Daily Archives: March 3, 2005

A “just war” debate

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On the heels of this earlier interview, don’t miss this Dartmouth Review article reporting on the recent “just war” debate between Professor Hanson and popular Dartmouth adjunct history professor Ronald Edsforth. Included in the article is this interesting report:

Edsforth proposed that the human race has learned the dangers of war, especially after the blood-soaked twentieth century. ?Evolution [of human behavior] is a fact,? he said. ?It didn?t stop back in ancient times? We are capable of learning as humans and changing our environment in such a way that that which we abhor is less and less likely.? . . . He proposed that the United States adopt a foreign policy for ?the twenty-first century, not the fifth century B.C., not the nineteenth century, not 1941.? The world sees ?war as a legacy of the imperialist era,? he added.
Hanson, though, maintained that the human race has not changed significantly in the past several thousand years. ?Human nature is set,? he said?it was ?primordial, reptilian,? adding that man is always ?governed by pride and fear and envy.? He cited Thucydides, who wrote that his works would remain valid through the ages precisely because human nature is unchanging. ?We have not reached the end of history.?
Whether human opinion changes is irrelevant to the question of human nature, Hanson said; . . .
At a question-and-answer session at the end of the debate, this view of human nature was the subject of much disdain by many members of the audience. One fellow questioned whether ?you and Homer and Thucydides two-thousand years ago? were cut out for modernity. Another asked Hanson when the war in Iraq would come to end??when will we reap the benefits of preemptive war???and wondered whether ?Pericles would have any advice for defeating suicide bombers in an urban environment.? Actually, Hanson retorted, the juxtaposition was poorly-chosen, as Peloponnesian War lasted for ?twenty-seven and a half years.?
During one of the lighter moments, Hanson jokingly observed that the Iraq war had made some unlikely allies. ?I never thought in my lifetime that Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan would have an alliance of convenience,? he said, smiling.

Bad Bankruptcy bill gets worse

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One of the only good provisions of the bad Bankruptcy Reform legislation — the anti-forum shopping provision for business bankruptcies — was pulled out of the Senate bill yesterday in what appears to be a political deal between Texas Senator John Cornyn and Delaware Senator Joseph Biden to protect Texas’ liberal homestead exemption law and Delaware’s favored nation status for business bankruptcies.
This proposed legislation is the quintessential example of poorly-concieved special interest legislation. Outside of the credit card industry, there is no meaningful public support for these proposed reforms of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, which is the preferred model for emerging countries to use in establishing their own insolvency and business reorganization systems. A radical overhaul of such a successful system is not only unnecessary, but unwise.
However, the credit card industry has contributed large amounts of cash to the campaign war chests of many Republican legislators, and the industry is now expecting a return on that investment in the form of this bad legislation. Remember that next time you are considering a vote for either Mr. Cornyn or Kay Bailey Hutchison, both of whom are supporting this abomination despite an extraordinary number of appeals to them from experts and professionals in the insolvency and reorganization field to do the right thing and reject this legislation.

Is DeLay vulnerable?

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Probably not, but this Washington Post article notes sure signs that the DeLay camp is concerned.

Enron saga turns Grisham

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This Weekend Advisor column in the Wall Street Journal ($) advises us that the market for books on the Enron scandal has not been all that great. The best book on the subject to date — Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (Portfolio 2003) — has sold only 75,000 hardback copies, which is not a great showing considering the $1.4 million advance paid to the authors. Heck, that number indicates that only a small portion of the lawyers involved in the Enron case have bought the book.
At any rate, publishers — who never want to give up on an opportunity to hammer the Capitalist Roaders — have concluded that the lackluster sales in regard to Enron books is because of reader fatigue. That is, the Enron story has been around for so long that casual readers have become bored by it all and have moved on to other matters. That’s probably correct, although many of the previous media accounts of Enron have followed such a familiar script and lacked any real insight that even avid business scandal readers have become bored by it all.
Thus, Random House’s Broadway Books is going to try a new tactic in regard to the newest book on the Enron saga. On March 14, Broadway is releasing the long-awaited (at least by folks involved in the case) book on the Enron scandal by NY Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, who has covered the Enron scandal from Day One. In so doing, the publisher hopes to break through the fog of Enron books by marketing Conspiracy of Fools to the John Grisham-novel crowd as a “true-crime thriller” rather than a business book. The name “Enron” appears no where on the book jacket and, although the book is nonfiction, the publishers hired well-known mystery novel editor Stacy Creamer to edit the book.
So, while publishers and other mainstream media types attempt to tell the Enron story in fashionable manner, the truly compelling human stories continue to be largely ignored — the sad case of Jamie Olis, the federal government blithely depriving thousands of innocent people their jobs by pursuing a dubious prosecution that put Arthur Andersen out of business, the “Justice” Department sledgehammering businesspeople into pleading guilty to questionable criminal charges out of fear of receiving of what amounts to a life sentence if they risk asserting their Constitutional right to a trial, or how the traditional form of corporate governance contributed to Enron’s collapse. Analysis of these more interesting, but admittedly harder, issues has been largely left to the world of blogs.
Nevertheless, Broadway is certainly bullish on the new book’s prospects. It has ordered 127,500 copies of the book and engineered a pre-release publicity campaign, which includes a desk drop of 1,000 copies to prominent CFOs and CEOs. Broadway’s release of 10,000 early copies of the book is the largest prerelease print of any Random House book since The Da Vinci Code.
By the way, Mr. Eichenwald’s last true-crime book — The Informant — is currently being made into a movie in which Matt Damon will play the mole who uncovers a price-fixing scheme at Archer-Daniels-Midland.
H’mm, Matt Damon as Andy Fastow? What do you think?