Bollettino
Leonard Bast
If you rehearse the news of this week � the deaths and explosions in Iraq, the shredding of our excuse for a pre-emptive war, the double standard of an administration that, on the one hand, imprisons dark skinned men en masse for security reasons, and, on the other hand, claims the de facto right to leak illegal, punitive information, the continuing unemployment misery, the shadows cast by the mountain of debts piled up in two brief years by this country � you would think that now, if ever, was the progressive moment. That poses an ugly question, however: why, if this is the progressive moment, has a Republican actor been overwhelmingly swept into office in California?
We believe part of the answer lies in Howard�s End.
We�ve been reading Howard�s End with a lot of attention this week, as part of our on-going campaign to scope out things we can use in the classic novels. Foster is a wholly admirable writer. Here�s how he does that most difficult thing, letting time, blank time, pass: �And the conversation drifted away and away, and Helen�s cigarette turned to a spot in the darkness, and the great flats opposite were sown with lighted windows, which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly�� This is superb on every level. The great flats opposite will soon be figuring in the story, for one thing, so their place as a sort of chronometer is appropriate � and yet, since the reader, at this point, doesn�t know that, their insertion here is one of those ways a writer insinuates his facts into the reader�s unconsciousness, becoming a sort of fate in the process, something that presses, however mildly, upon the reader, as we know that those lights will press upon Helen Schlegel � whose cigarette is (in a bit of a cheat) lit for an awful long time. The perfection of this kind of writing extends to the freedom it gives Forster with regards to his characters. Forster, again and again, will come out of his seemingly neutral role and make blatant and manipulative comments that he means to be read as blatant and manipulative. Thee reader, who is already caught up in the artificial fate spun by the text, has the sense, in these passages, that luck itself is speaking � that here at last privilege, the unfairness in things, is disclosing itself, becoming palpable.
Which brings us to Bast. Those who�ve read Howard�s End will remember that Bast is the striving clerk � the lowbrow from the East End whose entanglement with the Schlegel sisters will lead to disaster. Forster sizes up Bast with a famous passage. This passage crystallizes a mood and tone that, at least since the seventies, has been endemic to the American progressive culture. It comes in Chapter VI, which announces �We are not concerned with the very poor.� The hauteur of this announcement sets the whole tone for Leonard. He doesn�t have the Dickensensian advantage of rags and sentiment. No, he is merely one of the lowly. And the lowly must be squashed. �He knew that he was poor, and would admit it: he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it.� This, so far, is such a break with the politics of the English novel that we have to pause. Even Thackeray, who probably thought along these lines, never violated the novelistic rule here: the poor might be shown as greedy, criminal, ungenerous, etc. But at the end of the day, the poor anchor the novelistic notion of virtue. This is true not just in Bleak House, but in the Princess Cassamassima; in Vanity Fair, which departs about as far as any Victorian novel from the sentimentality that we associate with the Victorians, the excesses of the rich, or at least those who possess the credit of the rich, are projected, as it were, upon the screen of a society in which one man�s excess is the absence of another man�s bread.
What Lytton Strachey�s Eminent Victorians was supposed to have done, Forster, with these brief sentences, does; he rings down an era by negating its deepest sentiments. It is a curious gesture. There�s a fierce defense of caste encoded in it � a freezing of the social whole to preserve it from the social mobility that Wells� characters were all about � as well as Dickens. As well, perhaps, as Becky Sharp. This, in a way, is Foster's blow against the Invisible Man -- for the Invisible Man is from that class of the self-educated whose threat to Foster's own group will grow with the century. Forster effortlessly merges this affection for caste into the liberalism of his favored caste, whose progressive role is to worry, infinitely, about the social inequities at the origin of their wealth, even as they weld it as a weapon to defend their cultural privileges. This, I think, has a lot to do with the alienation between progressives and what would seem to be their natural constituency. Here is how Foster catalogues the gulf between Bast and the Schlegels (who, we later learn, are rich only by Bast like standards � between the three of them, they bring in a rentier income of about 1,900 pounds a year, not exactly wealth on the American scale -- but much more like the kind of income a tenured American professor can depend on): "He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food.�
The astonishing impudence of this affects a reader like me with the force of a slap in the face. It is, in fact, denied within the very narrative. We already have measured Charles Wilcox's manners, and found them wanting. When we later learn about Bast�s incredible patience with Jacky, the unlikely down at heels bathing beauty with whom he is living, we know immediately that no rich man would be as kind, or as lovable, in this kind of relationship � that is, no rich man in a novel. Forster, while blatant, does lace his presentation of Bast with irony. We watch Bast read the Stones of Venice, an activity Foster pokes a lot of fun at. Bast, we are told, has been �trying to form his style on Ruskin: he understood him to be the great master of English prose.� Of course, if we go back to the passage about the lights going on and off in the great flats opposite the Schlegels, we know that Bast isn�t the only one to absorb certain patterns of English prose from Ruskin. We know that the perfection of the dying phrase, �� which vanished and were relit again, and vanished incessantly� certainly comes out of Ruskin�s influence, if not Ruskin. That is inescapable. But rarely has a great writer been so undercut by another great writer � for Ruskin, become Leonard Bast�s standard of greatness, can certainly not be Bloomsbury�s.
I think it says a lot about the Progressive community that Schwarzenegger's obviously awful behavior towards women and men -- towards any subordinate, in fact -- was simply shrugged off by the electorate. The aftermath of the trashing of such as Paula Jones is not going to go away so easily. It discredits almost every word out of the mouth of the various feminists who enthusiasticaly piled on that Arkansas secretary whose down at heels-ness was every bit as painful as Foster's Jacky. Hypocrisy, which has become the conservative vice, is one thing; but meanness for the sake of power is something a lot scarier. That's because anybody who exists in that realm of the "craving for food' knows that meanness every day. The progressive movement without labor becomes Bloomsbury, and Bloomsbury is only attractive to people who live in Bloomsbury.
Friday, October 10, 2003
Thursday, October 9, 2003
Bollettino
We hate zombies. We�ve recently been copyediting some philosophy papers. One of the papers we had the privilege of marking up makes a plausible argument about consciousness as an emergent property. But the paper�s worth, we thought, was vitiated by its easy acceptance of the so-called zombie argument. That argument, which is associated with David Chalmers, goes approximately like this: a molecular level simulacrum of a human being without consciousness is imaginable. This human being, in other words, has no inner feels. Chalmers calls this imagined creature a zombie. He uses the logical possibility of zombies to argue that mental properties � feels, qualia, whatever you want to call them � can�t be explained by the physicalist agenda. In other words, consciousness is something over and beyond the physical properties of the brain, or whatever we take to be the material site of cognition, sensing, etc.
We thought that argument was bogus at the time � imagining the logical possibility of the unicorn doesn�t tell us squat about the ethology of the mountain goat � but having to confront it in a paper on emergence, it occurred to us that complexity theory gives a rather unique refutation of the zombie thesis.
Complexity theory is, of course, a huge topic in itself. However, one of its principles is emergence. Jaegwon Kim, who is a pretty heavy hitter in the world of event ontology, has an on-line paper about emergence that I�d urge LI readers to go to. The introduction is succinct and, for my purposes, sufficient:
� In trying to make emergence intelligible, it is useful to divide the ideas usually associated with the concept into two groups. One group of ideas are manifest in the statement that emergent properties are "novel" and "unpredictable" from the knowledge of their lower-level bases, and that they are not "explainable" or "mechanistically reducible" in terms of their underlying properties. The second group of ideas I have in mind comprises the specific emergentist doctrines concerning emergent properties, and, in particular, claims about the causal powers of the emergents. Prominent among them is the claim that the emergents bring into the world new causal powers of their own, and, in particular, that they have powers to influence and control the direction of the lower-level processes from which they emerge. This is a fundamental tenet of emergentism, not only in the classic emergentism of Samuel Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, and others but also in its various modern versions. Emergentists often contrast their position with epiphenomenalism, dismissing the latter with open scorn. On their view, emergents have causal/explanatory powers in their own right, introducing novel, and hitherto unknown, causal structures into the world.�
From Kim�s outline, it is obvious that emergence is a probabilistic property. That is, we need to scale our search for emergent phenomena to sets that are big enough to allow statistical analysis. Chalmers, and most writers on zombies that I�ve seen, seem oblivious to this approach. Chalmer�s thought experiment involves a one to one relationship between Chalmers and a zombie Chalmers. Yet Chalmers notion of consciousness seems to be at least consonant with the idea that consciousness is an emergent property.
Now if consciousness is truly emergent, than there is a big discrepancy between Chalmers example of a zombie and the emergent paradigm. That paradigm would take into account the fact that there is an exact molecular correlation between humans and zombies and it would predict that in any statistically significant set of zombies, consciousness would emerge in one of them. Nor would there be any way of culling the zombies to prevent this happening. Why? This is where the non-reductionism of emergence kicks in. There is no single physical feature, or single causative factor, that accounts for the emergent property. That is, indeed, the whole import of emergentism. So Chalmers zombies, which have been accepted as an imaginable, would have to have something else within them blocking consciousness � in other words, something distinguishing them, on the molecular level, from human beings � in order for one to be able to pick out, with 100% certainty, from a set of zombies the zombie without consciousness.
This leaves us with two possibilities: we can rescue zombies as a counter-factual by abandoning emergentism -- in which case we would have to explain why emergence doesn't happen given circumstances in which the emergent paradigm seems to apply -- or we can abandon zombies, and seek another counter-factual to talk about consciousness.
I�m rather surprised more people haven�t brandished the emergent program against the zombie thought experiment. Perhaps this is because the seduction of thinking of the zombie as a one to one relationship blinds philosophers to the fact that, in dealing with living creatures, they are dealing with biology. And biology works with populations.
We hate zombies. We�ve recently been copyediting some philosophy papers. One of the papers we had the privilege of marking up makes a plausible argument about consciousness as an emergent property. But the paper�s worth, we thought, was vitiated by its easy acceptance of the so-called zombie argument. That argument, which is associated with David Chalmers, goes approximately like this: a molecular level simulacrum of a human being without consciousness is imaginable. This human being, in other words, has no inner feels. Chalmers calls this imagined creature a zombie. He uses the logical possibility of zombies to argue that mental properties � feels, qualia, whatever you want to call them � can�t be explained by the physicalist agenda. In other words, consciousness is something over and beyond the physical properties of the brain, or whatever we take to be the material site of cognition, sensing, etc.
We thought that argument was bogus at the time � imagining the logical possibility of the unicorn doesn�t tell us squat about the ethology of the mountain goat � but having to confront it in a paper on emergence, it occurred to us that complexity theory gives a rather unique refutation of the zombie thesis.
Complexity theory is, of course, a huge topic in itself. However, one of its principles is emergence. Jaegwon Kim, who is a pretty heavy hitter in the world of event ontology, has an on-line paper about emergence that I�d urge LI readers to go to. The introduction is succinct and, for my purposes, sufficient:
� In trying to make emergence intelligible, it is useful to divide the ideas usually associated with the concept into two groups. One group of ideas are manifest in the statement that emergent properties are "novel" and "unpredictable" from the knowledge of their lower-level bases, and that they are not "explainable" or "mechanistically reducible" in terms of their underlying properties. The second group of ideas I have in mind comprises the specific emergentist doctrines concerning emergent properties, and, in particular, claims about the causal powers of the emergents. Prominent among them is the claim that the emergents bring into the world new causal powers of their own, and, in particular, that they have powers to influence and control the direction of the lower-level processes from which they emerge. This is a fundamental tenet of emergentism, not only in the classic emergentism of Samuel Alexander, Lloyd Morgan, and others but also in its various modern versions. Emergentists often contrast their position with epiphenomenalism, dismissing the latter with open scorn. On their view, emergents have causal/explanatory powers in their own right, introducing novel, and hitherto unknown, causal structures into the world.�
From Kim�s outline, it is obvious that emergence is a probabilistic property. That is, we need to scale our search for emergent phenomena to sets that are big enough to allow statistical analysis. Chalmers, and most writers on zombies that I�ve seen, seem oblivious to this approach. Chalmer�s thought experiment involves a one to one relationship between Chalmers and a zombie Chalmers. Yet Chalmers notion of consciousness seems to be at least consonant with the idea that consciousness is an emergent property.
Now if consciousness is truly emergent, than there is a big discrepancy between Chalmers example of a zombie and the emergent paradigm. That paradigm would take into account the fact that there is an exact molecular correlation between humans and zombies and it would predict that in any statistically significant set of zombies, consciousness would emerge in one of them. Nor would there be any way of culling the zombies to prevent this happening. Why? This is where the non-reductionism of emergence kicks in. There is no single physical feature, or single causative factor, that accounts for the emergent property. That is, indeed, the whole import of emergentism. So Chalmers zombies, which have been accepted as an imaginable, would have to have something else within them blocking consciousness � in other words, something distinguishing them, on the molecular level, from human beings � in order for one to be able to pick out, with 100% certainty, from a set of zombies the zombie without consciousness.
This leaves us with two possibilities: we can rescue zombies as a counter-factual by abandoning emergentism -- in which case we would have to explain why emergence doesn't happen given circumstances in which the emergent paradigm seems to apply -- or we can abandon zombies, and seek another counter-factual to talk about consciousness.
I�m rather surprised more people haven�t brandished the emergent program against the zombie thought experiment. Perhaps this is because the seduction of thinking of the zombie as a one to one relationship blinds philosophers to the fact that, in dealing with living creatures, they are dealing with biology. And biology works with populations.
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
Bollettino
"Every quantitative measure we have shows that we are winning the war." � McNamara, 1962.
This administration and its propagandists are so depressingly predictable that sometimes it just stops me. Do I really want to say the obvious, I say to myself. Here in LI central. There's a scene, at the end of Brazil, where a man is wrapped in newspapers: stray sheets that are blown by the wind and that adhere to him, first one, then another, until he is covered. That's how I think of the cliches that are employed both to defend and to diss the Bushies.
...So LI was unsurprised to read, in the WP today, a column that echoes McNamara. For weeks, the specifically conservative media - the Instapundits of the world -- has echoed with happy, happy images of Iraq, and scathing denunciations of the scurrilous liberal press � always reporting on things like dead American soldiers, instead of the 5,000 wonderful construction projects blossoming in some section of Northern Iraq, deploying our soldiers. Now, one might regard the latter fact as less a happy image of American benevolence and more an image of how out of whack the American mission in Iraq has become � U.S. soldiers competing with the 60% unemployed in Iraq on make work projects. But there is, at least, some sense to the rightwing complaint. The low intensity war in Iraq has not yet achieved critical mass � that is, it hasn�t passed from the kind of hostility that the French put down in Algeria after 1945 to the kind of hostility the French couldn�t put down in Algeria after 1954.
Yet, when we read, as we did today, in the Washington Post, the establishment estimate of our "progress" in Iraq, the spirit of McNamara starts howling through the halls. A Brookings Institute fellow, Michael O'Hanlen introduces us to some Ur McNamara technical analysis -- especially in terms of the lethality of our responses to hostile forces -- that the old man himself must admire.
"As for Baathist remnants of Saddam's regime, they are diminishing with time as coalition forces attack and arrest them. For example, in the region north of Baghdad now run by Gen. Ray Odierno's 4th Infantry Division, some 600 fighters have been killed and 2,500 arrested in recent months. Not all of these are Baathists, to be sure, but with such attrition rates, a group of fighters that probably numbered 10,000 to 20,000 at peak strength will decline significantly over time -- especially because it has no appealing ideology with which to attract more members (unless we so mishandle the operation as to make anti-Americanism that rallying ideology -- a prospect that remains unlikely at present, given our plans to intensify reconstruction efforts and turn over power to Iraqis quickly.) "
Notice the crock of these stats -- the 10,000 to 20,000, pulled out of a hat -- the number of killed, which is interesting insofar as the military has refused, so far, to give numbers of enemy dead -- and the final clause, with its heavy breathing pre-supposition that the Americans so obviously represent good that there should be no problem. Well, let's see, if I were trying to find a rallying ideology against the Americans, what would I say? Oh, perhaps something about how they are selling off Iraq's national property and supporting Israel against our Moslem brothers. Right off hand. But of course ... we know that story won't work. Hasn't Wolfowitz told us it won't work?
What to say? Except that these people are so amazingly incompetent that one wonders, were they ever really, like ... educated somewhere?
"Every quantitative measure we have shows that we are winning the war." � McNamara, 1962.
This administration and its propagandists are so depressingly predictable that sometimes it just stops me. Do I really want to say the obvious, I say to myself. Here in LI central. There's a scene, at the end of Brazil, where a man is wrapped in newspapers: stray sheets that are blown by the wind and that adhere to him, first one, then another, until he is covered. That's how I think of the cliches that are employed both to defend and to diss the Bushies.
...So LI was unsurprised to read, in the WP today, a column that echoes McNamara. For weeks, the specifically conservative media - the Instapundits of the world -- has echoed with happy, happy images of Iraq, and scathing denunciations of the scurrilous liberal press � always reporting on things like dead American soldiers, instead of the 5,000 wonderful construction projects blossoming in some section of Northern Iraq, deploying our soldiers. Now, one might regard the latter fact as less a happy image of American benevolence and more an image of how out of whack the American mission in Iraq has become � U.S. soldiers competing with the 60% unemployed in Iraq on make work projects. But there is, at least, some sense to the rightwing complaint. The low intensity war in Iraq has not yet achieved critical mass � that is, it hasn�t passed from the kind of hostility that the French put down in Algeria after 1945 to the kind of hostility the French couldn�t put down in Algeria after 1954.
Yet, when we read, as we did today, in the Washington Post, the establishment estimate of our "progress" in Iraq, the spirit of McNamara starts howling through the halls. A Brookings Institute fellow, Michael O'Hanlen introduces us to some Ur McNamara technical analysis -- especially in terms of the lethality of our responses to hostile forces -- that the old man himself must admire.
"As for Baathist remnants of Saddam's regime, they are diminishing with time as coalition forces attack and arrest them. For example, in the region north of Baghdad now run by Gen. Ray Odierno's 4th Infantry Division, some 600 fighters have been killed and 2,500 arrested in recent months. Not all of these are Baathists, to be sure, but with such attrition rates, a group of fighters that probably numbered 10,000 to 20,000 at peak strength will decline significantly over time -- especially because it has no appealing ideology with which to attract more members (unless we so mishandle the operation as to make anti-Americanism that rallying ideology -- a prospect that remains unlikely at present, given our plans to intensify reconstruction efforts and turn over power to Iraqis quickly.) "
Notice the crock of these stats -- the 10,000 to 20,000, pulled out of a hat -- the number of killed, which is interesting insofar as the military has refused, so far, to give numbers of enemy dead -- and the final clause, with its heavy breathing pre-supposition that the Americans so obviously represent good that there should be no problem. Well, let's see, if I were trying to find a rallying ideology against the Americans, what would I say? Oh, perhaps something about how they are selling off Iraq's national property and supporting Israel against our Moslem brothers. Right off hand. But of course ... we know that story won't work. Hasn't Wolfowitz told us it won't work?
What to say? Except that these people are so amazingly incompetent that one wonders, were they ever really, like ... educated somewhere?
Monday, October 6, 2003
Bollettino
Israel's strike against Syria poses a real question for Iraq -- although this angle seems to have wholly escaped the American press. The neo-con dream was to create, wholesale, a country that could accept an Israel that had absorbed the West Bank and shipped the pesky Palestinians to Jordan. However, this idea was and is crazy. It's shred of plausibility stems from Saddam resentment. Under Saddam, support for the Palestinians created a lot of that -- understandably so, given that the tyrant granted more money to the family of Palestinian martyrs than the average Iraqi could make in a year under the brainless system of looting that was Saddam's notion of the national economy. And one didn't have to be a genius to figure out that the money going to the martyrs was plunging the Palestinian state into an uncontrollable confrontation with a stronger power that wouldn't hesitate on killing two or three Palestinians for every Israeli killed.
That said, there is no way that any Arab nation is going to revert to 30s truckling to a Western colonial agenda. Personally, LI doubts that Israel is serious about attacking Syria -- bombing an empty camp was more of a gesture than a strike, and it was meant for home consumption. Sharon was signalling his one saleable characteristic -- his toughness -- to an audience that has to suffer the consequences of his career long effort to eliminate the "Palestinian menace" by any means possible. Sharon has brought the war home to every home in Israel, without successfully stemming the intifada. In normal circumstances, that failure would have long ago left him in the dust. But there is a special madness that reigns in besieged states -- it is the madness that does not reckon on the success or failure of strategies, but rather bets everything on the visceral reactions attendent on the momentary carrying out of the violent act. Retaliation feels good. Helplessness doesn't. Politics gets down, here, to two choices in the endocrinal system. That the retaliation feeds the helplessness is a view that is just too exterior, too cold, to be accessed in the moment. Sharon exists on that organic amphetimine surge. Given that, he could well decide to initiate other attacks, for instance in Lebanon, or against Iran, just in order to survive, politically. There's something ironic in this. Sharon is the most typically Middle Eastern leader Israel has ever had -- he is Israel's Nassar. And not from Nassar's golden period -- more from the decline, more from the late sixties.
Now, if Sharon acts to promote his interests in this way, it would surely provoke a reaction in Iraq. That the Bush administration seems blind to this is typical of the absurd way the Pentagon (which, by the grace of Bush's ignorance, is in charge of policy, here) has gone about reforming the Middle East without bothering to know anything about the Middle East.
Israel's strike against Syria poses a real question for Iraq -- although this angle seems to have wholly escaped the American press. The neo-con dream was to create, wholesale, a country that could accept an Israel that had absorbed the West Bank and shipped the pesky Palestinians to Jordan. However, this idea was and is crazy. It's shred of plausibility stems from Saddam resentment. Under Saddam, support for the Palestinians created a lot of that -- understandably so, given that the tyrant granted more money to the family of Palestinian martyrs than the average Iraqi could make in a year under the brainless system of looting that was Saddam's notion of the national economy. And one didn't have to be a genius to figure out that the money going to the martyrs was plunging the Palestinian state into an uncontrollable confrontation with a stronger power that wouldn't hesitate on killing two or three Palestinians for every Israeli killed.
That said, there is no way that any Arab nation is going to revert to 30s truckling to a Western colonial agenda. Personally, LI doubts that Israel is serious about attacking Syria -- bombing an empty camp was more of a gesture than a strike, and it was meant for home consumption. Sharon was signalling his one saleable characteristic -- his toughness -- to an audience that has to suffer the consequences of his career long effort to eliminate the "Palestinian menace" by any means possible. Sharon has brought the war home to every home in Israel, without successfully stemming the intifada. In normal circumstances, that failure would have long ago left him in the dust. But there is a special madness that reigns in besieged states -- it is the madness that does not reckon on the success or failure of strategies, but rather bets everything on the visceral reactions attendent on the momentary carrying out of the violent act. Retaliation feels good. Helplessness doesn't. Politics gets down, here, to two choices in the endocrinal system. That the retaliation feeds the helplessness is a view that is just too exterior, too cold, to be accessed in the moment. Sharon exists on that organic amphetimine surge. Given that, he could well decide to initiate other attacks, for instance in Lebanon, or against Iran, just in order to survive, politically. There's something ironic in this. Sharon is the most typically Middle Eastern leader Israel has ever had -- he is Israel's Nassar. And not from Nassar's golden period -- more from the decline, more from the late sixties.
Now, if Sharon acts to promote his interests in this way, it would surely provoke a reaction in Iraq. That the Bush administration seems blind to this is typical of the absurd way the Pentagon (which, by the grace of Bush's ignorance, is in charge of policy, here) has gone about reforming the Middle East without bothering to know anything about the Middle East.
Sunday, October 5, 2003
Bollettino
Blues and hard ons. That's the stuff your modern PharmaFrankenstein conglomerate battens onto, like a garbage fly taking on slime. Take GlaxoSmithKlein. Here's a multi-billion dollar, global corporation that sees, in this world of malaria, hepatitis C, and cancer a real growth opportunity in next generation Paxil and its newest drug, Levitra, to combat that truly fatal disorder, the unruly penis:
"The company says it plans to hold a meeting for analysts on Dec. 3 to describe in detail all the new drugs it hopes to roll out, including an AIDS drug and a medicine for incontinence, both of which are under review by the Food and Drug Administration. "If I can deliver this pipeline, the creation of value will be enormous," Dr. Garnier said. Convincing investors that the future is bright is crucial for Glaxo because the next several years don't look so good. Generics are threatening the company's biggest sellers, including the anti-depressant Paxil. The company's historical lead in AIDS drugs is slipping. And while its newest drug, Levitra for erectile dysfunction, is doing well, the company has few other potential big sellers ready for introduction in the next two years."
The Times story about Glaxo's failure to deliver on the 'synergies" that were supposed to power the merger that created the firm in 2000 takes aim at the problems in the laboratory -- problems at the heart of the Pharma industry. The Times angle is that these problems are organizational -- different lab routines, priorities and projects got tossed together, and that mix, along with the imperative to cut costs and raise profits, has devastated the 'intangible" knowledge structure that supports drug innovation.
But buried in the piece is an interesting graf that throws a light upon the announcements newspapers trot out almost every day about this or that medical breakthrough:
"Mergers are hardly the only reason Glaxo and its competitors have produced so few new medicines. The science of drug development has become tougher. New technologies like robotic screening machines that rapidly test millions of chemical compounds against biological targets have not worked as well as industry executives hoped. And the avalanche of genetic information created over the last several years has led to more confusion than clarity."
Shades of James Le Fanu, the British doctor whose book, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, was reviewed, with enthusiasm, years ago by LI. Le Fanu pointed out some startling things. For one thing, accident has played far more of a part in the history of drug development than anybody wants to admit. From the accidents that were capitalized on in the invention of Penicillin, to the vast, random experiment of administering a variety of chemicals to a host of humans during world war two -- which was the basis for the post-war discovery of the first anti-psychotic drugs, and of cortisone. Le Fanu was also very scoriating about genetic medicine and about epidemiology. Actually, he might have been a little too scoriating about both. However, there might be something to his sense that natural selection is not something that can be completely modeled by a computer algorithm. The "biological targets" that are aimed at by the "millions of chemical compounds" give us a sense of the still prevailing model of linear processes that bedevils expert systems. If these were really "targets," then surely throwing a million darts would hit one of them. But of course, this is a very foolish way to envision predator prey relationships. It is a very foolish way of modeling both genetic and pathogenic diseases.
For more about Le Fanu, here's our review
There is an economic moral, too, to be drawn from Glaxo's problems. A major argument of those who support BigPharma, like Andrew Sullivan, is that the free market cannot be trusted to encourage drug innovation. Of course, Andrew Sullivan types say just the opposite -- however, if you parse their prose, what they are really saying is that Pharma companies should enjoy extended monopolies on their Intellectual Property. This means essentially closing down the market in generic drugs. The argument goes something like this: because the lab work to produce a pharmaceutical is so costly, and because the tests and bureaucracy that intervene before the drug gets to market are also so costly, pharmaceutical companies should enjoy a longer period of monopoly in order to recoop their investments. The problem with this argument is that it ignores the fact that other salient avenues of cost cutting make it more likely that a pharmaceutical company will use that monopolistic advantage not to find new drugs, but to piggyback on successful older drugs. This, after all, is the ultimate cost cutter. Monopoly, in other words, creates a vicious incentive. That incentive would be abolished if, in fact, we encouraged a healthier market in generics. That we are contemplating allowing generic drugs to be imported from Canada that can't be manufactured here points to the convolutions by which Pharmaceutical companies have successfully blocked the real working of a free market economy. Remember, Adam Smith was much more concerned about the pernicious effects of monopoly than he was about State intervention in the economy per se: in fact, Smith pointed out that it the use of monopoly was precisely the preferred State method for economic intervention. At least in the realm of the health industry, we need a return to Smith.
Blues and hard ons. That's the stuff your modern PharmaFrankenstein conglomerate battens onto, like a garbage fly taking on slime. Take GlaxoSmithKlein. Here's a multi-billion dollar, global corporation that sees, in this world of malaria, hepatitis C, and cancer a real growth opportunity in next generation Paxil and its newest drug, Levitra, to combat that truly fatal disorder, the unruly penis:
"The company says it plans to hold a meeting for analysts on Dec. 3 to describe in detail all the new drugs it hopes to roll out, including an AIDS drug and a medicine for incontinence, both of which are under review by the Food and Drug Administration. "If I can deliver this pipeline, the creation of value will be enormous," Dr. Garnier said. Convincing investors that the future is bright is crucial for Glaxo because the next several years don't look so good. Generics are threatening the company's biggest sellers, including the anti-depressant Paxil. The company's historical lead in AIDS drugs is slipping. And while its newest drug, Levitra for erectile dysfunction, is doing well, the company has few other potential big sellers ready for introduction in the next two years."
The Times story about Glaxo's failure to deliver on the 'synergies" that were supposed to power the merger that created the firm in 2000 takes aim at the problems in the laboratory -- problems at the heart of the Pharma industry. The Times angle is that these problems are organizational -- different lab routines, priorities and projects got tossed together, and that mix, along with the imperative to cut costs and raise profits, has devastated the 'intangible" knowledge structure that supports drug innovation.
But buried in the piece is an interesting graf that throws a light upon the announcements newspapers trot out almost every day about this or that medical breakthrough:
"Mergers are hardly the only reason Glaxo and its competitors have produced so few new medicines. The science of drug development has become tougher. New technologies like robotic screening machines that rapidly test millions of chemical compounds against biological targets have not worked as well as industry executives hoped. And the avalanche of genetic information created over the last several years has led to more confusion than clarity."
Shades of James Le Fanu, the British doctor whose book, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, was reviewed, with enthusiasm, years ago by LI. Le Fanu pointed out some startling things. For one thing, accident has played far more of a part in the history of drug development than anybody wants to admit. From the accidents that were capitalized on in the invention of Penicillin, to the vast, random experiment of administering a variety of chemicals to a host of humans during world war two -- which was the basis for the post-war discovery of the first anti-psychotic drugs, and of cortisone. Le Fanu was also very scoriating about genetic medicine and about epidemiology. Actually, he might have been a little too scoriating about both. However, there might be something to his sense that natural selection is not something that can be completely modeled by a computer algorithm. The "biological targets" that are aimed at by the "millions of chemical compounds" give us a sense of the still prevailing model of linear processes that bedevils expert systems. If these were really "targets," then surely throwing a million darts would hit one of them. But of course, this is a very foolish way to envision predator prey relationships. It is a very foolish way of modeling both genetic and pathogenic diseases.
For more about Le Fanu, here's our review
There is an economic moral, too, to be drawn from Glaxo's problems. A major argument of those who support BigPharma, like Andrew Sullivan, is that the free market cannot be trusted to encourage drug innovation. Of course, Andrew Sullivan types say just the opposite -- however, if you parse their prose, what they are really saying is that Pharma companies should enjoy extended monopolies on their Intellectual Property. This means essentially closing down the market in generic drugs. The argument goes something like this: because the lab work to produce a pharmaceutical is so costly, and because the tests and bureaucracy that intervene before the drug gets to market are also so costly, pharmaceutical companies should enjoy a longer period of monopoly in order to recoop their investments. The problem with this argument is that it ignores the fact that other salient avenues of cost cutting make it more likely that a pharmaceutical company will use that monopolistic advantage not to find new drugs, but to piggyback on successful older drugs. This, after all, is the ultimate cost cutter. Monopoly, in other words, creates a vicious incentive. That incentive would be abolished if, in fact, we encouraged a healthier market in generics. That we are contemplating allowing generic drugs to be imported from Canada that can't be manufactured here points to the convolutions by which Pharmaceutical companies have successfully blocked the real working of a free market economy. Remember, Adam Smith was much more concerned about the pernicious effects of monopoly than he was about State intervention in the economy per se: in fact, Smith pointed out that it the use of monopoly was precisely the preferred State method for economic intervention. At least in the realm of the health industry, we need a return to Smith.
Friday, October 3, 2003
Bollettino
If we took a look around in 1688 - the year of the Glorious Revolution -- what would we say about torture? One of the things we'd say is that we could recognize the implements. Here is the machine that stretched the prisoner. Here is the whip that flayed the prisoner. Here is the wheel. But even in 1688, the divide between torture - as a subset of the work of punishment - and the whole set of punitive acts was porous. Here is the island on which the prisoner was worked to death harvesting sugarcane. Here was the ship on which the prisoner was starved, raped, and died. And so on. The distinction, then, is one of tools and rituals, not of pains and effects.
This is an important distinction insofar as the effects of torture were at the time, and are now, constitutive within the system of the spaces by which the system is identified. I mean, simply, that if I look around today and I do not see the whip, rack and the wheel, my inclination to say, well, there's no torture going on here is naive. I have not understood that prison, which was the work space within which torture happened, has absorbed the effect of torture, even when the implements of it are abolished. In other words, I ought to be looking for torture by other means, if I see a prison. The latter continues the former.
Readers are urged to check out the Slate article entitled Why no one cares about prison rape We immediately sent the article to various friends. We've long found the joky tolerance for prison rape in American culture -- in fact, the dependence on it as both an entertainment motif and, supposedly, a real police tool -- to be amazingly depressing. Robert Weisberg and David Mills are mostly pretty clear both about who gets raped, how often it happens, and the tolerance, even promotion of it, by the society prisons are supposedly protecting from violence. Here's their profile of stir:
"A recent report by Human Rights Watch synthesized data and various perception surveys from around the United States and conservatively concluded that approximately 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted in some way and at least 7 percent raped. A cautious inference is that nearly 200,000 current inmates have been raped and nearly 1 million have been sexually assaulted over the past 20 years. And, as HRW notes, prisoners with certain characteristics�first offenders, those with high voices and passive or intellectual personalities�face far higher probabilities. Moreover, the reports reveal that sexual slavery following rape is also an ordinary occurrence. Stories abound of prisoners who, once they are "turned out" (prison jargon for the initial rape) become the rapists' subordinates, forced to do menial jobs and sometimes "rented out" to other inmates to satisfy their sexual needs.
"Of course, prisoners face not only sexual assault from other inmates, but violence of all forms, often leading to horrific injuries and death. All too typical is the story, repeated by HRW, of a raped Texas prisoner with obvious injuries who reported the rapes (eight alleged rapes by the same rapist) to prison authorities. The authorities interviewed the rapist and the victim together, concluded it was nothing but a "lovers' quarrel," and sent them both back to their cells, where the victim was again repeatedly raped and beaten even more brutally."
Weisberg and Mills lose the thread near the end of the article, where they hypothesize that if American society tolerates prison rape, at least it could be open about it, and let it operate on murderers:
"Perhaps while this federal study is under way, there are other, more honest ways of acknowledging what the American prison system has created. Perhaps every sentencing judge should require that a defendant headed for prison be given extensive "pre-rape counseling" in the hope that he or she can take some small personal steps to reduce the risk of attack. Or perhaps we could require judges to demand data about the differential risks of rape and assault for different types of prisoners in different prisons and begin to factor such data into any sentence. "You committed murder, so let's send you somewhere where you're really likely to be raped." In that way we will be at least as brutally honest with ourselves as we are literally brutal with our prisoners."
Actually, the assumption that brutes are at least honest is disingenuous. Why should they be?
Weisberg and Mills at least come to terms with the reality of attitudes towards punishment. We find that a heartening attitude, in contrast to the somewhat airless world of legal philosophy. As an example of the latter, read the Sanford Levinson's article on torture in this summer's Dissent. Levinson is a well known legal theorist. He's irreproachably liberal. His approach is canonical -- insofar as that liberalism is concerned. His idea is that torture is simply about information. In this way, desire - the desire to hurt - is sublimated into the desire to know. The work of torture, here, is taken out of its work space - the prison - and inserted into another context. Call it a form of extreme research. Instead of going through files, you insert an electric cord into a man's anus. Of course, given Levinson's approach, torture derives from rational principles to accrue a rational gain. Other motives are dismissed:
"If torture never achieves its purpose and, indeed, is
harmful not only to the victims but even to the
police themselves (since false confessions lead
them to stop looking for the actual perpetrators),
then the obvious question is why any rational
police officer would ever engage in it. If
torture is in fact inefficient, then one must be
a sadist to defend it. One virtue of this response
is that it appears "tough-minded," unlike what
some might deem merely "moralistic" arguments
that we should adhere to the prohibition even if adherence
imposes serious costs on innocent people."
The reference to sadism is as close as Levinson wants to get to the desire to give pain. While, on the one hand, one welcomes the liberal civility of the gesture - wouldn't this be a better society if the desire to give pain was only a property of sadists? - on the other hand, one suspects that it encodes that typical liberal bad faith, hiding the desires that animate a social practice under the guise of a rationality that has only one legitimate desire: the desire to know.
It is hard to square Levinson's idea with the reality of prison. One could as well ask if enclosing a man or woman in a 10 by 10 space for twenty years, or enclosing a man or woman in a subterranean space that is for the most part unlighted 24/7, or enclosing a man or woman with another person who repeatedly hurts that person, rapes that person, beats that person - whether these, too, are the dreams of a sadist. In fact, anybody who reads Sade - an author that is probably too distasteful for the persnickety Levinson - understands pretty quickly that enclosure just is the sadistic premise. Without prison, there is no sadism. Sade knew prison from the inside, and he understood that it absorbed the torture effect and was constructed around it.
Our own contribution to prison journalism exists in cyberspace here, in the New York Obs.
If we took a look around in 1688 - the year of the Glorious Revolution -- what would we say about torture? One of the things we'd say is that we could recognize the implements. Here is the machine that stretched the prisoner. Here is the whip that flayed the prisoner. Here is the wheel. But even in 1688, the divide between torture - as a subset of the work of punishment - and the whole set of punitive acts was porous. Here is the island on which the prisoner was worked to death harvesting sugarcane. Here was the ship on which the prisoner was starved, raped, and died. And so on. The distinction, then, is one of tools and rituals, not of pains and effects.
This is an important distinction insofar as the effects of torture were at the time, and are now, constitutive within the system of the spaces by which the system is identified. I mean, simply, that if I look around today and I do not see the whip, rack and the wheel, my inclination to say, well, there's no torture going on here is naive. I have not understood that prison, which was the work space within which torture happened, has absorbed the effect of torture, even when the implements of it are abolished. In other words, I ought to be looking for torture by other means, if I see a prison. The latter continues the former.
Readers are urged to check out the Slate article entitled Why no one cares about prison rape We immediately sent the article to various friends. We've long found the joky tolerance for prison rape in American culture -- in fact, the dependence on it as both an entertainment motif and, supposedly, a real police tool -- to be amazingly depressing. Robert Weisberg and David Mills are mostly pretty clear both about who gets raped, how often it happens, and the tolerance, even promotion of it, by the society prisons are supposedly protecting from violence. Here's their profile of stir:
"A recent report by Human Rights Watch synthesized data and various perception surveys from around the United States and conservatively concluded that approximately 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted in some way and at least 7 percent raped. A cautious inference is that nearly 200,000 current inmates have been raped and nearly 1 million have been sexually assaulted over the past 20 years. And, as HRW notes, prisoners with certain characteristics�first offenders, those with high voices and passive or intellectual personalities�face far higher probabilities. Moreover, the reports reveal that sexual slavery following rape is also an ordinary occurrence. Stories abound of prisoners who, once they are "turned out" (prison jargon for the initial rape) become the rapists' subordinates, forced to do menial jobs and sometimes "rented out" to other inmates to satisfy their sexual needs.
"Of course, prisoners face not only sexual assault from other inmates, but violence of all forms, often leading to horrific injuries and death. All too typical is the story, repeated by HRW, of a raped Texas prisoner with obvious injuries who reported the rapes (eight alleged rapes by the same rapist) to prison authorities. The authorities interviewed the rapist and the victim together, concluded it was nothing but a "lovers' quarrel," and sent them both back to their cells, where the victim was again repeatedly raped and beaten even more brutally."
Weisberg and Mills lose the thread near the end of the article, where they hypothesize that if American society tolerates prison rape, at least it could be open about it, and let it operate on murderers:
"Perhaps while this federal study is under way, there are other, more honest ways of acknowledging what the American prison system has created. Perhaps every sentencing judge should require that a defendant headed for prison be given extensive "pre-rape counseling" in the hope that he or she can take some small personal steps to reduce the risk of attack. Or perhaps we could require judges to demand data about the differential risks of rape and assault for different types of prisoners in different prisons and begin to factor such data into any sentence. "You committed murder, so let's send you somewhere where you're really likely to be raped." In that way we will be at least as brutally honest with ourselves as we are literally brutal with our prisoners."
Actually, the assumption that brutes are at least honest is disingenuous. Why should they be?
Weisberg and Mills at least come to terms with the reality of attitudes towards punishment. We find that a heartening attitude, in contrast to the somewhat airless world of legal philosophy. As an example of the latter, read the Sanford Levinson's article on torture in this summer's Dissent. Levinson is a well known legal theorist. He's irreproachably liberal. His approach is canonical -- insofar as that liberalism is concerned. His idea is that torture is simply about information. In this way, desire - the desire to hurt - is sublimated into the desire to know. The work of torture, here, is taken out of its work space - the prison - and inserted into another context. Call it a form of extreme research. Instead of going through files, you insert an electric cord into a man's anus. Of course, given Levinson's approach, torture derives from rational principles to accrue a rational gain. Other motives are dismissed:
"If torture never achieves its purpose and, indeed, is
harmful not only to the victims but even to the
police themselves (since false confessions lead
them to stop looking for the actual perpetrators),
then the obvious question is why any rational
police officer would ever engage in it. If
torture is in fact inefficient, then one must be
a sadist to defend it. One virtue of this response
is that it appears "tough-minded," unlike what
some might deem merely "moralistic" arguments
that we should adhere to the prohibition even if adherence
imposes serious costs on innocent people."
The reference to sadism is as close as Levinson wants to get to the desire to give pain. While, on the one hand, one welcomes the liberal civility of the gesture - wouldn't this be a better society if the desire to give pain was only a property of sadists? - on the other hand, one suspects that it encodes that typical liberal bad faith, hiding the desires that animate a social practice under the guise of a rationality that has only one legitimate desire: the desire to know.
It is hard to square Levinson's idea with the reality of prison. One could as well ask if enclosing a man or woman in a 10 by 10 space for twenty years, or enclosing a man or woman in a subterranean space that is for the most part unlighted 24/7, or enclosing a man or woman with another person who repeatedly hurts that person, rapes that person, beats that person - whether these, too, are the dreams of a sadist. In fact, anybody who reads Sade - an author that is probably too distasteful for the persnickety Levinson - understands pretty quickly that enclosure just is the sadistic premise. Without prison, there is no sadism. Sade knew prison from the inside, and he understood that it absorbed the torture effect and was constructed around it.
Our own contribution to prison journalism exists in cyberspace here, in the New York Obs.
Thursday, October 2, 2003
Bollettino
What becomes a scandal in this country is a scandal.
We go to the NYT and we are greeted with two furors -- hey, that has a nice operatic sound, doesn't it? In one corner, the scandal that is singing away concerns the outing of the CIA credentials of an ex-ambassador's wife. She worked undercover. Here's a paragraph in, what, the third NYT story on the subject that I spot today:
"The White House encouraged Republicans to portray the former diplomat at the center of the case, Joseph C. Wilson IV, as a partisan Democrat with an agenda and the Democratic Party as scandalmongering. At the same time, the administration and the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill worked to ensure that no Republicans in Congress break ranks and call for an independent inquiry outside the direct control of the Justice Department."
On NPR, Tom Harkin, the Dem senator from Iowa, opined that this was the worst blow in the war of terrorism ever -- or something like that. Iowa is a pretty fur piece from New York City, as Faulkner might put it --- since I would hestitatingly, and in a quavering voice, suggest that 9/11 was pretty bad. Oh, not as bad as the pain inflicted on Wilson, of course -- but almost, don't you think, Tom? Somehow, that Wilson's wife can no longer work undercover for the CIA does not, to us, appear to undermine civilization as we know it. Actually, what undermines civilization as we know it is the continuing existence of an agency that can employ people that it can officially deny employing ... like, for instance, the CIA. But let's not go there.
Ah, and for those who, clinging to the wreckage of civilization laid waste by the Bush leaker, and who want something a little less D.C.-centric, there is Rush Limbaugh on ESPN. Now, that Rush Limbaugh is a racist pig has not been a secret for, oh, fifteen years or so. His demographic skews to professional Confederacy nostalgists -- like our Attorney General. So there the man was -- Rush, not Ashcroft -- doing the usual coded racist thing. That thing has warped, since the Civil Rights era. It used to be that blacks were inferior, ignorant, genetically challenged. Now it has merged with the old anti-Semitic meme -- the one that claims Jews control everything. The result is the idea that blacks get a free ride in this country. So, the remarks about some black quarterback getting disproportionate attention. Suddenly, the remarks get disproportionate attention, and Rush resigns.
Which begs too many questions about race for one morning. Such as, given that corporate TV is the most demographic driven of businesses, what was the thinking about hiring Rush in the first place? Obviously, appeal to the white male market to which he is such a magnet. And not just any white male market. We are looking for blue collar white males, who in the past thirty years, as their economic life form has been systematically devastated, to the advantage of a quite different circle of white males (see under top income 2 percentile), have secreted an almost predictable, enzymatic reactionary attitude that such as Rush live off of -- an attitude that makes it ever more convenient to assign those guys to the dust heap. The vicious circle of cynicism, race, and exploitation, all in a nice neat package. So the cynical manipulators hire a cynical manipulator whose cynical manipulations land him in hot water, since (since, since, since) ESPN has to pretend to not condone open racism.
Not that we are complaining about the latter. The progress of a civilization can be mapped by the structure of its hypocrisies over time. Still, this is a scandal only for the very bored.
Meanwhile, a non-scandal.
Here's the headline: Senate Panel Backs Bill to Give Tax Windfall to U.S. Companies."
And here's the first graf:
"WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 � American corporations that have deferred taxes for years on the profits they made overseas could be in line for a huge windfall from Congress.Hoping to bring more investment to the United States, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill on Wednesday that would give a one-time tax holiday to companies that have accumulated as much as $400 billion in foreign profits on which they have yet to pay American taxes."
And isn't this the right time for a tax holiday, boys and girls? With a petty 500 billion dollar plus deficit looming, and 87 billion of it going to an unwinnable war for an inscutable object, the Senate is feeling its oats. No doubt many a Dem, who will otherwise complain about the Bush tax cuts, will vote for this one. It is pure icing. Nobody cares, the angry white guys who are going to continue to be screwed by a government that is shifting the burden of its running to lower incomes either by cuts (which fall on those white guys and their families) or by taxes are going to be talking about Rush, the D.C. wonks will be talking about Wilson, and the corporations will, once again, embed the incredible advantage they have accrued in this society since 1980. Cool or what?
What becomes a scandal in this country is a scandal.
We go to the NYT and we are greeted with two furors -- hey, that has a nice operatic sound, doesn't it? In one corner, the scandal that is singing away concerns the outing of the CIA credentials of an ex-ambassador's wife. She worked undercover. Here's a paragraph in, what, the third NYT story on the subject that I spot today:
"The White House encouraged Republicans to portray the former diplomat at the center of the case, Joseph C. Wilson IV, as a partisan Democrat with an agenda and the Democratic Party as scandalmongering. At the same time, the administration and the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill worked to ensure that no Republicans in Congress break ranks and call for an independent inquiry outside the direct control of the Justice Department."
On NPR, Tom Harkin, the Dem senator from Iowa, opined that this was the worst blow in the war of terrorism ever -- or something like that. Iowa is a pretty fur piece from New York City, as Faulkner might put it --- since I would hestitatingly, and in a quavering voice, suggest that 9/11 was pretty bad. Oh, not as bad as the pain inflicted on Wilson, of course -- but almost, don't you think, Tom? Somehow, that Wilson's wife can no longer work undercover for the CIA does not, to us, appear to undermine civilization as we know it. Actually, what undermines civilization as we know it is the continuing existence of an agency that can employ people that it can officially deny employing ... like, for instance, the CIA. But let's not go there.
Ah, and for those who, clinging to the wreckage of civilization laid waste by the Bush leaker, and who want something a little less D.C.-centric, there is Rush Limbaugh on ESPN. Now, that Rush Limbaugh is a racist pig has not been a secret for, oh, fifteen years or so. His demographic skews to professional Confederacy nostalgists -- like our Attorney General. So there the man was -- Rush, not Ashcroft -- doing the usual coded racist thing. That thing has warped, since the Civil Rights era. It used to be that blacks were inferior, ignorant, genetically challenged. Now it has merged with the old anti-Semitic meme -- the one that claims Jews control everything. The result is the idea that blacks get a free ride in this country. So, the remarks about some black quarterback getting disproportionate attention. Suddenly, the remarks get disproportionate attention, and Rush resigns.
Which begs too many questions about race for one morning. Such as, given that corporate TV is the most demographic driven of businesses, what was the thinking about hiring Rush in the first place? Obviously, appeal to the white male market to which he is such a magnet. And not just any white male market. We are looking for blue collar white males, who in the past thirty years, as their economic life form has been systematically devastated, to the advantage of a quite different circle of white males (see under top income 2 percentile), have secreted an almost predictable, enzymatic reactionary attitude that such as Rush live off of -- an attitude that makes it ever more convenient to assign those guys to the dust heap. The vicious circle of cynicism, race, and exploitation, all in a nice neat package. So the cynical manipulators hire a cynical manipulator whose cynical manipulations land him in hot water, since (since, since, since) ESPN has to pretend to not condone open racism.
Not that we are complaining about the latter. The progress of a civilization can be mapped by the structure of its hypocrisies over time. Still, this is a scandal only for the very bored.
Meanwhile, a non-scandal.
Here's the headline: Senate Panel Backs Bill to Give Tax Windfall to U.S. Companies."
And here's the first graf:
"WASHINGTON, Oct. 1 � American corporations that have deferred taxes for years on the profits they made overseas could be in line for a huge windfall from Congress.Hoping to bring more investment to the United States, the Senate Finance Committee approved a bill on Wednesday that would give a one-time tax holiday to companies that have accumulated as much as $400 billion in foreign profits on which they have yet to pay American taxes."
And isn't this the right time for a tax holiday, boys and girls? With a petty 500 billion dollar plus deficit looming, and 87 billion of it going to an unwinnable war for an inscutable object, the Senate is feeling its oats. No doubt many a Dem, who will otherwise complain about the Bush tax cuts, will vote for this one. It is pure icing. Nobody cares, the angry white guys who are going to continue to be screwed by a government that is shifting the burden of its running to lower incomes either by cuts (which fall on those white guys and their families) or by taxes are going to be talking about Rush, the D.C. wonks will be talking about Wilson, and the corporations will, once again, embed the incredible advantage they have accrued in this society since 1980. Cool or what?
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