Month: July 2004

Josh Marshall on the on-schedule capture of a prominent Al Queda leader:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall:

This is just the latest, but perhaps the most blatant, example of how this administration has placed politics and, really, political dirty tricks above national security itself, and along the way persisted in defining political deviance down until tactics we used to associate with banana republics start to seem commonplace here.

And while we’re at it, this is yet another example of how truly important it is that we democratize the Middle East. Because once we have, some of them will be able to come back here and redemocratize us.

Amazing. I was wondering the Pakistanis could pull it off: nice to have some reliable allies.

<update> Although the capture took place in central Pakistan “a few days back,” the announcement came just hours before John Kerry will give his acceptance speech in Boston.

David Pogue’s weekly column in the NYTimes recaps his coverage of electronic voting systems with insights into hacking voting systems, old and new:
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > From the Desk of David Pogue: Putting E-Voting to Rest:

The problem, of course, is that many states have already spent millions of dollars on self-contained touchscreen machines with no paper trail and no “op-scan” ballots. The states are not about to throw out all that equipment.

When I made this point to one of my correspondents, he wrote back: “A few million dollars? So what? We’re spending $5 billion a MONTH trying to build a democracy in Iraq. Why not spend a tiny fraction of that to ensure a working democracy at home?”

So what is verifiable democracy worth?

Josh Marshall has some thoughts on Barack Obama’s speech at the DNC, with some favorable comparisons to Clinton’s Monday night appearance. Both speeches were anchored on a theme of unity, reminding the audience that the Republicans need a divided America, need to pit people against each, to win.

He excerpted this passage:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

I think about those spin masters and negative ad peddlers and their paymasters and how blinded they are by ideology and hatred that a message of optimism, of faith and hope like Obama’s, will never reach them. They’ll shut it out, they’ll filter it into a handful of hateful code words before it ever reaches their ears, let alone their souls. I read the speech and I can’t see what there is to dislike, what there is to sow distrust. But someone, somewhere, was spinning that speech with its unabashed declaration of love of and faith in America as something else, something perhaps unrecognizably different.

What a sad and meaningless way to go through life.

Some articles I have read in the past 24 hours on work and what it means to people: I see a common thread.

helmintholog: Where the money went:
Not all the gays in the world getting married live on television could do so much to destroy the patterns of marriage and family life in which they believe as these wage statistics have done. And they have nothing to do with feminism, militant or otherwise. It is simply the development of the modern American economy — but of course this can’t be said or thought. So they blame the feminists, the liberals, the democrats, the elites.

It is the quality of rancid dispossession, the feeling of being cheated, which is the most notable quality of modern right wingery; and it is unusual. The temptation, for liberals, is to dismiss it as nostalgia for the Fifties, and for a mindlessly conventional society in which many people were oppressed. But I think this is silly. There are some things from the Fifties that no one could miss, though most of them are technological inadequacies. There are many things that no one should miss, most to do with racism and the persecution of minorities. But there are important and worthwhile things that anyone would miss if they remembered them: chief among them is the reasonable expectation that things would go on getting better for ordinary people and their families.

No longer being able to get by or even thrive as a middle class family on a single income is what they miss: having one parent at home makes a huge difference, we’ve found.

The Seattle Times: Pacific Northwest Magazine:
ANOTHER POINT is that while many of you enjoy the highest standard of living in human history and will live in bigger houses, take better vacations and drive flashier cars than your parents, you nonetheless are well and truly screwed.

From 1947 to 1973, real income, adjusted for inflation, rose about 75 percent, and went up almost equally for the poor, middle class and rich. Since then, the growth of wealth has continued, but real hourly wages have declined and middle-class income is virtually static (rising at best half a percent a year, adjusted for inflation). Only pay for the upper classes has soared.

The stall in pay for most people is odd, since worker productivity — or the amount of goods and services we each produce, on average — has risen 61 percent since 1980. Benefit should have followed, right? If we make more, don’t we get more?

Nope. Instead, average CEO pay in the same period rose 480 percent, corporate profits rose 145 percent, and income for the top 1 percent of Americans climbed 157 percent, all adjusted for inflation. America now has 2.2 million millionaires, and CEO pay that was 44 times that of an average worker in 1980 has rocketed to 301 times in 2004.

As Billmon explained last week, wages dropped 17% in from 1972 to 1992. He sees the root cause as “the massive influx of women into the workforce in the ’70s and ’80s – a social trend which turned many, and then most, U.S. families into dual-income households. That’s primarily were the money came from to support the steady rise in personal consumption – that plus ample amounts of personal debt.” The trouble, as he notes, is that its not repeatable: once you soak up all the work capacity and thereby depress wages, you can’t get any more (though I suppose that’s what offshore outsourcing is all about: that or we resurrect child labor).

Then we have this on the fraying of Norway’s moral fiber:

IHT: Norway work ethic slips on oil-coated slope:

OSLO Before the oil boom, when Norway was mostly poor and isolated, it survived on hard work and self-reliance, two sturdy Scandinavian virtues.

Now, with the country still bulging from three decades of oil money, Norway is discovering that sudden wealth comes with complications: The country’s bedrock work ethic is caving in. Norwegians now stay home from work at the highest rate in Europe, outdoing even the former titleholder, Sweden.
[ . . . ]
The average time people were absent from work in Norway in 2002, not including vacations, was 4.8 weeks. Sweden totaled 4.2 weeks, Italy came in at 1.8 weeks and Portugal at 1.5 weeks, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Throw in vacation time (five weeks for most people), national holidays (11 per year) and weekends, and Norwegians take off nearly half the calendar year – about 170 days.

See my earlier comments on oil-based economies as based on hunting/gathering as opposed to the more evolved farmers we think we are.

Interesting essay about the petro-nutritional complex or how much oil goes into feeding us, from the obvious — fueling the tractors and delivery trucks — to the less obvious — the fertilizers and the ores and raw materials to make the trucks, tractors, etc. Once again, George Kennan — the author of the successful containment strategy, saw where we were headed.

The Oil We Eat (Harpers.org):

Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.””The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

Continue reading “Oil: it’s what’s for dinner”

Is there any reason why someone would visit a website and leave comments that display utter contempt for the intended recipients and engage on childish name-calling? By contempt, I don’t mean contempt for anyone’s opinions — though there’s that to spare — but willful misuse of language and a perverse enjoyment of one’s own ignorance. Making an effort to write clearly and with attention to detail is too much to expect from some: it’s clear to me that it’s intended to convey contempt rather than simply slovenliness. I have no time or patience for it.

a crank’s progress » Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it:

What tactics did they neglect Mr. Smarty?

I think I know what the writer is trying to say/ask, but since they took the time to come up with that deeply excoriating insult, perhaps I’m mistaken.

I’m tempted to delete anything so devoid of clue but then I’d find myself accused of censorship instead being sanitary.