The Disconnect

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Paul Krugman makes a seemingly notable observation about the recent economic expansion (“Where’s My Trickle?,” [$ | free], The New York Times, 10 September 2007):

As far as I can tell, America has never before experienced a disconnect between overall economic performance and the fortunes of workers as complete as that of the last four years.

It is a strange fact that throughout the Twentieth Century the benefits of industrialization, productivity gain and comparative advantage have been so well spread among workers. It is also a strange fact that over perhaps the last thirty years this has so progressively ceased to be the case. One might think that some serious analytic attention could be brought to bear on this transformation, but instead it seems that more tightly squeezed shut eyes and more urgent repetition of past dogma has been the response.

Oddly enough it is the center that is most in denial here. On the far left there is Robert Brenner and others around the New Left Review and the world-systems people like Immanuel Wallerstein and on the far right (the paleoconservatives) it seems like Patrick Buchanan and the people around The American Conservative are genuinely concerned about theses issues as well. Where are the neoliberals who will squarely face the problem and propose neoliberal remedies?

And in his usual fashion, Mr. Krugman doesn’t shy from a boldly leftist position, at least of a sort:

Guaranteed health insurance, which all of the leading Democratic contenders (but none of the Republicans) are promising, would eliminate one of the reasons for this disconnect. But it should be only the start of a broader range of policies — a new New Deal — designed to turn economic growth into something more than a spectator sport.

That’s all fine and good but I hope that Mr. Krugman will devote a future column to an outline sketch of what such a policy would look like, because short of direct redistribution — with all the problems that entails — I really don’t know. But Mr. Krugman is an economist and remains at least half-beholden to the idea of economic efficiency. Perhaps some Robert Reich-like scheme of investment in labor plus grand bargain between trade liberalization and labor entailing significant deals of the same, not the pathetic job retraining micro-initiative included as a part of the NAFTA legislation. But what programs, specifically? There’s only so much job retraining the government can do.

Hard-Line in a Smart Way?

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In case you were in need of some sort of a litmus test on Thomas Barnett, here is what he says in response to Michael Ledeen’s new book on Iran (“An Interesting Book on Iran,” 8 September 2007):

Ledeen’s a hard-liner on Iran but in a smart way.

Yeah, kinda like Austria-Hungary was hard-line on Serbian separatists, but in a smart way.

And while we’re at it, hey, “some self-confidence, America, please!” I’m going to vote for less self-confidence and more circumspection.

Attack on Peoria

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One might be prone to get worried about the fact that after fifteen years of dormancy, Russia has resumed regular, long-range bomber patrols (Troianovski, Anton, “Russia Resumes Its Long-Range Air Patrols,” The Washington Post, 18 August 2007, p. A7). Soviet era prop-driven TU-95 “Bear” bombers have been intercepted by Norwegian and British fighters (“British Jets Intercept Eight Russian Bombers,” Reuters, 6 September 2007) and have buzzed Guam and other U.S. targets.

One might be so inclined — were the United States not buzzing itself with nuclear bombers. On 30 August 2007 a B-52 took off from Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota, and flew to Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, unknowingly carrying five (or maybe six, but what’s a nuclear warhead between friends) armed W80-1 nuclear warheads (5-150 kiloton yield) in under-wing mounted air-launch cruise missiles (Hoffman, Michael, “Commander Disciplined for Nuclear Mistake,” Military Times, 5 September 2007). The missiles were being transported to Barksdale along with 400 others to be decommissioned and should have been without any munition but were somehow — no one knows how yet — inadvertently loaded with the nuclear armed variant. The most disturbing part is that to accomplish this fuck-up a number of heretofore though foolproof safeguards had to be foiled. Presumably no malfeasance was at play — which would only go to show that stupidity is a significantly greater danger than ill will — but a huge investigation, rising all the way to Defense Secretary Gates, the President and Congress has ensued. And rightly so. Though the probability of a nuclear detonation even in the event of a crash was vanishingly small, this is the first time since 1968 that armed nuclear weapons have flown and there is some concern that international treaties may have been violated.

Here (Philips, Alan F., “20 Mishaps That Might Have Started Accidental Nuclear War,” NuclearFiles.org) is a list of nuclear accidents, including the 1968 Thule, Greenland crash that brought U.S. armed airborne alert flights to an end. It’s a fairly disquieting list that just grew to twenty-one.

Running on Empty

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How the hell does one possibly move yet another book on the Bush administration? I am thinking here of Robert Draper’s newly released Dead Certain (see the Washington Post write-up, Abramowitz, Michael, “Book Tells Of Dissent In Bush’s Inner Circle,” 3 September 2007, p. A1). What more is there possibly to reveal? That the administration is a dysfunctional cage match between a bunch of 800 pound gorillas, that the President is too immature and clueless to exercise any adult-like responsibility over the mess, that the interagency process has been completely trampled under their turf wars, that this or that decision was taken with almost no consideration, or in complete disregard for all of the consideration that had been shunted aside, that yet another swath of officials turns out to be half-wits placed for fealty to some right-wing mania, that yet another critical governmental function is being run into the ground, that the good of the nation has yet again taken a backseat to partisan gain? Sacrebleu! Say it ain’t so!

I suspect that as the archives are opened up and as the perspective of history comes to fruition, rather than the Bush Presidency being vindicated an entirely new level of tawdriness and tragedy will be revealed. But until that day comes, each new gloss on the subject seems to be subject to the diminishing returns of our depleted capacity for another round of outrage.

The metaphor here is so addled that it is hard to believe this is the guy who invented the internets, but as Al Gore said in a recent interview (Born, Kim, “Man on a Mission: Al Gore,” 02138 Magazine, September / October 2007, p. 84), he is feeling it too:

I have a lot of friends who share the following problem with me: Our sense of outrage is so saturated that when a new outrage occurs, we have to download some existing outrage into an external hard drive in order to make room for a new outrage.

On the one hand, it is incumbent upon the left to keep up a relentless focus on the dysfunction of this administration and its master ideology. This is what framing looks like and the moment that it flags, the right-wing revisionism will start in. But on the other hand, instead of another book or expose article, I just which they would hand out a rod to every American to bite-down on for the next year and a half.

Popcorn Workers’ Lung

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This is potentially very bad news for K.:

Harris, Gardiner, “Doctor Links a Man’ Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit,” The New York Times, 5 September 2007

A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a 53-year-old Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants.

Lung specialists and even a top industry official say the case, the first of its kind, raises serious concerns about the safety of microwave butter-flavored popcorn.

Apparently many brands of microwave popcorn use a chemical called diacetyl to create their buttery flavor and inhalation of diacetyl is strongly associated with an inflammatory lung disease called bronchiolitis obliterans or “popcorn workers’ lung” (I hear a neo-Dickensonian tale in there somewhere). This guy had consumed at least two bags of microwave popcorn a day for the last ten years and when doctors measured the levels of diacetyl in his house, they found them comparable to those in popcorn factories.

K.’s tastes are so bland that he may have saved himself by not bothering with the buttered brands, but on the offhand chance that you have, K., the FDA might want to get in touch with you.

A Root Extravaganza

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5 September 2007, crockpot root extravaganza

Something that has been on my list for the longest time is a crockpot. I have been fantasizing about being able to come home, chop up a bunch of vegetables, throw them in a pot, and put the pot in the refrigerator. Then, before leaving for work the next morning, put it on low, leave for ten or twelve hours and come home to hot, stewey goodness.

5 September 2007, crockpot Mediterranean stew with squash

Anyway, S. and I finally picked one up this weekend. Yesterday it was Mediterranean stew with yams, tonight it’s Mediterranean stew again, substitute squash for yams (pictured above). The best will be in a few days though. I’ve never eaten a turnip before and have been dieing to try one for months now, but been at a loss as to what to do with one (is it like a giant radish, or is it more like a potato?). Anyway, next up on the crockpot experiment schedule is root extravaganza: turnips, rutabagas, beets, parsnips, carrots, potatoes, leeks and onions. Throw ’em in a pot and cook em’ up, yum!

The model we bought even comes with a canvas tote bag so next time MoveOn hosts a meeting of the neighborhood activists or we volunteer at the retirement community we will be all ready to go. Now if only they would make a combo bag for both the crockpot and my yoga mat so that I could go strait from yoga class to whatever volunteer opportunity / activist get-together I had in store, it would be perfect.

Before I leave the subject of the crockpot, a word of defense regarding structure food versus smash food is in order. Structure food is all the stuff that you see on the cooking shows: a tremendous amount of energy is given over to fussing at how all the different little pieces and individual flavors are arranged and laid out in often elaborate designs on the plate. Then there’s smash food. Smash food is where everything is just jumbled together in one admixture of flavor. The quintessential smash foods are all lowbrow. Nachos, burritos, Italian food, breakfast foods are all perfect examples. For a greasy spoon breakfast you take your egg and hash browns and run them all together and use the toast like an extra utensil to fork it all down. Even eggs Florentine is smash food masquerading as structure food. I mean, come on, the poached egg yokes and the hollandaise sauce are calling out to be all stirred around and mopped up with the English muffin.

The Post-August Assault on the Media Budget

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August is the slow month in the publishing industry. Everyone goes away on vacation and isn’t thinking about reading, so to help the first week sales figures, publishers don’t release titles in August. Being forward-looking in my book buying, I can see that September and October are make-up months and are going to decimate my book buying budget.

In economics there is the already much talked about and guaranteed to make waves title by U.C. Davis Economics Department Chairman Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Oddly enough, Mr. Clark has chosen a completely general sounding title for what is, in fact, a highly polemical and specialist book. For a taste of the controversy, see the New York Times article on the book (Wade, Nicholas, “In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence,” 7 August 2007). Seemingly just in time for the next economic crisis is Robert Bruner and Sean Carr’s book, The Panic of 1907. In the immense shadow of the Great Depression no one thinks about all the lesser economic crises that preceded it, but as Bruner and Carr argue, the crisis of 1907 was really a watershed. It would, among other things, play a part in bringing about the Federal Reserve six years later in 1913. Robert Reich, one of my favorite writers, has his latest offering, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life out. The cleaver cover is a dollar sign with a forked tongue. His thesis is previewed in the current issue of Foreign Policy (“How Capitalism Is Killing Democracy,” September / October 2007, pp. 38-42). The barn burner this month will undoubtedly be Alan Greenspan’s The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (due out 17 September 2007). As I previously observed (“Alan Greenspan’s Memoir,” smarties, 6 July 2007), while the title may be accurate, it is, to me, still a little off.

In history I seem to have developed a fixation on the Soviet Union and the Cold War. First is the most recent after some time without, a book on the origin of it all, Evan Mawdsley’s The Russian Civil War. Jumping ahead to the crucible of the century is a book, the title of which does not do justice to the controversial rampage beneath its covers, Norman Davies’s No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945. To get a flavor for his book, one may consult Benjamin Schwarz’s paragraphs devoted to in his review, “Stalin’s Gift” (The Atlantic Monthly, May 2007). Mr. Davis is an iconoclast come to raise the American mythos, a la Stephen Ambrose, of the Second World War as the good war, to show in fact that it was really a war in which one totalitarian dictator, Joseph Stalin, crushed another, Adolph Hitler, under the sheer weight of men and machines. On the Eastern Front 400 Soviet and German divisions squared off along a thousand mile frontier. There Germany would sustain 80 percent of its war casualties. By comparison, the Western Front, were 15 U.S. and U.K. divisions faced 15 German divisions, was little more than a harassing operation. The battle of Kursk remains the largest armor battle in history and saw the most deadly single day of aerial combat. Mr. Davis sets himself to exploding such myths of the Second World War. Less polemical, Benjamin Schwarz recommended the more scrupulously historical Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 by Evan Mawdsley. But he warned that in the deluge of books on the Eastern Front, even the latest research has “already been overtaken by new sources.” One such book will, I presume, be Chris Bellamy’s Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War.

Moving on in history, one of the most prominent Cold War historians, Melvyn Leffler has a new title coming out, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. It’s another that keeps up the theme of titles not really adequately descriptive of the content. It sounds as if Mr. Leffler’s book might be about the ideological struggle between the West and Communism or about the contending views of human nature, but it is instead a book about five occasions when either side contemplated winding down the Cold War. Though he was killed in an automobile accident in April, what David Halberstam considered to be his finest book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War will be published posthumously on 25 September 2007. Most significantly for me is volume three of what Richard Rhodes is now calling his Making of the Nuclear Age trilogy, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, about what is perhaps my favorite single subject.

But this monomania is all inadvertent and I remain on the lookout for broader histories. Also on the list are the longer histories of Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations by Martin Goodman and The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live in by Hugh Kennedy. Mr. Goodman has edited both The Journal of Roman Studies and The Journal of Jewish Studies and has been a professor of both Roman and Jewish studies at Oxford so I presume that he is uniquely positioned to do justice to the difficult subject of the clash of Rome and Jerusalem.

In philosophy and intellectual history is Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age which will hopefully be the first title for the book group on this blog and E.M. Cioran’s Notebooks, translated by Richard Howard who has done so much for Cioran’s English language readers. It’s been given a new release date of 3 October 2007 which will hopefully be met as publication has been delayed since, I think, 2005.

Finally, in the snark department, I am eagerly awaiting Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!).

Taken together that’s 7500 pages and $475 (sans tax) of book. Fortunately I only ever really peck at a book so at least the pages shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but the money remains another issue. I just have to shrug my shoulders and confess to a hopeless case of bibliophilia. At least it’s pulp and not poppies.

The Bibliographic Legacy of the Cold War

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Walking around a used book store in Washington, D.C. I am reminded of another as yet unresolved dilemma left over form the Cold War: what to do with all the really narrowly focused specialty books on the Soviet Union for which all the retired Kremlinologists no longer have any use. You go to the Russia section in the store and it is like the PC book section: full of titles so arcane to the average used book store buying agent that they have no idea that they are the dupe to someone’s need to offload a bunch of obsolete books. Instead of, say, a few general histories of Russia in the Nineteenth Century or some modern books on Putin’s Russia, what you have are dozens of heavily thumbed tombs dating from the Sixties and Seventies on topics such as the persistence of the third five year plan in Soviet economic planning or the roll of the Politburo in ideology formation, 1954-1960. Just like many used book stores don’t buy PC books, D.C. used book stores should adopt a policy of no books on the Soviet Union by former CIA Directorate of Analysis employees.

Ten More Years in Iraq

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As the September date for the report on the effects of the surge in Iraq approaches, the right has been ginning up the rhetoric over what happens if the United States withdraws from the country. But almost no symmetrical consideration is given to the scenario of what happens if the United States stays. “The surge is working; we need to give it more time,” or “The United States is making progress in Iraq; our soldiers need to be given the opportunity to finish their mission there,” or some such thing is what one hears. But that’s more or less the extent of the scenario for staying. So we stay. But what then? The way the dialog around the issue is happening it’s as if deciding to continue in Iraq means the surge will get another four or five months and then … and then … and then thoughts trail off.

But war opponents should point out that the calculation isn’t withdraw, genocidal civil war ensues versus stay, no further conclusion. Some people are thinking about what staying in Iraq means and it’s not what anyone signed up for back in 2003.

For instance, the Washington Post reports on the findings that Representative Jan Schakowsky (Democrat-Illinois) brought back from her recent visit to Iraq (“ After Iraq Trip, Unshaken Resolve,” The Washington Post, 26 August 2007):

Rep. Jan Schakowsky made her first trip to Iraq this month, the outspoken antiwar liberal resolved to keep her opinions to herself. “I would listen and learn,” she decided.

At times that proved a challenge, as when Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told her congressional delegation, “There’s not going to be political reconciliation by this September; there’s not going to be political reconciliation by next September.” Schakowsky gulped — wasn’t that the whole idea of President Bush’s troop increase, to buy time for that political progress?

…

But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus’s words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. “‘We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,’ ” Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: “Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time.”

“I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy — just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place,” Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, “acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that’s what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we’d have to be there nine or 10 years.”

And Ted Koppel relates a private conversation in which Senator Clinton relates some of her thoughts about staying on in Iraq (“A Duty to Mislead: Politics and the Iraq War,” National Public Radio, 11 June 2007):

I ran into an old source the other day who held a senior position at the Pentagon until his retirement. He occasionally briefs Senator Clinton on the situation in the Gulf. She told him that if she were elected president and then re-elected four years later she would still expect U.S. troops to be in Iraq at the end of her second term.

Ten years. Is anyone prepared for another ten years in Iraq?

If the United states were to stay in Iraq for the next ten years, that would make it by far the longest war in U.S. history, nearly twice as long as the Vietnam war (168 versus 90 months). Say we simply project forward the current casualty rate. There are all sorts of problems with this, but also some reasons that this is probably a pretty good basis for such a calculation. Today the confirmed total U.S. killed is 3,724. So if the United States stays in Iraq for the next ten years the total by then will be 13,000 Americans killed. The cost of the war to date has been $450 billion. A simple linear projection puts the cost at the end of the next ten years at $1.5 trillion, which would be not bad considering some have been projecting $2 trillion.

Those are the costs to the United States of staying. Iraq Body Count puts total Iraqi deaths since the onset of the war at 70 to 77 thousand. In another ten years that would amount to between 245 and 270 thousand Iraqis killed. But Iraq Body Count only tallies directly reported deaths in the English language media and requires two independent sources before counting a death, so this is a very conservative number.

A quarter of a million Iraqis may be killed even if the United States stays in Iraq. War supporters talk of a bloodbath that will ensue if the U.S. withdraws. Do they think that it will be worse than a quarter of a million? And if they do think that it will be a worse number, can they really argue that by reducing the death toll from their hypothetical number to a hypothetical quarter-million, the U.S. will have prevented a tragedy?

But who knows what could happen. The insurgency might radically accelerate. The U.S. could be drawn into a war with Iran; that could spread to Afghanistan. Pakistan might be destabilized by all this. The Saudis could intervene in Iraq. Turkey could go to war with a Kurdistan hiding under the skirt of the United States. Or things might improve. Judgment about the future is difficult. But the debate should cease to be between the options of withdrawing and terrible consequences versus staying and don’t think any further about it.

Update: Kevin Drum (“Nine or Ten Years,” Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, 26 August 2007) has been reading Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack ‘s Iraq visit report (“Iraq Trip Report,” Brookings, August 2007) and Messrs. O’Hanlon and Pollack’s prediction for the surge is,

Over the long term, the United States must be looking to draw down its force levels in Iraq overall — probably to 100,000 or fewer troops — by about 2010/2011.

That’s two and a half more years at current force levels. Then we can go back to what was, prior to the surge, merely a heightened troop presence for an indeterminate period of time. Mr. Drum points out, “that suggests he doesn’t think total withdrawal will happen until, say, 2016/17 or so. In other words, nine or ten years.” Mr. Drum also points out that historically prolonged counterinsurgency wars have had negative consequences for nations prosecuting them.

2008: Even the Worst Case Scenario is Rosy!

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Clinton vs. Giuliani, Hillary Clinton wins 335 to 203

I’m going to post an electoral map and some bean counting because I know this is one of Kyle’s favorite subjects and I am hoping to tempt him out of his quietude with a delicious helping of red and blue.

Chris Bowers at Open Left has crawled the recent polling data and — all appropriate qualifiers about people not tuned in yet and a lot can happen between now and then — compiled the current outcome of what he thinks is a strong Republican-weak Democrat match-up. In Clinton vs. Giuliani, Hillary Clinton wins 335 to 203. In Clinton vs. Romney it is a Hillary Clinton electoral landslide at 430 to 108.

As Mr. Bowers puts it (“Two General Election Maps,” 23 August 2007),

… it is important to keep in mind that Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are the two frontrunners for the Republican nomination right now, and that Hillary Clinton is supposedly the least electable Democrat of the four early state candidates in double digits. To put it another way, this is supposedly the worst-case scenario for Democrats right now. On top of this, what do you think will happen to either Giuliani or Romney’s numbers when, for nine consecutive months next year (February 6th through Election Day), they are on every media possible, every day, arguing that we don’t need to withdraw any troops from Iraq?

Call me permanently bearish on the Democrats, but it is not only the Republicans who are going to have to endure nine consecutive months of media coverage. What’s going to happen over those nine months is that, nomination in hand, the Republican will tack back towards the center and dissemble and equivocate on the Iraq issue while the Democratic candidate offers elaborate justifications of policy positions, long-winded explanations on the difficulty of carrying out a withdrawal, et cetera until the average voter cannot tell the difference between the two policy positions. Meanwhile, as the above depicted outcome becomes more clearly fixed in the mind of the right-wing machine, they will be driven to ever greater acts of desperation. For instance just yesterday we were reminded that Democrats were at fault for the Cambodian genocide.