links for 2007-12-29

• Cooking Up Bigger Brains - Scientific American
• In Japan, Inflation Surges and Job Market Sags - New York Times
• China Lets Currency Appreciate a Bit Faster - New York Times
• New-Home Sales Fell to 12-Year Low in November - New York Times
• As Iraqis See It - The New York Review of Books
• 'Supercapitalism': An Exchange - The New York Review of Books

Comments

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/us/29consumer.html

December 29, 2007

State Health Officials Fault Lack of Federal Action on Waterproofing Sprays
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — The Consumer Product Safety Commission is unnecessarily leaving the American public at risk through its failure to properly investigate a long-running series of lung injuries tied to widely available waterproofing sprays, public health officials from several states say.

The complaint concerns inexpensive sprays sold nationwide that rely on a water-repelling ingredient that contains a Teflon-like chemical known as a fluoropolymer.

Because the chemical resin is not considered hazardous at this concentration, federal laws do not require that spray-can labels mention its presence, and typically they do not, said Susan C. Smolinske, a professor of toxicology at Wayne State University in Detroit and the director of a Michigan regional poison control center.

But in the past several years, thousands of consumers are likely to have suffered respiratory problems — including shortness of breath, persistent cough and in some cases long-term lung injuries — after using these waterproofing sprays, Dr. Smolinske said, citing a smaller number of formal reports filed with poison control centers.

Most often the ailment, which is typically diagnosed as chemical pneumonitis, is not life threatening, and it does not appear to be permanent. But in many cases it results in trips to emergency rooms because the resin, once inhaled, can cause inflammation in the lungs, preventing a person from getting enough oxygen.

“Am I like imagining this?” Chrisanne Zolnierek, 49, of Saginaw, Mich., recalled thinking when she had trouble breathing last summer after using Kenyon Water Repellent on a tent she had set up in her yard.

Ms. Zolnierek ended up in the intensive care unit instead of on a Boy Scout trip with her 11-year-old son, she said....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/us/29consumer.html

December 29, 2007

State Health Officials Fault Lack of Federal Action on Waterproofing Sprays
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON — The Consumer Product Safety Commission is unnecessarily leaving the American public at risk through its failure to properly investigate a long-running series of lung injuries tied to widely available waterproofing sprays, public health officials from several states say.

The complaint concerns inexpensive sprays sold nationwide that rely on a water-repelling ingredient that contains a Teflon-like chemical known as a fluoropolymer.

Because the chemical resin is not considered hazardous at this concentration, federal laws do not require that spray-can labels mention its presence, and typically they do not, said Susan C. Smolinske, a professor of toxicology at Wayne State University in Detroit and the director of a Michigan regional poison control center.

But in the past several years, thousands of consumers are likely to have suffered respiratory problems — including shortness of breath, persistent cough and in some cases long-term lung injuries — after using these waterproofing sprays, Dr. Smolinske said, citing a smaller number of formal reports filed with poison control centers.

Most often the ailment, which is typically diagnosed as chemical pneumonitis, is not life threatening, and it does not appear to be permanent. But in many cases it results in trips to emergency rooms because the resin, once inhaled, can cause inflammation in the lungs, preventing a person from getting enough oxygen.

“Am I like imagining this?” Chrisanne Zolnierek, 49, of Saginaw, Mich., recalled thinking when she had trouble breathing last summer after using Kenyon Water Repellent on a tent she had set up in her yard.

Ms. Zolnierek ended up in the intensive care unit instead of on a Boy Scout trip with her 11-year-old son, she said....

[anne]

Know that Teflon coated products subject to heat and Teflon sprays in particular are highly dangerous to birds and should never be used in home where there are birds. I never use Teflon coated products.

Please excuse the double comment which was my foolish fault on thinking Typepad had swallowed the initial attempt.

[hari]

Supercapitalism!

Reich/Judt debate (it's NOT an exchange!) on the political consequences of present-day globalization, and the role of the State.

My sympathy, I must admit, falls more on the thoughtful analysis presented by Judt. I've a keen understanding of the history of ideas (!) in which Judt seems, to me, to come out more of a master than Reich. Reich appears to be unable or unwilling intellectually to take on Judt - may be it's not good for a tenure Professor @ Berkeley!

However, there's no question that globalization has literally un-leached the end of nation-state, as we've known it. By codifying WTO and its mandatory instruments for arbitration, in case of trade disputes, Clinton not only nullified the role of State in relationship to other States, but enforced the notion that in future the nation-state will NOT be able to interfere in the development and facilitation of what Reich dubiously (in my view) calls Supercapitalism.

I'm also confident Dani Rodrik's many distractors are more or less from the same school of thinking as Reich. Because they tend to forget the old dictum - the individual is the state, and state the individual! Once you isolate one from the other - under whatever globalization (fetish) you wish to classify it under - you fulfil what Judt rightly claims the end of the individual!

This subject is too serious to be categorized as "left" or "right" deviation in intellectual discourse. What we need is a full and forthright debate and exchange of views on what's the role of the state in future - now that we've witnessed the consequences of unfettered Globalization - a la Clinton/Rubin!

[anne]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20949

January 17, 2008

In Response to "The Wrecking Ball of Innovation"

To the Editors:

There is considerable irony in Tony Judt's use of my book for his jeremiad against modern capitalism ["The Wrecking Ball of Innovation"]. While I share his concerns about its con-sequences as well as his desire for a more robust expression of the common good, my central point is that such screeds won't help. Vilifying global corporations, international executives, and the very rich may be emotionally gratifying but they're the wrong targets. Denigrating economic growth, productivity, and the global market may be rhetorically satisfying but this can lead to nativism, protectionism, and brainless neo-Ludditism.

I think it better to acknowledge the natural desire of human beings to improve their material condition, but to understand how easily today's consumers seeking great deals in this hyper-competitive economy inadvertently trump their concerns as citizens who value the common good. This is happening not only in the United States but across Europe and Asia. Fierce competition for consumer dollars is pushing companies to slash payrolls, outsource abroad, fight unions, violate human rights, and spew gunk into the atmosphere, among other things. In America, that same competition has unleashed a political arms race among companies hiring ever-larger armies of Washington lobbyists to fight for public policies that help them and hurt their rivals. The resulting cacophony has overwhelmed the democratic process, making it difficult if not impossible for citizen values to be heard.

The answer, it seems to me, isn't found in Judt's "reassuring fatalism of the old left narrative," with its capitalist hobgoblins and proletarian revolutionaries. It lies in erecting a more effective barrier between the economy and politics, between capitalism and democracy. That way, we as consumers can enjoy the benefits of the former, as informed by the citizen values we express in the latter. Yet to accomplish this will require more than campaign-finance and lobbying reform, because such fixes are so readily undone. We will need to practice democratic citizenship with as much zeal as we practice consumerism, and elect leaders who inspire us to do so. Judt may call this project "humdrum" but I see it as the only way forward.

Robert Reich

[anne]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20949

Tony Judt replies:

I am surprised that Robert Reich resents my "use" of his book for the expression of some general thoughts on its topic. Taken for itself, after all, Supercapitalism would have merited at best a short notice. However, Reich's letter is welcome all the same. It helpfully reasserts the book's argument; and by its resort to invective—"jeremiad," "screeds," "emotionally gratifying," "capitalist hobgoblins," etc.—his letter offers an instructive insight into Reich's own thought processes. For in Reich's letter as in his book, the choices we face are simplified to "consumer deals" or "citizen values"; and his critics (me, on this occasion) are dismissed as "denigrators" of economic growth, enemies of capitalist globalization who pave the way for nativism: in short, prole-worshipping nostalgics.

But no good-faith reader, however solipsistic, could possibly suppose that I miss the "reassuring fatalism of the old left narrative." My point was precisely the contrary: now that we have said goodbye to all that, with what tools are we to respond critically to our present dilemmas? We need to relearn how to think politically about economic choices, and to rediscover uses for the state that entail neither a return to discredited practices nor wholesale abandonment of past achievements. If the Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley really thinks that we can improve upon the "cacophony" that passes for public debate with talk of "citizen values" and "leaders who inspire us" and that anything else is "brainless neo-Ludditism," then he is himself a depressing illustration of the problem he purports to address.

[anne]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE5D91F30F93AA35752C0A96E958260

January 9, 1998

Bhutto Clan Leaves Trail of Corruption in Pakistan
By JOHN F. BURNS

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A decade after she led this impoverished nation from military rule to democracy, Benazir Bhutto is at the heart of a widening corruption inquiry that Pakistani investigators say has traced more than $100 million to foreign bank accounts and properties controlled by Bhutto's family.

Starting from a cache of Bhutto family documents bought for $1 million from a shadowy intermediary, the investigators have detailed a pattern of secret payments by foreign companies that sought business favors during Bhutto's two terms as Pakistan's prime minister.

The documents leave uncertain the degree of involvement by Bhutto, a Harvard graduate whose rise to power in 1988 made her the first woman to lead a Muslim country. But they trace the pervasive role of her husband, Asif Zardari, who turned his marriage to Bhutto into a source of virtually unchallengeable power.

In 1995, a leading French military contractor, Dassault Aviation, agreed to pay Zardari and a Pakistani partner a $200 million commission for a $4 billion jet fighter deal that fell apart only when Bhutto's government was dismissed. In another deal, a leading Swiss company hired to curb customs fraud in Pakistan paid millions of dollars between 1994 and 1996 to offshore companies controlled by Zardari and Bhutto's widowed mother, Nusrat Bhutto.

In the largest single payment investigators have discovered, a gold bullion dealer in the Middle East was shown to have deposited at least $10 million into one of Zardari's accounts after the Bhutto government gave him a monopoly on gold imports that sustained Pakistan's jewelry industry. The money was deposited into a Citibank account in the United Arab Emirates sheikdom of Dubai, one of several Citibank accounts used by Zardari.

Together, the documents provided an extraordinarily detailed look at high-level corruption in Pakistan, a nation so poor that perhaps 70 percent of its 130 million people are illiterate, and millions have no proper shelter, no schools, no hospitals, not even safe drinking water. During Bhutto's five years in power, the country became so enfeebled that she spent much of her time negotiating loans to stave off default on more than $62 billion in public debt.

A worldwide search for properties secretly bought by the Bhutto family is still in its early stages. But the inquiry has so far found that Zardari went on a shopping spree in the mid-1990s, purchasing among other things a $4 million, 355-acre estate south of London. Over eight months in 1994 and 1995, he used a Swiss bank account and an American Express card to buy jewelry worth $660,000 -- including $246,000 at Cartier Inc. and Bulgari Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., in barely a month.

In separate interviews in Karachi, Bhutto, 44, and Zardari, 42, declined to address specific questions about the Pakistani inquiry, which they dismissed as a political vendetta by Bhutto's successor as prime minister, Nawaz Sharif. In Karachi Central Prison, where he has been held for 14 months on charges of murdering Bhutto's brother, Zardari described the corruption allegations as part of a "meaningless game." But he offered no challenge to the authenticity of the documents tracing some of his most lucrative deals.

Bhutto originally kindled wild enthusiasms in Pakistan with her populist brand of politics, then suffered a heavy loss of support as the corruption allegations against her and her husband gained credence. In an interview at her fortresslike home set back from Karachi's Arabian Sea beachfront, she was by turns tearful and defiant.

"Most of those documents are fabricated," she said, "and the stories that have been spun around them are absolutely wrong."

But she refused to discuss any of the specific deals outlined in the documents, and did not explain how her husband had paid for his property and jewelry. Lamenting what she described as "the irreparable damage done to my standing in the world" by the corruption inquiry, she said her family had inherited wealth, although not on the scale implied by tales of huge bank deposits and luxury properties overseas.

"I mean, what is poor and what is rich?" Bhutto asked. "If you mean, am I rich by European standards, do I have a billion dollars, or even a hundred million dollars, even half that, no, I do not. But if you mean that I'm ordinary rich, yes, my father had three children studying at Harvard as undergraduates at the same time. But this wealth never meant anything to my brothers or me."

The Student: Privileged Learning, Populist Platitudes

Bhutto, a student at Harvard and Oxford for six years in the 1970s, has been a vocal critic of "avaricious politicians." In a Harvard commencement speech in 1989, she said that such people had looted developing countries and left them without the means to tackle their social problems. Since she was ousted as prime minister during her second term, on Nov. 5, 1996, on charges that included gross corruption, she has been the leader of Pakistan's main opposition group, the Pakistan People's Party.

Some details of the allegations against Bhutto and Zardari appeared in European and American newspapers last fall, after Pakistani investigators began releasing some of the Bhutto family documents. But a much fuller picture emerged when several thick binders full of documents were made available to The New York Times over a period of several days in October. The Times' own investigation, lasting three months, extended from Pakistan to the Middle East, Europe and the United States, and included interviews with many of the central figures named by the Pakistani investigators.

Officials leading the inquiry in Pakistan say that the $100 million they have identified so far is only a small part of a much larger windfall from corrupt activities. They maintain that an inquiry begun in Islamabad immediately after Bhutto's dismissal in 1996 found evidence that her family and associates generated more than $1.5 billion in illicit profits through kickbacks in virtually every sphere of government activity -- from rice deals, to the sell-off of government land, even rake-offs from government welfare schemes....