we are being picked up in Scotland, in a manner of speaking. Actually, a friend from Barcelona called us yesterday and claimed that our posts are being used as fodder for idea starved Catalonian columnists. This is Scotland, indeed.
Meanwhile, we had to borrow some change yesterday because we are down to pennies. As in, for instance, not being able to afford a stick of deodorant. Luckily, we found a lender willing to supply us with the necessary for the next couple days. After that, well, c'est le deluge. Life, for Limited Inc., is gonna be tough.
Friday, January 11, 2002
Dope
Since no one responded to the "replace Remora" contest, Limited Inc spent some time bent over our dictionary, then the Shakespeare, then surfing through various columnists. So far, we haven't settled on a name. So we will continue to use "Dope" and think about linguistics until inspiration strikes.
Well, the headlines are Enron inspired, as the news wakes up to the fact that Enron was in bed with the Bush Administration. This is as unexpected as hearing that some Hollywood starlet is sleeping around. The Bush administration was pretty damn proud of its bedmate until recently. But like some chastened, though still eminently corrupt financial "advisor," the Bushies are pulling back on their investment. It is hard to see this as more than a passing scandal, however. The press still doesn't understand Enron's collapse; the biz press is unanimously on the side of "de-regulation." And the public is acquiescent, even to the extent that polls have shown no resistance to de-regulation even though they have also shown a majority expects that de-regulation will entail a price hike. If the nineties were about anything, they were about the crushing of the will to resist. Although it is gratifying to see anti-WTO protesters throng the streets when the WTO is in town, it isn't enough, right now. In the backlash atmosphere of Bush year one, it is easy to foresee questions about Enron's role in directing Bush policy being labelled unpatriotic. Don't forget, this prez is on a Heros bubble gum card now.
The WP story includes this characteristic Bushy touch:
"Bush reimbursed Enron for the use of its corporate jet during his presidential campaign, and was feted by company officials at Enron Field, home of the Houston Astros, seven months before the election. The Houston Chronicle has reported that Bush conferred a series of nicknames on Enron chief executive Kenneth L. Lay, including "Kenny Boy.'"
Since no one responded to the "replace Remora" contest, Limited Inc spent some time bent over our dictionary, then the Shakespeare, then surfing through various columnists. So far, we haven't settled on a name. So we will continue to use "Dope" and think about linguistics until inspiration strikes.
Well, the headlines are Enron inspired, as the news wakes up to the fact that Enron was in bed with the Bush Administration. This is as unexpected as hearing that some Hollywood starlet is sleeping around. The Bush administration was pretty damn proud of its bedmate until recently. But like some chastened, though still eminently corrupt financial "advisor," the Bushies are pulling back on their investment. It is hard to see this as more than a passing scandal, however. The press still doesn't understand Enron's collapse; the biz press is unanimously on the side of "de-regulation." And the public is acquiescent, even to the extent that polls have shown no resistance to de-regulation even though they have also shown a majority expects that de-regulation will entail a price hike. If the nineties were about anything, they were about the crushing of the will to resist. Although it is gratifying to see anti-WTO protesters throng the streets when the WTO is in town, it isn't enough, right now. In the backlash atmosphere of Bush year one, it is easy to foresee questions about Enron's role in directing Bush policy being labelled unpatriotic. Don't forget, this prez is on a Heros bubble gum card now.
The WP story includes this characteristic Bushy touch:
"Bush reimbursed Enron for the use of its corporate jet during his presidential campaign, and was feted by company officials at Enron Field, home of the Houston Astros, seven months before the election. The Houston Chronicle has reported that Bush conferred a series of nicknames on Enron chief executive Kenneth L. Lay, including "Kenny Boy.'"
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