The A Tidd Journal

A journal of various thoughts

[atidd]

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865 To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance. I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again. As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire. In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits. Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me. From your old servant, Jourdon Anderson A former slave writes his former master.

[ilyagerner]

However, on the whole, our criminal-justice system is so frightfully racist because it’s TOO EASY for prosecutors, not because it’s too hard. Of course, in a racist society, rules that help defendants are going to help the most privileged defendants the most, and that’s maddening. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognising that the least privileged, the most oppressed, the most discriminated against, are far and away most likely to stand accused. That’s why I suspect that a legal system making it harder for the likes of Mr Zimmerman to get away with it would be a system of even more outrageous racial inequity.

Will Wilkinson, Getting away with it, on why we should hesitate to make it easier for prosecutors to put away the Zimmermans of the world.

[atidd]

(via ilyagerner)

Look at the racial record for drug convictions and the death penalty if you think giving prosecutors more power would diminish racism in the legal system.

[atidd]

As with all giant figures, many myths cling to Wagner. But there’s no need to embroider the life, which is extraordinary enough already. It’s a heroic story of nurturing colossal dreams while the creditors are knocking on the door, and eventually success beyond any other composer. And it has its amusing sidelights and dark patches and very human foibles. Here are some of them.

Who was Wagner’s dad?

All his life Wagner fretted about the true identity of his father. Officially it was Carl Friedrich Wagner, but there are tantalising bits of evidence that it may have been the actor and painter Ludwig Geyer. Wagner’s mother Johanna was certainly in a hurry to visit Geyer in October 1813, only months after Wagner was born — a risky trip in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps she was keen for the father to see his son?

Vegetable lover

Wagner was passionate about animal welfare long at a time when it was regarded as cranky. In 1879 he read an anti-vivisection tract book called The Torture Chambers of Science, which incensed him. He became convinced that eating meat instead of vegetables corrupted the blood, and refuse to touch meat again.

Mother fixation

At the climactic moment of Siegfried, the third part of Wagner’s great four-part drama The Ring of the Nibelung, the hero Siegfried finds a sleeping warrior within a ring of fire. He removes the figure’s helmet, and discovers a woman. “Mother!” he cries in terror — surely the most Freudian moment in all opera. Some biographers say that Wagner’s worries about father led to a fixation on his mother. This helps to explain his constant pursuit of unattainable women, especially other men’s wives.

A passion for Greece

Wagner’s passion for all things Greek began young, but it was in his thirties that he really immersed himself in Greek playwrights, especially Aeschylus. He was gripped by the idea that for the ancient Greeks attending the theatre was a religious ritual, not an entertainment, and he had similar aspirations for his own works.

Manning the barricades

Before he decided to redeem the world through his music dramas, Wagner thought the answer to mankind’s ills lay in revolution. During the 1849 rebellion in Dresden he manned the barricades, and at one point was called on to climb the Kreuzkirche tower to report on troop movements. “Thus I spent one of the most extraordinary nights of my life,” he wrote in his autobiography, “taking turns with Berthold to keep watch and sleep, close beneath the great bell with its terrible groaning clang, and with the accompaniment of the continuous rattle of the Prussian shot as it beat against the tower walls.”

Despising the English

Like those other great German radicals of the 19th century, Marx and Nietzsche, Wagner found the English depressingly prosaic. In 1855 he came to England to conduct eight concerts for the Philharmonic Society, and described his life during the trip as being like “a damned soul in hell”. It didn’t help that he was savaged by the critics, though Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were nice to him.

Devoted to dogs

Wagner’s dogs were his pride and joy. During his Swiss sojourn in the 1850s, his two dogs, Russ and Koss, accompanied him on his daily walks to Lucerne to collect his post. One of them, Russ, is buried at the master’s feet in Bayreuth, where Wagner’s dog-whip is on display in the museum. At one time Wagner used to play whatever he’d written to his adored King Charles spaniel Pep for his approval.

Water on the brain

Wagner had a lifelong fascination for water and was convinced of its curative properties. In 1851, when he was working on an early version of the Ring, Wagner described his daily regime in a letter: “Half-past-five in the morning, wet pack until 7 o’clock; then a cold bath and a walk. 8 o’clock breakfast: dry bread and milk or water. Immediately afterwards a first and then a second enema; another short walk; then a cold compress on my abdomen; around 12 o’clock: wet rubdown; short walk; fresh compress…” And so it goes on.

Bewitched by Buddhism

Wagner was fascinated by Buddhism, and for a while thought about writing an opera based on the life of the Buddha entitled Die Sieger (The Victor). This didn’t go down well with his friend Liszt, who wanted him to become a proper Christian. Wagner, as ever, justified his own enthusiasms by appealing to history. “Christianity is no more and no less than a branch of that venerable Buddhist religion which found its way… among other places, to the shores of the Mediterranean.”

Seduced by satin

Wagner loved satin, and velvet, too. When he was composing his last opera, Parsifal, he would put himself in the right mood by running silk through his fingers, while the scent of exotic bath oils floated up from the bathroom below. However, this didn’t stop him raging against “mankind’s crazy appetite for LUXURY” in his essay The Artwork of the Future.

Some things you may or may not have wanted to know about Wagner.

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The Rich and Famous at the Farm Bill Trough

[atidd]

There are no farms in Manhattan, but residents there have collected subsidies totaling nearly $9 million in the past seven years. Recipients also include Mark F. Rockefeller ($356,018) and David Rockefeller ($591,057). Yes, the Rockefeller family (Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank, etc.).

Over on the West Coast, in Beverly Hills 90210, the estate of comedian Jack Benny has collected $18,120 for a farm in Madera County, California, while $142,933 was paid to Mary Ann Mobley (Miss America of 1959) for a farm in Madison County, Mississippi.

These examples are not exceptions but the norm. The USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that two-thirds of the farms with income exceeding $1 million annually received government payments averaging $54,745 in 2011. Meanwhile, just 27 percent of farms with income of less than $100,000 received payments—averaging just $4,420 in 2011.

Why farm subsidies won't die.

[atidd]

The rise to power of Hitler’s Nazi party in 1933 unleashed an almost unprecedented departure of composers from Germany. Many had enjoyed flourishing careers in the Weimar Republic, but they were now hounded out as result of a powerfully organised propaganda campaign that sought to purify German music from what was deemed to be pernicious cosmopolitan (ie Jewish) influences. Among the first victims of Nazi persecution were such figures as Kurt Weill, highly successful composer of the Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) and collaborator with the poet Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom eventually found sanctuary in the United States. 

Many other composers who left Germany and later German-occupied Austria during the 1930s as a result of Nazi persecution faced similar situations to Weill and Schoenberg. Some such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold changed direction, finding work with varying degrees of artistic fulfilment in Hollywood. Others such as Ernst Krenek and Ernst Toch, were not offered such financially lucrative opportunities and found it much more difficult to adapt to the different cultural environments of the country to which they had emigrated. But whatever the success or frustrations endured by these composers, they at least had their freedom and felt themselves not to be in imminent mortal danger.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War several other prominent composers including Stravinsky and Hindemith, both of whom had been denounced by the Nazis at the notorious Entartete (Degenerate) Musik exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1938, felt compelled to leave Europe for the United States. They were followed in 1940 by the staunchly anti-fascist Bartók, who had opposed Hungary’s continued alliance with Nazi Germany and in the following year by Bohuslav Martinů, the latter escaping from the clutches of the Gestapo in German-occupied France after they sought his arrest on account of his support for the Czech resistance. 

Premiere in a prison camp

Stravinsky, Hindemith, Bartók and Martinů were sufficiently well established to be able to secure relatively safe passage out of Europe either before or during the war. A number of younger composers were not so fortunate and inevitably became trapped or embroiled in the conflict. Among the several thousand French soldiers who were rounded up by the Germans after their army had overrun France was the composer Olivier Messiaen who was transported to Stalag VIII–A, a prisoner of war camp some 70 miles east of Dresden in July 1940. There under the most arduous of circumstances, Messiaen affirmed his ardent religious faith by a writing a work for himself and three fellow musicians (a violinist, clarinettist and cellist) that came to be known as Quartet for the End of Time, the titles of its eight movements having been inspired by visions of the Apocalypse.

The work was first performed on a bitterly cold night on 15 January 1941 in a camp hut before an audience of 400 prisoners. As Messiaen later recalled, ‘an out-of-tune upright piano, the keys of which seemed to stick at random’, had been brought into the camp for the performance, though the much-repeated claim that the cellist performed the work on an instrument with only three strings was later disputed by the original performer. Whatever the case, there is little doubt that the work had a profound impact on its original listeners. Messiaen suggested that never in his life had his music been heard with such attention and such understanding – a claim substantiated by a review of the performance in the camp newspaper: ‘It was our good fortune to have witnessed in this camp the first performance of a masterpiece. And what's strange is that in a prison barracks we felt just the same tumultuous and partisan atmosphere of some premieres: latent as much with passionate acclaim as with angry denunciation.’

Although one could interpret the Quartet for the End of Time as a symbol of defiance in the wake of oppression, Messiaen’s music is essentially apolitical, its unshakeable spirituality transcending the extraordinary conditions in which it was written. Despite the fact that Messiaen would not have known at the time whether he or his fellow prisoners were to survive, he was eventually released in 1942 and allowed to resume his career as Professor at the Paris Conservatoire. After the war he became one of the most important and influential French composers of the 20th century.

Music in Terezín

In contrast to Messiaen’s experience, there was little prospect of survival for those incarcerated in concentration camps on the Eastern front. Any cultural activity amongst inmates was pretty well curtailed in most of the death camps, the major exception being Theresienstadt (Terezín) where the Nazis rounded up 121,000 Jewish inmates, forcing them to live in the most squalid conditions. Yet for propaganda purposes, it suited the occupying forces to portray Terezín as a model camp in which prisoners were able to continue their work almost as before. This explains the unusually intense level of musical activity that took place there. Not only were there regular performances of the standard repertory from orchestra, choirs and opera ensembles, but also a number of composers were actively engaged in writing works that were to be played by their fellow inmates.

Four composers in particular were especially productive, though their musical language was strikingly different. The Schoenberg pupil Viktor Ullmann was perhaps the best known. Highly prolific, he composed numerous vocal, piano and chamber works in Terezín as well a remarkable chamber opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis that openly satirised the Nazis. Working alongside Ullmann was the talented Hans Krása whose children’s opera Brundibár was cynically featured in the propaganda film Theresienstadt. Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film of the Jewish Settlement Area) shown to members of the Red Cross as a ruse to deflect attention away from the policy of Jewish extermination.

Unlike Ullmann, whose musical allegiances were predominantly allied to the Austro-German tradition, and Krása, whose style owed more to French music, the other two composers to have established a distinctive voice in Terezín looked to Eastern European masters as their models. Pavel Haas continued to explore similar musical paths to his teacher Janáček whilst the youngest of all, Gideon Klein, followed in the footsteps of Bartók.

Hope for a better future

It should be emphasised that all four composers knew in their heart of hearts that there was little chance of them surviving the ordeal of incarceration and that they were to face death in Auschwitz. At the same time they pursued their compositional activity with feverish intensity and with a staunch hope for a better future. As Ullmann memorably said, ‘It must be emphasised that Theresienstadt has served to enhance, not to impede, my musical activities, that by no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon, and that our endeavour with respect to the arts was commensurate with our will to live.’

Whereas Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time quickly established itself in the post-war era as one of the major 20th-century pieces of chamber music, it took over 30 years before anyone became aware of the extraordinary body of new music composed in Terezín and a wider dissemination of their work was only achieved in the 1990s. Even with the passage of time, it remains difficult to apply conventional critical values in coming to terms with music composed in such straitened circumstances. Nonetheless there is little doubt that powerful works such as Ullmann’s Third Quartet and Klein’s String Trio possess an urgency of expression that qualifies them for a permanent place in the repertory. The one question that that can never be answered, however, is whether these hugely gifted composers might have achieved even more had their lives not been cut short in such a brutal manner.

[atidd]

This year marks the centenary of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), a gentle but enduring musical voice. Britten created a remarkable musical catalog, from operas like “Billy Budd,” “Peter Grimes” and “Death in Venice” to orchestral, choral and solo works, establishing him as one of the leading lights of the 20th century—all the while bucking the tide of trendy experimentation.

His music was, reported Leonard Bernstein in the Britten documentary “A Time There Was…,” on the surface, “decorative, positive, charming.” Yet, said Bernstein, the more one studied Britten’s pieces, the more obvious it became that something dark lurked underneath—that the composer “was a man at odds with the world.”

That tension was often hidden by a quality for which Britten credited his teacher, composer Frank Bridge: “scrupulous attention to good technique.” The gloss of technical mastery left him open to charges of emotional distance—of being too slick to touch the hearts of his listeners. But a sense of raw struggle was certainly obvious in his choice of narratives. “Peter Grimes” (1945) was about the confrontation between an outcast and the community that rejects him. “Billy Budd” (1951), based on an original story by Herman Melville, is a study in doomed innocence.

Britten’s personal sense of alienation was a natural outcome of his life as a homosexual in a society that criminalized this, but it also arose from his views of a world in which all sorts of injustice reigned. He abhorred the violence that permeated society. When World War II broke out, he declared himself a pacifist, and even fled to America. After the war, when Coventry Cathedral, which had almost been obliterated by German bombs in 1940, was celebrating its reconstruction and Britten was asked for a new composition to mark the dedication, he quickly agreed. He had been waiting for an opportunity to express artistically the horror and futility of warfare. The result was his monumental “War Requiem”—a work quickly declared a masterpiece by critics and colleagues alike.

After its 1962 debut, critic William Mann described it as “so superbly proportioned and calculated, so humiliating and disturbing in effect, in fact so tremendous, that every performance it is given ought to be a momentous occasion.” He was not alone. Peter Shaffer, in “Time and Tide,” wrote that “it makes criticism impertinent.”

There was bound to be some pushback in the face of all that acclaim. Igor Stravinsky noted that “Kleenex at the ready, then, one goes from the critics to the music, knowing that if one should dare to disagree with ‘practically everyone,’ one will be made to feel as if one had failed to stand up for ‘God Save the Queen.’” But Stravinsky was not criticizing Britten. Rather, he was reacting to the hype. “Nothing fails like success, or hurts more than the press’s ready certification of a ‘masterpiece.’” (In any event, the two composers were very different. A teenage Britten had found the “Rite of Spring” to be “bewildering and terrifying.”)

For the “War Requiem,” Britten assembled a large orchestra, a smaller chamber orchestra, two organs, three vocal soloists, a chorus and a boys’ choir (positioned at a distance, with a portable organ or harmonium). The sheer power of these accumulated forces can shake a listener to the core. (Two conductors are needed—for the premiere, Meredith Davies conducted the main orchestra and choir, while Britten conducted the chamber orchestra and the tenor and baritone soloists.) Britten selected for his text nine poems by Lt. Wilfred Edward Salter Owen, who lost his life in 1918 on the battlefield, shortly before the Armistice, and interwove them with the Latin Mass for the Dead.

Owen was not a pacifist—he had volunteered to fight. But his poems decry the horror of war, and they are devastating. The music is filled with allusions to Verdi, to Indonesian gamelan and to medieval plainsong. And it is dramatic, through and through. At the opening Requiem aeternam, plaintive strings play in short, breathless statements that grow in length and fervor before the chorus joins in, along with an array of chiming bells. And suddenly, there is the haunting sound of a boys’ choir from afar. The tenor intones: “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” As the vocal and instrumental forces merge, it is as if Britten has encompassed the whole world.

The interval of the tritone (an augmented fourth, known as the “devil in music”) emerges throughout, lending an eerie, uneasy atmosphere to the work. Britten brings out the meaning of the words through instrumental coloration. Owen’s “shrill demented choirs of wailing shells” are portrayed by flute and clarinet, with battlefield horn fanfares in the background. And odd meters suggest the limping of the wounded—”One ever hangs where shelled roads part. / In this war He too lost a limb,” wrote Owen.

In the work’s Offertorium, the poet retells the story of Abraham and Isaac, but in this version, the patriarch ignores the angel and kills his son, and “half the seed of Europe, one by one.” A glittering Sanctus, filled with tremolos for vibraphone, glockenspiel, antique cymbals, bells and piano, brings forth a chorus divided into eight ungainly parts, like cries from a crowd.

“I don’t think there is any other composer who set the English language better to music,” says tenor Nicholas Phan, who has recorded two albums of Britten, and will perform in the “War Requiem” next November with Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony. “He has the ability to lift the words off the page. He almost makes the poetry shine in a better light than when it is spoken.”

Attend if you can. If you can’t, there is a 1963 (remastered in 1990) recording available that stands as a testament to Britten’s original vision. It is on Decca Classics, and features singers Peter Pears, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Galina Vishnevskaya (who was invited to participate in the actual premiere but was prevented from doing so by Soviet officials), along with the London Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of the composer. Britten had intentionally picked an international lineup of soloists as part of his universalist message to the world. The result is exquisite.

[atidd]

Worried about the dollar? Worried about jobs? Worried about national security? Well then, you should feel very very good about a Chinese company buying Smithfield foods. Counterintuitive? Perhaps for some, but I’m hoping not so for my regular readers.

Here’s a little refresher course:

The dollar: China goes to great lengths to compete for our business—making us wealthier in the process (we enjoy more of life’s amenities as the world competes on price for our business)—because they love U.S. dollars. They love U.S. dollars because we apparently yet produce goods (like hogs) and services they deem valuable. The Smithfield Foods acquisition proves it. Thank goodness we have more than just federal debt to offer the world.

Jobs: Trust me, Chinese management and workers are not about to descend upon tiny Smithfield, Virginia. Shaunghui bought Smithfield Foods to exploit, and export (or import), its business model (along with its hogs). But we’re not talking merely the preservation of Smithfield jobs, we’re talking $4.7 billion U.S. dollars (a few of them you sent to China to buy the monitor, tablet, or cell phone you’re staring at right now*) flowing back to the U.S. You think Smithfield’s largest shareholders might be looking to grow other successful enterprises with their proceeds — creating jobs in the process? Yyyyep!

*So the next time you cringe before buying an item made in China, remember all those U.S. jobs you helped create when Shaunghui bought Smithfield Foods.

Worried about national security? This one’s the easiest: Nobody ever shoots their customer (or suppplier). Or, as an intuitive individual (most often ascribed to Frederic Bastiat) once said:

“If goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”

The beauty of trade is that it renders borders irrelevant.

[atidd]

Nobody in the developed world comes remotely close to the poverty level that $1.25 a day represents. America’s poverty line is $63 a day for a family of four. In the richer parts of the emerging world $4 a day is the poverty barrier. But poverty’s scourge is fiercest below $1.25 (the average of the 15 poorest countries’ own poverty lines, measured in 2005 dollars and adjusted for differences in purchasing power): people below that level live lives that are poor, nasty, brutish and short. They lack not just education, health care, proper clothing and shelter—which most people in most of the world take for granted—but even enough food for physical and mental health. Raising people above that level of wretchedness is not a sufficient ambition for a prosperous planet, but it is a necessary one.

The world’s achievement in the field of poverty reduction is, by almost any measure, impressive. Although many of the original MDGs—such as cutting maternal mortality by three-quarters and child mortality by two-thirds—will not be met, the aim of halving global poverty between 1990 and 2015 was achieved five years early.

The MDGs may have helped marginally, by creating a yardstick for measuring progress, and by focusing minds on the evil of poverty. Most of the credit, however, must go to capitalism and free trade, for they enable economies to grow—and it was growth, principally, that has eased destitution.

Poverty rates started to collapse towards the end of the 20th century largely because developing-country growth accelerated, from an average annual rate of 4.3% in 1960-2000 to 6% in 2000-10. Around two-thirds of poverty reduction within a country comes from growth. Greater equality also helps, contributing the other third. A 1% increase in incomes in the most unequal countries produces a mere 0.6% reduction in poverty; in the most equal countries, it yields a 4.3% cut.

China (which has never shown any interest in MDGs) is responsible for three-quarters of the achievement. Its economy has been growing so fast that, even though inequality is rising fast, extreme poverty is disappearing. China pulled 680m people out of misery in 1981-2010, and reduced its extreme-poverty rate from 84% in 1980 to 10% now.

That is one reason why (as the briefing explains) it will be harder to take a billion more people out of extreme poverty in the next 20 years than it was to take almost a billion out in the past 20. Poorer governance in India and Africa, the next two targets, means that China’s experience is unlikely to be swiftly replicated there. Another reason is that the bare achievement of pulling people over the $1.25-a-day line has been relatively easy in the past few years because so many people were just below it. When growth makes them even slightly better off, it hauls them over the line. With fewer people just below the official misery limit, it will be more difficult to push large numbers over it.

So caution is justified, but the goal can still be achieved. If developing countries maintain the impressive growth they have managed since 2000; if the poorest countries are not left behind by faster-growing middle-income ones; and if inequality does not widen so that the rich lap up all the cream of growth—then developing countries would cut extreme poverty from 16% of their populations now to 3% by 2030. That would reduce the absolute numbers by 1 billion. If growth is a little faster and income more equal, extreme poverty could fall to just 1.5%—as near to zero as is realistically possible. The number of the destitute would then be about 100m, most of them in intractable countries in Africa. Misery’s billions would be consigned to the annals of history.

Markets v misery

That is a lot of ifs. But making those things happen is not as difficult as cynics profess. The world now knows how to reduce poverty. A lot of targeted policies—basic social safety nets and cash-transfer schemes, such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família—help. So does binning policies like fuel subsidies to Indonesia’s middle class and China’s hukou household-registration system (see article) that boost inequality. But the biggest poverty-reduction measure of all is liberalising markets to let poor people get richer. That means freeing trade between countries (Africa is still cruelly punished by tariffs) and within them (China’s real great leap forward occurred because it allowed private business to grow). Both India and Africa are crowded with monopolies and restrictive practices.

Many Westerners have reacted to recession by seeking to constrain markets and roll globalisation back in their own countries, and they want to export these ideas to the developing world, too. It does not need such advice. It is doing quite nicely, largely thanks to the same economic principles that helped the developed world grow rich and could pull the poorest of the poor out of destitution.

[atidd]

President Franklin Roosevelt used the IRS to harass newspaper publishers who were opposed to the New Deal, including William Randolph Hearst and Moses Annenberg, publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Roosevelt also dropped the IRS hammer on political rivals such as the populist firebrand Huey Long and radio agitator Father Coughlin, and prominent Republicans such as former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Perhaps Roosevelt’s most pernicious tax skulduggery occurred in 1944. He spiked an IRS audit of illegal campaign contributions made by a government contractor to Congressman Lyndon Johnson, whose career might have been derailed if Texans had learned of the scandal.

President John F. Kennedy raised the political exploitation of the IRS to an art form. Shortly after capturing the presidency, JFK denounced “the discordant voices of extremism” and derided people who distrust their leaders—President Obama didn’t invent that particular rhetorical line. Shortly thereafter, JFK signaled at a news conference that he expected the IRS to be vigilant in policing the tax-exempt status of questionable (read: conservative) organizations.

Within a few days of Kennedy’s remarks, the IRS launched the Ideological Organizations Audit Project. It targeted right-leaning groups, including the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education. Kennedy also used the IRS to strong-arm companies into complying with “voluntary” price controls. Steel executives who defied the administration were singled out for audits.

A 1976 report by the Senate Select Committee on Government Intelligence on the Kennedy program noted: “By directing tax audits at individuals and groups solely because of their political beliefs, the Ideological Organizations Audit Project established a precedent for a far more elaborate program of targeting ‘dissidents.’”

After Richard Nixon took office, his administration quickly created a Special Services Staff to mastermind what a memo called “all IRS activities involving ideological, militant, subversive, radical, and similar type organizations.” More than 10,000 individuals and groups were targeted because of their political activism or slant between 1969 and 1973, including Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling (a left-wing critic of the Vietnam War) and the far-right John Birch Society.

The IRS was also given Nixon’s enemies list to, in the words of White House counsel John Dean, “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”

The exposure of Nixon’s IRS abuses during congressional hearings in 1973 and 1974 profoundly weakened him during the uproar after the Watergate hotel break-in. The second article of his 1974 impeachment charged him with endeavoring to obtain from the IRS “confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposes not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.” Congress enacted legislation to severely restrict political contacts between the White House and the IRS.

In the following decades, the IRS regularly sparked outrage by abusing innocent taxpayers, but there was not much controversy about the agency’s politicizing until Bill Clinton took office.

In 1995, the White House and the Democratic National Committee produced a 331-page report entitled “Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce” that attacked magazines, think tanks and other entities and individuals who had criticized President Clinton. In the subsequent years, many organizations mentioned in the White House report were hit by IRS audits. More than 20 conservative organizations—including the Heritage Foundation and the American Spectator magazine—and almost a dozen individual high-profile Clinton accusers, such as Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers, were audited.

Abuse of concentrated political power is hardly anything new.

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Why is There a Shortage of Toilet Paper in Venezuela?

Forget about price controls**. The Venezuelan government finally figured it out. The country is facing an acute shortage of toilet paper because people are eating too much. The head of the National Institute of Statistics released a survey yesterday that shows that Venezuelans “€œare eating three times a day or even more.”

** To wit:

As Dan Gross explains, the Venezuelan T.P. shortage is a fairly textbook case of well-intentioned safety-net planning run amok. Venezuela wanted to make sure toilet paper and other basic staples were available to the nation’s poor during a period of high inflation. Rather than simply subsidize purchases with an American-style food stamp program, it implemented strict price controls, putting a ceiling on how much manufacturers could charge consumers for basic goods.

Those price controls lowered producers’ profits and took away much of their incentive to produce. And combined with fairly strict currency controls that have made it harder for Venezuelan companies to receive foreign supplies and equipment, the result has been “shortages of staples like milk, meat and toilet paper,” as the Times put it last year.

Socialist logic at its finest.

[atidd]

There’s always a perfectly logical explanation for those in power to evade responsibility.

[atidd]

There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds the damage being done by climate change, and will for several decades yet. Hunger, rainforest destruction, excess cold-weather deaths and reduced economic growth are all exacerbated by the rush to biomass and wind. These dwarf any possible effects of worse weather, for which there is still no actual evidence anyway: recent droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability.

The harm done by policy falls disproportionately on the poor. Climate worriers claim that at some point this will reverse and the disease will become worse than the cure. An acceleration in temperature rise, they say, is overdue. The snag is, the best science now says otherwise. Whereas the politicians, activists and businessmen who make the most noise about — and money from — this issue are sticking to their guns, key scientists are backing away from predictions of rapid warming.

Yesterday saw the publication of a paper in a prestigious journal, Nature Geoscience, from a high-profile international team led by Oxford scientists. The contributors include 14 lead authors of the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientific report; two are lead authors of the crucial chapter 10: professors Myles Allen and Gabriele Hegerl.

So this study is about as authoritative as you can get. It uses the most robust method, of analysing the Earth’s heat budget over the past hundred years or so, to estimate a “transient climate response” — the amount of warming that, with rising emissions, the world is likely to experience by the time carbon dioxide levels have doubled since pre-industrial times.

The most likely estimate is 1.3C. Even if we reach doubled carbon dioxide in just 50 years, we can expect the world to be about two-thirds of a degree warmer than it is now, maybe a bit more if other greenhouse gases increase too. That is to say, up until my teenage children reach retirement age, they will have experienced further warming at about the same rate as I have experienced since I was at school.

At this rate, it will be the last decades of this century before global warming does net harm. As the economist Bjørn Lomborg recently summarised the economic consensus: “Economic models show that the overall impact of a moderate warming (1-2C) will be beneficial [so] global warming is a net benefit now and will likely stay so till about 2070.”

Now contrast the new result with the Met Office’s flagship climate model, the one that ministers and their advisers place most faith in. Called HadGEM2-ES, it expects a transient climate response of 2.5C, or almost double the best estimate that the Oxford team has just published. Indeed, the latter’s study concludes that it is more than 95 per cent certain that the response is below 2C, considerably short of the Met Office model’s estimate.

Why trust the new results rather than the Met Office model? The new study not only uses the most robust method, but joins several other observationally based studies from the past year that also find lower climate sensitivity than complex climate models exhibit.

Notice that this new understanding is consistent with what we have actually experienced: about 0.1C per decade over the past 50 years. The most remarkable thing about the recent milestone of 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (400 parts per million) is that it comes after 15 years of no net warming at all.

The new paper also fits the known physics of the greenhouse effect, which predicts a warming of 1.1C for a doubling of carbon dioxide. Only unverified assumptions by modellers about the added effects of water vapour and clouds have allowed politicians and activists to claim that a much higher number fits the laws of physics. Only now-disproven claims about how much the sulphur pollution in the air was masking the warming enabled them to reconcile their claims with the actual data.

It is true that the “transient climate response” is not the end of the story and that the gradual warming of the oceans means that there would be more warming in the pipeline even if we stopped increasing carbon dioxide levels after doubling them. But given the advance of nuclear and solar technology, there is now a good chance we will have decarbonised the economy before any net harm has been done.

In an insightful new book, The Age of Global Warming, Rupert Darwall makes the point that “in believing scientists and politicians can solve the problems of a far distant future, the tangible needs of the present are neglected”. The strong possibility that climate change will be slow and harmless must be taken seriously before we damage more lives, landscapes and livelihoods in its name.

If there can be a serious debate on climate, it has to include the unintended consequences of climate policy and the fact that the solution is often worse than the problem.

[atidd]

But the notion that the Fed is the firefighter standing by with the hose to douse any reignited embers of 2008 ignores its own role in creating those problems in the first place.

The Fed’s own policy choices were central to the housing boom and bust and the associated financial crisis. In trying to soften the possibility of a post-9/11 recession, and then wrongly worrying about deflation, the Fed expanded the money supply, dropping interest rates to unsustainably low levels in the mid-2000s. The nominal Federal Funds rate was well below the benchmark of the widely-recognized Taylor Rule. Worse, the real Federal Funds rate (the nominal rate minus inflation) was actually negative for roughly two years. A negative interest rate means people are essentially being paid to borrow.

This influx of cheap credit from the Fed gave lenders the funds they needed to provide mortgage loans. That credit – combined with the willingness of government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up and securitize those new mortgages without having to face a true profit/loss test in the market – were key causes of the housing boom. Easy credit and low rates fueled housing flippers and speculators like never before.

With housing prices moving ever upward, and the explicit and implicit backing of the Fed and Treasury behind the process generating it, it was no surprise that we saw a dizzying array of new financial instruments and a degree of recklessness that stretched beyond the control of regulators. When housing prices eventually fell, the instruments premised on rising housing prices collapsed as well, endangering institutions across the economy. It is tempting to blame this on greedy financiers, but they were simply responding to the poor incentives created by the Fed, Congress and others.

So while the Fed maintains that only it can prevent the serious problems arising from “systemic risk” of the sort we saw in 2008, it continues to ignore its own major role in creating that risk. Absent the cheap credit after 9/11, there would have been no fuel for the fires from which the Fed now claims to be saving us.

Although putting out fires is certainly a good thing, the Fed’s attempt to clothe itself in the glory of saving the day rings false; we should be very cautious of taking fire prevention advice from an arsonist.

Economics is about reacting to incentives, and while the banks were not innocent bystanders, they were reacting to perverse incentives created by political policy.

[atidd]

Free Men - Trailer (by FilmMovement)

In German occupied Paris, a young Algerian earns his living as a black marketeer. Arrested by the French police but given a chance to avoid jail, Younes agrees to spy on a Paris Mosque that the police suspect of smuggling North African Jews away from the Nazis. After befriending several Jews, though, he stops collaborating with the police and gradually transforms into a fully fledged freedom fighter.

Based on actual events of French Muslims giving sanctuary to French Jews under Nazi occupation. 

[atidd]

From a distance you feel the strokes… bam, bam, bam. The arm raises the thick fat stick and then lets it falls hard on the twisted sheet. The spray of lather explodes with every stroke and white water seeping from dirty fabric mixes with the river. It is very early, the sun barely up, and already the clotheslines are waiting for with damp clothes that must dry in the morning. The woman is exhausted. From the time she was a teenager she has washed her and her family’s clothing in this way. What other choice did she have? In that little village lost in the eastern mountains all her neighbors did the same. At times as she slept her body would move restlessly in the bed and repeat the hint of a movement: up… down… bam… bam… bam.

Lately the discussion of women’s emancipation in Cuba has been focused on persuading us of its extent, showing the numbers of women in parliament. There is also talk — in the official mass media — of how many have managed to climb into administrative positions, or to lead an institution, a scientific center or a business. However, very little is said about the sacrifice involved for them in managing in these positions with their busy domestic schedules and material shortages. You only have to look at the faces of those over forty to note the tense frown common in so many Cuban woman. It is the mark left by a daily life where a good part of the time must be dedicated to burdensome and repetitive tasks. One of these is the laundry, which many of our countrywomen do, at least a couple of times a week, by hand and in very tough conditions. Some do not even have running water in their homes.

In a country where a washing machine costs an entire year’s salary, we can’t talk about women’s emancipation. Facing the washtub and the brush, or the boiler filled with baby diapers bubbling on the firewood, thousands of women pass many hours of their lives. The situation becomes more difficult if we move away from the capital and look at the hands of the women who clean, with the strength of their fingers, the shirts, pants and even the military uniforms of their families. Their hands are knotted, stained white by the soap or detergent in which they’re immersed for hours. Hands belie statistics about emancipation and the fabricated gender quotas, with which they try to convince us otherwise.

1980s Aurika washing machine imported from the USSR to Cuba and still used by many Cuban families … in the absence of another.Photo from museodelanostalgia.blogspot.ch

Economic power derived from a vibrant marketplace, has emancipated far more women or any other segment of the population, than the illusion of political power.

[atidd]

Economic growth occurs when resources are shifted from a lower valued use to a higher valued use. If, as some believe, government spending is necessary to revive a depressed economy, one would think that the spending would have to be efficient and eventually produce sufficient wealth and not be subject to political considerations for that theory to be viable. Whatever benefits green energy may offer, and perhaps there are sufficient benefits, they are certainly not being realized now.

[atidd]

Let’s re-write the opening of your report with words that make the facts clearer: “Chinese solar-panel manufacturers European consumers of Chinese solar-panels will face import tariffs additional taxes of up to 67.9% on the price of solar panels at European Union borders under a plan scheme from the 27-nation bloc’s executive body, according to a copy of the plan scheme viewed by The Wall Street Journal (“EU Plans Tariffs Taxes of Up to 67.9% on Europeans Who Buy Chinese Solar Panels,” May 9).

“The tariffs taxes, which will come into effect by June 6, will range from 37.3% to 67.9%, according to the document, drafted by the European Commission. Some of the largest Chinese manufacturers Even the poorest Europeans, depending on which Chinese manufacturers they patronize, will face duties on the higher end of that range.

“The proposal is likely to spark one of the largest battles over unfair trade crony capitalism ever waged under the decades-old system of international trade rules. European manufacturers say Chinese firms are selling their products well below fair-market prices European consumers are buying Chinese products at prices well below the monopolistically high ones that European manufactures would like to fetch for their panels. To justify their proposal to force European consumers to pay unnecessarily high prices for solar panels, European politicians – who thrive by doling out corporate welfare – prey upon the gullibility of the typical European voter by making the baseless assertion that if Europeans aren’t forced to pay higher prices for solar panels the Chinese will dominate the world market for solar panels.”

A more realistic account of EU tariffs.

[letterstomycountry]

[thecallus-deactivated20130520]

I was going to write some long thing about how Syria shows the limitations of foreign policy based on human rights. The conceit was that there isn’t a choice of good or bad in this case from a human rights perspective, and that the decision the world has to make should reasonably be based on state interests. In other words, the amoral environment in Syria naturally begets a kind of secular Machiavellian approach to foreign policy.

I was going to make some pro-interventionist comment about how as bad as Iraq was, it never looked like Aleppo does right now. About how gee, you wanted to be free from US influence, how’s that dream working out? Or the futility of revolutions, especially in the Middle East where you trade authoritarians for fundamentalists with brief interregnums of one-election Republicanism.

But I’d guess that only some of those thoughts are right. I’m sure that none of them are useful. And at the end of the day, like most comfortable people, I just want to forget about those images.

[letterstomycountry]

Humanitarian interventions are attractive because they feel like “good” wars. They make us feel like we’re aiding helpless individuals and “fighting evil,” as it were. Many Americans also don’t want a repeat of previous historical occurrences where the U.S. refused to intervene in tragic foreign conflicts, and it seemed to result in prolonged suffering. There’s always been a lot of hand-wringing over Rwanda, for example, and whether it was right to not intervene in that conflict. Standing by and watching clearly innocent people get slaughtered when we have both the means and will to help them is never a comfortable position to be in.

But the problem with humanitarian interventions is that they are riddled with unknowables and unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences are at least as bad as the events we’re trying to stop. Our most recent intervention in Libya is an excellent example. Here are some links I posted back in January:

Gadaffi’s fall created an unstable post-regime atmosphere in which ethnic cleansing has taken place. There have been reports of Black migrant workers being rounded up an executed by Libyan rebels, in part because Gadaffi used Black mercenaries from other African countries to fight against the rebels, igniting racial tensions that fueled post-regime violence. Doctors Without Borders reported in January of 2012 that prisoners were being tortured to death in disturbing numbers, as rebels acted out their revenge fantasies on prisoners of war. In July of 2011, Human Rights Watch reported that NATO-supplied rebels in Libya were terrorizing civilians, using Western armaments and resources to steal from people who were trying to stay clear of the violence. U.S. guns were being used by Libyan rebels to terrorize non-combatants in Libya.

But more importantly, our intervention in Libya helped spark a civil war in Mali:

In the aftermath of Libya, Tuareg mercenaries who were fighting for Gadaffi packed up and returned home to Mali. When they left Libya, they took all the military weapons and resources that once belonged to the Libyan army with them. This huge influx of Libyan weapons gave them the resources they needed to wage a successful rebellion against the Malian government alongside disparate hard-line Islamist groups in Northern Mali. What was once a complicated regional dispute which goes back nearly a century is now an international incident, in part because the U.S. decided to pick a winner in Libya’s civil war.

It is also important to remember that when the U.S. commits military forces to a foreign conflict, we necessarily have moral responsibility for the results. Many of the rebel factions opposing Assad are hard-line Islamist rebels, many of them affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Intervening to depose Assad inevitably means that we have to worry about these factions gaining control of post-Assad Syria. If they do, that would arguably be just as bad a result for many of the people of Syria as living under the Assad regime itself. Or perhaps not. We don’t know. But the Syrian people should be the ones making that decision independent of U.S. intervention. We simply don’t know how the Syrian conflict will sort itself out in light of these competing interests.

Some might argue that the possible use of chemical weapons makes Syria different than Libya. I’d have to disagree with this argument on the basis that, although chemical weapons have scary implications, the wounds that Syrians have suffered from conventional warfare are at least as gruesome as what may be suffered from a chemical weapons attack. This video of a Syrian child with his jaw blown off does not strike me as more or less disgusting or reprehensible than a child who falls victim to a Sarin gas attack. Chemical weapons can kill more people more quickly, but it seems a flimsy basis for a “red line” when we’re dealing with a regime that has already shown it doesn’t need them to slaughter its own people wholesale.

Furthermore, we have no reason to expect that the more extreme factions of the Syrian opposition won’t behave with equal repugnance. The U.N. has already accused opposition fighters of various abuses. And here again, prior experience with “limited” interventions should inform our analysis of the Syrian conflict. As Doug Bandow wrote back in March:

In Kosovo NATO went to war to stop ethnic cleansing and stood by as the victorious ethnic Albanians defenestrated a quarter of a million Serbs, Roma, and others. In Syria the potential for a violent breakdown if the rebels triumph is even greater. Warned Holliday: “The remnants of the Syrian military and the powerful pro-regime militias are likely to wage a fierce insurgency against any opposition-led Sunni government in Syria if the Assad regime collapses.” At the extreme, imagine Iraq redux.

So there’s a lot of evidence which suggests that U.S. humanitarian interventions often have unintended consequences that are sometimes as bad as the events we’re trying to stop. That’s because when dealing with state violence and competing political factions, the sum of the situation is always greater than its parts.

Every sane person with a functioning human heart feels pain for the unbelievable human suffering that is happening in Syria right now. But past experience shows that the U.S. is terrible at intervening in foreign affairs without causing additional problems that are often at least as bad as the events we tried to stop. I think this alone should counsel the U.S. against intervening in Syria. As the old saying goes, we shouldn’t forget history, lest we continue to repeat it.

[atidd]

Sadly, those like Bill Keller, even while recognizing how misguided the Iraq war was, fail to learn the lessons from Iraq and readily accept without question, many similar arguments for intervention in Syria without attempting to understand the consequences of interventionism.