Heavy Things

Liz Penn writes

My favorite individual moment in a movie this summer occurs near the end of Spiderman 2. After untold travails (saving the world from a mechanical-armed human octopus, losing his girlfriend to a smug astronaut, having the last hors-d'oeuvre snatched out from under his nose at a humiliating party), the divided hero, Peter Parker/Spiderman (Tobey Maguire), finds himself holding up a huge wall of iron scaffolding that is about to crush his sweetheart, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). For reasons not worth going into here, a nuclear fireball burns nearby as the eight-limbed villain, Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) thrashes in his Miltonic death throes. Straining under the weight of the massive slab of iron, Spidey/Parker -- he's somewhere halfway between the two by this point, having dispensed with his red-and-blue disguise and revealed his human, bespectacled identity to those closest to him -- looks Mary Jane in the eye and says plaintively, "This is really heavy."

John Prendergrast, among others, has been all over the place trying to stop the Sudanese genocide in Darfur. I've seen him on Charlie Rose and on CSPAN speaking to a small college crowd at American University in DC. He's written op-eds for major newspapers and has appeared before House and Senate committees. Coupled with the efforts of Nicholas D. Kristof, Samantha Power, Julie Flint, Congressman Donald Payne and many, many others, enough pressure was put on the White House for it to name the beast. Secretary of State Colin Powell said "genocide" was occurring in Darfur, which must have been a first.

Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice say elections will go ahead in Iraq despite increased, pre-election violence by insurgents. The election in January will be another first and important milestone in the war on Islamic fundamentalism.

American soldiers and Iraqi police are venturing back into the Sunni triangle in what is essentially a war of attrition.

American forces entered the city of Samarra for the first time in months on Thursday, taking what appeared to be a small but significant step in their effort to regain control of contested Sunni areas north and west of the capital.

American commanders said their forces, accompanied by members of the Iraqi police and by national guard soldiers, drove into the city Thursday morning after gaining assurances from local Iraqi leaders that they would not be fired on. The local leaders said they sensed divisions within the insurgents' ranks between those who favored some accommodation with the Americans and those who rejected it, and felt secure enough to issue the temporary guarantee.
...

On Wednesday, in an interview with The Associated Press, Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste, the commander of the First Infantry Division, said his men were planning to go into Samarra whether they had a deal or not.

"It'll be a quick fight and the enemy is going to die fast," General Batiste said from his headquarters in Tikrit. "The message for the people of Samarra is: peacefully or not, this is going to be solved."

on this day in 1973

Didn't realize U2's One Tree Hill was partly about Chile:

And in the world a heart of darkness
A fire zone
Where poets speak their heart
Then bleed for it
Jara sang, his song a weapon
In the hands of love
You know his blood still cries
From the ground

(via Normblog)

Political Economy, Outsourcing and the American standard of living

Republican television journalist Lou Dobbs inveighs against offshore outsourcing in a new book. In a recent campaign speech, John Kerry attacked corporations again for sending jobs overseas. Daniel Drezner (pro outsourcing/free trade) writes about Paul A. Samuelson's new article which argues outsourcing will eventually lower America's standard of living.

So, in the end, I'm not convinced that Samuelson's dissent changes the substantive issues of debate. But as a political scientist, it is impossible to deny the extent to which Samuelson's article will alter the rhetorical balance of power in this policy debate. Samuelson will succeed in reigniting debate on this topic, as well as provide aid and comfort to those who wish oppose the practice of offshore outsourcing.

The New York Times article Drezner focuses on says

[Samuelson's] dissent from the mainstream economic consensus about outsourcing and globalization will appear later this month in a distinguished journal, cloaked in clever phrases and theoretical equations, but clearly aimed at the orthodoxy within his profession: Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve; N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers; and Jagdish N. Bhagwati, a leading international economist and professor at Columbia University.

Bhagwati and two other economists have respdonded. Arnold Kling summarizes the draft version of their response as follows

The authors point out that some of the concern is not about trade per se but about the accumulation of capital and know-how in China and India. They suggest that this could harm the U.S. if it reduces trade by eliminating the division of labor. That is, suppose that the U.S. stays stagnant, but China and India learn how to do everything that we know how to do. Then they will no longer export cheap goods to us, and we will lose. This, they claim, is what Samuelson's theoretical paper describes. If so, then it does not really describe outsourcing.

However, the Times piece notes

According to Mr. Samuelson, a low-wage nation that is rapidly improving its technology, like India or China, has the potential to change the terms of trade with America in fields like call-center services or computer programming in ways that reduce per-capita income in the United States. "The new labor-market-clearing real wage has been lowered by this version of dynamic fair free trade," Mr. Samuelson writes.

But doesn't purchasing cheaper call-center or programming services from abroad reduce input costs for various industries, delivering a net benefit to the economy? Not necessarily, Mr. Samuelson replied. To put things in simplified terms, he explained in the interview, "being able to purchase groceries 20 percent cheaper at Wal-Mart does not necessarily make up for the wage losses."

The problematic concept is "net benefit." Wages and commodity prices are only part of the equation. Profits is the missing variable. If American wages lower and prices lower too (because of cheap foreign labor), but not as much, the difference goes to profits and capital. Some of this will go towards new investments, but some goes into the pockets of wealthy investors. To sum up, the wealthy pocket the difference when competition causes wages to fall, but prices don't fall to match the loss of purchasing power of wage earners. As Drezner should know, this is as much a matter of politics, class war to be specific, as of economics.

The rational solution wouldn't be protectionism, but rather staid social democratic reforms, you know, the kinds of things the IMF asks governments to cut in exchange for loans. But would it be "inefficient" for these reforms to improve wage earners' standard of living in tandem with rising productivity without messing with protectionism and international trade? What occurred during the period of 1946-1973 would suggest it wouldn't be. Foreign workers will gain from international trade, even if their governments are much more oppressive than ours, and not only is this fair and just, it will benefit American workers in the long run in numerous, synergistic ways if international solidarity can be maintained.

Chalabi worse than Uday and Qusay?
To some this is because Chalabi "misled us." Toby Young has a review of Graydon Carter's new anti-Bush book in the New York Observer.

This volte-face must have been fairly sudden, since in that very same issue there was another David Rose piece, this one based on interviews with a series of Iraqi defectors, in which he detailed the appalling crimes committed by Saddam Hussein’s sons, Uday and Qusay, including torture, rape and murder.

Mr. Rose’s meetings with these defectors, as well as Mohamed Harith, were arranged by the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi’s outfit, which has subsequently been exposed as a fount of pro-war misinformation. All the so-called intelligence passed on by these "defectors" is now regarded as unreliable, even by the C.I.A. If Graydon was opposed to the war in Iraq, why did he allow the imprimatur of Vanity Fair to be used to lend credibility to Mr. Chalabi’s anti-Saddam propaganda? Perhaps he changed his mind about the war in the interval between commissioning the Uday and Qusay article and sitting down to write his "Editor’s Letter." (emphasis added)

So Uday and Qusay weren't that bad in Young's view.... It's common knowledge the C.I.A. has hated Chalabi ever since he publically faulted them for screwing up a military coup attempt against Hussein in 1996. He had warned them that the coup plotters had been infiltrated and compromised but they didn't listen. Many, many Iraqis better than Uday and Qusay - not hard to find - died because of the C.I.A.'s ineptitude and arrogance. And people think Chalabi is arrogant.

William Safire's take on the C.I.A is unique. He bashes the intelligence agency constantly, and rightly so, but doesn't think it should be abolished as Senator Roberts has proposed.

Mine Enemy's Enemy

Naomi Klein of No Logo fame penned a column recently where she opines "And Muqtada al-Sadr and his followers are not just another group of generic terrorists out to kill Americans; their opposition to the occupation represents the overwhelmingly mainstream sentiment in Iraq."

Who besides Manichean conservatives are arguing they're "generic terrorists"? "Terrorist" is an imprecise term. Nelson Mandela was once on the State Department's terrorist list. The central questions, though, are how many Iraqis support Sadr, if so in what manner and to what degree, and is he right to make war on the US forces. Klein writes "Before Sadr's supporters began their uprising, they made their demands for elections and an end to occupation through sermons, peaceful protests and newspaper articles. US forces responded by shutting down their newspapers, firing on their demonstrations and bombing their neighborhoods. It was only then that Sadr went to war against the occupation."

From what I remember, Sadr's followers went to war after US forces tried to arrest their leader for murdering a rival cleric in Najaf. Leftists Marc Cooper, Norman Geras, and Doug Ireland have written about Klein's "enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic. It doesn't register with Klein that many Iraqis - many Shiites - don't agree with a logic that's often been proven disasterous. Ayatollah Sistani, who's much more representative of the Iraqi mainstream, brokered a cease-fire between the Mahdi army and the US. The Iranian-based Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri, who was Sadr's mentor, has now withdrawn his support of Sadr. Both appreciate that Sadr isn't the way to democracy and an end to the occupation in Iraq.

Heather Havrilesky says she'll be blogging more often now that she's "swingle."

Pattern Recognition
(or Fear and Loathing in Globalization)

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition gives Fredric Jameson a jouissance attack.

Cayce Pollard's talent, lying as it does halfway between telepathy and old-fashioned aesthetic sensibility, is in fact what suspends Gibson's novel between Science Fiction and realism and lends it its extraordinary resonance. To put it simply (as she does), Cayce's business is to 'hunt "cool"'; or in other words, to wander through the masses of now and future consumers, . . . in order mentally to detect the first stirrings of anything likely to become a trend or a new fashion. She has in fact racked up some impressive achievements, of which my favourite, mildly redolent of DeLillo, is the identification of the first person in the world to wear a baseball cap backwards (he is a Mexican). But these 'futures' are very much a business proposition, and Cayce is something like an industrial spy of times to come. 'I consult on design . . . Manufacturers use me to keep track of street fashion'; these modest formulas are a little too dry, and underplay the sheer physicality of this gift, which allows her to identify a 'pattern' and then to 'point a commodifier at it'.
...
But Cayce's gift is drawn back into our real (or realistic) world by the body itself; she must pay for it by the nauseas and anxiety attacks, the commodity bulimia which is the inevitable price of her premonitory sensibility—no doubt nourished by obscure traumas, of which the latest is her father's mysterious disappearance in Manhattan on the morning of 9/11. It is as if the other face of the 'coming attraction', its reification and the dead-end product of what was once an active process of consumption and desire itself, were none other than the logo.
...
These nauseas are part of Cayce's navigational apparatus, and they stretch back to some of the oldest logos still extant, such as her worst nightmare, Bibendum, the Michelin Man, which is like that crack through which the Lacanian Real makes its catastrophic appearance. 'National icons', on the other hand, ‘are always neutral for her, with the exception of Nazi Germany’s . . . a scary excess of design talent’.

(via Gawker interview with Sasha Frere-Jones)

No problem, as long as the neocons don't invade
Samantha Power writes about Darfur:

Neither President Bush nor Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, spoke publicly about the killings in Darfur before March of this year, by which time some thirty thousand people had died as a result of ethnic cleansing.

Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis 2 is out. Here are the dates for her book tour.

Neal Pollack sells out
Maud Newton reports:

While the news is of little interest to me personally, Neal Pollack’s many fans may be interested to learn that the film rights to Never Mind The Pollacks, “the totally untrue adventures of Neal Pollack – world’s greatest living rock critic,” were sold last week to Warner Bros., for a price between $250k -$500k.

He better not beg us to buy his books anymore.

Icelandic system
"... a practice, supposedly based on child-rearing methods in medieval Iceland, of sending teenagers to live with other families in order to learn adult skills and behavior from grown-ups they have not yet learned to manipulate and despise."

This is Katha Pollitt's contribution to The Future Dictionary of America, a dictionary in the tradition of Gustave Flaubert's "Dictionary of Received Ideas," (1880), and Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary," (1911).

(via Newsday)

Not Quite
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd usually hits on interesting issues and raises thought-provoking questions, but her conclusions are always off. In her latest, she quotes a sports columnist writing about American Olympic atheletes: "Somehow, intimidating others is motivating to them." Then, she attempts to tie this in with American foreign policy.

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld thought they could change the American identity by invading Iraq, that they could toughen up our 'tude and remove the lingering post-Vietnam skittishness about force and the "blame America first" psychology.

They thought our shock-and-awe war would change America's image, adding some muscularity that would make Arab foes cower and the world bow down to the U.S. as an unassailable hyperpower.

This is no doubt an ancillary effect, but notice how she fails to mention 911. In his regular column, Fareed Zakaria hits on the more practical, material, real-world choice involved in the decision to liberate Iraq:

By the late 1990s, American policy on Iraq was becoming untenable. The U.N. sanctions had turned into a farce. Saddam was able to siphon off billions for himself, while the sanctions threw tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis into poverty every year. Their misery was broadcast daily across the Arab world, inflaming public opinion. America and Britain were bombing Iraqi military installations weekly and maintaining a large garrison in Saudi Arabia, which was also breeding trouble. Osama bin Laden's biggest charges against the United States were that it was occupying Saudi Arabia and starving the Iraqi people.

Given these realities, the United States had a choice. It could either drop all sanctions and the containment of Iraq and welcome Saddam back into the world community. Or it had to hold him to account. Given what we knew about Saddam's past (his repeated attacks on his neighbors, the gassing of the Kurds, the search for nuclear weapons) and given what we thought we knew at the time (that his search for WMD was active), conciliation looked like wishful thinking. It still does. Once out of his box, Saddam would almost certainly have jump--started his programs and ambitions.

Democrats, from President Clinton to candidate Kerry, all agree with this. Its disingenuous for partisan liberals to deny it.

Granted, Dowd no doubt agrees with Zakaria that the choice made was executed poorly to say the least, given the US's resources. But it is just more disingenuousness to complain:

Iraq is making us wring our hands over whether to blast our way into Najaf and Falluja, quavering with uncharacteristic sensitivity even as the White House fires verbal mortars at the domestic enemy, John Kerry, for suggesting that we be more sensitive.

Does she want us to behave as Russia did in Chechnya and engage in a scorched earth policy? There's sensitivity and then there's sensitivity.

The new Pew Research Center poll finds the country ever more divided. "The public takes a paradoxical view of America's place in the world," the poll reports, with 45 percent of Americans saying the U.S. plays a more important and powerful role as world leader than it did 10 years ago, and 67 percent saying the U.S. is less respected.

The president who promised a humble foreign policy ended up with a foreign policy inflated by hubris - which is, after all, a Greek idea.

Perhaps the U.S. is playing a more important role as world leader - we are the only superpower - *and* is less respected. Furthermore, the loss of respect could be undeserved or deserved. Why is this a paradox?

In 2000, Bush also promised not to engage in nation-building, nor to halt Rwandan-style genocides. Here, he was playing to his provincial, conservative isolationist base, but 911 demonstrated what a hubristic, naive philosophy that base holds.

Invisible Hand Gives Invisible Middle Finger to the Unfortunate

ORLANDO, Fla., Aug. 17 - Greg Lawrence talks about the $10 bag of ice. Kenneth Kleppach says he was clipped for nearly three times the advertised price for a hotel room. And a man with a chain saw told Jerry Olmstead that he could clear the oak tree off his roof, but it would cost $10,500.

So much for a friendly, helping hand in a time of crisis. Since the winds of Hurricane Charley subsided, officials say a wave of price gouging has swept across central and southwest Florida, putting law enforcement officials into high gear and infuriating storm victims already faced with damaged homes, shuttered workplaces and long lines for basic commodities.

"Why do people try to capitalize on other people's hardship and misery," Mr. Olmstead asked as he fumed over the tree removal. "Of course it angers me. They see an opportunity and, fine, if you want to make a little money. But there's a limit. This is ludicrous."

Charlie Crist, Florida's attorney general, said Tuesday afternoon that he had received more than 1,400 complaints of overcharging from throughout the disaster area. This morning he filed formal complaints against the Crossroads Motor Lodge in Lakeland and the Days Inn Airport Hotel in West Palm Beach, accusing them of price gouging and deceptive business practices.

This past weekend I turned 34 and celebrated Thursday, Friday and Saturday with Gen Y A.(we're sort of together again). Sunday was a day of recovery and sloth, culminating in a viewing of Under the Tuscan Sun which stars Diane Lane. The movie was surprisingly good given the plot and premise, mostly because of the intelligent, charming Lane. Her character hires some Polish laborers to fix up a Tuscan house she purchased and one of them gives her a book by Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz who coincidently died on Saturday.

When Communism was smashed in Poland, Mr. Milosz returned to what he called "the country of my first immigration." Arriving in Warsaw after an absence of three decades, he received a hero's welcome. Mr. Milosz was regarded as one of the world's literary immortals. When he chose, he walked and talked with the great men of his time, but he remained humble.

I once had the pleasure of seeing him read in college. He had some great lines, like in his poem No Way Out where he says Irony is the "glory of slaves."

The always interesting but rather sedate Josh Micah Marshall is getting a kick out of Alan Keyes, the Republican candidate for the open Illinois senate seat. He posts about him almost every day.

For those who are unfamiliar with Keyes, here's Peter Bagge's report on him from the 2000 Republican presidential primaries.

Keyes is one of those politicians who enjoys engaging in hyperbole and must drive the professional political consultants batty. For instance, in an unusual pitch to Illinois's apathatic non-voters, Keyes argued US Senate candidates shouldn't be directly elected.

Tucker Carlson had Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox on his show when they were both covering the Democrats' convention.

I'll never forget how Carlson reported that candidate Bush mocked Karla Fay Tucker, the Christian fundamentalist who was on Texas's death row at the time. Bush impersonated her saying "Please don't kill me" which Carlson found odd.

In his latest collection, he has a good piece on Dick Morris's fall from grace. Morris was caught with a prostitute and actually had a phone conversation with President Clinton while the hooker sucked his toes, according to her.

Christopher Buckley wrote a perceptive take on the Democratic convention.

On Tuesday night there was the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, on the podium saying - I wrote it down - "Americans aren't asking for special deals from Washington!" That giant snorting sound you heard was a year's worth of California chardonnay being expelled from the nasal passages of 15,000 K Street lobbyists.

He's predicting the Republicans will put on doozy of a show, too.

For the Red Team next month, I see a darkened Madison Square Garden. On the huge screen above the stage, dramatic images of American tanks roaring into Baghdad, the speakers suddenly booming Queen's "We Will Rock You!"

The Atlantic Monthly has an interview with him.

(via Bookslut)

21st Century Franz Ferdinand
In his Op-Ed, Jeffrey Goldberg reports Israel's extreme right wing are openly discussing their desire to kill Ariel Sharon.

Avi Dichter, the chief of the Israeli internal security service, has been for months running around - to borrow a phrase from George Tenet - with his hair on fire over the threat. He has warned of the potential for attacks against the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aksa Mosque, on the Temple Mount; such a strike, he said, would set off global war between Muslim and Jew - a goal the radical yeshivas of the West Bank share with Al Qaeda.

Here are some letters to the editor about the piece.

Scotland's Franz Ferdinand will be touring the States in September.

Amy Poehler, comic genius, was on Celebrity Poker. She's silly cubed.

The Group of 20 extracts concessions from the "Capitalist Center"

Do I detect a change of direction in the winds? Ever since the Battle of Seattle, respectable opinion has focused on American, European, and Japanese agricultural subsidies - to a tune of $300 billion a year - as the great injustice of the global economic system. Almost 5 years later, the poor nations of the world, led by Brazil, China and India, have convinced the US and EU to confront their powerful agriculture lobbies.

Although the proposed deal would only create a framework for further talks, it would for the first time commit the European Union to eliminating its controversial farm export subsidies

and

The United States yielded to pressure from developing countries on Friday and agreed to make a 20 percent cut in some of the $19 billion in subsidies it pays to American farmers each year.

This during an election year, no less.

Not everyone was satisfied with the concessions. A delegate from the Dominican Republic said the proposed framework agreement was still a betrayal of developing countries. And Celine Charveriat, head of Oxfam International in Geneva, said that the rich countries could create new subsidies by using loopholes in the agreement.

Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, the Dutch economy minister and chairman of a delegation of ministers from the European Union, disagreed. He argued that the proposed agreement reflected the growing muscle of the developing world, especially of countries like Brazil, China and India.

"The world has changed; we now live in a truly global world,'' he said, adding that these developing nations had changed the geopolitical boundaries of the talks and forced the new agreement.

I thought the Bush administration was chronically unilateralist. What gives? Even the hated WTO is impinging on our beloved rogue state's sovereignty:

Since the failure of the talks in Cancún, the United States lost a case brought by Brazil that challenged its cotton subsidies as illegal. That case, before the World Trade Organization's dispute body, could force the United States to lower its cotton subsidies even without these negotiations.

The trade talks aren't a done deal, however.

But talks could run aground on such issues as how much Japan can protect its rice or Norway its dairy products. Celso Amorim, the top trade negotiator for Brazil and an important negotiator here, said there were still several disputes to be resolved.

If the talks succeed, they are expected to lead to as much as a $3 trillion gain in the world economy.

Oh, is that all?