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

Monday, February 16, 2004

Food For Thought

All the current talk about outsourcing assumes something not at all in evidence: that large American corporations, which currently hold enormous sway over our economic life, will retain their ties to America. If they don't--if they take decades' worth of accumulated wealth created by Americans, and decide to base themselves elsewhere--there will be a net loss to America. All the 'in the long-run we'll be fine' arguments, notwithstanding whatever benefits to individual workers are provided by unemployment insurance and (currently insignificant) retraining programs, won't do a damn thing about it. We've only scratched the surface of the economic mobility that will ultimately be facilitated by globalization. It's but a small step from relocating individual production or service facilities to pulling out altogether.

As water seeks the lowest possible level, investment seeks the lowest possible costs. Economists, start your calculators.

posted by David at 2/16/2004 11:31:00 PM ::

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

Al Qaeda Letter Fails the Sniff Test

The 17-page document found at a supposed "al Qaeda safe house" seems mighty fishy to me. The upshot, that attacks should be staged against Shia targets in order to bring them into open conflict with the "sleepy Sunnis, who are fearful of destruction and death," in order to "prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and [Al Qaeda]" seems like an unnecessary strategem.

Attempts to pull together a government by the June 30 deadline are already highlighting differences between ethnic groups. Just about all of the local military and police (and paramilitary, etc.) have partisan affiliations, and therefore cannot be counted upon to neutrally uphold the law. No matter how a government is formed, there are bound to be a lot of armed people who will be unhappy with it. Given the 800 lb. gorilla status of the Shiites at the moment, it's a very good bet that it will be the Sunnis, and, to a lesser extent, the Kurds, who will be motivated to disrupt things.

If we've pulled out by then, a civil war is highly likely, the Bush administration is going to look awful, and muslims around the world are going to be awfully pissed off--advantage Al Qaeda. If we still have lots of soldiers on the ground then, we'll be putting them in harm's way between would-be combatants, and de facto undermining the legitimacy of the Iraqi government--advantage Al Qaeda. They win either way.

Al Qaeda doesn't need to foment conflict in Iraq--it exists already, and is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. It just doesn't make sense for them to expend resources and risk exposure doing something that is patently unnecessary. Therefore, I conclude the letter is almost certainly a fabrication.

For an interesting hypothesis concerning why such a fabrication might have been made, Hesiod's got the goods.

posted by David at 2/10/2004 02:36:00 PM ::

Thursday, February 05, 2004

From Michael Hersch at Newsweek:

Presently a new team enters the office of Iraq's civil administrator, his democracy task force, the project closest to his heart. Bremer notes he's giving the teaching teams some $450 million, nearly five times what they were budgeted; he talks about bringing in local U.S. battalion and brigade commanders. "You've got basically nothing in this area!" he says, scanning a printout. He asks if there is "an escape clause" in the contract being given to the U.S. company that's doing the democracy promotion because "it very well may be that the U.N. takes over." The Iraqi electricity minister pops in, and Bremer, with his usual genteel good humor, admonishes him for making wild predictions about megawatt increases in the country's still-flickering power supply (even now, Baghdad blacks out several times a day). Though he's careful not to flaunt it, Bremer controls everything down to Iraqi ministers' travel plans. "We're both going to get run out of town if you keep doing that," Bremer says. "What do we care?" the minister jokes, "we're both going to lose our jobs anyway."
[Emphasis added]

Now, we have several facts here. One is that the Christian Right, often described as George W. Bush's base, hates the U.N. The neocons hate the U.N. Mohammad ElBaradei and Hans Blix, the U.N.'s representatives in Iraq, who were attempting to meet U.S. requirements (and who turned out to be right on every major count), were routinely discounted and undermined by members of the Bush Administration.

How is it, then, that the Administration's Chosen Man in Baghdad is entirely sanguine about the fact that U.N., natural counterweight to the unfettered dominance of the United States of America, will likely wind up with the responsibility of running Iraq? Obviously he's a realist, but I'm really surprised he's saying this out loud, because it would be tantamount to saying we have failed in our Great Quest to Liberate Iraq.

via Tacitus

posted by David at 2/05/2004 11:57:00 PM ::

Will Lie for Food

In the latest installment of Brad DeLong's dressing-down of Jonathan Weisman for filing a report on the budget that "reads like 90% of it is a rewritten White House press release," Brad provides a list of defenses and/or excuses that have been suggested to him by several of Weisman's supporters. Among were the following points:

He's in an impossible situation. He knows he's not good enough to survive if White House Media Affairs directs the administration to close down his access, and they know he knows, so he is under immense pressure to trim his stories to the liking of the White House--or else.

He gets little backing in his struggle with the White House from his editors, so it is not credible for him to go back to his sources and say, "Gee, Karl, I know I told you I would write it that way, but my editor said that was unbelievable and made me change it."

He's not alone in feeling muzzled by enormous, intolerable pressures: remember, even reporters as good as William Greider and Ronald Suskind could not do their big stories about how it really happened until they were out of the daily news reporting cycle.

I don't understand what the whole media gotta-toe-the-line-if-I-want-to-keep-my-access thing comes from. At the beginning of the Bush presidency, I could see how that impression might have taken hold. If you're covering the administration, you need to be where they are. But that was then.

By now, it has to be plain to everyone that the worst possible source of information on the Executive Branch's activities is the White House. It's common knowledge that if there's good news, it'll be blown out of proportion. If there's bad news, it'll be ignored or denied. Sometimes they just make shit up. The only journalists who get anything relevant from actually being there are the Mo-bots who write piffle about the jaunty tilt of W's belt buckle and the raw virility of the gleam in Rummy's eye.

The news isn't about what the WH says. That isn't the news. The news is about what they do, and what it means for us. The WH isn't a closed soap opera, of interest in and of itself. It's a critical part of the awful and exquisite machinery that maintains our freedoms, such as they are. We are the issue. They are not.

What earthly purpose can be served by journalists' aiding and abetting the administration in disseminating its insultingly transparent dishonesty? If you ask the WH press corps, it's so they can be on hand to receive more of the same.

posted by David at 2/05/2004 05:59:00 PM ::

Monday, February 02, 2004

Republicans: Soros to Receive Blame for Bad Economy

This floater being put up by Jon Dougherty at Newsmax is sure to be a major item on Republican spin point lists within the week, and will remain in play through the election.

The billionaire's zeal to unseat Bush has caught the notice of top policy-makers in Washington who worry that Soros would not need to risk his whole fortune to cause mischief.

Here's the real worry: Could the master currency trader manipulate the financial markets to create a panic, collapsing the stock market or the U.S. dollar on the eve of the November election?

The thought of such a scenario – dubbed a "Financial October Surprise" – has some worried.

This is GOP disingenuousness at its sharpest, and has the potential to shield Bush from any electoral fallout arising from any sudden economic calamities. Those of us on the left need to study hard on this one, and make sure we're all knowledgeable enough on the subject to call it for the bullshit it is. It's always easier to understand world events in terms of single actors like Saddam and Osama (and, soon, George) than as the product of complex and unpredictable systems. If this Soros-sabotages-the-economy meme gets widespread traction among swing voters, it will be very difficult to get them to pay attention while we attempt to talk them through the mind-numbing arithmetic of tax policy and health-care accounting. However, if we can enunciate sharply, and in few words why this very idea is bogus, the issue could be nipped in the bud.

Soros already has the reputation of being a market-buster. A lot of semi-knowledgable people (journalists) have hazy recollections of a time when he single-handedly wrecked Britain's currency exchange rate mechanism with the Deutchmark through canny trading. It's a gross oversimplification that ignores the fact that even uniquely savvy financiers such as Soros cannot reverse gravity. At the time, the pound was obviously highly overvalued, and the British government was propping it up with £4 billion of its foreign exchange reserves and cripplingly high interest rates. Soros saw this was unsustainable, and proved instrumental in popping the bubble. The U.K. is better off today because of it.

If Soros convinces enough people he's right, the markets could move in response, but, as even (god help me) Don Luskin says, ""First and foremost, the speculators have to be right." In other words, Soros cannot push a market in a direction it wasn't going to go in anyway. Even if it has help, if the dollar plummets and interest rates rise, it will be because of massive trade and budget deficits, not because of the machinations of a transplanted Hungarian financier and his paltry $7 billion.

The whole point is that Soros made money in the currency markets because he was right. Again and again, he put his own money where his mouth was, and came out ahead. When he says something, people listen, because he knows what he's talking about. If he says the economy is screwed, there's probably something to it. We need to help the public understand that there's a difference between pointing out that something is wrong and making it wrong in the first place.

posted by David at 2/02/2004 12:37:00 PM ::

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