A Level Gaze

A Level Gaze

"What effect must it have on a nation if it learns no foreign languages? Probably much the same as that which a total withdrawal from society has upon an individual."
--G.C. Lichtenberg

Thursday, May 22, 2003

"Not a Story"

In a semi-coherent look at Sid Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Tina Brown wrote:

Blumenthal was absolutely right, of course, back in 1995 to keep insisting -- almost alone, and in the face of the frenzy of the press pack and my own anxiety about missing the bus -- that the allegations of Clinton corruption in the Whitewater affair were a big load of nothing. On the other hand, he was absolutely wrong to maintain -- as he put it with maddening loftiness -- that "It's not a story." Not a scandal, perhaps, but not a story? A cabal of right-wing fanatics manipulates the press, the judiciary, and the FBI to the point of nearly destroying a president and it's not a story? It was a helluva story -- as Sidney's book amply shows. And the story isn't over yet, as the Clinton wars continue to be fought in the reviews.

This woman ran the most famously literate publication in America, and she can't parse a sentence? "The Clintons did something bad in Whitewater" was not a story. The malignant skein of the Clintons' implicit "fecklessness" and "immorality" the press wove around it, the actions of Scaife and Starr and their carniverous ilk, yes, that was a story. Sid thought so. He wrote an 800-page book about it.

As I doubt even he would bother to deny, Sid was in the tank for the Clintons. (He just thought the tank was full of Evian.) The truth is, I would have been more tolerant of Sid being in the tank if it had delivered the New Yorker a string of scoops. The big problem with being relentlessly nice to politicians or even just fair and balanced is that they repay you by never giving you any real news. Their press secretaries save the red meat to throw off the back of the sled at the ravening wolves from the Washington Post. Why else would G.W. Bush invite scary Bob Woodward in to write an authorized account of the buildup to the invasion of Afghanistan? So he doesn't write the other book, the one where all the enemies talk. The Clinton White House knew Sid was the Democrats' samurai so they went elsewhere to break their hottest stories.

If Blumenthal had brought her incontrovertible proof that Whitewater and the carnival of crap that went with it was a complete sham, would she have considered that a "scoop?" It sure wasn't getting play anywhere else in the media.

To hell with parsing sentences, Brown can't even think clearly. "Being nice" to Clinton would have caused him to direct his press secretary to "save the red meat" for the people who weren't nice to him? The idea is absurd. Does she believe the press is following this strategy in its dealings with Dubya? They're being nice to him and being fed horseshit. To all appearances, they don't want any "real news." Otherwise, they'd call him on his administration's duplicity, arrogance, and, to all appearances, corruption. Deviate from the party line and you're in Siberia. With the kind of treatment Clinton was getting in the press, does Brown really believe Clinton would deliberately withhold information from a sympathetic reporter to instead give it to someone whose intent was to gut him with it?

No wonder she couldn't see the scoop sitting in her lap.

A general point about book reviews needs to be made, I think. If the facts presented in a book are true and fly in the face of conventional "wisdom," it's important. That's the essence of a good story, not whether and why the author actually had a reason to care about the subject of his/her book. We use this principle in our courts: the motive of the prosecution is to convict, of the defense, to acquit. Neither motive has any bearing on the truth of the case at all, but we still think of this system as the best way of getting to it. If the author gets the story right, it doesn't matter what the motive was.

posted by David at 5/22/2003 12:02:00 PM ::

Friday, May 16, 2003

Sometimes it helps to rephrase things

We've all heard about how Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton had been awarded the contract to run the Iraqi oil distribution system, without having to bid, without public hearings or any public oversight whatsoever, and contrary to initial Bush administration characterizations of the deal as a much smaller contract to repair and maintain Iraq's oil infrastructure. Apart from Henry Waxman, the news has caused barely ripple in the American public's consciousness.

Good thing we've got Chris Floyd around to put things in perspective:

Last week we learned that the U.S. administration lied about the extent of Halliburton Corp.'s involvement in the "reconstruction" of Iraq. Officials in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush initially claimed that Halliburton -- the oil and defense services conglomerate once headed by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who still receives an estimated $1 million annually from the company in "deferred compensation" -- had been awarded a relatively small contract to repair Iraqi oilfields.

But in fact, as the Washington Post reports, Halliburton is now pumping and distributing Iraq's vast oil reserves -- a privilege potentially worth billions of dollars. The Bush camp freely admits that this was part of Halliburton's no-bid, open-ended contract all along; they deliberately "failed to mention it" in their first official notices. It was not publicly disclosed until a congressman read the fine print of the contract and began asking questions.

To recap: a firm that pays the vice president of the United States a million dollars a year has now taken over operation of Iraq's oil wealth. There have been times in U.S. history when such an arrangement would have been called by its true name: "corruption." But these are not such times.

(emphasis added)

posted by David at 5/16/2003 11:57:00 AM ::

Wednesday, May 07, 2003

What We Need To Do

Go read this over at Ruminate This.

Then, let's engage in a national discussion about fixing this problem of "corporate personhood," an issue that should serve as the foundation of a coalition platform between Democrats, Greens, Independents and others. If the Democratic Party doesn't lead, if the party decides its not in its interest to solve the problem, then the Democratic Party deserves defeat. I'm hoping the Dems will instead find merit in tackling this populist issue, and thereby distinguishing itself from the Right in a meaningful way. Without this change, we're just spinning our wheels.

Lisa is absolutely, positively spot-on. Seriously, go read the whole post.

Before we go getting any ideas, though, we're going to have to be prepared: this is going to be HARD.

Why? Well, there are...

Political Obstacles

a) Money = power in U.S. politics these days according to a very straightforward equation. Corporations have plenty of money.

b) Unions are likely to be of no help if job or pay cuts are threatened.

c) As long as we've got Terry McAuliffe & Co. slobbering at the corporate trough, Democratic opposition will be nil. If Democrats espouse wholesale reductions in corporate privileges, we've realistically got to be willing to go through at least one entire election season, and win, without any coroporate money.

d) Conservative packing of higher U.S. courts with pro-corporation judges is going to have knock-on effects for years to come. This will be a slooow, ugly process.

While we're working on it, we'll have to deal with the...

Economic Obstacles

a) Current corporations have huge networks of business relationships with other countries and corporations located abroad. We were able to knock down the robber barons because they had nowhere else to go. Multinationals will see which way the wind is blowing and get as much of 'their' money out of the country as they can. The absence of this investment capital and productive capacity will be crushing.

b) Being free of all of those constraints by definition increases the competitiveness of corporations as currently constituted. Domestic production will suffer relative to other countries as a result.

c) Reducing our corporations' profitability will cause international investors of all stripes to pull out of U.S. assets. The stock market will go to hell. Real estate prices will dive. The dollar will go through the floor. Liquidity will be nil. Cats and dogs will live together in open co-habitation.

All of that said, (some) corporations are killing this country. Suggestions are welcome.

posted by David at 5/07/2003 11:39:00 PM ::

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