Remora



LI gives way to nobody in his utter contempt for the Bush administration. But you have to give them credit for moving the Middle East a giant step closer to peace. Sending Dick Cheney on his '002 Let's Roll tour apparently so alarmed the governments he visited (there's nothing like madness in a great power to make the satraps nervous) that the Saudis, of all people, have cemented a little peace, love and understanding between the monstrous minions of Hussein and the cold blooded plutocrats of Kuwait:





Attempts to reconcile Iraq and Kuwait at previous Arab summits failed � from the 1990 meeting immediately after the Iraqi invasion when a Kuwaiti sheik famously hurled plates at the Iraqi delegation to last year's summit in Amman, Jordan, when talks again collapsed. The annual gatherings of Arab heads of state were suspended throughout the 1990's because of the sour relations between Iraq and Kuwait. The Beirut meeting showed all the signs of following the usual pattern, with the Kuwaiti minister of state for foreign affairs summoning the press to his suite Monday to declare that Iraq was up to its old tricks.



But the existence of two major regional disputes � the Israeli-Palestinian turmoil and a looming conflict over Iraq � seems to have pushed through a compromise.



In order to avoid being attacked, the Iraqis were willing to be more flexible on Kuwaiti and other Arab demands. The other Arab states were eager to find a way to express their discontent over their perception that the United States is so little involved in the region that it could not even ensure the presence of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, at the summit."



Remember all those stories about the competence, ah, the admirable competence, of the crew around Bush, in the wake of 9/11? Let's add up the bill: Israel looks like Algeria, circa 1957; Iraq, led by one of the biggest mass murderers of our time, is now being welcomed into the fold of the former plate hurling alliance; the insane missile defense system, which has shown its irrelevance to the current world posture of threats for all to see, is being generously funded once again by the incorrigible folks in the White House (no doubt we would find, if we looked, long cozy meetings between the guys at General Dynamics and Donald Rumsfield's people before the Bushies fired up their Star Wars Defense propaganda machine); Pakistan and India look, more than ever, like two nations on the verge of nuclear war; and Br'er Rabbit, ie Osama Bin Laden, has apparently gone back into the briar patch -- notwithstanding the mythical ability of the US armed forces to see, hear, and know everything. And of course there's the little matter of the out standing anthrax monster, who all the king's horses and all the king's men can't seem to find. Instead, we get the FBI pressing some klutz who treated one of the hijackers for some infection on his leg until the man says, gee, that musta been anthrax. Yeah, right.



LI is a believer in the Reality principle, hard as that faith is to maintain in our present perilous times. So this is what we think: the sheer incompetence of the Coupsters is eventually going to leak through our shining victory over the Taliban. That is, unless they do something right. Like, for instance, catching Br'er Rabbit. Or catching the anthrax guy. Or coming up with some magic in Israel - the longest shot of all. Chance favors nobody in the short term-- and in the long term, to paraphrase Pasteur, "dans les champs de battaille, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits pr�par�s

."

Remora

This just in from the Times.



Washington, March 27 -- Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced today that the Energy Department is renaming itself. "From now on, we will be the Energy Company Department," Mr. Abraham said in a conference call with business journalists. A consortium of energy industries, lead by Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former top executives of the Enron Corporation, will oversee a tightening of the newly renamed department. Abrahams conference call was interspersed with his trademark gutsy humor. "Christ," he said, "we weren't even elected. We have to work fast to make sure you guys get some of that ROI in our coup." Abrahams was referring to the offer made by a SATANSPAWN, a limited liability corporation, to swap policy options with the Republican party. In a surprising use of this so far barely tested financial instrument, SATANSPAWN (consisting, reportedly, of 18 top energy CEOS) optioned a "put" on the so called "American energy policy" for $16.6 million, in return for a Stripped Mortgage-Backed Florida Election Security, or SMBFES (commonly called SMURF BALL FESTS by traders). These mortgage backed issues are indexed to two election market options: the value of non-felons erased "accidentally" from Florida voting rolls, and the amortized value of deteriorations among voting machines in the Miami metro area. Guaranteed by the Florida government, Smurf Ball Fests have not been as popular among hedge funds as was first hoped when they were issued in November, 2000.



The decision to rename the department is a welcome clarification of the Bush administration's end of the year projections. The pressure to speed up the Department's restructuring has increased as energy equities have languished this quarter. Analyst Dick Scheiner of Killemandsellem Consulting, said the announcement was expected, but welcome. "Since the coup, the Department has been re-configured away from any long term Eco concerns, but it has not been doing the big things the industry wants. Drags on the overall profit picture during the last five years have included forcing oil companies to pay taxes, to pay at least 5% of the tab on major oil spills, and protecting so called "environmental areas," such as the coast of the US, national parks, and even rain forests. What we are seeing now is a welcome signal that the administration is pushing the "rape of the earth scenario," which has been carefully worked out with more than 100 energy industry executives, trade association leaders and lobbyists, into high gear."



In a related development, Dick Cheney released his first single, "Blow-off da stratosphere, what you say?," on his four CD contract with Interscope records. His spokesman, Orah Reilly, said, 'with all the downtime in the cellar, when like the terrorists were getting all bitchy, DC started scratchin his Lawrence Welks. And it just like totally converged."



Mr Abrahams was credited as a turnround expert when first appointed by Commandante Bush, but since the rocky start of his tenure, many analysts have complained about the pace of change. "What we look at is the rate of species extinction," Mr. Scheiner explained. 'We were looking for a big bounce there. But so far, it has been pitiful -- a bird here, a mammal there. We were hoping for some robust SE in this quarter, frankly." Although the renaming to Energy Company Department is not a major policy change, it does send a signal that the Bush administration is serious about environmental degradation. Still, there are questions over the speed at which Bush can completely overturn democracy and all it stands for, which have depressed the Republican Party's share of energy company contributions to around 85% compared with a 12-month high of 100% in January last year. Democratic spokeswoman Jill Coleburn said that the Democratic Party would consider renaming other departments in a bid to remain competitive in the Policy option market. "We pioneered the Lincoln's bedroom thing, and I don't think the Republicans have anything to tell us about marketing," Ms. Coleburn claimed. "How about this? The Bill Gates Attorney Generals Office? We think it puts a more human face on oppressing the vast majority of the electorate in favor of enriching a few plutocrats, don't you?"

Remora



Are the hard times over for Burger King? Actually, LI doesn't care. We just wanted to write that sentence, which has a vaguely biz-o-lect sound. Apparently Burger King is suffering the pangs and arrows of outrageous customer dissatisfaction. They've turned against the whopper. Those bastards. Turns out BK is run by a giant British conglomerate -- you never know who owns the toys nowadays -- that also puts out the Smirnoff vodka. The Brits, showing rare good sense, have decided to concentrate on their intoxicant, and find a buyer for the ailing King.



When Limited Inc was a dewy youth, he preferred Burger King to McDonalds and especially to Dairy Queen. The royalty of cheap food -- how it studs the American highways and byways! Basically, LI's preference was swayed by the paper crowns you sometimes got at Burger King. And the shakes. As I remember it, the shakes were better than those plastic-y tasting concoctions you'd get at MacDonalds.



Time has not been kind enough to marry LI off ... Having no children to watch, wide eyed, as the tv shows grotesquely magnified burgers being whisked off grills, thus activating the Pavlovian impulse in the little dears, LI has no reason to return to the foods of yesteryear. Oh, now and then the rare visit to Schlotzky's, but besides that, fast food just isn't in our orbit. Nothing, though, conjures up repulsion like the thought of going into one of those boites and chowing down on the burgers. The LA Times, which has several unintentionally funny stories today (one about a "smear campaign" re Beautiful Mind, accusing the movie of covering up some of the facts about its subject, was particularly amusing -- it quotes Neal Gabler, a Hollywood intellectual whose brain stretches from Variety all the way to the spiritual heights of, say, Alan Toffler -- a giant, in other words, in every way, and a true credit to the industry -- as saying that the campaign, and Russell Crowe's failure to secure an Oscar, was -- well, I must quote the graf:



"I think, in the future, when people are thinking about using biopics, they'll be more cautious on how they use the facts," Gabler said. "I happen to think this is a tragedy. To think we have this new chilling effect. That artists are going to have to be bound by facts. ... Imagine if Shakespeare was bound to the real character in 'Richard III'? If he were alive today, would Shakespeare be called upon to revise that play?"



LI will not gild this lily with comment ), but the BK saga is tops. Here, for your dining and dancing pleasure, are the grafs that particularly amused LI:



"In recent months, Burger King has made its shakes creamier and thicker by adding ice cream. It dressed up the Whopper with larger pieces of lettuce, thicker slices of tomatoes and pickles with a stronger dill flavor.



Mike Aldredge, 36, a Burger King regular for the last 15 years, has noticed the difference. The Costa Mesa resident, who eats at Burger King twice a week, said he liked the new and improved food so much he might easily double his visits.



"This is the best fast food I've ever had," he said, clutching a double Whopper with cheese. "And it's getting better."



However, new products and variety might not be the sales drivers Burger King executives expect. McDonald's much-hyped New Tastes Menu, which rotates new products year-round, has failed to attract hordes of new customers. In a recent national survey, Villa Park restaurant consultant Robert L. Sandelman found fast-food customers ranked cleanliness, taste and food flavor ahead of choice, which placed 11th out of 12 categories."



Question: where did that Mike Aldredge, 36, come from? Was there some kind of casting call? Second question: how much does he weigh? The vision of him, clutching his double whopper with cheese, is going to remain with LI the rest of the day. Sadly enough.

Dope



Is it only Limited Inc's imagination, or should economists take more of an interest in "small-world" theory, associated with Duncan Watts and Stephen Strogatz?



Yes, my readers roar, in numbers too big to ignore. Read your Watts and Strogantz and sin no more! or something like that.



Well, to explain...



These two wrote a paper a few years ago, in which they tried to find the minimum path length for an undeterminately large network. They called these networks, with their improbably small dimensions, small worlds, after the Milgram experiment that supposedly showed that there are six degrees of separation or less between any two randomly selected people in the world (well, the experiment didn't make a claim that vast, but it has been made since then). The problem, from the perspective of networks, was that most individuals are connected to a cluster of individuals, in which each individual has a high chance of sharing acquaintances. So how do you break out of the cluster to connect to random, unfamiliar individuals? Here's a quote about the system set up by Watts and Duncan from a September, 1998 Physics Today article



"This result is actually quite general," says Watts (who will shortly be moving to the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico), "and does not depend on the choice of a ring substrate used in the model. All that is required to generate the small-world phenomenon is a network that is locally ordered (which means simply that two nodes with a mutual 'friend' are significantly more likely to be connected than two randomly selected nodes), and which has a small fraction of long-range shortcuts. The effect also does not depend on the specific nature of the network nodes or connections--only their topology--so the small-world phenomenon ought to arise in all sorts of large, sparse networks."



To check this, Watts and Strogatz examine the length and clustering properties of three real networks: the collaboration graph of movie actors (including approximately 225 000 actors of all nationalities since the start of motion pictures); the power-transmission grid of the western US; and the neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans (the only organism whose neural network is completely known).



As Watts explains, they show that, in each case, the characteristic path length of the network is close to its theoretical minimum (that of an equivalent random graph), yet the clustering coefficient is far from minimal, indicating the presence of significant local order. So all three networks exhibit the small-world phenomenon. "



There is a book coming out in May from Mark Buchanan, Nexus, that not only explains Watts and Strogatz' work, but expands on it, explaining that Watts and Strogatz had stumbled on one form of small world network, and that there is at least one other possible form of small world network. This other form is related to the principle of "the rich get richer" -- that certain individuals are more connected, and by that very fact will become more connected. There is a network form for the fact that wealth is unequally distributed. Among network people, this is known as preferential attachment.



Now here's the question. One of the big rightwing pushes right now is to promote the idea that poverty in the third world is rather a mirage. Or, if not a mirage, caused by ... as you might have guessed, big government. The idea comes from Hernando de Soto, and it isn't quite as silly as it sounds. In two books he has promoted the idea that small, informal vendors and makers and homeowners need a system that recognizes them as free economic agents with capital. That is, if we strip away the onerous bureaucracy and government thievery, we could unleash, in the third world, value that is already there. This, after all, is partly what happened in the French Revolution. Anybody who reads Le Rouge et le Noir is going to have some sympathy with de Soto's point, because Stendhal is very conscious of the effect of liberalism, ie stripping away big guv and its thievish attachments, on the French landscape.



Is the rightwing idea going against the rule of preferential attachment, or seeding it?



Hernando de Soto is being presented to the American public as some kind of third world guru. The NYTimes magazine, last year, presented him as the answer to our dreams (insofar as our dreams involve giving up none of our stuff and not feeling guilty about it). But the earlier image of de Soto wasn't so heroic. Tina Rosenberg wrote a review of The Other Path in the New Republic, in 1991, that pretty much blasted de Soto as an egomaniac and a crony of Fujimori. Here is what she said about de Soto's grand vision:



"To Reaganites, however, the most marketable aspect of The Other Path is what it does not say. It does not talk about helping small businessmen acquire the infrastructure, technical assistance, or capital they need. It does not propose improving education, health care, or other programs that could get Peru's poor off to a better start in life. It does not address discrimination against Indians, which has shut Peru's poor out of many opportunities. Most informals are one rung above beggars. Redefining them as entrepreneurs doesn't cure what made them poor, especially in an economy that has experienced one of the worst declines in modern history. (The informal sector exploded in part because traditional jobs dried up; only 9 percent of workers in Lima earn a salary they can live on.) Not even legal businesses can get credit. But the book asserts that legal reforms alone will suffice to unlock the informal sector's engine of growth. De Soto compared the state to a dying emergency-room patient and told me, "I want to burn down the hospital."



The burning down the hospital phrase has been toned down, lately, and there is a little bit more heed being paid to infusing capital. There is an organization, Trickle Up, which just announced its association with the ubiquitous De Soto. Trickle Up is dedicated to making micro grants to the third world street neediest. Because it promotes the solid virtues of entrepeneurship and self reliance, Trickle Up has become a favorite for conservatives trying to summon up a little chic compassion.





"Grants are made by TUP to selected groups of five or more people after a business plan is reviewed for them by unpaid TUP project coordinators. The maximum grant is $100, and recipients must pledge to reinvest at least 20 percent of their profits in their businesses. In the past ten years, more than 90,000 individuals have participated, 15,000 businesses have been started in 86 countries, and over $7.5 million in profits have been generated from TUP-funded businesses. All of this has been achieved without the involvement of governments, large staffs, or social researchers. By now, you probably see why it's called the "Trickle Up Program." Funds aren't lavished upon government entities in poor countries with the hope that a small portion will somehow "trickle down" to the very poor. The grants go directly to the cagey entrepreneurs of the streets, including those in Port-au--Prince, Haiti.



Now, LI is fascinated with the project here: can beggars become choosers? It all looks very much like... like the 1966 War on Poverty project. One of the oddities of contemporary conservativism is this adoption of sixties forms, from classical rock to agit-prop. Hmm. In any case, LI is going to go further into this issue, this grassroots wealth issue, in another post soon.

Remora



William Easterly. As in, who is William Easterly?



Right now, Easterly is on the screen as the World Bank economist who came in from the cold. He's written a book that points out (for those who haven't seen it) that the World Bank has failed to stave off poverty in the third world. He's being touted in conservative circles as the man who wants to cut aid, and make those third world slacker nations pay their debts on time. His article in Foreign Policy, which supposedly got him in dutch with his bosses (along with the book that came out of it, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics) is about the second of those two concerns. In it, he makes three of claims:

1. That debt relief is already happening, and in fact has been inscribed in the world system since the early eighties.

2. That the refusal of a nation that has a legitimate "democratic" government to pay back debts incurred by previous military or corrupt governments is a perverse incentive, insofar as the money loaned, at the same time, to "good governments" must be paid back. In effect, we are rewarding bad behavior.

3. That making debt relief conditional on a nation's having a democratic government, or the beginnings of a civil society, creates incentives to make the World Bank and the international lender entities more, rather than less, intrusive in the internal affairs of third world countries.



Now about these claims. Readers know that LI loves nothing better than setting up claims, like ninepins, and bowling them over. Arguing in the oxygen tent -- we take up all the air, you get the fun result.



But seriously, folks. All three of the claims are actually valid only insofar as debt relief is viewed from one side only: that is, from the side of the debtors. Take point 2. To claim that debt relief will send a perverse incentive, insofar as it will tip the parity between the debts of good nations and of 'bad" nations to the side of bad nations, is to ignore the disincentive sent to lender agencies if, in fact, the debts of military dictatorships and the like are voided. The perverse incentives in place, pace Easterly, have really been the other way: given the lack of discussion, or the lack of the organs necessary for discussion, in a military dictatorship, in fact lending agencies have a perverse incentive to loan to these nations. They can better negotiate terms with juntas than with democratically elected governments, and they can better envision the objectives of those loans -- say some unnecessary dam -- rather than the other type of loans -- a medical infrastructure, say. Meanwhile, there is, as we all know, an immense system of kickbacks in place, a system Easterly doesn't even touch on. Take Nigeria. We know that the loans that went to the rebarbative Abacha government. Here's a press release from, of all places, the American embassy to Nigeria:





"Jack A. Blum, an attorney who specializes in controlling bank fraud, government corruption and money laundering, said May 25 that "solving" Nigeria's long-term debt and corruption problem "will take a lot more than conferences on civil society and how to make people more honest."



To solve the problem, he told the Subcommittee on Domestic and International Monetary Policy in the U.S. House of Representatives, "You have to bring criminal justice and recovery of money into play. That is absolutely essential." That, he said, means "getting at the proceeds of corruption, going after the billions (thousands of millions of dollars) that (Former Nigerian Head of State, General Sani) Abacha took and the billions more that prior governments looted from the country."



Blum, who was called to testify on the Nigerian debt and corruption situation, said "Many of those people (who took those public funds) are sitting in London as some of the wealthiest people in England. Those assets cannot be overlooked.... Four billion (four thousand million dollars) with Abacha, $40 billion ($40,000 million) at least since independence," with some estimates running as high as $90 billion."



As a matter of fact, LI has talked to Jack Blum about this issue. We did a piece on money laundering for a magazine, the Globalist, which went funny on us and never paid for the piece. Blum's point is that the experience of Nigeria has been repeated over and over again. It isn't just that a place like Nigeria doesn't have infrastructural projects supposedly justifying the loans that were earmarked for them -- it is that the lending agencies knew, even as they were making the loans, that a significant portion of the money was being kicked back to the West, in the form of transfers to Western banks.



This is an area Easterly, supposedly the boldest and the baddest economist ever to walk away from the World Bank, doesn't even discuss.



Since his book was published eight months ago, one might wonder why he is being profiled, now, in the press. The reason is, he is dear to the Bush administration's heart, endorsing their position on foreign aid. Here are two grafs from his profile in the Washington Post:



"From 1988 to 2001, he was senior adviser to the World Bank's Development Research Group, the in-house brain trust charged with gauging the success or failure of the bank's development efforts around the world. In the process, he's trekked through slums from Karachi to Cairo and wears the good-humored but weary resignation of a lifetime idealist mugged at last by reality.



"He rejects the notion that he's any kind of whistle-blower. He still believes in both the World Bank ("there are a lot of really smart, really committed people there") and aid to developing nations, which he would like to see increased from the current level of $56 billion. In fact, foreign aid has been declining in recent years after peaking at $64 billion in 1991. Although private capital has taken up some of that slack, Wolfensohn has been calling for a $10 billion increase from the bank's member countries in each of the next five years."



Get the "mugged by reality line" -- was it William Krystal who said a neo-conservative was a liberal mugged by reality? Reality, you can be sure, is operating behind this metaphor in a very sooty skin. The American dilemma is, as it has always been, that no matter how elevated the supposed issue of the debate, it is always just one step away from a minstrel show. LI is infinitely depressed about that.

Remora



The romantic hero degenerates into a mere bundle of boorshness in Dostoevsky's Pere Karamazov. Having gone through the Byronic geste of having no limits, Pere Karamazov really does live without limits -- except those fears generated by the police and superstition. We thought of that dissolute father of four, today, reading another story about the ideological and fiscal corruption of the Bush administration -- surely, Bush is ushering in the age of Gall, the age of limitless affronts to democracy, honesty, and good taste. Pere Karamazov was moved to act by his capacity for lust. Dick Cheney is moved to act by his taste for collusion, something that develops in those who find positions in the higher echelons of the power industry. The story in the NYT, today about Exelon Corporation (Ex-es and En-s are seemingly Texas Greek), the controller of 20% of the nuclear power in this country, details how by a gosh almighty fortuitous circumstance, the Bush folk and Exelon's management rehabilitated of one of their dead in the water schemes to get nuke power rolling again. The age of Gall is particularly galling because it is presided over by a man who, every day and in every way, demonstrates the wisdom of the American people in not electing him. Exelon, according to the Times, cast its bread on the Republican waters, and just as in the Bible, got back threefold. Cheney for reasons that have to be protected by executive privilege saw pebble bed reactors as worthy recipients fo American bucks. And guess what? Exelon has the world monopoly on pebble bed reactors. Wow, is that lucky or what?



Is LI being unfari? Exelon has an explanation:



"Don Kirchoffner, a spokesman for Exelon, said campaign contributions had nothing to do with the pebble-bed reactor's mention in the report. "We didn't influence anybody," Mr. Kirchoffner said. For Exelon, the paragraph [in Cheney's report, extolling pebble bed nuke reactors] was seen as "a good thing," Mr. Kirchoffner said, but he insisted that the mention of the reactor's design did not necessarily represent a boon for the corporation.



"A good thing for the industry and the country was the fact that the administration came out with a recommendation for new forms of nuclear power, and our pebble-bed modular reactor is a byproduct of that," Mr. Kirchoffner said. "We just happened to have it. They took a look at what we gave them and they said this kind of makes sense."



Exelon owns and operates about 20 percent of the nation's nuclear capacity. Its co-chief executives, John W. Rowe and Corbin A. McNeill Jr., who has since retired, were among a group of about 75 energy executives who met with Mr. Cheney in March 2001. Along with other participants of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group, Mr. McNeill also met that month with Karl Rove, President Bush's chief strategist, and Lawrence B. Lindsey, the president's top economic adviser. "



However, far be it from LI to suspect that the half a million diverted into Republican pockets by Kirchoffner's employer had anything to do with the Cheney report. While companies are expected to cough up the dough in our pirate democracy, still, let's get real. These are people who have to restrain themselves from recommending nuke reactors in all the national parks. These are people who itch to see the global climate raised just to see if they can do it. Hell, buy a bunch of a/c stock and you are sitting pretty. This was a decision in line with the century long conservative policy of socialism for the rich -- especially if the rich have reactors. Cindy Folkers of the Nuclear information and resources service has produced a nice comparison of our government investment in different energy technologies. There is a canard that is sometimes heard on the WSJ editorial page -- which is where canard come home to roost -- that somehow, the energy biz was forced by the government to fork over incredible billions to create worthless green energy sources, like ethanol. But that isn't the truth. The truth is, nuke money comes from the government, goes into the energy industry, and in return the industry builds vast, costly behemoths that reinforce a dying grid idea -- that power will be generated from these expensive hubs and that end users will simply, passively recieve it. So here is what happens on the subsidy scene when the pretence is made that deregulation is going to give us consumer choice. There is this thing called stranded costs. These costs are for things like, well, pebble bed nuke plants. Stranded as in help me, I'm an old energy company too weak to get up myself. And our compassion is poured out upon them -- part of the deal of deregulation is taxpayers doling out sums to power companies of up to 25 billion dollars, in the case of California, for all that overbuilding, or ill planned building, they did in the seventies, eighties and nineties. It is only fair, of course. As in fair return on investment, the only justice Bush's people seem to recognize. It is interesting -- the conservative outcry about restitution that is owed to black americans for slavery is now standard boilerplate on the chicken wing circuit, but there's an awful lot of silence about the restitution owed to energy companies. The one isn't real, the other is all too real. So guess which one gets discussed most on the talk radio shows?



Anyway, thus speaks Folkers:



When comparing U.S. government subsidies for nuclear, solar, and wind, the nuclear power industry has received the majority (96.3%) of $150 billion in investments since 1947; that�s $145 billion for nuclear reactors and $5 billion for wind and solar. Nuclear subsidies have cost the average household a total amount of $1,411 [1998 dollars] compared to $11 for wind. The more money we spend on nuclear power, the less greenhouse gas reduction benefit we receive, while we hurt sustainable technology investment.

Remora



James Kenneth Galbraith � the Galbraiths are our favorite dynasty, much superior to the Kennedys and the Bushies � has a nice article in Daedalus entitled A perfect crime: Inequality in the age of globalization. Unfortunately, the article isn�t available on the web, but here are Galbraith�s points:



1. An old view of development and income inequality held that there was a archetypal pattern

that applied to developing economies, in which a primitive stage of industrialization would correspond to an increase in income inequality, which would then begin to level out as the

economy matured.



2. This view was disputed in the eighties and nineties, and displaced by a cultural view, which

held that one should concentrate on land holding, the level of protectionism, the willingness to sacrifice for an advantageous export position, and so on.



3. Galbraith gives us evidence to think that the older view is more realistic. Furthermore, he

holds that the increase in global income inequality since 1982 has not been the effect of the mystical machinery of globalisation, where the allocation of manufacturing effected by the magic invisible hand and the temporary availability of cheap labor � temporary in the historic sense, stretching over a generation or century or two - in diverse locales organizes itself spontaneously. His idea is that the Keynesian system fell apart on the backs of the poor. Here is

the core of his piece:



�Global inequality fell in the late 1970s. In those years, poor countries had the benefit of low interest rates and easy credit, and high commodity prices, especially for oil. Indeed, in the 1970s,

the UTIP [the University of Texas Inequality Project, headed by Galbraith -- LI] data shows that it was the lower-income workers in the poorer countries who made the largest gains in pay. But

in 1980--1981, the age of low interest rates and high commodity prices ended. In 1982, the repression took hold - a financial repression, to be sure, but not less real for having taken that form. And while the debt crisis was not accompanied by overt violence -- coups are,

indeed, often very limited in their overt violence --the effects were soon felt worldwide, and with a savage intensity that has continued for two decades. In sum, it is not increasing trade as such that we should fear. Nor is technology the culprit. To focus on "globalization" as such misstates

the issue. The problem is a process of integration carried out since at least 1980 under circumstances of unsustainable finance, in which wealth has flowed upwards from the poor

countries to the rich, and mainly to the upper financial strata of the richest countries. In the course of these events, progress toward tolerable levels of inequality and sustainable development virtually stopped. Neocolonial patterns of center-periphery dependence, and of debt peonage, were reestablished, but without the slightest assumption of responsibility by the rich countries for the fate of the poor.



It has been, it would appear, a perfect crime...�



Limited Inc should point out that there are some problems with Galbraith�s thesis. The major

one is that, as he admits, it does not account for China and India � a huge exception. But as a general thesis about the background dynamic of our present state of things, I�ll buy it.



So it is with the hauteur characteristic of inhaling theory that we read today�s NYT story about the coy corporate use of tax havens to cut down on their oh so substantial burdens. Senator Baucus and Senator Grasseley from Iowa have been tut tutting over Stanley Works decision to

�relocate� spiritually in the Bahamas � a shift in citizenship that costs the company nothing, but is a considerable tax savings. The Senators are even proposing doing away with this tax haven business. Horrors. Government interference with business once again! Here�s a couple of grafs:



�Gerard J. Gould, a Stanley Works vice president, said he had not known about the hearing. The company, he said, "feels there is nothing unpatriotic about following existing law and reinvesting the tax savings to grow the company for all of its shareholders."



In a statement, Ingersoll-Rand said, "Our move to Bermuda was approved by our shareholders, was a taxable transaction and is consistent with U.S. laws."



"We believe that upon further analysis, the committee will conclude that aspects of the U.S. tax law drive U.S. companies to change their place of incorporation in order to compete on a level playing field with international peers," it added.







Ingersoll-Rand�s idea, apparently, is that the tax rate should go down to, what? Rather like King Lear�s daughter: �What need you five and twenty, ten, or five� percent? There�s a Business Week story from March 4th that gives reports a study of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that found that �52 of the 250 biggest U.S. companies paid effective tax rates of 10% or less in 1998.� Indeed, there�s competitiveness for ya! But as the Repugs in the House will suggest, their mouths full of steak, this is just too great a burden for the wealthy to bear! And of course Dumbo, the commander in chief, will march off in that general direction.



So it goes on the tax front.

Dope



The Odd, Old decencies



Lefty nostalgia always makes Limited Inc nervous. It makes sense that it is rampant: another defeated ideology compensating for losing the future by claiming the past. Alas, these consolation prizes don't bring much comfort. That said, I am as wet eyed about the world we've lost as any old Wobbly. I've been reading Richard Lourie's biography of Andrei Sakharov for a review, and I was struck by one passage. When Sakharov met Brezhnev, who was, at that time, the Commisar for military research, Brezhnev told him a story. In his father's opinion, Brezhnev said, the people who invented new weapons should be hung from gallows on hills, pour encourager les autres. Brezhnev, of course, didn't follow his Dad's advice.



Still, Brezhnev's daddy was just displaying sans culottes common sense, if you ask LI. The feeling of a value beyond the value of political or economic power -- well, it dies a little every day. But we still catch glimmerings of it in the damnedest places.



Which leads us, by a cerebral by-way that might not be entirely clear to the rest of you, to today's news about Avon. It seems that they are firing 3500 people. These people are the packers in their plant. They aren't the Avon ladies themselves, who number, worldwide, something like 3.4 million people. To each of whom, when the order is written up, an individual package is sent off. WNET did a nice piece about Avon a while back, calling it the Company of Woman. I particularly liked the quote from Andrea Jung:



For all the effort Avon is putting into the U.S., the most dynamic growth is taking place overseas. Jung claims, "One of our fastest-growing regions of the world has been the entire Eastern European region. We've grown at 43 percent in dollars compounded over the last several years, with 45 percent more reps every year. We call it Avon heaven. Down the road I think China's an enormous opportunity."



I know all about Avon Heaven, since my mother and grandmother were part of the Avon work force. Sobel, in his history of the Great Boom, as he calls the last fifty years in America, rightly points out that the effect of franchising in American culture hasn't really been publicized. It isn't just the potential owners of small shops who took, instead, the franchising route, but also housewives, or in my Mom's case secretaries, retirees -- the great American muddle. My grandmother persevered long after my Mom had abandoned Avon heaven. So my memories of her, my grandma, are fused with the sickly sweet smell of Avon perfumes, or the sheer wierdness of soap on a rope. My grandmother was a connector because of these products.



The Avon Lady reversed the old trope of the travelling salesman, his bibles or cleaning products in his briefcase, his penis some fabulous cuckolding engine. Yes, in the old days we were all just a doorbell away from a dirty joke. In place of that mythology, the Avon Lady instantiated another one: that of the harem. Briefly, all too briefly, the split level suburban ranch (2 ba, 3br, covered garage) was transfigured into some female tropic.



And, not incidentally, my grandmother earned enough to handsomely supplement the inadequate pension her husband received from Smith Corona.



It has to be remembered about capitalism: it is a way of life. It also has to be remembered that, just like the revolutionary tribunals that accompanied its birth in the West, capitalism is very prone to irrational capital punishment, condemning ways of life to sudden extinction, eroding our sense that any way of life is grounded, or an intrinsically good thing. Human nature at its finest, the economist says. MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN, as Adam Smith once said. I don't know. I'd like to consult Leonid Brezhnev's daddy on the question.

Remora



The fight about Intellectual Property goes on. Listen to the shots outside your window in the lonely night, listen to the sirens coming closer. Converts to the Open source idea, which is also the idea of the commons, come out of their closets, in the business world, are attacked, and then go back in. One such is the Michael Capellas, CEO of Compaq, who made a slip the other day. He was speaking before a biotech conference in Boston. Here's a couple of grafs from the Globe report: "The hundreds of biotech executives and venture capitalists at yesterday's conference hope to make immense profits by turning that processed data into salable products. Some aim to do this by obtaining patents on genetic information that they discover along the way. But this is a controversial idea, with some critics arguing that because genes are a part of nature, businesses shouldn't be able to own them.



In a comment that stunned the audience into several seconds of silence, Capellas responded to a question on the issue by flatly saying that companies shouldn't be able to patent genes. But he quickly backed away from the comment, pleading ignorance of all the ramifications of the issue. ''If you're asking me what should be patentable,'' Capellas said, ''I don't know.''



In a later telephone interview, Capellas stressed that companies had a right to control their scientific discoveries. ''I absolutely believe that the intellectual property must be protected,'' he said. Original processes and products growing out of genetic research should definitely be subject to patent protection, he said.But he repeated his concern that patent law might not be the best way to deal with basic genetic information. ''I'm not sure if the best way you do that is taking individual components and patenting them,'' Capellas said. ''That process doesn't lend itself well to this new world of bioinformatics.''



Catch that explanation of open source resistance: since genes are "a part of nature,' businesses shouldn't be able to own them. There are, as my puss-in-boots readers will know (oh you heady slicers and dicers of the dialectic!)

two major problems with that sentence. The first is that opposition is based on businesses 'owning nature." If a business exists, it is going to own nature somehow -- unless, of course, it is one of those Enron style "asset-free" companies, in which case its claims (and its year end accounting) are more super-natural. No, the question is about particular kinds of nature. The question is about the commons.



The other mistake resides, of course, in the verb "own." As in the equivalence between patent and own. Patents, as we have said before (and said and said) are grants of monopoly. They are inventions of state governance. Unlike contracts, monopolies of this type have a time limit. The reason for this is simple: the perpetual ownership of things intellectual, whether it is the sentences in a book or the method for clicking through the webpages to own the book, are eventually common property. The patent office is borrowing from you every time they issue a patent. The copyright people are doing the same. And you -- you out there, scribbling a poem, or working on a new fuel cell, are continually borrowing from the commons to do what you do. There is no work of art or man that refers only to itself. Well, outside of a nuthouse. This isn't a controversial point. It is, in fact, the reason nobody had ever heard of the phrase Intellectual Property until a couple of decades ago. If we go back to the discussion of patents in the Constitutional era, as Lawrence Lessig has shown, you will see that Jefferson, like Adam Smith, viewed patents as monopolies, and was accordingly reluctant to encourage their growth. Only lately has this insidious ownership idea crept out of the teeming minds of Monsato, Microsoft and their ilk. This isn't the new economy, this is the Hubris Economy. Only in the current atmosphere would it be possible for a company to actually think it can buy the idea of corn seeds -- which is what Monsanto has done in Mexico. And the reason this is happening is that the conservative judiciary, far from displaying that fealty to the past which they like to entertain themselves with at the Federalist Society banquets, are actually wildly, promiscuously legislating.



SO: sorry LI has to be so casuistical, so ... boring. But let's go over it. In the sense that I own the apartment I am living in -- that is, I rent it -- yes, one can talk of ownership. But owning in the sense of my ownership of the computer I'm using is out of the question. Ah, the thing is to prevent, by semantic means, the question from even being posable. So the question won't be posed, the question will be perpetually distorted, as long as Business Journalists go along for the ride and quietly seed the ownership-patent equivalency in their little business stories.

Remora



Limited Inc has been quiet about the Middle East for a while. Since despair is the only rational response to the confluence of American inanity and Sharon's wet dream of a frontier war, we've been driven into internal exile on this one.



Still, even in the sea of distant bloodshed, there are humorous points to be made. LI has particularly liked the new patriotic strategy of the American press. As Quick Dick Cheney makes his grand tour of the world, '002 (get your t shirts now!) the NYT in particular has been interlarding every article with assurances that the unanimous hostility of both Arabs and Europeans to Bush's potential cavalry op in the badlands of Iraq conceals unamimous agreement with every burp and growl of the Heimat's foreign policy. This is truly a unique defense. We have to go way back to the Soviet-German peace treaty to find rhetoric that peculiar in the foreign policy sphere. Not that circular logic doesn't have a good and honorable place in our hearts. Remember the old Freudian argument that any objection to Freud's theory is really 'resistance" to the theory. And resistance stems from (hey presto) the unconscious id. Which proves there is an Id, which proves that Freud's theory is legitimate. QED. We all agreed with Freud, then, and we agreed more the more we disagreed.



Alas, there is another phrase of Freud's that occurs to LI: the reality principle. The reality principle seems to be breaking into the Heimat lovefest. Witness this last report from Saudi Arabia:



"American officials said before Mr. Cheney's trip to the Middle East that they thought Arab leaders would eventually acquiesce in an American military campaign against Iraq, even if they made a public show of disapproving of it. But the persistence and calculated nature of Arab response show how Middle East politics has intruded in Mr. Cheney's mission."



Is that the darndest thing? Middle Eastern politics intruding into OUR WAR! Why there ought to be a law.

However, not to fear. The more Bushypoo presses the war with Iraq button, the more he will maintain his ultrapatrotic poll numbers. Life is good for the former cheerleader!

Remora



Dostoevsky said that you could measure the degree of humanity of a civilization by its prisons. Limited Inc would like to suggest that you can measure the degree of literacy of a civilization by

its encyclopedias. If this is the case, the race is on and it looks bad for our culture. Right now, ancien regime France and Edwardian England come in at about no. 1 and no. 2, while contemporary American culture, despite its micro Britannicas and its multi-media Funk and Wagnalls, is back there with the melange of misinformation and rumor Isadore of Seville put together around 800. This isn�t good.



So you can, perhaps, understand Limited Inc.�s joy when we went to the On-Line book page, to

see what was new, and found a link to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Joy turned to ecstasy

as we went to the link and behold, it worked! (which does add points, admittedly, to our culture).



A few days ago, Limited Inc was corresponding with a friend, and trying to press this friend

to go to the site -- Limited Inc has a used car salesman�s view about pressing our site upon people. And the friend asked, reasonably, what was this site about? Like, was it a personal diary? Limited Inc, horrified at the thought, explained that the idea goes back to the New Yorker�s Talk of the Town � little quasi personal, quasi journalistic pieces. Well, the Encyclopedia Britannica,

1911, unlikely as this may seem, is to us as the madeleine was to Proust � it unlocks every memory.



Here�s why. When Limited Inc was a mere stripling, a dewy suburban lad, there was a woman across the street, a Mrs. Brooks, who was, to the dewy lads dewy eyes, an ancient woman. Now,

of course, being closer in age to Mrs. Brooks than I ever thought possible, I estimate she was in her late fifties, early sixties. Like her, I'm getting ropy and rheumy -- although unlike her, I have no interest in what hymns are sung at my funeral. This was a constant obsession, as I remember. Her husband, Doctor Brooks, died, and Mrs. Brooks gave me his 1911 encyclopedia.



Probably no gift in my life has been as significant as that encyclopedia. It crashed like a meteor

into my suburban Atlanta habitus, one that had been bounded, on the one side, by Life magazine, and on the other side, by my parents native Republican Party mores. And then I get these blue-ish volumes, speckled with some gross mold, and it was well, Alice�s wonderland. I got my stock of cultural capital from going unsystematically through those books -- much more than I got from, say,

going to Tulane, later on.

By common consent, or maybe not common -- Borges says something close to this, and so does LI, so it is authorative around here - the 1911 encyclopedia was the greatest collective product of the British Empire. The Empire, which has lately become the object of much imperialist nostalgia on the part of the Weekly Standard crowd, was, let's face it, an organized crime against humanity, a much more successful theft than any mounted by the Mafia. Add up the casualties, throw in that nasty business of the opium trade, and it rather disturbs Rudyard Kipling hour in the bungalow, in spite of the Bushypoo nostalgia for the white man�s burden.



So what makes this encyclopedia worth the encomiums I�m lavishing here? The only way to understand it is to sample. So here is a comparison. LI went to another encyclopedia site, at Bartleby, picking a random entry � Quevado � and then picked that entry in the wondrous �11. Go down to the next post, where have put our excerpts. They are too long for one post.

QUEVEDO Y VILLEGAS, FRANCISCO G6MEZ DE (1580-1645), Spanish satirist and poet,

was born at Madrid, where his father, who came from the mountains of Burgos, was secretary to Anne of Austria, fourth wife of Philip II. Early left an orphan, Quevedo was educated at the university of Alcala, where he acquired a knowledge of classical and modern tongues �of Italian and French, Hebrew and Arabic, of philosophy, ;heology, civil law, and economics. His fame reached beyond Spain; at twenty-one he was in correspondence with Justus Lipsius on questions of Greek and Latin literature. His abstruse studies influenced Quevedo's style; to them are due the pedantic traits and mania for quotations which characterize most of his works.He betook himself to the court and mingled with the society that surrounded Philip III. The cynical greed ofministers, the meanness of their flatterers, the corruption of the royal officers, the financial scandals, afforded ample scope to Quevedo's talent as a painter of manners. At Valladolid,where the court resided from 1601 to 1606, he mingled freely with these intrigues and disorders,

and lost the purity of his morals but not his uprightness and integrity. In 1611 he fought a duel in which his adversary was killed, fled to Italy, and later on became secretary to Pedro Tellez Giron, duke de Osuna, and viceroy of Naples. Thus he learned. politics�the one science which he had perhaps till then neglected,�initiated himself into the questions that divided Europe, and penetrated the ambitions of the neighbours of Spain, as well as the secret history of the intriguers protected by the favour of Philip III. The result was that he wrote several political works, particularly a lengthy treatise, La Politico, de Dios (1626), in which he lays down the duties of kings by displaying to them how Christ has governed His church. The disgrace of Osuna (1620) compromised Quevedo, who was arrested and exiled to his estate at La Torre de Juan Abad in New Castile. Though involved in the process against the duke, Quevedo remained faithful to his patron, and bore banishment with resignation. On the death of Philip III. (3ist of March 1621) he he commended himself to the first minister of the new king by celebrating his accession to power and saluting him as the vindicator of public morality in an epistle in the style of Juvenal. Olivares recalled him from his exile and gave him an honorary post in the palace, and from this time Quevedo resided almost constantly at court, exercising a kind of political and literary jurisdiction due to his varied relations and knowledge, but especially to his biting wit, which had no respect for persons. General politics, social economy, war, finance, literary and religious questions, all came under his dissecting knife, and he had a dissertation, a pamphlet, or a song for everything. One day he is defending St James, the sole patron of Spain, against a powerful coterie that wished to associate St Theresa with him; next day he is writing against the duke of

Savoy, the hidden enemy of Spain, or against the measures taken to change the value of the currency; or once more he is engaged with the literary school of G6ngora, whose affectationsseem to him to sin against the genius of the Castilian tongue. And in the midst of this incessant controversy on every possible subject he finds time to compose a picaresque romance, the Historia de la Vida del Buscdn, Ilamado Don Pablos, Exemplo de Vagamundos, y Espejo de Tacanos (1626); to write his Suenos (1627), in which all classes are flagellated; to pen a dissertation on The Constancy and. Patience of Job (1631), to translate St Francis de Sales and Seneca, to compose thousands of verses, and to correspond with Spanish and foreign scholars.But Quevedo was not to maintain unscathed the high position won by his knowledge, talent, and biting wit. The governmentof Olivares, which he had welcomed as the dawn of a political and

social regeneration, made things worse instead of better, and led the country to ruin. Quevedo saw this and could not hold his peace. An anonymous petition in verse enumerating the

grievances of his subjects was found, in. December 1639, under the very napkin of Philip IV. It was shown. to Olivares, who exclaimed, �I am ruined �; but before his fall he sought vengeance on the libeller. His suspicions fell on Quevedo, who had enemies glad to confirm them. Quevedo was arrested on December 7, and carried under a strong escort to the monastery of St I~Iark atLeon, where he was kept in rigorous confinement till the fall of the minister (January 1643) restored him to light and freedom, but not to the health which he had lost in his dungeon. He had

little more than two years to live, and these were spent in inactive retreat, first at La Torre de Juan Abad, and then at the neighbouring Villanueva de los Infantes, where he died September 8, 1645.



Okay, now tell me that doesn�t hop out at you like one of the Arabian Nights Tales? It is the

same mindset with which Richard Burton doggedly penned his translation and footnotes of the

latter. The "betook" is good -- there's a certain Victorian antiquitarianism about the locution that is, at this distant, not as terrible as it would have been for the Bloomsbury crowd. And how about the napkin, man? This isn't an encyclopedia entry, it is a mini-Dumas novel, and Errol Flynn should definitely play Quevedo. Still, the tensions within the monument shouldn't be overlooked. It is easy to see how it would seem to the Edwardians that this was the way to impart the sum of knowledge. Knowledge was itself an imperial form. This entry couldn't have been written by a person who was not aware of the globetrotting spirit that animated his own society -- one that sought profits in Africa and Asia, one that depended on free trade, and hypocrisy, to pull through.



Now, here is the Quevado entry from Colombia Encyclopedia:



�Spanish satirist, novelist, and wit, b. Madrid. In 1611 he fled to Italy after a duel and became involved in revolutionary plottings. When Philip IV ascended the Spanish throne, Quevedo narrowly avoided a long prison term. He was later imprisoned (1639��43) as the presumed author of a satire on the king and his favorite, the conde de Olivares. Quevedo was one of the

great writers of the Spanish Golden Age. Los sue��os [visions] (1627) is a brilliant and bitterly satiric account, after Dante and Lucan, of the inhabitants of hell. Other major works include the philosophical treatise Providencia de Dios (1641), the political essay Pol��tica de Dios y gobierno de Cristo (1626��55), and the important picaresque novel La vida del Busc��n (1626). Also a major poet, his verse was collected in El Parnaso espa��ol (1648). His Ep��stola sat��rica

y censoria (1639), a poetic satire against Olivares, is well known. Quevedo was a determined

opponent of Gongorism (see G��ngora). 1 See studies by D. W. Blesnick (1972) and J. Iffland

(1978).�

Our far-flung correspondents.



For some reason, for the last week Limited Inc is getting an alarming amount of traffic. In the high 20s, messieurs et mesdames. Yes, the views we ventilate here are slowly seeping into the Weltgeist, where, like CFCs in the stratosphere, they will do their silent and peculiar damage.



The last post elicited a nice little letter from D., who said he liked it, and his wife, who said what are you thinking of, describing D. as drinking like a fish. We replied that we were not saying D. was in any way an alky: "A drunk is a guy who is always longing for a drink; this is the exact reverse of the true artiste of drinking - in which case, the drink is always longing for the guy. The act of drinking, in the latter case, is just obliging the angel of history. Who is always saying: another round for my friend!" That post also elicited this opinion from the habitual scourge of Limited Inc's ill thought out attempts at humor, Alan C., who said he could reply to me in a on the one hand, on the other hand manner, but would be "brief and

polemical instead:"



"Freud said that the goal of psychoanalysis was to free people from neurotic

misery and to make it possible for them to experience ordinary human

unhappiness. Antidepressants and other psychiatric medications can in fact

do that, a lot more effectively than psychoanalysis ever could. Some of

your remarks seem to me to reflect an inability to understand the

distinction."



Our favorite Memphis-ite, M.B., who once had to travel through Round Rock on her way to a teaching gig in some Texas outpost town, liked the Round Rock post. As did the particular European woman mentioned in it. So, Limited Inc is just love festing with the good vibes, right? Well, we must be doing something wrong to please people as much as we have this week. Hmm. We'll try harder in the next couple posts to be really contrarian and mean-spirited.

Dope



D. called up this morning. He told Limited Inc a funny tale.



Seems D. and his wife went to a cowboy dancehall a couple of days ago.



Now, D., like Limited Inc, is an unhibited dancer. He dances like he has fishes in his britches, he flails galvanically, he pogoes to the sweet strains of trucker nostalgia coming over the loudspeakers, and he isn't afraid to dance alone.

He also, it should be said, drinks like a fish. Of course. He's a friend of mine.



Anyway, a good time was being had by all when D.'s wife was approached by a woman who identified herself as a school teacher. As you know, you can go through the education department at many of our illustrious institutions and come out without a clue as to how to do, say, long division. But one thing you can't skip is the class on how to drug the a- and anti-socials. Dumb em down, drug em up -- is this a win-win situation for your local school board or what? So, being a good diagnostician, this teacher had immediately spotted D. for what he was -- a sufferer from ADD. D.'s wife is doing the slow burn when the teacher, sly as a cat, made off with D.'s drink. Apparently, she didn't want this ADD guy running around drunk, who knows what he'd do.



D. told Limited Inc this story partly because he wanted to make us laugh. ADD is Limited Inc's current favorite designer disease. It is more than a state of mind, it is the state of the union, baby! If America pays attention to anything for more than two days, we all agree that it is world history, there's never been anything like it before, and, in short, "everything (as they say) will be different."



A designer disease is such a money maker that I feel it a public duty to reveal to my select audience, entrepeneurs all, how a designer disease work. Take any assortment of bad habits and aches and pains, package it, and baptize it with a nifty acronym. SDD, XDD, whatever. You need to link it to some neural jargon, and thence to a neuro-toxin, which can be had for x bucks a pill. Or as a wonderous site on ADHD puts it, licking its lips and rubbing its hands: ADHD in adults is very responsive to pharmacotherapy. Very, very big boy. Can't you just hear the pharma guys purring that line into the local doc's ear? Throw in eye of newt, whiskers of cat, and bingo:

"Research and clinical experience have shown that the antidepressants Norpramin (desipramine) and Tofranil(imipramine) effectively increase attentiveness.' In Limited Inc.'s case, attentiveness is also increased by the promise of large sums of money or ready sex, but alas, the pharmacist doesn't purvey such things.



Still, once you have your SXXD, you need a market. To get it across, most trained medical personel feel that you need to tell some tales of the tribe. Brochures, books, stories about people just like you and me, people who are sufferin' terribly from life dysfunction. A guy I know who is convinced he has adult ADD once proved it to me by telling me of a story he'd come across in a book on the subject. The guy in the book had a presentation to make, but kept putting it off, putting it off, couldn't concentrate until the last moment, did it, then, exhausted, fell asleep and slept through the time scheduled for the presentation. And, here's the killer, the reader told me, he'd done exactly the same thing . Is this Q.E.D. or what?



Tales like this are glommed onto by the great mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation. Now they suddenly understand that their desperation is a medical condition, and so they become much less quiet -- become positively noisy. This is the second phase of the designer disease profile -- the viral stage. It spreads from mouth to mouth, as people compare anecdotes and recall their own multiple failures and unhappinesses. It turns out it was this scoprion lurking in the shadows! ADD is just sitting there, in the biography, waiting to strike.



The importance of the anecdote can't be underestimated in this process. In this, it reminds me of fortune-telling. Fortune telling is a communicative emblem, really, because all of the cues plug in to a good fortune telling session. First, the fortune teller casts back into the past. Relationship problems? perhaps with a man who didn't appreciate you? perhaps this man, though, he had some good qualities? Of course. Play the averages, here. If you are dealing with a lesbian audience, the bad boyfriend thing isn't going to work, but you simple have to shift the gender stuff around, plug into a different regime of sentimentality. Ditto if you are dealing with a guy. Then some unusual circumstance that is statistically distributed: she told me all about that time X (the relationship reject in question) threw a fit about the car. about the dishes. About the insurance. About the vacation. Fortune telling relies on the odd relationship between our self consciousness and our unconsciousness of our fit into regular social patterns. The broad shapes of our fates within a population in which like social constraints apply are really not so different. Plug in the variables, take a ride on the wild side. But fortune telling also depends on vanity. The fortune teller who predicts, I see you marrying a man who will go bald and pudgy in ten years, pick at his food, and watch way too much television is not going to get a big tip, even though she gets points for truthtelling. You can only play the odds so much. L'amour propre is still the goddess.

Remora



From the WP a story ostensibly detailing another instance of environmental degradation:



"The first nationwide study of pharmaceutical pollution of rivers and streams offers an unsettling picture of waterways contaminated with antibiotics, steroids, synthetic hormones and other commonly used drugs.Of the 139 streams analyzed by the U.S. Geological Survey in 30 states -- including Maryland and Virginia -- about 80 percent contained trace amounts of contaminants that are routinely discharged into the water in human and livestock waste and chemical plant refuse."



But only the naysayers, the nattering nabobs, will jump on this story from the pollution side. Because this is a classic good news/bad news story. See how the liberal press typically showcases the bad side -- when the good news side of it is right in front of their collective noses: here's the solution to the pesky problem of universal health care! The compassionate conservatives can now make the case that health is just a glass of tapwater away from even our poorest citizens! Is this a great country or what? In other countries, to get your steroids, you have to know a doctor. You have to go through the state socialism of a bureaucracy. It is all the Soviet Union out there in the world where the parts aren't American (except for Britain, of course. They love us in Britain. They kiss our butts in Britain. They're crazy to go along with us when we do the darndest things -- oh, like attacking the axis of evil --in Britain. They have Tony Blair in Britain, and he understands our sorta sometimes hostile needs like perfectly!), and people have to queue up at the steroid store to get those necessary muscle builders. Imagine!



There was a story back in October (a month devoted to recoil from 9.11, and thus essentially a blank, as far as news goes, in Limited Inc's mind) in Salon http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/10/25/drugs_water/print.html that has a lot more fun facts to know and tell. For instance, the author, Mark D. Uehling, quotes some water honcho as saying: the presence of "endocrine-disrupting chemicals in potable and nonpotable water has not been established."



But Uehling

notes:



Scientists in Minneapolis presented abundant evidence to the contrary. For one thing, most farmers liberally dose pigs, cows and chickens with hormones. Those male and female hormones are definitely reaching the environment in both liquid and solid animal wastes. Birth control drugs, even steroids used by body builders and pro athletes, are making similar deposits. The question is what effects the chemicals are having, and whether the water (or something else) might be the source. One new clue came from the Mississippi River, where James Levitt of the University of Minnesota studied a variety of fish coping with endocrine mimic-molecules. Levitt compared walleyed pike upstream from a lock, where there were no endocrine mimic-molecules, with fish caught downstream from the lock, where there was plenty of sewage effluent and no shortage of estrogen disrupters.



The male fish swimming in the dirty water had no sperm, and malformed testes. The female fish in the same water had similarly degenerated ovaries

."



The old joke, from W.C. Fields, was that he didn't drink water, because fish fuck in it. The new joke is something like, I don't drink water, because fish can't fuck in it. As they say in the Reader's Digest, humor is the best medecine.

Note:



The usual process of putting out my posts involves proofreading them once they are up on the web page. For some unknown reason, the Blogger won't go into editing mode. So in the post below, there are several mistakes. For instance, "were does this woman, this woman flying around the Middle East alienating Egyptian journalists,. come from..." would have been edited to "where does this woman, jetting around the Middle East and alienating Egyptian journalists on US government time, come from..." Anyway, I apologize in advance for certain inelegancies.

Limited Inc.

Remora



Limited Inc, predictably, is a fan of Naomi Klein -- or at least is a fan of the idea of Naomi Klein. Sometimes, though, we feel that Ms. Klein allows the writerly ocassion, as Henry James might have put it, to pass her by. This is what we felt about her column, for the LA Times, on Charlotte Beers, America's official Image-meister:



"As undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, Charlotte Beers' assignment was not to improve relations with other countries but rather to perform an overhaul of the U.S. image abroad. Beers had no previous State Department experience, but she had held the top job at both the J. Walter Thompson and Ogilvy & Mather ad agencies, and she's built brands for everything from dog food to power drills."



Unsurprisingly, Charlotte Beers task, orientation, and administration are not to Klein's liking.



"So why, only five months in, does the campaign for a new and improved Brand USA seem in disarray? Several of its public service announcements have been exposed for playing fast and loose with the facts. And when Beers went on a mission to Egypt in January to improve the image of the U.S. among Arab "opinion-makers," it didn't go well. Muhammad Abdel Hadi, an editor at the newspaper Al Ahram, left his meeting with Beers frustrated that she seemed more interested in talking about vague American values than about specific U.S. policies. "No matter how hard you try to make them understand," he said, "they don't."



"The misunderstanding likely stemmed from the fact that Beers views the United States' tattered international image as little more than a communications problem. Somehow, despite all the global culture pouring out of New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, despite the fact that you can watch CNN in Cairo and Black Hawk Down in Mogadishu, America still hasn't managed, in Beers' words, to "get out there and tell our story." In fact, the problem is just the opposite: America's marketing of itself has been too effective."



And the drums go drum drum drum. The discrepancy between the American reality, which is a pretty consistently pursued imperialism, and American rhetoric, is hauled out, and we fade Charlotte Beers to black. All honorable stuff. Yet Limited Inc feels a distinct sense of the cobbled together, the held back, in Klein's piece. When Charlotte Beers went before the senate during her nomination, Time magazine's Richard Stengel wrote:



"It would be easy � too easy � to make light of Charlotte Beers, the former big-time advertising exec recently named undersecretary of state for public affairs. The so-called "queen of branding" who helped promote Head & Shoulders shampoo and Uncle Ben's Rice has now been assigned the job of helping to boost the U.S. image in the Muslim world."



Because a thing is easy does not mean it is not worth doing. Surely we should ask ourselves, were does this woman, this woman flying around the Middle East alienating Egyptian journalists,. come from, and why is she working for us, and why can't we make fun of her? According to an Economist piece, she once impressed a dog food client by eating dog food; she once impressed Sears execs by taking apart and putting together a power drill (she is apparently a woman of endless resources). She puts sweaters on her toy poodles and lounges around, apparently, with Martha Stewart, when Stewart is prepared to lounge.

This is the standard media identikit re Charlotte Beers.



Alan Rosenshine, in Advertising age, has risen to Stengel's call to seriousness, and delivers several solemnities about Beers' onerous task. He makes the point that we aren't selling our brand to terrorists. No, we aren't. We just aren't a-going to do that:



"Audience segmentation is a primary principle of branding. Terrorists and those who have turned hatred into violent fanaticism are not our audience. Their psyches are warped beyond any possibility of communication. Terrorists are criminals and enemies of civilization who deserve destruction in the name of justice and self-defense. The message of America must instead reach the many millions still in the process of being taught to hate us."





I'm glad that Rosenshine got that off his chest, but the interested by-stander has to disagree. Surely it would be cheaper to send Beers deep into the mountains of Afghanistan with an Uzi and letting her demonstrate to puzzled Al Quaeda execs stripping it and putting it back together again. She could also sample their simple fare, and get them rolling with her imitation of Martha confronting a badly done coq au vin. Instead, we waste her talents on Egyptian journalists. Even Beers seems to know that there's something hopelessly porkbarrel about her Nile tete-a-tetes. According to the NY Metro,



"Beers, for her part, seems to be busy managing expectations. Testifying before Congress, she recently characterized the propaganda war's goal as reaching young people. "It's the battle for the 11-year-old mind," she said, sounding ominously like someone who has decided that the 12-and-over demographic may already be a lost cause."



Actually, it isn't that the over 12 demographic is enfolded in the process of cult hatred. No, as any Piagetian psychologist can tell you, between the age of 11 and 12 the world begins to take on a cause and effect density. Bushiepoo, whose very ascension to the throne was in defiance of cause and effect, loses his aura of plausibility to the well tempered sixth grade mind. Best appeal to em while they are still in nappies.

Dope



Limited Inc was raised in the suburbs, but escaped those wastelands at the end of our larval stage. Still, sometimes there is a thing that calls us, a beckon in the sweet air, and we must go back to haunt those teen tedious reaches, those bloated wood and brick tents each on its own independent half to one acre� Well, really there isn�t, but for anthropological reasons we took off with a friend to explore Round Rock, Austin�s bedroom community, yesterday. The friend had romantic visions of Penny Lane, or at least the Cal-friendly colors of the Truman show, but we knew better. We knew that this is the South, after all, and that suburbs are where Yankees have traditionally coped with the South � by voting Republican, adopting Northern racism � a primness about language combined with a ferocity about money and who (and what color of who) it goes to � to Southern norms, and exuding around them, like the shell of some strange crustacean, that outlying reef of oddly monotonous shopping centers, among which old Southern remnants � the visibly unhygienic barbecue place, the commercially dubious shacks, usually sprinkled over with some disgusting grayish sludge of oil and rubber, somehow connected with the auto trade, the bakery outlets (white bread discounted) � exist in an uneasy symbiosis.



My friend, a product of Europe, had never taken a close and loving look at suburbia. Well, to the unaccustomed sensibility, it does come somewhat as a shock. She kept looking for waterfalls and greenery � Limited Inc never did find out where these inviting, though wavering, images came from. Alas, the only waterfalls to be found in the Round Rock area are artificially constructed, and usually involve railroad ties and some sprayer on an automatic timer. As for greenery, it has been a brown winter.



Paradise is getting everything you want � hell is the necessity of living with having gotten everything you want. Any teenager can tell you that. What makes America perpetually different is the p-to-h ratio � it is just at a different multiple from everywhere else. For three hundred years there�s been a bull market in paradise; but also, inexplicably, hell never disappears -- just take the next exit off the interstate if you want a taste of it. We Americans have produced the first real blackmail empire in world history � we have the weapons to end it all, and that armament has penetrated the pores of our very dreams. Assyrian lust for power, and the British conviction of our essential righteousness, this is a heady mixture. We like to think we are giants. But oh my friends, why, why, does all that power seems to leak away in the bungalows, at the end of the day? Why can one drive down the streets of Round Rock and feel something deadly, a tedium that seems to visibly weigh on the Dell Baseball Stadium, the HEB Grocery store, the Gatti�s Pizza Delivery place?

Remora



"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

"The dog did nothing in the night-time."

"That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.





That was, indeed, a curious incident, for those who have ears to hear (that there is nothing to hear) and eyes to see (that there is nothing to see). Well, campers, consider the curious incidents that await us in today's newspaper. One headline says, The surprise recovery is here. America is in great shape, happy days are here again, and Bushiepoo has avoided the curse of the house of Bush, which, before, has always gloomily exuded recession around its slimy walls. But what is this, Watson? Chap says Japan in deep recession, make that depression, with an incredible 4.5 percent drop in GDP. Curious. The stats the Financial Times packs into its first graf are heart stoppers:





"Japan's economy shrank in the fourth quarter of last year on falling exports and a plunge in capital spending, nudging the country into its longest recession since 1993, official data showed on Friday. Gross domestic product contracted 1.2 per cent in real terms between October and December compared with the previous quarter, and 4.5 per cent on an annualised basis. A 12 per cent drop in business investment undermined the benefits of an increase in consumer spending. "



On to today's mystery theater: why don't Japan's numbers bug us?



Perhaps, and here I am flying blind, it has to do with our decades long failure to pierce the Japanese market. This long deplored situation, in which the Japanese craftily avoid our meaty, beaty American products, stimulates periodic choler among our politicos, and the news story about some fantastically expensive thing in Japan that is cheap as water in Omaha and that we could be providing them with if only they didn't protect their farmers, retailers, industry, whatever. And this is a continuing scandal and a stumbling block to free traders. What free traders don't say, however, is that when the global economy is inter-connected, economic contagion is necessarily provided with routes to spread faster than if the global economy is, well, less inter-connected. Clearly, if the US economy depended on exporting to Japan, we would be in deep trouble. And we might well be in trouble with this recovery anyway. And -- to continue backpedalling - if we simulate an economy in which trade barriers with Japan had fallen, and the US was happily trading away with the Japanese, perhaps this kind of activity would re-compose our economy in such a way that its present state would be so different from its current state as to be unpredictible. All clever hypotheses, Watson. But the fact remains, Japan's troubles, so far, have left the U.S. relatively untouched. Given the extent of Japanese investment in this country, and given the size of the Japanese economy, the fact that Japan is doing a Titanic without sucking us into its wake is a mystery. I don't see any of the free traders out there, or the globalists, explaining it.

Remora



The Enlightenment was a great age for sympathy. The whole Scottish school, from Hume to Adam Smith, had spotted sympathy floating about in the culture and gone -- aha! Because the cultural sea, according to the best authorities, consisted of self interest -- wave after wave of the stuff -- so the question was, why was there morality at all? Sympathy was a respectable escape from self interest, without wholly being an escape. Besides, there is, in this idea, an agreeable dependence on some kind of narration. In fact, this moral elevation of sympathy surely fed into the later nineteenth century fascination with stories. First comes the moralist, then the novelist.



Hume, for instance, in his treatise on Human Nature, has this to say:



"We may begin with considering a-new the nature and force of sympathy. The minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations, nor can any one be actuated by any affection, of which all others are not, in some degree, susceptible. As in strings equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so all the affections readily pass from one person to another, and beget correspondent movements in every human creature. When I see the effects of passion in the voice and gesture of any person, my mind immediately passes from these effects to their causes, and forms such a lively idea of the passion, as is presently converted into the passion itself. In like manner, when I perceive the causes of any emotion, my mind is convey�d to the effects, and is actuated with a like emotion. Were I present at any of the more terrible operations of surgery, �tis certain, that even before it begun, the preparation of the instruments, the laying of the bandages in order, the heating of the irons, with all the signs of anxiety and concern in the patient and assistants, wou�d have a great effect upon my mind, and excite the strongest sentiments of pity and terror. No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes or effects. From these we infer the passions: And consequently these give rise to our sympathy."





Well, the NYT reports today on the terrible operations of modeling, and it is a nice little parable of the arousal of passion followed by its diminishment -- the limits of sympathy are the limits of my bank account, might be the moral. This week, as my trendy readers will surely know, is a great week for fashion in Milan -- one of the supreme rites, one of the ceremonies that holds together the universe. Guy Trebay, the NYT reporter, filed this account of an incident they should teach in intro to ethics:



"Midway through the Gucci show on Saturday, a young British model, Michelle DeSwarte, made her first exit, as entrances at fashion shows are called. She got about two-thirds of the way down the runway and staggered dramatically on a pair of four-inch heels before her ankles gave way."



The stumble created Humean gasps in the audience. We presume that a lot of mass infering was going on. It was the infering of an inference, if embarrassment be considered not a first level pain, but a second level pain -- a sort of sympathy with oneself. So it was already an intellectual effort, rather like reading a postmodern novel.



Hume was a man of abridged expectations. He did not expect the best from the human beast, and he was rarely disappointed. The effort of sympathy, its prolongation, is rather like reading to the end of a tedious story -- something we might do with some effort, once we have begun, but that very few will do if the tedium mounts too high (excepting us poor reviewers, who then attack -- our sympathy beyond eroded, actually transformed into malignancy). Well, our stumbling model stumbled again:



"Bret Easton Ellis pointed out in his novel "Glamorama" that, in objective terms, a model's job is not all that complicated. You have to look good and have the capacity to walk. Slick floors, fur rugs and weird and ill-fitting shoes are standard occupational hazards. All the same, people understand that things can go wrong. The reaction when Ms. DeSwarte fell the first time was mainly sympathetic. When she made a second exit and again crumpled to the runway, there was a widespread assumption among the spectators that they were watching a professional suicide."



Don't let it happen to you twice. The general sentiment from an audience a good third of whom have surely been treated, somewhere along the way, for addiction to one or another of our favorite candies. Isn't this, isn't this ... beautiful? The state of play of class relations emblematized in the stumble of a model in four inch heels. That is a lot of heel. Limited Inc is moved.

Remora



WP does the "on the one hand, on the other hand" kinda story (the tergiversations of moderation, as the late Barry Goldwater might have said) about the proposed drilling of the Arctic Refuge. The environmentalists and the Oil Reich, the message is, are both pulling fast ones. Under the headline, Some Facts Clear In the War of Spin Over Arctic Refuge,



Michael Grunwald plays the honest referee, whistle a-blowin'. But the article turns out to be spin for that most dangerous of media vices -- Middle-ism. The media loves to think the truth is in the middle. Sometimes, as with donuts, this is a big mistake -- since the middle is approximately nothing. A big zip. And the more you stand for the big zip, the further from reality you are.



Here's the truth. It is simple. The Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, has spent her whole life working to moderate, or decimate, environmental laws and regulations. She has never shown any park management skills. She has never demonstrated even an aesthetic appreciation for Nature. The spirit of the Interior department is foreign to her. There was no strong opposition to her because the Clinton era had a fatal, relaxing effect upon Democratic spine. Since she was appointed, she has dedicated her time to shilling for the Oil Reich. This is what you get when you have a man who was was appointed to his post - GWB, the Supreme Court President -- appointing career environmental hoodlums to environmentally sensitive posts. But this isn't the way the WP frames the issue:



"Ultimately, most Americans don't know the details of this intricate debate; they've just seen a few pretty pictures of the refuge. And even those pictures, as Klee suggested last spring, can be misleading. They often show ANWR's majestic Brooks Range, which will be preserved as wilderness regardless of the Senate's decision. They often show the refuge in springtime, when the landscape is lush but drilling would be forbidden.



So last Wednesday, Norton mailed the nation's network and cable news anchors a videotape � supplied by Arctic Power, a pro-drilling lobbying group in Alaska � showing the coastal plain in wintertime, with no polar bears or caribou running around.It looks white. It looks blustery. It looks flat.It looks kind of ugly."



One gets the feeling that "most Americans" doesn't include the ever sly Michael Grunwald. So why is it that we aren't treated to his personal experience of the Alaska coast? Well, for a reporter who is slicing and dicing the spin baloney, nothing in the piece indicates that his own two eyes have been laid, like in temps vecu, upon the controversial shores. His piece rightly accords to the greens a correct estimate of the amount of oil to be gotten from the Refuge -- not the 10.3 billion barrels estimated by the Oil R.'s minions, but 3.6 -- and points out that that is 60 billion dollars worth of oil. So what? The enviro point is that 3.6 billion gallons aren't going to make the U.S. energy independent, the justification for drilling in the Arctic Refuge -- and on that point there's no spin. The "facts' are clear. Grunwald doesn't go for the point, doing a little spin himself about the modern, efficient oil biz, not at all like that clunky infrastructure at Prudhoe Bay. And then there comes this wee kicker:



"Still, there will be impacts. Oil infrastructure damages tundra and vegetation even when it doesn't spill; and at Prudhoe Bay, there has been an average of a spill a day, mostly small, but totaling 1.5 million gallons of toxic materials since 1995. In the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge near Anchorage, the Fish and Wildlife Service is studying whether 350 toxic spills from oil fields have contributed to an abnormal number of deformed frogs."



Limited Inc likes the diminuendo at the end of the graf. The deformed frogs. Because here we have another issue entirely, we have another eco-system entirely, and the Enviro point is about the entire system. So Grunwald's graf is itself spinning for the Middle, until it spins right over the facts that are clear in the case. Instead of asking the obvious question: where does that 1.5 million gallons of toxic materials in 6 years go?



Michael Grunwald won a prize last year from a conservation outfit. Maybe his rather misleading spin article (his point about the environmentalists boil down to, they are telling the truth, but they are interpreting the truth environmentally -- that's spin?) is D.C. payback.

Remora



"The soul, being eternal, after death is like a caged bird that has been released. If it has been a long time in the body, and has become tame by many affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take another body and once again become involved in the troubles of the world. The worst thing about old age is that the soul's memory of the other world grows dim, while at the same time its attachment to things of this world becomes so strong that the soul tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But that soul which remains only a short time within a body, until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers its fire and goes on to higher things."



This is from one of Plutarch's letters. We're thinking about Plutarch this morning. The consolatory vision expressed in that letter casts a different light on biography as a genre. If one soul can exist, serially, in a number of bodies, life's accidents among the troubles of this world becomes representative of something behind the life, some one prolonged thing. The biographical seismograph charts, within its variations and seeming contingencies, the wanderings of a spirit for whom variations and contingencies are distinctly secondary, through a comic throng of masks. By producing parallel lives of the Greeks and the Romans, Plutarch is looking for hints, cries and whispers, the secret joke, the code of that rare stuff, that metaphysical Puck, the Great One and Oneness, in its two main falls into history.



Well, Limited Inc is not the Platonist Plutarch was. However, we do like the idea that lives give us points of orientation for the spirit of the age. We were reminded of this today when reading an interview with Dr. Callum Roberts in the NYT (No, really, incredulous reader, we were. Plutarch is always on our mind, just like Georgia's on Ray Charles' mind. We don't know why).



Roberts is a marine biologist who has become, as he says, the kind of scientist that didn't exist when he was a young man: a conservation biologist. As such, he works to conserve fish and the environment of fish. Well, that's hard work, especially given the attitude of fish em all and let God sort em out that prevailed in the 90s. He makes that point in the interview:



"The history of the problem is this: in the 1970's and 1980's as shallow- water fish got into trouble from overexploitation, the fishing industry worldwide began looking to the deep sea as virgin territory to work. By going to sea mounts (undersea elevations) and canyons that had never been trawled before, people were able to take huge catches � thousands of pounds in only a few minutes.Then, in the 1990's, after the cold war ended, military technology developed for underwater spying and sea floor imaging became available for civilian use. Thanks to multibeam sonars, sea floor mapping, and positioning systems, fishermen could suddenly exploit deep underwater terrains that previously had been unknown."



Robert has helped create fish sanctuaries, and has recently made the claim that virtue is not only its own reward, but rewards unworthy others, as far as fish are concerned:





"The research [Robert's research] into this controversial area is published in the journal Science (today, 30 November 2001), and examines the evidence that marine reserves, in which fish species are conserved, improve fish stocks in neighbouring areas. The research, centred on marine reserves in St Lucia and Florida, suggests not only that more fish appear in reserves following protection, but that they are also larger. They produce more offspring than exploited populations, and those offspring are exported to fishing grounds by ocean currents. There is also a spillover of adult fish migrating from the reserves as protected stocks build.

"



Robert's interview in the NYT won't change the minds of many regarding the cuter qualities of fish -- he seems to find the critters adorable -- since to experience fish as Robert experiences fish, you have to don your wetsuit and dive miles and miles from shore.



Our parallel to Roberts is an oily pseudo-conservationist, one Thor Lassen. Mr. Lassen has become the Whole Food's favorite conservationist, because Mr. Lassen's group eases Whole Food's conscience about shrimp, salmon, and the dripping edibles that Whole Food would like to purvey to your upper middle class consumer. Mr. Lassen is the alpha and omega of an organization called Ocean Trust. According to an admiring portrait of the man in Sea Food Business, Ocean Trust arose from some loose change flung at Lassen by the seafood companies:



"Ocean Trust�s annual budget in 1999 was $253,000, raised through donations from seafood companies, grants and marketing partnerships. In the day-to-day work of running a business, it�s difficult to keep on top of scientific reports about where the problems are and what should be done about them. That�s what Lassen does. "



Before becoming a conservationist as a result of such munificence, Lassen was a lobbyist. Lassen's character became, briefly, the focus of a fire fight between Whole Foods and Earth Island Institute in 1999. That year, the CEO of Whole Foods talked down EII because he claimed that Earth Island Instititute was guilty of negativism regarding shrimp. Yes, the folks at EII had the gall to consider boycotting shrimp harvests that endangered the habitats of the Sea Turtle in the Caribbean. So Whole Foods shopped around for a more compliant conservation group that would label its shrimp eco-friendly. Here's a rather hostile portrait of the Lassen, Whole Food's eventual choice for eco-friendly arbiteur, from Earth Island Journal:



"NFI [National Fisheries Institute] also founded Ocean Trust, a faux-green group run by Thor Lassen, a former NFI lobbyist. The group's stated mission is to "enhance the productivity of the marine environment as a source of food." Its biggest donor is the Long John Silver's seafood chain.Most frontline environmental workers have never worked with Ocean Trust, yet the group representing itself as having expertise in sea turtle conservation. Ocean Trust distributes expensive educational materials and videos that shift blame for sea turtle deaths away from the shrimp industry (although the US National Academy of Sciences identifies the industry is the primary human-related cause of these deaths). Ocean Trust's website links directly to NFI's web page and many NFI press releases quote Lassen.Ocean Trust is focusing on US/Mexican efforts to save the critically endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle in the Gulf of Mexico near Rancho Nuevo. Based on a very recent infusion of aid - a minute fraction of industry profits - the seafood industry is taking credit for more than 30 years of conservation work."



Ocean Trust's website is a "rich and strange" product of the sea. Its banners proclaim a happy green message about protecting the Sea Turtle, but it wastes no time getting to the main subject: nasty enviro exaggeration about the world state of fisheries. To make its points, it employs the pitiful jargon of the industry, along with industry statistics. Lassen's prose brings back the Vietnam era, in which the Military in Saigon was always proclaiming victory through better body counts. Here's the man on Sea floor damage:



"Much of the recent reports from environmental groups have focused on the impacts of fishing on the environment. The continued productivity productivity of sea clams and scallops harvested with dredges and shrimp, flatfish and other bottom species caught with trawls casts legitimate concern of the highly inflamed claims of ocean floor damage from fishing. We are just starting to learn whether gear has harmful or beneficial impacts like nutrient resuspension."



Ah, we are just starting to learn about the wonderful effects of littering the ocean with those one hundred yard trawler nets! Nutrient resuspension is a term that would turn one of Georgie Porgie Bush's speechwriter's green with envy. Redescribing litter in this way has a poetry, a fairy tale charm, all its own.



This is starting out to be Lassen's decade. Surely it is time to launch the phrase, compassionate environmentalist, meaning compassion should extend to fishery companies and their many employees. Surely we are going to hear that phrase echo from the Bush Administration. Nutrient resuspension will follow, soon after.



Life and rhetoric, folks. That's what we are all about.