Monthly Archive for April, 2010

Two connected news items this week, both concerning the attempt to bring to justice men who previously have been lent an air of respectability and untouchable privilege from the venerable institutions that housed them during their crime sprees.

Yes, Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger have quite a bit in common. Both were born and spent their boyhoods in Bavaria, Germany. Here their stories diverge but evince a strange symmetry. In 1938, when Henry was 15, his family fled to New York to escape Nazi persecution. It was right around this time that young Ratzinger was enrolled into the Hitler Youth. In 1943, Henry was drafted into the U.S. Army, and due to his fluent German, served as a military intelligence officer, helping to de-Nazify German cities and track down former Gestapo officers. Meanwhile, also in 1943, at age 16, young Joseph was drafted into Hitler’s Luftwaffenhelfer program, and later trained in the German infantry as the war was drawing to a close.

After the war, both men entered the academy; Henry going straight through at Harvard and then staying on as faculty, while Joseph went to seminary, wrote his dissertation on St. Augustine, and became a professor at the University of Bonn. Kissinger would reach the highest eschelons of power within the U.S. government, and Ratzinger would of course become the worldwide leader of the Catholic Church as Pope Benedict XVI.

Both men, now in their eighties, are being undone by the relentless unearthing of bygone documents, letters, cables, and memoranda, directly implicating them in a variety of prosecutable felonies.

First, do read Christopher Hitchens’ 2001 Harpers Magazine piece (part one, and part two), detailing the many provable, prosecutable war crimes and crimes against humanity of Henry A. Kissinger. The entire legal case is laid out definitively in Hitchens’ book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

What concerns us today (one must triage when discussing the Kissinger rap sheet) is the discovery of a 1976 State Department cable, released this week, showing definitively what has been long suspected and assumed: Henry Kissinger was directly complicit in the perpetuation of Operation Condor. Operation Condor was, in Hitchens’ words, "a machinery of cross-border assassination, abduction, torture, and intimidation coordinated among the secret police forces of Pinochet’s Chile, Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay, Jorge Rafael Videla’s Argentina, and other regional caudillos." It was a program of repression targeting the dictators’ political opponents throughout the world. (Kissinger’s entire sordid love affair with Chilean dictatorship is discussed in the end of part one, and into part two, of the Hitchens piece)

After the U.S. government learned of Condor, the State Department wanted to issue a stern warning to the three goverments not to engage in such assassinations. The new cable shows that Kissinger insisted on cancelling this warning. Five days later, agents of Augusto Pinochet detonated a car bomb in downtown Washington, D.C., killing former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier, a fierce critic of the Pinochet regime. From the AP piece:

”The Sept. 16 cable is the missing piece of the historical puzzle on Kissinger’s role in the action, and inaction, of the U.S. government after learning of Condor assassination plots,” said Peter Kornbluh, the National Security Archive’s senior analyst on Chile.

Why would Kissinger not want to warn foreign dictators against engaging in a string of international assassination and repression? Well because he was intimately involved in helping to carry out Operation Condor:

United States government complicity has been uncovered at every level of this network. It has been established, for example, that the FBI aided Pinochet in capturing Jorge Isaac Fuentes de Alarchon, who was detained and tortured in Paraguay, then turned over to the Chilean secret police and "disappeared." Astonishingly, the surveillance of Latin American dissident refugees in the United States was promised to "Condor" figures by American intelligence.

Anyway, this incident would be just a minor courtroom diversion if Kissinger were ever to be made to appear in the dock and stand for his many heinous crimes in Indochina, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cyprus, and of course Chile.

On the strength of the legal case, Hitchens acknowledged in 2001:

Some of these allegations can be constructed only prima facie, since Mr. Kissinger—in what may also amount to a deliberate and premeditated obstruction of justice—has caused large tranches of evidence to be withheld or possibly destroyed. We now, however, enter upon the age when the defense of "sovereign immunity" for state crimes has been held to be void.

But as we learned this week, there’s plenty more evidence out there. And the age of the end of sovereign immunity began in 1998, when a Spanish magistrate indicted Augusto Pinochet for human rights violations. Pinochet was in Britain for medical treatment at the time, and the UK honored the Spanish indictment and arrested Pinochet under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Henry Kissinger is, needless to say, very much opposed to the doctrine of universal jurisdiction. How ironic that Kissinger may one day be brought to justice under the precedent applied to the man whose crimes Kissinger was intimately involved in helping to carry out.

The limits of sovereign immunity provide a good segue into the current campaign to bring Joseph Ratzinger to justice, for the crime of aiding and abetting sex with minors.

In 1985, in a letter bearing his signiture, then-Cardinal Ratzinger resisted pleas to defrock a California priest who had confessed to a long history of rape and molestation. The priest, Stephen Kiesle, personally requested that he be defrocked, but his plea was ignored by Ratzinger, who cited concerns for "the good of the Universal church." Andrew Sullivan has an excellent roundup of the whole case.

The Vatican has tried to insulate the Pope by declaring that, as a head of state, he has sovereign immunity from any questioning or prosecution. However, the pope is scheduled to visit Britain in September, and two lawyers there are preparing a legal case to either force the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope; launch their own civil action; or refer the case to the International Criminal Court.

One of the magistrates, Geoffrey Robertson, writes in the Guardian that the Vatican’s claim to statehood and the Pope’s title of head of state are both deeply suspect, and could be challenged in both the UK and the European Court of Human Rights.

But in any event, head of state immunity provides no protection for the pope in the international criminal court (see its current indictment of President Bashir). The ICC Statute definition of a crime against humanity includes rape and sexual slavery and other similarly inhumane acts causing harm to mental or physical health, committed against civilians on a widespread or systematic scale, if condoned by a government or a de facto authority. It has been held to cover the recruitment of children as soldiers or sex slaves. If acts of sexual abuse by priests are not isolated or sporadic, but part of a wide practice both known to and unpunished by their de facto authority then they fall within the temporal jurisdiction of the ICC.

The symmetry in the ignominious careers of Messrs. Kissinger and Ratzinger is rather extraordinary. And as they began their lives in the same place, so too do they deserve to end their lives in the same place: in the dock, and then prison.

Etymology fact of the day, and slightly apropos of Bob McDonnell being for the Confederacy before he was against it. Do you know the original meaning of the term "Grandfather clause"? Maybe the lawyers out there know. PoliticsInVivo is HUGE with the lawyers. Anyway, I didn’t know this:

a provision inserted in the constitutions of some southern states after the Civil War requiring high standards of literacy and substantial property qualifications of voters, except for descendants of men voting before 1867.

In some states it literally stipulated that you were exempt from the literacy and property qualification if your grandfather could vote, i.e., your grandfather wasn’t a slave, i.e., your grandfather was white. Clever. It was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1915 as a rather obscene violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. Which of course didn’t stop southern states from trying to erect all sorts of other roadblocks to black enfranchisement.

Robert Rubin, former Chairman, Director, and Senior Counselor at Citigroup, and Charles Prince, former Citigroup Chairman and CEO, are currently testifying before a bipartisan congressional commission on the financial crisis. Citigroup is interesting because it was particularly addicted to exposing itself to the subprime and derivative pseudo-markets. Rubin and Prince did nothing, and Citigroup ended up requiring $45 billion in taxpayer bailouts. Mr. Prince at least had the shame to resign in 2007. Rubin, in his testimony, had the nerve to downplay his personal knowledge of or involvement in the absurd bets his company was making, even though Prince has said that the two talked three or four times a day:

In his remarks, Mr. Rubin distanced himself from Citigroup’s troubles. As he has for months, he refers to his employment contract — which explicitly gave him a nonmanagerial role at Citi — and said that he learned of the bank’s large exposure to certain complex mortgage-related assets only in the fall of 2007.

Rubin, however, played a critical role in 2004-2005 in Citigroup’s decision to take on more risk to boost flagging profits. And Mr. Rubin, of course, personally did very, very well in his “nonmanagerial” role:

But [Rubin's] remarks did not address the more than $100 million that he was paid for his role as senior advisor at Citi — an amount that rankles many bank employees who have seen their personal fortunes evaporate after the share price collapsed. Nor does he address why the board bestowed a discretionary bonus on Mr. Prince — even as the extent of Citigroup’s losses was becoming known.

It was actually $126 million, over eight years. And god knows how much bonus money Rubin made during his 25 years at Goldman Sachs, where he honed his unique talent for realizing short-term profits while ignoring long-term risk. His entire career consists of making a personal fortune on decisions that led inexorably to the future misery of millions of people, and to society having to bail out his failed company. Job well done, Bob.

The crux of the problem: “Citigroup bankers and risk officers told the panel yesterday they relied on statistical models that failed to predict the severity of the crisis.” No shit.

I’m struck by the fact that we can hide behind the statistical models,” said commission member John Thompson, who’s chairman of Symantec Corp. “Where was the intuitive leadership judgment that said something may not be right in this market?

Where indeed. And those bogus statistical models that purport to tame and corral hidden risk?—remember kids, if you can make up your own, you’ll probably get a Nobel Prize for it.

These guys represent every single thing that is wrong with our financial system. I am watching their testimony on C-Span right now: they both impressively manage to combine the height of contrition with the height of blame deflection: Few could have foreseen this crisis; the downside systemic risk was way more than we ever imagined; Sure we put billions of assets off our balance sheets, but everyone else did too; It wasn’t me, I barely worked there; Our chief risk manager was extremely well-qualified for his job; The crap we were buying was all triple-A rated!; Our internal processes were stellar; All of us acted in really good faith as we aimed the plane into the mountain…and on and on.

Their arguments essentially boil down to two points: “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” And, “Sure I was drunk off my ass, but it was a frat party!” These are, needless to say, deeply adolescent arguments. And you’ll be comforted to know that they both have plenty of ideas on how to fix the system that they and their ilk exploited for decades.

They are both very sad that this has all happened. There are plenty of apologies, yet there is no punishment, no accountability. Mr. Rubin is gearing up to relaunch his Washington-based “economic policy group”, and he apparently still has the ear of the president. And Rubin’s accumulated bonuses will afford him a lovely retirement with his private jet in St. Barts. Claw it back. All of it. It’s not unprecedented.

Maybe you’ve heard that Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has decided to reinstate April as “Confederate History Month” in Virginia. George “Macaca” Allen started the practice in 1997. The past two Democratic governors refused to issue the proclamation.

The proclamation does not mention the words slavery, secession, or the cause of institutional racism and segregation that lived on for a century after. McDonnell says that he left out the whole slavery angle because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

It’s true, when Virginia voted to seceed from the Union in April, 1861, there were fourteen proposals adopted as part of the secession resolution. The first proposal asserted Virginia’s states’ rights; the second was for retention of slavery; the fourth called for equal recognition of slavery in both territories and non-slave states. Several of the remaining proposals were procedural or dealt with the rights of secession. And the final proposal asked the border slave states to join in Virginia’s appeal.

So the bedrock of the secession document was the assertion of Virginia’s state right to guarantee the perpetuation of slavery forever; the right to expand slavery into the territories below the Missouri Compromise line; and the right to incite the border states to seceed and join the Confederacy.

But maybe the proposals I highlighted aren’t the significant ones. Let’s take a look at McDonnell’s idea of what is and isn’t “significant for Virginia.”

His proclamation reads:

WHEREAS, Virginia has long recognized her Confederate history, the numerous civil war battlefields that mark every region of the state, the leaders and individuals in the Army, Navy and at home who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth in a time very different than ours today;

What does that mean, “in a time very different than ours today”? A time in which people were not afraid to stand up for their right to own other human beings as property?

WHEREAS,  it is important for all Virginians to reflect upon our Commonwealth’s shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present;

How on earth are Virginians to recognize how their history has led to the present when Bob didn’t find the issues of slavery and segregation to be “significant” enough to mention? Does Bob really think we can get from there to here just by understanding “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers, and citizens”?

And now McDonnell descends into full-blown “Lost Cause” romanticism. Get your tissues:

WHEREAS, all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace….

This is fraught language. It echoes Robert E. Lee’s farewell address to the Army of Northern Virginia, in which he spoke of the Union’s “overwhelming resources and numbers”. It marked the beginning of the revisionist “Lost Cause” movement, which presented the South’s defeat as beyond its control, and the Southern cause as uniquely noble, chivalric, and romantic. The literary tradition that built up around it concocted a narrative that fetishized Southern virtue and bravery, saw itself as defending Southern “culture” and “heritage” from encroachment, and stressed states’ rights (along with unchecked Northern aggression), rather than slavery, as the main driver of conflict.

This is clearly a powerfully attractive narrative to a defeated and discredited people, and one that of course survives today under many guises. It allows the South to avoid admitting culpability in its devastating military defeat, and avoid repudiating the Confederacy’s odious ideology. Notice McDonnell’s proclamation says that we should appreciate the fact that Confederate soldiers returned home and rebuilt their communities in peace; but not because they disavowed the rectitude of their mission or somehow lost conviction in the righteousness of their “cause”, but only because they were defeated in battle, inexorably and without fault, in conflict against an “insurmountable” foe.

Also, McDonnell’s description of the conflict as a “four year war between the states for independence” is equally tendentious, and echoes the Confederacy’s avoidance of the term “civil war”, as well as the attempt to link the Southern cause to that of the original American War for Independence.

This is being seen as an attempt by McDonnell to shore up and assuage his conservative base in Virginia. It perhaps says something about the state of Virginia conservatism when providing succor to its members involves historical revisionism and whitewashing of this sort. Deliberately eliding a racist and supremacist past for political expediency is deplorable, and all Virginians should be embarassed that this document purports to speak for them.

I generally recoil from the cult of Warren Buffett, for no particular reason: I own none of his stock, I don’t know too much about his life, and he seems like a very pleasant fellow when he shows up on tv. I think it’s all this business about him being a “sage” and an “oracle” and possessing some brand of supernatural knowledge of how investment markets operate and how human beings act when they come in contact with such markets.

That said, he seems to have some pretty interesting and idiosyncratic views on the nature of his wealth, and the role that luck and genetic favor have played in his success. His famed annual letters to Berkshire shareholders are also noteworthy for their simple prose, eagerness to admit mistakes, and most of all, the evidence of clear strategic thinking. The 2009 letter was recently released.

Tom Ricks has an interesting post at his Foreign Policy blog, arguing that Buffett’s management style would make him an excellent Army Chief of Staff. Looking over the shareholder letter, I see some overlap in:

His humility in assessing risk:

Charlie and I avoid businesses whose futures we can’t evaluate, no matter how exciting their products may be….At Berkshire we will stick with businesses whose profit picture for decades to come seems reasonably predictable. Even then, we will make plenty of mistakes. […]

We will never become dependent on the kindness of strangers. Too-big-to-fail is not a fallback position at Berkshire. Instead, we will always arrange our affairs so that any requirements for cash we may conceivably have will be dwarfed by our own liquidity.

His insistence on broad delegation and decentralization:

But we will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately-managed mediumsized and large businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level. Charlie and I will limit ourselves to allocating capital, controlling enterprise risk, choosing managers and setting their compensation.

And most of all, his ability to maintain strategic equanimity without descending into rigidity:

Investors who buy and sell based upon media or analyst commentary are not for us. Instead we want partners who join us at Berkshire because they wish to make a long-term investment in a business they themselves understand and because it’s one that follows policies with which they concur…Scaling up to giant size doesn’t change that truth.

I am generally skeptical of analogizing across disciplines as Ricks is doing. For instance, Army Chief of Staff Warren Buffett would perhaps not like being ordered to come up with the best possible strategy for winning a war, regardless of whether he thought that best strategy would actually work. Likewise, I am baffled and annoyed to no end when I hear the argument that what the Oval Office really needs is a CEO president: someone who’s got some business experience and knows how to run a company and meet payroll and turn a profit. What nonsense! If the business world resembled in any way the peculiar method by which we have chosen to make collective political decisions (please recall the year-long health care decision we just endured), we’d still be waiting patiently for the industrial revolution.

Warren Buffett ends his shareholder letter this way:

At 86 and 79, Charlie and I remain lucky beyond our dreams. We were born in America; had terrific parents who saw that we got good educations; have enjoyed wonderful families and great health; and came equipped with a “business” gene that allows us to prosper in a manner hugely disproportionate to that experienced by many people who contribute as much or more to our society’s well-being. Moreover, we have long had jobs that we love, in which we are helped in countless ways by talented and cheerful associates.

Focusing on strategic vision, adaptability, structural fundamentals, and institutional constraints (and the paramount role of dumb luck) seems to be the way to go in a lot of complex behavioral systems, including politics, sports (I found this link—on the surprising greatness of NBA mediocrity Shane Battier—absolutely riveting), and as Ricks says, the military.

Each ecosystem has its own interminable list of variables and vagaries, and expertise in one domain does not imply expertise in any other. Buffett has figured out the workings of his own little domain pretty well, and for that he certainly deserves respect, if not slavish awe.

I think there are strong arguments for the necessity of a federal individual mandate to purchase health insurance. If you want guaranteed issue and no discrimination based on preexisting conditions, that’s gonna cost a lot of money, and so everyone who is able needs to pay some premiums. I just don’t know any other solution that gets around the free-rider problem, the adverse selection problem, and the death-spiral problem all at once. If you don’t care about those problems, and if you don’t want to end discrimination based on preexisting conditions, and if you want to routinize the denial of care to those unable to pay; then whether I like it or not, that is a coherent set of ideas, and I can’t really argue with it other than to shame your moral repugnance using the GLOBALLY DOMINANT public platform that is this blog.

Though practical impediments aside, it does seems to me that it is possible to be against the federal mandate on philosophical grounds, but just barely.

In the NYT today, Gail Collins thinks she has Mitt Romney in a big gotcha because he helped enact an insurance mandate in Massachusetts, yet he is against the new federal mandate:

No more free-riders,” Romney said frequently, back when he was a little more vocal about defending the Massachusetts plan. Lately, he’s been vaguer on the subject, and when it comes to the new federal law, he’s jumped on the repeal bandwagon. When someone from the liberal blog ThinkProgress asked Romney whether he thought the new federal insurance mandate — so very much like the Massachusetts one — was constitutional, he muttered something about it being “a big topic” and ducked into an elevator.

I assume Mitt either has already, or soon will make this argument: The federal mandate is so very much like the Massachusetts mandate only if you elide the one thing that makes it nothing like the Massachusetts mandate: It’s federal!

Consider this statement: "The federal ban on smoking in all bars and restaurants in the entire country is so very much like the Massachusetts state smoking ban, so what’s the problem?" There is of course no federal ban on smoking, but you can see that it is quite easy for a Massachusetts resident to be in favor of the latter and ruefully opposed to the former. No hypocrisy.

Though like I said, the philosophical argument on the mandate just barely makes it by me. Here’s why just barely: I find anecdotally that people who feel beseiged by the intrusive federal government nonetheless are happy to put up with the far more coercive and restrictive policies of their state and local government, which have a much greater day-to-day impact on our lives. Land use, zoning and development commissions, density ordinances, transportation regulation; they all make a huge difference on how we interact with each other, how we expend common resources, and how we structure and experience our civil society. 

Now people could argue that if they’re going to be tyrannized by government, they’d rather it happen close to home where they can better monitor it and hold it accountable. This is a fine point. You are clearly much better able to get your views heard and your policy preferences enacted by your local zoning board than by the United States Congress. But I find it more prevalent that people either don’t care or aren’t aware of how local restrictions impinge upon their individual rights, while some of the same people would march on the National Mall over a federal policy that probably won’t affect them at all.

I don’t think people who fetishize states’ rights are arguing for the idea of local coercion as a replacement for federal coercion. I think it’s the coercion they don’t like. In which case it is hard to be for a state mandate and against a federal one. It’s hard, but it’s possible. Mitt is OK. But I still find a slight disconnect between thinking there is something necessarily odious and despotic about federal coercion, but something pure and patriotic about state and local coercion.