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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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!’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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….”
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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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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’.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.’”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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• Joe Carducci, Chris Collins, James Fotopoulos, Mike Vann Gray, David Lightbourne
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kennan was a musician as well, his combo was banned by the kremlin during his stint in the ussr's capitol-never found out what kind of music it was, however.
ReplyDeleteHey, Joe... did you know that Laramie-born Jaycee Carroll is playing pro basket in Spain?
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