The Federal special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald led the prosecution of Lewis I. Libby, former chief of staff of and national security assistant to Vice-President Cheney, who was indicted for perjury, in particular, lying to a grand jury, and obstruction of justice. This was in regard to the matter of the administration’s deliberate public naming of an undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame Wilson, which is a crime, although not part of the charge against Libby. The CIA leak case and the Libby trial were live-blogged by Marcy Wheeler, Jane Hamsher, Swopa, and Pachacutec at FireDogLake.com, beginning here. Jeralyn Merritt at TalkLeft also live-blogged. The Huffington Post also blogged the trial and published a juror’s account.Sidney Blumenthal’s account of Fitzgerald’s summation is on Salon.
Regular readers of these Endnotes might recognize my own, early-formed skepticism of capitalist relations and its hand on the misnamed “marketplace of ideas.” In the inaugural essay,they would have read the following:
In an article in the TLS (January 31) entitled “The real scandal of Ulysses, How literary modernism came to retreat from the public sphere,” an American academic named Lawrence Rainey follows the publishing history through France, England, and the States, of Sylvia Beach’s limited edition of Joyce’s novel. Prof. Rainey holds that the “market dynamics of the limited edition,” meaning an edition designed and priced high enough to be sold to collector-subscribers, eliminated the “ordinary” reader as the normal buyer, reader, and critic of the novel; and “transformed” the buyer of such an expensive book from simple reader into “investor/patron.” Further, in order that an “investment” in this relatively rare object, the limited edition of ULYSSES, bear value, the book had to be “sold” a priori as great literature, before the slow accretion of critical reading judged it so. This is the true “scandal” of this great (we can say now) novel, argues Prof. Rainey: “For the market-place is not, and never can be, free from systemic distortions of power ... and its outcomes cannot be equated with ... norms of equal and universal participation in discussions about cultural and esthetic value. The operations of the market are not an adequate substitute for free agreement; they are operations of an entirely different order.”
Some readers may have thought the last point obvious, if not directly relevant to ULYSSES. But perhaps the point is not so obvious as it should have been, for the February Atlantic Monthly ran a lucid, primer-like essay by the financier-philanthropist George Soros, who urges us to understand that our social “belief in the magic of the marketplace” is pretty well misplaced. The “doctrine” of laissez-faire capitalism, he argues, which holds that the unregulated pursuit of self-interest best serves the common good, doesn’t allow for the “recognition of a common interest that ought to take precedence over particular interests.” And, he warns, unless we can “temper” the unbridled dynamics of the market-place with a strong, social belief in a common social interest, the “open society,” which our present system, however imperfectly, qualifies as being, “is liable to break down.”
Soros’ argument was nicely poised against the feature in New York magazine (February 10), called “How to Make a Best Seller, The Inside Story of One Publishing House’s Attempt to Turn a Literary Novelist into a Marketplace Superstar.”
Because rumors and signals of a new/renewed war fill the media, I would turn attention to another kind of assault on the common good. Privatization of public services and resources was one method Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, followed by Bush and Clinton (and Blair), used to reorganize their nations’ public sectors in favor of corporate, commercial beneficiaries; or, as their defenders claimed, to reduce the size of government.
Under Bush and Cheney, the process was carried forward. For instance, during Paul Bremer’s tenure as director of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Federal Reserve airlifted pallets holding four billion dollars in cash to Baghdad; most of it is unaccounted for. Sourcewatch links to sources on “privatization of Iraq.”
Recently, Dana Priest and Annie Hull at the Washington Post exposed the neglect under which veterans suffer at Walter Reed Army Hospital; within days, the Secretary of the Army was fired in disgrace. According to the Army Times, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Ca.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
has subpoenaed Maj. Gen. George Weightman, who was fired as head of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, after Army officials refused to allow him to testify before the committee Monday.
Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and subcommittee Chairman John Tierney askedWeightman to testify about an internal memo that showed privatization of services at Walter Reed could put “patient care services… at risk of mission failure.”
. . . . The committee wants to learn more about a letter written in September by Garrison Commander Peter Garibaldi to Weightman.
The memorandum “describes how the Army’s decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed Army Medical Center was causing an exodus of ‘highly skilled and experienced personnel,’” the committee’s letter states. “According to multiple sources, the decision to privatize support services at Walter Reed led to a precipitous drop in support personnel at Walter Reed.”
The letter said Walter Reed also awarded a five-year, $120-million contract to IAP Worldwide Services, which is run by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.
They also found that more than 300 federal employees providing facilities management services at Walter Reed had drooped to fewer than 60 by Feb. 3, 2007, the day before IAP took over facilities management. IAP replaced the remaining 60 employees with only 50 private workers. [Emphasis added.]
Juan Cole picked up the story and said further,
The privatization of patient care services is responsible for a lot of the problem here. . . .
And so is the privatization of services for US troops in Iraq punishing them. Indeed, the privatization of guard duties through the hiring of firms like Blackwater caused all that trouble at Falluja in the first place. KRB never delivered services to US troops with the speed and efficiency they deserved. The Bush-Cheney regime rewarded civilian firms with billions while they paid US GIs a pittance to risk their lives for their country. And then when they were wounded they were sent someplace with black mold on the walls. A full investigation into the full meaning of ‘privatization’ at the Pentagon for our troops would uncover epochal scandals. [Emphasis added.]
Mary-Sherman Willis, “The Fight for Kansas,” in Archipelago’s occasional series Livingwith Guns. About guns, we barely scratched the surface; see this article in the Washington Post.
And in the New York Times, “15 States Expand Right to Shoot in Self-Defense”:
. . . . The Florida law, which served as a model for the others, gives people the right to use deadly force against intruders entering their homes. They no longer need to prove that they feared for their safety, only that the person they killed had intruded unlawfully and forcefully. The law also extends this principle to vehicles.
In addition, the law does away with an earlier requirement that a person attacked in a public place must retreat if possible. Now, that same person,in the law’s words, “has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force.” The law also forbids the arrest, detention or prosecution of the people covered by the law, and it prohibits civil suits against them.
The central innovation in the Florida law, said Anthony J. Sebok, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, is not its elimination of the duty to retreat,which has been eroding nationally through judicial decisions,but in expanding the right to shoot intruders who pose no threat to the occupant’ssafety.
“In effect,” Professor Sebok said, “the law allows citizens to kill other citizens in defense of property.”
Mary-Sherman Willis drew upon the work of Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, p.b. 1994).
Dr. King gave his sermon at the Drexel Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on November 4, 1956. Textand audio are here. Collected in A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the Great Sermons of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Ed.Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran (New York: Warner Books, 1998)
See also, Nick Kotz, Race in America, in Archipelago, Vol. 9,an account of King and Johnson and the making of the Voting Rights Act.
See Hubert Butler, “The Artukovich File,” Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 2;and “The Sub-prefect Should Have Held His Tongue,” Vol. 5, No. 1.
See also, Chris Agee, “The Stepinac File,” Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 1;and “The Balkan Butler”. See also, Richard Jones, “An Appreciation of Hubert Butler,” Vol. 1, No. 2.