Donald Luzzatto, the editorial page editor of The Virginian-Pilot, had a really nice column about both me and my new book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies. A really nice summary of the book and of me, and he drew links between economic and religious thinking that was stimulating. Check out the column here. The Virginian-Pilot is my hometown newspaper and where I worked as a reporter for a decade.
Julia Vitullo-Martin, in the newsletter I edit, had a great piece about cities that take big approaches to the business of food, making themselves even more into food cities. London, Portland and others have done this. Should New York? Check it outhere, in Spotlight on the Region of the Regional Plan Association.
The piece dovetailed with an excellent piece this morning by New York Times’ Mark Bittman about establishing a new City Market, ala Pike Place or Barcelona’s covered market, down on Fulton Street. This is such a great idea. I would sacrifice much to see this happen.
all corporations are not cities. What’s this all about? Read here, in this column of mine on the subject in Citiwire. This draws from my new book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies
Back in 1988, just after graduating from Columbia Journalism School, I traveled to Cuba for two weeks as part of a small group of students from the school. We had received a license to visit the country. We had two weeks of interviews and meetings, but also substantial time to wander around Havana by ourselves. Being pretty fluent in Spanish, I took advantage of this and did my best to take the measure of the country, talking to many people in and around the streets. Sometimes I would knock on people’s doors. The story I wrote was published in The Virginian-Pilot and The San Francisco Chronicle. It was basically the first big story I had written outside school, and even vaguely then, I was surprised at how well it read. It hold up pretty well now. I did not have a digital copy of the San Francisco Chronicle version, so my friend John King, the architecture critic for the Chronicle, tracked one down for me. Here it is below, in full text. I may have a visit again to Cuba in my near future, so I wanted to put this up. I’m sure the Chronicle won’t mind.
|
Headline: |
The Many Faces Of Fidel’s Cuba / Positive changes have come atexpense of key freedoms |
|
Subhead: |
|
|
Notes: |
|
|
Correction: |
|
|
Story Byline: |
ALEX MARSHALL, Special to The Chronicle |
|
Credits: |
|
|
Desk: |
|
|
Source: |
|
|
Day: |
WEDNESDAY |
|
Dateline: |
|
|
Print Run Date: |
8/17/1988 |
|
Digital Run Date: |
|
|
Text: |
.
It was lunch hour inside the Ministry of Commerce in old Havana. In a small cafeteria, in a building that dated back to the 1800s, workers ate baked fish, rice and beans, soup, salad and cake, off white dishes on tin trays. They washed down the food and cut the sweltering heat with cold water from sweating metal pitchers placed on each of the 20 tables. Like many of the basics in contemporary Cuba, the meal was subsidized and cost each employee only a few cents. A clerk there, a 58-year-old man with crooked teeth and thinning hair, spoke about why life was better with a Communist government running his country. “Before the triumph of the revolution, ” he said in a gravelly voice, “it was a dictatorship here. Only a small group of people” – and he held up one hand with the fingers bunched together – “had money, jobs, power and opportunity in life.” “Now there’s liberty, ” he said, and he grinned. “People have jobs and money. Hospitals are free. I have two sons – one is studying economics at the university and the other electronics at technical school.” He patted his pants pocket. “I didn’t have to pay a cent for their education.” “I come from a poor family of farmers. We had no chance before. Things are much better now.” This is one of the faces of Cuba. — — — A mile or so away from the Ministry of Commerce, a middle-aged woman sat on her bed in a small room with soaring, 20-foot ceilings where she lived with her two small children. In the fading light of the afternoon, she spoke of feeling oppressed in a country where people were jailed for saying the wrong things, where neighbors watched each other for “counter-revolutionary” activity and sentiments, where private enterprise was forbidden and foreign travel restricted. She spoke of tiring of the interminable meetings of the Committee in Defense of the Revolution – one of the thousands of local block committees which monitored the actions and the ideology of their members. She spoke of Cuba’s president, the former guerrillero who 30 years ago gained international fame by ousting a dictator and successfully standing up to the United States – then the strongest nation on earth. “Fidel Castro is a greater leader, ” she said softly. “But he is only a leader.” Lowering her head, she said, “I feel like a pigeon in a cage here.” This is another face of Cuba. — — — Through Castro’s leadership and Soviet subsidies, Cuba now has universal education and literacy; it has a widespread system of modern hospitals and rural clinics staffed by Cuban doctors using Cuban manufactured medicine; it has full employment; it has eliminated hunger and malnutrition. Anyone who has traveled through other Latin American capitals and seen the filth, the beggars that gather like flies, and the miles of cardboard shacks on the outskirts of town, knows this is a remarkable achievement of which other Third World nations can only dream. PRICE OF CHANGE A price has been paid for this transformation, although Cuba is still a nation of surprising charm and sensuality. Its denizens still dance the rumba, the conga and the cha-cha-cha. They spend a surprising percentage of their income in restaurants and state-owned cabarets, where high-kicking dancers in sequined bikinis and two-foot high feather headdresses grind alongside throaty-voiced singers. Havana, despite the halt of roulette wheels and the extinguishing of the neon trim that once laced its skyline, remains an intensely beautiful city. One of terraces flung out over streets filled with aging American automobiles of the 1940s and ’50s, of columns with vines slithering up over wrought-iron railings. A city of fading pastel colors, of chipped mustard-yellow plaster around salmon-pink doors with eggshell-blue trim. The real loss has been the elimination of what Marxists contemptuously label “bourgeois freedoms.” It is a country where word, deed and even thought are controlled to an astonishing degree. Cuba is not an El Salvador, a Guatemala, or a Chile, where citizens are tortured, shot and “disappeared.” But Cuba is one gigantic company town. To get along, one goes along. In the past few years, the tight rein held on dissent has slackened a bit. Several hundred longtime political prisoners have been released. As for the press, Castro has urged journalists to be more critical and “less boring.” THE `PURE’ PATH Still, there is nothing approaching the glasnost of the Soviet Union. And instead of perestroika, Castro has begun a campaign of “rectification, ” in which capitalist tendencies that have sprouted up – such as the private farmer’s market in Havana which was shut down in 1986 – are weeded out. Castro, contrary to most other Socialist-bloc countries, has chosen to continue along the path to “pure” communism. Castro can take such a route because most Cubans support him and his decisions. The stoutest “Fidelistas” are the formerly poor and disenfranchised of the rural countryside. Prior to “the triumph of the revolution, ” – the phrase heard over and over here – Cuba was a country of some wealth compared to the rest of Latin America, but with vast inequities in its distribution. Much of the rural population lived in huts of palm and wood, worked three months out of the year during cane-cutting season and seldom saw a school or a doctor. Today, the closest thing Havana has to a slum is a barrio of wooden shacks on dirt streets by the Almendares River on the edge of Havana. Cubans call the neighborhood El Fangito – the muddy place – because the river periodically rises and floods the homes. From a distance, these plywood shacks look distressingly poor. Up close, one discovers electricity, running water, TV and refrigerators. Still, some vestiges remain. Outside one house, an old woman washed clothes in an iron cauldron over a wood fire. Most residents say they will soon move to new apartments they are building themselves as part of “microbrigades.” Under this program, begun a year ago, workers leave their regular jobs to build housing, day care centers and clinics. In return, they receive salaries and also the right to an apartment when the work is done. YOUTHFUL CONCERNS The level of “Fidelismo” among the youth is a topic of concern to party elders. They fear youngsters who have no memory of the fall of Batista in 1959, or the victory over the United States at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, may lack fervor. The youth are, perhaps, beguiled by the Madonna songs played even on government radio stations, the Hollywood movies, such as “Rocky, ” shown at government movie houses, and the fashionable clothes seen on the many tourists who come to Cuba. Much of the youth remains committed to communism and the ideal of a new society. At Che Guevara High School, for example, the young women were as giddy in their adoration of Fidel and Che as American teenagers are of rock stars Sting and Bono. But other young people are quite apolitically tired of the ever-present lines where one waits to purchase anything from a new bathing suit from a meagerly stocked store, to a shot of the thick, sweet black coffee drunk here. “I’ll tell you what’s good about my country, ” one youth told me: “The sun, ” aiming a finger at the burning sky; “the sea, ” pointing toward the aqua-green water before him; “the girls, ” motioning toward the supine, bikini-clad bodies around him; and “the tobacco, ” holding up the stubby unfiltered cigaret he was smoking. “That’s it, ” he said. I asked him what would happen if he talked like that to a neighbor. “If they’re finks, ” he said, “then” – and one hand quickly clasped the wrist of the other hand in the familiar gesture meaning police arrest and imprisonment. Fidel’s position on dissent and expression are defined in a famous speech, later named the “Word to Intellectuals, ” which he gave in June 1961 before a group of writers, scholars and artists at the National Library. In one much quoted sentence, Castro declared that “within the revolution, everything. Against the revolution, nothing.” Twenty-seven years later, it is still the guiding principle on civil liberties. Protection of the revolution is foremost. Interviews with top government leaders reveal a different conception of what human rights are. DEFINING HUMAN RIGHTS “I believe that our people are freer than the poor people in your country, ” said Jorge Enrique Mendoza, a close adviser to Castro who fought with him in the Sierra Maestra mountains in 1958. For 20 years, he was editor-in-chief of Granma, the nation’s top daily newspaper, which is published by the Communist Party. “I don’t believe that an unemployed person can be free, ” he said, “or a sick person, or someone who cannot go to school. “I am not going to debate with you about party (Communist) control of the press. It is certain. But we believe we represent the interests of the people. “One can criticize specifics, but to make propaganda about capitalist ownership is not permitted. I would like to see a capitalist newspaper that attacked the basis of the capitalist system.” In the area of religious freedom, a slightly wider circle is being drawn around what is “within the revolution.” The publication in 1987 of “Fidel and Religion, ” has radically altered the status of religious faith here. In the 300-page book, which is transcription of conversations between Fidel and Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar, Fidel talked favorably of his Jesuit upbringing and says, “I think one can be a Marxist without ceasing to be a Christian.” “The fact that this book exists, ” said Monsignor Manuel deCespedes, the archbishop of Havana. “Is a very positive fact. Before the book was published, it was taboo to talk about religion.” Wearing a black gown, and with a bald head and a quiet manner, deCespedes was the very image of a fatherly priest at an interview in his office in old Havana. He has established a close working relationship with Castro in recent years and deCespedes handles the complexities of being a Christian in a Marxist state with finesse. On the one hand, he says, “I am not a Communist, ” but on the other, he says, “a good Christian is not anti-anything.” This diplomacy has meshed with the government’s increasingly tolerant attitude. The archbishop ticked off the figures that show how church participation has grown in the last few years. Church attendance is up. Baptisms in Havana have tripled, from 7,000 in 1979 to 21,000 in 1987. Formerly only the elderly attended Mass, now 10 to 20 young people are seen at each service. Last year, the church was permitted to import 30,000 copies of the Bible for the first time. On a recent Sunday in a beautiful old cathedral in Havana, a priest gave mass to about 75 people of all ages. Before the service, a group of teenage boys said “repression” against religious practice did not exist, but a certain amount of discrimination did. “We don’t tell our friends at school about our faith, ” said one 17-year-old, “because they would stay apart from us if they knew.” He noted that because of his religious faith, he could not be a member of the Union of Young Communists. Despite their loss of status, they supported their government and country. “Some people think Catholics are counter-revolutionaries, ” said an 18-year-old. “But that’s not true. We will pick up a rifle and defend our country when necessary. We are with the revolution.” PUBLICIZING ABUSES Until recently, Castro has never allowed an organized opposition group to exist. The exception, since Spring of 1987, is the Cuban Human Rights Committee. The group is officially illegal, but allowed to operate in a limited fashion. “This small handful of people have had a tremendous impact, ” said one high-placed western diplomat. “For the first time, Cubans have a source outside the government to publicize abuses by security forces and police.” It’s leader is one Ricardo Bofill, 45, who has spent 13 of the last 20 years in jail for such crimes as “enemy propaganda.” Thanks to a massive campaign against him in the Cuban media, including a three-hour television documentary and full-page spreads in Granma, most Cubans are familiar with Bofill’s “beady” black eyes and scrub-brush mustache – and with some of his accusations. The article in Granma on Bofill was a good example of current Cuban journalism, managing to pack every paragraph with a few pejoratives, lest the reader hesitate in forming an opinion. “Faker, ” “swindler, ” “liar, ” “crook” and “bastard, ” were some of the most often repeated. Bofill insists such tactics have helped his cause by giving it publicity. He operates from a small apartment in Guanabacoa, a ragged suburb of Havana of light-industry and plain, one-story housing, and has few recourses. He cannot leave his home, he says, because he is attacked by stone-throwing government police dressed as civilians when he tries to walk to the bus-stop. Significantly, Bofill, once a professor of Marxism, looks toward the Soviet Union under Gorbachev as the best example of change for Cuba. “These are the materials one has to read, ” Bofill said, holding up copies of Moscow News and New Times, both Russian magazines translated into Spanish, “to find a path for Cuba to follow. Bofill does not deny the social advances made in his country. But, he said “you can’t separate public health and public liberty.” “To judge the achievements of this country, ” Bofill said, “you have to measure them in an integral form. For example, in South Korea and Taiwan, tremendous advances were made economically. “But they were still dictatorships.” So in Cuba, the debate between the right to eat, and the right to speak and think as one pleases, continues. That Bofill is not in jail proves the government’s tight grip on dissent has opened slightly. But the sledgehammer attacks against him in the official press prove the parameters set on dissent are still in place: Direct criticism of government policies is not permitted. In a recent article in The Nation, Professor Rene David of San Carlos Seminary in Havana was quoted as saying that Cuba has not “achieved the difficult balance between equality and liberty necessary for a more authentic fraternity.” Fidel, because of his overthrow of Batista, the subsequent social advances he made and his personal charisma, has built up an enormous reservoir of goodwill that has yet to be exhausted. For the time being, most citizens will continue to follow where he leads them. . Alex Marshall, a free-lance journalist, recently returned from a trip to Cuba sponsored by the Columbia School of Journalism and Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency |
|
End Note: |
|
|
Published Captions: |
A Russian-made car turns into a street in picturesque OldHavana / BY ALEX MARSHALL |
|
Publication: |
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE |
|
Edition: |
FINAL |
|
Section: |
BRIEFING |
|
Page: |
Z1 |
|
Column: |
|
|
Category: |
|
|
Copyright: |
|
|
Supplemental Category: |
|
|
Keywords: |
CUBA: |
|
Show Budget: |
|
|
Budget ID: |
|
|
Budget Slug: |
MARSHALL |
I got a glimpse of the future during a recent visit to Seattle to hawk my new book. People were all in a tizzy there, because a majority of Washington state voters in November, as well as voting for Obama, had approved full legality for the wacky weed, marijuana. Now officials and politicians were figuring out what that meant. Mayor Mike McGinn was leading the way, welcoming the transition rather than seeking to stop it. He was meeting with pot growers, and putting together a to-do list. And to tell you the truth, McGinn, who arose out of the environmental and neighborhood activism side of things, and has a nice grin and a scruffy beard, looks like he just might have inhaled a few times himself over the years.
Good for him. But while I was reading news reports on all this in the Seattle Times, the now lone remaining daily newspaper, I suddenly got a picture of where the pot business might go, now that’s it’s legal. Right now, my impression is that pot as a market consisted of relatively small growers, doing their thing, and jockeying for customers in between avoiding pests, whether of bugs that ate their crops, agents from the feds, or gun-carrying competition.
But if pot was legal, then the question is, would the business of it inevitably begin to resemble most businesses, where the big eat the little, and the bigger eat the big, and the giant eat the bigger, until there are only one or handful of monopolies or semi-monopolies. This saddened me. Because one appeal of the current state of affairs in the marijuana business, from what I can tell, is its homegrown flavor, no joke intended. Perhaps in a decade or two hence we will look back on this as the golden age of pot. Or maybe, pot will find a way to stay local in flavor.
I can see two futures here, based on the business history of two other mind-altering drugs.
In and around 1900, American Tobacco had a lock on 90 percent of the tobacco sales in this country. It emerged from James B. Duke, the guy behind the university in Durham, NC, buying up competitors, and establishing a monopoly. After anti-trust action broke it up in 1911, parts of it would become RJR and other companies. While we no longer have American Tobacco, we do have a few giant companies that control most of tobacco products, not only in the United States but the world.
Now let’s look at wine. Despite its popularity, the market for wine is incredibly diverse, with thousands of producers and sellers, in France, Spain, Italy, the United States and others, each vying to grab a small niche. Sure there are a few big guys, like Yellow whatever from Australia, but there overall market share is still really small. Instead, small producers with a few acres of land in Napa, Long Island or Bordeaux or Rioja produce grapes, turn it into wine, and then bottle it themselves or have someone else do it. It’s a process not that dissimilar from pot (or tobacco).
One thing that keeps the wine world happily fragmented, (happily from my perspective of a wine lover), is the very medieval character of our alcohol laws. There’s a federal policy on alcohol (note the bureau of alcohol, guns and tobacco), and then each of the 50 states governs how its citizens can drink, buy, sell or import alcohol, including wine. While there is a lot of complaining about this, it also keeps wine little, a good thing. It’s very had for a national purveyor to master 50 regulatory regimes.
This may be fate of pot. Now the state of Washington legislature and the city of Seattle are crafting laws and regulations that say where marijuana can be sold, how it can be sold, to whom, and by whom. In these details, will be the future of the marijuana business, on the state level.
We may never have a common policy for it at the federal level that supersedes all those state laws now emerging. Which means pot may remain a business that is mostly state-by-state. This may keep it small, and staying small, in my book, is even better than staying high.
In last Sunday’s New York Times, veteran Timesman Sam Roberts wrote a nice review of my new book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, in his “Bookshelf” column in the Metropolitan Section. Here’s the link, but I’ll post the whole thing here, since it was short.
Bookshelf Column, Excerpt
By Sam Roberts
Feb 22, 2013
Despite its dry title, “The Surprising Design of Market Economies” (University of Texas Press, $25), by Alex Marshall, offers keen insights into urban planning, public works and even the history of New York’s onetime ambivalence toward a professional police force. Mr. Marshall is a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning agency for the New York City metropolitan area, and many of his arguments turn on hometown examples.
Mr. Marshall’s premise is that “free markets” are, in fact, elaborate systems created and shaped by regulation, laws, cultural mores and public infrastructure. His exploration of these systems brings him to his point: Government can do some things better than private enterprise when it has the will.
“If you look at the way society and our nation have progressed,” he writes, “a simple rule is that they have progressed by converting private responsibilities to public responsibilities.”
I don’t know who “hismlane” is, but he did a great job summarizing my book on the Daily Kos. He not only summarized each chapter, but in his overview he got the crucial distinction that I’m making a distinction between “regulating” markets, and “designing” them. By getting down into the core architecture of our markets, I shift the playing field. Check it out here.
I had some colleagues from Korea in town a week ago, including Dr. Gyeng Chul Kim, president of the Korea Transport Institute. He delivered a great lecture at the AIA here in New York, which I and others at the Regional Plan Association, where I’m a Senior Fellow, help set up. I got to know Dr. Kim in Seoul last Spring when I was there. Dr. Kim helped spearhead the transportation reforms in Seoul in the 2000s under Mayor Lee Myung-Bak, who would go onto become president. Anyway, here is a picture of three of us breaking bread at a diner on the west side of Manhattan, after touring the High Line in the bitter cold.
Alex and Seoul Bigwigs Break Bread at Diner in Manhattan
In anticipation of my appearance in her fair city, design journalist Clair Enlow reviewed my book for the newspaper she writes regularly for, the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, which has articles about the real estate industry for the most part. I’m going to post her whole column here about my book. It was a nice piece of writing.
January 23, 2013
Design Perspectives: Book explores free markets that benefit everyone
By CLAIR ENLOW
Special to the Journal
Every day, it seems, we wake up and see our lawmakers in a standoff, and our national government nearing a standstill. Versions of the same scenes play out in state legislatures.
On screen, most of these officeholders are talking about the economy and the need to do something. Behind the lyrics there’s a chorus on the right saying the “free market” is a natural system, capable of providing almost all we need, if it is left alone. But it is in natural conflict with government, and can succeed in its mysterious and marvelous work only if government is kept severely in check.
For true right wing ideologues, this is not just a matter of principle. It’s war. Rhetorical hostages must be taken and arguments are useless. No one seems capable of presenting a countervailing view of the world that can break the deadlock.
Photo by Clair Enlow [enlarge]
A new book contends that markets are created by governments, through laws and infrastructure. Some markets, like Las Ramblas in Barcelona and Pike Place Market, above, are actual places nurtured and protected by the public.
But here is a tool. Anyone who wants to enter the fray from the other side should arm themselves with “The Surprising Design of Market Economies,” a new book by Alex Marshall (University of Texas Press). Marshall will appear at 7 p.m. Feb. 1 at Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave., Seattle.
Free markets aren’t so free
Here’s his message: The “free market” is really many markets — and they were never free. They were created, and paid for dearly, by — you got it — the government. Us.
Markets are anything but “natural.” They are designed. We come and go as we please and we do business in them. But we can’t get out of our responsibility for them, any more than we can escape responsibility for our own homes. And we’ve got to invest in them, or they will simply decline. Markets are powerful. But like them or not, we get the ones that we design and maintain, together.
Marshall shows how government, through history, has built the floor, the ceilings and the walls of the “free market.” They are made out of laws, on the one hand, and public infrastructure, on the other. Histories of modern, prosperous economies and markets vary, but they always involve lots of infrastructure — things like bridges, sewers, the Internet, education and law enforcement. Not coincidentally, that goes along with increasing investment in infrastructure as a percentage of gross national product, a trend Marshall says is the bedrock of economies in the developed world.
Marshall
Like many of today’s best writers on economics, from Malcolm Gladwell to Michael Lewis, Marshall is not an economist. He is a journalist, a senior fellow with the Regional Plan Association in New York City, and has written two previous books on cities.
His new book is not a comprehensive analysis of our economy. There is nothing about some of the most complex and troubling aspects of our age, such as banking and the growth of the financial sector.
For the most part, “The Surprising Design of Market Economies” is about the arc of history. This is fitting, since the stories about our past are at the heart of the ideological conflicts.
With an incisive voice and impressive research, Marshall goes centuries back for the roots of his premise, tracing the lines between “public” and “private” and showing they have been crossed so many times they are practically meaningless. One whole chapter is devoted to railroads, and the unresolved conflicts between public purpose and private capital that left us with a system far inferior to those in other parts of the developed world.
But no matter how deep he digs into the past, everything Marshall chooses to focus on ties squarely with the present.
Power to the corporations
In some of the most illuminating chapters, he traces the concept of corporations, showing that the laws governing them began with those that created cities, from London to New York. Marshall then points to the enormous powers and freedoms that have accrued to private, for-profit corporations, while the city of New York, whose charter comes from the state (just like other cities), must go begging to the state of New York for the right to levy “congestion pricing” on cars entering the streets of Manhattan. London and other cities have done this with great success, but Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg came away empty-handed.
Ownership laws — land, patents, equities — are always in flux, seeking balance. For instance, our system of patents actually originated in 15th century Venice as a rather ingenious way of rewarding individual inventiveness. Inventiveness indeed flourished, according to Marshall, and so did that city-state. But the time limit for patents was ten years, and over the next 300 years, Venice issued less than 2,000 of them.
Fast-forward to today’s world of patents and the evolving definition of intellectual property. According to Marshall, there were more than 185,000 U.S. patents issued in one year, 2008. Industries must contend with endlessly patentable features and “trolls” who make a business of buying up patents and suing companies for millions for infringement.
Patents and copyrights are good and necessary for optimum innovation and fairness, in Marshall’s opinion, but clearly the system needs a redesign. Much of our economic environment does. But we will not get there by idolizing a mythical “free market.”
“The Surprising Design of Market Economies” is not a book of radical economics. It’s about balance, reason, and reality. But it’s also about alternatives — and ongoing, successful experiments.
There are many frameworks for supporting people and enterprises, creating supply and meeting demand outside of the profit-driven model of private enterprise, and they are not new or radical. As Marshall points out, cooperatives — common in states like Minnesota and Washington, with deep Scandinavian and German roots — thrive in the USA, and they rely on common ownership, cooperation and democratic (one person, one vote) principles. Group Health Cooperative, PCC Natural Markets, REI, and any number of credit unions all come to mind.
We know that private enterprises and markets can be powerful and productive. But we also know they can be unfair and destructive of what should be free and natural — like clean air and water, not to mention a stable climate.
As this book shows, we can do much better. We’ve got to keep responding to our times and technologies, as we do the best we can to create markets that are fair, sustainable, and productive in the best possible sense.
If we can do that, we may get the markets — and the world — we deserve.
Clair Enlow can be reached at (206) 725-7110 or by e-mail at clair@clairenlow.com.
The movie Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, was a good one. Phenomenal really, and, like many of the movies and television shows I like, very journalistic in its flavor. It felt truthful. It definitely had a political message. I would summarize it this way.
Vengeance is mine. Torture works. Obama sucks.
I say the first two seriously, and the last one somewhat facetiously but sincerely.
The movie had an unapologetic, old Testament tone of striking and destroying our enemy, without qualms or regret. As for torture, it portrayed it as something done extensively, and that was a part of the successful detective work that led to finding Osama Bin Laden. As for president Barack Obama, I don’t believe he was ever even mentioned by name. His administration was portrayed as sluggish and risk averse, and certainly not given credit for taking a move labeled after the fact as risky and tough.
And so what’s the truth? Who knows. I bet though, that the movie maker’s point of view is defensible. Whether torture worked ultimately is something experts inside and outside the CIA can debate and disagree on.
My point of view is that I don’t want to see it done legally in my government’s name – even if is effective. If you only don’t torture when it’s not effective, well, that’s not much of an anti-torture and pro-human rights pledge, is it?