My take on what's going on in the Middle East and what we should do about it.

These are tumultuous times. The Middle East is in worse chaos than usual; a popular uprising overthrew the dictatorial government of Tunisia. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak lost the battle for Tahrir Square in the heart of his own capitol city. Protests and riots have rattled Yemen, Bahrain, and Jordan. This is the largest upset to the world’s status quo since the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty-odd years ago.


Now the attention is on Libya, where the mentally maladjusted Muammar Gaddafi is in the process of being overthrown. The ‘neoconservative’ wing of the United States political establishment—for example, former Bush apparatchik Paul Wolfowitz and Senator Joseph Lieberman -- has issued loud and numerous calls for the US to immediately intervene in force in the Libyan upheaval, while also criticizing the Obama administration’s handling of the uprisings that have shaken the region over the last two months. Even Christopher Hitchens (who is by no means part of the establishment but who is a self-styled radical with a penchant for interventionism) weighed in with a typically sarcastic but insubstantial opinion piece.


This is what guys like Wolfowitz and Lieberman always, always, always get wrong. They look at the last sixty-odd years of US foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and see that we’ve always got ourselves involved. The Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Yom Kippur War, for sixty years the White House has had every ruler or other politician of note in the region who would speak to us on speed-dial. The last time there was a major incident in the Middle East and the US didn’t immediately barge in was the Suez Canal crisis in 1956—when Wolfowitz, now 67, was 13 years old—and we stepped in only at the end.


Lieberman, Wolfowitz (whose alleged foreign policy credentials should be forever revoked for his involvement in Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq), and the rest of the hawkish neocons take it as a matter of faith that just because we’ve always jumped into the pool right at the start, that it’s the right thing to do and that’s what we should keep on doing.


This is a very dumb assumption to make. If we have an unfavorable position in the Middle East, it would be a particularly dumb thing to keep doing what put us in that position—Einstein’s definition of insanity is, after all, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting differing results.


First, consider our general favorability rating among the peoples of the Middle East – the ‘Arab street.’ The US is a very unpopular brand in the region, largely because we have been meddling in it since the Eisenhower administration, and treated its nations and peoples as pawns on a chessboard during the Cold War. Over the last six decades, the US did a lot of unpleasant things in the Middle East, and for most of that time it was done out of calculated and cynical realpolitik. Put in the simplest possible terms, the US would prop up any autocratic bastard and give him a nearly unlimited line of credit if he would toe the line on certain policy issues. Human rights violations, corruption, and other issues didn’t even enter into the equation; after all, this was war, albeit a Cold War, and for several successive presidents, beating the USSR required the US to compromise its principles by supporting ostensibly reliable dictators instead of self-willed democrats. We burned the village in order to save it, to paraphrase the slogan from the Vietnam War, and we did on a scale of nations rather than just villages. Guess what? The Arabs remember.


The term “blowback” is one of the more pungent terms of art in the intelligence and foreign communities, referring to the unforeseen negative consequences of one’s actions. The US’s status on the Arab street has been eroding steadily over the last forty years by a steady stream of blowback from things we did during the Cold War. Even aside from what many in the region see as our ultimate sin in supporting Israel, for three or four decades we supported a seemingly endless list of tyrants who brutalized their own people and looted their countries simply because Washington could count on these dictators to toe the US’s line against the USSR, just as we did in Latin America. The scale of the brutality used is appalling-- Hafez al-Assad of Syria, tyrant and father of tyrants, leveled most of the city of Hama in 1982 in response to an uprising by Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, killing up to 20,000 people. Saddam Hussein was our boy in Baghdad until he ended his war with Iran and turned on Kuwait, at which point he stepped outside of his box and became persona maximum non grata.


This behavior continued during the Bush administration’s War on Terror—the US even reached an accommodation with Muammar Gaddafi’s Orwellian regime in Libya in the early 2000s in order to pry him away from publically supporting international terrorist groups, and we quite probably absolved him for his role in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing as a cost of doing business. The UK apparently released the Libyan intelligence operative who planted the bomb in exchange for oil concessions from Gaddafi’s state-owned oil company. Egypt and Syria became valuable subcontractors to the Bush administration precisely because they were brutal dictatorships with horrible human rights records—the US shipped prisoners there to be tortured because we couldn’t do it ourselves.


One of the most important figures I can quote on the subject is none other than Osama bin Laden himself. His notorious ultimatum to the west, delivered in 1998, was essentially a cease-and-desist demand for a lengthy list of things he wanted the US to stop doing, including support for corrupt and brutal despots like Hosni Mubarak and the al-Saud dynasty, maintaining garrisons in Saudi Arabia, and the starving of the people of Iraq with sanctions aimed at the Hussein regime. Granted, bin Laden is a terrorist, the worst sort of a murderer, the most wanted man in the world, and couched his ultimatum in terms of a “crusader-Zionist alliance” between the US and Israel, but in this instance he simply articulated what many Arabs across the region want—for the US to stop manipulating the region like a rigged poker game.


Second, most of the Middle Eastern nations are self-consciously post-colonial. The ordinary people in the street know their countries have been manipulated by foreign powers for a long time, have struggled by the congenital economic and social deficiencies left by their colonial origins, and they don’t like it when foreigners try to meddle or order them around. Old people in Egypt still remember when the Union Jack flew over Alexandria, Cairo, and the locks of the Suez Canal. Even when Gamal Abdel Nasser threw off British control in the 50s, he immediately cut a bargain with the USSR because he needed a powerful ally to play off against the UK and France. This proved to be an object lesson in poor judgment because the USSR proved a far less benevolent master than the British Empire, and for two decades treated Egypt as little more than a garrison base on the Suez Canal. The Soviets were displaced in turn by the US, who propped up a tyrannical and corrupt police state for three decades because that was the cost of keeping Egypt out of another Arab-Israeli war, which meant the oil would keep flowing.


If the US jumped into the Egyptian revolution—let’s call it what it is, every bit as much a revolution as the one that started at Lexington and Concord—it could have been the worst possible thing to do. The Mubarak regime has never had a problem being two-faced, and could quite easily have permanently ruined the Tahrir Square protestors’ credibility with the Egyptian people by labeling them as agents of a foreign power. That it would have been the same foreign power that backed the Mubarak regime wouldn’t have mattered.


Third, last, and most important, these are popular and nationalist rebellions—“Egypt for the Egyptian people” and all that—fueled by popular concerns. What the US wants is generally irrelevant to the people who gathered for weeks on end in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Big matters of global foreign policy simply don’t matter there. What matters to them is the decades of grinding poverty, government corruption, and a tyrannical regime that drags grandfathers from their beds and smashes their bones with hammers to intimidate the population into fearful obedience. In other words, what the Egyptian people were protesting against was the status quo maintained by the regime we supported. That is blowback, yes, but in this case everyone except the Mubarak regime benefited from it. When they want help from the US, they’ll ask for it.


The Obama administration, in my opinion, did an excellent job with its hands-off approach to the Egyptian revolution. The White House watched carefully, but did not take an official position on the matter until the Egyptian people had made it clear that they were ready, willing, and able to throw Mubarak out themselves. Doubtless there was a lot of high-level, high-tension stuff going on behind the scenes and the telecom lines between Cairo and Washington were humming nonstop, but the Egyptian people needed an opportunity for self-determination, and letting them do things themselves was the best thing we could do. Now we’re doing the same thing with Libya, and again it seems like the right thing to do.


The US needs to think less like Richard Nixon or Henry Kissinger, and more like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt—stop trying to manage the world’s foreign policy like it’s a giant spider web, with us the spider rushing to every little disturbance. It’s true that the developed world now suffers from a 24-hour news cycle, and that American interests span the globe, yes, but they are not so delicate that but not every crisis demands an immediate response from the White House.


Remember the Fourteen Points Wilson offered during the First World War—the most important of these was the right of self-determination—or Roosevelt’s ‘good neighbor’ policy, which put a stop to a half-century of constant American meddling in Latin America. The Egyptians are people, too, and they deserve a chance to try to work things out for themselves. For our own part, the US should take the opportunity to mend fences and genuinely win new friends in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and other countries. This is 2011. The Cold War is over, and the dictators we took advantage of then are inexcusable now.


The only thing that stops the US from embracing this calmer and more rational foreign policy is our collective national ego, particularly the belief that the world can’t function without the US, and the presumption that America is always right. This is where jingoism, bumper-sticker patriotism and right-wing sneers about the “blame America first” crowd have to give way to a fearless moral inventory of the last century’s history. The original context of the ‘my country, right or wrong’ epithet was, after all, Commodore Stephen Decatur of the US Navy’s after-dinner toast "Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!"


While the Obama administration’s hands-off approach may look like indecisive lethargy to a quick-on-the-trigger interventionist like Lieberman or a ‘let’s start a war and see what happens’ guy like Wolfowitz, (Hitchens called it “pathetic and dithering”) it’s a pleasant change. The last thing the Egyptian, Tunisian, Jordanian, Yemeni, Bahraini, or Libyan people want or need is another superpower telling them what they should get without listening to what they want. I wouldn’t expect either Lieberman or Wolfowitz to understand popular movements—the last time the US experienced this sort of popular upheaval by ordinary citizens in the streets was the early 1970s, and neither of them strike me as the sort to stare down Bull Connor or protest at Kent State. Lieberman, in one of the stranger episodes of the 2008 election, even managed to ignore the popular sentiment of his own Democratic party by running for reelection as an independent.


In summary…. President Obama shouldn’t be listening to Lieberman, or Wolfowitz, or Hitchens, or Gaddafi, or Prince Bandar Al-Saud, or even me. He should be listening to the people in the streets in Cairo and Tobruk, since they’re the ones who matter.

Salt, Pollution, and Capitalism

I was reading a friend's blog on Commonground, a community forum for environmental engineers, geologists, the occasional lawyer, etc., and he referenced this article here, from the Economist of all places. It's a review of a book titled, The Case for Business in Developing Economies, by Ann Bernstein.

The Economist's summary email read:

Companies shouldn't worry about their "triple bottom line”—profits, people and the planet—since, ultimately, it's simply by pursuing profits that companies help their community, argues Ann Bernstein. Nebulous goals such as helping humanity and the environment sound worthy but don't add up to much, Bernstein says, so companies should stick to what they do best: making money and spreading prosperity through society as a whole.

With that, how could I pass it up? I pulled some strings and got an advance copy of the book. It has some good points, and it has some very bad points.


The author, Ann Bernstein, presents her book as a response to Naomi Klein’s wildly popular No Logo, a popular 2000 book criticizing globalization in the aftermath of the 1999 World Trade Organization popularly known as the “Battle in Seattle.” This book has, over the last ten years, become an international best-seller and one of the seminal texts of the anti-globalization movement, particularly in encouraging the public to seek out the sources of what they consume and the circumstances under which it was produced.


Bernstein offers her book (in her own words) “in praise of enterprise and corporations.” Her complaint is that businesses, particularly industrial corporations, are unfairly limited by expectations of “corporate social responsibility,” which impose on businesses responsibility for social and environmental stewardship. This book is essentially a polemic in favor of business regulated only by itself, as Bernstein argues that business should be given a free hand to do what it exists to do—make money—so that what benefits business can (notionally) ultimately benefit all. This is Atlas Shrugged with a corporation standing in for John Galt.


Bernstein’s book is, to put it mildly, poorly researched, poorly organized, and poorly thought out, with a number of gross internal inconsistencies between her evidence and her argument. Without even a pretense at an evenhanded analysis, she lumps environmental activist groups in with terrorists and blackmailers (31), while a glance at the bibliography reveals that a number of her most heavily-cited sources are press releases, interviews, or other documents from corporations such as Texas Instruments, Coca-Cola, and Wal-Mart. Certain of her other sources are themselves controversial opinion pieces, particularly Paul Dreissen’s Eco-Imperialism – Green Power Black Death, a racially-tinged 2003 argument against emphasizing sustainable energy in developing African nations.


Ms. Bernstein is the founder and director of the Center for Development and Enterprise, an independent policy “think tank” based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was formerly head of the Urban Foundation, a business-backed NGO that had lobbied the Apartheid-era government for economic reforms, and a board member of the Development Bank of Southern Africa. Doubtless she was considered a hopeless liberal by the unbending standards of the erstwhile de Klerk government, but to modern eyes her argument reads as a paean to deregulation and wild-hunt capitalism. Granted, her business-as-the-solution stance may be influenced by South Africa’s 25% unemployment rate and lackadaisical record of corporations investing in long-term projects without government sponsorship, financial guarantees, and considerable leeway in dealing with both people and the planet.


Ms. Bernstein’s central argument is that for-profit corporations should play a greater role in fostering economic development in the developing world, what was once less charitably described as the Third World. That makes a certain amount of sense, given that for-profit corporations tend to be more efficient at generating wealth from a given resource than other organizations. She further argues that in the interest of encouraging more rapid development, corporations should not be required to include environmental or social stewardship elements into their operations, and focus exclusively on the money-making end of things.


Granted, Ms. Bernstein does not voice the desire that the whole of the developing world be carved up among corporate interests, ala King Leopold’s domain in the Congo. One of her better arguments was for encouraging development by locally-owned corporations, preferably locally-owned, rather than internationals, NGOs, who would hopefully keep the wealth local and plow it back into the country’s economy rather than pumping it off to London or New York (or more likely these days, the Cayman Islands). So far, so good.


That still leaves us with Ms. Bernstein’s desire to ditch the other two elements of the ‘triple bottom line,’ namely people and the planet, the two elements which charge a corporation to embrace some element of social and environmental stewardship—if not making the world a better place, then at least not making it worse. In her case studies of corporate success stories in the developing world, she wholly omits discussing their effects on natural resources, e.g. air and water pollution from foreign-owned plants, and singularly avoids discussing more destructive industries such as oil and gas production, mining, and the like.


“People” and “the planet” are notionally the two principal areas of corporate public responsibility, the two metrics by which we judge whether or not a corporation is behaving as a “good citizen,” or when the corporation demonstrates that it cares about something more than itself. From a corporation’s point of view, though, these initiatives are usually public relations at best or balance-sheet liabilities at worst, and more likely to be obstacles than assets.


Ms. Bernstein cites the example of a pipeline that global energy giant ExxonMobil built in Chad. Although the project was eventually completed, Ms. Bernstein uses it as an example of the kind of extra costs that “people” and “planet” concerns can impose on a project, including relocation and compensation of villagers, a circuitous route, and avoidance of gorilla habitat.


Her argument in this instance is that the added costs, negative publicity, and other difficulties nearly convinced Exxon to abandon the project altogether, and that such concerns actually make companies reluctant to invest in Third World projects.


What makes these requirements so burdensome that abandoning them would be a good thing? Their purpose is to ensure that the benefit of the development—which invariably comes at a cost in damage to the environment—is not the corporation’s alone.


The author also quotes a vitriolic statement from James Shikwati of Kenya (borrowing the passage wholesale from Dreissen):

Why do Europe’s developed countries impose their environmental ethics on poor countries that are simply trying to pass through a stage they themselves went through? After taking numerous risks to reach their current economic and technological status, why do they tell poor countries to use no energy, and no agricultural or pest control technologies that might pose some conceivable risk of environmental harm? Why do they tell poor countries to follow sustainable development doctrines that really mean little or no energy or economic development?” (Bernstein 108, Dreissen 30)

Although Ms. Bernstein does not explain who Mr. Shikwati is, he is a prominent Kenyan libertarian economist, founder and Director of the Inter Region Economic Network, and has argued that foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa does nothing materially to aid the common people, but only abets government corruption and unbalances the national economy.


In response to Ms. Bernstein, and by extension to Mr. Shikwati, it is true that the position of the developing world is different from that of the developed world when it comes to issues such as clean energy and the development of natural resources. The developed world has the comparative luxury of an existing infrastructure, so that introducing clean power, for example is essentially a matter of replacing old fossil fuel plants with cleaner power sources on the same grid. Developing nations often have to build a nation’s infrastructure from scratch, grid and plants alike, which understandably results in a measure of frustration when foreign pressures are brought to bear to invest in unfamiliar wind turbines or solar power, rather than simply burning readily-available coal.


The same paradigm is true for many other issues, such as food or water resources—what appear to be ‘luxury items’ in the developed world, such being able to afford to turn away from effective but toxic pesticides such as DDT, genetically-modified food, infrastructure projects like dams—are simply not options to states such as Kenya. Without DDT there are malaria epidemics, without dams there is no water for irrigating farmland, and without genetically-modified food, there is famine.


The paradoxical result is that the developed world can afford unspoiled land but has only land scarred by two centuries of man’s labors, while the developing world has unspoiled land but cannot afford not to spoil it. Ms. Bernstein argues that nations in the developing world should have a free hand to regulate their own environmental practices, free of interference by NGOs or strings attached to loans from the World Bank, and by extension those of the corporations operating under their jurisdiction—in essence, to retain the right to sacrifice the environment in exchange for economic progress.


Although Ms. Bernstein disingenuously ignores it, the fact remains, that the developed world has come to its current state of environmental knowledge through bitter experience—consider the Great Smog of London, the Love Canal toxic waste dump in the US, the Bhopal catastrophe in India, or the Hungarian sludge lagoon disaster of 2010.


The last century and a half of the developed world’s experience offer a valuable object lesson on the merits of corporate good citizenship in environmental matters, and are relevant for two reasons. First, the developing world is repeating mistakes the developed world has already made, suffered through, and recovered from. Secondly, many of the corporations engaged in the developing world –for example, Royal Dutch Shell or AngloGold Ashanti--are multinational organizations born in the developed world, which have now extended their reach—sometimes for the express purpose of evading stricter standards in their home base countries. In addition to being closer to the source of production, oil refineries built in Nigeria do not have to have the same expensive pollution control systems as oil refineries built in Texas.


So much for Bernstein.


As it happened, I was reading Mark Kurlansky's Salt today-- it's a layman's history of salt production and consumption. I happily recommend just about everything Kurlansky's written.


What struck me is that Ms. Bernstein's argument—profit above all else, with profit and its trickle-down payoffs supposedly a panacea for a region’s problems-- is pretty much exactly the one that Kurlansky describes being advanced by Salt Union Ltd. in Cheshire (part of the northwest coast of England) in the late 19th Century. Most of the geology of Cheshire is rock salt, and people had been pumping brine out of the ground and evaporating it into table salt or packing salt for centuries. Pumping the salt-saturated (25% salt by weight) brine out of the ground drew fresh water into the salt formations, which dissolved the rock salt into new brine, much as water erodes limestone and creates caves.


By the late 1800s, though, the quantities and rates of brine withdrawal were causing severe subsidence problems throughout the county, had created, enormous sinkholes, and had pretty much obliterated most of the area's sources for potable water. Salt Union didn't start the damage, but did exacerbate it, and had bought up most of the other salt producers by 1890, by which time it controlled three-fourths of the British Empire's salt business and was the wealthiest corporation in the UK or any of the colonies.


When the locals in Cheshire focused on Salt Union as the cause of the damage and demanded compensation, the corporation gave them the same line Bernstein did-- the people whose houses have suddenly fallen into holes had been compensated by the profit brought to the area by the salt industry. The legal battles went on for years and eventually wound up in Parliament, and weren't settled until the government established a Compensation Board, funded by a flat tax on all producers (which promptly drove many small producers out of business, to Salt Union’s benefit) that handled reimbursements for damage caused by subsidence. Salt Union, Ltd. is still in business to this day.


If Bernstein had her way, her book argues, companies operating in the developing world would be free to act like Salt Union did, and divest themselves of any obligations toward environmental or social responsibility in the name of the almighty dollar. In fact, this is how most oil and gas producers, mining concerns, and other industrial corporations have operated in the developing world since the end of colonialism.


I find it surprising that she would write this, given the environmental problems in the developing nations with which she is presumably most familiar. Multinational corporations such as Shell have left an enormous environmental footprint in southern Nigeria, leaving vast swaths of land ruined with clear-cutting, defoliation, hasty drainage work that fouls rivers and drowns farmland, displaced people, and wholesale pollution of soil, water, and air, while oil revenues account for 90% of the Nigerian government’s income. State monopolies such as the Israeli Chemical Company have exploited scare resources (e.g. the Jordan River and the Dead Sea) to the point of ruining them.


In Ms. Bernstein’s own South Africa, beginning in the 1930s the government essentially rezoned the district of South Durban by government fiat, evicting thousands of residents and converting the area a vast petrochemical industrial park. As recently as the year 2000, South Africa had no legally-binding pollution regulations. The average concentrations of the air pollutant nitrogen dioxide in another South African city, Cape Town, which is usually considered a comparatively pleasant seaside city-- are significantly higher than those in the slums of Calcutta, India, which has yet to live down allusions to the infamous “black hole.” Organochlorine and organophosphate pesticides, banned in most of the rest of the world due to their toxicity, remain in common use on South African farms. The major cleanup provisions of the National Environmental Management: Waste Act are soon to go into effect, requiring property owners to clean up contaminated sites, but the government lacks the ability to enforce the laws.


It’s fair to say that nearly all of the world’s economy consists of the workings of corporations of one sort or another, to the extent that the term ‘corporations’ is nearly synonymous with the private sector in general. Corporations are organizations that ultimately exist primarily on paper, and (current US election laws notwithstanding), corporations are emphatically not people. They do not eat, breathe, drink, get cancer, or worry about their children. They are neither intrinsically good nor intrinsically evil. For all their potential size and legal complexity, corporations are ultimately as simple as a liver fluke. Corporations are money-making operations, which take some sort of resource and process it, sell it, or otherwise extract some kind of value from it, expressed as money.


Therefore, since corporations are the part of society that has the most to do with extracting resources and generating wealth, if corporations are not held responsible for environmental impacts of their work, who will be held responsible? Who else is there? The government? The local citizenry, who are already inconvenienced? Or, should polluters be given a free pass, with everyone else told up to shut up, suffer the side-effects of development, and live with the mess, all in the name of a (likely brief) spell of prosperity? Life in the developing world is already hard enough—a multibillion dollar corporation like Shell shouldn’t get a free hand to make it worse.


Take the United States as an object lesson in exactly how corporations behave in the absence of regulations to protect the environment.


Prior to the 1970s, industrial corporations in the United States had essentially no legal, popular, or moral expectations to meet regarding environmental stewardship, and the result of this was catastrophic air pollution, destruction of the nation’s rivers and lakes (to the point that a large part of Lake Erie, for example, remains essentially biologically dead to this day), abandoned mines pockmark dozens of states, hundreds of thousands of properties polluted by hazardous wastes, and untold millions of people have been sickened or killed by toxic exposure. The sheer scope of the United States’ environmental problems, as belatedly realized in the 1970s, was such that the new regulations included requirements to protect public health as well as ecological damage.


Yes, we as a society benefited from the industries that created this pollution. The American way of life from the 1950s onwards was built on it, fueled by cheap plastics, cheap gasoline, and cheap food from farms using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. We would not be where we are now without strip mines, coal-fired power plants or lavish use of asbestos and chlorinated hydrocarbons. That’s “better living through chemistry,” all right.


The obvious response to such wholesale pollution, is to hold the polluters responsible for the damage the caused. To do anything else is to essentially privatize the profits generated by a polluting operation, while socializing the costs and damages. This does nothing to protect the environment or public health, and in fact essentially subsidizes polluters by relieving them of the financial consequences of their actions. The environment’s financial status would revert to the sort of ‘tragedy of the commons’ scenario that Garret Hardin discussed in his seminal essay in Science in 1968.


A corporation’s bottom line is always the first concern—since corporations exist to make money, and if a corporation does not make money it goes out of business, and everything else is moot.


In other words, if environmental stewardship isn’t an enforceable requirement, or at the least loaded with very powerful incentives or penalties, the corporation probably won’t do it. This is not to damn all corporations as calculatedly indifferent to anything save the almighty dollar (though some doubtless are).


One of the most damning examples of this behavior is Monsanto’s behavior concerning polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. In 1937, the Harvard School of Public Health completed a study that determined PCBs were toxic to humans and most other forms of life. Monsanto and two other industrial giants, Westinghouse, and General Electric, sat on the study for forty years because PCBs just brought in SO much darn money-- $22 million (in 1970 dollars) yearly for Monsanto alone. Monsanto was the sole US manufacturer of PCBs, and both General Electric and Westinghouse manufactured thousands of products containing them, including electrical equipment, paints, hydraulic oil additives, plasticizers, and a million other uses. After several years’ worth of investigations into the harmful effects of PCBs the US banned the manufacture of PCBs in 1977.


Of these three, Monsanto became the textbook case for corporate malfeasance and bottom-line rationalization, in large part because numerous lawsuits and government investigations over the past forty years have forced the corporation to disclose reams of confidential documents that recount the corporation’s attitude towards the environment, the public, and even its own customers. Monsanto fought the PCB ban for ten years, to the point of conducting fraudulent toxicological studies that ‘proved’ PCBs were nontoxic. The directors of the laboratory that conducted studies on Monsanto’s behalf, Industrial Bio-Test Labs of Northbrook, Illinois, were subsequently convicted of fraud.


As an example of Monsanto’s behavior, corporate records show that in 1969 executives decided that although fish died within minutes of wastewater discharges from the corporation’s plant in Anniston, Alabama, “there was no reason to go to expensive extremes in limiting discharge form the plant” where PCBs were being manufactured. Much of the town and the nearby waterways are now heavily polluted with PCBs, due in large part to the dumping of vast quantities of PCB waste into the river and into landfills. Thousands of local residents have suffered severe health problems over the ensuing years—in 2003, Anniston lead the state in the number of birth defects found in newborns, and the cancer rate is 25% higher than the state average. Anniston residents first learned of the contamination in 1995, over a quarter century after Monsanto was indisputably aware of gross pollution problems at the Anniston facility.


That industrial corporations—in whatever nation-- have historically regarded environmental stewardship as a cost or liability becomes quite obvious when you look at how difficult it has been to pass regulations requiring stewardship of the planet from those extracting its resources. Monsanto spent over a decade actively arguing that PCBs were safe, and still refuses to acknowledge their danger. Even something as straightforward as the 1969 incarnation of the Safe Drinking Water Act –which did nothing more or less than to ensure the water the nation drinks is safe to consume-- took nearly five years to get through Congress due to the heavy lobbying from the oil, mining, and manufacturing sectors.


Perhaps the root of the problem is that money-focused corporations and actual human beings have different perceptions of what is valuable.


Money is not the only thing of value. Yes, this is 2011. Yes, pretty much every business decision made lately comes down to the pennies column in the financial spreadsheets. Yes, the economy trumped every economic and social issue save President Obama himself for the 2010 midterm elections. Yes, anyone with money is practically fawned over, whether he is a billionaire hedge-fund manager buying a fourth yacht or a restaurant owner able to put a down payment on a suburban house. Yes, it is very difficult to quantify “clean air” in dollars, Euros, or yuan when speaking in front of the stockholders or board of directors.


By contrast, the population of Dimock, Pennsylvania quite understandably values safe drinking water over corporate “money now” profits now that a natural gas hydrofracking project has ruined the town’s drinking water supply.


The people of Madhya Pradesh in India certainly valued the lives of people killed when the run-down and undermanned pesticide plant belonging to Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary suffered a catastrophic failure, releasing a cloud of poison gas over the city of Bhopal in 1984.


The residents of the La Toma region in Colombia certainly value their land, which the South African mining concern AngloGold Ashanti would very much like to strip-mine for gold over the heads of the local inhabitants and small private mine owners, citing mining rights granted to it by the Colombian government.


Residents of the Niger River delta in Nigeria are accustomed to oil spills as a routine part of life. The country’s first major environmental activist, Ken Saro Wiwa, was murdered by the Sani Abacha regime in 1995 after taking the environmental crisis there to the world stage.


As you can see, money is still not the only thing of value.


Money is fungible, yes, and can be exchanged for goods and services (Homer Simpson's brain said so, so it must be true) but while money is replaceable, most of the other “goods,” such as clean water, clean air, critter habitat, whales, passenger pigeons, etc. are far more fragile than Hardin understood them to be, and pretty much irreplaceable. Once land is ruined—for example, by careless open-pit mining, with nothing left behind save slag-heaps, pits, and polluted water—it changes from an asset to a liability. You can’t farm it, you can’t live on it, you can’t sell it, the water is worthless, and you can’t get any financial return out of it unless you spend a lot more money and a great deal of time to render it safe.


Sometimes natural resources are immediately necessary to sustain human life, let alone economic viability. In many places in the US, and many more overseas, such as most of Africa, simply having enough water, let alone drinkable water, is vitally important. The eastern United States generally doesn’t worry very much about water rights, but they are a very common and very contentious cause of disputes in the west. Nobody raised the issue of drilling in the Catskill Mountains region, from which New York City draws some of the best drinking water in the world without need for treatment or filtering, until the last few years. Meanwhile, concerns over drinking water have been percolating for decades in much of the Midwest, the Rockies, and the agricultural areas of rural California. If the water supply a Texan cattle rancher uses to water his herds dries up or becomes polluted and unusable, he is in dire straits indeed. If the source area for New York City’s drinking water is damaged, the economic costs just from the need to construct a treatment plant could run into the tens of billions of dollars. Now ask yourself why New York City’s water should be so protected, and Aba, Nigeria’s shouldn’t be.


A hypothetical upper-middle class businessman’s seven-figure salary is going to do him a fat lot of good if his drinking water is loaded with arsenic from mine tailings or fizzing with dissolved methane freed by gas hydrofracking. Granted, he could pay for a super-Brita or a lifetime supply of Dasani bottled water, but that costs money. He could sue the gas producer or the mining company, but that costs time and money, which in turn cuts into his quality of life.


This ruining of the commons is exactly what’s going on right now in Ms. Bernstein’s metaphorical backyard, in one of the economies for whom she is advocating industrialization and intensified resource extraction as a means to social and economic progress. Consider Nigeria again, where a reported 400 children have died since March 2010. They died of lead poisoning caused by unregulated gold mining.


Even clean air is a fragile resource. It’s been over fifty years since the UK passed air-quality legislation in response to the Great Smog of London in 1952—which killed over four thousand people in less than a week—and London air is still nothing pretty. It’s still better than Cape Town’s, though.


More to the point, the 'commons' - air, water, groundwater, public land, and so on—are not and should never be either open cookie jars or pollution-sinks. They are public resources, and public resources should not be used to subsidize private prosperity. Exactly what moral, legal, or economic arguments can be mustered in favor of allowing a chemical plant to discharge untreated toxic wastes into a publically-owned water body, thus ruining it for everyone else, simply to save the plant's owning corporation the cost of a wastewater treatment plant? Likewise, should they have the right to withdraw so much water from the water body that it leaves too little water for anyone else to use? Since when does, say, Omega Chemical's interest in its bottom line outweigh my right to go swimming without having my skin peeling off in sheets afterwards?


It’s a rather morbid and little-known fact, but the Environmental Protection Agency actually puts a dollar value on a single human life, for the purpose of evaluating the cost-effectiveness of hazardous waste cleanup options. It’s $7 million. Until the second term of the Bush administration, it was $8 million. The general idea of this grim calculus is that if the cost of a particular cleanup method costs more than $7 million per human life that would be saved, it’s not cost-effective and another method should be evaluated.


In conclusion, as much as some wish, we cannot have an economy without corporations, factories, mines, oil wells, and the like. Extracting resources from the earth will almost inevitably cause at least some damage to the environment. At the same time, however, some things are more important than "money now."


People and the natural environment are both resources that exist in and for the long term, and which require careful use and long-term planning to get the best out of them—“money later.” If you don't take care of your resources, you might have 'money now' in the short term, but you won't have 'money later' because there won't be anything to sell, or anyone to sell it to.

Does Wikileaks Really Matter?

Julian Assange is now quite probably the most-wanted man on the planet. In a story that sounds like part of a Neal Stephenson or Cory Doctorow plot, Assange’s tiny nonprofit group, Wikileaks, managed to unload gigabytes of official secrets onto the Internet for anyone to read, throwing diplomatic circles into disorder across the world and infuriating one of the most powerful countries on the planet. As a direct result, Mr. Assange is currently living in hiding, literally on the run from the law, and a massive international effort has been launched to shut down Wikileaks in an attempt to close the barn door after the cows have gone.


Most of the documents in this hoard are internal communications from within the Department of State, the government agency charged with the day-to-day management of the USA’s foreign affairs. It is, in a sense, like an email discussing his coworkers in scathing terms that some unfortunate man accidentally forwards to the entire corporate mailing list.


Two questions arise from the Wikileaks incident. The first is, will it really be important in the long term? The second is, is more transparency in the diplomatic world necessarily a good thing?


In terms of the first question, the array of embarrassments to come to light so far ranges from the egregious through the banal to the laughable. Secretary of State Clinton is documented as approving a program of spying on United Nations officials and other diplomats. A list of “vital” sites, important to the interests of the USA, includes an insulin factory in Denmark and a snake venom antidote factory in Australia. If Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi never leaves the house without his voluptuous blonde nurse Galyna, what have I to say but good for him?


There is no surprise at all in learning that Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, is in antiseptic State Department prose, “risk averse and rarely creative,’ or that Italy’s PM Silvio Berlusconi is a party animal with an eye for (much) younger women. Anyone paying attention to international affairs would probably reach the same conclusion. It would be impolite to say as much in public, of course, and their will doubtless be plenty of awkward moments for the next several months as diplomats find themselves in meetings with persons they described in unfavorable terms.


Some of the leaked documents sound incendiary but, as in the case of the memorandum describing Saudi Arabia as an “ATM machine for terrorists,” the quoted comments from various Arab leaders expressing concern for Iran’s nuclear program, or the note describing Afghan president Hamid Karzai as a corrupt weakling with delusions of grandeur, don’t contain anything that hasn’t been public knowledge for over a decade.


Some of the largest embarrassments will likely come from the American public finally learning what their government has been up to under the table. Karzai may not really care what a US diplomat thinks of him, but the American public will likely want to know why the USA is supporting a corrupt weakling in the first place


Although the State Department releases lack the immediate and visceral effect of Wikileaks’ previous releases of documents concerning the Iraqi and Afghan wars, the long-term consequences of StateGate, CableGate, WikiGate, or whatever it will eventually be dubbed will become more clear only over the long term. It is premature to say what these consequences might become. They could be quite severe, or perhaps not. It is entirely possible that the total damage done by CableGate will add up to less than that incurred by the Bush Administration’s never-adequately-prosecuted outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA agent in 2003, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.


In some respects, the Wikileaks incident may not actually matter very much. Regardless of what US diplomats may have said behind closed doors about South Korea, Seoul will still have to contend first and foremost with the psychotic hermit kingdom of North Korea, and will perforce retain close ties to the USA. Persons and countries already predisposed to dislike the US—Iran, for example-- will continue to do so, while our longtime allies will likely not see the documents as sufficient cause for severing a mutually beneficial relationship.


In fact, it is likely that CableGate will only really matter in areas in which the US already has a multitude of problems- for example, in dealing with China, Pakistan, or client states in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in the arena of the United Nations. In those areas, the US will likely have severe troubles, akin to trying to play a game of poker when all the other players have already seen what’s in the hand. The exposure of Secretary Clinton’s espionage initiative is probably the single most damaging revelation to date, but of course, the act was an egregious breach of the gentlemen’s agreement protocols surrounding the UN, and should not have been undertaken in the first place.


This isn’t the first time that diplomatic secrets have become public and created a furor. In fact, the United States should be thankful that the reaction so far has been benign—at least, by comparison to historical precedent. After all, the infamous “Zimmerman telegram” of 1917 was a diplomatic communiqué from Foreign Secretary of the German Empire, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassadors to the United States and Mexico. This telegram, surely one of the shortest important documents in history, directing the ambassador to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, to propose a military alliance between Germany and Mexico in the event that the United States appeared likely to enter the First World War, and to offer Mexico assistance in recovering the lands lost to the USA in the previous century. British intelligence intercepted the telegram and cracked the code, and Whitehall promptly published the incriminating little memo. The USA was of course infuriated at what Washington and the general public alike saw as foreign meddling with an ostensibly neutral USA, and entered the Great War three months later.


In one of the more curious postscripts to the Zimmerman telegram and to the private becoming public in general, in 1929 President Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, disbanded the United State’s own telegram-reading and code-breaking unit, the Black Chamber, with the dismissive remark "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." Stimson later found himself in charge of a massive intelligence apparatus when he served as President Roosevelt’s Secretary of War during the Second World War.


One thing the United States should not worry about, however, is offending its ‘friends,’ since to paraphrase Charles de Gaulle, “nations have no friends, only interests.” The community of nations is not a high school class in which one group suddenly takes a visceral dislike to a particular kid in math class because of something he said about a girl in the cafeteria. It may have been like that at times—for example, the Ems Dispatch which sparked French public opinion into the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870—but it is not now. The carefully-measured cynicism of realpolitik is a century and a half old and has seeped its Savile Row-clad way into every nook and cranny of every embassy in the world. A nation does not stop needing oil or wheat or steel just because the ruler is called out for hiding money in foreign bank accounts and becomes annoyed with the foreign diplomatic corps.


De Gaulle was right. For all the talk of globalization, cooperation on mutual concerns such as international terrorism, and the growth of supranational organizations such as NATO or the European Union, each nation is still out for its own interests, which often conflict. For this reason, modern diplomacy still includes a great deal of secrecy and deception, a recursive tangle of “I know that they don’t know that I know that they know.” This is also the reason why even nations that have long histories of alliance still spy on each other. Consider how the Bush Administration coaxed, chivvied, and coerced other nations into accepting the bogus claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2002 and 2003—eventually outright falsehoods had to be presented on the floor of the UN because all the ‘legitimate’ arguments had been presented and discredited.


It is no coincidence that one of the first fields laid out for studies in information theory was the issue of what information one could use in negotiations without rendering the information valueless.


This brings us to the second question: is more transparency in the diplomatic world necessarily a good thing?


The world’s international relations are a gearbox, in which nations’ interests and goals are inflexible blocks, and where deception, secrecy, doublespeak, and general sneakiness play the essential role of lubricant for the gears. “To be diplomatic” is itself a euphemism for shading one’s true feelings with language intended to avoid upsetting someone, whether negotiating an international nuclear weapons treaty or politely suggesting the ambassador from Belarus not eat all the canapés at the reception. It is precisely because of this film of the untrue or half-true or intentionally overlooked that the big pieces of metal can slide past one another to keep the machine spinning.


What causes the system to break down is when someone drops a big handful—several gigabytes big, let’s say—of truth into the gearbox, or when some thread of the international conversation becomes public when one or more parties to the discussion would rather it stay out of public view. That’s when all the difficulties arise.


For example, several major spy rings operated by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, have been uncovered in the United States over the last forty years, when all the while the United States has been by far Israel’s most generous and (for better or for worse) most loyal benefactor. Whenever Israeli spies are caught at their business, the whole nasty business is usually shoved under the rug—at least, to the extent the public can see.


Although the long-term effects of CableGate are not yet clear, the importance of what Wikileaks has done is shown simply by the speed and ferocity of the attempts to shut Wikileaks down. Within a week of publication, Amazon.com had booted the group from its servers, PayPal had shut down the group’s donations access, the website was hacked repeatedly, and a New Hampshire internet services firm had essentially shut off the Wikileaks website. All this led Assange and his representatives quite reasonably to complain about the US government’s attempts to shut Wikileaks down and re-bury the documents.


Try as Wikileaks’ opponents might, however, the cows have already left the barn—Assange and his cohorts spread their information far and wide across the Internet, in the form of encrypted ‘doomsday bombs’ that contain far more information, and far more sensitive information, than has been released to date. There is now essentially no way to re-bury that information without shutting down the entire Internet in every country on Earth. The United States is no longer in control of the situation, and if it takes extraordinary steps to try to keep control it may end up doing more damage to its own interests than the leaked documents would have inflicted.


The saving grace of the situation is that although the United States has been caught out on a great many lies, bogus promises, or nasty comments about world leaders, it’s very likely that most of those people already expected the USA to be lying to them, or at the very least to have hidden opinions about them. We know that, they know that, and we know they know we know that. If anything, Mr. Assange and his cohorts should have held off on releasing their information until they had ‘dirt’ on every government and major corporation, and released it all at once to level the playing field.


Of course, to borrow the catchphrase of the urbane, thoroughly vicious, and fortunately fictional British politician Francis Urquhart, “You might well think that, but of course I couldn't possibly comment.”

A couple of book reviews

This is a short review of Susan Ronald’s The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire, and John Nolan’s Sir John Norrys and the Elizabethan Military World. Since I have never mastered the ability to write anything short, I will throw in some additional observations.


The Pirate Queen is a generally enjoyable and accessible discussion of Elizabeth I and her pet “sea dogs”- Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, and the like.


I found the most interesting part of the book to be the first few chapters, which present an incisive examination of the relationship between the queen and her adventurers.


Most of Elizabeth’s adventurers were younger sons or the peerage or gentry, men raised with expectations of a certain quality of life, but who would not ordinarily inherit the familial wealth to maintain it. They had to earn it, as in past centuries their ancestors had done by going off on Crusade, plundering foreign lands as mercenaries, or attempting to carve holdings out of the Irish chaos. Is for this reason that Elizabeth’s adventurers generally “were not the stuff of ordinary merchant stock…..men who thirsted for knowledge, had tremendous egos, were desperate to make their fortunes, had an acute business sense, and possessed more than a fair portion of intelligence and cunning.” (17)


As Ronald puts it:


“If a lucky adventurer had a cunning plan to find treasure that mitigated the risk to the crown, then royal patronage would not be far behind. However, before the queen would commit herself or her ships to dangerous and costly overseas expeditions, she demanded that her men put their own personal fortunes alongside hers at the realm’s disposal for most voyages seeking treasure.” (22)


Elizabeth managed, in a sense, to privatize her naval war against Spain by combining the twin incentives of plunder and royal favor. Royal favor could bring opportunities for plunder—command of a ship, army, or fleet, a government sinecure, or a position in Ireland-- and plunder itself could buy royal favor. After all, the Crown got a cut of every expedition’s profits, and the bigger the booty, the bigger her cut.


There was thus a very fine line between public service and private ambition, since the one could be the means to satisfying the other. This was by no means limited to the adventurers—even members of what passed for the regular civil service indulged in wanton corruption and considered it a prerequisite of the job. Competition for such gleanings of office was fierce, and spawned countless bitter rivalries that spilled over into national policy based on who was more popular at court at a given time—for example, stripping troops from Sir John Norreys’ army in Brittany and sending them to the Earl of Essex’s in Normandy (see below).


The remainder of the book consists primarily of potted histories of the various sea dogs’ adventures, ranging from bloody raids on all things Spanish to the more epic achievements—Drake’s three-year circumnavigation of the globe, Raleigh’s failed colonies at Roanoke, the Armada, and the like. Although most of them are interesting, particularly the less commonly-known ventures such as the “English Armada” of 1589, the sequential recounting of these leaves something to be desired, as after the fourth or fifth voyage to the Caribbean to plunder galleons, the narrative becomes rather repetitive.


For those with a view of early modern history that extends beyond PBS reruns, Elizabeth is not an easy monarch to like. Even by the admittedly low and Machiavellian standards of her time she was inconstant, capricious, paranoid, easily taken in by her favorites such as the Earl of Essex, vindictive, displayed an exasperating unwillingness to commit to anything that had the slightest risk to it, and had a favorite sport in bear-baiting. Her preferred method of raising money was to bypass Parliament whenever possible, by handing out land grants or monopolies on trade in certain goods to her favorites.


In short, she probably had more personality traits in common with her correspondent Ivan the Terrible of Muscovy than any of her other contemporaries. Granted, one can hardly blame her, given whose daughter she was (Henry VIII) and what her early life was like, with religious wars, interregnums, foreign intrigue, and the like. Miranda Richardson’s comically vicious portrayal of the monarch in a series of Blackadder is probably much closer to the mark than most people realize.


Ronald’s book does, however, help illustrate England’s position in the grand scheme of things. For all that Britannia ruled the waves (and much of the land bobbing amidst those waves) in later centuries, during the later 16th Century and most of the early 17th Century, the cluster of small kingdoms set on a clutch of islands in the North Atlantic comprised second or third-rate powers at best. Christendom as a whole was in turmoil, with religious wars wracking France and Germany, the Turk literally battering at the gates of Vienna, and the Catholic powers were lashing out on all sides. Great Britain was not an important theater, the egos of the English-speaking world notwithstanding. Even the Spanish Armada of 1588, probably one of the two defining events of the century for England and the English (the other being Henry VIII’s break with Rome) is generally misinterpreted. The purpose of the Enterprise against England was principally to stop the English from meddling in the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and her rebellious Dutch and Belgian subjects. By the time of the Armada battles in 1588, Elizabeth had been openly supplying troops to the Dutch for three years, and had been sending money for decades (Sir John Norreys had led an expedition of ‘volunteers’ to the Netherlands in 1577), and then had the effrontery to be upset when the Spanish launched an attack on her!


Now remember, the modern distinction between public and private business was still in its infancy in Elizabeth’s day. Her reign sat at the beginning of one of the great eras of disingenuousness in international politics, which lasted until the modern monarchical state was cemented into place during the early Enlightenment. Rulers could claim—sometimes even truthfully—that they couldn’t control their subjects, since the machinery of control was so primitive. It was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times for Elizabeth to turn her sea dogs loose on Spain’s lands and commerce, in exchange for a cut of the take, while heatedly denying to Philip II’s ambassadors that she had any part of the business. It’s entirely possible she did the same thing in her famous ‘Golden Speech’ of 1601, in which she professed she had no idea how badly her favorites were abusing the commercial monopolies she had granted them.


Other rulers did the same thing—allowing border populations or ambitious ‘private citizens’ to wage a private or proxy war on a kingdom’s behalf, without the kingdom itself becoming involved. The Ottoman dynasty allowed its frontier freebooters free rein, and so on. A century’s worth of English and Scottish monarchs let the Border Reivers raid, kill, and burn at will—the West Riding of Yorkshire, site of so many Bronte novels, was formerly a thinly-populated wasteland in which every house was of necessity a fortress. Charles II let the English buccaneers of the Caribbean do whatever they wanted, so long as he wasn’t actually allied to Spain at the time. The Cossacks of the Ukraine, in their century long barroom brawl across the steppe, fought first for the Poles against the Russians, and later vice versa, and warred the whole time against the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars (or put another way, the Cossacks sat in the middle and fought all their neighbors in turn),


It may sound laughable to modern ears to hear of a monarch protesting that he can’t control his own subjects, but this is largely because people today expect governments to be able to control people. The machinery of social control was very primitive in the Sixteenth Century—with a government numbering at most a thousand clerks, justices of the peace, courtiers, and so on, the best that Henry VII and Henry VIII had been able to do to keep public order was to forbid the nobility from keeping private armies, and that mostly by threatening them with charges of treason and the prospect of the royal army coming down on their heads. Likewise, much of what made the Spanish Inquisition seem so horrible to contemporary eyes was how unprecedented it was—it may not seem like much compared to the legal machinery of the 21st century, but for its time it was a terrifying panopticon.




Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World will be of less interest to the general reader, and will probably appeal more towards the historian (professional or amateur) or the military hobbyist, as it is one of the very few biographies of the Elizabethan fighting man. It is a fairly straightforward biography of one of Queen Elizabeth’s relatively small coterie of what might be termed professional soldiers, and one of the even smaller number of successful and competent ones.


Sir John Norreys was born in 1547 at Yattendon Castle in Berkshire, the son of gentry who were staunch partisans of Queen Elizabeth. His family’s connection to the Tudors was occasionally a little awkward, as his grandfather had been Anne Boleyn’s friend and possible lover, and had been executed for it.


Nolan’s account then follows Norreys’ life and career in a chronological sequence. Much of the narrative focuses on administrative matters—cities taken, raids made, skirmishes with the Spanish, Irish, or Catholic French. Nolan discusses Norreys’ problems with money, food, and logistics in such detail that these constant complaints become rather tiresome, but their discussion is important because they were a major feature of Norreys’ career.


The book opens like a novel, with the young John and his brother Henry as sideline observers of the 1567 Battle of St. Denis, a particularly bitter clash in the French Wars of Religion. Norreys then spent some months fighting as a gentleman volunteer in the Huguenot army, before seeking out opportunities in Ireland under his father’s command. In this capacity he was responsible for the notorious Rathlin Island massacre of 1575.


This abrupt change in styles of warfare—cavalry actions in France in 1571, brutal hack—and-stab raids in Ireland in 1573, siege warfare in the Low Countries in 1577, back to Ireland in 1584, the Low Countries again in 1585—were a good general introduction to extremely diverse styles of warfare, and probably a much broader education than most of his continental contemporaries got (aside from those who had fought the Turks).


Save for being a soldier rather than a sailor, Norreys is by background or lifestyle not out of place in the company of Drake, Frobisher, and the other Elizabethan adventurers as a combination swashbuckler and venture capitalist. “Black John” Norreys had a lifelong reputation as a hard man; both his superiors and his subordinates considered him to be stubborn, opinionated, and arrogant, and he was certainly prone to allowing or encouraging atrocities. Very unusually for men of his age and social station, Norreys never married. He was conspicuously religious, and was apparently a strict Protestant with, in Nolan’s evaluation, possible Calvinist leanings acquired during his time spent with the Huguenots and Dutch.


One of the more interesting aspects of Norreys’ career, to which Nolan devotes some well-deserved attention, is the Norreys family’s ‘affinity,’ or a loose association of family members, feudal retainers, employees, and other trusted comrades who worked together in various arenas over a period of decades. Norreys would use many of the same officers and petty-captains (the contemporary equivalent of the non-commissioned officer) in most of his campaigns, also endeavoring to keep a core of veteran common soldiers available. In some circumstances, such as the early 1590s, Norreys was desperate for the Queen to restore him to favor and give him a job so that he could keep his affinity together. Without the Exchequer footing the bill, Norreys’ affinity would have disintegrated as his followers and comrades had to move on to greener fields in order to keep body and soul and estate together.


The most important difference is that while the sea dogs represented Elizabeth’s successes, Norreys’ career is often a list of her failures. Norreys was perpetually starved of resources, harassed and micromanaged by the government in London, accused of peculation and embezzlement, and generally prevented from doing anything worthwhile on the Continent because the Crown so dreaded the possibility of defeat that it dared not take a chance on victory. After his successful assault on a fortress at Arnhem and the Battle of Aarschot in 1585 earned him a thinly-veiled rebuke from the Queen for taking what the Queen saw as too much of a gamble. Within months after this victory, however, Norreys’ little army of raw recruits had virtually disintegrated due to lack of food, pay, and the like.


Norreys was also the chap saddled with the miserable task of preparing a land defense against the Spanish Armada. This was Norreys’ apogee, as he was given command of the largest land army England had assembled since the 1540s, and the largest before the outbreak of the Civil War. Ultimately it was all for naught, as the Armada was defeated at sea, without any Spanish forces landing in England


For all the national trauma the 1588 invasion scare had brought, Elizabeth’s government was quick to revert to its old miserly and vacillating ways. While on campaign in Brittany, which was to prove a pointless exercise, Norreys and his men went for long periods without receiving food, pay, or even ammunition, and had to resort to living off the land like their ancestors did during the Hundred Years’ War. At the same time, Lord Burghley’s government and the Queen herself spared no effort in sending a tide of nagging ‘suggestions’ to Norreys.


In the years after the Armada crisis, this miserly and crippling attitude towards the Queen’s wars was exacerbated by Lord Burghley, who succeeded Norreys’ erstwhile patron Lord Walsingham as the Queen’s Principal Secretary in 1590. Largely as a result of the shocking expense incurred by the Armada crisis, Burghley rather foolishly attempted to run the war against Spain on a strictly limited budget. The result was that if the bills came to more than Burghley wanted to spend, he simply let them go into arrears, sometimes for years and sometimes ad infinitum. Several once-promising campaigns in Brittany, the Low Countries, and Normandy thus quickly ground to a halt for lack of money and supplies, and Norreys’ older brother Henry was warned during Henry’s defense of Ostend, that excessive spending on fortifications would come out of his paycheck.


Between the two of them, these books give the reader a decent inside look into the Elizabethan world, government, and military. I’m going to go watch The Young Ones now.

Thinking about the election.....

I am thoroughly sick of the election coverage right now. This has been going on since November 2008. Sarah Palin is suffering from overexposure (and not just the Alaskan weather kind) and I can't keep track anymore of which vitriolic right-wing candidate's followers have arrested or beaten up people who disagree with the candidate. Joe Miller, Rand Paul, they all run together after a while. Personally, I think private retinues of political thugs is a rather ominous phenomenon. Alas, I'm not talking about Roderick Spode again.

The Tea Party is a formidable opponent, far more ferocious than the old-line institutional Republicans like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. They have a broad appeal to the people who feel they've been given short shrift by the system. Most of them are, however, probably mad at the government for what was actually done to them by their health insurance companies, employers, or banks, or the general and continuous slide in real wages since the 1970s, rather than the government.... but it is hard to get that point across. In any case, they're mad as hell and are lashing out at the most visible and vulnerable target. After all, you can't vote out the head of your HMO after your benefits have been slashed.

In that respect, they're not that different in motivation than the progressives who voted the Democrats into control of Congress in 2008, and into the White House in 2008. Some of them are probably even the same people.

Still, when the Tea Party puts the Republicans back in charge of the House, it won't be the hellraisers who get the prominent seats and the most power. We'll be back to guys like McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, et al., most of whom have been in DC for ages. Even if Christine O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, or any of the other current crop of Tea Party heart-throbs get elected, they'll be reduced to cogs in a machine controlled by older men with very different priorities, including an affinity for corporate economics and an ill-concealed disdain for the people and populism, even as manifested in the Tea Party. There is seldom any gratitude in politics.

Thus the irony.

It also says a great deal about the respective priorities of the Obama White House and the Republican machine that while the White House has imposed strict new disclosure and access requirements for lobbyists and has fought for campaign finance reform, the Republican candidates in this year's election benefit from the Citizens United windfall, which opened the gates to a flood of unregulated cash from anonymous donors. The Republicans are outspending Democrats seven to one on media advertisements, and it hasn't escaped public notice that multimillionaires in New York are meddling in congressional elections in Oregon by essentially laundering money through a 527.

For all that President Obama and his supporters have accomplished in the last year and a half-- and the list is really impressive, to those who bother to read it-- it was unlikely the Democrats would retain even their nominal control of Congress after the midterms.

That the Democrats managed to accomplish what they did in the face of such entrenched, well-coordinated, and well-funded opposition is extremely impressive.

I call it a nominal control because of two things. The Republicans managed to get a great deal of mileage out of simply saying 'no' and filibustering at every opportunity, and because the Democratic majority was a paper tiger that depended too heavily on Blue Dogs, many of whom are 'conservatives in the wrong party,' so to speak-- leftovers from before Goldwater and Nixon turned the Republican party into what it is now. Once you stop counting the Blue Dogs as Democrats (which Reid and Pelosi might well have done, since they couldn't count on Blue Dog support without heaps of pork), the Democrats didn't have any kind of a majority at all.

Most importantly, the expectation that the Democrats will take losses in the 2010 election isn't sour grapes or pessimism, it's based in historical reality.

Incumbent parties almost always take a brutal walloping in the midterm after a new president is elected. The most recent such midterm, in 2002, was an anomaly, largely because of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Even in midterms in general, every midterm election for the last 70 years has resulted in the President's party losing seats in Congress, with exactly three exceptions-- 1934, 1998, and 2002.

I must admit, though, that the Democrats are actually doing better than I expected.

What I find exasperating, however, is how many Democratic candidates like Chet Edwards, Jason Altmire, and Joe Manchin have essentially given in to the right wing's demonization of the President, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and (perhaps most of all) Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Most of these guys are essentially Blue Dogs anyways, and fighting for their lives against Republicans, but it is infuriating nonetheless.

The Republicans, for their part, generally wasted no time in running away from George W. Bush after 2006. I'm sure the world still wonders why.

I think part of the problem is that the public is just grossly misinformed about the issues.

TARP didn't start under Obama, it started under Bush.

So did the auto industry bailout.

The deregulation that allowed the crash of 2008 also happened under Bush, but Obama did something about that.

Most of 'Obamacare' consisted of strictures binding on health insurers, not the consumer, and were certainly more to the benefit of the consumer than the Republican bill of 2005, which forbade Medicare from negotiating pharmaceutical prices and gave Big Pharma the right to charge whatever it wanted.

The Obama administration actually CUT taxes for most people, which begs the question of exactly what reality most of the Tea Party howlers live in.

I'd particularly like to know how many people in the US actually understand what socialism is and how it works, as opposed to just parroting right-wing talking points.

In general, the election coverage as a whole increasingly begs the question of whether a non-conservative administration, candidate, or party can expect a fair shake from an increasingly partisan news media. Jon Stewart really IS the hardest-hitting journalist in the media, and I'm appalled by that fact too.

By partisan, of course, I certainly do not mean the mythical "liberal media." I point as an example, rather, to the network whose owner has donated millions of dollars to Republican party organs, and whose primary media outlet once used as a defense in court the argument that the media has no obligation to tell the truth.

The result ultimately remains to be seen......

Glenn Beck, America's Own Roderick Spode

My last post, Glenn Beck, The World’s Greatest Authority on Slavery, included the phrase “America’s own Roderick Spode.” I cross-posted the blog on the Daily Kos, and one Mr. Dbug enjoyed it immensely.


The more I think about the comparison, the more apt and amusing it seems, so I thought I should delve into it some more.


This is Roderick Spode, as played by John Turner in an episode of the Jeeves and Wooster television series produced during the 1990s. Most Americans will probably not know who Spode is, save for those of us who enjoy British humor.




Roderick Spode is a recurring character in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves” novels. Spode, usually portrayed as a nemesis of Jeeves’ master Bertie Wooster, is an overbearing presence, described as looking “as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.” In his spare time, Spode is an "amateur Dictator" and the leader of his own fascist movement, dubbed The Black Shorts. Spode is typically encountered as he stomps around the countryside, delivering passionate speeches at rallies (click to see Spode at full tilt) or marches consisting of a few dozen Black Shorts, while he poses and preens as if he was watching thousands go by.


Although an aristocrat—a baronet, and the 7th Earl of Sidcup-- and a wealthy man, Spode is a populist who believes that national industrial capacity, national prosperity and national unity are correlated, promising that “at birth, every citizen, as of right, will be issued with a British bicycle and an honest British-made umbrella. Thus assured of a mobile workforce adequately protected against the elements, this great country can go forward once more to glory!”


If Wodehouse’s satiric pen is laid aside for the moment, much of Spode’s ideology consists of a marriage of scientific rationalism (the idée du jour) to appeals to historic British nationalism, particularly the ideal of the “free-born Englishman.” Though in reality largely mythical, the idea was real enough in the heads of generation after generation of nostalgic working-class Britons as they sought a decent condition for themselves in the socioeconomic hammermill of the Industrial Revolution.


For all his buffoonery, Spode is unalterably convinced that he is right and bound only for success, and takes every opportunity to press his views on the idle landed gentry who are Bertie’s social circle. As Spode himself put it, “Nothing stands between us and our victory except defeat! Tomorrow is a new day! The future lies ahead!”


Like Beck, Spode had many strange fixations—his political platform included dedicating Wales entirely to the production of turnips; a ban on the import of foreign root vegetables; the mandatory eating of asparagus; widening railroads to allow for the transport of livestock; and the scientific measurement of all British male knees (a riff on the contemporary eugenics movement). Spode enthused at length on the knee issue in The Code of the Woosters, declaiming: “Not for the true-born Englishman the bony angular knee of the so-called intellectual, not for him the puffy knee of the criminal classes. The British knee is firm, the British knee is muscular, the British knee is on the march!” Spode is glib when it comes to defending his bizarre positions, with blandishments such as “I can assure you, it has all been worked out scientifically ...”


One of the easygoing Bertie Wooster’s few truly fiery moments was when he upbraided the overbearing Spode in The Code of the Woosters, written in 1938.


The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"


—P. G. Wodehouse, Bertie Wooster in The Code of the Woosters (1938)



Granted, Bertie had an ace up his sleeve, courtesy of his valet Jeeves, concerning Spode’s own dark secret—that Spode’s other enterprise is a very successful ladies’ undergarment store. As Bertie later put it, "You can't be a successful dictator and design women's underclothes...one or the other, not both..."


Spode was a cutting parody of the UK’s real would-be fascist of the 1930s, the pompous but deadly serious Sir Oswald Mosley, the aristocratic leader of the British Union of Fascists, as well as other fascist leaders such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and the like. Most of Mosley’s BUF was consciously based on Mussolini’s Brown Shirts and similar fascist groups in other countries, and his Black Shirt paramilitary organization were a rising and ominous force in British politics during the 1930s, until their defeat in an East London street brawl known as the Battle of Cable Street brought about the Public Order Act of 1936, forbidding political uniforms and private paramilitary associations in the UK. Mosley and the BUF championed British isolationism both before and after the outbreak of the Second World War. Mosley himself was attacked by a mob after the German invasion of Norway, following which he was interned as a potential spy or traitor, and kept under arrest for the remainder of the war. Ironically, after the war he changed his politics dramatically and launched a new, non-fascist organization, the Union Movement, whose goal was a unified Europe. Mosley continued as a perennial fringe candidate in British politics until 1977.


If you haven’t seen the Jeeves and Wooster series, incidentally you are seriously deprived—Hugh Laurie stars as Bertie Wooster, a well-meaning wastrel aristocrat, and the incredible Stephen Fry stars as Jeeves, valet to the gods. Hilarity ensues.


This is Glenn Beck. Most Americans will know who he is, mostly because he’s managed to attract a great deal of attention to his on-air and on-screen antics, as well as his recent rally at the Lincoln Memorial.




[I assure you, I had nothing to do with the coincidence in their poses and uniforms. All right, so I did, but it was only because the resemblance is what put the Beck = Spode thing in my head in the first place.]


Glenn Beck is a prominent conservative talk-radio personality, television presenter, and political activist, strongly allied with the more radical elements of the Republican party and other conservative organizations. He was born in 1964 and grew up in Washington State, having been raised Catholic. Catholicism notwithstanding, his parents divorced when he was 13, due to his mother’s alcoholism. Rather than attending college, Beck got married, worked a series of low-paying jobs at radio stations and “getting high every day” for fifteen years. After joining Alcoholics Anonymous in 1994, he remarried and converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons. From the late 1970s until 1999, Beck was a low-grade comedian and prankster, one step up from Jackass or Punkd.


Mr. Beck is frequently lampooned for his frantic blackboard diagramming and over-emotional delivery, including his famous March 13, 2009 ‘breakdown’ when he broke out in tears and theatrically sobbed, "I'm sorry, I just love my country and I fear for it." Jon Stewart of the Daily Show parodies Beck’s style here. The weeping was eventually revealed to be a not-even-very-clever stage trick, done by smearing Vick’s Vapo-Rub on his face to make his eyes water. Beck marries the fervor of the convert and true believer to the cynical charlatanry of the carnival huckster.


Beck is also frequently criticized by economists, scientists, historians, and other experts for gross errors of fact and repeated clumsy attempts to rewrite the republic’s history to fit his political views. These have included Beck’s supporting the patently false claim that Thomas Jefferson endorsed the idea of the US as a Christian republic, based on the evidence of his having signed shipping permits dated with the phrase “In the year of our lord, Christ.” As Chris Rodda promptly and succinctly pointed out, however, the documents in question were pre-printed forms prepared by the Dutch government, which was not separate from the Dutch Reformed Church, rather than the US government.


Beck’s standard approach to virtually any topic is to take any issue, whether a thing he favors or a straw-man iteration of something he opposes, and weaving around it a tangle of saccharine uber-patriotism, Leave-It-To-Beaver family values, and New World Order conspiracy theory, in which the latter imperils the former. He describes the federal government and the progressive movement as an enormous conspiracy dedicated to the repression of individual rights and the American way of life, staging a coup (referring to the 2008 presidential election, in which conservatives were sharply defeated) or ‘soft revolution,’ and amassing an army. He is essentially taking a large page out of Joe McCarthy’s “creeping communists” playbook and adding to it the ‘black helicopter’ antigovernment paranoia of the militia movement of the 1990s. He further accuses the left wing of preparing for mass violence. There is a black sort of irony in how much of Beck’s own fearmongering consists of allegations that the federal government is using fear tactics to further the progressive agenda. He has yet, to my knowledge, to comment on the Bush administration’s chronic and Machiavellian abuse of the Homeland Security “terror alert system” for political ends, including raising the warning level around election time or when the administration was having PR difficulties on other fronts.


In effect, he is working off the old ‘rights of the freeborn American’ idiom that has been kicked around the political sphere for two centuries, starting with a mythical golden age in which a Christian republic of happy freeholders basked in the glow of the free market, ruled over lightly by a limited federal government. What brought an end to these good old days—not that they ever actually existed—was supposedly creeping increases in government power, heavier taxes, and the evolution of the modern federal government from it’s 18th-century form, in a supposedly slow but steady march of big-government liberalism. This false continuity makes sense to people who only see history in black and white, but doesn’t even attempt to account for issues such as the legal status of slavery (more precisely, how could an ideal society embrace slavery as a fact of cold economics), the Industrial Revolution, evolutions in finance, the klepto-capitalist government from 1870 until 1930, and so on. It makes for a depressing story, a legacy of decline and defeat to rival that of Tolkien’s Sons of Feanor in the Silmarillion, or the humiliations of Israel in the Old Testament, but there always lingers the promise of eventual revenge and redemption.


As for Beck’s own particular interpretation of the ‘freeborn American’ idiom, religious scholar Joanna Brooks suspects that much of Beck’s almost religious reverence for the Founding Fathers and their era is an outgrowth of his newfound Mormon faith, where in her words, “reverence for the founders and the United States Constitution as divinely inspired are often-declared elements of orthodox belief.” At least one Mormon President claimed to have experienced divine visions including the signers of the Declaration of Independence.


Mr. Beck quite obviously doesn’t know his history very well—in fact, one of the major sources of his gratuitous factual errors is his partnership with David Barton, a controversial pseudo-historian, evangelical preacher, Republican political consultant, and textbook consultant to both the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and the Texas State Board of Education. Mr. Barton is an ardent advocate of Biblical government of the United States, to the extent of excluding non-Christians from public office, and argues that the traditional “separation of church and state” aspired to in the US is a myth built from false pretenses. The latter assertion was, unfortunately, included in a core textbook provided to JROTC students.


Mr. Beck is also conspicuous for embracing antigovernment conspiracy theories of the sort beloved by the 1990s “tin-foil hat” sector. In addition to alleging that the federal government is out to get him, personally, Mr. Beck has repeatedly insisted that that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running concentration camps in the continental united states (even after he was thoroughly spindled by Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman on the subject). Beck subsequently denied ever having mentioned FEMA, even though he was videotaped talking about the concentration camp issue on an episode of Fox & Friends.


In some ways, Beck also mirrors Stephen Colbert’s character on the Colbert Report, which presents the odd situation of Beck, a real person, being more off-the-wall than Colbert’s stage character pretends to be.


The significant difference is that while the worst damage Colbert has done is to conservatives who took too long to realize he was parodying them, not joining them, Beck has inspired people with short tempers and poor judgment to commit violent acts. As one example, an avowed Beck fan, Byron Williams of Oakland, California, in July 2010 engaged the California Highway Patrol in a gun battle in which two police officers were seriously injured. As it turned out, Beck had spent much of the previous several weeks ranting about the Tides Foundation, a harmless social justice nonprofit, and casting it as the nexus of a vast conspiracy of Beck’s enemies. Mr. Williams explained that listening to Beck had enraged him to the extent that he was attempting to start a revolution, and that the ACLU and the Tides Foundation were his targets.


As usual, Beck reacts to such criticism with his usual gormless and glib “who, me?” defense, and then goes right back to waving the same red flag in front of the bull. Despite the overtly political and heavily partisan nature of his programming, Beck has disingenuously claimed that his business is entertainment rather than the news, in an attempt to disassociate from the actions he quite plainly inspired. The extent to which Beck is responsible for their actions despite his own thinly-veiled advocacy of violence is starting to look like an increasingly valid legal question.


So to sum up, Beck and Spode have the following in common:


• A belief that modern society is sick and weak, and in need of rescue.
• Some really bizarre ideas about the proper order of human society, be they the proper agricultural economy of Wales or the role of the federal government in economics and religion.
• A belief that strongmen and motivated followers can effect change.
• Unabashed contempt for anyone who disagrees with them (c.f the title on the book cover above).
• Histrionic public speaking, and gross delusions of how many people are actually in the audience.
• A propensity to erratic behavior, and sweating.
• Outspoken interests in maintaining law and order, even though they also propose overthrowing or replacing the established order.
• A few embarrassing secrets. Please not that I am not equating being a Mormon with being a lingerie merchant, but it is quite likely that his following among evangelical Christians would shrink if his “heretical” Mormon religion were more widely known.
• A sense of messianic destiny, whether for themselves or for their movement.
• Horrible dress sense.







If there is one way in which Spode thoroughly outshines Beck, it is in having at least some intellectual respect for his audience. While Spode lays out his “worked out scientifically” platitudes, Beck reacts with a nauseatingly glib “who, me?” when called on the carpet, even when he’s not flatly denying that he said what he is caught on video as having said. Beck, it seems, simply doesn’t think his audience is smart enough to pick up flat-out lies and contradictions.


I can therefore assure you that it has all been scientifically worked out—that Glenn Beck is the United States’ own Roderick Spode. As with most American things appear when compared to their British counterparts, they are bigger, richer, louder, and cruder.


What makes the odious Spode more tolerable than the odious Beck, of course, is that the former is a fictional character, while Mr. Beck exists in this universe, which means we are unfortunately stuck with him. To be more precise, Mr. Beck’s corporeal form exists in this universe, but quite where his strange little mind is at any given time is…well, that is a damn good question, but it’s almost certainly not the same reality in which we live.