American Empire Begins

Here's my review of THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF U.S. CULTURE by Amy Kaplan, which I wrote in May, 2003 on Amazon. The book is particularly resonant nowadays given the current administrations' unilaterialst foreign policy, so reminiscent of America in the late nineteenth as it rushed to take over Spanish colonial possessions to promote the interests of American business.

Installing the Circuits of Empire, May 3, 2003
In THE ANARCHY OF EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF US CULTURE Ms. Kaplan has put together a number of illuminating readings of selected American texts as a way to explore the beginnings of empire, its expression in the U.S. in the mid to late 19th century. Her sources range from women's magazine's such as Harper's, works by Twain and W.E.B. du Bois, through "Birth of a Nation" to Welle's "Citizen Kane." She shows how the boundaries of empire were drawn, and how no one was were untouched by its discourse whether they recognized its contours or not.

She begins with a discussion of Mark Twain's first real assignment as a newspaperman: writing "letters" from Hawaii that were published in a San Francisco newspaper intended to promote the island to mainland businessmen and settlers. These letters and his observations later formed the basis of his first lectures and thus served as the springboard to his later career as a novelist. Twain, she notes, in his personal letters to friends and family is drawn to and repelled by the exotic, anxious to witness the rites of the dying Hawaiian people before they pass from history, and at the same time scandalized by their cultural practices, such as their lascivious dancing. Known generally now as an anti-colonialist because of an article he wrote during the Spanish American War(s), she demonstrates how he, knowingly, and with no little anxiety, early on recognized he was implicated in the colonial project.

On the sea voyage to Hawaii, for instance, he comes down with a bad cold, and mordantly writes to a friend that the illness he bears may kill off a few more thousand more Hawaiians. Kaplan maintains that Twain's exposure to empire in the color line in Hawaii and the exploitation of that people, (a quite different experience from how he experienced the color line in Missouri), laid the foundation for his later perspective and production of "Huckleberry Finn" some twenty years later.

Other key readings include the first full-length films produced during the "Spanish-American War Mania" when documentary footage of U.S. soldiers was mixed with some staged battles and scripted domestic scenes drew huge audiences to the movies. She suggests that the public happily participated in the jingoistic pursuit of empire through these films, and that these productions laid the groundwork for not just the war movie genre, but the full-length film.

Prior to these movies, shorts were the order of the day. She notes these films influenced the structure and visual imagery of "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915, which, if you haven't seen it recently, presents African Americans as the lords of misrule in the American South. Encapsulated in all these cultural productions are the portrayals of non-white men as stupid, power-crazed savages who in their grab at power, attempt to deflower the flower of the white womanhood, while non-white women are seen as exotic and erotically destabilizing. The Birth of a Nation casts the Klan as heroic figures who must preserve civilization through lynching, terror and mayhem. The Rough Riders were seen as masculine white heroes who swept away the decadent vestiges of a cruel empire, freeing Filipinos and Cubans who as non-whites and subjugated peoples could not understand or appreciate the boon of freedom that had been conferred upon them.

Orson Welle's "Citizen Kane," the fictionalized life of Henry Luce, is also examined as critique of the circuits of imperial power. She notes that it is one of the few films that even touches on the Spanish American War as a subject, but that this war was central to Luce's creation of his own media empire. Making the point that the yellow press grew to prominence during this era, repeating the story that Hearst started the war in Cuba to sell newspapers, she shows how the media supported the drive toward empire, and in their cultural productions assigned roles to citizens.

Her larger point is that empire is not a one way street, but rather is complex circuit through which the dreams of the imperial power are modified and altered through contact with the Other. Through her examination of W.E. DuBois, she summarizes his view that WWI was not centered in a dispute between European powers but that it grew out of Africa. By decentering the standard narrative, he rewrites the conflict as the history as growing out of the contact of Europe with Africa. This chapter nicely resonates with her introduction She relates through a Supreme Court decision how Puerto Rico was both a possession, and not a possession, holding it through law at arm's length -- a place in which it still resides, in a limbo as both dependent and quasi-independent. A similar judgment was made during the 1830s by the Supreme Court when they ruled that the Cherokee was not a nation in the strict sense, but a dependent population so that they could be uprooted and sent forth on the Trail of Tears. (See the book "1831" Year of Eclipse" by Louis Masur for the history behind that similarly ambiguous decision.

This is a thoughtful book to which full justice cannot be given in a short review. Her location of the Spanish American War as a key node in America's consolidation of its colonial aspirations is important and convincingly done. As a chapter in history, the Spanish American War(s) has always been dismissed as a minor episode, portrayed as the U.S. trying on the role of the colonizer during the colonial era's last gasp, an activity for which as a democracy it was ill suited. What Kaplan shows is that it was a rehearsal for a different kind of imperialism, the stimulation of the American middle-class through narratives of power as presented through the media, and the later colonization of the world through the globalization construct put forth under the rubric of democracy and free trade.

Follow the Shoes. Version 2.1

Back in the 70s I jogged for about half a summer. I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina because there were no jobs in upstate New York. Not for young men who were going to college at any rate. Scarce and soon to be much scarcer, jobs at the local lumber and paper mills were reserved for the sons and daughters of senior mill workers.

Within a few years though, those jobs would be sent to the Pacific Northwest, and then Canada, then overseas, leaving in their wake unpaid mortgages, unrepaired snowmobiles, abandoned trailers and shotgun shacks, their abject yards clotted with broken washers and refrigerators. But the job diaspora hadn’t come to that yet, although the seams were beginning to show.

Through my brother I got a job as an electrician’s helper. Paid minimum wage, barely able to afford one meal a day, I spent every evening in the air conditioning of the college library to get out of the stifling swampy North Carolina air.

At closing time, I’d trudge slowly back to the small second floor attic room I shared with my brother and two other struggling beneficiaries of the State of North Carolina’s right-to-work policy. The tiny air conditioner we shared could only about half wring the water from the sludgy, musty attic air. It could not actually cool off the room, but it did at least dry the sweat off of our skin.

Waking up in this musty airless den, I’d pull on my Converse sneakers and jog out to the college track and do laps for about half an hour. It was relatively pleasant in the early morning, about eighty degrees, dewy, which somehow held the mugginess in check.

Eventually, I got the point where I thought I deserved some real running shoes, and so putting aside money for a couple of weeks toward their purchase, I went to the local mall on a Friday night and bought a pair of no-name brand running shoes, bright blue with three yellow diagonal stripes on either side. I could not afford Nike’s or Adida's, which cost about twice as much as the knock-offs I bought.

The next morning, elated with my purchase, I ran an extra fifteen or so minutes to break them in, enjoying the sense of mastery my new shoes promised and seemed to deliver. Spongy, springy, they were clearly a departure from the thin-soled basketball shoes we had all grown up with.

But it was me that was broken in, not the shoes. The next morning I could barely walk. I couldn’t climb the ladder at work and could barely climb stairs. Back at home later that summer I described my symptoms to a friend who had become an expert jogger who told me I had given myself shin splints. I never wore those shoes again, but nevertheless kept them for years as literal object lesson of Thoreau’s teaching.

My boss, deservedly nicknamed Lard, couldn’t understand why anyone would run anywhere at anytime, much less run and injure one’s legs to the extent that they could barely work and cost him money. Although he was irritated to have less than half a worker for the week or so it took me to recover, he got a lot of mileage telling other bosses on the worksite about the northern college boy who hurt his legs “jogging.”

Jogging was new concept back then and Lard was able to put an extraordinary spin on it, a spin that spoke volumes about idiocy of Yankee college boys, and Yankees in general. To run in the heat, even of an early summer morning, was to him and his cohorts just plain crazy. Sauntering with grave rotundity, drinking Co’ Cola for breakfast, that was the sane and accepted practice.

In hindsight I can see that mid 70s was when the Counterrevolution of the Bosses was just beginning to kick in. Not the bosses like Lard, of course, but the big bosses. The thousand or so guys who tell Wall Street what to do. You know, the plutocracy whom if you mention people call you crazy. Because in America the plutocracy has managed to convince people they don't exist. Good ol' boys like George W. and his Daddy ain't no plutocracy. They's good folks, and don't you forget it, you damn liberals.

The post war consensus of business, labor and government was just starting to crack apart in the mid 70s. Northern jobs were being exported to the South and East, US banks were recycling petrodollars and colonizing the third world with indebtedness, and Paul Volcker, friend of Wall Street, was squeezing the money supply until he was able to establish the rentier economy so devoutly wished by the captains of the economy, and their neo-liberal apologists at the University of Chicago.

The Counterrevolution is now so complete that the wealthiest families in America have managed to get back most of the money and power they ceded during the short-lived liberal era that lasted roughly from Roosevelt through Nixon. They have managed to assert their will in every sector of the economy, demanding from workers longer hours on smaller paychecks, from the government more tax breaks and fewer regulations, from Wall Street greater returns on their investments. Further, they now support an apologist class so large and so vociferous that to propose an alternative to the plutocracy is to be attacked as mad, or even worse, a liberal.

I started thinking about this because I recently bought pair of retro 70s walking shoes made by Born. The shoes look similar to those bad jogging shoes, but are more upmarket. And also, the circumstances under which I bought them are entirely different than the 70s. These new shoes are made in China from a corporation -- Born -- whose headquarters is possibly in Europe, but like Haagen Dazs could be in located in New Jersey; I bought them from a national shoe discount store at a mega shopping center in Brooklyn that is soon to be a mega-mega shopping center: Mega-ization, globalization and anti-unionization were just barely on the horizon when I bought those first bad jogging shoes.

Back in the Watergate 70s, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.

Me -- I’m following the shoes.

Plutocracy, Bush, The 70s, Paul Volcker, Stagflation ,Wall Street

Things Are Going So Well in Iraq That...

Japan May Delay Iraq Withdrawl
By Associated Press
March 11, 2006, 5:57 AM EST

TOKYO -- Japan may extend its humanitarian mission in Iraq beyond a reported May deadline because of the deteriorating security and political crisis there, a news report said Saturday.
...

The U.S. government has repeatedly asked Britain and Japan not to withdraw troops for the time being amid intensifying sectarian violence and political confusion in Iraq, the newspaper said.

Paul Krugman on Spurned Suitors: "The Conservative Epiphany"

Here's Krugman's column from the NY Times today where he says "Nyah, nyah, I told you so" to conservatives like Barlett and Sullivan who have come around to his -- and most of the American public's -- point of view on the Bush gang.

In my opinion, conservatives like Bartlett and Sullivan were in the early years of the Bush regime trying hard to win the love of King Bush with the fawning (and now mortifying) praise common to such court supplicants. That's why their love was so willfully blind, their epiphany so belated -- they were hoping to get a piece of the action.

George W. and his gang, Bartlett and Sullivan and others like them now realize, are not conservatives, but rather reactionary statists.

Finally, I'm wondering if Krugman is reading my blog. See my blog entry from March 3rd where I talk about Krugman's previous column and an ephiphany of the Will. Probably just a coincidence, but weird.
Here's his column from today:

THE CONSERVATIVE EPIPHANY
By Paul Krugman
Bruce Bartlett, the author of "Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy," is an angry man. At a recent book forum at the Cato Institute, he declared that the Bush administration is "unconscionable," "irresponsible," "vindictive" and "inept."

It's no wonder, then, that one commentator wrote of Mr. Bartlett that "if he were a cartoon character, he would probably look like Donald Duck during one of his famous tirades, with steam pouring out of his ears."

Oh, wait. That's not what somebody wrote about Mr. Bartlett. It's what Mr. Bartlett wrote about me in September 2003, when I was saying pretty much what he's saying now.

Human nature being what it is, I don't expect Mr. Bartlett to acknowledge his about-face. Nor do I expect any expressions of remorse from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative Time.com blogger who also spoke at the Cato forum. Mr. Sullivan used to specialize in denouncing the patriotism and character of anyone who dared to criticize President Bush, whom he lionized. Now he himself has become a critic, not just of Mr. Bush's policies, but of his personal qualities, too.

Never mind; better late than never. We should welcome the recent epiphanies by conservative commentators who have finally realized that the Bush administration isn't trustworthy. But we should guard against a conventional wisdom that seems to be taking hold in some quarters, which says there's something praiseworthy about having initially been taken in by Mr. Bush's deceptions, even though the administration's mendacity was obvious from the beginning.

According to this view, if you're a former Bush supporter who now says, as Mr. Bartlett did at the Cato event, that "the administration lies about budget numbers," you're a brave truth-teller. But if you've been saying that since the early days of the Bush administration, you were unpleasantly shrill.

Similarly, if you're a former worshipful admirer of George W. Bush who now says, as Mr. Sullivan did at Cato, that "the people in this administration have no principles," you're taking a courageous stand. If you said the same thing back when Mr. Bush had an 80 percent approval rating, you were blinded by Bush-hatred.

And if you're a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you're to be applauded for your open-mindedness. But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

The truth is that everything the new wave of Bush critics has to say was obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts.

Mr. Bartlett's book is mainly a critique of the Bush administration's fiscal policy. Well, the administration's pattern of fiscal dishonesty and irresponsibility was clear right from the start to anyone who understands budget arithmetic. The chicanery that took place during the selling of the 2001 tax cut — obviously fraudulent budget projections, transparently deceptive advertising about who would benefit and the use of blatant accounting gimmicks to conceal the plan's true cost — was as bad as anything that followed.

The false selling of the Iraq war was almost as easy to spot. All the supposed evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was discredited before the war — and it was the threat of nukes, not lesser W.M.D., that stampeded Congress into authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. The administration's nonsensical but insistent rhetorical linkage of Iraq and 9/11 was also a dead giveaway that we were being railroaded into an unnecessary war.

The point is that pundits who failed to notice the administration's mendacity a long time ago either weren't doing their homework, or deliberately turned a blind eye to the evidence.

But as I said, better late than never. Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.

It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious question: What took you so long?

Technoratic Tags: Paul Krugman, Conservative Epiphany, Bush

Maureen Dowd on Deception: "Nipping and Tucking on Both Coasts"

Here's Maureen Dowd's column from today's NY Times with some links, as appropriate, to some of my musings on the productions of the Bush PR Theater Company.

NIPPING AND TUCKING ON BOTH COASTS
By Maureen Dowd
There is a crash of ideologies between the country's two most self-regarding and fantasy-spinning power centers. The Bush crowd cringes away from gay cowboys spooning, gay authors flouncing, transgender babes exploring and George the Dashing Clooneying in movies about the glories of free speech and the dangers of oilmen influencing policy.

But as I looked around Vanity Fair's slinky Oscar party on Sunday night, it struck me that the bellicose Bushies do share a presentation aesthetic with Tinseltown's trompe l'oeil beauties: you see no furrowed brows, no regretful winces, no unflattering wrinkles, no admissions of imperfection, no qualms about puffing up what you really have, no visible signs of hard lessons learned, and no desire to confront reality in the mirror.

Who ever thought Dick Cheney and Mamie Van Doren would have so much in common?

The White House is constantly trying to do laser resurfacing on its Iraq policy, to sandblast away the damage from its own mistakes. But its veneer may be beyond repair.

In Hollywood terms, we've reached an Indiana Jones crisis moment in our parlous protectorate. The cave is collapsing, the snakes are encroaching, the vehicles are exploding, the crushing ball is rolling down on us. The public has stopped buying the administration's sugary spin. The Washington Post reported yesterday that 80 percent of Americans — cutting across party lines — say sectarian violence makes civil war in Iraq likely. More than a third call it "very likely." Half also think the U.S. should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, the poll found, and two-thirds say the president has no clear plan for Iraq.

The widespread resistance to the Dubai ports deal, even among newly fractious Republicans, indicates that Americans have lost faith in the president's competence — a faith shredded by the White House's obtuseness and lies on Katrina.

As Hollywood often does, the administration scorns introspection and originality. It sticks with the same worn themes: Stay the course. Victory's around the corner. Anyone who expresses skepticism is a defeatist, a softie on terrorism.

On "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Iraq was "going very, very well, from everything you look at." And at a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Rummy, who should have resigned in shame long ago, tried to blame the press, echoing Gen. George Casey in saying: "Much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation."

He added, "The steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists."

After all the horrible mistakes in judgment the defense secretary has made — mistakes that have left our troops without proper backup and armor, created an inept and corrupt occupation, and confused soldiers into thinking torture was O.K. — it takes humongous gall to suggest that the problem is really the reporters.

Many experts say we're close to a civil war — or already in one. Even the U.S. envoy, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, told The Los Angeles Times on Monday that the invasion of Iraq had opened a "Pandora's box" of tribal and religious fissures that could devour the region. His words evoked a harrowing image of the bad spirits swarming up the mountain in Disney's "Fantasia" as Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" played.

He said that if there's another incident like the Shiite shrine's being blown up, Iraq is "really vulnerable."

The Pentagon says it'll look once more at the death by friendly fire of the football player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan, because the first three inquiries had problems — one more sad illustration of the administration's cynical attempt not to let anything get in the way of its heroic, and dermatologically plumped up, story line for America.

Technoratic Tags: Maureen Dowd, Bush

Bush: "Treaties Are From Liberals, Convenants Are From God"

Once again the New York Times (below) accuses the Bush administration of incompetence in an editorial today.

This is like accusing a fish of not being able to walk.

The Bush administration is not about competence. It is about the assertion of power in ways that benefit itself and its friends in miltary-industrial-energy-infotainment complex. It is about getting enough votes from their disparate factions so that that can stay in power and loot the Treasury.

Treaties like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or the Geneva Convention were made to be broken among this crowd. And when it comes to supporting allies like Pakistan who have taken great risks by proclaiming themselves US allies, this administration only supports them for PR purposes and only until they can be quietly moved to the backburner.

Like Krugman yesterday, the Times' editors think this gang can be brought low by pointing out their incompetence. And perhaps it's true that over time the drip, drip, drip out of their venality and maladroitness may undermine the adinistration.

But it isn't competence that their followers are looking for. Their followers are looking for the the stimulation of their resentments, the vindication of their beliefs and ideas.

Right on time for the mid-term elections, their followers on the cultural side are being whipped to a high froth as they anticipate the consternation the new anti-abortion law in South Dakota will cause the evil liberals.

For the fiscal conservatives, the administration is endorsing the line-item veto so Bush and the Executive can cut "government waste." Never mind that they have spent the US into a massive deficit and that Bush has never vetoed anything from the Republican Congress. It's appearances and rhetoric and "ideas" that count among ideologues.

In a few months the national media will be reporting on the latest cynically deployed manisfestation of the usual Republican wedge issues, and the only incompetence we'll hear about will be liberal incompetence: e.g., Liberals who can't run wars, who can't run governments without spending the public's hard-earned money on quixotic schemes to promote racial equality, Liberals can't say no to people who don't deserve help, who can't keep their pants zipped up, who kill babies, etc.

I will, however, predict it's going to be really, really ugly this time around for the very reason that the Republicans are losing some moderate and independent voters who are troubled by their incompetence.

But when push comes to shove the Republicans, led by Rove, are going to go to the mats and use their biggest anti-Liberal guns to scare these undecideds back into the enfolding, paternalistic arms of the Family.

The New York Times, March 7, 2006
MR. BUSH'S ASIAN ROAD TRIP
There is a lot of good a president can do on a visit to another country: negotiate treaties that enhance American security, shore up a shaky alliance, generate good will in important parts of the world. Unfortunately, President Bush didn't do any of those good things on his just-completed visit to Pakistan and India and may have done some real harm.

The spectacularly misconceived trip may have inflicted serious damage to American goals in two vital areas, namely, mobilizing international diplomacy against the spread of nuclear weapons and encouraging Pakistan to take more effective action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters operating from its territory.

The nuclear deal that Mr. Bush concluded with India threatens to blast a bomb-size loophole through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. It would have been bad enough on its own, and disastrously ill timed, because it undercuts some of the most powerful arguments Washington can make to try to galvanize international opposition to Iran's nuclear adventurism.

But the most immediate damage was done on Mr. Bush's next stop, Pakistan. Washington is trying to persuade Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani military dictator, to defy nationalist and Islamic objections and move more aggressively against Pakistani-based terrorists. This is no small issue because both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, are now believed to operate from Pakistani soil.

But sticking Mr. Musharraf with the unwelcome task of explaining to Pakistanis why his friend and ally, Mr. Bush, had granted favorable nuclear terms to Pakistan's archrival, India, while withholding them from Pakistan left him less likely to do Washington any special, and politically unpopular, favors on the terrorism front.

It's just baffling why Mr. Bush traveled halfway around the world to stand right next to one of his most important allies against terrorists — and embarrass him. India and Pakistan are military rivals that have fought each other repeatedly. They have both developed nuclear weapons outside the nonproliferation treaty, which both refuse to sign. When India exploded its first acknowledged nuclear weapons eight years ago, Pakistan felt obliged to follow suit within weeks.

So when Mr. Bush agreed to carve out an exception to global nonproliferation rules for India, it should have been obvious that Pakistani opinion would demand the same privileged treatment, and that Mr. Musharraf would be embarrassed by Mr. Bush's explicit refusal to provide it.

Mr. Bush was right to say no to Pakistan. It would be an unthinkably bad idea to grant a loophole to a country whose top nuclear scientist helped transfer nuclear technology to leading rogue states. Granting India a loophole that damages a vital treaty and lets New Delhi accelerate production of nuclear bombs makes no sense either.

Mr. Bush should have just stayed home.

Technorati Tags: India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bush, Bush's Road Trip, Wedge Issues, South Dakota Abortion Law ,Line-item veto

Follow the Shoes. Version 2.0

Back in the 70s I jogged for about half a summer. I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina, driven there by the promise of a summer job. There were no jobs in upstate New York at the time. Not for young men who were going to college at any rate. Scarce and soon to be much scarcer, jobs at the local lumber and paper mills were reserved for the sons and daughters of senior mill workers.

Within a few years though, those jobs would be sent to the Pacific Northwest, and then Canada, then overseas, leaving in their wake unpaid mortgages, unrepaired snowmobiles, abandoned trailers and shotgun shacks, their abject yards clotted with broken washers and refrigerators. But the job diaspora hadn’t come to that yet, although the seams were beginning to show.

Through my brother I got a job as an electrician’s helper. Paid minimum wage, barely able to afford one meal a day, I spent every evening in the air conditioning of the college library to get out of the stifling swampy North Carolina air.

At closing time, I’d trudge slowly back to the small second floor attic room I shared with my brother and two other struggling beneficiaries of the State of North Carolina’s right-to-work policy. The tiny air conditioner we shared could only about half wring the water from the sludgy, musty attic air. It could not actually cool off the room, but it did at least dry the sweat off of our skin.

Waking up in this musty airless den, I’d pull on my Converse sneakers and jog out to the college track and do laps for about half an hour. It was relatively pleasant in the early morning, about eighty degrees, dewy, which somehow held the mugginess in check.

Eventually, I got the point where I thought I deserved some real running shoes, and so putting aside money for a couple of weeks toward their purchase, I went to the local mall on a Friday night and bought a pair of no-name brand running shoes, bright blue with three yellow diagonal stripes on either side. I could not afford Nike’s or Adida's, which cost about twice as much as the knock-offs I bought.

The next morning, elated with my purchase, I ran an extra fifteen or so minutes to break them in, enjoying the sense of mastery my new shoes promised and seemed to deliver. Spongy, springy, they were clearly a departure from the thin-soled basketball shoes we had all grown up with.

But it was me that was broken in, not the shoes. The next morning I could barely walk. I couldn’t climb the ladder at work and could barely climb stairs. Back at home later that summer I described my symptoms to a friend who had become an expert jogger who told me I had given myself shin splints. I never wore those shoes again, but nevertheless kept them for years as literal object lesson of Thoreau’s teaching.

My boss, deservedly nicknamed Lard, couldn’t understand why anyone would run anywhere at anytime, much less run and injure one’s legs to the extent that they could barely work and cost him money. Although he was irritated to have less than half a worker for the week or so it took me to recover, he got a lot of mileage telling other bosses on the worksite about the northern college boy who hurt his legs “jogging.”

Jogging was new concept back then and Lard was able to put an extraordinary spin on it, a spin that spoke volumes about idiocy of Yankee college boys, and Yankees in general. To run in the heat, even of an early summer morning, was to him and his cohorts just plain crazy. Sauntering with grave rotundity, drinking Co’ Cola for breakfast, that was the sane and accepted practice.

In hindsight I can see that mid 70s was when the Counterrevolution of the Bosses was just beginning to kick in. Not the bosses like Lard, of course, but the big bosses. The thousand or so guys who tell Wall Street what to do. You know, the plutocracy whom if you mention people call you crazy. Because in America the plutocracy has managed to convince people they don't exist. Good ol' boys like George W. and his Daddy ain't no plutocracy. They's good folks, and don't you forget it, you damn liberals.

The post war consensus of business, labor and government was just starting to crack apart in the mid 70s. Northern jobs were being exported to the South and East, US banks were recycling petrodollars and colonizing the third world with indebtedness, and Paul Volcker, friend of Wall Street, was squeezing the money supply until he was able to establish the rentier economy so devoutly wished by the captains of the economy, and their neo-liberal apologists at the University of Chicago.

The Counterrevolution is now so complete that the wealthiest families in America have managed to get back most of the money and power they ceded during the short-lived liberal era that lasted roughly from Roosevelt through Nixon. They have managed to assert their will in every sector of the economy, demanding from workers longer hours on smaller paychecks, from the government more tax breaks and fewer regulations, from Wall Street greater returns on their investments. Further, they now support an apologist class so large and so vociferous that to propose an alternative to the plutocracy is to be attacked as mad, or even worse, a liberal.

I started thinking about this because I recently bought pair of retro 70s walking shoes made by Born. The shoes look similar to those bad jogging shoes, but are more upmarket. And also, the circumstances under which I bought them are entirely different than the 70s. These new shoes are made in China from a corporation -- Born -- whose headquarters is possibly in Europe, but like Haagen Dazs could be in located in New Jersey; I bought them from a national shoe discount store at a mega shopping center in Brooklyn that is soon to be a mega-mega shopping center: Mega-ization, globalization and anti-unionization were just barely on the horizon when I bought those first bad jogging shoes.

Back in the Watergate 70s, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.

Me -- I’m following the shoes.

Plutocracy, Bush, The 70s, Paul Volcker, Stagflation ,Wall Street

Follow the Shoes

On doctor’s orders I’ve taken to walking. The prescription: a half an hour a day at least three days a week. I’m doing five days a week and feeling quite good about it, thank you very much.

This regime encouraged me to purchase a new pair of walking shoes. Knowing of Thoreau’s injunction to beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, I did not act immediately to purchase the new shoes, but walked for a couple of weeks in my clunky, though not too uncomfortable work shoes. Eventually, however, I gave in to the urge to outfit myself properly, an urge I could justify to Mr. Thoreau, if necessary, under the heading of cardiovascular health.

The shoes, by Born, are a now retro version of jogging shoes that I wore -- that joggers all over the world wore -- in the 1970s: narrow, with slender diagonal racing stripes on the side, cut low around the ankles, long tongue and laces. The shoe form of the skimpy basketball shorts of the 70s.

Back in the 70s I jogged for about half a summer. I was down in Raleigh, North Carolina, driven there by the promise of a summer job. There were no jobs in upstate New York at the time. Not for young men who were going to college at any rate. Scarce and soon to be much scarcer, jobs at the local lumber and paper mills were reserved for the sons and daughters of senior mill workers.

Within a few years though, those jobs would be sent to the Pacific Northwest, and then Canada, then overseas, leaving in their wake unpaid mortgages, unrepaired snowmobiles, abandoned trailers and shotgun shacks, their abject yards clotted with broken washers and refrigerators. But the job diaspora hadn’t come to that yet, although the seams were beginning to show.

Through my brother I got a job as an electrician’s helper. Paid minimum wage, barely able to afford one meal a day, I spent every evening in the air conditioning of the college library to get out of the stifling swampy North Carolina air.

At closing time, I’d trudge slowly back to the small second floor attic room I shared with my brother and two other struggling beneficiaries of the State of North Carolina’s right-to-work policy. The tiny air conditioner we shared could only about half wring the water from the sludgy, musty attic air. It could not actually cool off the room, but it did at least dry the sweat off of our skin.

Waking up in this musty airless den, I’d pull on my Converse sneakers and jog out to the college track and do laps for about half an hour. It was relatively pleasant in the early morning, about eighty degrees, dewy, which somehow held the mugginess in check.

Eventually, I got the point where I thought I deserved some real running shoes, and so putting aside money for a couple of weeks toward their purchase, I went to the local mall on a Friday night and bought a pair of no-name brand running shoes, bright blue with three yellow diagonal stripes on either side. I could not afford Nike’s or Adida's, which cost about twice as much as the knock-offs I bought.

The next morning, elated with my purchase, I ran an extra fifteen or so minutes to break them in, enjoying the sense of mastery my new shoes promised and seemed to deliver. Spongy, springy, they were clearly a departure from the thin-soled basketball shoes we had all grown up with.

But it was me that was broken in, not the shoes. The next morning I could barely walk. I couldn’t climb the ladder at work and could barely climb stairs. Back at home later that summer I described my symptoms to a friend who had become an expert jogger who told me I had given myself shin splints. I never wore those shoes again, but nevertheless kept them for years as literal object lesson of Thoreau’s teaching.

My boss, deservedly nicknamed Lard, couldn’t understand why anyone would run anywhere at anytime, much less run and injure one’s legs to the extent that they could barely work and cost him money. Although he was irritated to have less than half a worker for the week or so it took me to recover, he got a lot of mileage telling other bosses on the worksite about the northern college boy who hurt his legs “jogging.”

Jogging was new concept back then and Lard was able to put an extraordinary spin on it, a spin that spoke volumes about idiocy of Yankee college boys, and Yankees in general. To run in the heat, even of an early summer morning, was to him and his cohorts just plain crazy. Sauntering with grave rotundity, drinking Co’ Cola for breakfast, that was the sane and accepted practice.

So with this retro purchase, I find myself thrown back in time to the mid 70s just at the moment when the Counterrevolution of the Bosses was beginning to kick in. Not the bosses like Lard, of course, but the big bosses. The thousand or so guys who tell Wall Street what to do. You know, the plutocracy whom if you mention people call you crazy. Because in America the plutocracy has managed to convince people they don't exist. Good ol' boys like George W. and his Daddy ain't no plutocracy. They's good folks, and don't you forget it, you damn liberals.

The post war consensus of business, labor and government was just beginning to crack apart in the mid 70s. Northern jobs were being exported to the South and East, US banks were recycling petrodollars and colonizing the third world with indebtedness, and Paul Volcker, friend of Wall Street, was squeezing the money supply until he was able to establish the rentier economy so devoutly wished by the captains of the economy, and their neo-liberal apologists at the University of Chicago.

The Counterrevolution is now so complete that the wealthiest families in America have managed to get back most of the money and power they ceded during the short-lived liberal era that lasted roughly from Roosevelt through Nixon. They have managed to assert their will in every sector of the economy, demanding from workers longer hours on smaller paychecks, from the government more tax breaks and fewer regulations, from Wall Street greater returns on their investments. Further, they now support an apologist class so large and so vociferous that to propose an alternative to the plutocracy is to be attacked as mad, or even worse, a liberal.

And so what that means is I’m buying shoes made in China from a corporation whose headquarters is possibly in Europe, but like Haagen Dazs could be in located in New Jersey, buying them from a discount store located on the site once offered by the Borough of Brooklyn to the O’Malley’s for a new Ebbets Field, but which, in fact, was never really seriously considered by same as secret talks were nearing completion with Los Angeles.

And right next door to that shopping center there probably is soon to be a Trojan horse of a basketball arena erected by a canny real estate speculator named in fine Dickensian fashion, Ratner, a project which is being sold to us as a means to bring Brooklyn back into the world of major league sport where we are told that we the people of Brooklyn belong and which some of the more gullible believe.

It is possible to buy clones of the Converse and Keds basketball sneakers that I wore before buying those crippling jogging shoes back in the 70s. I see people wearing them all the time these days. Not for playing basketball, but rather as a campy emblem of 50s Americana, a time when juvenile delinquency, Communists, the Warren Court and atomic destruction reigned as the four horsemen of the American Apocalypse: you know, that pre-lapsarian American favored by conservative mythologizers, that kinder, gentler America that was actually pretty much like America now, at least in it's right-wing fear mongering. I may be wrong about why people wear them; that’s why I would wear them, that’s what Converses say to me.

Back in the Watergate 70s, Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein to follow the money.

Me -- I’m following the shoes. Until I get tired. Which is right about now.

Plutocracy, Bush, The 70s, Paul Volcker, Stagflation ,Wall Street

Paul Krugman: On Bush "Feeling No Pain"

Here's the key section, followed by the entire column, of Krugman's NY Times column today, "Feeling No Pain":

...Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.

Funny isn't it, how when you're rich, you get to have so many good friends in government (as per my essay on the end of the American Dream, "Follow the Shoes"). Anyway, here's Krugman's entire column...

FEELING NO PAIN
By Paul Krugman
President Bush's main purpose in visiting India seems to have been to promote nuclear proliferation. But he also had some kind words for outsourcing. And those words help explain something that I know deeply puzzles the administration's political gurus: Mr. Bush's dismal polling on economic issues.

Now the American economy isn't doing as well as Bush partisans think it is. In fact, since the end of the 2001 recession, the recovery in jobs, output and especially wages has been unusually weak by historical standards. Still, the economy is expanding, so it's impressive just how large a majority of Americans disapproves of Mr. Bush's economic management.

Why doesn't Mr. Bush get any economic respect? I think it's because most Americans sense, correctly, that he doesn't care about people like them. We're living in a time when many Americans are feeling economically insecure, but a tiny elite has been growing incredibly rich. And Mr. Bush's problem is that he identifies so totally with the lucky, wealthy few that in unscripted settings he can't manage even a few sentences of empathy with ordinary Americans. He doesn't feel your pain, and it shows.

Here's what Mr. Bush said in India, when someone raised the question of the political backlash against outsourcing: "Losing jobs is painful, so let's make sure people are educated so they can find — fill the jobs of the 21st century. And let's make sure that there's pro-growth economic policies in place. What does that mean? That means low taxes; it means less regulation; it means fewer lawsuits; it means wise energy policy."

O.K., so you're a 50-year-old worker whose job has just been outsourced, and Mr. Bush tells you that you should go get a 21st-century education and rejoice in the joys of a lawsuit-free economy. Uh-huh.

Actually, Mr. Bush's remarks were even more off-key than they seem, coming during a visit to India. India's surge into world markets hasn't followed the pattern set by other developing nations, which started their export drive in low-tech industries like clothing. Instead, India has moved directly into industries that advanced countries like the United States thought were their exclusive turf. When Business Week put together a list of areas "where India has made an impact ... and where it's going next," that list consisted almost entirely of high-technology activities like software and chip design.

What this means is that American workers whose jobs are threatened by Indian competition are, in many cases, people who thought they already had acquired the skills to "fill the jobs of the 21st century" — but have just discovered that Indians, who are paid about a tenth as much, also have those skills.

Am I saying that we should try to stop outsourcing? No. But if you don't feel conflicted about the effects of globalization, if you don't worry about the many losers from the process, you aren't paying attention. And American workers deserve a better answer to their concerns than yet another assertion that a rising tide raises all boats, because that's manifestly untrue.

The fact is that we're living in a time when most Americans are seeing little if any benefit from overall income growth, because their share of the economic pie is falling. Between 1979 and 2003, according to a recent research paper published by the I.R.S., the share of overall income received by the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers fell from 50 percent to barely over 40 percent. The main winners from this upward redistribution of income were a tiny, wealthy elite: more than half the income share lost by the bottom 80 percent was gained by just one-fourth of 1 percent of the population, people with incomes of at least $750,000 in 2003.

And those fortunate few are the only people Mr. Bush seems to care about. Look at what he had to offer after asserting, in effect, that workers get outsourced because they don't have the right education: lower taxes, deregulation and fewer lawsuits. Funny, that doesn't sound like "pro-growth" policy to me. Instead, it sounds like a wish list for wealthy individuals and big corporations.

Mr. Bush once joked that his base consisted of the "haves and the have-mores." But it wasn't much of a joke. His remarks in India show that he really can't imagine what it's like not to be a member of a privileged economic elite.

Bush Approval Ratings: Bottoming Out

You gotta love this graph from Gallup's latest survey.


But this is pretty exciting, too: Only Nixon -- just before he was impeached -- and Truman back in 50'-51', had lower approval ratings at this point in their presidencies.

George The Unready and His Triumph of the Will

Below are the key paragraphs from Krugman's column today in the NY Times, "George The Unready."

I like Paul Krugman, but he keeps insisting that the Bush gang is a failure because of its managerial and administrative incompetence.

In fact, the Bush cabal are ideologues who are reaching toward an epiphany of the Will. By their lights, they are succeeding.

They are manufacturing a new reality, a reality governed by propaganda under the cover of which they are looting the public treasury and robbing the American people.

In Krugman's column he notes Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief: "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Earlier this week I said that in "BushWorld and in the world of conservatives, to believe in victory is to have victory. To believe in defeat is to have defeat. Heart is all. Facts need not apply." Bush's statement is just another example of this gang's preference for will over intellect.

Krugman, a member of the reality-based community, still thinks the Bush PR Theater Company can be brought low by citing their incompetence.

Krugman doesn't get the fact that much of the audience for Bush productions prefers the mendacious thrills of the long-running white hat vs. black hat melodrama to the mundane rewards of good, competent government.

GEORGE THE UNREADY
By Paul Krugman
Iraqi insurgents, hurricanes and low-income Medicare recipients have three things in common. Each has been at the center of a policy disaster. In each case experts warned about the impending disaster. And in each case — well, let's look at what happened.

Knight Ridder's Washington bureau reports that from 2003 on, intelligence agencies "repeatedly warned the White House" that "the insurgency in Iraq had deep local roots, was likely to worsen and could lead to civil war." But senior administration officials insisted that the insurgents were a mix of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

Intelligence analysts who refused to go along with that line were attacked for not being team players. According to U.S. News & World Report, President Bush's reaction to a pessimistic report from the C.I.A.'s Baghdad station chief was to remark, "What is he, some kind of defeatist?"

Many people have now seen the video of the briefing Mr. Bush received before Hurricane Katrina struck. Much has been made of the revelation that Mr. Bush was dishonest when he claimed, a few days later, that nobody anticipated the breach of the levees.

But what's really striking, given the gravity of the warnings, is the lack of urgency Mr. Bush and his administration displayed in responding to the storm. A horrified nation watched the scenes of misery at the Superdome and wondered why help hadn't arrived. But as Newsweek reports, for several days nobody was willing to tell Mr. Bush, who "equates disagreement with disloyalty," how badly things were going. "For most of those first few days," Newsweek says, "Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing."

Now for one you may not have heard about. The new Medicare drug program got off to a disastrous start: "Low-income Medicare beneficiaries around the country were often overcharged, and some were turned away from pharmacies without getting their medications, in the first week of Medicare's new drug benefit," The New York Times reported.

How did this happen? The same way the other disasters happened: experts who warned of trouble ahead were told to shut up.

We can get a sense of what went on by looking at a 2005 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office on potential problems with the drug program. Included with the report is a letter from Mark McClellan, the Medicare administrator. Rather than taking the concerns of the G.A.O. seriously, he tried to bully it into changing its conclusions. He demanded that the report say that the administration had "established effective contingency plans" — which it hadn't — and that it drop the assertion that some people would encounter difficulties obtaining necessary drugs, which is exactly what happened.

Experts within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services must have faced similar bullying. And unlike experts at the independent G.A.O., they were not in a position to stand up for what they knew to be true.

In short, our country is being run by people who assume that things will turn out the way they want. And if someone warns of problems, they shoot the messenger.

Some commentators speak of the series of disasters now afflicting the Bush administration — there seems to be a new one every week — as if it were just a string of bad luck. But it isn't.

If good luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, bad luck is what happens when lack of preparation meets a challenge. And our leaders, who think they can govern through a mix of wishful thinking and intimidation, are never, ever prepared.

We Were Kind of Duped: The Brave New Wold of Work

"Most of us thought we would work and have kids, at least that was what we were brought up thinking we would do — no problem. But really we were kind of duped. None of us realized how hard it is."
- CATHIE WATSON-SHORT, 37, on women in the work force from the NY Times today.

I've got news for you, Cathie, there's been a whole lot of dupin' goin' on, and not just women. Below is my review of Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy by Vicki Smith, which I reviewed on Amazon in July of 2001.

THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF WORK, July 6, 2001
In "Crossing the Great Divide," Ms. Smith explores four organizations and sizes up their employment and personnel practices against the rhetorics of social science and global economy theorists. What she finds is a much more complex picture than the theorists allow for.

In and of itself, this is a great service to readers interested in the "Brazilianization" of the Western work force(see Ulrich Beck's "The Brave New World of Work for a good companion read), because, as Smith notes, most of the writing on this phenomenon tends to either demonize those companies who practice "perma-temp" strategies as exploitative, or to praise them as leading-edge companies which are reacting to the exigencies of global capitalism. An example from Smith's book may be helpful.

One of the companies where she conducts research, a new company which she pseudonomously calls "Reproco," contracts with firms (such as law firms and other organizations) to provide copying service -- a complete service including copiers and copy machine operators. The machine operators are paid a little more than minimum wage, are shuttled from one location to another every six months, are given little chance of advancement, but they are given training in interpersonal relations, scheduling, business goals, etc.

For many Reproco employees -- most of whom worked in low-paying jobs in the service industry flipping burgers and have a high school education or less, this training gives them insight into business and handling business relationships that they never had before. So, while the constant shuttling from location to location works to prevent the formation of unions, the lessons in business practices activates a new sense of self-regard and potentiality the employees have rarely experienced.

Smith then contasts these workers at "WoodWorks" an old economy "extractive" business in the Pacific Northwest which manufactures building materials (plywood, studs, etc.) The workforce has been downsized through technology upgrades and in reaction to the global market, and employees hopes for lifetime employment are coming to an end.

"Woodworks" has employed a quality control program which attempts to engage workers more fully into all aspects on the business -- from understanding balance sheets, improving manufacturing quality -- as a means to creating teamwork. Theorists have charged that the devolution of authority makes workers work harder than ever, that it disrupts traditional worker/employer identities in ways that privelege employers and disadvantage workers, and Smith does find evidence of that.

Yet at the same time, she notes that workers, under the gun of the global economy, choose the quality program as the best option in that it demonstrates their desire to keep the factory productive so that they can maintain the lifestyles and their local economy. Many workers to whom she spoke claimed to have learned much about business from the training programs, and some thought they could use this training if (or when) the plant finally shut down. While middle-class managers found the quality program an affront to their business acumen -- just another program cooked up by some distant consultant that didn't understand their business -- the plant workers, with some notable exceptions,were willing to try and some found the knowledge they gained useful.

The third case study "Computech" looks at a high tech firm with "MicroSerf" temporary/permananent employment practices. The fourth, and the most dispiriting of the 4 organizations examined, is a special job search service for out of work executives based in Sacramento. It is the most dispiriting because the executives -- for instance a nuclear engineer, an environmental consultant -- are told they must become non-specialist multi-taskers, remodeling themselves in lieu of the latest buzzwords of the employment market.

Smith points out that this rhetoric is a roundabout way of telling the mostly 40 years plus people who frequent this organization that they need to lower their sites and to get used to lower wages and less job stability. She also notes that most of them do not find the jobs at the salaries with the benefits they want. There is no upside for these workers, it's almost all downhill.

Smith does a good job of putting a human face on the Brave New World of Work. She demonstrates today's workers are more resourceful, and their reactions to their new work situations more complex than are presumed by theorists. Not exactly earth-shattering -- people are always more complex than theorists would have it, but a nice corrective to the high-flown rhetorics and partisanship usually encountered in such discussions.

In short, Smith shows us examples of the willingness of business and government to renege on the "worker-citizen" model (the post-war Keynesian model) and substitute to "worker-capitalist" (the post-modernist conservative, Friedman model). She treats the devolution of risk downward, examines the American "jobs miracle" (where lots and lots of low-paying service jobs are created for those who can stay out of the vast penal colony) through the real work lives of real American workers.

Bush "On the Road" Update: Light at the End of the Tunnel

Guess I was wrong in my previous post today.

Looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel for Bush in his visit to India.

Oh, yes, and if you have time -- and the stomach -- check out the screeds on this right wing site that I've linked to for the AP story and photo.

Bush On The Road: No Light at End of the Tunnel

Bush can run to Afghanistan and India for photo ops, but he's going nowhere fast.

Per the Washington Post:
"The release of a new CBS News poll showing Bush's approval rating dropping to 34 percent, a low for him in that survey, sent tremors through Republican circles in Washington. Scott Reed, who managed Robert J. Dole's presidential campaign in 1996, called the results "pretty shattering." Most distressing to GOP strategists was that Bush's support among Republicans fell from 83 percent to 72 percent.

"The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down," Reed said. "It started with women and it's spreading. It's just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel."