agog

Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson, 2009

Here is an update on the activities of Mortenson, the Central Asia Institute (CAI) and his self selecting “Dirty Dozen” following up on his previous Three Cups of Tea. Greg begins with an event from 1999 while he was visiting the Charpurson Valley. He had just met Sarfraz Khan, former mujahedin fighter with a disfigured hand who is making his living trading across the mountains into the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan (”no much success”) when they spot a group of 14 Kirghiz (nomadic Afghan) horsemen straight out of the 13th Century riding toward them. Their leader is the young son of the Kirghiz headman and he has heard that Mortenson is in the area and has ridden across the mountains to meet him and see if he would be willing to build a school for their children. Greg is so moved that he impulsively promises their school knowing full well he can’t go into Taliban controlled Afghanistan. It takes him ten years to keep his promise.

Video by Sarfraz Khan

Greg is so impressed with Sarfraz, who speaks seven languages and whose ancestors are Waki from the Corridor, that he hires him as his remote areas project manager. Thus begins what Greg calls the closest friendship of his life.

The promise of the school and the hiring of Sarfraz are the sort of impulsive decision making that make the CAI unique among NGOs. The other unique feature is their “last place first” philosophy, probably owing its origin to the first school Greg built in Korphe Pakistan a village so remote he first had to raise more money so he could build a bridge across a river in order to transport building materials to the village. Korphe was the village that rescued and nursed Greg after his failed attempt to climb nearby K2 and its headman Haji Ali is credited with Greg’s first and best education in the area (”After 3 cups of tea you will be friends forever.”). Haji Ali wanted a school for his grandaughter Jahan Ali, who became CAIs first high school graduate. The emphasis on girl’s education Greg acquired while growing up in Africa (where his father ran a hospital near Mount Kilimanjaro) and where he learned the expression “educate a boy and you educate an individual, educate a girl and you educate a community”. Greg has observed his girl students teaching their mothers to read and write proving to him the truth of this saying.

CAI offers scholarships to the smartest girls to continue their eduction. Once offered, these scholarships can be accepted at any time in the future. One girl was unable to accept a scholarship to become a health worker because of the opposition of the local headman. She married, raised children, and ten years later, the new headman asked her to accept her scholarship. She did, received her education, and returned to her village to help pregnant woman and their babies. Childbirth and infant mortality rates in her village fell to zero. She thinks that her own experiences as a wife and mother have helped her become a better trained health worker and she is grateful for the delay. This type of patience both by CAI and the students is one of the important lessons Greg has learned from his experience.

Wakhan Corridor

After 9/11 and the US displacement of the Taliban, Greg and Safran entered the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan and Safran began his education of Greg into Afghan “style“. Safran not only speaks the various languages of the area, but he adapts his accent to the specific region, speaking a fast, clipped Dari in Kabul, and slowing, softening, and rounding the language as he travels further into the Corridor until he morphs seamlessly into the next language of the region. He also adjusts his dress according to region and teaches Greg to follow him. Greg must have felt a little like Sir Richard Burton, the master of disguises. Safran also taught Greg about identifying the real decision makers during a Jirga (meeting of elders) just from their subtle gestures and body language. They develop close friendships with the leaders of the Waki and Tajik groups of the Corridor as well as the border security commander, Wohid Khan, who comes to their aid time after time. They build a series of more than 20 schools in the area. Safran also taught Greg the skills of avoiding kidnapping by never revealing your destination and changing transport frequently. This also assures that the driver is familiar with local conditions. They are constantly moving large sums of money from the Kabul bank to their remote schools to pay teachers, buy supplies and pay for construction. They are never robbed.

In 2005 the report that Americans had put a Koran down the toilet in an Iraqi prison set off riots throughout the Islamic world. NGO workers fled to Kabul and their offices and abandoned vehicles were destroyed. Greg stayed put as a guest in a house where he met for the first time the headman of the Kirghiz, Abdul Rashid Khan the father of horseman Greg and Safran had met in 1999. Abdul Rashid is returning empty handed from several months in Kabul where he had hoped to get help for his isolated people. Hamid Karzi made some half hearted promises which he had no intention of keeping. Abdul Radhid had spent much of his remaining capital to finance the trip. The government eventually sent one rusted out van to the Kirghiz who have no roads. Greg is able to again promise that CAI will build a school in Kirghiz so the old man can return home with some hope. The next day Greg traveled through scenes of destruction (the NGO offices) on his way to determine the fate of his nearby school. The school stood untouched because the village elders had stood in front of it explaining that the school belongs to the village. The rioters departed elsewhere. Greg credits the CAI strategy of making sure the local community takes full pride and ownership of their own schools with saving this school in the riots. The school was not viewed as international by the elders. Again on the NGOs, Greg comments that they insist on dressing in western clothes, drive the latest SUVs complete with nine foot satellite antennas, and generally just scream rich foreigners to the impoverished Afghanis. No wonder they find themselves targets of violence and resentment.

Greg is constantly approached by people wanting schools for their villages. Among those was the desk clerk at the Kabul guest house where Safran and Greg stay when in town. The clerk is a young Pashtun, Wakil Karimi, who grew up in Pakistani refugee camps and speaks several languages including English which is how he got the guest house job. Wakil persists about his school in visit after visit and Safran and Greg get to like him for his intelligence, energy, and persistence. They offer him a job as Afghan project manager and Safran begins Wakil’s boot camp training in Afghan “style“. Wakil’s village is in Taliban country but they visit and decide to let Wakil build his school once they see that the village elders really want it.

Azad Kashmir

Then, in 2005, a massive earthquake devastates much of Pakistani controlled Kashmir. The CAI rushes to the area to see what they can do. Most schools in the area have collapsed and many students have died. The CAI manage to get some tents for temporary schools and start traveling among their tent schools to give aid and pay the teachers. They can’t rebuild schools because people are on the move, farming terraces and drinking water springs have disappeared, the students are afraid to be inside buildings, and their usual stone construction would just collapse in the next earthquake. The CAI scrounged some PVC piping and found itself restoring water supplies so the girls could stop carrying water and return to school. This infuriated some NGOs who had lucrative contracts to restore water but CAI could care less. They just wanted to get their schools functioning again and the NGOs would probably never get the job done.

Greg is always emphasizing the importance of listening. His daughter asked him one day how the earthquake victim children played. Greg thought maybe they didn’t play at all so his young daughter launched a personal effort to round up jump ropes. Mothers joined in and soon he returned to Pakistan carrying hundreds of jump ropes. They were a big success in Kashmir and soon CAI is buying jump ropes locally. Greg starts thinking that while a couple of school have play fields (for soccer), none have a playground with slides, swings, and see-saws. CAI starts adding these to their schools. He relates a story on Bill Moyer’s Journal and in this book about a group of pro Taliban elders who come to see one of CAIs schools. They spend 30 minutes playing on the playground equipment and then started to leave. Greg asked them if they don’t want to see the school. They say no, they already decided they want CAI to build them a school like this one but they insist it must have a playground.

In another instance of listening carefully, Greg finally got one traumatized girl to relate the experience of the earthquake in her tent class. When Greg asked her why so few students had returned to class she said it was because there were no desks and it didn’t seem like a school. The students somehow associated having a desk with the learning and security of school. Greg immediately set villagers to work finding salvageable desks in the school’s rubble and building new ones. The students returned to school, some even without tents sitting under a tree once the desks were available.

Greg returned home to Montana to raise more money but Safran meanwhile uncovered some Chinese engineers in Pakistan who have experience building earthquake resistant structures in Xinjiang Province China. He arranges for the Chinese to design and fabricate three schools in Xinjiang, arranges transport for the materials from Xinjiang, and sets the logistics in place to compete the schools on site in Kashmir in only one month. Lastly, (after already committing CAI to the schools without authorization) he faxes Greg in Montana for the $54k needed for the schools catching Greg by total surprise. Greg takes the schematics for the buildings which are prefabricated from wood and designed to move in a quake to a civil engineering professor in Bozeman. they are to be assembled on a floating concrete pad which can also move in the quake. They are designed to withstand a magnitude 8.2 earthquake. The professor declares the designs sound and Greg gets CAI board approval, as always, to proceed. The schools are ready for occupation in 19 days. Just another typical CAI project.

The following link shows a video with one of these earthquake resistant schools, the Balseri Girls School, Patika, Azad Kashmir, Pakistan in the background.

Greg comments that they encountered very few NGOs in remote Kashmir but the extremists groups including the one that later bombed Mumbai were very effective at reaching the remotest villages and setting up madrasas, extremist Islamic schools often led by illiterate teachers who have memorized a little of the Koran. They feed most effectively on remote and ignorant villagers.

Greg and Safran are terrible at dealing with bureaucracies and are busy building schools throughout the outer regions of Afghanistan without any license or sanction from the central government. They initially tried to register CAI as a NGO with the government but quickly gave up. One official contradictorily claimed 1) there are already hundreds of schools in the Wakhan (there were none); 2) the Corridor is actually a part of China (never); and 3) no one lives in the Wakhan (there are three distinct ethnic groups in the Corridor, each with several thousand members).

Wakil took upon himself the task of getting CAI an NGO license. He spent a full month in the process, finally yelling and shaming the bureaucrats into stamping his final document. Unstated but implied is the refusal of CAI ever to pay a bribe to a government official even when it is clear all other NGOs have paid bribes to get their paperwork approved. CAI stretches their dollars and can construct a typical school and fund it for five years for about $40k. In this context, the cost of even a modest bribe would be intolerable to them.

Greg knows that some of the elders that support his schools make much of their income from poppies and the drug trade. He acknowledges that there are few other opportunities to make money in Afghanistan and praises those that give most of the proceeds back to the people in the form of low cost loans, seed, and other assistance. He regrets the some Afghanis become opium addicts, the cost of which further impoverishes them.

Greg discusses his strange relationship with the US military. He was initially opposed to the US military actions in Afghanistan while welcoming the removal of the Taliban from power, allowing CAI to operate to build schools in the country. As he saw it, a single US missile costing $850k could be used instead to build 20 schools which is a far more productive use of resources.

Then the earthquake struck in Kashmir and the US military loaned a number of Chinook helicopters from Afghanistan to transport supplies in and wounded earthquake victims out and Greg came to see the now popular crews in a new humanitarian light. The crews themselves, after Iraq and Afghanistan also came to see themselves in this new popular humanitarian light and liked it.

The other strange thing that happened was that military wives came across the Parade magazine article about the CAI and started reading “Three Cups of Tea” and discussing the book at their women’s clubs. Their enthusiasm spilled over and soon their husbands, serving or having served in Afghanistan started reading the book, particularly, counter insurgence soldiers. Pretty soon, “Three Cups of Tea” was required reading in counter insurgence academies. Greg discovered all this when forward base commander Christopher Kolenda asked if CAI could build a school near his base in Kunar Province. Kunar Province certainly fits the description of an “end place” but it is also Taliban country. Nevertheless, Wakil and Safran visit Kolenda then sat down with the village elders and decided to build the school.

Soldier Invites CAI to build school in Kunar Province

Thus began a major effort by CAI to build schools across the heart of Taliban country including Kunar Province and Nangarhar Province, the location of several Al Qaeda camps that includes the now famous Tora Bora caves where Bin Laden was thought to have hidden before slipping across the border into Pakistan. For one particularly vulnerable school they convinced a respected local Mullah to be headmaster. When warnings started appearing on the school, the Mullah went directly to Taliban leaders and convinced them to leave the school alone. They did. While CAI has had a little violence and threats at their schools, none have been damaged or closed unlike many other new schools that have been closed, students and teachers killed, and girls attacked with acid. Greg attributes the difference to the strong support the schools have had from the local elders and leaders. Even though CAIs schools are secular, they receive strong support from the local Mullahs.

CAI has by now received widespread recognition. Great Britain’s Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, visited one of the Kashmir earthquake resistant schools; Greg became the recipient of the Star of Pakistan the highest civilian award in Pakistan; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, opened one of the Panjshir Valley schools; and Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McCrystal are both Mortenson fans.

Admiral Mullen with Mortenson

Greg quotes Mike Mullen to show how far the military has come:

The Muslim community is a subtle world we don’t fully – and don’t always – attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of the people’s culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope to supplant the extremist narrative. We cannot capture hearts and minds. We must engage them; we must listen to them, one heart, and one mind at a time.

Quite a contrast to the usual nightly news Neanderthal general spouting nonsense about getting the bad guys like he’s playing some kind of video game, which incidentally, is how young military minds are recruited these days – through video games.

Kirghiz porting their school

In late 2009 the nomadic Kirghiz finally got their school built on the very roof of the world at 12,500 feet. The logistics of getting materials and workers to the site required some miracle planning and an approach from three sides. Money and lighter materials like the door and window frames traveled across the Wakhan Corridor to the end of road where they were loaded onto Yaks for the three day journey to the site. Trained masons hiked over the mountain passes from the Charpurson Valley in Pakistan. A truck laden with cement, roof beams and other heavy construction material drove across Tajikistan to an old Soviet tank trail leading south toward a lake in Kirghiz. To get permission for the truck to cross Tajikistan, border commander Wohid Khan agreed to personally accompany the truck. From the lake, more Yaks and men transported the heavy materials the final 15 miles to the building site. Greg considers this his last best school even though illness has prevented him from seeing it. In fact fate has twice prevented Greg from entering Kirghiz. But after 10 long years, he has finally kept his promise.

For those wanting a good introduction of this region this book is one of the best. Greg furnishes a series of maps but it is hard to grasp the impact of all those massive mountain ranges. For a while Safran shuttled overland between Kashmir and the Wakhan Corridor to supervise his various building projects. Although the bird flight distance is only 200 miles. Safran needed to cross three different mountain ranges. For two he could drive CAIs 28 year old Land Cruiser across but for the third, into the Wakhan, he used his horse. His first horse died of exhaustion in 2006 and he acquired a new horse which is pictured in the book (They mistakenly identify the horse in the picture as the one who died, probably in the rush to publish. There are a few nonsense sentences in the book as well.). The most startling of the maps shows the ethnic distribution of the area (Pakistan and Afghanistan). There are 18 distinct ethnic groups shown here, one of which is “other” which implies there are even more groups. With the mountains and the ethnic diversity no wonder everyone is confused.

For an account of how the boundaries defining the various countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan came to be and why Kashmir ended up in India (none of which has very much to do with ethnic boundaries) read the untold story of India’s Partition the tragedy that set off the chain of events leading to our current state. The “Great Game” between Russia and England, which contributed to the partition and boundaries predates the Cold War by a hundred years.

For a recent history of Afghanistan, the Soviet occupation, the CIA (Charlie Wilson’s War) and Pakistani intelligence backing of the Afghan mujahedin, followed by the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet pullout giving rise to the Taliban read Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars.

The Places In Between, Rory Stewart, 2006

I first discovered the Scotsman Rory Stewart on the Bill Moyer’s Journal. Rory Stewart is now director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Lynn Sherr introduced Stewart as advisor to both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke. The following is a small part of the transcript:

LYNN SHERR: What do you tell them?

RORY STEWART: Again, my message is: focus on what we can do. We don’t have a moral obligation to do what we can’t. People can get very fixed by saying, “But surely you’re not saying we ought to do nothing? Surely you’re not saying we ought to allow the Taliban to do this or that?” And I just keep saying “ought” implies “can”– you don’t have a moral obligation to do what you can’t do.

LYNN SHERR: How is your advice taken?

RORY STEWART: I think what I see at the moment is that people are polite, because they imagine maybe I have some experience with Afghanistan. But I’m one of a broad community of people — we have nine people working in my center at Harvard who’ve worked there for 20 or 30 years and the problem we all have is that if the Administration has for some reason already decided that they’re going to increase troops, they’re going to do a counterinsurgency campaign, it’s very difficult for them to take on board people coming back and saying, “Look, actually, I don’t think this is going to work. It’s a great idea. I can see why you want to do it. But by trying to do the impossible, you may end up doing nothing. I’d like to present an alternative strategy, which is lighter, more intelligent, and may end up actually achieving something.”

LYNN SHERR: And again, their reaction? They listen politely, you say?

RORY STEWART: They listen politely, but in the end, of course, basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: it’s as though they come to you and they say, “We’re planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?” And we say, “Don’t drive your car off the cliff.” And they say, “No, no, no. That decision’s already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?” And you say, “Why by all means wear a seatbelt.” And they say, “Okay, we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart,” et cetera.

So much for being an expert today.

Rory Stewart’s biography sounds like fiction. Born in Hong Kong in 1973, he was educated at Eton and Oxford. He was tutor to Prince Harry and Prince William. In the 90’s he joined the Secret Intelligence Service and served in the embassy in Jakarta dealing with East Timor. He was next appointed British representative to Montenegro dealing with Kosovo.

Rory Stewart in Afghan garb with Mastiff Babur

This book recounts a small part of an amazing walking journey historian Rory Undertook over 20 months to recreate the 1514 journey of Babur (descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan) from Samarkand, Uzbekistan to Kabul which he conquered. By 1527 Babur had conquered all of Northern India establishing the Mogul dynasty with Agra his capital.

Rory spent 16 months walking from Iran to Nepal. The government of Iran took his visa away and he was refused entry to Afghanistan by the Taliban so he resumed his journey in Pakistan, crossing to Katmandu where, in December 2001, he heard that the Taliban had fallen, so he returned to Herat to pick up his journey from Herat to Kabul. Babur had made his journey through the mountains in the dead of winter and Rory seemed to find the prospect of doing the same thing in 2002 appealing. U.N. workers called him “a nutter” for his walk which he took as a complement.

This book recounts the kind of travel that is far more common in Europe than in America. Herman Hesse in Narcissus and Goldmund describes a young man wandering around medieval Germany indicating that this coming of age European “Walkabout” has been a tradition for a long time. Overland trips from Europe to India and Nepal by motorcycle, van, and bus were common in the 1960s and 1970s but with the Iranian Revolution and Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 such journeys died down. A recent German biopic, Eight Miles High, of Uschi Obermaier features a three year trip with boyfriend adventurer Dieter Bockhorn by customize bus from Germany to India in 1973. Their adventure lasted three years and was highlighted by their wedding, complete with elephants, in India. God seems to protect the young and naive which is why most young travelers, despite taking crazy risks, seem to come through relatively unscarred by the experience.

As if walking through the mountains alone in the dead of winter were not enough challenge, Rory somehow acquires a dog, a half wild, uncared for 140 pound mastiff of indeterminate age that he names Babur. So not only does he have to beg for food and shelter in each village for himself, he must find food and shelter for his huge dog in a culture where dogs are considered unclean. A boy who is in training to become a mullah informs Rory that the Koran declares dogs to be unclean. When Rory asks to see the passage, the boy says he doesn’t know where it is. “But haven’t you memorized the entire Koran in your studies? Yes, but it is written in Arabic and I don’t understand Arabic.” Like Roman Catholics who loved the Latin mass they cannot understand, this boy has memorized the entire Koran without understanding anything in it. In many villages he has to fight off with his walking stick packs of dogs sent by children to harass him and his dog.

The journey itself is pretty bleak. Rory walks in sub zero temperatures, through blizzards with zero viability, fighting to forge a path through waist deep snow, and trying to break through thick ice to reach drinking water. Through the first half of his trek, he follows the Hari Rud river, climbing to its source. In Herat, Rory collects a series of letters of introduction which he hopes will result in offers of hospitality along his route. This plan is quickly dashed as a village headman demands the letters (for his own use) and Rory discovers that the local head men are mostly illiterate so cannot write much less read such letters. He falls back on an oral tradition where he recounts the list of men who have recently offered him hospitality and memorizes the names of important men he is likely to meet at the next villages. To make life more miserable Rory suffers from constant dysentery and headaches. He tries to document his travels by writing in his journal, sketching people he meets (some are reproduced in the book) and taking very dark black and white film photographs in which the features of people pictured can hardly be made out.

From Herat he is accompanied by two security soldiers who are ordered to walk with him halfway to Kabul. Both are wearing American camouflage overalls and ill fitting boots which damage their feet. The leader is a congenital liar who introduces Rory as an Ukrainian (Soviet), American Spy, U.N. high official with millions to disperse to the local authorities. After the two start suffering from dysentery and foot sores, Rory is finally able to bribe them to leave him and they return to Herat. With the occasional local guide as part of local hospitality, Rory completes his walk largely on his own.

Minaret at Jam

Rory comes to the ancient city of Jam, destroyed by Genghis Khan. A lone minaret remains of what was once a major trading center. In the 1970s professional archeologists were busy excavating the historic city but the Soviet invasion forced them to leave and they have never returned. Rory encounters hundreds of local villagers randomly digging throughout the ruins looking for any artifacts which they will be able to sell to collectors for $1 or $2 dollars.

Rory’s route took through all four major ethnic groups making up Afghanistan. The Pashtun posed the biggest threat to Rory’s trek. When he asks village elders who they want to lead a new Afghanistan they invariably start by naming their local strongman. When Rory persists, they all mention Ahmed Shah Massoud the Tajiks fighter assassinated by al Qaeda. When he asks their opinion of Hamid Karzai, the most remote villagers immediately respond that Karzai is America’s puppet.

Stewart encounters more U.N. and other aid workers and writes one the best accounts of this new breed that I have seen anywhere (as a footnote):

Critics have accused this new breed of administrators as neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth century colonial officer. Colonial administration may have been racist and exploitative, but they did, at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation.They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographic societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny.

Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are not credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, or oppression.

Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan… A year before they had been in Kosovo or East Timor and a year later they would be in Iraq or offices in New York and Washington.

Murad Khane District of Kabul

A year after his Afghan trek, Rory Stewart was appointed Coalition (civilian) Deputy Governor of Maysan and Senior Adviser in Dhi Qar, two provinces in southern Iraq. From this experience he penned his second book The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq. For this he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire at age 31. In 2005, he founded an NGO, the Turquoise Mountain Foundation and spends much of his time in Afghanistan. Chalk one up for the neocolonialists.

The Predator State, James K. Galbraith, 2008

James Galbraith’s father John Kenneth Galbraith (The New Industrial State 1967), in 2006 from his deathbed, suggested that James write this book. It was published in the spring of 2008 before the total meltdown of the financial system threw the economy into a downward spiral whose bottom we have yet to see.

The Keynsian Johns

Both Galbraiths are Keynesian economists, those forgotten guys. The basic tenet of Keynesian economics is that only aggressive government policy can stabilize the economy which is otherwise subject to massive swings, creating enormous problems such as run away inflation, failing financial institutions, failing corporations, and massive unemployment. But, hey, today everyone in Washington is a Keynesian, right? After forty years of Chicago school dominance, Keynes is back.

James Galbraith outlines a history of the world economy starting with the Bretton Wood Conventions following WWII which established the U.S. economy and the gold backed dollar as the standard on which all foreign currencies would be based. The breakdown of this system, started when Nixon went off the gold standard and allowed the dollar to float, provides the backdrop to a consideration of the major economic theories of the conservatives advanced to fill the void left by the abandonment of Bretton Wood; monetarism, supply side economics (with trickle down), balanced budgets, and free trade. Even the Democrats became advocates of balanced budgets and free trade.

One by one Galbraith exposes these theories to be false with no empirical evidence. Unlike Kline’s Shock Doctrine, which portrays Milton Friedman and his colleges as co conspirators in a massive transfer of wealth, Galbraith, who remains friends with some conservative economists, views them as benignly misdirected, living in their ivory towers where they consistently ignore the facts.

While the Presidents from Reagan through Clinton felt the need to incorporate conservative economists into their administrations to give a veneer of academic respectability, George W Bush felt no such need and simply appointed cronies who poured the public coffers directly into the pockets of lobbying client firms without any resort to economic theoretic justification.

Today there is open discussion of the role of Alan Greenspan in the current crisis. There is no corresponding discussion or remembrance of the role of his predecessor, Paul Volcker, who held interest rates at rates as high as 20%, ruining the economies in much of Africa, Asia, and Latin America who had borrowed heavily from the Chicago school dominated IMF who insisted on shock therapy changes as a condition of their loans. Unsurprisingly the struggling countries were unable to pay off the loans at the new extortionary levels. This led to a collapsed overseas markets for American products and to greatly strengthening the dollar, permanently weakening steel and auto production in the US as it was unable to compete with cheaper products from Germany and Japan. Galbraith points out that inflation is another thing economists are unable to understand or control. It seems to appear and disappear out of nowhere.

Galbraith attributes the fall of the Soviet Union largely to their inability of pay off their massive loans in an environment of super high interest. The rise of China and India as an economic powers was made possible precisely because they did not borrow heavily from the IMF or adopt shock therapy.

What actually ended inflation in 1984 was the incoming flood of foreign investments looking for high returns from the interest rates and the stability of the American government. It had nothing to do with monetarism, the supposed justification for the extortionary interest rates. Yet, worryingly, this same Volcker has been named to the new Obama economic team, presumably because of his “expertise” in fighting inflation. Lord, save us from the experts.

One concept, that of the free economy, Galbraith points out is without any meaning at all except perhaps to very large multinational corporations, yet all politicians who hope to be successful must pay lip service to it just as they must attend church even though they may be atheists. In the real world, free markets are so rare, they are almost non existent.

Galbraith points out when the Japanese real estate and financial bubble burst throwing that country into a decade long stagnation:

This dimmed the luster of the Japanese model for American observers, even as they largely overlooked the obvious point: there is evidently no development path that an unfettered, liberated, free capital asset market cannot screw up.

On the relationship between full employment (deemed by conservative economists to be inflationary and therefore bad) and wage inequality, Galbraith demonstrates, as do all Keynesians, that full employment, such as is enjoyed in Denmark, actually leads to greater wage equality, not less, and there is no evidence that full employment is inflationary.

Getting into the book’s central theme, he then makes some original observations along the lines of the Black Swan phenomenon. The big dominant corporations such as ATT and IBM lost their technological leadership to small startup entrepreneurs who were funded by new venture capital and equity raising wall street firms. The founders of these firms in Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, and other technology hubs overnight became extremely wealthy together with their supporting financial institutions.

Traditional companies became dependent on technology from outside rather than developing it internally and the CEOs of these traditional companies became extremely envious of the great wealth of these new technology usurpers. The CEOs formed closed groups, gained control of boards of directors, and demanded and received compensation and bonuses to close the gap with their entrepreneurial counterparts at levels unsustainable by the companies they ran. In a word, these CEOs became predators, preying on the companies they supposedly were leading (down the drain).

Unmanned Predator RQ-1

This group did not come from within their companies but were outsiders with little technical knowledge of the company. Their primary justification for their compensation was that they had been CEO of other firms where they were paid outrageously. As a new and small elite, they became predators, feeding off and destroying stockholder value and even whole companies as they competed with other CEOs to maximize their own compensation. They measured their own success and worth, not by the success of the companies they were failing to lead, but by their accumulation of personal wealth. Where did this loot go? Not into the productive economy, but into private mansions and conspicuous consumption.

Galbraith attributes the decline of the modern American industrial system studied by his father to:

These four phenomenon — the rise of trade, the reassertion of financial power (wall street and venture capital), the outsourcing of technological development, and the ascendancy of an oligarchy in the executive class — … had dramatic effects on American industrial corporations, on the way they are run, and on their broadly declining position in the world.

On the need for and desirability of regulation:

…Regulation helps the competitive position of relatively advanced businesses, by reducing or even eliminating the competition from backward enterprises that offset higher production posts with less safe factories and products and will lower wage bills.

Unfortunately for America the advanced “better” businesses of today are often offshore like the Japanese automakers.

Galbraith considers the rise of predator executives not to be a part of the normal process of growing wealth disparity, but a separate and more pernicious phenomenon. Not satisfied to raid and bankrupt their firms, this group set out to control and dominate the government and its apparatus as well. They are not normal conservatives, desiring a smaller government; they want a strong government, led by an imperial executive branch, in position turn a blind eye to regulation, to privatize as many government functions as possible with extortionary contracts, but also to be ready to bail them out when their destructive practices bankrupt their companies. By controlling government, they can minimize governments regulatory oversight that may interfere with their predatory practices while assuring that the government is ready with contracts and bailouts when needed. Hence the phenomena of Cheney turning the executive, and Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, and Jack Abramoff turning the congress into the arms of the new predator state.

Predator State

…it is fair to say that the very concept of a public purpose is alien to, and denied by the leaders and operatives of this coalition.

Modern corporate decision-making structures exist … to permit senior executives to do what they want… This is the culture that Richard Cheney brought back into government… The operational result is a government by cliques operating in secret, indeed with their very membership unknown outside…We have instead (of checks and balances) a government public relations apparatus whose purpose is not to persuade but to deflect, deter, and frustrate inquiry into the operation of the government…It fills the courts with functionaries who are prepared to act as enablers for the executive branch.

But if the government is predatory, then it too will fail in every substantial way (just like the corporations). Government will not cope with global warming, or with Hurricane Katrina, or the occupation of Iraq, or Election Day chaos, or avian influenza, or nuclear weapons…Failure on that scale is not due to incompetence. It is intended. Inside government no one cares. The attention of the people in charge is focused on other goals (acquiring massive personal wealth).

So, can the predator state be turned around under an Obama Presidency to tackle current problems like global warming, broken health care, a financial meltdown taking more and more companies with it? Galbraith hopes so but recognizes how broken government is, how far down the predator path we have gone.

Galbraith ends with discussions of the need for reestablished regulation and the re institution of utilities where free markets do not exist (like California and Texas electric power), the need for massive new levels of government planning and investment to rebuild infrastructure, provide public services like education and health care, and to tackle really tough problems like CO2 emissions and global warming. He pleads for the reestablishment of standards for safety, working conditions, minimum and maximum income and the environment. We also clearly need new standards for financial markets and energy and global trade. Galbraith remains confident that America will be able to pay for all these reforms and recover its global leadership position as an innovative, moral, economic power.

This book is a compact 200 pages. It would have been helpful to provide more detail and facts to debunk the conservative’s economic theories, but maybe Galbraith thought too much detail would discourage readers.

McMafia, Misha Glenny, 2008

This well researched look at global criminal empires highlights the darker side of the Chicago School’s Shock Doctrine. When the Chicago boys set out to massively transfer the worlds wealth into the hands of a few oligarchs, they simultaneously undermined state apparatus of regulation and control and brought about the most massive increase in organized crime in human history. The increase was not only in scale but in violence and capability as former secret police and world class martial arts athletes found themselves in need of new employment. The pinnacle of this worldwide movement was reached under Yeltsin who moved control of vast reserves of oil and natural gas to his handful of oligarchs. Realizing they needed protection that the state could no longer provide, the oligarchs turned to private organized criminal elements, who for 10% of the profits, were very effective at protecting the fortunes of the new Billionaires. Overnight, criminal organization found themselves rolling in wealth undreamed of by earlier criminal elements. Enter the Billionaire godfathers. Clearly this great wealth could not be left lying around the highly unstable financial institutions of the shocked states and Reagan and Thatcher come to their rescue deregulating the world’s financial institutions allowing movement and laundering of mind boggling Billions through places as diverse as Switzerland, Dubai, Tel Aviv, and tiny South Pacific Islands. Now needing to be able to travel anywhere in the world, Russian mobsters rushed to become Israeli citizens so they could get widely accepted Israeli passports. Even non Jewish Russians joined the rush to get a passport. So gratful were the Russian mob bosses to Israel, they jointly agreed not to engage in criminal behavior inside Israel as long as Israel continued to launder their Billions.

We start our tour in the Balkans where the mobs were cooperating fully through multiple wars and ethnic strife, even smuggling goods and people directly through the front lines of the wars. Moving to the Crimean Sea, he notes that the breakup of the Soviet Union and loss of control is now endangering the Sturgeon as Moscow’s new Billionaires gorge on caviar. A tiny sliver of Moldova, Transnistria split into an independent criminally dominated country. The Russian fourteenth army and its vast arsenal were located in this area and chose to stay in the new state providing arms and force to ensure the independence of the new state. Putin has called Transnistria the black hole and it is one of the biggest arms sources in the world. Most people have left the tiny country which boasts a world class soccer team than performs at home before 4,000 fans.

Dubai

In India we discover that Bombay (Mumbai) is the organized crime capital which has assumed control over Bollywood. The mob bosses used to live in Dubai where they can be protected from the police and rival gangs, but a recent crackdown has sent them to Pakistan where the ISS Pakistani intelligence provides them shelter and training. From Pakistan they are free to launch attacks into India.

In Japan we learn the integral roll of the yakuza in Japanese society. They were centrally involved with the Zaibatsu and the big banks in the 80s real estate bubble but received primarily blamed when the bubble burst. The yakuza’s biggest problem today is aging and the inability to recruit young Japanese men to join them. They are forced to subcontract much of their dirty work to the Chinese tongs or Korean gangsters.
China is feared throughout Asia. Its primary current contribution to global crime is their ability to copy and reproduce virtually anything up to and including ersatz Mercedes automobiles.

Medellin Columbia

South Africa leads organized crime in the continent. In Latin America Columbia is still a big supplier of cocaine to the world, shipping via Mexico into North America, and via Brazil into Europe. Brazil is particularly attractive because of its trained chemists and local access to virtually any chemical needed in production.
The US war on drugs has done more to perpetuate the global market for narcotics than any program in history. The only thing holding back growth of heroin and cocaine whose prices are dropping is the ready availability of synthetic drugs like ecstasy and methamphetamine (the drug of choice in Asia). Instead of regulating and taxing narcotics, governments are spending vast revenue in the hopeless effort to reduce of eliminate it. Any seizure or arrest leads to the immediate filling of the vacuum by new criminals and new shipments of the drug.
The trend toward globalization and domination by multinational corporations has blurred the distinctions between the legal and illegal. Is it any more legal for corporations to move money offshore to avoid taxation than for mobs to launder their money? Does the scramble to protect property rights give the rights to multinational corporations to patent plants and herbal cures that have been known to places like China and India for thousands of years? Does a patent give the right to a corporation to deny medication to those who can’t afford it?

Somehow the author is able to interview many of these underworld leaders and he seldom misses the local brothels.

Common Wealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet, Jeffrey D. Sachs, 2008

End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs

We last met Jeffrey Sachs in Shock Doctrine and the PBS series Commanding Heights where he gained notoriety for advising nations throughout Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union in the largest transfers of wealth to private and often foreign hands in human history. From these introductions, we would naturally associate Sachs with the Chicago School and neo-liberal movements. So it is refreshing to see Sachs here as Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University (alma-mater of Kissinger and Greenspan) advocating massive and coordinated government programs to tackle the monumental problems of global warming, environmental damage and species extinction, population control education food supply health care, poverty, clean fresh water supply, sustainable energy supply.

He is very aware of the wrong footed long term foreign policy of the United States, referencing Legacy of Ashes and adopting the term Blowback from Chalmers Johnson. He references Jared Diamond and like Diamond, Sachs is an optimist, and like Diamond, the litany of massive problems addressed is enough to depress anyone. Where does all this optimism come from?

Sachs is very smart, becoming the youngest Professor in Harvard history but the surprise in this book is how well and clearly he organizes and writes. He makes an excellent case that big changes can be made with modest (relative to the U.S. defense budget) investment, using existing technologies and proven techniques of implementation. Imagine what would happen if serious investments were made in new technologies.

Some examples and highlights. Two human activities that provide little income to the participants but have a devastating impact on the environment are deforestation and fishing (particularly bottom net fishing). If those involved were paid modest sums not to cut trees or fish, the improvements in the environment would have economic value in huge multiples of the amount spent.

Preindustrial CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 280 ppm and are 380 ppm today. The international community have set a goal of stabilizing CO2 at no higher than 560 ppm. Two changes alone; sequestering CO2 emissions from power and industrial plants, and converting the world’s auto fleet to hybrid-plug-in technology would stabilize CO2 at 488 ppm by 2050.

In addition to extensive water world wide pollution, global climate change is having a dramatic impact on water through melting glaciers and ice caps and changing rain patterns. Ground water is being rapidly depleted and water problems will lead to conflicts since water requirements of many nations originate in other nations, for example, Bangladesh which gets most of its water from India.

We know how to control population growth with governmental educational and health support systems. Education, health, and ending poverty will bring population stability to all countries of the world. Poverty and population growth lead to conflicts, wars, and genocide. Spending money to end poverty, improve health and education will improve national security for the U.S. that defense expenditures cannot. Defense moneys need to be diverted to these positive activities. Sachs highlights the relationships between large percentages of young men in poor countries with high unemployment and food shortages and violence. He specifically points to Afghanistan and Darfur as places with exceptionally high percentages of young men where military solutions are impossible without addressing the fundamental problem of poverty.

He doesn’t address one troubling trend, in China, where the cultural preference for boy babies is leading to an entire generation where boys vastly outnumber girls. I guess he hopes that China’s continued economic growth will somehow absorb this problem without leading to unusual violence.

Sachs explicitly rejects the Invisible Hand of Chicago School fantasy. On the contrary, Sachs delineates the six kind of essential governmental intervention:

The first is help for the destitute …so that the poor can stay alive, meet basic needs, and step onto the ladder of development… The second is the public provision of key infrastructure (roads, ports, and airports, power, telecommunications, and broadband connectivity, all of which are required by the private sector in order to flourish) as well as other public goods such as infectious disease control and environmental management… The third is the provision of a sound business environment, including monetary stability, protection of property rights, contract enforcement, and openness to international trade. The fourth is the provision of social insurance, to ensure that all parts of the population can maintain their economic security and well-being in the face of inevitable economic dislocations. The fifth is the promotion and dissemination of modern science and technology…. The sixth is proper stewardship of the natural environment.

Millennium Project

Sachs was director of the UN Millennium Project under Kofi Annan. In this program, 78 villages across Africa were selected to demonstrate that coordinated efforts in education, health care, agriculture, and infrastructure can lift villages out of poverty and into sustainable economic growth. Each village of approximately 5,000 population were allocated aid totaling $120 per person of which external donors provided $60, the host government provided $30, $10 in kind (labor) from villagers, and $20 from other partners such as NGOs. The success of these carefully coordinated and monitored programs show how effective and inexpensive it is to attack the problems of poverty. Sachs appeals to the US to divert even a small portion of its defense budget, say, from nuclear arms development, into a global poverty program. Military solutions clearly don’t work to provide security, so why not solve the world wide poverty problem and see what the impact would be on security? Currently, the US spends 2 days of military budget per year equivalent on health and poverty programs. Sachs estimates the worldwide required worldwide annual budget to implement Millennium Projects everywhere at $245 Billion or 0.7 % of total developed world income. The U.S. currently spends more than twice this total amount on defense alone.

Electrical Consumption

Sachs attacks neo-liberal spread falsehoods that Western Europe, Japan, and the Asian Tigers were able to achieve their remarkable economic growth without foreign aid. Starting with the WWII Marshall Plan, all currently successful economies were put on the road to sustainability through massive foreign aid. And the money spent has been returned many fold through the resulting successes. It worked well in the past, the Millennium Projects has demonstrated that coordinated efforts will work in the poorest villages on earth, so why aren’t the developed nations rushing to offer assistance?

Sachs demonstrates that social welfare economies such as those in Scandinavia, have been even more successful economically, with higher standards of living, higher growth, and higher R&D investment than free-market economies like the United States. They accomplish all this and still are able to provide a social network of protection, universal health care, retirement security, excellent education, and high employment with the government acting as employer of last result hiring people to serve as care givers, child care providers, and other essential social tasks that are not provided under free-market economies. To the critics that point out that Scandinavia has a largely homogeneous population so people are caring for their own kind, Sachs reminds us that these same countries are also the largest providers of foreign poverty aid in the world. Their populations seem to have no trouble caring for people of very different cultures and ethnicity worldwide. In other words, the argument that social welfare somehow interferes with economic performance and growth is simply wrong.

Muhammad Yunis Receives Nobel Prize

Finally Sachs gives some modern philanthropists and NGOs their due. He points out that the Rockefeller Foundation was largely responsible for the Green Revolution that increased agricultural food production in India starting in the 1960s. He praises Muhammad Yunis for inventing micro finance and founding the Grameen Bank to give very small loans to women without a credit history so they can start small scale businesses. This community based lending has proven amazingly able to life people and communities out of poverty and into sustainable growth. The idea is not spreading throughout the world. He gives praise to the Gates Foundation and to the donations from Warren Buffet which allows the foundation to invest in the development of products for health care, telecommunications, and other areas needed by poor places where the free market would not be interested. He asks what if the 950 world billionaires pooled their $3.5 Trillion like Gates and Buffet? At 5% yield, that sum would produce $1.75 Billion annually, enough to make a huge dent in world poverty. Dream on. He even manages to find a good word for a few pharmaceutical companies, like Merck, that have been persuaded to stratify their markets so they can offer the newest drugs at cost to the poorest places on earth while maintaining their prices to the developed world. This has now evolved to the point where fragile but growing places like Brazil can be offered prices somewhere between cost and high developed prices. He uses this as evidence that even greedy corporate managers can be induced to do the right thing for the poor. The jury is still out on that one, but give Sachs credit for being the eternal optimist.

Melinda and Bill Gates
Buffet and the Gates

Oil on the Brain, Lisa Margonelli, 2007
Margonelli takes a three year journey to try to understand the complex and critical resource oil. Her ventures take her places few journalist have been, probably as much due to her lack of obvious agenda as much as her persistence and persuasiveness. She did not set out to establish that oil reserves are vastly exaggerated, that exploration technologies are unlikely to uncover vast new reserves, that oil companies are in a vast conspiracy to drive up prices and realize record products. She honestly set out to learn as much about the oil industry as she could learn, wherever that might take her.

The result is a slow start at her local independent gas station on Twin Peaks San Francisco which stays in business largely due to impulse purchases from its mini mart. She rides a fuel delivery truck working out of an independent distribution point in San Jose which buys its product from different sources delivered to it via pipeline. She learns that gas is a uniform product that is differentiated with branded additives put in as the last moment. Even color is added to identify non taxed fuel to be used off road such as by farmers.

BP Carson

She visits BP’s refinery in Carson, near Long Beach, now surrounded by suburbia. She tries to understand why no new refineries have been built for 50 years despite existing refineries continuous full capacity operation. She gets a glimpse of the enormous scale and complexity and continuous evolution of the refinery process as ever more product is squeezed out of crude oil, and of the great variety of crude oil from sweet light to almost tar that must be reduced to a common set of products. She also experiences, first hand, the dangers of the refinery when a partial power failure occurs (an accident at a BP plant in Texas killed a number of workers). She discovers that any interruption of operation has an instant impact on prices, the most notable example being the shutdown in production caused by hurricane Katrina in the gulf states.

She meets one of the last Texas wildcatters who dies while the book is in process and discovers that the new natural gas explorers are accountants, extremely averse to risk and who use MBAs to squeeze productivity by reduced job security, minimum benefits, and reduced wages and salaries just like all other modern American corporate enterprises.

SPR

She talks her way into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) that she likens to Fort Knox in the days of America’s gold standard, an object of endless fascination, imagination, and speculation. She idly wonders why a movie like Goldfinger doesn’t exist for the SPR. The reality is that any Presidential move to add or take away oil from the SPR has an immediate and exaggerated impact on the NYMEX spot market price. But the SPR actually represents a very small cushion of a few months supply at most and if called on in a real emergency cannot deliver oil to the markets very fast due to the limits of its pipelines. In reality, the refineries use the SPR as a hedge so they can limit their crude oil inventories. They regularly “borrow” oil from the SPR if their own inventory is exhausted and “pay back” oil when they can afford to out of inventories. In other words, the SPR is a publically funded store to be used by the refineries as they see fit.

She visits NYMEX and talks to industry experts about pricing. OPEC began in the 1970s as a cartel of oil producing nations who would set quotas of production in an attempt to control supply and hence keep oil prices high. It never worked very well and individual members would cheat whenever it suited their own short term needs The main impact of OPEC seems to have been to greatly exaggerate oil reserves so the member states would have a high basis for their quota. These non existent reserves are the subject of Oil Twilight which doubts the middle east has the vast reserves most analysts assume. Now, with non OPEC states such as Russia becoming an increasing portion of world supply and with the emergence of NYMEX as a worldwide price setter, OPEC no longer has much control over prices, if they ever did. Instead, today, the worldwide increases in demand for oil, led by China and India, combined with the inability of oil producing states to dramatically increase production, has led to a permanently tight market for oil and ever increasing prices. NYMEX is a very sensitive gauge of world oil affairs, overreacting to every little outbreak of violence or instability in an oil producing state whether in Africa (Nigeria), Venezuela, or the middle east. The New York analysts she interviewed believe this is a permanent state and that prices will no longer fall like they once did. Only a dramatic lowering of demand could ever cause prices to fall such as the increased mileage of American cars for a few years after Carter’s oil crisis in 1979. As to the record oil company profits, she points out that Congress investigates the industry for collusion and gouging every time prices go up but never find evidence of wrong doing. Making a profit, after all, is capitalisms highest goal and achievement. She doesn’t take this discussion very far and never really gets into the subject of record profits.

As an aside, I have never understood why a resource so critical to the economy as a whole is not treated in this country as a regulated utility that provides total transparency and requires regulatory approval in order to raise prices. Whatever happens behind the closed doors, the record profits are there for all to see and the main benefactors seem to be the oil executives. There is virtually no evidence beyond superficial (and cheap) PR exercises that the oil companies are putting these record profits to a use that might actually benefit the world as a whole. They certainly have a negative impact on every other aspect of the economy. Both Nixon and Carter attempted price controls of gas at the pump but each time, the oil companies retaliated by limiting supply, creating long lines and furious public backlash against the Presidents, not against the oil companies. There is some evidence that huge pension-funds backed speculators are currently manipulating the oil futures market to drive the price of crude oil ever higher. Some predict that a bubble is forming that when it bursts could devastate several pension funds. If true, these oil gamblers are devastating economies around the world in search of selfish short term profits, and recklessly risking the critical retirement funds of its members. Are we looking at Enron redo?

She then travels to oil producing regions of the world starting with Venezuela which is an old timer, having started production in the 1920s. She notes that the Dutch disease, coined by the Dutch in the 1960s to describe the loss of manufacturing and exports to any nation with major natural resource exports has been known to Venezuela for a long time. This is also known as oil’s curse. She highlights another critical factor in all oil producing states, the changing relationship between the government and its citizens as oil revenue replaces taxes as the major source of government funding. Whether the government is “democratic”, a monarchy, or a military dictatorship, the presence of oil comes to dominate the relationship between the rulers and the ruled. This dominance is obvious and central to both. The state is relieved on needing to set and collect taxes from the public as the public is freed from paying those taxes. The public comes to expect some benefit from the oil revenues and the government usually complies by supplying very cheap gas for cars (19 cents a gallon in Venezuela). Beyond cheap gas, services for the public seems to break down, probably because the human infrastructure needed to effectively deliver such services never develops. Oil producing state governments are all corrupt. The only competent sector of the economy is the oil producing sector with its trained engineers, managers, and accountants. Chavez is testing the bounds of this competency by firing 25,000 oil personnel following the failed coup attempt in 2002. Can Venezuela sustain its productivity without the services of its trained oil oligarchy?

She next travels to Chad, a military dictatorship thinly disguised as a democratically elected government. Chad was very poor and very backward before Exxon and the World Bank invested $3.7 billion to develop an oil field and pipeline to the coast across Cameroon. The president/dictator claims to have signed the oil contract without reading it. While in Nigeria the state realizes 80% of oil revenues, Chad receives 28%. Knowing that the government was corrupt, Exxon and the World bank tried to create a third player, a “college” of educated citizens who would receive half the government oil revenue and could decide to spend it on schools, roads, hospitals, or any other public works. Once in place, the “college” was simply undermined by the president, who replaced the original members of the college with his cronies. Chad is now rated the most corrupt regime in the world. Chad’s citizens have gotten nothing from oil.

She visits Iran with rare to permission to visit some Persian Gulf oil platforms damaged or destroyed by the U.S. Navy during the Iraq-Iran war where the U.S. supplied arms to Iraq. She enumerates the long list of grievances Iran holds and remembers against the U.S. starting with the imposition of the “Shah”. This is a good reminder why Iranians don’t much like or trust the U.S. and why they are so intent on acquiring a nuclear weapon, after witnessing the invasion on non-nuclear Iraq while nuclear North Korea went untouched. She was struck by the geography of the Gulf and the number of disputes between the states over the British drawn borders (sound familiar? The British were still committing the same mistakes in the Partition of India). She was particularly struck by the narrow Strait of Hormuz through with 40% of the worlds oil passes. She points out that Iran can easily control this narrow strait military if they so desired. The U.S. navy’s constant presence in the gulf is probably an attempt to prevent such an occurrence.

Gulf Oil

She next and finally travels to oil producing Nigeria, where the delta has been the site of much pollution, violence, and suffering. The corrupt government of Nigeria is located elsewhere and normally buys off the rebel leaders when they cause too much havoc. Then things quiet down until a new charismatic rebel leader arises. She is struck by the education and articulateness of the unemployed Nigerians she meets, but for all their articulateness, they don’t make much sense and nothing ever seems to change. For their part, the oil companies wish the world would look to the Nigerian government rather than blame the oil companies for all the problems in the country. Regardless of who is to blame, Nigeria remains the source of much volatility in the price of oil.

Almost buried in the account of these travels, but confirmed, is the terrible role played by the IMF and World Bank explicated in some detail in The Shock Doctrine. The IMF particularly, insisted that governments cut back or eliminate social programs as a condition of their loans. Klein explains the Chicago School neocon rational for these requirements that would exacerbate the crisis and lead to privatization of state resources, hopefully into the hands of foreign owners. What we are seeing is a new form of capitalist imperialism, but the perpetrators have virtually no understanding of the enormous costs and consequences of their greedy and selfish actions.

Finally, Margonelli travels to China, the fastest growing new market for oil. She is astounded by the 100 year long term visions of Beijing’s leaders who continually talk of leapfrogging changes. They have enacted one of the strictest mileage requirements in the world and appear to be serious about alternate energy sources such as hydrogen fuel cells, hybrids, and all electrical vehicles. Unlike the west, China has very different requirements for performance of cars (acceleration, top speed, and driving range) so that golf cart like vehicles or even electric bicycles are very acceptable options. Unfortunately, an increasingly autonomous regional focus may undermine the advantages of long range central planning for pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and adaptation of alternate energy. For instance, gas guzzling large cars are banned in the big cities but Guangdong chooses to ignore the rule feeling that a successful entrepreneur should be free to show off his success however he wishes (sound familiar?).

Path Between the Seas, The Creation of the Panama Canal, David McCullough, 1977

French Excavator

Epic tale of the efforts of the French and Americans to create the long desired passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. President Grant sent survey teams to find the best route in 1870 but nothing further was done by the U.S. to attempt to build a canal. Instead, the French, following their engineering and financial success at Suez, raised private money under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lessep, hero of Suez, who insisted a sea level canal be built in Panama. The French effort was under-funded and plagued with problems, not least of which was disease. Further efforts to raise money failed and the company was thrown into bankruptcy. Scandals at the highest level were uncovered with newspaper payoffs and political bribes but only Charles Lessep, son of Ferdinand, and one other minor player were ever sent to jail. The effort ended in 1889.

Teddy Roosevelt became President in 1902 and immediately set out to build the canal. He left it to Congress to decide the best route, although Nicaragua was assumed to be favored. Enter Philip Bunau Varilla, a French engineer of the earlier French effort and influence peddler William Cromwell who set out to convince Congress that Panama was the better route and that the U.S. should buy the French assets including rail and digging excavators at $109 Million. When it appeared they would lose, the French lowered the price to $40 Million and TR became interested, thinking this purchase would speed the completion of a canal. Two volcanic eruptions, one on Martinique and one in Nicaragua convinced Congress to vote for Panama.

Secretary of State John Hay (former private secretary to Lincoln (star with Henry Adams of Gore Vidal’s Empire ) immediately negotiated a new canal treaty with Columbia but after months of delay, the Colombian Legislature rejected the treaty in spite of the offered $10 Million immediate payment. Bunau Varilla, with Hay and TR working behind the scenes engineered a coupe in Panama with American naval support (gun boat diplomacy) so that Columbia could not land troops to regain control. TR asked his Attorney General to construct a legal defense for his actions, but Attorney General Knox replied:

Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.

When TR trying out a defense during a cabinet meeting demanded “Have I defended myself?” Elihu Root responded:

You certainly have, Mr. President. You have shown that you were accused of seduction, and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.

TR at the Controls

Bunau Varilla was named special envoy to negotiate a canal treaty and Bunau Varilla wrote a draft totally favorable to the U.S. Hay recognized Panama as an independent country, signed the canal treaty and Congress ratified the treaty immediately. Panama hesitated to sign until Hay threatened to pull the navy back. The $10 Million went to JP Morgan to hold for Panama who invested most of it in New York real estate. The French got their $40 Million. McCollough reminds us that American Imperialism was largely the result of purchases (Louisiana, Alaska, Philippines) and was never considered to be imperialist as a consequence.

Heroes of Panama were William Gorgas who understood the role of mosquitoes as carriers of Yellow Fever and Malaria and who headed the health and sanitation efforts that came close to eradication these two killers. He had previously done the same in Cuba. John Stevens had built the Great Northern railway, discovering the Marias pass and the Stevens pass, giving the Great Northern the lowest elevation trans continental route. Stevens immediately saw that the keys to Panama were eradication of disease and building railroads capable of hauling the excavation debris away from the cuts. He spent a couple years building housing, hospitals, harbors, and railroads before any major excavation could start. He resigned at this point.

Colonel George Goethels of West Point was then appointed as the virtual dictator of Panama. TR knew that the military man would complete his mission and not resign.

Digging the Culebra Cut

The choice between a sea level and lock and lake canal was not made until 1907. The canal was designed then to accommodate the Titanic, the largest ship of the time. The locks were 1000 feet by 102 feet. The size of the canal was to dictate the maximum size of ships for decades including aircraft carriers of the navy. Only the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were too large for the canal. Modern oil tankers are far too large. The lock and lake design meant damming two rivers on the Atlantic and Pacific sides.

The dams had the side effect that electric power could be made available for everything in the canal zone and in the entire country. The canal pioneered electrical trains, locks, and much else. The Culebra Cut, a nine mile stretch at the highest elevation, was the biggest challenge given the massiveness of the cut and the continuous land slides. Even after the canal opened, slides would close the canal for months at a time.

The canal became a major tourist attraction while it was being built with hundreds of thousands of visitors. The canal opened simultaneously with the outbreak of WWI in 1914 and ceremonies were canceled. The first crossing was by one of canal’s own freight ships and was hardly noticed.

Club House

The physical and social structure of the canal zone comes in for detailed scrutiny with some suggesting the canal was actually a socialist system. It is probably more correct to look at the canal zone as a very large military base before the days of outsourcing with its rigid hierarchical structure and completely self contained infrastructure, even though most residents and workers were civilian and not military. In any event the canal zone was a model of efficiency virtually without corruption, nepotism, or fraud, a remarkable achievement. In this way, the canal zone stands as a shining beacon of American know how in sharp contrast to today’s Baghdad Green Zone where waste, nepotism, cronyism, fraud, and incompetence are the only way of life.

The Bin Ladens, Steve Coll. 2008

This book seems to be almost a companion volume to the author’s previous Ghost Wars. That book was the account of the struggle over Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia without any consideration to the possible interests of Afghanis. Now we have a partial history of the Yemeni Bin Laden family whose patriarch Mohamed Bin Laden learned his way into construction at the same time that Abdulaziz Ibn Saud was consolidating his control and unifying what would become the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Bin Laden family kept relationships with the royal house of Saud by being useful to them. Mohamed established relationships with Addulaziz and his two sons and successors King Saud and King Faisal.

Salem Bin Laden 1975

When Faisal and Saud asked Mohamed to mediate a dispute between them, Mohamed fained illness, explaining to his associates that the brothers Saud and Faisal would never hurt one another but anyone getting in the middle might well die. The Bin Ladens understood their place in order of things in a genealogically determined society. Mohamed’s sons and successors Salem and Bakr stayed close to king Fahd and were described by Coll as Concierges to the royal family. This is a polite way to put their role. Royal procurer is more apt. Still, the roles have paid off giving the Bin Ladens a steady stream of increasingly large construction contracts and they are among the wealthiest non royal families in Saudi Arabia.

This book gives a useful look at the tight family relationships of Arabs and the dictates of Islam as to multiple marriages (4 wives allowed – divorce is easy) inheritance (all sons get a share with daughters receiving a half share). For the Bedouin living on the edge of existence these rules allowed strong patriarchs to survive. In oil rich Saudi Arabia, it leads to an explosion of descendants (Mohamed had more than 50) and a population explosion.

The book is largely devoted to Mohamed’s oldest son Salem who became head of the Bin Laden family in 1967 when Mohamed died in a plane crash. Salem was educated in and comfortable with the west, a lover of aviation and of western women, and a popular party giver to the royal family. Extremely audacious, Salem is seen by the royal family as a kind of lovable, loyal court jester. In one instance, Salem bets King Fahd that he can propose to and marry his four western girl friends in one big get together in London. Salem loses the bet but later marries his British girl friend. He also dies in a plane crash in 1988. After Salem’s death, his British widow married a half brother of Salem to remain part of the Bin Laden family.

Mosque at Mecca and Prophet’s Mosque at Medina

The Bin Ladens, both Mohamed and his sons, got contracts for restoration work on the holy shrines in Mecca, Medina, and the Dome of the Rock Mosque in Jerusalem. From the beginning, revenue from the Hajj, the pilgrimage to the holy sites which is the lifelong dream of every Muslim, provided a significant source of revenue to the Kingdom. As the number of pilgrims exploded to more than 2 million annually, facilities had to be greatly enlarged and expanded. The Bin Ladens even installed the worlds largest York air conditioning in the mosques for the comfort of the pilgrims. Because infidels are not allowed near the holy sites, the machinery was located several miles away so maintenance workers could access the equipment. Of the Hajj Coll writes:

The pilgrims all arrived at the same time of year and all went to the same places, Medina and Mecca, and more or less simultaneously. They arrived, too, in a heightened state of spiritual awareness, if not longing or near-rapture. On this heavily preconceived yet richly emotional journey, millions of Muslims discovered and judged modern Saudi Arabia. It was a process about as reliable as the one by which Saudis discovered America through vacations in Disney World and west Los Angeles. But it was no less true of powerful, in either case, for being incomplete.
Well-educated, globally conscious Hajj pilgrims from poorer Muslim countries such as Egypt or India sometimes resented Saudi Arabia for two reasons; its garish, wasteful nouveau wealth, and its intolerant religious orthodoxy.

So where is Osama in this tale? It seems not much is known – knowable about him. Most of the information we have which finds its origins in American “Intelligence” is wrong. Osama is a younger son of Mohamed and a poor 15 year old Syrian girl Mohamed married probably to land a construction contract. He divorced her again within 3 years. Unlike his educated (both in Europe and America and the best schools in the middle east) brothers, Osama is a mediocre student with a Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) high school education. While in high school, he is targeted by the Muslim Brotherhood, probably because he is a member of the wealthy Bin Laden family. He never studies engineering but becomes a radicalized Muslim. When the brothers try to involve him in construction contracts in the holy cities, Osama proves to be a bad manager, and while quiet and polite, when he does talk, he seems to create friction and problems with his extreme religious views.

The family sends him off to Peshawar Pakistan to funnel charity donations to the Afghan cause during the Soviet occupation. Salem often acts as currier carrying bags of money for Osama to distribute. Osama wants to join the action and asks Salem for arms. Salem looks but is unclear what he finds for Osama. In Osama’s only significant military engagement on the Afghan border, 100 of his fighters are killed. While a military disaster, Osama films the whole thing and turns the result into a propaganda film with himself as star.

After the Soviet withdrawal, Osama returns to Saudi Arabia offending everyone in sight. He suggests to the royal family that they should allow Osama to raise an army to chase Sadam Hussain out of Kuwait rather than allow infidel Americans onto Saudi soil. The royal family tells the Bin Laden family to shut Osama up but they cannot so the Sauds pulled Osama’s passport and deport him. He chooses Sudan, one of the few countries willing to accept him. Bakr, now head of the Bin Laden family, sorts out inheritance issues in the family and Osama chooses $15 million in cash and small continued holdings in Bin Laden businesses.

Osama invests and loses most of this money in bad business deals in Sudan. Osama takes credit for blowing up two American embassies in Africa and the US pressures Sudan to exile Osama yet again. They do, and Osama returns to Afghanistan where he promises $10-20 million annually to the Taliban to give him asylum. It is unclear if he ever gave the Taliban financial support but he did build Mullah Omar a new family compound.

The idea for the plane bombing in the US probably originated with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the man who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Osama revised the plan to scale it back from 10 planes and to cast himself as the star.

Strangely, there is no mention of Osama’s health issues in this book. After 9/11, the American public was media fed the image of this tall guy running from cave to cave with a dialysis machine strapped to his back. Could Coll find no verifiable evidence of a health problem or did he simply think it wasn’t worth mentioning? Is this more evidence of invented intelligence like Osama’s wealth? Coll should have said something.

Both Mohamed and Salem Bin Laden died in plane crashes. Osama is unlikely to follow suit. American intelligence, after greatly exaggerating Osama’s Wealth ($300 million reported in the press up to $500 million) now set out to find the new sources of his money. This is a bit silly since the African embassy bombings are estimated to have cost only $10,000 and the 9/11 airline bombing to have cost only $100,000. Rich Saudis including Kings are known to drop several millions in a single night of gambling. The focus of this effort fell, of course, on the rest of the Bin Laden family. No connections or money flows have been discovered. The Bin Ladens continue to thrive in the construction business, being awarded a $1.6 billion contract for prisons in 2006. Osama has apparently not damaged the family reputation with the house of Saud.

This book, like Ghost Wars was hastily edited and is full of nonsense sentences and misspellings. Still, it gives a glimpse of Saudi Arabia, the house of Saud, and the role of the Bin Laden family within the kingdom. It is disappointing when it comes to Osama. Beyond debunking some of the false information about Osama, it sheds little light on this enigmatic, fanatical figure. We don’t understand him any better now than before.

Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic, Chalmers Johnson 2006

Asking whether the U.S. will go the way of Rome or of Britain who “voluntarily” divested itself of its empire, Johnson completes his doomsday trilogy (The Sorrows of Empire and Blowback). This volume, while published earlier, makes an excellent companion piece to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. Where Klein explicates the Chicago school-Adam Smith-Neocon creed explaining the intellectual basis and beliefs behind our bewildering current mess, Johnson provides the indisputable facts and figures of our current situation in condensed 280 very, very depressing pages.

Fort Baghdad Embassy

On Iraq, Johnson explains that the covert (i.e. real) reasons for the war were to secure permanent military bases in the Middle East and to secure a reliable source of oil. He says that the U.S. military will try to hold four military bases permanently in Iraq no matter what (perhaps in defiance of a new President?) including the green zone and airports where the U.S. has built hardened, permanent facilities and the world’s largest embassy on 104 acres built at a cost approaching $1 Billion. The green zone has its own power, water, and all utilities. Ironically the headquarters for the elected government of supposedly sovereign Iraq is located inside a U.S. fort! The other critical bases the U.S. military will hold onto are located next to the oil fields of course. He concurs with Klein that allowing the looting and destruction of priceless cultural artifacts and archaeological sites in Iraq was a deliberate act by the neocon Bush administration.

To tamp down violence in Iraq, at least until Bush is out of office, the military has resorted to bribing the different factions. FrontLine recently reported that Muqtada al-Sadr was given $300 million for assurances of a cease fire from his Shia Mahdi Army. That would have built a few schools and houses in New Orleans.

He notes that while Bush made the CIA the fall guys for the failure of intelligence leading to war with Iraq and largely dismantled the CIA intelligence gathering function, covert operations at the CIA are stronger than ever. He says that the intelligence role of the CIA has always been to tell the President what he wanted to hear, not to provide independent actual intelligence. He also points out that every President since Truman (i.e. since the founding of the CIA) has used the agency for covert operations. Add to the CIA covert operations, the black ops portion of the Defense Department budget and you have a huge well funded establishment beyond the scrutiny of the public or of Congress.

In Blowback, Johnson explained why various terrorist acts such as the African Embassy bombings, the Cole attack, and even 9/11 were in retaliation for U.S. activities the American people know nothing about because the U.S. acts are kept secret. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was passed in 1966. In 1974, in response of Nixon’s use of the CIA and FBI to spy on Americans, the FOIA was strengthened. Much of the information we have today about the secret activities of our government comes from the courts upholding FOIA requests. Even with extensive redacting (blacking out portions of the documents) much information can be gained from secret documents. The Bush administration first had a policy of complying as slowly as possible to FOIA requests and then instituted a prohibitive price of $372,999 for each search.

Until Bush, Presidential records were released to the public 12 years after the President leaves office. Bush changed this in 2001, just as key Reagan era documents were set to be released, perhaps to protect his father who escaped the Iran Contra mess largely unscathed. Now Presidential records will only be released when authorized by both the current sitting President and the former President, if still living.

Johnson gives a laundry list of countries (very long) where the CIA has interfered with, assassinated, or propped up authoritarian governments believed to be anti-Soviet. He details the CIA role in the 1973 overthrow of the democratically elected Allende of Chile and military takeover by the torturing dictator Pinochet. He also details the role of the CIA in funneling money and advanced weapons via Pakistan to the Muhajadin fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

CIA 737 leaves Majorca Spain – Protestors in Shannon Ireland
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The most entertaining (if this is the right word) portion of the book was his discussion of the activities of amateur plane spotters, whose hobby since WWII has been spotting and recording the activities of military and private aircraft around the world. The internet now provides an almost complete and accurate record of the landings of all private planes anywhere. When Sweden broke the story of a special rendition (arresting two Egyptian refugees and handing them over the CIA at a private airport to be flown to Egypt), this database was used to identify the plane used in the rendition and to trace the travels of this same plane throughout the world over time. The plane was owned by a fictitious company with fictitious owners but with a P.O. box near Langley. Once outed, the plane’s ownership and identification numbers were changed, but the plane could be instantly identified from its manufacturers identification number and the tracking continued. The entire fleet of CIA planes was identified in this way and with them a complete picture of renditions; which countries cooperated in the arrests; where the prisons were located; the magnitude of the effort. The CIA seems to have been totally oblivious to this amateur network and its worldwide resources. The network estimates the number of people grabbed as more than 3,000. The victims simply disappeared either to be killed or tortured for information. The outstanding work of this amateur network at outing CIA’s fleet and tracking renditions sounds like the material for a movie. The administration and CIA strongly believes they have stopped terrorist attacks in Europe and the U.S. with this program. That this activity violates the rights of many innocent individuals and violates the laws of virtually every nation involved doesn’t matter in the least. Hearing the term for the first time one wag said special rendition sounds like something Pavarotti would do before a small audience.

Johnson decries the growing insensitivity of Americans and its media to innocent civilians being slaughtered by our military in bombings and ground assaults. No one counts the number. They are seldom reported and incidents are known by the Administration, the military, and our own media as collateral damage. Its as if we are to believe these death are unavoidable accidents instead of the direct result of U.S. military action. In the unlikely event the military ever accidentally destroyed a nuclear armed missile launched from the middle east, the weapons could fall anywhere in the region including Europe. The military still refers to the catastrophic potential results of such an incident as collateral damage.

Johnson really hits his stride when discussing the ever growing number of military bases occupied by U.S. forces throughout the world. The new trend is for smaller bases located closer to potential hot spots such as two islands off the coast of Venezuela where we are positioned to instantly take out democratically elected Chavez. He uses Japan with which he is most familiar to discuss the effects on the occupied country of these bases; the raping, the pollution, the damage, the noise of an insensitive military. He says the public and the military have no understanding of the ill feelings caused by all these bases (800 plus the actual count is unknown even by the military) and the damage to our reputation in the world. Japan is spending $7 Billion of its own money to help the U.S. build a new base on Guam to remove at least some occupiers from Japan.

He then turns to star wars, the ultimate military spending boondoggle. He explains that even a small military incident in space could pollute the orbits with so much junk that all satellites would be forever unusable with crippling impact to the economies of the world. The Air Force is currently running a “recruiting” ad on television showing just such an incident in space. He talks about the air force monopoly over GPS which is now indispensable both for military and civilian use. The air force currently reserves the right to shut down a region of GPS at their own discretion. The Europeans are so concerned about the air force monopoly on this critical resource, that they have funded Galileo a competing higher tech system which was to have gone online this year. When Bush threatened the Europeans to stop this deployment, the threat backfired and funds and new countries rushed to join the Galileo network. Recent setbacks may delay the start of Galileo until 2014 however. We only hope Galileo doesn’t go the way of Motorola’s Iridium satellite telephone system that was delayed so often it was obsolete by the time it was introduced.

The Imagined North Korean Threat

And the American Response (Why is Putin worried?)
ABL GMD Test

After WWII the military and military industrial complex greatly exaggerated the cold war Soviet threat so they could continue to expand defense budgets. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the government toyed with the idea of making China the new evil empire. Neocon interests in trade and investment with China defeated this idea and instead they invented a new threat using poor North Korea. Much of the justification for the anti ballistic missile program lies with the idea that North Korea or another rogue state could acquire and use nuclear armed ICBMs. The military is fully aware that all their proposed programs are useless against the latest Russian build ICBM but might have a chance at a Korean ICBM (actually two antique Russian scud missiles strapped together. The last one the Koreans tested barely cleared Japan.) So the military is cynically spending billions to build weapons systems they know won’t work to address threats that don’t exist. The most ridiculous of these weapons and the most costly is the megawatt laser to be mounted in a 747. Even if the laser worked (it doesn’t) The 747 has to fly so close to its intended target that it can easily be shot down by simple existing ground to air missiles costing next to nothing. What matters is not the practicality of the weapon but the money required to build it.

The reason this all works is that the military and military industrial complex is spread throughout the entire country. In each congressional district with facilities and plants, the industry simply buys a congressman who, in return for election support and a guaranteed lifetime job when they leave Congress, will vote for any appropriation proposed. A quid pro quo agreement means that I vote for your district’s appropriations if you vote for mine. To suppress public outrage, Congress hides more and more appropriations in special earmarks and outright black ops budget items. The public is kept in line through fear (terrorism, nuclear armed rogue states, etc.) and Johnson refers to Bush as “Fear-Monger-in-Chief“. The system is thoroughly ingrained and, under Bush, totally out of control. We are guaranteed to bankrupt our system if the trend continues. As it is, the deficit limits must continually be raised. China and Japan are the two biggest holders of this massive budget debt. The system is totally corrupt and will lead to the downfall of the entire government if it continues. In summary:

The iron triangle of the Air Force, Congress, and the military industrial complex, sanctified by high tech jobs it offers to American workers, is driving our country toward bankruptcy. For some it is tempting to continue the lucrative practice of buying arcane space technologies that do not work – missile defenses, for example, simply because it keeps people employed. Meanwhile our democracy is undercut by members of Congress who use the lavish “campaign contributions” they receive – bribes by any other name – to buy elections. The only public service these bought-and-paid-for Congressmen attend to is providing a legal veneer for munition makers’ unquestioned access to the tax revenues of the government.

Johnson talks briefly about Keynesianism, where a government is justified in instituting spending and employment programs to level the business cycle. His theories were put to large scale successful tests by FDR in the great depression with works programs in the parks and the building of roads and dams. Keynes believed that military spending and employment could also be justified in times of recession and depression. The problem with a Keynesian justification of our current boondoggle military spending is that the military spending is totally insensitive to the business cycle – it only ever goes up through boom and bust.

The King Makers

The President’s constitutional job is to carry out the laws passed by Congress. When Clinton tried to veto single line items in a legislative bill, the Supreme Court ruled this was unconstitutional. The President must either sign or veto a bill in its entirety. Bush instituted a new approach called a signing statement wherein the President reserves the right not to enforce provisions of a bill with which he disagrees. In a Bush stacked Supreme Court, who after all appointed his majesty in the first place, the signing statements have not been challenged. Bush used a signing statement to gut John McCain’s 2005 anti torture provision. Bush disagrees with it and refused to enforce it, end of discussion. With this simple devise, Bush has totally undermined the separation of powers and has rendered Congress virtually powerless.

Another terrible precedent of the Bush era is the extensive use of the low level fall guy. Torture at Abu Ghraib came to light with the leaking of photographs to the press. The ACLU was able to get ahold of key documents establishing responsibility for torture at the prison through FOIA lawsuits. Today we have a picture of the all the leading White House officials sitting around a conference table in the White House discussing torture. Who was prosecuted? The top official held accountable was Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, a woman and reserve officer who was briefly in charge of all U.S. prisons in Iraq. She received a reprimand and was demoted to colonel even though she clearly was not an instigator of the torture program. Johnson asks what does this do to a military command structure? As a soldier do you blindly carry out the commands of your superior officers even if you think they are illegal? Why weren’t officers and officials at the highest level held accountable if the commands were illegal? Does a soldier need to consult a lawyer before obeying orders in the future?

To be fair, Bush has used higher level fall guys as well; Scooter Libby, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales are prominent examples.

What a depressing picture. A Congress bought and paid for by the weapons makers. A President with a total disregard for the American Constitution. A Supreme Court who appoints a monarch and stands ready to do his bidding. The only bright spot Johnson can see is that there is unlikely to be a military coup for two reasons; The generals have very good lives with absolute security and luxury as it is and second, the soldiers may now refuse to follow orders if those orders are seen to be illegal such as overthrowing the government. OK, I know, but this will have to stand for optimism in an otherwise totally depressing account.

Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond, 2005

Three Gorges Dam China

Diamond is a Professor at UCLA specializing in evolutionary biology and bio-geography. This book looks at man’s effects on the environment today and in the past. He is interested in decisions that cause some societies to collapse and others to sustain themselves successfully for thousands of years. The book’s blurbs and Diamond himself try to give reason to hope, but the facts and figures of the situation in the modern world are pretty depressing reading, particularly the discussion of modern China. But Australia is pretty depressing reading as well. And I skipped altogether reading the chapters on Rwanda and Haiti.

Haze over China

His central thesis seems to be that some people in the past have made enlightened decisions, some by highly centralized governments like Japan, and some by highly decentralized systems like New Guinea. He also finds optimism in some corporations who find economic reasons to act responsibly in the environment to avoid the massive cleanup costs of destructive mistakes. He sites a Chevron subsidiary (since spun off) that is such a model of environmental stewardship in New Guinea that their project is, in effect, the countries largest and most successful wildlife preserve. Of Chevron’s and Shell’s project in Nigeria, Diamond says merely that the project is older and the government of Nigeria is corrupt.

Shell Nigeria Oil Spill

His discussion of the Bitterroot Valley south of Missoula in Montana was extensive. It seems that Montana, which has fallen to one of the lowest income states in America is now best suited for fat cat vacation homes such as those of Charles Schwab’s 2600 acre Bitterroot Stock Farm, 125 home sites with 6,000 sq ft million dollar homes of in a gated community. The only contact with the local population is when the fat cats show up at a local bar to enjoy the Montana Western fauna. Ted Turner’s buffaloes are elsewhere in the state. Is this a success or a failure? Preserve the environment for the wealthy?

Bitterroot Shack

Gated Mansion in Bitterroot Valley

His reasons for optimism at the end are a little strange; e.g. we could have been hit by a huge meteor over which we have absolutely no control, instead of the current man made disaster. If man did it, surely man can undo it. Really? It seems that man’s impact and control over the environment is why we are in this mess to begin with.