Sunday, September 30, 2007

Weekend Roundup

Tom Engelhardt: Bush's Free World and Welcome to It. Another installment in Engelhardt's series on Bushian automythologizing in the Iraq war. Most useful for the background to the Blackwater news, which is hardly new at all. Ends on a Robert Gates speech viewed as the return of the realists, but you have to wonder what are those socalled American interests the socalled realists are so hardnosed about, and why in the end it makes so little practical difference whether the realists or the ideologues are setting the propaganda tone.

Dilip Hiro: It's the Oil, Stupid. Starting with Alan Greenspan's quote ("I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil") Hiro traces back what we know about what the Bush administration was thinking about oil in Iraq. (One wonders if Greenspan is also saddened that it's politically inconvenient for the Republicans to acknowledge how important it is that they cater to white racism.) This includes conflicting State and Defense Dept. plans:

By January 2003, a plan for Iraqi oil crafted by the State Department and oil majors emerged under the guidance of Amy Myers Jaffe of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. It recommended maintaining the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company, whose origins dated back to 1961 -- but open it up to foreign investment after an initial period in which U.S.-approved Iraqi managers would supervise the rehabilitation of the war-damaged oil infrastructure. The existence of this group would come to light in a report by the Wall Street Journal on March 3, 2003.

Unknown to the architects of this scheme, according to the same BBC Newsnight report, the Pentagon's planners, apparently influenced by powerful neocons in and out of the administration, had devised their own super-secret plan. It involved the sale of all Iraqi oil fields to private companies with a view to increasing output well above the quota set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for Iraq in order to weaken, and then destroy, OPEC.

Even now, about the only argument that the war was not over oil is the incoherency in the administration's policies, a problem which is certainly abetted by the mandate of secrecy surrounding it all.

Kathleen Christison: Whatever Happened to Palestine? A big part of this long piece is a screed against the US peace movement for ignoring the Israel/Palestine conflict. I clicked on this thinking I'd say something in defense of the beleaguered peace movement, but in the end the bill of particulars got to me. One reason antiwar Democrats in Congress seem so confused on Iraq (and Iran) is that they can't draw the connections to Israel. With Israel totally off base, they have no way to move American foreign policy to a grounding in justice, and that leaves them with no concrete, plausible plan for peace. As it stands now, Iraq is a bloody mess with no possible American-directed solution, even if the American doing the deciding wasn't a complete shithead. Israel/Palestine is a different situation altogether -- a place to start rebuilding an American strategy that is desperately needed to get along with anyone in the Middle East. But it's not just Bush who's gone over the deep end there.

Andrew Cockburn: Iraq's WMD Myth: Why Clinton Is Culpable. By 1997 UN weapons inspectors had determined that Iraq no longer had any WMD. The Clinton administration prevented that finding from becoming official by escalating US ambitions to include regime change in Iraq. Clinton succeeded in getting the UN inspectors pulled out of Iraq, and for the rest of his term used Iraq as a punching bag whenever his political situation needed a little distraction. By keeping WMD in play, Clinton made it possible for Bush to use WMD to promote his war. That much is all very straightforward. Cockburn doesn't go into Clinton's political predicaments, not least the Republians' constant hounding on defense issues, but a big part of that was that Clinton had no principles to defend. He and Gore had supported the first Bush war in Iraq, and he and Gore scored political points in the 1992 presidential campaign over the first Bush failing to get the job done. Clinton had escalated anti-Saddam containment operations after taking office. Clearly, he liked having Iraq as an open sore, as it gave him a common bond with the military and some high ground on hawkishnes to defend against constant Republican sniping. Clearly, he didn't give a shit what came out of his policies or positions. Like everything from Sister Souljah to Marc Rich, his only concern with politics was tactical, how to turn a bad situation (often of his own making) to his short-term advantage.

Of course, it's was mostly the right wing think tanks and their mostly Republican operatives who kept the fires burning under Iraq all through the Clinton years, and under Bush they carried their logic through to consequences that Clinton and Gore wouldn't have risked. In the end, blame for the war rests squarely on Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their little helpers. But they were able to do this because others failed to stand up to them -- Clinton, above all, because he was in a position to actually do something to defuse the situation. This was hardly Clinton's only failure: he managed to avoid doing anything constructive on Israel/Palestine until he put forth his compromise "principles" in the very last days of his term, after his cynical Camp David con had failed and blown up.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Chris Hedges: American Fascists

Michelle Goldberg's explored the same ground in her Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, but with the tentativeness of an outsider. Chris Hedges's American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007, Free Press) minces fewer words. The book makes me wonder why, in this age of neoliberal and neoconservative, we don't just come out and honor the new American right as the neofascists they are.

Hedges starts by quoting Blaise Pascal: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

He then reprints a piece by Umberto Eco, "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt." I'll quote the subject heads and a bit more from two points I found particularly striking (no page numbers):

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. [ . . . ]

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. [ . . . ]

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Herman Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "egg-heads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. [ . . . ]

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity. [ . . . ]

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration. [ . . . ]

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. [ . . . ]

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. [ . . . ]

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak. [ . . . ]

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero. [ . . . ]

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. [ . . . ]

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. [ . . . ]

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.

Hedges' father was a Presbyterian preacher, and Hedges attended seminary at Harvard Divinity School. Hedges talks about faith as he was taught (p. 2):

We were taught that those who claimed to speak for God, the self-appointed prophets who promised the Kingdom of God on earth, were dangerous. We had no ability to understand God's will. We did the best we could. We made decisions -- even decisions that on the outside looked unobjectionably moral -- well aware of the numerous motives, some good and some bad, that went into every human act. In the end, we all stood in need of forgiveness. We were all tainted by sin. None were pure. The Bible was not the literal word of God. It was not a self-help manual that could predict the future. It did not tell us how to vote or allow us to divide the world into us and them, the righteous and the damned, the infidels and the blessed. It was a book written by a series of ancient writers, certainly fallible and at times at odds with each other, who asked the right questions and struggled with the mystery and transcendence of human existence. We took the Bible seriously and therefore could not take it literally.

(p. 5):

There is enough hatred, bigotry and lust for violence in the pages of the Bible to satisfy anyone bent on justifying cruelty and violence. Religion, as H. Richard Niebuhr said, is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people. And the Bible has long been used in the wrong hands -- such as antebellum slave owners in the American South who quoted from it to defend slavery -- not to Christianize the culture, as those wielding it often claim, but to acculturate the Christian faith.

(pp. 10-11):

These values, democratic and Christian, are being dismantled, often with stealth, by a radical Christian movement, known as dominionism, which seeks to cloak itself in the mantle of the Christian faith and American patriotism. Dominionism takes its name from Genesis 1:26-31, in which God gives human beings "dominion" over all creation. This movement, small in number but influential, departs from traditional evangelicalism. Dominionists now control at least six national television networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes, and virtually all of the nation's more than 2,000 religious radio stations, as well as denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Dominionism seeks to redefine traditional democratic and Christian terms and concepts to fit an ideology that calls on the radical church to take political power. It shares many prominent features with classical fascist movements, at least as it is defined by the scholar Robert O. Paxton, who sees fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of command nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Dominionism, born out of a theology known as Christian reconstructionism, seeks to politicize faith. It has, like all fascist movements, a belief in magic along with leadership adoration and a strident call for moral and physical supremacy of a master race, in this case American Christians. It also has, like fascist movements, an ill-defined and shifting set of beliefs, some of which contradict one another. Paxton argues that the best way to understand authentic fascist movements, which he says exist in all societies, including democracies, is to focus not on what they say but on how they act, for, as he writes, some of the ideas that underlie fascist movements "remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language," and "many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feelings than to the realm of reasoned propositions."

(p. 24):

It is perhaps telling that our closest allies in the United Nations on issues dealing with reproductive rights, one of the few issues where we cooperate with other nations, are Islamic states such as Iran. But then the Christian Right and radical Islamists, although locked in a holy war, increasingly mirror each other. They share the same obsessions. They do not tolerate other forms of belief or disbelief. They are at war with artistic and cultural expression. They seek to silence the media. They call for the subjugation of women. They promote severe sexual repression, and they seek to express themselves through violence.

(p. 81):

Fundamentalism, Karen McCarthy Brown wrote, "is the religion of those at once seduced and betrayed by the promise that we human beings can comprehend and control our world. Bitterly disappointed by the politics of rationalized bureaucracies, the limitations of science, and the perversions of industrialization, fundamentalists seek to reject the modern world, while nevertheless holding onto these habits of mind: clarity, certitude, and control."

(pp. 115-116):

In the promulgation of the totalitarian belief system, at first we are told we all have a right to an opinion, in short, a right to believe anything. Soon, under the iron control of an empowered totalitarian movement, facts become worthless, kept or discarded according to an ideological litmus test. Lies become true. And once the totalitarians are in power, facts are ruthlessly manipulated or kept hidden to support the lie. Hannah Arendt called the principle behind this process "nihilistic relativism." The goal of creationism is not to offer an alternative. Its goal is the destruction of the core values of the open society -- the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong. To be self-critical, to challenge authority, to advocate for change and to accept that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable.

(p. 118):

Evolution implicitly challenges the possibility of miracles, the Second Coming of Christ, the Resurrection, and an apocalyptic end to human existence in which the saved are lifted up into heaven. For believers who have found in the certitude of Christian fundamentalism a shelter from despair, a despair that threatens to consume them again if they return to a reality-based world, evolution is terrifying. The miracles they insist they see performed around them, the presence of the guiding, comforting hand of God in their lives, the notion that there is a divine destiny specially preordained for them, crumbles into dust under the cold glare of evolution. Evolution posits what they fear most: a morally neutral universe. It obliterates the fantastic constructs of their belief system. And the steady efforts by creationists to erode the authority of evolution and discredit Darwin are, because of all this, unrelenting and fierce.

(pp. 142-143):

The strangest alliance, on the surface, is with Israeli Jews. After all, the movement generally teaches that Jews who do not convert are damned and will be destroyed in the fiery, apocalyptic ending of the world. It is early on Sunday morning in a ballroom on the second floor of the Hilton Hotel. The Israel Ministry of Tourism is hosting a breakfast. Several hundred people are seated at round tables with baskets of bread, fruit plates and silver pitchers of coffee. Waiters are serving plates of scrambled eggs and creamed spinach. Nearly everyone is white. On the platform is a huge picture of the Dome of the Rock, the spot where the Temple will be rebuilt to herald the Second Coming. Some 700,000 Christian tourists visit Israel each year, and with the steep decline in overall tourism, they have become a valued source of revenue in Israel.

Dominionists preach that Israel must rule the biblical land in order for Christ to return. The belief that Jews who do not convert will be killed is unmentioned at the breakfast. The featured speakers include Avraham Hirschsohn, the new Israeli minister of tourism; and Michael Medved, a cultural conservative and nationally syndicated radio talk-show host. Medved is one of the most prominent Jewish defenders of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and of the radical Christian Right. He wears a yarmulke and is warmly greeted by the crowd.

"A more Christian America is good for the Jews," he says. "This is obvious. Take a look at this support for Israel. A more Christian America is good for America, something Jewish people need to be more cognizant about and acknowledge. A more Jewish community is good for the Christians, not just because of the existence of allies, but because a more Jewish community is less seduced by secularism." [ . . . ]

He ticks off causes in which both Jewish and Christian people have been active, including the call for prayer in schools and the fight against abortion (although abortion is legal in Israel). He defends his Jewish integrity by saying he does not believe in the Rapture. But this is more than a religious alliance. It is a political alliance. It unites messianic Christians with right-wing messianic Jews, who believe God has annointed them to expand their dominion throughout the Middle East at the expense of the Arab majority.

(pp. 174-175):

The triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement's primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America's political,social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movement, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, promises to lift us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from the dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television's imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. And they understand the enticement of credo quia absurdum -- I believe because it is absurd.

Hedges reminiscences about Dr. James Luther Adams, his ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, who had spent 1933-36 working underground in Nazi Germany with Christian opponents such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer (pp. 195-196):

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities, he said that would, in the event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed empty platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. His long discussions with church leaders and theologians in Nazi Germany -- some of whom collaborated with the regime, some of whom resisted and most of whom remained silent -- were the defining experiences of his life. He was preoccupied with how liberal democracies, which could never hope to compete with the fantastic, utopian promises of personal and collective salvation offered by totalitarian movements, could resist. Adams was a close friend of the theologian Paul Tillich, a vocal opponent of the Nazis who in 1933 became the first non-Jewish professor barred from German universities and soon went into exile. Tillich, he reminded us, taught that the role of the church was in society, that the depth of its commitment and faith were measured by its engagement with politics and culture. It was this engagement that alone gave faith its vibrancy and worth. Tillich did not retreat from the looming crisis around him. He spoke out against the intolerance and hatred preached by the Nazis before they came to power. And Tillich angrily chastised those in the church who, preoccupied with narrow Christian piety, were passive. He thundered against this complacency and begged Christians to begin to "take time seriously."

Adams had seen how the mask of religion hides irreligion. He reminded us that "our world is full to bursting with faiths, each contending for allegiance." He told us that Hitler claimed to teach the meaning of faith. Mussolini used to shout, "Believe, follow, and act," and told his followers that fascism, before being a party, had been a religion. Human history is not the struggle between religion and irreligion, Adams said. "It is veritably a battle of faiths, a battle of the gods who claim human allegiance."

(p. 201):

Adams, finally, told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. The Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered, culminating in the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin and the permanent exile of its director, Magnus Hirschfeld. Thousands of volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a bonfire. The stripping of gay and lesbian Germans of their civil rights was largely cheered by the German churches. But this campaign legitimized tactics, outside the law, that would soon be employed against others. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first "social deviants" singled out and disempowered by the Christian Right. We would be the next.

(p. 202):

Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school. Naive attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we, too, are Christian or we, too, care about moral values, are doomed. This movement is bent on our destruction. The attempts by many liberals to make peace would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives. They have one goal -- its destruction.

(p. 205):

The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, cruelty and intolerance in the name of God. Its members do not commit evil for evil's sake. They commit evil to make a better world. To attain this better world, they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them must be destroyed. The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek to implant by force their narrow, particular version of goodness. This is true for all doctrines of personal salvation, from Christianity to ethnic nationalism to communism to fascism. Dreams of a universal good create hells of persecution, suffering and slaughter. No human being could ever be virtuous enough to attain such dreams, and the Earth has swallowed millions of hapless victims in the vain pursuit of a new heaven and a new Earth. Ironically, it is idealism that leads radical fundamentalists to strip human beings of their dignity and their sanctity and turn them into abstractions. Yet it is only by holding on to the sanctity of each individual, each human life, only by placing our faith in tiny, unheroic acts of compassion and kindness, that we survive as a community and as individual human beings. These small acts of kindness are deeply feared and subversive to these idealists, as the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman wrote in Life and Fate.

Friday, September 28, 2007

David Halberstam: The Coldest Winter

David Halberstam's big (719 pp.) book on the Korean War is something I don't have time to read any time soon, but the war itself may be more interesting now with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bogged down. After WWII it must have been inconceivable to view Korea as anything like the defeat that Vietnam turned out to be, but it was certainly an immense frustration -- the first real taste that Americans had that post-WWII wasn't going to be like WWII. In lieu of reading the book, here's a quote from Max Frankel's New York Times review:

Ever the patriot, Halberstam bemoans not so much the fact of our intervention as the mind-set behind it, which led to "an American disaster of the first magnitude, a textbook example of what happens when a nation, filled with the arrogance of power, meets a new reality." The underrated North Koreans virtually destroyed two American regiments and cornered our retreating forces for three blood-soaked months at the edge of the Sea of Japan.

MacArthur responded with his career's most brilliant tactical stroke, which paradoxically inspired an even greater disaster. Instead of reinforcing his surrounded troops, he threw a Hail Mary pass, staging an amphibious landing at Inchon, 150 miles to the north, seizing Korea's narrow waist and decimating the suddenly encircled North Korean invaders. Feeling invincible now, MacArthur refused advice that he settle for a defensible line well south of the restive Chinese forces massing at their Korean border. And with Truman rushing across the Pacific to bask in the general's glory, no one was able to restrain him.

MacArthur ordered the swift conquest of all North Korea, confident that the Chinese would not dare challenge him. But hundreds of thousands of Chinese lay in wait to spring American history's greatest ambush. Halberstam writes: "The bet had been called, and other men would now have to pay for that terrible arrogance and vainglory."

Yet again the Americans were routed, and MacArthur's obsessive reaction was to agitate for total war against China, nuclear if necessary. He had to be fired by Truman in April 1951 so that more sober generals could settle for "a grinding, limited war" that asked men to "die for a tie," a stalemate that eventually restored the original border between the Koreas.

The Korean War was still mostly a set-piece war between regular military units, which is not to deny the violence aimed at civilians. As such, the US tended to draw on lessons from WWII, but with one major difference. From the start, the US bought into total war with Germany and Japan, demanding unconditional surrender and mobilizing the entire national economy behind the war effort. In Korea, the US had the option of choosing how much war it was willing to get into: with Korea only, or with Korea backed by China, or with China backed by Russia. MacArthur was reckless enough to bring China into the war, but Truman was prudent enough to keep Russia on the sidelines. Given limited war, there could only be limited results -- something close to the prewar status quo. But the US psyche couldn't handle anything less than total victory, and that drove a wedge between what we did and what we thought and said about it. That wedge proved to be poisonous in the long run. Indeed, it is still a big part of Bush's problems with Iraq and Afghanistan. What we see through the entire history of America's post-WWII wars is the increasing inutility of military power, and the increasing confusion and madness that is causing in people who can imagine no other way to get their way.

This inability to deal realistically with the world let the Korean War drag on stalemated two more years, and let America maintain a spiteful isolation of North Korea ever since. We treated Vietnam the same way. For that matter, every American foreign policy failure has brought out the same vindictive cold shoulder, especially countries so small and powerless we risked nothing -- Cuba, Iran, Iraq. Since the fall of the Axis Powers we are far and away the most hateful country on earth. I suspect the roots of all that are buried deep in WWII -- James Carroll argues that the fateful decisions were to build the Pentagon, fund the Manhattan Project, start area bombing of enemy cities, and demand unconditional surrender. The latter is a reflection of the unquestionable power we sought, and with victory over the Axis and the unveiling of nuclear weapons we thought we had achieved. We saw the submission of Germany and Japan as proof of our might and our righteousness, and we acknowledge that submission with some measure of grace. But one is hard pressed to find US grace in any subsequent history -- indeed, it is easier to argue that the real reason we rebuilt Germany and Japan (or more accurately, let them rebuild themselves) was to shore up our power against the Soviets. But we never lost the myth of our triumph in WWII. Indeed, when Bush's idiots flew into Baghdad in 2003 the few history books they bothered to consult were not about Iraq or the Middle East or Islam; they were about America's occupation of Germany and Japan. By then, Iraq had little or nothing in common with Germany and Japan, and we were little like the country we were then, so it's easy to dismiss such folly out of hand.

But Korea should have been different -- far closer in time and space and attitude and orientation to our WWII experience than any subsequent war, but still we see the same deep set failures. The root cause is, I believe, war itself. That we got away with it at all in WWII was an amazing stroke of luck -- in large part because the Germans and Japanese were so conscious of their own culpability for the war, and so exhausted by its consequences, that they lost the desire to plot their revenge against our own numerous atrocities (especially when we proved amenable to their reconstruction and independence). We've never encountered such luck again, not least because we've never again deserved it.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

In the Library

I stopped by the Wichita Public Library early this week, and took a look at the new nonfiction shelves. Once again, I was struck by the huge number of more/less interesting books. I jotted a list down on some scratch paper. These are all things I might consider reading, but given the numbers I'll never get around to more than a handful. The list, sorted alphabetically by author, follows, along with some notes. Some are no doubt wrong-headed, but I generally didn't bother with obvious losers, including 6-10 books that look to be promoting war against Iran (but none by Michael Ledeen or Norman Podhoretz, so their collection is incomplete).

• Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science (Houghton Mifflin): A general book on science and what it means to think about. I bought a copy of this recently as a gift for a niece who asked me for recommended readings on science. I was impressed, delighted even, by the few pages I read in the store.

• Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Perseus): Revised paperback edition of an older book. Not sure exactly what this is -- game theory, maybe. Author has another book, The Complexity of Cooperation. Important subject, the bedrock of civilization.
• Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Pantheon): Travel journalist goes to Vietnam with his father, who fought there in 1965-66. I read his book on Uzbekistan -- beautifully written, and thoughtful enough that he no doubt has something to say about what Vietnam did to America and vice versa, some of which is bound to be uncomfortable.
• Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (New Press): Still human-oriented, but in in big chunks favoring pre-history, focusing on things like agriculture and cities.
• Matthew Carr, The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism: From the Assassination of Tsar Alexander II to Al-Qaeda (New Press): A global, comparative history, going back at least to 19th century anarchists, with at least some concern for what states do before and after terrorists attack.

• Zev Chafets, A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance (Harper Collins): Menachem Begin's former press secretary. Strikes me as a pure horror story, but it may help that Chafets at least finds it weird. Another book on the same subject is Timothy P Weber, On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel's Best Friend (Baker Academic)
• Zaki Chehab, Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement (Nation Books): Probably an honest account, although a David Ignatius comment on the back cover makes one wonder ("it's obvious that Chehab has had access to some of the PLO's most sensitive files"). Chehab also wrote Inside the Resistance: Reporting From Iraq's Danger Zone. Both are impossibly difficult subjects, shrouded in secrecy and propaganda, and ultimately far less significant than the public policies of occupation that those groups are fighting against. There's also a boomlet of books on Hezbollah, including some I could have listed here but didn't bother.
• Aviva Chomsky, "The Take Our Jobs!" and 20 Other Myths About Immigration (Beacon Press): You can probably guess the rest; most likely, you can also come up with a list of counter-myths.
• Eric Clark, The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America's Youngest Consumers (Free Press): The toy racket; the muckraking possibilities are endless.
• David Cole/Jules Lobel, Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror (New Press): Two law professors, so I suspect this leans toward less free, which is the less interesting part of the equation, not necessarily the less important.
• Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Oxford University Press): Development economics, gets compared favorably to Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly, both of whose books sit unread on my shelf; e.g., by Niall Ferguson, whose paeans to imperialism cost him all credibility.
• Trevor Corson, The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, From Samurai to Supermarket (Harper Collins): Food business, culture industry, etc.
• Gary Cox, Think Again: A Response to Fundamentalism's Claim on Christianity (University Congregational Press): Normally, I wouldn't give a second thought to an attempt to save Christianity from the Christians, but the late Cox was a local minister involved in the peace movement here, and I appreciate the slack his emphasis on non-judgmentalism cut me. Incidentally, another Wichitan, Gerald Paske, has a book called Why the Fundamentalist Right Is So Fundamentally Wrong (Marquette). Paske taught the first philosophy class I took at Wichita State.
• William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (Knopf): Large history of England's takeover of India. I've read a bunch of essays/reviews by Dalrymple recently, and they've left a favorable impression, although the subject itself may have sufficed.
• Mike Davis, Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso): "The poor man's air force"; I read some of this at TomDispatch, probably enough.
• Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel (New York Review Books): A collection of essays on science, especially book reviews on biographies of interesting scientists.
• Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn: TE Lawrence, Aaron Aaronsohn, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Viking Adult): Aaronsohn was a Zionist who organized a British spy ring in Ottoman Palestine, providing a contrast to the Arabophilic Lawrence. But both are tied to British imperialism, which hasn't gotten anywhere near its due share of the blame.
• David Friend, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 (Farrar Straus & Giroux): Mostly a day-by-day photo analysis/record of 9/11 and its immediate aftermath. I think it may be important to return to that record to see just how we were led to war. I doubt that this book does the job, but it may be a useful start.
• Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (Metropolitan Books): His previous essay collection, Complications, turned out to be a pretty useful book, especially for thinking about malpractice issues, and well written as well. This is evidently more of the same.
• David Gelernter, Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion (Doubleday): I've generally avoided listing examples from the enemy, and this is certainly suspicious with advance praise from William Bennett and Norman Podhoretz, but the idea of Americanism as religion has some attraction, even if it's likely to be misguided. Gelernter's argument that Americanism is "in fact a secular version of Zionism" is pretty scary, but maybe it helps explain what is otherwise simply bizarre.
• Gary Giddins, Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books (Oxford University Press): Less on music, I think, and much already familiar. One of the great critics of our times.
• Victor Gold, Ivasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP (Sourcebooks): This looks to be the most entertaining of several recent books taking aim at the Busheviks from their right flank -- John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience is another.
• Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think (Houghton Mifflin): An intrinsically interesting book. I've seen better reviews for this than for Atul Gawande's Better, which appeared at the same time. Health care is something I figure to write on, and there's something to be said there for the experiences of everyday professionals as opposed to politicians and economists.
• Ann Hagedorn, Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919 (Simon & Schuster): A big (543 pp.) history book on a subject of minor but genuine interest: post-WWI trauma, the red scare, race riots, flu pandemic, the failed and flawed return to normalcy. The same issues returned after WWII, to be dealt with differently, but one wonders about the connections.
• Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (Viking): Green capitalist, not real sure what the point is, but my cousin was reading this along with Bill McKibben's Deep Economy for a labor conference she's working on. Has a long appendix that looks to be a useful reference.
• Regina Herzlinger, Who Killed Health Care? America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem -- and the Consumer-Driven Cure (McGraw-Hill): Harvard Business School Dean, advocates some kind of market-driven system; not sure how that works, but looks like it could be a useful critique.
• Robert Irwin, Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents (Overlook): A counterattack on Edward W. Said's famous book Orientalism, which itself discredited several generations of Western scholarship on the Middle East for their support of western imperialism. Seems likely to me that both views are true, in large part because texts inevitably reveal more than they intend.
• Sasha Issenberg, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy (Gotham): Food business, culture industry, etc.
• Zachary Karabell, Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Coexistence in the Middle East (Knopf): A view worth shedding some light on.
• Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture (Currency): This looks like an annoying elitist screed -- indeed, looking at the Publishers Weekly review it may be worse than that. I listed it because I find amateurism on the web not a cult but a sad effect of lack of cooperation and hope for anything better. But for me Wikipedia is the exception, not (as Keen seems to think) the rule. Maybe someone who doesn't moonlight for the Weekly Standard should rewrite this.
• Jonathan Kozol, Letters to a Young Teacher (Crown): I haven't read anything by Kozol since Death at an Early Age, when I was still a teenager. The recent spate of "letters to a young [whatever]" books have become a cliché, but one thing they reveal is a sense that we're losing our grip on the handing down of knowledge. In any case, this one looks to be earnest and heartfelt. Kozol ranked high on Bernard Goldberg's list of 101 people screwing up America. I could see the logic of some picks and take others as back-handed compliments, singling Kozol out struck me as plain proof of Goldberg's moral rot.
• Steven E Landsburg, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (Free Press): Presumably inspired by the chart success of Freakonomics, but Landsburg has been perverse longer. I started reading his previous Armchair Economist but got disgusted. Still, his description of "the principle of indifference" has haunted me ever since, perhaps the most dismal idea the Dismal Science ever concocted.
• Brink Lindsey, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture (Collins): Cato Institute VP, for figure on the predictable policy arguments, but it probably true that prosperity makes people more libertarian. To argue that libertarianism makes people more prosperous is harder to back up.
• Alexander Litvinenko/Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror (Encounter Books): Covers the apartment bombings and Ryazan "training exercise" that helped start the Second Chechen War and bring KGB veteran Vladimir Putin to power. Has an air of paranoia to it, but Litvinenko was the Russian murdered in 2006 by polonium poisoning. Also available: Alex Goldfarb/Marina Litvinenko, Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB, written with his widow. The latter also discusses the murder of Anna Politikovskaya, another murdered Russian journalist.
• James Mann, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression (Viking): There is a lot of nonsense written on China these days, and this is probably some, but Mann's The Rise of the Vulcans is a useful, albeit far from adequately critical, book.
• Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (Times Books): Possibly an important book, but not one I'm looking forward to. His The End of Nature did manage to convince me about global warming even though I had been pretty skeptical before, but it also annoyed me much in the process. The subject here is an important one: sustainable economy. He has some grasp of the problem, which itself is a rare accomplishment. But his solutions are likely to be annoying -- e.g., from an Amazon review: "Wow, makes me want to move to Vermont and become an organic farmer."

• Paul Molyneaux, Swimming in Circles: Aquaculture and the End of Wild Oceans (Thunder's Mouth Press): General survey of aquaculture business, a major recent/future frontier in the domination of nature and the artificialization of everything else.
• John Mueller, Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them (Free Press): Certainly the threat of terrorism is overblown, at least compared to many other threats. Why is a more complicated question, and it's not clear how insightful this is on that score. I'm also disinclined to ignore the threat of terrorism because I regard it as symptomatic of deeper problems, like the arrogance and injustice of US foreign policy.

• Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Houghton Mifflin): I figure this to be a forced analogy, but could be an amusing parlor game, and I have a lot of room (but not a lot of motivation) to learn more about Rome.
• Katherine S Newman, Chutes and Ladders: Navigating the Low-Wage Labor Market (Harvard University Press): Another book on "not making it in America" (Barbara Ehrenreich's subtitle), along with David Shipler's The Working Poor and others.
• Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (Farrar Straus & Giroux): An interesting character, his life a prism for evaluating the reluctance of both sides to be reasonable.
• John Perkins, The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption (Dutton Adult): Haven't read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which seemed like it could very well be true but also self-serving and glib. This is more general, with a region-by-region, country-by-country organization that covers a lot of ground briefly.
• Anthony D Romero, In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror (William Morrow): ACLU Executive Director. We take such people for granted, but their value is impossible to underestimate.
• Josh Rushing, Mission Al Jazeera: Build a Bridge, Seek the Truth, Change the World (Palgrave Macmillan): Story of an ex-Marine Corps propagandist who went to work for Al Jazeera, figuring he'd offer himself as a bridge between two hostile cultures.
• Seth Shulman, Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration (University of California Press): Well, you know how that goes. Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science is an earlier book covering the same ground.
• Michael D Tanner, Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution (Cato Institute): Cover has faded pictures of Goldwater and Reagan along with a sharply delineated Bush. One thing I find shocking about Bush is the extent to which he embraces the full ugliness of Hobbesian conservatism. Until recently, I always figured Hobbes was some sort of idiot satire, like Jonathan Swift.
• Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (Pluto Press): From the 16th century on, a reasonable compromise between ancient and contemporary histories -- we've needed such a book for a while now. I'll also mention two new books in the wake of last year's war: Gilbert Achcar/Michel Warschawski, The 33-Day War: Israel's War on Hezbollah in Lebanon and Its Consequences (Paradigm), and Nubar Hovsepian, ed., The War on Lebanon: A Reader (Olive Branch Press; Amazon attributes this to Rashid Khalidi, who wrote the introduction).
• Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Secret Past (Walker): Travel/history book, often a very enjoyable as well as educational combination. More history than travel, I gather. Spain isn't all that far removed from decades under Franco, except perhaps in the minds of Spaniards, which may be for the best.
• Werner Troesken, The Great Lead Water Pipe Disaster (MIT Press): The politics of neglecting well-known health problems.
• Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press): This connection makes sense to me, but I tend to use my website as a massive unkempt file cabinet. Amazon led me to another book worth mentioning, although it appears to be out of print: John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.
• Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous? (Wm B Eerdmans): Appears to be arguing "no" as opposed to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al., although just raising the question opens several cans of worms.
• Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs): Bill Clinton says, "This is the most interesting, informative book on politics I've read in many years." Westen seems to like Clinton, too. Evidently, Westen tries to offer practical political advice built on brain science. Something about the whole approach strikes me as disreputable.

I wound up checking out Big History and Undermining Science, figuring that they fit a couple of immediate niches I have in my research, and may wind up being useful even if all I do is scan and poke. The books I'm actually most likely to read sooner or later are: Angier, Bissell, Dalrymple, and Groopman. Probably later, once they come out in paperback. As it is, I just ordered a batch of books: Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music; Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture; Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right; John Dean, Conservatives Without Conscience; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City; Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism. Nor have I made much of a dent in the last couple of batches, which included: Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower; Ian Jackman, Eat This!; Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma; Julee Rosso/Sheila Lukins, Silver Palate Cookbook (25th Anniversary Edition); William Ashworth, Ogallala Blue; David Sirota, Hostile Takeover; Dave Lindorff/Barbara Olshansky, The Case for Impeachment; Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map; plus a couple of items I did get to. So much to read.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Michael Perelman: Steal This Idea

Michael Perelman is a fairly prolific left-wing economist. I noticed several of his books, then looked him up in the library, finding this one: Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity (2002, Palgrave Macmillan; paperback, 2004, Palgrave Macmillan). I have my own critique of various issues in intellectual property, and consider it to be an important issue. This is a useful book, but Perelman makes a critical mistake in treating intellectual property as a single issue. It is, rather, an artificially agglomerated set of laws, each with its own issues. (Richard Stallman has lectured us to death on this point. The lack of any reference to Stallman, or more generally to free software, is a shortcoming in the book.) But while Perelman talks about intellectual property, for the most part he means patents. And his critique of patents does go beyond the usual norm to consider such issues as the negative impact of patents on scientific research and the contribution they make to a culture of secrecy and litigiousness.

The book has lots of case examples, especially on patents. One general point is the role of intellectual property in increasing inequality both within the US and throughout the world. This is one case where it may be appropriate to generalize about intellectual property, since even such innocuous properties as trademarks, backed by sufficient advertising and an appropriate culture, have precisely that effect.

The selected quotes are mostly self-explanatory.

Some general statements (p. 3):

Today, matters are completely different. Intellectual property covers just about everything. The system is riddled with overlapping claims. The contemporary system of intellectual property, rather than spreading information, creates a pervasive atmosphere of secrecy. Litigation is becoming far more important than creativity. In fact, I will show that intellectual property rights threaten to stifle creativity. Taking a historical view, we can compare the system of intellectual property to a stimulant that may well have promoted economic and cultural progress in an earlier period, but now threatens to exhaust creative activity.

Even in the arts, intellectual property rights offer very little to the mass of creative artists. In contrast, intellectual property rights grant enormous powers to corporations that distribute music or run movie studios. These corporations typically wield their power to the disadvantage of the artists, as well as society at large.

In science, intellectual property rights encourage secrecy and wasteful duplication of effort. They hold back economic progress by fostering inefficient monopolies. They encourage costly litigation that dissipates an unimaginable amount of time and resources. Over and above these problems, intellectual property rights pervert the entire scientific process by undermining the traditional incentives to engage in the basic scientific research essential to developing future improvements in technology.

Actually, Perelman doesn't have much to say about the arts case. The implication that copyrights benefit corporations at the expense of artists is certainly true, but that doesn't mean that artists don't benefit from copyrights, or that simply eliminating copyrights would benefit artists.

On developed vs. developing countries (p. 6):

Internationally, a regime of intellectual property rights condemns the poorest countries of the world to an even more disadvantaged future. For example, the United Nations reports that in 1993, just 10 countries accounted for 84 percent of global research and development expenditures. These same countries controlled 95 percent of patents registered in the United States during the past two decades. The rich, industrialized countries now hold 97 percent of all patents worldwide. Compounding the inequity, more than 80 percent of patents granted in developing countries belong to residents of industrial countries. No doubt this situation has worsened in the intervening years.

(p. 34):

Texas Instruments struck first. Typically license fees ran about 1 percent of revenues. In 1987, Texas Instruments raised its royalties on chips to 5 percent. The company filed a suit against one Korean and eight Japanese semiconductor companies, accusing them of infringing semiconductor patents. The settlements yielded the company more than $600 million in payments, according to a 1990 report. The company became so aggressive in seeking royalties that by 1992 it earned $391 million in royalties, compared to an operating income of only $274 million.

Other companies are even more successful. For example, IBM's annual report announced that the firm had earned more than $1.5 billion in income in 2000 from its intellectual property portfolio.

(p. 36):

From the standpoint of exports alone, this emphasis on intellectual property proved highly successful. In 1947, intellectual property comprised just under 10 percent of all U.S. exports. By 1986, the figure had grown to more than 37 percent. By the early 1990s, the best estimate was that intellectual property accounted for well over 50 percent of exports from the United States. In 1999, U.S. exports in the form of royalties and licensing revenue alone exceeded $37 billion -- topping aircraft exports, at $29 billion, and telecommunications equipment. Moreover, the trade surplus in intellectual property -- the exports minus imports -- is running at about $25 billion annually, and growing. As already noted, IBM alone enjoyed worldwide licensing revenues that exceeded $1.5 billion, according to its annual report for 2000. These figures exclude payments for physical goods, such as computer chips, which also embody intellectual property.

On radio patent conflicts, which the US Navy had worked to manage during WWI (pp. 51-52):

Once World War I was over, the litigation recommenced. Between 1900 and 1941, a total of 1,567 infringement suits entangled 684 different radio patents. These patent suits extracted a heavy price in terms of technological development. Reviewing the history of the British radio industry, one writer observed with a notable understatement that radio manufacturers in Britain wasted "a lot of ingenuity" during the 1920s devising circuit arrangements that reduced the royalties that would otherwise have to be paid to British Marconi. Although radio tube technology advanced in the process, this progress would have been much greater had researchers not directed so much energy to working around existing patents.

(p. 60):

Cadtrack was headed toward bankruptcy in 1983 when the head of licensing at IBM called to discuss the possible licensing of a patent for moving a cursor on a screen. In 1985, [Cadtrack CEO Eugene] Emmerich went to the board of his company and suggested that the company get out of the production business. The company then laid off all of its employees and concentrated on collecting revenues from its patent. By 1997, when the patent finally expired, he had signed deals worth about $50 million with 400 companies.

Emmerich was proud that only one company refused to take Cadtrack's license -- Commodore. He boasted, "So we took them to court and got a permanent injunction barring sales of their computers in the U.S. When that happened, their creditors called in their loans and they went bankrupt. That little patent of ours put Commodore out of business."

The latter paragraph helps explain why IBM brought up the issue of the patent in the first place. While it may seem to have added to IBM's costs, thereby cutting into profits, the net effect was to drive one of IBM's major PC competitors out of the market. Perelman doesn't go into this sort of strategy, but IBM has played this game before. In fact, their initial success in mainframes was at least in part based on their licensing of early computer patents: while IBM's competitors were busy suing each other over patents, IBM advanced to dominate the market.

(pp. 83-84):

The researchers who developed the transistor were not doing pure science. A 1931 paper had already laid out the basics of a quantum mechanical model of a solid semiconductor. Their work was not merely applied, either. It was something in between. The history of the transistor also illustrates how important accidents can determine intellectual property rights. A team at Purdue University was within weeks of discovering the transistor.

If AT&T had been free to use its intellectual property rights in the transistor the way contemporary firms can and do, modern technology would be far less advanced than it is today. Merges and Nelson have written:

Because of an antitrust consent decree, AT&T was foreclosed from the commercial transistor business. . . . [As a result] AT&T had every incentive to encourage other companies to advance transistor technology, because of the value of better transistors to the phone system. AT&T quickly entered into a large number of license agreements at low royalty rates. Many companies ultimately contributed to the advance of transistor technology because the pioneers patents were freely licensed instead of being used to block access.

Because of government intervention, intellectual property rights did not limit the revolutionary potential of the transistor as they might have. Richard C. Levin, economics professor and later president of Yale University, speculated some time ago that the computer industry might not have developed if AT&T had not been forced to license the transistor to all comers.

(p. 102):

In this world, academic careers rest on the ability to land corporate or government (mostly military) contracts. Researchers can either work at the behest of corporate "donors" or attempt to become independent by seeking out profitable discoveries either to patent or to use as the basis for their own firms.

The legal system is bending over backward to accommodate such practices. Today, when a biologist can patent a sequence of genetic material or a mathematician can patent an algorithm, money rather than the acclaim of colleagues becomes the coin of the realm. Researchers, who once worked in the open to win recognition from their peers, now shroud their research in secrecy in the hope of striking it rich.

(p. 133):

Dean Baker of the Center for Economics and Policy Research made a few rough calculations concerning the costs of intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry. Presently, people in the United States spend close to $100 billion a year on prescription drugs. In the absence of patent protection, Baker estimated that the cost of these drugs would fall to less than $25 billion -- a savings of more than $500 a year for every household in the country. By contrast, the proponents of deregulation in the airline, trucking, and telecommunications industries put the gains from each of these policies in the neighborhood of $10 billion to $20 billion annually.

Yes, but what about the great medical advances that arise out of the efforts of these companies? Dean Baker observed:

According to its own data, the pharmaceutical industry funds only 43 percent of medical research in the United States. The federal government funds close to a third of all medical research, primarily through the National Institutes of Health. Universities, private foundations and charities account for the rest. These other methods of funding research have a proven track record. This research has produced a long list of major medical breakthroughs, including the discovery of penicillin, the polio vaccine and AZT (though not its use as an AIDS treatment). In just the past two months, NIH researchers developed a vaccine that will prevent the transmission of AIDS through breast-feeding, and a use for aspirin for people undergoing heart surgery. The industry is presently spending approximately $20 billion a year on research. Some portion of this spending, probably in the neighborhood of one-third, is devoted to researching copycat drugs. But in the absence of the patent and the amount of research spending that would have to be picked up in the absence of patent protection comes to approximately $13.3 [b]illion a year. This amount is approximately equal to what state and federal governments could expect to save on Medicare and Medicaid payments for prescription drugs in the absence of patent protection. . . . In other words, this would allow the patented price of drugs to fall to a free market price that on average would be less than 25 percent (and in many cases less than 5 percent) of the patent-protected price.

The quote actually says $13.3 million, but the math and logic argue for billion. Cost is actually only one issue here. Public funding of pharmaceutical development would also entail public testing, which would make it harder to hide dangerous complications -- indeed, it would pretty much eliminate the motivation to cover them up. That in turn would limit liabilities, a big expense for the industry in its own right. Public research would also put more emphasis on cures and vaccines, which are economically less profitable to the industry than long-term palliatives.

(p. 156):

Federal officials have not challenged the industry in this respect. In fact, they have not even bothered to keep track of the products, including drugs, that have profited from federally funded research. A 1995 study done at MIT found that of the 14 new drugs the industry identified as the most medically significant in the preceding 25 years, 11 had their roots in studies paid for by the government. In 1999, a preliminary report by the inspector general's office of the Department of Health and Human Services found that as many as 22 percent of discoveries financed by the federal health institutes were not reported by universities, as is required. More than 2,000 inventions developed with government money were reported to the health institutes last year, but officials told the New York Times that they had no idea which, if any, companies had licensed those inventions, or how they were being used.

(p. 159):

Like most forms of public investment, public health has suffered from terrible neglect in the United States. In the words of Laurie Garrett, author of a panoramic study of the decline in public health: "It took centuries to build a public health system, and less than two decades to bring it down. Once the envy of the world, America's public health infrastructure was, at the end of the twentieth century, indeed in a shambles.

The full consequences of erosion of the public health system will not be felt until the nation faces an emergency, such as the rapid outbreak of a dangerous epidemic for which the system is not prepared. The anthrax scare of 2001 should have brought home this point.

(p. 160):

The history of tetraethyl lead, the poisonous gasoline additive that has since been banned, brings together a number of threads in this book, including the point I just mentioned about the rationality of preventing rather than curing illness. Intellectual property rights were a central factor in the initial development of this lethal product. The early research on gas additives actually favored alcohol, which could be made from agricultural waste products. The opportunity to gain a monopoly through patent rights was the main advantage of lead-based additives.

(pp. 177-178):

But information, a major constituent of intellectual property rights, is not scarce. As Kenneth Arrow recently noted, "Patents and copyrights are social innovations designed to create artificial scarcities where none exist naturally." In spite of the efforts to make information artificially scarce, economists realize that information differs from scarce goods, such as detergents or canned soups.

These scarcities, however, serve no social purpose whatsoever. In fact, using the market to exclude people from access to information is self-defeating. It does not increase the supply of information. It only spreads ignorance. Nor does my consumption of information detract from the access of anybody else; it may even add to the pool of social information, possibly creating an advantage for others. As a result, fields of research are very different from agricultural fields. While exclusivity is imperative in the farmer's field, it makes no sense whatsoever in science. After all, the more information that I gather, the more potential information is available to you.

For example, if you let me read your book or use your computer program, you may benefit from sharing the fruits of my experience. In fact, unlike so-called rivalrous goods, which can be used up, the more that people partake of the supply of information, the greater the total stock of information becomes. In short, using information can spawn more and better information. For instance, as a scientist learns more about her field, she has more to share with others. While scientists might compete with each other for the priority of a finding, the discovery of one enriches all. [ . . . ]

I cannot emphasize this point enough: The concept of scarcity is absolutely irrelevant to information. The more the law restricts people's access to information, the less information will be available.

One might also point out that the classic theory of markets, per Adam Smith, assumes perfect information. As such, efforts to limit information only serve to subvert market efficiency.

(p. 182):

Most economists make the case for awarding intellectual property rights to the "owners" of information by applying one side of the logic of public goods. They accept that in competitive markets prices fall toward marginal costs and the marginal cost of information is zero. At a zero price, firms would not have an incentive to produce information because they could not make a profit for their efforts.

Such economists conclude that the solution is to treat the information as intellectual property, thereby converting a public good into a monopoly. In making this case, they ignore the other half of the logic of public goods; namely, the central proposition of economic theory, which maintains that efficiency is maximized when goods sell for their marginal costs. Habitually caught within the narrow confines of their economic models, these economists content that the monopoly is required to provide the incentive to create information.

I'm struck here by the either-or logic: that the only alternatives are free information and monopoly. Since monopolies are generally, and properly, understood as inefficient, economists should go out of their way to devise methods that provide a marketable value for information without locking it up in a monopoly. Such methods are possible; e.g., mechanical licensing for radio performance of music. Alternatively, one could devise systems to promote the creation of free information, putting a value on its creation as opposed to its marginal cost. That so many economists hasten to support monopoly just goes to show that their fundamental instinct is to rally behind the status quo.

(p. 187):

[Paul] Samuelson laid the framework of treating such goods as quasi-public goods by insisting that goods can be more or less rivalrous, falling along a continuum. For example, if a software program costs a few cents to reproduce, it is not entirely non-rivalrous, even though it has much more in common with a public than a private good. In this respect, Samuelson showed that it should be treated as if it were a public good.

While Samuelson was correct to insist on the inefficiencies caused by treating public goods as private goods, he missed a larger dimension of the problem: namely, that the privatization of public goods can distort the nature of the goods themselves, or even the way that they are produced. For example, the scrambling of television signals creates an inefficiency that harms society, but the damage arising from this practice may seem minimal.

I'll write more about this in the future, but briefly I don't see any justification for patent protection, even if it could be modified to limit the worst abuses of monopoly grants. There may be a few minor instances where privately funded research would be abandoned without the promise of a patent payoff (e.g., in pharmaceuticals), but those cases could easily be remedied with a little public funding, and the public information sharing and the ability to build on each other's advances would be a positive advance that patents currently preclude. In most other cases there is no value whatsoever. Indeed, patents are often no more than an artificial means of legally enforced inequity.

Other intellectual property issues are more vexed, and need to be sorted out case by case. But the one thing they do have in common is that they are all cases of creating property by legal fiat as opposed to by possession or obligation. As such, there is no necessary reason that they exist. So such cases need to justify themselves as serving some public good as well as private benefit. Mostly, those cases come down to how people get paid for work. Copyrights, for instance, help to support artists, and they have the advantage of doing so in an unpolitical way, but they are not the only way to motivate artists.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Music: Current count 13613 [13587] rated (+26), 791 [798] unrated (-7). It's been a long, slow, frustrating week, home alone (except for an initially oblivious, ultimately demanding cat), with Laura away for work. My brother was in town for the weekend, hoping to close selling the two ancient Hull family houses, so he can buy a new one up near Portland OR. The finality of the move has gotten me down. I dropped by their house Sunday evening, figuring it to be the last chance I'll ever get to drop by unannounced and chew the fat. I've missed that the two years he's been working away from home. My sister was out of town last week; took a vacation to go to Jefferson City and work with the Superartists. They came back Saturday evening after exacting a promise that I'd cook dinner for them. I recently picked up a copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook -- something I noticed in David Kamp's The United States of Arugula -- so tried my hand at the chicken marbella, French potato salad, technicolor bean salad, layered tomato and mozzarella salad, and the carrot cake. Wasn't a lot of work, and it all came out pretty good, but it did have the air of a last supper, and didn't help that Laura was away too.

Jazz Consumer Guide (#14) is done, sent off to the Village Voice, which will publish it sometime in late October. Did a little bit of everything this week, including playing some classic Cuban music I haven't gotten around to writing about. Recycled Goods is next week's project.

• Kiran Ahluwalia: Wanderlust (2007, Times Square): A Punjabi who left India as a child for New Zealand and Canada, she returned for the heritage, studying ghazals and folk songs, which she renders with elegant clarity and cosmopolitan borrowings, like José Manuel Neto's Portugese guitarra; Rez Abbasi, a jazz guitarist who followed a similar path, produced and plays. B+(*)
• Anti-Flag: The Terror State (2003, Fat Wreck Chords): Pittsburgh punk rockers and left-wing ranters, each having attractions but also liabilities. The punk is surefire most of the time but falls apart more often than it should. The rants are right on when they stay negative, but "You Can Kill the Protester, but You Can't Kill the Protest" isn't something I believe, much less something I want to risk. "The people united can never be defeated" is a noble old chant, but it soon turns in on itself, attacking the disunity of a people getting their asses kicked every day. It may be I've gotten too old for this shit -- not the punk, and not the rant, but the attitude that the only thing that matters is attitude. B
• Miri Ben-Ari: The Hip-Hop Violinist (2005, Universal): Violinst from Israel, has the usual classical training, not to mention that all important Israeli Army String Quartet cred. Hip-hop is more of a callout than a calling, but she plays gamely in what's basically a various artists/producers record, where the classics -- including "Star Spangled Banner" -- are jokes and the jokers include Fabolous, Kanye West, Scarface, Akon, Pharoahe Monch, Lil' Wayne, Doug E Fresh, John Legend, and Anthony Hamilton. B+(*)
• Vic Dickenson & Joe Thomas & Their All-Star Jazz Groups: Mainstream (1958 [1999], Koch): Originally released as LP on Atlantic. Actually two distinct groups, with two tracks from Dickenson (w/Buck Clayton, Hal Singer, and others) mixed in with four tracks from Thomas (w/Dickie Wells, Buddy Tate, Buster Bailey, Herbie Nichols, and others). Mostly blues based. Hard to spoil, especially with these guys. B+
• The Inspiring New Sounds of Rio de Janeiro ([2007], Verge): Thirteen tracks of hip-hop by aspiring artists who are most likely unknown anywhere more than a few blocks from home -- what is basically a propaganda tract could have used some background story, but the hard knocks and high hopes are evident, and a whiff of samba leaves everyone at ease. B+(***)
• Harry Manx & Kevin Breitt: In Good We Trust (2007, Stony Plain): Two guitarists, with occasional variants -- banjo, mandolin, mandola, bazouki, slide mandocello, lap slide guitar, national steel guitar, etc. Manx reportedly "fuses south Asian music with the blues" -- I can't really attest to either, nor can I see much reason to file this as folk or country or jazz but at least it's better than new age. Manx also sings, starting with Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire," taken at a past that doesn't risk combustion. B+(*)
• Abra Moore: On the Way (2007, Sarathan): Originally from Poi Dog Pondering, a group I didn't follow but don't mind. Now she has a series of solo albums. She has a tiny little voice, reminds me of what Carola Dibbell once dismissed as a geisha. You may find it charming or annoying; I'm not so sure myself. But the songs don't convince me either. B-
• 17 Hippies: Heimlich (2007, Hipster): It's easy to peg this group as Germany's answer to Pink Martini: they sing in English and French but mostly in German, they sound less like cabaret because they don't want to give the impression that they are folkies, and they adopted hippies as in hip with no reference to San Francisco in the '60s; the number of musicians seems to vary since it was locked into their name -- I could 13, plus 2 Gasthippien. B+(*)
• The Shins: Wincing the Night Away (2007, Sub Pop): Alt-indie pop-rock group, made a splash in 2003 with Chutes Too Narrow. This one is only momentarily charming -- wincing could well be code for whining. B
• Dave Soldier/Richard Lair: Thai Elephant Orchestra (2000, Mulatta): I figure this for a novelty record, but it's not without interest. Twelve cuts of up to six elephants playing some large instruments specially constructed for them, including diddley bow and harmonica as well as various percussion, including something called a renat -- a Thai instrument, somewhat like a balafon, but scaled way up. The music is percussive, somewhat abstract, not at all unpleasant. Then there's a selection of natural elephant sounds, some mixed ensembles with humans, and some humans playing "music about elephants." The latter is not necessarily an improvement, although it does get more intricate. B

Jazz Prospecting (CG #15, Part 1)

Jazz Consumer Guide #14 is now at the Village Voice. I've heard that they will publish it sometime in mid-late October. Sometime between now and then we'll edit the draft, then they'll lay it out, realize that it doesn't all fit on their single page, and cut some things out. The cuts will be added to #15, which is already about half full. I hope to get back to it sooner rather than later, but the priority for the next week is Recycled Goods. I often take a jazz prospecting break between cycles, but I spent the early part of last week playing prospects, and have enough that I might as well go ahead and report them here.

Jimmy Bruno: Maplewood Avenue (2007, Affiliated Artists): Guitarist, from Philadelphia, b. 1953, fits in the line of mild-mannered, swing-happy guitarists from the '50s; started recording in 1991 for Concord, when they were trying to corner the market for mainstream jazz guitar. This is a trio with Tony Miceli on vibes and Jeff Pedras on bass, both named on the front cover. If Bruno doesn't leave much of an impression, that's because Miceli is so entertaining. B+(*)

Jonathan Kreisberg: The South of Everywhere (2007, Mel Bay): Guitarist, from New York, has several albums since 1996. This is a quintet with alto sax (Will Vinson), piano (Gary Versace), bass (Matt Penman), and drums (Mark Ferber). Some cuts drop down to a trio. The sort of record I find appealing while it's playing but can't remember much of afterwards. There are dozens and dozens of good jazz guitarists these days, and he's certainly one of them. B+(*)

Ezra Weiss: Get Happy (2006 [2007], Roark): Pianist, under 30, grew up in Phoenix, studied in Oberlin and Portland, wound up in New York. Has a couple of albums. Tends toward complex postbop arrangements, which here include a range of horns and three singers. Even with the familiar Arlen-Koehler title cut, nothing here strikes me as all that happy. Or all that interesting, but tenor saxophonist Kelly Roberge makes the most of his spots. B

Onaje Allan Gumbs: Sack Full of Dreams (2006 [2007], 18th & Vine): Pianist, b. 1949 in New York, 6th album since 1990, with a long list of sideman credits going back to Betty Carter's boot camp in 1972 and Woody Shaw's Moontrane in 1974. He's always struck me as an able supporting player, but I've never gotten a sense of his own style, and this strikes me as all over the map. One vocal track, featuring Obba Babatunde, disrupts the flow, despite noble sentiments. B

Gino Sitson: Bamisphere (2007, 18th & Vine): Vocalist, from Cameroun, based in New York, but still sings mostly in his native Medumba. Third album. Claims four octaves, "the only vocalist who is incorporating African polyphonic techniques into the improvisational jazz vocalese tradition." Hard for me to tell. He does work quite a bit in falsetto registers, with a lower range that sounds more spoken. He does his own backing vocals, and has credits for "vocal instruments" and "miscellaneous vocal effects." Opening track reminded me of mbube, but styles vary a lot after that. He does have a reputable jazz group backing him: Helio Alves on piano, Ron Carter or Essiet Essiet on bass, Jeff Watts on drums. They don't get to do much, and while I don't doubt his virtuosity, I don't get it either. Kind of like Cameroun's answer to Bobby McFerrin. B

Timo Lassy: The Jazz and Soul of Timo Lassy (2007, Ricky Tick): Finnish saxophonist, tenor and baritone, plus a little show-off flute. Looks like his first album, a sextet with trumpet and trombone shagging his flies; piano, bass and drums for rhythm. Website suggests: "He is the perfect melting of diverse characteristics triggering a likeness to Willis Jackson and Pharoah Sanders in one's mind." I can't say that he sounds like either, although the juxtaposition is bizarre enough that it helps locate where he'd like to be. He's not there -- simply doesn't have the sound or authority. But his band is happy playing soul jazz, and trombonist Mikko Mustonen, who also works with UMO Jazz Orchestra, earns a shout out. B

Alex Kontorovich: Deep Minor (2006 [2007], Chamsa): Credits are listed from drums forward with the leader last, rather than the convention of starting with the horns or the leader, in this case both. At first I wondered whether that was because I had heard of Aaron Alexander and Reuben Radding but not Brandon Seabrook (guitar, banjo, tapes) or Kontorovich (clarinet, alto sax), but then I figured that's cutting the market research pretty thin. Kontorovich was born in Russia, lives in New York, is 26, is working on a PhD at Columbia, in math. He has an interest in klezmer, but also wrote a "New Orleans Funeral March" and a "Waltz for Piazzolla." Solid record; first one this cycle I want to hear again. [B+(**)]

The Pizzarelli Boys: Sunday at Pete's (2007, Challenge): The senior figure here is listed as John "Bucky" Pizzarelli. Somehow I never noticed before that père et fils were Sr. and Jr. The father was always just Bucky, which seems like a natural nickname for a natural rhythm guitarist. John, on the other hand, could be a matinee idol. I never heard the well-regarded guitar duos they did in the early 1980s, before John started his singing career, but lately they've returned to the format -- cf. Generations (Arbors). The marquee is different here to accommodate a third Pizzarelli, bassist Martin, plus drummer Tony Tedesco, but the sound and feel are the same: old songs, tight leads accented by rhythm chords and a bit more. B+(*)

Harry Allen: Hits by Brits (2006 [2007], Challenge): Needing only ten songs, the limit doesn't cramp Allen too bad -- it means three songs by Ray Noble, including "Cherokee" and "The Very Thought of You." The others are hardly more obscure, and some, like "These Foolish Things," are even less. This is a quartet with his recent partner Joe Cohn on guitar, Joel Forbes on bass, and Chuck Riggs on drums, with John Allred's trombone added on four cuts. In his liner notes, Richard Sudhalter hedges that the album is "perhaps Harry Allen's best yet," which is certainly false. It strikes me as utterly typical. Sudhalter also likens Cohn to Wes Montgomery, but for once I'm inclined to be more generous. I'd say he's graduated into Bucky Pizzarelli territory. [B+(***)]

David Rogers Sextet: The World Is Not Your Home (2007, Jumbie): AMG lists 12 Dave or David Rogers, plus 3 more Rodgers. There are probably some duplicates in there, but there's still too much noise to find much out. This one is from Missouri; lived in Ghana, where he picked up an interest in talking drums; lives now in New York; plays tenor sax. It's hard to get a good take on this. Starting out awkwardly, he seems to be having a tough time getting the sax and the African percussion to mesh. Later on, especially on "Mobius Trip," the sax comes alive, but the Africana has vanished -- replaced by capable support work from pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver. B+(*)

Jacky Terrasson: Mirror (2006 [2007], Blue Note): German pianist, b. 1966, won the Thelonious Monk Piano prize in 1993, has nine albums on Blue Note or EMI, maybe a couple more, which should put him somewhere in the forefront of jazz pianists of his generation. I can't second that opinion. I've heard very little, and never been impressed enough to seek him out over dozens of other similar postbop players. This one is solo -- aficionados love the intimacy and/or freedom of the format, but I usually find solos underdressed, not to mention underdeveloped. This is no exception. B

Muhal Richard Abrams: Vision Toward Essence (1998 [2007], Pi): My usual caveats about solo piano apply here, but one thing I can't complain about is lack of ideas, and another is lack of sonic depth. Abrams plays the whole piano, with the rumblings and reverberations of the box a big part of his sound. Recorded live at the Guelph Jazz Festival, this is one piece, three parts, just under an hour. A lot to take in. [B+(***)]

The Jimmy Amadie Trio: The Philadelphia Story: The Gospel as We Know It (2006-07 [2007], TP): A veteran pianist, Philadelphia's favorite, or so I hear. Not actually a trio record: special guests Benny Golson, Randy Brecker, and/or Lew Tabackin play on virtually every track. Amadie is a throwback to the '50s, with his trio swinging hard throughout, the horns delightful. Nothing here not to like. B+(**)

Harry Manx & Kevin Breitt: In Good We Trust (2007, Stony Plain): Two guitarists, with occasional variants -- banjo, mandolin, mandola, bazouki, slide mandocello, lap slide guitar, national steel guitar, etc. Manx reportedly "fuses south Asian music with the blues" -- I can't really attest to either, nor can I see much reason to file this as folk or country or jazz but at least it's better than new age. Manx also sings, starting with Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire," taken at a past that doesn't risk combustion. B+(*)

No final grades/notes on records I put back for further listening the first time around this week.

Unpacking:

• Tony Bennett: Sings the Ultimate American Songbook Vol. 1 (1958-97, RPM/Columbia/Legacy)
• Snowfall: The Tony Bennett Christmas Album (1968, RPM/Columbia/Legacy)
• Bloodcount: Seconds (Screwgun, 2CD)
• Anthony Braxton: Solo Willisau (Intakt)
• Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown: Bogaloosa Boogie Man (1975, Sunnyside)
• Cique (Capri)
• The Essential Fred Hammond (1991-2004, Verity/Legacy, 2CD)
• Billie Holiday: Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles (1935-42, Columbia/Legacy, 4CD)
• Charlie Hunter and Bobby Previte as Groundtruther: Altitude (Thirsty Ear, 2CD)
• The Essential John P. Kee (1991-2000, Verity/Legacy, 2CD)
• Stacey Kent: Breakfast on the Morning Tram (Blue Note)
• Amy London: When I Look in Your Eyes (Motéma)
• Memphis Slim: Boogie Woogie (1971, Sunnyside)
• Memphis Slim & Roosevelt Sykes: Double-Barreled Boogie (1970, Sunnyside)
• Eddy Mitchell: Jambalaya (2006, Sunnyside)
• Frank Sinatra: A Voice in Time (1939-1952) (Columbia/RCA Victor/Legacy, 4CD)
• The Essential Hezekiah Walker (1992-2005, Verity/Legacy, 2CD)

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Weekend Roundup

Not much this week. Haven't done much browsing, and didn't find much of interest when I did.

American Exceptionalism Meets Team Jesus: A Tomdispatch Interview with James Carroll. A couple of quotes:

"When Americans talk about freedom, it's our secular code word for salvation. There's no salvation outside of the church; there's no freedom outside the American way of life."

"What's interesting is that this sense of special mission cuts across the spectrum -- right wing/left wing, liberals/conservatives -- because generally the liberal argument against government policies since World War II is that our wars -- Vietnam then, Iraq now -- represent an egregious failure to live up to America's true calling. We're better than this. Even antiwar critics, who begin to bang the drum, do it by appealing to an exceptional American missionizing impulse. You don't get the sense, even from most liberals, that -- no, America is a nation like other nations and we're going to screw things up the way other nations do."

Friday, September 21, 2007

David Satter: Darkness at Dawn

The third of my series of post-Communist Russian books is David Satter's Darkness at Noon: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (2003, Yale University Press). Satter wrote a previous book on Russia during the late-Communist period, Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union (1996; paperback, 2001, Yale University Press), which I haven't read but have seen highly recommended. Darkness at Noon finally quenched my thirst for a history of how Russia sunk so hard and fast following the fall of the Soviet Union. This is really a harrowing book. Reading it now it's impossible not to think of Iraq, one of the few comparable instances of a relatively advanced country sufferng a national catastrophe. Of course the two are not the same: Iraq was crushed under war and foreign occupation, but both involve major breakdowns in law, order, and basic civility, and both are conditioned by an American ideology -- capitalism in its rawest form, as the war of all against all -- given uncritical, unrestrained reign.

In Russia's case, you can chalk a lot of that up to ignorance. The Soviet regime had lost its legitimacy so completely that folks were prepared to believe anything about capitalism. I doubt that many Iraqis had any such illusions, but they were confronted with the most delusionary and coercive of American regimes. As Michael Schwartz has argued, Iraq's economy collapsed in a fit of Bremer privatization before the insurgency kicked into gear. Which makes me wonder whether Russia's fate isn't in the cards for the US, at least if you give Bush and his crowd enough time. It's often been commented that Washington's neoliberal economic dogmas have never actually been tried in the US or any other successfully developed nation. The fact that we haven't fallen apart like Russia or Iraq is testimony that we don't really believe all the crap that we routinely inflict on others. But we are starting to tatter around the edges, so much so that almost everything that is endemic in Russia is symptomatic and increasingly chronic in the US. Among the worst things is the Bush regime's contempt for law and their ability to rouse thuggish support for their cause. That they haven't started to whack their domestic enemies is a tribute to the enduring civility of American society, but if you spend much time with their dogs like Bill O'Reilly you'll start to appreciate how thin that veneer of civility has become.

The book starts with two chapters on specific events in 2000: the sinking of the submarine Kursk and a bomb scare in Ryazan. Exactly why isn't all that clear, but both represent failures of government and growing distrust of government. The books gets down to business in the third chapter, "The Young Reformers" (pp. 37-38):

The reformers' social darwinism was, in many ways, a reaction against Soviet society's professed concern for the needy and helpless. It was expressed in a refusal to consider the effects of their policies on the Russian population. When, in one of the new government's first acts, price controls were lifted on almost all products, wiping out the savings of 99 percent of the population, [Yegor] Gaidar answered objections by saying that the money in people's savings accounts was not real because it did not reflect the quantity of available goods.

The reformers' social darwinism was complemented by their economic determinism. It is an irony of the transition period that the reformers, intending to destroy socialism, preserved its most basic philosophical assumption, the belief that morality and law have no independent validity but are a function of underlying economic relations.

The reformers showed little interest in the sources of the legal framework that regulated the way in which the market economy in the West operated. In fact, conditioned by years of Marxist training, they dismissed moral idealism as "bourgeois thought," which was not based on anything real.

The consequences of social darwinism and economic determinism were greatly magnified by the most important practical effect of the worldview that the reformers brought to Russia's transformation. This was the reformers' indulgent attitude toward crime. Influenced by decades of mendacious Soviet propaganda, they assumed that the initial accumulation of capital in a market economy is almost always criminal, and, as they were resolutely procapitalist, they found it difficult to be strongly anticrime.

Because the bandits and black-market operators also wanted a free-market economy, the reformers began to see them as "socially friendly" and reacted to the criminals' growing wealth and property with equanimity and even approval, assuming that the gangsters would be able to hold on to their capital only as long as they were able to make it work "for the benefit of society."

The combination of social darwinism, economic determinism, and a tolerant attitude toward crime prepared the young reformers to carry out a frontal attack on the structures of the Soviet system without public support or a framework of law. The result was a catastrophe for Russian society.

(pp. 38-39):

The temptations that the new system introduced were overwhelming. The salaries of officials were low, and a single official decision could make a businessman rich overnight. As a result, decisions began to be sold. A businessman seeking an export quota, the right to hold government funds in his bank, or a favorable privatization decision was told, "It would help your application if you could make a loan to the following offshore company." Sometimes, particularly in the case of the city of Moscow, the transfer data for the offshore company were printed on cards for distribution. It was understood in such cases that the "loan" would not be repaid.

Bribery quickly became an integral part of the Russian way of doing business, and the expense of buying a government official was considered the most important part of a new enterprise's starting capital.

(pp. 46-47):

The creation of an oligarchic system began during the perestroika period, but its untrammeled development started in January 1992 with the beginning of the post-Soviet reforms. The reforms were dominated by three processes: hyperinflation, privatization, and criminalization. Their intersection led to economic collapse, mass poverty, and the effective privatization of the Russian state.

The hyperinflation began on January 2, 1992, after the abrupt freeing of prices, and it quickly divided the population into a minority of the very rich and a majority of the hopelessly poor. Yegor Gaidar, the deputy prime minister, predicted that prices would increase three to five times and then begin to fall. In ten months, however, prices rose twenty-five- to thirtyfold, driving millions into destitution. Soon hawkers and peddlers were everywhere as the members of the World War II generation took to the streets to sell their personal belongings. Within three months, 99 percent of the money held by Russian citizens in savings accounts had disappeared. Money that had been saved for decades to buy an apartment or a car or to pay for a wedding or a decent funeral was lost, causing psychological crises for millions of people.

The wiping out of citizens' savings was followed by the appearance of numerous commercial banks and investment funds, which were totally unregulated. At a time when spiraling inflation pushed ordinary citizens to seek ways to conserve their incomes, these investment funds and many commercial banks, a large number of which had ties to high-ranking officials, launched massive advertising campaigns, promising rates of return on investment of up to 1,200 percent. Most of these funds were pyramid schemes, and when they collapsed, more than 40 million people lost their savings a second time.

(pp. 47-48):

There were several ways of quickly accumulating vast, unearned wealth. One was to appropriate government credits.In 1992 inflation created a shortage of turnover capital, which paralyzed production and prompted the issuance of credits to Russian factories, whose value reached nearly 30 percent of the gross domestic product. With the inflation rate at 2,500 percent, these credits were offered at rates of from 10 to 25 percent. Instead of being used to pay salaries and purchase supplies, however, they were deposited in commercial banks at market rates, with the difference split between bank officials and the factory director.

A second way to acquire great wealth was to obtain permission to export raw materials. Although most prices in Russia had been freed from controls, energy prices, which at the beginning of the reform period were less than 1 percent of world market prices, continued to be regulated. Having abandoned the Soviet-era monopoly on foreign trade, the government began to allow anyone to export who could get a license; and since Russian raw materials were bought at the internal price for rubles and sold abroad at the world price for dollars, export licenses were akin to permission to print money. In Moscow they were frequently issued by the Ministry of Foreign Economic Ties, which functioned like a market, granting licenses in return for bribes, with the fee for the license insignificant in comparison to the size of the bribe.

A third source of wealth was subsidized imports. Out of fear that there would be famine in the country in the winter of 1991, the government sold dollars for the importation of food products at 1 percent of their real value, with the difference subsidized with the help of Western commodity credits. The products were sold, however, at normal market prices, with the result that the attempt to relieve the country's anticipated food crisis led to the enrichment of a small circle of Moscow traders. The value of import subsidies in 1992 came to 15 percent of the gross domestic product.

(pp. 51-53):

In theory, the "loans for shares" program provided for competition for the blocks of shares, with the winner determined by who could offer the largest credit to the government. In practice, however, the winner was the bank with the closest "informal" ties to the government, and the scheme, although it facilitated the handover of the most profitable Russian enterprises to the country's oligarchs, provided very little in badly needed revenue to the government. In 1995, for example, the total revenue from the mortgage auctions of twenty-one of Russia's most profitable enterprises was $691.4 million and 400 billion rubles.

Once an enterprise had been "mortgaged," the proprietary bank was free to exploit it; and when the government failed to repay the bank loans -- which, given the state's revenue shortage, was always the case -- it was up to the bank that held the mortgage to organize the final sale of the enterprise. Unsurprisingly, the enterprises became the property of the banks that had provided the original loans.

In 1995, Oneximbank won control of 38 percent of Norilsk Nickel, the giant nonferrous-metals producer, in exchange for a $170 million loan to the government. Two years later, in August 1997, it paid $250 million to retain the stake. After its repayment of the loan was deducted, the government had gained a mere $80 million for a major share in the plant that produces 90 percent of Russia's nickel, 90 percent of its cobalt, and 100 percent of its platinum.

In the meantime Oneximbank was free to expoit the giant combine as it saw fit. Norilsk Nickel was one of Russia's leading earners of hard currency, but by the spring of 1997 it owed its workers 1.2 trillion rubles in back wages. It was common for workers to faint from hunger, and that year, for the first time in decades, the children of Norilsk were not sent out of the polar city for the summer. The failure of Norilsk Nickel to meet its obligations raised the question of what Oneximbank was doing with the money that it earned from the combine. According to Obshchaya Gazeta, the bank was involved in highly profitable projects that required enormous amounts of cash. One such project was paying early on promissory notes from the federal government to the regional administrations in return for 20 to 30 percent of the note's face value. Inasmuch as the government had a budgetary debt of more than 50 trillion rubles to exployees, it was often unable to pay on these notes itself, and commercial banks used the income generated by their enterprises to buy these notes, leaving enterprises they controlled without enough money to pay salaries.

In fact the empowered banks, which soon controlled roughly 50 percent of the conomy of the country, began to feed continually off the state budget. They collected interest on budgetary funds, used the money to acquire the most valuable Russian enterprises, and then used the revenue from the enterprises to make huge profits by, in effect, leanding money back to the government.

The loan-for-shares scheme changed the relationship between major financial institutions and the government. The banks had long enjoyed the protection of patrons in government, but now, for the first time, the banks were in a position to put pressure on the government. Officials had to go to the banks to discuss such issues as changes in interest rates and the size of the government's indebtedness. Having created powerful banks by entrusting them with the government's money, the government fell into dependence on them.

With the approach of the 1996 presidential elections, it became clear that the government not only would not be able to repay the loans it had taken but, on the contrary, would need new loans. This state of affairs led to plans to put some of the country's most valuable properties, such as the Perm Motor Factory, which produces aircraft engines, Aeroflot, and Svyazinvest, the telecommunications holding company, up for auction, with the banks that had received shares in the enterprises dictating the conditions.

(pp. 53-54):

As was the case with privatization, the modern stage of criminalization in Russia began during perestroika. The Gorbachev-era reforms started with the legalization of "cooperatives," which became the only privately run businesses in the Soviet Union. The cooperatives quickly prospered, but, viewed as ideologically illegitimate,they were left without police protection at a time when it was illegal to hire private guards. They therefore became tempting targets for coercion, and gangs began to be formed all over the country to extort money from them.

By 1992 nearly every small business or street kiosk in Russia was paying protection money to gangsters. As a source of wealth, however, shops and kiosks could not compare with the state budget, and when, after the beginning of the Gaidar reforms, criminal gangs saw that former Soviet officials were using their connections to acquire vast, unearned wealth,they began to use terror ot take over the enterprises that the former officials had established. One sign of the gangsters' activities was the growing number of bankers and busienssmen who fell victim to contract murders.

The criminal terror against well-connected Russian businessmen, however, was short-lived. Soon the gangsters, businessmen, and corrupt officials began to work together. The gangsters needed the businessmen because they required places to invest their capital but, in most cases, lacked the skills to run large enterprises. For their part, businessmen needed the gangsters to force clients to honor their obligations. Before long, nearly every significant bank and commercial organization in Russia was using gangsters for debt collection.

The bandits' methods were simple. The debtor was contacted and informed that the gang knew his address and all his movements and that if he did not pay his debt by a certain date, he and his family would be killed. Usually this was enough to induce payment, in which case 50 percent of the money went to the gang. In cases in which the debtor was unable to make good the debt, he was usually murdered.

The partnership between business and crime did not stop with debt collection. In rapidly became clear that gangsters could be used for many purposes, from eliminating unwanted competitors to "persuading" potential business partners to soften their terms in contract negotiations. The most successful bankers and entrepreneurs became those with the closest criminal structures.

(pp. 53-54):

The ascendancy in Russia, however, of people who made their fortunes not through legitimate conomic activity but through stealing led to economic collapse. In the period 1992-1999 Russia's gross domestic product fell by half. Such a drop had not occurred even under German occupation. Russia became a classic third-world country, selling its raw materials -- oil, gas, and precious metals -- in order to import consumer goods. The value of investmen tin Russia fell every year for eight years, until in 1999 it was roughly 20 percent of its level in 1991. Having acquired their money, for the most part illegally, Russia's newly rich declined to invest in Russia lest a future government confiscate their wealth. Money was moved out of the country in enormous quantities; estimates of the amount that left Russia illegally during the Yeltsin era range from $220 billion to $450 billion.

The economic disaster was accompanied by a demographic catastrophe. In the years 1990-1994 male life expectancy fell by more than six years. In 1998 it was fifty-seven years, the lowest in the industrial world. IN the late 1990s the Russian population overall fell by 750,000 a year, and the country faced epidemics of drug-resistant tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

I included a number of quotes on the Second Chechnya War and Vladimir Putin's accession to power in a separate post (pp. 64-71). Satter argues that the apartment bombings that led up to the war were the work of the Russian FSB, led by Vladimir Putin, intended to start a war which would serve first as a distraction from efforts to reform Yeltsin's oligarchy and second as a vehicle to promote Putin's succession of Yeltsin. The Ryazan event in the second chapter is key to these charges: in it the FSB was caught red-handed, then claimed that they put the bombs there as part of a training exercise.

(pp. 74-75):

In late 1991 the Russian Exchange Bank began to pay 20 percent on deposits. This rate was several times higher than the interest paid by other commercial banks, and the offer was publicized with the help of professional advertising. Almost immediately deposits began to pour in. For the first time, the market saw that it was possible to attract huge amounts of money with high interest rates. This lesson was learned best of all, however, by unscrupulous operators who found that the possibilities for using high interest rates to attract money from a population with no experience of prudent investment were practically unlimited, particularly if there was no intention to pay.

From 1992 through 1994, 800 dummy firms defrauded nearly 30 million Russians of 140 trillion rubles in what became known as the "theft of the century."

(pp. 95-97):

The condition of the seamstresses at the Golubaya Oka Textile Factory was typical of the situation of workers in Russia. Privatization, which put 80 percent of Russian industrial enterprises in private hands by 1996, was supposed to make workers "co-owners" of their factories, but instead it made it possible to exploit workers in a manner that, in some respects, was worse than the expoitation that had existed under the Soviet Union.

The liquidation of state property removed Russia's factories from the control of the government but did not alter the working relationships inside the factories, leaving the directors, who were the last representatives of the Soviet regime following the dispersal of the Communist party committees, in complete administrative control.

In formal terms, ultimate authority was vested in the shareholders, but in reality the shareholders were not in a position to impose their will on the director. Because the director decided on hiring, firing, and promotions and controlled all information, he could dominate the shareholders' meetings even if he owned only a small number of shares. It was he who decided what information to make available to the shareholders,a nd with the shareholders' names printed on the ballots, the consequences of voting against him ranged from demotion to dismissal.

In a few short years there was a change in the character of Soviet-era factory directors. Men who had been dedicated to meeting the targets of the economic plan and often knew little else began to strip the assets of their factories.

One technique used was to withhold necessary payments, including salaries, and deposit the funds at interest. The director typically established close personal connections witha local bank, making it dependent on the factory, and thus on him. The factory's income was then deposited in the bank at high interest or invested, with the director and bank officials splitting the income.

Another technique for stripping assets was to create "daughter firms" that functioned as middlemen, charging exorbitant prices for inconsequential services. Finally, as a result of their access to shops and warehouses and control over transport and security guards, the directors were able to organize the theft of equipment, raw materials, and products, which, following privatization, began to disappear in large quantities from Russian factories. In the first years of the reform period, huge lines formed at Russian border crossings as trucks headed for foreign ports with materials stolen from factories at the behest of their directors.

Faced with the rapacity of the directors and their own vulnerability as a result of the collapse of industrial production, the workers often sank into a helpless passivity, which was reflected in letters to Russian newspapers.[ . . . ]

In fact, it was the defenseless of Russian workers that, amid the rise of a class of criminalized factory directors and the impotence of the official trade unions, gave rise to the first workers' protests. These protests were crushed ruthlessly, but they demonstrated by their futility the real condition of workers in the post-Soviet era.

Most of the stories involve companies not paying workers, as well as crushing unions and protests (pp. 98-102):

The delays in paying salaries soon reached two months, and the factory began to give workers part of their pay in the form of meals in the factory buffet. The food was of prison quality, but the workers accepted it eagerly, often bringing it home for their children without eating anything themselves.

After the factory was privatized, conditions became worse. Part of the production as well as truckloads of spare parts disappeared. Metal cutting machines were removed and sold on the side. Materials were taken from the construction site of a future sports complex and used to build three- and four-story dachas for the factory management.

By mid-1994, malnutrition and financial uncertainty had led to a deep social crisis. Families broke up as men found it impossible to support their children. Workers who became ill could not afford medical care and died prematurely. There were the first suicides. One day in the factory, a woman stopped Dorofeev and said to him, "Do you know what I'm forced to feed my daughters? Animal feed. I take cow feed, mix it with pearl barley, cook it, and serve it." Dorofeev recalled that the last time people had been forced to eat animal feed was during the siege of Leningrad. [ . . . ]

As a trade union leader, Dorofeev had the right to review the factory's financial records, and he soon made several discoveries. One of them was that although the factory was not giving workers their salaries, [company director] Pirozhkov had been paid 48.5 million rubles between December 1995 and June 1996. He also discovered that the factory had paid 391 percent intereston credits of 3.5 billion rubles from Credprombank, although the highest interest rate being charged for such credits during that period was 200 to 240 percent. At the same time, the factory's taxes were not paid directly to the government but to Credprombank so that the bank could first collect interest on the money. Payments had been delayed by two weeks for at least a year and a half. Dorofeev took this information to the prosecutor, and the police arrested the Credprombank executives responsible for the Leninsky raion.

By June the lag in paying salaries had reached eight months, and the workers survived only because they raised potatoes and other vegetables on their dacha plots. Every Monday they arrived at the factory exhausted after a weekend of hard work. [ . . . ]

One night, shortly before May Day 1997, Dorofeev was at home watching television when he heard the sound of bottles in another room. He got up and found his wife lying across their bed in an unnatural pose. He called an ambulance, and she was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors pumped her stomach and saved her life. She had taken sleeping pills. Vladimir found a suicide note, which summed up the impotent anguish of the entire workforce of the Heating Equipment Plant. It read: "Damn you, Pirozhkov."

On the police (p. 113):

There are several reasons why the police often do not make a serious effort to defend ordinary citizens. In the first place, the Russian police, as in the past, are organized to support the political authorities against society. They do not have a psychological predisposition to defend individuals. In this respect, the situation is little different from what it was in the nineteenth century, when the marquis de Coustine noted that police in Russia harass the innocent but, in a crisis, do not rush to offer aid.

Alao as in the past, the Russian police are judged according to a quota system that rewards a low crime rate and a large number of "solved crimes." This system induces the police to avoid anything that will ruin their statistics. As a result, they avoid accepting complaints from citizens who have been the victims of difficult-to-solve crimes. If a citizen's apartment is robbed, they may try to persuade the victim not to report it by saying, "Nonetheless, we won't find them." They also may avoid classifying a person who has disappeared as missign or an unidentified corpse as the victim of foul play because, in both cases, they may become involved in efforts that threaten their record for solving crimes.

Perhaps most important, the police in postcommunist Russia do not want to defend ordinary citizens because they regard it as an unproductive use of their time. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many of the best law-enforcement professionals left the intelligence services, the Interior Ministry, and the Office of the Prosecutor General to work for private security bureaus at fifteen times the pay. Many of thsoe who were left were incapable of getting a job elsewhere. These officers saw that government officials all around them were using their positions to obtain illegal wealth and, following their example, began to use every opportunity to solicit bribes.

In time, the police began to resemble just one more criminal gang, and their obsession with making money left them with neither the time nor the energy to enforce the law.

The book has many examples. One of the most striking is of Tatyana Zelinskaya and her estranged husband Vladislav Bezzubov. She divorced him in 1997. He was deep in debt, and starting making threats against her (p. 124):

In November 1998 Buzzubov moved out of the apartment but made harassing phone calls