The New Vulgate

Issue #127 (December 28, 2011)

2012-01-03T09:39:00.000-08:00

Centennial, WY

Photo by Joe Carducci

From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…

Allysia Finley in WSJ, "The Chicago Expulsion Act of 2011".

“That's the legislative initiative of State Reps. Adam Brown and Bill Mitchell, who think politicians from the Windy City have blown the state too far left. ‘At every town-hall meeting I hear, 'Can't we separate from Chicago?'’ says Mr. Mitchell. Chicago pols control almost all seats of power in Illinois. Gov. Pat Quinn, House Speaker Mike Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton, Attorney General Lisa Madigan and Secretary of State Jesse White are all Democrats from Chicago. So was former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who this month was sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption, including trying to sell President Obama's vacated seat in the U.S. Senate. Consequently, as Mr. Wooters says, a lot ‘of the money that we have down here goes up there to bail out Chicago.’”

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Mark Wyman in CT, "The Illinois North-South split".

“The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 specified that Illinois' northern border should run from the southern tip of Lake Michigan straight across to the Mississippi River. But Ohio and Indiana had edged their borders up a bit, so in 1818 Congress moved the line 60 miles north and handed Illinois its lake port, taking the land from the Wisconsin Territory. While the new state's politics were strongly dominated by settlers from Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina, before long those pioneers were challenged when the Erie Canal crossing New York State scrambled migration patterns. By 1840 the Buffalo-to-Chicago steamship fare on the Great Lakes was $20; 10 years later it was $10. Largely as a result, the cluster of cabins known as Chicago grew from fewer than 400 inhabitants in 1833 to a city of more than 4,000 by 1837. And it kept growing. Yankees and other Easterners were soon pouring into Chicago. Many continued on across northern Illinois, impressed by the rock-free soil (no stone fences here!), forming new communities that quickly boasted both a church (usually Presbyterian or Congregational) and a public school. Of Chicago's first 10 mayors, five were born in New York and four in New England. Forty-seven percent of its residents counted in the 1850 census were from New York or New England.”

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WSJ: "Corporate Carve-out Revolt".

“It's not often that the Occupy Wall Street and tea party movements see eye-to-eye, but a tax bill before the Illinois legislature is testing whether left and right can combine to limit corporate tax favoritism. The proposal would give an estimated $85 million tax exemption to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Chicago Board of Trade and a $15 million annual break to Sears Holding Corp. to mitigate the state's big tax increase earlier this year. It would also vastly expand the earned income tax credit. The bill sailed through the state Senate two weeks ago, but it was crushed in the House in a stunning 99-8 vote later that same day. After intense lobbying by the Merc and Sears, a similar bill will be voted on as early as today.”

***

Richard Teitelbaum in Bloomberg Markets, "When Hank Paulson Tipped His Hand".

“On the morning of July 21, before the Eton Park meeting, Paulson had spoken to New York Times reporters and editors, according to his Treasury Department schedule. A Times article the next day said the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency were inspecting Fannie and Freddie’s books and cited Paulson as saying he expected their examination would give a signal of confidence to the markets. At the Eton Park meeting, he sent a different message, according to a fund manager who attended. Over sandwiches and pasta salad, he delivered that information to a group of men capable of profiting from any disclosure. Around the conference room table were a dozen or so hedge- fund managers and other Wall Street executives -- at least five of them alumni of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), of which Paulson was chief executive officer and chairman from 1999 to 2006. In addition to Eton Park founder Eric Mindich, they included such boldface names as Lone Pine Capital LLC founder Stephen Mandel, Dinakar Singh of TPG-Axon Capital Management LP and Daniel Och of Och-Ziff Capital Management Group LLC. After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into ‘conservatorship’ -- a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets.”

***

Ross Douthat in NYT, "The Decadent Left".

“In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Jane Mayer highlighted ‘the difference between the focused, agenda-driven campaign’ fought by critics of the Keystone pipeline ‘and the free-form, leaderless one waged by the Occupiers.’ Given that anti-Keystone activists succeeded (at least temporarily), she wrote, ‘the Occupy movement could do worse than to learn from the pipeline protest.’ But there’s a sense in which the pipeline protesters and Midwestern unions are exactly the people that the O.W.S. crowd should not learn from, if they aspire to appeal to a wider audience than left-wing activists usually reach. Yes, Occupy Wall Street was dreamed up in part by flakes and populated in part by fantasists. But to the extent that the movement briefly captured the public’s imagination, it was because it seemed to be doing what a decent left would exist to do: criticizing entrenched power, championing the common good and speaking for the many rather than the few. The union rallies and the Keystone demonstrations, by contrast, represented what you might call the decadent left, which fights for narrow interest groups rather than for the public as a whole.”

***

William McGurn in WSJ, "The Church of Kathleen Sebelius".

“There was a day when liberals and libertarians appreciated the importance of upholding the freedoms of people and groups with unpopular views. No longer. As government expands, religious liberty is reduced to a special ‘exemption’ and concerns about government coercion are dismissed, in the memorable words of Nancy Pelosi, as ‘this conscience thing.’”

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WSJ: "The Cellulosic Ethanol Debacle".

“The optimistic forecast is that this plant will produce about 23 million barrels a year -- a fraction of what Washington promised in 2006. In September the Department of Energy provided POET, which advertises itself as the ‘world's largest ethanol producer,’ a $105 million loan guarantee for cellulosic. To recap: Congress subsidized a product that didn't exist, mandated its purchase though it still didn't exist, is punishing oil companies for not buying the product that doesn't exist, and is now doubling down on the subsidies in the hope that someday it might exist. We'd call this the march of folly, but that's unfair to fools.”

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Richard Epstein at Hoover.org, "In Private Enterprise We Trust".

“Unfortunately, Gore and Blood have picked a bizarre way to promote accurate assessments of long-term firm value. One of their odd recommendations calls on firms to ‘end the default practice of issuing quarterly earnings guidance’ on the ground that these reports encourage a mentality that ‘overemphasizes’ short-term profits at the expense of long-term wealth creation. But that criticism shows a profound misunderstanding of how valuation processes work. In general, the scarcity of information is one of the key stumbling blocks toward making an accurate assessment of the current value of the firm. Faced with this difficulty, too little information -- not too much information -- is the central problem. Wholly without regard to any requirements of the SEC, firms publish quarterly reports to supply some information to improve the estimates that shareholders and lenders make of the businesses. The want of this short-term information should have the predictable effect of reducing the value of assets. There is no way to evaluate the long-term prospects of a firm by ignoring all short-term data. Nor does it help to say, baldly, that we need not worry about cutting out that information because the ‘standard’ models of economics rely on, as Gore and Blood write, ‘the illusion of perfect information and the assumption that markets tend toward equilibrium.’ Not so. The first part of this sentence has been uniformly rejected by economists and corporate experts of all stripes for well over 50 years.”

***

Philip Howard in WSJ, "Starting Over With Regulation".

“This is the way regulation works in America: Regulators try to imagine every possible mistake and then dictate a solution. The complexity is astounding. Under a recent federal directive, the number of health-care reimbursement categories will soon increase from 18,000 to 140,000, including 21 separate categories for ‘spacecraft accidents’ and 12 for bee stings. There are over 140 million words of binding federal statutes and regulations, and states and municipalities add several billion more.”

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WSJ: "Federal Police Ranks Swell to Enforce A Widening Array of Criminal Laws".

“In the latest survey, by the Government Accountability Office in 2006, there were 25,000 sworn officers in the smaller government agencies (which excludes departments more commonly associated with crime fighting: Treasury, Justice, Defense and what is now Homeland Security). That number includes police, inspectors, security guards and rangers, as well as criminal investigators. Across all government agencies, there were about 138,000 federal law-enforcement officers that year, GAO figures show. The Justice Department accounted for more than 40% of that total. Among the smaller agencies, currently there are 3,812 criminal investigators, up from 507 in 1973, the first year for which records are available from the Office of Personnel Management. The EPA received its first two criminal investigators in 1977. It now has 265.”

***

Ira Stoll at NYSun.com, "Andy Stern v. Free Labor".

“One of our favorite moments in a long newspaper life came in a conversation about the fall of the Soviet Union. We had put a question to the president of the AFL-CIO, Lane Kirkland, along the following lines. ‘Lane,’ we said, ‘what about all the talk about how our victory over the Soviet Union was a conspiracy between President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and yourself.’ He looked at us and said: ‘They had nuttin’ to do with it.’ Kirkland didn’t mean to deny the role of Reagan and the Pope in the defeat of Soviet communism. His wisecrack was designed to emphasize the long, pre-meditated, and too rarely recognized role that the free trade union movement played in the long, twilight struggle — and the fact that it was a free trade union, Solidarity in Poland, that finally cracked the Soviet rule in the East Bloc by putting paid the lie that communism defended the interests of working men and women. We were thinking of this as we read, in the Wall Street Journal, the paean penned by the former president of the Service Employees International Union, Andrew Stern, to the Chinese communist system. ‘China’s Superior Economic Model” was the headline over the piece.’”

***

Nathan Hodge in WSJ, "In Iraq, U.S. Shifts From One Large Footprint to Another".

“U.S. troops are on track to leave Iraq before the end of December, but the U.S. involvement there is anything but over -- meaning local resistance to Americans, and the security challenges that come with it, will continue. In place of the military, the State Department will assume a new role of unprecedented scale, overseeing a massive diplomatic mission through a network of fortified, self-sufficient installations. After the troops have left, the U.S. presence in Iraq -- which peaked at 170,000 -- will number between 15,000 and 16,000, including federal employees and private contractors.”

***

Robert Landers in WSJ on Scott Farris’ book, Almost President.

“‘Dewey, along with his protégés Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon,’ Mr. Farris writes, ‘moved the Republican Party away from an agenda of repealing the New Deal to a grudging acceptance of the permanent welfare state.’ Dewey -- who had been a nationally renowned prosecutor and then a three-term governor of New York -- called himself a ‘New Deal Republican.’ He favored the pursuit of liberal ends by conservative means. ‘It was fine for the federal government to initiate social reforms, Dewey believed, but those reforms should be implemented at the state or local level, and they should be funded in a fiscally responsible manner that did not increase the national debt.’ Barry Goldwater dismissed the Eisenhower administration's Dewey-esque ‘Modern Republicanism’ as nothing but a ‘dime store New Deal.’”

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Virginia Postrel at Bloomberg.com, "U.S. Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid".

“As veteran education-policy consultant Arthur M. Hauptman notes in a recent essay: ‘There is a strong correlation over time between student and parent loan availability and rapidly rising tuitions. Common sense suggests that growing availability of student loans at reasonable rates has made it easier for many institutions to raise their prices, just as the mortgage interest deduction contributes to higher housing prices.’ It’s a phenomenon familiar to economists. If you offer people a subsidy to pursue some activity requiring an input that’s in more-or-less fixed supply, the price of that input goes up. Much of the value of the subsidy will go not to the intended recipients but to whoever owns the input. The classic example is farm subsidies, which increase the price of farmland.”

***

Ira Stoll at Futureofcapitalism.com, "Disabled America".

“Has the number of disabled Americans really doubled in the past 20 years and has it really gotten three times as expensive to take care of them? The answer to the first part of that question is probably not: ‘there is little evidence that the underlying health of the working-age population in the U.S. is deteriorating.’”

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Christopher Caldwell in FT, "An incentive is not a reward, it’s an exercise of power".

“Incentivising is not only the market’s alternative to coercion. It is also powerful people’s alternative to persuasion. It can render governing classes unaccountable. Rulers get the outcome they desire, while the masses on whom it was imposed get the responsibility for having chosen it. An incentive is not a reward, something that can be fair or unfair. It is just a hedonic incitement. Prof Grant notes that the controversial bonuses paid to AIG employees after the insurer’s $180bn bail-out were revolting to those who think of bonuses as wages but acceptable to those who think of bonuses as incentives.
Dubious incentivisation is the hallmark of much of the US public sector.”

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John Paul Rathbone in FT, "A beginners’ guide to debt crises: lessons from Latin America".

“Technocratic governments (pace Italy and Greece) can work. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for example, was an academic before he became Brazil’s finance minister and twice president. But bear in mind that Mr Cardoso had a popular mandate. Without that, any government is just a caretaker. Argentina is a case in point. In 2001, it ran through a series of governments before triggering the world’s then-biggest default ($100bn; so small compared to Italy’s €1.9tn bond market). Even the brilliant economist Domingo Cavallo failed to turn the tide. To restore competitiveness without breaking Argentina’s euro-like currency peg, he engineered a ‘synthetic devaluation’. Across-the-board export subsidies and import duties came straight out of the textbooks, but didn’t work. Just as they often do in Europe today, investors saw the country’s debt dynamics still working against it.”

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Roderick Parkes at EUobserver.com, "EU counterterrorism policy: a case of casino technocracy".

“After years of self-denial, EU policymakers are outing themselves as technocrats. From now on decisions will be scientific and evidence-based. The years of European vanity projects, dogma and ideology are over. Even our parliamentarians have given the idea of technocracy an enthusiastic I Like This. In a resolution on Wednesday, for example, the European Parliament called for an evidence-based assessment of the EU’s counterterrorist policies. It all goes to show how much we want to believe that European decision-making is a logical and linear process – a process in which law-makers identify the problems that require EU-wide treatment, adopt the right solution and then tweak it in the unlikely eventuality that it does not work properly.”

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Kerin Hope in FT, "Tax collectors accused of bribery".

“Greek tax collectors routinely pocket 40 per cent of fines imposed in disputed tax cases in return for lowering the penalties paid by miscreants, a former senior Greek finance ministry official has revealed. Diomidis Spinellis said a standard scale is used at more than 250 tax offices across Greece to handle settlements with wealthy individuals, family-owned companies and self-employed professionals – seen as the country’s biggest tax evaders. The long-established practice is known as the ‘40-40-20 deal’, he said. The tax evader receives a discount of 40 per cent on the agreed fine, while the tax official takes another 40 per cent – effectively a bribe. The state receives only the remaining 20 per cent, he said.”

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Noelle Burgi in Le Monde diplo, "Greece in chaos".

“Greek citizens are subject to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, with its incomprehensible, fluctuating regulations. Addressing colleagues, a civic employee in the Cyclades said: ‘People want to conform to the law, but we don’t know what to tell them, [the authorities] haven’t given us any details.’ A man had to pay € 200 and present 13 papers and proofs of identity to renew his driving license. Salary cuts among public employees have disrupted the public sector. ‘When you call the police to alert them to a situation, they reply, it’s your problem, you deal with it,’ said a retired engineer officer from the merchant navy. Tensions are rising. Reports show a big increase in domestic violence, theft and murder.”

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Rachel Donadio in NYT, "Italy’s Leader Offers Tax Increases, but No Deep Reforms".

“Mr. Monti has said he wants to make Italy more equitable — especially for young people and women, whom he has called a “wasted resource” — and to help the economy grow. But even as he pledged on Thursday to address labor reform and other structural changes in the coming weeks, he has run up against a wall of vested interests. ‘In Italian society, there is no division between left and right; there’s a division between those who are inside or outside some organized groups,’ said Sergio Fabbrini, the director of the School of Government at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. ‘All the main political parties from left to right represent the insiders. The left represents the pensioners, the trade unions. The right represent various insiders: the lawyers’ organizations, notaries.’ The only way for young people and women to be represented ‘is to have a technical government,’ he added, ‘but of course a technical government will have to pass through the approval of the Parliament. And here again the insiders are well organized.’”

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Clive Crook in Bloomberg Markets, "Why the Euro Must Be Saved".

“Their hope was that Europe’s new currency would speed the development of a European political identity -- a necessary condition for achieving their larger ambition, a United States of Europe. Once Frenchmen, Germans, Italians and Greeks were citizens of Europe first and of their own countries second, the project would be strong enough to withstand shocks like those of recent months or, better, would avoid them in the first place.

Actually, this made some sense. It was a gamble, but it could have paid off.”

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Tony Curzon Price at Opendemocracy.net, "Why I wish I could condemn Cameron’s decision whole-heartedly but can’t".

“I wish I could condemn the narrowness and stupidity of Cameron's decision to veto the Franco-German proposal of EU Treaty modifications with all my heart. I am deeply committed to the para-national. Three of my grandparents grew up fluent in at least one language none of the others spoke. I grew up on borders and never feel so comfortable as when positioned in-between things. I want Europe to succeed, to be the model, the stepping stone, for the global government we need and should dream of. And yet I can't condemn it. I can't help thinking that Cameron made the best of a bad choice. The fatal flaw that leads me to this uncomfortable conclusion is the almost complete absence of a European democratic community; it is more than the democratic deficit in the institutions of Europe - it is a European deficit in the civil society of the continent.”

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Wolfgang Munchau in FT, "The British will fare better in this Anglo-French spat".

“Beggar-thy-neighbour type economic policies have a long tradition in Europe. They can work when you are the only one who pursues them – or when the weight of countries not pursuing them exceeds that of those that do. In that case, the adjustment usually goes along with an improvement in the current account position. Given the size of the eurozone, and the policies of the rest of the world, the scope for an increase in the eurozone’s current account position is relatively small. The failure to take into account the effect of co-ordinated austerity has been the main reason the European authorities misjudged the adjustment dynamics in Greece. They are now making the same mistake on a much grander scale.”

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Hugh Carnegy in FT, "Sarkozy’s summit ‘victory’ proves to be shortlived".

“Over weeks of negotiations with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, Mr Sarkozy yielded to pressure from Berlin that imposing budgetary discipline required automatic sanctions embedded in EU law for eurozone countries that broke fiscal rules. But Paris insists that building this inner eurozone core should be based not on transferring more power to the EU’s central – and unelected – institutions, such as the European Commission, but on an ‘intergovernmental’ basis of the council of eurozone heads of government. French officials say this does not mean the creation of new, parallel institutions – although the council will have a permanent president and a ‘reinforced structure’ to prepare summits and carry out decisions. But Mr Sarkozy does stress the central role of the eurozone council, which is now due to start meeting monthly as long as the crisis lasts.”

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Samuel Brittan in FT, "‘More Europe’ is a mindless slogan, not the answer to all problems".

“The selling point of the original Common Market was that it would bind the basic industries of Germany and France so closely together that the wars that had split Europe asunder would become inconceivable. Oddly, the economic logic was less clearly spelt out; but the thought was that, at a time when the future of world trade was in doubt, here, at least, was an area where trade would flow freely; and production take place in the most efficient centres with a strong safety net to protect the victims of change. It is not a coincidence that this was also the guiding philosophy of the German social market; nor that agriculture was subject to a different and more protectionist regime. Some of the most job-destroying rules came from the later social charter, from which John Major’s government secured an opt-out; even Tony Blair dropped it. The enlarged EU has moved in a perverse direction. Its ruling spirits combine a penchant for micro and industrial policies that destroy jobs with an espousal of deflationary macro policies.”

***

Paul Betts in FT, "Greek banks become victims of Europe’s rule by diktat".

“The scorn poured on Mr Cameron, ostentatiously fronted by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, will have reminded Mr Papandreou of the drubbing he received from the euro fraternity at the recent Cannes summit. Having dared to propose that Greek people be allowed their say on the increasingly severe austerity measures imposed on them by the EU, Mr Papandreou was humiliatingly scolded and sent home to withdraw his offer of a referendum and resign. The British can console themselves that the UK still has the choice – right or wrong – to stand up to the rule by diktat that seems to have become the norm the more the eurozone crisis has ballooned, alongside the ever increasing desperation of its leaders. They might cast an eye over the ‘victor’s justice’ that Mr Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, German chancellor, have meted out to Greece when considering the merits of Mr Cameron’s stand in Brussels.”

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Gareth Harding at EUobserver.com, "Vaclav Havel: Europe’s philosopher-king".

“Havel, a man with a shuffling gait and mumbling, monotonous speech, represented a radical break from the ossified politics and personalities of the past. In addition to books and beer – he worked in a brewery for nine months in 1974 – the man who paved the way for the Czech Republic’s entry into the EU and NATO loved rock music. He founded the Charter 77 movement in protest against the arrest of members of the rock group Plastic People of the Universe. He appointed Frank Zappa as a special ambassador shortly after his election as president. And when the Rolling Stones rolled into Prague in August 1990 he welcomed the group on stage. So when a jean-clad man tapped me on the shoulder and asked for a cigarette at a punk-rock concert in Prague that summer I wasn’t entirely surprised it was Vaclav Havel. ‘Sorry, Mr President but I don’t smoke’ I replied. For once in my life I wished I did.”

***

Pavel Bratinka interview in American Interest.

“I was always sure I would live to see that end. But when Brezhnev died and the new man was Andropov, I became absolutely certain I would see the end while still in my prime. That the Soviet Politburo named a member of the secret police for that job told me all I needed to know…. Of the regime’s three pillars -- the party, the army and the secret police -- only the secret police could not afford to live in illusion or isolation and still do its job. So when Andropov was appointed, it was evident to me that the reality wing of the Soviet establishment had gotten the upper hand.”

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Neal Ascherson in London Review of Books on Norman Davies’ book, Vanished Kingdom: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe.

“The Jagiellonian realm was a pre-modern state. Fussy-minded historians used to call it ‘ramshackle’; it’s better called ‘dispersed’, and that’s what attracts Davies. It contained Balts and Slavs of many varieties, Germans, Jews, Armenians, some Tatars and even some Scots. Their religions might be Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Calvinist, Lutheran, Jewish or Muslim. But, with lapses, they got on with one another, perhaps because little was required of them beyond loyalty to the king and grand duke. The commonwealth’s boundaries were fluid; its constitution (kings elected by acclamation, parliament subject to the veto of a single member) was a controlled chaos. To its swarming nobility, it felt like a sort of democracy -- ‘golden freedom’.”

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Steven Shapin in London Review of Books on Mary Jo Nye’s book, Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science.

“Many Hungarian intellectuals of that generation passed through double exile. After the 1914-1918 war, and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, their geographically challenged homeland experienced, first, the brief Red Terror of the Hungarian Soviet Republic headed by the Bolshevik Bela Kun, followed immediately by the longer-lasting White Terror of Admiral Miklos Horthy’s government. Kun had a Jewish background; the commissariat was heavily Jewish (or formerly Jewish); and, even though well-off Jews had suffered under the Kun regime, the White reaction sometimes referred to the displaced Soviet Republic as the ‘Jewish Republic’ and presided over the ‘Magyarisation’ of Hungarian institutions.”

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Gordon Fairclough in WSJ, "Poland Gives Arab Nations Lessons".

“Poland has offered humanitarian and medical aid since people in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya rose up against authoritarian rule earlier this year, but Warsaw’s main focus has been on the less tangible work of promoting democracy. In November, Poland sponsored a simulation exercise for dozens of Tunisians, designed to give them experience in managing affairs of state during the country’s transformation to democracy. Tunisia in Ocotober had its first parliamentary election since the ouster of former strongman Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.”

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Isabel Kershner in NYT, "Finding Fault in the Palestinian Messages That Aren’t So Public".

“‘This is the inner truth of the Palestinians,’ he said. ‘They really mean it. It is not what they say on CNN, but it is what they teach their children.’ But for many, the subject of incitement and media monitoring has become as contentious as some of the messages, especially since these pronouncements are often used to score propaganda points.
The book goes to the heart of this debate. Its authors — Itamar Marcus, the founder and director of the privately financed Palestinian Media Watch, and an analyst from the group, Nan Jacques Zilberdik — called their book ‘Deception: Betraying the Peace Process.’ ‘There is no preparation for living with Israel as neighbors,’ Ms. Jacques Zilberdik said. ‘Instead, we see the opposite.’”

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Raymond Ibrahim at MEForum.org, "Collective Punishment Under Islam".

“Collectively punishing dhimmis -- non-Muslims who refused to convert after their lands were seized by Muslims, and who are treated as ‘second-class’ infidels -- for the crimes of the individual is standard under Islam. In this instance, dhimmis are forbidden from striking -- let alone killing -- Muslims, even if the latter perpetrate the conflict. Prior to the fight that killed him, the Muslim in question had, through the help of radical Salafis, burned down the Christian's home and was threatening him over a property dispute. Still, non-Muslims are forbidden to raise their hands to Muslims, even in self defense. Collectively punishing Egypt's Christians is common.”

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Tony Barber in FT, "Written in blood".

“An appreciation of how wrenching the war was for France’s political leaders and population must start from the recognition that, from a French point of view, Algeria was no mere colony but an integral part of the nation. From the 1880s its administrative structures were the same as those on the mainland, consisting of departments, prefectures and communes. That Algeria might be lopped off was close to unthinkable, akin to losing a limb. But the notion that Algeria was essentially no different from Brittany or Languedoc was a fiction. The code de l’indigénat (native code) was a ‘uniquely repressive set of laws that applied only to Muslims’, writes Evans. ‘French Algeria was rigidly segregated. Exclusion was a defining principle. Political separation produced physical separation. Europeans, Jews and Muslims inhabited different spaces, co-existing but never truly intermingling. Marriages between these different groups were very rare indeed, and the result was a society that was deeply divided and deeply unequal, defined by hatred, conflict and tension.’ Why did the French settlers never go their own way, forming an independent state like Britain’s 13 American colonies in 1776? Demography supplies the answer.”

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Ambreen Agha at South Asia Intelligence Review, "Karachi: Annus Horribilis".

“On December 12, 2011, the Gadap Town Police in Karachi, the Provincial capital of Sindh, rescued 53 children chained in an underground dungeon at a seminary, the Jamia Masjid Zakaria Kandhelwi Madrassa Arabia, situated in the Afghan Basti in the Sohrab Goth area of Karachi. These children had been chained for 30 days. Unearthing tales of torture, the Police revealed that the chained captives received indoctrination from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan instructors, preparing them to join the outfit’s ‘jihad’ (holy war) on the Afghan front. One of the rescued students stated, ‘We are being made mujahedeen (holy warriors) here. We are being made Taliban here. They say you should get training... we will send you to fight.’ An unnamed Police official told the Press, ‘The rescued students included kids as young as seven years old and 21 teenagers,’ and further revealed that the chained students were beaten and barely fed. This gory incident is only the tip of the iceberg. There are more than 1,935 seminaries in Sindh, of which 1,800 are in Karachi alone.”

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Andrea Wenzel in CSM, "Using Islam to counter jihad in southern Thailand".

“‘It’s not like the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where madrassas are producing militants,’ says Don Pathan, a journalist and security analyst based in Yala. The fight is rooted in an ethno-nationalist narrative about restoring the historically Malay kingdom of Patani, says Mr. Pathan. Militant cells can come from secular origins. For example, a Malay soccer team once became a militant cell. ‘It’s that narrative that you see every day, the minute you walk out of your home and see armed troops walking up and down your street. It radicalizes people,’ he says.”

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Vikas Bajaj in NYT, "Wal-Mart Debate Rages in India".

“If the government eventually lets foreign firms expand beyond wholesaling to open retail stores, Mr. Mahajan said, many of his retail customers would be forced out of business, while squeezing out traders like himself who have long served as the crucial middleman in Indian commerce. ‘We’ll be destroyed,’ Mr. Mahajan said last week, minutes after he and dozens of other traders burned an effigy with a bloated belly and a crudely drawn face, meant to represent multinational marauders. But Indian business is far from united in opposing foreign retailers. Farmers like Avtar Singh Sidhu, who sells potatoes to PepsiCo for its Lays chips and has sold baby corn and other vegetables to Wal-Mart’s local partner, the Indian conglomerate Bharti, argues that foreign retailers will be a boon to India’s struggling agricultural sector. The multinationals, he said, will buy directly from farmers and pay better prices than local wholesalers. Already, he said, PepsiCo is offering 6 rupees per kilo (or 11 cents) for his potatoes, while local traders offer only 3 rupees (6 cents). ‘We need more competition,’ Mr. Sidhu said.”

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David Barboza in NYT, "Entrepreneur’s Rival in China: The State".

“The patents Cathay won prompted Dupont, a leading global producer of nylon, to become one of Cathay’s biggest customers. And the $120 million that Goldman Sachs and other backers have pumped into Cathay in recent years primed investors in China and abroad to eagerly await a public stock offering that had been planned for earlier this year.
They’re still waiting. According to Cathay, a factory manager stole its secrets and started a rival company that has begun selling a suspiciously similar ingredient, undermining Cathay’s profits. Instead of planning to go public, Cathay is now struggling to stay in business. In this counterfeit-friendly nation, employees run off with manufacturing designs almost daily. But according to Cathay, this was copying with a special twist: the new competitor, Hilead Biotech, is backed by the Chinese government.”

***

Michael Wines in NYT, "A Village in Revolt Could Be a Harbinger for China".

“On paper, the Wukan protests never should have happened: China’s village committees should be the most responsive bodies in the nation because they are elected by the villagers themselves. Moreover, the government has built safeguards into the village administration process to ensure that money is properly spent. Village self-administration, as the central government calls it, is seen by many foreigners as China’s democratic laboratory — and while elections can be rigged and otherwise swayed, many political scientists say they are, on balance, a good development. Actually running the villages, however, is another matter. Village committees must provide many of the services offered by governments, such as sanitation and social welfare, but they cannot tax their residents or collect many fees. Any efforts to raise additional money, for things like economic development, usually need approval from the Communist Party-controlled township or county seats above them. In practice, the combination of the villages’ need for cash and their dependence on higher-ups has bred back-scratching and corruption between village officials and their overseers.”

***

Rahul Jacob in FT, "China’s stuttering local land sales programme poses threat to growth".

“Land sales typically account for about 40 per cent of local government revenues which Chinese city and county governments rely on to finance large infrastructure projects. For city governments across China, most of whom are seeing a fall-off in land sales, this will translate into larger debts – and consequently fewer railway stations, airports and even opera houses being built. For the wider Chinese economy, the problem is more serious: China relies on large investment projects to boost and maintain its high gross domestic product growth rate – running at 9.1 per cent in the third quarter. If the trend in land sales continues, China’s GDP growth rate will slow and its banks, which have accepted land as collateral for local government loans, could potentially be saddled with bad debts.”

***

Victor Cha in NYT, "China’s Newest Province?".

“But even as Beijing sticks close to its little Communist brother, there are intense debates within its leadership about whether the North is a strategic liability. It was one thing to back a hermetic but stable regime under Kim Jong-il; it will be harder to underwrite an untested leadership. For Xi Jinping, expected to become China’s president over the next year, the first major foreign policy decision will be whether to shed North Korea or effectively adopt it as a province. All indications are that Beijing will pursue the latter course, in no small part because of a bias among its leadership to support the status quo, rather than to confront dramatic change.”

***

Daniel Tudor in FT, "State and big business decide to foster entrepreneurship".

“That the chaebol have made large contributions to South Korea’s economic development is beyond doubt. However, one unfortunate consequence of their size and diversification has been the discouragement of entrepreneurship and the hindrance of small- and medium-sized business. Because of Korea’s risk-averse culture and the power of the chaebol, the usual choices of bright graduates have been to join the civil service, one of the professions, or a chaebol. Times are changing, however, and the country is experiencing a start-up boom.”

***

James Hookway in WSJ, "Par Value: Vietnamese Investors Sink Savings Into Golf Memberships".

“Prices for club memberships around Hanoi have risen from around $6,000 in 2004 to roughly $30,000 now, with some of the plushest, complete with swimming pools, villas and tennis courts, reaching $130,000. That's not as expensive as top clubs in Japan or Singapore, but it is still a large slice of change in a country where the average income is around $1,200 a year. ‘Buying a membership is better than putting cash in the bank, better than putting it in the stock market, and better than putting it into gold,’ said Do Dinh Thuy, a 48-year-old management consultant, amid the steady thwack of balls being driven out onto a local range here in Hanoi's suburbs. He recently bought a third membership, ‘and that one's not for playing -- it's for investment.’”

***

David Pilling in FT, "Just two cheers for a sputtering Indonesian dream".

“Why is Indonesia growing so slowly? The very question seems absurd. A huge exporter of coal, liquefied natural gas and palm oil, Indonesia’s economy continues to rattle along at 6 per cent. Driven in large part by domestic demand, it is reckoned to be among the most resilient economies to external shock. Its finances look rock solid too. With near-balanced budgets, low inflation and a debt-to-gross domestic product ratio of 25 per cent, it is enough to turn a Greek statistician honest. What is more the future looks brighter still. Of south-east Asian economies, Indonesia is the only one the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development expects to grow faster in the next five years -- at an annual 6.6 per cent -- than it did in the last.”

***

Michael Gardiner at Japantimes.co.jp, "The Scot who shaped Japan".

“Firstly, the British Empire had demanded a typology of race (Brits on top; others in need of civilizing, benevolently or otherwise) that would be drawn on by Meiji conservatives as if it were natural and universal. In due course, this was to amplify Japan's sense of an Imperial civilizing mission, while following the humiliation of World War II it would again resurface to amplify a face-saving myth of Japan's separateness. This conception of race had largely been invented in Edinburgh (the famed medical school's anatomy was key) in the 1840s and '50s, and was typical of a peripheral region that had been humiliated and had lost government power (following failed rebellions in 1715 and '45) and was after new universalizing, rationalist, managerial guidelines — the Scottish Enlightenment — to help them spread into empire. Imported at a very rapid pace in the Meiji Era and, translated into samurai terms, this typology became a principle for the free-market civilizing mission that was the Japanese empire.”

***

Josef Joffe in American Interest, "Declinism’s Fifth Wave".

“The United States now faces its fifth wave of Declinism, that sinking feeling that the country’s best days are over. The first wave rolled across America with the ‘Sputnik Shock’ of 1957, when Little Johnny was said to have fallen behind Little Ivan in the Three Rs. That wave crested in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon. JFK rode all the way to the White House on a non-existent ‘missile gap’ that supposedly presaged America’s demise at the hands of the Soviet Union. The second angst attack came with the quagmire in Vietnam, as the 1960s turned into the 1970s. Cities burned, students revolted: This was America’s ‘suicide attempt’, as one Jeremiah put it. Yet when Richard Nixon ended the draft, the students went back to their libraries, and when the war ended, the ‘dominoes’ did not fall all over Asia. ‘Decline 3.0’ was marked by Jimmy Carter’s ‘malaise’, exploding inflation and the dollar shrinking to half its former size. The theme, all the way into the early 1990s, was Nippon’s Revenge. Having grown at 10 percent per year, Japan would wrest back commercially what it had lost after Pearl Harbor militarily. (Re-read books like Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One, substituting ‘China’ for ‘Japan’, and it is back to the future in 2012 -- for the fourth wave.)”

***

Richard Haas in American Interest, "The Restoration Doctrine".

“The fact is that the benefits of inclusion in a global commons cannot be expected to outweigh parochial aspirations in many respects. There is more than a little irony in my pointing this out, since I developed and introduced the idea of integration a decade ago when I was Director of Policy Planning at the State Department. Why is the idea not gaining more traction? The simple answer, as already suggested, is that most governments are more sensitive to immediate domestic political and economic pressures and interests than they are to medium- and long-term considerations, be they strategic or economic. This goes a long way toward explaining the lack of push behind a new world trade pact. There are also flat-out disagreements. For example, there is no consensus on the limits of sovereignty or on the appropriate times to use military force. Finally, there are differing priorities and differing resource constraints. Integration, still perhaps the most appealing foreign policy compass for the long-term, is an idea whose time has not yet come.”

***

George Packer at Newyorker.com, "Hitchens and Iraq".

“Hitchens took me on a long excursion through his political life, an account of the Education of Christopher Hitchens, with key stops at the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, which had pitted everything he loved against everything he hated, and the first Gulf War in 1991, which he had opposed. He described driving through the refugee camps in Kurdistan at the end of that war, with peshmerga fighters who had a picture of George H.W. Bush taped to their windshield. The thought of America on the side of a liberation movement occurred to Hitchens then, for the first time. It didn’t change his position on the war, but it planted a seed. His monologue continued up until 9/11 and the singular insight that the attacks had given him: the American revolution was “the last one standing” and beat pretty much any conceivable alternative in the oppressed corners of the world. He was saying that he had been wrong, something that Hitchens didn’t do often enough -- wrong not about anything in particular (he defended every specific political choice he’d made), but about the core question of whether America was a force for good or evil in the world.”

 
***

Mark Pagel interview at Edge.org.

“One of the first things to be aware of when talking about social learning is that it plays the same role within our societies, acting on ideas, as natural selection plays within populations of genes. Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those. And so, we see a direct comparison between social learning driving idea evolution, by selecting the best ideas --we copy people that we think are successful, we copy good ideas, and we try to improve upon them -- and natural selection, driving genetic evolution within societies, or within populations. I think this analogy needs to be taken very seriously, because just as natural selection has acted on genetic populations, and sculpted them, we'll see how social learning has acted on human populations and sculpted them.”

***

NYT: "Hope in the Age of Man".

“Some environmentalists see the Anthropocene as a disaster by definition, since they see all human changes as degradation of a pristine Eden. If your definition demands that nature be completely untouched by humans, there is indeed no nature left. But in fact, humans have been changing ecosystems for millenniums. We have learned that ecosystems are not — and have never been — static entities. The notion of a virgin, pristine wilderness was understandable in the days of Captain Cook — but since the emergence of modern ecology and archaeology, it has been systematically dismantled by empirical evidence.”

***

Roger Hodge in London Review of Books on S.C. Gwynne’s book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanche Tribe.

“The Parkers had fought Indians in Illinois, Tennessee and Georgia, and they expected to fight them in Texas as well. They probably didn’t realise, however, that their grant from the Mexican government had placed them deep in Comancheria, the area of the South-West controlled by the Comanches, or that the Mexicans intended to use the rapidly growing colonies of English-speaking settlers from the US (known as Anglos) to create a human shield between the Comanches and their traditional raiding grounds further south. It is unlikely the Parkers would have passed up the free land in any case. They were devout and aggressive Baptists who believed that God had empowered them to make the barbarian deserts bloom. ‘The elect are a wrathful people,’ Elder Daniel Parker said, ‘because they are the natural enemies of the non-elect.’”

***

Steven Mithen in London Review of Books on Chris Stringer’s book, The Origin of Our Species.

“Mysteries remain, and the fossil and archaeological evidence continues to turn up new ones from time to time. Who, for instance, were the Denisovans? This human population has been identified by the analysis of DNA extracted from a 40,000-year-old finger bone and molar tooth found in Denisova Cave in Siberia. The expectation was that the DNA would assign the bones to either Homo sapiens or Homo neanderthalensis, but instead it indicated a completely new human species living in eastern Asia, a derivative from Homo heidelbergensis well over half a million years ago. Even more mysterious, the distinctive Denisovan DNA has been found in a population of living humans: not East Asians, as might have been expected, but Melanesian inhabitants of places such as New Guinea.”

***

Michael Neill in London Review of Books on Louise Noble’s book, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, and Richard Sugg’s book, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians.

“Paradoxically enough, the routine practice of corpse medicine coincided with a period of extreme anxiety about the cannibal indulgences of people outside European civilisation. The literature of voyaging and discovery exhibits an obsessive interest in the anthropophagous customs of New World indigenes, which are held up as proofs of irredeemable barbarity.”

***

James Taranto at WSJ.com, "Selling ‘Diversity’".

“This ‘diversity bureaucracy’ is unquestionably a worthy target of scorn. It is, as Mac Donald suggests, fundamentally parasitic, producing nothing of value to the taxpayers, students and parents who foot the bills. Resources wasted on this nonsense are not spent on actual education -- or, for that matter, on other vital government services or investment in the real economy. But to read Mac Donald's writings on the subject, you'd think the burgeoning diversity bureaucracy was nothing more than a patronage machine or an ideological vanity project. Actually, it is central to the business model of contemporary higher education, and that is why institutions like the University of California prioritize it even at a time of fiscal distress. Mac Donald seems to adhere to the old-fashioned idea that the purpose of a university is education. It's a worthy ideal, and of course learning goes on at universities. But in today's world, education is not the primary business of the higher-ed industry. The main ‘product’ that institutions like UC Davis are selling is credentials -- job-hunting licenses.”

***

Ruth Graham in WSJ on Jean Baker’s book, Margaret Sanger.

“If Sanger had approached the issue as a matter of individual human rights, she would be a heroine today to everyone but the conservative Catholics whose predecessors she battled in her day. (In 1921, the archbishop of New York, a Sanger nemesis, proclaimed birth control a greater evil than abortion: ‘To take life after its inception is a horrible crime; but to prevent human life that the Creator is about to bring into being is satanic.’) But she never seemed to be able to decide whether the main benefit of birth control was freedom or social welfare. And that's where things get sticky for both her legacy and Ms. Baker's defense of it. Eugenics was an enormously popular idea in the early 20th century, supported by everyone from presidents Wilson and Hoover, to leading scientists, to the Supreme Court, which issued an 8-1 ruling in 1927 upholding the involuntary sterilization of institutionalized citizens. Sanger seemed to agree.”

***

Michele Brown at LAreviewofbooks.org on Peggy Drexler’s book, Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Dads and the Changing American Family.

“With respect to muscularization more generally, it is worth recalling a bit of fairly recent history: Congress’s 1972 passage of Title IX, which guaranteed equal funding for girls’ sports in schools. It would be hard to overestimate its importance in the story Drexler attempts to tell. Symbolically and literally, it marked the moment when Victorian models of girlhood gave way to more muscular ones, and eventually to ideals of girl grit and resilience. In other words, culturally speaking, in the 70s and especially the 80s, girls were viewed less and less as delicate flowers or future mothers than as potentially hard-hitting players in public life. It could be argued that it was fathers who were the initial midwife to that transformation — perhaps not consciously, but because of their desire to see their individual daughters triumph. Some of Drexler’s enabling fathers are then part of that group who taught girls to invade personal space, collide, pick themselves up, keep their eye on the ball, and, perhaps most significantly, to score and invest that scoring with significance — not always an easy task, according to some coaches of girls’ sports.”

  
***

David Hart in New Criterion, "America & the angels of Sacre-Coeur".

“There may not be a distinctive American civilization in the fullest sense, but there definitely is a distinctly American Christianity. It is something protean, scattered, fragmentary, and fissile, often either mildly or exorbitantly heretical, and sometimes only vestigially Christian, but it can nevertheless justly be called the American religion—and it is a powerful religion. It is, however, a style of faith remarkably lacking in beautiful material forms or coherent institutional structures, not by accident, but essentially. Its civic inexpressiveness is a consequence not simply of cultural privation, or of frontier simplicity, or of modern utilitarianism, or even of some lingering Puritan reserve towards ecclesial rank and architectural ostentation, but also of a profound and radical resistance to outward forms. It is a religion of the book or of private revelation, of oracular wisdom and foolish rapture, but not one of tradition, hierarchy, or public creeds. Even where it creates intricate institutions of its own, and erects its own large temples, it tends to do so entirely on its own terms: in a void, in a cultural and (ideally) physical desert, at a fantastic remove from all traditional sources of authority, historical ‘validity,’ or good taste (Mormonism is an expression of this tendency at its boldest, most original, and most effervescently vulgar). What America shares with, say, France is the general Western heritage of Christian belief, with all its confessional variations; what it has never had any real part in, however, is Christendom.”

***

Darrin McMahon in NYT on Jonathan Israel’s book, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790.

“Whereas historians in recent years have emphasized how often religion and Enlightenment got along, Israel relegates such cushy coexistence to a ‘Moderate Enlightenment’ that was decidedly second-tier. The great names one learns at school — Voltaire and Rousseau, Newton and Locke, Leibniz and Kant — turn out never to have been willing or able to think themselves through to the new. Israel’s real heroes were hard-nosed atheists, materialists and revolutionaries who brooked no compromise with the status quo. Israel traces the lineage of this Radical Enlightenment to Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who serves here as the father of all atheists and ‘one substance’ materialists who rejected the suspiciously spiritualist dualism of mind and body. Spinoza was certainly a radical critic of Scripture, who denied miracles and seemed to equate ‘God’ with nature. But in Israel’s controversial account, a complete ‘package’ of modern values sprang from Spinoza’s head — fully formed like Athena from Zeus — including equality, democracy and a litany of basic human rights.”

***

Franklin Foer in New Republic on Dwight Macdonald’s collection, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain.

“Macdonald was a first-rate talent scout. At politics, he opened his pages to young writers such as Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, C. Wright Mills, and Daniel Bell, he published essays by little-known European intellectuals such as Camus, Weil, Chiaromonte, and Arendt. Yet his eye for the undiscovered somehow failed to manifest itself in his criticism. Unlike Edmund Wilson or Susan Sontag, Macdonald never had much desire to trumpet the good news about literature or film. He never used his essays to call attention to an obscure novel.”

***

Nate Jackson in LAT, "Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth, creator of Rat Fink: A son remembers".

“But after the decline of hot rod culture in the '70s and '80s, Roth's conversion to Mormonism and family squabbles over the business, Rat Fink and company became less and less ubiquitous until it all seemed to fade away entirely. ‘My dad was always convinced that once the Beatles came to the States, kids kind of lost interest in cars and American culture and started picking up guitars instead,’ said the 51-year-old Roth, who worked for two decades as a manager in an auto parts store and is a reserve policeman for the City of Bell.”

***

Erick Lyle in L.A. Weekly, "Black Flag’s Damaged Changed Punk, and L.A.".

“In late 1981, Black Flag moved their headquarters to an unused office at Unicorn Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. ‘We had a whole top-floor office,’ Cadena says. ‘It had a shower, so that was cool. We slept under the desks.’ (The site where they would make a record that presented a definitive punk vision of dread, paranoia and existential angst now houses a Trader Joe's.) The band launched into their now-legendary daily rehearsal regimen, sometimes practicing up to eight hours a day. ‘Those of us who woke up early slept on the floor of the outer offices,’ says Carducci. ‘The guys who slept in the practice room got no sun and so might sleep till noon. At that point we all slept on the floors in our clothes; the rooms had carpeting, but not shag enough to help make that comfortable, exactly.’ ‘We looked like trolls who lived under the bridge!’ Cadena adds. ‘Greg's dad would get a big bag of random clothes for us from the thrift store and we'd dig through it. Like, 'Oh, I love these polyester pants that don't fit!'’ Rollins chimes in: ‘We ate wherever we could. I ate off people's plates after they had gotten up. I did a lot of that.’”

***

Bob Lee at "Thelosangelesbeat.com", Live Review.

“I didn’t turn around to watch the crowd at the moment ‘Nervous Breakdown’ began but I could feel a wave of energy at my back, and Youtube clips shot from the crowd show the Civic floor erupting into an over-boiling mass of humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band booed so intensely for stopping; Morris diplomatically stepped out to apologize that they hadn’t had time to rehearse anything else.”

***

"The Way Out Lyrics of Meat Puppets II" by Matt Smith-Lahrman.

“Cris suggests here that the mingling of personalities, the joining of perspectives of people from slightly different life experiences, comes together for the Kirkwoods and Derrick in a way that makes Meat Puppets II a unique album, one that mixes together Derrick’s ‘hip’ understanding of punk rock with the Kirkwood’s sense of ‘horror’ and love of classic rock from the ‘sixties and seventies.’ Derrick adds a sociological twist to Cris’s statement about the coming together of personalities in the creation of Meat Puppets II. He suggests that the structural situation of the band members’ lives was a contributing factor to the unique sound of the record. Specifically, he suggests the fact that they didn’t have day jobs and lived in a house already paid for and, therefore, could concentrate on nothing but their art made all the difference in the world for making Meat Puppets II the eclectically pure album that it turned out to be.”

***

Vickie Chang in O.C. Weekly, "Gary Tovar Has His Goldenvoice".

“Chuck Dukowski, founding member and bass player of Black Flag and the man behind the Goldenvoice logo still in use today, says there was one main distinction between Goldenvoice and other promoters at the time: ‘Gary and Goldenvoice were willing to work with us and other new groups coming out of the punk rock underground. When the going got rough, Gary wasn't scared away by police pressure.’ Born in Los Angeles, Tovar was now splitting his time between Santa Barbara and Huntington Beach. He decided to start his venture first in Santa Barbara, comparing it to ‘practicing in the minor leagues before I came into the majors.’ Goldenvoice's first show featured T.S.O.L., Shattered Faith and Rhino 39 at La Casa de la Raza on Dec. 4, 1981.”

***

Alice Bag audio interview by Matt Smith-Lahrman at Newbooksinpopmusic.com.

***

Nicholas Pell in L.A. Weekly, "Tons of Punk Videos Were Yanked Off Youtube: Here’s What Happened".

“On Wednesday morning, several punk bands awoke to find their videos had been removed from YouTube. They were understandably irritated; that's almost worse than running out of beer. In their places were notes that they'd been yanked due to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints lodged by SST Records -- the legendary label founded by Black Flag's Greg Ginn, formerly based in Los Angeles but now in Austin. The allegation? That these videos were using unauthorized SST music. But that was not so.”

***

Duff McKagan interview at Thenervousbreakdown.com.

“Interestingly, instead of discussing Axl’s behavior, you focus more on the fact that you never called him out for that. You never confronted him, and you take accountability in that sense. But do you think that he would have been receptive to that if anyone had said something to him at that point?

I don’t know. You raise the point of my self-discovery of my role, but the other part (how Axl might have reacted) is a whole separate study. But this is also a book written by the guy now -- I’m writing this book and I’m sure as I can be of myself today. I couldn’t say that when I was twenty-seven. Saying ‘I’m a bad ass motherfucker!’ isn’t being sure of yourself, that’s just being full of yourself. So I know that if I were the guy I am now back then, I would’ve said, ‘Okay guys, alright -- let’s everybody just stop. Stop.’ I would have said to the management, ‘Stop -- don’t book us another gig. We need to come off the road and we need to step back and examine this whole thing. The band needs some time away from all this stuff so we can figure our shit out.’ Because we were really close dudes, and now we’re all separate. Or I might’ve also said, okay -- like Izzy did -- if you can’t stop it, I’m out. So it’s really a study of my own self. I didn’t stand up when I should have. I didn’t rise to the occasion. I did rise to a lot of occasions, but I didn’t rise to as many as I think I did.”

***

James Fotopoulos in NYC:

•Jan 5 - Anthology - premieres Chimera, Thick Comb, Untitled (Thanks. Get In…)
•Jan 6 - Anthology - Alice in Wonderland
•Jan 7 - Microscope Gallery: Drawings and Videos 

Fantasma.

***

Target Video 77: cal punk and performance
Annie Wharton Los Angeles

“The TargetVideo77 show at the Annie Wharton gallery is up through Jan. 13th. Hope you get a chance to view the two single channel video installations, one of which is pure Black Flag. There are also large format prints selected from the videos on exhibit (and for sale.)”

***

LATmag: 50 78rpm picture disks.

***

David Brauner at Minneapolis Post, "Boogaard’s brain: How the New York Times got that story".

“Though the story eventually included a photographer, a videographer, two multi-media producers and a graphic artist, Branch says his editor’s original instruction was, ‘Why not spend a month or two getting to know as much as possible about Derek Boogaard?
At least in terms of time, That’s probably the greatest thing a reporter will ever hear.’
The story grew as ‘we realized all these potentially uncovered and interesting tangents — hockey enforcers, youth hockey in Canada, fighting in the NHL,’ Branch explains. ‘In all of our coverage, we’d do a single story, but [we asked] what if we stepped back and tried to explain an entire life?’”

***

Obituaries of the Month

• Bob Hare (1931-2011)

“There was money to be made in serving coffee at 50 cents to $1 per cup, he told The Times in 1959 when his coffeehouse was reported to be one of only two in the South Bay. He had borrowed $2,000 to open the Insomniac on Pier Avenue and grossed more than $100,000 the first year, according to a 1960 Times article. As the Insomniac expanded to include a bookstore, art gallery, and book and record departments, Hare billed it as ‘America's First Supermarket of Culture.’ One night in 1962, he advertised a bill that included blues singer Brownie McGhee and harmonica player Sonny Terry; Mel Carter and the Gospel All-Stars; and ‘a new folk trio,’ the Landsmen.”

  

• Jacob Goldman (1921-2011)

“In the late 1960s, Xerox, then the dominant manufacturer of office copiers, was searching for ways to move into new markets when he proposed an open-ended research laboratory to explore what C. Peter McColough, chief executive at the time, called ‘the architecture of information.’ Computer systems were still not available in offices at that time, and little was known about the shape of what would come to be called ‘the office of the future.’ Xerox had recently acquired Scientific Data Systems, a California computer maker, to compete with I.B.M. in the data-processing market. At the time, however, computers were largely centralized systems that were not interactive. The minicomputer market was just being pioneered by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Xerox did not initially have a grand strategy for entering the computing business, only an inkling that the data processing world was both an opportunity and a potential threat.”

• Park Tae-joon (1927-2011)

“Mr. Park was a young colonel in 1961 when he participated in the military coup that put a general named Park Chung-hee in power. Just four days after the coup, Gen. Park, who was no relation, tapped Mr. Park as his general secretary. Over the next few years he built a reputation as an economic problem-solver for Gen. Park, who named himself president in 1963 and held power until 1979. No steel mill was built in the early years of President Park’s government. So the president asked his former aide, Mr. Park -- who at the time was running a state-owned tungsten firm -- to visit Pittsburgh, the capital of the U.S. steel industry, and return with ideas for building a steel mill in South Korea.”

• Jim Rathmann (1928-2011)

“Royal Richard Rathmann was born outside Los Angeles in Alhambra, Calif., on July 16, 1928, and was called Dick. He earned renown in Southern California drag-racing circles, receiving 48 traffic tickets before he was 18 — four during one lunch break. He moved to Chicago to race hot rods, then stock cars.When he was ruled too young to compete in a stock car race in Iowa in the 1940s, his older brother, James, traded driver’s licenses with him. (James was not competing in the race.) From then on, Dick Rathmann was Jim; Jim Rathmann, Dick. The older brother was also a superb driver: he won 13 times on the Nascar circuit and claimed the pole position in the 1958 Indianapolis 500. Jim Rathmann made his Indianapolis debut in 1949 at 20, claiming to be 24. He finished second in 1952, 1957 and 1959. Had he finished second again, he would have had the most runner-up finishes. Rathmann parlayed his driving success into a thriving Chevrolet-Cadillac dealership in Melbourne, Fla., where he worked with General Motors to enable astronauts to lease cars at virtually no cost. A Corvette once owned by the astronaut Alan Shepard is now displayed in the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum beside a sign that says it came from Rathmann.”

***

Thanks to Jay Babcock, Andy Schwartz, Steve Beeho, Elise Thompson, Chris Woods, Andy Schwartz.

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• The New Vulgate
• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
• Copyright retained by the writer, artist, or photographer

Issue #126 (November 30, 2011)

2011-12-21T14:56:00.000-08:00

Naperville, IL

Photo by Joe Carducci

Lesser Chicagoland
by Joe Carducci

It was interesting to be back in Naperville for a couple weeks. It’s not Chicago but the media is Chicago. It isn’t small-town old Naperville anymore either, so now its doings make the city papers and newscasts regularly, and I see no ex-classmates when visiting, though last time back I did see my cousin who was visiting from Phoenix and met her son who plays in a Norwegian black metal band.

I only went into the city once to see a terrible little movie about an aging small-timer played by Dennis Farina. He’s always fine but having nothing to work with I was struck by the fact of his participation, not to mention Steppenwolf Theater’s, Tribeca Films’ and the rave review it got in the Sun-Times by Roger Ebert. Maybe he gives everything at the Gene Siskel Theater a rave, I’m not sure, but judging all that plus the sellout crowd of actual Chicagoans its clear the Big Town is fully trapped in the aspic of its own self-image, imagined as what others think of the place. The not-New York-or-L.A. but neither one of those other lesser NFL franchisees. Watching the film I kept thinking how Bullet on a Wire was ten times better a dime to the dollar. (One of our actors, Rex Benson, died a month ago, the obit ran two NVs back.)

We weren’t in the city long because my sister drives like she’s still in Beijing. Her husband drove back so that he could be certain we hit Johnnie’s Italian Beef in Elmwood Park or maybe Forest Park or Oak Park. Well worth the detour.

I look at the Tribune and Sun-Times websites when in Wyoming but getting the papers in hand for two weeks gives one a better sense of where they are in their individual glide paths to Pulitzer’s heaven. The Trib is not well and so much national and international news is credited “from Tribune papers,” or “from Tribune wires,” that you wonder whether they have any bureaus anywhere. And the Sun-Times seems to exist on the fumes of Colonel McCormick hatred, which come to think of it powers the Trib too. I pick both up at a Starbucks along with the New York Times (WSJ and FT come to my parents’ house). I was telling an ex-neighbor of ours that it seems as if there are just five bylines that keep the Sun-Times a real newspaper; they are good ones though. I left him the Weekend section with Dave Hoekstra’s Chaka Khan feature which I linked to last week; it was full of local band names from the soul-rock scene circa 1970 (Baby Huey & the Babysitters, Rotary Connection…) that had minor if not purely local hits. Hoekstra’s one of those bylines; my friend knows him and says he lives in Naperville.

There’s plenty of interesting local news and Illinois competes with California and New York for pride of place in the Greek sweepstakes. Illinois is the odds-on favorite unless New York really decides to leave its gas in the ground unfracked. For human interest the papers and newscasts got to set aside politics to observe the death of Maggie Daley. Her cancer being the reason the mayor didn’t run for a seventh term. I will always remember Mrs Daley the younger for her ill-advised beautification campaign which seemed obsessed for quite awhile on tearing down newsdealer sheds throughout the city. She brought the entire weight of the machine down on the poor guy who’d just paid alot in 1984 for the 70 year-old world-class news-shed that stood on the sidewalk north of the old central library, now the Cultural Center. Dude had no contract, the sheds had been a feature of Chicago streets by custom since the old newspaper wars between the Colonel’s Tribune, the Sun, the Times, and all the rest they buried. That beautification drive which included cow statues, and the unauthorized nighttime wrecking of Meigs Field’s runways probably was the younger Daleys managing to drop Chicago from the world-class category by forgetting who they were, what the city was. On behalf of the long-beautified Tribune and Sun-Times who made little complaint, and the old ghosts of the Colonel’s era who couldn’t, we at the New Vulgate break the spell and wish Maggie several uncomfortably warm years in Purgatory on her way to whatever Irish pols have turned Heaven into.

Daley leveraged last minute privatizations for all they were worth to get out of office without the door hitting his ass. Rahm Emanuel is going to have to pull a number of rabbits out of a hat he’s going to have to use as a pot to piss in. I left the city fifteen years ago largely because of the end of parking due to neighborhood permits, night baseball at Wrigley, and quick-timed parking meters. I took those unjust tickets as permission to carry in the car a small ballpeen hammer and plastic bags I could tape around suddenly broken meters. Being half-Italian I thought it best I get out of town before fantasy became reality became nightmare. Now it sounds like the city will go after cars again, as well as property owners, businesses, cabs, retail, tourists, conventions, etc., for another round in an effort to squirm out of right-sizing a city governance. The civic corruption is much cleaner now; in fact its simply baked into the “tight” budgets that since 1970 have risen while the city lost one million in population.

Like the newspaper shed owner, the family that owned McCuddy’s Tavern which sat across the street from old Comiskey Park got the shaft. They even had the full faith and promise of the state of Illinois:

“The tavern stood as a well-known companion to Comiskey Park for eight decades at 245 W. 35th St. When it was demolished in 1988 to make way for new Comiskey Park, the Senese family said the Illinois Sports Facility Authority and Gov. James Thompson promised that they’d be able to rebuild in three years, across from the new stadium, now U.S. Cellular Field…. But a judge ruled in 1991 that the Seneses did not secure an enforceable contract and that the authority did not have to honor the agreement.” (CT)

Perhaps the Daleys no longer drink.

The former capitol of working class America is now the largest tourist trap in America (Chicago Blues! Lollapalooza! Taste of Chicago! Theater! Cuisine!). The statistics were assembled by Thomas Hargrove in the Sun-Times, “The Lost Decade: Cook County.” The county had the second largest drop in manufacturing jobs in the first decade of the 21st century.

“Among the bigger-name casualties: a Motorola plant in Harvard in 2003; a Jays’ Potato chip plant on the South Side in 2007; a Brach’s Candy factory on the West Side in 2003; Replogle Globes announced it was closing its plant in Broadview 2010; Wrigley shuttered its South Ashland plant in 2006.” (CST)

The piece claims that “Illinois manufacturers still employ about 600,000 people and account for 13 percent of the state’s economic output…” slightly less than Michigan, though Illinois is up slightly and Michigan is plummeting. However, there is as of yet no reported farming on vacant stretches of reclaimed Chicago.

In the Tribune Ray Long has a piece called “Union lobbyist’s children scored scholarships” which spells out how the politics of Illinois costs the public:

“A Tribune/WGN-TV investigation disclosed last month how a 2007 law allowed (Steven) Preckwinkle and fellow lobbyist David Piccioli to sub one day in a public school and line up their teacher pensions for life.” (CT)

Preckwinkle also got tuition waivers at ISU for two of his children and a nephew. It pays to be an insider, here the political director of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. These public service unions need a paint job bad. Even if they fend off cuts to their pensions and privileges this time there’s really no future in driving these states off a cliff. They only succeeded to date because WWII destroyed the rest of the world’s manufacturing capacity. Conditions have changed.

Whatever Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s playbook proves to be, there’s no question of Governor Pat Quinn’s reformer bona-fides, he’s like a less colorful Jerry Brown who never got bored with the dullest political questions regarding utilities rates. There’s only a question of his comprehension of the nature of the crisis. He only stepped up into office when former Gov. Rod Blagojevich managed to get caught being colorful. That scandal keeps giving too. Natasha Korecki in the Sun-Times has the story of Tony Rezko’s sentencing, “'Great Fall’ of Rezko”:

“‘Just looking at you physically is evidence of the great fall that you have had,’ U.S. District Judge Amy St. Eve told Rezko. At that, the pallid Rezko flushed, his eyes welling up. But the one-time top fund-raiser to Rod Blagojevich and former friend of Barack Obama remained steady even as St. Eve handed down a 10 ½ year sentence for corruption, describing Rezko’s actions during the former governor’s tenure as ‘selfish and corrupt…. This sentence must send a message that enough is enough.’” (CST)

John Kass underlines the outline of Rezko’s case in his column, “Up the ladder and down the chutes of Chicago Way”. He describes Rezko and his family at the sentencing,

“His two stone-faced sons would sit quietly, their black eyes deep-set, young hawks angry and wounded. I could see their father in them. Watching the boys I thought about what Rezko must have been like years ago, at 19, coming out of Syria hungry and broke, with nothing but ambition. It didn’t take him long in Chicago to see how things were done, how crooked politics are here, played as politics are played in the Middle East and everywhere else. Everywhere, that is, but in those embarrassing Obama creation myths spun by myth masters from Chicago’s City Hall, all about hope and change and Barack transcending the broken politics of the past. Rezko was of the old broken politics, which is the same as the new, hopeful politics.” (CT)

Rezko appeared to hurry his own imprisonment and was never called during the Blago trial, apparently to help clear the air for his neighbor, the President of the United States, but its hard to imagine him receiving a pardon from on high.

Another surprise is reported in the Trib by Katherine Skiba, “House Ethics Committee says it will continue investigating Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.”

I had thought Blagojevich’s attempted sale of Barack Obama’s Illinois Senate seat a notional crime to an immaculate customer. But apparently the Jackson family’s eagerness to commence raising the purchase money seemed to confirm the worst too loudly. I predict both Jesses will walk, though since they are giving off the whiff of cash the Congressional Ethics Committee may be hard pressed to turn down the offer by fining them.

The Tribune’s editorials have improved in these crisis years of late, though they are still written by Bruce Dold I think. They are also laid out in a more assertive way, though that is difficult to pull off given just how narrow a narrow-sheet the former broadsheet is today. (Come to think of it, I didn’t see the tabloid edition of the Trib during weekdays this time distributed through Starbucks, and they only intermittently had a stack of the RedEye edition on weekdays.) Here the Tribune hails progress in Illinois budgetary matters to its dubious readership, “Government success stories. In Illinois. Really.”

The sub-head: “With their 2012 budgets, Emanuel and Preckwinkle are forcing efficiencies and representing taxpayers. Imagine that.” (This Preckwinkle is Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, a well thought of black female reform pol who uncannily, is not a Stroger.)

The city, county and state are less dependent on the CBOT and Merc exchanges than New York city county and state are on Wall Street, but revenues are down and that ain’t good. David Roeder in his Sun-Times piece, “CME’s reputation gets a stress test,” recounts how the markets entered into new vulnerabilities in this decadent phase:

“The markets that make up CME Group created financial futures here in the 19th century as a service to agriculture, which needed certainty and a centralized information source for prices…. The Merc was the first exchange to ‘go public’ and issue stock in itself so it could better compete as technology was remaking the business. It absorbed the Chicago Board of Trade a few years later. Traders who used to own the joints sold out for their benefit, or kept shares and watched them rise more until the financial crisis undercut stocks. But they were no longer in charge. Shareholders and heavy users of the markets, the big investment banks, were in control” (CST)

Commodities keep the Chicago exchanges grounded compared to how their tools were adapted to other purely financial uses in the New York and London markets. Still the Mayor and Governor are looking at those revenues and the cost of doing business will go up.

In lighter news while I was reading the Chicago papers, Scott Tyler was remembered for his Flag stunt back in the 1980s at the School of the Art Institute. He wasn't in Repulse Kava but “Dread Scott” was a classmate of Bill and John's at SAIC and when he lost interest in music donated his equipment which the new guy, Craig White, also a black kid but much poorer, got to use. Don’t know what Craig is doing now but he was a favorite guitarist.

Howard Reich does a pretty extensive review of the blues in Chicago today, “Playing the blues in black and white”:

“Two nights later at the Water Hole, a long-running bar on the West Side, the band out-numbered the audience. Septuagenarian blues belter Mary Lane sang for all she was worth, but not more than 15 people, if that, wandered into the place all evening. ‘It’s been steady going downhill,’ Lane said after. ‘I always had a crowd. I ain’t never had no six or seven people.’”

In the Sun-Times novelist Harry Mark Petrakis remembered an old job, “Laboring in the shadows of the ice men”, though I couldn’t find a link to it:

“For the following year, four nights a week, I became familiar with a network of transcontinental transport. Day and night, long trains of freight cars moved east from the Pacific Coast and north from Florida carrying vegetables, oranges, grapefruit and peaches. From the heartland of the country, trains carried bacon, ham and sausage processed at huge packing plants. All this transport required icing to keep down spoilage. For decades, ice cars called ‘reefers’ provided that cooling. Bunkers holding the ice were built into each end of the reefer. Salt was added to hasten the ice melting and lower the car’s temperature. A reefer required as much as 10,000 pounds of ice to fill its bunkers, while a transcontinental trip required that a train make half a dozen stops in railroad yards of different cities to be re-iced.”

I probably won’t get back to Illinois until the spring.

Drawing by James Fotopoulos

From the desk of Joe Carducci…

Matthew Kaminski interviews Fred Siegel in WSJ, "‘The New Tammany Hall’".

“One can appreciate why the ‘we are the 99%’ militants might resist Mr. Siegel's logic. He links the liberalism of the 1960s, not any excess of the free market, to today's crisis. The Great Society put the state on growth hormones. Less widely appreciated, the era gave birth to a powerful new political force, the public-sector union. For the first time in American history there was an interest dedicated wholly to lobbying for a larger government and the taxes and debt to pay for it. A former editor of the left-leaning Dissent magazine, Mr. Siegel has written several well-received books on New York, including the 1997 ‘The Future Once Happened Here.’ He calls his hometown ‘the model for cross subsidies’ in America. ‘Wall Street makes money off the bonds that have to be floated to pay the public sector workers in New York.’ Thanks to union clout, he notes, salaries and benefits for teachers, bus drivers and city secretaries have outgained the private sector during this sluggish economy.”

***

Robert Costrell in WSJ, "Collective Bargaining Weakens Cities".

“In the heated debates over government collective bargaining, a simple fact is often lost: Benefits for teachers and municipal workers are often more expensive than they are for state employees, let alone for workers in private business. The disparity between runaway local costs and more restrained state benefits is the key rationale -- often misunderstood -- for the efforts of Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Ohio and other states to limit local collective bargaining over benefits.”

***

WSJ: "A Democrat Bites Union Story".

“The Ocean State has been running a $7 billion unfunded pension liability, one of the largest per capita in the nation, and its annual pension bill was expected to double next year to $600 million. While public unions wanted to keep partying like it's 1995 -- when its pension liability was $1 billion -- the state's left-leaning independent Governor Lincoln Chafee and Democratic treasurer Gina Raimondo took a more sober view.”

***

Richard Teitelbaum at Bloomberg, "How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word".

“After a perfunctory discussion of the market turmoil, the fund manager says, the discussion turned to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Paulson said he had erred by not punishing Bear Stearns shareholders more severely. The secretary, then 62, went on to describe a possible scenario for placing Fannie and Freddie into ‘conservatorship’ -- a government seizure designed to allow the firms to continue operations despite heavy losses in the mortgage markets. Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So too would the various classes of preferred stock, he said. The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information -- to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.”

***

Futureofcapitalism.com: "Paulson’s Meeting".

“The Bloomberg Markets scoop about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's meeting with money managers at which he disclosed to them his plans to seize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he was telling the public something else is attracting a bit of attention elsewhere. Ben Smith has a post at Politico pointing out that a lot of those at the meeting are Democratic political donors. And Jesse Eisinger has a post at ProPublica calling for a congressional inquiry to get to the bottom of whether any of those at the meeting made money by shorting Fannie or Freddie after the tip from Secretary Paulson. But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC have held back from the full-scale pile-on or swarm that you sometimes see on a big or not-so-big story like, say, Governor Perry's memory lapse. Maybe it's because Henry Paulson is out of office. Or maybe the other news organizations don't want to give Bloomberg Markets credit for the scoop that Bloomberg Markets developed out of envy or out of a desire not to call attention to the fact that they didn't develop the news on their own.”

***

Edward Glaeser at Bloomberg, "Protesters Ignore American Love of Entrepreneurs".

“The dominance of the European aristocracy provided the old European left with convenient villains, people whose great wealth and power were guaranteed by birth and who seemed to do little to justify their luxuries. By contrast, Carnegie and Jobs earned their billions with ingenuity and effort. The recent biography of Jobs by Walter Isaacson reminds us that he was no saint, but he certainly provided plenty of joy in return for his billions. Every American playing ‘Angry Birds’ on an iPhone or downloading Lady Gaga on an iPod or watching Pixar’s ‘Toy Story 3’ on an iPad owes something to Jobs. To most of us, he’s far more hero than villain. My Harvard colleague Elizabeth Warren, who is running for a Massachusetts Senate seat, recently reminded us that ‘there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own.’ I espoused similar ideas in my book ‘Triumph of the City,’ when I discussed the magic that occurs when people learn from one another in urban clusters. Jobs’ own success was built on collaboration with Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and John Lasseter. But the collaborative nature of creativity only makes innovation more delicate and unpredictable and more likely to be damaged by an overly aggressive federal government.”

***

James Grant in WSJ on H.W. Brands’ book, Greenback Planet.

“Worse than Mr. Brands's sin of omission, however, is this sin of commission: His assertions that there is something new under the monetary sun. Actually, with the exception of the automatic-teller machine, we've seen it all before. Inflation is as old as the first coin clipped for a bit of valuable metal, and the first bad loan no doubt followed hard on the founding of the first bank. The author writes that Lincoln, by detaching the dollar from its golden anchor, ‘made possible innovations in finance unimagined by previous generations.’ But John Law, the 18th-century Scottish economist who served as finance minister for Louis XV in France, not only imagined this particular innovation but also implemented it for the king -- with disastrously inflationary results. ‘Stubborn tradition’ is Mr. Brands's explanation for the persistence of mankind's adherence to currencies backed by something other than the good intentions of the governments that print them. If so, humanity is stubborn for cause. The invariable rule on paper currencies, as the author does not quite right come out and say, is that they lose their value. Will the dollar prove an exception? The rising price of gold suggests that many doubt it.”

***

Ira Stoll at nysun.com, "Owners of New York Times Used Tax Loopholes the Paper Scored Ambassador Lauder for Using".

“The game the Times and its reporter, David Kocieniewski, are up to is clear at the start of the article, with this false dichotomy: “A handful of billionaires like Warren E. Buffett and Bill Gates have joined Democrats in calling for an elimination of the breaks, saying that the current system adds to the budget deficit, contributes to the widening income gap between the richest and the rest of society, and shifts the tax burden onto small businesses and the middle class. Republicans have resisted, saying the tax increases on the wealthy would harm the economy and cost jobs. This is just flat out-false, in at least third ways. First, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have not called for eliminating the charitable tax break. In fact, they are using the tax break to avoid paying taxes on tens of billions of dollars more than Ronald Lauder has through his charitable activities, which, while vast, are themselves dwarfed by the assets of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, funded by Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett. Second, if anyone has been calling for the elimination or reduction of special tax breaks in favor of a flatter, simpler system, it’s not been Democrats, but Republicans like Rick Perry, Steve Forbes, and Herman Cain. And third, eliminating the special breaks doesn’t necessary require ‘tax increases on the wealthy’ — one could have revenue-neutral tax reform that lowers rates for everyone while broadening the base.”

***

Laim Pleven & Russell Gold in WSJ, "U.S. Nears Milestone: Net Fuel Exporter".

“The U.S. was a net exporter of petroleum products in six of the first nine months this year, and the trend accelerated in the third quarter, with September data released Tuesday showing net exports of 919,000 barrels per day, more than any month this year. That indicates to observers that this year will be the U.S.’s first as a net exporter since 1949, when the U.S. economy was ramping up rapidly after World War II.”

***

Christopher Hitchens in CST, "GOP ‘loyalty oath’: USA is best".

“Long-term ideas of ‘destiny’ are not easily assimilated to shorter-term glooms about the loss of American power and prestige. It’s a strange fact, but in the present political season it is the American right that seems to harbor the most skepticism about American power. I personally find this odd: Yet again the United States has managed to get itself largely on the right side of a massive historical shift — the Arab Spring. And yet, most of the remarks made by seekers of the Republican nomination have been sour or grudging.

I remember Bernard-Henri Levy saying, in the early stages of the Iraq war that he opposed, that America had been essentially in the right about combating fascism and Nazism, and essentially right about opposing and outlasting the various forms of Communism, and that all else was pretty much commentary. Something of the sort seems to apply in the present case, both in recent developments in Burma and Vietnam as well as in Libya and Syria. The crowds have a tendency to be glad that there is an American superpower, if only to balance the cynical powers of Moscow and Beijing. Perhaps if it were not for President Obama being in the White House, our right wing would be quicker to see and appreciate this point.”

***

Neil King in WSJ, "Antsy Voters Look for a Third Way".

“Ross Perot, who won nearly one in five votes in 1992 to become the most successful independent candidate in modern presidential politics, ran at a moment when 39% of Americans said they were dissatisfied with how the nation was being governed. Today, Gallup reports, 81% say they are dissatisfied. Pollsters and politicians of both parties say those and slate of similar findings show that voters have become unusually open to an independent presidential run next year.”

***

Yan Xuetong in NYT, "How China Can Defeat America".

“But realism does not mean that politicians should be concerned only with military and economic might. In fact, morality can play a key role in shaping international competition between political powers — and separating the winners from the losers. I came to this conclusion from studying ancient Chinese political theorists like Guanzi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius. They were writing in the pre-Qin period, before China was unified as an empire more than 2,000 years ago — a world in which small countries were competing ruthlessly for territorial advantage. It was perhaps the greatest period for Chinese thought, and several schools competed for ideological supremacy and political influence. They converged on one crucial insight: The key to international influence was political power, and the central attribute of political power was morally informed leadership. Rulers who acted in accordance with moral norms whenever possible tended to win the race for leadership over the long term.”

***

Wei Gu at Reuters, "China’s Little Greeces".

“China can’t afford to be smug about the euro zone’s woes. Although the nation’s total debt comes to no more than 44 percent of GDP, China has some overextended regions of its own - Little Greeces. Hainan province, for example, has amassed debt close to 100 percent GDP. The new policy of allowing local governments to issue their own bonds may make the problem worse. High debt levels threaten to choke a fifth of Chinese cities, as a quarter of the $1.7 trillion local government debt matures in 2011. According to the National Audit Office, as many as 78 Chinese cities have debt to GDP ratios of more than 100 percent.”

***

Jamil Anderlini in FT, "China in crackdown on rogue exchanges".

“Apart from the country’s two main stock exchanges, three commodities exchanges and one financial futures exchange, no other entity is allowed to list new shares, offer centralized pricing or make markets, and no more than 200 investors may hold stakes in a single traded asset, the notice said…. Although there is no official estimate for the number of unregulated exchanges or the volume of trading conducted through them, Chinese analysts say there are well over 300, up from a handful five years ago.”

***

Andrew Rettman at EUobserver.com, "Tibet leader to EU: Do not believe the myth of Chinese supremacy".

“Asked if he is concerned the EU is going soft on values for the sake of strategic relations, Sangay said EU politicians should not believe the narrative that China is becoming an economic superpower. He pointed to studies which say the Indian model of organic growth, next to China's model of foreign capital and state-run firms, will see India move ahead of China in the coming years: ‘As long as a process is democratic and based on rule of law, rather than top-down, there is more chance of its being fair and sustainable. Because of censorship, we do not see the damage [the Chinese government] is doing. We don't understand the ramifications of the economic and political decisions made by the leadership.’ Lack of proper oversight on dams built on rivers such as the Brahmaputra and the Mekong could cause environmental chaos in future, he warned. Political persecution and mass-scale mineral exploitation in Tibet is also causing ‘a scar on the psyche of the people’ that could end in upheaval, he added: ‘I am not predicting anything, but the Arab Spring also came out of nowhere.’ He noted that Chinese statisticians have been caught lying on GDP growth: ‘The Chinese economy might seem to be booming. But what is really happening on the ground is difficult to asses ... Reports say they are spending $1.4 trillion on an internal stimulus package. But at the same time, China is also spending more on internal security than on external security.’”

***

Austin Bay in Weekly Standard, "Restitching the Subcontinent".

“In retrospect, splitting British India into East and West Pakistan and India may have been one of the 20th century’s greatest geostrategic errors. I got a hint of this in the 1970s when I was injured at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and befriended by two Pakistani officers attending an advanced military course. My leg-length cast made walking to the mess hall a pain, so the Pakistani major and lieutenant-colonel took turns chauffeuring me in their car. One evening, in slow traffic, the major and I passed an Indian Army colonel standing on the sidewalk. The major cracked his window, yelled, and waved. The Indian colonel smiled, raised his left hand, and wiggled his fingers. The major glanced at me and with a soft chuckle said, ‘That man -- he is my enemy.’ Despite their recent war, I knew better. On at least two occasions the Indian colonel had dropped by our bachelor officers’ quarters to watch television with the Pakistanis.”

***

Charles Levinson & Tamer El-Ghobashy in WSJ, "Key Clans Seen Keeping a Grip on Egypt".

“At sunset, on the eve of Monday’s vote, a group of local farmers sat sucking on a water pipe on the roadside near Tomiya. Asked what they thought of their local candidates, they named the Muslim Brotherhood candidates and, like everyone here, candidate Yussuf Abu Talab, whose father and grandfather have represented the district in parliament for as long as anyone can remember. ‘Abu Talab’s father was very powerful, anything you needed, he would give you,’ said one of the farmers, Taha Abu Shaaban. ‘He was in the ruling party, but the people loved him.’ As for the young upstarts in Tahrir, Mr. Abu Shaaban said there was one guy from the Revolutionary Youth Coalition running in the area. ‘But I can’t remember his name,’ he said. ‘There are so many new candidates and parties here.’”

***

Borzou Daragahi & Heba Saleh in FT, "Egypt’s youth rages against old order".

“Young Egyptians at the leading edge of the January revolution watched for 10 months as grey-haired politicians and generals wrangled fruitlessly over the country’s future. Now they have returned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square in full force against both the armed forces that have stifled change and the political elite -- including opposition parties -- that appeared all too willing to collaborate with them.”

***

FT: "Iraq’s rich pickings entice bankers".

“The number of bombings and attacks has fallen sharply from the peak in 2006-2007, but Iraq still seethes with barely contained sectarian tensions and intermittent bouts of violence. That is not deterring investment bankers hungry for potentially lucrative mandates. Over the past year a trickle of visits from intrepid bankers has turned into a steady stream of senior executives from some of the world’s largest financial institutions.”

***

Ann Marlowe in Weekly Standard, "Pop Goes Libya".

“The sound was both familiar -- Amazigh music uses half tones, like European classical music, rather than Arab music’s quarter tones -- and hard to pin down. There are suggestions of Spanish and Cuban music, which makes sense given Libya’s proximity to the former Muslim kingdoms of Al Andalus and to Niger, Mali, Sudan, and other points of origin for Afro-American music. The bundeer, of course, is African. And while this music sounds as though it were the fruit of a long tradition, it is not. The guitar arrived in Zuwarah only in the 1970s, as part of a North African Amazigh cultural awakening -- ‘Berber’ is the term outsiders use -- and all of Zuwarah’s young players are self-taught. While Amazigh have always sung at weddings, the first modern song written in the Tamazight language dates only to 1975, when “My City” was sung. When he heard ‘My City,’ the poet Mahrouq wrote ‘Amousnaw’ and gave it to his disciple Naggiar to sing. Neither song was recorded at the time.”

***

Jeffrey Gettleman in NYT, "African Force Makes Strides Inside Somalia".

“The Shabab have been terrorizing Somalia for years, imposing a harsh and alien form of Islam, chopping off heads and unleashing suicide bombers, including Somali-Americans recruited from Minnesota. But the African Union has dealt the Shabab a crippling blow in Mogadishu, which is what may have encouraged Kenyan and Ethiopian forces to recently invade separate parts of Somalia in an unusual regional effort to spread the Shabab thin on several fronts and methodically eliminate them. But the Shabab are hardly giving up. Young, messianic insurgents are viciously resisting the African Union troops, sometimes fighting hand to hand, with both sides suffering heavy losses. African Union officials, who have been reluctant to disclose casualties and in the past even provided apparently false accounting of the numbers, revealed that more than 500 soldiers had been killed in Somalia, making this peacekeeping mission one of the bloodiest of recent times.”

***

Patrick McGroarty in WSJ, "Africa’s Goal: Europe Without the Currency".

“Europe's crisis has created a world of common-market skeptics. Except in Africa.
Although the euro zone is convulsing from debt contagion brought on by the profligacy of its weakest members, several regional trading blocs in Africa are pushing for closer integration among countries big and small. For decades, African technocrats have admired Europe's common market, where open borders and the right to work in any member country are seen as the kind of steps that would boost trade in Africa as well. Those steps are also seen as lowering barriers that now deter investors, allowing smaller African states to thrive.”

***

Kerin Hope in FT, "Athens statistics agency chief accused".

“‘I am being prosecuted for not cooking the books,’ Mr Georgiou told the Financial Times. ‘We would like to be a good, boring institution doing its job. Unfortunately, in Greece statistics is a combat sport.’ The accusations against him come as eurozone finance ministers prepare to decide on Tuesday whether to release a delayed 8bn ($10.6bn) loan tranche to Athens, needed to pay public sector salaries and pension next month. Mr Georgiou is due to appear before Greece’s prosecutor for financial crime on December 12. If convicted of ‘betraying the country’s interests’, he could face life imprisonment.”

 

***

Edward Rothstein in NYT, "French Museums Atone For a Colonial History".

“Could two museums be more different? Both were unveiled during the last decade (the Quai Branly in 2006, the Patrimoine in 2007). Both evolved out of older collections and defunct institutions. But one displays authentic artifacts, the other reproductions; one focuses on non-Western cultures, the other on a quintessentially Western culture. One takes whole objects out of context, essentially turning them into fragments, while the other takes fragments out of context, essentially treating them as whole objects.
But both are also responses to issues that have been transforming museums in recent decades. And those challenges can seem more evident here in Paris, where so many museums are still staging places for the shaping of civilization. The European Enlightenment, born here, enshrined Reason as its deity. Museums became its temples.”

***

Excerpt of Goetz Aly’s book, Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Equality, Envy and Racial Hatred 1800-1933, at Signandsight.com.

“The Prussian reforms of 1808 to 1812 granted all citizens freedom of trade, and put an end to serfdom and what until then had been utterly unchecked arbitrariness towards the Jews. The Jews were still only allowed to become public servants in exceptional cases and certainly never officers in the military, but unlike the Christian majority, they made the most of the new opportunities. They emancipated themselves and at high speed. Germany, with its half-hearted reformism, sluggish economic development (until 1870), and strong legal security provided a fertile ground. To top it all, Germany had some of the best Gymnasiums and universities in Europe, as well as some of the worst primary education. Unlike the majority of their Christian and still largely illiterate peers, Jewish boys as a rule had always been taught to read and write Hebrew. Their parents did not put silver spoons in their cradles, but all manner of educational nourishment. Jewish parents knew exactly how much cultural skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic would improve their children's chances, whereas Christian parents and clerics were still claiming, right up into the 20th century, that ‘reading is bad for the eyes!’”

 

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David Harris at AJC.org, "Israel and ‘Pinkwashing’: What was the New York Times thinking?".

“Amidst all the turmoil going on in the world today, the editors chose to publish a column entitled ‘Israel and Pinkwashing.’ In the first paragraph, the author, Sarah Schulman, sets forth her premise: ‘After generations of sacrifice and organization, gay people in parts of the world have won protection from discrimination and relationship recognition. But these changes have given rise to a nefarious phenomenon: the co-opting of white gay people by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political forces in Western Europe and Israel.’ Schulman quickly loses sight of Western Europe, however, as do the Times' headline writers, and zeroes in on her real target – Israel. She accuses Israel of ‘pinkwashing,’ which she defines as ‘a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians' human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.’ In other words, if Israel takes pride in being a country where gays don't have to live in hiding or terror, it's actually nothing more, we're told, than an elaborate ruse to distract attention from the country's true nature.”

 

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Tony Barber in FT, "An Alpine peak the eurozone can only aspire to attain".

“The chaos of Metternich’s era prompted Switzerland’s transformation in 1848 into a federal state that, notwithstanding various blunders and blemishes, has proved a model of freedom, affluence and social stability up to the present day. No wonder other European Union citizens look enviously at Switzerland. Could a Swiss-type solution be the answer to the eurozone’s troubles?”

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FT: "In defence of democratic politics".

“‘All those noisy and incoherent promises, the impossible demands, the hotchpotch of unfounded ideas and impractical plans.’ It is hardly surprising that Antonio Salazar, the ruthless dictator of Portugal, had such thoughts when talking about democratic politics. Yet, his appraisal has now become wide-spread among disenchanted voters. Two decades after Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of history, it is now common to talk about the end of politics.”

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Leigh Phillips at EUobserver.com, "The EU’s ‘techno party’ is hollowing out democracy".

“But technocracy is not to be limited to the allegedly wayward southern pair of states. It is such a grand wheeze, believe the project's deep thinkers, that under proposals for deeper economic integration unveiled by the European Commission last week, the unelected EU executive and the ECB are now to dictate national budgets of all eurozone states.

Firstly, let us be clear about what has not happened. Goldman Sachs has not been made king of Europe, as some recent articles in the French press have hinted at, given the association of Mario Monti, Lucas Papademos and the new head of the ECB, Mario Draghi, with the organisation that American journalist and professional muck-raker Matt Taibbi described as a ‘great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.’ The reality is far worse than a cabal of undead 'banksters' imposing their will. It is systemic and not a conspiracy by a coterie of Trilateral Commission members, Bilderberg Group attendees or Goldman Sachs staff.”

***

Georg Diez in Der Spiegel, "Habermas, the Last European".

“‘Zur Verfassung Europas’ (‘On Europe's Constitution’) is the name of his new book, which is basically a long essay in which he describes how the essence of our democracy has changed under the pressure of the crisis and the frenzy of the markets. Habermas says that power has slipped from the hands of the people and shifted to bodies of questionable democratic legitimacy, such as the European Council. Basically, he suggests, the technocrats have long since staged a quiet coup d'état. ‘On July 22, 2011, (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel and (French President) Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to a vague compromise -- which is certainly open to interpretation -- between German economic liberalism and French etatism,’ he writes. ‘All signs indicate that they would both like to transform the executive federalism enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty into an intergovernmental supremacy of the European Council that runs contrary to the spirit of the agreement.’ Habermas refers to the system that Merkel and Sarkozy have established during the crisis as a ‘post-democracy.’”

***

Gideon Rachman in FT, "The long shadow of the 1930s".

“The lesson of the 1930s is that a global depression weakens democracies, leads to the rise of radical new political forces -- and, in the process, raises the risk of international conflict. A modern version of the 1930s would see a new generation of nationalist politicians rise to power in Europe, against a background of economic chaos and the break-up of the EU. Tensions would also rise outside Europe, as the global economic situation worsened. The balance of power in Asia would shift even faster, with a rising China facing a weakened America.”

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Modris Eksteins in WSJ on the Harry Kessler collection, "Journey to the Abyss".

“If Kessler was at the center of everything, the center itself -- owing in part to his own efforts -- was disappearing in his lifetime. He was witness to an astounding process of demolition, the collapse of empire and of centuries-old authority, intellectual and artistic as much as political, social and economic. The process had clearly begun in the decades leading up to World War I but then accelerated at a blinding pace in the war years and after. W.B. Yeats said as much -- ‘things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ -- in his famous poetic assessment of 1919, ‘The Second Coming.’ Kessler was in the eye of the storm, actually wallowing in the adventure, but he was always more a witness, or facilitator, than a primary actor. Born in 1868, the eldest child of the Paris-based German banker Adolf Wilhelm Kessler and the Irish baroness Alice Harriet Blosse-Lynch, he was a cosmopolitan from the outset. Schooled in Paris, Ascot and Hamburg, with subsequent military service in a socially prestigious Prussian cavalry regiment and surrounded by wealth and privilege, he would nevertheless exemplify a revolutionary turmoil that was the antithesis of his family and social milieu. His sexuality, which Mr. Easton rightly emphasizes in his excellent introduction, may have motivated this revolt. Kessler was decidedly homosexual and reveled in his own sensuality. The senses, he insisted, were the only source of true beauty. ‘Is it possible that our culture can find its way... to a standpoint from which it can say yes, with a good conscience, to lust, to the naked, to all of life, as did the Greeks?’ he asked in May 1908. ‘This,’ he then asserted, ‘is the fundamental problem of our culture.’ An emphatic presentism, a celebration of life and experience as opposed to history and morality, guided him in all his pursuits.”

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Christopher Caldwell in FT, "Why climategate is a catastrophe for good science".

“All the emails have shown is that scientists are no less prone to vanity, rivalries and corner-cutting than people in other walks of life. But that is everything. Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth…. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that ‘his science is good’ is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he ‘did nothing illegal’. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.”

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Raymond Pettibon at Regen Projects, "“Desire in Pursuyt of the Whole”".

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Mike Watt’s "Spielgusher".

“the story of spielgusher begins at what would be near the end of the minutemen. me and d. boon were huge richard meltzer students. we knew of him from his helping to create rock-write. in most places where we read him, it was the only thing we found interesting. it was also gut busting and for corndogs like us, that meant brain busting - or was it the other way around? we dug the confusion. we knew of him from his ‘hepcats from hell’ radio show on kpfk, they were on after midnight on saturdays. they were the best, they were a trip. literally for us - I'd be on the deck w/lights out and just listening/ tripping/ pondering/ voyaging. of course we knew of him from writing lyrics for the blue oyster cult, of course! ‘scientist rock’ is what he called the minutemen in creem magazine for a review of the ‘bean-spill’ e.p.”

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The Nervous Breakdown: Mark Evans’ book, Dirty Deeds: My Life Inside/Outside of AC/DC.

“Evans’ three years touring and recording with AC/DC account for the lion’s share of the material, and fans won’t be disappointed. Beginning with his audition for the band through his unceremonious dismissal in London in 1977, Evans issues a page-turning, unsparing look at the personalities and attitudes that dominated that group. Brothers Malcolm and Angus Young, who founded AC/DC in 1973, are seen as the band’s creative, financial and strategic shot-callers, dictating virtually all aspects of the group’s operations and soliciting minimal input from the other three members. While their passion for making music and for achieving commercial success is white hot, their interpersonal skills evoke images of towering glaciers. Evans describes frontman Bon Scott as savvy enough to stay close to the brothers and tow the company line, but whenever circumstances allowed, Bon was out the door, eager to enjoy the trappings of the rock and roll lifestyle away from the Youngs’ sharp, puritanical assessments.”

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Jan at Trust:

“On the www.goodbadmusic.com there are always (re-) posts of SST bands music and rare video footage plus some (always well written) thoughts by Erich on the music and art.

ANGST

STAINS.

Please buy music at SST.”

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Henry Rollins in LAWeekly.com, on Alice Bag’s book, Violence Girl.

“More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, ‘Survive’ and ‘Babylonian Gorgon,’ were great and made many of my mix tapes. A few weeks ago, the girl on the cover of the single sent me her new autobiography, released on Feral House Press. It's called Violence Girl, and the author is Alice Bag. I read it from cover to cover. If you are a fan of the classic, early punk music that was happening in the late 1970s here in Los Angeles, this is a well-written and informed read from someone who was there from the beginning. Alice wasn't one of those who turned up late to the game and benefited from the hard work and innovation of the L.A. punk bands and musicians who came before her. Rather, she was in one of the bands that got the whole thing started.”

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Pat Place interview by Tim Broun at PerfectSoundForever:

“PSF: So that line up, did the band end because of the dysfunction?

PP: Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. What happened was when James hooked up with Anya Phillips, who was a good friend of mine - I loved Anya but um, she was his manager. She became the manager of the band, and she had visions of James being this big star, and thinking that he should be separate from the band, that it was really James' thing. She kind of planted that, and the truth is James was writing most of the music, but Jody was an amazing guitar player and really, the sound of the music was created by the individuals as musicians so it was, in that respect, a band. But she kind of separated the band, and that's why when we were recording she wanted to pay the band just session fees, and it started this divide. That's when George Scott quit the band, and then they brought in Dave Hofstra, who's also an amazing player, but to re-do George's parts on some of the record... It got really messy, and in Paris it all blew up, and I was kind of the go-between between the band, and James and Anya. So they'd say ‘tell the boys this,’ you know? So (a resignation laugh) what happened, basically, is they took the money from the Paris gig and - should I say this?- they bought drugs and so the band was really pissed. So we had to decide and Anya said ‘stay with us,’ and I kinda just said, ‘Ah, you know, I'm gonna quit with the boys.’”

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“Scarcity Of Tanks is a music group that began in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. during the summer of 2004 by Matthew Wascovich. They played their first show on 28 December 2004 in Cleveland. SOT has released five full-length albums from Total Life Society Records and have toured throughout the United States. Their latest albums are "Vulgar Defender" and "Fear Is Not Conscience." These albums, released on 22 January 2012, feature Nick Lesley on guitar, Kid Millions on drums, John "Broken Hand"(r) Morton on guitar/theremin, Jim Sauter on saxophone, Weasel Walter on bass, and Matthew "Muug Shank" Wascovich on vocals. Familiar names? Yes, these guys play(ed) in Necking, Oneida, the electric eels, Borbetomagus, Impractical Cockpit and The Flying Luttenbachers, so these are albums worth checking out."

More information.

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Peter Hartlaub at SFChronicle, "News Cowboys".

“I’ve been working on what may become my all-time favorite Chronicle photo morgue archive gallery, a tribute to TV news anchors of Bay Area past. I was reminiscing on YouTube and beyond the other day, and ran across this epic 1970s promo for KGO, which featured Van ‘The Kid’ Amburg and the news cowboys. The San Francisco Peninsula Press Club has more information about the video here. KGO was pioneering in a more conversational/ sensational news delivery style in the 1970s, which was controversial at the time.”

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Adam Jahns in CST, "NHL up next for bout with labor pains".

“Like the NBA, revenue sharing should be a topic. Players are entitled to 56 percent-57 percent of league revenues in any year in which revenues exceed $2.7 billion. The NHL topped that mark last season and is expected to this year. Long-term, front-loaded contracts also figure to get attention. They had become common practice under the current CBA, which had to be amended after Ilya Kovalchuk’s contract debacle with the New Jersey Devils. Still, many believe the negotiations won’t be as volatile as they were in 2004, when the players finally agreed to a hard salary cap.”

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Obituary of the Week

Odumegwu Ojukwu (1933-2011)

At 33, he found himself at the vortex of simmering ethnic rivalries among Nigeria’s Hausas in the north, Yorubas in the southwest and Ibos in the southeast. The largely Christian Ibos were envied as one of Africa’s best-educated and most industrious peoples, possessed of much of Nigeria’s oil wealth. Tensions finally exploded into assassinations, coups and a massacre of 30,000 Ibos by Hausas and federal troops. While he denounced the massacre and cited other Ibo grievances, Colonel Ojukwu for months resisted rising Ibo pressure for secession. He proposed a weak federation to separate Nigeria’s three tribal regions politically. But Col. Yakubu Gowon, leader of the military government in Lagos, rejected the idea. A clash over federal taxation of the Ibo region’s oil and coal industries precipitated the final break. ‘Long live the Republic of Biafra,’ Colonel Ojukwu proclaimed on May 30, 1967. Five weeks later, civil war began when Nigerian military forces invaded the breakaway province. It was a lopsided war, with other nations supporting federal forces seeking to unify the country and Biafra standing virtually alone. Nigeria was Africa’s most populous nation, with 57 million people, of which 8 million to 10 million were Ibos.”

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Thanks to Steve Beeho, Jay Babcock, Jan Roehlk, Joe Pope, Dave Naz.

Issue #125 (November 23, 2011)

2011-12-06T12:00:00.000-08:00

Morton Arboretum, Naperville, IL

Photo by Joe Carducci

Drawing by James Fotopoulos

From the Illinois Desk of Joe Carducci…

Fran Spielman in CST, "50-0".

“Emanuel’s $6.3 billion 2012 budget — and the $220 million in taxes, fines and fees needed to pay for it — scored a 50-to-0 vote in the City Council on Wednesday.

That’s a triumph for a rookie mayor — even one who honed his lobbying skills on Capital Hill — and a tribute to the partnership he forged with aldermen by tweaking his budget to accommodate their concerns. Moments after the final vote, Emanuel warned aldermen from the rostrum that it was only ‘the beginning’ and that ‘hard decisions’ await. Police and fire contracts expire June 30.”

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Mark Brown in CST, "Aldermen decry politics of past".

“One by one, Chicago aldermen stood Wednesday and decried the past, bemoaned the tough decision they were faced with making, complimented Mayor Rahm Emanuel for treating them fairly and then promised to approve his budget. It was the part about decrying the past that I had the most trouble swallowing, as I could swear that many of those who spoke about the bogus budgetary of the last decade -- never mentioning Mayor Daley by name mind you -- were the same ones who stood and praised the wisdom of Daley’s robbing Peter to pay Paul methods.”

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Carol Marin in CST, "Fast Eddie freed, now… the movie".

“On the Southeast Side, in the rust belt of old steel mills where Vrdolyak grew up and stayed, some still see him as a Robin Hood. People whose kids got jobs because Eddie made a call. Or whose mother’s medical bills were paid out of his own pocket. Unlike Robin Hood, however, Vrdolyak helped the poor but got very rich. Amazingly, he’s one of the lawyers being paid from the multibillion-dollar tobacco settlement. And so even in prison, he was collecting tens of thousands of dollars each month — and he’ll keep collecting for years to come. Imagine. Stuart Levine, who ratted him out, is today destitute and selling synthetic cigarettes in a suburban mall at the same time Ed Vrdolyak will walk out of federal prison possibly richer than when he went in.”

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Stephan Benzkofer in CT, "The original ‘private eye’".

“By 1857, less than two years after Pinkerton launched his ‘detective police business,’ the Tribune called on the city to fire the police chief and appoint Pinkerton in his place to stem a recent rash of burglaries and robberies. Pinkerton's reputation soon spread across the nation. In 1860, Pinkerton was hired by a Baltimore railroad company to protect its lines against Southern secessionists. In February 1861, a Pinkerton man uncovered a plot to kill President-elect Abraham Lincoln, who was making a multicity tour on his way east for the inauguration. Pinkerton thwarted the plot by smuggling Lincoln through to Washington. Soon Pinkerton — and his men — were everywhere. Nearly every major crime story or figure in the late 1800s is linked in some way to Pinkerton's men, including the hunts for Jesse James and Butch Cassidy, and the investigations of numerous bank heists, train robberies, sensational kidnappings and gruesome grave robberies. Pinkerton also wrote more than 15 detective stories based on his experiences that became best-sellers. Pinkerton revolutionized law enforcement. In an era when city policemen rarely caught any criminals, he and his men tracked down fugitives and brought thugs to justice. He taught his detectives surveillance and undercover techniques. Pinkerton was one of the first to compile mug shots of known criminals and suspects, a practice later adopted by the FBI. His efforts protecting Lincoln and spying during the Civil War was the forerunner of the U.S. Secret Service. His agency slogan, ‘We Never Sleep,’ and its image of an unblinking eye, is believed to be the source of ‘private eye.’”

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Blair Kamin in CT on Richard Cahan & Michael Williams’ book, The Lost Panoramas: When Chicago Changed Its River and the Land Beyond.

“Changing the river's flow sent untreated waste down the Des Plaines, Illinois and Mississippi rivers, past farms, small towns and big cities like St. Louis. ‘What right has Chicago to pour its filth down into what was before a sweet and clean river, pollute its waters, and materially reduce the value of property on both sides of the river … and bring sickness and death to the citizens?’ a resident of Morris, Ill., asked after the reversal was completed in 1900.By digging a 28-mile canal between the Chicago and Des Plaines rivers, engineers broke down the natural barrier between the watersheds of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. Yet they left an unintended legacy that haunts us today: The canal created a kind of highway that allowed invasive species like the Asian carp to swim up the Mississippi and, it is feared, into the Great Lakes.”

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David Segal in NYT, "What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering".

“So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime. ‘The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,’ says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. ‘They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.’ Last year, a survey by American Lawyer found that 47 percent of law firms had a client say, in effect, ‘We don’t want to see the names of first- or second-year associates on our bills.’ Other clients are demanding that law firms charge flat fees. This has helped to hasten a historic decline in hiring. The legal services market has shrunk for three consecutive years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Altogether, the top 250 firms — which hired 27 percent of graduates from the top 50 law schools last year — have lost nearly 10,000 jobs since 2008, according to an April survey by The National Law Journal.”

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Richard Epstein at Hoover.org, "ObamaCare vs. The Commerce Clause".

“Looked at from the vantage point of the original Constitution, ObamaCare should be dead on arrival. But the New Deal transformation of long-established Commerce Clause jurisprudence has introduced a set of unprincipled (but fine-grained) distinctions that turn the law into a mass of linguistic absurdities that should lead ordinary people to question the collective sanity of the legal profession. From the straightforward prose of the Commerce Clause, Judge Silberman concludes (accurately) that ‘[t]oday, the only recognized limitations are that (1) Congress may not regulate non-economic behavior based solely on an attenuated link to interstate commerce, and (2) Congress may not regulate intrastate economic behavior if its aggregate impact on interstate commerce is negligible.’ From this dubious premise (which has no mooring in either the text or history of the Commerce Clause), Judge Silberman’s closing salvo in Seven-Sky then waxes eloquently on ‘the imperative that Congress be free to forge national solutions to national problems, no matter how local -- or seemingly passive -- their individual origins.’ In one well-crafted sentence, he has managed to encapsulate everything that is wrong with our modern Commerce Clause jurisprudence.”

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Daniel Henninger in WSJ, "Obama Abandons (Private) Labor".

“No subject sits more centrally in the American political debate than the economic plight of the middle class. Presumably that means people making between $50,000 and $175,000 a year. The president fashions himself their champion. This surely is bunk. Mr. Obama is the champion of the public-sector middle class. Just as private business has become an abstraction to the new class of public-sector Democratic politicians and academics who populate the Obama administration, so too the blue-collar workers employed by them have become similarly abstracted. You would think someone in the private labor movement would wake up and smell the tar sands. Last week's Big Labor ‘victory’ in Ohio was about spending tens of millions to support state and local government workers. Many union families attached to the state's withering auto plants no doubt voted with their public-sector brothers in solidarity. But why? Where the rubber hits the road -- new jobs that will last a generation -- what does this public-sector vote do for them?”

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Roderick Kefferputz at EUobserver.com, "We need an honest debate on shale gas".

“Shale gas has undoubtedly been a game-changer in the United States. Over recent decades, the rapid uptake of new innovations such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and horizontal drilling has transformed the country from a gas importer to exporter. For years an accompanying debate has been raging in the US concerning the merits and demerits of shale gas. Across the Atlantic, the European Union has been behind the curve. Only recently has talk of shale gas finally reached the ears of the European Parliament. The EP hosted a number of hearings on this issue in October and its industry (ITRE) and environment (ENVI) committees have now decided to draft separate own-initiative reports on shale gas. Regrettably, this development mirrors the current discussions on this new energy source only too closely. Public debate on shale gas has become polarised.”

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Stephen Cave in FT on Robert Trivers book, "Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself The Better to Fool Others".

“Trivers’ Deceit and Self-Deception is the most original and important of these works. In it, he attempts to construct a grand theory of deception, arguing that we continually paint a distorted picture of the world so that we might more easily get our way with others. So we inflate our achievements, play down our failings and rationalise away our mistakes.”

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David Hambrick & Elizabeth Meinz in NYT, "Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters".

“David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, restates this idea in his book ‘The Social Animal,’ while Geoff Colvin, in his book ‘Talent Is Overrated,’ adds that ‘I.Q. is a decent predictor of performance on an unfamiliar task, but once a person has been at a job for a few years, I.Q. predicts little or nothing about performance.’ But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point. Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious youths directed by the Vanderbilt University researchers David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow. They and their colleagues tracked the educational and occupational accomplishments of more than 2,000 people who as part of a youth talent search scored in the top 1 percent on the SAT by the age of 13. (Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a ‘thinly disguised’ intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were ‘only’ in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work.”

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Economist: "Minds like machines".

“Crankishness aside, technocracy and autocracy have long been natural bedfellows. When political power is not publicly contested at all, electability is irrelevant and expertise can give the ambitious an edge. In China all but one of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee are engineers. This marks a shift: many of Mao’s revolutionary generation had no higher education at all. And it may be temporary. Li Keqiang, likely to take over from Wen Jiabao as prime minister in 2013, has degrees in law and economics. Other upcoming leaders are similarly schooled. Such unconstrained technocracy is no guarantee of good ideas or decisions. China’s engineer-kings threw their weight behind the Three Gorges dam, for example, despite the prophetic advice of some more eminent scientists. In the SARS epidemic in 2003, the technocrats were initially inept too, putting face-saving ahead of epidemiology. A rapid rollout of China’s high-speed rail network was followed in July by a slowdown after a fatal train crash: technocracy did not prevent corruption and poor quality-control.”

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Joseph Leahy in FT, "Brazil: Emerging political correctness".

“When two of Brazil’s most powerful women, President Dilma Rousseff and supermodel Gisele Bundchen , last moth emerged as the figureheads of two opposing sides in a heated debate over sexism in advertising, it did not seem like a fair fight. After all, Ms Rousseff is ranked third on a Forbes list of the world’s most powerful women compared with number 60 for her celebrity opponent. Yet Ms Bundchen’s camp eventually came out on top in an epic battle that offers some insights into Brazil’s booming advertising world.”

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Edmund Sanders in LAT, "Israeli feminists see erosion of rights".

“Feminists who once thought Israel's battle for gender equality had been mostly won are warning of a new assault from Israel's fast-growing ultra-Orthodox community, which is seeking to expand religious-based segregation into the public realm. ‘We are going backward and losing all our achievements,’ said Rachel Liel, executive director of the New Israel Fund, which advocates for civil rights and equality. ‘A 21st century democracy is not a place where women sit in the back of the bus.’ Israel's ranking in gender equality — based upon workplace discrimination, pay differentials and other factors — compared with other countries dropped from 36th place in 2007 to 55th in 2011, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index.”

 

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Economist: "The right to be hidden".

“Her eyes, all that could be seen, gleamed as she revelled in a new-found freedom. For 40 years under what she disdainfully termed the ‘liberalism’ of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the niqab had been forbidden. ‘But now we can wear what we like!’ Aliaa el-Mahdi, a 20-year-old university student in Cairo, has found a very different way to celebrate the Arab spring. She recently posted an alluring photograph on Facebook, Twitter and her personal blog. It showed herself standing unclothed, bar thigh-length stockings and a pair of bright-red shoes. The public airing of a nude self-portrait, an act of almost unheard-of daring in a conservative Arab country, stirred instant controversy, as well as more than a million page views. Ms el-Mahdi, who describes herself as an atheist, says she meant to echo ‘screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy’.”

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Andre Aciman in NYT, "After Egypt’s Revolution, Christians Are Living in Fear…".

“In light of the events in Maspero, it is thought that another 150,000 Copts may leave their ancestral homeland by the end of 2011. When Mr. Mubarak was in power, the Copts were frequently the victims of violent attacks and official discrimination — the New Year’s bombing of a Coptic Church in Alexandria that left 21 dead is the most recent instance. Now, with Mr. Mubarak gone, Copts fear that an elected Muslim majority is likely to prove far less tolerant than a military dictatorship. Conditions were by no means good for the Copts when Mr. Mubarak was at the helm. The most risible instance occurred in 2009 when, in an absurd effort to prevent the spread of swine flu, the government decided to slaughter all pigs in Egypt. But since neither contact with pigs nor eating pork spreads swine flu, why kill the poor pigs? The answer is very simple. Slaughtering the pigs, as it turns out, was probably meant to inconvenience the Copts who farmed them and ate them. This constituted another of those petty measures intended to harm the Copts financially. Today, Egypt is doing the same with Israel. Under the pretext of preserving its national agricultural patrimony, it has forbidden the sale of palm fronds to Israel. Palm fronds are used ceremonially by Jews during the holiday of Sukkot, and since Israel doesn’t grow enough palm trees, it imports the fronds from Egypt…. What doesn’t occur to most Egyptians is that the Copts represent a significant business community in Egypt and that their flight may further damage an economy saddled with a ballooning deficit. But this is nothing new for Egypt. The Egyptians have yet to learn the very hard lesson of the post-1956 departure of its nearly 100,000 Jews, who, at the time, constituted one of the wealthiest Jewish communities in the Mediterranean region.”

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FT: "Doha unbound".

“Powered by the cash which accompanies the world’s third largest gas reserves, and bouyed by the soft power provided by Al-Jazeera, the most influential Arab news network, Qatar has become a vigorous cheerleader for the Arab spring. Its funding and weapons were critical to the downfall of the Libyan dictator, Muammer Gaddafi. Its diplomatic manoeuvring has helped isolate Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. The state-let’s leaders have even offered to mediate in Yemen.”

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Daniel Dombey in FT, Interview: Ahmet Davutoglu.

“As for self-confidence, he says, ‘ordinary citizens are proud of the rise of Turkey and if you ask them who can threaten Turkey, they will say nobody.’ All the same, criticism has grown of late of Mr Davutoglu’s policy of ‘zero problems with neighbours’ -- his efforts to improve Turkey’s relations with nearby states. This year, Turkey has broken with Damascus, expelled Israel’s ambassador, locked horns with Cyprus over drilling in the eastern Mediterranean and seen an attempt to normalise relations with Armenia fade away.”

***

Andrew Rettman at EUobserver.com, "Free press on trial in EU aspirant Turkey".

“The trial of 11 journalists - including Turkey's ‘last investigative reporter’ - begins on Tuesday (22 November) in a country which says it wants to join the EU. Nedim Sener, Ahmet Sik and nine other journalists will face the court after spending six months in pre-trial detention on charges they support Ergenekon - an alleged conspiracy against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan named after a fairy tale palace. If convicted, they will join the 63 newspaper men and women who are already in prison or the 50 journalists who live under threat of prison due to suspended sentences. The trial comes one month after Turkey arrested Ragip Zarakolu, an eminent intellectual and free speech campaigner, on charges that he collaborates with an illegal Kurdish movement, the KCK. It also comes the same day the government launches a Chinese-style Internet filter designed to block access to thousands of websites containing pornography or Kurdish ‘separatist propaganda.’”

***

Geoff Dyer in FT, "Working with Washington is threat to cosy ties with China".

“For the past three decades, Australia has served as a sort of early-warning system for the rise of china. To understand the effect China is having on the world, Australia has been a good place to start. Prodded by some far-sighted diplomats, Australia was one of the first countries to wake up to the economic potential of China. In 1985, then prime minister Bob Hawke took Chinese leader Hu Yaobang on a personal tour of the Pilbara, a remote stretch of Western Australia with vast deposits of iron ore. In a way, it was the start of the current commodities boom.”

***

James Areddy in WSJ, "Wenzhou’s ‘Annus Horribilis’ Shakes China".

“Now, the trust-based financing networks that took the place of banks in Wenzhou and fueled its binge are collapsing in the face of slowing exports, a trend made worse by Europe's economic woes. Property prices are down. Captains of local industry have fled from debts, sometimes escaping loan sharks by taking their own lives, local authorities say. Add to that strikes, heavy-handed policing, food scares and grisly score settling -- for an ‘annus horribilis’ in the Zhejiang province city of 9.1 million. Images of a bullet-train carriage dangling from a Wenzhou viaduct after a July railway collision seemed to illustrate the city's bad luck. Its stumbling local economy has much of China fretting whether trouble for Wenzhou's famously nimble manufacturers heralds broader danger.”

***

Stephen Brown in CT, "Chinese and Russian firms fare worst in bribery index".

“China ranks 27th and Russia 28th in the 2011 index, while the Dutch, Swiss, Belgians, Germans and Japanese get the top scores. Britain and the United States rank eighth and ninth. But the Berlin-based anti-corruption campaigners said not one of the 28 countries surveyed — which include all of the G-20 — was perceived as ‘wholly clean of bribery,’ and few had made a major improvement since the last bribery index, in 2008.‘India's score improved the most … but it still remains near the bottom of the table. Canada and the United Kingdom saw the most significant deterioration in their scores,’ read the report, released this month.”

***

Patrick Barta in WSJ, "A Pariah Regime Courts West in China’s Shadow".

“The interview, conducted by the country's information and culture minister flanked by a phalanx of advisers and officials, comes as U.S. President Barack Obama and Asian leaders head to Indonesia for a summit at which Myanmar is seeking to boost its international reputation after decades of tough military rule. Myanmar has embarked on an ‘irreversible’ reform process, said the minister, U Kyaw Hsan, speaking for the government. He blamed U.S. sanctions for delaying the country's development and said they made Myanmar more reliant on Chinese companies. ‘When we are striving for development, we cannot be choosers -- we have accepted what is best for the country,’ he said. Since November 2010 elections that Western governments decried as a sham, the new government has surprised critics with its changes, which have included freeing dissident and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi from years of house arrest, as well as easing media reins and pushing to make Myanmar more attractive to foreign investors.”

***

Patrick Barta in WSJ, "Myanmar Tackles Ethnic Conflicts".

“The talks began in recent weeks and included meetings with ethnic rebel leaders over the past weekend in an undisclosed location along the Thai-Myanmar border, according to ethnic leaders and others familiar with the meetings. The government’s goal is to convince the insurgent groups, which have long lobbied for more political rights, to fully recognize the new government and possibly lay down their arms, these people said. In return, the government offers more economic development and other incentives, they said.”

***

Andrew Jacobs in NYT, "Dispute Over Islands Underscores Philippines’ Rocky Relations With China".

“In the months after his June 2010 election, Mr. Aquino made some striking concessions to China. The Philippines was one of the few democratic counties last year to hold back its ambassador from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. A few months later, Manila angered Taiwan by honoring Beijing’s request to deport to mainland China 14 fraud suspects who hailed from Taiwan.

But the limits of Manila’s influence were revealed shortly after Mr. Aquino’s visit, when the mainland Chinese authorities executed three Filipinos accused of drug trafficking despite Mr. Aquino’s clemency pleas. The executions, and an increase in skirmishes between fishermen and naval vessels from both countries, have fueled Philippine determination to stand up to Beijing.”

***

WSJ: "China Putin".

“China created the Confucius Prize last year, in its fury that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo. It's a kind of anti-Nobel, and in that sense it is meant to flatter both Mr. Putin and China's government. China's Communist Party sees a kindred soul in a man who has stayed in power in Moscow for 12 years and has designs on at least 12 more. China's other great fear is that ethnic nationalists in Tibet or Xinjiang, like democrats in Taiwan, might succeed in governing themselves. Thus does Mr. Putin, who razed the small province of Chechnya and who invaded Georgia in 2008 to teach an imperial lesson, became a hero to Chinese rulers.”

***

Neil Buckley in FT, "Putin’s return is making Russia restive, if not revolutionary".

“‘Because of the Soviet legacy and the 1990s, ordinary Russians don’t trust one another,’ says James Sherr of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. ‘They don’t combine in… political activity. They opt out.’ The Arab spring has shown small sparks can produce unexpected results. If rigging is too blatant, we could yet see a test of assumptions over Russians’ passivity.”

***

Lynn Berry at AP, "Moscow martial arts fans greet Putin with catcalls".

“The whistles and shouts, heard clearly on the live television broadcast, were an unprecedented rebuke as Putin prepares to return to the presidency next year. A judo enthusiast, Putin has long been an admirer of Russian heavyweight mixed martial artist Fedor Emelianenko and came to see him take on American Jeff Monson. After Emelianenko won, Putin stepped into the ring to congratulate him, but was met with catcalls from many of the 22,000 fans at the Olympic Stadium.”

***

Jennifer Siegel in WSJ on Robert Massie’s book, Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman.

“Catherine had spent the long, lonely years at the Russian court before her enthronement educating herself broadly. She was a self-proclaimed disciple of the French philosophes, counting Montesquieu as her great inspiration and Voltaire and Diderot as correspondents, friends and beneficiaries of her largess. Early in her reign, she made an ambitious attempt to reform Russia's convoluted and outdated legal code, issuing instructions steeped in Enlightenment philosophy. But this venture, like her early desires to eliminate or, at the least, mitigate the oppressions of serfdom throughout her realm, foundered on the realities of the state she now ruled. As the czarina informed Diderot: ‘You work only on paper which accepts anything, is smooth and flexible and offers no obstacles either to your imagination or your pen, while I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is far more sensitive and touchy.’”

***

Walter Russell Mead in WSJ, "The Culture War Over Europe’s Money".

“The underlying problem remains: Germany and France are locked into their most bitter struggle since the panzers exploded out of the Ardennes Forrest in 1940. Money is one big component of the fight. The French bottom line is that Germany must help raise the carcass of the French banking system from the dead. Clueless European regulators (who accomplished the not insignificant feat of making American’s dysfunctional regulatory system look Solomonic) pushed many banks to invest in soon-to-be-worthless sovereign debt from soft euro countries like Spain, Italy and Greece. So French banks in particular are loaded to the gunwales with bonds that won’t float.”

***

Landon Thomas in NYT, "Rise of a Euro Doomsayer".

“‘The current policy of lending plus austerity will lead to social unrest,’ Mr. Connolly told investors and policy makers at a conference held this spring in Los Angeles by the Milken Institute, arguing the case that Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain could not simply cut their way to recovery. ‘And one should not forget that of the four countries we are talking about, all have had civil wars, fascist dictatorships and revolutions. That is history,’ he concluded, his voice rising above the chortles and gasps coming from the audience and the Europeans on his panel. ‘And that is the future if this malignant lunacy of monetary union is pursued and crushes these countries into the ground.’ Mr. Connolly has been warning for years that Europe was heading for disaster. As a European Union economist in the early 1990s, he helped design the common currency’s framework, but then he was dismissed after he expressed turncoat views.”

***

Excerpt at Signandsight.com: Götz Aly's new book, Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Equality, Envy and Racial Hatred 1800 - 1933.

“The Prussian reforms of 1808 to 1812 granted all citizens freedom of trade, and put an end to serfdom and what until then had been utterly unchecked arbitrariness towards the Jews. The Jews were still only allowed to become public servants in exceptional cases and certainly never officers in the military, but unlike the Christian majority, they made the most of the new opportunities. They emancipated themselves and at high speed. Germany, with its half-hearted reformism, sluggish economic development (until 1870), and strong legal security provided a fertile ground. To top it all, Germany had some of the best Gymnasiums and universities in Europe, as well as some of the worst primary education. Unlike the majority of their Christian and still largely illiterate peers, Jewish boys as a rule had always been taught to read and write Hebrew. Their parents did not put silver spoons in their cradles, but all manner of educational nourishment. Jewish parents knew exactly how much cultural skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic would improve their children's chances, whereas Christian parents and clerics were still claiming, right up into the 20th century, that ‘reading is bad for the eyes!’”

 

***

Ross Douthat in NYT, "Conspiracies, Coups and Currencies".

“For Americans, the scenario I’ve just imagined is a paranoid fantasy, the kind of New World Order nightmare that haunts the sleep of black-helicopter watchers and Trilateral Commission obsessives. But for the inhabitants of Italy and Greece, who have just watched democratically elected governments toppled by pressure from financiers, European Union bureaucrats and foreign heads of state, it evokes the cold reality of 21st-century politics. Democracy may be nice in theory, but in a time of crisis it’s the technocrats who really get to call the shots. National sovereignty is a pretty concept, but the survival of the European common currency comes first.”

***

Christopher Caldwell in FT, "The protests failed but capitalism is still in the dock".

“The most powerful description of what has gone wrong in western societies was laid out by the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck in the New Left Review. He argues that full employment policies of the golden age of social democracy caused the voting public’s measures of the proper allocation of resources to diverge widely from market measures. Meeting both measures required more resources than governments could get their hands on. The filled the gap through various tricks: inflations, deficit financing, deregulated private credit and now the public commandeering of private resources for bail-out programmes.”

***

David Brooks in NYT, "The Technocratic Nightmare".

“The European leaders would come together for a summit and issue a joint communiqué. But then if you sampled the coverage in each of the national medias, you felt as though you were reading about 12 entirely different events. Europe was unifying legalistically and economically, but there was no common language or common conversation. At one meeting, leaders embraced ‘federalism,’ but that word meant one thing in Britain and another thing in Germany. Then there was the elitism. Off the record, Europe’s technocrats would say the most blatantly condescending things: History had taught them that Europe’s peoples were not to be trusted and government should be run from the top by people like themselves. As a consequence, European integration was opaque, and consisted of a long series of complicated fudges.”

***

Michael Ignatieff in FT, "One professor to another: listen to the people, or fail".

“Technocrats are supposed to have the mysterious authority of being above politics. But there is no ‘above politics’. The crisis is political all the way through. The problems both countries face are not technocratic. The measures that must be taken are obvious enough: regain control of public finances, restart demand and make the two southern economies competitive again. The problem is political….”

***

Martin Jacomb in FT, "Now is the time to go back to square one".

“There are examples of monetary unions that have worked, but these have been accompanied by political union. Italy and Germany provide contrasting examples. In 1818 the German states formed the Zollverein, a customs union that was complete by 1833. Railway construction followed and powered economic convergence. Political union came in 1871 and a single currency followed. Italy was unified about the same time under the Risorgimento but full economic unification was not achieved. Railway construction was opposed by the Papal States, impeding integration, and the imposition of the lira meant that southern Italy, never as economically successful as the north, could not become competitive.”

***

Victoria Ward & Nick Collins in Telegraph, "EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration".

“Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month. Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: ‘This is stupidity writ large. The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.’”

***

Renee Schoof in Miami Herald, "Can oceans keep feeding us?".

“Today, Nickson said, these management groups aren't doing a very good job of restoring tuna populations and making sure they can be fished sustainability. One of them is the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, which oversees more than 60 percent of the world's tuna catch. Its members include Pacific island nations and the homes of the world's large industrial fishing fleets - the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and Taiwan. Nickson said it's a David vs. Goliath matchup of island nations pushing for sustainable management vs. the large fishing nations, which block the restrictions needed to achieve it. The group's next meeting is in December in the island nation of Palau. The Pew Environment Group is pressing it to set limits on the amount of fish caught for each species; to take action to protect sharks, which are unintentionally caught along with tuna; and to reduce the catch of juvenile bigeye tuna, an overfished species, by ships fishing for skipjack tuna. Skipjack, the most common tropical tuna, is very heavily fished in some places, but isn't yet overfished, said William Fox, a biologist and the World Wildlife Fund's U.S. vice president for fisheries. Skipjack is the only tuna species that hasn't been fished to its maximum limit or overfished, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.”

 
***

Donald Morrison in FT on Michel Houellebecq & Bernard-Henri Levy’s book, Public Enemies.

“Many thanks, M Houellebecq, for deftly explaining your motives, and the book’s title, in your first letter: ‘We have, as they say, nothing in common – except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals.’ Non-French readers might demur, given your friend Lévy’s three dozen, mostly erudite, books and his high-profile involvement in admirable causes from Bosnia to Libya. Or your own recent Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary gong, for your novel The Map and the Territory.
In France, however, you are both widely reviled. M Lévy – can I call you BHL? Everyone else does – you are derided for your media-saturated, champagne-socialist lifestyle and the bespoke white shirts that expose much of your perpetually tanned, 63-year-old torso. As for you, M Houellebecq, your old-git grumpiness (after only 53 years on this earth) and your run-ins with Islam and women have won few French admirers. Reluctantly but correctly, you describe BHL’s image as ‘a philosopher without an original idea but with excellent contacts’ and your own as a ‘nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist ... an unremarkable author with no style’.”

***

Gabriel Josipovici in WSJ on The Letters of Samuel Beckett Volume II, 1941-1956.

“Beckett was always dismissive of his work as a courier in the French Resistance, when he was often on the point of capture, describing it as ‘boy scout stuff.’ But of course the experience marked him. He felt that whatever would subsequently befall him was, in a sense, trivial in comparison with what had happened to so many in those terrible times. (Many of the members of his Resistance group, ‘Gloria,’ were arrested, tortured and deported to Buchenwald or Mauthausen.) After the liberation, he worked for the Irish Red Cross in Brittany and then returned to Paris to take up his old life as an impecunious freelance writer, with his companion, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who had been with him throughout the war years. There are other reasons for the new, more restrained tone of the subsequent letters. For one thing, Beckett's mother, from whom he had spent so much of his early life trying to escape, was increasingly ill, which necessitated repeated visits to Dublin and a reappraisal of their intense relationship. He was also starting to write in French, discovering in the process a less linguistically brilliant but more profound vein.”

***

Alonzo Hamby in WSJ on John Lewis Gaddis’ book, George F. Kennan: An American Life.

“Kennan barely managed acceptance to Princeton University but proved to be a good student, though a social misfit disconnected from the culture of the elite eating clubs. The experience established another template for Kennan's life -- that of the loner dedicated to hard work but inclined to tell uncomfortable truths to superiors who did not want to hear them. By joining the Foreign Service in the mid-1920s, Kennan became a member of the first generation of professionally trained Russian hands. He emerged from the experience fascinated with the Russia of Chekhov and Tolstoy and feeling contempt for Soviet communism. He watched an emerging Stalinist despotism from the U.S. listening post in Riga, Latvia, then studied advanced Russian in Berlin.”

***

Matthew Garrahan in FT, "Movie world reels at forecast of final cut for celluloid".

“Demand for 35mm cinema film is projected to fall from a peak of 13bn feet a year in 2008 to as little as 4bn by 2012, HIS said. There will be no more ‘mainstream’ 35mm usage in the US after 2013, with the format expected to be phased out worldwide by 2015. Its demise will be mourned by directors and actors who have spent their careers shooting movies on 35mm film. ‘I will remain loyal to this analogue art form until the last lab closes,’ said Steven Spielberg in a recent tribute to celluloid, while French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard had a haughtier view of digital projection. ‘The so-called digital is not a mere technical medium but a medium of thought,’ he mused. ‘And when modern democracies turn technical thought into a separate domain, those modern democracies incline towards totalitarianism.’”

***

Charles Taylor in Dissent, "The Problem with Film Criticism".

“When I started as a film critic online at Salon.com, readers could click on a link that allowed them to e-mail me directly. Within a month, I heard from more readers than I had in a decade as a print critic. Not all the letters were nice (though the rude writers often apologized if you wrote back to them and reminded them a person was on the other end of their missive), but I felt in touch with my readers. There was also an edited letters column. That all ended when the publication made it possible for readers to post directly without going through an editor. Almost immediately, I and the other writers I knew stopped hearing directly from readers. Instead, instant posting became survival of the loudest. Posturing and haranguing ruled. If the writer was female or Jewish, misogynists and anti-Semites would turn up. Why wouldn’t they? There was no editor to stop them. Bullies and bigots seized the chance to show off. And those reasonable people, the ones I and my colleagues heard from? They went nowhere near the online forums.”

***

Saul Levmore in CT, "From the NBA to the Euro zone crisis".

“The financially stable countries are in the position of repeat negotiators who do not want to bear even part of the cost of other countries' overspending. At the same time there is a secondary bargain going on in each country as to how to share the burden of lowered expectations, or even austerity, between current workers and retirees. The retirees, like the foreign banks and governments, need the workers to get down to work, and the workers, meanwhile, sense that they, like the NBA stars, might actually be better off by threatening to work less rather than more. Once the eurozone is stabilized, or contracted, it will be time for the International Monetary Fund, or the most stable countries, to devise some tax or penalty system that discourages countries from trying this tactic again. If they do not do so, we are in for decades of bailouts and crises, as we are for interruptions in professional sports.”

***

Dave Hoekstra in CST, "Chaka Kahn wants to rock you".

“With her open ears and powerful, elastic voice, it is hardly surprising that Khan broke through the rock ’n’ soul Rush Street scene of the early 1970s. When the underchampioned 350-pound Baby Huey (James Ramey) died in 1970, Khan replaced him in the Babysitters, an electric soul band that played Rush Street. This caught the attention of the American Breed, a successful South Side pop group that was starting to splinter. The American Breed had 1967 national pop hits with ‘Bend Me, Shape Me’ and ‘Step Out Of Your Mind.’ Breed guitarist Al Ciner and keyboardist Kevin Murphy stepped out to form a new group called Ask Rufus. ‘I never sang with the Breed,’ Khan said, ‘but I don’t think [Ask Rufus] had been together a year when Paulette [McWilliams, the vocalist] quit and I got in the band. I was working the Rush Street circuit with the Babysitters, playing Nero’s Pit and Dante’s Inferno…. Rufus was playing the Rush Up… When I had a break I went to see Rufus, and when they had a break they’d come over to see me. We became fast friends before we worked together. Because they had been an established group before Rufus, they were getting better gigs and money, so yeah, I had no problem joining.’ Chicago saxophone player Bobby Baker was in the Babysitters for Khan’s audition in 1971. In an email he recalled, ‘She sat right next to me when she sang and after I heard her voice, I said to her, ‘You got it baby.’ These were the only words I ever said to Chaka Khan.’ He saw her another time when he sat in during a Rufus rehearsal. ‘Six months later,’ he recalled, ‘Rufus and Chaka Khan were off to Hollywood becoming famous and rich.’ …American Breed/Ask Rufus guitarist Al Ciner said, ‘Rotary Connection [with Minnie Riperton] played Rush Street. The Exceptions. That’s where Pete Cetera came from. He was the bass player before he went with CTA [which became Chicago]. We were more of a rock and R&B thing.’”

***

Thanks to Jay Babcock, Chris Woods, Steve Beeho.

Issue #124 (November 16, 2011)

2011-11-29T04:05:00.000-08:00

East of the Peaks, Snowy Range, Wyoming

Photo by Joe Carducci

From the London desk of Steve Beeho…

John Gray in the New Statesman on Sylvia Nasar’s book, "Grand Pursuit: the Story of Economic Genius".

“The contrast between the shambles at Versailles and the reconstruction of the world economy that came out of Bretton Woods in 1944 is at the heart of Grand Pursuit. The story Nasar tells of the passage from disaster to new world order is gripping and, at times -- as when she details the pivotal role played in the negotiations by Harry Dexter White, later accused of being a Soviet agent -- disturbing. It is also a story that undermines the inflated claims she makes in the epilogue for economics as a discipline that provides intellectual ‘instruments of mastery’, ideas that ‘could be used to foster societies characterised by individual freedom and abundance instead of moral and material collapse’. After the crisis of 2008-2009, she writes, the ‘world financial system did not collapse. There was no second great depression . . . Returning to the nightmare of the past seems increasingly impossible.’ Strikingly triumphal in tone, this assertion is sharply at odds with the rest of the book.”

^^^

Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday on Max Hastings’ book, All Hell Let Loose.

“It is our duty to imagine this event not as the buried past but as the blazing present, and to question all decisions which might take us back towards it, with all the intelligence and scepticism at our command. Yes, war is sometimes necessary. But the calculation of whether it is a fit price to pay should be made in the knowledge of what that price really is.”

^^^

Brad Cohen in the Village Voice interviews three former SST alumni about how, in Curt Kirkwood's words, “that circle [SST] is still really vibrant in a strange way”:

 "Bob Mould".

“Throughout much of Hüsker Dü's lifeline, your bandmates [singer/drummer] Grant Hart and [bassist] Greg Norton took a back seat while you handled the bulk of the managerial side of things, basically acting as tour manager and you talk about that at length in the book. Had you not taken an active role of booking tours and such, would Hüsker Dü had endured?

It could have gone in a number of different ways. I never really thought about it, but the first thing that comes to mind is that SST [Records] probably would have run us into the ground. The second scenario is a big-time management company comes on and the band would have imploded instantly because I like to control things and Grant was pretty uncontrollable. That actually worked to our benefit that I could control it from within. Those were the first two outcomes I could see if I did a ‘what if?’ I'm sure there are other iterations but those are the two that come to mind right away. SST would have killed us -- or we would have killed ourselves quicker with a big manager trying to direct traffic.”

"Lou Barlow".

“So when you guys signed with Black Flag's label SST, needless to say, that must have been huge.

It was monumental, man. It was like the end. That was it [laughs]. When you think about it now, you think about like American Idol [laughs]... ‘If I only can reach the top five of American Idol.’ And that's their dream. Like our dream, that was if you could take that dream, with all of its intensity and everything you know and to then be on SST was like Where the fuck do you go from there? Nowhere else.”

"Curt Kirkwood".

“What about SST stuff?

I still keep up with those people. I played with [Chuck] Dukowski fairly recently. I played plenty of shows with Watt in the last number of years. Did a tour with Bob Mould a few years ago. I met Bob a long time ago. He's one of the people I met really early on my first tour in '82. He was at the show. It was the first time we played Minneapolis. I befriended Bob and Grant [Hart] the first time around. First show we ever did in New York City was at Folk City was with Sonic Youth and Rick Rubin's band Hose opened the show. It's pretty amazing that way, it still continues and the same people are still around [laughs]. We all had the fire to begin with. It was cultural and it seemed like a microcosmic way that like this is cultural change and we are involved in something here. Really what I thought it was was good music, it's good garage music and it could get a little attention. I actually thought in the early '80s, it'd get really big -- I was that enthusiastic about the whole thing. I thought Black Flag was great -- I figured they'd be what Nirvana was ten years later, ya know?”

^^^

Mark E Smith/The Fall profiled in the FT
(!) and the New Yorker (!!), although for entertainment value Robert Chalmers' Independent interview tops them both:

“‘How about you?’ Smith asks. ‘Any regrets?’ ‘I regret turning down an invitation to contribute to Perverted by Language, that [2007] book of fiction where they asked various writers to compose a short story based on a Fall title.’ ‘That book,’ says Smith, ‘was shite.’”

^^^

 Jay Hinman recalls the vanished record shops of 80s LA at his Hedonist Jive blog.

^^^

 Jon Savage's great playlist of garage/psych/punk from 1966/67, put together for Domino Radio.

^^^

Byron Coley's 1987-90 "Underground” Spin columns.

^^^

James Dean vs Ronald Reagan in The Dark, Dark Hours originally broadcast in 1954. Ironically Reagan is far more convincing than Dean's overwrought performance. Better hair, too. 

Drawing by James Fotopoulos

From the DuPage desk of Joe Carducci…

Frederik Stjernfelt at Signandsight.com, "Nausea in Paris".

“Satire famously played an important role in the long process through which European societies emancipated themselves from religious dominance over centuries and finally forced Christianity to give in to enlightened principles and liberties. There is no reason to assume Islamists are not aware of this -- all the sweet-talking about ‘defamation’ and ‘offense’ by Islamists and their intellectual fellow travellers is but a thinly veiled demand for exemption from criticism. This combination of whimpering, death threats and arson has been employed by fundamentalists for years, and not without effect.”

***

Tom Nairn at Opendemocracy.net on Jeremy Paxman’s book, Empire: What ruling the world did to the British.

“Successful imperialism required an extensive elite, built up by an educational system distinct from (though allied to) the state — the 'public' school and 'Oxbridge' hierarchy. Hence the 'illogical' salience of social class in the land of the industrial revolution.

This led in turn to the over-theorization of social class. A stratification actually generated by empire was confused with one due to capitalist development itself, and then given philosophical shape by Marxism and other ideologies. Such was Anglo-Britain's principal 'legacy in the modern world' in Kwarteng's sense, now also described by Paxman. The greater part of Empire is taken up with how the legacy was acquired, through plunder, slaughter and theft, much of it 'made by Scots' (p.50). At the heart of the inheritance is an instinctive conspiracy to resist the return of England: that is, 'little England' as simply one nation amongst others: Greenfeld's 'First Born' reduced at last to identikit nationality.”

***

FT: "Brutalised protesters turn to subtler means".

“Strange things are happening on the streets of Damascus. In September, as Bashar al-Assad’s security forces continued their slaying of anti-regime protesters, fountains in the Syrian capital’s main squares began gushing blood. Then last month the green litterbins on the city’s streets suddenly blared out revolutionary songs, startling passers-by and panicking the armed guards of local government buildings.”

***

Peter Wonacott in WSJ, "Madagascar Tries -- Again -- for Democracy".

“African leaders who have bristled at recent Western involvement in the continent's troubles have dived into this island nation's two-year-old political crisis with the intent of showing how democracy can be restored without Western military firepower.
South African diplomats have been shuttling to and from the island that sits off the continent's southeast coast, meeting with Andry Rajoelina, a former nightclub disc jockey who now runs Madagascar, as well as with politicians that oppose him.”

***

John Kay in FT, "What Bob Diamond really tells us about the City".

“The changes implemented in and around 1986 involved a mixture of deregulation and reregulation. The conventions that had governed behaviour, largely tacit, were embedded in the English class system that governed recruitment. But now the informal, value-driven culture, whose ultimate sanction was famously described as the raised eyebrow of the governor of the Bank of England, was replaced by an extensive rulebook. The gates of the City were opened to comprehensive school boys, and girls, and to foreigners who might not even recognise the governor, far less appreciate the significance of his raised eyebrow.”

***

Economist: "Addio, Silvio".

“If, for example, Italians cannot find a dry cleaner’s open on a Saturday; if they have to pay thousands of euros to a dispensable public notary to buy a house; if they are forced to accept the service laid on by a single, erratic (and doubtless strike-prone) local bus company, then it is because Mr Berlusconi -- and the others who have led Italy over the past couple of decades -- have left in place a web of entrenched monopolies, vested interests and cartels that stifle competition and diminish competitiveness. Brave attempts have been made to reform pensions and education. The outgoing government has had considerable success in tackling organised crime. But Italy still suffers from deep-seated ills. Social convention keeps too many married women at home, limiting the size of its workforce. Its capitalism is opaque, typified by cronyism, government interference and shareholder pacts. The trade unions are skewed towards the public sector and the protection of mostly older workers in permanent employment. Italy’s cumbersome justice system, in which the average length of a civil suit is nine years, desperately needs an overhaul to reassure investors that contracts will be enforced and dodgy accounting punished.”

***

Rachel Donadio & Elisabetta Povoledo in NYT, "Magnetic and Divisive, A Man Whose Politics Were Always Personal".

“Mr. Berlusconi entered politics in the wake of a bribery scandal that had brought down Italy’s postwar political order, where for decades a centrist Catholic party was pitted against Westernized Communists. In a 1994 televised address, unprecedented in Italy’s staid political culture, he promised a new world, and invited Italians to join him. ‘I have decided to enter the playing field and to take up politics because I don’t want to live in country that is not free, governed by immature political forces and by men who are bound hand and foot to a past that was both a political and economic failure,’ he said. Alexander Stille, the author of a book on Mr. Berlusconi called ‘The Sack of Rome,’ said he represented something new. ‘The old political parties, the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party, represented broad ideologies and their leaders were comparatively unimportant,’ he said. ‘Berlusconi, already a celebrity, offered himself: no real ideology other than his own personal wealth.’ It was a brilliant strategy, and it catapulted him into power. But his first term lasted only eight months, crashing when he lost a coalition ally. Mr. Berlusconi led the opposition for the rest of the 1990s, when a series of technocratic and center-left governments brought Italy into the single European currency. He was elected again in 2001, after delivering a magazine-sized volume, ‘An Italian Story,’ to every doorstep in Italy. A masterpiece of self-branding, it depicted him as a self-made businessman, a family man and a ladies’ man.”

***

Stacy Meichtry & Deborah Ball in WSJ, "Culture Built on Family Firms Tests Italy’s Plan for Growth".

“Dell'Orco & Villani is the sort of small company that dominates the Italian economy and is essential to rejuvenating this crucial part of the euro zone. There's just one problem. ‘Our policy has always been not to grow,’ says Sergio Dell'Orco, the 64-year-old head of the recycling-machine maker from Tuscany. Among other issues holding the company back are strict labor laws and an inefficient legal system ‘that become difficult to work under if you're big,’ he says. The lack of growth at family businesses such as Dell'Orco is a huge obstacle to making the country more dynamic -- especially at a time when Italy urgently needs higher growth to pay down its €1.9 trillion ($2.6 trillion) national debt. On Sunday, Italy named a new leader, Italian economist Mario Monti, to tackle the country's economic woes. In his first speech as premier-designate, Mr. Monti said Italy needed to make a huge effort to reignite growth. ‘We owe it to our children. We need to give them a future of dignity and hope,’ Mr. Monti said.”

***

Paul Betts in FT, "Ill-judged smirks about Italy miss the deeper truth".

“There is a naïve tendency among foreigners to dismiss Italians as incompetents who are simply in need of a little outside discipline. Nothing could be further from the truth. The system, or myriad systems that govern Italian life at every level, are in fact highly organized and impervious to change. They are almost impossible for outsiders to comprehend.”

***

Victor Mallet in FT, "Spain’s party leaders indulge in navel-gazing as crisis rages".

“‘After seeing the debate, who do you think will run Spanish policy for the next few years?’ asks a Spaniard, turning off the television at the end of the pre-election confrontation between the two main candidates for prime minister. ‘Angela Merkel,’ replies his wife cheerfully. The humorous reference to the German chancellor in a cartoon in Tuesday’s El Mundo newspaper made an important point about Spain’s future that was largely absent from the actual debate between Mariano Rajoy, leader of the opposition Popular party, and Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, his Socialist rival.”

***

Economist: "The road to self-deception".

“Thankfully, the EU has not decided to censor The Economist. But a European Commission draft paper on credit-rating agencies does propose that, in some circumstances, they should be barred from changing their sovereign ratings. Let us be clear what that means. A credit rating is an opinion about the likelihood that a borrower will repay its debts. The issuers of these opinions are largely based in America, a land where free speech is constitutionally guaranteed. (Fitch has dual headquarters in New York and London, although its majority-owner is a French investor.) Even if the EU could get away with this censorship, what purpose would it really serve? At a crucial moment the agencies would have to declare that they were unable to provide a rating of the country, as clear a signal to the markets as a downgrade itself.”

***

Economist: "Beyond the fringe".

“What the EU lacks is not democracy but popular engagement. It always has and it always will. There is a small industry churning out suggestions for how to remedy this. How about directly electing the commission’s president? Or sending national MPs to sit part-time in the European Parliament? Or staging Europe-wide referendums, so that a single country cannot hold the other 26 to ransom? None of them would change the fact that the EU is remote, impenetrable and elitist. However hard it tries, the EU will not be loved by European citizens -- even those who are broadly pro-European. In the words of Anand Menon, a British academic, it is ‘structurally condemned to inspire apathy’.

‘Public opinion is a new actor in the EU,’ says Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. ‘It limits what technocrats can do.’”

***

Hernando de Soto in FT, "The free-market secret of the Arab revolutions".

“A few weeks ago I met Salem, the younger brother of the brave Tunisian fruit and vegetable vendor whose self-immolation triggered the Arab uprising. When I asked him what his brother in heaven would say if we asked him what his sacrifice would bring to the Arab World, Salem did not hesitate: ‘That the poor also have the right to buy and sell.’ It is worth remembering these words as experts debate the future of the Arab revolution, focusing on the crucial issues of democracy, fidelity to Islam, secularism and tribal power. What they may have missed is that a mighty consensus behind the uprising is the desire of a vast underclass to work in a legal market economy.”

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Mario Vargas Llosa in WSJ, "Literature and the Search for Liberty".

“What is lost on the collectivists, on the other hand, is the prime importance of individual freedom for societies to flourish and economies to thrive. This is the core insight of true liberalism: All individual freedoms are part of an inseparable whole. Political and economic liberties cannot be bifurcated. Mankind has inherited this wisdom from millennia of experience, and our understanding has been enriched further by the great liberal thinkers, some of my favorities being Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.”

***

Peter Aspden in FT, "Enriched by poor art".

“Arte Povera, or ‘poor art’, was the name given to an artistic movement of the 1960s in Italy that disdained that country’s postwar economic ‘miracle’ and called for a more pragmatic and modest cultural response to its excesses. In sharp contrast to Pop Art, its ostentatious contemporary, Arte Povera sought to restore poetry and simplicity to art. There was nostalgia and humility in its ambitions. ‘In Italy,’ wrote designer Ettore Sottsass in 1964, ‘there is none of the hard sell that comes with Coca-Cola, no post-cowboy violence, little birth control, little use of deodorants and boules is still played.’ Notwithstanding their ironic tone, the distrust of affluent modernity is palpable in those words, as is the feeling that the poor life is also the purer life.”

***

James Mackintosh in FT on Jim Rickards’ book, Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis.

“Rickards examines the ongoing financial crisis through the same currency lens. On his view, quantitative easing -- the Federal Reserve’s creation of money to buy bonds -- was a ‘secret weapon’ to weaken the dollar, aimed mainly at China. The Arab spring was collateral damage, as the Fed’s flood of dollars drove food price inflation and so provided the spark for revolution.”

***

Jamie Bartlett & Jeff Howard in Prospect, "Talking right".

“Because several of these parties have historic roots in extreme right politics, many progressive politicians and thinkers view such rights-talk as a disingenuous veneer, a cover for bigots who couldn’t care less about liberalism. This is a mistake. To see just how dangerous the populist threat is, we should recognise the sincerity -- and the grain of hard truth -- in their words. The latest study from Demos, ‘The New Face of Digital Populism,’ which was released this week, shows why. Based on a survey of over 10,000 supporters of these parties across Europe, it dispels some myths about the current crop of European populists. They are disillusioned with out-of-touch political elites, but not with democracy, which they cite as a top personal value, along with the rule of law and human rights. They overwhelmingly reject violence. One of the most significant drivers of support is a perceived threat to national identity and culture posed by immigrants, other minorities, and increasingly the European Union. These findings undercut the myth that the populist right is no more than a petulant manifestation of economic angst, an attempt to pin the blame for hard times on immigrants. Only four per cent of respondents cited economic issues as reasons to join their organisation.”

***

Michael Spence interview in Hoover Digest, "The Next Convergence".

“Spence: The colonial empires fell apart, and they arguably had built-in asymmetries in them. One would have guessed, I think incorrectly, that there were cultural differences holding these countries back -- some inherent defect. I don’t think that has turned out to be true. Colonialism fell apart. We had a bunch of new countries that were finding their identity, finding a government structure that worked. It was chaotic and a mess, and then came two other key ingredients. One, very wise people, led by Americans, decided not to repeat the aftermath of World War I, not to crush the vanquished and create a situation that led to another war. Instead, we built up the vanquished. We worked through the Marshall Plan on rebuilding Europe. We worked on restoring Japan. We opened the global economies so that these economies became permanently interconnected. And when we did that, Peter, we probably didn’t know that the long-run beneficiaries were going to be these poor countries whose future we didn’t really know…. But once they figure out a way to connect to the global economy, they are not held down. You have an opening into the global economy through a set of policies that turn out through the benefit of hindsight to be A, generous, and B, really farsighted. And the third ingredient is technology. The costs of transportation went down, communication costs went down, and the tools that you use to integrate a global economy were being built and then used.

Robinson: So there is a distinctively American piece of that story, which is to say that after the Second World War, the United States, measured as a proportion of world domestic output, has a position of dominance that constantly recedes, but the United States lets it happen and seems to welcome the growth of other countries. Americans ought to be proud of that, right?

Spence: Absolutely.”

***

Ian Bremmer & Nouriel Roubini in WSJ, "Whose Economy Has It Worst?".

“The campaign season will only exacerbate petty partisanship and political gridlock, which means that the structural problems of the U.S. economy are likely to persist.

But the longer-term future appears much brighter for the U.S. than for either Europe or China. America is still the leader in the kind of cutting-edge technology that expands a nation's long-term economic potential, from renewable energy and medical devices to nanotechnology and cloud computing. Over time, these advantages will yield more robust economic growth. The U.S. also has a demographic advantage. In Europe, declining birthrates and rising sentiment against immigration point toward a population that will shrink by as much as 100 million people by 2050. In China, thanks in part to its one-child policy, the working population has already begun to contract. By 2030, nearly 250 million Chinese will have passed the age of 65, and providing them with pensions and health care will be very costly. Despite debate over illegal immigration, the U.S. population will likely rise from 310 million to about 420 million by midcentury. Between 2000 and 2050, according to Mark Schill of Praxis Strategy Group, the U.S. workforce is expected to grow by 37%. China's will shrink by 10%. Europe's will contract by 21%. Finally, despite the rising exasperation of the American public, the U.S. is significantly more likely than Europe or China to quit kicking the can down the road.”

***

Rahul Jacob in FT, "Chinese look overseas in move to cut costs".

“The pressure to move is clear and growing. Labour costs in China have risen 15-20 per cent annually over the past couple of years, squeezing margins and creating increasingly testing times for Guangdong, the engine room of Chinese manufacturing. The rising costs – along with the rise in the renminbi – have forced Mr Leung to reduce headcount in Dongguan from 8,000 three years ago to 3,000 today. The wages in Bangladesh, he reports, are about 20 to 30 per cent of those in China. Workers also work 48 hour weeks against the legislated norm of 40 hours in China. The government is offering a 10 year tax holiday. But instead of sounding ebullient, Mr Leung is shell-shocked. ‘They have crazy traffic congestion and everyone uses a generator in factories (because the power supply is erratic),’ he says. ‘The logistics make it very hard to work efficiently’. A couple of weeks after his trip to Dhaka, Mr Leung flew to Addis Ababa. Wages were even lower than those in Bangladesh but he could not find the supporting industries, such as manufacturers of shoe soles and cardboard. ‘Ethiopia has less congestion but it is in the middle of nowhere,’ he says. India’s oppressive poverty put him off altogether after a visit to Chennai. Now Mr Leung is uncertain whether he will move production from China after all.”

***

Andrew Jacobs & Adam Century in NYT, "In China, Buick’s for the Chic".

“Take, for example, Mercedes-Benz, a brand that in much of the world suggests moneyed respectability. In China, many people think Mercedes-Benz is the domain of the retiree. The Buick, long associated in the United States with drivers who have a soft spot for the early-bird special, is by contrast one of the hottest luxury cars in China. But no vehicle in China has developed as ironclad a reputation as the Audi A6, the semiofficial choice of Chinese bureaucrats. From the country’s southern reaches to its northern capital, the A6’s slick frame and invariably tinted windows exude an aura of state privilege, authority and, to many ordinary citizens, a whiff of corruption. ‘Audi is still the de facto car for government officials,’ said Wang Zhi, a Beijing taxi driver who has been plying the capital’s gridlocked streets for 18 years. ‘It’s always best to yield to an Audi — you never know who you’re messing with, but chances are it’s someone self-important.’”

***

WSJ: "Japan’s Third Opening".

“Last year, then Prime Minister Naoto Kan proposed Japan pursue trade liberalization with a ‘third opening’ to the world -- the first two being the arrival of Commodore Perry in the 19th century and the post-World War II American occupation. The difference is that this time Japan has to make the decision on its own. But opponents are portraying joining the talks as a favor to the U.S., rather than a move that will benefit Japanese. That doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Take the two industries that would be affected -- agriculture and medicine. Japanese economists have long argued that deregulation would make them more efficient, but regulators favor the existing players. Opening to international competition can help to break the political logjam and force reforms. Imported rice faces a 778% tariff, which has shielded farmers from market pressure to consolidate their small plots. The average farm is less than two hectares worked by a 66-year-old farmer.”

***

Michael Auslin in WSJ, "Is South Korea Headed for Trouble?".

“‘Korea has another decade of growth, and then we'll start down Japan's path.’ So declares a prominent Korean economist to an American visitor. President Lee Myung-bak, who is in the last months of his administration, may be President Barack Obama's favorite Asian leader. But his 30% approval rating at home reflects frustration with rising inflation, his cozy ties to business groups, and public fears of a growing wealth gap. The likelihood that a left-wing candidate will capture the presidency next year portends a turbulent future for U.S.-Korea relations as well as the Korean economy.”

***

Paul Kane in NYT, "To Save Our Economy, Ditch Taiwan".

“There are dozens of initiatives President Obama could undertake to strengthen our economic security. Here is one: He should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United States-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015. This would be a most precious prize to the cautious men in Beijing, one they would give dearly to achieve. After all, our relationship with Taiwan, as revised in 1979, is a vestige of the cold war. Today, America has little strategic interest in Taiwan, which is gradually integrating with China economically by investing in and forming joint ventures with mainland Chinese firms. The island’s absorption into mainland China is inevitable.”

***

Bradley Gardner in Reason, "China’s Black Market City".

“Wenzhou was one of the first cities to develop methods to work around the financial sector’s aversion to private enterprise. According to local entrepreneurs, it was this secondary banking system that made the biggest contribution to Wenzhou’s early development. ‘While northern people kept the money they made, Wenzhou people immediately lent it to their friends to help get ventures off the ground,’ says Weng Yuwen, a Wenzhou native now running a clothing design company out of nearby Hangzhou. Dozens of financing options are available, and although most of them intrude on the jurisdiction of the state-controlled banking system, they are not all illegal. Or at least not completely illegal. The different levels of legality that Wenzhounese perceive are a bit of a puzzle to an outside observer. Weng quickly disavows any knowledge of ‘underground banking’; like every other Wenzhou entrepreneur I speak to, he has ‘friends’ who have dealt with gray-market lenders but declares he would never do so himself. A more standard form of getting a loan, he explains, is borrowing from a contact…who also happens to be lending to a large number of other entrepreneurs at interest. Weng contemplates this arrangement, then admits that the whole thing might be ‘somewhat illegal.’”

***

Laura Meckler in WSJ, "U.S. to Build Up Military in Australia".

“The agreement will lead to an increase in U.S. naval operations off the coast of Australia and give American troops and ships ‘permanent and constant’ access to Australian facilities, the people said. While no new American bases will be built under the plan, the arrangement will allow U.S. forces to place equipment in Australia and set up more joint exercises, they said. The move could help the U.S. military, now concentrated in Japan and South Korea in Northeast Asia, to spread its influence west and south across the region, including the strategically and economically important South China Sea, which China considers as its sovereign territory.”

***

Matt Welch in Reason, "The Simpletons: David Brooks, Thomas L. Friedman, and the banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry".

“Do something. Is there a two-word phrase in politics more loaded with disguised ideological content? Embedded within is both an urgent call for powerful government action and an up-front declaration that the policy details don’t matter. The bigger the crisis, the more the urgency, the sparser the detail.”

***

Lawrence Lessig interview in Boston Review, "Reclaiming the Republic".

“DJ: You’ve really tried to make this a bipartisan effort. One thing I’ve noticed with regard to the Tea Party protests and Occupy Wall Street is that each tends to dismiss the other, even though both sides might find a lot of agreement in their anger.

LL: There is this bizarre blindness. I think we all need to carry around two hats. One of those hats should say, ‘I’m working for our side.’ The other hat should say, ‘I’m working for the U.S.’ And what that means is not ‘I have to give up my commitment to leftist values or to right-wing values,’ but it means that I need to try to figure out if there’s a way, despite our differences, for us to find a unity. If we can’t get beyond the architecture of polarization, we are doomed.”

 
***

WSJ: "About That ‘Christmas Tree Tax’".

“But rather than another zany liberal's plan to tax a few of his favorite things -- which sometimes seems to include everything -- the real story here is about collusion between business and government. Under the plan, the USDA would have required Christmas tree growers to pay 15 cents per fresh-cut tree to fund an advertising board to ‘enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States.’ But the idea didn't belong to the USDA—it was the Christmas tree lobby's. (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing.) The National Christmas Tree Association, a trade group, requested this ‘check off’ tax in 2009, much like the 18 other generic agricultural programs that the government backs under the Commodity Promotion, Research and Information Act of 1996. Think ‘Got Milk?’ or ‘Beef: It's What's for Dinner.’ Usually on the menu in these cases are the smaller producers that don't want to chip in for marketing and would rather promote their products themselves. The bigger companies then gang up and appeal to the government.”

***

William McGurn in WSJ, "Crony Capitalism, Chicago-Style".

“Soon the Illinois state legislature will meet in special session to consider the Chicago machine's latest favor: legislation designed to deliver tax relief to three of the state's largest companies. These tax breaks for the lucky few come just 10 months after the Illinois legislature approved what has been described as the largest tax increase in the state's history. It's no coincidence that both have been supported by Gov. Pat Quinn and other top leaders of the state’s Democratic Party. In so doing, Chicago is giving America a window into the logic of crony capitalism: Raise taxes on everyone -- and then cut side deals with those big enough to lobby for special relief.”

***

Tyler Cowen in NYT, "Whatever Happened To Discipline and Hard Work?".

“The United States has always had a culture with a high regard for those able to rise from poverty to riches. It has had a strong work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit and has attracted ambitious immigrants, many of whom were drawn here by the possibility of acquiring wealth. Furthermore, the best approach for fighting poverty is often precisely not to make fighting poverty the highest priority. Instead, it’s better to stress achievement and the pursuit of excellence, like a hero from an Ayn Rand novel. These are still at least the ideals of many conservatives and libertarians. The egalitarian ideals of the left, which were manifest in a wide variety of 20th-century movements, have been wonderful for driving social and civil rights advances, and in these areas liberals have often made much greater contributions than conservatives have. Still, the left-wing vision does not sufficiently appreciate the power — both as reality and useful mythology — of the meritocratic, virtuous production of wealth through business. Rather, academics on the left, like the Columbia University economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Jeffrey D. Sachs among many others, seem more comfortable focusing on the very real offenses of plutocrats and selfish elites.”

***

Philip Howard in WSJ, "The Public-Union Albatross".

“The indictment of seven Long Island Rail Road workers for disability fraud last week cast a spotlight on a troubled government agency. Until recently, over 90% of LIRR workers retired with a disability -- even those who worked desk jobs -- adding about $36,000 to their annual pensions. The cost to New York taxpayers over the past decade was $300 million. As one investigator put it, fraud of this kind ‘became a culture of sorts among the LIRR workers, who took to gathering in doctor's waiting rooms bragging to each [other] about their disabilities while simultaneously talking about their golf game.’ How could almost every employee think fraud was the right thing to do? The LIRR disability epidemic is hardly unique -- 82% of senior California state troopers are ‘disabled’ in their last year before retirement. Pension abuses are so common -- for example, ‘spiking’ pensions with excess overtime in the last year of employment -- that they’re taken for granted.”

***

WSJ: "The EPA’s Reliability Cover-Up".

“Congressional and industry investigators have combed the EPA's rule-making docket that contains hundreds of thousands pages of electronic documents. Many of these files are for some reason not ‘smart’ PDFs (i.e., they're unsearchable). But lo and behold, they uncovered one 934-page EPA draft that was circulated within the Administration sometime before the utility rule was formally proposed. In a ‘What are the energy impacts?’ section, the EPA concedes that it ‘is aware that concerns have been expressed by some, even in advance of this proposed rule, that this regulation may detrimentally impact the reliability of the electric grid.’ The agency admits that what it calls ‘sources integral to reliable operation’ may be forced to shut down -- those would be the coal-fired plants the EPA is targeting -- and that these retirements ‘could result in localized reliability problems.’ The EPA insists that it knows how to balance ‘both clean air and electric reliability,’ but all along in public it has denied that reliability is in any way at risk.”

***

WSJ: "Student Body Left".

“It gets even more expensive for taxpayers when student borrowers take a ‘public service’ job after graduation, thanks to a program that began in 2007. ‘Public servants’ can get all of their remaining federal student-loan debt forgiven after only 10 years. This applies to government employees such as teachers and to workers at nonprofits. It’s too early to know for sure how this will affect student-borrower behavior, but you can guess. Here we have the federal government offering significant financial incentives to encourage young people to choose what the late Irving Kristol called the politically active ‘helping professions’ over wealth-creating businesses. Go to Georgetown, borrow $100,000 from Uncle Sam, join the Sierra Club, wait a decade and the loan becomes a free lunch.”

***

James Taranto at WSJ.com, "Be Certain With Cert".

“Because the question they raise is novel, the ObamaCare cases will not turn back the tide of New Deal jurisprudence. But if the court strikes down the forced insurance provision, it will finally, after more than 70 years, stop its advance. On the other hand, if the court upholds ObamaCare, it will mark yet another expansion of federal power. Although the justices will not acknowledge it in their opinions, today's court operates in a very different political environment than did their New Deal-era predecessors. Back then, the country was in crisis and an expanded federal government seemed to be the solution. New Deal programs were popular and enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress (not that they needed it, so dominant were the Democrats in those days). Today America is also in crisis, but this time an enormous, sclerotic government is a cause rather than a solution.”

***

Motoko Rich in NYT, "Future Farmers Look Ahead".

“Although the nation has shifted ever further from its agrarian roots, the organization is thriving. Begun 83 years ago and now known simply as the F.F.A., it is the largest vocational student group in the country, with more than half a million members and still growing. Although farm employment accounts for less than 1 percent of all jobs in the United States, the Agriculture Department says that one in 12 jobs is agriculture-related. And during the deep downturn and rocky recovery, these workers have actually fared better than most. That gives the F.F.A. a calling card as an organization that actually prepares students for viable careers. About 70 percent of its members live in rural areas, and 19 percent live in small towns. The fastest growing segment, however, is in urban and suburban areas, now making up 10 percent of the membership.”

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CT: "Sink the Badger (proposal)".

“Every day from May to October, the SS Badger, the last coal-powered steamship on the Great Lakes, ferries cars and tourists across Lake Michigan on a picturesque four-hour journey from Manitowoc, Wis. to Ludington, Mich. Along the way, it leaves a souvenir in the lake: a total of about 509 tons of toxic coal ash, laced with arsenic, lead and mercury over a 134-day operating schedule. That's far more pollution than all the other 125 freighters plying the Great Lakes collectively leave in a full year, according to Coast Guard records. In 2008, the U.S. EPA set a four-year deadline for the Badger's owners to sharply limit its pollution, the Tribune's Michael Hawthorne recently reported. Didn't happen. Instead, the Badger now is one step away from being protected — in all its polluting glory — as a National Historic Landmark.”

***

Eliot Cohen in WSJ, "America’s Distinctive Way of War".

“America has participated in every global conflict since the end of the 17th century. What European colonists in North America called King William’s War, Queen Anne’s War, King George’s War, and the French and Indian War went by other names in Europe (the War of the Spanish Succession, for example), but they were parts of the same conflict. America’s War for Independence turned into a global war, and France’s revolution and imperial wars also came to these shores in 1812. The American way of war originated not in the 20th century, and not even in our own Civil War, but rather in a protracted contest with our most enduring and effective enemy of all: Canada.”

***

Sharon LaFraniere in NYT, "Chinese Flock to U.S. Envoy, but Leaders Are Ruffled".

“Some news organizations have even suggested in commentaries that his man-of-the-people style is an act, an American plot to stir citizens’ resentment of their own leaders.

Two Chinese journalists covering Mr. Locke’s visit last week to Guangzhou and his ancestral village said propaganda officials had issued a directive not to ‘hype’ the trip. That meant that they would write straightforward articles of about 1,000 Chinese characters and that their work would be kept off newspaper front pages. ‘They don’t like him,’ one reporter, who insisted on anonymity, said of the propaganda authorities. ‘They think he is too high-profile and he is embarrassing Chinese leaders.’ But somehow, the word has not gotten to ordinary Chinese. As Mr. Locke traveled on Nov. 4 to his ancestral village, Jilong, a cluster of gray-brick homes two and a half hours from this provincial capital, hundreds of people gathered on the streets of the city of Taishan, to watch as he stopped at a local kindergarten and — if they were lucky — to have their picture taken with him. Mr. Locke was typically obliging about posing for snapshots. ‘He likes to be with common people,’ said Wu Qiang, a 35-year-old factory worker, as he waited patiently for the ambassador’s motorcade. ‘He has Chinese blood, but American characteristics.’”

***

Ben Austen in Bloomberg Businessweek, "The End of Borders and the Future of Books".

“Edwards says that by the time he became CEO in 2010, Borders had already lost ‘the founders’ DNA, why the company was successful in the first place.’ He blames the 1992 acquisition by Kmart -- which he feels ran Borders like a general merchandising company -- and a three-year stock buyback that began in 2005 and cost the company $600 million. (Kmart spun off the bookseller in 1995, when Borders went public.) No contacted analysts thought there was anything improper in the stock buyback -- online sales had seemed to plateau at the time, and the company had generated more money than it did in each of the preceding five years. But the book industry runs on an ancient credit system, with booksellers at any moment indebted to publishers for more than the value of the books on their shelves. (At the time of its bankruptcy, Borders owed Hachette $36.9 million, Simon & Schuster $33.8 million, Random House $33.5 million, and HarperCollins $25.8 million, to name just a few of its publishing creditors.) In arrears and undercapitalized even in good times, Borders lost with the stock buyback the slim buffer it had. Edwards says the company was too saddled with debt to navigate properly. It had no capital to invest in online retailing or to separate its good stores from its bad ones.

Maybe most stunning is how Borders proved incapable of upgrading the systems and processes it had pioneered.”

***

Laura Winer at L.A. Review of Books, "Zell to L.A. Times: Drop Dead".

“Even in the negotiation stage, the Tribune deal enabled Zell to measure himself by a flattering new yardstick: He was no longer simply the ‘grave dancer,’ an investor who took risks on troubled companies; he was now in competition with Rupert Murdoch who was in the process of buying the Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family (which had controlled that paper since 1902.) In November 2007, Zell told Connie Bruck of The New Yorker: ‘Rupert is paying a huge price [$5 billion]. In our case, we’re paying what we think is a very attractive price — so our point of entry in this transaction is such that we have a lot of optionality.’ If ‘optionality’ means having options, the opposite was true. Zell’s deal was freighted with debt; Murdoch’s was not. More crucially, Murdoch had a vision for his media empire.”

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“KUSF in Exile weekly "Archie Patterson Radio Show".
 Listen LIVE Friday's 7PM

After producing several radio specials this past year I was asked by KUSF in Exile in San Francisco to host a weekly program every Friday night at 7PM Pacific time. The first show aired on OCT 28. The programs focus will be highly eclectic with music played ranging the spectrum of sound and styles. I began Eurock as an FM radio program in California in 1971. Now after 40 years I have come full circle to begin again a new musical adventure. 

Archived programs:

Program 3 featuring 60 minutes of music taken from the 4 albums by legendary French rock band Lard Free!  

Program 1 UK Psychedelic Rock & Acid Folk 1968-1970 featuring The Nice, Tomorrow, Deviants, Pretty Things, Twink, Kaleidoscope, Tyrannosaurus Rex & the Incredible String Band. 

Program 2 German Transcendental Music featuring Embryo, Between, Peter Michael Hamel & Camera Obscura.  

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Nathaniel Friedman in WSJ on Scott Raab’s book, The Whore of Akron.

“At the time, Mr. Raab was working on a book he hoped would be a chronicle of Cleveland's first title in more than four decades. Stung and confounded by Mr. James's perfidy, he wrote ‘The Whore of Akron’ instead. While Mr. Raab repeatedly brands Mr. James a coward and a fraud, LeBron's cardinal sin is walking out on Cleveland when, more than anyone else, Mr. James should have understood what that meant. Mr. Raab can't shake the city, nor does he want to; Mr. James has no such qualms or demons. The two-time MVP doesn't get it: In Mr. Raab's mind, since Cleveland made LeBron, just as it made him, he owes this crumbling city loyalty. Over lunch, Chris Rock, one of the several celebrities whose cameos remind us of Mr. Raab's day job as a glossy-magazine feature writer, tries to convince him that any sane person would choose Miami over Cleveland. Mr. Raab doesn't buy it.”

***

Obituaries of the Week

• Robert Scalapino (1919 - 2011)

“The author of 39 books on Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan and Taiwan, Professor Scalapino was also editor of Asian Survey, a scholarly publication, from 1962 to 1996 and advised the State Department and other government agencies. In 1965, he wound up arguing the Johnson administration’s case for escalating the war at what was billed as a national teach-in on Vietnam policy. The event was a debate by a panel before an audience of 5,000 in Washington and more than 100,000 people at more than 100 campuses who had gathered to hear the debate by radio hookups. McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, had been scheduled to attend, and many participants had hoped to hear his pro-war views and confront him. When he canceled at the last minute, it fell to Professor Scalapino, who had also been invited to join the panel, to take the lead in defending the White House’s policy.”

 
• Rex Benson (1925 - 2011)

“Rex Benson, who appeared in more than 300 productions, including films and television, died Friday at the Aleda E. Lutz VA Medical Center in Saginaw. He was 86.
Benson, a native of Chicago, moved in 2002 to Frankenmuth to live near his son, John, a certified public accountant. He lived in Reese as well. It wasn’t long before he stopped by Fischer Hall to join the Cass River Players. ‘He stepped right in and we had a good time. He sure knew his stuff, and he was always willing to do anything that needed to be done,’ said John Matuzak, who worked with the group. Long before he played the community theater circuit in the Great Lakes Bay Region, often taking his one-man-shows to wherever he found an audience that appreciated his corny jokes, Benson was writing for ‘Sanford and Son,’ doing skits with Johnny Carson on ‘The Tonight Show,’ and playing roles in shows and films such as, ‘CHiPS,’ ‘All in the Family,’ ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ and ‘Shades of Red.’ He also was a professional photographer, and his son said that’s what paid the bills while he was waiting for another acting role. But among all his pursuits, John Benson said, Rex Benson called the years he served in World War II his favorite days. As a decorated U.S. Navy aviation radioman, he flew from the carrier USS Ticonderoga as a rear seat aerial gunner, running the first bombing raid on Tokyo and sinking a Japanese cruiser, his son said.”

***

Thanks to Jay Babcock, Andy Schwartz.

Issue #123 (November 9, 2011)

2011-11-17T13:13:00.000-08:00

Snowy Range Peaks, Wyoming

Photo by Joe Carducci

Kennedy Erotomania
by Joe Carducci

It hadn’t yet occurred to me back when the networks turned on Gary Hart in 1988. Reporters hadn’t actually wanted to out him because back then they too were still on the Kennedy q.t., caught halfway between their own nerd selves and their insider surmisal of the ribald habits of the stars of politics and showbiz. And a certain type of male style leveraged the still middle American reserve to live like Bluebeard in that strange period after the Pill was available but before it was handed out like candy by the school nurse. Since the sixties Gary Hart was living a dry-look dream, nominally married but carrying the JFK, RFK, MLK torch, posing for his money shot, enabled by his earnest, ex-seminarian nobility. But the greasy-look news directors decided Hart was dead meat after one of Gary’s girlfriend Donna Rice’s girlfriend called the Miami Herald on him, and they all piled on like the resentful nerds they were. What you saw then was a dissection of Gary Hart’s political persona. One of the networks went through footage of Hart getting off of planes, shaking hands, giving speeches. They would freeze frame and underline by comparison to old footage of John F. Kennedy. It was like a Zapruder film as Rosetta stone. There it was, the hand in the pocket, the crimped shoulder, the wince-smile and wrenched back… all on display as imitation in tribute to a man in pain and on drugs who never should have offered himself as a candidate by a guy who could no longer tell who he was.

After the up-and-up Carter, Reagan, and Bush terms it was the get-down Bill Clinton era that pulled it all together in my mind. Everything was different by then except Gary Hart’s hair. All you had to do was pick your news and you could find charitable or critical coverage of anybody. Especially in those first two years the Bill and Hillary show was really out of hand, just ask the notional then vice-president Al Gore. Bill was wearing European-cut suits fit for the globalizing technocratic elite and vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard, where the Kennedys would finally have to put up with that damn wannabe who gottobe. But it was that Bill got caught and the news media, reluctant as ever after twelve years of Republican White House etiquette, got caught out by DNA and the Drudge Report that forced me to contemplate the politico-erotic implications of his and Gary’s dog-pile of Kennedy-love and satyriasis.

There was more than enough out-of-hand coverage of it all, especially as the New York Times, Time magazine, and the network news divisions could no longer determine the manner of coverage, though they did manage to save the Clinton presidency. But there was very little Kennedy-context in any of the coverage, even though Kennedy could only make any of these pikers look better. JFK’s secrets had come out very slowly over the decades. Only a couple years ago was it confirmed that he was locked in a metal back-brace that held him bolt upright in the back seat of that convertible. He’d wrenched his back reaching for some bimbo and so he could only sit and wait for the third bullet. Decades of conspiracy theories to explain that his body stayed upright because he was hit from the front by a second gunmen in the grassy knoll -- all so we’d be spared the knowledge that our young dead president had had one foot in the grave before he ever set foot in Dallas.

Kennedy was getting shot up with speed, steroids, testosterone and God-knows-what-else in those brave days of better living through chemistry. He wasn’t interacting with the women he was fucking. He wasn’t even fucking them in any normal sense; he wasn’t alone with them. He was blowing his nose in some kind of chemo-compulsive reaction to the drugs and the illness and being in over his head. He’d gotten what his father wanted. Given the early sixties, most of the women were professionals anyway. That Kennedy mystique actually had a greater homoerotic half-life. Women generally were more interested in Jacqueline, as an American princess. All of that cold rutting by Bill, Gary and a whole generation of wannabes was homoerotic communion with Jack; the women were mediums.

Chris Matthews has a new ridiculous mediation on his own never-ending teen-crush on John F. Kennedy. This from a guy who actually was sick to his stomach over Bill Clinton’s much more trivial and limited foibles. Today at least the Kennedy industry doesn’t have such an easy time of it. Even its prime architect, Ted Sorensen, just before he died wrote an overdue graceless memoir finally take his bows for all the words he put in President Kennedy’s mouth. His book tour killed him.

Jeff Bercovici talked to Matthews and wrote up his book, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, at Forbes.com, “The One Question You Should Never Ask Chris Matthews”:

“We’re talking about his new book… when the subject turn to ‘Profiles in Courage.’ Kennedy won a Pulitzer for the book even though he farmed out most of the actual writing to an uncredited co-author, his aide Ted Sorensen. Did Matthews have a Sorensen of his own, I wonder? Matthews’ genial, boyish face darkens. ‘Forget you,’ he says.

(Only he doesn’t say ‘forget you.’ Both Matthews and my editor asked me not to print what he actually said….) ‘Forget you,’ he repeats. ‘Where’d you get that? Is that what you think? You think I don’t write my books?’ I try to explain that I hadn’t meant the question to be insulting.” (Forbes.com)

As if the question wasn’t relevant. Call Kennedy your hero and be prepared to defend what he did, and entertain queries as to whether you’ve done same. Matthews was treated much better by Charlie Rose; in fact it was a double-gush of that kind of homo-mimetic submission to the idea that they’d been mentored as young boys into “public service” by JFK; manhandled by the Man. Those damned Catholics!

Christopher Hitchens wrote one of the harsher appraisals of the Clintons, No One Left to Lie To, which was perhaps somewhat optimistic in its titling since Bill’s Global Initiative and Hillary’s Secretary of State gig have given them billions more folks to lie to. In the current Vanity Fair he goes after “The Myth of Jackie Kennedy” almost casually, as the Kennedy myths dissolve before him as he simply follows the trail of public record. It’s taken fifty years for most of it to be available to assemble. Hitchens writes:

“Recent years have seen the departure of Schlesinger and Sorensen from the scene, and a continued slow erosion of the old bodyguard of liars, prepared at least to prick themselves with their swords as they contested any additional unwelcome disclosures about what had sometimes gone on down Camelot way. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is now renowned among presidential and other scholars as the most obstructive and politicized of the lot.” (Vanity Fair)

Given what we know, there must really be some enquiring minds-type stuff hidden yet. However Vanity Fair itself will soon enough purchase some glorious-looking previously unseen photographs of the Kennedys at work or play and reconstitute the mystique as if they’d never run Hitchens on Camelot. (His principal point is that Jackie actually lowered the tone of the Kennedy White House and its Camelot legend beginning with her naming of it.)

Gary Hart still pops up on occasion to remind us all what might have been; he must hear such charitable blather from everyone who recognizes him on the street. He must strike the eye as a ghost from the old, strange sixties, when at first the older fifties-formed Hefner-types had fed at the trough of the sexual revolution. Ghostly, as if our minds at first confuse him with one of the assassinated. As if not electing him amounted to the same thing. Hart had expected his busy social life to be contrasted with old-fashioned Republican marriages; he lived in a Kennedy bubble. After Bill Clinton one might be any sort of sex criminal short of a serial killer and get and keep the gig. And this too makes Gary a sadder case haunting “public service.” The last time Hart set up as if to run was in 2004, likely a feint to impress John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Hart decided to become a Soviet specialist as a way of redeeming himself and keeping an oar in on policy if not politics. He saw himself as a Secretary of Defense who could really understand the Soviets. And given there is zero need for super-empathetic Soviet specialists he’s left to have his mock summits with Strobe Talbott.

I’ve written before about James Piereson’s book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution. It’s a key text in the necessary recalibration of the Kennedy mystique at this late date, and a clear re-reading of what was wrought by the dissembling that Jackie, Sorensen, the news media, and the publishing industry performed over the assassination of the last cold warrior Kennedy by a communist. They required that JFK be seen as rather a martyr to civil rights (to which he’d contributed nothing). Piereson writes:

“The idea of national guilt, which surfaced in more innocent form following Kennedy’s assassination, had now spread through the institutions of politics, academe, and journalism that shaped liberal culture. The reformist emphasis of American liberalism, which had been pragmatic and forward-looking, was overtaken by a spirit of national self-condemnation.” (Camelot and the Cultural Revolution)

That got us to the point where the otherwise dominant Democratic Party seemed unable to win the White House when the party’s first order of business seemed to be to bring the war home. That sour constituency is routinely disappointed that their infrequent winners are sell-outs once in office. But in their way they enjoy this. Meanwhile the straights in the party cling to dreams of Jack. They are wet ones.

From the Wyoming Desk of Joe Carducci…

Immanuel Wallerstein at YaleGlobal, "The 19th-Century World-System: Yesterday and Tomorrow".

“Centrist liberalism won out on three crucial fronts. First, it installed the liberal state in the two key countries – the new hegemonic power, Great Britain, and its junior partner, France. The liberal state was not the night watchman state it claimed to be. Quite the contrary! Not only centrist liberalism but its two avatars, enlightened conservatism and pragmatic radicalism, all talked an anti-state language, but they all were in practice devoted to expanding state powers. The second crucial front was that of ‘citizenship.’ The geoculture proclaimed the legitimacy of popular sovereignty. But, in fact, all the powers that be were terrified by the prospect of the exercise of real popular sovereignty. To limit its impact, the powers-that-be divided ‘equal’ citizens into two categories – ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizens. The former could participate in decision-making. The latter – those without property, women, ‘minorities’ – had natural and civil rights, but were said to be incapable of exercising political rights. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries ‘passive’ citizens fought to be given political rights. It was a difficult, never fully-completed process, in which centrist liberals did their best to slow it down. The third pillar was the creation of the social sciences as ways of understanding the real world – the better to control it in the interests of centrist liberals. The restructuring of the universities, the separation of knowledge into the ‘two cultures,’ and inventing a limited number of ‘disciplines’ were all part of this process.”

***

Andrew Rettman at EUobserver.com, "Chinese fund manager lambasts EU ‘sloth, indolence’".

“Using language recalling German tabloid depictions of ‘lazy Greeks’, the chairman of China’s sovereign wealth fund… Jin Liquin made the comments during a TV interview with Al Jazeera on Sunday. ‘If you look at the troubles which have happened in European countries, this is purely because of the troubles of a worn-out welfare society. I think welfare laws are outdated. The labour laws induce sloth, indolence. The incentive system is totally out of sync,’ he said. He referred to ‘some countries happily retire at 55 to languish on the beach.’”

***

Lawrence Rosenthal at Opendemocracy.net, "Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party: bedfellows?".

“Yet the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) are expressions of pain from differing points of view of the same social process. This process has been the dismantling of American middle class life. This is sometimes called the American Dream. Sometimes the American Deal. Or the Fordist Deal. It was the essential quality of the working lives of the so-called ‘greatest generation’: the expansive home-owning world that generation stepped into after returning from World War II. It is a deal that has been undergoing a slow-motion erosion since the first oil shock of 1973. One example of this unfolding erosion: over these years, even conservatives most closely tied to a notion of the ‘traditional family’ have come to accept the two-earner family. It’s now an economic given. Not so for the middle class of the 50s, 60s and early 70s.”

***

David Pilling in FT, "Megacities".

“The idea of a megacity derives from ‘megalopolis’, a pejorative term coined in 1918 by Oswald Spengler, the German historian. He was describing cities that had grown too large and were edging toward decline. Jean Gottmann, a French geographer, used the term more positively in the 1950s to refer to the metropolitan corridor along America’s eastern seaboard. Now, the concept has changed again to mean massive agglomerations, mostly in the developing world. In truth, more of the world’s population is moving to second-tier cities than to the mega cities. But huge, conurbations have a symbolic potency. For some, they represent a brave new world in which Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and others in the developing world are clambering from poverty. For others, the megacity is nothing less than a nightmare. The urban shift of humanity, whose number topped 7bn in October, is inexorable. In 2008, for the first time in human history, more people were living in cities than in the countryside. By this measure, Asia, where only 40 per cent of people are urban, is behind. Much of Asia’s city-building lies ahead.”

***

Monica Davey in NYT, "Detroit’s Mayor Says Budget Gap May Require Emergency Manager".

“Nationally, the idea of an emergency manager is hardly unique. States have tried all sorts of measures, with mixed results, to prevent cities from falling into default. But in Michigan, the role of emergency managers has drawn particular scrutiny since early this year when the state’s Republican leadership granted them far-reaching powers, especially over union contracts. At the time, union supporters objected vehemently in Lansing, the capital, saying that the move amounted to another effort — similar to moves in Wisconsin and Ohio — to weaken unions and labor contracts. The Michigan Supreme Court has yet to say whether it will consider a lawsuit challenging the new powers for managers. Currently, only four Michigan governmental bodies — including the Detroit public school system — are under the control of an outside manager, but some fear those numbers could grow with local budgets, like that of Detroit, under significant strain.”

***

Hal Weitzman in FT, "Illinois juggler keeps state creditors at bay".

“Illinois has a chronic inability to pay bills. It’s a condition that affects thousands of small companies that do work for the state, non-profit organisations providing critical social services as well as hospitals and schools that complain they do not know when bills might get paid -- or if they will get paid at all. In many cases, when payments eventually arrive, they are incomplete. Like most US states, Illinois is required to balance its budget, an obligation Ms. Topinka says in practice is a sham. ‘It isn’t balanced. It’s never balanced,’ she says. ‘There’s always ways to have things off budget -- one of them is all of these bills.’”

***

Bryan Burrough in NYT on Joseph McCartin’s book, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America.

“‘Collision Course’ charts the rise of Patco and other public-sector unions over the course of 20 years, from the moment that President John F. Kennedy allowed government workers to bargain collectively. This power, however, came with strict limitations; unions like Patco were not allowed to strike or bargain for higher wages. Their negotiations with the government typically revolved around working conditions. Mr. McCartin is especially good at showing why air traffic controllers quickly emerged as perhaps the most militant group of government workers. As air travel surged in the 1960s and ’70s, conditions in American control towers didn’t keep pace. Controllers were working longer hours than ever, often with equipment dismally out of date. Many controllers had come from blue-collar backgrounds — many were sons of union members, in fact — and came to believe that the responsibility they carried for the safety of millions of travelers entitled them to white-collar wages, a contention that few in government agreed with. Supervisors at the Federal Aviation Administration tended to treat the controllers as drones.”

***

Guy Dinmore in FT, "‘Baby pensioners’ face a beating".

“Gianfranco Fini, speaker of the Italian lower house who defected from the government majority last year, fired the latest salvo in the national furor over ‘baby pensioners’, wryly noting on a television talk show that the wife of Umberto Bossi, minister for ‘reforms’ and stalwart opponent of pension reform, had retired as a teacher in 1992 at the age of 39. The next morning -- coincidentally when a decorous German parliament was overwhelmingly lending its support to Angela Merkel on her way to the Brussels summit -- Italy’s lower house erupted in turmoil with cries for Mr Fini’s resignation and fisticuffs between one of his members of parliament and a rival from Mr Bossi’s Northern League.”

***

Guy Dinmore in FT, "Italy’s survivor determined to endure".

“And as his loyal courtiers point out, would any successor do better in reforming Italy’s powerful vested interests -- be that Mario Monti, technocrat in waiting, or as the Berlusconi family newspaper Il Giornale wrote, ‘the Madonna of Lourdes’? Many despondent Italians ask the same question, among them a senior opposition politician who privately conceded he hoped his party would not be called on to fill the gap. ‘It would be a disaster. We are not ready to govern,’ he said.”

***

Jean-Claude Piris in FT, "An EU architect writes: time for a two-speed union".

“This is a painful admission. I laboured long and hard to produce a treaty fit for a union of 27 members. The EU is ponderous and unable to make rapid decisions. It finds it hard to finalise and enforce rules to govern the internal market, the Schengen agreement, or co-operating on defence. The commission is weak. The one-size-must-fit-all decision-making system does not suit a heterogenous union. Rather than responding swiftly and decisively to events, the EU is more likely to produce a mouse. Irrelevance looms. It is time to admit that the enlargement of the EU from 15 to 27 members was too rapid. Europe’s citizens no longer understand the purpose of the EU, its political aims and what its geographical borders will be. They are lost.”

***

Scott Peterson in CSM, "Turkey’s rising clout leaves Iran fuming on sidelines of Arab Spring".

“On many fronts, Turkey's rhetoric – including its increasingly strident anti-Israeli views – had prompted Western analysts to question whether the NATO ally was forsaking its pro-West outlook to join the Iranian-led axis of resistance. But the Arab Spring has changed Turkey's calculation. That may have factored in to Turkey's decision in September to end years of foot-dragging and accept US anti-missile radar units on Turkish soil – part of a NATO missile shield aimed at thwarting Iranian ballistic missiles. Turkey's adjusted approach is not a ‘coordinated number of steps, following each other, complementing each other,’ adds Kalaycioglu. ‘Rather there are lots of disparities, trials and errors, some erratic moves, and it looks as if the Turkish government currently is testing the waters.... The former policy is completely down the drain, of 'zero problems with neighbors.' Now we have mounting problems with neighbors.’ Iranian officials have sharply criticized Turkey as a sellout to the West, but recent polling of Arab views indicate that they don't buy it, and Iran's popularity has dropped.”

***

Nicola Clark in NYT, "As Trial Nears, ‘Carlos the Jackal’ Retains His Bluster".

“In 1992, France convicted Mr. Ramírez in absentia for the 1975 Paris killings. He spent a decade on the run across Eastern Europe and the Middle East, but in 1994, French secret service agents, acting on a tip from the C.I.A., seized him from a hospital bed in Sudan. He was wrapped in a burlap bag and spirited away to France, where he was re-tried in 1997 and given a life sentence. In 2007, a French investigating judge ordered Mr. Ramírez and three others to stand trial for complicity in four bombings in 1982 and 1983 that left 11 people dead and wounded 195 others, but it was not until this year that a trial date was set. The charges against Mr. Ramírez stem from a bombing in March 1982 of a Paris-Toulouse train in southwestern France; an attack in April 1982 on the Paris offices of an Arabic-language newspaper, Al Watan; and the bombing in December 1983 of a high-speed train and the main rail station in Marseille. Prosecutors allege that those attacks were part of a personal war that Mr. Ramírez waged against the French authorities in an effort to secure the liberation of his girlfriend at the time, Magdalena Kopp, a German former revolutionary who had been imprisoned for an attempted bombing in 1982.”

***

Aymenn Al-Tamimi in American Spectator, "Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech, and Islam".

“A report by the center-right Le Figaro provides a useful overview of reactions to the firebombing. For example, the center-right Union for a Popular Movement's secretary general -- Jean-François Copé -- rightly pointed out that ‘there can be no impunity [for this]. It's an act which must give rise to legal proceedings.’ The Communist party was unequivocal in describing the vandalism as an ‘appalling act,’ adding that ‘political and media debate cannot be controlled at the hands of Molotov cocktails.’ In fact, the firm support for free speech across the French political spectrum was also apparent in 2007, when the Grand Mosque, World Islamic League, and Union of French Islamic Organizations sued the magazine for incitement to racism for reprinting the Danish cartoons. The case resulted in an acquittal by a court in Paris as leading figures of the left and right came to testify on Charlie Hebdo's behalf. So too calls to support Charlie Hebdo unreservedly in the wake of the firebombing have come from the major French media outlets like Le Monde and Le Figaro. The contrast with the debate in English-speaking circles is quite telling. Already the Guardian has put up an article by one Pierre Haski -- a ‘co-founder and CEO of the French independent news website Rue89’ -- who does not explicitly condemn the attack and effectively urges readers to understand the firebombing in light of the fact that ‘for many French Muslims, religion has become a cultural identity, a refuge in a troubled society where they don't feel accepted.’ …So back in 2006 and 2007 the Guardian went out of its way to publish articles by the likes of Karen Armstrong, a leading non-Muslim apologist for Islam. Her words speak for themselves: ‘But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others.’ The result is that in Britain, this subject has often become a partisan left-right issue, even though it should transgress political boundaries.”

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Qantara.de: Ziad Majed on "Islamism and the Arab Spring".

“Ziad Majed: The demographic boom that we had in the past was over a few years ago, but the product of this boom is there, and it was young people taking to the streets now. However, the birth rate of this generation is much lower than that of its parents. That means at the age of 25 or 26, when their parents had two or three or four children, they don't have any kids. That makes them more capable of being mobilized. In addition, the fact that the age of marriage, whether for economic reasons or changing values, is becoming higher allowed them to take to the streets. This explains why the revolutions happened now and not five or 10 years ago. But youth still plays a role. You have to realize that people were simply extremely tired of seeing the same old faces in power who ruled when their parents were young. What I could also add is urbanization. That means territorial and social continuity. Young people are no longer isolated in small villages or small towns.”

***

Tim Arango in NYT, "A Long-Awaited Apology for Shiites, but the Wounds Run Deep".

“Particularly galling for the Iraqis was that President George Bush publicly encouraged the revolt and then allowed American forces to stand by while it was suppressed by Saddam Hussein’s helicopter gunships and execution squads in a bloodbath that claimed tens of thousands of lives. The perception of American betrayal still resonates deeply in the Iraqi psyche, and explains one of this war‘s enduring contradictions: that even though the Shiites benefited most from the war that overturned a long reign of tyrannical Sunni rule, they never completely trusted the Americans. Meanwhile, the Middle East revolts this year have reopened the wound of 1991, with Iraqis left to wonder what might have happened if their own revolution had received the same support as Libya’s did this year…. Amid the Arab Spring, policy makers and academics, if they consider Iraq at all, largely regard the Iraq war as a cautionary tale, a model of democracy-building to avoid. But Iraqis have tried to bill themselves as leaders of the regional revolution. Local television has shown an image of Mr. Hussein as the first dictatorial domino to fall, and journalists have claimed that the image of Mr. Hussein’s hanging was the original inspiration for the young people in Egypt and Tunisia.”

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Friederike Ott at Qantara.de, "Fostering Democracy through Commercial Advertising".

“‘The system that is so familiar to us is completely new there,’ says Koch at the start of his trip. ‘There are very few companies that are placing advertisements, but lots of media.’ It is estimated that there are 200 newspapers and magazines, 60 radio stations, and 30 television channels in Iraq. Most of them are funded by parties or other interest groups, who then exert a massive influence on the way that medium reports. In order to support the independent media, Koch and Klaas Glenewinkel of the non-profit-making organisation Media in Cooperation and Transition (MICT) set up the media agency Plural Media Services. MICT specialises in media development in crisis regions. The organisation has been active in Iraq since 2003, for example training local journalists.”

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Tom Wright in WSJ, "Pakistan to Boost Trade With India".

“Pakistan's Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan told a news conference Wednesday that Pakistan's cabinet decided to grant India ‘Most Favored Nation’ status, a decision that will likely boost bilateral trade. ‘This was a decision taken in the national interest and all stakeholders, including our military and defense institutions, were on board,’ Ms. Awan said. Under World Trade Organization agreements, the MFN principle is supposed to ensure that WTO members don't discriminate against one another, allowing all countries in the organization to benefit equally from the lowest possible tariffs. India granted Pakistan MFN status in the mid-1990s, but Pakistan declined to reciprocate despite its WTO obligations. Both countries are members of the WTO.”

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Bernard Porter in London Review of Books on Julia Lovell’s book, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China.

“The irony -- in view of the wars’ importance to the Chinese now -- is that at the time they didn’t take them very seriously. On the emperor’s part this was largely due to ignorance, both of the world outside China -- ‘Where is this England?’ he asked, quite late on in the war -- and of the progress of events. His officials constantly lied to him…. It was only much later, in the 1920s, that Western capitalist imperialism came to seem the real villain of the piece, ‘discovered’ by Lenin and then scapegoated by Sun Yat-sen in order, Lovell suggests, to get desperately needed Soviet funding for the Nationalist revolution he was leading.”

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Andrew Jacobs in NYT, "Another Tibetan Nun Dies by Self-Immolation in China".

“Exile groups say that scores of monks and nuns have been detained, among them three women who were said to have been given three-year prison terms for their role in a June demonstration. The ruling Communist Party has sought to portray the self-immolations as a form of terrorism inspired by the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since fleeing Tibet during a failed uprising against Chinese rule in 1959. Beijing consistently accuses the Dalai Lama of agitating for an independent state despite his insistence on greater autonomy for the region’s five million ethnic Tibetans.”

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Jeremy Page in WSJ, "Many Rich Chinese Consider Leaving".

“Many Chinese who have profited most from the country's growth also express increasing concerns in private about social issues such as China's one-child policy, food safety, pollution, corruption, poor schooling, and a weak legal system. Rupert Hoogewerf, the founder and publisher of Hurun Report, said the most common reason cited by respondents who were emigrating was their children's education, followed by a desire for better medical treatment, and the fear of pollution in China. ‘There's also an element of insurance being taken out here,’ he said, citing concerns about the economic and political environment.”

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Kathrin Hille & Jamil Anderlini in FT, "Netizens chip in to help Ai Weiwei pay tax demand".

“This week Chinese authorities ordered Fake Cultural Development, the company Mr Ai runs with his wife, to pay more than Rmb15m in back taxes, interest and penalties within 15 days. Chinese web users responded to news of the fine, which Mr Ai revealed on Twitter, by requesting the artist’s bank account details so they could send him donations…. The use of Alipay by Mr Ai’s supporters has put the Chinese company in a difficult position, possibly forcing it to choose between offending the government and helping a dissident raise money and annoying netizens if it blocks their transfers.”

***

Ellen Barry in NYT, "Russia Declares Deal to Join Trade Group".

“Because accession to the trade group is a consensus process, Russia had to gain the consent of Georgia, a member, overcoming the hostility that has divided the two countries since they went to war in 2008. Russia has built military bases in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two separatist enclaves that make up a large portion of Georgia’s territory, and Moscow has recognized them as sovereign nations. In exchange for its consent, Georgia sought transparency of trade on its border with Russia, a delicate issue because two sections of that border abut Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russian leaders said Georgia’s demands were political, and urged Western governments — in particular, the United States — to pressure Georgia into giving its consent. The trade monitoring proposal put forward by Switzerland would station observers in three places: at the main crossing from Russia into Abkhazia; at the Roki Tunnel, which cuts through the Caucasian Ridge into South Ossetia; and at a mountainous crossing into central Georgia, Mr. Kapanadze said.”

***

Andrey Kurkov in NYT, "Drinking on the People’s Tab".

“All I know is that the Ukrainians will continue amazing the world by the very fact of their existence, by their flexibility, shrewdness and their ability to adapt to any circumstance. Given the current situation, I find the latter quality encouraging, because as soon as real democracy comes to Ukraine, Ukrainians will quickly grow accustomed to it, life will become civilized, and Ukrainians will turn into law-abiding citizens. Obviously, that is not something that comes naturally to them, but should life require respect for law, they will do it, even if that should run counter to their interests. The authorities must simply create the appropriate conditions.”

***

Simon Romero in NYT, "Brazil’s Long Shadow Vexes Some Neighbors".

“Brazilian endeavors are being met with wariness in several countries. A proposal to build a road through Guyana’s jungles to its coast has stalled because of fears that Brazil could overwhelm its small neighbor with migration and trade. In Argentina, officials suspended a large project by a Brazilian mining company, accusing it of failing to hire enough locals. Tension in Ecuador over a hydroelectric plant led to bitter legal battle, and protests by Asháninka Indians in Peru’s Amazon have put in doubt a Brazilian dam project. But perhaps no Brazilian project in the region has stirred as much ire as the one here. Financed by Brazil’s national development bank — a financial behemoth that dwarfs the lending of the World Bank and has become a principal means for Brazil to project its power across Latin America and beyond — the plan was to build a road through a remote Bolivian indigenous territory. But it provoked a slow-burning revolt; hundreds of indigenous protesters arrived here in October after a grueling two-month march that took them up the spine of the Andes, denouncing their onetime champion, President Evo Morales, for supporting it.”

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Ross Douthat in NYT, "Our Reckless Meritocracy".

“But this sudden fall from grace doesn’t make Corzine’s life story any less emblematic of our meritocratic era. Indeed, his rise, recklessness and ruin are all of a piece. For decades, the United States has been opening paths to privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human history. And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff — mostly by being too smart for its own good. In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with ‘Lysenkoist’ agriculture. In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world.”

***

Anthony Grafton in New York Review of Books, "Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?".

“The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying -- down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading. Results varied to some extent. At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields -- humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics -- outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.”

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Steve Sailer at Vdare.com, "Steve Jobs: Nature, Nurture, And Apricot Orchards In Silicon Valley".

“How do you get to be the top businessman in America? The first element is will, which Jobs had in abundance. The second is luck. For example, getting to know the older brother of a high school classmate, who turned out to be the hardware genius Steve Wozniak. Jobs was lucky to have been raised in Santa Clara County, the R&D capital of the military-industrial complex, where every other dad on the block was an engineer. That the San Francisco Bay area was also the center of hippiedom interacted in unforeseeable ways with the slide rule set. The third and fourth factors are nature and nurture. One fascinating aspect of Steve Jobs is that Isaacson provides enough detail to allow the reader assess the impact of Jobs's being adopted. He was a one-man adoption case study, whose life embodied much of what social scientists have learned about the impact of nature and nurture. Adoption was not uncommon during the middle of the 20th Century. But after the legalization of abortion in the 1970s, the supply of middle class white babies started to dry up. Sentiment turned against adoption as people (at least those who had already been born) seized upon the notion that adoptees would inevitably grow up damaged, thus making abortion seem more humane than adoption. (Isaacson has caused a bit of a scandal by quoting Jobs saying, ‘I'm glad I didn't end up as an abortion.’) Since there's never a shortage of unhappy individuals, there was an ample supply during the 1980s and 1990s of stories in the press about unhappy adoptees. Normally, there's no market for happy tales about adoptees.”

***

Adam Shatz in London Review of Books on Patrick Wilcken’s book, Claude Levi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory.

“It was the mind, and what he considered to be its formal patterns -- particularly as revealed in art and storytelling -- that fascinated Levi-Strauss. Reading this biography one sometimes wonders whether he might in the future be thought of as a theorist of cognition and aesthetics who only happened, because of disciplinary prejudice, to take tribal cultures as his material. Like Freud, he believed that the deeper truths of culture are hidden from consciousness, lodged in a subterranean stratum of the brain the interpreter can never fully excavate. He came to believe that anthropologists would have to team up with neuroscientists to explain the mysterious patterns of behaviour: a view, Wilcken suggests, that ‘presaged the cognitive revolution in the social sciences’.”

***

Theodore Dalrymple in New English Review, "Knowledge Without Knowledge".

“Be that as it may, there is a single reference to Dostoyevsky in the fragment that illustrates perfectly Deutscher’s learned obtuseness. Writing of Lenin’s father, an inspector of schools who was loyal to the Tsar and the Orthodox church, Deutscher says:

‘In his young years memories of the suppression of the Decembrist rising were still fresh and forbidding. Then came the terror that crushed the Petrashevsky circle and broke a man of Dostoyevsky’s stature.’

Admittedly I do not read Russian, unlike Deutscher, but still I do not think it would be possible to write a single sentence that could misunderstand Dostoyevsky more fundamentally, completely and deeply that the second which I have just quoted. Far from breaking Dostoyevsky, his imprisonment, death sentence, reprieve and exile were the making of him, in the sense that they were the experiences upon which his subsequent philosophy, for good or evil, was based. The reason for Deutscher’s most elementary error is obvious. Lenin was the very embodiment of precisely the kind of ruthless, murderous revolutionary to whom Dostoyevsky was drawing attention: he was the very fulfilment of Dostoyevsky’s prophecy. Dostoyevsky foresaw not by ‘scientific’ deduction, a la Marx, of course, but rather by intuition and imaginative insight into the souls of men, and he was vastly more accurate as a guide to the future than Marx ever was. But to have admitted this would have been to blow apart Deutscher’s whole world-view, the world-view that made his very considerable literary labours meaningful for him, and for which he had, when in Poland, risked his life. So he preferred to see Dostoyevsky not as a man who, as a result of his experiences (in conjunction with native talent, of course) had penetrated to what others had not penetrated, but as a broken reed, a man successfully terrorised by the powers that were.”

***

Michael Kimmage in NYTBR on Adam Kirsch’s book, Why Trilling Matters.

“For Kirsch, Trilling’s liberalism affirms a timeless notion of human diversity more than any New Deal tradition. In his essays on literature, Trilling upheld the pluralism Isaiah Berlin promulgated in his philosophical essays. He learned from Henry James that ‘not all human goods’ can be attained simultaneously. Trilling believed, as Kirsch puts it, that ‘the preservation of human difference, the ability to imagine opposing characters with equal sympathy, is the greatest expression of love,’ and he practiced the pluralism he preached. He welcomed T. S. Eliot’s reactionary Anglicanism as a provocation to liberal complacencies. At the same time, he corresponded at length with Allen Ginsberg, a precocious student who asked his professor to tutor Neal Cassady, patron saint of the Beats. (The tutorial never took place.) Trilling found Ginsberg’s incendiary poem ‘Howl’ the opposite of shocking — he labeled it ‘dull’ — but he also lent Ginsberg support and encouragement.”

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David Kelly in NYTBR on James Wolcott’s book, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.

“[Patti] Smith is a welcome presence in Lucking Out, whether she’s performing or offering consolation to a young woman whose boyfriend vomited on her: ‘A guy’s not really your boyfriend until he’s thrown up on you.’ There are also guest appearances by John Cale, Lester Bangs, Tom Verlaine — who, on a night Television was playing, demanded that Lou Reed, sitting in the audience, turn over his tape recorder — and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads, on whom Wolcott had a ‘crush.’ He seems to have had various unrequited crushes, lamenting ‘those 3 a.m.’s of the soul when you know there’s a lot going on in the untamed night and you’re not doing any of it.’ The woman he was most attentive to, however, was Pauline Kael, to whom he devotes 50 genuflecting pages and who lurks around every corner here. Wolcott was one of the more talented of the Paulettes, but that word doesn’t do him justice: maybe the less popular Paulinista, or just cinephant.”

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Dave Kehr in NYT, "Another Nice Set We’re In, Stanley".

“The set also contains several foreign-language versions of the shorts, which were made in the days before dubbing was perfected and feature Stan and Ollie speaking phonetic Spanish and French. (There were a few German versions as well, though none are included here.) The alternate versions often include different gags and interpolated variety numbers to bring them up to feature length for foreign release. (For example, ‘Politiquerías,’ the Spanish version of the 1931 ‘Chickens Come Home,’ contains a complete performance by the Egyptian vaudeville star Hadji Ali, whose specialty — swallowing water, gasoline and small objects and regurgitating them in spectacular fashion — has sadly gone out of style.) Most important, these are new transfers, scanned from restored copies of the original release versions — no small thing for these films, which were so often sliced, diced, rescored and retitled over the years, as they were reissued by various companies for various markets. If anything, these were movies that were loved too much, copied so frequently that the original negatives for many of the early shorts were worn out and either lost or junked.”

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Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in FT, "The Fall guy".

“After leaving school in 1974, he worked as a clerk on the Manchester docks, at a time when there were still merchant ships from around the world trading there. This cosmopolitan aspect of Manchester, one of the industrial age’s first modern cities, finds an echo in the Fall’s music, with its openness to avant-garde traditions alongside a grittier attachment to rockabilly and punk. ‘You got it in one, cock,’ he agrees. But then he changes his mind. ‘I don’t want to push it too far. I can’t stand Manchester.’ He has tried living elsewhere, in Edinburgh and Chicago but was always drawn home. ‘They were too nice.’ Smith’s contrariness is deep-rooted, automatic. It is the psychic balancing act of the clever working class boy from north Manchester unwilling to betray his class by moving away from it, but who also didn’t want to be constrained by the low expectations of remaining within it. When he passed the exam to get into grammar school, ‘My dad used to complain about buying a bleeding blazer. That was the worst news in my house when I passed the 11 plus.’ There was more grumbling when he began the Fall. ‘When I said to my dad, I’m going into a group, he said, You’re bleeding mentally ill. But not in a nasty way.’”

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"“We Were Feared”" The Cuckoo’s Nest, Costa Mesa punk doc.

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Disaster Amnesiac begins on the post-Black Flag "Greg Ginn releases".

“Next week Greg Ginn will be releasing a new recording, that of his Greg Ginn and the Royal We project. It seems as if our man at SST has started yet another new chapter in his going on four decade career of music making. This turn of events has had Disaster Amnesiac thinking about, and listening to, as much of Ginn's work from the 2000's as I can scour up.”

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Dave Hoekstra in CST, "Two sidemen play at Chess Records once again".

“When artists had time they would swing around the corner from Chess to lunch at Mama Batt’s restaurant at 22nd and South Michigan. The restaurant was a favorite of Mayor Richard J. Daley, and owners would send a bowl of chicken soup to City Hall when Hizzoner had a cold. Batt’s was part of the Lexington Hotel, where Al Capone lived between 1928 and 1931. Batt’s closed in the late 1970s. The hotel was demolished in 1996. ‘They had a ‘Redemptive Beef’ [sliced, freshly cut on rye] sandwich, and the Lemons brothers were cooks who eventually opened their own barbecue joint,’ Barge said. ‘They cooked Jewish food like blintzes [and fried kreplach] at Batt’s. They had a very good corned beef sandwich. Most of our sessions were done in the daytime. When I was there it was Little Milton. Fontella Bass. [Vocalist] Billy Stewart was a character. He had two dispositions, either really jolly or hostile. I met Billy in the 1950s when he was a young kid and Bo Diddley’s keyboardist. Bo was a Chess artist and I was a Chess artist in ’55 and ’56.’ Stewart was an amazingly powerful singer. One of the first Chess hits for the rotund singer was the 1960 self-penned Latin-tinged ‘Fat Boy.’ He probably ate at Mama Batt’s, too.”

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LAT Mag: Excerpt from Laurel Saville’s book, Unraveling Anne: A Memoir of My Mother’s Wreckless Life and Tragic Death.

“I thought, The most striking thing about my mother is not that she was murdered but that she survived her own life for as long as she did. It is also striking that my older brothers and I survived our childhoods with her. My mother positioned herself in the epicenter of 1960s Los Angeles, and like most parents of that milieu, she thought nothing of bringing her three young children along for the ride. I thought, The most striking thing about my mother is not that she was murdered but that she survived her own life for as long as she did. My earliest memories are of the gatherings that so defined that era. Sometimes we would set out to join a horde collecting for a ‘love-in.’ Twisting my body like a cat that didn’t want to be held, I would squirm as my mother’s boyfriend, Henry, carried me to the car, begging to be left behind, while my mother exhorted me to stop being such a ‘drag.’ I didn’t want to get flowers and rainbows painted on my face or beads and ribbons plaited into my hair. I didn’t want to watch glassy-eyed people twirling in tie-dye skirts and peasant blouses -- or without shirts at all, their thin, bare chests and small, drooping breasts open to the air and sunshine as they tangled together on a blanket or in the mud, their mouths and limbs slack against one another.”

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Obituary of the Week

Joe Frazier (1944 - 2011)

“‘A kind of motorized Marciano’ is how Time magazine described his style in a 1971 cover story before Mr. Frazier’s $5 million fight with Muhammad Ali, the first of their three epic battles and the most lucrative boxing match ever at the time. Fans could watch Mr. Frazier fight for minutes at a time and not see him take one step back. ‘There were fights when he didn’t step backward. He took very few backward steps in his career,’ recalled Larry Merchant, the HBO boxing analyst, who was a Philadelphia newspaperman during Frazier’s early years. ‘What made him good was not so much his punching power as his willingness to keep coming and walking through the fire, his toughness and grit — and willingness to train so he could take the kind of punishment a fighter take in order to get to his opponent.’ Mr. Frazier’s signature weapon was a destructive left hook, which he used to win his first title in 1968 and floor Ali in their first meeting in 1971. He developed his powerful left as a young child, growing up without electricity or plumbing in rural Beaufort, S.C. His father had lost his left arm in a shooting over a mistress, and young Joe became his father’s left arm.”

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Thanks to Jay Babcock, Chris Collins.

Issue #122 (November 2, 2011)

2011-11-08T11:19:00.000-08:00

East of Libby Flats, Snowy Range, Wyoming

Photo by Joe Carducci

The Laws of Physics - The Rules of Theater
by Joe Carducci

The Supreme Court will rule on the Obama-care mandate next spring. At that point the election will find its final shape. Given the rules of physics, I’d guess that who loses that decision wins the election. Meaning, if the conservative justices rule against the mandate President Obama becomes “safer” to re-elect as Bill Clinton was after losing on Hillary-care and triggering his party’s loss of Congress. If Justice Anthony Kennedy votes with the liberal justices and gives the go-ahead to the “health reform law” then the Republican party tips further into Tea Party sentiment and if Mitt Romney has sewn up the nomination a third party attempt by Ron Paul would have wind in its sail.

If I was writing this episode of Supreme Court drama I would have Obama-care crash-and-burn over its compromise for a crony-capitalism-writ-large rather than its preferred single payer system. I believe Shakespeare would write it that way as well. The Justices notice such weaknesses in argument and case construction. Our activist community takes doctors for granted (calls them “providers”) as they yielded to corporate interests of hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, etc., and together sold out this profession’s attempt to keep from being demoted to wage labor simply following federal guidelines while continuing to absorb all liabilities.

A single-payer system passed by Congress and signed by a President would face a challenge as well but might have a better chance. That might be cleanly repealed by Congress if it failed to “contain costs” or the other promises, whereas the justices (i.e., Kennedy) might feel that the current mal-formed creature might take ten years to evolve into that worst monstrosity of the Democrats thirties-style dreams. Justices aren‘t supposed to “feel“ things about these cases, but, again, this is what the liberals have been demanding and the rules of theater demand the Hero get what he desires, yielding the kind of Tragedy we the chorus can’t get enough of.

The teachers voted themselves out of their profession when they turned the N.E.A., formerly a professional association along the lines of the A.M.A., into a union. FDR and most Democrats had been opposed to the formation of public employee unions, but they got lazy too during the post-war boom, just like General Motors, Zenith, etc. One wonders if the profession of Law will follow Medicine and Education to the gallows, swallowed up by the great single-payer of Marxo-Sadean control-freak dreams? It might take that for the Justices to rule overwhelmingly that this state-corporatism ought to be ruled out of order at least in their profession’s court.

The size of the state has been growing. It took two years after the 2008 crash for government employment to dip ever so slightly downward, while private sector employment dropped immediately and much deeper. The public sector and its advocates may truly believe that we need even more civil servants and now more than ever. But what’s happened is that President Bush on his way out the door acted on behalf of these oligarchic interests and President Obama could only concur, whatever he may have liked to think he believed in. Below are recent New York Times articles about major Democratic Party figures like Robert Rubin and Jon Corzine who have been back and forth between Wall Street and Washington and, let’s say, have done a human centipede number on Obama to Bush. Obama might have written it off as Bush’s fiasco but then where did he disagree with too-big-to-fail? Once the left gave up on nationalizing the means of production all they can conceive of to do is the regulatory capture of capitalism. And this is best done after massive consolidations accompanied by a steepening of the path for the arrival of new competitors via regulatory and tax burdens. Too-big-to-fail is Washington’s preference. And the crony capitalists of the Republican party are pleased to serve this up to the occasional Democratic administration. There is continuity.

Last month there was a week of media concern that they’d been slighting coverage of Ron Paul, given that he’d been contending consistently in early polling yet had been reflexively discounted with nary an explanation. But the newsmedia were just doing a little housecleaning, throwing some meta-minutes his way to look better in post-election analyses where they get their report cards. The resultant Ron Paul reports didn’t actually succeed in intoning his position as the one true opt-out from this bipartisan public-private too-big-to-succeed shell game. The lords of the Democratic Party at the national level take embracing this mess as a test of their realism and seriousness -- their passage from the naivete of McGovernism, or pious futility. The Republican Party has been riven all along. It was the party’s tragedy to be trusted with the cold war because this led their “serious” statesmen into the Nixon- and Bush I-style obliviousness on domestic issues. Those were traded away by Nixon for cold war chess moves the Democrats were increasingly reluctant to allow. Bush II knew that era was over and he was trying that first year to recalibrate to more difficult and tedious domestic concerns but the 9/11 attacks relieved him of that, allowed another “outsider” come to tame and right-size the federal government to kick the can down the road.

The New York Times’ Deal Book ran an obituary for a living person this week. It’s titled, “In Corzine Comeback, Big Risks and Steep Fall.” Peter Lattman and Nelson Schwartz combined aren’t quite Shakespeare, never mind Carducci, but its worth reading:

“And Mr. Corzine, with a fortune estimated at half a billion dollars at its peak, did not confine his future ambitions to Wall Street. Even as he was seeking to revive his financial career, Mr. Corzine, a Democrat, had long styled himself as a financial executive moving seamlessly between Washington and Wall Street, in the mold of former Treasury secretaries like Robert E. Rubin or C. Douglas Dillon.” (New York Times)

Seamlessly…. Corzine’s unfortunately named brokerage, MF Global, filed for bankruptcy Monday since it failed to become too-big-to-fail. He apparently tried for six weeks to sell it off which would have been embarrassing enough but would have assuaged that somewhat with a $12.1 million “severance” according to Joe Nocera’s Times column, “Corzine Crashes Like It’s 2008” (see link below). I like the cruel reference to then New Jersey Governor Corzine’s actual automobile crash in his second year in office. He was being driven in the Governor’s SUV well above the speed limit when they came up on a pickup truck pulling into the passing lane. Corzine was not wearing a seatbelt, busy as he was doing the public’s or the private’s business on his phone. While he was taken to the hospital the pickup driver was at first arrested. A near Soviet-style painting of the actual public-private relationship. In the Soviet Union only politburo members possessed cars and for their drivers there were no traffic laws whatsoever. Imagine what wonders our politburo could accomplish if they just could clear us off the roads? But would they then meet their proper fate? I think so. Physics and Theater are God’s fascism.

Drawing by James Fotopoulos

From the Desk of Joe Carducci…

Nicholas Kristof in NYT, "Crony Capitalism Comes Home".

“I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism. But, in recent years, some financiers have chosen to live in a government-backed featherbed. Their platform seems to be socialism for tycoons and capitalism for the rest of us. They’re not evil at all. But when the system allows you more than your fair share, it’s human to grab. That’s what explains featherbedding by both unions and tycoons, and both are impediments to a well-functioning market economy.”

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Joe Nocera in NYT, "Corzine Crashes Like It’s 2008".

“When I read MF Global Finance’s second-quarter results, though, what popped out at me was its compensation expenses: 64 percent of revenues went to compensation. In any industry but Wall Street, that would be obscene. Indeed, in a talk he gave at Princeton last year, Corzine said that he’d been ‘arguing about compensation sins of Wall Street’ for decades. Not enough to actually do anything about it, though, once he was back in charge of a firm.”

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Andrew Sorkin in NYT, "It’s Lonely Without Goldman Net".

“Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman — and former Treasury secretary — joined Citigroup as a senior adviser and board member in 1999. A dazzling trader when he was at Goldman, he counseled Citigroup that the firm should take more risk. While he did not manage the firm’s trading or its day-to-day activities, the firm lost more than 70 percent of its value during his tenure, and ultimately the government had to bail out the company twice. It is clearly debatable whether he deserves blame, but the outcome is incontrovertible. What is clear is that Citigroup did not have the kind of risk management or culture that Mr. Rubin had grown accustomed to at Goldman.”

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Carolyn Lerner in NYT, "A Law Misused for Political Ends".

“The law, the Hatch Act of 1939, was intended to keep improper politics out of the federal workplace. At its best, it prevents people in political power from abusing their positions. It prohibits coercion by a government supervisor — such as pressuring employees to volunteer for or contribute to a campaign — and shields the civil service and the federal workplace from politicking. But at its worst, the law prevents would-be candidates in state and local races from running because they are in some way, no matter how trivially, tied to a source of federal funds in their professional lives. Our caseload in these matters quintupled to 526 complaints in the 2010 fiscal year, from 98 in 2000. We advised individuals on this law 4,320 times in 2010.”

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Elisabeth Rosenthal in NYT, "Reinventing Post Offices in a Digital World".

“With the United States Postal Service facing insolvency, and one of the postal workers’ unions hiring consultants on business restructuring, it is looking toward Europe for new operating models, even though American legislation currently precludes adapting some of those innovations. After selling off all but 24 of 29,000 post office buildings in the past 15 years, the German postal service is now housed mostly within other business ‘partners,’ including banks, convenience stores and even private homes. In rural areas, a shopkeeper or even a centrally located homeowner is given a sign and deputized as a part-time postmaster.”

***

NYT: "Tales From the Supercommittee".

“Last week, Democrats offered a $3.2 trillion compromise — proposing cuts to domestic spending and social-insurance programs that were so large as to be imprudent. Their proposal was instantly rejected by Republicans on the panel. Why? Because the Democrats included $1.3 trillion in new tax revenues, which is exactly $1.3 trillion more than Republicans are willing to accept. In contrast, Republicans say they are willing to cut $2.2 trillion from the deficit, but only about $40 billion of that would be from new revenues. None would be from new taxes.”

***

Eric Posner in New Republic on Kevin McMahon’s book, Nixon’s Court: His Challenge to Judicial Liberalism and Its Political Consequences.

“What strikes the reader hardest is how casually Nixon made his choices. Many of them were not seriously vetted before they were nominated, or their names were disclosed publicly and they were shot down. With perhaps the exception of Burger, Nixon knew little about the ideological positions of his nominees and did not seem to care as long as they came across as conservative to the public. As Nixon said to Mitchell, ‘Be sure to emphasize to all the southerners that Rehnquist is a reactionary bastard, which I hope to Christ he is.’ But Nixon concluded that the only political benefit from appointing Rehnquist was the impression that he was appointing a qualified person, and he did not think that this amounted to much. McMahon spends only a handful of pages on the four candidates whom the Senate confirmed, and, since he seems to have scoured the archives, one can only conclude that appointing a Supreme Court justice was of little interest to Nixon -- seen only as an opportunity to make a modest political gain, akin to a small-town mayor’s appointment of the local water board. Nixon was hardly alone. Virtually all presidents have treated Supreme Court nominations with a casualness that appalls the legions of Court-revering lawyers and makes a mockery of the worshipful attitude of the press. Americans know little about the Supreme Court, and generally respect its decisions, regardless of their political valence. So a president gains no credit for appointing a justice who advances the public interest and receives no blame for appointing a justice who subverts it.”

***

Steven Malanga in WSJ, "How Harrisburg Borrowed Itself Into Bankruptcy".

“Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, is drowning in debt. City officials have known for more than four years that they'd have to deal with the fiscal mess, but they punted. The state has engineered a bailout plan, but the city council rejected it. Instead it has asked creditors to forgo as much as $100 million of the debt. Essentially, the city council is engaged in a giant game of brinksmanship with the state and creditors, daring them to come up with something that's less onerous than the current state plan, which involves asset sales and renegotiating union contracts. ‘There's no way [state] legislators are going to sit up there and let the capital city of this state go under. They would be the laughingstock of the country,’ council member Gloria Martin-Roberts said earlier this year. Under seven-term Mayor Stephen Reed, who governed from 1982 to 2010, Harrisburg had a long love affair with borrowed money, using it to spur projects of dubious value.”

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John Kass in CT, "What’s so crazy about unity between occupiers, tea partiers?".

“And both groups know that scoundrels are running their government, and that sleek corporatists and politicians in both parties have been in league against them, bailing out Wall Street and accepting Wall Street political cash while the little guy drowns. Someday, will both groups — occupiers and tea partiers — realize we have enough common ground to join together as libertarians and bend the nation to our collective will? ‘No,’ said my friend of the left, Jerry Vasilatos, 45, a freelance filmmaker who wants to tax the rich. ‘But nice try. We've got to hold the 1 percent with all the wealth and make them accountable.’ Mike Akyol, 18, a DePaul University student, hasn't been part of the Occupy Chicago protest. But as an economics major, he wanted to study it up close. Like me, he admired their passion, but not the lack of focus. ‘The tea party was about anger and so is this,’ Akyol said. ‘But is that anger sustainable without a clear focus?’ OK, some of the Occupy Chicago folks may be young, and like their Occupy Wall Street brothers and sisters in other cities, many of them mistakenly believe that America can tax its way back to economic vitality. And yes, a few of them may communicate by the use of hand puppets. But where else would you see protest signs like this? ‘Jerry Reinsdorf is a Welfare Queen!’”

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John Kay in FT, "Europe’s elite is fighting reality and will lose".

“An elite in Brussels and some other capitals takes the view that whatever the problem, the answer is more Europe. Another reason is the pleasure European leaders take in holding international crisis meetings. Nicolas Sarkozy will not forgo any opportunity for public grandstanding, while the representatives of smaller European states exploit the crisis to acquire a profile they would not otherwise achieve or, in most cases, deserve. Financial markets are desperate to be bailed out, with the support of Tim Geithner, in his capacity as ambassador for US investment banks. The decisive action they all seek is not really a European solution at all. It is that the German government should write very large cheques -- or underwrite very large borrowings. Whenever you assert responsibility for issues you do not have authority to tackle, you risk a crisis of credibility that undermines the authority you do have.”

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Francesco Guerrera in WSJ, "Debt Deal Has Dose of Irony".

“As the stock market and the euro celebrated a deal on Greek debt that maybe, just maybe, could put an end to two years of bumbling procrastination, a bitter irony emerged from the 15-page statement penned by bleary-eyed bureaucrats Thursday. After spending the aftermath of the financial crisis hogging the moral high ground and criticizing ‘Anglo-Saxon capitalism’ for its penchant for financial engineering and excessive leverage, European Union leaders employed some of the same devices for Greece. The plan was passed, but not without getting around some of the principles outlined after the 2008 debacle.”

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Philip Stephens in FT, "Little England: Britain sleepwalks towards break-up".

“The implication is that the return to Scotland of full control over the economy, spending, taxation and borrowing would represent a moderate third way. It would be nothing of the sort. Devolution max would put Scotland on the threshold of independence. It would demand a rewriting of the constitutional settlement that would inevitably leave many Scots asking why not independence. The fact that such an arrangement is presented as a ‘sensible compromise’ speaks to Mr Salmond’s political genius in reframing the debate. For many in Mr Cameron’s party, however, it seems that severing ties with Brussels is more important than preserving them with Edinburgh.”

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Landon Thomas & Jack Ewing in NYT, "Can Super Mario Save the Day for Europe?".

“‘The solvency of sovereign states has ceased to be a foregone conclusion,’ Mr. Draghi told bankers in Rome. It is too soon to tell whether he will adopt a more pragmatic, flexible approach at the central bank, which under Mr. Trichet came to be seen as rigid. It is the only major central bank that has not reduced interest rates to near zero. Those closest to Mr. Draghi say his economic views have been shaped by his challenges at the Italian finance ministry in the 1990s, when Italy was expelled from the eurozone’s predecessor, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and, like Greece today, came close to bankruptcy. His record is not without controversy. In Italy and later, as a vice chairman for Goldman Sachs in Europe, Mr. Draghi was a proponent of nations and other institutions like pension funds using derivatives to more efficiently manage their liabilities. In some cases, many experts now contend, these transactions helped mask the finances of Greece and Italy before those nations were allowed into the euro.”

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Alex Barker & Quentin Peel in FT, "Sarkozy-Cameron spat lays bare tensions over economic integration".

“Germany, with some difficulty, secured agreement this weekend to move forward with work on possible treaty amendments, such as making the rules for budget discipline enforceable by the European Court of Justice and introducing automatic sanctions for those who break the rules. But the calls for a fresh round of wrenching treaty negotiations dismayed some smaller states that need to put such agreements to public votes, while prompting Britain to say it will ‘exact a price’ in return for the changes. Mr Cameron wants ‘safe-guards’ so that those involved in the fast-track economic integration do not rig rules in their own favour and threaten the EU’s single market, which extends to all 27 member states. Of particular concern are some eurozone integration proposals circulating in Berlin, including closer tax harmonization and a common regulatory framework for financial markets in the eurozone.”

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Wolfgang Munchau in FT, "What saves the eurozone will kill the wider union".

“The euro was introduced on the back of two lies, which the complacent policy crowd in Brussels rarely bothered to challenge. The first, now well known, is that monetary union could exist without political integration. The second derives from it: that the EU’s euro and non-euro countries could sustainably co-exist. This is the idea of the EU as a ‘club of clubs’. We all share the single market, but otherwise co-exist in a framework of flexible and variable geometry. The eurozone’s crisis-resolution is already unfolding a dynamic that is inconsistent with this.”

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Guy Dinmore in FT, "Berlusconi faces ultimate sovereign downgrade".

“In private, Italian officials say EU leaders are allowing their personal disdain of Mr Berlusconi to cloud their jedgment over Italy -- and, in the case of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is facing re-election next year, disguising France’s own economic weaknesses. But they also realise that such views no longer cut any ice as markets increasingly lose faith in Italy’s ability to stop the Greek contagion from spreading. The extent of the concern was highlighted last week when Angela Merkel telephoned Giorgio Napolitano, Italy’s head of state. According to leaks, the German chancellor wanted to know if Mr Berlusconi was capable of implementing budget cuts and fulfilling reform pledges, and whether Italy had an alternative to take his place. Mr Berlusconi, who, according to diplomats, pretended to doze off during the weekend’s summit, has been given until the next meeting of Euro zone leaders on Wednesday to come up with a convincing plan.”

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Beppe Severgnini in FT, "How Italy just survives having the class truant as leader".

“Under Mr Berlusconi since 2001, the budget deficit rose from 107 per cent to 120 per cent. His populist instincts would have made him spend even more had not the finance minister, Giulio Tremonti, said no. But Italy does not get by only with a little help from its friends abroad. It also benefits from its strength at home. There are 8,000 town halls in the country. Most of them do their job under tight scrutiny from citizens, who regularly meet their local authorities at the local caffe. Local elections work well, unlike messy national elections; mayors are confirmed or kicked out. If you go down one layer, things work even better. In hard times, Italian families start doing what they do best, taking care of everyone in a way that northern European or American families will not.”

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David Enrich & Deborah Ball in WSJ, "European Drama Engulfs The World’s Oldest Bank".

“Banking crises are painful everywhere. In countries like Italy and Spain, where banks historically have served as bedrocks of local communities, the financial turbulence is exacting an especially severe toll. In Spain, local savings banks known as cajas traditionally have been controlled by local politicians or in some cases, the Catholic Church. They were free to use their institutions to bankroll pet projects. When Spain's real-estate market cratered, many cajas were ravaged by heavy losses. Less money is flowing to local social projects. The situation in Italy is more complex. For six decades starting in the Mussolini era, Italian banks operated in a role akin to government-owned utilities. They regularly recycled some profits into local charity. In the early 1990s, as Europe became increasingly economically integrated, Italy started to privatize its banks. Seeking to preserve their charitable roles, newly created foundations were endowed with majority stakes in the lenders. The banks churned out a steady stream of dividends that enabled the foundations' charitable giving. Over the next 15 years, most of the foundations diversified their investments so that their fortunes weren't completely entwined with those of their banks. Other banks merged, reducing the ownership stake of their respective foundations. On average, bank stocks now represent only about a third of the foundations' assets. The Monte dei Paschi Foundation is an exception. Nearly 90% of its assets are concentrated in the bank. It's the only large banking foundation that still controls its legacy bank.”

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David Gardner in FT, "The three spectres at the Arab feast".

“Which of these ways of running a country eventually comes to be the norm greatly matters. The battle to shape the future of an Arab world in flux will be fierce -- and the Saudies will be in the thick of it. From behind the defensive wall of their puritanical Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam, they will deploy petrodollars to steer Arab Islamism in their direction. While to many this is not an appealing version of bread and circuses, the Saudi regime, built upon the twin pillars of absolute monarchy and Wahhabi sectarianism, tends to feel history as well as divine right is behind its cause.”

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Raymond Ibrahim at Meforum.org, "Top Muslim Declares All Christians ‘Infidels’".

“To what extent was Egypt's Maspero massacre, wherein the military literally mowed down Christian Copts protesting the ongoing destruction of their churches, a product of anti-Christian sentiment? A video of Egypt's Grand Mufti, Sheikh Ali Gomaa (or Gom'a), which began circulating weeks before the massacre, helps elucidate. While holding that Muslims may coexist with Christians (who, as dhimmis, have rights), Gomaa categorized Christians as kuffar — ‘infidels’ — a word that connotes ‘enemies,’ ‘evil-doers,’ and every bad thing to Muslim ears. After quoting Quran 5:17, ‘Infidels are those who declare God is the Christ, [Jesus] son of Mary,’ he expounded by saying any association between a human and God (in Arabic, shirk) is the greatest sin: ‘Whoever thinks the Christ is God, or the Son of God, not symbolically — for we are all sons of God — but attributively, has rejected the faith which God requires for salvation,’ thereby becoming an infidel.”

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Firuz Kazemzadeh in WSJ, "Iran’s Outcast Religion".

“Unlike Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians, who have certain limited rights under the Islamic Constitution, Bahais were declared unprotected infidels immediately following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Bahais have faced persecution in Iran since their religion was founded more than a century and a half ago, but it was never as systematic as in the last 30 years. Since the Islamic Revolution, more than 200 Bahai leaders have been put to death. The regime has outlawed Bahai institutions, confiscated their properties, desecrated their cemeteries, demolished their holy places. Bahais are subject to constant state-sanctioned pressure to recant their faith. To stamp out that faith, Iranian Supreme leader Ali Khamenei approved the so-called Golpaygani memorandum in 1991. Photo copies describing plans to slowly strangle Iran's Bahai community were made public by the United Nations in 1992. One measure was to deny Bahais entry to universities, thereby impoverishing them intellectually and economically.”

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Simon Montefiore in NYT, "Dictators Get the Deaths They Deserve".

“Unlike monarchs, who pass power to their heirs at the moment of death to ensure the survival of the regime, tyrants must simply survive as long as possible. Hence inhumane struggles by indefatigable doctors to keep ailing dictators — Chairman Mao, Leonid I. Brezhnev, Marshal Tito, General Franco — alive. Only the ingenious North Koreans have solved this problem by declaring Kim Il-sung immortal, perpetual president. The courtiers of modern tyrants have sought to avoid the inconvenience of death by creating new hereditary monarchies. Outside the Arab world, the Kims of North Korea, Kadyrovs of Chechnya, Kabilas of Congo and Aliyevs of Azerbaijan all achieved this dictator’s dream. Few in the Arab world have done the same. Hafez al-Assad of Syria, who ruled from 1970, died in his bed in 2000, passing the presidency to his son Bashar. Colonel Qaddafi, Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Hussein all dreamed of it. But the spoiled heirs of such hereditary tyrannies usually lack the talent of their fathers.”

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Roman Kabachiy at Opendemocracy.net, "Ukraine-Poland: history wars rage on".

“On 14 October, the unofficial Day of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), nationalists from Oleh Tyahnybok’s party came out once more on to the streets of Kyiv. Vyatrovich and Tyahnybok are united in their desire to achieve recognition for the UPA as a participant in WWII. For the moment, their battle has been without much success.

The chief problem besetting the procedure for raising the role of the UPA to nationwide Ukrainian status is not only the lack of national consensus (the UPA was mainly active in Western Ukraine: its veterans living there now have all the relevant privileges, though only within the region), but the international situation too. If Kyiv officially recognises the UPA – and Viktor Yushchenko made a feeble attempt to do just this at the end of his term in office in January 2010 – there will be protests from at least three capitals: Moscow, Tel Aviv and Warsaw.”

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Michael Wines in NYT, "China Takes a Loss to Get Ahead in the Business of Fresh Water".

“There is but one wrinkle in the $4 billion plant: The desalted water costs twice as much to produce as it sells for. Nevertheless, the owner of the complex, a government-run conglomerate called S.D.I.C., is moving to quadruple the plant’s desalinating capacity, making it China’s largest. ‘Someone has to lose money,’ Guo Qigang, the plant’s general manager, said in a recent interview. ‘We’re a state-owned corporation, and it’s our social responsibility.’ In some places, this would be economic lunacy. In China, it is economic strategy. As it did with solar panels and wind turbines, the government has set its mind on becoming a force in yet another budding environment-related industry: supplying the world with fresh water.”

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NYT: "China Reins in Liberalization of Culture".

“‘Whether spooked by popular uprisings worldwide, a coming leadership transition at home or their own citizens’ increasingly provocative tastes, Communist leaders are proposing new limits on media and Internet freedoms that include some of the most restrictive measures in years. The most striking instance occurred Tuesday, when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television ordered 34 major satellite television stations to limit themselves to no more than two 90-minute entertainment shows each per week, and collectively 10 nationwide. They are also being ordered to broadcast two hours of state-approved news every evening and to disregard audience ratings in their programming decisions. The ministry said the measures, to go into effect on Jan. 1, were aimed at rooting out ‘excessive entertainment and vulgar tendencies.’”

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Harsh Pant at YaleGlobal, "Wary of China, Its Southern Neighbors Court India".

“India’s role becomes critical in such an evolving balance of power. As Singapore’s elder-statesman Lee Kuan Yew has argued, he would like India to be ‘part of the Southeast Asia balance of forces’ and ‘a counterweight [to China] in the Indian Ocean.’
…Both Vietnam and Burma have hit a rough patch in their ties with China. China has sparred with regional states including the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan, asserting its ‘indisputable sovereignty’ over the South China Sea. Some like the Philippines and Vietnam have pushed back. Philippines President Benigno Aquino Jr. told his nation: ‘We do not wish to increase tensions with anyone, but we must let the world know that we are ready to protect what is ours.’ Ever mindful of not provoking China, Vietnam has sent its top party leader to China and the president to India, but has made it clear that it wants the US and India to counterbalance Chinese power. In September, when Beijing told New Delhi that its permission was needed for India’s state-owned oil and gas firm to explore energy on two Vietnamese blocks in the South China Sea, Vietnam quickly cited the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea to claim that blocks 127 and 128 were in Vietnamese territorial waters. New Delhi supported Hanoi’s claims and has made it clear that its state-owned firm would continue to explore in the South China Sea. This rare display of spine has helped India strengthen its profile in the region and its relationship with Vietnam in particular.”

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Kathrin Hille in FT, "Belligerent language masks limited capability".

“What has particularly unsettled other countries in the region and eroded the credibility of Beijing’s assurances is the, at times, belligerent language from military commentators, growing nationalism among the population and a lack of transparency on the part of the PLA beyond its general statements of peaceful intentions. This month, an opinion piece in the Global Times, a tabloid owned by People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist party, called for war against Vietnam and the Philippines. An analyst, writing under the pseudonym Long Tao, said in the piece that China should launch military strikes against the ‘two noisiest troublemakers’ in the region and transform the South China Sea into a ‘sea of fire’.”

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MercoPress: "Brazil will look into its harsh political past but the military are safe".

“‘The committee will investigate forced disappearance of people and human rights abuses allegedly committed over a 42 year period but without revoking the 1979 Amnesty law which was confirmed by the Brazilian Supreme Court a year ago. The purpose of the bill is ‘to guarantee the peoples’ right to memory and historic truth, and promoting national reconciliation’. The committee of seven members named by the Executive will have two years to analyze the cases to be presented. However the relatives of disappeared have criticized the bill because it ‘won’t come up with new conclusions’ and because it supports the Amnesty law which protects the alleged military culprits of crimes against humanity.”

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MercoPress: "The Argentine economy is ‘a time-bomb ticking’ warns economist".

“‘I have been asked to explain what is happening in Argentina but it’s not easy because we have record sales of cars, record votes and record of capital flight, so really instead of me an economist, maybe you should have contracted a psychologist’ said Melconian to an audience of business leaders and analysts in Montevideo. ‘Argentina is sailing along an anaesthetic path of commodities’ high prices which overshadows reality’, said Melconian arguing that the growing value of Argentine exports in recent years can only be explained because of higher prices since agriculture production is Argentina is stagnant and productivity has ‘not improved’. Without the need of significant investments or improved production methods, Argentine farmers can ‘sit and drink mate’ because the trade surplus is safe, said the economist who estimated Argentina will end 2011 with a positive balance of ten billion dollars.”

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Gerard Helferich in WSJ on Scott Wallace’s book, The Unconquered.

“For the native peoples of the Amazon, the beginning of the end arrived one day early in 1500, when Spanish explorer Vicente Yáñez Pinzón eased his small ship into the mouth of the great river. The waterway was so incomprehensibly grand that Pinzón sailed 200 miles upstream before realizing he had left the ocean. Forty-one years later, conquistadors Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana dared the rainforest in search of El Dorado, the fabled land of gold, only to encounter starvation and violence at the hands of the indigenous tribes. Then, beginning in the 18th century, European scientists such as Charles Marie de La Condamine and Alexander von Humboldt ventured into the Amazon, taking only measurements and specimens. All these outsiders kept to the principal rivers, and most of Amazonia remained a vast unknown. But that began to change in the late 1800s, when the demand for rubber lured outsiders deeper into the forest, where they terrorized and enslaved the native peoples (and prompted a British diplomat to coin the expression ‘crime against humanity’). Early in the next century came explorers such as Teddy Roosevelt and Percy Fawcett, bent on discovering and mapping, and anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Napoleon Chagnon, keen to contact and study far-flung tribes. From the start, the most dangerous baggage carried by these invaders wasn't guns or metal axes but microbes. With no resistance to European diseases, the Indian populations plummeted, and the survivors abandoned their traditional lands and fled farther into the rainforest.”

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Jeffrey Gettleman in NYT, "Kenyan Motives in Somalia Predate Recent Abductions".

“For several years, the American-backed Kenyan military has been secretly arming and training clan-based militias inside Somalia to safeguard Kenya’s borders and economic interests, especially a huge port to be built just 60 miles south of Somalia. But now many diplomats, analysts and Kenyans fear that the country, by essentially invading southern Somalia, has bitten off far more than it can chew, opening itself up to terrorist reprisals and impeding the stressed relief efforts to save hundreds of thousands of starving Somalis. Somalia has been a thorn in Kenya’s side ever since Kenya became independent in 1963, and the two countries have followed wildly different paths. Somalia has become synonymous with famine, war and anarchy, while Kenya has become one of America’s closest African allies, a bastion of stability and a favorite of tourists worldwide. Kenyan officials said it was becoming impossible to coexist with a failed state next door.”

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Jeffrey Gettleman in NYT, "An Exceptional Change, And via the Ballot Box, Too".

“In a way, Mr. Scott was an apt person to make this point and spotlight Zambia’s unusual degree of stability and harmony. Mr. Scott is Zambia’s vice president and he is white. He now calls himself ‘the highest pure honky’ official anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa and he seems to be right. While black-white relations tend to be touchy in some of the other countries — in Zimbabwe, whites have been pushed off farms, and in South Africa black leaders are fighting for their right to sing ‘Shoot the Boer,’ which literally means white settlers — Mr. Scott ascended to Zambia’s second most powerful position without a ripple. ‘We don’t just like Guy Scott,’ said Paul Bunda, a student-cum-taxi-driver in Lusaka, the capital, with a huge smile on his face. ‘We love him.’ Unlike so much of the continent, Zambia has been spared chronic famines, civil wars and poisonous ethnic or racial politics. It is highly uncommon for an incumbent African president to lose a hotly contested election and then simply retire quietly by the pool. But that is exactly what Rupiah Banda just did.”

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Kevin Boyle in NYTBR on Tony Horwitz’s book, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.

“Horwitz moves nimbly through Brown’s deepening involvement in the movement in the 1830s and ’40s, setting his devotion alongside the growing national conflict over slavery’s place in a country ostensibly dedicated to equality. Abolitionism was then dominated by pacifists like Garrison, who insisted that the evil could be destroyed by moral suasion. Brown didn’t agree. In 1837 he gathered together his wife and three teenage boys — the eldest of 20 children he would father — and asked who among them ‘were willing to make common cause with him in doing all in our power to break the jaws of the wicked and pluck the spoil out of his teeth.’ From then on, one of his sons said, ‘there was a Brown family conspiracy to break the power of slavery.’ They got their first chance in 1856, when Brown and his boys joined the antislavery forces trying to prevent Kansas from entering the Union as a slave state. Brown’s vigorous defense of the free-state town of Osawatomie made him famous in the North, infamous in the South. But Horwitz lingers on a different action. On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown and four of his sons raided a tiny proslavery settlement on the banks of Pottawatomie Creek, not far from the Missouri border. There they killed and butchered five men, all of them violently opposed to abolitionism though not themselves slaveholders, slicing off their arms and splitting open their skulls with the broadswords Brown had brought with him for the occasion. ‘God is my judge,’ he told another son upon their return. ‘We were justified under the circumstances.’”

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Ron Rosenbaum in NYTBR on "The Journals of Spalding Gray".

“Looking backward, he spoke for a generation of people who had learned to doubt everything conventional but couldn’t find sure satisfaction in the unconventional, even as they (and Gray) turned to Eastern spirituality as an alternative to Western tradition. And looking forward, he helped inspire (for better and worse) a generation of memoirists, most of whom lacked his self-deprecatory humor and, instead of finding the large in the small, found their smallness in the melodramatic, self-congratulatory accounts of their tribulations.”

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Jeanine Basinger in WSJ on James Curtis’ book, Spencer Tracy: A Biography.

“Throughout most of his life, on and off, Tracy was an alcoholic who disappeared on lengthy binges, sometimes trashing hotel rooms. Mr. Curtis doesn't shirk ugly facts. Describing a double date that Tracy and Loretta Young had with Josie and John Wayne, Mr. Curtis admits that Tracy was ‘well blasted before dinner’ and had to be carried to his hotel suite by the Duke. He tells of a week in 1945 when Tracy ‘ran amok’ in New York and MGM's police chief had to bring ‘a few elite members of his constabulary’ to town and arrange for Tracy (‘fighting mad and struggling wildly’) to be admitted to Doctors Hospital. Tracy's drinking has usually been explained as stemming from guilt over his son's deafness. (A friend said, ‘It was very hard for him to talk about John.’) Mr. Curtis paints a more complex portrait, and the truth is that no one today can really know what made Tracy so angry, so guilty, so unhappy -- and so drunk -- for so much of his life. Mr. Curtis sketches Tracy's human flaws with clarity and tact. He doesn't try to explain what he can't explain. He describes.”

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Elisabeth Kasson in LAT Magazine, "When Country Was King".

“The music was also media supported. Southern California radio stations KFOX, KXLA, KMTR, KFWB, KGER and KRLA all featured country. Personalities like Squeakin’ Deacon, Tennessee Ernie Ford and the tireless local country-music promoter and publisher Cliffie Stone ruled the airwaves. By 1949, some radio shows had television counterparts, like Hollywood Barn Dance and Hometown Jamboree. An acquaintance gave me Marilyn Tuttle’s name and told me she had some great photographs from the era. When I arrived at her cheerful yellow ranch house in the San Fernando Valley, I quickly assessed that he didn’t know the half of it. Tuttle was a featured singer on Foreman Phillips Presents and, more important, Town Hall Party. A spry, quick-witted 85, with a delicious sense of humor, she is also the widow of one Wesley Tuttle, celebrated country singer and guitarist, radio personality, reluctant actor and minister. Marilyn and Wesley had a recording deal at Capitol and a social circle that was a veritable who’s who of the musicians, performers and businessmen that made up the core of Southern California country.”

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Brian Walsby’s Minutemen T-shirt.

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Archie Patterson’s radio show on KUSF in exile.

“The first show aired on Oct 28 and featured UK Psychedelic Rock & Acid Folk 1968-1970. The programs focus will be highly eclectic with music played ranging the spectrum of sound and styles. I began Eurock as an FM radio program in California in 1971. Now after 40 years I have come full circle to begin again a new musical adventure. Tune in, Listen & Enjoy every Friday night!”

  
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Mondo Memphis book event with authors Tav Falco & Erik Morse

• Wed. Nov. 16, 6:30pm
The powerHouse Arena 37 Main Street, Brooklyn

“‘Mondo Memphis’ is a dual, 450-page encyclopedic history and psychogeography of the city of Memphis, written by legendary performer Tav Falco and cultural critic Erik Morse. ‘Mondo Memphis’ is both an original history of the gothic South and an intertext of the urban legends, rural fables and literary clichés that have made the Bluff City simultaneously a metropolis of dreams and a necropolis of terrors.”

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Slam #58, “30 Jahre Damaged”

Wir zelebrieren 30 Jahre „Damaged“, das Meisterwerk der Hardcorepunk Legende BLACK FLAG, lassen deshalb den Wüterich und Literaten HENRY ROLLINS vom Cover schreien und präsentieren euch auf acht Seiten exklusive Einblicke in die Welt der Band sowie exklusive Bilder vom visionären Fotografen Glen E. Friedman.

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Mugger’s Vice.com interview.

“VICE: So how did the Nig-Heist get going?

 Steve Corbin: Black Flag kept going on these big long tours, and there were always these really crummy punk bands opening for them. So I told them, ‘Man, I can do better than that. But we can sort of make a parody of it.’ So they let me do what I wanted to do, and I just started to get crazy with things.

And what’s with the name?

 I had this black friend, Eugene, who would always hit me up for cigarettes. He’d come up and say ‘Nig heist!’ when he’d take one of my cigarettes.

So that was Eugene’s move?

 That was his move.”

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Obituary of the Week

"William Niskanen" (1933 - 2011)

“The distinguished economist, who served the Cato Institute as its longtime chairman, was famous for his integrity, collegiality, and far-ranging scholarly interests, and in particular for his pathbreaking work in the field of ‘public choice’ economics. His departure from Ford Motor’s chief economist post after declining to back the company’s push for auto import quotas came to symbolize an honesty and adherence to principle that set a sorely needed example in Washington.”

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Thanks to Jay Babcock, Steve Beeho, Tony Rettman, Jan Roehlk.