Michael K. Busch

New Blog

I am moving my blog to a new site.  From here on out, I'll be posting my thoughts at michaelkbusch.wordpress.com.  Hope to see you there!

War for Dummies?

My review of Rosie Garthwaite's How To Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone is up at the brand-new online journal Warscapes. 

 

Discussion with Christian Parenti: Tropic of Chaos

I recently had to privilege to talk with Christian Parenti about his new book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Chnage and the New Geography of Violence and the intersections between environmental degradation, violence and the political economy of neoliberalism.  A transcript of our discussion appeared this morning at the Institute for Policy Studies' Foreign Policy in Focus site.

Read more...

 

This Week in Thomas Friedman

Having trouble swallowing Tom Friedman's latest effort at wasting valuable space on the New York Times op-ed page?  Use Tom Tomorrow as a chaser (h/t to the Village Voice's Steven Thrasher).   

Trafficking and Labor in the Gulf: A Discussion with Pardis Mahdavi

 

My interview with Pardis Mahdavi--author of the recently published Gridlock--is up at Jadaliyya. In the course of our discussion, we touched on issues of labor, migration and the trouble of discourses surrounding the issue of human trafficking in the Gulf.

Boom and Bust, and Bust, and Bust Again

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells review Jeff Madrick's new book, Age of Greed, in the current issue of the New York Review of Books.  The piece largely mirrors Madrick's tale of Wall Street villainy over the course of the last forty years, a history of which the vast majority of Americans remain entirely ignorant. 

The key points?

The first thing you need to know about the cycle of financial overreach, crisis, and bailout is that it was not always thus. The United States emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated financial sector, and for about forty years those regulations were enough to keep banking both safe and boring. And for a while—with memories of the bank failures of the 1930s still fresh—most people liked it that way. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, however, both the political consensus in favor of boring banking and the structure of regulations that kept banking safe unraveled. The first half of Age of Greed describes how this happened through a series of personal profiles.

Importantly,

Madrick stresses a key point that is often forgotten or misunderstood to this day: the surging inflation of the 1970s had its roots not in some general problem of “big government” but in largely temporary events—the oil price shock and disappointing crop yields—whose effects were magnified throughout the economy by wage-price indexation. Yet constant policy shifts by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve (remember wage-price controls?) under Nixon, Ford, and Carter, Madrick argues, made the American public lose faith in government effectiveness, creating within it a ready acceptance of the antigovernment messages of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan.

Madrick also makes sure to take aim at the myth of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan as supertitans of American high finance and economics, a myth that obscures the fact that each was philosophically bankrupt and directly responsible for the socioeconomic and political suffering of millions of people the world over.  This will be familiar terrain for readers of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and Matt Taibbi's Griftopia. 

Where Madrick departs from other economic histories of the wilful dismantling of regulations designed to mitigate against greed and cycles of irrational exuberance that have characterized the last four decades of global economic experience is his discussion of CitiCorp's central role in all this.  At the heart of things is Sandy Weill. As Krugman and Wells note, 

Weill’s personal rise paralleled the transformation of finance, as the genteel figures of the era of regulated, boring banking were replaced by aggressive outsiders. During the 1960s, old-school Wall Streeters mockingly referred to Weill’s brokerage—Cogan, Berlind, Weill & Levitt—as Corned Beef with Lettuce. By 2000, however, the old Wall Street was gone, and the former outsiders were in charge. Weill, in particular, had masterminded the merger of Citibank and Travelers, and after a power struggle emerged as the new Citigroup’s CEO.

What was truly remarkable about that merger is that when Weill proposed it, it was clearly illegal. Salomon Smith Barney, a Travelers subsidiary, was engaged in investment banking, that is, putting together financial deals. And New Deal–era legislation—the Glass-Steagall Act—prohibited such activities on the part of commercial banks (deposit-taking institutions) like Citibank. But Weill believed that he could get the law changed to retroactively approve the merger, and he was right.

Despite heaps of evidence that Wall Street has and will continue to piledrive the American economy into the ground, major resistance to regulatory oversight still obtains.  Why?

Krugman and Wells close on a depressing note, made all the more upsetting by last night's news that the Obama administration will not seek to nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

We don’t seem to have learned the lesson that unregulated greed, especially in the financial sector, is destructive. True, most Democrats are now in favor of stronger financial regulation—although not as strongly as is required by the continuing manipulations by large financial institutions. But today’s Republicans remain firmly attached to greedism. In their view, it’s still government that’s the problem. It has now become orthodoxy on the right—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not Angelo Mozilo and Countrywide Credit, are to blame for the subprime mess. While proclaiming themselves defenders of the little guy, Republicans are currently hard at work undermining the Obama administration’s consumer protections that would largely prevent a replay of rapacious subprime lending.

And they've done so quite successfully, to the detriment of us all. 

Liza Featherstone Leaves 'Em Speechless

 

I was glad to see that the NYC Public School Parents blog has taken note of--and rightly recommended--the excellent education reporting and analysis of Liza Featherstone in her monthly column for the Brooklyn Rail.

Says NYCPSP, not only is her column a "must read," but:

Featherstone unearthed a DOE document [for an article on the poor DOE ratings issued to the city's charter schools] that dropped some bombshells about Democracy Prep's review, including the finding that “few lessons required higher-order thinking skills or deep analysis of concepts.” When I asked Chancellor Walcott and Deputy Chancellor Sternberg at the PEP why we were clearing Board of Ed space to expand a school that can't teach critical thinking they were speechless. Eventually Sternberg responded with an offer to visit Democracy Prep.

Yikes.

And while you're at it, beyond making Liza's education reporting part of your regular reading, check out her recent article in the latest issue of New Labor Forum, "Caught in the Web" where she looks at the prospects for a counter-assault by teachers' unions using technology resources against the waves of ideological attacks directed at unionized educators in recent years. Included in her discussion is the successful push-back on the part of faculty, staff and a host of interested outsiders in the case of Kristofer Peterson-Overton and CUNY last fall. 

This Week in Thomas Friedman

 

Will somebody please get Thomas Friedman to step away from his keyboard and give us all a break? His magical workshop of clever ideas is churning out cheap columns these days that are so clearly junk, you'd think they were made in China.

As I argued in an earlier post, the stable of Times columnists appears intellectually exhausted as a group, and Friedman is no exception. But what makes TF's weekly trash heap remarkable is the degree to which he doesn't even bother to cover up, anymore, his lackluster attempts at meaningful thought mongering.

The most recent example of this trend appeared in yesterday's Times.  TF opens by taking aim at the gridlock on Capitol Hill over the debt ceiling and the impasse between Democrats and Republicans on how best to stimulate job growth. Things were actually moving along, until this:

Indeed, what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics — anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change.

The fact that this is, in a nutshell, one of the defining features of capitalism and not some new phenomenon produced by recession seems to have escaped Friedman, but who cares?  Our man is too busy charging toward to the next pocket of hot air to worry much over the mess he's made in previous paragraphs. 

What's important to Friedman is not his own observation that the American economy is more or less dependent on a handful of companies in Sillicon Valley, and that "what's scary" is that "you could easily fit all their employees together into the 20,000 seats in Madison Square Garden, and still have room for grandma." In fact, wrestling with this disturbing reality and its likely short- and long-term consequences would have been an incredibly valuable exercise.

But no.  What Friedman wants to do is discuss how young American college grads can break into this elite crew of computer geeks and savvy engineers, everyone else be damned.  And how do you go about doing this?   

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day — more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer? 

Never mind whether you should be working for an employer that's thinking along these lines.  Instead, as a prospective employee, put yourself in the boss' shoes and ask yourself these questions:

Can he or she help my company adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job for tomorrow? And can he or she adapt with all the change, so my company can adapt and export more into the fastest-growing global markets?

Because at the end of the day, "In today’s hyperconnected world, more and more companies cannot and will not hire people who don’t fulfill those criteria."

Oh, crap.  I'm in big trouble.

But wait: what does this even mean?  How does anyone, let alone a recent college grad, demonstrate the ability to "adapt by not only doing the job today but also reinventing the job tomorrow"? The answer to this question, we're told, can be found in a new book by LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Garrett Hoffman. 

Here, Friedman switches gears from pundit to salesman by converting his column into an advertisement for the business equivalent of a self-help book.

Hoffman

one of the premier starter-uppers in Silicon Valley — besides co-founding LinkedIn, he is on the board of Zynga, was an early investor in Facebook and sits on the board of Mozilla — has a book coming out after New Year called “The Start-Up of You,” co-authored with Ben Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: “Hey, recent graduates! Hey, 35-year-old midcareer professional! Here’s how you build your career today.”

Unsurprisingly, we're told by TF that

Hoffman argues that professionals need an entirely new mind-set and skill set to compete. “The old paradigm of climb up a stable career ladder is dead and gone,” he said to me. “No career is a sure thing anymore. The uncertain, rapidly changing conditions in which entrepreneurs start companies is what it’s now like for all of us fashioning a career. Therefore you should approach career strategy the same way an entrepreneur approaches starting a business.”

Instead of entertaining the notion that it may be in our best interests to resist systems that offer zero security, Friedman implores us to not to be suckers and just conform.  What's the first step? "Ditch" your "grand life plan." What about building a life savings, planning for your children's future, and setting the groundwork for a retirement life that won't be utterly humiliating? Pshaw!  You fool, "this is not your parents’ job market."

The next step, as far as I can tell, involves embracing a bunch of gobbledygook masquerading as wisdom and just hoping that everything more or less works out. 

It...means using your network to pull in information and intelligence about where the growth opportunities are — and then investing in yourself to build skills that will allow you to take advantage of those opportunities.

What Friedman doesn't tell us is that, frankly, if you haven't already figured this much out on your own, you were doomed from the start.

The next lesson is: stop your whining!

“You can’t just say, ‘I have a college degree, I have a right to a job, now someone else should figure out how to hire and train me.’ ” You have to know which industries are working and what is happening inside them and then “find a way to add value in a way no one else can. For entrepreneurs it’s differentiate or die — that now goes for all of us.”

Finally, and one suspects most importantly for Friedman and Hoffman, "you have to strengthen the muscles of resilience." 

“You may have seen the news that [the] online radio service Pandora went public the other week,” Hoffman said. “What’s lesser known is that in the early days [the founder] pitched his idea more than 300 times to V.C.’s with no luck.”

The same could be said of lotto winners, right?  Here we see what Friedman is really up to, whether he gets it himself or not. Namely, that he is making an argument that there is no alternative to the casino capitalism of the American economy, and so instead of waiting around for government to create jobs--which admittedly it has a bizarrely difficult time doing--we should throw caution to the wind and all start playing the numbers in the hopes of hitting the jackpot.

Oh, there'll be winners all right.  But at what cost, Tom Friedman?  After all, the house always wins.

My Big Fat Racist Wedding

 
From the department of double-takes comes news of a colonial themed weddingin Mpumalanga, South Africa. As Jezebel's Dodai Stewart notes, the wedding planners, including "Super Bride" Chantal spared no expense in ensuring that the special day would fully embrace the spirit of white apartheid rule. Needless to say, "an all-white crowd was waited on by an all-black staff of servants."

The folks at welovepictures.blogspot.com, whoever the hell they are, couldn't contain their enthusiasm:

We love themed weddings, especially beautiful themes like 'Colonial Africa' which promise great pictures and a nostalgic and thoughtfully decorated wedding.

Ah yes, the good ol' days. Nostalgic indeed.

Note: It seems as if the original picture archive and description of the wedding have been taken down, which is too bad.  It was a great example of the thoughtless, casual racism that is still celebrated amongst affluent whites (and not just in South Africa) a mere two decades after the official end of apartheid. 

Update: My friend Anne tells me that the original homepage with the wedding photos can be accessed here, though all pictures of black wait staff have been excised.

Somalia's CIA Rendition Sites

 

An important, must-read article by Jeremy Scahill is just up at The Nation website, detailing the CIA's secret rendition and training activities in Somalia.  Among other things, Scahill reports that

the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

In addition,

the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners.

All of this is in service to Washington's developing counterterrorism strategy in East Africa, which also includes a recently sealed, $45 million military package to Uganda and Burundi to help combat the rising tide of Islamic extremism with unarmed drones and other state-of-the-art equipment. 

Alex Thurston argues that the drones and other increased American attention runs the risk of making the situation in Somalia worse for US interests, as foreign intervention prompts blowback in the form of increased recrutiment numbers for anti-American militias.

Compounding the problem still further, Scahill points out that the CIA-led program hasn't really acheived much.

“So far what we have not seen is the results in terms of the capacity of the [Somali] agency,” says the official. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces have been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in the Shabab’s areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in a Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in several of them being killed. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalls. They have not tried another targeted operation in Shabab-controlled territory since.

 

New Revelations Could Sink Rupert Murdoch, But at What Cost?

 

The Rupert Murdoch scandal surrounding News International took another surprising turn this afternoon as revelations surfaced that the paper--in addition to hacking into the voicemail of a murder victim and targetting 9/11 victims for the same treatment--turned their sites on former prime minister Gordon Brown.

The Guardian reports today that:

Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account, his legal file as well as his family's medical records.

There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him.

Not only that, but

That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it has not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.

Separately, Brown's tax paperwork was taken from his accountant's office apparently by hacking into the firm's computer. This was passed to another newspaper.

And the story only gets crazier from there.

It's hard not to think that American prosecutors will now get involved in the case--given Murdoch's American citizenship--with yet another accusation of the paper's alleged attempts at bribery of governmental officials in Britain--a violation of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The scandal will likely also sink the media mogul's desire to acquire Sky TV in Great Britain.  But better yet the revelations could mark the end of Murdoch's rapidly expanding media empire and political influence.  Only trouble is, will it come at the cost of a free media, not only in Great Britain, but also at home? 

Way to Use that Bully Pulpit!

 
Given the increasingly flimsy state of the New York Times opinion page, I'm thinking that the Gray Lady's editorial team might want to take a page out of any Major League Baseball manager's playbook and send up some pinch hitters.  They do a variety of this when they invite guest columnists to fill the space left by vacationing regulars.  But my idea is a bit different: when faced with having to run a column that is self-evidently awful, why don't the editors avail themselves of the option of rolling the dice a bit, and inviting an up-and-coming writer to produce a 750 word opinion piece--at the last minute--on something that actually matters.  I mean, it couldn't be that much worse than what they run right now, could it?

To be direct: the Times opinion staff is tired and out of touch.  Take David Brooks, whose Monday column, "The Mother of All No-Brainers,"  was apparently referring to itself. It offered the following assertion, intended to be a self-evident statement of common sense: 

If the Republican Party were a normal party, it would take advantage of this amazing moment. It is being offered the deal of the century: trillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases.

Trouble is, Brooks' numbers were off...by billions of dollars. The Times later posted this correction to the bottom of Bobo's piece: "An earlier version of this column misstated the amount of revenue increases needed in exchange for spending cuts. It is a few hundred billion, not a few hundred million." Oh, whoops!  This might not have been so bad but for the fact that for conservatives, Brooks' error opened the door to renewed outrage at the possibility that the country's rich might actually be asked to contribute their share to the American recovery. 

Then yesterday, Nicholas Kristof abused the world's most influential editorial page by running a top-ten list of books recommended for this year's jaunt to the beach.  "I guarantee pleasure," Kristof promised, "and also bragging rights at your next cocktail party. And if your kids read these, I bet they’ll ace the SAT." Bragging rights to what, you might ask. That you actually read a book that wasn't The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? Admittedly, though, Kristof's list is a step up--but only a step--from that produced by the collective mediocrity that is the Times magazine staff, which published its "best book" list earlier in the week.

But then today, Maureen Dowd took things even further, devoting a whole column in the Sunday edition to discussing the possibilities for Martin Scorsese's new flick on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It's not as if we're experiencing a slow news cycle or anything. Why does the Timesput up with this sort of thing? More importantly, why do they then foist it on their readership? If Dowd feels inspired to comment on Hollywood, fine.  Put it in the Arts section. But don't waste space, or my time, by running it in the back pages. 

Instead, it would be refreshing to see some new voices mixing it up with provocative, well-informed, and timely arguments--the sort of content that Times' opinion leaders are supposed to be churning out, but rarely do (and I won't even get started on Tom Friedman). This would also have the benefit of getting more for the money from their op-ed superstars who would no longer be allowed to dial-in nonsense to fulfill their weekly quota if they hoped to continue to see their names in print.

What would be cooler still is to see printed at the bottom of such pieces not "Maureen Dowd is off today," but "Maureen Dowd is really, really off today, so we chose to run this instead."   

Stuff White People Like: Saving Africa

My friend Denice recently chided me for failing to post good news about Uganda on Twitter.  Her criticism was fair, because it's true: I tend to highlight news that I think is most important--about Uganda or anywhere/anything else--and unfortunately, with the exception of my frivolous thoughts about sports, much of that news tends to be negative. 

But there's a second reason, and that's this--while the great degree of positive stories are too local in nature to be of interest to most beyond those with direct connections to the communities described, the remaining stories are a load of crap. 

Take, for example, this story from NPR, about 22-year-old Katie Davis who recently became a foster mom to thirteen orphaned and abandon children in Uganda.

Four years ago, Katie Davis was homecoming queen at her high school in Brentwood, Tenn. She had a yellow convertible and planned to study nursing in college.

But those plans changed just a little. Today, she's in Uganda, sharing her home with 13 orphaned or abandoned girls, ages 2 to 15. Davis is the legal guardian or foster mother for all of them, and hopes to one day adopt them.

"I think that's definitely something that I was made for," said Davis, 22, a devout Christian who idolizes Mother Teresa. "God just designed me that way because he already knew that this is what the plan was for my life — even though I didn't."

God and The Kristof are certainly smiling down, and I'm sure thousands more got the wam-and-fuzzies while listening.  But am I alone in thinking that this kind of reporting relies on exactly those tropes of the white man's burden that journalists, aid workers and academics should be militating against? There's a brief mention that local child advocates think the idea of anyone--let alone a twenty-two-year-old--taking responsibility for thirteen children might be madness, but this concern is almost immediately swept away so that Davis' other good deeds can be highlighted.

Davis has also started a nonprofit organization called Amazima Ministries. With support from U.S. donors, Amazima helps 400 children go to school, provides community health programs and feeds more than a thousand children five days a week. Davis is the director, and the job supports her and her family.

To her credit, Davis does acknowledge that she's not a total lunatic:

"My first instinct is not, 'Oh, a baby — let me adopt it!' Because I think, best-case scenario, they're raised in Uganda by Ugandans," said Davis. "But knowing there is nowhere else for them to go, I don't find myself capable of sending them away."

Away to what? Is it the case that these children are doomed to Oliver Twist existences if Katie Davis doesn't swoop in to save the day?  Are there no inidigenous organizations that strive to care for children orphaned by AIDS and place them in Ugandan homes? Are these efforts successful or not, and why? We're not likely to find out from reports like these, and that's a shame.

Instead, we're stuck with Katie Davis who, when pressed to explain her motivations to assume such an inappropriately heavy burden at such a young age, sums things up with "I don't know. These are the children that God brought to my door."

Good grief.

The Literary Taste of the NYT Magazine

 

My confidence in the New York Times Magazine dropped a bit today after reading its staff's "best fiction of all time" picks.  First, because the Times referred to its own literary taste as "fancy" despite the fact that Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay almost beat out Lolita as best book of all time.  Nothing against Chabon, but c'mon: let's be serious.

More importantly, though, what I really want to know is the identity of the staff bozo who chose Atlas Shrugged as his/her favorite piece of literature. This same staffer also chose a book that they had never read--Don Quixote--but planned to. I guess that counts, sort of.

The list, in its entirety, is this:

“The Awakening,” by Kate Chopin
“The Passion,” by Jeanette Winterson
“The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee
“A Visit From the Goon Squad,” by Jennifer Egan

“Crime and Punishment,” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“At Swim-Two-Birds,” by Flann O’Brien
“Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace
“Ulysses,” by James Joyce
“Molloy,” by Samuel Beckett

“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov
“Rabbit, Run,” or anything by John Updike
“American Pastoral,” or anything by Philip Roth
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon
“Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides

“For Whom The Bell Tolls,” by Ernest Hemingway
“The Mezzanine,” by Nicholson Baker
“The House of Mirth,” by Edith Wharton
“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The Master of Go,” by Yasunari Kawabata

“The Golden Bowl,” by Henry James
“In Search of Lost Time,” by Marcel Proust
“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis,” by José Saramago
“The Savage Detectives,” by Roberto Bolaño
“Light Years,” by James Salter
“Green Wheat,” by Colette

“To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee
“The Sound and the Fury,” by William Faulkner
“Neverwhere,” by Neil Gaiman
“The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James
“All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren
“Snow Country,” by Yasunari Kawabata
“Plainsong,” by Kent Haruf
“Eventide,” by Kent Haruf
“The Sportswriter,” by Richard Ford

“Sense and Sensibility,” by Jane Austen
“The God of Small Things,” by Arundhati Roy
“Cathedral,” Raymond Carver
“Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen
“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy

“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon
“Jane Eyre,” by Charlotte Brontë
“The Shipping News,” by Annie Proulx
“Underworld,” by Don DeLillo

“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by Milan Kundera
“White Noise,” by Don DeLillo
“Mating,” by Norman Rush
“Another Marvelous Thing,” by Laurie Colwin
“American Pastoral,” by Philip Roth

“A Sport and a Pastime,” by James Salter
“V.,” by Thomas Pynchon
“Cat and Mouse,” by Gunter Grass
“The Floating Opera,” by John Barth
“The Blood Oranges,” by John Hawkes

“A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole
“Passage to India,” by E.M. Forster
“Wolf Hall,” by Hilary Mantel
“Atonement,” by Ian McEwan
“The Tin Drum,” by Gunter Grass

“White Teeth,” by Zadie Smith
“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” by Milan Kundera
“Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides
“To The Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov

“Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville
“Pale Fire,” by Vladimir Nabokov
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov
“Dead Souls,” by Nikolai Gogol
“A Confederacy of Dunces,” John Kennedy Toole

“The Power and the Glory,” by Graham Greene
“The Age of Innocence,” by Edith Wharton
“The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” by Carson McCullers
“Brideshead Revisited,” by Evelyn Waugh
“The Leopard,” by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

“Crime and Punishment,” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon
“Leviathan,” by Paul Auster
“My Name Is Asher Lev,” by Chaim Potok
“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” by Mark Haddon

“Cloud Atlas,” by David Mitchell
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon
“The Executioner’s Song,” by Norman Mailer
“London Fields,” by Martin Amis
“Disgrace,” by J.M. Coetzee

“Invisible Man,” by Ralph Ellison
“Moby-Dick,” by Herman Melville
“The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger
“Jaws,” by Peter Benchley
“1984,” by George Orwell

“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” by Haruki Murakami
“Remains of the Day,” by Kazuo Ishiguro
“Against Nature,” by Joris-Karl Huysmans
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov

“Disgrace,” by J.M. Coetzee
“Birdsong,” by Sebastian Faulks
“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” by George Saunders
“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy
“American Pastoral,” by Philip Roth
Also: “James & the Giant Peach,” by Roald Dahl

“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” by James Joyce
“A Personal Matter,” by Kenzaburo Oe
“To the Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf
“Invisible Man,” by Ralph Ellison
“Sirens of Titan,” by Kurt Vonnegut

“The Godfather,” by Mario Puzo
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon
“The Thin Man,” by Dashiell Hammett
“The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.,” by Robert Coover
“Bright Lights, Big City,” by Jay McInerney

“A Confederacy of Dunces,” by John Kennedy Toole
“Catch-22,” by Joseph Heller
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain
“Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov

“Middlemarch,” by George Eliot
“Persuasion,” by Jane Austen
“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov
“The House of Mirth,” by Edith Wharton
“Franny and Zooey,” by J.D. Salinger

“Cruddy,” by Lynda Barry
“Chelsea Girls,” by Eileen Myles
“House of Leaves,” by Mark Z. Danielewski
“The Rules of Attraction,” by Bret Easton Ellis
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams (God, I’m such a nerd)

“Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen
“Pere Goriot,” by Honore de Balzac
“We All Love Glenda So Much and Other Tales,” by Julio Cortazar
“Middlemarch,” by George Eliot
“White Mule,” by William Carlos Williams
Right now I am reading, in honor of the capture of Whitey Bulger, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V.Higgins, a fantastic crime novel set in Boston, composed almost entirely in dialogue.

“Infinite Jest,” by David Foster Wallace
“The Golden Notebook,” by Doris Lessing
“Catch-22,” by Joseph Heller
All P.G. Wodehouse
“Alexandria Quartet,” by Lawrence Durrell

“Baron in the Trees,” by Italo Calvino
“Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand
“Dance, Dance, Dance,” by Haruki Murakami
“A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” by Mark Twain
“Strange Pilgrims,” by Gabriel García Márquez
This Summer: “Don Quixote” by Miguel De Cervantes

“The Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger
“A Prayer for Owen Meany,” by John Irving
“Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austen
“To Kill a Mocking Bird,” by Harper Lee
“My Antonia,” by Willa Cather

“The Sportswriter,” by Richard Ford
“Independence Day,” by Richard Ford
“All the King’s Men,” by Robert Penn Warren
“The Moviegoer,” by Walker Percy
“Slaughterhouse Five,” by Kurt Vonnegut

“Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov
“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy
“The Sound and the Fury,” by William Faulkner
“The Great Gatsby,” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle,” by Vladimir Nabokov

“The Needle’s Eye,” by Margaret Drabble
“The Master,” by Colm Toibin
“Middlearch,” by George Eliot.
“The Ambassadors,” by Henry James
“The History of Love,” by Nicole Krauss
“Anna Karenina,” by Leo Tolstoy

What's in a Name?

 
I don't know about you, but if I were a UN peacekeeper headed to newly-independent South Sudan, I think I'd want a better acronym for the mission than UNMISS, which was agreed upon unannimously today by the UN Security Council. 

The UN News Center reports that

Resolution 1996 establishes the UN Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (UNMISS) for an initial period of one year. Headed by the newly-appointed Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Hilde Johnson of Norway, the peacekeeping mission will consist of up to 7,000 military personnel and up to 900 civilian police personnel as well as a civilian component.

The new forces will assume responsibility from the previous UNMIS operation which was deployed as part of the 2005 negotiated settlement between factions in Sudan's north and south, and set the stage for the creation of an independent South Sudan. 

But as Reuters notes, considerable uncertainty remains. One point of contention is the fate of the current UNMIS operation.

Khartoum has made clear it is against a continuing U.N. peacekeeping presence. That has raised concerns about what will happen to strife-torn Southern Kordofan region and other areas when the U.N.'s existing UNMIS mandate ends on Saturday.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the unmoved mover of UN politics, "urged the Government of Sudan for technical and practical reasons for an extension of the mandate of the United Nations in Sudan," which is set to expire tomorrow, "at least until the situation (in Southern Kordofan) calms down." Speaking with jounalists during a brief stop in Khartoum today, Ban warned that "We can not afford to have any gaps."

Guernica Talks with Rebecca Hamilton

 

There's good stuff over at Guernica, where Jina Moore talks with Bec Hamilton about Sudan, tomorrow's splitting of the country into two nation-states, Save Darfur, and the struggles of battling publishing companies that want to slap poverty porn on the cover of books dealing with Africa (not the country).

Corey Robin Talks "Constituencies"

 

If you haven't caught Corey Robin's excellent new blog, well, then you're missing out.

Corey's post from today--"David Frum, Regular Pain in the GOP Ass, Writes the Most Honest Sentence In Journalism I’ve Seen"--is dead-on as usual. 

Analyzing Obama’s bungling of the debt crisis—having failed to back the GOP into a corner, Obama is now hoping for a best-case deal in which he gets massive cuts in Democratic programs with not much in the way of tax increases—Frum writes: "[Obama] issued no public call to constituencies like the financial industry to bring pressure to bear on the issue."

Reading along, noting those strong declarative terms—issued, public, call, constituency—you think Frum is going to say something like: Obama “issued no public call to constituencies like the labor movement” or Obama “issued no public call to constituencies like the elderly.” Instead, he slips in that mention of the financial industry, which is not, to put it politely, what we ordinarily think of as a constituency.

Disaster Capitalism in Haiti

 

Naomi Klein was asked today about what additional case studies she would add to future editions of her 2007 Shock Doctrine. Klein's answer: Greece and Wisconsin.

Fair enough, but I was surprised that she did not also include Haiti which, if recently released Wikileaks documents are accurate, provides a textbook case of disaster capitalism.  The embassy documents, obtained by Haïti Liberté and The Nation, paint a disturbing if not unexpected picture of American coercion of the struggling Caribbean nation between 2004 and the month following the 2010 earthquake that flattened Port-au-Prince. 

Among other important revelations that emerged over the past six weeks or so, the cables reveal that the Barack Obama administration aggressively lobbied the Haitian government to resist calls to raise the national minimum wage from 24 to 61 cents an hour.  The Atlantic notes that

The 37¢ bump seems small by American standards, but considering it would raise wages by 150 percent…the new rule stood to dramatically affect the lives of poor Haitians. However, it would also dramatically affect the bottom line of American companies, like Hanes and Levi Strauss who contracted labor in Haiti to sew their clothes. The companies insisted on capping the wage increase at 7¢ an hour, and the U.S. ambassador pressured Préval into a $3 per day wage for textile workers, $2 less than the original $5 a day that Préval had wanted.

More shocking still—to my mind at least—was a cable dated just weeks after the 2010 earthquake.  Written by US Ambassador Kenneth Merton, the cable doesn’t mince words about the opportunity available to investors willing to capitalize on suffering.  “THE GOLD RUSH IS ON!” Merton announces. 

As Haiti digs out from the earthquake, different companies are moving in to sell their concepts, products and services.  President Preval met with Gen Wesley Clark Saturday and received a sales presentation on a hurricane/earthquake resistant foam core house designed for low income residents.  AshBritt has been talking to various institutions about a national plan for rebuilding all government buildings.  Other companies are proposing their housing solutions or their land use planning ideas, or other construction concepts.  Each is vying for the ear of President in a veritable free-for-all.  Presidential advisor Leslie Voltaire and Minister of Tourism Patrick Delatour, working with the NGO and the UN shelter "cluster" have a systematic approach, but the attention of the President is on impressive new (expensive) designs.

And this is only the beginning of the story.  As Haiti Liberte reports:

One man who had the ear of President Préval, perhaps more than anyone else, was Lewis Lucke, Washington’s “Unified Relief and Response Coordinator,” heading up the entire U.S. earthquake relief effort in Haiti. He met with Préval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive two weeks after the quake, and at least one more time after that, according to the cables. Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the U.S. Agency for International Development, had overseen multi-billion contracts for Bechtel and other companies as USAID Mission Director in post-invasion Iraq.

Lucke didn’t stick around very long, however, abandoning his post after just a few months of work only to be hired in a private capacity by AshBritt to lobby the Haitian government on their behalf. The relationship soured, it seems, as Lucke sued the multinational later that year for not paying “him enough for consulting services that included hooking the contractor up with powerful people and helping to navigate government bureaucracy.” Lucke reportedly earned $30,000 a month for his services.  And he was effective: the Associated Press reports that AshBritt was awarded $20 million in reconstruction contracts in Haiti.

You might think that Lucke would be reticent about discussing the situation in public.  But then you’d be wrong.  In fact, the former USAID officer has vomited up a number of statements tailor made for a sequel to Shock Doctrine should Klein ever endeavor to write it. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake’s destruction, for example, Lucke told the Austin-American Statesman that

It became clear to us that if it was handled correctly, the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity... So much of the china was broken that it gives the chance to put it together hopefully in a better and different way.

And just recently, Lucke continued to spell out his perspective even more clearly for Haiti Liberte. "It’s kind of the American way,” he told a reporter for the paper. “Just because you’re trying to do business doesn’t mean you’re trying to be rapacious. There’s nothing insidious about that... It wasn’t worse than Iraq.

Oh! Well, I suppose if that’s the benchmark…

Bloomberg to Officiate Same-Sex Marriage Ceremony

 

I'm hardly a fan of Michael Bloomberg, but there's no denying that New York's mayor has been out in front on the civil rights issue of our day: same-sex marriage.  When some politicians hemmed and hawed--and others continue to do so--Bloomberg has been outspoken on the issue, and was a key driver behind New York State's recent decision to legalize it. 

The law will goes into effect on July 24, and according to the New York Times, Bloomberg will preside over at least one of the first marriages that day:

Mr. Bloomberg will officiate at the nuptials of his chief policy adviser, John Feinblatt, and his commissioner for consumer affairs, Jonathan Mintz, partners of 14 years who have two young daughters, city officials said.

The Times also reports something that I didn't know, namely that

As mayor, Mr. Bloomberg can marry any couple he wishes — a right that Mr. Bloomberg, who is divorced and lives with his longtime partner, Diana Taylor, has used sparingly over the last nine years.

In any event,

Mr. Bloomberg offered to marry the City Hall couple, according to his aides, despite his general reluctance to officiate at weddings. The reason, they said, was his long and close relationship with Mr. Mintz and Mr. Feinblatt, who worked closely with the mayor on the campaign to legalize same-sex marriage.

 

 

Shining Path Resurfacing in Peru?

 

I’ve spent the last week or so preparing for an interview with the British travel writer Michael Jacobs. In the process, I plowed through his wonderful recent book Andes, an account of Jacobs’ journey along the Andean spine of South America.  A beautiful mix of history and first-person observation, Andes above all showcases Jacobs’ talent for dialogue, as he conveys tidbits of talks with academics, politicians, artists and regular Joes. 

In one scene, Jacobs relates his chance encounter on a bus journey with a witness to the mid-1980s slaying of German couple at the hands of the Shining Path in Peru, a story that shocked Westerners into awareness of the violent civil war that devastated the country throughout significant chunks of the 1980s and early 1990s. The tale—as terrifying as it is sad—takes place “at around this time of year, on a bus owned like this one by the Molina Union.”

A group of Sendero Luminoso terrorists, some little more than young boys, had blocked the road with boulders. We all had to get out of the bus. They took everything we had, even though most of us were as poor as they were…The Germans of course did not really know what was going on. I told them there was nothing to worry about. But they weren’t stupid. Many people around them were sobbing and moaning.

Eventually we were all told we could get back on the bus. The Germans were on the point of stepping in through the door. A young man, the leader of the tyerorists, held them back. “Not you!” he shouted. I pleaded with him to let the Germans go. I said they have done nothing…”They are traitors,” he replied. “All foreigners are traitors.”

The Germans asked me to repeat what had been said. Strangely, they did not seem frightened any more. It was if they suddenly knew they were going to do, and that there was nothing that they could do about it. I just told them that everything was going to be alright. They held hands tightly and looked into each other’s watery eyes. They obviously were very much in love. I was shoved onto the bus. I could hear the gunshots as we pulled away.”

I was reminded of this story by the news this week that Peruvian intelligence officers had arrested Elisa Monica Culantres Cordova, partner of Shining Path leader “Comrade Artemio,” who was nabbed outside Lima seven months pregnant. Besides being a direct connection to the most powerful surviving member of the once-revolutionary movement, Cordova had been wanted for numerous acts of terrorism that left dozens dead, including eleven national police officers. 

This may not seem like a big deal: the conventional wisdom holds that the Shining Path has been reduced to a skeleton of its former self, and poses no serious threat to Peruvian state security. As it so often happens, however, the conventional wisdom is wrong. 

One of the perverse effects of the American-led war on drugs in South America—largely under the umbrella of Plan Colombia—has been the so-called balloon phenomenon, where drug production has been pushed out of Colombia and spread around to its neighbours in the continent’s south and east.  New market opportunities produced exploding profits seized by armed factions associated with traditional coca farming families, chief among them the Shining Path. 

Like the FARC in Colombia, elements of the Shining Path have switched gears from Marxist revolution to the trafficking of drugs in an attempt to maintain relevance and a measure of political power. According to InSight,

The new reach of the Shining Path has also allowed the rebels to diversify the routes they use to smuggle cocaine out of the Peruvian highlands on their way down to the Pacific Coast, where shipments are bought by the Mexican drug cartels and smuggled northwards through the Pacific...Shining Path rebels escort shipments across stretches of Peru, charging drug traffickers up to $30 a kilo. The rebel columns are not only marching through the mountainous terrain but have access to vehicles and are able to cover large distances quickly.

Recently elected president Ollanta Humala made the war on drugs a priority concern in his successful bid for the country’s highest office, but there’s reason enough to be sceptical of his ability to follow through successfully.  As government attention to the drug trade intensifies, and becomes increasingly violent, Shining Path traffickers have invested their booming proceeds in outfitting the movement’s foot soldiers with the latest in military technology. Again, Insight:

Another effect of the army offensives against the rebels has been to force them to better arm and equip themselves, using the proceeds from drug trafficking to buy weapons on the black market. Police intelligence sources are cited tracking more than 100 rifles (mostly AKMs, the upgrade of the basic AK-47 Kalashnikovs produced in the 1960s) and some rocket-propelled grenades used to target military helicopters, one of which was hit in 2009 in Santo Domingo de Acobamba (Huancayo province).

But the bigger threat may reside in Humala’s constituent base made up in part by the country’s powerful coca growers union, the leadership of which has demonstrated ties to the Shining Path. If Humala institutes aggressive policies that threaten coca production generally and leave behind piles of bodies, his political future will be cast in serious doubt. On the other hand, if the Shining Path is permitted to reconstitute itself in any guise—political movement or trafficking outfit—Humala will almost certainly guarantee himself a legacy of failure. Meanwhile, the country’s conservative forces, who have demonstrated no qualms about instituting human-rights abusing mano dura policies to squash threats to the state—will be primed to recapture the mantle of political leadership.