Pundita

On June 10 South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun will meet with President George W. Bush in Washington for a one-day 'working' visit. This will be to discuss ways to bring North Korea back to the Six-Party Talks and strengthen the Seoul-Washington alliance. The alliance, if not in tatters, is at a low point; this is despite the help Seoul has given Washington in the war on terror, which includes providing the second-largest contingent of Coalition troops in Iraq.

The meeting can't come soon enough for Pundita because it's past time for the Congress, the Bush administration and the State Department to confront the fact that South Korea, not China, is the real power broker in negotiations with North Korea. To see this one must look past the trade figures--China is North Korea's biggest trading partner--and focus on the offshoring situation.

South Korea is the only country that does legal offshoring in North Korea (versus offshoring factories that make or process contraband). That's the real story behind the Sunshine Policy or rather how the policy works out in practice.

South Koreans are copying the strategy that Westerners use, whereby you turn a poor nation into an industrial plantation and work the Natives for a pittance, then export and sell for domestic consumption the manufactured products at a good profit under your company name.

The South Korean government has invested USD multimillions in building up North Korea's Kaesong Industrial Park, where three South Korean companies have begun operation during the past six months. Twelve other companies are scheduled to start up by the end of the year. South Korea, which is North Korea's second-largest trading partner, is also pressing ahead with agreements for new road and rail links to help boost trade over the heavily fortified border.(1)

South Korea likes the North for a plantation for the same reasons American businesses like China for a plantation. It represents a slave worker population that has no choice but to work for starvation wages and doesn't demand OSHA standards, vacation time, sick days or rest periods.

As a South Korean shoe manufacturer put it, "We have lots of reasons for wanting to do business in North Korea; the labor costs are lower than in South Korea or China and a North Korean worker pretty much does what he is told...stronger relations with North Korea is also good for South Korea's future. The last thing we want is for them to be our enemies."(1)

However, Washington is basing their assessment on North Korea's trade with China. Trade between the two countries nearly doubled between 2002 and 2004 to $1.39 billion. This makes China North Korea's largest trading partner, which is a major reason Washington wants to pressure China into taking a more proactive role in the Six Party Talks.

In an interview with Larry King aired on CNN on Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney said that China could have a big impact on reviving the multilateral talks with North Korea because it shares North Korea's longest border and is its chief trading partner.

Cheney also said that "The Chinese need to understand that it's incumbent upon them to be major players [in resolving the US standoff with North Korea over nuclear weapons]."

Yet he admits that this argument has to this date failed to budge the Chinese, who do not want to impose sanctions or other economic pressure on North Korea. The Chinese say want they want to resolve the dispute through "continuing dialogue."

"To date, you know, those talks have not produced much," Cheney said, in what is the understatement of the year.

His analysis ignores that South Korean trade with the North increased by 58% in the first three months of this year to $170 million, compared to the same period last year, according to South Korea's Unification Ministry. North Korea's trade with Russia grew faster over the same period, from $80.7 million to $218.4 million. (1)

These trade numbers will leapfrog with more offshoring production in the North in the coming year. So the China trade figure is deceptive when used as a measure of the power that China has over North Korea. Right now, South Korea is holding the high cards, although Kim Jong-il has seen the advantage of playing Seoul against Beijing.

Beijing's great interest at this time is in limiting Japan's power. Seoul has sided with Beijing and Pyongyang in opposing Japan's bid for a seat on the UN Security Council. The alliance against Japan is much broader than the UN issue. Both Koreas and China have serious issues with Japan, which have deep historical roots and which have come to the fore in recent years. Beijing is heavily promoting anti-Japan sentiment in China in advance of a possible military showdown over Taiwan. (Japan is a strong ally of Taiwan.) And Seoul's relations with Tokyo are the worst since relations started up again in the 1960s.

As for Seoul's relations with the USA, you don't have read the English-language press in South Korea for many days to realize that Seoul has encouraged anti-US sentiment at home while promoting pro-North Korea sentiment. A recent poll taken in Korea found that 39% of Koreans consider the United States the greatest enemy of the ROK, with North Korea coming in at 33%.(1)

I interject that is why John Bolton recommended going around the Seoul government and taking the US case against North Korea directly to the South Korean people--a sound recommendation that has been ignored and overshadowed by complaints regarding his strong language about Pyongyang.

So the way it stacks up, South Korea wants to do big business with North Korea. If China plays along, China receives support from Seoul for their case against Japan and the United States. Thus, Beijing would be foolish to apply pressure to Pyongyang because that would anger Seoul.

For their part, Seoul would be foolish to push for North Korea to open up to the outside because that would give businesses in other countries the opportunity to set up plantation factories in NK. That would take away a trading edge from South Korea.

Kim Jong-il is fine with keeping the country closed because if it opens up it's only a matter of time before large numbers of North Koreans learn what he's been up to for decades. North Korea is not China; it's only got about 22 million people and it's roughly the size of Mississippi. It's a little bitty country, which means it wouldn't take many hopping mad citizens to bring down the government.

The rationale for the Six-Party Talks is that the countries that have the most to lose from North Korea developing nuke weapons should be involved in negotiations about the North's weapons program. Pundita fails to understand the reasoning. Pyongyang obtained much of their nuclear weapons technology and materials from China and Russia, didn't they? So obviously, China and Russia are not all that concerned about a nuke threat from North Korea.

As for Japan, they already have China's nukes trained on them. I'm sure they don't want to see North Korea with nuke armed missiles, but their biggest problem is China. In any case, the argument that China is worried enough about North Korean nukes to lean on Kim Jong-il doesn't hold water.

As for South Korea, no matter what they tell the US government, all their actions during recent years with regard to North Korea parallel the actions of US citizens with regard to China. I seem to recall we fought a civil war that was mounted in part to outlaw slave labor. But when it comes getting cheap goods made by a bunch of Chinese thousands of miles away, hey, slave labor is okay. If the slavemaster is selling nuke technology to any regime that comes down the pike, if it's offshoring heroin and meth factories in every despotic country it can find, that's not our problem either.

That's also how the South Koreans feel about their neighbors to the north. They take their lead from the world's superpower nation. If we do it, it must be okay. So maybe Bolton could warm up for his talks to the South Koreans by first talking to the American business community and consumer.

None of the above speaks to the Crime, Inc. aspect of North Korea's business, which has an offshoring component. But all that for another day, except to note that Seoul swears they have stopped North Korean contraband from passing through their largest port. Pundita already believes in the Tooth Fairy, Tinkerbell, leprechauns and the Gold Dinar Fairy. That's enough irrational hope for any one adult to entertain.

(1):
Despite U.S. Attempts, N. Korea Anything but Isolated by Anthony Faiola,
Washington Post Foreign Service, Thursday, May 12, 2005; Washington Post, Page A18.

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1. Appoint a US ambassador to South Korea who is fluent in Korean and with extensive experience in East Asia. Mark Minton, who is holding things down at the embassy in Seoul, is a career foreign service officer with extensive experience in East Asia; he seems to speak Japanese and passable Korean so he might be the Man for the Job. In any case, put someone in the post who is very knowledgeable about that part of the part of the world and Korea in particular.

2. Remove Christopher R. Hill from his assignment as head of the US delegation to the Six-Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear issue. Mr. Hill does not speak Korean, Japanese, or any Chinese dialect. He speaks Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Albanian. Not speaking the lingo is not automatic disqualification for such a sensitive job but Mr. Hill is also an idiot. He's also an advocate of the Nanny School of foreign policy. This is where you lecture countries to try to get along, after you've put them together in an untenable position.

3. Also remove Hill from his new post as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, for the reasons cited above.

4. President Bush should personally ask Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to read the riot act to Yakuza bosses who are overseeing drug trade in North Korea.

5. President Bush should personally ask Vladimir Putin to read the riot act to Russian mob bosses who are overseeing drug trade in North Korea. If Putin says to contact the Israeli government for that kind of help, whatever; just get the riot act read.

6. President Bush should personally explain to President Roh Moo-hyun that it would be very unwise for South Korean lobbies in the US to attempt to block John Bolton's appointment as Ambassador to the United Nations.

7. Remove Condoleezza Rice from her post as Secretary of State.

8. Ask Donald Trump if he could spare George for a year then make George the Interim Secretary of State. This would be until President Bush can find an appointee who is more interested in doing a job than winning a popularity contest with the most powerful Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

9. The US should cut off all negotiations and back channel discussions with the North Korean government until Kim Jong-il and his crew decamp. They will leave very quickly if they lose the help of the most powerful international crime syndicates.

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On August 10, 1945...two young officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, were given the task to come up with a plan on how to divide the Korean peninsula. The time allocated for this undertaking was half an hour, the officers had little knowledge of the area and used a National Geographic map to divide the peninsula along the 38th parallel, thus splitting it exactly in half.

So begins a Wikipedia article on the dividing of Korea. Placed above the article is a red Wiki stop sign with the ominous words, "The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the relevant discussion on the talk page."

After reading through every comment on the talk page, Pundita finds no serious reason for the stop sign. Clearly, the author is not jumping for joy about the mess that the United States made with Korea but he provides a reasonably accurate account of how Korea was divided and how this played out. That throws much light on how the United States got from the Korean War to the Six Party Talks. The US can't hope to come up with good policy toward Korea unless we look squarely at how we got to this point.

"This point" to include the dustup between Seoul and Tokyo. This happened when a Japanese envoy told his South Korean counterpart to his face that Tokyo couldn't share US intelligence on North Korea's nuclear weapons program because the US government doesn't trust the South Korean government. You can imagine how that went over in Seoul, particularly after the envoy refused to retract the statement.

So Pundita asks that before you continue with this essay you read the Division of North Korea article. What I find striking about Korea is that this is one situation we can't blame on the French, the British, the Soviets or the Red Chinese, or the Japanese. Korea is one of the 'Tomorrows' we piled up while fighting the Cold War. Tomorrow has now come. We broke Korea; it's up to the United States to put it back together again--and hopefully in better shape than we found it in 1945.

That is one of two reasons why President Bush should order the US Department of State to immediately end the Six Party Talks, which are worse than counterproductive. Here's why:

With the exception of the United States, not one of the parties to the talks can provide a meaningful guarantee to Kim Jong-il if he agrees to order his military to dismantle the nuclear weapons program. In other words, by agreeing to negotiate with Kim's regime, the United States is boxed into accepting the regime if they comply with the US central demand. Tacking on a demand about addressing human rights violations has turned the talks into a free-for-all between Tokyo, Pyongang, and Beijing, with Seoul getting caught in the middle.

Kim has complained that the Japanese party to the talks brought to the table the issue of kidnappings of Japanese citizens--a human rights issue. This dredged up more discussion of Japan's human rights violations while they ran Korea and gave Beijing an opening to heap on complaints about what the Japanese did to the Chinese.

So this is the other reason for ending the talks: by bringing in the humans right issue, the US stuffed four dragons in a paper bag, shook it, then said, "Now all of yiz get along and negotiate for your best interests."

Then Washington wondered why Moscow heard their phone ringing every time Washington asked, "Can't you do more at those Six Party Talks?"

The third issue the State Department wanted negotiated by Russia, China, Japan, Seoul and Pyongyang is the opening up of North Korea to the outside world. But when large numbers of North Koreans learn that their government's method of population control is systemically starving the number down to manageable size, they will overthrow the government and kill the ruling class in Pyongyang.

There is no way that Kim's regime can open up the country; he would be forced to pull an Idi Amin, and his military and the ruling class would be left to face the wrath of about 19 million people. So that is a third reason for suspending the Six Party Talks: they have no basis in reality.

None of this means that the US should restart bilateral talks at this time. Before talk must come thinking. The question is how to organize thinking about Korea. I've chosen to start with separating two issues that got tangled together: the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation, and the issue of Pyongyang's role in the war against the United States.

Bush named three countries--Iraq, Iran, and North Korea--as making asymmetrical war against the United States via the use of terrorist armies. He didn't put it quite that way in his Axis of Evil speech, but that's what he meant.

I don't know whether there is intelligence to indicate that Pyongyang has cooperated directly with al Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and so on. But the US military has collected enough intelligence to make it indisputable that Pyongyang is and has been participating in the attempts by several governments to build the Arab Bomb. That ties in directly with the US war on terror.

So the nuclear proliferation issue is superseded by the US war on terror. Pundita ventures that the US Department of State and Seoul need to get very clear on that point. This is because there is now a distinct and fast-gathering possibility that the US military will conduct a strike against North Korea. Is there a way to avoid the strike? We'll discuss that question tomorrow.

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"Pundita, dear, I enjoyed Dave Schuler's charming coin story but I had to visit Wikipedia's article on the WTO, which you thoughtfully link on your sidebar, to find the answer to the questions you posed in your aptly titled Dim Sum Squad essay. You asked whether international patent law now supersedes domestic patent law and if so, "whose bright idea was that?"

The answer to the first question is yes if one amends "law" to read "de facto international law." No country has to be a member of the WTO but exclusion from the WTO constitutes a de facto embargo by the Big Three [US, EU nations, and Japan] against any or all of a nonmember's exports.

A nation can't be a member of WTO without accepting the TRIP rules. These are the rules that pertain to patent and copyright protections. Any nation breaking the rules is open to sanctions. This would include the United States.

Aspects of patent laws vary from nation to nation, and nations have latitude in how they enforce compliance with regard to TRIPs; however, if a nation wants to avoid the threat of sanctions, they must comply with TRIPs. The rules in part, as listed in Wikipedia, are as follows:

Copyright terms must extend to 50 years after the death of the author (although films and photographs are only required to have fixed 50 and 25 year terms, respectively).

Copyright must be granted automatically, and not based upon any "formality", such as registrations or systems of renewal.

Computer programs must be regarded as "literary works" under copyright law and receive the same terms of protection.

National exceptions to copyright (such as "fair use" in the United States) must be tightly constrained.

Patents must be granted in all "fields of technology" (regardless of whether it is in the public interest to do so).

Exceptions to patent law must be limited almost as strictly as those to copyright law.

In each state, intellectual property laws may not offer any benefits to local citizens which are not available to citizens of other TRIPs signatories (this is called "national treatment").

The penalty for breaking the rules is potentially very stiff:

...unlike other international agreements on intellectual property, TRIPs has a powerful enforcement mechanism. States which do not adopt TRIPs-compliant intellectual property systems can be disciplined through the WTO's dispute settlement mechanism, which is capable of authorising trade sanctions against non-compliant states.

Now to answer your second question. Bringing nations under a de facto international law on patents and copyrights was chiefly the US government's bright idea or to be more specific, it was Pfizer's bright idea, which they sold to the US government.

...the United States strategy of linking trade policy to intellectual property standards can be traced back to the entrepreneurship of senior management at Pfizer in the early 1980s, who mobilised US corporations and made maximising intellectual property privileges the number one priority of US trade policy.

Of course this was before AIDS became epidemic in Third World countries but there you have it: One the one hand, the US and other developed nations will end up spending billions to fight the AIDS epidemic in Africa, India and China with medications that are hideously expensive because of TRIPs rules. Is this what you mean by the loop de loop?
Boris in Jackson Heights"

Dear Boris:
I think you might be the most cynical of all my readers. But yes, that's an example of the Loop de Loop. However, don't discount Dave Schuler's contribution because he focused on untangling the rationale for the Monsanto chapati patent and similar patents. For that, one needs to learn about the aspect of TRIPs that deals specifically with biotechnology. That's what Dave ferreted out and focused on--Article 27.3(b). To really understand why the G-20 nations are upset about TRIPs, you need to know about that particular rule--and to know about the G-20 (or G-21; the number of members, as with the Coffee Club, waxes and wanes).

The G-20, as distinct from the G-77 (the world's poorest nations), represent the world's middling developing nations. Don't let the 'middling' fool you. China, Brazil and India are members, as are major oil exporting nations such as Mexico, Argentina, and Nigeria. So taken as a bloc, the G-20 represent 65% of the world's population.

But that's not the key statistic when it comes to understanding the outrage directed at TRIPs and specifically Article 27.3. Here are the statistics to keep uppermost in mind:

The G-20 represent 72% of the world's farmers while representing only 22% of the world's agricultural output.

Taken together, the statistics suggest that no small part of that 65% of the world's population has to import food. If basic foodstuffs such as rice and wheat are patented, that ups the price for the imports.

The 22% figure is also important because the G-20--and indeed, the entire anti-globalization movement--is bent out of shape because of the WTO double standard. The most powerful nations in the WTO retain trade protections and subsidies for their farmers and the farm output. At the same time, the nations demand that the little guy nations drop their protections.

To keep the charge about a double standard in perspective, the G-20 should remember that without the G-7, there would be no international trade to speak of. So they can hop and down outside the G-7 annual meeting all they want; it won't change the fact that they depend greatly on the big fish for their survival and progress.

However comma it's crossing the line that separates Darwinian Survival from Greedy Fool when one starts patenting the staff of life. This is because anyone can play the patents game. So with 65% of the world's population as the brain pool, it's only a matter of time before inventions that are critical to the G-7 peoples emanate from G-20 nations. For all we know, tomorrow could see an invention from a genius in a Peruvian village that makes petroleum obsolete or puts Microsoft out of business. Then the patent shoe will be on the other foot.

What's the tiebreaker? As with solving many problems, common sense and common decency go a long way. If you ask Americans what an inventor is, they think of brain-busting labor. They don't think of a technician who takes a bit of wheat, puts it in a gizmo connected to a computer, then watches the computer print out the genetic code of the wheat and then patents the printout. That's not invention. That's use of modern and very expensive technology.

That kind of behavior, when codified and protected by a powerful international trade organization, is definitely on the Greedy Fool side of the line. The ghost of Pericles could tell you where that side leads; it leads inexorably to little guys ganging up and launching war that can last a generation and bring down a mighty civilization.

I will close with a passage from The Glittering Eye essay:

Once again narrowing the focus to the intellectual property law of biotechnology, Article 27.3(b) of the agreement micro-organisms, non-biological, and microbiological processes must be eligible for patents. Governments may elect to exclude plants, animals, and “essentially biological processes” from patent protection but plant varieties must either have patent protection or some sui generis system created especially for the purpose (or both)...

The paragraph indicates that governments can elect to practice common sense, and common decency, when it comes to interpreting how patent laws are applied to critical export products. Good foreign policy should be directed at encouraging all exporting nations to take that path.

The quotes in Boris's letter are from the Wikipedia article on TRIPs . You might want to review the Wikipedia article on the WTO (see Pundita sidebar link "What is the WTO?") before starting on TRIPs.

Well, I intended this post to be about North Korea, which means I did not meet my goal to publish three essays today. The other two will have to wait until the weekend, which bumps forward to next week other essays in the works.

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Note to the Reader: Also see the most recent Pundita essays on the Khodorkovsky verdict and sentencing: ...The Brothers Karamazov, The Death of Ivan Ilyitch, Doctor Zhivago, the charges against Khodorkovsky... (May 26) and Mikhail Khodorkovsky bemoans Russian Justice, Anne Williamson tries to map Hell (June 1).

Breaking News! The judges are almost halfway through reading the charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev! Monday the judges managed to zip through 150 pages of the charges. There is a rumor that the youngest judge has taken to wearing pancake makeup and sprinkling in sentences from The Idiot when it's her turn to read the charges.

Lebedev continues to work on his crossword puzzles, Khodorkovsky continues to scribble notes and complain about the travesty to justice. Aw pipe down, bubba; K you ain't.

Meanwhile, the Tory backbench has breathed a collective sigh of relief. The Western press hailed the opening of the Caspian oil pipeline as a great triumph and another blow against Russia. The Reuters story was typical of the spin given to the news:

Oil started to flow into a U.S.-backed pipeline on Wednesday which will carry Caspian oil to the West and loosen Russia's stranglehold on exports from the region. The pipeline, built by a multi-national consortium led by British-oil giant BP, will eventually pump more than 1 million barrels a day from Azerbaijan along a circuitous route through Georgia to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan in Turkey.

The venture is helping to redraw the geopolitical map of the turbulent Caucasus, reducing the region's economic reliance on Moscow, and will also give emerging oil giant Kazakhstan an outlet to Western markets that bypasses Russia.

"Circuitous" and "turbulent" are considerable understatements. So what does it all mean? It means that the United States of America, not the United Kingdom, will be left holding the bag, when military intervention is needed in the countries through which the pipelines run. It means that the United States of America, not the United Kingdom, will bear the lion's share of the financial burden for bringing those countries out of the Middle Ages. It means that the United States Department of State needs to be shut down until an army of forensic accountants can get in there and piece together what in the hell the State Department has been up to since the Yeltsin era in Russia.

Meanwhile, the electricity failed in large parts of Moscow yesterday, exposing for all the world to see what everyone in Russia has long known, which is that the oligarchs pillaged Russia to such an extent that Russia's infrastructures are held together with duct tape and paper clips.

Meanwhile, Peter Lavelle at Untimely Thoughts reviews Vladimir Putin's smart plan to trim OPEC's sails. If Lavelle is right, it might be back to the drawing board.

Part of the Kremlin's damage control campaign as it assaulted Khodorkovsky and Yukos was to present foreign investors with an enticing investment alternative to Yukos. Yugansk was to be merged with the last remaining state-own oil company Rosneft and later that new entity would be added to the portfolio of natural gas giant Gazprom. Collectively, these three companies would be poised to not only to become the largest energy conglomerate in the world, but also able to compete with petroleum cartel OPEC. This new energy giant and Russia's new national champion would be open foreign investors. At present, foreign investment in Gazprom is limited and regulated by the state.

This was to be the happy end to an ugly story. The above scenario is unlikely to play-out anytime soon as the architects of the "Oligarch War" against Khodorkovsky and Yukos are fighting over the spoils and demanding their right to record victory in history.

I'm not sure the picture is quite that bleak. One would think that common sense would prevail but of course this is Russians we're talking about. And happy endings are un-Russian.

On the plus side--for those who would like to see the OPEC cartel broken up--there's no dearth of smarts in Russia. If the Kremlin plays it smart they have a clear shot at taking down OPEC. Surely the possibility is not lost on the House of Saud, so we can assume they are lobbying hard in London and Washington.

The formula is falling into place: the smarter the Kremlin's moves on the petroleum chessboard, the more we'll hear from the Get Putin Gang in the US and the more machinations we'll see from US and British-backed "democracy movements" in Russia. The machinations will give Moscow little choice but to move closer to Beijing.

It would be tacky to ask why the American portion of those machinations wouldn't be better channeled into a sound energy policy for the US. Study the Investech chart that Mover Mike publishes in his Oil Price in USDs and Employment essay to back up his contention that oil is cheaper in Europe than the US.

Is there a way to stop the madness? Yes. But not without first shutting down the US Department of State until an army of forensic accountants can get in there and piece together what the hell the State Department has been up to since the Yeltsin era in Russia.

There is a clear choice forming for the Republicans: get control of the State Department or Eliot Spitzer will be President of the United States and maybe as soon as 2008. The American people won't really looking for a president by that time if things continue on; they'll be looking for a prosecuting attorney who knows how to deal with mobsters and white collar criminals.

However, there are strict limits on how much blame can be shifted to State--or the British government or any oil consortium or the Saudis--or any American transnational corporation, for that matter. The bottom line is that you cannot expect a policy of rational self-interest for a country as a whole, if you place what is essentially a transnational corporate lobbying mechanism into a foreign office--then keep the whole shebang closed to congressional scrutiny. So the ball bounces into the court of the American voter.

For those readers who are having a hard time following, I refer you to two essays I published about the Office for Commercial and Business Affairs (CBA) at State: The America Desk and More on the America Desk . I advise that you read those essays as if your life depended on it.

Please don't write to tell me that surely, since 9/11, it's no longer official that business concerns drive US foreign policy because that would be suicidal. The CBA needs to be entirely removed from the State Department, and State's intelligence agency needs to be shut down or rather transferred to the CIA.

Do not expect the White House or even the Congress to make such recommendations without the American voter setting up a howl. Without that howl, State can and will destroy the career of any elected official--up to and including the US president--any Pentagon general, and any whisteblower who tries to take on The Forbidden City.

Go ask Bill Clinton, if you don't believe me--or ask the US general who was ordered not to provide adequate protection to the U.S.S. Cole at port in Yemen so as not to offend the Yemen government. Or ask John P. O'Neill--oh wait I forgot; you can't ask him, he's dead--murdered on 9/11 along with thousands of other Americans.

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Dave at The Glittering Eye has come through with a plain English explanation of how it came to be that Western companies are taking out patents on stuff such as chapati wheat and getting the Developing World riled at the USA in the process. Click on the link to bring up his report titled The sound of coins. The coin story alone makes the essay worth the read.

As promised, for his efforts Dave will receive the recipe for Pundita's Very Own Brand Demon Repellent, for use only while visiting Trotskyite websites (or, if the emergency need arises, for use as an improvised Molotov cocktail). OR Dave may elect to have lunch with Pundita at Taco Bell the next time he visits the Greater Washington, DC region.

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"Dear Pundita, what do you think of the proposed Kennedy-McCain immigration bill?
Claudia in Taos"

Dear Claudia:
The bill reflects very specific immediate actions with regard to a visa program--but very hazy long-range proposals with regard to security:

Title I: Border Security

Requires the development of various plans and reports [that evaluate] information sharing, international and federal/ state/ local coordination, technology, anti-smuggling, and other border security initiatives.

Establishes a Border Security Advisory Committee made up of various stakeholders in the border region to provide recommendations to the Department of Homeland Security regarding border enforcement.

Encourages the development of multilateral partnerships to establish a North American security perimeter and improve border security south of Mexico.

In effect, the Kennedy-McCain bill asks for studies of the security situation. That is working blind and putting the cart before the horse.

First do the studies, set up the committee, and allow the DHS to review the recommendations. Then, based on the recommendations made by the DHS (and the Pentagon), draft immigration legislation that is specifically designed to take the security angle into account.

Other very important studies should also be commissioned and completed before leaping in with legislation. The United States is seeing a resurgence of infectious diseases that were wiped out in this country. The US is now on the verge of a leprosy epidemic. Not only leprosy but also tuberculosis, polio, and several other serious diseases are threatening the American population and with attendant costs to industry and families, not to mention "the taxpayer."

The path for reintroducing 'extinct' diseases to the US is via foreign visitors of all kinds--tourists, students, immigrants both legal and illegal, and so on. The question is how to set up health screening for the legal visitors, including temporary guest workers. This task should not be left to the US companies employing temporary workers. Nor should it be left to the companies that have come to depend on illegal workers. We need the screening program in place first, before making any legislation with regard to updating visa programs.

We also need to study the "immigrant" practice of buying single-family dwellings for use by multiple immigrant families. To my knowledge the only study done on this situation was by Gary Painter and Zhou Yu of the University of Southern California's Lusk Center for Real Estate; they based their study on analysis of 1990 and 2000 US census data. I have not read the study, which was mentioned almost in passing in a Realty Times column by Al Heavens on immigrant buyers:

[The study authors] also found that immigrants pool resources to buy one home for multiple families, which California new-home developers have been reporting for at least 10 years.

I doubt the study went deeply into the phenomenon and of course the latest census was conducted prior to the effects of very low interest rates on home buying patterns by immigrants. In any case, many immigrant homebuyers in the US are not actually immigrants--they are temporary workers, but they sell the house to other such workers when they return home.

In other words, American homebuyers who conceive of a house as a place to put down roots and raise a family are now in competition for housing with foreigners who snap up houses for use as dormitories.

One can sympathize with the practice--after all, guest workers have to live somewhere, and the east and west coast housing market is now such that an average one-family dwelling is around $500,000. But the housing squeeze in California is now such that companies in the state that desperately need employees can't attract American workers from other parts of the country because housing prices are prohibitive for all but the rich--or for those willing to live with other families in dorm fashion.

To my knowledge the phenomenon hasn't been formally studied on the east coast but from anecdotal accounts many eastern companies surely face the same problem as the California counterparts.

So there is a vicious cycle in motion: The companies need workers, but the housing isn't available for the workers. That forces companies to seek employees who don't mind bunking several families to a house. That's not the American Dream for born Americans or true immigrants--those who want America to be their permanent home.

The dream might have to undergo considerable revision if the housing squeeze on the coasts is not simply a bubble. But that's why we need a study on the immigrant-housing situation before we can work out good legislation pertaining to temporary foreign workers.

Also, more Americans need to understand that the US realty profession is salivating over the huge profits that can be made if more illegals become homeowners in the USA. See: Reaching Out To Undocumented Immigrants by Al Heavens at the Realty Times site.

The studies I mentioned--on security, disease, and home buying patterns--need to be coordinated by one commission. And conducted before trying to cobble together proposed legislation that represents a compromise with the many interest groups pushing hard for immigrant legislation reform "right away."

And before plunging in with more hasty and poorly-researched legislation, it might also be a help if senators McCain and Feingold explained how they were taken for a ride by George Soros with regard to "big grassroots support" for the campaign finance reform bill. I suppose the senators can blame their aides for not looking more deeply into the polls and the "grass roots" organizations. However, this kind of situation tracks back to Yossef Bodansky's complaint about congressionals who are in over their heads when it comes to studying intelligence reports on critical defense issues.

Congressionals are now asked to make recommendations and legislation on numerous highly complex and diverse issues that have huge international ramifications--and without adequately trained staff to help them. The upshot is that congressionals tend to rely on policy institutes and lobbyists to help fill in the data/analysis blanks. This process doesn't necessarily produce bad conclusions, but in the case of the bill you mentioned--and all proposed legislation with regard to immigration--another disaster is in the making.

For details on the Kennedy-McCain bill, see Daily Kos for an overview (and study the comment section for some informative and bitter remarks).

For an eye-opening look at the bicoastal housing squeeze and some jaw-dropping statistics, visit the PBS website for a transcript of the Real Estate Boom segment by the PBS NewsHour with Jim Leherer on May 17. Note that renters are also being squeezed out in California cities.

For earlier Pundita essays on Mexico-US relations and the immigration situation, visit The Mexico Desk

.

The following is from the first part of my discussion with Michael Wright, which I omitted from Part 5 of the Stuck at the Intersection of Government and the Mass Age series in the effort to chop down a very long post. If you are a new reader, the URL for the first five parts of the series is shown at the end of this post.

White Noise

P: I’ve noted four trends and how they interact to create a kind of white noise. Taken together they screen out situations that are vitally important for the American public to understand.

One trend is the industrialization of academia; that, combined with the US federal government’s expansion and reliance on academic opinion, eclipsed the generalist and created a tyranny of specialization in government policy and planning. That blocks Americans without relevant academic credentials but with relevant experience from advising the government about problems the post WW2 administrations have been tasked to deal with.

Running alongside this trend, and fed by it, is a journalism profession that by the 1970s had ossified into a collegial sphere, which excluded “experience-based” reporters in favor of credentialed journalism majors.

By experience-based I mean people whose knowledge of a situation or field comes from direct experience rather than research. The trend toward “soft” news that began in the 1980s brought some of those people back into media, but “hard news” editorial policy became dominated by journalism professionals. This created the weird situation of an empirical endeavor—reporting—dominated by theoretical views.

Running alongside those trends, and fed by the Cold War, is a foreign office—the US Department of State—that by 2000 had gathered more power than all three branches of US government. This is an opaque power, remarkably evocative of the Mandarins’ power under Chinese dynastic rule.

The fourth trend is the industrialization of the American two-party political system. An army of professionals from sales, marketing, legal, statistical, accounting, public relations, fundraising, and various academic fields raised up to sell product to the political party machines and their candidates.

The industry depends on framing every issue under the sun in political terms, which puts the cart before the horse. That’s why large numbers of Americans know nothing about an issue but know exactly where they stand on it. The industry that serves the two-party system is not focused on informing, it’s focused on winning a war.

M: You’re saying that not any one of these trends but how they interact screens out a lot of what’s happening from the general public and makes simple solutions hard to see.

P: There are contributing factors, and trends spinning off from the four I outlined but yes; put those four trends together and there’s no mystery why citizens of the most advanced, powerful society in history were totally unprepared for the 21st Century.

M: I’d push that observation back to the late 20th Century. The hi-tech and dotcom bubbles bursting, the Enron scandal, the 9/11 attack and what the Bush administration considered to be the betrayal by the French and German governments over Iraq—all those collapses reflected situations that had been building for years before the turn of the century. But they came as a surprise to the public, as did massive offshoring of US hi-tech and clerical jobs.

Loop-de-Loop

P: What I’ve seen for a long time is that many offshore situations fall back hard on America but there’s a looping situation. Bad trade, economic, development, and strategic policies originating in the most powerful Western countries have a negative impact on less developed countries that for one reason or another have a card to play against the Western countries. When the negative impact loops back to the USA, this brings forth more US policies that treat only the symptoms, which loops back on the other countries, which loops back to the USA.

M: I’m thinking of China, of US policy toward China during the Cold War and since.

P: China is a perfect example. However, the loop-de-loop is an old story in civilization. What’s new is that given today’s human population number, it doesn’t even take some guys with a major case of road rage or a government’s sneaky covert war to wreak wide-scale havoc. Bad policy ripples fast among large populations, and the ripples are virtually impossible to stop or control.

The flip side of the loop-de-loop is that the mountain of policy mistakes during the past 40 years represents a trove of data, which if mined properly can provide solutions that short-circuit the loop. And the flip side of the problems generated by large populations is that there are unprecedented numbers of people who have experience solving just about any problem you can think of.

M: That way of looking at things helps explain your optimism, which I don’t share. You’re saying the problem has generated its own solution, if we could find a way to utilize it.

Stop, Look and Listen

P: It could be argued that to view a situation in problematical terms is to initiate the first stage of a solution but yes, this is an incredibly hopeful time in history to be living through. I suppose I see things that way because I speak with so many people—

M: [laughing] Pundita walkabout routine. Keeping in touch with the realm.

P: Don’t be mean or I’ll clam up. I prefer to think of it as my Miss Marple routine—

M: Washington, DC as the village of St. Mary Mead.

P: People from all over the world and from all over the country, and from every walk of life, head for Washington, DC and Northern Virginia during the spring and summer; they do so for different reasons, not just for tourism. So what better way to learn what visitors to my village are thinking about the USA and the world than to strike up conversations with them?

M: I see you more as Holmes, disappearing from Baker Street for days on end, putting on a disguise and chatting up—

P: Well, no. It’s learning to adopt the village mentality at least temporarily: everybody minding everybody else’s business. Village life is stifling because of that attitude. On the other hand, the behavior of a couple kids walking around in full-length black overcoats in summer weather doesn’t go unnoticed and unremarked.

M: The Colombine murderers.

P: Yes. A neighbor of one of the boys said after the massacre, “If only we’d noticed things in our neighborhood, we might have alerted his parents that he was acting strangely, but we just never had the time to notice what with commuting and work.”

M: A street full of neighbors living as complete strangers; that’s modern life in many places. So you try to get around that and what the national media presents about America—

P: Regular conversations with Americans from all around the country prevent my thinking from being too much Inside the Beltway and remind me that there’s much intelligence and experience in this country; the amount is staggering, if you stop to think about it. We really benefit from our immigrant heritage.

M: Okay but all that intelligence and experience isn’t reflecting at the political and government levels.

P: At the macro level, often not, although one shouldn’t underestimate the intelligence of Bush’s democracy doctrine. He’s not getting his ideas out of thin air; he’s sketching conclusions that have been rolling around the development/foreign policy establishments for years.

Many people have figured out that there’s a cause-and-effect connection between a free society and unleashed creativity, of the kind needed to fuel market-driven economies and avert aggression against other countries. Bush’s contribution has been to emphasize the need for genuine democracy instead of a stage show.

The problem is translating that observation into sound policy regarding government aid, development loans and private sector investment in developing countries. It’s at that level where you see idiocy. But if you dig deep enough, you can usually find someone in government who knew it was idiocy and argued against it, and got shot down.

M: So he—

P: Or she—

M: So he or she is up against a system that favors compromises, or a prevailing view, or a bureaucratic culture or whatever, instead of the best solution.

P: They are not “up against” the system; they are part of the system. Government isn’t set up to be a problem-solver; it’s set up to govern, which translates to a containment approach to problems. The bright ones figure that out soon after they go to work for government or they become very cynical or live on anti-depressants. In a democratic government, the best you can do is put forward a good idea, fight for it as hard as you dare, and hope that the prevailing political winds catch it and blow it forward.

M: But now, since 9/11, there’s a lot of pressure on governments here and around the world to actually solve problems that have taken decades and even centuries to build.

P: The pressure is increasing, all around the world. The Internet and satellite TV is bringing problems to light that were long hidden.

Stuck at the Intersection series
(In order of publication)

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/is-there-
traffic-engineer-in-house.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/your-
village-called-theyre-missing.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/stuck-at-
intersection-part-3-nope-guru.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/stuck-at-
intersection-part-4-this.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/05/getting-
unstuck-part-5-stuck-at.html
.

"Dear Pundita, If many governments are as you say crooks, how is it possible for the US to make policy with crooks?
Takako in Honolulu"

Dear Takako:
That is a fair question. The answer is that you don't make policy for crooks or law-abiding governments; you make policy for the era and consistently apply the policy.

The age of globalization came and intersected with megapopulations and the scramble by poor governments to make oil payments and build up their arsenals. And nobody--no major government--was ready for the upshot, which was crime on a scale we haven't seen since the days of Genghis Khan's youth.

The Khan hadn't imagined how many crooks there were in the world but as his conquests proceeded he found out. The same key factors were in play at that time as now. There was a boom in global trade--the globe at that time. The boom was fed by the demands of the walled cities, which fed a population boom. The upshot was that a caravan couldn't travel two miles without being set upon by brigands or marauding tribes, which meant payoffs, which bumped all the way up to highest government levels.

This was accompanied by price gouging, usury, and every type of dirty business and corruption you can think of. All that led to cities living under constant threat of attack.

All that was accompanied and fed by a level of hypocrisy that would be right at home in today's world. The Khan saw it all. He saw the Chinese mandarins and the emperor worship they promoted. He saw the Calculator Christians, who totted up conversion rates while stepping over starving Christians. The Turks lectured him about Islam. He looked at their showy mosques and how they treated women and the poor. He told them to their faces they were phonies.

In short, it was chaos. All the gains civilization had made during the preceding few centuries were in danger of being wiped out. With the help of a brilliant Chinese bureaucrat, the Khan saved the day. He did this in many ways, some of them horribly ruthless. Yet the single greatest reason for his success at ruling over so many peoples was a fair code of laws that he enforced with consistency; consistency meaning no exceptions, not even for the Yakka Mongols--his own tribe.

The upshot was that, "A naked virgin carrying a sack of gold could walk unmolested from one end of Genghis Khan's empire to the other."

The key concepts are fairness and consistency of application. There is not a single factor to explain the rise and scope of globalized crime, just as there is not a single factor to explain criminality. There can be different reasons why governments come to rely on crime. However, there is only one reason governments in the modern era consistently get away with crime: that's if other governments employ a double standard in their relations with criminal governments--a standard that shifts with the expediency of the moment.

People can adjust to a double standard if it's consistently applied; what they can't adjust to is a high level of uncertainty. If you have the means to force people to live according to your shifting political whims, you breed the sense among them that nothing can be relied on, that integrity is a penalty, that truth has no meaning. So then you should not wonder why, when criminal behavior becomes rampant.

Policy begins not with your expectations of others but with how you conduct yourself. It begins with the rules you lay down for your company or government's conduct. If the rules are inconsistently applied, "foreign" policy is a joke. As with any joke, it won't be taken seriously.

One General Temujin--Genghis Khan--was quite enough for world history. We now have much experience to guide us, so humanity should be able to avoid the need for another supercop of the magnitude represented by the Khan. The ball, however, is in our court.
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"Pundita, I strongly disagree with your statement [in May 19 post] that US foreign policy shouldn't take radical Islam into account. The Saudis, the Iranians, and other Islamic governments have exported extremist Muslim views, which strongly color their policy toward America. US policy has to take that into account."
Jan in Reston"

Dear Jan:

So where do you think the State Department should stand on Ahl-i Hadith or the argument about whether Shias are kadir? And what do you mean by "extremist" Islam?

The Saudi government did not export extremism; they exported their claim to be the rightful guardians of Mecca and Medina. The claim is hotly contested from many quarters in Islam. That is why the Saudi government poured many billions of petrodollars into defending their claim that Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab's teachings represent normative or "true" Islam. That Wahibism is denounced as false by many Muslims, and seen as an extreme form of Islam by many non-Muslims, are entirely separate issues.

All three issues, and the thousands of issues arising from the three, are quicksand for any nation's foreign policy. You cannot do foreign policy around religious issues, any more than you do it around tribal or clan issues. Foreign policy in the modern era is N2N: Nation to nation (national government).

Western academics who supported their families by opining on the Soviet Threat saw funds dry up for their university departments and think tanks once the union was dissolved. So some looked at al Qaeda's attack on the US as manna falling on the desert. However, to frame foreign policy in terms of an Islamic Threat depends on viewing Islam as a 'world' then saying effect, "We have to do foreign relations with this world."

There is no world or nation of Islam--any more than there's a nation of Christianity or Judaism and so on. Those who claim that religious sensibilities have anything to do with the way the world works need to get their head out of the clouds.

I once warned that it's important to keep in mind that George W. Bush is a member of the ruling class. Perhaps I could have put it more clearly if I'd written that he also thinks like a member of that class. In any case you didn't take my warning to heart. So allow Pundita to pull aside the curtain and reveal at one glance what I've been saying in bits and pieces over many essays.

When President Bush said that he'd looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and seen a person he could deal with, he was speaking to the Saudi government. Here is Pundita's translation of what he said:

You have a choice: You can kill or capture every member of al Qaeda you can find. Or you can helplessly watch as the American government teams with the Kremlin to bring down OPEC. Have a nice day.

This is not to denigrate the efforts of CENTCOM and the Coalition militaries and intelligence agencies that have turned themselves inside out to fight al Qaeda and similar terror organizations. Many hands make light work. But you can trace a line between Bush's slowly hardening rhetoric during the past year toward the Kremlin and Abdullah's decision to stop clowning around with excuses--a decision that needed to be demonstrated by more than token actions, I might add, before Bush would start to believe.

Bush has said there are to be no more US "deals," of the kind characterized by US policy during the Cold War. I like to think he's telling the truth but he has also brought US foreign policy back to where it should be, which is behind defense policy. Part of that means breaking the hammerlock of Cold War deals that are still with us, and which work against US defense.

There was no deal made with the Kremlin--unless you want to read Bush giving Putin a ride in his pickup as a deal. Yet every Gulf government knows that Bush is not bluffing. At any moment, he could reverse direction again. If that happens, we'll see the end of OPEC. I hope Vicente Fox is taking notes.

If the Saudis are worried that an Iraq with the Shia majority in charge will lead to yet more challenges from within Islam to their authority, they should think of it this way: President Bush is helping them prioritize their worries.

That's foreign policy. That's how it's done. All the rest is confusion. I hope the US Department of State is taking notes.

Readers who are new to Pundita's blog might wish to look at The plot thickens: Putin takes on OPEC.
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December 2004

I, in America, listening to John Batchelor in Jerusalem talk with Robert Alter in Wales. They are discussing Alter's work to translate the five books of Moses. With millions sitting by the radio and hanging on every word, Alter is discussing -- a word. "Seed" to be exact.

How to get at the essence of what Hebrew scholars were trying to convey thousands of years ago? How to intuit what Alter terms "a little puffy cloud of abstraction," the significance the scholars attached to the word "seed" in writing about The Flood?

I scribble notes and ponder. For those of us awake to the scale of this war and the nature of the enemy it has become a duty to think hard on what is worth fighting to defend.

I remember overhearing my father ask my mother, "How could a country that produced Bach and Beethoven produce Hitler?" Of course it was a rhetorical question but small children don't understand the meaning of rhetoric.

It took me a few decades to work it out, but the answer to my father's question is that civilization is not self-perpetuating. It takes a conscious decision on the part of many people, a constant effort to be guided by conscience, a determination to struggle against barbarity.

Adolf Hitler was explicitly aware of that point although I didn't know it until I read an essay by Aisha Siddiqa Qureshi. Qureshi observes:

In his writings, Hitler clearly said that he is a barbarian who wants to express his primal instincts and Judaism says he can't. For him... the concept of conscience [is] "a Jewish invention; it is a blemish, like circumcision... I am freeing man from... the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a false vision known as conscience and morality."

I don't know how much stock to put in Quershi's thesis that "people are and have always been willing to hate the Jews [because] they gave the world the concept of objective right and wrong."

And I think most who are prejudiced against Jews are not well-informed enough about Jewish theology to think about them at the level Hitler did. But Hitler and his circle certainly understood that to take control of ideas of right and wrong they had to suppress attention to conscience. Can that really be done on a widescale basis?

Patrick K. O'Donnell, who was embedded with the Marines during the Battle of Fallujah, reported to John Batchelor last week that the Marines found many used syringes in the rubble. They also found vials of adrenaline and caches of cocaine.

That explains how the enemy is able to wire his own wounded with explosives, wire himself with explosives, and remain in a fighting posture even when surrender is clearly not dishonor. The jihadi warrior in Iraq is a druggie. He arrives at the gates of his imagined paradise stoned out of his skull.

So yes, it's possible to condition or drug a person into not referencing the dictates of conscience. The catch is that it's not possible to forge a civilization with such people. That's because the bedrock of human society is the ability to put oneself in the place of another. That ability is conscience.

If not for conscience there could be no civilization -- not even primitive tribal societies. For society to exist people must be able to ask themselves, "How would I feel, if this were done to me?" when they contemplate murder.

So Hitler spoke nonsense in saying he could both create an Aryan civilization and destroy conscience. One can't have it both ways. But of course the Nazis knew this. That is why they had to keep conquering, in the way a junkie has to steal more and more to support his addiction. It was the only way to keep the illusion going that it's possible to do anything you damn well please to others and suffer no great consequence.

It is the same for the present enemy and his talk of an Islamic civilization. At their core the Nazis and Islamic terrorists are a murder-suicide cult. Last man standing shoots himself.

Dear Pundita, Your blog is supposed to be about US foreign policy but I notice you write very little about the Middle East and China and I don't think you've written at all about the situation with North Korea, even though those regions are of particular importance to US policy at this time. I know you're examining what you consider to be fundamental issues, however, you also do a lot of writing about Russia and Mexico. Do you have a special interest in those two countries, or do you think they are of particular importance to US policy?
[Signed] Justin in Toronto"

Dear Justin:
The tendency in Washington has been to line up foreign policy behind issues that relate to the war on terror; e.g., violent radical Islam. This is despite the fact that Bush made it very clear in his Axis of Evil speech that the enemies we're fighting are states, not individual terror organizations.

Of course, from the military standpoint--from the standpoint of war--one has to study and deal with radical Islam and issues relating to terrorism tactics. But this is a job for the military and intelligence agencies--counterintelligence, psyops, counter-propaganda, and so on. To build foreign policy on all that diverts attention and funds from situations that gave rise to the terror-sponsoring regimes in Saddam's Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, and so on.

What's striking about all these regimes is that their political or religious ideology is not their chief characteristic. The chief characteristic is that they're crooks. Yet it's as if the cattle rustlers took over Dodge City and instead of looking at the situation that way, the Feds ponder the rustlers' religion, their views on totalitarian government, and agonize over whether they've smuggled a cannon into the town. That's hot pursuit of red herring.

Pundita doesn't like chasing red herring. So I asked, "How did so many governments in so many diverse cultures, and with such diverse histories, end up plain crooks during this era?"

I don't think you can begin to make effective foreign policy until that question is answered.

Thus, my special interest in Russia and Mexico. I like those two countries for contrast because they are so very different in culture and history and they're separated by vast distances. Yet their problems are strikingly similar.

What's also striking is that Mexico is the United States' next-door neighbor--yet the country might as well have been situated behind the Iron Curtain, for all the understanding that American foreign policy has shown toward Mexico. So I think it overlooks factors, if we simply blame the Cold War for bad US policy toward Russia today.

However, US Cold War policy got so entrenched in Washington that it's now hard for Washington to frame discussions about democracy outside the anti-totalitarian and anti-Communist arguments. Yet you can go down the list and find country after country where it's clear the regimes don't give a hoot about governing and economic philosophy; they'll float any rap but their only philosophy is about how to raise mega cash through crime.

The problem is that there is not one neat answer to the question I posed. There are a variety of factors that converged, then took on great force and momentum when globalized trade got off the ground. The upshot can be considered a 'system.' There is a powerful system in force, and it's this system that is the greatest enemy of civilization.

However, once a problem becomes systemic, it's very tricky to dismantle the system without crashing larger orders of systems. A case in point is the system of development bank loans. If you shut down all the development banks or even fiddle too much with the development loan model, you risk putting a lot of contractors out of business. That sets off a chain reaction, which can crash the society in a small country.

Another example is dismantling state-run major industries. It's a bad system but once it's a system, it has to be broken up very carefully.

Because more than one factor created the system of crook regimes, the question is how to prioritize the factors and whether repairs should be stepwise or coordinated across several factors.

One factor is that there's too much cash and specifically US dollars sloshing around the world. I suspect that diversifying from the dollar to a basket of currencies for oil and gold purchases would only be kicking the can down the road.

However, I leave that mess to what I call the Lords of the Craps Table--the central banks, BIS, OPEC, IMF, and treasury chiefs of the major developed countries. They're supposed to figure out how to sop up the oceans of dollars flooding The Casino--the international monetary system.

I've focused on a factor that is so obvious it's hidden in plain sight. The last person you'd call for advice on how to set up and maintain a workable government is a crook. Yet here we have gun runners, dope dealers, money launderers, counterfeiters, crooked accountants, and so on trying to master the intricacies of modern government. It doesn't work.

Saddam Hussein said many times that he had to be ruthless because it was the only way to maintain order in Iraq. Actually there are other ways, but they entail a detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of modern government, which Hussein and his technocrats didn't have.

When the governed population is small, you can wing it on the details. But once the numbers climb, and when a sizable portion are nomadic, you have to get the governing mechanics down pat; e.g, make sure the tax base is adequate. If that doesn't happen, the alternatives to maintaining social order are very ugly: brute force, or cutting down the population via mass murder (e.g., "ethnic cleansing") or driving large numbers away from the country.

Developing countries inherited or copied government administration from the Colonial imperialist model or mid-twentieth socialism. To the extent those types of central government administration worked, they were not designed to deal with the convergence of large populations and the complexities of the modern era of trade. Right there is the elephant in the world's living room. Getting the elephant to decamp is the foundation for sound foreign policy in today's world and the best way to carry forward the democracy doctrine.

The Russian judges seem about a twelfth of the way through the hundreds of pages detailing the counts against Khordokovsky and Lebedev and the verdict on each. Today they resume taking turns reading the pages aloud.

They do things differently in Russia. First of all, they don't have a trial unless it's about 99% certain the defendant is guilty. Then there is the tradition of reading out the details of the verdict. Khordokovsky's lawyers, knowing that most Americans don't have a clue about the way things work in Russia, are spinning the tradition to US journalists as yet another sign that their client is persecuted.

The details the judges are reading out, if you can stay awake through them, are illuminating history: a window on the breakup of the Soviet Union, which to this day is not accurately reported by the mainstream Western media.

Steve Cohen reported last night on John Batchelor's show that he's looking for a verdict today in the Khordokovsky trial; if the verdict comes, it will coincide with the showdown in the Senate between George Galloway and the Senate committee investigating the Oil for Food graft. Both events will have far-reaching global consequences.

If you missed Monday's Winds of War Briefing (compiled by Bill Roggio at The Fourth Rail and evariste at Discarded Lies ), Pundita advises you visit their most recent weekly roundup on war-related stories from around the world. Many events are converging in June, so you might want bone up now on war news before you find yourself trying to play catch-up.

Tip: Take special note during the coming weeks of official US statements/publicized intelligence reports about China.

Also, Bill Roggio is following and linking to data about the unfolding Newsweek debacle. See his essays on the topic and links to other good essays (e.g., Belmont Club blogs) on the same.

And if you have time, the RUSNET encylopedia biographies of Alexander Voloshin and Vladimir Zhirinovsky (Hat Tip: John Batchelor's website ) will help you sort through the complexities of deeply entrenched corruption in Russia's government and the US Senate's investigation of the Oil for Food Program.

To help put Voloshin's career and vast power in context, realize that the billions of USD looted from the Oil for Food Program are a drop in the bucket, compared with the billions looted from Russia during the decade following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Yet Voloshin was hailed as a "liberal democrat" by Washington officials and congressionals and seen as a martyr when Putin fired him. It's to be hoped that the revelations coming out of the Oil For Food investigation will finally wise up Washington and the American public.

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Vladimir "Lips" Zhirinovsky, "Gorgeous" George Galloway, David B. "Bunny" Chalmers, and Charles "Poofdaddy" Pasqua practicing for their American Idol audition.

Simon to Paula: Who told them there was a Four Tops-barber shop quartet-Frank Sinatra soundalike category?

Paula to Simon: Probably the ABC Primetime crew.

Randy: (Wrapping his head in a towel) Okay dogs, you got 15 seconds.

"Doowop Doowop doop doop diddy/
Talk about the boys from Ripoff City/
Talk to our bankers we ain't signed nothin/
Talk to our lawyers we ain't seen nothin/
O we're the same old song/
Just a diff'rent meaning with the billions gone/
So here is our love song, not fancy or fine/
We got you goin in circles/
And we did it ouuuuur waaaaaaaaaaay/
Doop!"

If you can stand it, here's today's news on the Oil for Food Shakedown investigation. Tomorrow, Gorgeous George faces off against Norm Coleman at the US Senate. Standing Room Only.

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Historian Mark Safranski, whose evil twin dabbles in the attempt to develop a rational set of rules for assessing threats to the US, shows a street fighting side in his bare-knuckle attack on Washington's Get Putin gang:

...Dick Morris, a former adviser to a Senate majority leader, a President and lately,Viktor Yushchenko, the new president of Ukraine, writes in the influential Capitol Hill paper Roll Call of a "Czar Putin" under whom "... the old Soviet Union will be back on the road to regional domination and the old ambitions of global power will return."

The otherwise sensible National Center For Public Policy Research with solidly Reaganite credentials, maintains a satellite operation called Center for the Future of Russia that is little more than a comical propaganda sheet for the Oligarchs (which makes one wonder if any unusually large checks have floated the National Center's way of late)...

Putin is not the enemy of the United States and he is a determined reformer who is by all reports, honest. Can that be said of Khordokovsky, Berezovsky, Gusinsky and the other Oligarchs who have looted Russia of hundreds of billions of dollars with the help of...crime lords and ex-Communist fixers? These characters do not have clean enough hands for any respectable American conservative to imagine they represent the free market or for any American liberal to pretend that these looters are democrats. In Chicago, we have a term for " businessmen" like the Oligarchs: " Mobbed Up"

These are ruthless men with very, very, large bank accounts and sinister motives who are trying hard to get the ear of official Washington because they would like to see the Bush administration begin to undermine Putin...

Whoever said foreign policy is dry stuff? I have only two quibbles. First, the oligarchs have long since gotten the ear of official Washington; the oligarchs are as much a creation of official Washington (during Clinton's era) as of Boris Yeltsin's clan. Putin was Washington's pet as long as he did what the oligarchs wanted, which was allow them to conduct business as usual.

My other quibble is Mark's statement that Putin is, "...censoring the [Russian] press through pressure, confiscation, intimidation and legal harassment."

The issue of press censorship in Russia is as complex as the influence of the oligarchs and their various foreign (non-Russian) backers on Russian media and the concept of "paid-for press" in Russia. The issue is further complicated for Americans because of the vastly different perceptions that Russians and Americans hold about the concept of censorship. In his analysis Perestroika 20 years later Peter Lavelle writes:

Unfortunately, under Yeltsin, most [of] the country's electronic media turned into a ghastly means for a paid-for-press to strike political enemies. Yeltsin was returned to office for a second term in 1996 because the free media he helped to create had lost much of its relevance.

For Putin, glasnost ("openness" or transparency) serves the purposes of the state--this comes nothing near supporting a Western concept of freedom of speech. It does not mean complete censorship. The almost shrill claims of the Western press about the end of freedom of speech in Russia are premature and exaggerated. Even with the Kremlin's desire to tame and intimidate the media into self-censorship, it is not hard to find print media and Internet content completely out of sync with the new Kremlin line."

But to get a handle on the debate, one needs to understand the Russian perception of censorship. In Lost in Translation: Russia's Political Lexicon Lavelle lists political terms dear to the hearts of Americans and shows how differently Russians interpret the very same terms. Under Censorship he explains:

This is the right and responsibility of the authorities to determine the quality and condition of the public sphere. Censorship has a large following [in Russia], hoping to see the end of paid-for political articles in the media, ending the transmission of pornographic images during primetime television broadcasts, and protecting what are believed to be national values.

Lavelle ends by noting:

"...if the West desires to win the hearts and minds of Russians concerning its own changing political lexicon to create a liberal democracy in its own vision in Russia, it should consider how the its lexicon gives every reason for Russians to resist and reinterpret the same lexicon.

I think it might come as a surprise to many to learn that we have a huge problem right here in the USA with "paid-for political articles in the media." It's just that the problem is not noticeable because the pay is one step removed from the actual media outlets.

Oligarchs (or anyone else, for that matter) with the big bucks to buy in as major donors to respected policy institutes or universities, or to start policy institutes, or hire big-name public relations firms with access to major media, have a direct line to the American public and with attendant influence.

Indeed, that's a big reason why the American public was unaware of the gathering threat from Arab terrorism. Rich Arabs who supported al Qaeda, and with the money to lavish on policy institutes ("think tanks") and public relations campaigns, used their access to the American press to tamp down questions about the rising tide of terrorist acts and divert attention from violent Muslim extremism.

One would think the American press learned their lesson after 9/11, but the same pattern is playing out with the Get Putin movement. I don't think it's McCarthyism for an American reporter to ask a source for a list of their donors and to mention it in the report if the source has financial ties to an Oligarch (particularly those with known ties to organized crime).

And it's time for members of the Get Putin movement to realize that in Russia, much censorship comes not from the government but from mobsters settling scores. For Russians to wrest control of their society from the mobsters and the oligarchs will take more than urging more freedom of speech on them.

The above quibbles aside, I am glad that Mark Safranski has found time away from the esoterics of Rule Set theory to deploy his knowledge of Russia. This is helping his fellow Americans (and one hopes this includes Americans in Washington) make sense out of modern Russia.

The question is how many in Washington are interested in making sense out of Russia, or any other foreign country. American policy has struck out on such a new direction and on so many fronts that Pundita suspects cognitive weariness is setting in. Since 9/11 official Washington has been on a steep learning curve about many subjects. ("What the hell is the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni?" "Are Kurds Arabs?") I suspect weariness is causing some to set up cognitive base camp around the simple, easy-to-grasp notion that all workable foreign policy comes from the barrel of a gun.

Actually, all workable foreign policy is backed up by the barrel of a gun, but the "workable" part requires that policy not get lost in translation. For that, policymakers need to acquire understanding of subtext--what the other side means when they say something. Avoidance of that necessary step brings negative consequences--as Safranksi notes when he reminds the Get Putin gang of what's waiting in the wings, if "Putin's replacement proves to be a hapless stooge and Russia goes off the rails in the direction of a failed state armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons..."

In the face of confusion it's tempting to fall back on what one knows best. But it would be a very bad idea for Washington to attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance by re-starting the familiar groove of the Cold War.

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"Pundita, re your last two posts about illegals and the war on terror. Do you want to see lettuce go to five bucks a head? Then keep it up. The Yuma lettuce grower's association just told the border patrol in western Arizona to back away from some of the checkpoints because the growers don't have enough illegals to harvest the lettuce.

I think you're one of those people who are cursed with foresight. You would never have gotten on the Titanic. You would have counted the lifeboats and said, "No way." I'd bet $100 you never stepped foot in the World Trade Center. I bet you said, "Too high."

To use your favorite expression, that's not how things work down here on earth. First we crash into the iceberg, then we go back to the drawing board."
[Signed] Caesar in San Francisco

Dear Caesar:
What you mean "we" kemosabe? A popular thesis is that the dinosaurs were wiped out by atmospheric conditions brought on by a meteor or asteroid hit. But then how come the possum survived the same conditions? I always listen carefully to Charlotte--the possum member of my team--because her clan memory goes back over 70 million years. That clan of critters survived virtually unchanged all those years. And they survived living with the dinosaurs.

Popov once tried to lure Charlotte into a taxi by opening a box of lemon Krispy Kremes and eating one donut after another in front of her. Incidentally, this is my enemies: utter ruthlessness. She stood there and watched him eat all the donuts in the box. When I asked why she put herself through that, she replied, "I needed the box."

After he threw the box out of the taxi and took off, she collected the box. As a bonus she got pieces of Krispy Kremes left in the box. She reported that toward the end he wasn't able to finish each donut.

Wildlife have a good grasp of the concept of boundaries, even though the highly abstract concept of "nation" tends to elude them. So when I asked the possum for her fix on the illegals situation, she reminded me of a couple reports I'd mentioned to her a few years back:

Many villages in Mexico are now virtual ghost towns because Mexicans have left to work in the USA. There's not enough Mexicans left to farm and harvest crops in these villages. And the people left in the villages don't want to do the hard farm work because they can collect more from remittances sent by relatives working in the US.

I've spoken with Americans from Pennsylvania and Ohio who tell me there's no work to be had in their regions because all the plants were shipped offshore. These people were losing their mortgages because they couldn't make the payments. They were living on the dole; their unemployment checks had run out a long time before.

Charlotte asked why the jobless Americans don't take up residence in the deserted Mexican villages and support themselves by doing farming.

When you stop and think it through, she has a point. Gringos are welcome in Mexico up to a certain line, which has to do with spending dollars and making jobs for Mexicans. But I doubt the Mexican government is big on the homesteader concept.

Yet that would be a solution, wouldn't it? If hundreds of thousands of broke Americans in the Rust Belt are willing to homestead in Mexico--where's the beef? If Mexicans and US employers don't feel they're really committing a crime by working here illegally, this view should be a two-way street.

Actually, the pay in Mexico that many Mexicans are snubbing for pay here in the USA works out to more money than many Americans are subsisting on right now.

And what about all the broke and starving Africans, Haitians, and so on, who are coming here to work? Many of these people have a serious hard luck story. So, if there's plenty of land and jobs going unfilled in Mexico because so many Mexicans want to live and work here--why can't the Mexican government liberalize their immigration policy? Show a little more compassion toward the truly downtrodden of the world? And actually, Mexico is paradise to people who are fleeing, say, North Korea and Burma.

To put this another way, the Mexican government is full of hot air, and so are the Americans who make a living off advocating for Mexican illegals. They all know that their arguments don't hold up to logic or the American standard of compassion.

If an industry is built on breaking important laws and exploiting the very poorest, that's not business, is it? It's organized crime. For that reason I don't eat lettuce, unless it's locally grown--in Maryland or Viginina--and I know the farmers. And no, they don't charge five bucks for a head of lettuce.

You would win the bet but it wasn't the height of the twin towers that troubled me. It's that the higher you go, the more precautions you should take and this wasn't done. They cut up those towers for offices in the same way they cut up much lower buildings. It seemed to me they needed a lot more exits for such tall structures.

However, that's not why I never entered the towers. It's because I considered them unlucky. When I was a little kid I visited San Xavier del Bac, in Arizona. My mother told me to notice that one of the towers wasn't finished. She told me that the Indians who built the church for a Catholic priest refused to add the final touch.

She said they told the priest that humans can get on the wrong side of the gods when they build something very grand that reaches to the heavens. They explained you should always leave something unfinished, to show the sky gods that you're not trying to take their place.

Pundita doesn't know whether that's the real story behind the unfinished tower but it made a deep impression.

For links to other Pundita essays on Mexico, US-Mexico relations, immigration from Mexico and the Mexico-US border situation/war on terror, see Mexico Desk.

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Liz and Pundita continue the dialogue started in The bridge ahead and the bridge here now....

"Pundita, you ask what would happen to the Mexicans who depend on work in the US, and their employers, if the unthinkable--a catastrophic terror attack against the US--happened. That's taking the view, "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later."

I agree with your view, wholeheartedly.

Plans don't have to be perfect, or even constructed for a particular disaster scenario, to apply with success--provided the plans are "worked at" and don't sit on the shelf. Basic plans for how to respond to a disaster can be quickly adapted.

For example, Merrill Lynch got their people out of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attack and maintained operations because they had a disaster plan for a hurricane sweeping up the East Coast and pounding Manhattan.

The Wall Street Journal was able to put out a paper the day after the 9/11 attack because they had vowed to never be subject to a failure of a single location; this came about as a result of an electricity crisis in New York years before.

And the United States Secret Service had a plan for backing up data and proper archival after the Oklahoma City bombing. However, the plan was never funded by the Congress, so during the 9/11 attack their Manhattan office lost precious, probably irreplaceable, evidence for ongoing investigations.

The moral is that disaster plans must be conceived and acted upon, even if imperfectly.

If a disaster from a terrorist attack occurs, there are two possible means I can see to lock down the US-Mexico border; neither is politically acceptable now--though, depending on the nature of the disaster and how clear a trail there is pointing at Mexico, either could become so.

First, we could use military force to create a lethal barrier until a physical one can be emplaced. The military can come from activating the remaining reserves and (especially, even appropriately) federalizing the National Guard. However, this detracts from our ongoing obligations elsewhere in the world, and in the interests of the war, we must not do that. Of course, our enemies probably play a little chess too, from time to time, and may have considered that. This adds to the rationale for finding another option.

The second possibility is to adapt the recent Minutemen project in conjunction with the time-honored Western tradition of citizens at arms protecting what the local government is too thinly spread to do: the local sheriff deputizing an appropriate number of townsfolk, and so forth.

Of course, the federal government has the Constitutional responsibility for foreign policy, and border control is a matter of foreign policy. Therefore, it would seem to me that the federal government would have to charter these forces.

To minimize the inconsistency of enforcement by these new folks, organization and at least some training, establishing a set of Rules of Engagement (ROE), clear means of identification of the real border enforcers, and at least some vetting of volunteers (MS13 need not apply) must all be established. Unfortunately, they would probably need to be established on the fly.

For all those reasons, and the logical consequences of them, I agree with your arguments. Getting Washington to listen is not high in my expectations while Senators are more concerned with stopping an appointment of a second- or third-tier Executive in the EPA to force the outcome of an administrative dispute in a Senator's favor. On the other hand, Ronald Reagan demonstrated that mobilizing the people tends to mobilize the Congress, albeit with varying degrees of alacrity.

Oddly enough, another possible means of changing things in Washington would be to end the gerrymander. While this would probably take too long for our current problems, two items stand out for me:

Some states have established independent commissions to draw district boundaries, and those states do have some moderate turnover in the Congress (more in the House, of course).

And the House, as a whole, has a lower turnover than the British House of Lords. If the legislative branch had its tenure threatened, it might be a tad more responsive to the vox populi.

The second observation represents a longer-term solution, but the American public can move surprisingly quickly when something gets our attention, so I don't rule this out as a possibility, no doubt to be taken in conjunction with other tactics.

Regarding your suggestion that the US exert greater pressure on Mexico to make needed reforms--of course, there will be those who would resent our role in accelerating the reforms, but they are not likely to be our citizens. The resenters would probably be those losing privilege/having to pay taxes for a change, i.e, the wealthy and well-connected of the Mexican establishment. So their resentment should not be a governing factor in US policy toward Mexico.

I think the reforms, and the changes they bring to Mexico, will come sooner or later, because the Mexicans will not stand by forever when they can see other possibilities. If we are proactive in adapting to the changes, we protect ourselves and we may earn goodwill from Mexicans who realize that we nudged the reform process along.
[Signed] Liz in USA

PS: You might be interested in the post-9/11 book, Planning for Survivable Networks. It needs updating, and it deals specifically with keeping cyber networks safe from security disasters and planning for a dependable recovery strategy. However, its premise, which is planning for the unthinkable by planning for what we know and can imagine, is applicable to the points you raised and which I've addressed in this letter."

Dear Liz:
Thank you for an instructive and comprehensive reply. There is a third possibility other than the two you discussed or as adjunct. The San Diego-Union Tribune reports that a little known 1996 law authorizes state and local governments to enforce immigration status. (Hat tip: Bruce Kesler) A California assemblyman, Ray Haynes, has introduced a constitutional amendment in the Legislature that makes use of the law. He's drafted a companion measure, which he intends to offer as a ballot initiative. Both proposals seek the same end: creation of a California Border Police agency to enforce immigration law at the border and in the state's interior:

The goal is to block illegal immigration at its source and crack down on employers who hire undocumented migrants.

"The total mission is the comprehensive, statewide uniform application of federal immigration laws," Haynes says. "That's the only job they have. I want to keep it real simple, real focused, real straightforward."

Haynes concedes that it is not entirely clear how much the state can do without the federal government's permission. The law he cites permits state and federal partnerships under federal control. A pilot project under way in Florida operates under strict rules of engagement.

"Basically, you enter into an agreement with immigration and customs about where you can enforce and what you can enforce," he said. "A lot of that is subject to negotiation."

Haynes...envisions a new agency modeled after the Highway Patrol, with mobile agents patrolling near the border, conducting sweeps of employment centers and investigating employers suspected of hiring undocumented workers. Illegal immigrants picked up by state agents would be held until the federal government took them into custody for deportation.

Haynes holds out little hope that his proposal will be approved in the Legislature, where it would take a two-thirds vote in each house to place it on the ballot. But he has enlisted the help of Rescue California, the political committee behind the 2003 recall of former Gov. Gray Davis, to help him gather signatures....

What's particularly interesting about the proposal is that Haynes has attached it to reality. He points out the obvious, which is that the Mexicans who are being fed into the illegal system of work are horribly exploited while the US and Mexican governments look the other way.

"They are exploited by the traffickers who bring them across the border...They work in substandard conditions for substandard pay. They can't report crimes. They live in constant fear. How can you say that's good for them? Through all of this, the government just averts its eyes and says we don't see this happening."

But if you want to be shocked, read the Union-Tribune's editorial in protest of the Haynes proposal. After a critique that wrongly compares the proposal to Proposition 187, the editorialist writes:

...Until U.S. employers stop hiring illegal immigrants and until all Americans begin to treat those who knowingly hire illegal immigrants with the same contempt that they do other lawbreakers, the United States is going to have a problem with illegal immigrants trampling our borders. And it's going to continue happening at a rate that neither the federal government nor state governments can keep up with. When it comes to illegal immigration, Americans have met the enemy–and, guess what: We're it.

Has this writer never heard of the war on terror? Living on the edge of an active volcano with the ground shaking, the writer's solution to the crowds at the border waits for Americans enmasse to realize we're the enemy.

Earth calling the Union-Tribune: It doesn't even take a terrorist attack on the US to set in motion a disaster for Americans who depend on daily labor by legal and illegal Mexican commuters, and for those Mexicans who depend on the paychecks.

All it takes is a US Code Red security alert extended over many weeks or months and directed at the southern border. There would be no warning of the alert. No time to plan, no time for two-paycheck families that depend on cheap daycare from Mexican workers to find an alternative solution. No time for small businesses to line up other employees.

Yet we're entering a phase with regard to the war and in particular two enemies--Iran and North Korea--where a Code Red could be issued at any moment. In that event the commuter traffic at the southern border could be slowed to a snail's pace for a long time. Here, "snail's pace" would not be a predictable crawl, where you could factor in an approximate delay time. The delay in getting through the checkpoints for all but the most critical traffic would be highly unpredictable--and deliberately so.

I went through something like that right after 9/11. Not that I'm complaining because I understood the reason for the action but it was a commuter's worst nightmare; I had to abandon that vehicular route, as did many others. At least I could find an alternate route. What I went through would be small chips next to the same scenario applied to the US southern border region.

So everything you've noted has great resonance with me. I just don't understand why many who would be most negatively affected by a border lockdown or slowdown have their heads in 1989, when they study the daily crowds at the border.

If only there was some way to get across to the Mexican government, and the American oil company executives who don't want to rile the Mexican government, that Ayman al-Zawahiri is not Pancho Villa.

For links to other Pundita essays on Mexico, US-Mexico relations, immigration from Mexico and the Mexico-US border situation/war on terror, see Mexico Desk.
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"Dear Pundita:
I have read your series on Mexico and it made me think. The emigration in search of credit was an aspect I was not aware of, but it makes quite a bit of sense to me, as did the logic of your argument for an "external" approach to the illegal immigrant problem.

Scarcity is the key assumption--the sine qua non--of economics, and the scarcity of major global credit leading to a reallocation as Mr. Wolfowitz assumes his new post is more food for my thought.

Re the external vs. internal approach to our [southern] border: perhaps it's useful, in terms of lowering the emotional level of the argument, to consider the parallels of the War on Drugs. There, too, we have a domestic demand for an illicit product and a foreign supply of same. In both cases, the foreign supply is driven, at least in part, by poor alternatives for the suppliers (no other crop is as remunerative as coca or poppies, not to mention...coercion on the growers by the drug organizations to supply or die). And in both cases, the domestic demand's immoral character has been weakened over time to the point where its existence is accepted as part of the norm of life.

There are alternatives on the demand side, and we [Americans], as a society, have more direct control over that. With respect to drugs, there are alternative means of gratification; with immigrants there are alternative means of getting the work done.

But economics teaches that price matters, too--and as long as there is plenty of supply, the price will not be "too expensive" for many consumers. To change things, we need to change both demand and supply.

Another thing I used to teach my students was that incentives matter. If you change the rules of the game, the players' behaviors will change (sports always makes good examples, but so do Enron, MCI, et al). Change the suppliers' incentives and the quantity supplied at a given price will adjust; the same principle applies to demand. But here we get into another of your recent topics--systems analysis and modeling of projected successful outcomes of a solution. I think this is another one of those areas where we need to think carefully, like a chess player, three or four steps down the line.

If Mexico's banking and regulatory structures change with the effect of increasing the economic opportunities within Mexico, what are the ripple effects? Mexico becomes richer; how will that change its behavior vis a vis the US?

If Mexico doesn't need us as a social safety valve, might one of their responses to their newfound economic independence be a closer relationship with the Castro/Chavez party?

What sort of border problem does that raise, given the existence of many coyotes [smugglers of illegals] with their known routes across the border?

Note that I do not mention these examples as a reason to maintain our current Faustian bargain, but only as a cautionary note to look before we leap.

If Mexico becomes richer, and the economic migrants here head home, what happens to our economy? If labor prices have been artificially reduced, then what's the inflationary impact (until substitution of alternatives kicks in, and it's unlikely to be complete, meaning some amount of price changes will persist)?

If two-income families, managing by hiring out lawn care and housework, no longer have those options, what are the social as well as economic impacts? How many families don't know how to take care of a lawn, how to keep a house clean beyond running the vacuum? I kid you not, there are families in some neighborhoods of my suburb where the kids have never done chores, and I'm not sure their parents ever did, either.

And what happens if Mexico goes halfway then stalls, or regresses, after having excited in the bosoms of its patriots the possibility of change? Are we prepared to relive the first two decades of the last century along the border? Ask the residents of Columbus, NM.

I have no answers -- but I think (with a reasonable amount of conviction but little to no proof) that we will be better off with a prosperous and stable border, north as well as south. But getting there from here, assuming those countries make the changes, will not be pretty.
Signed "Liz" in USA

Dear Liz:
Pundita is very happy with your observations because they address and integrate several themes I've pounded away at. And I think your observations are sound. However, they are made outside the context of war.

Over the course of my arguments for an external solution to the illegals problem, I've brought up so many issues that admittedly it can be hard to keep hold of the thread of my rationale for discussing the problem. But all my discussion is grounded in my best guess as to what will happen to the southern border if a major terrorist strike happens again in this country.

The border will be locked down--all the legal entry points. That's just for starters. A likely scenario will be that trenches will be dug or bombed along the entire stretch of border to make it virtually impossible to circumnavigate the check points.

By the time the legal checkpoints would be reopened, you wouldn't want to think about what happened to millions of innocents on both sides of the border, and to US businesses that depended on legal Mexican workers--not to mention the hardship for the small businesses that depended on illegal employees.

If the border checkpoints are locked down for many weeks or months, it would be akin to the disaster situation after the worst hurricane on US shores in recent memory.

And if the attack is catastrophic, the American local governments directly impacted by the sudden loss of Mexican employees might have to stand at the back of a very long federal funds relief line.

Is there a way to avoid the secondary effects I've sketched? I would say the answer is no. I think the checkpoints would be shut down; no way around that. However, the severity of the hardship generated by the lockdown would depend on factors that we can address now.

There is a way to greatly minimize the secondary effects. That's if the crowds at the border are thinned out previous to the attack. Thinner crowds would allow border police to routinely make the kind of close surveillance that would go with a heightened security alert.

From the above, clearly I'm assuming a terrorist(s) could get through even the best surveillance, as happens in Israel. However, if the best surveillance is already in effect at the time of the attack, then--as with Israel--the US airports and other border checkpoints can be reopened sooner after the attack.

On the other hand, if the surveillance at the southern border is at the current level, it could take a long time before the checkpoints reopen after the attack. In that event you're looking at widescale secondary effects.

So, all of my arguments and suggestions are built on asking how to get the crowds thinned out quickly and permanently at this time, and without locking down the border. I'm saying in effect, "Do it now (thin the crowds now) while there is time to adjust, while the changes brought about by thinning the crowds are not sudden and uniform; i.e., all at once."

"Doing it now" means putting a lot of pressure on the Mexican government to push through reforms that the IMF has called for.

"Doing it now" means extending the pressure to countries that feed many illegal immigrants into Mexico.

"Doing it now" means that the US and the aid institutions and development banks have the time and wherewithal to nurse Mexico and Central American countries through the shock of the changes brought about by reforms.

So I've factored in the cautions you mentioned. I'm saying the cautions should not have weight against catastrophic secondary effects from an act of war.

Again, that observation does not overturn your points. Yes, there is going to be pain, no matter how you stack the situation. But during war one must think in terms of triage. At all costs, at #1 priority, you want to avoid the double whammy of effects from an attack and catastrophic secondary effects from the attack.

I assume the same principle applies for disaster planning of all kinds including hurricane disaster. Frankly, Pundita doesn't understand why few American commentators think along those lines while discussing the illegals problem at the southern border.

Given that we are at war the disaster planning mindset should dominate all discussion about the illegals. Instead there are the Buckleyites, who argue that Americans must simply get used to illegals coming across the border. There are what I suppose could be called the Johnsonites, who look at the problem as a kind of Great Society challenge. There are the Technocrats, who think that if we put enough laws on the books and create enough new forms for US employers to fill out, this will solve the problem.

We've got the hounds of hell after us but Americans wrangle about a universal ID and forms in triplicate, which a crack enemy military unit can counterfeit. The rickety bastards are trying every which way to get past the southern border. The pain and suffering of American teenagers who never learned how to work a lawnmower must be viewed in that context. Yes, there will be pain and suffering for many Americans if Mexicans in droves find happy employment and good banking practices back home. But we're talking about losing a pinkie versus an arm. The pain and suffering will be as nothing, if those crowds at the border are not already thinned out prior to an attack.

Mexico is rolling in dough. It's just that the government, at every level, is crooked and scared and playing ostrich. They've been getting away with putting off changes. This is because the poor and illiterate Mexicans are just like poor illiterate Americans: they don't have a clue about what their government is actually up to.

And also because literate Americans don't follow Mexican news enough to get steamed about the doings of the Mexican government. This means the US government can futz around when it comes to leaning on Mexico's government to make changes.

With regard to having a very unfriendly neighbor--if Lopez Obrador is as described by the US Department of State, and if he's elected in 2006, we're getting another Hugo Chavez no matter what we do with regard to the border situation. All the more reason to act now to thin out the border crowds--a point not lost on Vicente Fox.

I think the proper response to such concerns is that we'll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. The bridge here now has "fortifications" written on it.

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Last updated June 15.

(In Order of Publication)

Why Vicente Fox is going straight to hell

Mexico

Truth, lies and damning statistics

Terroristas and banditos...

Pundita clarifies a point

Beep this is a recording

Winter soldier tells of grim toll...

Bruce Kesler responds

The darkness of inattention

Mexico-US War on Terror: The bridge ahead and the bridge here now

Mexico-US War on Terror: Disaster Planning for what we know and imagine

US-Mexico Immigration: Lettuce not quibble

US-Mexico Immigration: Brother, can you spare a half million dollar house?

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Note to The Reader: Fifteen minutes after I published the following, I found an email in my inbox that contains a link to a Washington Times opinion piece by Arnaud de Borchgrave. It's not often that I'm in agreement with that particular analyst but not only do I agree, I'm stunned that the Times printed his piece. There is a ray of hope, after all, with regard to US mainstream reporting on Russia. Thanks to Mark Safranski at Zenpundit for alerting me to the piece. I hope that Mark, whose opinion as a Russia historian carries weight, will expand on the points made by de Borchgrave.

"Pundita, dear, I must admit I was touched by your little tribute to the 'Soviet' contribution to winning the [second world] war. A little tribute to those who died because of Soviet rule might help round things out. Now that the festivities are over, any bets on the Khordokovsky verdict?
[Signed] Boris in Jackson Heights"

Dear Boris:
You're such a cynic to imply that the verdict was delayed by the festivities. But when the Kremlin does to Khordokovsky what Eliot Spitzer does to Wall Street pirates, it's not okay with the American press, is it? So how about if we answer your question this way:

How about if we let those Americans whose lives were ruined by pirate companies such as Enron place their bets on the Khordokovsky verdict? Oh but I that's right; such Americans can't place bets because the American media has not seen fit to describe in detail just what Mr Khordokovsky did to get himself arrested.

I was a child of the Cold War; it wasn't until my 20s that I learned that large numbers of Russians died fighting the Nazis. Even then, I had no idea how many Russians had given their lives. The Soviet Union didn't 'win' the second war, but I don't want to think about how many more innocent lives would have been lost in that war, if not for Russia pounding down Hitler's divisions.

So I am very proud that President Bush attended the Russian VE Day memorial, and prouder still that he officially acknowledged the American part in the betrayal at Yalta. As representative of the American government, Bush set a standard for conduct by a nation that China and Japan and many other countries should emulate.

We cannot build the future on evasions; we must build it on truth. Yet the truth has many faces. The Baltic peoples suffered terribly under Soviet rule; another truth is that governments in that part of the world corroborated with the Nazis to massacre Jews. Bush made an attempt to acknowledge all the truths of that terrible time. No national leader could do that neatly, cleanly, in a way that satisfied everyone. Yet Bush's attempt signals the determination to look forward with hope. The alternative is to keep looking back with hate.

I have seen with my own eyes where the alternative leads. In the middle of an ethnic "cleansing" I witnessed, I was served tea by an educated man--educated in America--who matter-of-factly explained why there must be a Final Solution to the "problem" of a minority people in his country. That was his way of agreeing with my plea that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Today that country is in ruins; to the extent there is peace it is the peace of exhaustion, the quietude of despair.

Vladimir Putin, with his trademark sarcasm, is a marked contrast to Bush's idealism, yet both leaders are saying the same thing in their own way. Whereas Bush lectures the Latvians to leave go of old hatreds, Putin snaps at them to stop ranting and start working on constructive solutions to the border dispute with Russia.

Of course it's easy for an American to support the move-on approach; I didn't suffer under Stalin's rule, except indirectly via the drain that the Cold War made on American society. And Putin would do well to take instruction from Bush's attempt to hear and acknowledge Pain and Suffering from the various sides. Sometimes, saying "We're sorry" once is not enough. And sometimes, apologies must be backed up by a gesture, no matter how token it might be.

From the other side, Americans could take instruction from the fact that the US press didn't see fit to report the Latvian call for apology within the context of a border dispute with Russia.

How are we to see our way clearly in East Europe, and indeed the rest of the world, if our news media act mainly as a conduit for agendists? Equal US media time for opposing views extends only to Republican and Democrat domestic positions. When it comes to international affairs, the media tend to act as a mouthpiece for special interests and factions in the government. This is on the excuse that reporters need to keep their access to important sources.

But then how is the American public supposed to arrive at intelligent observations about the world outside our door? Are we supposed to spend all our free hours trolling the Internet, just to scrape together enough data to make reasoned observations? And what about those Americans who don't have Internet access?

I keep hearing about the "Two Americas." I am seeing two Americas emerge--the America representing well-informed news consumers and the America representing news consumers who don't know what century this is.

I have no idea how the Khordokovsky verdict will go. A guilty verdict and serious jail time would send a message to the other oligarchs but I think they've already gotten the drift.

Much could hang on whether Khordokovsky decides to take his mother's advice to heart. Not long before his arrest she warned him that he needed to start thinking some about what was best for Russia. He ignored the warning.

Last night on John Batchelor's show, Victor Gubareff--a Russian who does analysis for Stratfor--called it like it is for Russia. He said that Russia is a society of bandits and oligarchs. It's also a society of very old clan ways. To get from there to a functioning democracy is going to take more than uninformed Americans and West Europeans urging more "freedom" in Russia.

For those who never heard a word about the border dispute, here are two short reports, which fill in several blanks and open a bigger window on the kind of problems Putin is wrestling with.

Russia calls on Latvia to stop ranting...

Russia-Latvia border treaty hangs in mid-air...

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Pundita doesn't mind certain kinds of rascals but I admit that I don't like Ahmed Chalabi even though I've never met him. In fact, the one thing I have against Paul Wolfowitz is that he allowed Chalabi to parlay their mutual love of math into a garden path, down which Wolfy blindly walked.

I agree with the Iraqi who call Chalabi a drum--makes a big noise but hollow inside. I think he's a phony on top of being a rascal. I grudgingly admit this makes him, as another Chalabi observer remarked, a great politician. So it is with great effort that I heave aside my personal dislike and attempt to plumb King Abdullah's decision to let bygones be bygones about the matter of $300m in bank fraud.

Incidentally, Americans can study Mr Chalabi's career as a banker if they want to feel their way toward understanding why peoples in the developing world don't trust banks. In America when lazy crooks want to scare up quick cash, they rob a bank. In the developing world, the same types start a bank.

But Chalabi will sue anyone who calls him a crook. If the Jordanian government hadn't instituted the silly rule that banks in Jordan must put 30% of their foreign exchange into the central bank, nobody would have gotten upset that there was no money in Jordan's second biggest bank. However, as the (UK) Independent online edition notes with a straight face, "Unbowed, Mr Chalabi went into politics."

There it seems he found his calling. Chalabi's methods of quickly raising large amounts of cash must be weighed against more positive factors: his political skills, his obsessive determination that Iraq will become a great modern country, and his close ties with Iranian royalists and moderate factions inside Iran. By promising everything to everyone in Iraq, Iran and Jordan, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress party are part of the reason that Iraq has not fallen into civil war.

Another part is Bush's decision to yank Paul Bremer and put Iyad Allawi in charge of things until an Iraqi government was formed. The decision extended the first hope to Iraqi Sunnis that they would not to be purged from post-Saddam Iraq. The hope, shored by recent appointments of Sunnis to posts in the new Iraqi government, is making the Coalition military's job easier in Iraq.

The relative unimportance of the posts, and their small number, might not sound like much to us but they are a huge deal to the Sunnis--a sign that pragmatism, rather than revenge for the Saddam era, will rule the thinking of the Shia majority government.

Meanwhile, the US military command in Iraq continues their methodical draining of the swamp via Operation Matador. The news that Bill Roggio marshals in his Bringing it On essay might come as a shock due to paltry and highly distorted media coverage of Coalition activities. But the news is evidence that the military's grinding force and careful planning, which makes good use of the heroism and professionalism of the US solider, is paying off.

It's paying off to the extent that King Abdullah of Jordan and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia have finally come to trust the US military command, which under Bremer's CPA rule were made to look like idiots. That is why the mullahs who report to Prince Abdullah are now encouraging remaining al Qaeda sympathizers in Saudi Arabia to march over there to Iraq and show the Marines what real men are made of.

Oddly, some American observers are reading snowballing success in Iraq as failure. Why they should be doing this, Pundita doesn't know, yet. Of one thing I'm certain: Chalabi's bullish forecast for Iraq is catching. Iraqis as a whole are waking up to the possibilities for their country, if it remains unified, and the chance to write a glorious chapter in the Middle East's history. If Western powers handed them a lemon by glomming together disparate tribes into a nation, they can make lemonade.
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Pundita received several letters in praise of her analysis of the EMP story; these included a letter from a blogger (Steve at Word Unheard). In a published defense of the seriousness of the EMP threat he added criticism of himself for overlooking the points I raised.

The blogosphere gods tend to visit brain furballs--or worse, Rugby--on Pundita when she displays a puffy head. So I will draw back the curtain to reveal the high level of efficiency, organization, and research behind that blog on the EMP:

Basically, I sent an email to three bloggers-- Dave Schuler , Bill Roggio and Mark Safranski --that boiled down to, "Help! I heard a scary story about EMP from John Loftus on John Batchelor's show last night! Does anybody know anything about EMP and whether Loftus's story should be taken seriously??"

By the end of the day, Mark Safranski had tracked down blogger friend "Dr. Von" (a particle physicist) and offered to write up an analysis of the EMP threat, to the best of his ability, whenever he heard back from him. This meant that Dr. Von set aside his schedule to dash off something about EMP. Then Mark set aside his schedule to do research and write up an analysis.

It was not until I read Mark's blog that I saw my mistake. On the night he broadcast Loftus's report on EMP, John Batchelor had published on his website the May 2 World Net Daily story, which--if I'd read it closely--would have alerted me to the very points I covered in my essay. But I was blindsided by the sheer drama and scariness of Loftus's tale. Yet all Loftus did was repeat what Admiral Woolsey said in testimony before a congressional committee (and which WND duly reported) --although without mentioning the context in which the testimony arose.

Several morals derive from the odyssey I've recounted. Serious bloggers are always on a learning curve in their role as news consumer and blogger. And given the sheer amount of news they take in daily, one can slip by them on occasion.

Steve deserves credit for catching his oversight and discussing it on his blog on the EMP threat. That shows integrity as well as dedication to the empirical viewpoint (as versus the agendist or theoretical ones, which can wreak havoc with news reports).

One of the nice things about the blogosphere 'community' is that it serves as additional eyes and ears (and brain!). I note that my blog wasn't about EMP or even the threat it posed; it was an analysis of media treatment of EMP. I depended on the work done by other bloggers for the analysis of EMP and its potential threat--and for digging up sources on EMP.

Being a news consumer is hard work--particularly during war, when the agendists and propagandists ratchet their rhetoric, and when there's so much news requiring attention. Everybody fogs out and gets caught napping--even the best analysts. But you'll regain your bearings easily if you remember to ask about the context in which the news story arose; e.g., was it part of testimony before a committee or during a press conference? If so, what is the background?

The EMP story is particularly instructive because so much was 'going on' with it. It had different elements mixed together:

> The technical element (the nature of EMP and debates about its threat),

> the very scary and highly dramatic statements about a specific type of threat (an EMP fired at the US from a tramp steamer),

> and the claim that the Iranian missile test "must" have indicated that the Iranians were readying an EMP weapon.

So one has to isolate and untangle the separate elements then analyze them singly--not an easy task for the general public, and not easy for those under pressure to comment quickly on a news story (e.g., bloggers).

Yet that kind of analysis is required, if one is to avoid gross misperceptions. Ideally, we should be able to depend on professional news analysts to do that brain sweat for us. But professional news commentary in the mainstream media is so poor that the serious news consumer has to learn and practice at least the basics of analysis.

Eventually, all that citizen effort will result in demands for better professional new analysis. Right now the professionals are getting off the hook; they divert attention from their incompetence by bringing up the bias argument then concentrating debate around that.

Bias is the least of the problem; most professionals simply aren't trained in news analysis. Part of that is the fault of journalism schools; part of it is the tendency to look for 'personalities' in commentators--people who become professionals by virtue of their writing or speaking ability and appeal with the public.

Another part is the Talking Head phenomenon--the tendency to bring in an expert on the subject matter of a particular news story, rather than someone who specializes in analyzing news as data.

Heavy reliance by the mainstream media on Talking Heads is why it's so easy for the news consumer to lose the thread of a news story. Once experts start debating the technical aspects of an issue, the context in which the issue arose as a news story gets lost in the maze of expert opinion.

That's what happened with the EMP story. To catch hold of the thread, always ask yourself in what context the news story arose. In the case of the EMP threat, the news arose in the context of testimony before a congressional committee. Holding onto that thread will lead you out of the maze of data, exposition, speculation and debate and deposit you at a reasonably objective view of the news of the day.

For readers who despair that the quality of MSM news analysis (and reporting) will improve, never underestimate your power and the determination of those inside the business to make improvements. Over the years, John Batchelor has aired many segments that serve as a primer on defensive news consumption. During the run-up to the gubernatorial recall vote in California, John took Craig Crawford through a step-by-step analysis of a poll that the Los Angeles Times printed about the candidates. Under Batchelor's questions, Craig's 'forensic' analysis was a jaw-dropper; the poll, when closely examined, was very misleading.

Within days of that broadcast, the mainstream media began airing and publishing stories about the media's heavy reliance on polls as the basis for news stories, the different types of polls, and the highly deceptive results of some types of polls.

When Eason Jordan used the World Economic Forum (or the other way around) to launch a sneak attack on the Bush administration, Bill Roggio and a handful of other bloggers closely analyzed Jordan's remarks and the context in which they arose. Their analysis cut so close to the bone that it seems CNN preferred to ditch Mr. Jordan in an effort to tamp down further inquiry. In any case, CNN was served notice that the American news consumer is becoming more sophisticated.

Yet the nature of news in this highly complex war means that no matter how trustworthy we consider a news source, we need to learn the basics of good reporting and apply the standard to important news stories.

For new readers who wonder about the identity of Rugby, Pundita refuses to give that precocious lab rat any more publicity than he's already received on this blog. But if you must know, I suppose you might type "Rugby" into the search engine that Google perches on this page.

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"Dear Pundita, I don't know what to make of Bush's visit to Russia, Georgia and Latvia. It seems he was trying to do many things at one time but I think he managed to upset everyone and satisfy no one.
[Signed] Ann in Cincinnati"

Dear Ann:
The people who wanted to carve up the Soviet Union got their wish. Now Russia is surrounded small dirt-poor countries, none with any experience at democracy; all with deeply entrenched government corruption at the state and local levels, and with age-old internal tribal and clan rivalries--and without the means to compete in the globalized era of trade. And Russia itself is a mess.

But when you ask the freedomists, "Okay, so what are you going to do now that you have brought freedom?" they don't have the answers. All they can do is keep encouraging more freedom, more breakaway regions, more democracy.

Putin managed to get that reality check across to Bush this time around. That's what was accomplished during Bush's trip.

Now in the old days--the days before 9/11--the freedomists didn't have to think because there was a drill in place: First you demand freedom, then you get the World Bank and IMF to figure out what to do, to keep your new country from sinking into quicksand.

But now with The Arab Problem to deal with, and with Tony Blair breathing down Bush's neck about the Africa commission's findings (Blair's pet project) it's a new day. Bank resources won't continue to pour into the sieve of newly independent states in East Europe and Central Asia, not at the rate they did during the 1990s. Ditto for the European versions of the Bank.

To put all this another way, the people who made a killing from the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Soviet state-run enterprises didn't invest their easy USD billions in solving the problems that independence brings. So now there's many mega-messes to deal with.

Just how big the messes, Putin and his technocrats have been learning the hard way. They went gaga over Hernando de Soto's ideas, as did many governments in the developing world. His ideas are sound; for example, the black market is indeed a vampire. But the black market is only one part of a matrix of problems that bedevil every developing country--Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, Georgia, Russia, you name it. You have to go after the matrix.

For example, none of the profits from black market trade are taxed. In Russia alone, the black market accounts for about 40% of business. You can't have a modern government, much less a modern country, if you don't take in enough revenue to build and maintain critical infrastructures.

So Putin said okay, let's go after the black marketeers. But unless you also get control of organized crime then de Soto's point, if implemented, is a disaster. The little guy who did black market trade now has to pay taxes on top of the 30% he has to give mobsters. If he doesn't make those payments on time, he doesn't get a visit from the taxman. He gets his legs broken.

This is the situation in Latin America, as well--everywhere that governments have gone after the black markets. It's a huge problem--just one of many that comes with trying to make democratic government work in regions with no history of democratic government.

That's one reason Putin made the historic trip to Israel. He went in person to ask Sharon a favor. If Sharon's government wouldn't throw out the tax-cheating Russian Jewish oligarchs, could they maybe throw out the Russian mobs?

But that's another part of the matrix. Today's globalized mobsters aren't Al Capone; they don't buy out city governments; they buy out countries. They buy up a big interest in a small country's banking system and financial markets. Israel's been trying for years to extract themselves from that Faustian bargain, as have many other small countries.

Israel wasn't always America's fair-haired child. There were years when the Israeli and American governments were barely on speaking terms. Israel was desperate for cash and had nowhere to turn. Along came Russian mobsters lugging suitcases stuffed with millions of USD to invest.

The hellish part of the deal is that the Russian mobs working in the Middle East touched off wars with mobs connected with the Arab governments in the region.

To pile hell on top of hell, the Iranian military and police have lost many men to fighting the mobs. That's a big reason the awful mullacrat regime stays in power in Iran. The Iranian police state is all that stands between their country being overrun by mob wars.

When Sharon calls them up, they say, "Okay we'll leave. Just give us 10 minutes to cash in our stocks and bonds, the government debt instruments we're holding and withdraw our savings."

Nope, arrests won't work. They keep their nose clean in the countries they park in or do business in such a way that it would take an army of forensic accountants to spot a crime. And realize there are countries that should be called, "Money Laundering, Inc.," so it takes the mobsters only moments at a computer keyboard to transfer funds. And when the auditors show up, the banks simply transfer the funds to another Money Laundering,Inc. then transfer them back when the heat is off.

Nope, tougher banking laws won't work. In the immortal words of one Citibank executive, there's no law you can think up that some Brazilian banker can't find a way around. And if you make the laws too tough, legit corporations and powerful politicians in developed countries set up a howl.

So who do you ring up for answers? Nobody. The policy institutes and academia, the progressives and conservatives--all of them have great strategies for how to bring more freedom. But you get a recorded message when you call and say, "Now clean up the messes that freedom without thought made."

If you have any ideas for how to solve the problem, send them to Vladimir Putin and Ariel Sharon with a cc to George Bush. Before you put on your thinking cap, read the International Crime Threat Assessment Report. The report, published in December 2000, is the first comprehensive inter-agency study of international organized crime and it remains the most informative for the layperson.

Pundita advises that you take a stiff drink before you start reading. Seeing the matrix, all at once, can be a shock.
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We in the media--and the blogosphere counts as media--have a duty to walk on the right side of the fine line between scaremongering and warning. Many in the blogosphere take the duty very seriously. The duty is hard at any time but during war, which generates large amounts of propaganda, counter-propaganda, misinformation and disinformation, it becomes devilishly hard.

Thus, Defense Tech, ZenPundit and Dr. Von are to be commended for setting aside their schedule to look into the hideously complex, highly technical and very scary story on Electromagnetic Pulse weapons (EMPs) that surfaced again last week in World Net Daily, and which was picked up by the John Batchelor Show.

Dr. Von, being the only particle physicist among the lot, gets the last word on the technical aspects of the story.

Defense Tech receives Pundita's special David Letterman Award for calling World Net Daily a Tinhat--short for Tinfoil Hat --publication.

Mark Safranski at ZenPundit is to be commended for somehow pulling together key points made by Defense Tech and Dr. Von and delivering a balanced assessment of how much we should be worrying at this time about an EMP weapon launched at the US from a tramp steamer.

This still leaves open the question, "Why now?" For the answer we must get historical, as Paris Hilton might say, or as Alfred Hitchcock might have said, set up the plot.

It all began one dark and stormy night back in the 1990s, when the CIA received a phone call from a gaggle of unemployed Russian nuke scientists and KGB/GRU defectors.

"Hello? Between us spoke good English. We have knowledge between us to blow galaxy up. If not hiring, we can try Pyongyang."

Happily for the continuation of the historical, the person on the other end of the phone had enough sense not to hang up.

How do you keep a gaggle of Russian defense tech experts and spooks happily and gainfully employed? Here in Washington we have the tradition of setting up a commission to handle delicate human resources situations. But first must come The Book, to introduce credentials and provide the rationale for establishing a commission.

By October 1999 The Book, KGB, had been published and so the Military and Research and Development Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services was ready to hear from Russian experts about the threat to military and civilians from an EMP bomb.

That being the trickiest part of the Clinton era, which was never kind to defense expenditures anyhow, it was not until October 30, 2000, that Clinton signed the FY2001 National Defense Expenditure Authorization Act, which brought the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack (EMP Commission for short) into existence.

Then came the presidential election, then came everybody on the Hill and at the Pentagon sorting through the shock of Bush and Neocons in the White House. Then 19 guys with box-cutters as weapons demonstrated that with some ingenuity, planning and a suicidal bent, you didn't need hi-tech weaponry to launch a catastrophic attack on the USA.

Then came the Department of Homeland Security. At last count the DHS is made up of five million agencies, all of them wrangling with each other over budget allocations. It's just here that we again pick up the tale of the EMP Commission, which Pundita has pieced together by studying recent World Net Daily reports filed by Joseph Farah. All the reports (and the Washington Post op-ed piece by Kyl) can be found by following links in Farah's May 2 report for World Net Daily.

I've bolded every reference to the EMP Commission, so the thread is clear:

Sometime in Early 2005
Peter Fonash, acting deputy manager for the National Communications System in the Department of Homeland Security, says the agency has "determined that there is minimal EMP effect."

March 2005
The EMP Commission is called upon by one congressional committee or subcommittee or another to justify its continued existence. The EMP Commission testifies that the EMP threat is not being taken seriously by the Department of Homeland Security. The commission explains that the Department of Defense has received briefings at the highest levels but that equivalent briefings have not been conducted at DHS "yet."

(Translation: DHS kept saying their briefing schedule was full up.)

April 2005
The Washington Post publishes an op-ed by Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Chairman, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security. Kyl warns in the direst terms of the threat from an EMP attack and offers that "Iran has surprised intelligence analysts by describing the mid-flight detonations of missiles fired from ships on the Caspian Sea as 'successful' tests."

(In other words, what looked like a test failure was read by experts on the EMP Commission as a sure sign that Tehran was fiddling with making an EMP bomb. A fact that Tehran would know, I might add.)

Kyl finally gets down to brass tacks by noting: "Fortunately, hardening key infrastructure systems [against EMP bomb attack] and procuring vital backup equipment...is both feasible and -- compared with the threat -- relatively inexpensive, according to a comprehensive report on the EMP threat by a commission of prominent experts [EMP Commission].

"But it will take leadership by the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, and other federal agencies, along with support from Congress, all of which have yet to materialize."

May 2, 2005
Joseph Farah reports for World Net Daily:

WASHINGTON – Former CIA chief James Woolsey affirms the work of a special commission [EMP Commission] investigating the threat of a nuclear-bomb generated electromagnetic pulse attack on the U.S. by rogue states or terrorists and is urging the country to take steps necessary to protect against the potentially devastating consequences.

In testimony before the House International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation Subcommittee, chaired by Ed Royce, R-Calif., Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993 through 1995, referred to the nuclear EMP threat, characterized in intelligence circles, he said, as "a SCUD in a bucket."

Woolsey commended the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack [EMP Commission] for its years of work on the subject and for its dire report concluding that it is a means of attack that could lead to the defeat of the U.S. by a much smaller enemy and utter devastation of the country.

"That is a very serious threat," he told the committee.... Woolsey, like the commission, specifically mentioned the new dimension a nuclear Iran would add to the risk of such an attack.

"We do not have the luxury of assuming that Iran, if it develops fissionable materials, for example, would not share it under some circumstances with al-Qaida operatives," he said. "We don't have the luxury of believing that just because North Korea is a communist state, it would not work under some circumstances to sell its fissionable material to Hezbollah or al-Qaida."...

From all the above I think it's reasonable to conclude that the EMP Commission is for now safe, by the skin of its teeth, from the budget ax.

Again, I was able to draw that conclusion based on data presented in Farah's reports and the links he provided. Yet The Tale of the EMP Commission is virtually invisible to the eye of the casual reader. It's hidden because the reader's mind is focused on dire predictions about what an EMP bomb can do, descriptions of what it is, and a mixture of speculation and intel regarding recent enemy activities. However, all that exposition tracks back or specifically quotes testimony given before committees and/or subcommitees -- testimony given to defend the work of the EMP Commission.

So what does it all mean? It means that the consumer of news has to learn to think like an old-school reporter--a reporter well-trained in ferreting out the traditional Four W's of a story:

Who (said or did it)?
What (what was said or done)?
Where (where was it said or done)?
When (when was it said or done)?

There is also the "H" (How did it come about?) if the reporter has space for it in the report.

But given the skill of today's disinformation specialists and the general low quality of reporting, I insert an "I" in my list:

Who?
What?
In What Context?
Where?
When?
How?

Asking yourself in what context something is said helps you quickly spot where in the story you've been napping. For example:

Farah's May 2 on EMP is headlined, "Ex-CIA chief warns of EMP nuke threat" and sub-headed, "Woolsey calls on U.S. to defend against devastating 'Scud-in-a-bucket' attack."

So you mentally stop and ask yourself, "In what context did Woolsey give that warning and make that call?"

Farah's report answers the question in the second paragraph:

"In testimony before the House International Terrorism and Non-Proliferation Subcommittee, chaired by Ed Royce, R-Calif., Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993 through 1995, referred to the nuclear EMP threat, characterized in intelligence circles, he said, as "a SCUD in a bucket."

But back up: What about the first paragraph? Why didn't he mention at the beginning of his piece the Who, What, Where, When and In What Context Woolsey spoke?

Okay, let's look again at the first paragraph:

"WASHINGTON – Former CIA chief James Woolsey affirms the work of a special commission investigating the threat of a nuclear-bomb generated electromagnetic pulse attack on the U.S. by rogue states or terrorists and is urging the country to take steps necessary to protect against the potentially devastating consequences."

The "special commission" is our old friend by now, the EMP Commission. Farah names the commission in the fourth paragraph:

"Woolsey commended the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack for its years of work on the subject and for its dire report concluding that it is a means of attack that could lead to the defeat of the U.S. by a much smaller enemy and utter devastation of the country. "That is a very serious threat," he told the committee. "

Most of the balance of the report is given to expanding on the dire warnings and predictions. Some of the data he presents easily gives rise the Tinfoil Hat dig. But if you get hung up on that data you tend to forget the context in which Woolsey is speaking.

You won't lose your bearings if you remember that Woolsey is talking to a congressional committee that has budget on its mind, and which is wanting to know just what the heck the EMP Commission has been doing for years to justify its existence. In short, he's on a mission to persuade, so of course he's full throttle.

If you tell me it would be helpful if Farah had specifically mentioned that--well, here we come to the need to be a defensive news consumer. Farah doesn't exactly run with people who have excellence in journalism as their top priority. He has an agenda to push. That observation holds true for many who report the news.

I don't know Mr. Farah's career or even whether he's primarily a reporter; he could be an intelligence analyst who also does reporting. I rarely read World Net Daily and only glance at the Counterintelligence Blog, to which Farah contributes--and only when I want to catch wind of defense tech/intel doings on the Hill or at various Washington agencies.

But Mr. Farah's career and his particular skill set are irrelevant to my points. People who earn their living by massaging data into news reports range on a scale from 'average bias'--of the kind you and I and most people bring to studying data--all the way up through highly trained propagandists.

I interject there are several gradations on the scale between those two extremes. One is 'spin doctor'--someone with PR or marketing skills who is good at directing the data consumer's attention to the positive data.

Bad reporting is also one gradation--people who simply have not been adequately trained to report; they're been trained to promote an agenda; e.g., 'watchdogging' the US government.

It's such observations that cause many news consumers to throw up their hands. Many are very cynical about the news media. However, that cynicism is dangerous if it leads to tuning out the news or to a wholesale rejection of a news story. Thomas Jefferson and many others have correctly warned that democracy depends on an informed citizenry. So you need to stay tuned in.

And most news stories are not a pack of lies. They are mixture of analysis and opinion that shades perception of the story by emphasis on certain facts and by omission or addition of facts.

So you've got choices:

> You can sit around and complain about the sorry state of reporting.
> You can tune out the news.
> You can find news sources that don't irritate you, so that you're getting mostly reinforcement for your own views.
> You can learn to think like a good reporter while you're taking in the news.

If you want to go for the last choice, which Pundita recommends, here's a tip: It helps at first to take in the news via print versions or to print out reports you read on the Internet. Then use a magic marker to highlight the Who, What, In What Context, Where, When, and How. After a while, you won't need a physical highlighter; you can do it in your head. Practice.

For more on the EMP commission and a good layman's description of EMP and the various threats it poses, see the Heritage Foundation's August 2004 report .
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(Many thanks to Bruce Kesler , who alerted me that The San Diego Union-Tribune is a good source for US news about Mexico and sent me the Union-Tribune report that quotes Sidney Weintraub.)

"Pundita, re your essay on the external approach to solving the illegal immigrant problem:

The way I conceptualize the problem is in terms of "pull" forces and "push" forces. Both need to be addressed but while the push forces (the forces pushing Mexican migrants over our borders) are the more important they're also the hardest to address both politically and pragmatically.

The pull forces can be addressed by putting more onus on employers. Leaning on employers in just three states--California, Texas and Illinois--would produce a mighty effect. Coincidentally, those three states have large numbers of electoral votes and presidents (or those who wish they were presidents) are disinclined to do much leaning.

An additional problem in dealing with immigration is that we don't even agree on the terms of the discourse. I'm in the process of preparing a decision diagram on immigration that may make things a little clearer.
Dave in Chicago at The Glittering Eye."

Dear Dave:
Please hurry up with that diagram; it's desperately needed. I am going to assume that by "immigration" you're referring principally to illegal immigration. Now let me see if I understand you correctly: It's hard for Americans to address the actual reasons that drive large numbers of Mexican/Central Americans to illegally enter the US. Ergo, Americans who want solutions to the illegals problem should busy themselves with addressing the price of tea in Outer Mongolia.

If you cry, "Foul!"--well, pragmatic solutions only work if they deal with reality. The reality is that the Mexican government has the US government in a hammerlock because of the oil deal that Fox struck with Bush. Fox's government has taken obscene advantage of the deal. His administration has a tacit program of encouraging Mexicans to illegally immigrate to the USA--a program that's flowed to the state and local levels in Mexico. The upshot: a tidal wave of Mexicans trying to get across the border. According to Georgie Anne Geyer at the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Mexico, as a state, is publicly encouraging its people to go to America – in effect, to break its neighbor's laws – so that (1) it can rid itself of its egregious overpopulation and bring its approximately $12 billion in remittances home every year, and (2) thus also rid itself of ambitious dissidents who politically could threaten the corrupt and inept state they come from.

The Bush administration wants to form a guest-worker program for the estimated 500,000 Mexican workers who cross the border every year. Sidney Weintraub, one of America's most cogent Latin American scholars, now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recently pointed out in The Financial Times that what America would really be doing with a guest-worker program is subsidizing companies who can get away with paying foreign workers pittances of what they pay Americans.

At the same time, he pointed out – and these figures can be backed up endlessly with examples of the Mexican government's corruption and haplessness at development – federal tax revenue in Mexico is now less than 12 percent of gross domestic product, one of the lowest ratios in even Latin America.

So one can argue that U.S. taxpayers are not only relieving Mexico of its excess and potentially politically tricky population, but also making good the shortfall from the failure of the country's own tax collection efforts.

So if you won't take it from Pundita or the International Monetary Fund, perhaps you'll take it from Sidney Weintraub. The rich tax deadbeats in Mexico and Fox's government are pulling a fast one, which is why my first essay on Mexico was titled Why Vicente Fox is going straight to hell.

There's no internal or "pull" solution that will deal effectively with a bunch of slicks operating from Mexico's side of the border. And with all due respect, it's naive to propose that the US employers who benefit from Fox's human export program are going to cooperate with US laws meant to break dependence on illegal employees. Such employers will stop hiring illegals only when forced to do so by draconian enforcement mechanisms that would turn this country into a police state. But no fear of that happening because the expense of creating and maintaining that kind of enforcement would crash US state budgets.

Of course laws already on the books should be enforced but the first task is to thin the crowd of illegals so that present US enforcement mechanisms are not overwhelmed. The only way to thin the crowd is to back it away from the border: deal with it at the points of origins; e.g., southern Mexico. But this approach depends on breaking Fox's hammerlock on the Bush administration. This in turn depends on the American voter waking up to the "push" side of the problem.

Realize that Fox's human export program operates under cover of darkness--the darkness of inattention from the American public. The irony is that many educated Americans of Mexican heritage are not blind to what's going on in Mexico, but their voices don't make it onto the US nightly national news.

It's so hard to address the "push" issues simply because Americans haven't the foggiest idea about the issues. That's because for decades our glorious national news media have conceived of Mexico as situated somewhere out in the galaxy between Venus and Saturn. Only a handful of regional (southwestern) US media do daily reporting on Mexico yet that is not enough, given Mexico's importance to the USA and the complexity of the illegals problem and it's connection with post-9/11 defense concerns.

The upshot is that Americans can't talk knowledgeably let alone intelligently about Mexico's problems. So when asked why so many illegals come to this country from Mexico, Americans reply that it's because of poverty and unemployment. Internal or what you term "pull" solutions stack up from there. Yet the entire stack is based on erroneous perceptions, a general view of Mexico that is decades old, and ignorance about recent developments in Mexico.

Because of the knowledge deficit, few Americans are aware that concerns in Washington about Lopez Obrador's growing power in Mexico translate to a glass ceiling for many proposed US measures to deal with the immigration problem.

Because of the knowledge deficit, few Americans know there is a faction in Mexico that intelligently views the illegals problem as Mexico's problem to deal with. This is an extraordinary development. It goes against the long-held Mexican tradition that looks at the illegals as America's problem to deal with--a tradition that Fox's government has promoted.

The faction has set off great controversy in Mexico. So they need all the help and encouragement they can get from Americans, including the Congress. Instead, they're getting obstruction from American activists who work to help illegals assimilate in the US and no attention from the general American public, which translates to no help from Congress.

And because of the knowledge deficit, Americans can't argue to Mexicans who have been unwitting pawns of Fox's human export program that they are pawns. Mexico's ruling class has long encouraged the export of their 'troublemakers' --the Mexicans who have the strongest opposition to corruption and inertia in their government. This set in motion a vicious cycle: the more the really outraged Mexicans flee to the US, the fewer troublemakers left in Mexico to contest bad government. This makes conditions in Mexico worse by further weakening opposition to bad government. This causes yet more Mexicans to flee.

To help break the cycle, Americans must effectively argue to their congressional representatives, the White House and Mexicans that if there was ever a time for Mexicans to stay home and fight for better government, now is that time because of historical forces. Yet Americans can't argue because of their knowledge deficit.

I hope by now I've made my point. Americans concentrate on internal solutions to the illegal immigrant problem because that's all they know--and even their knowledge of technical and legal matters concerning proposed internal solutions is very sparse and often erroneous.

But because of the knowledge deficit, the American window on Mexico only looks out on the US-Mexico border. Thus, Americans fixate on solutions that equate to asking, "How can we stop this flood of Mexicans and Central Americans from crossing the border into the US?"

Just from the security angle that's the wrong question. Once you've got a flood backed up, the most you can do is play Hans Brinker. The right question is to ask how to prevent pools of people from becoming a human tide at a border. The answer is that you use every diplomatic means available, including the US arsenal of policy instruments, to stop the pools from turning into a tide at the border. For a few specific suggestions, read back through my earlier essays on Mexico.

But the World Bank and the IMF have dug in their heels. They've said in effect to Fox's government: Fix the blasted tax code and go ahead with structural adjustments, or forget getting more megabucks WPA-type project loans that we know Mexico will default on anyway.

So what we have is a Mexican Standoff. Is there any way to break the standoff? Yes; there are two ways that I've seen. But much depends on Mexico's political parties and the Fox and Bush administration seeing Americans awakened from their long slumber about Mexican affairs. As with so many other problematical situations around the world, the "illegals problem" has flourished in the darkness of inattention.

I understand that I've thrown a great deal of data at the reader since starting my series of essays on Mexico and the illegal immigrant situation. Much if not all the data is new to Americans who don't live in the southwestern United States and don't follow doings at the World Bank and IMF. I myself am struggling to play catchup regarding Mexico's situation because so much of my attention has been focused the Middle East and Europe since 9/11. But the journey of a thousand miles has to begin. If Americans really want a solution to the illegals problem, we must get better informed about the "push" factors and act on what we learn. Toward this end I look forward to your diagram.
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"I'm glad Tony Blair won reelection but I'm concerned that the vote signals a rejection by the British people of his stand on the Iraq war and Britain's position in the Coalition. What do you think are the foreign policy implications for the USA?
[Signed] Jan in Reston"

Dear Jan:
First let's congratulate Tony Blair for going down in history. He is the only Labor party candidate to win a third term in a row and only the second prime minister in history to win three general elections in a row with a mandate. Today is his birthday, so he has much to celebrate.

Second, it's early hours to be making sweeping assumptions about what the vote means. There were predictions that voter turnout would be low. And Michael Howard's party got strategic advice, which seems to have paid off, from American GOP operatives. So Pundita waits on the breakdown of the vote numbers and technical analysis by British pundits who specialize in such matters.

I will note that the votes weren't even counted before the Left here and in Britain were spinning the numbers to mean a resounding rejection of Blair's decision to stand by the Bush administration's position on Iraq.

Blair is sensibly not disputing the spin, for to dispute it would point to other reasons why the Conservatives made gains in the election. It's to be remembered that Michael Howard and his party took virtually the same position as Blair with regard to supporting the US in the Iraq campaign.

Britain's defense secretary took a more measured view of the vote. According to the Scotsman

Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon acknowledged Iraq had been an issue in the campaign, but insisted it was “nothing like” as significant as the economy and public services.

He told ITV1: “I have not found people saying that Iraq is the most important issue as far as they are concerned.

“I have had some people who have raised it with me but not as a central decision-making factor in how they cast their vote.”

Pundita does not think Mr Hoon was blowing smoke, although his observations might be precise to the point of misleading.

It's to be remembered that while a "majority" of British polled at various times in the past were against Britain joining the Iraq campaign that is not to say a majority is "practically all." Many British did support and continue to support Blair's decision on Iraq. However, what has many British concerned is the way the decision was made--it rested solely with Blair--and what is seen as Blair's stubborn and wrong-headed defense of intelligence on Iraq WMD that was viewed at the time as greatly flawed.

What Pundita finds stubborn is the persistent refusal of Blair's critics to accept the obvious, which is that Britain agreed to support the US war on terror. This support includes accepting the US military command's general strategy on how to fight the war and where the campaigns should be staged. This would include the Iraq campaign.

There is no "Iraq war," as Pundita has noted more than once on this blog--any more than there was an Afghan war. There are operations within the war on terror; Afghanistan and Iraq are but two.

In other words, when Blair stood with President Bush's decision to invade Iraq, he was standing with the war on terror. Thus, he didn't make a liar out of the British people's agreement to support the US war--an irony, given that Blair is accused of being a liar by his critics.

Blair's greatest mistake, and Bush's, was in not stressing in their speeches what I've just noted. However, I think the history books could view their reticence to speak straight not so much as a mistake as an unavoidable tradeoff. Once you start talking about the "war on terror" in fully rational terms, it leads to clarification of the battle plan.

So it doesn't do for a national leader to be terribly clear during war when making public statements about the war. Of course that observation runs against the grain of democracy but there is nothing democratic about war and its prosecution.

Blair and Bush decided to get behind the WMD rationale for invading Iraq and tough out the consequences. It will be up to history to determine the wisdom of their decision.
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Dear Pundita:
Re: Your comments about my report for the Augusta Free Press on illegal immigration.

Better put than those who commented the other way, that we should just throw up our hands and virtually open the borders, to whatever. In fact, both your "external" and my "internal" approaches are needed. I focused on the "internal" approaches, as we have most immediate control of these, but I do also mention the need for Mexico to get its own act together and the US to push hard for that. Mexico, alone, is the source of half the illegals, and most of the illiterate ones (probably also the hardest working and nicest, and most exploited ones) who are the primary financial burden and slowest assimilators -- Again, thank you for your additional comments.
[signed] Bruce Kesler in Encinitas

Dear Bruce:
Thank you for your reply and thanks to Mark Safranski at ZenPundit for forwarding you my blog on your report. It was on my To-do list to send you a copy--my To-do list now long enough to reach from my house to somewhere in Kansas City.

The problem with the internal solutions is that they're geared toward the way the US was in the year 2000 and assume the enemy we face today is an idiot. But you may trust that the enemy, once across the border, will play things by the book.

If the enemy is smart, and he can be very smart when it comes to doing sneaky things, he will not risk jumping a checkpoint to truck in hazmat, conventional weapons and high value operatives. We must assume he's constantly testing the system at the US southern border so the system needs to become a hard target.

So here's why I am in favor of Americans getting behind the external approach: From the security standpoint, which should be the #1 priority right now for the USG, the US and Mexico need to throw all available resources toward thinning out the crowds at all US-Mexico border checkpoints.

The task is to thin the crowds at the conventional border crossings to the point where guards and covert military observers have time for more eyeballing, and so that there can be more random checks.

The only way to thin the crowds significantly is to thin them at the point of origin. Most of the very poor, illiterate Mexicans who seek work in the USA are from southern Mexico. So stop them from migrating to the north of Mexico. How to do that?

Part of the answer is "Development-bank funded WPA-type projects that employ them at points in southern Mexico." The Mexican government doesn't want to take that approach. They want other types of loans from the World Bank and other development banks. And they fear that attractive work in southern Mexico will only bring more illegals from Central America across their border.

The answer to the last is arm-twisting by the USG for stricter border control measures and a coordinated approach to WPA projects that involves Central America as well.

Here one might ask whether all this wouldn't take years. The answer is that the World Bank can move with jaw-dropping speed when they want and that they are one of the world's most efficient organizations, when they want.

The problem is the infamous "mafias" at the Bank. So called because a certain group(s) of nationals or regionals gets in power inside the Bank and diverts Bank loans to their country or region.

You may trust that once Paul Wolfowitz gets to the Bank, the Arab mafia will gain power and that an Iraqi mafia will materialize almost overnight. This is because the USG wants to make Iraq a showcase and throw resources to addressing The Arab Problem.

So the "Latin American" mafias at the Bank, along with Ukraine and other East European mafias, will be left with crumbs, which is why Yushchenko was here recently glad-handing US senators. He senses the party is over.

The World Bank (and development banks in general) is not the only option, of course, but the idea is for Americans to set up such a howl that the USG uses influence at major development banks to set up a mini-Marshall Plan composed of WPA projects for countries that are hurling waves of immigrants at the southern US border.

That's only one approach I suggest along external lines; another is to arm-twist the Mexican government into adopting reforms that ease "temporary worker" immigrants--the people who are coming here just because they can't get loans at Mexican banks, and so on.

There are many other approaches as well--and once Americans greatly concerned with border security put their attention and ingenuity toward stopping waves of immigrants at the point of origin, many more workable approaches will be devised.

So I'm really suggesting a paradigm shift; I'm calling for Americans to look at the situation from the southern side of the problem and ask, "How can the Mexican government be helped and prodded to stop migrations at the point of origin?"

The USG won't get fully behind the external approach unless prodded by the American voter. The Bush administration is dragging their feet on the external approach because they're playing oil politics with Vicente Fox. Oil politics is serious business, but President Fox is playing oil politics because he can get away with it.

So US firms that employ legal immigrants from Mexico need to make it clear to Fox that they want Mexico's government to step up to the plate and get behind an external approach. Once Fox hears US businesses snapping at him about reform, this will put wind behind the Bush administration's sails. This will translate to the World Bank and other international organizations getting behind the WPA projects. Quickly.

None of this means abandoning the internal approach because quite frankly it won't be abandoned; there's too much political will behind it. But that's exactly the crux of the problem. There is not enough political will behind an external approach. This is despite the fact that the approach aims to actually solve the problem of huge crowds at the border instead of the futile approaches to 'managing' them once they are across the border.

For links to other Pundita essays on Mexico, US-Mexico relations, immigration from Mexico and the Mexico-US border situation/war on terror, see Mexico Desk.

Pundita is closing down the Comment section again. This is after receiving only four comments (two, if one cuts out the clowning around in PNMSpeak) in response to Part 5 of the Intersection series. I am still hoping for comments from two other readers but these, if and when they arrive, will be published (along with the two serious comments) in a post.

Dave Schuler's comment is part of a "riff" on Part 5 that he published on his own blog, The Glittering Eye. His wide-ranging thoughts about various points I made in the essay are worth the read. He notes in part:

Central planning whether in totalitarian Soviet Russia or the bureaucratic European Union have several problems in handling problems effectively and expeditiously. Perhaps the most important of these is informational: the very mechanism of its operation obscures the market information that's necessary to make an efficient choice. There's something similar at work in any top-down technocracy: no expert is so expert that he or she is smarter than the aggregate wit, wisdom, and experience of the
crowd.

The link in the passage refers to James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Just the Publisher's Weekly review is worth the read. In part:

While our culture generally trusts experts and distrusts the wisdom of the masses, New Yorker business columnist Surowiecki argues that "under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

To support this almost counterintuitive proposition, Surowiecki explores problems involving cognition (we're all trying to identify a correct answer), coordination (we need to synchronize our individual activities with others) and cooperation (we have to act together despite our self-interest).

His rubric, then, covers a range of problems, including driving in traffic, competing on TV game shows, maximizing stock market performance, voting for political candidates, navigating busy sidewalks, tracking SARS and designing Internet search engines like Google.

If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's "collective intelligence" will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally.

The author's observations fly against the cherished notion that once the masses are allowed into government, anarchy inevitably follows.

Aristophanes, observing the chaos of the Athenian assembly, wrote, "The ruler of the world is Whirlwind, that hath unseated Zeus."

I was reminded of the quote by Dave Schuler's Angel in the Wind.

There are, perhaps, too many variable factors to draw fast conclusions about what trips off anarchy. However, it could be argued that the chaos that overtook Athenian government had more to do with special interests manipulating votes than with mass participation in governing decisions.

I continue to welcome comments via email about the Intersection essays. However, after receiving a letter that seems to represent a thesis on stochastic calculus or a discussion of an Esperanto translation of James Joyce's Ulysses, I see it's time to tighten up on this blog's letters policy.

As I have noted before regular Pundita readers are very smart. So it is with regret that I lower the boom by instituting the dreaded Dalai Lama Rule of Thumb.

The way this rule came about...during a guest appearance years ago on William Buckley's Firing Line, the Dalai Lama brought along a translator and parked him within whispering range of his chair.

Buckley would ask a long question about the Chinese, Communism or Tibet, then the Lama would lean toward the translator, who would whisper and wave his hands to translate the question.

Suddenly Buckley leaned forward, listened intently to the whispers, then exclaimed in confusion, "Wait a minute! Your translator isn't speaking to you in Tibetan; he's speaking in English!"

The Dalai Lama boomed cheerfully, "Yes. Simple English."

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Bruce Kesler has written a data-rich report for the Augusta Free Press Online that is required reading if you want a handle on how illegal immigration affects America. Thanks to Mark Safranski at ZenPundit for finding the report.

In simple businesslike language, Kesler orders the jumble of issues into the tolls that a large illegal population exacts on Americans and illegals:

The toll on the American tax system; the toll on the US federal and local government budgets; the toll on employers, individual taxpayers, schools, police departments--and the toll on the American political system.

Perhaps most troubling is the last. In the space of a few sentences, Kesler explains how the inclusion of illegal immigrants in the census works in practice, and how this robs US citizens of fair representation.

The writing is so clear that Pundita wondered what branch of academia or bureaucracy Mr. Kesler represents. The byline, "Bruce Kesler resides in Encinitas, Calif." threw no light, so it was off to Google's search engine, where the mystery was quickly resolved.

Mr. Kesler "has worked as a finance and operations executive for Fortune 100 companies, and now owns an employee benefits consulting and brokerage firm in Encinitas, California."

That certainly explains how Kesler deftly marshals so many facts and figures on the immigration issue; it's part of his job as an employee benefits consultant. So his piece is not only enlightening, it's also a great example of citizen journalism and shores points I made in the "Getting Unstuck" essay posted yesterday. I will not labor my points, except to note that Kesler's work experience, while outside the bureaucracies that deal with immigrant issues, is nonetheless very valuable toward understanding the issues.

But now I must proceed to dispute the basis of Mr. Kesler's recommendations. With one exception (better efforts by border patrols on the Mexican side of the border), he tasks the United States with the job of solving the problems created here by illegals.

Of course that is a pragmatic approach because the problems have fallen to the US to solve. Yet the approach is unworkable as its been unworkable for decades. Kesler is simply ordering up more of the same.

More of the same; e.g, "a federal law withholding other funds if each state does not institute a minimum $200-per-infraction fine payable to the local governments for hiring illegal gardeners, day-laborers, nannies, house cleaners, etc.," presupposes a vastly expanded bureaucracy and judicial system to enforce new and tougher laws and with attendant expense.

It's an expense that the US should and need not incur, and it's an expense that is ever-expanding because every relevant law on the US books only calls forth the need for more laws and more enforcement mechanisms--none of which work, which only calls for more revenue outlay and more laws. That's a vicious cycle.

To break the cycle, one needs to study data that is not produced by looking at things from the American side; i.e., one needs to study the situations at the points of origin. Kesler inadvertently refers to this need when he writes, "We do not want to follow Germany's path to unassimilated, impoverished Turks, or France's to antagonistic and violent Arab subcultures."

But only one category of the immigrants coming from Mexico can be compared to the category represented by the impoverished Turks and Arabs who flee to Europe. I have argued this point in detail in other essays so I won't trot out the details here.*

Yet there's lots of data to indicate that it's barking up the wrong tree to look at immigration as a monolithic phenomenon; indeed, much of it isn't even immigration. It's daily commuting and temporary (albeit illegal) residence. People in these two categories plan to return to their point of origin, or close nearby, at a foreseeable time in the future.

Point of Origin
So to set up more complex mechanisms in the US than already exist on the books to help vast numbers of illegals assimilate is putting money in the wrong place. If you're coming here illegally because you've been trying for five years to get a housing loan at your bank in Mexico, and the bribe to move the loan process along is bigger than the loan amount, what's the solution? A better assimilation process for you, once you get here? Of course not. The solution is to get the blasted Mexican government to vaporize the mountain of red tape wrapped around antiquated Mexican banking laws.

You can continue a far way down the list of reasons for coming here illegally (from the regions south of the US) before you hit the kind of problems that send waves of African Arabs flooding into Europe. The OECD, IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Bank, and USAID are inching their way to grappling with that bald fact. They've figured out between them that by gum you have to deal with situations at the point of origin if you don't want them overwhelming resources at the arrival point.

As to why those organizations are only inching toward a fact that has piles of data to support it, because development banks and USAID might as well be headquartered on the moon, for all the scrutiny they receive from US voters and Congress. And without the voter breathing down necks of congressionals and the White House, one is routed to Pluto for answers.

There on Pluto you will speak with lobbyists who lean across the desk and say earnestly, "But if you push these governments too hard to join the Nineteenth Century, you do realize, don't you, that they'll get really mad at the USA. Then what will happen to gas and oil prices?"

The Cascade Effect
That reply doesn't stay on Pluto long because it makes such a handy excuse for the shrewd ones that they deploy it right here on Earth. For example, when the Mexican government sees the US handing out that excuse about them, they use it to avoid confronting governments in Central America about their crummy outdated banking laws, which are bringing thousands of illegals across Mexico's border. And each government passes the excuse on down the line--or up the line, as the geographic case may be.

Realize the cascade starts when the obvious leader (in this case, the world's most powerful nation) sets the bar for intelligent behavior so low that a chipmunk could hop over it.

Then governments from south of the US border put on a long face and stand outside the G7/8 annual meetings and honk into mounds of Kleenex. Please give us more money, please forgive our debt, we're soooooo overwhelmed with problems.

Tip for those waiting for the end of the world: Don't hold your breath; any race this full of monkey business is kept around for laughs.

My dispute with his recommendations takes nothing away from the reporting part of Kesler's article; he well understands the American side of the illegals problem and clearly explains it.

A footnote about Mr. Kesler: I found his biography on the Winter Soldier website, which is "dedicated to the American veterans of the Vietnam War, who served with courage and honor."

Kesler is one of a group of Vietnam veterans who make themselves available to "answer questions and accept speaking engagements regarding the Vietnam-era war crimes disinformation campaign."

Pundita is glad to see that the Winter Soldier organization still seems to be going strong. You might want to visit the site, if only to read about Bruce Kesler's accomplishments.

* See today's earlier post, Mexico Desk for a list of earlier Pundita essays on Mexico.

Michael Wright, an old friend, talks with Pundita about the direction her blog has taken. New readers might want to skim Parts 1-4 of the “Stuck at the Intersection” series (links shown at the end of this essay) before reading the interview.

M: In the essay you refer to as Pundita’s mission statement [1] you set yourself the task of discovering where Americans are now in relation to understanding the world at large outside US shores. I know this task actually began for you on September 11, 2001. You zeroed in on studying broadcast television news media. That led to you sounding an alarm about the general public’s ignorance of the wholesale transfer of US white-collar jobs offshore. I assumed at the time you’d continue in that area. Instead, you focused exclusively on foreign policy and in late 2004 started a blog on the topic. So where is Pundita now? What general trends or major factors have you identified, what’s important to you?

P: Actually, I started the research a couple months after 9/11. I halted in 2003 when I found that I could predict the line-up and how the local affiliates and the Big Three [CBS, NBC, ABC] and [PBS] NewsHour would handle the same headline story.

I haven’t set aside the issue of jobs offshoring; I see what I’m doing now as an extension of my reaction to the incredibly naïve arguments that Bill Gates and other American industry leaders used to defend offshoring.

M: I’d call the arguments “the bottom line.”

P: Then maybe we haven’t read the same arguments. Gates views the individual American hi-tech worker as in competition with individual hi-tech workers in other countries. This simply isn’t the case in the key instances. The worker and the college student in free societies are in competition with authoritarian governments that control the education and work choices of their citizens. I touched on this situation in the Pharaoh essay.[2]

And even in countries such as India and Romania where the citizens can say ‘no’ to their government about job and study choices, the government usually subsidizes education in hi-tech fields and/or supplements by one means or another the pittance that their workers receive from Western firms. In some cases the pittance is actually no pay; the government wants them to work for free for the Western firms just to get the technology/information transfer. All this is a modern version of the Plantation economy.

So how is the American worker supposed to compete with workers who will work for free or for peanuts? This is what the American worker is in competition with—the Plantation and Pharaoh governments, not “individual” foreign workers.

And the ”investments” that Microsoft and other American businesses are making in China and India are naïve to the point of funny if they weren’t scary. India and China will throw them out at the first opportunity.

It’s easy to assume that the arguments put forward by Bill Gates and his counterparts are not naïve but cynical and ruthlessly focused on the bottom line. Yet everything I have learned since 9/11 about Americans’ understanding of international affairs would challenge that assumption. The majority of Americans, and this includes American executives at transnational organizations, are on a steep learning curve about how the world works and the historical forces underlying the worst problems in developing countries.

My most pointed writings verbally shake the reader by the shoulders and cry, “Wake up! This is not 1989!” Every spring and summer I spend half a day on the Washington National Mall, asking visitors from all around the country and the world to give me their views of the world and America. What I find most striking about the replies is that they reflect unrealistic expectations about the American government’s capacity to resolve global situations they view as problematical.

America is and will remain for the foreseeable future the world’s most powerful nation. The catch is that the jobs outsourcing/offshoring trend is but one among many warnings that at some point which is fast approaching, American financial resources will be greatly refocused on domestic concerns.

In case after case around the world, America spent the past half-century pouring trillions—when reckoned in local currencies—into hard luck countries. And trillions of US military dollars were poured into shoring up governments that had great strategic importance for America’s defenses during the Cold War.

However, in this globalized era, precious few countries don’t have strategic importance for America’s defenses. So when that bald fact is weighed against the onrushing need to re-deploy American resources, is plain as day that something’s got to give.

To put that observation in cold-blooded language, the governments in the world’s hard-luck countries had better assume they’ve got less than five years to stop futzing around. They have to address situations they’ve been able to avoid because of their dependency on aid and development bank loans provided by the developed countries. American foreign policy needs to make the same assumption.

But with the exception of the military branch, governments, including the US government, are not set up to solve problems but to manage them--chiefly through strategies of containment. And international organizations such as the World Bank are not set up to save the poorest except via the longest way around, which is trickle-down economics. But trickle-down theory addresses growth, not triage; it’s directed at development not rescuing populations from a train wreck of worst-case scenarios.

So the question is whether the containment approach can work this time around. I don’t think it can. I think we’re at a crossroads that parallels the crossroads with the social security program. The argument about social security is whether to attempt to fix it, or simply wait until the program goes broke then ask, “Now what do we do?” There are arguments for either approach because any attempt at a fix will involve pain.

However, the analogy falls apart if you consider the scope of the global problems that have been propped up and created by governments not addressing their most glaring failures. I think we’re at a place where the US government has to make a sincere attempt to prod the developing world governments to deal with their chief problems, which are remarkably similar. Part of that attempt involves devising and proposing real solutions—

M: What you’re saying is that Americans need to move away from asking, for example, what the government is doing to help African nations and ask instead, “Why, after all the help they’ve received, can’t the nations help themselves?”

P: Well, you can’t just ask that, in the manner of washing your hands—no more than you can tell a dope addict that he’s got no one but himself to blame after you’ve spent years supplying him with low-cost dope. But I’m warning that such questions will come, once it’s unavoidably clear that American resources will need to be shifted more to America’s domestic problems. Actually, such questions have already been voiced but they don’t get a hearing at the government level and with good reason.

M: Okay but in trying to establish Pundita’s approach -- you’re saying that we have to move away from fixes and toward finding real solutions and that part of this involves asking tough questions of other governments.

P: The tough questions have been asked but institutions such as the IMF have been willing to accept evasions for answers. But yes, this is the direction that President Bush has laid down, or tried to. My blog, which was launched within days of his reelection, takes Bush at his word and asks, how do we get from here to there?

If Bush is asking for real democracy to be instituted across the board, if he’s asking for more accountability from the world’s hard luck governments, if he wants those governments to get their act together, how does all this translate for American foreign policy and particularly our policy instruments, such as the World Bank? That’s the patch of ground on which I stand when I look at US government initiatives events that greatly impact US policy.

M: Yet you’ve been critical of Bush in several instances.

P: If US foreign policy comes in line with the general statements Bush has made, I’ll have no major gripes. But so far we don’t have policy in a lot of areas; we have talk. And even the talk has been flagrantly contradicted by some recent State Department actions. If the US weren’t at war, I’d have more criticisms than ones I’ve voiced on this blog. But I have to assume that Bush is getting sound counsel from military advisors, which could explain some of the gaps between public statements and actions.

My concern is that the US war on terror, which I find justifiable in the way it’s been prosecuted so far, will morph into a cold war that provides cover for bad US foreign policy. This time, though, the policy would be playing out in a world that’s vastly changed from the one during the Cold War era. A world that’s vastly more difficult for a few rich nations to control, let alone manage.

M: This is why you’ve made a huge issue out of what you call stage show democracy. Frankly your argument for democracy is taking some getting used to and I don’t know if I accept what you’re saying. It’s almost as if you’re challenging all the traditional arguments for democracy.

P: I’m not challenging the philosophical arguments; I’m saying that there is a purely empirical defense of democracy and that we should line up the execution of policy—planning, financial aid, loans, and so on—behind that defense.

The traditional philosophical arguments for democracy, and even Sharansky’s argument, overlook that the problems of the Mass Age are too numerous and complex for a small number of people—a governing elite—to solve. My argument for democracy is grounded in the empirical observation that true democratic government, which allows many people to participate at the problem-solving level, is the only form of government capable of effectively administering to the needs of mega-populations.

M: [laughing] You’re saying that until AI is a lot farther along, we need many more brains involved in government.

P: If that way of looking at it helps you find where I am, you’re welcome to the idea. But it doesn’t take an artificial form of intelligence to solve the problems that besiege mega-populations. It doesn’t even take a high IQ—a point that I’m afraid was misunderstood in the responses to my essay on the topic.

The intelligence I referred to reflects job experience in a post-industrial society as much as educational background, IQ, and so on. I was saying that many American voters of average intelligence are now more intelligent than the majority of government workers and elected representatives--or at the least, fully as intelligent.

The pyramid of knowledge possession, whereby a small number of informed, educated people rule over large numbers of uneducated, uninformed masses, has been up-ended if not atomized.

So while most Americans are still poorly informed about offshore situations, the expert knowledge derived from the work experience of many 'average' Americans is an untapped resource for solving problems that vex the governing elite.

M: Okay but that up-ended pyramid holds true only for very few countries. But there’s still the traditional defense of democracy to fall back on for the others.

P: I think the phenomenon is more widespread than that. What we’d call the upper middle class is bigger in India than the entire population of the United States. Inclusion in that class doesn’t necessarily equate to job experience in a post-industrial society but trust me when I tell you that the average informed Indian voter—I emphasize ‘informed’—is in many cases just as smart or smarter than the majority of bureaucrats who labor for the Indian central government.

A similar situation is occurring in China, which causes China’s communist party bosses at the central government level unending worry.

M: But this pool of smart citizens doesn’t want to work for government because the money’s not there, or because they’re frustrated with the bureaucratic way of doing things --

P: I don’t want to make generalizations about other countries. I’d say that in America, the challenge is how to connect this pool with the governing process in a more direct way and without crippling the necessary bureaucratic infrastructure of government and raising the specter of anarchy.

Much history can be viewed as one long cry against the failure of elites to effectively and humanely govern large populations. But the alternative--to open up the governing process to large numbers, is also fraught with peril, given the population size in today's largest democracies.

Yet clearly humanity is at a crossroads. Several of today's biggest social problems are highly complex and interconnected via conditions set in motion and reinforced by the policies of transnational organizations and trade practices.

Of course, that observation is the theme song of the anti-globalists. But if governments are to be charged with finding and implementing solutions, they must move away from tradition-bound, rigidly enforced civil service routines and embrace strategies used in the private business sectors. And they must rely less on political ideology and theorizing and more on systems that provide constantly updated data and analysis. That’s something the anti-globalists don’t want to hear—at least, not the ones I’ve spoken with. They still think a gussied-up socialist ideaology can save the world.

M: And you’re saying the tecchies can save the world? This is the new Promised Land? The development bankers and economists failed, so now we try out the systems guys?

P: You lose points if you make Pundita laugh.

M: [laughing] Sorry!

P: You’re making this more complicated than it is, or maybe I could put it more clearly. Here’s an example to illustrate:

A woman outside the government and with no military training came up with a simple idea for how to flummox the terrorists in Iraq with regard to a specific situation. She passed the idea to Paul Wolfowitz during a public email exchange run by the White House. Wolfowitz must have fallen over with excitement when he read the idea but his reply politely turned aside the suggestion. The proposed strategy depended on the element of surprise so of course he was noncommittal.

The military deployed the very same strategy the woman proposed and with great success. I don’t recall whether the woman stated her occupation, but it was the kind of idea that someone very experienced with outfoxing a group of small children—say, a kindergarten teacher—could have thought up with no trouble.

It’s possible that the military came up with the idea independently. But the story illustrates the possibilities with regard to problem solving, once you think in terms of finding and matching relevant experience with a problem.

M: But even if the command in Baghdad got the idea from that woman they would have needed to do analysis. So if you bring more people into the governing process, this can produce more intelligent decisions, but also increases the need to test decisions and analyze plans that rest on intuition rather than data. That’s where communications technology, decision analysis, better intelligence reports, and so on, come in.

P: That’s the idea. Also, the technologies can help match the right people with problems.

M: The technology is out there. The people who can solve the problems are out there. It’s a matter of connecting them.

P: Yes, but it’s also a matter of getting very sophisticated about the downside of problem solving, as applied to large complex systems, which modern societies represent. That’s why I dredged up my recollection of conversations with a computer scientist from decades ago. It’s not enough to come up with a workable idea. You have to factor in how the idea, once implemented, will impact the society and take measures to offset negative consequences. Again, that is where technology comes in.

M: One-half is rocket science. The other half is common sense.

P: Something like that, yes. Of course, there are a few things standing in the way.

M: The World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations, governments, political party machines, policy institutes to mention a few.

P: Don’t forget the industries they’ve generated.

M: I’ve gotten you to come out of the closet and admit you’re a wild-eyed visionary.

P: I’d say I’m also a cold-eyed realist. The problems humanity is facing are enormous. So this is what’s known as enlightenment at the point of a gun.

M: You’re envisioning a world where a farmer in say, Mongolia can get on a sat-phone or computer and dial up a data bank of agricultural extensions and farmers who’ve dealt with the kind of problem he’s got with his soil. And another data bank where he can look up funding for the soil additives or farm implement he needs. You’re a visionary.

P: I think a lot of people have had the same vision. And what you’re talking about is already here, in some form. If you’re a doctor anywhere in the world with access to a computer and the Internet, you can access databanks that discuss the kind of symptoms you’re analyzing in a patient and look up research on the disease and cures. Of course there are counterpart databases for the legal profession and others.

The trick is to include this kind of approach in the governing process. That would save tons of tax revenue by distributing it more efficiently than done now.

M: It’s a new chapter, not the end of history.

P: Before you get carried away, there is a specific set of recurring problems in developing countries that’s best studied as a system—one that’s so far proven almost impossible to dismantle. That’s why I’ve gotten interested in complex systems and want to talk with decision analysts. I’m also trying to scare up conversation with retired cops and officials, inside and outside the force, who were directly involved in fighting corruption in the NYPD back in the 70s. The Serpico era. I’m beginning to suspect that the systemic problem of government corruption in developing countries is intractable because the wrong people have been consulted for solutions.

M: Is that why you suggested Eliot Spitzer for the job of World Bank president? [3]

P: Yes, but all that for another day.

(1)
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/01/in-search-
of-where-we-are-now.html

(2)
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/03/pharaoh.html

(3)
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/01/why-eliot-
spitzer-is-man-for-job.html

Stuck at the Intersection series
(In order of publication)

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/
is-there-traffic-engineer-in-house.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/
your-village-called-theyre-missing.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/
stuck-at-intersection-part-3-nope-guru.html

http://pundita.blogspot.com/2005/04/stuck-at-
intersection-part-4-this.html