Export Janet.

"... on behalf of the
Entertainment Industry Coalition
for Free Trade (EIC),
we appreciate the opportunity
to appear before you...."
-- Testimony before the
U. S. International
Trade Commission
at mpaa.org

From the CNN transcript of Lou Dobbs Tonight, Friday the 13th of February, 2004...

DOBBS: Joining us tonight... Steve Forbes, the editor and chief of "Forbes".... Mark Morrison, managing editor of "Businessweek"........

MORRISON: We'd all like to see more job creation and less exporting of jobs. But coming to the right answer as to achieving that, what policy changes, can we make? We don't want to go down a protectionist road.

DOBBS: Why not?

MORRISON: What would you suggest?

DOBBS: Why not?

You want to know what I would suggest? You go first.

FORBES: I don't want another depression.

DOBBS: You don't want a Great Depression. Do you think Smoot-Hawley caused the depression?

FORBES: It certainly contributed to it.

DOBBS: Oh, for crying out loud. The fact of the matter is, that...

FORBES: Do you want to go to North Carolina and say to the BMW workers send the jobs back to Germany?

DOBBS: I haven't made a proposal yet and Forbes is all over me here.

FORBES: You want to have a lively show, keep your ratings up.

(LAUGHTER)

DOBBS: Yes, we'll do that talking about Smoot-Hawley.

The fact of the matter is...

FORBES: Culture... Janet Jackson Act.

DOBBS: The fact of the matter is, we're exporting our wealth at an alarming rate. We simply cannot continue this. And we've got 3 trillion dollars in IOUs. You tell me, at some point you are going to have to make a decision, either you are going to have free trade that has mindlessly led us to this point, or you are going to have fair, managed, mutual trade and build the economy back up.

FORBES: The trouble with managed trade it's managed by politicians.

DOBBS: Well, I'd rather it be managed by politicians...

FORBES: Managing anything is something to be avoided and deplored. There -- our economy today.

DOBBS: There are politicians who care about working men and women in this country. Who care about long-term wealth of this economy [more] than heads of multinationals who are indifferent.

FADE OUT; BACKGROUND SOUND:

Can I Get a Witness?

Profile in Courage:

Bush Distances Himself from Aide
on Exporting Jobs

Thursday, February 12, 2004  1:23 PM ET

"The (economic) numbers are good. But I don't worry about numbers, I worry about people," Bush told students and teachers at a high school in Pennsylvania -- a pivotal state in this year's election and one of the hardest hit by factory job losses during his presidency.

Without mentioning by name the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, Bush said he was concerned "there are people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas" and vowed to "act to make sure there are more jobs at home" by keeping taxes low and by retraining displaced workers. Bush offered no new initiatives to curb outsourcing and aides said he opposed restrictions on free trade.

"You can fool all of the people
all of the time."

-- Art Buchwald

The Smoking Stovepipe

"What appears to have happened is this. Sometime soon after 9-11, the neocons persuaded the president that invading Iraq was the next crucial step in winning the war on terror and evil in which Divine Providence had chosen him to be the Churchill of his generation. And if the country and Congress were unconvinced of the need for war, it was his job to convince them.

And here is where the administration began to cross the line. To persuade us that Saddam was a mortal threat to which the only recourse was war, they needed evidence. But, apparently, there was little or no hard evidence to be had. No smoking guns....

First, they decided on war. Then they sent everyone out on a global scavenger hunt to find the evidence to prove we had no alternative but war. And though the information that came back was suspicious and the sources suspect, at least it pointed, as desired, in the right direction.

And, so, the hawks fed it to their propagandists in the press and 'stovepiped' it to the White House, where it soon began to appear in the statements and speeches of the president and his War Cabinet."

-- Patrick J. Buchanan, Feb. 11, 2004

Happy birthday, Abie baby.

"Every totalitarian leader claims that, in himself, he is nothing at all: His strength is only the strength of the people who stand behind him, whose deepest strivings only he expresses. The catch is, those who oppose the leader by definition not only oppose him, but they also oppose the deepest and noblest strivings of the people."

-- a column opposing the president at foreignpolicy.com.

On Exporting Jobs

The liberal view:

"Outsourcing raises American productivity, gives our economy a boost, increases foreign demand for U.S. products and leaves us better off."

-- Nicholas D. Kristof
   in today's New York Times

The Perot view:

"Perot Systems, the computer services company founded by former presidential candidate Ross Perot, is all set to add about 3,500 jobs in India and move into two new facilities there this year."

-- Times of India, Feb. 7, 2004

The conservative view:

As noted by Pat Buchanan in yesterday's entry, the conservative view is strongly anti-free-trade.  This view currently seems best defended, not by Buchanan and Perot's largely defunct Reform Party, but instead by the Communist Party... in, for instance, its incarnation as the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).   See the Committee's World Socialist Web Site for details.

See particularly the World Socialist account of demonstrations against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Miami last year:

Legal observer details police violence
against FTAA protesters in Miami.

Supporters of free-trader John Kerry might consider taking the Communists a bit more seriously this year.  There is no credible challenge to Bush from the right, but a challenge to Kerry from the disgruntled left -- in the form of write-ins, stay-at-homes, and votes for obscure leftist candidates -- could tip a close election in Bush's favor... as Nader did in 2000.

George W. Bush,
Liberal!

Part I:

Part II:

A search on liberal "free trade" leads to the following quote:

"One of the central concepts of classical liberal economic thought is the superiority of free trade over protectionism."

Therefore George W. Bush, by courageously advocating free trade despite its political unpopularity, is a classic liberal.

Part III:

Context for the above quote:

The Liberal Agenda for the 21st Century

George W. Bush's free-trade policy
fits right in.

Part IV:

The Conservative Alternative...

Patrick J. Buchanan,

author of "The Death of Manufacturing"

and A Republic, Not an Empire.

"Let it be said: George Bush is beatable. He has no explanation and no cure for the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs at Depression rates, no plan to stop the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to Asia, no desire or will to stop the invasion from Mexico.

Yet, he remains a favorite against Kerry, because Kerry has no answers, either. Both are globalists. Both are free-traders. Both favor open borders. Again, it needs to be said:  There is no conservative party in America."

-- Patrick J. Buchanan, Feb. 2, 2004

Not yet, there isn't.

Hermes and Folded Time

Yesterday's entry on painter Ward Jackson and the philosopher Gadamer involved what is called hermeneutics, or the art of interpretation.  Gadamer was a leader in this field.  The following passage perhaps belabors the obvious, but it puts hermeneutics clearly in context.

From Daniel Chandler's Semiotics for Beginners:

"The 'tightness' of semiotic codes themselves varies from the rule-bound closure of logical codes (such as computer codes) to the interpretative looseness of poetic codes. Pierre Guiraud notes that 'signification is more or less codified,' and that some systems are so 'open' that they 'scarcely merit the designation 'code' but are merely systems of "hermeneutic" interpretation' (*Guiraud 1975, 24). Guiraud makes the distinction that a code is 'a system of explicit social conventions' whilst 'a hermeneutics' is 'a system of implicit, latent and purely contingent signs,' adding that 'it is not that the latter are neither conventional nor social, but they are so in a looser, more obscure and often unconscious way' (*ibid., 41). His claim that (formal) codes are 'explicit' seems untenable since few codes would be likely to be widely regarded as wholly explicit. He refers to two 'levels of signification,' but it may be more productive to refer to a descriptive spectrum based on relative explicitness, with technical codes veering towards one pole and interpretative practices veering towards the other. At one end of the spectrum are what Guiraud refers to as 'explicit, socialized codes in which the meaning is a datum of the message as a result of a formal convention between participants' (*ibid., 43-4). In such cases, he argues, 'the code of a message is explicitly given by the sender' (*ibid., 65). At the other end of the spectrum are 'the individual and more or less implicit hermeneutics in which meaning is the result of an interpretation on the part of the receiver' (*ibid., 43-4). Guiraud refers to interpretative practices as more 'poetic,' being 'engendered by the receiver using a system or systems of implicit interpretation which, by virtue of usage, are more or less socialized and conventionalized' (*ibid., 41). Later he adds that 'a hermeneutics is a grid supplied by the receiver; a philosophical, aesthetic, or cultural grid which he applies to the text' (*ibid., 65)."

* Pierre Guiraud, Semiology (trans. George Gross), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975

Related material:

From Michalinos Zembylas on Michel Serres:

"Serres' use of Hermes is reminiscent of hermeneutics. The word derives from Hermes and implies that the idea of hermeneutics as a theory of interpretation (and consequently of communication) is necessary when there is a possibility for misunderstanding. Hermes translated the 'word of Gods'; an interpreter translates the written text, and a teacher 'translates' the literature....  Understanding then is aided by the mediation of a hermeneut.... According to Gadamer (1975), the pleasure such understanding elicits is the joy of knowledge (which does not operate as an enchantment but as a kind of transformation). It is worth exploring this idea a bit more since there are interesting connections with Serres' work."

There is also an interesting connection with Guiraud's work.  As quoted above, Guiraud wrote that

"...a hermeneutics is a grid supplied by the receiver; a philosophical, aesthetic, or cultural grid which he applies to the text."

Serres describes Hermes as passing through "folded time."  Precisely how time can be folded into a grid is the subject of my note The Grid of Time, which gives the context for the Serres phrase "folded time."

For more on hermeneutics and Gadamer's "joy of knowledge," see Ian Lee in The Third Word War on "understanding the J.O.K.E." (the Joy of Knowledge Encyclopedia).

The Quality of Diamond

On February 3, 2004, archivist and abstract painter Ward Jackson died at 75.  From today's New York Times:

"Inspired by painters like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, Mr. Jackson made austere, hard-edged geometric compositions, typically on diamond-shaped canvases."

On February 3, the day that Jackson died, there were five different log24.net entries:

1. The Quality with No Name 
   
2. Speaking Globally
   
3. Lila
   
4. Theory of Design
   
5. Retiring Faculty.

Parallels with the Helguera exhibit:

Florence Foster Jenkins: Janet Jackson in (2) above.

Giulio Camillo: Myself as compiler of the synchronistic excerpts in (5).

Friedrich Froebel: David Wade in (4).

The last Shakers: Christopher Alexander and his acolytes in (1).

Ward Jackson: On Feb. 3, Jackson became a permanent part of Quality -- i.e., Reality -- itself, as described in (3).

Some thoughts of Hans-Georg Gadamer
relevant to Jackson's death:

As noted in entry (3) above
on the day that Jackson died,

"All the world's a stage."

-- William Shakespeare

Attack Ad

Scholarship vs. Bullshit

"Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge." -- Vladimir Nabokov

An example of scholarship:

Paul Friedlander.

An example of bullshit:

Leo Strauss.

Further background:

Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq.

Government by Crackpots

Morning briefing:

Paul Krugman on Laurie Mylroie in today's New York Times...

Get Me Rewrite!,

Peter Bergen in the Washington Monthly...

Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons'
Favorite Conspiracy Theorist,

and Cecil Adams in the Chicago Reader on...

Leo Strauss and
the Neocon Crackpots.

Strauss lectured on Plato at the University of Chicago.  For more on Plato and philosophy at the University of Chicago, see the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.