writing in mockingbird

Cioran supposedly began to write in French in 43, 44. As he tells the story, he was in France, trying to translate Mallarme into Romanian, when he decided to break entirely with his native language. By this time Cioran had witnessed to the full the flame out of his early, fascist dreams, what his biographer, Zarifopol-Johnston calls “the lyrical virtues of totalitarianism.” In a sense, the renunciation of Romanian for French – a language which he claimed was “sclerotic” – was his repentance. Perhaps it is the kind of punishment only a writer can fully appreciate – to be sentenced to write in another language.

The beginning of History and Utopia is couched in terms of a letter Cioran writes some Romanian friend. The friend had asked how he could give up his language – he had intimated that it was a betrayal on the deepest level.

Cioran writes:

It would be undertaking the story of a nightmare to tell you the intimate history of my relationship with this borrowed idiom, with all those thought and rethought words, smoothed out, subtle to the point of non-existence, bent under the exactions of nuance, inexpressive by having expressed everything, frightening with precision, charged with discretion and modesty, discrete even in its vulgarity. How could you think a Scythian might accommodate himself to it, that he’d grasp the fine significance – and that he’d manipulate it scrupulously and with probity? There is not a single one of them that doesn’t give me vertigo with its extenuated elegance: no more trace of the earth, of blood, of the soul in them.” (470 – my translation)

Of course, the mention of blood and soil here is rather tricky, rather flirtatious- it is one of those innumerable moments in Cioran when the political unconscious comes to the surface and prances about like a naked clown. Still, I take it that this is a serious passage. Apparently Cioran was never entirely comfortable in French, as he was in German or Hungarian – his other second languages. He gargled his French. And yet, by a tremendous act of will, he wrote a French that was as pure as Chamfort’s.

“What consumption of coffee, cigarettes and dictionaries to write a barely correct phrase in this unapproachable language, too noble, too distinguished for my taste.”

Writing in neither French nor German but my own native American, I am, in one way, a Scythian at home in Scythia. The barbaric yawp that comes out of my mouth or, nowadays, flows out of the fingers typing this, should be one hundred percent made in America.

But a language can be pulled out from under your feet – oh, you can’t trust it, and certainly not the people who speak it. When I first resolved to be a writer, I too, consumed the cups of coffee and consulted, if not dictionaries, at least arbiters of what I took to be the best style. I read Johnson, Hazlitt and Ruskin for the music. I read Emerson, Thoreau and Twain for the tartness of an American speech starting to feel that it could punch its weight in the world. I read Hemingway and Faulkner and the minor New Yorker writers – Thurber, Leibling, Mitchell – in order to be able to shift to any tone I wanted.

And as I was stocking up on how to write, the audience was stocking up on how to speak in all the tones of inspirational books and get rich quick seminars. It was staring at cartoons and slowly unlearning how to read a newspaper. It was being deafened by bullshit, a historic avalanche of bullshit pouring out every second of every day from monitors placed everywhere, as though we’d been invaded by the aliens of some 50s movie, and the system worked, the mass mind was milked of every nuance, every complications, and its ideas were replaced with advertisements. It learned to believe everything at least once. It learned that it was selfish and that selfishness was good – which was a double lie, as it didn’t have enough self to be selfish, and what it called good was just the blind hope that everything didn’t cave in before the looting was over.

Such, of course, was the 00s, a decade that we all wear with extreme shame. Myself, I don’t have time or money to go to France and start over like Cioran. I take my cue from crows, grackles and mockingbirds, and write as though I were the last of my species – a bitter keening that sounds like a stand up comic’s routine.

ps - everybody seems to be seeing through me lately! My friend Chad said he liked the first part of this thing, but... and of course he is right. It is true that a writer better learn the clockwork of the masters. But then, too, he should read the comments sections of YouTube, fan fic fuck fiction, listen to street people slag each other off and the latest slang of sorority girls and in general have some sense of the direction to which that great beast, the language, is slouching. And then, for the piece de resistance, he should burn his taste down. Torch the motherfucker. Because writing - or at least that writing which aims to 'drain the last drop of slavery from one's blood' - is always a child of arson.

the problem of the second corpse

It is a triumph of Dante’s art that we remember the nine circles of hell without really puzzling over their essential irrelevance to their inhabitants. After all, if the inhabitants of the first circle are really being punished eternally, from their point of view, it matters not if they are in the second or the ninth circle. Instinctively we suppose that the nine circles must be distinguished by greater or lesser pain, but this isn’t true. Francesca and Paolo, in the second circle, suffer an equal quantity of pain as does Judas in the ninth circle: it is not the quantitative order of pain, but another order – that of the quality of the sins – that organizes the circles.

This is a reflection of a dilemma at the heart of retributive justice. The scale of retaliation is very easily overwhelmed by the human capacity to commit evil. I can be killed for killing one person; but I can’t then be revived and killed all over again for killing a second person. The extra corpse is secretly buried beneath all of justice’s physical and metaphysical structures.

One of the motives for moral absolutism is to find some way to mark out and retaliate against grades of fault. On the one hand, we would like to say that if a man kills, or puts in motion processes that kill, 40 million people, that such a person is more evil than a person who kills one person. On the other hand, justice has no way of expressing this – there is, so to speak, a market meltdown in retaliation. Dante had to accept this logic as well – once you have decreed eternal pain for Francesca and Paolo, you can vary the pain that separates them from a usurer or traitor, but the quantity of the punishment will be the same.

The moral absolutist complains any moral perspective but one that grounds good and evil in an absolute will collapse morality. But, in practical terms, the second corpse does the same thing for the absolutist. If the killing of the first corpse is absolutely bad, the killing of the second corpse, or n-times corpses, can only be as bad. Infinity times itself is infinity. Having axed the money lender, Raskolnikov becomes no better or worse by axing the maid.

Theologically, the dilemma of retaliation has driven the design of numerous afterlife narratives. One solution to the quantitative problem is reincarnation, so that, in a sense, we can revive Raskolnikov to die twice for his victims. In the next life, Raskolnikov might be born a money lender and have to face the axe himself. The problem is, of course, that such retaliation makes us wonder about our “original” murder. Perhaps Raskolnikov is just revenging a deed in the previous life lived by the moneylender. In which case, as an instrument of justice, it is hard to see why he should be retaliated against. One can imagine nemesis as being very clever in fatal symmetries: Raskolnikov can, perhaps, be reborn as the moneylender and the moneylender as practically another Raskolnikov. However, the couple seems unstuck from the absolute moral schema, as they slaughter each other in one life after the other. If we live in the circular world of the eternal return, it would be hard to see, even, what is the after and what is the before life justifying the slaughters.
Another way out of the dilemma of lex talionis is to decree that no killing at all is allowed, ever. No circumstance, here, justifies killing. Historically, the move of absolute pacifism has never caught on. The reason seems to be that unless it catches on universally, the pacifist seems to either be headed towards certain destruction at the hands of the non-pacifist or, what is worse, colluding with the non-pacifist in the destruction of others, insofar as the non-pacifist does not resist the killing. Isn’t it funny that the absolute ethic, extended into practical life, so quickly loses its appeal? And yet, it does have such appeal that many religious leaders have preached just such pacifism. And if the leaders were successful enough to create religions, than the church’s that follow them will inevitably twist the founder’s words and come up with dozens of creative ways to allow killing.

Defending moral relativism

I’ve been reading Hans-Georg Moeller’s The Holy Fool: the case for amorality. Moeller, whose notion of the holy fool comes from Daoism, defends a radical version of negative ethics, which arises, he says, from a “disgust with ethics and its failures.” Given such a viewpoint, you would think that Moeller would be sympathetic to moral relativism.

Yet, in the midst of arguing for amorality, Moeller is careful to say that he is not a moral relativist. It is as if moral relativism is in itself a kind of contagious failure. Myself, if I am anything, I’m a moral relativist, even though I rarely recognize moral relativism in the way it is usually constructed in philosophy. It is usually assumed that if you are a moral relativist, you cannot, for some reason, condemn people who exist in another moral perspective. This, to my mind, is very weird. If you are a moral relativist, why should you pledge yourself to a universalist notion of respecting other moral perspectives? In fact, such a pledge is one possible way of constructing a moral perspective, but not, of course, the only one. Moral relativism, as I understand it, derives its power from anthropological relativism – the refusal to assume that cultures sort themselves hierarchically in terms of some value. But the refusal to assume this sorting occurs, of course, within a discourse about culture. It occurs at the intellectual level in which one studies cultures. Within cultures as historical entities, it doesn’t exist at all. Historically, cultures are always sorting themselves both inside and outside – inside, by way of changes in the symbolic mediations of the members of the culture, and outside, by way of expansions, retreats, stances of neutrality, etc. The Spanish culture sorted itself out with the Mixteca-Aztec culture by trying to destroy the latter, for instance.

Similarly, the moral relativist could well believe that the perspective in which he or she exists should sort itself out with another perspective by destroying it. Meanwhile, internally, the moral perspective, insofar as one aspect of it is actual culture practices, is of course under tension as well. All the moral relativist has to claim is legitimacy with regard to the perspective he embraces. What the moral relativist gives up is the idea that he has access to an absolute perspective. If morality is a way of making us feel good about condemning people, then I have plenty of moral equipment for condemning, say, Hitler, without condemning Hitler absolutely. The demand for an absolute here seems to mean either one of two things. It is the demand that Hitler is not just evil, but really really evil – it is an intensifier. Or it is the demand that there be no moral perspective in which Hitler could justify himself. Of course, the latter is historically falsified – we know quite well that Nazis thought that they were morally justified, which is why they acted the way they did. So what is the absolute demand really for? I think it is for a justification of annulling, or killing, Nazis. But such justification could easily be constructed in one moral perspective without being constructed in all of them.

Obviously, my version of moral relativism isn’t that thing philosophers like to attack when they claim that moral relativism is saying morality is an individual taste. Or the “you believe x and I believe y” by which people agree to disagree. However, the motive for moral relativism does arise from things like agreeing to disagree, or holding a value as a taste. The moral relativist can doubt that morality is individualistic in the sense that it is unlikely any individual creates a morality, any more than any individual creates a language, but the underlying notion that there are different moral perspectives which, perhaps, don’t compete in some agreed upon way to win is the insight that first animates the thought that morality could be relative. In that sense, taste and differences about taste are the most powerful models for the liberal utopian immpulse - the impulse to construct a tolerant society. This liberalism undoubtedly nurtures contemporary moral relativism, even though most moral relativists keep their heads down - as it is one of those terms that is supposed to be damning.

this is your captain

We are all still going down.

Bloomberg, in March, reported that the Bush-Obama plan was sailing along quite smoothly. In return for keeping our financial sector number one – and remember, at least one hundred thousand people make substantial money there – the government did the following:

"The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s.

New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner met with the chief executives of the nation’s 12 biggest banks on March 27 at the White House to enlist their support to thaw a 20-month freeze in bank lending.

“The president and Treasury Secretary Geithner have said they will do what it takes,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein said after the meeting. “If it is enough, that will be great. If it is not enough, they will have to do more.”

Commitments include a $500 billion line of credit to the FDIC from the government’s coffers that will enable the agency to guarantee as much as $2 trillion worth of debt for participants in the Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility and the Public-Private Investment Program. FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair warned that the insurance fund to protect customer deposits at U.S. banks could dry up because of bank failures.
The combined commitment has increased by 73 percent since November, when Bloomberg first estimated the funding, loans and guarantees at $7.4 trillion.”

As we can tell from the line about consumer deposits, this was really about Joe Public! That it had the affect of creating a little bubble for Joe Predator, the hedge funder, and all the guys at Goldman Sachs (we heart you, Lloyd Blankfein!) was an entirely happy accident. And my, what a spring they have had!

The happiness of the million dollar bonus set far outweighs any small misery caused by the destruction of the 4 million jobs since January. The deadweight, as we like to call them, may not have any insurance or any way to cover house payments or little things like that – but they are thrilled and electrified by our proud, proud financial sector, standing tall and giving itself big raises for the excellent job it has been doing.

But there is a fly, a stinking fly and a big one – in fact, it is as big as Manhattan! – in the ointment. Because it is fun to make money playing three card monte with the government. Who doesn’t see how glorious and fitting it is that the Fed loans you money at 2 percent in order for you to loan money to the government at 2.5 or 3 percent. So, so much better than just taking the money from the government by hand – that is just vulgar! It is what welfare mothers do! But as in a ship in which a big big hole has been punched, if the ship’s crew spends all its time making the first class passengers feel secure and tucked into their beds and do nothing about the hole, unfortunately, the first class passengers might well go down with the scum. Oh, it is so, so unfair.

And so that slight, ever so slight uptick in unemployment of one hundred thousand human products has started an uneasy stir. Could it be that the mercy and kindness lavished on the very sector which, in its search for high yield, fucked the globe, could it be that this is the wrong policy?

Of course not! The alternative would have been to turn that firehose of money on the populace, the people if you will, and let’s face it, these are folks who have never summered in the Hamptons! Still, the crazy lunatic left fringe who wrote that all the money in the world is not going to heal the financial sector, and that the Fed should have been making those below par loans to median income household, either through modalities set up in the present banking system or through a bank that was capitalized entirely by the government, are looking like they were right. In fact, they were so right that we aren’t ever going to talk about it – don’t look for any revisiting of Summers remark, this spring, that the “government” doesn’t know how to run a bank.

To sum up: the mangle of inequality is still eating Uncle Sam’s shorts. The astonishingly few people that almost all government activity is oriented to help – we are talking about the financial sector – have shown an amazing amount of political power and an amazing lack of intelligence. Larry Summers, who I said would be a disaster, has proven to be more than a disaster. There are even articles appearing now about how, uh, Summers ideas for making Harvard into the world’s most profitable hedge fund are now threatening Harvard’s very existence – ah, the man leaves a trail of pretty heavy corpses, at least. And we are heading into the second half of the year with NO driver of growth. The magicians have prayed to the idol of the market – a being that is as mythical as the aether – and believe, every one of them, that it is a self-correcting god. These are the words of people who have pickled their brains in the half truths of Econ 101, and pickled their lifestyles in rubbing elbows with the oligarchs.

And:
Put your head on your knees. Put your head in your hands. Put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your hips. He he. This is your captain speaking. We are all going down … together.

an overheated thesis about men and women

I always like going out with my friend S. Last night we went to dinner and then saw Public Enemy, which I enjoyed in parts, and in parts wished that the camera man had taken his anti-spasm pills before filming the big scenes. We did not go out to the cineplex to see nude descending a staircase, starring John Dillinger - and so I was not happy with the camera work that got so jiggly in the film’s big action scenes that in the shootout, it actually was almost impossible to follow how Dillinger escaped. We needed Weegee here, not Boccioni. We wanted to see a summer movie with a lot of Thompson machine guns in it, and we weren't entirely satisfied.

Anyway, over dinner before we saw the movie, we talked about men and women and history. I proposed an overheated thesis, which S. agreed with in part, or at least thought had some redeeming bits of plausibility. So I thought I’d write it down.

My thesis was that the Cold war male was cast into a situation of perpetual wars – WWII, the Korean War, the first war in Vietnam, Algeria, the second war in Vietnam, etc. – as well as having the nukes leaning over his shoulder. In that context, the cold war male was expected to be heroic and aggressive. And of course the target of aggression was the Cold War female. Now, in other generations in which war figures so heavily, destitution or sacrifice also figures. Yet one of the brilliant things about the capitalist-war machine is that war brings affluence. Given this, the aggressive cold war male’s status became tied to himself as both provider and cocksman. It is important to bring in, here, as a necessary supplementing social factor the fact that rise in the divorce rate in the post-war era was male-driven.

The result of these combinations was borne by the cold war woman and the cold war children. It was, I think, an amazing generational experience for the children to see how the marriage broke up and the provider, the heroic provider, didn’t provide. Not only was there a lack on the emotional level, but even on the promised level of affluence. These were the children of the deadbeats.

My idea is that this was devastating, on the unconscious level, to the imago of the male. Hence, the generation that was born at the end of the cold war and is having children now, both the males and the females, have to cope with the ruins of masculinity – for the father role has been thoroughly trashed. One way of coping is through a new image of passivity. However, as we all know from Freud, passivity is not the opposite of aggression.

On the social level, these are all factors in the great turning inward. It isn’t just that unions were battered to death, or the party system became so entangled with entrenched power that, in almost all the developed countries, there is no longer an organized opposition to entrenched power – it is also that the aggression, the heroic cast of the Cold war, which was oriented in so many ways to the world outside of the private sphere – as though the tips of those ICBMs were pressed up against the back of millions of heads – has now been so discredited that there’s a sense of exhaustion about public matters. Who would have predicted, in the early fifties, for instance, that the summer in which the American political establishment was gingerly debating the first step towards the socialization of medicine, that the public’s eyes would be riveted on a bunch of celebrity deaths? Or on anything that reminds one of cocooned private histories.
Obviously, I, a son of the cold war indeed, am ambiguous about the discrediting of the heroic male. There’s a definite dialectic loss there. And yet, who had it coming? Nemesis stalked the entire cocksman and coldwarsman culture, and saw how shallowly that hedonism was rooted, and how many crimes it accumulated, how much misery it shed. The strategy of hiding one’s head like a turtle, however, is not the answer.

Cutting out our tongues, and serving them up in a rich stew

I was going to devote this week on News from the Zona to news from Iraq, adopting, as I have done before, Titus Andronicus’ principle:


“Enter TITUS dressed like a Cook, LAVINIA veiled, Young LUCIUS, and others. TITUS places the dishes on the table
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Welcome, my gracious lord; welcome, dread queen;
Welcome, ye warlike Goths; welcome, Lucius;
And welcome, all: although the cheer be poor,
'Twill fill your stomachs; please you eat of it.
SATURNINUS
Why art thou thus attired, Andronicus?
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Because I would be sure to have all well,
To entertain your highness and your empress.”

Like Titus, I would like to busy myself cutting and dealing in pie – meat pie, boy pie, girl pie, the bloody pies of Iraq, which seemed, at one time, to so charm an American public that, with a cretinous smile and patriotic hearts bursting to revenge 9/11 on anybody but the, uh, perpetrators – who were away in safe havens in Pakistan to provide the cutest little threat that ever dumped money into a defense contractors hot little hand – this self same public, le peuple in all their glory, allowed itself to be led to the feast by a usurper and a fool, only to find – alas – that there was more in the cooking than could be well borne in the eating, and that the tongue grows weary of all those human all too human bones. But eat up! Eat up! There is always more meat pie.

Such was my purpose. But I am going to swerve from this rich, indigestible topic, and comment instead on news from the zona. In particular, on David Leonardt’s piece on the ‘miscalculation’ of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil – otherwise known as Obama’s economic advisors, Geithner, Romer and Summers.

“To make the case for a big stimulus package, they released their economic forecast for the next few years. Without the stimulus, they saw the unemployment rate — then 7.2 percent — rising above 8 percent in 2009 and peaking at 9 percent next year. With the stimulus, the advisers said, unemployment would probably peak at 8 percent late this year.

We now know that this forecast was terribly optimistic. The jobless rate has already reached 9.4 percent. On Thursday, the Labor Department will announce the latest number, for June, and forecasters are expecting it to rise further. In concrete terms, the difference between the situation that the Obama advisers predicted and the one that has come to pass is about 2.5 million jobs. It’s as if every worker in the city of Los Angeles received an unexpected layoff notice.”

Uh huh, as Li’l Kim might say at this point. It turns out that if you look at the glass from the top, it is full of sparkly water from the finest springs, and if you look at it from the bottom, the thing has been fucking dry for ages. The see no-s have concentrated on the great task they saw before them – to make sure that the richest level of Americans were as well off now as they were in 2007. And to this task they devoted the major portion of the government’s resources – not simply TARP, but the amazing Fed loan program – which has its equivalent in the Arabian nights tale of the hawker who bought tarnished pots for gold. And thus, and thus, my lords, was an opportunity squandered and the great squeeze put in its place. Did the treasury and the fed take the giant predatory financial sector companies and put them through the rigors of bankruptcy, such as befall the poor schmuck who gets behind on the Visa payments? They most definitely did not. Did they set up modalities in the vast and living banking system that allowed consumers to trade their own pots for gold – in other word, trading in old debts for new debts at the 2 percent rate? Oh no, for such deals smack of communism. Such deals are only meant for the Fed and its confederates, who need to be, what is the phrase? Oh, made liquid again. Yes, liquidity – the very sound has something of saliva in it, something silvery, something glittery, does it not?
And so the models, apparently, don’t understand:

“These models, which are also used by Wall Street and various research firms, do a decent job most of the time. But they are notoriously bad at forecasting turning points because they are based on an assumption that the recent past will more or less repeat itself.”

This is, of course, a smoothing out, a tidying up of why the models are bad – which has nothing to do with the recent past repeating itself and everything to do with the notion of market clearing. For the models are premised on that old hoax, the Dr. Moriarty of economics, known as the self-adjusting market. Ah, that dear old fiction, the market, which dances to the beat of an equilbrium while magically mounting higher and higher! The models, shall we say, are top down models, and find it frankly unscientific and pathetic that there should be any other. For why should the bugs have a say in the choice of the bug spray? This, and none other, is the beginning of Economics 101, taught to fresh faced predators everywhere. But my model, to which I am sticking in spite of the see no-s, is the mangle of inequality. A mangle that has enmeshed a greater and greater number of souls, as it was obvious it would not just to the Marxists among us, but also to those who have attentively studied Memlinc’s pictures of the Last Judgment.

TITUS ANDRONICUS
Will't please you eat? will't please your
highness feed?
TAMORA
Why hast thou slain thine only daughter thus?
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Not I; 'twas Chiron and Demetrius:
They ravish'd her, and cut away her tongue;
And they, 'twas they, that did her all this wrong.

who owns the copyright on the invasion of Iraq?

The war is over, the war is not over.


I received a book a few months ago that I have not yet had time to read: Savages and Scoundrels: the untold story of the American road to empire through Indian territory by Paul Vandevelder. It is a story all Americans know, really – how every treaty between an Indian nation and the U.S. was merely an instrument used to remove the Indians from the soil, to exterminate them or push them into uninhabitable territory, or to disperse them utterly within the American cosmos as though they had never been.

“Even in the 1830s, James Fenimore Cooper could see how this story would play out. By the end of Natty Bumpo’s life, in The Prairie, the famous frontiersman realizes that the freedoms he imagined, so beautifully symbolized by the vast and unfenced panorama of the American West, would inevitably be transformed into cruel illusions.”

Every American war has a strain of Cowboys and Indians in it. It was simply more so in the Iraq fiasco. The dialectic between the stated principles underlying the American mission (contravening reality with the sort of lunatic delight characteristic of the Bushites) and the mean, atrocious, measly way the war was managed for the profit of the few and the misery of the many (a misery resulting in two million refugees and half a million Iraqi deaths, as the valedictory articles in the papers will resolutely not inform us) from the Green zone was a speeded up version of past American exterminationist ventures, with its faux humanitarianism, its penchant for creating “reservations”, its denial of self interest in the midst of vast and shameless profit-seeking – this was the war that was.

To ‘celebrate’ the holiday – Maliki’s end of the war holiday – I went back to Limited Inc and tried to find some item in the midst of my mental morass to comment on. I hit on a curious theme that emerged in the first months of the occupation – the part played by that sinister company, SAIC. A San Diego company with no record of experience in Iraq, SAIC was the beneficiary of some astonishingly generous contracts. SAIC, for a while, even paid the Iraqi Council – in a deal in which the Bushites literally rented out the government of the country. SAIC controlled the first Iraqi tv station. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Not much attention is being paid to the renting out of Iraq to SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation)-- which is apparently the plan hatched by Paul Wolfowitz and Smilin' Jay Garner. Iraq has already been graced with a paramilitary group, flown out at Pentagon expense, to surround the eventual proconsul of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi. Now the Pentagon is flying out a group of exiles to take over Smilin' Jay's ministries -- including the ever juicy Oil Ministry -- and they are paying them, for reasons unexpressed in the press releases, through SAIC -- an employee owned defense tech company. SAIC is run by one J. R. Beyster, who has worked, in the past, in Los Alamos. SAIC was last in the spotlight for buying the company that has the privilege of deciding who gets domain names on the Internet. At that time, a lot of paranoia was generated among the true net-cognescenti by the composition of the Board of Directors. Yes, here's a bunch of fun facts to know and tell: that board of directors has included former National Security Agency chief Bobby Inman, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, and the former head of research and development for the Pentagon, Donald Hicks, ex-CIA Director Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense William Perry, and another ex-CIA Director John Deutch

Business 2.0, to its credit, has an article this month that explores the super-secretive SAIC -- although it is explored in the gung-ho spirit of geek patriotism. As long as they use neat technology to curtail our freedom, it is alright with Business 2.0.



Here are a few excerpts to make you confident that we are in good hands -- xray hands, the hands of Donald Rumsfeld and company:



SAIC is now the country's largest privately held infotech company, with 2002 revenues of $6.1 billion. About a third of SAIC's business is systems integration for other companies, such as Pfizer (PFE) and BP (BP), but its heart and soul is spy tech. Intelligence agencies don't list or rank their contractors. Intelligence sources, however, say SAIC was the NSA's top supplier last year and in the top five at the CIA. In addition to the high-powered data-mining software that helped nail Mohammed, SAIC makes undersea thermal imaging sensors for tracking submarines. It produces software that spy satellites use to map the earth and feed target data to precision munitions, including those that have been pounding Iraq. It's also a leader in the booming homeland security business: It builds gear that uses gamma rays to peer inside cargo containers and truck trailers. Adding to SAIC's covert aura, Beyster has hired an unusual number of former spies, law enforcement chiefs, and secret warriors. Some 5,000 employees -- roughly one-seventh of the workforce -- have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest arrays of top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country. "We are a stealth company," says Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer. "We're everywhere, but almost never seen."

My interest in SAIC was diverted by the downward turn of events in Iraq. Curious about how good the war was for SAIC, I searched the net and found a nice, juicy article on them by Donald Bartlett and James Steele, published in Vanity Fair in 2007. SAIC is proof that even a bad war can be very very sweet for investors

“SAIC maintains its headquarters in San Diego, but its center of gravity is in Washington, D.C. With a workforce of 44,000, it is the size of a full-fledged government agency—in fact, it is larger than the departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined. Its anonymous glass-and-steel Washington office—a gleaming corporate box like any other—lies in northern Virginia, not far from the headquarters of the C.I.A., whose byways it knows quite well. (More than half of SAIC's employees have security clearances.) SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 activefederal contracts in all. More than a hundred of them are worth upwards of $10 million apiece. Two of them are worth more than $1 billion. The company's annual revenues, almost all of which come from the federal government, approached $8 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, and they are continuing to climb. SAIC's goal is to reach as much as $12 billion in revenues by 2008. As for the financial yardstick that really gets Wall Street's attention—profitability—SAIC beats the S&P 500 average. Last year ExxonMobil, the world's largest oil company, posted a return on revenue of 11 percent. For SAIC the figure was 11.9 percent. If "contract backlog" is any measure—that is, contracts negotiated and pending—the future seems assured. The backlog stands at $13.6 billion. That's one and a half times more than the backlog at KBR Inc., a subsidiary of the far better known government contractor once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, the Halliburton Company.”

At the time, I wondered why SAIC was the stealth company of choice for Iraq. As Steele and Bartlett make plain, the Iraq invasion was sort of a stepchild of SAIC. They financed propaganda for it, they rolled out their military analysts as early as 1998 to make the case for it, and once the invasion started, it was SAIC that organized the Iraqi “advisors”:

David] Kay [a former U.N. official associated with the first Gulf war] and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis "are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a "military analyst." It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC's board of directors and a company stockholder. (Downing was also the chief proponent of a weapons system called Metal Storm, capable of firing a million rounds of ammunition a minute; SAIC received $10 million from the Pentagon to develop prototypes, but in the last two years the Metal Storm company has lost millions.) In the run-up to the war, David Kay remained outspoken. He told NBC News in October of 2002, "I don't think it's possible to disarm Iraq as long as Saddam is in power and desires to maintain weapons of mass destruction."

On all these points Kay and Downing were buttressing the views of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Bush administration. They were also echoing the assertions of Iraqi exiles living in the United States, who had been trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein for years. Many of those exiles—people like Khidhir Hamza, a onetime atomic-energy official in Iraq, who insisted that Saddam posed an imminent nuclear danger to the United States—would in time receive paychecks from SAIC. Although his evidence had long been discredited by weapons experts, Hamza was among about 150 Iraqi exiles designated by the Pentagon as members of the newly chartered Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council. The plan was that, once American troops secured Iraq, the I.R.D.C. recruits would move into influential positions in a rebuilt Iraqi government.

SAIC served as the paymaster for the Iraqi exiles under a $33 million government contract. It brought them all together in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, rented apartments for them, paid their living expenses, provided various support services, and, later, after the invasion and occupation, flew them to their jobs in the new, democratic Iraq. This SAIC operation reported to Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, a key assistant to Rumsfeld, and one of the architects of the Iraq invasion and occupation. Feith's deputy was Christopher "Ryan" Henry, a former SAIC senior vice president.”

And so it goes. Matt Taibbi maintains that TARP was essentially a Goldman, Sachs operation, mounted by former Goldman Sachs employees to rescue Goldman Sachs butt. Throw in the SAIC influence on the war in Iraq, and you have an x-ray of power in the U.S. And, honey, that power ain’t exercized by the people. The human product are just supposed to watch tv and nod their heads.