STARR (voice-over): Iran's once secret underground nuclear fuel enrichment plant. The Pentagon is worried Iran is now burying weapons factories so deep, that the current arsenal of bombs can't reach them, leaving the U.S. with no viable military option if a strike was ever ordered.
This new Air Force 15-ton bomb may change that calculation.
JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: We'd certainly be able to take this out with a massive ordnance penetrator, the 30,000-pound boss.
STARR: This is the massive ordnance penetrator, or MOP, now being rushed into development to be carried on B-2 and B-52 bombers. The most likely targets? Iran and North Korea, which are believed to have buried weapons facilities hundreds of feet underground or into the sides of mountains.
PIKE: Some of those would probably require this massive ordnance penetrator simply because they are buried so deep and no other bomb would be able to certainly destroy them.
STARR: At 30,000 pounds, the MOP, some experts say, will be able to penetrate 650 feet of concrete, a significant boost over current bunker-busting bombs like the 2,000-pound BLU-109, which can penetrate just six feet of concrete, and the 5,000-pound GBU-28 which can go through about 20 feet of concrete.
GEOFF MORRELL, PENTAGON SPOKESMAN: This has been a capability that we have long believed was missing from our quiver, our arsenal, and we wanted to make sure we've filled in that gap.CNN Transcript, via Glenn Greenwald
Turgidson: I think we should look at this from the military point of view. I mean, supposing the Russkies stashes away some big bomb, see. When they come out in a hundred years they could take over!
General: I agree, Mr. President. In fact, they might even try an immediate sneak attack so they could take over our mineshaft space.
Turgidson: Yeah. I think it would be extremely naive of us, Mr. President, to imagine that these new developments are going to cause any change in Soviet expansionist policy. I mean, we must be... increasingly on the alert to prevent them from taking over other mineshaft space, in order to breed more prodigiously than we do, thus, knocking us out in superior numbers when we emerge! Mr. President, we must not allow... a mine shaft gap!Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Closing the Mineshaft Gap
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Lord Blankfein
Even though he proudly pays himself more in a year than most of us could ever dream of — $68m in 2007 alone, a record for any Wall Street CEO, to add to the more than $500m of Goldman stock he owns — he insists he’s still "a blue-collar guy".There is an ill wind blowing here and I could say a lot, but these three articles together (and related links) will say more than I ever could. So let me just back up and double take Blankfein's statements about being a blue collar guy doing God's work. If your gap toothed, second trimester Waffle House waitress told you that she has a Wall Street banker, millionairish, courvoisier swilling, Armani pant-suit sensibility even though she has to pour your coffee and, oh, by the way, hon, how would you like your eggs?, would that be any less ridiculous than blankfein's ridiculous ego-tripping? If a $70M a year Wall Street banker who runs one of the most powerful corporations in the world can get away with calling himself 'blue collar', then class labels have gone beyond meaningless into a realm of anti-meaning that only quantum physicists can suss the meaning of; I know everyone in America considers him or her self 'middle class', but come on!
...
So, it’s business as usual, then, regardless of whether it makes most people howl at the moon with rage? Goldman Sachs, this pillar of the free market, breeder of super-citizens, object of envy and awe will go on raking it in, getting richer than God? An impish grin spreads across Blankfein’s face. Call him a fat cat who mocks the public. Call him wicked. Call him what you will. He is, he says, just a banker "doing God’s work"I'm doing 'God's work'. Meet Mr Goldman Sachs
The Sunday Times
November 8, 2009
A Congressional investigation into energy trading in 2003 discovered that ICE was being used to facilitate "round-trip" trades. Round-trip trades occur when one firm sells energy to another, and then the second firm simultaneously sells the same amount of energy back to the first company at exactly the same price. No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.
...
You can chart the damage done by Goldman Sachs and their gang of thieves by looking at commodity pricing pre- and post-ICE. Before ICE, commodities followed a more or less normal growth path that matched global GDP and was always limited in price appreciation by the fact that, ultimately, someone had to take delivery of a physical commodity at a set price.
ICE threw that concept out the window and turned commodity trading into a speculative casino game where pricing was notional and contracts could be sold by people who never produced a thing, to people who didn’t need the things that were not produced. And in just 5 years after commencing operations, Goldman Sachs and their partners managed to TRIPLE the price of commodities.
...
Before ICE, the average American family spent 7% of their income on food and fuel. Last year, that number topped 20%. That’s 13% of the incomes of every man, woman and child in the United States of America, over $1Tn EVERY SINGLE YEAR, stolen through market manipulation. On a global scale, that number is over $4Tn per year...
In the 1980-2007 era of cheap credit and deregulation, banks had every incentive to move from real-economy projects, yielding a profit, towards lending against rising asset prices, yielding a capital gain. In the 1990s and 2000s, loan volumes rose to unprecedented levels, supporting global assets booms in property, derivatives and the carry trade. The share of lending by US banks to the US financial sector – instead of to the real economy – went from 60 per cent of the outstanding loan stock in 1980 (up from 50 per cent in the 1950s) to more than 80 per cent in 2007Lending Must Support the Real Economy
Financial Times, November 4, 2009
Bonus Coverage from the New York Times, because 4 blockquotes would exceed my license.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Documentaries: The Garden and Religulous
Religulous (Bill Maher) (2009)
This Maher vehicle has a few amusing spots and would have worked well as a 30 minute special, but Bill’s unwillingness or inability to go anywhere with his premise makes this a tedious film to watch. The scenes run into one another endlessly; it’s Bill pointing out the ridiculous myths and legends of religion in the faces of believers, who argue back with him in the circular, tautological logic of religion. “I know God exists because I feel it”, “The bible is the word of God so it has to be true” and on. The only wrinkle in the movie is when it points out all the legends that Christianity borrowed from prior religions. (They did this to make Christianity more attractive to barbarians – hey, we have Christmas too. Our guy was resurrected after three days too, come on and join us, you won’t have to change much at all!)
Maher argues with Christians of every stripe; a converted Satanist, priests, Vatican clergy, tourists at a Christian amusement park, a Christian museum curator, clergy who are 'reformed' homosexuals, and on and on with the same arguments. Having exhausted the Christian world, Maher argues with Jews, Scientologists and Muslims over their doctrine.
I had my fill of frustrating, pointless, and heated arguments about religion many years ago. Maher’s mash-up doesn’t go beyond the typical dorm-room arguments between an atheist and faith-based roommate who are equally savvy with Google and like to drink and argue into the night without resolution.
The Garden (2009)
This documentary follows the thread of a 14 acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles. The local community appropriated an unused plot of land to grow crops for the community in the middle of the city. They struggle against the local political and wealthy interests, who want to evict them.
The villain of the movie is the land owner, who leveraged his political connections to purchase the land at an extremely favorable price and plans to flip it for 300% of its purchase price a few years after purchasing it from the city. The community fights in court to stop the loss of this massive urban garden. Things get heated. The land owner sarcastically tells them that if they can raise the $16 million in a few weeks then he will sell to them; unbelievably they manage to raise the capital. I’ll stop there without giving any other plot points away.
The film raises several questions; How does the appropriation and usage of otherwise unused property for the benefit of the many compared to the prerogatives of a delinquent land owner? How does the American system of justice come down when resolving disputes between capital and people? (I recall one anguished cry from a woman in the film who asks incredulously, how in America could things be like this?) How closely do wealth and political influence track? In one gripping sequence, the police assemble in mass to break up the community in one stand-off; amazingly, the SWAT teams are acting on the behalf of one private land-owner to brutalize a community; who exactly to the police ‘serve and protect’?
One last point; the garden is geographically huge, well developed and maintained, and the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of members in the local community. They have a system of law and order, only subsistence farming allowed for example, and they successfully enforce those rules. The community is also interracially mixed, primarily Latinos with some African-Americans and whites. This communal organizing and use of the land happens in what most Americans think of as a thoroughly atomized neighborhood in Los Angeles, South Central. In other words, all of this runs contrary to some prevailingly popular economic orthodoxy – namely, the problem of the commons that holds that unless some property has an owning and controlling interest, then it will fall into ruin and disrepair. From this belief flow policy proposals like cap and trade to curb CO2 emissions, or privatizing wild lands to preserve it from loggers or polluters. Even less controversial, the concept of land ownership.
This Maher vehicle has a few amusing spots and would have worked well as a 30 minute special, but Bill’s unwillingness or inability to go anywhere with his premise makes this a tedious film to watch. The scenes run into one another endlessly; it’s Bill pointing out the ridiculous myths and legends of religion in the faces of believers, who argue back with him in the circular, tautological logic of religion. “I know God exists because I feel it”, “The bible is the word of God so it has to be true” and on. The only wrinkle in the movie is when it points out all the legends that Christianity borrowed from prior religions. (They did this to make Christianity more attractive to barbarians – hey, we have Christmas too. Our guy was resurrected after three days too, come on and join us, you won’t have to change much at all!)
Maher argues with Christians of every stripe; a converted Satanist, priests, Vatican clergy, tourists at a Christian amusement park, a Christian museum curator, clergy who are 'reformed' homosexuals, and on and on with the same arguments. Having exhausted the Christian world, Maher argues with Jews, Scientologists and Muslims over their doctrine.
I had my fill of frustrating, pointless, and heated arguments about religion many years ago. Maher’s mash-up doesn’t go beyond the typical dorm-room arguments between an atheist and faith-based roommate who are equally savvy with Google and like to drink and argue into the night without resolution.
The Garden (2009)
This documentary follows the thread of a 14 acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles. The local community appropriated an unused plot of land to grow crops for the community in the middle of the city. They struggle against the local political and wealthy interests, who want to evict them.
The villain of the movie is the land owner, who leveraged his political connections to purchase the land at an extremely favorable price and plans to flip it for 300% of its purchase price a few years after purchasing it from the city. The community fights in court to stop the loss of this massive urban garden. Things get heated. The land owner sarcastically tells them that if they can raise the $16 million in a few weeks then he will sell to them; unbelievably they manage to raise the capital. I’ll stop there without giving any other plot points away.
The film raises several questions; How does the appropriation and usage of otherwise unused property for the benefit of the many compared to the prerogatives of a delinquent land owner? How does the American system of justice come down when resolving disputes between capital and people? (I recall one anguished cry from a woman in the film who asks incredulously, how in America could things be like this?) How closely do wealth and political influence track? In one gripping sequence, the police assemble in mass to break up the community in one stand-off; amazingly, the SWAT teams are acting on the behalf of one private land-owner to brutalize a community; who exactly to the police ‘serve and protect’?
One last point; the garden is geographically huge, well developed and maintained, and the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of members in the local community. They have a system of law and order, only subsistence farming allowed for example, and they successfully enforce those rules. The community is also interracially mixed, primarily Latinos with some African-Americans and whites. This communal organizing and use of the land happens in what most Americans think of as a thoroughly atomized neighborhood in Los Angeles, South Central. In other words, all of this runs contrary to some prevailingly popular economic orthodoxy – namely, the problem of the commons that holds that unless some property has an owning and controlling interest, then it will fall into ruin and disrepair. From this belief flow policy proposals like cap and trade to curb CO2 emissions, or privatizing wild lands to preserve it from loggers or polluters. Even less controversial, the concept of land ownership.
Foot Notes for "Bob Dylan Cliff’s Notes"
In the course of researching the post on Dylan’s cliff’s notes, I came across a couple of gems that I couldn’t fit into the post, but wanted to recommend.
1. Nashville Sessions, album (1969)
The first is a bootleg of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan jamming together, the Nashville Sessions recorded circa 1969. Dylan used one of the tracks for his Nashville Skyline studio release. The quality is much better than Tree With Roots and the album is pretty good in its own right. I don’t think it has been released and I have no idea why not given both men’s popularity - probably legal issues.
Here is a sample. Cash’s voice sometimes calls up the same ball of emotions in me that looking at paintings sometimes does, a sort of bottom of the stomach swelling that almost feels like tears.
I Walk The Line, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash
2. Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973), movie
I enjoy westerns. The American old west and its mythology is Americana; violent, unruly, arbitrary, stoic, dusty, bloody and cruel. Built on theft and nobility, myth and reality.
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid illustrate the tale of these two legends. Dylan scored the movie’s sound track and played a small role.
I saw the restored director’s cut; an angry studio exec butchered the original release so badly that Peckinpah sued to have his name removed from the credits. The film opens with Garrett’s bloody death 30 years after the events of the rest of movie. As he goes down in a hail of gunfire and betrayal, he thinks back to his time hunting and killing his friend Billy the Kid, hired to do so by the same men killing him in the present. Peckinpah cut this scene with the opening of the movie properly, with Billy and his gang taking target practice at chickens as Garrett arrives on the scene. The edits make it appear as though Peckinpah is being killed by bullets fired all those years earlier. The movie echoes back on itself like this time and again in alignment with its broader theme, which I took to be capturing the transition from chaotic, every many is his own law old west to a profitable business for big money interests – thereby turning the old ways into myth and legend. Before several shoot-outs, characters retell stories from the past, blurring the legends and present.
Garrett tells Billy that he intends to grow old comfortably, he has accepted the big business paymasters, and his first task is to run the Kid out. Billy says he isn’t changing and the stage is set. Garrett is the former villain who has accepted the changing times and seeks to ally with power; Billy doesn’t. Garrett departs, warning Billy to leave in 5 days.
The rest of the movie is the tale of the chase with Garrett revising several former friends and partners, shooting many of them down. The actor plays him with a seething self loathing. In one haunting scene, Garrett enlists the help of another lawman, played by Slim Pickens, and his wife to call on one of Garrett’s old riding partner during his investigation. A shoot out occurs, mortally wounding Pickens and the partner. Before Garrett guns down his old friend, his friend recalls their past when they road into the territory 15 years earlier. Meanwhile, Pickens stumbles off to a nearby river to die, his wife follows to say goodbye. Pickens is mortally wounded, eyes wide and teary, staring off into the distance and coming to terms with his death. The strains of Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door frame the scene wonderfully.
Many scenes are cut from the same pattern, Garrett gunning down old friends who despise him for selling out, Garrett withdrawing into greater self-loathing and cruelty, and on it goes. It’s the end of an era, and the black-clad sheriff is a bought and paid for grim reaper harvesting the men who are living out of time. By the way, Billy is not portrayed as a noble hero. He spends most of his time drinking, sleeping with women, occasionally alpha dogging members of his crew, and not doing much but gunning down bounty hunters looking for him and enjoying himself. In one scene, on his way to Mexico to flee Garrett and the ranchers, he comes upon several men killing a friend and raping his wife. He quickly dispatches the three men, watches his friend die and rides off, leaving the woman on her own in the middle of nowhere to deal with the situation. I don't think Billy said or looked at the widow of his friend even once, riding off and vowing revenge (and instead of revenge he gets drunk and beds down another woman.)
Dylan’s role in the film is minor; he plays a printer who follows Billy, presumably to chronicle the events. More interesting, I have to wonder if Peckinpah cast Dylan as a meta-comment on the story. The Times are a Changing could be the movies theme song. Moreover, Dylan had come to fame as a counter culture icon; and then spent the rest of his career running from that movement and its expectations of him. He refused to make any political statements outside of his music, never attended protests, and angered when his friends tried to talk him into publicly speaking against the Vietnam War. He hated and feared the elements of the counter culture that preached revolution and wanted to overturn the existing order. Like many famous artists in this age, Dylan was a savvy businessman and capitalist. He wanted to get make records and get paid, hated injustice but had no interest in wrecking the existing order that afforded him a life of riches and excitement. In other words, Dylan in real life was closer to Peckinpah’s Garrett and the legendary Dylan as he existed in the minds of many of his fans, such as Dohrn-Ayers Weather Underground, closer to the Kid.
It’s a good movie if you like westerns, probably my second favorite next to The Unforgiven.
1. Nashville Sessions, album (1969)
The first is a bootleg of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan jamming together, the Nashville Sessions recorded circa 1969. Dylan used one of the tracks for his Nashville Skyline studio release. The quality is much better than Tree With Roots and the album is pretty good in its own right. I don’t think it has been released and I have no idea why not given both men’s popularity - probably legal issues.
Here is a sample. Cash’s voice sometimes calls up the same ball of emotions in me that looking at paintings sometimes does, a sort of bottom of the stomach swelling that almost feels like tears.
I Walk The Line, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash
2. Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973), movie
I enjoy westerns. The American old west and its mythology is Americana; violent, unruly, arbitrary, stoic, dusty, bloody and cruel. Built on theft and nobility, myth and reality.
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid illustrate the tale of these two legends. Dylan scored the movie’s sound track and played a small role.
I saw the restored director’s cut; an angry studio exec butchered the original release so badly that Peckinpah sued to have his name removed from the credits. The film opens with Garrett’s bloody death 30 years after the events of the rest of movie. As he goes down in a hail of gunfire and betrayal, he thinks back to his time hunting and killing his friend Billy the Kid, hired to do so by the same men killing him in the present. Peckinpah cut this scene with the opening of the movie properly, with Billy and his gang taking target practice at chickens as Garrett arrives on the scene. The edits make it appear as though Peckinpah is being killed by bullets fired all those years earlier. The movie echoes back on itself like this time and again in alignment with its broader theme, which I took to be capturing the transition from chaotic, every many is his own law old west to a profitable business for big money interests – thereby turning the old ways into myth and legend. Before several shoot-outs, characters retell stories from the past, blurring the legends and present.
Garrett tells Billy that he intends to grow old comfortably, he has accepted the big business paymasters, and his first task is to run the Kid out. Billy says he isn’t changing and the stage is set. Garrett is the former villain who has accepted the changing times and seeks to ally with power; Billy doesn’t. Garrett departs, warning Billy to leave in 5 days.
The rest of the movie is the tale of the chase with Garrett revising several former friends and partners, shooting many of them down. The actor plays him with a seething self loathing. In one haunting scene, Garrett enlists the help of another lawman, played by Slim Pickens, and his wife to call on one of Garrett’s old riding partner during his investigation. A shoot out occurs, mortally wounding Pickens and the partner. Before Garrett guns down his old friend, his friend recalls their past when they road into the territory 15 years earlier. Meanwhile, Pickens stumbles off to a nearby river to die, his wife follows to say goodbye. Pickens is mortally wounded, eyes wide and teary, staring off into the distance and coming to terms with his death. The strains of Dylan’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door frame the scene wonderfully.
Many scenes are cut from the same pattern, Garrett gunning down old friends who despise him for selling out, Garrett withdrawing into greater self-loathing and cruelty, and on it goes. It’s the end of an era, and the black-clad sheriff is a bought and paid for grim reaper harvesting the men who are living out of time. By the way, Billy is not portrayed as a noble hero. He spends most of his time drinking, sleeping with women, occasionally alpha dogging members of his crew, and not doing much but gunning down bounty hunters looking for him and enjoying himself. In one scene, on his way to Mexico to flee Garrett and the ranchers, he comes upon several men killing a friend and raping his wife. He quickly dispatches the three men, watches his friend die and rides off, leaving the woman on her own in the middle of nowhere to deal with the situation. I don't think Billy said or looked at the widow of his friend even once, riding off and vowing revenge (and instead of revenge he gets drunk and beds down another woman.)
Dylan’s role in the film is minor; he plays a printer who follows Billy, presumably to chronicle the events. More interesting, I have to wonder if Peckinpah cast Dylan as a meta-comment on the story. The Times are a Changing could be the movies theme song. Moreover, Dylan had come to fame as a counter culture icon; and then spent the rest of his career running from that movement and its expectations of him. He refused to make any political statements outside of his music, never attended protests, and angered when his friends tried to talk him into publicly speaking against the Vietnam War. He hated and feared the elements of the counter culture that preached revolution and wanted to overturn the existing order. Like many famous artists in this age, Dylan was a savvy businessman and capitalist. He wanted to get make records and get paid, hated injustice but had no interest in wrecking the existing order that afforded him a life of riches and excitement. In other words, Dylan in real life was closer to Peckinpah’s Garrett and the legendary Dylan as he existed in the minds of many of his fans, such as Dohrn-Ayers Weather Underground, closer to the Kid.
It’s a good movie if you like westerns, probably my second favorite next to The Unforgiven.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Older Brother
Friday, November 13, 2009
Friday Night Fun
Now, for something different - an amusing picture of me eating and wearing a shirt in a pool.
Response to the Gervais Model, RibbonFarm
"Good sociopaths operate by what they personally choose as a higher morality, in reaction to what they see as the dangers, insanities and stupidities of mob morality. Evil sociopaths are merely looking for a quick, safe buck"
...
"criminal worlds have the one advantage that they do not need to maintain the fiction that the organization is not pathological"RibbonFarm, The Gervais Principle
RibbonFarm has a series of posts about organizational social-economic strategies called “The Gervais Principle“, after Ricky Gervais, comedian and creator of the British Office. The author, Venkat, uses the NBC comedy The Office to add color to the archetypes he describes in his model; losers, sociopaths and clueless. (These are loaded terms that do not fully mean what they imply, you will have to read the original to get understand the framework and these definitions within its context.) The second post describes norms of communication on how power players masterful use of language to manipulate any situation to their advantage.
In the first passage I excerpted, Venkat writes of two paths for the winners to take, the good, morally conscious route and the quick buck, ‘greed is good’ Gekko path. An example of a bad sociopath in an economic setting would be Bernie Madoff. A good sociopath would be Bill Gates. This (may) immediately raises several questions and objections, I know, hold your thoughts and we will get to it.
In this second passage, Venkat has brought in other fictional works, such as Goodfellas. Venkat recommends criminal organizations (not just fictional ones) as useful case studies in understanding human behavior in an organization because crim. orgs. are not compelled to hide their pathological behavior with comforting fictions At this I recall an article on plant closings in Georgia, the supervisor interviewed registered shock at how quickly they shut down the plant and moved it over seas, and how little they provided as severance and thanks to himself and others on their way out the door. At his abrupt termination, he incredulously and with a sense of betrayal recalled years of company barbeques and other events that led him to think the company cared about its workers on an interpersonal level. He worked there for 20+ years.
To return to fiction for a television series full of this dynamic at work, watch The Wire. The drug dealing Bodie is a clueless soldier in the drug dealing trade. At several points when he interacts with sociopaths like Stringer Bell or Slim Charles, they reveal to him through coded power language that all the street tough mythology they promote is of secondary importance to the business of making money; this is a hidden audition to separate the Clueless from sociopaths that can help run the organization. He doesn’t get it and he remains a member of the clueless middle management until his bloody end. McNulty is another fine example of the overachieving loser and without a clueless buffer in the police department (which should be Seargant Jay Landsman’s role) McNulty angers the sociopaths immensely for not understanding the game they are playing. A sociopath in his place would immediately understand the leverage he had over the higher ups in season five when he comes to his end, but even when they reveal that they cannot prosecute him and thereby go public with his hoax he still never quite gets it.
To return to the excerpts at the heading of the post, these are two interesting and somewhat contradictory observations as presented. My response is that the idea of good-bad route for sociopaths is wrapped tightly within the aforementioned fiction. The current corporate-capitalist organization's entire premise is based upon disparities in power, which in turn means that some are exploited and others exploiting. That is not to say that some people can’t make more moral decisions within that context, Venkat’s moral route, but only that from a capitalist critique, those decisions are somewhat beside the point as the underlying disparities in power exist. 'Moral' decisions and activities, sponsoring community little league teams and company barbecues, for example, are forms of noblesse oblige and pandering. These are part of the illusions to obscure the pathological nature of these organizations and are dispelled quickly and without hesitation if necessary or desirable - like when higher ups see that a higher margin can be made by moving factory operations overseas and importing the products back into the U.S.
Another question is in turn raised by the above, is this the best we can do? I'll leave that to another day. In the meantime, I recommend the Ribbon Farm posts. They are far more interesting than the fictional examples presented, but as a model of understanding organizations.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Bob Dylan Cliff's Notes
update: While researching this I stumbled upon a Johnny Cash-Bob Dylan bootleg session from 1969. Good stuff.
Marshall McLuhan wrote that television was an appealingly flawed and incomplete “cool” medium, meaning that the fuzzy, grainy images drew the viewer’s subconscious into the picture to fill in the visual gaps. It was this facet of television that would capture the public's imagination and attention.
I don’t know if I buy that completely with respect to television, but I get the general picture. The most compelling visual art is that which leaves some work for the viewer. A gestural drawing is more compelling than a true to life rendering; a silhouette can be more dramatic and compelling than a 3-dimensional form. Part of the genius of art is to convey the image with as little work from the artist as necessary.
Pablo Picasso, after having mastered classical techniques, spent most of his career trying to paint like a caveman. The gaping holes he left in his work are precisely what make his work so compelling. The Cubists stepped sidewise with this idea, depicting primitive forms from multiple angles, inviting the viewer to consider an image from multiple angles in one go.
Great art is as much about what is left out as in. This brings me round to the main subject of this post, the musician Bob Dylan. The only reason I am writing this is for a certain someone in my life who loves music, managed record store years ago, attended hundreds of Indi concerts, but hasn’t listened much to Bob.
So what is there to say about the man’s art? His life and work has been dissected about a thousand different ways and almost every conceivable angle that there is to take has probably been taken. Well, one thing that I may bring to the table is perspective. Born in 1979, Dylan had already had a longer musical career than many musicians by the time I was born into the world. I started listening to music from an early age, my mother’s records mostly. I remember the Dylan-Susie Rotolo Freewheelin' album cover and that is about all; she had a lot of Beatles and Zeppelin albums. I started listening to Bob when I was about 20, but I didn’t quite get it. About 3 or 4 years ago I gave him another spin and for whatever reason, I was older, tastes changed, I don’t know, but I really got it. I mention my age only to point out that I am divorced from the personal context that many of his fans have evaluated him within – hopefully this will make more sense later. I’ve filled in a bit of detail about his life after reading his 2004 autobiography and seeing Scorsese's No Direction Home. I’ll add some of my interpretation of his career arc and some of the songs; I am probably going to be more or less wrong here to varying degrees, sue me.
Part of Dylan’s appeal is his voice, flawed and incomplete as it is. At first, his voice may be a turn off, it's not a gilded instrument, at times it is like a garbage disposal, other times like a broken whistle. But that is part of his appeal, once you get it. Who hasn’t tried something, whether some form of art, school, work, whatever, any goal, and felt insecure about their own abilities to get it done? If only I were stronger, or smarter, or had a steadier hand, more solid voice, skinnier fingers then I could run that marathon, finish this degree, draw a beautiful picture, sing a beautiful song, play the guitar with dexterity, etc. Point being, Dylan is an example of an iron will to success, damn the limitations or what other see as a fatal flaw, of turning that weakness into a strength. But enough about that, here is one man’s primer, a man who is out of time with what many consider Dylan’s golden and silver ages in the 1960s and 1970s, who isn't carrying all the nostalgia and personal baggage from that era.
I’ll break down Dylan’s work into specific eras and add a little color to each one along with Youtube tracks of songs that I particularly enjoy from that time.
The Folk Years
Discs: Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin Bob Dylan, The Times The Are A-Changin’, Another Side of Bob Dylan
Dylan started as a folk singer and from his humble beginning playing coffee houses in Greenwich Village he found himself thrust into the role of leader of the counter-culture, anti-war movement. He felt uncomfortable in this role, which is an understatement.
This era of his career is one of my least favorite, though he did write some powerful songs. His voice is nasally and the music is very folky. I enjoy much of it, but if he had stopped here creatively, I don’t know that I would be listening to his music today.
Many of the songs from this period speak directly to social issues and tell the stories of everyday people. While there are many great songs from this era, I’ll assume that everyone is familiar with songs like A Hard Rain, Masters of War, Blowin in the wind, and The Times are a Changing, so I’ll try to include some lesser heard cuts.
Don’t think twice, it’s all right,
When the Ship Comes in
The power and force of the songs from this era brought acclaim and admiration that Dylan would spend much of his career deliberately undermining. He felt uncomfortable being the leader of any movement, and more importantly, felt intimidated by strangers approaching him at home, breaking into his house, digging through his trash, mobbing him in public, writing nutty articles about him and generally invading his privacy.
Many of his more amusing and contentious interviews for the rest of his career would happen if the interviewer made the mistake of referring to him as a voice of the generation or counter culture icon. He wrote that he began to feel trapped by his fame and what people expected of him, he felt that his first obligation was to himself as an artist and though concerned with injustice, had no love for political movements. He decided to consciously undermine his status with calculated public embarrassments, appearing drunk to accept awards and insulting the hosts, pummeling a journalist who repeatedly rummaged through his trash, and most importantly from an artistic perspective, by taking folk music electric and braving the scorn and hatred of his fans who felt betrayed by his switch. He hinted at this coming change with My Back Pages and It Ain’t Me Babe from Another Side of Bob Dylan, the last album of this era. Back Pages is an expression of uncertainty, of getting older and realizing that you aren’t always as right as you once thought, that some of that idealistic fervor of youth may have been misplaced. This was a slap in the face to the earnest folk protestors. It Ain’t Me Babe is an inverted ballad to a lover, a song about not being able to meet a lovers expectations of flowers and chivalry, which could be read as a rejection of the folkies.
Rock and Roll
Discs: Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde
This era is one of my favorites. Bringing it all Back Home is the bridge from folk to rock. His voice has come down out of the nose for the most part. There is a great bootleg from this period at the Royal Albert Hall, 1966. Dylan comes out for the first set and plays acoustic to a wildly appreciative audience. The second set, Dylan goes electric. The audience is apoplectic, taunting and jeering him between songs, trying to interrupt the songs with clapping and heckling him. In between one break, someone can be heard yelling at Dylan that he is Judas. Dylan calls him a liar, then someone in the band (Dylan?) tells them to “play it fucking loud”, at which point they rip into Like a Rolling Stone, with Dylan drawing out the lyric, “how does it feeeeeel!”. The point is that he made the break at this time and I think he probably realized that the love of audience and critics was about as deep as the love one has for a jukebox. He was fearless after this, and freed up to explore any musical tangent that tickled his fancy.
He opens Bringing it All Back Home with Subterranean Homesick Blues, a rap song, and runs down the state of youth in short order. On the Road Again ridicules barefoot aesthetics and so called simpler ways of living. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), Dylan reaffirms scorn for political organizations. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, is a goodbye to the past, Dylan goes as far as to call his former supporters stepping stones.
Highway 61 Revisited is the album with one of his biggest hits, Like a Rolling Stone, but I personally feel that there are at least 4 tracks on there that are just as good or better. Here is one of them.
Queen Jane Approximately
From Blonde on Blonde, Visions of Johanna, a wonderfully evocative song about a rambling man pining for a lost lover, making do with whoever is with him. Ghosts of electricity howl in the bones of her face…
Folk-Country –
Discs: John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Dylan has hinted that Self-Portrait was a deliberate effort to tarnish his reputation and the expectations placed upon him. Pat Garret is a soundtrack. The best album of this bunch in my opinion is Nashville Skyline. Harding is a bit slow and folky for my tastes, though one track did inspire Jimi Hendrix to record one of the most definitive Rock & Roll songs of all time. Once again, Dylan's voice changed and took on a twangy, golden tongued quality. This is a recurring pattern, in every one of these eras Dylan’s voice takes on a different quality, he almost inhabits his musical role and changes to meet the sound that he expects from himself.
To Be Alone with You from Nashville Skyline.
Creative
Disks: New Morning, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, The Basement Tapes, Desire, Street Legal
An interesting time in Dylan’s career, his style evolved at this point into a mash-up of influences. I don’t rightly know what to call it other than creative, it’s too electric for folk, too rock for country, to off-beat for rock. New Morning and Blood on the Tracks are my personal favorites. The Basement Tapes is a collection of 100 bootleg recordings; many are too rough and raw for me to listen to. Desire has the well known cut about Hurricane Carter; the White Stripes covered One More Cup of Coffee later and The Dead Weather took New Pony from Street Legal, so I am guessing that Jack White is a big fan of this period.
Day of the Locusts, about Dylan's reluctant acceptance of an honorary degree
The dreamy Isis from Desire, covered by The White Stripes.
And, what the hell, Tangled up in Blue from Blood on the Tracks.
Gospel
Disks: Slow Train Coming, Saved, Shot of Love, Infidels, Empire Burlesque, Knocked out Loaded, Down in the Groove
There are some strong tracks in here, but there is a lot of dreck. Dylan became a born again Christian and decided to make Christian music. I speculate that he became a born again to make Christian music, similarly to how a method actor takes his role as an identity to feel more authentic, as opposed to the other way around. The results were uneven, his voice kicked into high nasal, and it sounds like whoever produced him basically wanted his music to sound like Devo or something. In his biography he describes this period as the bottom of his career creatively.
Groom Still Waiting at the Altar, Knocked out Loaded.
I and I, Infidels (live).
Collaboration in the late 1980s– Travelling Wilburies, Grateful Dead
Dylan teamed with the supergroup Wilburies featuring Dylan, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lyne and Roy Orbison, for two albums and released one live album with the Dead. The Dead album is lifeless. In his biography, Dylan wrote that he had lost his way onstage at this time. One day he was rehearsing with Tom Petty, who he was playing with, and lost it. He lied about taking a smoke break and took off, not intending on returning and feeling that it was time to retire from music. He stepped into a bar with a blues singer and something about the way he sung triggered Dylan’s brain. He recalled advice he received in the 1960s about a different way to order music and sing, things I do not understand, and suddenly he felt the doors, long shuddered, thrown open. He returned to the studio with Petty and began playing with these new techniques in mind. This paved the way for his comeback.
Here is Inside Out from the Travelling Wilburies, featuring Dylan on vocals.
A Comeback
Disks: Oh Mercy, Under the Red Sky
Oh Mercy is an utter revelation and the mark of a late career resurgence. The music is unlike just about anything else I’ve heard. It’s bluesy, gravelly, smooth, ambient, tight. Dylan took on the voice of a gravelly blues singer, which I once thought was a result of aging, but on some of the outtakes and bootlegs from this era Dylan sings with a much clearer voice, so who the hell knows. Under the Red Sky is considered a weak effort by critics, I think it is a solid album, but not the equal of Oh Mercy. In his autobiography, Dylan wrote that he was inducted into the hall of fame at this point, which he took to be an insult - the music industry was telling him that he was all but done. (Interestingly, he played Masters of War at the ceremony, on the eve of the first Gulf War.) No telling how much he used this as motivation to resurrect his career.
Here are some tracks from Oh Mercy
Where Teardrops Fall, Oh Mercy
Man in the Long Black Coat, Oh Mercy
Stripped Bare
Disks: Good as I been to You, World Gone Wrong
After a frustrating time in the studio with Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky, Dylan pared things down and created these two folk albums, producing his own music and stripping the instrumentation down to the bare essentials. I think all of these songs are covers from oldies that he loves.
A cover of the Grateful Dead’s Jack-A-Roe from World Gone Wrong, live here
The haunting Blood in My Eyes from World Gone Wrong.
A Late Period Golden Age
Disks: Time out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times, Together Through Life
The music once again defies my limited ability to define it. It is some parts Indie Rock, country, and the brassy sound of the harmonica is accompanied by an accordion in spots. This is my favorite of his incarnations, and my favorite album from this time is Time Out of Mind. After the acoustic cover albums in the early 1990s, Dylan returned to the studio with a full band and the producer from Oh Mercy (Lanois?) to record original music. His comeback was complete with his grammy winning performance of Love Sick. These albums are the legacy of an artist who may no longer be at the height of his physical powers, but has pushed through stumbling blocks, never became too satisfied with himself or complacent, and has no fear left. I suspect that the music is so unique sounding because few musical artists continue growing for 5-6 decades; most careers don’t last much longer than 10 years. It was hard to winnow down to just a few songs, but the point is to give a taste so I did it.
Cold Irons Bound, Time out of Mind.
The hauntingly mortal Not Dark Yet, Time out of Mind
The sarcastic take on hipster indifference, It’s All Good from Together Through Life (live)
Marshall McLuhan wrote that television was an appealingly flawed and incomplete “cool” medium, meaning that the fuzzy, grainy images drew the viewer’s subconscious into the picture to fill in the visual gaps. It was this facet of television that would capture the public's imagination and attention.
I don’t know if I buy that completely with respect to television, but I get the general picture. The most compelling visual art is that which leaves some work for the viewer. A gestural drawing is more compelling than a true to life rendering; a silhouette can be more dramatic and compelling than a 3-dimensional form. Part of the genius of art is to convey the image with as little work from the artist as necessary.
Pablo Picasso, after having mastered classical techniques, spent most of his career trying to paint like a caveman. The gaping holes he left in his work are precisely what make his work so compelling. The Cubists stepped sidewise with this idea, depicting primitive forms from multiple angles, inviting the viewer to consider an image from multiple angles in one go.
Great art is as much about what is left out as in. This brings me round to the main subject of this post, the musician Bob Dylan. The only reason I am writing this is for a certain someone in my life who loves music, managed record store years ago, attended hundreds of Indi concerts, but hasn’t listened much to Bob.
So what is there to say about the man’s art? His life and work has been dissected about a thousand different ways and almost every conceivable angle that there is to take has probably been taken. Well, one thing that I may bring to the table is perspective. Born in 1979, Dylan had already had a longer musical career than many musicians by the time I was born into the world. I started listening to music from an early age, my mother’s records mostly. I remember the Dylan-Susie Rotolo Freewheelin' album cover and that is about all; she had a lot of Beatles and Zeppelin albums. I started listening to Bob when I was about 20, but I didn’t quite get it. About 3 or 4 years ago I gave him another spin and for whatever reason, I was older, tastes changed, I don’t know, but I really got it. I mention my age only to point out that I am divorced from the personal context that many of his fans have evaluated him within – hopefully this will make more sense later. I’ve filled in a bit of detail about his life after reading his 2004 autobiography and seeing Scorsese's No Direction Home. I’ll add some of my interpretation of his career arc and some of the songs; I am probably going to be more or less wrong here to varying degrees, sue me.
Part of Dylan’s appeal is his voice, flawed and incomplete as it is. At first, his voice may be a turn off, it's not a gilded instrument, at times it is like a garbage disposal, other times like a broken whistle. But that is part of his appeal, once you get it. Who hasn’t tried something, whether some form of art, school, work, whatever, any goal, and felt insecure about their own abilities to get it done? If only I were stronger, or smarter, or had a steadier hand, more solid voice, skinnier fingers then I could run that marathon, finish this degree, draw a beautiful picture, sing a beautiful song, play the guitar with dexterity, etc. Point being, Dylan is an example of an iron will to success, damn the limitations or what other see as a fatal flaw, of turning that weakness into a strength. But enough about that, here is one man’s primer, a man who is out of time with what many consider Dylan’s golden and silver ages in the 1960s and 1970s, who isn't carrying all the nostalgia and personal baggage from that era.
I’ll break down Dylan’s work into specific eras and add a little color to each one along with Youtube tracks of songs that I particularly enjoy from that time.
The Folk Years
Discs: Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin Bob Dylan, The Times The Are A-Changin’, Another Side of Bob Dylan
Dylan started as a folk singer and from his humble beginning playing coffee houses in Greenwich Village he found himself thrust into the role of leader of the counter-culture, anti-war movement. He felt uncomfortable in this role, which is an understatement.
This era of his career is one of my least favorite, though he did write some powerful songs. His voice is nasally and the music is very folky. I enjoy much of it, but if he had stopped here creatively, I don’t know that I would be listening to his music today.
Many of the songs from this period speak directly to social issues and tell the stories of everyday people. While there are many great songs from this era, I’ll assume that everyone is familiar with songs like A Hard Rain, Masters of War, Blowin in the wind, and The Times are a Changing, so I’ll try to include some lesser heard cuts.
Don’t think twice, it’s all right,
When the Ship Comes in
The power and force of the songs from this era brought acclaim and admiration that Dylan would spend much of his career deliberately undermining. He felt uncomfortable being the leader of any movement, and more importantly, felt intimidated by strangers approaching him at home, breaking into his house, digging through his trash, mobbing him in public, writing nutty articles about him and generally invading his privacy.
Many of his more amusing and contentious interviews for the rest of his career would happen if the interviewer made the mistake of referring to him as a voice of the generation or counter culture icon. He wrote that he began to feel trapped by his fame and what people expected of him, he felt that his first obligation was to himself as an artist and though concerned with injustice, had no love for political movements. He decided to consciously undermine his status with calculated public embarrassments, appearing drunk to accept awards and insulting the hosts, pummeling a journalist who repeatedly rummaged through his trash, and most importantly from an artistic perspective, by taking folk music electric and braving the scorn and hatred of his fans who felt betrayed by his switch. He hinted at this coming change with My Back Pages and It Ain’t Me Babe from Another Side of Bob Dylan, the last album of this era. Back Pages is an expression of uncertainty, of getting older and realizing that you aren’t always as right as you once thought, that some of that idealistic fervor of youth may have been misplaced. This was a slap in the face to the earnest folk protestors. It Ain’t Me Babe is an inverted ballad to a lover, a song about not being able to meet a lovers expectations of flowers and chivalry, which could be read as a rejection of the folkies.
Rock and Roll
Discs: Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde
This era is one of my favorites. Bringing it all Back Home is the bridge from folk to rock. His voice has come down out of the nose for the most part. There is a great bootleg from this period at the Royal Albert Hall, 1966. Dylan comes out for the first set and plays acoustic to a wildly appreciative audience. The second set, Dylan goes electric. The audience is apoplectic, taunting and jeering him between songs, trying to interrupt the songs with clapping and heckling him. In between one break, someone can be heard yelling at Dylan that he is Judas. Dylan calls him a liar, then someone in the band (Dylan?) tells them to “play it fucking loud”, at which point they rip into Like a Rolling Stone, with Dylan drawing out the lyric, “how does it feeeeeel!”. The point is that he made the break at this time and I think he probably realized that the love of audience and critics was about as deep as the love one has for a jukebox. He was fearless after this, and freed up to explore any musical tangent that tickled his fancy.
He opens Bringing it All Back Home with Subterranean Homesick Blues, a rap song, and runs down the state of youth in short order. On the Road Again ridicules barefoot aesthetics and so called simpler ways of living. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), Dylan reaffirms scorn for political organizations. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, is a goodbye to the past, Dylan goes as far as to call his former supporters stepping stones.
Highway 61 Revisited is the album with one of his biggest hits, Like a Rolling Stone, but I personally feel that there are at least 4 tracks on there that are just as good or better. Here is one of them.
Queen Jane Approximately
From Blonde on Blonde, Visions of Johanna, a wonderfully evocative song about a rambling man pining for a lost lover, making do with whoever is with him. Ghosts of electricity howl in the bones of her face…
Folk-Country –
Discs: John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
Dylan has hinted that Self-Portrait was a deliberate effort to tarnish his reputation and the expectations placed upon him. Pat Garret is a soundtrack. The best album of this bunch in my opinion is Nashville Skyline. Harding is a bit slow and folky for my tastes, though one track did inspire Jimi Hendrix to record one of the most definitive Rock & Roll songs of all time. Once again, Dylan's voice changed and took on a twangy, golden tongued quality. This is a recurring pattern, in every one of these eras Dylan’s voice takes on a different quality, he almost inhabits his musical role and changes to meet the sound that he expects from himself.
To Be Alone with You from Nashville Skyline.
Creative
Disks: New Morning, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, The Basement Tapes, Desire, Street Legal
An interesting time in Dylan’s career, his style evolved at this point into a mash-up of influences. I don’t rightly know what to call it other than creative, it’s too electric for folk, too rock for country, to off-beat for rock. New Morning and Blood on the Tracks are my personal favorites. The Basement Tapes is a collection of 100 bootleg recordings; many are too rough and raw for me to listen to. Desire has the well known cut about Hurricane Carter; the White Stripes covered One More Cup of Coffee later and The Dead Weather took New Pony from Street Legal, so I am guessing that Jack White is a big fan of this period.
Day of the Locusts, about Dylan's reluctant acceptance of an honorary degree
The dreamy Isis from Desire, covered by The White Stripes.
And, what the hell, Tangled up in Blue from Blood on the Tracks.
Gospel
Disks: Slow Train Coming, Saved, Shot of Love, Infidels, Empire Burlesque, Knocked out Loaded, Down in the Groove
There are some strong tracks in here, but there is a lot of dreck. Dylan became a born again Christian and decided to make Christian music. I speculate that he became a born again to make Christian music, similarly to how a method actor takes his role as an identity to feel more authentic, as opposed to the other way around. The results were uneven, his voice kicked into high nasal, and it sounds like whoever produced him basically wanted his music to sound like Devo or something. In his biography he describes this period as the bottom of his career creatively.
Groom Still Waiting at the Altar, Knocked out Loaded.
I and I, Infidels (live).
Collaboration in the late 1980s– Travelling Wilburies, Grateful Dead
Dylan teamed with the supergroup Wilburies featuring Dylan, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Jeff Lyne and Roy Orbison, for two albums and released one live album with the Dead. The Dead album is lifeless. In his biography, Dylan wrote that he had lost his way onstage at this time. One day he was rehearsing with Tom Petty, who he was playing with, and lost it. He lied about taking a smoke break and took off, not intending on returning and feeling that it was time to retire from music. He stepped into a bar with a blues singer and something about the way he sung triggered Dylan’s brain. He recalled advice he received in the 1960s about a different way to order music and sing, things I do not understand, and suddenly he felt the doors, long shuddered, thrown open. He returned to the studio with Petty and began playing with these new techniques in mind. This paved the way for his comeback.
Here is Inside Out from the Travelling Wilburies, featuring Dylan on vocals.
A Comeback
Disks: Oh Mercy, Under the Red Sky
Oh Mercy is an utter revelation and the mark of a late career resurgence. The music is unlike just about anything else I’ve heard. It’s bluesy, gravelly, smooth, ambient, tight. Dylan took on the voice of a gravelly blues singer, which I once thought was a result of aging, but on some of the outtakes and bootlegs from this era Dylan sings with a much clearer voice, so who the hell knows. Under the Red Sky is considered a weak effort by critics, I think it is a solid album, but not the equal of Oh Mercy. In his autobiography, Dylan wrote that he was inducted into the hall of fame at this point, which he took to be an insult - the music industry was telling him that he was all but done. (Interestingly, he played Masters of War at the ceremony, on the eve of the first Gulf War.) No telling how much he used this as motivation to resurrect his career.
Here are some tracks from Oh Mercy
Where Teardrops Fall, Oh Mercy
Man in the Long Black Coat, Oh Mercy
Stripped Bare
Disks: Good as I been to You, World Gone Wrong
After a frustrating time in the studio with Oh Mercy and Under the Red Sky, Dylan pared things down and created these two folk albums, producing his own music and stripping the instrumentation down to the bare essentials. I think all of these songs are covers from oldies that he loves.
A cover of the Grateful Dead’s Jack-A-Roe from World Gone Wrong, live here
The haunting Blood in My Eyes from World Gone Wrong.
A Late Period Golden Age
Disks: Time out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times, Together Through Life
The music once again defies my limited ability to define it. It is some parts Indie Rock, country, and the brassy sound of the harmonica is accompanied by an accordion in spots. This is my favorite of his incarnations, and my favorite album from this time is Time Out of Mind. After the acoustic cover albums in the early 1990s, Dylan returned to the studio with a full band and the producer from Oh Mercy (Lanois?) to record original music. His comeback was complete with his grammy winning performance of Love Sick. These albums are the legacy of an artist who may no longer be at the height of his physical powers, but has pushed through stumbling blocks, never became too satisfied with himself or complacent, and has no fear left. I suspect that the music is so unique sounding because few musical artists continue growing for 5-6 decades; most careers don’t last much longer than 10 years. It was hard to winnow down to just a few songs, but the point is to give a taste so I did it.
Cold Irons Bound, Time out of Mind.
The hauntingly mortal Not Dark Yet, Time out of Mind
The sarcastic take on hipster indifference, It’s All Good from Together Through Life (live)
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Mercernaries
Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.
Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license
…
The Nisour Square shooting was the bloodiest and most controversial episode involving Blackwater in the Iraq war. At midday on Sept. 16, 2007, a Blackwater convoy opened fire on Iraqi civilians in the crowded intersection, spraying automatic weapons fire in ways that investigators later claimed was indiscriminate, and even launching grenades into a nearby school. Seventeen Iraqis were killed and dozens more were wounded.
The matter set off an international outcry and intense debates in Iraq and the United States over the role of private contractors in war zones. Many Iraqis condemned Blackwater, which they had long seen as an arrogant rogue operation, and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki declared that the Blackwater shooting was a challenge to his nation’s sovereigntyBlackwater Said to Approve Iraqi Payoffs After Shootings
Mazzetti and Risen
New York Times, November 11, 2009
U.S. firms seeking to do business in foreign markets must be familiar with the FCPA. In general, the FCPA prohibits corrupt payments to foreign officials for the purpose of obtaining or keeping business. In addition, other statutes such as the mail and wire fraud statutes, 18 U.S.C. § 1341, 1343, and the Travel Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1952, which provides for federal prosecution of violations of state commercial bribery statutes, may also apply to such conduct.
The Department of Justice is the chief enforcement agency, with a coordinate role played by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Cracking Up
So demand for crude is down so much that we’re actually closing refineries in this country, but the price of crude is up 150% since the beginning of the year. Makes sense, right?I’ve followed Matt Taibbi’s political reporting since Spanking the Donkey (2004), but he simply gets this wrong. Falling demand and rising prices are congruent. My interpretation of his statement is that falling demand should result in falling prices, and since this is not the case something fishy is going on in the commodities market. Well, the behavior is as expected, though there is probably some mucking around in the commodities markets.Commodities Casino Keeps Rolling
Matt Taibbi
There is this from the Guardian,
the "peak oil" theory is gaining support at the heart of the global energy establishment. "The IEA in 2005 was predicting oil supplies could rise as high as 120m barrels a day by 2030 although it was forced to reduce this gradually to 116m and then 105m last year," said the IEA source, who was unwilling to be identified for fear of reprisals inside the industry. "The 120m figure always was nonsense but even today's number is much higher than can be justified and the IEA knows this.
"Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources,"
The IEA whistleblowers are saying that the age of cheap, plentiful energy is already over, done, gone, finished. If this reality is pressing enough that it is leaking out like this, then you can bet the US government has already factored this into its equations. I wouldn’t bet on any timelines for complete withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan any shorter than 50 years, so long as we can afford it. Our government probably hopes to have a draw down from ongoing combat operations, but troop presence is to last indefinitely.
Coming back to Taibbi’s post, what has become obvious over the past 3-4 years is just how inelastic energy prices are. Double the price, lose 1% of demand. Double it again, shed another 5%. (You can do the math to see how profitable that is.) In economic terms, the demand curve for energy is almost horizontal with respect to price.
The reality of oil supply is trumping the American fantasy of ‘recovery’. Going forward, every time the global economy begins to regain its footing, the reality of limited energy is going to shake the ground underfoot. As I occasionally point out, the past couple of centuries may well be looked back upon as an aberration in human history, powered almost entirely by non-renewable energy resources. That era in human history is winding down. I would not be surprised if in 20 years there are more bicycles, rickshaws and horse drawn carriages than the occasional wealthy person’s car on American city streets, which is, in fact, how most of the world has looked even during the flush energy era. This brings me to my next point.
The comedown underway is felt most acutely by those societies of privilege and disproportionate wealth, such as ours. One of the most interesting aspects of Studs Terkel’s, Hard Times is how some people barely noticed the Great Depression, either because they were always living in hard times, or because they were sufficiently insulated from the economy as dilettantes. The working poor who lost what little they had generally relayed an ethic of self-sufficiency and stoicism. The hardest psychological blows landed on the wealthy and near wealthy who lost everything. What we are witnessing now from our political, media and economic elites is a form of mass denial. Cash for clunkers, home buyers tax credits, and loose talk of recovery – as though we can ‘recover’ to credit fueled bubbles and haphazard development of bridges to nowhere and housing projects with no walkable space, 60+ miles from economic centers of activity, in other words places that make no sense in a world of scarce energy supplies.
The U.S. is in an interesting position in this global realignment, the esteem its holds itself in is ripe for deflating. It has found out just how meaningless the exercise of military power can be, giving lie to the fantasy of acting as a world’s policeman, saber rattling, or maintaining ‘security’ with force. (And I have to maintain that on this point about maintaining liberty and the 2nd amendment, the domestic gun nuts have a point – if a bunch of homemade devices operated on garage door openers can bog down the US military in Iraqi sand, then if it things went down to the wire in the States all those rifle waving nuts could probably have a chance of winning a war while losing a series of WACO like battles.) The lone superpower is also in the throes of a series of domestic institutional crises brought on by a recurring struggle of reality overcoming myth.
The first institution is capitalism and the Horatio Alger up by the boot straps story that resonates in the American conscious. The reality is that the economy is hallowed out; people have experienced a several decades long declines in real wages, increasingly stultifying class structure (people are less likely to move up from where they are born) that is now the most rigid in the industrialized world and widening gaps between the rich and poor as measured by the GINI coefficient. The American auto industry, once a large source of pride, is in its death throes. The rapid expansion of the financial industry in our economy, from 18% in the 1980s to over 40% this decade, is something that is seen with distrust, a rigged game that continues sucking wealth out of the economy to the benefit of the priveledged few, whose bets are hedged. Heads, they win. Tails, the taxpayers lose.
A second institutional crisis is the American democracy and nature of our government. Having long maintained the myth of democracy, the reality is that the government is owned and controlled by wealth. People have no faith in the government to provide basic services; many express this with a weary cynicism. (This is not new, many politicians have played on this weariness by fronting as outsiders, at least as far back as Reagan who famously said the scariest words to hear were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”) Years of business propaganda have altered how people even conceive of government, who now see the government through the lens of a poorly run and inefficient business. Compounding the problem is the ongoing crack-up of one of the two major political parties.
Every mature political institution has a shared culture and hierarchy. In the middle and bottom is where the most devout true believers are found. At the top is where the most cynical and clear eyed thinkers sit, they need intelligence and some relationship to reality to make decisions and broker power. This is true of the old Soviet system, the modern Catholic Church or the modern corporation. When trouble comes, the true believers find openings to propel themselves into the real seats of power at the top, displacing the clear eyed rational thinkers. The Republicans are rapidly becoming a party of fanatics and purity, the wall between cynical manipulation of the electorate via rhetorical tricks and true believers has been breached. The crackpots have begun taking over, most of their statements are a set of disconnected clichés, already disproven myths and barely coherent expressions of anger.
A third institutional crisis is the news media. The newspaper and television media are cratering. The US once had a vibrant news media, with papers that covered working class issues along with financial press. The working class press died in the middle of the century, leaving the financial press as an institution of business and commerce. The troubles in the business world have bled over to the news media while the internet is a direct assault on their authority and power over information. The media has been left fighting a rear guard action against the internet and defending its front from declining advertising budgets. To offset declining revenues, the media has cannibalized its business, which only tightens the spiral. The effect for many people who follow the news is a declining faith in what news media have to say about the world, their lack of faith exacerbated by the mindless adherence to balanced (as opposed to informed) coverage, the disconnect from what is seen and felt in the real world. For example, the DOW is at 10,000 so the talking heads are abuzz on recovery, meanwhile unemployment is over 10%, and real unemployment that counts the under employed and those who have quit looking is probably closer to 20%. There is no shared outlook of the world; the narratives we all carry in our heads are more uneven and disparate than in previous eras; No one knows anything, which heightens anxiety.
This has left many Americans unmoored from the political process, atomized within a society and culture that is violent, superstitious, divided, and all too often confuses avarice for self-sufficiency, their lives squeezed on all sides by raging economic forces and resource pools that are drying out and in an age of information, ironically, we appear to know very little. Absent any reliable outlet for rage, change, or narrative, who knows what kind of wacky, violent bubbles are going to begin surfacing in this great melting pot we call the USA.
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