06.17.08
Posted in Philosophy &c, In the Kitchen, Rant and Rave at 6:51 pm by steve
An Extended Complaint About Kitchen Aide’s Customer Service
Lean thinking was the business rage of the late eighties. Ideas in lean thinking include reducing redundancy, reducing inventory, and reducing the amount of capital one uses to achieve an end. There is much good to be found in lean thinking; but as is true of every good idea it is essential to bring the idea into practice, to use it to inform decisions, but to stay clear of letting it control your business or your life. Lean thinking is one business tool. No matter what its proponents claim it is not the whole of a business.
Let us construct a hypothetical example of a customer service center for a kitchen counter-top appliance manufacturer. Assume it stocks and ships several hundred SKUs. All of them are replacement parts for things like mixers, blenders, toasters, and so on.
Now, let us assume that the management of this enterprise has the lean thinking religion. That is, they organize all of their business approaches around the lean thinking idea, assuming that what else there is to running the business well will take care of itself. Perhaps they lose sight of the idea that the business purpose of the enterprise is to keep parts flowing to customers. Instead, they see only the operational mandate to minimize costs by keeping a razor-thin inventory. Or rather, to arrange a flow of goods from suppliers to customers in a way that reduces the inventory at the service center to zero.
In fact, the optimal solution in terms of minimizing cost of managing the center is to arrange it so that an order for a part and the part itself arrive at the center on the same day. This would allow one to keep zero inventory. And it would provide prompt service for each customer. It’s the best of all possible worlds.
If the scale of the business is large and the number of SKUs is small, it is likely that the average amount of volume for each SKU is relatively large compared to the random noise in order volume. And one can schedule regular deliveries for most SKU’s - maybe weekly or even daily. If one has been in the business for decades, one can develop high-quality time-series forcasting models for parts orders. One can actually hope to approach the ideal situation in which a part and order arrive on the same day.
If the parts are not of some highly time-sensitive nature, then two or three week delivery times may be assumed to be acceptable. In this case, all one needs to do is to arrange weekly or biweekly deliveries of virtually every SKU that might ship. Inventory then becomes nothing but evidence that one has overestimated the order volume of an SKU. A well-managed SKU, then, is never in stock.
In this model, the optimal solution from a cost standpoint is not to carry stock but to carry a standing backorder quantity on all parts. The game is no longer to minimize inventory, but to manage the backorder list in a way that loses the fewest customers. If one gets incredibly good at the game, one needs not stock any parts. And the customer remains oblivious to the fact.
The model above has a glossy kind of appeal that would give lean-thinking fundies wet dreams. And if all one can see in a business is the goal of minimizing costs, there is no other possible model. But is minimizing cost the only game? A business with no costs is no business at all. A business with no customers has the lowest operational costs of all.
Cost minimization is unconditionally good to the extent that it improves efficiency - delivering the same net results with fewer resources. But cost minimization is unconditionally bad when it kills your business. All the stuff that actually matters lies somewhere in between.
You have to actually connect the operational details with the business goals. One of those goals has to be delivering stuff to the customer. Lean strategies that fail to deliver have ceased cutting fat and started amputating limbs. This is where the model begins to fail.
The model above starts with a hidden assumption. It assumes that parts are ordered one at a time. It is not an unreasonable assumption if one is shipping blender parts to housewives. It might work most of the time in this or some other contexts. If one has business practices that always treat the order of any part in a manner that is consistent with this assumption, one has a viable operation. But what happens if someone orders more than one SKU?
I ran into a very interesting example of this in a recent exchange with Kitchen Aide’s customer service department. Last November my wife placed an order for some parts with them, several different SKUs. In April, when they had still not shipped, she cancelled the order. In May I tried again. I started online filling out a customer request. Nearly two weeks later, after getting no response, I called the company. The first call was shuffled through the auto-answering maze. I waited five minutes. Then there were some rings at the other end. Then dial tone.
On the second or third try, after ten or twenty minutes of waiting I got a real person. Long queues is a sign of lean thinking. It screams “The customer’s waiting time costs us nothing.” Not true, but that’s another argument.
I placed an order for the parts. I was told that everything was in stock except for one part, and it was due the next day. Roughly three weeks passed and I did not receive the order. So I called customer service and spoke to Janet.
This time I was told that “all the parts were on backorder.”
“How could this happen?” I asked. “All the parts, save one, were in stock when I placed the order. And that part was due the next day.”
“The order is configured to ship when all the parts are available,” answered Janet. “Some are coming in this week and some are coming in next week.” In other words, parts that should have been shipped to me were shipped to other customers because of the way my order was configured.
I suddenly understood the game. And I explained it to Janet in a forceful and unpleasant way. “While my order waits for food processor blades, all the blender jars are shipped to other customers until there are none left. When the food processor blades arrive, the blender jars are out of stock. But while we wait for jars, the blades go out of stock again. And we are back to where we started. This process repeats itself forever. Or until one cancels the order.”
Janet assured me that what I was explaining was impossible. And that the parts would be in stock maybe this week. Or maybe by the end of this month. Really, I had no cause for concern.
But I have had graduate courses in statistics and in inventory control. I have a good imagination. I have also worked in industry and I have lived among fundamentalists of all sorts: I know how insane things can get. I understand something about what might have happened and why. I was capable of setting up a model of their operation in my own mind and proving to my own satisfaction that unless the system were fooled into treating my order that had four separate SKUs as four separate orders, I would absolutely never receive any part of my order. I was upset that the whole of the customer service organization was completely oblivious to this glaring problem and that it meant that people with smaller orders who ordered after I did always got their stuff first.
The special quality of the idealized operation we described above is that it assures that most parts are on backorder most of the time. It is not an accident. It is not even viewed as an undesireable side effect of minimizing inventory. It is the operational goal of the inventory management system. Now, if regular deliveries always brought in more parts of every SKU than there were backorder quantities, one could still recover.
But if one were designing the system to be brutally efficient on a day-to-day operating sense, then one would take deliveries five days a week. And it would almost always be the case that some SKUs would arrive only on certain days of the week.
On a given week blender jars would arrive on Monday. And they would all ship out Monday. Food processor blades would arrive Tuesday. And they would all ship out Tuesday. And so on. Such an arrangement would distribute labor over the week and achieve certain returns of scale in the process of moving parts from incoming queue into outgoing queue.
So, if a person placed an order that included a blender jar and a food processor blade; and if that person specified not to ship until all the parts were in stock, it was a mathematical certainty that they would never receive their order because it could never ship. The parts would never be in the warehouse at the same time. It was not an accident of the design, it was a goal of the design.
It is at this point that an enlightened business manager might begin to understand how lean-thinking fundamentalism is strangling his business. The lean-thinking model eliminates all sales to customers who order more than one part at a time. It assures that their broken appliances remain broken forever. It drives them to buy from competitors with inferior products who have business processes that allow them to actually ship product against complicated orders.
Now, I am absolutely certain that if some person from Kitchen Aide were to read this essay they would categorically deny every part of it. That’s fine; but as I write this I am still waiting for those parts my wife ordered in November. I am still waiting for those same parts I ordered in mid-May. The explanation may be subtly different; but the results are the same.
In the mean time we bought an Oster blender that turns ice cubes into snowdrifts in a way that my Kitchen-Aide blender never could approach. But it makes such a godawful racket that I fear it will cause hearing loss. And while it boasts “all metal drive” it also has a base that has the look and feel of really cheap plastic. I look at it, and I feel sad because all I can see is the day i throw it out, another tangible symbol of the gap between the hopes we have for products and what they deliver.
We live in a marvelous age where all sorts of stuff is incredibly cheap. We have learned to manufacture efficiently. We have learned to distribute efficiently. But there are still gaping holes in our ability to manage effectively. I just want a blender that can be made to work, even after parts break; and one that does not make me deaf. I’m sure that there exists a solution to this problem; but the first two tries were failures.
When you have to throw away the first two instances of any good before settling on one that works, you begin to wonder whether the current world is not built upon false economies. You begin to wonder whether lean thinking has not just cut the fat but also amputated important organs; the principle organ of thought, for instance.
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06.08.08
Posted in Rant and Rave, Snark and Snarkier, Politics at 9:53 pm by steve
The Secret Plan* to Portray Obama as a Pederast
I was sweeping the floors down at the neocon headquarters the other day when I overheard a few prominent neocons discuss a few dirty tricks that would make Nixon’s “dirty tricks” crew green with envy.
K: What do you think, is “Obama the Marxist” idea getting traction?
F: People are idiots. We tell them a hundred times that Obama is a Marxist and he will be a Marxist.
K: So where are we in that process?
G: Not far along. We need to swing about fifteen percent of the electorate and any movement so far is much less than the margin of error.
K: There’s lots of time before the election. Think we can reach the middle on this one?
G: We can certainly energize the base. We can swing a few of the aging “better dead than red” “yellow dog Democrats” in the South. We can give a lot of traditional Republicans second thoughts about abandoning their beloved GOP. They might go into the booth intending to vote for Obama but emerge having voted for McCain.
K: Whether they realize it or not. (All Laugh.)
G: We expect to count the vote this time around, too.
K: Okay, so the Marxist thing doesn’t completely solve the problem, it just stops the bleeding. What else do we have?
F: There is race. As I said before “I say Obama is a racist. And unless he can prove otherwise, he is one.”
K: Sound’s like children’s game of cooties.
F: That’s politics today, isn’t it, Bill?
K: But of course, you are right, Bill.
G: “I know it’s true, like all fundies:
God wrote it clearly on my undies.”
F: Don’t knock divine revelation; it takes whole peoples where reason dare not go.
K: Race is tricky ground, because if one appeals to race explicitly, the process backfires. But there are dozens of indirect approaches. The swiftboating approach is a good one. Produce fake associates who portray him as racist. Guilt by association is good, too. Portraying his preacher as anti-American was a great start.
F: Why not provoke a few of the more volatile black leaders. High visibility guys like Sharpton or Jackson tend to grate on the independent voter. There are even non-racist Democrats who find the demagoguery of these guys to be strongly distasteful. If guys like this could be broadcast saying outragiously racist things in a speech supporting Obama, we could turn half the white voters in America away from Obama.
G: It’s a thought. Obama would be in the difficult position of having to choose between distancing himself from men who are closest to his core supporters and allowing guilt by association to poison his candidacy. In one case he alienates his base. In the other case he is painted as a racist.
K: We have some good speechwriters who work for Democrats. Let’s see what we can do. If we can get the right connections, we’ll set up a media event.
F: What about the Islamist tag? I mean, he has an Islamic name.
G: Hussein, mother of all bad guys in the Mideast. And Osama, father of all bad guys in the Mideast. Son of a divorced white woman and a black foreigner. How does such an evil person even get to be a candidate? (Chuckles)
K: Pillory Hillary. Rush did most of the groundwork. But you wrote the book on it, Jonah.
G: It was a close call.
K: The Islamist tag seems to work pretty well with the poor white trash. It might make a difference in the heart of the Appalachians. But the real question is whether the independent voter can be persuaded that Barak Hussein Obama is actually an islamofascist. If he chooses Hillary, it will be easier. Even if he himself is not one, he associates with them. End of story.
G: But if he doesn’t choose Hillary?
K: It’s not clear to me that there is a lot to gain from this fight other than to energize the base.
G: But the Sharpton thing can be exploited here. Sharpton is viewed widely as also being antisemitic. So if one could provoke Sharpton to really alienate every Jewish person in America, one might swing a big chunk of the liberal Jewish vote.
K: We’ll work that into the racism project. It will be a good two-fer, racism and anti-semitism. What else?
G: That he is a crook, and a pederast.
K: Crook? What does that get you?
G: I see your point. Nobody gives a shit that Dubya broke the law. Over and over. Law means nothing. But sex: everyone understands sex.
F: You think you can get that to stick?
K: The idea is to sow seeds of doubt, then nail the issue at the last minute. On the issue of Marxism, we just keep repeating the same old stuff. We have dozens of footsoldiers; guys at think tanks, guys who mysteriously resigned from Congress, and so on. On the more scary issues we use more subtle tactics. Like starting the rumor that the guy denies being a pederast.
F: Ha, Ha, why would anyone deny being a pederast if they weren’t one? There simply would be no question.
G: But that’s just the start, right? The rumors of denials will just set up the mental frame for the big putsch.
K: We have radio talk-show hosts and guests who are perfect for the job. They will float the rumors for weeks; and the rumors will be persistently lambasted in the “liberal media.” This will keep the idea in circulation. Meanwhile, find someone who has a bone to pick with Obama personally, someone who has a twelve year old son. Pay them a few hundred thousand to claim that Obama solicited sexual favors from their son. Hold the press conference on Halloween to announce the charges. By the time the law-suits are settled and people understand what really happened, McCain will be out of office.
G: It’s a slam-dunk. I have to give you and your father credit, Bill. Over the last fifty years you have reduced public discourse to pure pablum and reduced the reasoning powers of the public to the sub-moronic level; their capacity for critical thinking is inferior to that of the nematode. Fifty years ago the kind of approach you advocate would have been unthinkable. Today it’s actually the most effective approach.
K: You give me too much credit, Johah. The American impulse to be motivated in political choices by material gains rather than by moral reasoning, and to be people of action rather than people of thought has always made them perfect candidates for this kind of treatment. It’s just an accident of history that we’re the first people in a long time to really capitalize on the gap. So long as Americans choose warriors and giants of commerce as heroes rather than philosophers, true moral leaders, and insightful men of science, our jobs will be easy.
G: I’ll tell you, this is the team to be on. There’s some serious thinking and long term planning going on. Thinking up dirty tricks is diabolically fun. It pays very well. And we never lose.
K: We never lose.
*The conversation is purely fictional. Any resemblance it might bear to persons, institutions, events, conversations orl dirty tricks - real, planned, or imagned by others - is purely coincidental.
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12.03.07
Posted in Philosophy &c, Social, Rant and Rave at 2:59 pm by steve
“Kill her, Kill her.” That’s what the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum were chanting during the trial of a western school teacher who had allowed her students to name a teddy bear “Mohammed.” The judges handed down a somewhat more moderate sentence, 15 days in prison. The schoolteacher, Gillian Gibbons, a young British woman, had offended Islam by allowing a stuffed animal to bear the name of its greatest prophet. And this, the fundamentalist crowds of Khartoum found heretical.
The scene hearkens to a Monty Python sketch in which a young woman is on trial for being a witch. At one point it is proposed that the young woman be thrown into the moat; if she floats she is a witch, and must be stoned. A bit later one of the townspeople complains “She turned me into a newt.” The judge scowls in disbelief. The townsperson mumbles “I got better.” What this woman’s actual offense might have been I cannot recall. Whatever it was it had no basis in law. And more tolerant sensibilites won over less tolerant ones. But only just.
The teddy bear named Mohammed scene is described in a piece by Mark Steyn. The subtitle of Steyn’s piece suggests that the difference between Sudan and the United States is “the ability to give and take offense.” But whether this is true or not depends a bit on what it means. Certainly in a society characterized by fundamentalist values such as the one of the uneducated Sudanese, tolerance of other points of view is not considered a virtue. And certainly in the Anglophone tradition since at least the early seventeenth century tolerance of other regligious points of view and other social methods is considered a virtue. So if Steyn is referring to the idea of tolerance as a virtue when he uses the term “ability to give and take offense” I would have to agree with him.
But it seems that this is not what Steyn is talking about. He complains about people who wish to remove “God” from the pledge of allegiance to the flag. And this is not an inherently tolerant point of view. Nor is tolerance a virtue widely preached among the NR faithful.
Now I happen to have a very different point of view about the pledge of allegiance. I happen to believe that a nation must earn what allegiance it gets. And that pledges of allegiance, if they are thought to be necessary, are a sign of bad faith on the part of a government toward its people. For a pledge forces honorable people to behave constructively toward a government even once that government works to undermine the general welfare of a people. Now I admit that at any given point in time a well run legitimate government will be doing a number of things with which good and honorable people disagree. And this should not be cause for undermining a government. But when a government is actively engaged in destroying the lives and livelihoods of most of its citizens or when it is completely unprepared to protect them from highly destructive external forces, it may sometimes be viewed as illegitimate. The pledge, if it means anything, removes this possibility.
The pledge, then, because it implicitly denies this contractual point of view, is antithetical to the idea not just of democracy but of all forms of government that assume a contractual bond between government and governed. In other words, the pledge of allegiance actively undermines the idea that government is properly judged in terms of how well it governs - or at least on how well it intends to govern. It undermines the idea that allegiance is an earned property of good government. This is the fastest shortcut to bad government.
The pledge calls all honorable people to respond to country as the religious do to their God. The great difference being, however, that many religions today encourage their followers to study the founding texts of the religion and to judge their own beliefs in light of those writings; while the proponents of the pledge of allegiance also argued against the study of civics in schools, effectively making the writings of the founding fathers and the ideals upon which this nation are founded less available and less widely circulated. Belief in the nation becomes more an act of blind faith than it does an act of reason. It becomes a kind of fundamentalist act.
I am, therefore, a little ambivalent over the whether the term “God” appears in the pledge of allegiance. I believe that, to the extent its existence encourages people to maintain a kind of moral framework that lives outside that encouraged by their government, it ought to stay so long as the pledge is said. So long as people imagine that there is a moral framework that informs law there is some tiny hope that some parts of the body of law will agree with good ethical principles. I yearn for the day when it is a moot point.
I disagree with the practice of public prayer in schools. If people wish to sequester themselves in rooms after school hours and practice Yoga, or Wicca, or Buddhism, or Catholicism, or Islam, or Methodicism or any sort of legitimate religious practice, I have no problem with that. I categorically reject public prayer in schools because it conflates religion with nationalism. While I am inclined to reject both; I wish to do so for different reasons.
I reject prayer in schools not because I am offended by prayer in schools. It is not because it causes offense to others. No. It’s because it turns us into the very people who wish to burn witches and kill clueless teachers who allow stuffed animals to be named after sacred personages. Homogenizing God and Country is the most effective way of producing a huge class of fundamentalists of the sort who burn witches and chant “kill her, kill her” in the streets of Khartoum. Nor is it an accident that Darfur is on the western fringe of such a fundamentalist nation. This is the natural consequence of fundamentalism run rampant.
Mr Steyn’s paper routinely panders to the fundamentalist right in America. It does so in this article by calling for prayer in schools, by calling for a pledge of allegiance containing God, And as it does so it strengthens the fundamentalist fringe by giving its ideas more currency.
The great irony of Steyn’s piece is that Gillian Gibbons is saved from the fundamentalist mob by a judge who, in the eyes of that mob would undoubtedly seem like a great liberal activist. He would be viewed contemptuously by them for undermining the precious fundamentalist values of the Moslem masses of Khartoum. Yet here in the US. the National Review publishes its own “Judicial Watch” in which it takes to task judges who, when viewed from the point of view of good old fundamentalists are doing things that are offensive.
If acts that are liberalizing - acts that tend to get us to view the world from other points of view - they will axiomatically be seen as being offensive by fundamentalists. On the other hand, not all offensive acts are necessarily liberalizing. I might call Mr. Steyn a kike and cause offense. Because it is a pejorative term and causes offense, Mr. Steyn might argue that doing exactly this furthers the cause of western civilization. I would agree with thim that it is offensive. But I would never be able to understand how, outside simply being offensive, it serves any liberalizing purpose.
In fact, such a comment could reasonably elicit a defensive reaction from Mr. Steyn and at the end of the conversation it is most likely that we would find our fundamentalist prejudices more firmly entrenched. And this conflict would tend to make both of us more firmly entrenched in our own fundamentalist biases.
So Steyn is mostly wrong. And to the extent that he is right, he is right by accident; liberalizing forces offend fundamentalists simply because fundamentalists have so much of their selves invested in their closed-minded views of the world. The differences between the fundamentalists of the west and those of Khartoum is a matter of degree, not of kind. Steyn and the paper he writes for, I fear, are not drawing us in a liberalizing direction. They are not working to preserve the benefits of the differences that exist between the west and the Moslem mideast. They are, if anything, working to establish an oppositional fundamentalism, one no less based on arbitrariness and blind faith. One that is gratuitously offensive, evidently.
If they succeed, the following question will again make sense in a judicial debate: “Does Gillian Gibbons float?”
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07.21.07
Posted in Rant and Rave at 10:05 pm by steve
For nearly five years men have rotted in the prison of Guantanamo Bay, men who have not been formally charged with crimes, men who have faced a “justice system” that would have been an embarassment to Attilla the Hun.
The number of points of embarassment is large; but the ruling in question is about just one of them. It deals with evidence. Rules of evidence require disclosure. Why? Because evidence is some fact that can be brought to bear on the case in question; and it is only when the body of fact is broad, robust, compelling, overwhelming, beyond reasonable doubt that one can draw a reasonably conclusion about the culpability of an accused person. Everything that might be relevant to a case must be known by all parties. For the purpose of a trial is to get public agreement on the culpability of a defendant. Regular failure to do this causes great societal tension that eventually erupts and singes the frail fabric of society into oblivion. Things fall apart.
But the administration has been lobbying for two practices. One is not to reveal evidence that might be used by the prosecution. The other is not to reveal evidence that might be used by the defense. In fact, it has attempted to hold people without charge. Of course, if one can get away with the latter, there is no need of the former. Fortunately, it seems that the legislature and the judiciary are much less keen on incarceration without charge than is the executive. So it’s on to the trial phase.
Now, in the BusCheney fantasy, the perfect trial goes like this:
Judge: Defendent K, you are charged with a crime. The charges are an issue of national security. How do you plead.
Defendent K: [hooded and unidentifiable] Not guilty, your honor. Whatever it was, I didn’t do it.
Judge: The prosecution will now give evidence.
Prosecution: All evidence is classified as a matter of national security.
Judge: The defense will now give evidence.
Defense: Your honor, none of the facts of the case have been disclosed to the defense on grounds of national security.
Judge: National Security. Serious case, this. The court has no alternative but to find the defendant K guilty of unspecified charges. He is sentenced to spend an unspecified term confined in an unspecified location.
Remember, this is not a jury trial. “Enemy combatants” are not considered to be human beings under the theories of “law” that the current administration is working under: they do not enjoy the protections of the Constitution.
Fortunately, the the tide is turning. The voice of reason - weak though it might sound amidst the martial drumbeat of a tribal leader whose sole leadership skill is his ability to whip the rabble into a war-fury - has prevailed in this instance. A federal appeals court ruled unanimously in favor of more meaningful rules of evidentiary disclosure for BusCheney kangaroo courts set up to “try” the “cases” of “enemy combatants.”
This ruling does have its major problems. Communications between lawyers and their clients are censored. This practice would presumably allow the prosecution to redact comments from a defendant’s communications that suggest exculpatory evidence, meaning that such evidence may not make its way into the trial. But hey, as Attorney General Sir Edwin Meese III put it “They wouldn’ t have been arrested if they weren’t guilty.” The BusCheney kangaroo courts are modelled on his doctrine.
All of this leads us to ask, “if the men held at Gitmo are terrorists, what is the Bush administration so afraid of?” Why fear evidence? Could it be that there is some relationship between these men and the administration that is embarassing? Or could it be that evidence of their guilt necessarily makes criminals of the administration, too? How else might one explain both how the administration could be so certain of their guilt and why it is being so cagey with evidence?
Those of us who are interested in the rhetorical aspects of the ruling see it in two lights. In one sense, it is good to move toward a sensible process of justice in trying the detainees at Gitmo.
But the problem with making it seem sensible is that the whole military courts idea created by Bush needs to be categorically rejected. The people who are at Guantanamo Bay are criminals. Or they are not criminals. If they are criminals, they must be tried in a normal court of law. If they are not criminals, they must be released.
Any victories for reason that make the proceedings of the kangaroo court seem more reasonable will tend to weaken the forces that would otherwise lead them to be permanently eradicated as the dangerous pests that they are. Because in the end, these courts are rightly seen as a means of wresting the judicial process out of the hands of the judicial branch and placing it in the executive. As we have learned from the Gonzo DOJ, this administration will push the politicization of justice as far as is needed to reach their political ends. Quibbling about the rules of that process is not what we need to be doing.
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Posted in Rant and Rave at 3:04 am by steve
Power corrupts. So the problem of giving any authority the power to be abusive guarantees that such power of abuse will eventually be used. The question is never if; the question is when. So if there are laws or executive orders on the books that might theoretically be used to do violence to the spirit or the actual provisions of the Constitution and the liberties it was designed to assure, one can rest assured that such violence will occur, eventually.
Despite being jaded, cynical, and basically unable to imagine how things can get worse in Washington, we find today that the White House has managed to keep pushing things in the same direction. The latest blow in the BusCheney coup is a new “Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.” This measure is a masterpiece of the creeping hegemonic psychosis. Because it descends from a long line of other emergency measures whose purported purpose was to deal with emergencies that arise from “terrorist” acts, this order pretends to authority by analogy.
Here is the supposed justification for the order:
..due to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people, it is in the interests of the United States to take additional steps with respect to the national emergency..
In other words, acts of violence threatening the peace and stability of Iraq and undermining efforts at reconstruction pose an “unusual and extraordinary threat to national security” that are evidently part of some ongoing “national emergency.” What does this mean?
On one hand it is technical boilerplate. It is language that must be used in order for the executive order to pass muster under the IEEPA, we imagine. That act allows a president to declare “an extraordinary threat to the US national security .. that exists in whole or in part outside the United States.” And to block transactions or freeze assets. But the purpose for existence of the law that gives authority to Presidents to do this seems to be quite far afield of the situation in Iraq.
In a practical sense, there has been nothing about the violence in Iraq per se that has posed any threat whatsoever to national security in any domestic sense. The threats have been more to US commercial interests in the region. So in a practical sense, the threat is unusual or extraordinary in essentially the same sense that the absence of threat is an unusual or extraordinary sort of threat.
Rather, if there has been a threat, it is due to American presence in Iraq. That presence sucks the operational strength from the military and drives up costs of recruiting. It degrades operational preparedness. Failure to treat injured vets fairly has led to widespread cynicism about the good intentions of the military establishment among its own soldiers. And the presence of national guard reservists in Iraq materially degrades the abilities of local agencies to respond to emergencies of all sorts, including emergencies that might be caused by some hypothetical terrorist act.
Furthermore, the pretense that we exist in a state of national emergency is delusional, psychotic, insane. If there were a national emergency on American soil, why is it that all the National Guard reservists are in Iraq? If we live to see another “terrorist” attack of the sort that Pat Robertson and Dubya Bush have been promising for this fall, then we need to look first at the parties who stand to benefit most from such an attack for clues to the origin of the attack. This of course is quite speculative; and it is legitimate to discuss openly what measures might reasonably be needed to prevent certain kinds of attacks on American soil. As we do so, we must bear in mind that Iraq never did have anything to do with the incident that caused the president to declare any state of emergency: Iraq never had anything to do with 9/11. And if “terrorists” today operate inside Iraq it is because of US action there.
Finally, Iraq - in the language of this order - is treated as if it were a US territory. And as if Iraqi territorial interests were domestic interests. It is only under such an assumption that threats to Iraqi security would be de facto threats to US national security. Therefore, the premise of the order is flawed on its face. Iraq is not the same state as the US. These two entities are separated by geography, history, culture, language, and formal governmental structure. Smart second-graders can tell the difference. A presidential directive that confuses the one state with the other is muddleheaded, insane. And it is not so because Cheney is incapable of distinguishing the two; it is so because it is convenient for him to do so.
The flaws, however, are much deeper than its failure to deal with geography in a sane manner. We are intended to read the document as if it were dealing with domestic terrorism. But the subject of the document is not domestic terrorism. Nor is it terrorism per se in Iraq. Rather, it is “threats to peace and stability in Iraq.” In other words, this document is using techniques that were originally designed to deal with supposedly legitimate terrorist threats and expanding them to more distant realms, realms that may not be related at all to terrorism. A person with an AK-47 and a political point of view that is in opposition to one’s own is only a terrorist in a rhetorical sense, not in a functional sense. Sure, they might be scary, but so would be a delusional, alcoholic president, just a whim away from nuking whom drunkeness and insanity chose. Now that’s a terrifying notion.
To suggest that any local party fighting in Iraq is a terrorist party is more sheer insanity. The parties in question are fighting for power. It’s what would happen here in the US if we did not hold legitimate elections on some regular basis. If one side in Iraq brings in fighters from outside to help with its cause, again, it’s hard to call these parties terrorists because they act as agents of a faction. It is only when no internal Iraqi factions support a group of armed people in Iraq that one might consider using the term “terrorist.” But even in this case, they are in Iraq as fighters, not as terrorists.
In the end, the fighting in Iraq is about power, control. And most sane people just want it to end. One will find that different people have different points of view about what is necessary to bring about such a state.* But whereas in a civilized nation people would discuss the most useful policy to bring about a peaceful outcome, Americans have framed the whole question in terms of whether we take action or not.
So one side advocates occupation of Iraq until the day when every person has a portable pocket-sized nuclear fusion reactor powering all his miscellaneous household and portable appliances. And the other side wants to leave post-haste. And the reasons for one sort of action or another are never discussed because that’s what we do. We never discuss reasons. We only act.
The side advocating occupation has handicapped their own credibility because it was less than frank about its reasons for invading. And it has been less than frank about its reasons for staying. So it is impossible to have a frank and open discussion about staying or leaving. Similarly, the side advocating leaving is blind to the realities of energy resources. They simply do not understand how totally dependent our way of life is on those resources. Rather, we stay or leave on the basis of the flow of political forces. And that is what this proclamation is about.
For some time Americans entertained the hope that the reason for staying was to pacify the nation - in a favorable sense. But there is growing evidence that the reason for staying is to induce the Iraqis to sign exclusive development contracts with Western oil majors that have terms that no unoccupied nation would agree to; the revenues realized by the Western majors would be roughly twice what they would be under freely negotiated contracts. And that amounts to roughly $1 trillion of incremental oil revenue. Cynics have even argued that deBaathification was designed to destabilize and weaken Iraq’s central power so that it would be both dependent upon the occupying US forces and compliant to US will.
So the reason for staying in Iraq is clear. And it has absolutely nothing with national security or with bringing peace to the region. With this idea in mind, we set out to judge the language of the directive.
all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense,
This language freezes assets of all people in reach of the US law enforcement agencies who satisfy a set of criteria that follow. We are, of course, supposed to think “aha, terrorists,” but the language makes no mention of terrorists. nor does it clearly describe the people in question as such. Rather, they are people whose acts “have the effect of threatening stability” or “have the effect of undermining efforts.”
(i) to have committed, or to pose a significant risk of committing, an act or acts of violence that have the purpose or effect of:
(A) threatening the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq; or
(B) undermining efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq or to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people;
It does identify as the first group those actually committing violent acts in Iraq. But isn’t this why we have criminal prosecution, to punish people who commit violent acts? The rather supreme irony of this is that of the people in the US, none satisfies these criteria better than the president himself and the people who formulated and carried out his Iraq policy. Invasion certainly is a violent act. And its consequence was the instability in Iraq. How ironic it is that the president intends to freeze the assets of people who act with respect to Iraq precisely as his own administration has done.
Then there is the second group with the “significant risk of violent acts” part. The president seizes assets of people whom he thinks might commit a crime. How constitutional is that? How does one adjudicate who poses a “significant risk?” In this case it appears to be someone whom the Secretary of the Treasury says is one. Again, who constitutes such a risk? Anyone opposed to the policy of keeping troops in Iraq, perhaps?
And what constitutes a threat to the peace in Iraq? Does withdrawal of troops threaten the peace in Iraq? Big flashing lights should come on at this point. We recall the point in General Petraeus’ confirmation hearing in which Lieberman asks whether people talking about withdrawal from Iraq are giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy. And Petraeus answers “Yes sir, I believe so.”
So we have to ask, does this executive order give the President the power to sieze the assets of Congressmen who vote to withdraw troops from Iraq? Surely such an act would undermine the “efforts to promote economic reconstruction of Iraq” The first section, because it requires either violence of the threat of violence, seems not to actually allow this. But it depends upon how malevolently dishonest one is being in assessing the “threat” of violence. Without some fairly robust challenge and adjudication process, this is an invitation to the Secretary of the Treasury to identify political enemies and seize their assets.
The proclamation, too, seems not to approach the question of how such frozen assets are disposed of. Are they, in the end, turned into cash, shrink-wrapped, air freighted to some foreign nation, and handed out to contractors who are flown in sepecifically to receive them? Or do they just get transferred into the personal accounts of the Secretary of the Treasury, or the President?
The hazards of falling afoul of this proclamation are deep and obscure. It is one thing to act violently. But it is another to act indirectly on the behalf of a group or organization that reputedly intends to act violently, or one that actually had no such intention, but was declared by the executive to have had such.
(ii) to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, logistical, or technical support for, or goods or services in support of, such an act or acts of violence or any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order; or
(iii) to be owned or controlled by, or to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.
These items create guilt by association. A person “purported to act on the behalf of, directly, or indirectly, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked” makes one culpable before this order who may not have any knowledge of his culpability. Suppose John works for a company XyXyX. Suppose XyXyX gives money to an “Islamic Charity.” Suppose, too, that every person within the XyXyX corporation believes honestly and in good faith that this charity is, in fact, charitable. Now suppose that Secretary of the Treasury declares that some part of the money given to this charity goes to support some resistance group in Iraq. Under the provisions of this order, not only can he seize the assets of the company XyXyX, but he can sieze John’s personal property as well. Neither XyXyX nor John would know what hit them.
And if we see John sitting on a street corner begging for food because of this action and we give him the change left over from our latte purchase, the Secretary of the Treasury can seize our assets, too.
Does anyone see a problem with this?
This is a draconian measure. It appears to allow the executive branch to seize assets of any party who opposes its Iraq policy in any form. And it appears to allow the executive branch the power to seize assets of any persons who aid and assist people whose assets have been seized under this measure and who have nothing. It may be that the technical limitations to these effects are hidden in the “pursuant to.. ” language that we have not read. Nevertheless, the language of this document pretends to give to the office of the president the power to reduce any person to penury; to do so arbirtrarily, without due process, and without recourse.
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*In fact, I imagine that it is difficult to find a person in Iraq who wishes for some outcome other than peace and stability; only in their cases the fighting is over the conditions of such a peace. We had our revolution; and we still advocate the use of violence to get our way in the world - else why would we be in Iraq. So it is quite hypocritical to begrudge the factions in Iraq the same right.
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07.07.07
Posted in Rant and Rave, Snark and Snarkier at 6:34 pm by steve
One of the marvelous things about the Democrats’ aikido approach to political issue formulation “exactly what he said, only a bit less so” is that they have driven the Republicans so far right that Barry Goldwater, were he alive today, would probably be pummelled and pelted into seclusion by jeers of the neocons and fundamentalists yelling “librul, fascist, ter’rist.”
So when we discover the real Republican agenda in a secret, encrypted document that we are not allowed to speak about, there is nothing there that can really surprise us: Here are some tasty tidbits from “Plans for a Great America”
- Require “Made in USA” labels and little embossed flags to be on all goods sold in the US.
- Outlaw burning, shredding, defacing, discarding, composting, marking or otherwise desecrating any object that bears the likeness of an American flag colorized or embossed.
- Ban marriage among “God-haters.” That would be people who do not belong to approved religions and to the official Party of the United States of America.
- Require that all Gays and Prostitutes relocate to the District of Columbia.
- Ban condom sales within 100 miles of any church, school, or interstate highway. District of Columbia is exempt.
- Nuke Iraq to free up troops for other invasions.
- Invade: Iran for their support of “terrorists,” Venezuela for no longer being an easy target of capitalist exploitation, and France for being French. Also to get their expertise on bread and nuclear reactors.
- Free trade deal with Aruba - keeping free enterprise safe for democracy.
- In the spirit of Enron, export the obligation to pay government debt instruments to offshore entities. These would be corporations who agree to assume the US government’s indebtedness for pennies on the dollar. Then, when the debts come due, they default and close up shop. Most of them would be corporations whose corporate offices are located within P.O. boxes in Aruba.
- Rescind any laws that restrain the flow of money between corporations and politicians. Giving us the “best government money can buy.”
- Require that all people who say things in public post $1 million bonds which may be forfeit if they say anything “unpatriotic.” Public is defined in such a way that this requirement extends to speech on airplanes, on shopping mall sidewalks, and in internet e-mail, on web sites, and in blogs. “Unpatriotic” is generally assumed to be what the president says it is.
- Cap taxes just as Social Security contributions are capped so that nobody pays more than $30,000 per year in tax, no matter how much they make. This will keep capital flowing out of te US and into underdeveloped nations such as Dubai. And Aruba.
- Inflate. Only foreigners and suckers hold cash or credit instruments. Smart people hold foreign assets or are in debt up to their eyeballs.
- Bigger prisons, tougher laws. Too many Americans disagree with us. We need to be more persuasive.
- Require that all votes in general elections and statewide elections be tallied on computer systems owned by The Party and operated by loyal party operatives.
- Require Party loyalty oaths to be administered to all people receiving jobs that are paid for by government funds. This would include positions in universities, work by private contractors, and so on.
Bear in mind: sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
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07.05.07
Posted in Rant and Rave at 4:36 pm by steve
Definitely worth a listen . From the Agonist library.
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06.21.07
Posted in Rant and Rave at 5:51 pm by steve
Political truth lies in what can be sold by the elite, and in what will be bought and paid for by an undereducated and disenfranchised underclass.
Bush entered the White House determined to create political truth by controlling information. The idea that information is power was not lost on the administration; so it sought to create the mythology that would support its practices. The creation of a suitable mythology meant choking off access to information that contradicted the official point of view. John Dean discussed this problem in Worse than Watergate. Scooter Libby is paying the price for but one small part of of the practice. Casual acquaintance with the ongoing news stories today demonstrates that it does not take long to realize that the lies that led us into Iraq are just the tip of the iceberg.
To ambitious politicians it is an alluring idea - the idea of creating political truth out of whole cloth. It descends from the idea that in politics perception is reality, that authories can “spin” stories to create any favorable interpretation they please. Frank Luntz championed the idea for the Republicans, and Newt Gingrich exploited it first. George Lakoff treats the idea in Don’t Think of an Elephant. There is some truth to this idea, but as is true for any models of reality it has its limitations.
One problem is that denying real world conditions only works for so long. And if one tells the same lies for long enough one starts to believe them: it is an inevitable part of human nature. This then stops one from being able to perceive the problems. It debilitates one in solving real world problems. It logically sets one on a path of justifying bad behavior or inaction as conditions deteriorate. Once the real problemmatic conditions have disappeared from one’s carefully fabricated “reality” spun from twisted lies, there is no hope of addressing those conditions.
This leads to the second problem. The conditions that fail to correspond to the political dogma continue to deteriorate in the face of delusional thinking. And eventually the people who are affected by the denied conditions begin creating other narratives and explanations of reality that undermine the official version of truth.
It is not long before the official in question has credibility of “Baghdad Bob” claiming “There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!
Here’s another case in point. This is who we must become to win in Iraq. And the current administration has taken upon itself to make that happen. In the official story everything is hunky-dory, nothing but green pins, all in service of the tribal clan or the political elite. In the real story, carnage.
Spin has its costs. And everybody pays.
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06.20.07
Posted in Rant and Rave at 9:00 pm by steve
Ann Althouse makes some provocative observations about the Hillary theme song video. Set in a diner and spoofing a scene in the last episode of the Sopranos, on the surface, it is shiny and witty and funny. But the undercurrent is murky. There is a kind of David Lynch - “trouble beneath the surface” sensibility that makes one’s skin crawl. On one hand it invites that sense with the intercut image from the Sopranos. But what is more disturbing is what it treats as funny.
Nearest the surface is the carrots vs onions rings controversy. Althouse provides a Freudian interpretation that is lambasted by the liberal blogosphere. But there is a more literal interpretation that is equally as disturbing. It’s one thing to convince a person to eat carrots; it’s something else entirely to impose the choice on them. Anyone who has read Gary Taub’s classic article on nutrition mythology “What if it’s All a Big Fat Lie” will get it. At least half of what we “know” about nutrition is false. But we don’t know which half. More recent research suggests that carrots, as nature’s richest source of beta carotene, may interfere with the action of lycopene in protecting the prostate from cancer. Hillary, in eschewing ketchup and embracing carrots is unwittingly trading away prostate health for heart health. There is something deeply symbolic here, maybe.
Hillary has already “ordered for the table.” It doesn’t matter what others want, she knows best. Again, this is a kind of self-referential spoof on Hillary’s original single-payer plan for health care which was defeated mostly because it was her idea alone. Also because it would have worked ( but that’s another story.) Again, the truth is spoofed in the way Hillary is portrayed as having whipped Bill into submission. This is meant to be self-referential and a bit ironic; but not all of the nation is going to see the irony or see the face-value situation as an endorsement for Hillary’s way of doing business. Are we to suffer the same fate? I admire strong women and wish more of them would serve in office; but something of the gestalt here is suggestive of a disregard for others’ points of view. It’s a recurring Hillary theme.
Althouse is also correct in her assessment of the Sopranos as an evocation of a kind of secret clubhouse of cool which cannot both ring true and sound attractive throughout the red state populace at whom the ad is ostensibly targeted. Cool is an urban thing like the Sopranos. The ad dresses the Clintons in small town garb, but it fails to establish them as real small-towners. They don’t even know the meaning of “parallel park.”
Of course, how the video impacts the race depends on how it is used. If it is only used as blog fodder, then it successfully keeps us focused on Hillary and her image. It simultaneously keeps us from talking about other candidates and the issues that distinguish one from another. In this sense it is a highly successful ad.
By comparison, Gravel’s silent classic “Making Waves” seems somehow more substantial, if for no other reason than because it deftly deconstructs the whole image machine phenomenon. Gravel’s ad has a homegrown sensibility in addition to a Zenlike depth. Hillary’s ad is slick, clever, snide, disturbing. It reminds me of why I yearn for the image-challenged, bumbling of Ron Paul and Mike Gravel. At least in those cases I know what to disagree with. And I have reason to expect that their messages are their own and not the product of some deep-pocket media machine.
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06.16.07
Posted in Rant and Rave at 8:20 pm by steve
It’s a rude trick to start evaluating an opponent’s piece from the wrong end. After all, the whole goal of the beginning two thirds of a work is to set up the argument for the last third. And if the last third could be made without resort to the first two thirds, that’s just what one would do.
So we cheat when we evaluate this piece by Mr. Kagan and Mr. Kristol that, once again, tries to make the comparison between Vietnam and Iraq. The irony of it is: much of the writing in this article is clear and much of it uses facts that might support a conclusion of prolonging engagement in Iraq. But things all go to hell in a handbasket near the end.
So without further apology, that’s where we’ll begin.
.. the real progress has already been made in the war against al Qaida in Iraq. And the terrorists know it. That’s why they are surging.
This is quite a funny proposition to anyone who is willing to savor it for a moment. Perhaps al Qaida is saying the same thing about America. If so, we can be pretty certain that they are correct. Getting us to show up was more than half the battle. So al Qaida has Kagan and Kristol to thank for the bulk of their “progress in Iraq.” A trillion dollars is a lot to piss away.
I have always suspected that Mr Kristol has a well developed sense of humor - one that relishes and warmly embraces the absurd. The above quotation is proof.
Not much later, in support of a continued presence in Iraq, they pronounce:
Surely our political leaders have enough sense and enough courage not to believe enemy propaganda.
So long as we remain in a laughing mood, such a pronouncement might cause us to slap our knees or roll on the floor. For it implies not that neocons or Americans or Saudis or Israelis or Iraqis control the American media, but that al Qaida does. I wonder what Rupert Murdock would think of that proposition? Or the owner of the NYT corporation?
So long as we are willing to believe that Mr’s Kagan and Kristol are merely toying with us, provoking us, trying to get us to laugh ever harder at the sheer ridiculousness of their argument, it is harmless enough.
But there is a darker possibility here. The implication is that those who disagree with Kagan and Kristol are actually enemies, terrorists. We note that al Qaida propaganda actually promotes the idea that US forces stay in Iraq until America is defeated. So the authors, when they talk about “enemy propaganda” are not talking about al Qaida; they are talking about people stateside who oppose their views. To the extent that Kagan and Kristol expect us to take their argument seriously, they depend upon a seriously frightening rhetorical flourish. It is not terrorists who disagree with them in the press. Even al Jazeera, an Arab language media company operated out of the Arab Emirates is not operated by al Qaida.
Nevertheless, this rhetorical flourish is aimed at defining anyone who disagrees with them as a terrorist. If such thinking were to spread far, democracy would be doomed. There is evidence that such thinking has a firm hold on the vice presidency and on the authors of the Patriot and Military Commissions acts; so we do well to treat this seriously.
I respect the rights of Kagan and Kristol to say anything they can that sheds light on the situation and helps us to cooperatively reach a constructive concensus. Even when I disagree. But they cannot be forgiven for engaging in and encouraging speech that physically endangers my own person just because I happen disagree with them. I find the prospect that this is what they are intending to do here terrifying. It is reasonable to infer that they mean to pronounce me a terrorist for the purposes of the two bodies of law we just cited - in which case I have real reason to fear for my safety.
As a practical matter, if Kagan and Kristol would denounce all the people who question their view as enemies and terrorists and ship them off to concentration camps, they must either be willing to hire a cadre of mass murderers or they shall have to recant and let some of their adversaries back out of those prison camps quickly. Otherwise, the world will collapse around their ears. The capacity of the facilities under contract to Halliburton that might be used to realize such a plan will otherwise prove insufficient.
Kagan and Kristol go on to imply that it was the “belief in enemy propaganda” that brought an end to the Vietnam war, to suggest that the cause here is more serious, and that we ought not “make that grave mistake again.” They do this even as articles come out suggesting that Vietnam is the very best place to invest right now. Intel, for instance, is in the process of building one of its most advanced wafer fabs in Ho Chi Minh city (nee Hanoi.)
It is impossible to imagine that none of these men’s closest friends has or anticipates major business interests in Vietnam or in parts of China that would be affected negatively today were the war there still raging. The strict laissez affaire doctrine that neocons have been pushing for half a century is precisely in service of such investment policy. In short, either they are idiots or they are making a joke.
So I think we can be assured that Kagan and Kristol jest. But can we be certain their readers all take it in the same spirit? Do the advertisers at NRO who spend a fortune pushing ever more military expenditure realize they are joking, for instance?
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