14 JULY 2002: WHAT POOR
FARMERS HAVE BEEN REDUCED TO.

(LEFT)   
An armed boy walks away from a fire in San Salvador Atenco. About 900 policemen
have surrounded the site of the standoff.

(Agence France-Presse)
(RIGHT)  Residents of San Salvador Atenco capture and disarm a policeman,
center. Farmers in the Mexican town are holding hostages to protest the
expropriation of their land for an airport. (Associated Press)

FROM THE
L.A. TIMES:

Mexican Farmers Take 3
More Hostages

Standoff: Now holding 15
captives, they demand formal talks in land dispute.

By RICHARD BOUDREAUX, Times
Staff Writer

MEXICO CITY — Farmers armed
with machetes and homemade firebombs took three more hostages Saturday
and demanded formal negotiations to end their violent standoff with the
government over plans to build an airport on their land 18 miles northeast
of Mexico City.

The showdown was in its third
day with no sign of a breakthrough. Hundreds of protesters are now holding
15 captives in the tense, barricaded town of San Salvador Atenco, which
is surrounded by about 900 riot policemen. Police have jailed two protest
leaders and 10 followers.

Federal authorities last
October ordered 13,300 acres in the rural municipality expropriated for
the $2.3-billion airport, setting off months of sporadic protests that
exploded in violence late Thursday. The farmers seized government offices
in the town, abducted local officials, hijacked and burned vehicles, and
attacked policemen with machetes. About 30 people were injured.

Protest organizers and officials
of the state of Mexico have been on the phone at least five times since
then, trying to work out an exchange of captives.

Those talks hit a snag Friday,
despite jailed protest leader Ignacio del Valle’s telephone appeal to followers
to accept the state’s offer. Under that proposal, Del Valle and Adan Espinoza,
who face charges of inciting violence and stabbing a policeman, would stay
in jail but the 10 other protesters and all the hostages would go free.

A rowdy assembly of farmers
in the town’s auditorium shouted down the proposal. Participants said Del
Valle must have endorsed it under duress. “They’re torturing him!” one
farmer shouted.

At a news conference late
Friday, other protesters again insisted on the release of all 12 prisoners.
They demanded that the federal government, not the state, take charge of
the conflict and agree to formal negotiations through a mediator. They
proposed three human rights champions to play that role.

President Vicente Fox’s administration
has tried to stay out of the conflict, saying the airport construction
would continue as planned. However, Interior Minister Santiago Creel said
federal officials were ready to negotiate with any group disposed to a
peaceful settlement–but would “act with a firm hand to avoid an increase
of violence.”

About 34,000 people live
in villages and farmland destined for the new six-runway facility that
would replace Mexico City’s Benito Juarez International Airport. Many object
that the federal government’s offer to buy their land for 70 cents per
square meter is too low, while others refuse to leave at any price.

The dispute has put Fox’s
government at odds with its erstwhile leftist ally, the Democratic Revolution
Party. Rosario Robles, the party’s leader, called Saturday for a “human
fence” around San Salvador Atenco, saying its residents must be protected.

The protesters took three
more hostages Saturday, identifying them as undercover state police officers
posing as journalists.

For the second day in a row,
leaders of the uprising brought hostages before TV cameras to show that
they had not been harmed. They include several policemen and state officials.
Some took the opportunity to talk to reporters.

“I call on my superiors,
on state officials and on President Fox not to abandon us,” said Jose Andres
Mediola, a deputy state prosecutor and the most prominent hostage. “I want
to go home. I want to feel like authorities and the government are doing
all they can to get me there.”

13 JULY 2002: “IN ECUADOR’S
BANANA FIELDS, CHILD LABOR IS KEY TO PROFITS.”

A group of 10- and 11-year-old
boys outside an

Ecuadorean banana plantation
where they work.

Child labor has endured
in Latin America

despite efforts to abolish
it.

FROM THE
NEW YORK TIMES:

July 13, 2002

In Ecuador’s Banana Fields,
Child Labor Is Key to Profits

By JUAN FORERO

PUERTO INCA, Ecuador ˜ At
Los Álamos plantation, it would appear that no expense was spared
to produce the Bonita brand Cavendish bananas sold in the United States.

The modern 3,000-acre hacienda
in this steamy corner of Ecuador, one of the most efficient in Latin America,
employs some 1,300 workers to tend banana plants fed by a state-of-the-art
irrigation system.

The owner is Álvaro
Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man and a worldly bon vivant. He has become the
leading candidate for president with the help of a slick marketing campaign
that has cast him as a populist friend of the poor. “I love the workers
at Los Álamos,” Mr. Noboa told local reporters in May, when he announced
his candidacy.

But in interviews, a dozen
children and many adults spoke of child laborers at Los Álamos,
among them a spindly-armed 10-year-old, Esteban Menéndez. “I come
here after school and I work here all day,” Esteban said. “I have to work
to help my father, to help him make money.”

The presence of children
on the plantation of a man who may win Ecuador’s presidential election
in October is one of the more glaring examples of how enduring the use
of child labor remains in Latin America, where some 42
million children from ages 5 to 14 have been estimated to be working
in recent years.

The problem has been made
more durable still by the competition that comes with a consolidated global
market. Pressures on businesses to be efficient and profitable are often
passed on to the world’s most vulnerable population, its poorest children.

Growers and exporters here,
who supply 25 percent of the bananas eaten in the United States, say the
product earns them about 30 percent less today than a decade ago, often
prompting them to turn a blind eye to labor codes. Child labor is common
on plantations, large and small.

Meanwhile, grim economic
realities leave families more than ready to send their boys, and sometimes
girls, out to work, even if it means pulling them out of school and placing
them in fields or factories where they are exposed to hazardous conditions
for little or no pay.

For two years, Esteban and
his family say, the boy has bounded up 15-foot banana plants, tying insecticide-laced
cords between them to stabilize trunks that might otherwise collapse under
the weight of the produce that is behind Mr. Noboa’s fortune of over $1
billion.

He works for nothing to help
his father, who tends 98 acres, avoid having his pay docked.

“That is the life of my sons,
working in the bananas at such a young age,” said Esteban’s mother, Benita
Menéndez, 36, who has had three sons working at Mr. Noboa’s plantation,
only one of them an adult. “I did not want them to work when they were
little, but this is the reality.”

Ecuador’s problem is less
severe than that of other countries in the region. Even so, the International
Labor Organization estimated that 69,000 children ages 10 to 14, and an
additional 325,000 young people ages 15 to 19, were working here in 1999.

Only a significant increase
in wages, at best a distant prospect in a country where the average worker
earns $5.74 a day, will keep families from sending their children out into
the fields, labor advocates here and in the United States say.

But while rights activists
regard such labor as unacceptable, many parents like Mr. and Mrs. Menéndez
see it as a necessity.

When several plantations,
fearing unwanted attention, dismissed their child workers after a damning
114-page report in April by Human Rights Watch, the action was taken as
a disaster by families across the lush banana belt of southern Ecuador
˜ the world’s largest banana exporter and an increasingly important source
for American corporations like Dole and Del Monte, according to the report.

“They fired all the children,
but the work they did helped us,” complained María Narváez,
31, whose two sons, Néstor and Luis Boa, 12 and 13, were dismissed
from a big hacienda where they earned $3 a day. “The situation is such
that we all have to pitch in.”

At Los Álamos, which
supplies the world’s fourth-largest banana company, labor conditions have
become increasingly contentious. Employees’ efforts to organize for better
wages and working conditions led to a violent standoff this year ˜ a dispute
that simmers today in the form of an intermittent strike by some families,
including Esteban’s own.

The workers unionized in
March. The company responded by dismissing more than 120 of them.

When the workers occupied
part of the hacienda, guards armed with shotguns, some wearing hoods, arrived
at 2 a.m. on May 16, according to workers, and fired on some who had refused
to move from the entrance gate, wounding two.

The guards, workers said,
then entered the grounds and burst into barracks where other workers were
sleeping and forced them out.

The next afternoon, workers
again gathered at the gate, where they parked a bus across the road to
block delivery trucks. The guards confronted them again, this time wounding
seven more ˜ including Esteban’s father, Bernabé Menéndez
˜ and a policeman.

“It was an attack on innocent
people,” said Jan Nimmo, a Scottish labor advocate who was with the workers
that day and videotaped the afternoon confrontation at the gate.

Mr. Noboa’s lawyer, Rafael
Pino, attributed the violence to the workers, saying the guards had been
sent in to protect property that was being vandalized. “At no moment were
there shots from our side,” he said.

But the violence prompted
the United States Embassy to ask the government to ensure the safety of
the striking workers. An American delegation that included two members
of Congressional staffs visited Los Álamos workers in June.

“This is sort of the underbelly
of globalization,” said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat
who sent an aide to Ecuador.

“We ask for labor protections
and we ask for environmental protections,” Mr. Miller said, “and we’re
told we can’t have them, and when the citizens of that country try to get
those protections, they’re met with force from the company to keep that
from happening.”

After the confrontation at
Los Álamos, a Chicago-based labor rights group, the U.S./Labor Education
in the Americas Project, began pressing Costco, a distributor of Bonita
bananas, to lean on Mr. Noboa to improve labor conditions.

Under pressure, his banana
company has promised to improve medical services, provide masks, gloves
and other equipment and settle complaints about unpaid overtime wages.
But it has refused to recognize the workers’ unions, Labor Ministry officials
said.

Mr. Noboa, who divides much
of his time between Guayaquil and New York, declined to be interviewed,
and campaign aides did not return phone calls and e-mail messages seeking
comment. But his lawyer, Mr. Pino, said children under 14, who are tightly
restricted from working under Ecuador’s labor laws, did not work at Los
Álamos. “Impossible,” he said in an interview. “To violate the law
cannot be done, and it is not the company policy either.”

Though no one knows exactly
how many children work on the large plantations across Ecuador, Sergio
Seminario, an analyst and former president of the Association of Banana
Exporters, estimated 6,000, with thousands more working on small family
farms.

The Labor Ministry has long
been aware of the problem in the industry, which accounts for 20 percent
of Ecuador’s exports. But Alberto Montalvo, the highest-ranking ministry
official in this region, said it was difficult to root out. “We all believe
in human rights and labor rights,” he said. “It is all very beautiful,
but we also have to recognize that all the members of families have to
work to pay for basic needs.”

The existence of child labor
on plantations is a product of simple arithmetic. Workers receive so little
in part because the wholesalers and retailers abroad reap most of the profits,
particularly with the recent consolidation of huge retail outlets like
Wal-Mart, Costco and Carrefour.

Each 43-pound box of bananas
purchased here by exporters for $2 or $3 goes for $25 in the United States
or Europe. The Ecuadorean grower makes 12 cents on the dollar, according
to the National Association of Banana Growers. “These big chains say, `We
will buy your bananas off the boat, but at our price,’ ” Mr. Seminario
said. “So the exporter has learned that to sell to those chains he must
sell at their price.”

If the growers are squeezed,
the banana workers feel the pain. Their work force is almost entirely nonunion,
and workers are often deliberately shifted from one payroll to another
by growers who set up multiple companies on paper to avoid paying benefits
and higher wages.

The workers and their children
here said difficult conditions had long been the norm at Los Álamos.
The families who live here in Puerto Inca cram themselves into crude cinder-block
houses with tin roofs. Indoor plumbing is rare.

The main earners among several
families said they received $6 to $7 a day ˜ within Ecuador’s minimum wage
of $128 a month ˜ but were often expected to work six or seven days a week,
failing to earn the overtime pay set by law.

The monthly minimum they
earn falls far short of the $220 the government says a poor family of four
needs to meet basic needs, so children go to work.

“With my husband’s salary,
we did not have enough for school, not enough for food,” said Patricia
Céspedes, explaining why she had pulled her nephew out of school
at age 11 and sent him to work at Mr. Noboa’s hacienda. The boy, Máximo
Gómez, whom Ms. Céspedes has raised since his mother’s death,
is now 14 and a veteran field hand.

Esteban goes to school in
addition to working. But many families say they earn so little that they
must choose which of their children to educate and which to send into the
factories and fields. Such economic necessity keeps 55 percent of Ecuadorean
children from attending secondary school, the World Bank says.

Mr. Noboa remains a frequent
visitor to New York, where, according to his spokesman, Pablo Martínez,
he mingles with the Rockefellers and other luminaries. When his son was
christened at St. Patrick’s Cathedral last year, an event shown on Ecuadorean
television, Robert Kennedy Jr. served as the godfather.

But Mr. Noboa’s great hope
is to reach the presidency, which he failed to win in 1998. Mr. Noboa has
portrayed himself as an outsider whose policies will improve life for most
Ecuadoreans.

He has made no extensive
public remarks about the dispute with the workers at Los Álamos.
In fact, the poor labor conditions and the existence of child workers have
made barely a political ripple here. An investigation of the shootings
at Los Álamos has not led to any arrests, nor has it shed light
on what happened.

Mr. Noboa’s aides say the
troubles on his hacienda are politically motivated efforts to embarrass
him in the midst of a presidential campaign.

“If he wasn’t running for
president and wasn’t the richest man in Ecuador, this wouldn’t be happening,”
Mr. Martínez said.

 

12 JULY 2002: 3 BILLION
PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET LIVE ON LESS THAN $2 A DAY.

 

FROM THE
NEW YORKER:

July 10, 2002 | home

 

MASTER OF DISASTER

by JOHN CASSIDY

A leading economist says
the protesters have a point about the I.M.F.

 

In 1998, Joseph Stiglitz,
a Columbia professor who shared last year’s Nobel

Prize in Economics, visited
a village in rural Morocco where aid workers had

been encouraging local women
to raise chickens. At the time, Stiglitz was the

chief economist of the World
Bank, the Washington-based lending agency, which

was supporting the project.
It had started out well. The Moroccan government

supplied the villagers with
as many newly hatched chicks as they needed. But at

some point, Stiglitz says,
the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank’s

sister organization, told
the Moroccan government to leave the task of

distributing chicks to private
enterprise. A for-profit firm agreed to supply

the villagers, but it refused
to guarantee the chicks’ survival˜a policy that

had calamitous consequences.
The impoverished peasants refused to risk what

little money they had on
livestock that were likely to die in large numbers in

infancy, and the nascent
industry withered. When Stiglitz arrived in Morocco,

the chicken coops were empty.
A promising attempt to alleviate poverty had

failed.

It may seem like a long way
from Moroccan chickens to the economic crisis in

Argentina, the recent financial
upheavals in Southeast Asia, the failures of

post-Soviet capitalism,
and anti-globalization protests on the streets of

Seattle and Genoa, but in
“Globalization and Its Discontents” (Norton; $24.95)

Stiglitz argues that all
these matters are related. In promoting private

enterprise wherever it can,
the I.M.F. was following the so-called Washington

Consensus view of economic
development, which sees the expansion of free-market

capitalism as the route
to prosperity. With the backing of the United States

Department of the Treasury,
the I.M.F. urges governments everywhere to

privatize, liberalize, and
retrench. In the past twenty-five years, many

developing countries have
followed this advice, dismantling their public-sector

enterprises and opening
up their economies to international trade and

investment. As a result,
the world has become more interconnected than ever,

with the level of exports,
imports, and cross-border investment all increasing

sharply.

According to classic economic
theory, this expansion of trade and commerce

should have made humanity
a lot better off. Ever since Adam Smith, economists

have generally agreed that
trade is a good thing, because it allows countries to

specialize in what they
do best. This “division of labor” (Smith’s phrase)

raises productivity, which
results in more income to spend on food, health,

education, and consumer
goods. Although some people lose their jobs as the

pattern of trade changes,
the winners gain enough to compensate the losers and

still have some left over
for themselves.

During the nineteen-seventies
and eighties, when countries like South Korea and

Singapore were exporting
their way out of poverty, the theory seemed to be

working as advertised. Globalization,
in Stiglitz’s words, “helped hundreds of

millions of people attain
higher standards of living, beyond what they, or most

economists, thought imaginable.”
During the past decade, however, something has

gone wrong. Since 1990,
the number of people living on less than two dollars a

day has risen by more
than a hundred million, to three billion. The gap between

rich and poor countries
has turned into a chasm. Even relatively prosperous

parts of the developing
world, such as Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe, have

fallen into unprecedented
slumps. “Globalization today is not working for many

of the world’s poor,”
Stiglitz declares. “It is not working for much of the

environment. It is not
working for the stability of the global economy.”

Why not? According to Stiglitz,
the rich countries have hijacked globalization,

using as weapons the I.M.F.,
the World Trade Organization, and other

international bodies that
are supposed to act in the interests of all countries.

These institutions are
“all too often closely aligned with the commercial and

financial interests of
those in the advanced industrial countries,” Stiglitz

writes, and the net effect
of the policies they promote is “to benefit the few

at the expense of the
many, the well-off at the expense of the poor.” The

governments of the rich
countries have pushed developing nations to open their

borders to computers
and banking services but continued to protect their own

farmers and textile workers
from the cheap food and clothes that poor countries

produce. They have supported
the extension of patent agreements that guarantee

high profits for Western
pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Merck while

depriving African governments
of the drugs they need to fight an AIDS epidemic.

“The
critics of globalization accuse Western countries of hypocrisy,” Stiglitz

writes,
“and the critics are right.”

If this argument brings to
mind the young protesters who have made a business of

disrupting international
summits, Stiglitz is unapologetic. Until the

anti-globalization movement
came along, “there was little hope for change and no

outlets for complaint,”
he writes. “Some of the protestors went to excesses;

some of the protestors were
arguing for higher protectionist barriers against

the developing countries,
which would have made their plight even worse. But

despite these problems,
it is the trade unionists, students,

environmentalists˜ordinary
citizens˜marching in the streets of Prague, Seattle,

Washington, and Genoa who
have put the need for reform on the agenda of the

developed world.”

As this passage suggests,
Stiglitz is part of a growing heterodoxy that seeks to

define a middle ground between
the Washington Consensus and the more radical

elements of the anti-globalization
movement. The financier and philanthropist

George Soros is part of
the dissenting movement, too, and he has written a pithy

little book, “On Globalization”
(Public Affairs; $20), setting out his views and

his recommendations for
reform. Like Stiglitz, Soros supports globalization in

principle but is dismayed
at the narrow focus among policymakers on expanding

trade and industry. “International
trade and global financial markets are very

good at generating wealth,
but they cannot take care of other social needs, such

as the preservation of peace,
alleviation of poverty, protection of the

environment, labor conditions,
or human rights,” he maintains.

Soros’s book is clearly written,
but it doesn’t carry as much weight as

Stiglitz’s. As a leading
economic theorist and someone who has served in senior

government positions, Stiglitz
has a perspective on his subject which can hardly

be ignored. Within four
years of obtaining his Ph.D., from M.I.T., in 1967, he

had published more than
fifteen academic papers, several of which are now

regarded as seminal. He
has since established himself as an expert in many areas

of economics, including
finance, development, and the public sector.

The common theme running
through Stiglitz’s academic work is that markets often

don’t work in the simplistic
way that is taught in Econ. 101. Because of

complications like asymmetries
of information between buyers and sellers,

markets sometimes fail to
work at all, and the government has to step in. (It

was Stiglitz’s work on asymmetric
information that won him a Nobel Prize.) In

1993, when Stiglitz joined
the White House Council of Economic Advisers, at the

start of the Clinton Administration,
he naïvely thought he saw the chance to

“forge an economic policy
and philosophy that viewed the relationship between

government and markets as
complementary.” Instead, he found that “decisions were

often made because of ideology
and politics. As a result many wrong-headed

actions were taken.”

Stiglitz stayed at the council
for four years, eventually becoming its chairman.

In 1997, he moved a few
hundred yards along Pennsylvania Avenue to the World

Bank. The World Bank and
the I.M.F. had been founded at the end of the Second

World War to promote expansionary
Keynesian policies around the globe, with the

bank focussing on long-term
development and the fund on short-term crisis

management, but they long
ago converted to the tenets of what Stiglitz calls

free-market fundamentalism.
The I.M.F., in particular, seems to revel in its

role as enforcer of the
Washington Consensus. Since countries approach the

I.M.F. only when they are
desperate for money, the fund has a good deal of

leverage, which it uses
to force governments to cut budget deficits, raise

taxes, and close down or
sell off state enterprises. Though these reforms are

sometimes necessary, Stiglitz
maintains that the I.M.F.’s representatives are

often oblivious of the human
suffering they cause. “Modern high-tech warfare is

designed to remove physical
contact: dropping bombs from 50,000 feet ensures

that one does not ‘feel’
what one does,” he writes. “Modern economic management

is similar: from one’s
luxury hotel, one can callously impose policies about

which one would think
twice if one knew the people whose lives one was

destroying.”

The centerpiece of “Globalization
and Its Discontents” is a critical account of

the I.M.F.’s role in the
Asian financial crisis and the Russian transition. The

Asian crisis began in July,
1997, when Thailand devalued its currency, and it

quickly spread throughout
Southeast Asia, plunging the region into the deepest

recession it had seen for
decades. Stiglitz argues that the underlying cause of

the collapse was the misguided
financial liberalization that Washington had

urged upon the Asian countries
during the previous few years.

Countries like Singapore
and South Korea hardly needed economic advice from

anybody. Through a combination
of hard work, high savings rates, and extensive

government intervention,
they had turned themselves into universally admired

models for development.
Between 1950 and 1990, South Korea raised its gross

domestic product per capita
from ninety dollars to forty-four hundred dollars.

As part of the “Asian model”
of development, governments prevented foreign

investors (and domestic
residents) from moving money in and out of their

countries freely. These
restrictions helped prevent damaging swings in exchange

rates; they also kept out
American financial firms, which were eager to expand

in Asia. Beginning in the
early nineteen-nineties, the I.M.F. and the Treasury

Department encouraged the
Asians to remove the restriction on capital movements.

Stiglitz viewed this policy
as an unnecessary sop to Wall Street, but the

Treasury Department overruled
his objections. By the middle of the

nineteen-nineties, South
Korea, Thailand, and most other Asian countries had

heeded Washington’s advice
and abolished controls on money flows. The result was

a speculative boom, with
foreign capital pouring into risky investments. For a

while, the region seemed
to be growing even faster than usual. But, once the

Thai crisis erupted, overseas
investors pulled out their money en masse, causing

financial markets to collapse.

The I.M.F. made the downturn
worse by ordering the stricken countries to raise

interest rates and balance
their budgets in order to restore the confidence of

investors. These austerity
policies had been designed for profligate countries

in Latin America, which
ran big budget deficits and printed too much money. Most

of the Asian countries,
by contrast, had balanced budgets, or even surpluses,

when the crisis struck.
The fact that monetary policy was being tightened during

a recession only spooked
investors more, and the conflagration spread to other

countries, including Malaysia
and Indonesia. Suharto’s government was forced to

cut food and fuel subsidies
in order to meet the I.M.F.’s fiscal targets, and

the subsequent riots ended
up bringing down the dictator. Mahathir bin Mohamad,

the Malaysian Prime Minister,
managed to escape Suharto’s fate only by ignoring

the I.M.F.’s advice. In
the face of bitter opposition from Washington, he

introduced laws that made
it difficult for Malaysians and foreign investors to

send their money abroad.
Far from destroying the Malaysian economy, as some

free-market economists had
predicted, these “capital controls” allowed the

country to recover more
quickly than most of its neighbors.

The Asian financial crisis
never came any closer to most Americans than the

business pages. Yet it was
so severe that some people in the region concluded

that the I.M.F. and the
American government had set out deliberately to weaken a

potential economic rival.
Stiglitz doesn’t go that far, but his judgment is

almost as damning: “The
I.M.F. was not participating in a conspiracy, but it was

reflecting the interests
and ideology of the Western financial community.”

Stiglitz’s analysis of what
happened in Russia will be more controversial. As he

details, the I.M.F. advanced
the country billions of dollars in loans to support

the “shock therapy” that
Boris Yeltsin’s government administered after the

collapse of the Soviet Union.
The therapy involved freeing prices, hawking

state-owned enterprises
to private investors at a discount, and trying to

maintain a strong currency.
Stiglitz argues that these policies were misguided,

and he marshals some depressing
statistics to support his case. Between 1940 and

1946, a period when Hitler’s
Army laid waste to Russia, total industrial

production in the Soviet
Union fell by about a quarter. Between 1990 and 1999,

Russian industrial production
fell by more than half. Though the economy has

recovered somewhat in the
past couple of years, the Russian gross domestic

product is still well below
where it was when the Berlin Wall came down. Poverty

rates are much higher, life
expectancy has fallen (almost unprecedented in a

developed country), and
much of Russia’s industry is in the hands of former

Communists and gangsters.
For Stiglitz, the Russians’ attempt to build

capitalism virtually overnight
was reminiscent of the Bolsheviks’ failed attempt

to impose Socialism after
November, 1917. Just as chaos forced Lenin to retreat

to the halfway station of
the “New Economic Policy,” the dramatic collapse of

the post-Soviet economy
forced the modern-day reformers to back off. In 1998,

the ruble collapsed (despite
another I.M.F. loan) and the Yeltsinites were

eventually replaced by a
former K.G.B. agent, Vladimir Putin.

Is Stiglitz overstating the
case against the I.M.F. here? The proponents of

shock therapy, such as the
Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, who advised the

Russian government during
the mid-nineteen-nineties, argued that moving rapidly

was the only way to prevent
a Communist resurgence, and that the policy wasn’t

enforced vigorously enough.
Instead of consistently promoting radical change,

Yeltsin vacillated, one
moment supporting reformers like Anatoly Chubais, the

next moment backing conservatives
like Viktor Chernomyrdin. Whatever the merits

of such political considerations,
though, the strictly economic case for the

shock therapy is underwhelming.
Indeed, there is now a consensus among

economists that it is a
mistake to try to create a market economy without first

developing the institutions
necessary for capitalism to function properly, such

as enforceable laws and
a working tax system. Under Putin, the Russian

government is now concentrating
on building just that sort of infrastructure,

and the results are encouraging.
Even the I.M.F. has come to acknowledge the

wisdom of this strategy;
almost everyone agrees that there is no shortcut to

building a modern economy.

Stiglitz commends the gradual
approach that China and Poland have taken toward

liberalizing their economies.
In Poland, one of the best-performing economies in

Eastern Europe in recent
years, the government rejected a key element of the

Washington Consensus: rapid
privatization. Instead of rushing to sell off state

enterprises, the Poles concentrated
on creating a modern legal system and a

social safety net. Only
then did they allow private investors to take over banks

and the like. In China,
too, the government left most of the big state-owned

firms in place, but it created
new firms alongside them by allowing villages and

towns to set up their own
enterprises, often in partnership with foreign

companies. During the nineteen-nineties,
China’s G.D.P. grew at an average

annual rate of about ten
per cent, and its poverty rate dropped dramatically.

“The contrast between what
happened in China and what has happened in countries

like Russia, which bowed
to I.M.F. ideology, could not be starker,” Stiglitz

writes. “In case after case,
it seemed that China, a newcomer to market

economies, was more sensitive
to the incentive effects of its policy decisions

than the I.M.F. was to its.”

“Globalization and Its Discontents”
does have some disappointing omissions,

especially concerning the
author’s own experiences. In the Clinton

Administration, Stiglitz
clashed frequently with Lawrence Summers, the Harvard

economist who served in
the Treasury Department and eventually became the

Secretary of the Treasury.
Summers was far more sympathetic to the Washington

Consensus than Stiglitz
was, and he worked closely with the I.M.F. According to

some people in Washington,
Summers forced Stiglitz out of the World Bank by

demanding his departure
as the price of supporting the reappointment of James

Wolfensohn as the institution’s
president. Yet, apart from a few derogatory

references to Summers’s
role in specific policy debates, Stiglitz makes no

mention of their rivalry,
or of the circumstances surrounding his resignation

from the World Bank.

All of this raises the inevitable
question of how much of the book is

score-settling. It will
not escape I.M.F. officials that Stiglitz is overly

reluctant to criticize the
governments of developing countries for making bad

policies, which have done
at least as much as the I.M.F. to keep poor people

poor. And he surely understates
the difficulties facing the I.M.F. when it goes

into a country where the
stock market and the currency are both plummeting.

What’s more, I.M.F.-led
bailouts can sometimes work, as they did in Mexico.

Still, there is no disputing
Stiglitz and Soros’s central point that global

capitalism has outgrown
its institutional framework. Both authors suggest

reforms that might go some
way toward remedying this situation. First and

foremost, they advocate
restructuring the international institutions, so that

they are more democratic
and effective. The I.M.F.’s voting structure dates back

decades and makes no
sense˜the Netherlands has about as many votes as China has.

Stiglitz also recommends
improving banking supervision, changing the

international bankruptcy
laws, reducing the number of I.M.F. bailouts, and

increasing the amount of
aid and debt relief that developing countries receive,

especially those in Africa.
Soros, for his part, thinks international aid should

be increased and that the
World Trade Organization ought to take more account of

issues like workers’ rights,
health and safety, and the environment.

One can debate the particulars
of reform but not the need for it. “Without

reform, the backlash that
has already started will mount and discontent with

globalization will grow,”
Stiglitz writes. “This will be a tragedy for all of

us, and especially for the
billions who might otherwise have benefited.”

11 JULY 2002: KARIN AND
ALIASS ARRIVE IN OAK RIDGE…

Karin Bolender and her donkey
Aliass,

a member of the American
Council of Spotted Asses Inc.,

visited the American Museum
of Science and Energy

Tuesday on their two-day
stop in Oak Ridge.

Quest
brings artist/writer to OR

by Beverly Majors

Oak Ridger staff

Karin Bolender and her friend,
Aliass, stopped in Oak Ridge Tuesday and could be seen Wednesday traveling
toward the Museum of Appalachia in their quest for imagination.

Bolender and Aliass, a donkey,
started their quest in Oxford, Miss., the home of William Faulkner, and
will end their journey in about three weeks in Roanoke, Va.

Bolender said she started
her “literary pilgrimage” after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center. She is a writer who lived about an hour outside of New York
but worked inside the city. On Sept. 9, she had decided to move to Portland,
Ore., and was in the Badlands of Nebraska when she heard about the attack.

She calls her pilgrimage
“an urgent manifestation of the imagination.” and said she has learned
a lot about people and, along with Aliass, has helped open up some people’s
imaginations. She said she has had to turn down invitations from people
wanting to give her a place to sleep.

In Oak Ridge she has visited
the American Museum of Science and Energy and the International Friendship
Bell. She said she decided to stop here because of her interests in the
“historical aspects of Oak Ridge.”

She said she learned of Oak
Ridge from her grandfather, who flew over the “Secret City that was not
on any maps” during the early World War II years while he was in the military.

Bolender said her next stop
will be Knoxville, home to two of her favorite authors, James Agee and
Cormack McCarthy.

“I plan to cross the border
at Bristol,” she said. “I have only three more weeks because Aliass is
due to foal.”

10 JULY 2002: HOW CORPORATE
AMERICA SUPPORTS SPAM.

From the New
York Times:

“Brightmail says the volume
of spam it encounters has almost tripled in the last nine months. The
company adds that 12 to 15 percent of total e-mail traffic is spam; a year
ago, that figure was closer to 7 percent. Brightmail, which maintains a
network of In boxes to attract spam, now records 140,000 spam attacks a
day, each potentially involving thousands of messages, if not millions.

Statistics like these are
supported by anecdotal evidence from computer users, who report that they
are seeing more unwanted e-mail every time they log on. Hounded by spam,
some computer users have simply abandoned e-mail addresses…

Ideally, consumer advocates
want the spam equivalent of the 1991 federal Telephone Consumer Protection
Act, which prohibited prerecorded telemarketing calls and junk faxes. The
trade commission was also given power to enforce the legislation.

A broad anti-spam law has
been approved in Europe. On May 30, the European Parliament passed a ban
on unsolicited commercial messaging. Electronic marketing can be aimed
only at consumers who have given prior consent.

In contrast, more than a
dozen spam-related bills have been introduced in Congress over the last
two years, and most of them have languished. Of the handful that have made
progress, the most recent is the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited
Pornography and Marketing act (a contorted title that yields the acronym
Can Spam), which was unanimously approved by the Senate Commerce Committee
last month. The Can Spam bill would, among other things, let the F.T.C.
impose civil fines up to $10 per unlawful message, require valid “remove
me” options on all e-mail and authorize state attorneys general to bring
lawsuits.

Now it must be voted upon
by the full Senate, and two other independent spam bills are moving slowly
through the House of Representatives. But interest groups are lobbying
to tone down the strongest aspects of spam legislation.

Those lobbyists are not
spammers. They are some of the country’s largest corporations and commercial
associations: Citicorp, Charles Schwab, Procter & Gamble, the National
Retail Federation, the Securities Industry Association and the American
Insurance Association. The groups argue that many of the bills would unfairly
restrict e-mail marketing and put electronic commerce at a disadvantage.

“We would like the bill narrowed
so only pornographic, fraudulent and deceptive spam are targeted,” said
John Savercool, the vice president of federal affairs for the American
Insurance Association. “We think that is where the consumer angst is.”

But Senator Conrad Burns
of Montana, a Republican sponsor of the Can Spam bill, says that consumer
frustration goes beyond pornography and fraud. “I get enough applications
for credit cards, offers to consolidate my debt and advertising for Viagra
in my mailbox,” he said. “I don’t need it on my computer too.”

09 JULY 2002: Walter
Benjamin on the flâneur

FROM “FRAGMENTS
OF THE PASSENGWERK”:

“There was the pedestrian
who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur
who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman
of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against
the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also
his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable
to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to
have the turtles set the pace for them.” 1938

“The street becomes a dwelling
for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses
as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of
businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to
the bourgeois in his salon. The walls are the desk against which he presses
his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of cafés
are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work
is done.”1938

“The crowd was the veil from
behind which the the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flâneur.
In it, the city was now landscape, now a room. And both of these went into
the construction of the department store, which made use of flânerie
itself in order to sell goods. The department store was the flâneur’s
final coup. As flâneurs, the intelligensia came into the market place.
As they thought, to observe it – but in reality it was already to find
a buyer. In this intermediary stage…they took the form of the bohème;.
To the uncertainty of their economic position corresponded the uncertainty
of their political function.” 1935

“These writings were socially
dubious, too. The long series of eccentric or simple, attractive or severe
figures which the physiology presented to the public in character sketches
had one thing in common: they were harmless and of perfect bonhomie. Such
a view of one’s fellow man was so remote from experience that there were
bound to be uncommonly weighty motives for it. The reason was an uneasiness
of a special sort. People had to adapt themselves to a new and rather strange
situation, one that is peculiar to big cities. Simmel has felicitously
formulated what was involved here. ‘Someone who sees without hearing is
much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is
something characteristic of the sociology of the big city. Interpersonal
relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance
of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason
for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development
of buses, railroads and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never
been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or
even hours without speaking to one another’.”1938

“On his peregrinations the
man of the crowd lands at a late hour in a department store where there
are still many customers. He moves about like someone who knows his way
around the place…If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur,
which is how the flâneur sees the street, the department store is
the form of the intérieur’s decay. The bazaar is the last hangout
of the flâneur. if in the beginning the street had become an intérieur
for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed
through the labyrinth of merchandise as he had once roamed through the
labyrinth of the city…The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd.
in this he shares the situation of the commodity.”1938

THANKS TO JOHN C.!

THE INTERNET DEBACLE – AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW

Originally written for Performing
Songwriter Magazine, May 2002

* Shortly after this article
was turned in, Michael Greene resigned as president of NARAS.

 “The Internet, and downloading, are here to stay… Anyone who thinks otherwise should prepare themselves to end up on the slagheap of history.” (Janis Ian during a live European
radio interview, 9-1-98)   *Please see author’s note at end!

When I research an article,
I normally send 30 or so emails to friends and acquaintances asking for
opinions and anecdotes. I usually receive 10-20 in reply. But not so on
this subject!

I sent 36 emails requesting
opinions and facts on free music downloading from the Net. I stated that
I planned to adopt the viewpoint of devil’s advocate: free Internet downloads
are good for the music industry and its artists.

I’ve received, to date, over
300 replies, every single one from someone legitimately “in the music business.”

What’s more interesting than
the emails are the phone calls. I don’t know anyone at NARAS (home of the
Grammy Awards), and I know Hilary Rosen (head of rhe Recording Industry
Association of America, or RIAA) only vaguely. Yet within 24 hours of sending
my original email, I’d received two messages from Rosen and four from NARAS
requesting that I call to “discuss the article.”

Huh. Didn’t know I was that
widely read.

Ms. Rosen, to be fair, stressed
that she was only interested in presenting RIAA’s side of the issue, and
was kind enough to send me a fair amount of statistics and documentation,
including a number of focus group studies RIAA had run on the matter.

However, the problem with
focus groups is the same problem anthropologists have when studying peoples
in the field – the moment the anthropologist’s presence is known, everything
changes. Hundreds of scientific studies have shown that any experimental
group wants to please the examiner. For focus groups, this is particularly
true. Coffee and donuts are the least of the pay-offs.

The NARAS people were a bit
more pushy. They told me downloads were “destroying sales”, “ruining the
music industry”, and “costing you money”.

Costing me money? I don’t
pretend to be an expert on intellectual property law, but I do know one
thing. If a music industry executive claims I should agree with their agenda
because it will make me more money, I put my hand on my wallet?and check
it after they leave, just to make sure nothing’s missing.

Am I suspicious of all this
hysteria? You bet. Do I think the issue has been badly handled? Absolutely.
Am I concerned about losing friends, opportunities, my 10th Grammy nomination
by publishing this article? Yeah. I am. But sometimes things are just wrong,
and when they’re that wrong, they have to be addressed.

The premise of all this ballyhoo
is that the industry (and its artists) are being harmed by free downloading.

Nonsense. Let’s take it from
my personal experience. My site (www.janisian.com ) gets an average of
75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975….

[CONTINUED AT JANIS
IAN’S WEBSITE.]

THANKS TO J. LEWIS!

                  
June 30, 2002

                  
Commentary / Edward Monks: The end of                  
fairness: Right-wing commentators have a                  
virtual monopoly when it comes to talk                  
radio programming                  
By EDWARD MONKS
                  
For The Register-Guard

                  ONCE UPON A TIME, in a country that now seems
                 
far away, radio and television broadcasters had an

                  
obligation to operate in the public interest. That

                  
generally accepted principle was reflected in a rule

                  
known as the Fairness Doctrine.

                  
The rule, formally adopted by the Federal Communications

                  
Commission in 1949, required all broadcasters to devote a

                  
reasonable amount of time to the discussion of controversial

                  
matters of public interest. It further required broadcasters to air

                  
contrasting points of view regarding those matters. The Fairness

                  
Doctrine arose from the idea embedded in the First Amendment that

                  
the wide dissemination of information from diverse and even

                  
antagonistic sources is essential to the public welfare and to a

                  
healthy democracy.

                  
The FCC is mandated by federal law to grant broadcasting licenses

                  
in such a way that the airwaves are used in the “public

                  
convenience, interest or necessity.” The U.S. Supreme Court in

                  
1969 unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Fairness

                  
Doctrine, expressing the view that the airwaves were a “public

                  
trust” and that “fairness” required that the public trust accurately

                  
reflect opposing views.

                  
However, by 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was gone – repealed by

                  
the FCC, to which President Reagan had appointed the majority of

                  
commissioners.

                  
That same year, Congress codified the doctrine in a bill that

                  
required the FCC to enforce it. President Reagan vetoed that bill,

                  
saying the Fairness Doctrine was “inconsistent with the tradition of

                  
independent journalism.” Thus, the Fairness Doctrine came to an

                  
end both as a concept and a rule.

                  
Talk radio shows how profoundly the FCC’s repeal of the Fairness

                  
Doctrine has affected political discourse. In recent years almost all

                  
nationally syndicated political talk radio hosts on commercial

                  
stations have openly identified themselves as conservative,

                  
Republican, or both: Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, Michael

                  
Reagen, Bob Grant, Ken Hamblin, Pat Buchanan, Oliver North,

                  
Robert Dornan, Gordon Liddy, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al.

                  
The spectrum of opinion on national political commercial talk radio

                  
shows ranges from extreme right wing to very extreme right wing –

                  
there is virtually nothing else.

                  
On local stations, an occasional nonsyndicated moderate or liberal

                  
may sneak through the cracks, but there are relatively few such

                  
exceptions. This domination of the airwaves by a single political

                  
perspective clearly would not have been permissible under the

                  
Fairness Doctrine.

                  
Eugene is fairly representative. There are two local commercial

                  
political talk and news radio stations: KUGN, owned by Cumulus

                  
Broadcasting, the country’s second largest radio broadcasting

                  
company, and KPNW, owned by Clear Channel Communications,

                  
the largest such company.

                  
KUGN’s line-up has three highly partisan conservative Republicans –

                  
Lars Larson (who is regionally syndicated), Michael Savage and

                  
Michael Medved (both of whom are nationally syndicated), covering

                  
a nine-hour block each weekday from 1 p.m. until 10 p.m. Each host

                  
is unambiguous in his commitment to advancing the interests and

                  
policies of the Republican party, and unrelenting in his highly

                  
personalized denunciation of Democrats and virtually all Democratic

                  
Party policy initiatives. That’s 45 hours a week.

                  
For two hours each weekday morning, KUGN has just added

                  
nationally syndicated host Bill O’Reilly. Although he occasionally

                  
criticizes a Republican for something other than being insufficiently

                  
conservative, O’Reilly is clear in his basic conservative viewpoint.

                  
His columns are listed on the Townhall.com web site, created by

                  
the strongly conservative Heritage Foundation. That’s 55 hours of

                  
political talk on KUGN each week by conservatives and Republicans.

                  
No KUGN air time is programmed for a Democratic or liberal political

                  
talk show host.

                  
KPNW carries popular conservative Rush Limbaugh for three hours

                  
each weekday, and Michael Reagan, the conservative son of the

                  
former president, for two hours, for a total of 25 hours per week.

                  
Thus, between the two stations, there are 80 hours per week,

                  
more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and

                  
conservative hosts of political talk radio, with not so much as a

                  
second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.

                  
For anyone old enough to remember 15 years earlier when the

                  
Fairness Doctrine applied, it is a breathtakingly remarkable change

                  
– made even more remarkable by the fact that the hosts whose

                  
views are given this virtual monopoly of political expression spend

                  
a great deal of time talking about “the liberal media.”

                  
Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level

                  
of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian

                  
society, where government commissars or party propaganda

                  
ministers enforce the acceptable view with threats of violence.

                  
There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it. Yet the

                  
almost complete right wing Republican domination of political talk

                  
radio in this country has been accomplished without guns or

                  
gulags. Let’s see how it happened.

                  
As late as 1974, the FCC was still reporting that “we regard strict

                  
adherence to the Fairness Doctrine as the single most important

                  
requirement of operation in the public interest – the sine qua non

                  
for grant for renewal of license.” That view had been ratified by the

                  
U.S. Supreme Court, which wrote In glowing terms in 1969 of the

                  
people’s right to a free exchange of opposing views on the public

                  
airwaves:

                  
“But the people as a whole retain their interest in free speech by

                  
radio and their collective right to have the medium function

                  
consistently with the ends and purposes of the First Amendment. It

                  
is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the

                  
broadcasters, which is paramount,” the court said. “Congress need

                  
not stand idly by and permit those with licenses to ignore the

                  
problems which beset the people or to exclude from the airwaves

                  
anything but their own views of fundamental questions.”

                  
Through 1980, the FCC, the majority in Congress and the U. S.

                  
Supreme Court all supported the Fairness Doctrine. It was the

                  
efforts of an interesting collection of conservative Republicans (with

                  
some assistance from liberals such Sen. William Proxmire, a

                  
Wisconsin Democrat, and well-respected journalists such as Fred

                  
Friendly) that came together to quickly kill it.

                  
The position of the FCC dramatically changed when President

                  
Reagan appointed Mark Fowler as chairman in 1981. Fowler was a

                  
lawyer who had worked on Reagan’s campaign, and who

                  
specialized in representing broadcasters. Before his nomination,

                  
which was well received by the broadcast industry, Fowler had

                  
been a critic of the Fairness Doctrine. As FCC chairman, Fowler

                  
made clear his opinion that “the perception of broadcasters as

                  
community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters

                 

as marketplace participants.” He quickly put in motion of series of

                  
events leading to two court cases that eased the way for repeal of

                  
the Fairness Doctrine six years later.

                  
At almost the same time, Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., who became

                  

chairman of the Commerce Committee when Republicans took

                  
control of the Senate in 1981, began holding hearings designed to

                  
produce “evidence” that the Fairness Doctrine did not function as

                  
intended.

                  
Packwood also established the Freedom of Expression Foundation,

                  
described by its president, Craig Smith, long associated with

                  
Republican causes, as a “foundation which would coordinate the

                  
repeal effort using non-public funds, and which could provide

                  
lobbyists, editorialists and other opinion leaders with needed

                  
arguments and evidence.”

                  
Major contributors to the foundation included the major broadcast

                  
networks, as well as Philip Morris, Anheuser-Busch, AT&T and

                  
TimesMirror.

                  
Packwood and the foundation argued that the Fairness Doctrine

                  
chilled or limited speech because broadcasters became reluctant to

                  
carry opinion-oriented broadcasts out of fear that many

                  
organizations or individuals would demand the opportunity to

                  
respond. The argument, which appealed to some liberals such as

                  
Proxmire, thus held that the doctrine, in practice, decreased the

                  
diversity of opinion expressed on public airwaves.

                  
In 1985, the FCC formally adopted the views advanced by

                  
Packwood and the foundation, issuing what was termed a

                  
“Fairness Report,” which contained a “finding” that the Fairness

                  
Doctrine in actuality “inhibited” broadcasters and that it “disserves

                  
the interest of the public in obtaining access to diverse viewpoints.”

                  
Congress, and much of the rest of the country, remained

                  
unconvinced.

                  
Shortly thereafter, in a 2-1 decision in 1986, the U.S. Court of

                  
Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a new FCC rule refusing

                  
to apply the Fairness Doctrine to teletext (the language appearing

                  
at the bottom of a television screen). The two-judge majority

                  
decided that Congress had not made the Fairness Doctrine a

                  
binding statutory obligation despite statutory language supporting

                  
that inference. The two judges were well-known conservatives

                  
Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, each thereafter nominated to the

                  
U.S. Supreme Court by President Reagan. Their ruling became the

                  
beginning of the end for the Fairness Doctrine.

                  
The next year, 1987, in the case Meredith Corp. vs. FCC, the FCC

                  
set itself up to lose in such a way as to make repeal of the Fairness

                  
Doctrine as easy as possible. The opinion of the District of Columbia

                  
Court of Appeals took note of the commission’s intention to

                  
undercut the Fairness Doctrine:

                  
“Here, however, the Commission itself has already largely

                  
undermined the legitimacy of its own rule. The FCC has issued a

                  
formal report that eviscerates the rationale for its regulations. The

                  
agency has deliberately cast grave legal doubt on the fairness

                  
doctrine. …”

                  
The court was essentially compelled to send the case back to the

                  
FCC for further proceedings, and the commission used that

                  
opportunity to repeal the Fairness Doctrine. Although there have

                  
been several congressional attempts to revive the doctrine,

                  
Reagan’s veto and the stated opposition of his successor, George

                  
Bush, were successful in preventing that.

                  
It is difficult to underestimate the consequences of repeal of the

                  
Fairness Doctrine on the American political system. In 1994, when

                  
Republicans gained majorities in both chambers of Congress, Newt

                 
Gingrich, soon to become speaker of the House, described the

                  
voting as “the first talk radio election.”

                  
Although it is not susceptible to direct proof, it seems clear to me

                  
that if in communities throughout the United States Al Gore had

                  
been the beneficiary of thousands of hours of supportive talk show

                  
commentary and George W. Bush the victim of thousands of hours

                  
of relentless personal and policy attack, the vote would have been

                  
such that not even the U.S. Supreme Court could have made Bush

                  
president.

                  
Broadcasters’ choice to present conservative views is not purely

                  
about attracting the largest number of listeners. Broadcasters and

                  
their national advertisers tend to be wealthy corporations and

                  
entities, operated and owned by wealthy individuals. Virtually all

                  
national talk show hosts advocate a reduction or elimination of

                  
taxes affecting the wealthy. They vigorously argue for a reduction

                  
in income taxes, abolition of the estate tax and reduction or

                  
elimination of the capital gains tax – positions directly consistent

                  
with the financial interests of broadcasters and advertisers.

                  
Imagine a popular liberal host who argued for a more steeply

                  
graduated income tax, an increase in the tax rate for the largest

                  
estates and an increase in the capital gains tax rate.

                  
Broadcasters and advertisers have no interest in such a host, no

                  
matter how large the audience, because of the host’s ability to

                  
influence the political climate in a way that broadcasters and

                  
advertisers ultimately find to be economically unfavorable.

                  
Hence we wind up with a distortion of a true market system in

                  
which only conservatives compete for audience share. Whether the

                  
theory is that listeners listen to hear views they agree with, or

                  
views they disagree with, in a purely market driven arena,

                  
broadcasters would currently be scrambling to find liberal or

                  
progressive talk show hosts. They are not.

                  
The beneficiaries of the talk show monopoly are not content.

                  
Immediately after he became House speaker, Newt Gingrich led the

                  
Republican battle to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation

                  
for Public Broadcasting, which, free of some commercial

                  
considerations, had broadcast a wider spectrum of opinion.

                  
Although not fully successful, that campaign led to a decrease in

                  
federal funding for the CPB, a greater reliance on corporate

                  
“sponsors” and a drift toward programming acceptable to

                  
conservatives.

                  
No reasonable person can claim that the repeal of the Fairness

                 
Doctrine has led to a wider diversity of views – to a “warming” of

                  
speech, as the FCC, the Freedom of Expression Foundation and

                  
others had predicted.

                  
Perhaps it should not be a surprise that the acts of President

                  
Reagan, Reagan’s FCC appointments, Sen. Packwood, Justice Scalia

                  
and failed Supreme Court nominee Bork and the first President

                  
Bush should combine to ultimately produce, in my town, a 4,000

                  
hour to zero yearly advantage for Republican propaganda over the

                  
Democratic opposition.Nor should we overlook the Orwellian irony

                  
that the efforts of an organization calling itself the Freedom of

                  
Expression Foundation helped result in so limited a range of public

                  
expression of views.

                  
Perhaps the current president, aware that the repeal of the

                  
Fairness Doctrine had the opposite effect of what was publicly

                  
predicted by his predecessors and aware that a monopoly on public

                  
expression is inconsistent with a democratic tradition, will direct his

                  
administration to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. What about that

                  
cold day in hell?

                  
Edward Monks is a Eugene attorney.

 

COURTESY: J. LEWIS!

From the New York Times:

A Mad Emperor Meets His Match

By RICHARD EDER

THE BOOK OF SPLENDOR

By Frances Sherwood

348 pages. Norton. $25.95.

Stout, vain, self-willed
and under a lowering psychotic melancholia, the Emperor

Rudolph II dismisses his
trusted manservant Vaclav from the imperial bedroom. He

swaddles himself in cream
silk and ermine, lifts a razor and inflicts a delicate

cut on his wrist.

“Vaclav,” he screams immediately.
“Do you not see, you knave, I am bleeding to

death?” Successively then,
in the rhythm of the clockwork figures that circle

atop one of Prague’s Old
Town towers, Rudolph’s doctor, courtiers and guards

troop in, followed by the
clergy, heads of guilds, leading citizens and Maisel,

the emperor’s wealthy court
Jew.

Why the flirtatious dabble
at suicide? It is an act of petulance. As one Prague

resident remarks later:
“The emperor is so afraid of dying, he tried to get it

over by killing himself.”
Capricious as a kitten, frightening as a panther,

Rudolph instantly switches
from petulance to autocratic mania.

Two eminent English alchemists
˜ one, Queen Elizabeth’s legendary John Dee ˜

will be sent for to prepare,
on pain of death, an eternal-life elixir. As

backup, Rudolph commands
Prague’s likewise legendary Rabbi Loew to devise, on

pain of the destruction
of the Jewish quarter and its inhabitants, an

immortality spell.

The clouds of imperial madness
give way, for the tiniest of moments, to a patch

of mad lucidity. How will
he tell, the emperor wonders, whether the remedies

have worked? “How will I
know that I will live forever? What if I live and then

I die? What then?”

“What then?” would make a
splendid title for Frances Sherwood’s historical novel

˜ a confining category for
such a freely expansive book ˜ set at the start of

the 17th century. Her choice,
though, “The Book of Splendor,” is not just a

title but truth in labeling.

How the author presents Rudolph,
and what she does with him, is by turns a

fiction, an essay and a
Punch-and-Judy show about the comedy, the aberrance and

the futility of power. About
its humanity, too, in a way: the tyrant as infant.

Conceive a Nativity scene
with Herod burbling in the manger.

If this were all, “Splendor”
would be a chilly gem: a portrait of the rarefied

atmosphere at power’s heights
(Hradcany Castle, in this case, set on a bluff

above the town) and of the
oxygen-starved delusions they breed. The author has

surrounded her lethal imperial
child, though, with a quirkily humane

counterpoint.

There is the astronomer Tycho
Brahe ˜ the savant likewise as child, but an

endearing one ˜ and Johannes
Kepler, his disciple and mentor a posteriori. He

instructs Brahe’s theories,
that is, by taking them further. There is Vaclav,

who turns out to be something
more and better than a servant, and Kirakos, the

court doctor, who is also
something more ˜ an Ottoman spy ˜ and then more and

better than that. Ms. Sherwood’s
characters don’t just possess qualities; they

propagate them.

The main counterpoint to
the castle, though ˜ the heart and a dose of demonic

cackle to “Splendor’s” brain
˜ lies in the town below, specifically in the

Judenstadt or ghetto. Here,
in alternating and converging chapters, is the story

of Rochel, the beautiful
and restless bride of Zev the shoemaker. For a while we

may wonder: another “Fiddler
on the Roof”? Forget it: heartwarming it may be but

only to provide forging
temperature for an armored spine and spark-spitting

medulla.

Rochel is an orphan; worse
than that she is illegitimate and the product of

rape; worse yet, the rapist
was not a Jew but a Cossack. Only the prophetic love

of Rabbi Loew and his wife,
Perl, win her a grudging acceptance by the community

and marriage to a fussy,
loving, but, at that point, unloved older man. She is a

free spirit confined. “I
have entered the forest of the dead,” she exclaims when

she sees Zev’s dark dwelling,
hung with tanned hides.

But the ghetto is in danger,
not just from the emperor’s threat but also from

whispers of pogrom from
the town. So Rabbi Loew ˜ a real figure to whom a legend

has attached ˜ goes down
to the river bank and fashions a golem, traditionally

meant to do household chores
and defend the community.

As prescribed, Yossel is
a giant, though a gentle, loving one (until the end)

and beautiful. He and Rochel
exchange glances. “A delicious tingle started at

her heels, spread upward,
and the tips of her fingers sizzled like a water

bubble in a frying pan.”
Then come caresses, then much more. Ms. Sherwood writes

with quiet but arousing
eroticism; no small achievement for a coupling of maid

and mud.

Yossel’s true strength is
an innocent intelligence. Accompanying the rabbi, he

stymies the emperor’s pogrom
threat by devising community life insurance. Each

Jew, he tells Rudolph, will
uniquely possess one secret word in the eternal-life

spell that is being prepared
for him.

There is a violent and exuberant
climax that enmeshes the castle with the

ghetto. There are heroic
deaths and a variety of ingeniously encouraging

individual endings. The
main ending is stunning: as Yossel tragically blossoms,

we realize, Rudolph has
been receding all the while into golemlike mud. Rochel

grows old and wise. She
writes books. Her face, by Ms. Sherwood’s description,

resembles her own jacket
photograph. Why shouldn’t an author have her personal

golem, particularly when
she uses it so well?

As noted, “Splendor” is based
on history. But Ms. Sherwood, author of

“Vindication,” a treatment
of the early English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is

the rare writer whose work
goes far beyond what we think of as historical

novels.

Instead of history’s retrospective
certainty ˜ this is how it was ˜ Ms. Sherwood

projects her readers, as
if by time machine, back into a place where everything

is still to be discovered.
We do not feel that her characters are keeping

appointments. Rather than
moving confidently backward out of the clarity of Now,

we move uncertainly forward
from a foggy Then. We are only truly in the past

when we feel lost in it.

Water Puppets of Vietnam Are Making a Comeback

By DAVID THURBER, ASSOCIATED PRESS

HANOI, Vietnam — A grinning tiger splashes through the water, grabs a duck from a helpless farmer and
races up a palm tree 20 feet away, its prey dangling from its mouth.

    The audience roars at the antics–controlled by puppeteers standing thigh-deep in water
behind a bamboo screen. Long underwater poles and ropes transmit the complex
motions to the colorful hand-carved puppets–including dancing maidens,
smoke-belching dragons and fish that pull lazy fishermen into the deep.

    Vietnam’s unique water puppets have been portraying the foibles of rural life for
nearly 1,000 years. They are among many traditional Vietnamese performing
arts that nearly faded away during decades of war and communist revolution,
but have now found new audiences. About a dozen water puppet troupes are
currently performing, mostly in villages in northern Vietnam’s Red River
Delta. Most of the puppeteers are farmers who devote long hours to practice
but perform for free.

    Water
puppet shows originally were performed in rice paddies or ponds when farm
work allowed, either after spring planting or harvesting.

    The performances
intersperse vignettes of life in a farming village with legends about Vietnam’s
creation, magical turtles and brave kings. In many, the humans are outfoxed
by nature, to the delight of generations of rural Vietnamese.

    Water
puppetry nearly disappeared during the decades of wars against France and
the United States, poverty and communist revolution.

    After
the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Communist authorities believed that traditional
culture and festivals were backward and frivolous in a time of extreme
poverty and political upheaval. That policy began shifting in the mid-1980s
as Vietnam introduced economic reforms that ended its failed experiment
in collectivized agriculture and a centralized command economy.

    The government
now officially encourages many traditional arts in an effort to forge a
national cultural identity, and this year plans to ask UNESCO to designate
water puppetry as part of the world’s cultural heritage.

    In theaters
in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, water puppet performances are packed every
night with foreign tourists. But the art form’s future is less certain
in its countryside roots, where it faces growing competition from TV, pop
music and the allure of private enterprise.