links for 2007-11-12

• Back from war, out of a job - The Boston Globe
• Striking Out - James Surowiecki - The New Yorker
• Some Wonder if the Banks’ Stabilization Fund Will Work - New York Times

[Please feel free to add more links in comments.]

Comments

[Farrar Richardson]

For once, Roger Cohen has got it right. Al Jazeera English is one of the few free English language channels we can get it France, and considering where it's coming from, it can give us a real lesson in "free and balanced" reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/opinion/12cohen.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2007/11/maliki-said-to-induct-18000-militiamen.html

November 12, 2007

What I don't understand about American newspaper articles is why they let people like Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki dictate the headlines, even when the headline is undermined by the information gathered by the journalist who wrote the article. So the NYT reports, *

"Most of the capital’s displaced people have yet to return, and the number of those leaving still outpaces those returning, according to Dana Graber Ladek, the Iraqi displacement specialist for the International Organization for Migration.

"Over a million Iraqis have fled their homes in the past year and a half, she said, nearly three-quarters of them from Baghdad. And though the Iraqi government is offering one million Iraqi dinars, or roughly $812, to each Baghdad family that returns, she said, only a fraction of residents has done so."

So, why isn't that the headline? "More Iraqis still Leaving Capital than returning to It"? Why is it al-Maliki's irrelevant assertion that "7,000 families" have come back to the capital? First of all, that isn't that many people, and second of all, what we want to know is if they are the ones kicked out of Syria during the past month.
And we want to know how many Baghdadis are still fleeing their own city every week. Do the editors just automatically cede the headlines to the Rich and Powerful? Why? Isn't this sort of complaisance toward propaganda what got us into the Iraq War in the first place?

* http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html

-- Juan Cole

[anne]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/11/09/iraq_veteran_healthcare_could_top_650b?mode=PF

November 9, 2007

Iraq Veteran Healthcare Could Top $650 Billion: Physicians for Social Responsibility Warns Possible Crisis Looming
By Bryan Bender - Boston Globe

WASHINGTON - A group of noted physicians predicted yesterday that healthcare for Iraq veterans could top $650 billion, another warning of a looming social crisis as thousands of veterans struggle with mental and physical disabilities and other disruptions to family life.

The study by marked the first attempt to isolate the financial costs of "the wide-ranging traumatic mental and social effects of the Iraq war."

Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize, estimated that the long-term financial burden to care for a new generation of veterans will far outstrip the amount of money spent on combat operations in Iraq....

[anne]

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/11/09/iraq_veteran_healthcare_could_top_650b?mode=PF

The Alliance to End Homelessness, a nonprofit organization, found that 194,254 out of 744,313 homeless people on any given night are veterans. The findings, released yesterday, were based on information from the Department of Veterans Affairs and the US Census Bureau.

[I wonder if such a finding on the vulnerability of veterans in the wake of war and occupation reflects what would be similar findings through our history.]

[anne]

We are more than 10 months from America encouraging an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, an invasion opposed through Africa but successful in deposing the Somali government in days. From then on what had been increasingly a relatively stable Somalia, has become a Somalia of Ethiopian occupation and resistance and returned violence, and the displacement of what appears to be more than 100,000 Somalis.

Why we seem so little to understand the cycle of destruction that is war and occupation is beyond my understanding, though of course Somalia is given little attention. Still think of America encouraging a war and occupation involving the poorest of the poor. This is immoral madness.

[anne]

There is, by the way, a United Nations report that Basra is shutting out displaced Iraqis. Displaced Iraqis who externally and internally were about 2.7 million in summer 2007, are increasingly unwanted and being turned away. But, war and occupation have always led to such displacement and current African displacement patterns even now are colonial war and occupation remmants which we so easily forget.

Jared Diamond, who is a brilliant scholar, would have us consider the tragedies of Rwanda and Darfur as partially geographic-environmentally driven. Of course Diamond is absolutely correct as even a quick historial geographic survey of Rwanda and Burundi and Darfur, along with the southern Sudan, will show.

[anne]

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/11/are-we-headed-f.html

Jared Diamond was attacked for drawing attention to the severe environmental strains that help us understand Rwanda or Darfur, and that analysts ignore to the extent that at a recent university international studies lecture on Darfur a faculty couple called to me at the close to ask whether there had been any explanation given of the violence. There had been no explanation, as so often. Darfur is a resource war, a resource exploitation.

[anne]

http://www.cbpp.org/11-12-07bud.htm

November 12, 2007

A Tale of Two Bills
By Richard Kogan

The Administration wants to cut programs funded under the Labor-HHS-Education bill by $6.7 billion, or 4.5 percent, below existing funding levels for these programs, adjusted only for inflation. Congress, in contrast, would increase funding by $5.2 billion, or 3.5 percent. The Administration never mentions that the President's veto is designed to force reductions in programs funded by this bill.

For the Department of Defense, the Administration wants to increase funding by $32 billion or 7.5 percent while Congress provides an increase of $29 billion or 6.6 percent. None of this Defense funding is to prosecute the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the "global war on terror." The Administration has requested $196 billion for these wars for 2008, which Congress will address in other legislation.

One might ask why a $5 billion increase for education, health research, and job training is "excessive" and constitutes "runaway spending" but a $29 billion (or $32 billion) increase for defense activities unrelated to the war does not.

When inflation and population growth are both taken into account, the funding Congress would provide for the Labor-HHS-Education programs is actually below the average levels for fiscal years 2002 through 2006, which the President signed in each of those years. Thus, the President is vetoing a bill that will cost $5 billion less in real population-adjusted terms than the average level for the Labor-HHS-Education bills he signed for 2002 through 2006, when his party controlled Congress. This casts doubt on the Administration's characterization of the funding for the current bill as "excessive" and "irresponsible."

In contrast with the Labor-HHS-Education programs, Congress is increasing funding for the Pentagon by almost $41 billion, relative to its 2002-2006 level adjusted for inflation and population growth, while the President wants a still larger increase.

The Administration might have argued that cutting education, health, and job training programs by $6.7 billion is necessary because of overall budget constraints, and that these programs have a lower priority than other needs (such as increased funding for the Pentagon, the costs of the wars, and the costs of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts — the tax cuts will cost more than $250 billion in 2008 alone). But the Administration has never made such an argument, perhaps in part because it does not wish to acknowledge that the President would actually cut education, health, and other programs. The Administration has instead asserted that the funding increases Congress seeks for these programs are inherently "excessive" and constitute "runaway spending" — assertions that have little merit, as the figures in this analysis indicate....

[anne]

Notice then what compassionate Republican conservatism is always about, cut cut cut social benefit programs, raise raise raise military spending and cut cut cut taxes. George Bush is a definitive conservative, and since the initial Republican Administration-Congress budget in 2002, social benefit spending has increased more slowly than the economy has grown while military spending has increased far faster. No matter the repeated evidence however, conservatives are bent on claiming that the President has firecely increased social benefit spending.

[anne]

Again, because this issue is so important for those who worry about and complain about mounting economic problems for middle class and poorer households in America. This Administration has been increasing social benefit spending more slowly than the economy has grown whether from the final Clinton budget or initial Bush budget. Taxes have been increasingly structured to support the wealthiest during this time.

At least we can understand that when the needs for health care for 3.8 million children are set aside by conservatives for the cost of a mere $7 billion a year, a cost already provided for, to claim the President and Republican Congress were spending fiercely for social benefit programs is false.

[anne]

Notice in regard to the Physicians for Social Responsibility examination of costs for caring for soldier casualties from the war in and occupation of Iraq, that we keep finding how conservative Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes were is examining the costs no matter the terrible criticism they faced. We are a fabulously rich country, that has been squandering resources in what should be a most alarming manner and at a most alarming rate, but we will not attend.

We have a war and occupation that beyond the immorality and beyond the physical and mental suffering caused, is a drain beyond compare. We went from University of Chicago professors' calls for invading and occupying Iraq with no cost, to denial of $50 billion in cost by the Administration, to a budget of $200 billion this year alone, to more than $2 trillion in costs in full.

[anne]

Notice by the way, the African Americans were relatively more abused by mortgage cost discrimination and are suffering relatively more through the decline in the housing market. I am told the Commerce Department is finding more than 1/2 the gain in home ownership by African Americans from 1994 to 2004 is now gone, with more to come.

[anne]

The just dismissed CEO of Citigroup, last I noticed, was leaving the company with more than $65 million in current compensation, having cost the company only about $65 billion in market value. Nice.

[anne]

I am wondering how it could be possible that more than 190,000 veterans could be homeless or more than 1/4 of all homeless. Could this be a fast reflection of how intellectually and emotionally debilitating Iraq has been? What is Iraq doing to us? Remember, that by October 2006 more than 100,000 returned soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan had been granted disability status by the Veterans Administration. What are we dealing with?

[anne]

No; I am wrong, the homeless plight of veterans does not reflect those from Iraq or Afghanistan but veterans of earlier wars. The effects of the current wars on homelessness is minimal to this point.

[gordon]

Anne says: "One might ask why a $5 billion increase for education, health research, and job training is "excessive" and constitutes "runaway spending" but a $29 billion (or $32 billion) increase for defense activities unrelated to the war does not".

Because US Federal spending on R&D, industry subsidies and import replacement (which would ordinarily be called industrial policy) have, through an extraordinary chain of circumstances, become part of military expenditures. I know that this very remarkable fact about the way the US Federal Govt. does things has called forth some comment (generally by writers about the Cold War), but it seems to me to be a very under-analysed and under-remarked aspect of US post-WWII economic policy. I am always surprised that writers on the US economy, including advocates of an explicit industrial policy, give it so little attention.

[anne]

Please set down suggested resources as they occur, but I do not begin to know of the outlines or understand the structures of the military-industrial budget.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2DF1F39F930A35750C0A967958260

March 3, 1991

The One True Picasso
By JOHN RUSSELL

A LIFE OF PICASSO
Volume One, 1881-1906.
By John Richardson.
With the collaboration of Marilyn McCully.

Few biographies in the literature of art have aroused more expectation than the four intended volumes of "A Life of Picasso" by John Richardson. Though sometimes despaired of by those who were most impatient to read it, Mr. Richardson's Volume One turns out to have been worth the wait.

A remarkable achievement on more than one count, it has the steady, unhurrying pace and the superabundance of detail that were the mark of biography in High Victorian days. It is warmed throughout by unforced private affection and by a veritable tumult of reminiscence. But neither hype nor adulation plays a part in it. The record is set straight, without bias, even where the buzzword "manipulative" is the only one that fits Pablo Picasso's treatment of others.

Not only Picasso himself, but all those with whom he came into close contact -- friends, lovers, colleagues, nonentities and men and women of genius -- are brought to rounded life. And if we sense here and there that Mr. Richardson has a score to settle with people, now dead, who did not further his researches, Picasso himself would have been the first to note that and to enjoy it.

Conversational in tone, the book musters and marshals a truly formidable amount of material, surrounded by about 900 illustrations (all in black and white). Since it was first mooted, during the lifetime of Picasso, the available information on the subject has increased to a barely manageable degree. The artist's estate was large beyond all expectation. Great exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and elsewhere. The Picasso Museum in Paris was opened in 1985. Much-improved comprehensive catalogues of Picasso's paintings, sculptures and prints have been published. The specialized contribution of independent scholarship has been continuous. As for Picasso's surviving sketchbooks, they would repay a lifetime of study.

Meanwhile, high-level biographical studies in French and Spanish have mapped and remapped the terrain Mr. Richardson had set himself to cover. In particular, "Picasso: The Early Years, 1881-1907" by the Catalan poet Josep Palau i Fabre was invaluable. Mr. Palau had known Picasso since 1947, and with its 200,000-word text and its 1,587 illustrations (many of them previously unknown), his book (published in English in 1981 and now out of print) made a redoubtable contribution.

An easygoing, low-pressured English-language ramble through the literature might, therefore, have been easy to write. But in four volumes? At an expected total length of well over 2,000 pages? With every word rechecked and rethought? No more challenging task could confront a late-20th-century biographer.

If there were strains during the writing of the first volume, they don't show. The tale begins 500 years ago -- in 1481, to be precise, with the death in battle of a forebear on Picasso's father's side of the family who was a legendary warrior. So far from being the miraculous product of an unmemorable line, Picasso turns out to have been related to a famous general, an Archbishop of Lima and captain-general of Peru, a late-19th-century theologian, a diplomat, a customs officer, a double-bass player, a holy man who lived as a hermit in the mountains above Cordoba and the director after World War II of a psychiatric clinic in Barcelona.

As is well known, Pablo Picasso was born in 1881 in Malaga, Spain. His father was a failed painter and a failed museum curator who, but for his son, would have sunk without trace. Raised in Malaga, La Coruna, Madrid and Barcelona, Picasso made the most of those not always promising environments, and so does his biographer. (Behind a reference to Picasso's "cool Andalusian swagger," there lies research into the immemorial motivation of Andalusian machismo.)

Thanks in part to his collaborator, Marilyn McCully, Mr. Richardson has been able to fill out the story of Picasso's early life week by week, and sometimes almost day by day. Curious discoveries abound along the way, such as when he backdates to Picasso's childhood the notion -- fundamental to Picasso's paintings of beach life at Dinard in 1928 -- of the cabana as a stronghold of clandestine sexual activity.

From the outset, Mr. Richardson's "Life" does a cleaning job on the overlay of fantasy and speculation, error and untruth that accompanies the life story of a great artist who was also an irresistible, if often destructive, human being. How often have we not read, for instance, that in 1894 Picasso's father was so overcome by the genius of his barely adolescent son that he handed him his palette, paints and brushes and never painted again? It was a good tale, but Manuel Pallares, the Catalan painter who was a close friend of Picasso in boyhood, told Mr. Richardson that it was "made up out of whole cloth." Mr. Richardson further observes that Picasso's father, far from bowing out, went on wielding his feeble brush until well into the 20th century.

When faced with received wisdom of another, later and more important sort, Mr. Richardson often comes forward with rebuttals of his own devising. One of the most famous of all episodes in Picasso's professional life concerns his portrait of Gertrude Stein (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art). After a long period of trouble with the head, Picasso painted it out in the spring of 1906. Then, after several months in Spain, he returned to Paris and painted in the head from memory in a single day. That was what Gertrude Stein said. Picasso never denied it. Recently discovered Iberian reliefs were always said to have prompted the revised version of the head.

Mr. Richardson doesn't buy that....

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E0DC1F38F93BA35752C1A960958260

November 8, 1996

Magician and Miscreant of Modernism, Continued
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

A LIFE OF PICASSO
Volume Two, 1907-1917.
By John Richardson.
With the collaboration of Marilyn McCully.

Poor Picasso: he's taken a lot of recent hits. Here, at last, is an antidote to the awful silliness of the new Merchant-Ivory film, ''Surviving Picasso,'' the hero-worship bunkum of Norman Mailer's ''Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man'' and the crass, gossipy contempt of Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington's ''Picasso, Creator and Destroyer.'' Here is the second volume of John Richardson's magisterial -- and masterly -- biography of the minotaur of modernism: ''A Life of Picasso.''

The second in a projected four-volume study, this book takes up where Volume I, published in 1991, left off: with the creation in 1907 of that revolutionary painting ''Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,'' those five apocalyptic whores whose ferocious, disjunctive visages and cruelly contorted bodies would secure Picasso's claim as ''le peintre de la vie moderne.'' The book ends a decade later with the painter's less well known masterpiece, ''Seated Man,'' and his incipient turn toward classicism. The great subject of the book, of course, is Cubism, the movement Picasso founded with Georges Braque, a movement, in Mr. Richardson's view, that not only nourished Picasso's later achievements but also engendered ''every major modernist movement'' that followed.

Unlike the books by Mr. Mailer and Ms. Huffington, ''A Life of Picasso'' makes the painter's work -- not his affairs, personality or high jinks -- the centerpiece of the story. Mr. Richardson, who knew Picasso for many years when they were both living in the south of France, uses his familiarity with the artist's oeuvre to decipher and decode the painter's dense, gnomic iconography and to put individual paintings in context with Picasso's overall development and with larger developments in the world of art. Influences and sources are nimbly explicated, and so are the ripple effects that the painter's work had on others. By the end of the book, the reader is left with a genuine appreciation of Picasso's major works of this period as well as a visceral understanding of the prodigality of his gifts: his willful determination to shatter tradition, his chameleonlike ability to shift styles and his dazzling and sustained inventiveness.

This is not to say that Mr. Richardson has written a dry, academic study of Picasso's art. Indeed, he chronicles the painter's life in minute detail, giving us richly detailed (if occasionally long-winded) portraits of Picasso's mistresses, friends, colleagues -- even his dealers and collectors. Mr. Richardson conjures up for us the incestuous demimonde these painters and poets inhabited and the alliances and resentments that fueled their work. The highly productive collaboration with Braque is expertly traced, as is the equally productive rivalry with Matisse.

The Picasso that emerges from this volume is a far cry from the cruel monster depicted by Ms. Huffington and the Nietzschean shaman portrayed by Mr. Mailer. He is a far more complicated, conflicted figure: alternately manipulative and tender, predatory and generous; a wily, secretive man whose mocking humor and gift for self-dramatization animated both his work and his life. Assailing recent biographers ''who choose to judge this great artist, born into another age and another culture, by the light of today's cant,'' Mr. Richardson writes that Picasso, in his view, ''was as much sinned against as sinning,'' at least in these early years....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/books/06kaku.html?hp

November 6, 2007

More on the Career of the Genius Who Boldly Compared Himself to God
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

A LIFE OF PICASSO
Volume Three, 1917-1932.
By John Richardson.

Talking about his own highly eclectic, highly protean style, Picasso once said to his mistress Françoise Gilot: "Of course if you note all the different shapes, sizes and colors of models he works from, you can understand his confusion. He doesn't know what he wants. No wonder his style is so ambiguous. It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor. First he works from nature; then he tries abstraction. Finally he winds up lying around caressing his models."

The comparison to God, like the use of the third person, was deliberate, of course. As John Richardson reminds us in the third installment of his magisterial and definitive biography, Picasso not only worshiped the gods Dionysius, Priapus and Mithra (the god of light and wisdom), but also regarded himself as their confrère — an artist so prodigally talented, so daring and so virtuosic that he could reinvent the universe. He was a Nietzschean shaman who regarded art as a mysterious, magical force, offering the possibility of exorcism and transfiguration; a chameleon who effortlessly moved back and forth between Cubism and classicism, irony and sentimentality, cruelty and tenderness; a wily, self-mythologizing sorcerer who inhaled history, ideas and a cornucopia of styles with fierce, promiscuous abandon — all toward the end of exploding conventional ways of looking at the world and remaking that world anew.

In "A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years," Mr. Richardson takes up the story of the Minotaur of Modernism where he left off, a decade ago, in Volume 2, with Picasso's growing interest in classicism. This volume, dealing with the years 1917-32, lacks the great drama of the preceding volume, which chronicled the crucial development of Cubism — a movement, in Mr. Richardson's view, that would nourish all of the artist's later achievements and propel "every major modernist movement" that followed in the decades to come.

This book, in contrast, deals with Picasso's midcareer forays into a variety of styles — from his reworking of the masters of the past (including the Greeks and Romans, Ingres, Corot, Chardin and Renoir) to his growing interest in sculpture to his experiments with the radical deconstruction of the human body. Mr. Richardson sketches out the competitive dialogue that Picasso carried on for years with Matisse, charts Picasso's transit from bohemia to the bourgeoisie and maps the myriad intramural spats and schisms that fractured the avant-garde, all the while conjuring the heady, incestuous world of artists (including Ernest Hemingway and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, none of whom Picasso much liked), patrons and socialites that Picasso frequented in 1920s France.

Although this all makes for a more discursive and at times less focused narrative than that of Volume 2, "The Triumphant Years," like its predecessors, is informed by Mr. Richardson's consummate knowledge of Picasso's work — his intimate understanding of the artist's temperament and endlessly inventive styles, his expansive vocabulary of myths and motifs and, most important, the mysterious nature of the alchemy by which he transformed his own experiences and emotions into art....