perfidy

Via Pejman and the Corner, comes this:

Who saw Paul O'Neill on Today this morning? He's backtracking from all the Suskind-CBS hype attacking the president. He says he wishes he could retract his "blind and deaf" remarks, and says he'll vote for Bush in the fall because he doesn't see anyone else as "capable." With Katie as with Lesley Stahl, you see liberal reporters trying to put words in his mouth. The more he talks, the more it shows he doesn't fit their anti-Bush mold any more than he fit Bush's.

A commenter on Pejman's site had this to say:

Timing the wait until the first accusation that the Bush administration somehow 'got to' O'Neill on my... mark.

My current estimate: tempest in a teacup.

An internal audit of Wal-Mart employment records has revealed a total of more than 100,000 labor-law violations ranging from minors working during school hours to failure of employees to take legally mandated breaks.

An internal audit and they found that many? Jesus! Let's put Wal-Mart's auditors on the trail of Nicole Brown Simpson's real killers and we'd get that mess cleared up right quick too!

All I can say is, it's about time some attention was paid to Wal-Mart's relationship with their workforce. For all their happy-family rhetoric, Wal-Mart treats their workers with as much respect as most people treat public bathrooms. Union-busting, unfair wage practices, illegal immigrants, unpaid overtime, and tacit managerial coercion are all well-documented.

Wal-Mart responds: "[A] spokesperson told the paper the audit was meaningless, since what looked like violations could simply reflect employees' failure to punch in and out for breaks and meals they took."

So their contention is that they don't watch our workers every minute of every day, and really pretty much leave them to their own devices, like any good parent would. Riiight. Because you know how mellow and easygoing managers are about the time clock. More likely, it was made "known" that anyone punching out for breaks would be pushed to the bottom of the happy-family enthusiasm-scrum and eventually relegated to straightening the bra display and cleaning the crapper. And, jeez, Wal-Mart's protestations would be a lot easier to take if everyone and their brother hadn't already read Nickel and Dimed.

I've worked in union shops and non-union shops, and all I can say is that a good union well managed is a great thing. Right now Wal-Mart is in the same position US Steel was back in the day, what with their size and their benevolent attitude toward the meatsacks that they employ. They union-busted too, and they lost eventually. What's it going to take for a service-industry labor movement to gain traction?

[wik] In response to a question by Minister Buckethead, allow me to clarify. This 100,000 labor violations was collected from a total of 128 Wal-Mart stores only.

[alsø wik] Commenter Murdoc observes that my math is bad, and it's 77.8K violations. But Murdoc takes his arithmetic wizardry one step further and reasons that if these 128 stores are any indication, this suggests that the rate of labor violation for all Wal-Marts is on the order of almost two million per week. Mmmmmm, now that's perfidy!

Daniel Gross covers ground that, I seem to recall, we've covered here before.

Old folks is gettin' older. Payroll taxes is risin'. Income taxes is goin' down.

Why, pray tell, did we give the richest 1% of this country a massive tax cut? Why, they were going to invest it, right?

But we gave them an income tax reduction. Not an investment tax reduction. If they invest the money, long term, they were already getting a different, lower tax rate.

So why did we give a tax break on income that doesn't go to investment?

Beats me.

Via geekpress we answer the timeless question, "In a fight, who would win, a medieval knight, or a samurai?"

Still no answer on whether Daisy Duke could beat a Charlie's Angel at foxy boxing, though. To the library!

"[Fo]r me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds."

--Wallace "Inconceivable" Shawn, in the New York Times.

"Very well... Security for some, and tiny American flags for others! [wild cheering]"

The Weekly Standard (!) (?) (!!) (???) (....!) (.) is running a cover story making the case for creating a federal terrorism court so that cases like Gitmo and Jose "dirrrty" Padilla can be dealt with in a clear, standard, and lawful manner. Whoda thunk the Standard would come around?

If you can stand a certain amount of horseshit (see the following excerpt... "bullying" my arse), do read it. Support for a very good idea, from an unexpected quarter.

Morally intimidated and bullied by civil libertarian ideologues, partisan opportunists, and a press almost universally hostile on these issues--yet having accepted, along with the rest of the country, the lessons of Korematsu, the Red Scare, and the due process revolution of the 1960s--administration officials seem, not surprisingly, to prefer to evade the debate or retreat behind the rhetoric of "security." The administration has failed to make its case well or to take modest actions that could strengthen its case. This in turn encourages the critics and deepens the government's reluctance to touch a set of issues on which it feels it can only lose.

The time has come for the government to break this poisonous cycle. Balancing liberty and security in a way that is plain and understandable to all is a tough job, but it must be attempted. The centerpiece of a Bush administration civil liberties offensive should be creative institutional reform. A new terrorism court is the place to start.

[wik] I had to pull out this observation too, which lends a particular urgency to the Standards' call: "The enemy combatant designation, while it fills a legitimate need in the current context, exists in a legal limbo where no court, civil or military, has clear jurisdiction, and thus opens the door to valid concern about due process." Damn straight.

Despite my lengthy absence from these august pages, I have not forgotten the challenge I laid at my own feet. My task was to examine the various problems we face (or don't, as the case may be) with the environment, and to outline a course of action to deal with them.

I was able to do some reading on the matter last month, and the problems boil down to several claims from the environmentalists:

• Pollution
• Resource Depletion
• Loss of Biodiversity/Species Extinction
• Overpopulation/Famine
• Global Warming

Here, I will deal with two of them, and the rest will follow shortly.

Resource Depletion and Overpopulation/Famine have declined in importance, even amongst environmentalists over the last couple decades in large part because they have proven to be untrue. Back in the early seventies the Club of Rome and people like Paul Ehrlich famously predicted famine, running out of natural resources and generally the end of the world. They predicted that it would have happened by now. That this has not come to pass (though I forgot to check Drudge this morning, it might have happened. Nope, I checked and the world hasn't ended) should have chastened them. But Ehrlich among others is still selling his heady brand of doom.

The most recent demographics indicate that the world population will peak somewhere around mid century at about 8 billion people, and thereafter begin to decline. The low end UN projection in fact predicts a peak at less than 8 billion before 2040, and then decline. Since this is only about a 25% percent increase, it seems unlikely that this will cause great chaos in the coming decades. Even without GM foods, recent advances in agriculture (at least in the wealthier nations, though slowly spreading) seem adequate to handle this increase.

Given that there is likely going to be enough food, and that in the last couple centuries most if not all famines have had political causes (Ukraine, China, Biafra, Ethiopia, Somalia) rather than purely environmental ones, I think it is safe to say that this is really not an issue we need to worry about, at least on the big scale.

For the other, resource depletion, we face a similar non-crisis. Most of the projections that led to the Club of Rome and others to declare that we would run out of x resource in y years were based on known reserves of x and current consumption rates. The fundamental problem with these projections is that they are based on known reserves, or worse on proven reserves. This is akin to being hungry and in a large warehouse with a flashlight. You shine the beam around, and see food. You feverishly calculate that you will run out of the food you see in front of you in three days. Certain starvation! Of course, as you eat the food in front of you, you can shine the flashlight around to look for more food. Of course, you might have to walk further to get it, or climb up the shelves, but it is there.

So it goes with minerals and petroleum and other things we dig out of the ground. Despite increasing consumption, proven reserves of every commodity metal are larger than they were when the Club of Rome first published its predictions. Also, prices for most of these are lower - indicating that they are trending less rather than more scarce. The Earth is a very, very big place, and we inhabit only the surface. There is little likelihood that we will ever "exhaust" the Earth of resources. (And if it ever seemed likely that we were about to, there are always asteroids...)

There are a couple things that we can learn here. One, always take doomsday scenarios with a grain of salt. Don't ignore them, but certainly don't begin screaming that the sky is falling. Two, to the extent that these problems ever were problems, technology was the solution. Better agricultural technology has vastly increased our ability to grow food. The Green revolution was happening at the same time that Ehrlich was prophesying doom. The new revolution in GM foods promises to similarly increase our ability to produce sustenance for the teeming hordes. A side benefit of these new techniques is that the land needed for farming is actually reduced - which means that where the new style farming is adopted, there is less pressure on marginally arable land, which means less desertification or encroachment on rainforests. In the United States, there is more forestland east of the Mississippi than at any time since the early 1800s.

A primary reason that population is expected to begin falling is that generally speaking, the wealthier a nation it is, the less children its citizens will have. Europe and Japan are facing a demographic crisis already as their birthrates have fallen below replacement levels. And large areas of east Asia have apparently crossed the line into lowered fertility rates. Of course, the draconian policies of the Chinese communist government have played a role here as well. If we continue to get wealthier, the population will eventually decline. Though this may cause other problems…

The same is true of mining. New technology means that we can affordably (profitably) get at resources that would have been completely unfeasible twenty years ago. So, reserves are larger. And the new methods are almost universally less damaging to the environment. The oil drilling that was proposed in the Alaskan ANWR reserve would have tapped the oil of a region the size of South Carolina from a facility no larger than Dulles Airport outside Washington. Strip mining is becoming a thing of the past, and in general things are getting better. And it is wealth and technology that is making them so.

So, for these two issues, I hereby declare them to be non-issues, and needing no corrective action of any kind.

In the next few days, I will tackle the other issues. Stay tuned.

Slate is hosting a week-long series called Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War. As a centrist fencesitter whose support for the war changes like Ohio weather, I have to say it's interesting reading.

Well, that's not quite fair to myself. What I ought to say is this: I remain deeply skeptical about the reasons that the Bush administration offered about why Saddam Hussein needed to fall. Whether or not Hussein was thisclose to using lethal force against the US remains very much in doubt and no matter how you parse the words that Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc. used on any given day the undeniable impression which accrues is that they wanted us, the Amurrican people, to think that Hussein was, in fact, thisclose.

For me, the humanitarian argument was one of the strongest in favor of getting rid of the rat bastid. A close second was the "unfinished business" scenario. Unfortunately, I also believe that "unfinished business" is no reason to go to war.

My other, more specific objections over timing and preparation are well-covered in this month's Atlantic Monthly cover stories by James Fallows and Kenneth Pollack. I suggest you check them out.

That all being said, it's an interesting thing to watch hawkish liberals play Monday morning quarterback on their own predictions and opinions about Iraq.
Jacob Weisberg starts things off as moderator, offering his own assessment:

To me, the liberation of 25 million Iraqis remains sufficient justification, which is why I don't think the failure to find weapons of mass destruction by itself invalidates the case for war (though it certainly weakens it). What does affect my view is the huge and growing cost of the invasion and occupation: in American lives (we're about to hit 500 dead and several thousand more have been injured); in money (more than $160 billion in borrowed funds); and in terms of lost opportunity (we might have found Osama Bin Laden by now if we'd committed some of those resources to Afghanistan). Most significant are the least tangible costs: increased hatred for the United States, which both fosters future terrorism and undermines the international support we will need to fight terrorism effectively for many years to come. Of course, the fall of Saddam has made us safer and is likely to produce all sorts of positive side effects, such as Qaddafi's capitulation. But the diminution of America's ability to create consensus around actions necessary for collective security makes us less safe. So, while I still think the Iraq war was morally justified, I'm not at all sure it was worth the costs.

Kenneth Pollack offers his (re)assessment thus:

I think the war put to rest the fantasies of the neocons that we could simply arm Ahmad Chalabi and a few thousand followers (followers he still has not actually produced), give them air cover, and send them in to spark a rolling revolution. Richard Perle and others argued for that initially, but in the end they had to support a full-scale invasion as the only realistic course. The covert-action-based regime-change policies that I and others in the U.S. government had pushed for as an alternative never had a high likelihood of success, either—they were just slightly more likely to produce a coup and much less likely to create a catastrophic "Bay of Goats," as Gen. Anthony Zinni once put it. Ironically, I think the events of the last 12 months have also indicated that containment was doing both better than we believed, and worse. On the one hand, the combination of inspections and the pain inflicted by the sanctions had forced Saddam to effectively shelve his WMD ambitions, probably since around 1995-96. On the other hand, the behavior of the French, Russians, Germans, and many other members of the United Nations Security Council in the run-up to the war was final proof that they were never going to do what would have been necessary to revise and support containment so that it might have lasted for more than another year or two.

Pollack goes on to mention deterrence as a possible gambit to keep Hussein in check. I find this curious. Hussein had a gift for self-preservation at all costs (the same impulse which makes it very unlikely he was going to do anything on his own to infuriate the USA). But at the same time he has proven a notoriously slippery customer, more like the Saddam Hussein of South Park's imagination (yeah, budday!) than a brittle aging autocrat like that shit Castro.

Just a thought: given the interplay of these two things-- self-preservation and perfidousness-- how would it be possible to know whether deterrence was working?

Anway, moving on. The next commenter, Thomas Friedman, also mentions deterrence but then swings for the fences.

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we too are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

I can almost buy this-- almost. I would be more convinced that this analysis is correct if we had invaded Syria or Pakistan-- a real, live, state sponsor of Muslim extremist terrorism.

The way I see the libervasion of Iraq, in a geopolitical sense, is like this (cowboy analogy to follow-- please excuse me): the US walks into the meanest, roughest bar in town, pulls out a sixgun, and shoots the guy closest to the door in the face. Sure, it makes everyone think you're crazy and not to be fucked with, but might there not be better, more efficient ways to make it utterly and unmistakably clear that the USA is unfuckwithable?

That's it folks. The half-bakery is closed. No more donuts today.

Yesterday, the Ministry of Minor Perfidy suffered a brief and minor suspension of operations. This blackout, apparently caused by a rogue agent known only as "mySQL" has been isolated, corrected, and restored as an honored, functioning member of the Perfidy support staff.

Our apologies to the thousands of gnomes displaced in the aftermath of the correction of "mySQL." Your families will be duly compensated and the area where your homes stood will be safe for habitation once again within 1.3 million years, give or take.

Special attention must be given to "Kathy Kinsley," the entity entrusted with the care and feeding of the servers on which the Ministry's online presence resides. Within minutes of the problem arising, Ms. Kinsley was working to rectify it. Truly an exceptional entity.

Go about your business.

WSJ responds to some of the Paul O'Neill information...by saying he's just a baby, a big fat ego-driven CEO...unlike the other ego-driven CEO types in the administration.

That was then and this is now. It now turns out Mr. O'Neill has talked nearly daily for the last year with Mr. Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, who has now written a new explosive book on President Bush's first term. Mr. O'Neill also turned over to Mr. Suskind a minute-by-minute accounting of his time in office along with CD-ROMs containing 19,000 pages of documents he took with him from Washington.

Mr. O'Neill may have been a team player during his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, but his tenure as the successful head of Alcoa, the aluminum company, seems to have instilled in him "CEO disease," the inability for someone who runs a large enterprise to adapt and subordinate a large ego to the interests of a group.

Far from being a truth-teller, Mr. O'Neill comes across in Mr. Suskind's book as a vengeful Lone Ranger, someone bitter because his advice was spurned but who stubbornly chose to stay in the job anyway. "He could have resigned quietly on principle," one White House aide told me. "Instead we had to push him out."

Mr. O'Neill may like to see himself as a contemporary Cyrus Vance, who in 1980 left as Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State over principled disagreements on foreign policy. But instead he resembles Don Regan, the temperamental White House chief of staff who, after President Reagan fired him, went on to write a tell-all book embarrassing his old boss with revelations about Nancy Reagan's fondness for astrologers. The book made Mr. Regan look small and it didn't do much damage to Mr. Reagan's reputation. The same will be true of Mr. O'Neill's poison-pen recollections.

Not one word in their editorial about whether the circumstances he's describing are actually true or not. Dear WSJ: Is Paul lying? Do you care to address the accusations directly?

No, they don't. And neither will any other conservative commentator. Well, maybe Buckethead.