Remora
A story in the Biz section of the NYT about the conflicted interests of the banks that are presiding over the anatomy lesson taking place over Enron's corpse:
"In a Manhattan bankruptcy court, where hundreds of lawyers are trying to carve up what remains of Enron, the first order of business is finger-pointing � and many of the fingers are pointing at J. P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup.With billions of dollars at stake, many creditors question whether the two Wall Street giants can represent their interests when, they contend, the banks helped cause many of Enron's financial problems in the first place. Some are even asking that the banks be thrown off the 15-member committee responsible for determining what is owed to Enron shareholders, lenders, employees and thousands of others left in the lurch by Enron's collapse. The banks are the subject of government investigations and private lawsuits over their role in structuring off-balance-sheet partnerships that helped sink Enron. Some creditors say the banks are in hopeless conflict, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has expressed concern, as well."
Greider has a nice piece on the suit against the banks that kept investor money flowing into Enron. This is manna -- poisoned manna, granted, but what else does a critic of the corporate culture live for, nowadays?
"Win or lose, the lawsuit poses numerous embarrassments for Washington politics, and Congressional reformers should study it for a summary of the corrupted laws that need to be re-examined. Perhaps the most important one is this: The merger of commercial banks and Wall Street investment houses, ratified by Congress in 1999 and legalizing the new financial conglomerates like Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, has already reproduced the very scandals of self-dealing and swindled investors that led to the legal separation of these two realms seventy years ago in the Glass-Steagall Act. Morgan and Citigroup senior executives, for example, consulted Enron's top executives almost daily on how to solve the company's deepening financial problems, but that knowledge was never shared with investors to whom the banks sold Enron shares and debt securities or, for that matter, with other banks who took a share of syndicated loans. The banks' stockbrokers maintained "strong buy" recommendations even as Enron entered its "death spiral," as the lawsuit calls it. "
Lose is probably the way that coin is going to come up. But remember, way back, when the banking regulatory "reforms" were enacted -- remember the ardent opposition of Ralph Nader and his ilk? And the bipartisan, smily support of the Clintonites and the Repubs, all just getting along, for once?
Thank God for the impeachment. More bipartisanship would have sunk us all.
Here's an other graf from Greider's piece explaining the workings of the Enron partnerships:
"E nron's "partnerships" essentially allowed the company to sell assets to itself--a Brazilian utility, commodity trading contracts, broadband capacity--and to rig the prices and profits on both sides of the transaction, then book the sale as rising revenues for Enron and thus send the share price higher. "In order for Enron's accounting scheme to work, the parties involved had to be controlled by Enron," the lawsuit explains. "But this control and affiliation had to be concealed." The selected private investors, who received lucrative rewards for putting up front money for Jedi or Chewco or the others, understood this reality because they were assured by Enron execs managing the schemes of exclusive access to the company's charmed opportunities. If they knew, the bankers who arranged the SPEs must also have known."
Greider reaches back to Ponzi to explain this kind of scheme. But a much more relevant reference is to the daisychains of beloved memory perpetrated by Texas S & L's in the 80s. It would surprise LI if Ken Lay didn't know various of the participants in that scandal. The Enron partnerships look like the old "flips" so beloved of the consortium of S&L pirates and crafty realestatesmen in the good old days.
There's a story in D Magazine about one of the jailed in that scandal, which also, come to think of it, involved some Bush nearest and dearest. Those Bushes.
The story is authored by the fishily named Shad Rowe, and it rains down sympathy on one Wayne Pickering, who 'flipped' some land for an international "loan facilitator", an Indian named Asomull Mukesh. The S &L scandal actually puts LI in a difficult position, cliche wise, since we'd like to use the old, first time is tragedy, second time is farce phrase, but ... what about when the first time around was farce?
Well, upshot of the D story is that Wayne went to jail, yes he did, while Mukesh, incredibly, became a protected witness type. Mr. Rowe is very sympathetic to Wayne's plight, and mentions that "despite 400 letters on his behalf", our man had to go to the hoosegow. Once in prison, Wayne discovered that he was in... prison. There is a truly heartfelt graf in the piece -- don't cry after you read this, I beg you, reader. This is Wayne on what he learned in prison:
"Pickering says that in prison, if you mind your own business and keep your head down, people leave you alone. �For example,� he says, �I would not sit in the rec room with 100 guys�most of whom are minority�and try to change the TV channel from the NBA game to the Golf Channel. I would use a little common sense." Common sense kicks in when you are with minority guys, We suppose.
And so the middle class meets its prize construction. Imagine! The article is full of compassion for a guy like Wayne in meshes like that. Ah, perhaps if there were more Waynes checking out the dark side, there'd be less prisons.
Tuesday, April 30, 2002
Sunday, April 28, 2002
Dope
Burke, when speaking of the Gordon riots -- a series of London anti-Catholic riots targeting the relief of the Penal laws against Catholic property holders in Britain -- used the wonderful phrase, "the midnight chalk of incendiaries" to refer to the crude, grafitti driven style of jacquerie populism. I love the phrase partly because of the violence it both encodes and expresses -- the violence with which a higher literacy, or at least a more clerically orthodox one, meets a lower literacy, scrawling with its chalk, or spraying with its paint cans, the complaint of the day. The Gordon riots are in their way a perfect example of popular anger harnessed to the worst and most reactionary forces in history. That's the force that drives the Lepeniste, the Peronist, the Fascist, and every black shirted factotum that stalks the street, lead pipe in hand. Often, of course, the black shirt is hidden beneath the policeman's blues.
But LI also knows something else. LI is perhaps fatally addicted to knowing something else, but so it goes. The aristocratic disdain, the disdain of men like Burke, derives its own sarcasm from a privileged resentment that has never scrupled to use the midnight chalk of incendiaries for its own ends. To make an excuse for arrangements of property and caste that are inherently unjust by manipulating a thuggish and sickening discourse against any that would criticize them, and to do this in the name of populism, has become the dominant style of conservatism in our time, its own pact with the cretinous devils. We all know the drive by shooting style of talk radio hosts, right wing columnists, and Texas politicians. And we all know that grafitti artists, now, are killed by the cops, and that the cops are are simply the incendiaries in power.
Limited Inc has been mulling this politico-stylistic question since Saturday morning, when we read the NYT's Tom Shanker and David Sanger's excellent report on the administration planning for Mr. Bush's coming bully little war. It is a measure of the nihilism of the opposition in this country that LI's first reaction -- and we would bet the first reaction of most members of the scattered American left -- was indignation mixed with helplessness. Here is the machine, here are its parts, here is its objective, here are the erroneous assumptions that have gone into its design. And what words are there to oppose it? Not simply condemn it; not simply analyze it, unfolding error upon error; not simply insult the men who have compounded it, and the supposed leader (that man whose face, every day, becomes just a little bit more unendurable, don't you think?) who desires it; where are the words going to come from that will stop it?
The feeling that the words aren't going to come from anybody in the official opposition party is rather paralyzing. The feeling that there is, in the incendiaries who gathered to protest against Bush's Middle East policy in D.C. last weekend, a few too many who are anti-Semitic, and a few too few who want to extend the same rigorous standard of conduct to Israel and, say, Cuba -- this rather knocks at LI's nervous system.
Okay, for what it is worth, here is the beginning of Shanker and Sanger's story:
"WASHINGTON, April 27 � The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops.
The administration is turning to that approach after concluding that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed and that a proxy battle using local forces there would be insufficient to bring a change in power.But senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions.
These include avoiding summer combat in bulky chemical suits, preparing for a global oil price shock, and waiting until there is progress toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
There was surprisingly little stir about this story in this weekend's media. At least, the WP didn't bother to cc it with addenda, as they would with the usual scoop. I saw no reference to it in the Dallas paper site. Even the Boston Globe, owned by the Times, headlined the ongoing, ambiguous struggle of the Catholic church against
pedophilia (with the attitude of the cardinals being much like the attitude of union bosses being asked to give up a traditional rank and file perk in hard times -- a disgruntled acceptance, and a search for loopholes, about describes it).
Nevertheless, LI is preparing the midnight chalk. We will speak more, this week, about Iraq.
Burke, when speaking of the Gordon riots -- a series of London anti-Catholic riots targeting the relief of the Penal laws against Catholic property holders in Britain -- used the wonderful phrase, "the midnight chalk of incendiaries" to refer to the crude, grafitti driven style of jacquerie populism. I love the phrase partly because of the violence it both encodes and expresses -- the violence with which a higher literacy, or at least a more clerically orthodox one, meets a lower literacy, scrawling with its chalk, or spraying with its paint cans, the complaint of the day. The Gordon riots are in their way a perfect example of popular anger harnessed to the worst and most reactionary forces in history. That's the force that drives the Lepeniste, the Peronist, the Fascist, and every black shirted factotum that stalks the street, lead pipe in hand. Often, of course, the black shirt is hidden beneath the policeman's blues.
But LI also knows something else. LI is perhaps fatally addicted to knowing something else, but so it goes. The aristocratic disdain, the disdain of men like Burke, derives its own sarcasm from a privileged resentment that has never scrupled to use the midnight chalk of incendiaries for its own ends. To make an excuse for arrangements of property and caste that are inherently unjust by manipulating a thuggish and sickening discourse against any that would criticize them, and to do this in the name of populism, has become the dominant style of conservatism in our time, its own pact with the cretinous devils. We all know the drive by shooting style of talk radio hosts, right wing columnists, and Texas politicians. And we all know that grafitti artists, now, are killed by the cops, and that the cops are are simply the incendiaries in power.
Limited Inc has been mulling this politico-stylistic question since Saturday morning, when we read the NYT's Tom Shanker and David Sanger's excellent report on the administration planning for Mr. Bush's coming bully little war. It is a measure of the nihilism of the opposition in this country that LI's first reaction -- and we would bet the first reaction of most members of the scattered American left -- was indignation mixed with helplessness. Here is the machine, here are its parts, here is its objective, here are the erroneous assumptions that have gone into its design. And what words are there to oppose it? Not simply condemn it; not simply analyze it, unfolding error upon error; not simply insult the men who have compounded it, and the supposed leader (that man whose face, every day, becomes just a little bit more unendurable, don't you think?) who desires it; where are the words going to come from that will stop it?
The feeling that the words aren't going to come from anybody in the official opposition party is rather paralyzing. The feeling that there is, in the incendiaries who gathered to protest against Bush's Middle East policy in D.C. last weekend, a few too many who are anti-Semitic, and a few too few who want to extend the same rigorous standard of conduct to Israel and, say, Cuba -- this rather knocks at LI's nervous system.
Okay, for what it is worth, here is the beginning of Shanker and Sanger's story:
"WASHINGTON, April 27 � The Bush administration, in developing a potential approach for toppling President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, is concentrating its attention on a major air campaign and ground invasion, with initial estimates contemplating the use of 70,000 to 250,000 troops.
The administration is turning to that approach after concluding that a coup in Iraq would be unlikely to succeed and that a proxy battle using local forces there would be insufficient to bring a change in power.But senior officials now acknowledge that any offensive would probably be delayed until early next year, allowing time to create the right military, economic and diplomatic conditions.
These include avoiding summer combat in bulky chemical suits, preparing for a global oil price shock, and waiting until there is progress toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
There was surprisingly little stir about this story in this weekend's media. At least, the WP didn't bother to cc it with addenda, as they would with the usual scoop. I saw no reference to it in the Dallas paper site. Even the Boston Globe, owned by the Times, headlined the ongoing, ambiguous struggle of the Catholic church against
pedophilia (with the attitude of the cardinals being much like the attitude of union bosses being asked to give up a traditional rank and file perk in hard times -- a disgruntled acceptance, and a search for loopholes, about describes it).
Nevertheless, LI is preparing the midnight chalk. We will speak more, this week, about Iraq.
Thursday, April 25, 2002
Remora
LI likes a hard hitting first graf. Why go to a boxing match if the fighters aren't going to mix it up? As the rounds toll by, one understands a little hanging onto the ropes, but one wants to see a little blood in the first round, at least. Similarly, we have such steak tartar tastes in news pieces -- a journalist should come out from his corner with appropriate growling, and wound up. So we liked this graf from Josh Gerstein's story about the continuing scandal of the government sponsored kidnappings of Middle Eastern men in this country:
"Last month, Colin Powell unveiled the State Department's annual report on human rights. Not surprisingly, the report faults authoritarian regimes such as China, Iraq, and North Korea for imprisoning people without charge and for holding legal proceedings in secret. What it neglects to mention is that in the past year those two practices have also become widespread in the United States."
The article rehearses the sad state of civil liberties, when it comes to men named Mohammed or, of course, Osama since 9/11. It focuses particularly on the New York City judge who is condemning many of these people to indefinite sequestration as "material witnesses" (ah, the lawyers wink, another material witness): Michael Mukasey. Mukasey sounds like a man on a mission. "Within days of the September 11 strikes, Mukasey announced that court hearings in all of the material-witness cases would be closed to the press and the public on the grounds that they were connected to a grand jury probe. (Grand juries, by law and tradition, usually carry out their business in secret.) The transcripts, dockets, and court orders in the material-witness cases remain sealed. Last fall Mukasey's secretary told The Washington Post that Mukasey wanted the cases kept secret "forever."
"
Forever is a long long time -- inaccessible to most of us, but not, perhaps, so much to Mukasey, one of whose colleagues is 95, and many of whose co-judges are over the age of 65: "Nearly 40 percent of the nation's more than 1,200 working federal judges are on senior status." Eternity, for Mukasey and his like, is less a theological issue than a tenure description.
There's a decidedly tedious news release from Human Rights Watch about conditions in the U.S. jails for these detainees, which seems designed, mainly, to show that HRW is there. It isn't doing much there, but by God, they want to see where these prisoners shower. Why this sound and lack of fury, one wonders. Touring the jails is good -- LI applauds this, and besides, our Lord Jesus Christ seems to find visiting prisoners of such high merit those who do it are conducted to the right hand of God, and ... well, live happily ever afterward. But shouldn't we be seeing jeremiads? Shouldn't human rights organizations be attacking with fire and brimstone this gross, massive abuse of judicial power? Apparently that is is off the agenda, apparently. There's an arrogance in a U.S. based Human Rights organization adopting such a tepid attitude that one wonders what is behind it. Is HRW afraid of angering some donation base? Or is it easier to condemn Albania, or Macedonia, or whatever onia, than going after the District court for the Southern District of New York?
LI likes a hard hitting first graf. Why go to a boxing match if the fighters aren't going to mix it up? As the rounds toll by, one understands a little hanging onto the ropes, but one wants to see a little blood in the first round, at least. Similarly, we have such steak tartar tastes in news pieces -- a journalist should come out from his corner with appropriate growling, and wound up. So we liked this graf from Josh Gerstein's story about the continuing scandal of the government sponsored kidnappings of Middle Eastern men in this country:
"Last month, Colin Powell unveiled the State Department's annual report on human rights. Not surprisingly, the report faults authoritarian regimes such as China, Iraq, and North Korea for imprisoning people without charge and for holding legal proceedings in secret. What it neglects to mention is that in the past year those two practices have also become widespread in the United States."
The article rehearses the sad state of civil liberties, when it comes to men named Mohammed or, of course, Osama since 9/11. It focuses particularly on the New York City judge who is condemning many of these people to indefinite sequestration as "material witnesses" (ah, the lawyers wink, another material witness): Michael Mukasey. Mukasey sounds like a man on a mission. "Within days of the September 11 strikes, Mukasey announced that court hearings in all of the material-witness cases would be closed to the press and the public on the grounds that they were connected to a grand jury probe. (Grand juries, by law and tradition, usually carry out their business in secret.) The transcripts, dockets, and court orders in the material-witness cases remain sealed. Last fall Mukasey's secretary told The Washington Post that Mukasey wanted the cases kept secret "forever."
"
Forever is a long long time -- inaccessible to most of us, but not, perhaps, so much to Mukasey, one of whose colleagues is 95, and many of whose co-judges are over the age of 65: "Nearly 40 percent of the nation's more than 1,200 working federal judges are on senior status." Eternity, for Mukasey and his like, is less a theological issue than a tenure description.
There's a decidedly tedious news release from Human Rights Watch about conditions in the U.S. jails for these detainees, which seems designed, mainly, to show that HRW is there. It isn't doing much there, but by God, they want to see where these prisoners shower. Why this sound and lack of fury, one wonders. Touring the jails is good -- LI applauds this, and besides, our Lord Jesus Christ seems to find visiting prisoners of such high merit those who do it are conducted to the right hand of God, and ... well, live happily ever afterward. But shouldn't we be seeing jeremiads? Shouldn't human rights organizations be attacking with fire and brimstone this gross, massive abuse of judicial power? Apparently that is is off the agenda, apparently. There's an arrogance in a U.S. based Human Rights organization adopting such a tepid attitude that one wonders what is behind it. Is HRW afraid of angering some donation base? Or is it easier to condemn Albania, or Macedonia, or whatever onia, than going after the District court for the Southern District of New York?
Wednesday, April 24, 2002
Dope
The end of Sir Thomas Browne�s Garden of Cyrus, a meditation on the forms and meaning of the quincunx, is one of the most gorgeous ringings down of the curtain in all literature:
Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no other advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.
Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon, I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, as some conjecture all shall awake again?
LI is impressed by this on a number of levels (let me not count the ways). Take, for instance, the tacit opposition between the hunters in America and the writer and his audience in the Old World. The page that is ended is also, for the reader, the page that is turned. But the page turned in the Old World will not be turned back in the New � in the New, they hunt. In the New, action, not contemplation, occurs over the hills and dales; the old violence is renewed, the old energy revived, and who knows if the hunters will not one day set up an X on those hills again, and nail a man to it.
Opposition, the antipodes, for Browne, and for all educated Europeans, was not a thing of the mind, but in the very grain of nature, operating there much as the opponents in a chess game operate, moving pieces against each other, creating the patterns that appear and disappear on the board. This sense of opposition as a living principle, the foundation of alchemy, magic, and natural philosophy in general, was weakened by the Enlightenment and overthrown entirely by Darwinism. Opposition has retreated to a mere mode of cognition, and not, probably, a very respectable one.
All this folderol to tell you, readers, that LI has been reading Hayek's much touted and little read summa, The Constitution of Liberty -- and we have found our opposite. It is a book with whose premises we agree vehemently, and with whose conclusions we disagree with equal vehemence. More in our next post.
The end of Sir Thomas Browne�s Garden of Cyrus, a meditation on the forms and meaning of the quincunx, is one of the most gorgeous ringings down of the curtain in all literature:
Night which Pagan Theology could make the daughter of Chaos, affords no other advantage to the description of order: Although no lower then that Masse can we derive its Genealogy. All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.
Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon, I finde no such effects in these drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? Or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, as some conjecture all shall awake again?
LI is impressed by this on a number of levels (let me not count the ways). Take, for instance, the tacit opposition between the hunters in America and the writer and his audience in the Old World. The page that is ended is also, for the reader, the page that is turned. But the page turned in the Old World will not be turned back in the New � in the New, they hunt. In the New, action, not contemplation, occurs over the hills and dales; the old violence is renewed, the old energy revived, and who knows if the hunters will not one day set up an X on those hills again, and nail a man to it.
Opposition, the antipodes, for Browne, and for all educated Europeans, was not a thing of the mind, but in the very grain of nature, operating there much as the opponents in a chess game operate, moving pieces against each other, creating the patterns that appear and disappear on the board. This sense of opposition as a living principle, the foundation of alchemy, magic, and natural philosophy in general, was weakened by the Enlightenment and overthrown entirely by Darwinism. Opposition has retreated to a mere mode of cognition, and not, probably, a very respectable one.
All this folderol to tell you, readers, that LI has been reading Hayek's much touted and little read summa, The Constitution of Liberty -- and we have found our opposite. It is a book with whose premises we agree vehemently, and with whose conclusions we disagree with equal vehemence. More in our next post.
Remora
After a night of disturbing dreams, LI awoke to find ourselves transformed into a crab... No. It isn't the dreams that have been disturbing, but the news. Merely the news. Every day, showered with evidences of universal imbecility, LI gets more crab-like -- with a crustacean's melancholy, or what we imagine to be the melancholy of an imperfectly armored creature. Yesterday, we were putting out a claw and an antenna, testing the air, and we stumbled upon, of all things, good news. Let's modify that as -- less than catastrophic news. News of the type: dam holds. Building does not collapse. Type news. Good news, in short, from, of all places, the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 ruling, the S.C. actually built a levee, at least a temporary one, against takings madness.
"The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners.The 6-to-3 decision was a sharp setback for the property rights movement, which has scored many recent successes in the Supreme Court. The ruling came in a case that sought millions of dollars in compensation for a prolonged restriction on development along the shores of Lake Tahoe."
The takings movement, which is the child of the University of Chicago Law and Economics movement, has become the right's battering ram against environmental and, in general, corporate management. It is an attempt to hotwire a coup against the New Deal behind the backs of the electorate. The coup is rather funny -- these are the same people who want to reduce social costs, which is a real cost against third parties, i.e., property-holders, into a vaguely distributed "externality." But their ardor for property is really an ardor for large property holders... Far be it from us to evoke that dread and discredited phrase, class warfare, for this instance of class warfare. But one needs an analytic category to explain systematic discrepencies in the application of a theory, and class, pace the neo-liberal crowd, certainly seems to fit the bill.
Scalia, the right's Quasimodo on the court, suffered a setback with the ruling. NYT, again:
"For Justice Scalia, the decision today in Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, No. 00-1167, must have been a particularly bitter defeat in two respects.
First, the majority rejected an expansive ruling of one of his most important opinions, a 10-year-old decision called Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council in which the court announced for the first time that a land-use regulation that, while leaving the property in the owner's hands, permanently deprived it of all economic use was a "categorical taking" that must be compensated.The Lucas decision breached what had been a doctrinal wall between a physical taking, in which the government actually takes possession of private property and for which compensation has always been required, and a "regulatory taking," in which the government restricts the owner's use of the property."
The second defeat is more technical. To paraphrase the NYT, Scalia had advocated a flat rule regarding the application of regulatory taking, which claimed that no pre-existing regulation should be considered when considering individual cases that might constitute such takings. Thus, the size of the taking would be calculated without regard to previous restrictions on the property -- an absurd attempt to inflate the cost of regulatory taking, the importance of which lies less in the individual cases to which it might apply than in scaring legislatures from considering measures that might, conceivably, be construed as regulatory takings -- measures such as protecting wetlands.
Private property is not, in itself, theft, contra Proudhon -- the phrase is in the nature of a sorites. However, given the wild eyed ideology of the Law and Economics movement, property functions as theft. The "takings" movement goes back to a case, Pennsylvania Coal Company vs. Mahon, from 1922. The Community Rights Org website has a nice summary of the case:
"Mahon sold the surface rights to land, but he reserved the right to remove the coal from under the land. The state then enacted a statute that prohibited coal mining if it threatened subsidence and damage to structures on the surface. The Court ruled that the restriction constituted a taking of Mahon's coal because the law made it commercially impractical for Mahon to mine the coal and thus had the same effect as destroying or appropriating the coal. In the first decision to hold that a land use restriction constituted a taking, the Court noted that "property may be regulated to a certain extent, [but] if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking."
Holmes wrote the following in his opinion:
"The question of whether a regulation is a valid exercise of the police power or an unconstitutional taking depends on the particular facts. The property being protected here is private property belonging to a single citizen, in which there is no public nuisance if it is destroyed. The law is not justified as a protection of personal safety. The contract itself provided notice of the risks, and the grantee still contracted. Since coal rights are worthless if the coal can not be mined, preventing their mining is a taking because it is tantamount to destroying it. If the police power of the states is allowed to abridge the contract rights of parties, it will continue until private property disappears completely. In general, while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far, it will be recognized as a taking.The loss should not fall on the coal company who provided for this very risk contractually. If the state wants more protection for its citizens,it can pay for it."
How Holmes logically juggled his argument that the slippery slope was inevitable, but that "property may be regulated to a certain extent," I leave to the psychologists. If, indeed, there are gradiants of regulation such that we can understand the phrase "a certain extent," then the force of the idea that abridging contract rights, i.e., regulation of property use, is such that "it will continue until private property disappears completely," is, to say the least, weakened.
Brandeis dissented in this case. Here's his dissent
"A restriction imposed to protect the public health, safety or morals from danger is not a taking. The restriction here is merely the prohibition of a noxious use. Just because a few private citizens are enriched does not make the law non-public. If the mining were to set free noxious gas, there would be noquestion that the state could prohibit it for the safety of the citizens, without paying the miner."
In LI's opinion, the Brandeis dissent is obvious. LI's opinion has been the opinion of the Federal Government, and of state governments, since the 1930s. The throwback position reminds us of why, originally, FDR tried to pack the court -- since the Court periodically feels called upon to play the avant garde for the reactionary cenacle among the ruling classs. Let's sum up: the robbery of the commons isn't justified by the enrichment of the property owner. And this isn't inessential robbery -- we are interested, as a society, in punishing individual robbery (instead of letting that duty devolve upon the victims as it may) because, theoretically, any robbery is an assault against a common good.
So, the court didn't do anything particularly lunatic yesterday. Good news. We are waggling our claws for joy. Dance dance dance.
After a night of disturbing dreams, LI awoke to find ourselves transformed into a crab... No. It isn't the dreams that have been disturbing, but the news. Merely the news. Every day, showered with evidences of universal imbecility, LI gets more crab-like -- with a crustacean's melancholy, or what we imagine to be the melancholy of an imperfectly armored creature. Yesterday, we were putting out a claw and an antenna, testing the air, and we stumbled upon, of all things, good news. Let's modify that as -- less than catastrophic news. News of the type: dam holds. Building does not collapse. Type news. Good news, in short, from, of all places, the Supreme Court. In a 6-3 ruling, the S.C. actually built a levee, at least a temporary one, against takings madness.
"The Supreme Court ruled today that a government-imposed moratorium on property development, even one that lasts for years, does not automatically amount to a "taking" of private property for which taxpayers must compensate the landowners.The 6-to-3 decision was a sharp setback for the property rights movement, which has scored many recent successes in the Supreme Court. The ruling came in a case that sought millions of dollars in compensation for a prolonged restriction on development along the shores of Lake Tahoe."
The takings movement, which is the child of the University of Chicago Law and Economics movement, has become the right's battering ram against environmental and, in general, corporate management. It is an attempt to hotwire a coup against the New Deal behind the backs of the electorate. The coup is rather funny -- these are the same people who want to reduce social costs, which is a real cost against third parties, i.e., property-holders, into a vaguely distributed "externality." But their ardor for property is really an ardor for large property holders... Far be it from us to evoke that dread and discredited phrase, class warfare, for this instance of class warfare. But one needs an analytic category to explain systematic discrepencies in the application of a theory, and class, pace the neo-liberal crowd, certainly seems to fit the bill.
Scalia, the right's Quasimodo on the court, suffered a setback with the ruling. NYT, again:
"For Justice Scalia, the decision today in Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, No. 00-1167, must have been a particularly bitter defeat in two respects.
First, the majority rejected an expansive ruling of one of his most important opinions, a 10-year-old decision called Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council in which the court announced for the first time that a land-use regulation that, while leaving the property in the owner's hands, permanently deprived it of all economic use was a "categorical taking" that must be compensated.The Lucas decision breached what had been a doctrinal wall between a physical taking, in which the government actually takes possession of private property and for which compensation has always been required, and a "regulatory taking," in which the government restricts the owner's use of the property."
The second defeat is more technical. To paraphrase the NYT, Scalia had advocated a flat rule regarding the application of regulatory taking, which claimed that no pre-existing regulation should be considered when considering individual cases that might constitute such takings. Thus, the size of the taking would be calculated without regard to previous restrictions on the property -- an absurd attempt to inflate the cost of regulatory taking, the importance of which lies less in the individual cases to which it might apply than in scaring legislatures from considering measures that might, conceivably, be construed as regulatory takings -- measures such as protecting wetlands.
Private property is not, in itself, theft, contra Proudhon -- the phrase is in the nature of a sorites. However, given the wild eyed ideology of the Law and Economics movement, property functions as theft. The "takings" movement goes back to a case, Pennsylvania Coal Company vs. Mahon, from 1922. The Community Rights Org website has a nice summary of the case:
"Mahon sold the surface rights to land, but he reserved the right to remove the coal from under the land. The state then enacted a statute that prohibited coal mining if it threatened subsidence and damage to structures on the surface. The Court ruled that the restriction constituted a taking of Mahon's coal because the law made it commercially impractical for Mahon to mine the coal and thus had the same effect as destroying or appropriating the coal. In the first decision to hold that a land use restriction constituted a taking, the Court noted that "property may be regulated to a certain extent, [but] if regulation goes too far it will be recognized as a taking."
Holmes wrote the following in his opinion:
"The question of whether a regulation is a valid exercise of the police power or an unconstitutional taking depends on the particular facts. The property being protected here is private property belonging to a single citizen, in which there is no public nuisance if it is destroyed. The law is not justified as a protection of personal safety. The contract itself provided notice of the risks, and the grantee still contracted. Since coal rights are worthless if the coal can not be mined, preventing their mining is a taking because it is tantamount to destroying it. If the police power of the states is allowed to abridge the contract rights of parties, it will continue until private property disappears completely. In general, while property may be regulated to a certain extent, if regulation goes too far, it will be recognized as a taking.The loss should not fall on the coal company who provided for this very risk contractually. If the state wants more protection for its citizens,it can pay for it."
How Holmes logically juggled his argument that the slippery slope was inevitable, but that "property may be regulated to a certain extent," I leave to the psychologists. If, indeed, there are gradiants of regulation such that we can understand the phrase "a certain extent," then the force of the idea that abridging contract rights, i.e., regulation of property use, is such that "it will continue until private property disappears completely," is, to say the least, weakened.
Brandeis dissented in this case. Here's his dissent
"A restriction imposed to protect the public health, safety or morals from danger is not a taking. The restriction here is merely the prohibition of a noxious use. Just because a few private citizens are enriched does not make the law non-public. If the mining were to set free noxious gas, there would be noquestion that the state could prohibit it for the safety of the citizens, without paying the miner."
In LI's opinion, the Brandeis dissent is obvious. LI's opinion has been the opinion of the Federal Government, and of state governments, since the 1930s. The throwback position reminds us of why, originally, FDR tried to pack the court -- since the Court periodically feels called upon to play the avant garde for the reactionary cenacle among the ruling classs. Let's sum up: the robbery of the commons isn't justified by the enrichment of the property owner. And this isn't inessential robbery -- we are interested, as a society, in punishing individual robbery (instead of letting that duty devolve upon the victims as it may) because, theoretically, any robbery is an assault against a common good.
So, the court didn't do anything particularly lunatic yesterday. Good news. We are waggling our claws for joy. Dance dance dance.
Tuesday, April 23, 2002
Correspondence
LI has received, by way of a friend of a friend, a reply to our last post. Here it is:
"Where to begin...
First of all, the cretin in France would find no home in mainstream American conservative politics. Remember: today's right in America is for less government involvement and control over citizens. When confronted with a choice of citizens overcoming corporations and citizens overcoming governments (with police and armies...) they overwhelmingly choose to take their chances with corporations. A unilateralist, big government socialist like Jospin in an anethma to the mainstream American right. Quite frankly,
Gore and Daschle are the closest equivalents available in mainstream American politics. Their issues are not Jospin's (and I don't mean to slander them in that way) - but they are the politicians practicing
minority rule in America on their big issues (Environment and Taxation).
As for why The 3rd Way buried traditional leftist politics: that's easy. Their politics impoverished all who submitted to them. It happened 100% of the time to 100% of those afflicted (usually by force perpetrated by a small minority of people who chose themselves to be the government of the people afflicted...). The only variation was the rate and pace of the economic decay in the afflicted societies. France and many of EU-niks felt really good about their socialist tilt of the past 30 years while it was happening - but as a result they've (collectively) gone from the premier power on earth to an afterthought begging for attention and a voice on the world stage.
Finally: all the Enron comments are just tripe. Enron owns as many Democrats as Republicans. That's why the Dem's aren't (can't actually...) making a big issue out of it..."
LI has received, by way of a friend of a friend, a reply to our last post. Here it is:
"Where to begin...
First of all, the cretin in France would find no home in mainstream American conservative politics. Remember: today's right in America is for less government involvement and control over citizens. When confronted with a choice of citizens overcoming corporations and citizens overcoming governments (with police and armies...) they overwhelmingly choose to take their chances with corporations. A unilateralist, big government socialist like Jospin in an anethma to the mainstream American right. Quite frankly,
Gore and Daschle are the closest equivalents available in mainstream American politics. Their issues are not Jospin's (and I don't mean to slander them in that way) - but they are the politicians practicing
minority rule in America on their big issues (Environment and Taxation).
As for why The 3rd Way buried traditional leftist politics: that's easy. Their politics impoverished all who submitted to them. It happened 100% of the time to 100% of those afflicted (usually by force perpetrated by a small minority of people who chose themselves to be the government of the people afflicted...). The only variation was the rate and pace of the economic decay in the afflicted societies. France and many of EU-niks felt really good about their socialist tilt of the past 30 years while it was happening - but as a result they've (collectively) gone from the premier power on earth to an afterthought begging for attention and a voice on the world stage.
Finally: all the Enron comments are just tripe. Enron owns as many Democrats as Republicans. That's why the Dem's aren't (can't actually...) making a big issue out of it..."
Monday, April 22, 2002
Dope
In a decade, the Third Way has effectually buried every left wing party that embraced it, except for Tony Blair's Labour Party -- and for Mr. Blair, the hens, or is it the vultures, are coming home to roost. Especially in the aftermath of his poodle act for Mr. Bush. The British have traditionally, and inexplicably, imagined themselves collectively as a bull-dog -- but even the British don't necessarily want to see their leader flaunt a fetch it boy attitude, which Mr. Blair displayed in his pow-wow with his master in Crawford, Texas (not exactly Yalta. More like, Y'allta).
And now Jospin. A socialist leader who couldn't find one single issue that would distinguish him from his conservative opponent. Not that the French socialist party has accrued a lot of credit since Mitterand was elected on the promise of breaking with the logic of capitalism, and was promptly broken by the logic of capitalism. Still, there is the 35 hour working week; there is the social service sector, embattled but still funtioning; and there is the rhetorical opposition to the avatar of the logic of capitalism in our time, the USA. Not that LI approves of that rhetoric very much -- in fact, its inhuman consequence in Rwanda remains to be explored. We'd like nothing better than to see the Mitterandish clique that encouraged the genocide in Rwanda marched into court in the Hague. Still, in the Middle East, and in Russia, and in Latin America, the French hesitancy about the American model has served as a hopeful corrective to those of us who think unleashing a pure market economy upon the helpless multitudes is a recipe for disaster.
The point is this, though: even as the leaders of the left were dismantling it, they were assuring us that they were merely modernizing it. The new face of the left, for the new millenium. In the film, Brazil, there is a recurring comic gag concerning older women getting their faces lifted. The face lifts involved swathing their heads in plastic sheeting for a period, and then cutting the sheeting off. The result was an ephemeral, goggly youthfulness, a grotesque contrast with their aging bodies, followed by a period in which the face would "leak." Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon would insist on the beauty of the warped faces, the drooping cheeks, the flacid noses and weird lips -- a congery of impressively hag-like features -- he'd produced.
That plastic surgeon is Jospin. He is Blair. He is Clinton. He is Schroeder. The collective direction of the lefty parties in the West has been lost not because the rank and file are suffering a crisis of faith. No, it is because the leadership longed for that respectability that comes from betraying every one of labor's ideals to Capital. In exchange, the leadership got touted by the editorialists of the world's leading newspapers. The leaders got to hang out at Davos. And they lost all credibility with their followers. It is a nightmarish situation. How can you vote for a liberal, in the United States, for instance, when your choice is between George Bush and Al Gore? Between a man owned lock stock and oil barrel by energy companies, and a man who shilled for the defense industry in the Arabian Peninsula, and never met a corporate contributor he wouldn't do a favor for. The choice is no choice. In the end, the policy of accomodation to the right serves only ... the right.
This is from Michelet's Le Peuple
Ce qu' on remarque le mieux sur une personne
qui est nue, c' est telle ou telle partie, qui sera
d�fectueuse. Le d�faut d' abord saute aux yeux.
Que serait-ce, si une main obligeante pla�ait sur
ce d�faut m�me un verre grossissant qui le rendrait
colossal, qui l' illuminerait d' un jour terrible,
impitoyable, au point que les accidents les plus
naturels de la peau ressortiraient � l' oeil
effray� !
Voil� pr�cis�ment ce qui est arriv� � la France.
Ses d�fauts incontestables, que l' activit�
croissante, le choc des int�r�ts, des id�es,
expliquent suffisamment, ont grossi sous la main de
ses puissants �crivains, et sont devenus des
monstres. Et voil� que l' Europe tout � l' heure la
voit comme un monstre elle-m�me...
Le peuple qu' on peint ainsi, n' est-ce pas l' effroi
du monde ? Y a-t-il assez d' arm�es, de forteresses,
pour le cerner, le surveiller, jusqu' � ce qu' un
moment favorable se pr�sente pour l' accabler ?
"What one sees first about a person who is nude is that such and such a part is defective. The faults leap immediately to the eye. But when over the faulty spot, someone obligingly places a magnifying glass to make it even more colossal, illuminating it with the pitiless, terrible light of day, to the point that the most natural accidents of the skin jump out at the terrified eye, how do you think you'd feel about that?
This is precisely what has happened to France. Its incontestable faults, which economic growth, the shock of interests, of ideas, sufficiently explains, have been enlarged under the hands of its most powerful writers and have become monsters. And thus, Europe soon sees it as a monster. The people that are so depicted, aren't they the horror of the world. Are there enough armies, fortresses, to surround them and watch them up to the favorable moment for destroying them?"
Michelet is employing reactionary tropes that will later come to political fruition under Stalin -- the idea of the critic as traitor, and the people as monstrously traduced. But the Le Pen vs. Chirac contest coming up is a product of Michelet's Peuple. And guess what? That series of writers -- Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola -- they were right, they were a thousand times right: there's a monster in France, and it is stirring, stirring...
In a decade, the Third Way has effectually buried every left wing party that embraced it, except for Tony Blair's Labour Party -- and for Mr. Blair, the hens, or is it the vultures, are coming home to roost. Especially in the aftermath of his poodle act for Mr. Bush. The British have traditionally, and inexplicably, imagined themselves collectively as a bull-dog -- but even the British don't necessarily want to see their leader flaunt a fetch it boy attitude, which Mr. Blair displayed in his pow-wow with his master in Crawford, Texas (not exactly Yalta. More like, Y'allta).
And now Jospin. A socialist leader who couldn't find one single issue that would distinguish him from his conservative opponent. Not that the French socialist party has accrued a lot of credit since Mitterand was elected on the promise of breaking with the logic of capitalism, and was promptly broken by the logic of capitalism. Still, there is the 35 hour working week; there is the social service sector, embattled but still funtioning; and there is the rhetorical opposition to the avatar of the logic of capitalism in our time, the USA. Not that LI approves of that rhetoric very much -- in fact, its inhuman consequence in Rwanda remains to be explored. We'd like nothing better than to see the Mitterandish clique that encouraged the genocide in Rwanda marched into court in the Hague. Still, in the Middle East, and in Russia, and in Latin America, the French hesitancy about the American model has served as a hopeful corrective to those of us who think unleashing a pure market economy upon the helpless multitudes is a recipe for disaster.
The point is this, though: even as the leaders of the left were dismantling it, they were assuring us that they were merely modernizing it. The new face of the left, for the new millenium. In the film, Brazil, there is a recurring comic gag concerning older women getting their faces lifted. The face lifts involved swathing their heads in plastic sheeting for a period, and then cutting the sheeting off. The result was an ephemeral, goggly youthfulness, a grotesque contrast with their aging bodies, followed by a period in which the face would "leak." Meanwhile, the plastic surgeon would insist on the beauty of the warped faces, the drooping cheeks, the flacid noses and weird lips -- a congery of impressively hag-like features -- he'd produced.
That plastic surgeon is Jospin. He is Blair. He is Clinton. He is Schroeder. The collective direction of the lefty parties in the West has been lost not because the rank and file are suffering a crisis of faith. No, it is because the leadership longed for that respectability that comes from betraying every one of labor's ideals to Capital. In exchange, the leadership got touted by the editorialists of the world's leading newspapers. The leaders got to hang out at Davos. And they lost all credibility with their followers. It is a nightmarish situation. How can you vote for a liberal, in the United States, for instance, when your choice is between George Bush and Al Gore? Between a man owned lock stock and oil barrel by energy companies, and a man who shilled for the defense industry in the Arabian Peninsula, and never met a corporate contributor he wouldn't do a favor for. The choice is no choice. In the end, the policy of accomodation to the right serves only ... the right.
This is from Michelet's Le Peuple
Ce qu' on remarque le mieux sur une personne
qui est nue, c' est telle ou telle partie, qui sera
d�fectueuse. Le d�faut d' abord saute aux yeux.
Que serait-ce, si une main obligeante pla�ait sur
ce d�faut m�me un verre grossissant qui le rendrait
colossal, qui l' illuminerait d' un jour terrible,
impitoyable, au point que les accidents les plus
naturels de la peau ressortiraient � l' oeil
effray� !
Voil� pr�cis�ment ce qui est arriv� � la France.
Ses d�fauts incontestables, que l' activit�
croissante, le choc des int�r�ts, des id�es,
expliquent suffisamment, ont grossi sous la main de
ses puissants �crivains, et sont devenus des
monstres. Et voil� que l' Europe tout � l' heure la
voit comme un monstre elle-m�me...
Le peuple qu' on peint ainsi, n' est-ce pas l' effroi
du monde ? Y a-t-il assez d' arm�es, de forteresses,
pour le cerner, le surveiller, jusqu' � ce qu' un
moment favorable se pr�sente pour l' accabler ?
"What one sees first about a person who is nude is that such and such a part is defective. The faults leap immediately to the eye. But when over the faulty spot, someone obligingly places a magnifying glass to make it even more colossal, illuminating it with the pitiless, terrible light of day, to the point that the most natural accidents of the skin jump out at the terrified eye, how do you think you'd feel about that?
This is precisely what has happened to France. Its incontestable faults, which economic growth, the shock of interests, of ideas, sufficiently explains, have been enlarged under the hands of its most powerful writers and have become monsters. And thus, Europe soon sees it as a monster. The people that are so depicted, aren't they the horror of the world. Are there enough armies, fortresses, to surround them and watch them up to the favorable moment for destroying them?"
Michelet is employing reactionary tropes that will later come to political fruition under Stalin -- the idea of the critic as traitor, and the people as monstrously traduced. But the Le Pen vs. Chirac contest coming up is a product of Michelet's Peuple. And guess what? That series of writers -- Voltaire, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola -- they were right, they were a thousand times right: there's a monster in France, and it is stirring, stirring...
Thursday, April 18, 2002
Remora
Washington Post headlines the Italian strike that brought a million people into the street. NYT story about the Italian paralysis...
No, just joking.
Not that there wasn't a general strike -- a magical phrase to the IWW lefties among us -- in Italy. Not that it didn't paralyse Italy. Not that it didn't bring a million people into the street. But a fact like that is much too inconvenient for American papers.
Liberation, yesterday, had the story (which has spilled into the French election, today -- Jospin accusing Chirac of being a French Berlusconi):
Here's what it looks like in French:
Contre le projet de r�forme gouvernemental de l'article 18 du statut des travailleurs, qui r�glemente les licenciements abusifs, plusieurs millions d'Italiens ont r�pondu hier � l'appel � la gr�ve g�n�rale lanc� par les syndicats. Selon les chiffres des trois grandes conf�d�rations italiennes (CGIL, CISL et UIL), plus de 13 millions de personnes ont cess� le travail, le taux de participation atteignant pr�s de 100 % dans certains secteurs.
Paralysie. A Florence, pr�s de 400 000 travailleurs sont descendus dans la rue derri�re le leader de la CGIL, Sergio Cofferati (lire ci-contre), tandis que de nombreux cort�ges ont envahi les rues de Milan (300 000 personnes), Bologne (350 000), Rome (200 000) ou Palerme (100 000).
Translation:
Against the proposed governmental "reform"[ LI Note -- we have grown tired of the abuse of "reform" to mean corrupting the old Keynsian system of protecting the countervailing power of labor by acceeding to the most outrageous demands of capital. So we are putting the scare quotes into play. And if you don't like it, find your own translator] of article 18 of the labor code concerning abusive layoffs, more than a million Italians responded to the appeal for a general strike broadcast by the unions. According to the numbers of the three big unions (CGIL, CISL, and UIL), more than 13 million people stopped working, the level of participation attaining nearly 100% in certain sectors.
Paralysis
In Florence, nearly 400,000 workers descended in the streets behind the leader of the CGIL, Sergio Cofferati, while numerous groups invaded the streets of Milan (300,000 people), Bologna (350,00), Rome (200,000) and Palermo (100,000)
The NYT did have an article on the strike yesterday, and with typical Times hauteur , (the hauteur of the true globalist), surveyed the scene and asked what the fuss was about:
"Though the actual changes he has proposed are considered minor, labor leaders see this as the first step in a government plan to undermine job security. Then, too, Mr. Cofferati, who leads the largest Italian union, is considered a rising star on the left.The unions did succeed well enough that there was no television coverage of today's demonstrations � since journalists, too, were on strike.
Much of the center of Rome became a street carnival as protesters waved huge puppets of Mr. Berlusconi dressed as Napoleon and as the pope. Roberto Benigni, the actor and film maker, told a crowd in the Piazza del Popolo that he would not speak because he, too, was on strike."
Of course, to the Times, Berlusconi's labor law is only common sense. LI searched Gibbons Decline and Fall of the R.E. for a phrase evocative of the neo-liberal attitude in these fair States. Gibbon, he never fails us! Here is his description of the foreign policy, as we'd call it now, of the Roman Empire: "Those princes [of their outer dependencies], whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had per formed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude."
Quite.
Finally, since LI is in a hormonally lefty mood this morning -- there is good news from France, where the Trotskyist candidate, Arlette Languiller, a typist, is getting 10 percent in the polls -- ahead of the Greens and the Commies. Hooray!
This year, she has turned out to be a surprisingly sharp thorn in the side of the left-wing political establishment. Polls show that this retired, Trotskyist typist may get as much as 10 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections set for Sunday.
That could mean third or fourth place in a field of 16 candidates � ahead of both the candidates for the Communist Party and the Greens, the two left-wing parties that have been junior partners in the ruling government coalition for the last five years. The likely winners of the Sunday vote, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, are expected to garner just 18 to 22 percent each."
Apparently Arlette -- as she is known -- has come under the gun, since her numbers rose. The trotskyists have been accused of being cultists. Well, duh. Of course they are cultists. Trotsky's critique of bureaucracy preceeded the irresistable plunge into roccoco parlimentarian excess, factionalism, and distemper that has been the mark of every Trotskyist part every since. Who cares? Arlette isn't going to win -- she is simply going to make the powers that be nervous. That's her job.
Washington Post headlines the Italian strike that brought a million people into the street. NYT story about the Italian paralysis...
No, just joking.
Not that there wasn't a general strike -- a magical phrase to the IWW lefties among us -- in Italy. Not that it didn't paralyse Italy. Not that it didn't bring a million people into the street. But a fact like that is much too inconvenient for American papers.
Liberation, yesterday, had the story (which has spilled into the French election, today -- Jospin accusing Chirac of being a French Berlusconi):
Here's what it looks like in French:
Contre le projet de r�forme gouvernemental de l'article 18 du statut des travailleurs, qui r�glemente les licenciements abusifs, plusieurs millions d'Italiens ont r�pondu hier � l'appel � la gr�ve g�n�rale lanc� par les syndicats. Selon les chiffres des trois grandes conf�d�rations italiennes (CGIL, CISL et UIL), plus de 13 millions de personnes ont cess� le travail, le taux de participation atteignant pr�s de 100 % dans certains secteurs.
Paralysie. A Florence, pr�s de 400 000 travailleurs sont descendus dans la rue derri�re le leader de la CGIL, Sergio Cofferati (lire ci-contre), tandis que de nombreux cort�ges ont envahi les rues de Milan (300 000 personnes), Bologne (350 000), Rome (200 000) ou Palerme (100 000).
Translation:
Against the proposed governmental "reform"[ LI Note -- we have grown tired of the abuse of "reform" to mean corrupting the old Keynsian system of protecting the countervailing power of labor by acceeding to the most outrageous demands of capital. So we are putting the scare quotes into play. And if you don't like it, find your own translator] of article 18 of the labor code concerning abusive layoffs, more than a million Italians responded to the appeal for a general strike broadcast by the unions. According to the numbers of the three big unions (CGIL, CISL, and UIL), more than 13 million people stopped working, the level of participation attaining nearly 100% in certain sectors.
Paralysis
In Florence, nearly 400,000 workers descended in the streets behind the leader of the CGIL, Sergio Cofferati, while numerous groups invaded the streets of Milan (300,000 people), Bologna (350,00), Rome (200,000) and Palermo (100,000)
The NYT did have an article on the strike yesterday, and with typical Times hauteur , (the hauteur of the true globalist), surveyed the scene and asked what the fuss was about:
"Though the actual changes he has proposed are considered minor, labor leaders see this as the first step in a government plan to undermine job security. Then, too, Mr. Cofferati, who leads the largest Italian union, is considered a rising star on the left.The unions did succeed well enough that there was no television coverage of today's demonstrations � since journalists, too, were on strike.
Much of the center of Rome became a street carnival as protesters waved huge puppets of Mr. Berlusconi dressed as Napoleon and as the pope. Roberto Benigni, the actor and film maker, told a crowd in the Piazza del Popolo that he would not speak because he, too, was on strike."
Of course, to the Times, Berlusconi's labor law is only common sense. LI searched Gibbons Decline and Fall of the R.E. for a phrase evocative of the neo-liberal attitude in these fair States. Gibbon, he never fails us! Here is his description of the foreign policy, as we'd call it now, of the Roman Empire: "Those princes [of their outer dependencies], whom the ostentation of gratitude or generosity permitted for a while to hold a precarious sceptre, were dismissed from their thrones, as soon as they had per formed their appointed task of fashioning to the yoke the vanquished nations. The free states and cities which had embraced the cause of Rome were rewarded with a nominal alliance, and insensibly sunk into real servitude."
Quite.
Finally, since LI is in a hormonally lefty mood this morning -- there is good news from France, where the Trotskyist candidate, Arlette Languiller, a typist, is getting 10 percent in the polls -- ahead of the Greens and the Commies. Hooray!
This year, she has turned out to be a surprisingly sharp thorn in the side of the left-wing political establishment. Polls show that this retired, Trotskyist typist may get as much as 10 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections set for Sunday.
That could mean third or fourth place in a field of 16 candidates � ahead of both the candidates for the Communist Party and the Greens, the two left-wing parties that have been junior partners in the ruling government coalition for the last five years. The likely winners of the Sunday vote, President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, are expected to garner just 18 to 22 percent each."
Apparently Arlette -- as she is known -- has come under the gun, since her numbers rose. The trotskyists have been accused of being cultists. Well, duh. Of course they are cultists. Trotsky's critique of bureaucracy preceeded the irresistable plunge into roccoco parlimentarian excess, factionalism, and distemper that has been the mark of every Trotskyist part every since. Who cares? Arlette isn't going to win -- she is simply going to make the powers that be nervous. That's her job.
Wednesday, April 17, 2002
Remora
Hail Freedonia.
The Washington Post piece on the failure to kill or capture Osama would make a nice script for a latter day Marx brothers film. You have the man directing the battle of Tora Bora from Tampa, Florida, no doubt operating on intelligence that Tampa was in imminent danger. You have Jethro Bodine as president. You have the escape of the Great Satan, Osama himself, from a redoubt of caves built in the 80s, no doubt with the aid of the always generous Freedonian Intelligence Agency. And you have an absence of suggestions as to where Satan flew to -- although perhaps we should check with our hundred percent ally in the war on terror, Pakistan, for that one:
"Another change since Tora Bora, with no immediate prospect of finding bin Laden, is that President Bush has stopped proclaiming the goal of taking him "dead or alive" and now avoids previous references to the al Qaeda founder as public enemy number one.
In an interview with The Washington Post in late December, Bush displayed a scorecard of al Qaeda leaders on which he had drawn the letter X through the faces of those thought dead. By last month, Bush began saying that continued public focus on individual terrorists, including bin Laden, meant that "people don't understand the scope of the mission."
"Terror is bigger than one person," Bush said March 14. "He's a person that's now been marginalized." The president said bin Laden had "met his match" and "may even be dead," and added: "I truly am not that concerned about him."
Top advisers now assert that the al Qaeda leader's fate should be no measure of U.S. success in the war."
Limited Inc has been quoting all the greats recently -- Burke, Spencer. The appropriate quote, here, is obviously from Duck Soup. This is Trentino, the wily ambassador from Sylvania, asking his henchmen about their progress in overthrowing the new president of Freedonia, Rufus T. Firefly:
Chicolini: Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said, 'Follow him?'...Well, we get on-a the job right away and in-a one hour - even-a less than one hour...
Trentino (excitedly and expectantly): Yes?
Chicolini: We losa-a the picture. That's-a pretty quick work, eh?
Do they watch Duck Soup in the Pentagon? LI can't help but wonder about the scorecard in the delicious scene painted by the Post. Did some flunky get it as a historic souvenir? In any case, it is nice that the war against terrorism, our rulers have decided, isn't about anything so mundane as terrorists. This is a confidence builder. This is a lifter upper. This is a shot in the arm. Man, for a while Limited Inc was entertaining paranoid fantasies. LI is obviously unable to comprehend the sublime plan. LI is obviously not rolling. He should roll. Let's all roll is the slogan. Our war against the Shadow, LI misunderstood as a war against the guy who organized the group that attacked the World Trade Center. Damn, that is such short sighted thinking! Obviously, the Shadow is Saddam Hussein, who might not have had anything to do with the WTC, but was soooo disrespectful to Bush's father! Now of course, after the true enemy of all mankind -- Mullah Omar, I believe his name was -- has fallen, we can get serious.
Let's point out the obvious. This is an administration that performed dismally before 9/11, and they seem to be reverting to a mindset that would allow another 9/11. An inability, for one thing, to understand that an illorganized group of 19 dissatisfied Saudis can do more damage to the Heimat than S Hussein has ever done.
But LI imagines the scene in the DoD.
I mean, look what-a we got, boss! We got a missile defense, we got a great ally in this Sharon, we got a war with Saddam coming up, as soon as we can find a reason for it, and a place to launch it from! Plus Tom Ridge personally working on our security problem. Boss! Boss!
Hail Freedonia.
The Washington Post piece on the failure to kill or capture Osama would make a nice script for a latter day Marx brothers film. You have the man directing the battle of Tora Bora from Tampa, Florida, no doubt operating on intelligence that Tampa was in imminent danger. You have Jethro Bodine as president. You have the escape of the Great Satan, Osama himself, from a redoubt of caves built in the 80s, no doubt with the aid of the always generous Freedonian Intelligence Agency. And you have an absence of suggestions as to where Satan flew to -- although perhaps we should check with our hundred percent ally in the war on terror, Pakistan, for that one:
"Another change since Tora Bora, with no immediate prospect of finding bin Laden, is that President Bush has stopped proclaiming the goal of taking him "dead or alive" and now avoids previous references to the al Qaeda founder as public enemy number one.
In an interview with The Washington Post in late December, Bush displayed a scorecard of al Qaeda leaders on which he had drawn the letter X through the faces of those thought dead. By last month, Bush began saying that continued public focus on individual terrorists, including bin Laden, meant that "people don't understand the scope of the mission."
"Terror is bigger than one person," Bush said March 14. "He's a person that's now been marginalized." The president said bin Laden had "met his match" and "may even be dead," and added: "I truly am not that concerned about him."
Top advisers now assert that the al Qaeda leader's fate should be no measure of U.S. success in the war."
Limited Inc has been quoting all the greats recently -- Burke, Spencer. The appropriate quote, here, is obviously from Duck Soup. This is Trentino, the wily ambassador from Sylvania, asking his henchmen about their progress in overthrowing the new president of Freedonia, Rufus T. Firefly:
Chicolini: Well, you remember you gave us a picture of this man and said, 'Follow him?'...Well, we get on-a the job right away and in-a one hour - even-a less than one hour...
Trentino (excitedly and expectantly): Yes?
Chicolini: We losa-a the picture. That's-a pretty quick work, eh?
Do they watch Duck Soup in the Pentagon? LI can't help but wonder about the scorecard in the delicious scene painted by the Post. Did some flunky get it as a historic souvenir? In any case, it is nice that the war against terrorism, our rulers have decided, isn't about anything so mundane as terrorists. This is a confidence builder. This is a lifter upper. This is a shot in the arm. Man, for a while Limited Inc was entertaining paranoid fantasies. LI is obviously unable to comprehend the sublime plan. LI is obviously not rolling. He should roll. Let's all roll is the slogan. Our war against the Shadow, LI misunderstood as a war against the guy who organized the group that attacked the World Trade Center. Damn, that is such short sighted thinking! Obviously, the Shadow is Saddam Hussein, who might not have had anything to do with the WTC, but was soooo disrespectful to Bush's father! Now of course, after the true enemy of all mankind -- Mullah Omar, I believe his name was -- has fallen, we can get serious.
Let's point out the obvious. This is an administration that performed dismally before 9/11, and they seem to be reverting to a mindset that would allow another 9/11. An inability, for one thing, to understand that an illorganized group of 19 dissatisfied Saudis can do more damage to the Heimat than S Hussein has ever done.
But LI imagines the scene in the DoD.
I mean, look what-a we got, boss! We got a missile defense, we got a great ally in this Sharon, we got a war with Saddam coming up, as soon as we can find a reason for it, and a place to launch it from! Plus Tom Ridge personally working on our security problem. Boss! Boss!
Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Remora
King Gall
According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, gall is a "secretion of the liver known as � bile,� the term being also used of the pear-shaped diverliculum of the bile-duct, which forms a reservoir for the bile, more generally known as the� gall-bladder �. From the extreme bitterness of the secretion, � gall,� like the Lat. fel, is used for anything extremely bitter, whether actually or metaphorically. From the idea that the gall-bladder was the dominating organ of a bitter, sharp temperament, �gall� was formerly used in English for such a spirit, and also for one very ready to resent injuries. It thus survives in American slang, with the meaning �impudence � or � assurance.��
The older use of gall -- to mean bitterness, not presumption -- is illustrated in this quote from Thoreau's letter on John Brown:
"On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold- blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual "pluck"- as the Governor of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the cockpit, "the gamest man be ever saw"- had been caught, and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that "he died as the fool dieth"; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away," because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray?- such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers."
Limited Inc's sweetness readily turns to gall -- every morning, about 9:30, when we finish reading the papers. The meaning bodied forth in American slang is well illustrated today, reader, in this quote from today's NYT's article about the rise and fall and rise of President Chavez of Venezuala:
"Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Ch�vez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."
One feels, reading this, like Keat's Cortez, or one of his men: "when with eagle eyes/He star'd at the Pacific- and all his men/Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -/Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Silence, though, is perhaps not LI's best exercized talent. Wild surmise soon dissolved into wild laughter. Talk about a smoking gun! Isn't this the very attitude one always suspected? Isn't this too much? If only we had heard more of this in December, 2000, as the corrupt current POTUS and his crew were overthrowing the democratic election of Al Gore. As the current administration massaged the leaders of the coup against Chavez, did they assured them that time and custom will take care of any problems the seizure of power might cause in the consciousness of the people?
Ah! It all brings back the judicially "corrected" election of 2000. LI, nostalgically, looked up a pre 9/11 issue of Newsweek -- remember the era before 9/11? Before we declared war on Osama bin Laden, and brought down, with our slingshot, the wrong bird? Before the war on terrorism increasingly became a mere machination to disguise the essential corruption of the Bush administration, from its Power company powered Energy plan to its absurd tax giveaway to the top 5 percentile. Here's the beginning of the Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas article on the stolen election:
" Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband, John, a Washington lawyer, have long been comfortable on the cocktail and charity-ball circuit. So at an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, she let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess's den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois. Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years.
O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to NEWSWEEK. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment. O'Connor had no way of knowing, as she watched the early returns, that election night would end in deadlock and confusion--or that five weeks later she would play a direct and decisive role in the election of George W. Bush. O'Connor could not possibly have foreseen that she would be one of two swing votes in the court's 5-4 decision ending the manual recount in Florida and forcing Al Gore to finally concede defeat. But her remarks will fuel criticism that the justices not only "follow the election returns," as the old saying goes, but, in the case of George W. Bush v. Albert Gore, Jr., sought to influence them."
Did Bush's advisors tell the anti-Chavez people to get the courts in their pocket before they proceeded? It is important advice.
King Gall's foreign policy favors more legitimate rulers than the neo-Peronist Chavez -- such as Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Obiang has suddenly become rich with the discovery of oil in his country. The man is a friend of all that is beautiful and true -- if you don't believe LI, look at the terms of the oil contracts: 75 percent for the oil companies, 25 for Obiang and his cronies. Or, as they will call themselves, the sovereign nation of Equatorial Guinea. The Nation has a very nice report, by Ken Silverstein, on this obscure country. It is not obscure to Triton Energy, however. And Triton Energy is run by an old friend of GWBII:
"Perhaps best connected of all is Triton, whose chairman, Tom Hicks, made Bush a millionaire fifteen times over when he bought the Texas Rangers in 1998. Hicks's leveraged buyout firm, Hicks Muse, is Bush's fourth-largest career financial patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity."
Oil, money, blood, and a leader who, unlike Chavez, is thoroughly democratic -- which is how he gained his 92 percent of the vote in the last election. Life is so good.
However, Silverstein's story interests LI less as another tawdry adventure of the Bush administration than for the tergiversation of Equatorial Guinea's pr man in D.C., Bruce McColm. Bruce's upward and onward career really caught our eye:
"In addition to direct lobbying, the oil industry sought to improve Obiang's image by hiring the services of Bruce McColm, a former head of Freedom House who now runs the Institute for Democratic Strategies (IDS), a Virginia-based nonprofit whose stated mission is "strengthening democratic institutions." The Obiang regime's most tireless champion, McColm works closely with the government, which now pays him directly. (According to its latest nonprofit tax form, the IDS spent $223,000 in 2000, of which all but $10,000 went toward its Equatorial Guinea work.) In 2000 McColm sent a team of observers to monitor Equatorial Guinea's municipal elections, which it reported to be basically free and fair. "Electoral officials should be recognized for discharging their responsibilities in an effective and transparent manner," said an IDS press release at the time. "Observers generally felt that the positives of this election far outweighed the negatives." This was in marked contrast to a UN report that said the electoral campaign "was characterized by the omnipresence of the [ruling] party, voting in public and the intimidating presence of the armed forces."
Go to the Freedom House site and you get this slogan:
"Freedom House, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization, is a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world. Through a vast array of international programs and publications, Freedom House is working to advance the remarkable worldwide expansion of political and economic freedom."
An admirable stance, n'est-ce pas? Don't think that Equatorial Guinea has become a much better country recently -- at least according to Freedom house, it rates a 7.7 in terms of freedom. According to FH's explanation of its rating system, "those whose ratings average 1-2.5 are generally considered "Free," 3-5.5 "Partly Free," and 5.5-7 "Not Free." This does not give the Bruce McColm's of the world pause, of course. Far from it. When someone like Bruce McColm acquires the moral capital that accrues from taking the honorable position that people should have a say in the government that has the power to incarcerate them, the goal is to leave, and then to gleefully squander your conscience as you defend the dictators whose money helps you dine out in Georgetown. Because in D.C., as we know, the NGO post is only a first step on the ladder. Shedding your entire moral character, and revealing yourself as a devil in human skin, is the process. Not of course that we wish to slander a man of McColm's sterling character, we only wish on him what, well, what King Lear wished on Goneril and Reagen. In the mean time, LI thinks he should take on a few of Rwanda's past rulers as his next clients. Or perhaps he already has.
King Gall
According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, gall is a "secretion of the liver known as � bile,� the term being also used of the pear-shaped diverliculum of the bile-duct, which forms a reservoir for the bile, more generally known as the� gall-bladder �. From the extreme bitterness of the secretion, � gall,� like the Lat. fel, is used for anything extremely bitter, whether actually or metaphorically. From the idea that the gall-bladder was the dominating organ of a bitter, sharp temperament, �gall� was formerly used in English for such a spirit, and also for one very ready to resent injuries. It thus survives in American slang, with the meaning �impudence � or � assurance.��
The older use of gall -- to mean bitterness, not presumption -- is illustrated in this quote from Thoreau's letter on John Brown:
"On the whole, my respect for my fellow-men, except as one may outweigh a million, is not being increased these days. I have noticed the cold- blooded way in which newspaper writers and men generally speak of this event, as if an ordinary malefactor, though one of unusual "pluck"- as the Governor of Virginia is reported to have said, using the language of the cockpit, "the gamest man be ever saw"- had been caught, and were about to be hung. He was not dreaming of his foes when the governor thought he looked so brave. It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that "he died as the fool dieth"; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away," because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray?- such as would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves or murderers."
Limited Inc's sweetness readily turns to gall -- every morning, about 9:30, when we finish reading the papers. The meaning bodied forth in American slang is well illustrated today, reader, in this quote from today's NYT's article about the rise and fall and rise of President Chavez of Venezuala:
"Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Ch�vez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."
One feels, reading this, like Keat's Cortez, or one of his men: "when with eagle eyes/He star'd at the Pacific- and all his men/Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -/Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Silence, though, is perhaps not LI's best exercized talent. Wild surmise soon dissolved into wild laughter. Talk about a smoking gun! Isn't this the very attitude one always suspected? Isn't this too much? If only we had heard more of this in December, 2000, as the corrupt current POTUS and his crew were overthrowing the democratic election of Al Gore. As the current administration massaged the leaders of the coup against Chavez, did they assured them that time and custom will take care of any problems the seizure of power might cause in the consciousness of the people?
Ah! It all brings back the judicially "corrected" election of 2000. LI, nostalgically, looked up a pre 9/11 issue of Newsweek -- remember the era before 9/11? Before we declared war on Osama bin Laden, and brought down, with our slingshot, the wrong bird? Before the war on terrorism increasingly became a mere machination to disguise the essential corruption of the Bush administration, from its Power company powered Energy plan to its absurd tax giveaway to the top 5 percentile. Here's the beginning of the Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas article on the stolen election:
" Sandra Day O'Connor and her husband, John, a Washington lawyer, have long been comfortable on the cocktail and charity-ball circuit. So at an election-night party on Nov. 7, surrounded for the most part by friends and familiar acquaintances, she let her guard drop for a moment when she heard the first critical returns shortly before 8 p.m. Sitting in her hostess's den, staring at a small black-and-white television set, she visibly started when CBS anchor Dan Rather called Florida for Al Gore. "This is terrible," she exclaimed. She explained to another partygoer that Gore's reported victory in Florida meant that the election was "over," since Gore had already carried two other swing states, Michigan and Illinois. Moments later, with an air of obvious disgust, she rose to get a plate of food, leaving it to her husband to explain her somewhat uncharacteristic outburst. John O'Connor said his wife was upset because they wanted to retire to Arizona, and a Gore win meant they'd have to wait another four years.
O'Connor, the former Republican majority leader of the Arizona State Senate and a 1981 Ronald Reagan appointee, did not want a Democrat to name her successor. Two witnesses described this extraordinary scene to NEWSWEEK. Responding through a spokesman at the high court, O'Connor had no comment. O'Connor had no way of knowing, as she watched the early returns, that election night would end in deadlock and confusion--or that five weeks later she would play a direct and decisive role in the election of George W. Bush. O'Connor could not possibly have foreseen that she would be one of two swing votes in the court's 5-4 decision ending the manual recount in Florida and forcing Al Gore to finally concede defeat. But her remarks will fuel criticism that the justices not only "follow the election returns," as the old saying goes, but, in the case of George W. Bush v. Albert Gore, Jr., sought to influence them."
Did Bush's advisors tell the anti-Chavez people to get the courts in their pocket before they proceeded? It is important advice.
King Gall's foreign policy favors more legitimate rulers than the neo-Peronist Chavez -- such as Equatorial Guinea's Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Obiang has suddenly become rich with the discovery of oil in his country. The man is a friend of all that is beautiful and true -- if you don't believe LI, look at the terms of the oil contracts: 75 percent for the oil companies, 25 for Obiang and his cronies. Or, as they will call themselves, the sovereign nation of Equatorial Guinea. The Nation has a very nice report, by Ken Silverstein, on this obscure country. It is not obscure to Triton Energy, however. And Triton Energy is run by an old friend of GWBII:
"Perhaps best connected of all is Triton, whose chairman, Tom Hicks, made Bush a millionaire fifteen times over when he bought the Texas Rangers in 1998. Hicks's leveraged buyout firm, Hicks Muse, is Bush's fourth-largest career financial patron, according to the Center for Public Integrity."
Oil, money, blood, and a leader who, unlike Chavez, is thoroughly democratic -- which is how he gained his 92 percent of the vote in the last election. Life is so good.
However, Silverstein's story interests LI less as another tawdry adventure of the Bush administration than for the tergiversation of Equatorial Guinea's pr man in D.C., Bruce McColm. Bruce's upward and onward career really caught our eye:
"In addition to direct lobbying, the oil industry sought to improve Obiang's image by hiring the services of Bruce McColm, a former head of Freedom House who now runs the Institute for Democratic Strategies (IDS), a Virginia-based nonprofit whose stated mission is "strengthening democratic institutions." The Obiang regime's most tireless champion, McColm works closely with the government, which now pays him directly. (According to its latest nonprofit tax form, the IDS spent $223,000 in 2000, of which all but $10,000 went toward its Equatorial Guinea work.) In 2000 McColm sent a team of observers to monitor Equatorial Guinea's municipal elections, which it reported to be basically free and fair. "Electoral officials should be recognized for discharging their responsibilities in an effective and transparent manner," said an IDS press release at the time. "Observers generally felt that the positives of this election far outweighed the negatives." This was in marked contrast to a UN report that said the electoral campaign "was characterized by the omnipresence of the [ruling] party, voting in public and the intimidating presence of the armed forces."
Go to the Freedom House site and you get this slogan:
"Freedom House, a non-profit, nonpartisan organization, is a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the world. Through a vast array of international programs and publications, Freedom House is working to advance the remarkable worldwide expansion of political and economic freedom."
An admirable stance, n'est-ce pas? Don't think that Equatorial Guinea has become a much better country recently -- at least according to Freedom house, it rates a 7.7 in terms of freedom. According to FH's explanation of its rating system, "those whose ratings average 1-2.5 are generally considered "Free," 3-5.5 "Partly Free," and 5.5-7 "Not Free." This does not give the Bruce McColm's of the world pause, of course. Far from it. When someone like Bruce McColm acquires the moral capital that accrues from taking the honorable position that people should have a say in the government that has the power to incarcerate them, the goal is to leave, and then to gleefully squander your conscience as you defend the dictators whose money helps you dine out in Georgetown. Because in D.C., as we know, the NGO post is only a first step on the ladder. Shedding your entire moral character, and revealing yourself as a devil in human skin, is the process. Not of course that we wish to slander a man of McColm's sterling character, we only wish on him what, well, what King Lear wished on Goneril and Reagen. In the mean time, LI thinks he should take on a few of Rwanda's past rulers as his next clients. Or perhaps he already has.
Monday, April 15, 2002
Remora
"We are a humane army."
"I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not." -- Edmund Burke
I've extracted this quote from a letter Edmund Burke wrote in defense of his prosecution of Warren Hastings to the painter Joshua Reynold's niece. She'd written Burke on behalf of a friend to ask him, politely, if he knew what he was doing. It's a nice example of the way pressure is exerted to destroy dissent -- you don't need a police force when there is a steady supply of Miss Palmers, generation after generation, to imply that, well, the dissenter is embarrassing himself among her sort.
From the Guardian:
The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, denies the Palestinian claims that a 'massacre' took place. Their version is that those who died were combatants in very heavy fighting. Shlein believes few civilians were killed, despite the claims of those at the hospital and the evidence of the dead and wounded we see there. Shlein believes too that the Israeli army showed restraint while operating in Jenin. 'There would have been no problem completing the operation immediately,' he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on Friday. 'But we are a humane army.
"Whether the white people like it or not." The pathos of the conditional rings down the ages, at least for LI, sitting here in our isolation, impotent critic of all we survey. For surely one of Miss Palmer's questions -- not the one she put into words, but the one underneath all the ones she put into words -- was how a man like Burke could make himself an advocate of, well, a lower, duskier race. One that was certainly not Christian. One whose deaths couldn't be measured in the same proportion as good White deaths. And certainly Burke lived among the set of "the white people", the whitest, in fact, in the land. The Whig Aristocracy, Lord Rockingham's coterie, the London coffeehouse intellectuals. Yet Burke was too Irish not to know he had a secret sharer as he moved among these groups; it was not Conrad's secret sharer, that Blond Uber-Englishman in which the slav was at last washed away; no, this was the Catholic mother, this was Dublin, this was the sometimes over-excited (some would say affected) speech. This was a line within himself, creating zones. And definitely there was a zone to be crossed into, and out of which, in raids on the inexplicable, came that famous talent for indignation in elevated language. The banned zone within himself.
From the LA Times:
But also Saturday, rescuers discovered two other members of the family still alive. The rescuers plucked the couple--Abdullah Shobi and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt.
The recoveries seemed to bolster allegations that the Israeli army--as it invaded towns and cities across the West Bank and met stiff resistance--bulldozed homes with people still in them. Similar tales have emerged from the Jenin refugee camp, site of the most widespread destruction and highest death toll in any of the fighting.
An army spokeswoman said Saturday that efforts are always made to notify the residents of a home that is to be demolished. She said the army destroys only buildings that have been used as explosives factories or sniper positions.
The Shobis' neighbors gave a different account. Although fighting, gunfire and explosions had raged for days, the family was not involved. The neighbors said the bulldozer approached from the plaza in front of the Shobi home and began attacking. The building collapsed, with the family inside.
We appeal to Burke sane -- where to his Tory fans he appeared most mad -- from Burke mad, the Burke who, as the enemy of "theory in politics," was eventually driven to an excess of theory, theory as the perennial policing of theory. Burke's reactionary philosophy centers around the sort of paralogism that, in another context, would be sorted out by Godel: the idea that a meta-theory of politics that found theory in politics to be illegitimate was not, itself, a theory, and not itself subject to the fanaticism Burke felt was consequent upon the application of theory to human affairs. It was a paralogism that called upon the same apocalyptic language, the same world wide militancy, as its opponents.
"As for me, I was always steadily of the opinion that this disorder [the French Revolution] is not intermittent. I conceived that the contest once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought we could make peace with the system, because it is not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself we were at war."
From the New York Times:
For Israeli forces, it is also an especially dangerous mission. This is not an American-style military campaign that uses airstrikes for weeks or even months before ground troops are deployed.It is urban warfare, with soldiers moving alley to alley, house to house, searching for militants amid booby-trapped homes. Twenty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed and 124 wounded since the operation began on March 28.
The raids have also led to charges by Palestinians that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, which the Israeli Army says is one of the main sanctuaries for the militants. The Israelis have adamantly rejected allegations that their troops have attacked civilians.
And so this is the tone of the "white people's" newspaper of note -- a paper which holds that bullets can kill an Israeli soldier, but Israeli bullets can only lead to "charges", a social condition in which, for psycho-pathological reasons, the hate America crowd, parlor politicians of Europe, and other assorted malcontents have some kind of problem with the program. They hear the "let's roll," and they don't want to roll, these people. The inherent humanity of Israeli weaponry must be one of the wonders of the world. In today's paper, the IDF, which was quite happy to report one hundred to two hundred Palestinian deaths, for domestic consumption, last week, is now claiming that the dead number in the dozens. A change that will no doubt be echoed in further stories about Jenin, and contrasted with the especially dangerous missions mounted by the government of Sharon. And LI is ready to concede that there is something mystical about the transfiguration of Palestinian flesh, properly shredded, or crushed in a house, into so many words, mere words. First comes the righteous act, then the "charges." We are watching white people's history unfold before us, entranced and horrified by the spectacle, readers.
"We are a humane army."
"I have no party in this business, my dear Miss Palmer, but among a set of people, who have none of your lilies and roses in their faces; but who are the images of the great Pattern as well as you or I. I know what I am doing; whether the white people like it or not." -- Edmund Burke
I've extracted this quote from a letter Edmund Burke wrote in defense of his prosecution of Warren Hastings to the painter Joshua Reynold's niece. She'd written Burke on behalf of a friend to ask him, politely, if he knew what he was doing. It's a nice example of the way pressure is exerted to destroy dissent -- you don't need a police force when there is a steady supply of Miss Palmers, generation after generation, to imply that, well, the dissenter is embarrassing himself among her sort.
From the Guardian:
The man in charge of the operation is Brigadier-General Eyal Shlein. Shlein, like Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, denies the Palestinian claims that a 'massacre' took place. Their version is that those who died were combatants in very heavy fighting. Shlein believes few civilians were killed, despite the claims of those at the hospital and the evidence of the dead and wounded we see there. Shlein believes too that the Israeli army showed restraint while operating in Jenin. 'There would have been no problem completing the operation immediately,' he told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz on Friday. 'But we are a humane army.
"Whether the white people like it or not." The pathos of the conditional rings down the ages, at least for LI, sitting here in our isolation, impotent critic of all we survey. For surely one of Miss Palmer's questions -- not the one she put into words, but the one underneath all the ones she put into words -- was how a man like Burke could make himself an advocate of, well, a lower, duskier race. One that was certainly not Christian. One whose deaths couldn't be measured in the same proportion as good White deaths. And certainly Burke lived among the set of "the white people", the whitest, in fact, in the land. The Whig Aristocracy, Lord Rockingham's coterie, the London coffeehouse intellectuals. Yet Burke was too Irish not to know he had a secret sharer as he moved among these groups; it was not Conrad's secret sharer, that Blond Uber-Englishman in which the slav was at last washed away; no, this was the Catholic mother, this was Dublin, this was the sometimes over-excited (some would say affected) speech. This was a line within himself, creating zones. And definitely there was a zone to be crossed into, and out of which, in raids on the inexplicable, came that famous talent for indignation in elevated language. The banned zone within himself.
From the LA Times:
But also Saturday, rescuers discovered two other members of the family still alive. The rescuers plucked the couple--Abdullah Shobi and his wife, Shamsa--from their living room, which was under a mass of stone and dirt.
The recoveries seemed to bolster allegations that the Israeli army--as it invaded towns and cities across the West Bank and met stiff resistance--bulldozed homes with people still in them. Similar tales have emerged from the Jenin refugee camp, site of the most widespread destruction and highest death toll in any of the fighting.
An army spokeswoman said Saturday that efforts are always made to notify the residents of a home that is to be demolished. She said the army destroys only buildings that have been used as explosives factories or sniper positions.
The Shobis' neighbors gave a different account. Although fighting, gunfire and explosions had raged for days, the family was not involved. The neighbors said the bulldozer approached from the plaza in front of the Shobi home and began attacking. The building collapsed, with the family inside.
We appeal to Burke sane -- where to his Tory fans he appeared most mad -- from Burke mad, the Burke who, as the enemy of "theory in politics," was eventually driven to an excess of theory, theory as the perennial policing of theory. Burke's reactionary philosophy centers around the sort of paralogism that, in another context, would be sorted out by Godel: the idea that a meta-theory of politics that found theory in politics to be illegitimate was not, itself, a theory, and not itself subject to the fanaticism Burke felt was consequent upon the application of theory to human affairs. It was a paralogism that called upon the same apocalyptic language, the same world wide militancy, as its opponents.
"As for me, I was always steadily of the opinion that this disorder [the French Revolution] is not intermittent. I conceived that the contest once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion; but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last. I never thought we could make peace with the system, because it is not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself we were at war."
From the New York Times:
For Israeli forces, it is also an especially dangerous mission. This is not an American-style military campaign that uses airstrikes for weeks or even months before ground troops are deployed.It is urban warfare, with soldiers moving alley to alley, house to house, searching for militants amid booby-trapped homes. Twenty-four Israeli soldiers have been killed and 124 wounded since the operation began on March 28.
The raids have also led to charges by Palestinians that hundreds of civilians have been killed in the Israeli assault on the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin, which the Israeli Army says is one of the main sanctuaries for the militants. The Israelis have adamantly rejected allegations that their troops have attacked civilians.
And so this is the tone of the "white people's" newspaper of note -- a paper which holds that bullets can kill an Israeli soldier, but Israeli bullets can only lead to "charges", a social condition in which, for psycho-pathological reasons, the hate America crowd, parlor politicians of Europe, and other assorted malcontents have some kind of problem with the program. They hear the "let's roll," and they don't want to roll, these people. The inherent humanity of Israeli weaponry must be one of the wonders of the world. In today's paper, the IDF, which was quite happy to report one hundred to two hundred Palestinian deaths, for domestic consumption, last week, is now claiming that the dead number in the dozens. A change that will no doubt be echoed in further stories about Jenin, and contrasted with the especially dangerous missions mounted by the government of Sharon. And LI is ready to concede that there is something mystical about the transfiguration of Palestinian flesh, properly shredded, or crushed in a house, into so many words, mere words. First comes the righteous act, then the "charges." We are watching white people's history unfold before us, entranced and horrified by the spectacle, readers.
Saturday, April 13, 2002
In the book LI mentioned in the last post � The Siege, by Conor Cruise O�Brien � there�s a
quotation from a critic, Edward Alexander, that is much on our mind today. Alexander, glossing
a poem, exudes a telling phrase: �... the Jewish people finds itself caught in a conflict between
the covenant and the historic necessity to survive within history...�
Indeed. But we are living, just as the evangelists say, in the end time -- the time when this kind of talk, this pattern of thinking, this use of a coy theology to justify the regretable theft, the imperial murder, has collapsed in on itself, corrupted by its own sentimentality. The covenant and the historic necessity have converged; the messianism of one coincident at all points with the irrationality of the other. Covenant and historic necessity are hauled out by thugs, ultras, gunmen, and news personalities to rhetorically drape any wretched activity whatsoever that can be enforced on one set of skin and bones by another, favored set. So watch: History wrenches concrete from concrete in Jenin; history blows itself up in the marketplace in Jerusalem, and survives; then it is ambushed on the West Bank, eleven dead, and
it survives. It whispers to soldiers that wouldn�t it be a good idea to use civilians as shields to advance on terrorist nests? Its spokesman come on the radio and admire themselves and their government for sparing life and limb by not carpet bombing encampments of refugees. With malice towards none, and a few missiles towards all, here we have a perfect moral stance for our times. It is a morality that dances on its own immoral means and jeers at critics.
Well. What did we go out in the killing fields to see, kiddies? A reed broken in the wind? Or
this:
Powell was only about a mile away when today's blast happened, about to board a helicopter for
a tour of Israel's volatile Northern border region with Lebanon. His helicopter did a turn in the sky to allow the secretary to survey firsthand the bombing site, where glass and metal mixed with body parts and a severed head across a wide area of asphalt.
Or this:
JENIN, West Bank, April 11 -- There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them.
There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home
with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her.
And there is Khadra Samara, 33, who said she shepherded more than a dozen children as she fled from house to house to house in the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, under repeated assault from Israeli bulldozers and missiles that, house by house, nearly toppled the walls on top of them
Well, those are definitely some stories we could have gone out to see. But they aren't stories of much interest to, say, the New Republic. This week the magazine runs two stories on the Jenin operation, and both of the stories are pumped. The smell of massacre in the morning agrees with these guys. However, in the tumult of emotions attendent on seeing the enemy and his wife smashed by the finest American weaponry, the writers come to two completely opposite conclusions: one that Hamas� infrastructure has escaped the Israeli sweep,the other that it has been destroyed by it.
Both, however, conclude that the Palestinian will and ability to retaliate has been severely impeded. Both were written before the bus bombing, and before yesterdays return of the repressed bombing in Jerusalem.
To everything, there is a spin, it says in Ecclesiastes. The spin in preparation was that Sharon, in spite of petty criticism, launched an absolute operation that worked. The new justification will be that the Palestinians haven't been tamed yet. Robert Wright, with whom LI usually has no truck, had a sensible column about this in Slate last week which predicted, wrongly it turned out, that Sharon's hardcore strategy would pay off in the short run, and diminish the likelihood of suicide bombing. The two final grafs in his piece,consonant with that prediction, and with the puppylike excitement of the TNR reporters, makes a very LI-like point:
"And we shouldn't be beguiled by short-run success. If terrorist bombings indeed abate after the current incursion, prepare yourself for the inevitable Charles Krauthammer column touting the success of Sharon's iron-fist policy. It's a natural sequel to Krauthammer's column belittling the significance of the "Arab Street" after the Street failed to boil over and depose any Arab regimes in the wake of the Afghanistan war. In both cases, the fallacy is the same: failing to see 1) that metastasizing hatred can work slowly, beneath the surface; 2) that, increasingly, hatred needn't be mediated by a regime (or a quasi-regime, like the Palestinian Authority) to be lethal; and 3) that the lethal leveraging of hatred�the hatred-death conversion factor�will probably grow exponentially over the next five to 10 years, as lethal technologies advance and spread. (Hamas recently moved from crude fertilizer bombs to sophisticated plastic explosives.)
Unfortunately, Krauthammer's time horizons mirror those of many politicians in a democracy. If your goal is to keep your poll numbers up for a few months or even years, it may pay to be crudely, crowd-pleasingly tough on terrorists while avoiding the messy and frustrating spectacle of addressing terrorism's causes: Just do the immediately popular things and hope that the long-run cost of your negligence doesn't show up until your successor takes office. If that is your ambition, Ariel Sharon is a fine role model."
quotation from a critic, Edward Alexander, that is much on our mind today. Alexander, glossing
a poem, exudes a telling phrase: �... the Jewish people finds itself caught in a conflict between
the covenant and the historic necessity to survive within history...�
Indeed. But we are living, just as the evangelists say, in the end time -- the time when this kind of talk, this pattern of thinking, this use of a coy theology to justify the regretable theft, the imperial murder, has collapsed in on itself, corrupted by its own sentimentality. The covenant and the historic necessity have converged; the messianism of one coincident at all points with the irrationality of the other. Covenant and historic necessity are hauled out by thugs, ultras, gunmen, and news personalities to rhetorically drape any wretched activity whatsoever that can be enforced on one set of skin and bones by another, favored set. So watch: History wrenches concrete from concrete in Jenin; history blows itself up in the marketplace in Jerusalem, and survives; then it is ambushed on the West Bank, eleven dead, and
it survives. It whispers to soldiers that wouldn�t it be a good idea to use civilians as shields to advance on terrorist nests? Its spokesman come on the radio and admire themselves and their government for sparing life and limb by not carpet bombing encampments of refugees. With malice towards none, and a few missiles towards all, here we have a perfect moral stance for our times. It is a morality that dances on its own immoral means and jeers at critics.
Well. What did we go out in the killing fields to see, kiddies? A reed broken in the wind? Or
this:
Powell was only about a mile away when today's blast happened, about to board a helicopter for
a tour of Israel's volatile Northern border region with Lebanon. His helicopter did a turn in the sky to allow the secretary to survey firsthand the bombing site, where glass and metal mixed with body parts and a severed head across a wide area of asphalt.
Or this:
JENIN, West Bank, April 11 -- There is the Fashafsheh family. According to their relatives, the mother, father and 9-year-old son were killed when an Israeli tank fired a shell through their living room in downtown Jenin and an Israeli bulldozer plowed into the thick walls of their home, smashing it down on top of them.
There is Rina Zayyed, 15, who said she was struck in the chest by a bullet as she sat at home
with her father and brother. An Israeli helicopter gunship opened fire on a man in the street below who was recharging a cell phone with his car battery, she recounted, and a fragment hit her.
And there is Khadra Samara, 33, who said she shepherded more than a dozen children as she fled from house to house to house in the adjacent Jenin refugee camp, under repeated assault from Israeli bulldozers and missiles that, house by house, nearly toppled the walls on top of them
Well, those are definitely some stories we could have gone out to see. But they aren't stories of much interest to, say, the New Republic. This week the magazine runs two stories on the Jenin operation, and both of the stories are pumped. The smell of massacre in the morning agrees with these guys. However, in the tumult of emotions attendent on seeing the enemy and his wife smashed by the finest American weaponry, the writers come to two completely opposite conclusions: one that Hamas� infrastructure has escaped the Israeli sweep,the other that it has been destroyed by it.
Both, however, conclude that the Palestinian will and ability to retaliate has been severely impeded. Both were written before the bus bombing, and before yesterdays return of the repressed bombing in Jerusalem.
To everything, there is a spin, it says in Ecclesiastes. The spin in preparation was that Sharon, in spite of petty criticism, launched an absolute operation that worked. The new justification will be that the Palestinians haven't been tamed yet. Robert Wright, with whom LI usually has no truck, had a sensible column about this in Slate last week which predicted, wrongly it turned out, that Sharon's hardcore strategy would pay off in the short run, and diminish the likelihood of suicide bombing. The two final grafs in his piece,consonant with that prediction, and with the puppylike excitement of the TNR reporters, makes a very LI-like point:
"And we shouldn't be beguiled by short-run success. If terrorist bombings indeed abate after the current incursion, prepare yourself for the inevitable Charles Krauthammer column touting the success of Sharon's iron-fist policy. It's a natural sequel to Krauthammer's column belittling the significance of the "Arab Street" after the Street failed to boil over and depose any Arab regimes in the wake of the Afghanistan war. In both cases, the fallacy is the same: failing to see 1) that metastasizing hatred can work slowly, beneath the surface; 2) that, increasingly, hatred needn't be mediated by a regime (or a quasi-regime, like the Palestinian Authority) to be lethal; and 3) that the lethal leveraging of hatred�the hatred-death conversion factor�will probably grow exponentially over the next five to 10 years, as lethal technologies advance and spread. (Hamas recently moved from crude fertilizer bombs to sophisticated plastic explosives.)
Unfortunately, Krauthammer's time horizons mirror those of many politicians in a democracy. If your goal is to keep your poll numbers up for a few months or even years, it may pay to be crudely, crowd-pleasingly tough on terrorists while avoiding the messy and frustrating spectacle of addressing terrorism's causes: Just do the immediately popular things and hope that the long-run cost of your negligence doesn't show up until your successor takes office. If that is your ambition, Ariel Sharon is a fine role model."
Thursday, April 11, 2002
Remora
Okay, LI is obsessed. You are tired of the Middle East. You want things the way they used to be around here. The eccentric flights into biz-olect. The homey essays about encyclopedias.
Well, forget it.
David Remnick's Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker is a bouquet of Cold War flowers of rhetoric. It exudes a sweet, poisonous smell. He even writes of the "parlor politicians" in Europe -- is this derived from the phrase, parlor pinks? Surely it is. I suppose the contrast is between those effete guys enjoying teas in roccoco-ish chambers and speaking French to each other (yuck!) while on the other side of the world, in the New World, our politicians are up at the crack of dawn, donning grease stained t shirts, smoking marlboros, roping and wrangling and squinting into the sun and getting long and tall and philosophical. Our politicians are like our usurping Potus. They are like Trent Lott. They are as honest and funloving a bunch of guys as you'd want to take out on patrol. And smart! Not in that parlor sense, not with a bunch of book larnin.' No siree, they was all trained at their grandmas knee on the good book and Horatio Alger, and has forsaken the word since then, since what is the point?
But the more interesting part of Remnicks' demagogery is another McCarthy-ite trope: moral equivalency. Remember the second Cold War, the Reagan phase, when we were hammered with that phrase? It has been a while since we saw it last. But here it comes again. We particularly enjoyed this passage:
"There is no moral equivalence between Arafat and Sharon: the first thrives on the idealization of martyrdom; the other now blunders while trying to stifle him. Nevertheless, history has seldom conjured two leaders less fit for their historical moment than Arafat and Sharon. (And those who stand in waiting�a murderer's row of Palestinian security chiefs and Benjamin Netanyahu�are no more promising.) Another party is needed, and this moment, like September 11th, demands American diplomacy, imagination, and intervention. President Bush was, at first, slow to engage at anywhere near the level needed. His actions, and the actions of his agencies, were contradictory and confused. One day early last week, when Bush was asked about criticism that he had not done enough to bring an end to the confrontation, he complained that in fact he had been making calls all morning. The President sounded put out; it was a tone familiar not from his best speeches after the September attacks but, rather, from his more feckless moments during the 2000 campaign."
We vote for "moral equivalence" as our favorite phrase in Remnick's piece, because unlike parlor politician, it is not mere vituperation. It supposedly means something, something deep. Demagogery is not mere ornament. It has to provide a content, however ersatz. So here we are in the Cold War again, with an 'us' -- see above, re squinting into sun politicos on ranches -- and a 'them'. There's evil Arafat, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a figure out of the Flintstones -- blundering, but no doubt decent and humane Ariel Sharon.
Well, all talk about the Middle East eventually gets around to history -- which is why, perhaps, the place seems so enigmatic and maddening to Americans, who officially believe history is something that comes in marble, with columns and a statue, that you visit on your D.C. vacation -- but that is otherwise irrelevant to anybody's life.
Yet because Remnick's Fred Flintstone is leading a party that actually has a history -- and because that history, with its roots in the Irgun, exhibits pattern that are on display in every one of Sharon's acts and speeches, and in the acts and speeches of his rightwing cabinet ministers -- LI would think that the New Yorker editor would have some feel for the past, here, as that force that portends the future. LI has been boning up on the Middle East himself, kiddies. We are reading Conor Cruise O'brien's book about Israel, The Siege. Though we are far from finished with that book, one thing clearly emerges from the history of Israel's founding. The PLO's model for statehood is not Algeria, it is Israel.
The Israel, that is, that countenanced a double track policy in its early years. The Israel that knew that its very existence depended on provisionally defying the world, or at least the Free World. On the one hand, the official Zionist line of peaceful coexistence, promulgated by David Ben-Gurion. On the other hand, the unofficial Irgun line of "by whatever means necessary." The Irgun line involved massive covert shipments of arms, assassination (as of the UN's mediator at the time, Count Bernadotte), and the deaths of as many Palestinian Arabs as was necessary to create the critical fright that leads to wholesale flight.
Since this history is a mere fifty years ago and less, burying it is still difficult. But les gens bien-pensants like Remnick, who have otherwise exhibited a ravenous thirst for information about, say, Stalin's crimes -- which stretch back sixty years and more -- seem to be satiated on a tepid version of Israel's founding, development, and present state. It is all in the heroic mode, a la Leon Uris, and bloodshed is what the Israelis suffered, instead of caused.
So we have this version of Arafat the terrorist, which is a top ten number for right wing pundits and moderates alike. How can the man actual debase the peace process by competing with more radical Palestinian factions? Such behavior would never be allowed in Israeli politics, right?
Come on. Are we serious here? Of course not. That's why, out of the ruins of the camps, the newspapers will be extracting, in the next few days, evidence from the IDF, the most neutral and kindly of armies. As the mounds of the Palestinian dead are buried, the papers will instead focus, with their eternal vigilance over right and wrong, on documents and weaponry.
As for the hand-wringing in Remnick's article about the settlements on the West Bank -- like every other American journalist, he assures us that the vast majority of the Israelis don't want them, don't need them, etc., etc. But by some magical force, some national impotence a la the Fisher King, they just can't seem to prevent them from happening. They just can't seem to connect, say, electing Ariel Sharon prime minister and the continuing support given to the West Bank settlements.
For a much more specific article about the politics of those settlements, go to Anthony Lewis' article in the NYRB.
. LI has been planning to comment on this surprising and slendid article for a couple of days, but we don't have time to right now. Look for it in the future, kiddies.
Okay, LI is obsessed. You are tired of the Middle East. You want things the way they used to be around here. The eccentric flights into biz-olect. The homey essays about encyclopedias.
Well, forget it.
David Remnick's Talk of the Town piece in this week's New Yorker is a bouquet of Cold War flowers of rhetoric. It exudes a sweet, poisonous smell. He even writes of the "parlor politicians" in Europe -- is this derived from the phrase, parlor pinks? Surely it is. I suppose the contrast is between those effete guys enjoying teas in roccoco-ish chambers and speaking French to each other (yuck!) while on the other side of the world, in the New World, our politicians are up at the crack of dawn, donning grease stained t shirts, smoking marlboros, roping and wrangling and squinting into the sun and getting long and tall and philosophical. Our politicians are like our usurping Potus. They are like Trent Lott. They are as honest and funloving a bunch of guys as you'd want to take out on patrol. And smart! Not in that parlor sense, not with a bunch of book larnin.' No siree, they was all trained at their grandmas knee on the good book and Horatio Alger, and has forsaken the word since then, since what is the point?
But the more interesting part of Remnicks' demagogery is another McCarthy-ite trope: moral equivalency. Remember the second Cold War, the Reagan phase, when we were hammered with that phrase? It has been a while since we saw it last. But here it comes again. We particularly enjoyed this passage:
"There is no moral equivalence between Arafat and Sharon: the first thrives on the idealization of martyrdom; the other now blunders while trying to stifle him. Nevertheless, history has seldom conjured two leaders less fit for their historical moment than Arafat and Sharon. (And those who stand in waiting�a murderer's row of Palestinian security chiefs and Benjamin Netanyahu�are no more promising.) Another party is needed, and this moment, like September 11th, demands American diplomacy, imagination, and intervention. President Bush was, at first, slow to engage at anywhere near the level needed. His actions, and the actions of his agencies, were contradictory and confused. One day early last week, when Bush was asked about criticism that he had not done enough to bring an end to the confrontation, he complained that in fact he had been making calls all morning. The President sounded put out; it was a tone familiar not from his best speeches after the September attacks but, rather, from his more feckless moments during the 2000 campaign."
We vote for "moral equivalence" as our favorite phrase in Remnick's piece, because unlike parlor politician, it is not mere vituperation. It supposedly means something, something deep. Demagogery is not mere ornament. It has to provide a content, however ersatz. So here we are in the Cold War again, with an 'us' -- see above, re squinting into sun politicos on ranches -- and a 'them'. There's evil Arafat, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a figure out of the Flintstones -- blundering, but no doubt decent and humane Ariel Sharon.
Well, all talk about the Middle East eventually gets around to history -- which is why, perhaps, the place seems so enigmatic and maddening to Americans, who officially believe history is something that comes in marble, with columns and a statue, that you visit on your D.C. vacation -- but that is otherwise irrelevant to anybody's life.
Yet because Remnick's Fred Flintstone is leading a party that actually has a history -- and because that history, with its roots in the Irgun, exhibits pattern that are on display in every one of Sharon's acts and speeches, and in the acts and speeches of his rightwing cabinet ministers -- LI would think that the New Yorker editor would have some feel for the past, here, as that force that portends the future. LI has been boning up on the Middle East himself, kiddies. We are reading Conor Cruise O'brien's book about Israel, The Siege. Though we are far from finished with that book, one thing clearly emerges from the history of Israel's founding. The PLO's model for statehood is not Algeria, it is Israel.
The Israel, that is, that countenanced a double track policy in its early years. The Israel that knew that its very existence depended on provisionally defying the world, or at least the Free World. On the one hand, the official Zionist line of peaceful coexistence, promulgated by David Ben-Gurion. On the other hand, the unofficial Irgun line of "by whatever means necessary." The Irgun line involved massive covert shipments of arms, assassination (as of the UN's mediator at the time, Count Bernadotte), and the deaths of as many Palestinian Arabs as was necessary to create the critical fright that leads to wholesale flight.
Since this history is a mere fifty years ago and less, burying it is still difficult. But les gens bien-pensants like Remnick, who have otherwise exhibited a ravenous thirst for information about, say, Stalin's crimes -- which stretch back sixty years and more -- seem to be satiated on a tepid version of Israel's founding, development, and present state. It is all in the heroic mode, a la Leon Uris, and bloodshed is what the Israelis suffered, instead of caused.
So we have this version of Arafat the terrorist, which is a top ten number for right wing pundits and moderates alike. How can the man actual debase the peace process by competing with more radical Palestinian factions? Such behavior would never be allowed in Israeli politics, right?
Come on. Are we serious here? Of course not. That's why, out of the ruins of the camps, the newspapers will be extracting, in the next few days, evidence from the IDF, the most neutral and kindly of armies. As the mounds of the Palestinian dead are buried, the papers will instead focus, with their eternal vigilance over right and wrong, on documents and weaponry.
As for the hand-wringing in Remnick's article about the settlements on the West Bank -- like every other American journalist, he assures us that the vast majority of the Israelis don't want them, don't need them, etc., etc. But by some magical force, some national impotence a la the Fisher King, they just can't seem to prevent them from happening. They just can't seem to connect, say, electing Ariel Sharon prime minister and the continuing support given to the West Bank settlements.
For a much more specific article about the politics of those settlements, go to Anthony Lewis' article in the NYRB.
. LI has been planning to comment on this surprising and slendid article for a couple of days, but we don't have time to right now. Look for it in the future, kiddies.
Wednesday, April 10, 2002
Remora
Headline politics
At least 8 killed in Bus Bombing in Israel (NYT)
Toll Rises as Israel Presses on: 13 soldiers die; bus explosion kills 8, hurts 14; Sharon resolute (Boston Globe)
8 killed after Passenger Bus attacked in Israel (Washington Post)
Ambush in West Bank Kills 13 Israeli Soldiers (San Jose Mercury Mercury)
That much gone from the world, of skin,tissue, the delicate, fine optic nerve, the hands, the genitals, thought (thethinker dying), bad moods, bad relationships, love, the taste of coffee, hair. Burned, battered, bloody, done. Bad news.
But somehow, the headlines never seem to read: 150 dead inJenin; or, Israeli Troops Kill 150 in Camp. Somehow the headline writers neverget around to Palestinian dead except as the sort of cortege of Israeli dead.Somehow Palestinian dead never make the grade, never deserve the caps.Something about them, no doubt. They are, after all, living in a camp. And look at what they are finding in those camps! Weapons! Documents! My god, for all the world like, well, like a sovereign state, instead of the dependents that they were made to be by nature and art. Better than the beasts of the field, let's be human here -- but with no right of self determination. Rather, endowed with the right to wait, eternally.
Now, if by some miracle tanks rolled intoSharon�s compound, what interesting papers they would find. What weapons. Andof course those tanks would, as an iron semantic rule, be manned by terrorists.No two ways around that. Still, the publication of those documents and the exhibition of those weapons � including, in Israel�s case, surely, atom bombs �would be interesting, n�est-ce pas?
Let's scatter a few caveats.
Here is the thing. There are those who believe Israel is an illegitimate state. There are those who are anti-Semites, and simply want Jews killed or persecuted. There are those who mourn for the displaced Palestinians, and have no time for, say, the 150,000 Jews that were driven out of Iraq, or the comparable numbers driven out of a number of Arab nations in the fifties and sixties. Charles Krauthammer, our convenient devil doll, into whose prose LI likes to stick pins, had a point in a column he published a month ago:much of the Palestinian and Arab press is filled with ridiculous, immoral,sickening anti-jewish crap.
"This indoctrination goes far beyond expunging Israel, literally, from Palestinian maps. It goes far beyond denying, indeed ridiculing, the Holocaust as a Jewish fantasy. It consists of the rawest incitement to murder, as in this sermon by Arafat-appointed and Arafat-funded Ahmad Abu Halabiya broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television early in the Intifada. The subject is "the Jews." (Note: not the Israelis, but the Jews.) "They must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.' . . . Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them."
The tropes unchanged since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first manufactured by the Czar�s secret police (the Czar in question, Czar Nicholas II, was recently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church,to the world�s thunderous silence).
LI suspects that there are leftists whose flaming hatred for Israel overlaps with a not so latent anti-jewish bias.
But LI also knows that in the ecology of chauvinisms, one prejudice can exist quite nicely behind another prejudice � that the victims of a bias can themselves be biased. Victimhood confers no honor. In the best of cases it extends the imagination. If I suffer, I can imagine that my neighbor might suffer. That, at least, is one possible outcome of suffering. I wouldn�t bet the house on it, however.
All this to introduce one Effi Eitam, the man Sharon just inducted into his Cabinet, as a sort of fuck you to the Labor party.
Eitam is the head of the National Religious Party. Here's one summing up of the guy, from Ha'aretz:
Eitam's aim is to turn the national religious camp into a kind of bridgehead, a national avant-garde movement. According to Eitam, the Zionism of normality has run its course. So the mission of religious Zionism now is to lead the entire country toward a new horizon, a new purpose: to establish the Temple.
The thoughts of Eitam are instructive. Here, for instance, is his version of Eretz Israel:
"What has to be done with regard to the Palestinians?
"The immediate solution consists of three elements. First, get rid of this leadership. Second, to enter Area A [under full Palestinian control] and uproot the military terrorist capability. Third, to make it clear that there will be no foreign sovereignty west of the Jordan River. I am not sure that this is the time to organize what will happen east of the Jordan. But as for the area west of the Jordan, we have to state that no sovereignty will be established there other than that of the State of Israel."
And here are his thoughts on the means to that greater state;
And what will become of the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza?
"They will be residents without the right to vote. We have to obtain an interim settlement regarding their status. Not on the status of the territory - on their status. They have to be given a choice between enlightened residency with us or dark citizenship in the Arab states. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria will be able to make a free choice between a situation in which they will be Palestinian citizens who are residents of Israel, or citizens of their country who reside in the Palestinian state in Jordan and Sinai."
And what will induce them to cross to the other side of the Jordan? To emigrate?
"I don't want to be hypocritical. But I will put it like this: We do not need a declared emigration policy that encourages the emigration of Arabs. I think that we have to sincerely offer them an alternative of residency. Of course, whoever does not accept will have to be told: Your place is not with us. In a case like that, not even a wink is needed."
Yes, not even a wink, when a bullet will do. This isn't a man of muted views. Palestinians can read, oddly enough. They hear Powell say that the Bush administration is behind a Palestinian state. And they see that the Bush administration is very much behind the Sharon government, which includes Eitam. And they know that, in headline math, 150 palestinians do not equal 8 israelis. So they go for bombs instead.
It isn't hard to foresee where this is going.
Headline politics
At least 8 killed in Bus Bombing in Israel (NYT)
Toll Rises as Israel Presses on: 13 soldiers die; bus explosion kills 8, hurts 14; Sharon resolute (Boston Globe)
8 killed after Passenger Bus attacked in Israel (Washington Post)
Ambush in West Bank Kills 13 Israeli Soldiers (San Jose Mercury Mercury)
That much gone from the world, of skin,tissue, the delicate, fine optic nerve, the hands, the genitals, thought (thethinker dying), bad moods, bad relationships, love, the taste of coffee, hair. Burned, battered, bloody, done. Bad news.
But somehow, the headlines never seem to read: 150 dead inJenin; or, Israeli Troops Kill 150 in Camp. Somehow the headline writers neverget around to Palestinian dead except as the sort of cortege of Israeli dead.Somehow Palestinian dead never make the grade, never deserve the caps.Something about them, no doubt. They are, after all, living in a camp. And look at what they are finding in those camps! Weapons! Documents! My god, for all the world like, well, like a sovereign state, instead of the dependents that they were made to be by nature and art. Better than the beasts of the field, let's be human here -- but with no right of self determination. Rather, endowed with the right to wait, eternally.
Now, if by some miracle tanks rolled intoSharon�s compound, what interesting papers they would find. What weapons. Andof course those tanks would, as an iron semantic rule, be manned by terrorists.No two ways around that. Still, the publication of those documents and the exhibition of those weapons � including, in Israel�s case, surely, atom bombs �would be interesting, n�est-ce pas?
Let's scatter a few caveats.
Here is the thing. There are those who believe Israel is an illegitimate state. There are those who are anti-Semites, and simply want Jews killed or persecuted. There are those who mourn for the displaced Palestinians, and have no time for, say, the 150,000 Jews that were driven out of Iraq, or the comparable numbers driven out of a number of Arab nations in the fifties and sixties. Charles Krauthammer, our convenient devil doll, into whose prose LI likes to stick pins, had a point in a column he published a month ago:much of the Palestinian and Arab press is filled with ridiculous, immoral,sickening anti-jewish crap.
"This indoctrination goes far beyond expunging Israel, literally, from Palestinian maps. It goes far beyond denying, indeed ridiculing, the Holocaust as a Jewish fantasy. It consists of the rawest incitement to murder, as in this sermon by Arafat-appointed and Arafat-funded Ahmad Abu Halabiya broadcast live on official Palestinian Authority television early in the Intifada. The subject is "the Jews." (Note: not the Israelis, but the Jews.) "They must be butchered and killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will torture them at your hands.' . . . Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them."
The tropes unchanged since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was first manufactured by the Czar�s secret police (the Czar in question, Czar Nicholas II, was recently canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church,to the world�s thunderous silence).
LI suspects that there are leftists whose flaming hatred for Israel overlaps with a not so latent anti-jewish bias.
But LI also knows that in the ecology of chauvinisms, one prejudice can exist quite nicely behind another prejudice � that the victims of a bias can themselves be biased. Victimhood confers no honor. In the best of cases it extends the imagination. If I suffer, I can imagine that my neighbor might suffer. That, at least, is one possible outcome of suffering. I wouldn�t bet the house on it, however.
All this to introduce one Effi Eitam, the man Sharon just inducted into his Cabinet, as a sort of fuck you to the Labor party.
Eitam is the head of the National Religious Party. Here's one summing up of the guy, from Ha'aretz:
Eitam's aim is to turn the national religious camp into a kind of bridgehead, a national avant-garde movement. According to Eitam, the Zionism of normality has run its course. So the mission of religious Zionism now is to lead the entire country toward a new horizon, a new purpose: to establish the Temple.
The thoughts of Eitam are instructive. Here, for instance, is his version of Eretz Israel:
"What has to be done with regard to the Palestinians?
"The immediate solution consists of three elements. First, get rid of this leadership. Second, to enter Area A [under full Palestinian control] and uproot the military terrorist capability. Third, to make it clear that there will be no foreign sovereignty west of the Jordan River. I am not sure that this is the time to organize what will happen east of the Jordan. But as for the area west of the Jordan, we have to state that no sovereignty will be established there other than that of the State of Israel."
And here are his thoughts on the means to that greater state;
And what will become of the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza?
"They will be residents without the right to vote. We have to obtain an interim settlement regarding their status. Not on the status of the territory - on their status. They have to be given a choice between enlightened residency with us or dark citizenship in the Arab states. The Arabs in Judea and Samaria will be able to make a free choice between a situation in which they will be Palestinian citizens who are residents of Israel, or citizens of their country who reside in the Palestinian state in Jordan and Sinai."
And what will induce them to cross to the other side of the Jordan? To emigrate?
"I don't want to be hypocritical. But I will put it like this: We do not need a declared emigration policy that encourages the emigration of Arabs. I think that we have to sincerely offer them an alternative of residency. Of course, whoever does not accept will have to be told: Your place is not with us. In a case like that, not even a wink is needed."
Yes, not even a wink, when a bullet will do. This isn't a man of muted views. Palestinians can read, oddly enough. They hear Powell say that the Bush administration is behind a Palestinian state. And they see that the Bush administration is very much behind the Sharon government, which includes Eitam. And they know that, in headline math, 150 palestinians do not equal 8 israelis. So they go for bombs instead.
It isn't hard to foresee where this is going.
Tuesday, April 9, 2002
Remora
Museum or Masoleum
According to a story in the Ha'aretz,
thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush in Jenin this morning.
"Thirteen IDF soldiers were killed following a series of clashes in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on Tuesday morning. In addition, an officer with the paratrooper brigade was killed during gunfights in the Nablus casbah.
Also Tuesday, in Dura, south of Hebron, another paratroop brigade officer was critically wounded after the IDF thrust into the village.
All of the casualties in Jenin were reserve soldiers. Nine other soldiers, also predominately reservists, were hurt in the clashes, two moderately and seven lightly. They were taken to Afula's Emek Hospital for treatment. "
According to the paper, there are a dozen Palestinian dead, at least, scattered through the camp. According to the Washington Post, Palestinians estimate that there are many more dead: "more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in battles inside the camp over the last week. Before the latest ambush, nine Israeli soldiers had been killed inside the camp and the neighbouring town."
This, according to the Economist, is how the battle went down in Jenin:
"But the real carnage on Monday and Tuesday occurred in Jenin refugee camp and in Nablus�s Old City, hitherto impenetrable bastions of the Palestinian militias. In Jenin, Israeli army bulldozers ploughed through flimsy shelters in pursuit of Palestinian fighters; helicopters pitched rocket after rocket into mosques; and Israeli and Palestinian machine-gun fire raked the alleys of a camp that is home to 13,000 refugees. No one has any idea of the Palestinian death toll. But the conservative estimate is �dozens�, says a doctor at Jenin hospital. He cannot be sure, because his ambulances are fired on when they try to cover the 200 metres to the camp. It is the same in Nablus, as soldiers and fighters fight house-to-house�and sometimes hand-to-hand�through the Old City�s warren of cobbled streets. The avowed aim of the Israeli incursions is to root out the �terrorist infrastructure� which has underpinned so many suicide bombings, including, most bloodily, the one on March 27th, in Netanya that killed 27 people. That was the immediate provocation for the latest Israeli offensive, which has certainly dealt grievous blows to the Palestinian militias and police forces: dozens have been killed, hundreds arrested and arms, equipment and buildings seized. But the result is not going to be surrender. It will almost certainly mean radicalisation."
As the Economist points out, Sharon has succeeded in destroying the Palestinian authority. One of Sharon's advisors said that the only place for Arafat was in a museum or a masoleum. Well, there are a lot of Palestinian corpses to put in a masoleum, aren't there? Luckily they didn't get there through the messy and barbaric acts of suicide bombers, but the rational, nay, compassionate method of raking alleys between dwellings with machine gun fire. It is the clash of civilizations, after all; and we know the terrorism taught by those Koran shaking Palestinians. So we just have to deal with it, although of course in our hearts, our compendious hearts (heart of Cheney, heart of Bush, heart of Peres, heart of Sharon, heart of Daschle, heart of Powell, heart of Zinni, heart of Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz, heart of Blair -- oh, the parade of hearts on display! all these honorable men dealing, hand to hand, frankly, with animals!) we are deeply, deeply grieved. But we have to remember that though the bodies in the alleys of Jenin look human, -- they are beyond are compassion. We might pity the kicked dog, but our duty is to put him down, put him manfully down, if he turns on his master. So the Sharon-Bush strategy now is to find a kicked dog that doesn't turn. One of the canine sort that you can kick again and again.
Good luck, boys.
Museum or Masoleum
According to a story in the Ha'aretz,
thirteen Israeli soldiers were killed in an ambush in Jenin this morning.
"Thirteen IDF soldiers were killed following a series of clashes in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank on Tuesday morning. In addition, an officer with the paratrooper brigade was killed during gunfights in the Nablus casbah.
Also Tuesday, in Dura, south of Hebron, another paratroop brigade officer was critically wounded after the IDF thrust into the village.
All of the casualties in Jenin were reserve soldiers. Nine other soldiers, also predominately reservists, were hurt in the clashes, two moderately and seven lightly. They were taken to Afula's Emek Hospital for treatment. "
According to the paper, there are a dozen Palestinian dead, at least, scattered through the camp. According to the Washington Post, Palestinians estimate that there are many more dead: "more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in battles inside the camp over the last week. Before the latest ambush, nine Israeli soldiers had been killed inside the camp and the neighbouring town."
This, according to the Economist, is how the battle went down in Jenin:
"But the real carnage on Monday and Tuesday occurred in Jenin refugee camp and in Nablus�s Old City, hitherto impenetrable bastions of the Palestinian militias. In Jenin, Israeli army bulldozers ploughed through flimsy shelters in pursuit of Palestinian fighters; helicopters pitched rocket after rocket into mosques; and Israeli and Palestinian machine-gun fire raked the alleys of a camp that is home to 13,000 refugees. No one has any idea of the Palestinian death toll. But the conservative estimate is �dozens�, says a doctor at Jenin hospital. He cannot be sure, because his ambulances are fired on when they try to cover the 200 metres to the camp. It is the same in Nablus, as soldiers and fighters fight house-to-house�and sometimes hand-to-hand�through the Old City�s warren of cobbled streets. The avowed aim of the Israeli incursions is to root out the �terrorist infrastructure� which has underpinned so many suicide bombings, including, most bloodily, the one on March 27th, in Netanya that killed 27 people. That was the immediate provocation for the latest Israeli offensive, which has certainly dealt grievous blows to the Palestinian militias and police forces: dozens have been killed, hundreds arrested and arms, equipment and buildings seized. But the result is not going to be surrender. It will almost certainly mean radicalisation."
As the Economist points out, Sharon has succeeded in destroying the Palestinian authority. One of Sharon's advisors said that the only place for Arafat was in a museum or a masoleum. Well, there are a lot of Palestinian corpses to put in a masoleum, aren't there? Luckily they didn't get there through the messy and barbaric acts of suicide bombers, but the rational, nay, compassionate method of raking alleys between dwellings with machine gun fire. It is the clash of civilizations, after all; and we know the terrorism taught by those Koran shaking Palestinians. So we just have to deal with it, although of course in our hearts, our compendious hearts (heart of Cheney, heart of Bush, heart of Peres, heart of Sharon, heart of Daschle, heart of Powell, heart of Zinni, heart of Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz, heart of Blair -- oh, the parade of hearts on display! all these honorable men dealing, hand to hand, frankly, with animals!) we are deeply, deeply grieved. But we have to remember that though the bodies in the alleys of Jenin look human, -- they are beyond are compassion. We might pity the kicked dog, but our duty is to put him down, put him manfully down, if he turns on his master. So the Sharon-Bush strategy now is to find a kicked dog that doesn't turn. One of the canine sort that you can kick again and again.
Good luck, boys.
Remora
LI has previously sighed over the marvelous Gretchen Morgenson. She is a beacon among financial writers, a reporter who has never churned out fatuous praise, or bogus analysis, or ideological pap, or any of the 101 flavors usual to biz journalism. Gratifyingly, ours is not a minority opinion. GM won a Pulitzer prize for, as the NYT puts it, beat reporting, with the citation praising her "for her trenchant and incisive Wall Street coverage."
So, reader, we aren't always out of the loop. We aren't always out of the mainstream. We aren't always the stray from the herd, the doggie that won't get along. So there.
LI has previously sighed over the marvelous Gretchen Morgenson. She is a beacon among financial writers, a reporter who has never churned out fatuous praise, or bogus analysis, or ideological pap, or any of the 101 flavors usual to biz journalism. Gratifyingly, ours is not a minority opinion. GM won a Pulitzer prize for, as the NYT puts it, beat reporting, with the citation praising her "for her trenchant and incisive Wall Street coverage."
So, reader, we aren't always out of the loop. We aren't always out of the mainstream. We aren't always the stray from the herd, the doggie that won't get along. So there.
Monday, April 8, 2002
Remora
Sharon
The Financial Times commences its portrait of Ariel Sharon with an unlikely comparison to Charles De Gaulle.
"A few weeks ago, an Israeli newspaper columnist revealed that Ariel Sharon's latest bedside reading was a history of France's Algerian war. It may turn out to be useful study for a leader who, despite his warrior history, was billed by some as Israel's Charles de Gaulle, a strongman who would ultimately understand his adversary's yearning for statehood and deliver peace."
Luckily, the portrait doesn't pursue that fantasy very far, because as we say in Texas (and as is infinitely repeated in the press, which can never let go of a faux folksy phrase), that dog don't hunt. You can't go through Sharon's life and find glorious moments of defiance in the face of implacable odds. You can't find a sense of nationhood in the modern sense (vague yearnings for the return of King David don't count). You can't find a coherent vision of the economy. And you certainly can't find the non-gambler's instinct for cutting your losses (the gambler's instinct, unfortunately, is to compulsively renew his stake. Usually the cliche is that a professional gambler has that sixth sense of imminent loss, that magic ability to fold em at just the critical instant, but nothing in the history of gambling, or the various biographies of gamblers, leads us to think this is true). No, you simply find a man who has one strategy. That strategy is to kill Arabs. And to kill Arabs. Until Arabs surrender.
There cannot be a worse strategy, even from the point of view of Israel's interests. Of course, in the American press, the heat is always on Arafat. That Arafat walked from peace talks two years ago is repeated over and over as a mark of his insincerity. As the mark of the beast, really, on his forehead. That Sharon opposed the Oslo accords is, on the other hand, simply not mentioned. That he has done all he could do to disrupt the peace process doesn't figure in the op-ed huffing and puffing of the right. The FT ends its portrait with a glimpse into the great man's prophetic dream:
"He now officially acknowledges the possibility of Palestinian statehood, having shelved his past thesis that Jordan is Palestine. Over the past year, he has spoken repeatedly of his willingness to make painful concessions to achieve peace on the basis of two states. What he has not done, in 12 months during which the conflict has escalated, is to present a peace plan of his own that might stand a chance of meeting Palestinian aspirations.
"From the interviews he has given, a vision has nevertheless emerged of a demilitarised state on some of the occupied territories. The Jordan valley would remain in Israeli hands and an expanded Jerusalem would remain Israel's undivided capital. Many of the Jewish settlements, built on Arab land, would remain; and there would be no right of return for more than 3m Palestinian refugees.
"It is a formula that the Palestinians would be certain to reject, even as a starting-point for negotiations. But Mr Sharon believes that he understands the Arabs among whom he grew up. He believes that military power can force them back to the negotiating table and to a settlement on Israel's terms. "
So, let's get this straight. The Palestinians would have no army whatsoever. Israel would retain its army, which happens to be one of the biggest in the region. The Palestinians would receive no compensation for land that was seized from them, although Israel has been (quite rightly) adamant about, say, accounts in Switzerland seized during the Holocaust. The Jordan would be an Israeli river. I suppose the Palestinians could pay for some use of it, although not too much. A quota has to be set up for the lesser races. An "expanded" Jerusalem would remain Israel's capital. The Palestinian capital could, perhaps, be located in an outhouse in Bethlehem.
Take away place names, and this is South Africa's homeland policy. It didn't work then, it won't work now. Of course, the American press is mulling the funny idea that they can find some Palestinian figurehead to replace Arafat. On the principle, I suppose, that it worked with the Indians. Starve em enough, drive em from their homelands, and attack em fiercely, and eventually they sign on to the cultural death of the reservation.
In 1890, that was fine with your average Caucasian American male. And it probably still is, but sufferage and time has eroded that male's influence. I don't think the majority of Americans will stand for that for very long. I think that the right wing is about to spring another suprise on the Republicans with this issue. Like the Clinton impeachment, it will become one of those hardliner mantras that the party goes down with. Meanwhile, Israel is plunged into an unsustainable, permanent war, and the Palestinian situation -- the slum state -- gets worse. Because everything can get worse.
Limited Inc's motto for the day: Everything can get worse. Watch.
Sharon
The Financial Times commences its portrait of Ariel Sharon with an unlikely comparison to Charles De Gaulle.
"A few weeks ago, an Israeli newspaper columnist revealed that Ariel Sharon's latest bedside reading was a history of France's Algerian war. It may turn out to be useful study for a leader who, despite his warrior history, was billed by some as Israel's Charles de Gaulle, a strongman who would ultimately understand his adversary's yearning for statehood and deliver peace."
Luckily, the portrait doesn't pursue that fantasy very far, because as we say in Texas (and as is infinitely repeated in the press, which can never let go of a faux folksy phrase), that dog don't hunt. You can't go through Sharon's life and find glorious moments of defiance in the face of implacable odds. You can't find a sense of nationhood in the modern sense (vague yearnings for the return of King David don't count). You can't find a coherent vision of the economy. And you certainly can't find the non-gambler's instinct for cutting your losses (the gambler's instinct, unfortunately, is to compulsively renew his stake. Usually the cliche is that a professional gambler has that sixth sense of imminent loss, that magic ability to fold em at just the critical instant, but nothing in the history of gambling, or the various biographies of gamblers, leads us to think this is true). No, you simply find a man who has one strategy. That strategy is to kill Arabs. And to kill Arabs. Until Arabs surrender.
There cannot be a worse strategy, even from the point of view of Israel's interests. Of course, in the American press, the heat is always on Arafat. That Arafat walked from peace talks two years ago is repeated over and over as a mark of his insincerity. As the mark of the beast, really, on his forehead. That Sharon opposed the Oslo accords is, on the other hand, simply not mentioned. That he has done all he could do to disrupt the peace process doesn't figure in the op-ed huffing and puffing of the right. The FT ends its portrait with a glimpse into the great man's prophetic dream:
"He now officially acknowledges the possibility of Palestinian statehood, having shelved his past thesis that Jordan is Palestine. Over the past year, he has spoken repeatedly of his willingness to make painful concessions to achieve peace on the basis of two states. What he has not done, in 12 months during which the conflict has escalated, is to present a peace plan of his own that might stand a chance of meeting Palestinian aspirations.
"From the interviews he has given, a vision has nevertheless emerged of a demilitarised state on some of the occupied territories. The Jordan valley would remain in Israeli hands and an expanded Jerusalem would remain Israel's undivided capital. Many of the Jewish settlements, built on Arab land, would remain; and there would be no right of return for more than 3m Palestinian refugees.
"It is a formula that the Palestinians would be certain to reject, even as a starting-point for negotiations. But Mr Sharon believes that he understands the Arabs among whom he grew up. He believes that military power can force them back to the negotiating table and to a settlement on Israel's terms. "
So, let's get this straight. The Palestinians would have no army whatsoever. Israel would retain its army, which happens to be one of the biggest in the region. The Palestinians would receive no compensation for land that was seized from them, although Israel has been (quite rightly) adamant about, say, accounts in Switzerland seized during the Holocaust. The Jordan would be an Israeli river. I suppose the Palestinians could pay for some use of it, although not too much. A quota has to be set up for the lesser races. An "expanded" Jerusalem would remain Israel's capital. The Palestinian capital could, perhaps, be located in an outhouse in Bethlehem.
Take away place names, and this is South Africa's homeland policy. It didn't work then, it won't work now. Of course, the American press is mulling the funny idea that they can find some Palestinian figurehead to replace Arafat. On the principle, I suppose, that it worked with the Indians. Starve em enough, drive em from their homelands, and attack em fiercely, and eventually they sign on to the cultural death of the reservation.
In 1890, that was fine with your average Caucasian American male. And it probably still is, but sufferage and time has eroded that male's influence. I don't think the majority of Americans will stand for that for very long. I think that the right wing is about to spring another suprise on the Republicans with this issue. Like the Clinton impeachment, it will become one of those hardliner mantras that the party goes down with. Meanwhile, Israel is plunged into an unsustainable, permanent war, and the Palestinian situation -- the slum state -- gets worse. Because everything can get worse.
Limited Inc's motto for the day: Everything can get worse. Watch.
Saturday, April 6, 2002
Remora
Limited Inc is boiling with indignation about the Middle East, and Bush, and Tony Blair (the Daily Mirror supposedly headlined their story about Blair's visit to Bush's ranch, Howdy, Poodle), but what the hell? We don't write well in the boiling mood. Ice, we prefer lots of ice in the veins. Besides, any piker with a clicker can move around the Web and compose an editorial view for himself, re the multifarious failures of US foreign policy this week. We will add our tinsel thunder to the obvious, soon enough, but not every day is a good day to go all red in the face.
Limited Inc, instead, wants our readers to head over to a very nicely put together site about Dublin history put together by a Ken Finlay. We haven't explored the entire site (which seems to be a huge enterprise with links to a couple of very hard to acquire texts of Dubliniana) since we don't have that much time -- after all, there are only 200 more shopping days to Christmas. But we did take a look at Letters and Leaders of My Day, a book of reminiscences by Tim Healy. We love the way Healy begins his story on a cheerful note:
In 1862 (when I was seven) my father left Bantry, Co. Cork, on being appointed Clerk of Union at Lismore, Co. Waterford. The retiring clerk, J. C. Hennessy, had been promoted to Waterford Union because of a tragedy which afterwards became the plot of a novel. In outline the story ran that the wife of Richard Burke, Clerk of Waterford Union, sickened and died about 1960. Her burial at the family graveyard, Kilsheelan, Co. Tipperary, was attended by the husband, who in apparent sorrow stayed that evening with her sister. Their converse meanwhile was friendly, yet in the"dead waste and middle of the night "the sister thundered at his door, "Get up, you murderer, you poisoned my sister! Get up! Get out!"
A dream, according to the whispers of the village, had inspired her. Burke tried to pacify the woman, but the only answer she made was: "Get out of my house! You killed my sister!" Then without giving him time to dress, she bundled him into the street.
In his night-shirt Burke made his way to the police-barracks, and was there accommodated till day broke. Then the sister accused him to the police of the murder of his wife, and demanded that the body should be exhumed. This was duly reported to Dublin Castle, but Burke was not arrested. Inquiries, however, were set afoot, and the Government gave permission to open the grave so that an inquest might be held. The husband nonchalantly attended the Coroner's inquiry. He drove to it from Waterford in a hired car, and the driver related that, where a view of the River Suir met his eyes, he declaimed, "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain," at full length.
At the inquest the doctor declared his suspicions, but medical knowledge as to poisons was not then exact. As he was unable to pronounce positively on the cause of death, the stomach was removed and sent in a jar to the Cork Queen's College. There the analyst put the jar into the laboratory, but before he could examine it, the place was burnt down. To rebuild the laboratory a vote of
Parliament was necessary, and the British Treasury was not to be hurried. When the delay in providing money ended, workmen set about clearing the foundations, and a pickaxe struck a jar in the d�bris which emitted a peculiar sound. It was lifted out, unbroken, and the analyst identified it as the jar sent to him the year before containing the stomach of Mrs. Burke.
On examining the contents he certified that arsenic was present in the stomach in fatal quantities, and after a long delay the Tipperary coroner reassembled the jury
Meanwhile the police learnt that Burke had been friendly with a nurse in Waterford Union. They also heard from a pauper-assistant there that he had been seen to take a white powder from a vessel on the shelves of the pharmacy. So the Coroner's jury brought in a verdict of wilful murder against him, and Burke was arrested and put on trial before Baron Deasy at Clonmel Assizes in 1862. Confident of acquittal, he issued invitations to his friends to dine with him at an hotel in Waterford after the trial. Nevertheless, Burke was found guilty. Thousands flocked to see him hanged. His execution made the vacancy in the clerkship of the Waterford Union to which the Lismore Clerk, Hennessy, was elected. The coming of my father from Bantry to take the latter's place brought me as a child to Co. Waterford."
Limited Inc has some colorful stories about our father. But, well, when we were seven our father moved down to Atlanta to work on Carrier HVAC equipment. As far as we know, the way to his advancement was not preceded by poisoning, stabbing, adultery, or fraud. We feel left out.
Limited Inc is boiling with indignation about the Middle East, and Bush, and Tony Blair (the Daily Mirror supposedly headlined their story about Blair's visit to Bush's ranch, Howdy, Poodle), but what the hell? We don't write well in the boiling mood. Ice, we prefer lots of ice in the veins. Besides, any piker with a clicker can move around the Web and compose an editorial view for himself, re the multifarious failures of US foreign policy this week. We will add our tinsel thunder to the obvious, soon enough, but not every day is a good day to go all red in the face.
Limited Inc, instead, wants our readers to head over to a very nicely put together site about Dublin history put together by a Ken Finlay. We haven't explored the entire site (which seems to be a huge enterprise with links to a couple of very hard to acquire texts of Dubliniana) since we don't have that much time -- after all, there are only 200 more shopping days to Christmas. But we did take a look at Letters and Leaders of My Day, a book of reminiscences by Tim Healy. We love the way Healy begins his story on a cheerful note:
In 1862 (when I was seven) my father left Bantry, Co. Cork, on being appointed Clerk of Union at Lismore, Co. Waterford. The retiring clerk, J. C. Hennessy, had been promoted to Waterford Union because of a tragedy which afterwards became the plot of a novel. In outline the story ran that the wife of Richard Burke, Clerk of Waterford Union, sickened and died about 1960. Her burial at the family graveyard, Kilsheelan, Co. Tipperary, was attended by the husband, who in apparent sorrow stayed that evening with her sister. Their converse meanwhile was friendly, yet in the"dead waste and middle of the night "the sister thundered at his door, "Get up, you murderer, you poisoned my sister! Get up! Get out!"
A dream, according to the whispers of the village, had inspired her. Burke tried to pacify the woman, but the only answer she made was: "Get out of my house! You killed my sister!" Then without giving him time to dress, she bundled him into the street.
In his night-shirt Burke made his way to the police-barracks, and was there accommodated till day broke. Then the sister accused him to the police of the murder of his wife, and demanded that the body should be exhumed. This was duly reported to Dublin Castle, but Burke was not arrested. Inquiries, however, were set afoot, and the Government gave permission to open the grave so that an inquest might be held. The husband nonchalantly attended the Coroner's inquiry. He drove to it from Waterford in a hired car, and the driver related that, where a view of the River Suir met his eyes, he declaimed, "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain," at full length.
At the inquest the doctor declared his suspicions, but medical knowledge as to poisons was not then exact. As he was unable to pronounce positively on the cause of death, the stomach was removed and sent in a jar to the Cork Queen's College. There the analyst put the jar into the laboratory, but before he could examine it, the place was burnt down. To rebuild the laboratory a vote of
Parliament was necessary, and the British Treasury was not to be hurried. When the delay in providing money ended, workmen set about clearing the foundations, and a pickaxe struck a jar in the d�bris which emitted a peculiar sound. It was lifted out, unbroken, and the analyst identified it as the jar sent to him the year before containing the stomach of Mrs. Burke.
On examining the contents he certified that arsenic was present in the stomach in fatal quantities, and after a long delay the Tipperary coroner reassembled the jury
Meanwhile the police learnt that Burke had been friendly with a nurse in Waterford Union. They also heard from a pauper-assistant there that he had been seen to take a white powder from a vessel on the shelves of the pharmacy. So the Coroner's jury brought in a verdict of wilful murder against him, and Burke was arrested and put on trial before Baron Deasy at Clonmel Assizes in 1862. Confident of acquittal, he issued invitations to his friends to dine with him at an hotel in Waterford after the trial. Nevertheless, Burke was found guilty. Thousands flocked to see him hanged. His execution made the vacancy in the clerkship of the Waterford Union to which the Lismore Clerk, Hennessy, was elected. The coming of my father from Bantry to take the latter's place brought me as a child to Co. Waterford."
Limited Inc has some colorful stories about our father. But, well, when we were seven our father moved down to Atlanta to work on Carrier HVAC equipment. As far as we know, the way to his advancement was not preceded by poisoning, stabbing, adultery, or fraud. We feel left out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
