Obama as the American Gorbachev?

A few months ago, reviewing Dmitry Orlov's brilliantly provocative book Reinventing Collapse, Small Precautions wondered whether Obama might end in a position of being the American Gorbachev. Well, it turns out that former chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Rezai, has a similar speculation:

When Mr. Gorbachev came to power in Russia, no one believed that a great transformation was in the making.... When Mr. Bush invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq and talk of new crusades proliferated in the political discourse, and even the Italian Prime Minister called Muslims a savage and uncivilized people, no one believed that six years later a black man from the bosom of a Muslim family would take leadership of the United States. Despite the fact that the religion of Mr. Obama is in a shroud of ignorance and it is made known that he is not Muslim, the issue is that he has emerged from the bosom of an Islamic family and his uncle is muazzin at a mosque in Africa and that most his family members are Muslim. This alone is a great victory for Muslims...Under any circumstances, the Mr. Obama phenomenon may either be result of calculations of the internal political colonialist structure of the United States in order to reconstruct the image of the United States, or Obama is a phenomenon of the kind of Gorbachev who will conduct fundamental reforms in economics and politics of the United States, or is result of the 'Hidden Hand' [of God].

None of these hypotheses must be refuted totally or accepted one hundred percent and we must await further signs and see what happens...Just to repeat: (A) The fact that a black man from the bosom of a Muslim family has taken up the leadership of the United States is a victory for the world of Islam. (B) Negative talk about this issue and Obama could be a hastily done deed resulting in damage to our country.

Kim Long Il on eHarmony

Capitalism

William Pfaff, reporting from Davos, summarizes the current global mood:

The American economic model of deregulated market capitalism, dominant today in the U.S. and the rest of the industrial world, cited as a vehicle of human progress, proves under examination to have been in significant part an affair of swindle, personal enrichment, looted third world nations, international and national crime conspiracies, bank robbery and Ponzi schemes, criminal real estate practices, environmental and institutional rip-offs, and official corruption.

How flat now, Tom?

Bruce Sterling on the evaporation of collective illusions

Bruce Sterling suggests that the collapse in confidence in financial institutions may only be the tip of the iceberg. He then lays out some other collective illusions which risk evaporating in 2009. Among others:

Intellectual property. More specifically, the fiat declaration that properties that are easy to reproduce shouldn't be reproduced.

Declaring that "information wants to be free" is an ideological stance. A real-world situation where information can't be anything but free, where digital information cannot be monetized, is bizarre and deeply scary. No banker or economist anywhere has the ghost of clue what to do under such conditions.

Intellectual property made sense and used to work rather well when conditions of production favored it. Now they don't. If it's simple to copy just one single movie, some gray area of fair use can be tolerated. If it becomes easy to copy a million movies with one single button-push, this vast economic superstructure is reduced to rags. Our belief in this kind of "property" becomes absurd.

To imagine that real estate is worthless is strange, though we've somehow managed to do that. But our society is also built on the supposed monetary worth of unreal estate. In fact, the planet's most advanced economies are optimized to create pretty much nothing else. The ultimate global consequences of this situation's abject failure would rank with the collapse of Communism.

National currencies. What do these odd numismatic relics have to do with today's roiling global economy? There is no national currency remotely strong enough to resist persecution by speculators. They're all potential bubbles — panics in the making.

If cash becomes king, what happens when market forces smash the cash? Was that inky paper really, truly supposed to be worth more than real estate, or unreal intellectual property, or shares in productive companies? Why should anyone honestly believe that local treasury departments are somehow more credible than global bankers? What on earth were people thinking? Flee for the hills!

The Westphalian system. Why are so many great military powers losing a war in Afghanistan? Afghanistan isn't even a nation-state, yet it's defeating all comers. Why do we even pretend to have nations these days? Hollow states, failed states, non-states... The European post-state!

No flag, no currency... People no longer have to believe in these effigies. Why do they persist? The benefits of believing in nations are slim. The planetary slum-dwellers of failed states may find the rollicking life of a Somali pirate far more attractive than the hard work of state-building. The nation-state is torn from both above and below. The global guerrilla and the Davos globe-hopper are cousins.

Sterling also points out that the creeping demographic crisis of vastly expanding ranks of the elderly, and the environmental catastrophe portended by exploding atmospheric carbon levels both hang out there like grim reapers from the future. His prediction? The same as Small Precautions, namely that Hurricane Katrina was an epistle from the future.

More bad news at Fannie

Fannie Mae just barely and by luck managed to avoid a virus deployed by a disgruntled ex-employee that would have erased all of its data and brought the company to a halt. The short story is that an IT contractor by the name of Rajendrasinh Babubahai Makwana was fired on October 24 for violated security protocols. What happened next is a scandal:

The allegations [in the indictment] lay out a cautionary tale about the risk of lax security practices at highly sensitive enterprises. Despite his dismissal on October 24, Makwana's highly privileged computer access wasn't terminated until late into the evening because of bureaucratic procedures in Fannie's procurement department, according to court documents.

Shortly after Makwana was informed he was being fired, he logged in to Fannie's main development server and embedded a series of malicious scripts inside a legitimate program. To conceal the malicious payload, he created a page worth of blank lines between the legitimate code and the malicious code.

Makwana won't be the only part of Fannie's IT staff getting fired, I expect. In general, this story underscores two key points about hacking: (1) insiders pose the greatest security risk for most companies (because of both malice and stupidity), and (2) for that reason, access governance control is perhaps the single most important dimension of network security.

A Poem for Pittsburgh

There was sadness,
There was loss.

To lose on a called penalty safety,
I laced up my shoes.

To walk and not witness,
celebration and post-mortem.

But they have played like this, all season.
But they have played like this, forever.

And they did not panic.
And they played.
And they won.

Forever.

Local impact of climate change

In California, as usual, the future is now.

A Cocaine Iceberg

Article from here:

ACCRA, Ghana -- West Africa is an unlikely center for the international cocaine trade. It is not a producer of the drug nor is it a consumer, as the vast majority of its people are very poor.

Yet a startling 50 tons of cocaine is transported through West Africa each year, according to the latest United Nations estimates. The value of this illicit trade dwarfs entire economies and has the potential to corrupt the region's fragile states, which are just pulling out of decades of bitter civil wars. In the past Africa has been a treasure trove looted by covetous colonialists, voracious rebels and kleptocratic rulers -- over the last 300 years think slaves, ivory, gold, diamonds, tin and coltan.
Now it is a transit point and storeroom for the cocaine trade.

Title from here.

Contraction Expansion

To be fair there are two wars in there...of course the expensive one was voluntary so here is the GAO's condemnation, with commentary and more. The 1978 number represents 3.02% of fed non-interest spending that year, the 2008 number 19.79%.

You: Jewish, Attractive and Drunk

Trying to turn a long, rambling post on Obama's inaugural address and language into a short rambling post, meanwhile a love story from DC Craigslist:

Jewish girl who passed out in my bed - m4w - 25 (Chinatown-Gallery Place)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reply to: pers-1001706735@craigslist.org
[?]Date: 2009-01-21, 12:26PM EST

You: Jewish, attractive and drunk

Me: Not Jewish (Gentile), dashing, gazelle on the dance floor and drunk

In case you were as blacked out as I think you were, I feel as though I should reintroduce myself. You were dancing around and enjoying the festive cake and brownies at the JCC inaugural bar mitzvah…I mean inaugural ball, before cabbing to Chinatown and passing out in my bed. Nothing makes me swoon for interfaith relationships like a girl who passes out in my lap in the back of a cab.

You might be asking yourself “why did that sweet boy not call me?” or “did I really wake up in a random guy’s bed in Chinatown?” and other important questions to gauge whether or not last night was a dream, drunken haze or bittersweet reality. Allow me to answer those questions.

Keep reading for the answers.

Riddle (and quote) of the day

Guess who wrote this in the an op-ed column in today's New York Times:

The basis for the modern State of Israel is the persecution of the Jewish people, which is undeniable. The Jews have been held captive, massacred, disadvantaged in every possible fashion by the Egyptians, the Romans, the English, the Russians, the Babylonians, the Canaanites and, most recently, the Germans under Hitler. The Jewish people want and deserve their homeland.

Click here for the surprising answer.

So far, so good

The big news of Obama's first day is the order to close down the GOP's secret foreign prison archipelago, end the kangaroo courts for inmates, and accelerate troop withdrawal from Iraq. Those are all important issues. But as a matter of political aesthetics, these things please me even more.

Shutting the revolving door:

Obama rolled out new rules for his appointees, requiring them to sign a pledge meant to disrupt the "revolving door" by which lobbyists flow seamlessly into government and back into the lobbying business.

His aides are barred from lobbying any executive agency for the life of the Obama administration. That means an appointee who leaves the White House in, say, 2010 would be barred from lobbying the executive branch until 2017 if Obama were to serve two terms.

At present, officials who leave an agency or department cannot go back and lobby their old offices for at least one year.

"It's unprecedented," said Fred Wertheimer, president of the nonpartisan watchdog group Democracy 21. "It basically protects citizens against individuals entering public service and then converting their public service to personal financial gain when they leave."

Lobbyists who join his administration must wait two years before they can take part in any issue on which they lobbied.

And issuing three executive orders to restore transparency to its rightful place as a centerpiece of substantive democracy:

The first order effectively undid a Bush administration policy that had restricted the release of presidential documents.... Bush's rule allowed former presidents, vice presidents and their heirs to cite executive privilege to block the release of documents after they have left office. With his order, Obama essentially threw out that rule, allowing only the current president to block the release of documents and depriving heirs of that right.

The second Obama order was designed to reinvigorate the Freedom of Information Act. Open-records advocates have complained that a memo by former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft in 2001 encouraged executive branch officials to delay or halt the release of documents requested under the law.

The third Obama memo was meant to instill a stronger spirit of openness in government. It directed executive branch employees to "operate under principles of openness, transparency and of engaging citizens with their government."

The first two rules are the most direct, but for my money the last one is the most important one, since it speaks to the spirit of governance. Small Precautions has argued for years that substantive democracy depends on a variety of tacit norms of political decency, many of which were actively and intentionally violated by the Bush regime, with transparency and openness at the head of the list. My great worry for the last four years especially was that the Bush regime's violations of those norms would be impossible to reverse, that is, that Bush was doing irreparable, irreversible damage to the fabric of our democratic culture. But Obama is showing a determination to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Looking back: how Obama won the election

Today I stumbled across the following clip from September 9, 2008 discussion between Emily Bazelon and Matt Lewis, discussing the Obama-McCain race, and specifically the impact of the nomination of Sarah Palin, who Lewis describes as "this amazingly exciting pick." (I wonder if Lewis would still stick with that judgment.)

For anyone who thinks either that Obama was inevitable (or who doubts that the financial meltdown that commenced with Lehman's implosion a week later decisively changed the race) would do well to watch this clip:


By the way, before anyone accuses me of being unjust in mocking Lewis, I'll note that I made the call on Palin right out of the gate.

Purdy

I can't believe I'm endorsing anything that Jedediah Purdy has to say, but he's profoundly right on the issue of balancing liberty and security. Money:

The Bush-era conceit that we accept no level of terrorist threat is, as philosopher John Searle once said about Jacques Derrida's work, the kind of bullshit that gives bullshit a bad name.... It may be rational in one way to lump terrorism in with traffic accidents and trans-fats as just another way for Americans to lose quality-adjusted life years; but that public-health take on terrorism is superficially smart, profoundly obtuse. Terrorism strikes at a government's capacity to protect its people from organized violence. That protection is one of the most basic reasons to have government at all. Terrorism is a glimpse of Hobbes's State of Nature, the antithesis of political society, in a way that the worst traffic accident or artery-clogging restaurant chain can never be. But to say that it's never "acceptable" doesn't mean either (1) that we can always prevent it or (2) that we should sacrifice other core values in trying. The fact that we can't perfectly prevent it is tragic, literally - the product of a clash of irreconcilable values, and of flaws in the formation of the world - but imagining that because it's evil, we can stop it altogether, is the kind of magical thinking that gives magical thinking a bad name.

Where "Mandarins" succeeded

I've spent the last few days reading the most recent articles that discuss Mandarins of the Future, and I am gratified to note that it appears that one of the central historiographical aims of the book has succeeded, namely to convince historians and practitioners of the American social science that modernization theory stands at the very center of postwar American social science, that is, it is the linchpin paradigm that, properly understood, unlocks the puzzle of why postwar American social science was what it was. I'm not solely responsible for promoting that thesis, of course (the work of David Engerman, Michael Latham, and Nick Cullather has been at least as important) but I believe that Mandarins was important for helping to define this nascent consensus.

Even more gratifying, I think that the moral thrust of the book, namely that modernization theory was an abomination, but that the Enlightenment ideals it venerated must be critically revisited and revitalized, has also found an audience, including among many critics who might otherwise have been presumed to be skeptical. This judgment is more tentative, and we'll see over the next few years where it goes, but this is my hope.

Update on the crisis

Banking stocks got absolutely hammered today, losing 20 percent of their value. They've already lost over a trillion dollars, and Nouriel Roubini thinks that have $2.5 trillion more to go.

The Financial Times suggests that the best solution is to "shoot the bankers and nationalize the banks." With friends like those.

Welcome to office, Mr. Obama.

Restoring the ambition of the social sciences

Peter Hall's sweeping assessment of the transformation of American social science over the last six decades contains some heroic overgeneralizations, but also identifies something profound about constricted political vision of post-Mod Theory American social science:

Shifts in the social sciences have also fueled political cynicism and eroded confidence in the possibility of alternative political projects. The ghost in the machine is the loss of faith in the modernist political vision that animated social science until the 1970s. That vision embraced Enlightenment ideals, regarded agitation on behalf of a working class as one of its best expressions, and saw the state as the political vehicle for realizing such aspirations. One by one, each of these pillars has crumbled under an acid intellectual rain....

The collapse of the modernist ideal has also left social science without a firm sense of political agency. Post-modernism cannot supply it. There is something oddly similar between the radicalism of Michel Foucault and the conservatism of Michael Oakeshott. Each sees the webs we weave as such complex constructions that it seems foolhardy to imagine disassembling them. Both find something risible in projects of reform. (p. 19-20)

I think Hall gets his causality backwards: it's not that methodological shifts in the social sciences have led to the collapse of utopian or even meliorist hopes and ideas, but rather that the ideological collapse of Enlightenment ideals have precipitated a narrowing of methodological ambition.

US 1549 as political symbolism

I've been wondering why a liberal political blog like Talking Points Memo has spent so much time writing about the US Airways crash.

At first I thought it was just because it was an obviously dramatic human interest story, and one happening right outside their offices, to boot. But I've also just realized that part of the fascination of the story is its latent political symbolism. This story is a metaphor not only for what the Obama administration faces, but also for the hopes that the country is investing in him.

George Bush and the GOP are effectively handing over the country in a state not that different from a plane where both the engines have gone out at low altitude. Obama's task -- his "historic opportunity" as the pundits like to say -- is to make the cool decisions that can bring the country down for a soft landing where no one gets seriously injured, rather than flame-balling into a heavily populated urban center.

If the perfect political symbol of the Bush years was Cheney's preemptive shotgunning of his friend, then the miraculous landing of US 1549 is the perfect political symbol of the country's current hopes for Obama.

Amazing video of the US Airways crash and rescue

Coast Guard surveillance video. The crash happens about two minutes in, and then it zooms in and you can see the people scrambling out of the plane and onto the wing, and then rescuers arrive. Check it:

One for the Kids

The Playmobil Security Check Point


It's all about the comments, sample:

I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger's shoes cannot be removed. then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger's scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said "that's the worst security ever!". But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.

Finding the Humor

thebailoutgame.us

A phase shift?

John Robb on the implications of the financial crisis: Apocalypse Now:

Historically, economic recessions that last longer than a year have durations/severities that can be plotted as power law distributions (Ormerod and Mounfield).* Given that we are already over a year into this recession, it implies that we are really into black swan territory (unknown and extreme outcomes) in regards to our global economy's current downturn and that no estimates of recovery times or ultimate severity based on historical data of past recessions apply anymore. This also means that the system has exceeded its ability to adapt using standard methods (that shouldn't be news to anyone).

Quote of the Day

Fernando Enrique Cardoso, addressing Lula, in 1998:

We were taught, years ago, to expect there would be a tremendous crisis, the uprising of a new society, a new political system, and the working class taking power.

All that is gone. The Berlin Wall is gone. So is the Soviet Union. There is no historical alternative now. So if there is a crisis... after that there will only be disaster.

Renal Recompense

"If you ain’t no chump; holla we want prenup!"

Good to know the going rate for a kidney is $1.5M, question Nils, in your research what do the back alley kidneys go for?

Update (by Nils): The retail price of kidneys varies tremendously worldwide--hence creating massive arbitrage opportunities for organ brokers. The cheapest kidneys come from India, where the price is typically under US$1000. In Iran, there the official state price for a kidney is US$1000, but the black market price is said to be significantly higher. A Romanian kidney fetches for US$3,000 dollars, while Turkish kidneys cost US$10,000+, and Mexican, Brazilian and South African kidneys fall in between. Finally, in the U.S., the price is typically US$60-90K. These are the prices the donors get; middlemen add a significant markup, so that the price recipients pay is often over US$100K. And that's before the surgery costs.

How to deliver cash to a pirate

The U.S. Navy has released a fine image of contemporary ransom-paying:
Historically, piracy (and, more generally, warlordism) has tended to arise in the context of unstable power relations between major powers, which opens up loopholes and arbitrage opportunities. With this in mind, it's noteworthy that the Chinese have decided to dispatch a couple of warships to help patrol the Gulf of Aden--a move that, depending on your perspextive, can be seen as either an alarming escalation of Chinese military ambitions, or as a salutary increase in Chinese contribution to the global public good of safe international waters. What it undoubtedly indicates is that the Chinese think the Americans aren't willing or able to defend the Chinese merchant marine. 

Chilling

The Indian government has released a dossier of alleged transcripts of the VOIP-based cell phone calls that record what handlers in Pakistan directing in real-time the actions of terrorists inside the Taj Mahal hotel during the Mumbai attacks last month. Some of it reads like dialog from a bad Hollywood thriller:

The dossier notes that on the basis of the interrogation of Mohammed Ajmal Amir ‘Kasab,’ the lone terrorist to be captured alive, the role of Lashkar commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi in the training of the crew had been established. The terrorist group initially consisted of 32 persons but the team chosen for the operation was eventually whittled down to 10.

[snip]

At the Oberoi at 0353 hrs on November 27, a handler phones and says:

“Brother Abdul. The media is comparing your action to 9/11. One senior police official has been killed.”

Abdul Rehman: “We are on the10th/11th floor. We have five hostages.”

Caller 2 (Kafa): Everything is being recorded by the media. Inflict the maximum damage. Keep fighting. Don’t be taken alive.

Caller: Kill all hostages, except the two Muslims. Keep your phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire.

Fahadullah: We have three foreigners, including women. From Singapore and China.

Caller: Kill them. The dossier then notes that the telephone intercept records the “voices of Fahadullah and Abdul Rehman directing hostages to stand in a line, and telling two Muslims to stand aside. Sound of gunfire. Cheering voices in background. Kafa hands telephone to Zarar,” who says, “Fahad, find the way to go downstairs.”

There's also a strong suggestion that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence--widely regarded as an Islamist-sympathizing rogue agency within the Pakistani government that once backed the Taliban in Afghanistan and still supports Kashmiri insurgents--was behind the Mumbai attacks.

Now it's certainly possible that this released material is disinformation--it's impossible to verify definitively. But if these allegations are true, it's a casus belli for sure.

The South will Rise Again

Attending ZooLights a few weeks ago with a group of friends a comment was made, in jest, as we were leaving dinner, "oh, we have to wait for the breeders." Now I am not particularly defensive about choosing to have children, nor have I been on offense about it, until I read this:

Mississippi has claimed the distinction of having the highest teen birth rate in the United States, a figure more than three times higher than the states with the lowest rates, health officials said on Wednesday...New Mexico (a rate of 64.1 per 1,000) and Texas (63.1) were next on the list, according to the CDC. ...Teen birth rates were highest in the South and Southwest and lowest in the Northeast, the CDC said. The lowest rates were recorded in New Hampshire (18.7), Vermont (20.8) and Massachusetts (21.3), according to the report.

Check out the map:


I am certainly not advocating for teen pregnancy, but as a proud member of the East Coast Elite I fear this path:

So c'mon bi-coastal progressives put the Rabbit away and get it on old school. The future of our country is at stake.

The Mustache strikes again

Tom Friedman has his usual painfully shallow take on the conflict in Gaza. Here's his contextualization of the rise of Hamas: "Hamas’s overthrow of the more secular Fatah organization in Gaza in 2007 is part of a regionwide civil war between Islamists and modernists."

What arrant nonsense. Just for starters: On which side of that alleged "regionside civil war" is, say, the Saudi royal family? how about those ultraorthodox Israeli zealots--big modernists, they! when the Israelis, during the First Intifada, chose to back Hamas and other Islamic charities against the secular Fatah, did that make them "anti-modern"?

Next up: does that allegedly central division have anything to tell us about the main actual civil war in the region--namely the one the U.S. precipitated in Iraq? Are the Sunni insurgents modernists or Islamists? How about the Mahdi Army?

As Sarah Palin might put it: Here's a little clue for y'all: whenever you hear some pundit bring up the word "modernity" as an analytical tool for understanding the Middle East, they almost always are full of shit. That's because "modernity" is not an analytically stable category, but rather is a political code word for "like us" (itself a fungible, messy concept that depends on what the speaker thinks "we" are actually like). In other words, examining the way the term "modernity" get used around Washington may provide a useful tool for understanding attitudes in Washington, but it is basically irrelevant for understanding the divisions on the ground in the Middle East or anywhere else.

Eyeless in Gaza

Juan Cole pens a neocon obituary. If only I were as confident as he that we have seen the last of those idiots.

Another financial scenario

So Obama says we're going to run trillion dollar deficits for years to come. And, he adds, we're eventually going to have "change" (e.g. massively cut) the social safety net to rein the deficit into line. 

As Small Precautions has noted before, this is in fact the usual outcome of huge debt and banking crises: the slashing of social services and the immiseration of the middle class. We're really at the beginning of the crisis, and it's going to be an utter disaster for the boomers, who are going to see their retirement funds decline, inflation erode away their pensions, and a collapse of social security and public health funding.

As bad as all this will be (and most of this stuff strikes me as all but inevitable), Martin Wolf asks if even this may not be the worst of it, because what if all these painful fiscal measures are not enough to get the U.S. economy back on track:

Think what will happen if, after two or more years of monstrous fiscal deficits, the US is still mired in unemployment and slow growth. People will ask why the country is exporting so much of its demand to sustain jobs abroad. They will want their demand back. The last time this sort of thing happened – in the 1930s – the outcome was a devastating round of beggar-my-neighbour devaluations, plus protectionism. Can we be confident we can avoid such dangers? On the contrary, the danger is extreme. Once the integration of the world economy starts to reverse and unemployment soars, the demons of our past – above all, nationalism – will return. Achievements of decades may collapse almost overnight.

I think one should be careful about making the historical parallels to the 1930s too neat -- after all, back then the world economy and particularly finance was far less integrated than it is today, Europe still governed massive mercantalist colonial empires, the specter of Communism haunted the world, and we didn't have massive built-in countercylical fiscal measures (e.g. unemployment insurance, social security, etc.).

With that said, the current crisis will certainly tempt many countries to return to autarchic economic policies, perhaps green-washed under the rubric of "sustainability" or "resiliency."

The Post-Human Future

Kevin Kelly has an interesting review of geologist Jan Zalasiewicz's new book on what traces of humans will remain on Earth 100m years from now.

The short answer: not much, and it'll look totally different from what it does today. Geological time wreaks tremendous transformation on minerals at an atomic level, and no one really knows how, say, an iPhone might fossilize.

Whither Britain in the Crisis?

James Meek, on the best and worst case scenarios for Britain in the ongoing financial crisis:

In the best scenario, the financial system starts to function again, albeit more responsibly than before; job losses tail off towards the end of the year after another half million people have got their P45s; house prices bottom out; inflation plummets to nearly zero, without slipping lower into the menace of deflation; the faint possibility of Britain balancing its books glimmers in the distance; and the benign side of Britain's non-membership of the euro comes into play. Because we're not in the euro, our currency can fall against it - the pound has already fallen by a quarter against the euro in the past few weeks - making it less likely we'll buy wine from France or cars from Germany or hotel rooms from Spain, and cheaper for Europeans to buy whisky from Scotland or aircraft engines from Derby or hotel rooms in Cornwall. In short, we muddle through.

The worst case is the Icelandic scenario: foreclosure on Britain. That's where the dark side of not being in the euro might emerge. Like most countries, Britain is in debt to its own citizens, and to the rest of the world. That debt is backed up by two things - confidence in the value of Britain's assets, its land and factories and skilled people, and confidence in Britain's future prosperity. That's fine as long as the confidence is maintained. But if the rest of the world decides Britain's debt is out of proportion to its actual worth, things can turn nasty very fast, and a country can find itself, like some impecunious homeowner, being judged not on hopes and prospects but on the repossession value of the house and the auction value of the furniture. Doubt abroad about what we are really worth has already set in. If you're a homeowner, in sterling terms, your house is worth, on average, 12% less than it was this time last year. But from the euro-denominated point of view, your house has fallen in value by another 25%.

The U.S. faces a pretty similar situation.

Not for the squeamish

A slide show from Gaza.

"Bombing 1.5 million People in a Cage"

10 best American movies of the 20th century

Stanley Fish sets out to start an argument by naming the ten American movies he considers the best of the 20th century. My own list would be almost completely different. In chronological order:

• City Lights (1931)
  
• Casablanca (1943)
  
• The Third Man (1949)
• Sunset Boulevard (1950)
  
• Vertigo (1958)
  
• Dr. Strangelove (1964)
  
• Chinatown (1974)
• The Godfather, Part II (1974)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• Pulp Fiction (1995)

Cyberwarfare

I'll shortly be publishing something formal on the emergent cyberthreat. For now, I'll note simply that over the last two years, cyberattacks have become a standard part of warfare information operations. For example, one of the crazy rightwing Israeli blogs that I regularly read, DEBKAfile, was by its own report taken down when Israeli troops crossed into Gaza.

Thorstein Veblen's Neglected Feminism

My first peer-reviewed article, on Thorstein Veblen, which I first drafted fifteen years ago, is now available online. I couldn't bear to reread it myself, but it may amuse some of you.

The larger context here is my interest in unorthodox, post-institutionalist thinking about economics, which ties together my various writings over the years on intellectuals as otherwise different as Veblen, Clifford Geertz, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, and Peter Drucker. It's also at the core of my interest in deviant globalization.

Modern Social Imaginaries

At the behest of a friend, I just read Charles Taylor's recently published Modern Social Imaginaries, which offers a pointed intervention into the debate about the relationship between "modernity" and "modernization," which was of course a central subject of Mandarins of the Future.

Taylor's core concept is that there exist popular "imagineries" (idea sets about how life is and should be led, in order to instantiate a "community") that are more important for defining the content of modernity than elite "theories." This is a useful distinction, albeit largely derivative of Benedict Anderson's original and much-cited phrase. What I like most about the way Taylor describes this concept is that it suggests a way to apply methods from intellectual history to popular ideas. Unfortunately, this isn't what Taylor actually does with the concept, choosing instead to focus most of his attention on the writing of the usual suspects in most debates about the rise of modern ideas in the from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries (Montaigne, Pope, Locke, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Mill).

I also like that the book suggests a way to revivify the generally scorned Hegelian concept of Zeitgeist. Certainly, it is a useful antidote to the unreconstructed, reductive bourgeois materialism (if you'll pardon my french) that subtends most discussions of the unity of the modernization process. Such discussions focus on the similarities of, say, the Japanese and German economies and demographic experiences, and ignore the fact that these two countries could scarcely feel more socially different if one of them were a paleolithic tribe.

The problem with all this is not that it's wrong, but that it's really pretty old hat. The entire "post-development" crowd (Escobar, Ferguson, Dirks, Chakrabarty, Kamali, and so on) along with various philosophers (Bauman, Volf, Eisenstadt) made the same basic point throughout the 1990s. What's more, Taylor doesn't makes his substantive case as strongly as he might have. Even though he claims that the intellectual payoff of his methodology is to "provincialize Europe," he ends up spending almost all his time focused on the evolution of, well, the European social imaginary. If provincializing Europe is really the point--that is, if the aim is to prove that there are multiple sharply contrasting modern social imaginaries that overlay a common material modernity--then wouldn't it have made better sense to spend time contrasting two really sharply distinct examples of "modern social imaginaries"? For example, Taylor would have made a far more powerful case if he had rigorously distinguished the evolution of the Japanese modern social imaginary from the European modern social imaginary, or the German social imaginary. As it was, I was left wondering whether the methodological distinction between theories and imaginaries really provides the foundational payoff for proving that there are "multiple" modernities.

Even if we ignore the evidentiary issue and assume that there actually are sharply distinct modern social imaginaries, it still seems to me that Taylor dances away from the key methodological problem with any concept of "multiple" imaginaries, or modernities, which is: what is the right unit of analysis? For example, can we speak today of the existence of a "European" social imaginary? Or are there still "Spanish," "French," and "English" social imaginaries? Or are there, actually, "Welsh," "Scottish," and "English" social imaginaries? Or "Glaswegian" and "Edinburgher" social imaginaries? It seems to me that all of these different social imaginaries exist as potentialities, and which ones get invoked depend on mood, leadership, circumstance. (Admittedly, this is the classic critique that a lumper and makes of a splitter. At the same time, it's a critique that must be met if the splitters are to convince any of the lumpers that they should stop lumping and start splitting.)

Finally, and most pointedly (because here's where there might be some policy payoff to the discussion), Taylor refuses to ask the tough moral question that his splitting would seem to me to demand. That is: are some sorts of social imaginaries more "useful," in terms of creating a stable polity and productive economy? That's a highly un-PC question, of course, since it suggests that some "imaginaries" and some "cultures" may be "better" than others in utilitarian terms--and even asking utilitarian questions about culture is to the post-development crowd suspect. (Unless, that is, you want to celebrate the supposed superiority of the hybrid cultures of postmodern post-peasantries.)

By my sights, if Taylor is going to make the sorts of positive splits between different modernities, then he must realize that some people (like me) are going to draw normative conclusions from them. Sure, the old modernization theory claim that modernity is singular was nothing but a varnish for the implicit idea that the "Western" social imaginary would eventually become universal, and as such was culturally imperialistic. But claiming that modernity is multiple doesn't get us around that problem. Instead, it merely begs the questions of which of these multiple modernities is superior or inferior.

That's the key, tough question that Taylor's distinction demands. But he ducks it, to my disappointment.

The crisis in 2009

Niall Ferguson has a scenario on how bad the economic situation is likely to be next year.

"Mexican beauty queen arrested in gun-filled truck"

I got no point of view on this, just thought that everyone ought to enjoy this:

Predictions and Predilections

Eric Weiner examines confirmation bias in economic reporting here, while elsewhere Foreign Policy Magazine issues "The 10 Worst Predictions for 2008." My favorite:

“Peter writes: ‘Should I be worried about Bear Stearns in terms of liquidity and get my money out of there?’ No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine! Do not take your money out. … Bear Stearns is not in trouble. I mean, if anything they’re more likely to be taken over. Don’t move your money from Bear! That’s just being silly! Don’t be silly!” —Jim Cramer, responding to a viewer’s e-mail on CNBC’s Mad Money, March 11, 2008

Hyperinflation: The "Bush Curve," Redux

Last summer, before the credit crisis hit full bore, I suggested that there were conspicuous parallels in the in the shape of many metrical assessments of the Bush years. 

Well, we have another entry, this time on the size of the monetary base in the U.S.:

Despite the sense of deflation that we currently feel, this implies that, unless the Fed can manage to turn fiscal policy on a dime, the hyperinflationary iceman cometh. Even if the Fed perfectly times the policy turnaround, it's unclear from a technical perspective how exactly it can pull all these dollars back out of circulation. (For more detailed analysis, see here.)

If you believe this, here's what it implies at a personal level: get your hands on real assets, e.g. property and commodities (canned goods and bullets?), ideally by leveraging up on unindexed dollar-denominated debt (which will soon be meaningless). Securing large amounts of debt is of course very hard to do right now, since banks are refusing to lend -- which is exactly what the Fed's monetary policy is trying to address -- but you can do this in modest ways by buying a car on credit, for example. But the key point is this: the real, tangible assets you possess (goods and skills) are likely to be the only thing you've got in a few years. So get as many of these as you can.

Thinking about this less personally, one has to figure that the coming orgy of inflation will be socially catastrophic. We know from the historical record what hyperinflation does to a country. Anyone on an fixed income is hosed (hello, AARP!). Anyone holding unindexed dollar denomination paper is hosed (hello, Beijing!). Government spending nolens volens must be radically curtailed (hello, Obama!). As the middle class evaporates, barter and scavenging rapidly emerge as crucial forms of economic exchange. 

Finally, the political implications of all this. Since massive cuts to U.S. government programs will inevitably include a massive reduction in defense spending, we are opening a vista with implications as radical for international relations as the similar hyperinflation-stoked reduction in the Russian military ambition after 1991. Except unlike in the 1990s, there's no clear power that will rush in to occupy the power vacuum left by a withdrawing Soviet military. As a thought-experiment, it's worth thinking about what a de facto withdrawal of the U.S. security umbrella would mean in places like Northeast Asia or Europe -- not to mention the Middle East. Security regionalization looks likely to be a byword for the 2010s.

The fun never has to stop!

"Size ten," the video game!

Hat tip: AH

Blafuckingojevich

Not to be missed: the transcript of the conversation between Rahm Emanuel and Rod Blagojevich.

Incidentally, the lexigraphy of this post's title can be found here.

Update: Incidentally, since some people seem not to be able to tell, let me say explicitly that the transcript is a fiction, albeit one with a high degree of verisimilitude. 

Forecast

My friend Stephan Faris's new book, Forecast, was published today. I read it in draft, and recommend it highly. It's written as a travelogue that takes a close look what climate change is doing (and is likely to do) to a broad range of human environments, from Darfur and Bangladesh to Napa and the Amazon. Buy it.

The end of industrial civilization

I'm on a kick right now reading a series of recent books on civilizational decline, trying to understand what a post-industrial future will look like, and what living through the transition away from an energy-intensive civilizational framework will feel like, both physically and intellectually. There's a variety of important texts out there for understanding what this process will look like, and I'll be posting from my readings regularly. 

So far my thinking on this topic has been particularly influenced by Tainter's The Collapse of Civilizations, Homer-Dixon's The Upside of Down (who I've blogged about before),Orlov's Reinventing Collapse (which I first blogged about here), Kunstler's The Long Emergency, Greer's The Long Descent, and John Robb's invaluable blog, Global Guerrillas.

These gentlemen (and it seems that most all writers on this topic are North American men--a fact possibly worth pondering) come from a wide variety of political and technical backgrounds, but they all converge on a common set of themes. The key variable, for most of them, is peak oil (or, more precisely, the asymptotic approach of EROI toward 1.0). This spells the end of the energy-intensive, globalized industrialism that U.S. politicians like to refer to as the American Way of Life. They concur that the industrial world will not end in a bang but rather in a whimper. (All them rightly excoriate End Days-Road Warrior apocalyptic visions as merely the inversion of the faith that endless technical progress will forever propel our civilization forward, eventually to other solar systems.) Most agree that the secular decline has begun in the center of this industrial civilization, marked by the stagnation or decline in the median standard of living over the last generation. All agree that the ride down will take a long time, and be, in technical economic terms, very lumpy. Most of them, I suspect, would agree with me that Hurricane Katrina, in both its ecological and its political implications, was not a one-off failure but rather represents a dark glass for scrying the future. All agree that government isn't going to save us, and suggest various strategies for learning to live locally.

So what will this look like as we play it forward? For my money, the best brief scenario for what this decline will look like is Greer's:

Imagine an American woman born in 1960. She sees the gas lines of the 1970s, the short-term political gimmicks that papered over the crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and the renewed trouble in the following decades. Periods of economic and political crisis, broken by intervals of partial recovery, shape the rest of her life. By the time she turns 70, she lives in a beleaguered, malfunctioning city where nearly half the population has no reliable access to clean water, electricity, or health care. Shantytowns spread in the shadow of skyscrapers while political and economic leaders keep insisting things are getting better.

Her great-grandson, born in 2040, manages to avoid the smorgasbord of diseases, the pervasive violence, and the pandemic alcohol and drug abuse that claim a quarter of his generation before age 30. A lucky break gets him into a technical career, safe from military service in endless overseas wars or "pacification actions" against separatist guerrillas at home. His technical knowledge consists mostly of rules of thumb for effective scavenging. Cars and refrigerators are luxury items he will never own, his home lacks electricity and central heating, and his health care comes from an old woman whose grandmother was a doctor and who knows something about wound care and herbs. By the time his hair turns gray the squabbling regions that once were the United States have split apart. All remaining fuel and electrical power have been commandeered by new regional governments, and coastal cities have been abandoned to the rising oceans.

For his great-granddaughter, born in 2010, the great crises are mostly things of the past. She grows up amid a ring of villages that were once suburbs, but now they surround an abandoned core of rusting skyscrapers that are visited only by salvage crews who mine them for raw materials. Local wars sputter, the oceans are still rising, and famines and epidemics come through every decade or so, but with a global population less than half what it was in 2000 and still declining, humanity and nature are moving toward balance. The great-grand-daughter learns to read and write, a skill most of her neighbors don't have, and a few old books are among her most proud possessions, but the days when men walked on the moon are fading into legend. When she and her family finally set out for a village in the countryside, leaving the husk of the old city to the salvage crews, it likely never occurs to her that her quiet footsteps on a crumbling asphalt road mark the end of civilization.

We're living the industrial analog of the Severan Dynasty. It's worth thinking carefully about how people living in the few decades after that experienced their world, as it marked the shift from the classic ancient world to the world of so-called Late Antiquity. Can Obama be our Diocletian? 

The year in pictures

The LA Times has a great set. My personal favorite: a kid with toy guns approaches a U.S. soldier in Baghdad.

A Christmas Wish

Invoking St. Nicholas as an instrument of an occasionally vengeful G*d I would like to ask this week for a single pillow; placed over the face of Robert Mugabe and held there until the sun rises in Zimbabwe.

Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

From Reuters:

President George W. Bush said Thursday he would not be second guessing Barack Obama's decisions after he hands over the White House keys next month.

That's, um, mighty white of him. I'm sure Obama was losing sleep over that. Quite frankly I would pay Bush much money to second guess me.

For Worse

Even since the voters of California decided to protect chickens but not same-sex couples we knew this day was coming:

The sponsors of Proposition 8 asked the California Supreme Court on Friday to nullify the marriages of the estimated 18,000 same-sex couples who exchanged vows before voters approved the ballot initiative that outlawed gay unions.

The Yes on 8 campaign filed a brief arguing that because the new law holds that only marriages between a man and a woman are recognized or valid in California, the state can no longer recognize the existing same-sex unions. The document reveals for the first time that opponents of same-sex marriage will fight in court to undo those unions that already exist.

"Proposition 8's brevity is matched by its clarity. There are no conditional clauses, exceptions, exemptions or exclusions," reads the brief co-written by Kenneth Starr, dean of Pepperdine University's law school and the former independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton.

Ah, Ken Starr, you dick.

I question the use of the word "reveals", this is like saying "Joe bought a case of condoms and has revealed for the first time that he plans on having sex."

My own take on it, shared by a constitutional law professor friend of mine who happens to be a lesbian, is that the word "marriage" does have religious meaning in most faiths, for better or for worse. A much more comprehensive approach to establishing this particular freedom of association would be to acknowledge that fact and challenge the constitutionality of the State santioning a religious activity.

A win would threaten the canon of family law and force legislators to establish, for everyone, a solution absent of religion. A civil solution for a civil right. As for marriage, you are free to pick a faith which is truly inclusive, or ends participation with 'hillbilly heroin' dealers.

Alaskan Gothic

The stories about the colorful extended Palin family just keep coming.

The Anthropocene?

Humans are inducing such rapid biological change to the planet that a scientific consensus is forming that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The term was originally coined in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, to denote that the impact of industrial-era humans on the planet were creating such an impact (notably by spurring climate change, but also more generally inducing a huge die-off in species) that our own era deserved a different moniker than the the standard Holocene--that is, the post-ice age era that began some 10 millennia ago. Geologists are now joining the bandwagon, arguing that human effects on the planet are creating a distinct stratigraphic signature, based on the about of exotic chemicals, radioactive elements, and above all carbon that we are spewing into the environment.

Obviously, I'm not an expert on such debates, but as a sometime historian, I know a thing or two about disputing periodization. My own view is that "in the long run" (that is, from the point of view some putative scientific observer millions of years from now), it would not make sense to demarcate the Anthropocene from the Holocene. In fact, seen in geological terms, the heat-up of the planet that happened 14,000 years ago and is now set to take another sharp uptick, should really be seen as one continuous process. Seen from the perspective of millions of years, the planet has been in a glacial period for several million years, with phases of warming and cooling, in which species were fairly stable. The last phase of cooling, however, happened to spit out a novel feedback element (modern humans, which evolved around 100-150K years ago) that happened to engage in behavior that diverted the usual cooling cycle, such that the planet now appears to be shifting to a definitively post-glacial period, more climatically akin to the way the world was some 55 million years ago.

However, seen in the millions-of-years perspective, the two distinct heat-ups -- the one 14K years ago and the one now -- look less like two distinct events, and more like one continuous event, rather than two distinct events, and should probably be interpreted as such. After all, the massive extinctions we are witnessing now are of the same order (and arguably, so far, less severe)  than the ones that took place 10K years ago, when much of the North American megafauna was killed off, radically changing the North American continental ecosystem.

Indeed, I'd argue that human-induced climate change is just another part of the wider ecosystemic feedback mechanism that humans are. Further, I'd argue that, qua feedback mechanism, humans are no different in our bio-geologic essentials than any other feedback mechanisms, such as the release of methane from melting tundra. I would argue that it is merely a conceit, a kind of species-narcissism, to think that just because we humans understand this feedback process that this makes our participation in that feedback mechanism somehow radically different from any other feedback loop. Neither scientific consciousness nor intellect generally are a geologic features.

From the Tehran fashion show

Abu Ghraib meets Sexy!


For comparison:

Hat tip: PN

Bizarre

Someone should check George Bush's neck for bite marks, because he's suddenly breaking out a surprisingly statesmanlike approach to governing, providing the Obama team with extensive contingency plans for dealing with various possible emergencies that may erupt early in the administration. Money:

"This doesn't absolve the Bush administration of some of their judgments they've made over the years, but this is the right thing to do," said a Democrat close to the transition who did not want to be named to avoid alienating the team. "This is when enlightened self-interest works."

More on banker pay

A banker investor friend of mine writes:

The real reason that comp in investment banking should be regulated is that the comp levels attract people who are very energetic but in a stupid way and greedy way. Its an entire industry populated by lobotomized greyhounds.

A Tale of Two Bubbles

With all of the Madoff madness it is good to see some in-depth coverage from the Washington Post of the much bigger pyramid scheme which is taking us all down right now, the packaging and repackaging of mortgages. From the lead,

It was Wall Street's version of an inside joke: Take a motley collection of largely unwanted assets, repackage them into a new set of bonds, and name it after the pristine white-sand beaches of an exclusive New Jersey town where Katharine Hepburn once summered.

to the close,

Former SEC commissioner Paul S. Atkins, a strong advocate of deregulation during his six-year tenure that ended earlier this year, agreed that the trading of CDOs and other private investments must be done more openly to prevent systemic risk. But he cautioned that there needs to be smarter regulation, not just more rules.

"Remember this crisis began in regulated entities," Atkins said, referring to investment and commercial banks overseen by the SEC and other federal agencies. "This happened right under our noses."

this article shows both the promise of journalism and the problem of groupthink inside a bubble.

Jumping to the back of the A-Section Richard Cohen takes a look at a different bubble, the Presidency.

Inside The Bubble, as Obama well knows, lurks a further danger: groupthink. Obama has used this Orwellian word himself. "One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in groupthink, and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views," he said this month.

Cohen has an self-serving antidote for the president-Elect: the newspaper. Given the quality of above article I will go ahead and give him the cure; but given Obama's self-awareness, and his appointments so far I am not sure we will see a repeat of the disease.

Quick reflexes

Update: Jim Fallows has a pitch-perfect reaction.

Uncooperative

Here's a story I just don't understand: the Justice Department is apparently refusing to allow the Obama transition team to examine the classified legal memos that sanctioned NSA wiretapping of US citizens and the CIA torture of terrorist suspects. This follows on the heels of the rumor that Mike Griffin, the head of NASA, is also refusing to cooperate with the Obama transition team, claiming they aren't technically qualified to judge the merits of NASA's program's.

Assuming these rumors are true, I fundamentally don't get this approach. If you've got a new boss coming in who you think is likely to torpedo your favorite program, the best approach has to be to make a strong case for those programs, not to deny him or her access to the information or to claim that he or she doesn't know enough to make a call on whether these programs are good. I mean, Obama's going to be the boss in five-six weeks--all that blocking his team access to information is going to do is sow ill will that will increase the chance that they will reverse these policies.

This seems like such a bureaucratically self-evident observation, that it casts doubt on whether these stories can possibly be true. (Indeed, Griffin is vigorously denying any rift with the incoming administration--although there seems to be litle doubt that there are sharp policy differences.) 

Then again, maybe these guys are simply trying to cause as much trouble as possible in order to disrupt Obama's ability to govern. Seems like you have to assume that they are both malign and stupid in order for that to be the case.

By Default

A few years ago as part of buying a house the old-fashioned way, saving up money beforehand, we stopped going to restaurants during the week. It was depressing how much money this saved. The exception was Thursday night, when we did cheap takeout. Of course once you have the house you have to maintain the house and what exactly where they thinking when they put that tile in the bathroom? So, the tradition continued.

And the back-story continues. A friend of a co-worker does marketing for Budweiser and he provided some insight on their advertising theme. It seems that the overall goal of Budweiser advertising is to establish it as the “default beer,” not the best beer, the default beer. I was fascinated by the idea and have been looking for similar patterns in other marketing campaigns and in the grand tradition of looking for something you see it everywhere. Particularly in policy campaigns, where I am looking hardest. On almost every issue there is a mad scramble to define the “default solution.”

Theory in action occurred last night as I stopped to pick up wine before getting the takeout. A couple walked in, he strolled over and bought one of the 2-liter white wines they sell while she gazed in wonder at the wall of beer in the coolers. “What should I get?” she asked. “I don’t know, Bud Light?” he asked back. A 12-pack of Bud Light was soon on the counter, the default beer.

Modernization Theory and Deviant Globalization

Pundita has some very flattering things to say about Mandarins of the Future, and she also correctly notes that my current efforts to understand deviant globalization are built on the foundation of insights generated from the earlier study.

But it's also important to note that the concept of deviant globalization has also been deeply informed by my collaboration with Jesse Goldhammer and Steve Weber, starting with in the course we taught togehter at Berkeley last year, who have brought with them a very different set of ideological, theoretical, and methodological commitments. Likewise, I've learned a vasy amount from reading and talking to, among others, John Robb, Mark Duffield, John Hagedorn, Mike Davis, William Langeweische, Carolyn Nordstrom, and Moises Naim.

My understanding of deviant globalization has also been shaped by my client work, which over the last several years addressed topics as seemingly disparate but in fact deeply intertwined as 

• how urbanization happens without industrialization
  
• what vast and growing wealth disparities means
  
• how the poor are reacting to climate change
  
• what the implications are of the commercialization of a vast number of crucial social functions that used to be managed either by governments or deeply rooted cultural institutions
  
• and how all this intersects with the rapid proliferation and democratization of media and communications technologies
  

Daniel Lerner wasn't wrong when he claimed that the adoption of modern media would fundamentally undermine traditional societies, ushering in "modernity." What he was wrong about, however, was the meaning of modernity.

Strange Currencies

An NPR story this morning gives a good example of the inefficiencies of greed. The greed in this case is not for money, but for position and power, the currency of bureaucracy.

In New York City, the local police and the feds do not get along — at least when it comes to counterterrorism. Now the FBI has a new man in New York. His name is Joe Demarest. Besides guarding against terrorists, his top job will be to help patch things up between the New York Police Department and the FBI.
...
That's because things are a little different in New York. While the law enforcement community does pull together in a pinch, the personalities are very strong, very "New York." The U.S. attorneys are aggressive, and so are the district attorneys. As the police commissioner of America's most populous city, Kelly is used to picking up the phone and calling [FBI Director] Mueller directly. And if he doesn't get what he wants from that call, he'll call his friends on Capitol Hill.

Something to keep in mind as various proposals for more government involvement in certain industries bubble up, trade and trespass will always find its currency, be it dollars, mentions in the dispatches, or mackerel. I personally find it easier to follow the money, the machinations are usually more apparent. But neither of the above selections are why the story stuck in my mind this morning, it was this one:

And then there's what happened last month: The head of the NYPD, Commissioner Raymond Kelly, accused the Justice Department of dragging its feet on approving wiretap applications. The Justice Department said the New York police were asking for wiretaps that broke the law. The angry letters between Kelly and Attorney General Michael Mukasey went public.

Exactly how messed up is your wiretap request that THIS Justice Department raises a red flag?

Chuzpah Dept.

Remember my post the other day about cutting banker pay? Well, here's why I say things in this country are fundamentally out of whack, and may in fact require a solution like the one that Mick calls for: John Thain, the boss of Merrill Lynch--which lost $11B over the last year, necessitating a firesale of itself to Bank of America for about ten percent of what it was worth eighteen months ago--just informed his board of directors that he believes he deserves a $10,000,000 bonus this year.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Actually existing development

I just finished Mark Duffield's latest excellent book, this one entitled Development, Security, and Unending War, a profound analysis of the recent evolution of the official discourse of development (particularly the British discourse of development). Duffield has an annoying tendency to wallow in unnecessary theoretical disquisitions about Giorgio Agamben and Etienne Balibar, but if you bracket that, he offers some extremely interesting insights that bear very directly on the politics of deviant globalization.

First, the central historical thrust of Duffield's book is the story of how the NGO-led model of development, which emerged in the 1980s and which remains dominant to this day, displaced modernization theory, which was the dominant model of development from the early cold war through the middle 1970s. Unlike modernization theory, which sought a technology that would allow post-colonial states to "close the gap" with the developing world, the NGO-led model of development seeks to "contain" and "stabilize" the poor. Institutionally (as we know from reading James Scott), the high modernist model of development believed that the state should be the instrument that would drive development. By contrast, the NGO-led model believes in working around the state, which is rightly perceived as corrupt and predatory. (Of course, while the NGO-friendly "sustainable development" movement likes to think of itself as politically progressive, its anti-statist bias dovetails very conveniently with neoliberal views of reducing state power--hence the  liberal-conservative "consensus" in the Washington Consensus.) Successful development, in this model, is not about "catching up" but rather about achieving "sustainability" or "self-reliance." Contemporary liberal developmental dogma holds that such "self-reliance" not only provides local dignity and eliminates the need for humanitarian interventions, it also reduces local sympathy for radicalism, jihadism, etc.

Second, analyzing this NGO-led model of development, Duffield points out that the use of NGOs to deliver developmental aid and to perform aid-effectiveness monitoring compromises the sovereignty of the subject state by wresting the biopolitical commanding heights (e.g. population surveilance and monitoring) away from the state, and placing these responsibilities in the hands of non-governmental organizations. With a nod to Judith Butler, Duffield describes this process as a multiplication of "petty sovereignties." His point is that in much of the so-called developing world, "governmental" functions (e.g. the delivery of "political goods" such a social services, health care, education, security, etc.) are being taken over by non-state actors. 

Because he is writing about the official development discourse, Duffield focuses on the role of official (that is, West-approved) NGOs in this process of multiplying petty sovereignties. But he might also have pointed out that there are plenty of other non-state actors that are taking on (or taking back) these "governmental" functions: tribal elders, gangsters, religious leaders, transnational and local corporations, mercenaries, ethnic militias, etc. I would suggest that, rather than refer to non-state actors who deliver political goods generically as "NGOs," we should instead refer to them as "governmental organizations" (not to be confused with "government organizations," which ironically enough are often not performing these "governmental functions").

Third, while most of Duffield's book is an extended analysis of the evolution of the official discourse of development, he also briefly alludes to the danger at the heart of making "self-reliance" the key metric of developmental success, in a passage that resonates with my own work on deviant globalization:

Self-reliance has a dangerous ambiguity in relation to attempts to strengthen state authority. When successfully and innovatively pursued, rather than being a process of governmentalization, self-reliance supports resistance and imparts independence. The "actually existing development" of informal trade, illegal commodity procurement, transborder smuggling networks and diaspora enterprise can encourage centrifugal forces of autonomy and alternative cases of legitimacy (p. 183).

Trying to wrap my head around "actually existing development" is precisely what I've been after ever since I finished my book on modernization theory. Duffield's book offers the beginning of a vocabulary for understanding what is happening on the ground in weak or fragile states. The majority of people in these locales of course merely become victims of the situation into which they are born. But there are some who refuse to be victims, and follow their entrepreneurial instincts (read: risk-willingness and bloody-mindedness) to make the best of their situation, using the channels provided by globalization to free themselves. These are the people who participate in the economy of deviant globalization.

Deviant globalizers know the state is neither going to help them close the gap with the rich world, nor protect them from the buffets of the global market. But for that very same reason, they are also not revolutionaries: they have no interested in seizing the state to enact development (that's so twentieth century). Rather, they seek autonomy from the state, so that they can build their economic empires and establish alternative forms of legitimacy. This analytic applies broadly to groups as otherwise different as the PCC, Laurent Nkunda, Lakshar e Taiba, Viktor Bout, Hamas, Mara Salvatrucha, and the Muslim Brothers. These deviant entrepreneurs aren't waiting for the state -- or for Washington-sanctioned NGOs -- to come to their rescue. They're doing it for themselves.

The most popular online video of the campaign

The most popular homemade online video of this past campaign season was not, liberals may be surprised to learn, Will.i.am's "Yes We Can," but rather the following independent video released in support of the McCain campaign:

What's effective, and affecting, about this video is not just that the young veteran politely criticizes Obama on the point that made his candidacy within the Democratic party. (Obviously one can argue with the substance of what the young man has to say -- notably his ridiculous claim that "Iraqis are just like us.")

Rather, the real effectiveness of his video comes less from the words than in the sincerity and personal nature of this veteran's commitment to those words that gets demonstrated visually when he walks away from the camera. It is ironic that this mode of visual persuasion was originally (and, even more effectively) used by the epic anti-war documentary "Hearts and Minds," which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1975 (and which the same kinds of people who probably like the video above excoriated as a hachet job). What makes both the video above and "Hearts and Minds" so moving is the way that passionate, sincere words are given forceful weight by a visual trick which, after the intellectual argument is made,seals the case by visually "proving" the commitment of the speaker. (Only a cynic would argue, in both cases, that the personal sacrifices of the speakers delegitimate what they have to say: in the case of the video above, is the veteran merely desperate to ensure that his personal sacrifice was not fruitless? in the case of the anti-war veterans of "Hearts and Minds," are they merely displaying bitterness over their personal sacrifices?)

Clay Shirky has more.

Update: The original version of this post incorrectly implied that this video was produced by the McCain campaign. In fact it was produced independently, in support of the McCain campaign, much as Will.i.am's video was produced independently, in support of Obama. I have changed the wording of the post to make this distinction clear.

My New Favorite Newspaper

I was on vacation last week and have spent most of this week catching up on the myriad of blogs I read daily; so it was refreshing tonight to sit down and do some honest-to-goodness web surfing, just riding links through the craziness. It was “Bride-to-be Lost at Sea” which led me to OregonLive.com, the website of The Oregonian with such headline goodness as:

• Machete leads to arrest of three robbers in Newberg


• Thieves make off with 130 guns in Vancouver smash-and-grab


• Gun sales explode in Oregon on Black Friday


• Armed sex offender on the loose

It was the last one which got me to thinking. Earlier this week I sat in on a pitch meeting from some visual information wizards --political, not Tufte stuff-- and I flashed back to the meeting when the page loaded with the article. Now the headline obviously did the trick, I clicked through, but in terms of properly using the visual they totally missed an opportunity. "Armed sex offender on the loose" gets you traffic, but

THIS MAN HAS A GUN AND WANTS TO FORCIBLY SODOMIZE YOU

rallies those crazy gun buyers and thieves, plus every machete wielding maniac in the Northwest into a frenzied mob to track this guy down. Then afterward they could help the Coast Guard find the other guy’s mail-order bride. Now that would be community organizing.

Cutting banker pay

Maybe its my bolshy tendencies, or more likely my ethnic background, but I have an instnct that massive payand wealth disparities are a sign of a sick society. While I have respect for entrepreneurs who have built lasting businesses and gotten rich doing so, the paydays in the finance sector over the last three decades have been, to my mind, sickening. And with the current financial meltdown, even some longtime and sympathetic industry observers are beginning to look at it the same way, and finding the testicular fortitude to dismiss the usual hogwash about how lower pay would lower performance:

I've now reached the point at which I simply don't believe people when they say that lower pay for bankers will result in worse performance -- especially since it looks very much as though it was higher pay for bankers which was at least partly responsible for much of the present crisis. Let's bring down pay, a lot, and see whether performance really falls.

The financial system went for decades, quite happily, without monster paydays: why can't we go back to those days? No one thinks we need to pay the Treasury secretary lots of money to make sure he's "working hard"; why are bank CEOs any different? And insofar as lower bank salaries would drive America's best and brightest into other sectors of the economy, that would surely be a good thing.

A massive, across-the-board pay cut in the banking system -- to levels which would still be incredibly generous by normal-America standards -- might result in a mass exodus of employees and a radical downsizing of the banking sector. But that's going to happen anyway, this would just achieve it without layoffs. And the outcome can't really be worse than what we've seen to date.

I don't know how you legislate this except through taxation, but as a matter of political ethics, this is just about common sense and democratic decency. The argument for much greater pay equality is fundamentally about political justice. And just as Salmon dismisses as nonsense the argument that lower pay would lower performance, I dismiss as nonsense the claim that higher taxes compromise the liberty of the rich.