A Colossal Wreck (76 page)

As Pierre Sprey remarked to me, “Note also that this is one of those rare but dangerous moments in history when Big Oil and the Israelis are pushing the White House in the same direction. The last such moment was quickly followed by Dubya’s invasion of Iraq.”

January 20

Newt Gingrich is a one-man, made-in-America melting pot. Here’s a committed devotee of tooth-and-claw capitalism, vultures perched on both shoulders, advocate of eight-year-old black children working as janitors—campaigning with a pro-worker film of which John Reed or Ken Loach would be proud, paid for by a rabidly anti-union billionaire who thinks Israel should bomb Iran and drive the Palestinians into the sea.

Gingrich burned for revenge for his rough treatment in New Hampshire by Romney’s campaign commercials. But how, on a tight timeline, to acquaint South Carolina Republicans with Romney’s infamies? He needed money, lots of it, double-quick.
Occupy Las Vegas!

Some things don’t change in American politics, and rich people sitting in Las Vegas with pots of cash is one of them. Joel McCleary, a friend, remembers fund-raising in Las Vegas when he was working for the Jimmy Carter campaign in 1976. The crucial Pennsylvania primary was coming up and the Carter people (their chief fund-raiser was Morris Dees) needed a big wad of cash for the final push against Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, known as “the Senator from Boeing,” also running for the Democratic nomination and favored by powerful labor chieftains in Pennsylvania.

Joel was told the go- to guy for untraceable campaign cash was Hank Greenspun, publisher of the
Las Vegas Sun
. Greenspun was a
notoriously tough egg, a former gun-runner for the Haganah, the man who, in the midst of the cold war witch-hunts, outed Senator Joe McCarthy in the
Sun
as a homosexual. Joel was told to act manly. Greenspun duly received him in his office. “Why the hell should I get money for Jimmy Carter?” he asked. “Because Jimmy Carter is going to be President,” Joel answered boldly, “and if you don’t support his campaign he’ll fuck you.”

Greenspun told Joel to come back in two hours. He returned to find Greenspan sitting at a table surrounded by other toughs. In the middle of the table was a paper bag. “So the Baptist fuck wants money,” Greenspun growled, as he pushed the bag over to Joel. “Remember, this comes from the State of Israel. Don’t you ever forget it.”

Enter seventy-eight-year-old Sheldon Adelson, the world’s sixteenth richest man, a bit dented by the property crash in Nevada but still with $23 billion at his disposal. The sun rises on his empire in Las Vegas, sets on it in the east in Macao, with its zenith over the State of Israel, whence his second wife hails. On Israel Adelson entertains very harsh views about the advisability of negotiations of any sort with Palestinians and lately has been lobbying fiercely—he owns the free weekday
Israel Hayom
, the largest circulation newspaper in Israel—for an attack on Iran.

When Newt Gingrich, fishing for Zionist money, abandoned his previous, relatively temperate, posture on the Israel/Palestine issue, and declared that Palestinians were an “invented people,” he was directing his remarks to an audience of one.

Adelson was exceedingly pleased and expressed his gratification in material terms, with a further $5 million, now staking Gingrich’s campaign ads in South Carolina. To date Adelson has donated about $13 million to Gingrich’s campaign—a US record.

January 27

Last week revolutionary Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville announced the capture and imminent trial of “grow,” long sought in its counter-revolutionary mutation as a transitive verb governing an abstraction, as in “grow the economy,” a formulation popular among the
Girondin faction. “Grow,” said the Prosecutor, was being held in the Conciergerie, under constant surveillance.

I’ve no doubt that the Tribunal will not long delay in sending “grow” in this usage to a well-deserved rendezvous with the fatal blade. I associate the usage with the 1992 Clinton campaign, where talk about “growing the economy” was at gale force. My friends and neighbors here in Petrolia, Karen and Joe Paff, tell me that when they were starting up their coffee business, Goldrush, at the start of the 1980s, the local bank officials were already hard at it, talking about “growing the business.” I hate the usage, with its smarmy implication of virtuous horticultural effort. As CounterPuncher Michael Greenberg writes, “It sounds phony, aggressive, and even grammatically incorrect, not the nurturing ‘grow’ that one associates with living things.”

Joining “grow” in the tumbril will, I trust, be “blood and treasure,” used with great solemnity by opinion formers to describe the cost, often the supposedly worthy sacrifice, attached to America’s wars. The usage apparently goes back to Jefferson, but that’s no excuse. The catchphrase seeks to turn slaughter and the shoveling of money to arms manufacturers into a noble, almost mythic expenditure.

Shackled to “blood and treasure” should be its co-conspirator, “in harm’s way.” Jack Flannigan writes from Kerala, “Mr. Cockburn, Somebody might have beat me to it but my candidate for the squeaky old tumbril is ‘in harm’s way.’ It has, especially in the last ten years, acquired a treacly red, white, and blue patina about it that is overwhelmingly connected to the military and police. Someone sailing on a Gaza flotilla or staring down a line of sneering, rabid cops is not very likely to be referred by our political/media elites as ‘in harm’s way.’ ”

Last week, dispatching the phrase to the tumbrils, I said the G. H. Bush campaign of 1979 for the Republican nomination hefted “It’s not over till the fat lady sings” to national prominence. Jeremy Pikser writes to say the phrase “was actually first popularized by the coach (or owner?) of the Baltimore Bullets basketball team in 1978. As usual G. H. Bush was only capable of feeble imitation when he used it, hoping to sound like a ‘real guy.’ ” Further research discloses its use
in sports journalism has been attributed to writer/broadcaster Dan Cook around the same time, and in the mid-’70s by a Texas Tech sports official.

From: Kevin Rath

Mr. Cockburn,

Recently I have been accosted with the phrase “reaching out to you” by sales people. While it may be inappropriate since your focus is the news, this stupid phrase people from marketing use in their email subject titles and language is really annoying.

Reaching out to your tumbril cart,

Kevin Rath, a CP member

January 31

Why do American jobs end up in China? The supposed answer in an anecdote: the late Steve Jobs summons his senior lieutenants and holds up the iPhone prototype. It’s due to be shipped to stores in not much more than a month. He points out that the plastic screen has been scratched by his keys. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he says, according to a recent
New York Times
story. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

“After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China,” the
Times
reports. “If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.” The next sequence reads like a montage in some 1920s film about industrial production. Within days, a Corning Glass plant in China is turning out big sheets of toughened glass, which are shipped to a nearby Chinese plant to be cut into iPhone panes. The small panes are trucked to a Foxconn factory complex eight hours away.

The first truckloads arrived in the dead of night, according to a former Apple executive. Managers rousted thousands of workers out of their beds, lined them up, gave each of them a biscuit and a cup of tea and launched them on a twelve-hour shift. In ninety-six hours, the plant was producing more than 10,000 iPhones a day. Within three months, Apple had sold one million of them; since then
Foxconn has assembled more than 200 million units. The suicide rate among its workers was, Jobs insisted, below the overall Chinese rate.

Of course, typical
Times
readers nod their heads. No, cohorts of American workers aren’t available to be kicked out of bed in their communal dorms and put to work in half an hour. There’s no China-subsidized factory space. And pulsing just below the surface of the text: no tiny, skillful Oriental fingers (“flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers”), not to mention tiny Oriental wages, for the uniformed assemblers.

When President Obama dined with the kings of Silicon Valley last year and asked, “Why can’t that work come home?” Jobs’s reply was “unambiguous”: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.”

Apple is spiritually offshore. “We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” an Apple executive told the
Times
. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

It was the phrase about having no obligation that riled up Clyde Prestowitz, one of the US government’s top trade negotiators in the Reagan years. In an acrid posting on the
Foreign Policy
website and in a chat over the phone with me from his winter quarters in Maui, Prestowitz efficiently dismembered Apple’s “no obligation” pretensions and its rationale for why it and kindred companies had no alternative to offshoring.

In the 1981–86 period, Prestowitz says, Jobs and his executives “had the funny notion that the US government had an obligation to help them … We did all we could, and in doing so came to learn that virtually everything Apple had for sale, from the memory chips to the cute pointer mouse, had had its origins in some program wholly or partially supported by US government money … The heart of the computer is the microprocessor, and Apple’s derived from Motorola’s 680X0, which was developed with much assistance, direct and indirect, from the Defense Department, as were the DRAM memory chips. The pointer mouse came from Xerox’s PARC center near Stanford (which also enjoyed government funding). In addition, most computer software at that time derived from work with government backing.”

Prestowitz points out that Apple also assumes the US government is obligated to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and, should supply chains in the Far East be disrupted, to offer the comforting support of the Seventh Fleet. “And those supply chains—are they the natural product of good old free market capitalism, or does that scalability and flexibility and capacity to mobilize large numbers of workers on a moment’s notice have something to do with government subsidies and the interventionist industrial policies of most Asian economies?”

What about those jobs that “aren’t coming back”? We’re not talking about simple assembly that costs a bundle per unit in America and mere cents in China. In the mid-’90s, at the Apple plant in Elk Grove, California, the cost of building a computer was $22 a machine, compared with as little as $5 at a factory in Taiwan. This is not a dominant factor when the machine sells for $1,500 and you have costs like transport to figure in. Furthermore, stricken America is actually becoming a low-wage magnet.

The high-wage, more complicated manufacturing jobs are in microprocessors, memory chips, displays, circuitry, chip sets and so forth. This is where America is supposed to have a comparative advantage. So why are Asian countries supplying the memory chips and microprocessors and displays instead of the United States? Prestowitz points to government subsidies and protection for Asian producers, currency manipulation and bureaucratic pressure on US corporations by Beijing to make the product in China.

So there’s nothing irrevocable about the job loss. US workers, taught the necessary skills, can put things together properly. But if the jobs keep going away, why would any American lay out the money to learn those skills? Obama’s recent State of the Union speech was a step in the right direction: calling on business leaders to “ask what you can do to bring the jobs back.” Specifically, he proposed ending tax breaks for US corporations operating overseas, rewarding US-based production and turning the unemployment sinkhole into a re-employment system. “These jobs could and would come back to America,” says Prestowitz, “if Washington were to begin to respond tit for tat to the mercantilist game … It wouldn’t be difficult to make
a lot more of the iPhone in America and to make it competitively if either Apple or the US government really wanted that to happen.”

February 8

“Civilian deaths due to drones are not many, Obama says.” So that’s okay then. This was a headline in the
New York Times
for January 31, accurately reflecting Obama’s expressed views. It was back in the mid-1920s that my father Claud, then working as a night editor at the London
Times
, won a prize for writing the dullest headline actually printed in the
Times
for the following day. Headline: “Small earthquake in Chile. Not many dead.”

February 10

Back in the 1960s Herbert Marcuse pointed out in one of his books that the Pentagon had given up on verbs. Pentagonese consisted of clotted groups of nouns, marching along in groups of three or four. Verbs, which connected nouns in purposive thrust, were regarded as unreliable and probably subversive. They talked too much, gave too much away.

Despite the Pentagon’s best efforts, linguistically the ’60s were a noisy and exhilarating era: “bitching.” The ’70s gave us the argots of feminism and queerdom and then suddenly we were in the wastelands of Political Correctness, where non-white people were described as being “of color,” cripples became “less-abled,” and sexual preference (non-heterosexual) became LGBTQ, though another capital letter may have been added while my back was turned.

Where are we now? Irritating words and terms spread across the internet like plague through a European town in 1348. There’s something very passive about the overall argot and a look through one’s daily inbox is like walking along a beach piled with decayed words and terms. There’s much more ill-written prose than there was thirty years ago.

The following words and phrases are under severe scrutiny by Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, renowned for his implacable fairness:
“Reach out,” “discourse,” “the Other,” “massive” and its associate “whopping.”