Avuncular American

That Different Kind of Car Company? It's In China

Last Saturday, Thomas Friedman finally gave up on Detroit.  Not the city, but the American auto industry headquartered there.  Me too.  I give up.  How in their right minds can they throw this away:

Saturn's dealers, with laid-back salesmen and no-haggle pricing, often match luxury brands' scores in independent customer satisfaction surveys. Their locations could be a ready retail network for a foreign automaker to come to the U.S.*

Customer satisfaction - isn't that what building and maintaining a brand is all about?  I've written about Saturn before, and having owned two of them during stints in Washington, I was proud that the American car industry was capable of making such nice, affordable, and environmentally-sound cars.  But just like it showed when killing the electric car, Detroit's penchant for self-inflicted wounds is undiminished by the current economic crisis.

*Business Week wrote about the brand last week in "Saturn Seeks Another Carmaker as GM Casts It Aside," by Tom Krisher:

GM started Saturn in 1990 as a small-car answer to Japanese automakers and billed it as a "different kind of car company." Its new factory in Spring Hill, Tenn., had more flexible work rules than traditional GM plants and more autonomy for those who built the cars...

"More flexible work rules" may be interpreted as lower wages and fewer benefits than GM's other United Auto Workers (UAW) employees.  A lot of good that appears to have done the Saturn workers.  Note to the UAW negotiators: GM used their Saturn "autonomy" to make the brand so inconspicuous that they're now getting rid of it.  Trading away their wages and benefits appears to have purchased the Saturn workers absolutely zero employment stability.

Automotive writer Steven Cole Smith in the Orlando Sentinel put his finger on the problem:

Too bad... the Saturn products are caught up in GM's financial crisis.  There has long been the philosophy in the auto business that if you build good products, you will succeed. Saturn's woes suggest that is no longer a given.

Enter BYD.  Well, perhaps not (they didn't return Business Week's calls about possible interest in Saturn).  This Chinese company has its own product lineup of plug-in electric hybrids, which transformed the normally staid BBC business commentator Peter Day into an enthusiast - and he's apparently not alone:

In September [2008] there was a remarkable endorsement of BYD when even as global stock markets were plunging, the canniest American investor of them all, Warren Buffet of Omaha, Nebraska, paid $230 million for a 10% stake in the Chinese company.

Mr Buffett is a quite notorious investor for the long-term, not the quick buck, so he must recognise something in those initials BYD.

The company says they stand for "Build Your Dream."

I'm sorry that the American automotive dream has long since appeared to have gotten outsourced, but hell, that's what happens when Japanese and now apparently Chinese car makers successfully pick up on ideas that American car makers ignore.

President Obama believes that "the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it."  Perhaps.  But unless and until Detroit stops shooting itself in the foot pedal, Americans will drive away from GM dealerships in droves.  I wish Saturn well.  Maybe it will be "adopted" by a wiser investor than its soon-to-be-former owner, where people like "Mr. Horsepower" are finally leaving.

Maybe when Detroit lionizes a "Ms. Fuel Efficiency" we'll know things have changed.

Elements of National Power: Health, Education, Energy

Type into Google the phrase "elements of national power" (whether or not preceded by the qualifier "all") and you will get a collection of references from mainly military commentators.  The Project on National Security Reform (PNSR) translates "all elements of national power" into bureaucratese - "interagency" - and provides a useful reading list of articles and books explaining why the United States Government must better integrate all the tools at its disposal.

This process of reminding ourselves that power does not only come out of the barrel of a gun has had one of its most persuasive advocates in Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who often outdid his former cabinet colleague Condoleezza Rice in trying to push resources to American diplomacy.  The military - which loves acronyms, and loves acronyms that you can pronounce even better - has a trusty standby to define the elements of national power: DIME -- Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic.  It's probably too "cute" a summary, and people keep trying to throw things in (from Law Enforcement to Sociology, but it messes up the acronym).

OK, enough background.  Here's my point: on Tuesday, in his "budget vision" speech before a joint session of Congress, President Barack Obama promised to "use all elements of our national power" in a very interesting juncture of his speech, right between activating the Middle East peace process and shoring up the faltering world financial system.  I believe the President gets it.  National power does not (only) come out of the barrel of a gun.

If a parent has to spank his or her child, they've probably lost the battle.  What do they do the next time, spank harder?  If the US has to resort to shooting, doesn't that undermine other courses of action - the D, I, and E of "DIME?"  What's the use of having that nice shiny military machine if all the spare parts are held up because you've overshot your credit limit?  And the issuer is the Bank of China?

By shoring up the fundaments of an infrastructure - both physical and societal - in distress, "Doctor" Obama shows that he "gets" the fundamental "comorbidities" of "Patient" America.  Weakness in the health care system, in the educational system, and deadly dependence on climate-warming foreign energy sources - any one of them can make a body sick, and combined they can be fatal.  The budget is what the doctor ordered.

Kyrgyzstan: Rumsfeld's Lily Pads Start to Sink

"Kick-Me" or "supine" diplomacy is what Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post called the Obama Administration's world view on Friday.  Krauthammer was reacting to news that the Soviet Russia had persuaded (via $2.15 billion) Kyrgyzstan to push the "eject" button on the US Manas Air Base, used to resupply NATO troops in Afghanistan.  Whereas, according to Vice President Biden, the button was supposed to be the "reset" one, as in a different dynamic in international relations now that Bush is gone.

I can see why Krauthammer would be a mite upset, in the same week that Russia announced other stick-in-the-eye moves like setting up an anti-NATO rapid reaction force.  But we didn't hear from the neocon Mr. K. back in 2005, when the Bush Administration was ousted from Karshi-Khanabad Air Base ("K2"), in Uzbekistan.  For background, read "The World's Fireman and Its Lily Pads: The Case of K2" by Dr. Stephen R. Schwalbe in The Air & Space Power Journal.

Dr. Schwalbe, Air Force veteran and adjunct professor for Air Command and Staff College, describes former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's lily pad strategy as "employing numerous and varying types of bases and base agreements to allow maximum flexibility when required to conduct military operations."  You'll remember Rumsfeld's enthusiasm for bases in "New Europe," when what he disparagingly called "Old Europe" didn't sign up as willing partners for the invasion of Iraq.

Rumsfeld's lily pads started to prove to be rather unstable platforms even while he was still in office.  The May 2005 massacre in Uzbekistan of some 1,000 unarmed demonstrators resulted in the US ouster from K2 when human rights concerns were expressed.  But the US still had other lily pads, notably Manas in Kyrgyzstan.  Rumsfeld had to shore up wobbly Kyrgyz commitments in the wake of the Uzbek crisis, after the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) called for the closure of all US bases in Central Asia.

But wait - Kyrgyzstan is no paragon of human rights, as the US State Department's most recent report indicates.  While probably not the worst perpetrator in the region, State catalogues a litany of abuses including "pervasive corruption, torture, child labor, discrimination against women..."  You get the picture.  We're being bounced out of a joint that maybe we shouldn't have tried to enter in the first place.

BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reported from Kyrgyzstan this week, and visited Manas Air Base, speaking with its "extremely perky" officers who try to put a smiley face on their efforts to bond with their host country.  But the BBC reporter concludes that

there is little to show for the eight years America has spent here.  Inside the Manas airbase the buildings all look distinctly temporary.  For all their talk of "partnering", the Americans have not even fixed the broken concrete runway.

They pay a paltry $60m a year in rent. And one day, when their war in Afghanistan is done, they will go home. Unlike the Russians, who have already been here for well over 100 years.

By the way, that "broken concrete runway," some 13,800 feet long, was built for Soviet bombers.  According to GlobalSecurity.org,

American airmen said Ganci [note: informal American name for Manas Air Base] was setting a new standard for comfortable deployments downrange. Compared to the dusty and desertlike temperatures at the tent city at Karshi-Khanabad, also known as K-2, in neighboring Uzbekistan, Ganci was almost like a resort.

In his 2007 book America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, Mark Gillem provides a detailed look at American military outposts.  Like Manas, as the BBC's Wingfield-Hayes says, "inside, it's the American Midwest."  Gillem, himself an Air Force Reserve officer and architect, says "these outposts might as well be islands."  Lily pads, perhaps.   

During the Bush "with us or against us" days, authoritarian Central Asian leaders thought they knew which way the wind was blowing, and "lily pads" might have appeared a relatively cheap and expedient way to project 'American power.  Now that they are sinking, the challenge for the Obama Administration will be to find relatively stable arrangements in an extremely unstable region to service US and international community goals in Afghanistan.

I don't know what those arrangements should be.  But I do know that they will call for enhanced diplomacy, and a recognition that there are others in the region - Russia, China, and the SCO - who want to be consulted.  Supine - as Krauthammer thinks - I think not; but for sure, no longer supremely arrogant.

(Image source: National Association of Conservation Disticts - NACD)

Former African Granaries, Algeria to Zimbabwe

Today is Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's 85th birthday.  To read about his "obscenely" lavish party, read Martin Fletcher's report in the Times of London.

You've seen the TV footage of the misery reigning in the country where he holds the reins of power; here is what (Obama advisor) Samantha Power wrote in The Atlantic in December 2003, "How to Kill a Country."

A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women.

Imagine - the above was written when Zimbabwe's inflation rate was reaching an "unprecedented" 700 percent.  In other words, in the golden days of 3 digit inflation, before today's 6.5 quindecillion percent (I confess I didn't know of this measure) inflation and cholera epidemic.  Wait a minute - inflation may have reached 10 sextillion percent.  Hard to keep track.

How does a country go from being a "net exporter" of food to a situation where 7 million of its citizens require international food aid?  "Governance" practiced as "power grab" is the point of departure.  Then you dispossess the heretofore productive farmers of their land, to the point where they seek refuge in Nigeria, which welcomes their agricultural know-how.

Normally I wouldn't put Zimbabwe and Algeria in the same post, except if I were listing African countries in alphabetical order.  But the latter was also a breadbasket, and you don't even have to go as far back as the days when it was "the granary of the Roman Empire" (above left, map of the Roman Province of "Africa," from a site dedicated to subjects Roman, UNRV.com).

In the early '90s when we lived in Oran, Algeria's second city and major port, the American Consulate overlooked the harbor, where the grain facility was located (photo at right, Wikipedia).  When it was built by the French, its purpose was to export Algeria's considerable wheat production.  When we lived there, some thirty years after Algerian independence, it served to import huge quantities of foreign grain.  Here's what an upbeat (for grain farmers) Canadian Government site says about the Algerian market:

Algeria is the largest importer of agricultural goods in Africa, making it an attractive market, holding immense potential. Agricultural imports provide for most of the consumption needs due to unfavorable harvest conditions often resulting from drought. In 2007 Algeria imported $4.8 billion in foodstuffs from all countries; of these, $1.8 billion (38%) were grains, $1.1 billion (22%) dairy and $348 million (8%) was sugar. Algeria's largest import in 2007 was wheat at $940 million.

Don't get me wrong: whatever problems Algeria has, and they are legion (canceled elections leading to terrorism, huge youth unemployment, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the ruling class), it is not a Zimbabwe.  But through a combination of hubristic industrialization and its leadership equating "agriculture" with "French colonialism," it threw away its indigenous source of sustenance.

Algeria, Zimbabwe - Africa's list of granaries and breadbaskets, past, present, and future is mainly a matter of good governance.  But talk to African economists, and you'll hear that American and European farm subsidies hurt African farmers.  In the new world of recession and retrenchment, let's see where the "trade not aid" argument takes us.

But don't count on those white Zimbabwean farmers in Nigeria returning "home."  That home exists no more.

Young Greens "Deconstruct" Obama

This week members of the "Ecolo-J" - the youth wing of Belgium's francophone Green Party - at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) organized an evening devoted to "deconstructing" (in the analytical, though not quite Woody Allen sense) Barack Obama's first month as President of the United States.

They invited two of their professors (American expat and political science expert Katya Long and Francois Heinderyckx, communications analyst), Hubert Bedoret, Green Party deputy political director, plus me, representing Democrats Abroad Belgium (DAB) and addressing how the Obama campaign used Democratic Party rules to best advantage and created its own fundraising network of local activists.

NDLR: Pour les francophones, voici le texte de mes remarques - sans accents: Download Deconstructing Obama majuscules.

Apart from a few questioners on the far left of what is already a progressive party, the audience appeared to share the panel's realistic assessment of a Presidency that offers America's best chance at solving a collection of seemingly insurmountable problems.

A roomful of environmentalists naturally focused on prospects for change in the climate change arena after the "negationist" Bush years, and while the United States has much further to go to make up for lost time, Obama's appointment of scientists to key positions shows that he means business.

Francois Heinderyckx underscored the enormous, almost "grotesque" expectations accompanying Obama's election, and described a communications strategy that not only has to manage expectations but has to manage inevitable disappointment.  For a campaign that stressed openness and solicited input from voters, right up through the Transition ("Change.gov"), the Obama Administration's first month has shown a rather sparse "controlled transparency" (the "13 Questions" press conference).  Finally, Heinderyckx expressed reservations about "Public Diplomacy 2.0" degenerating into a kind of "Propaganda 2.0."

Panel and audience shared an appreciation of the historic nature of Obama's election in a country with such a fraught racial history, though a sense remained of the surprising closeness of the results given the utter failure on all fronts of Bush and his Republican Presidency.  Europeans continue to be fascinated by what appears to be the insurgent power of the Obama campaign and its ability to rally support in unexpected areas of the nation, in part through use of modern means of communication.

Not wanting to dampen their enthusiasm, I warned about the dangers of the American "permanent campaign," where no sooner do we inaugurate a new president than we cast our eyes towards the next election cycle, in this case Congressional elections of 2010 - next year!  Europeans, with election seasons that last 5-6 weeks max, conduct campaigns that are like 90-minute soccer matches.  Kick the ball back and forth, score 2 or 3 goals, and it's basically over.  Form your government.

Europe, please do copy Obama's astute use of networks and citizen involvement, but please do not try and import American Superbowl political campaigns, which last way longer than the Superbowl Pre-Game show and cost billions more.  Political campaigning - keep it short, and simple.

Asia-U.S. Cooperation Prosperity Spheres

The title of this post is perhaps unfortunate: "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was a wartime Japanese construct to rally captive Asian nations on a racial, "anti-colonial" basis against the Western Allies.  It was as short-lived as the Japanese occupation of much of mainland Asia and the Pacific islands.

These days the stress is on peaceful economic cooperation, as in APEC "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation," where heads of state and government get to wear the hosts' idea of national dress (bombardier jackets in the US, batik shirts in Indonesia) at annual summit meetings.  The forum, started in 1989, got a boost during the Clinton years.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's inaugural foreign trip to East Asia will of course include China, and as Glenn Kessler noted in Sunday's Washington Post, in many ways is about China.  He reminds us of candidate Clinton's remark:

"our relationship with China will be the most important bilateral relationship in the world in this century"

Yesterday's forum in Brussels therefore couldn't have had better timing.  The European Institute for International Relations (IERI) sponsors the "Academia Diplomatica Europaea," and the ADA program yesterday concentrated on Chinese diplomacy.  The guest speaker was Dr. Gustaaf Geeraerts, Director of the Brussels Institute of Contemporary Chinese Studies (BICCS), a joint venture of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and China's Renmin University.

Dr. Geeraerts firmly believes that Western attitudes towards China, and Chinese attitudes towards the West, are a matter of mutually reinforcing perceptions: negativity produces the effect you fear, positivity pays its dividends.  In the current world economic crisis of confidence, we are starting to see the self-fulfilling prophecy of deflationary protectionism, and nowhere is the interaction between China and the outside world more important than in the economic sphere.

But as Geeraerts underlined, China's leadership is painfully aware of the link between general world prosperity, internal Chinese development, and the continued legitimacy of the Chinese regime.  If I didn't know that "a rising tide lifts all boats" was either an Irish or an Irish-American aphorism, I'd say that it sounded like an old Chinese proverb updated by its "Communist"/capitalist (or is it capitalist/Communist?) leadership.

I'm reminded of a comment on a post of mine last autumn, when I was adding to the general level of worry about Chinese sovereign fund encroachment investment in US financial institutions.  A reader took issue:

It behooves us as a nation to keep them whole so that they continue to invest their money here. Reading the blogs one comes across a number of "let them go down" type comments,"why should we bail out the Chinese", etc. However, if [they] lose confidence in the U.S. and stop investing their money here, it will cause a world of hurt and our standard of living will take a real hit over many years.

Rising tides, bailing out, sink or swim - the analogies to The Flood are legion, and indicate the dire straits (yet another nautical phrase!) we're all in.  Yesterday, Dr. Geeraerts stressed the opportunities: engagement with a China that is feeling its way around international institutions (membership in the WTO and the IMF) as well as creating one of its own, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO - logo above left).

The SCO bears watching, but I suppose that we should take comfort in its nomenclature.  Naming it after China's most populous city, its international "showpiece" of commerce, stresses the economic cooperation message that is designed to calm fears about a budding hegemon.  If the US set up an international organization in say, Chicago, wouldn't that be less threatening than in Washington?

Secretary of State Clinton, making her rounds tomorrow at the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Secretariat, will further reinforce the importance of relations with the countries on China's periphery.  In all, it's a sign that the Obama Administration is cognizant of the central importance of China, Japan, and the "tigers" to prospects for world economic recovery.

China already owns some $700 billion in US Treasury securities, and if the US is going to sell a further $3 trillion over the next 30 months, we definitely want our main customers to be in a position to buy.  Carry on, Madame Secretary.

Win One Lose One: Afghanistan and Iran

Afghanistan: 15 February 1989 - 15 February 2009

Having missed it when it was released in Europe last year, it was time to watch Charlie Wilson's War.  Today, exactly twenty years after the last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan after Wilson's mujahideen blasted them out of the sky with U.S.-provided shoulder-fired missiles, Russians and other former Soviets are marking the day in cemeteries from Archangel to Almaty.  BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet recalls the final days here.  The Soviets are gone, but the Stingers still get aimed at foreign helicopters.

The advantage of watching Mike Nichol's film on DVD are the bonus tracks: a bio of former Democratic Congressman Wilson and a "making of" with plenty of good interviews.  These extras actually made me appreciate the film more than the film itself, which at times I felt glided over many of the moral and geopolitical ambiguities in exchange for a glib line of dialogue.  Plus the Moroccan extras posing as Afghan refugees in Peshawar were way too Hollywood to be credible.

Anyway, this is not a film review.  If you want a good one, read Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

Milt Bearden, the ex-CIA operations guy who advised Nichols during the shooting of the film, worries about what Vanity Fair entitled "Obama's War" in an interview with Michael Hogan.  Additional troops might sound fine on the campaign trail, says Bearden, but

once you’re president you’re going to say, “Are the numbers important, or is the mission—the redefinition of the mission—more important?” My sense is that if you send more gunfighters, you get into more gunfights.

Bearden sees hope in the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as Af/Pak envoy - "he’s not going to be overly burdened with conventional wisdom."  Holbrooke, he of the Bosnia settlement, brings relevant negotiation clout to this job.  But partitioned Bosnia - like the U.K.-partitioned India/Pakistan, Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland/Irish Republic, all having experienced various stages of non-war, non-peace - still has unhealed stitches and requires the presence of foreign troops.

Iran: February 1979 - February 2009

I've already written about Iran's 30th anniversary, but what I'd like to point out here are a couple of interesting BBC reports that show an Iran beyond the ubiquitous photos of the scowling Ayatollah and blindfolded US Embassy hostages.  Not to hide that reality, but to show that there is more to this country of 65 million people.

This morning on BBC World Service Radio, John Simpson put Iran in perspective in "From Our Own Correspondent."  He also put Iran's President Ahmadinejad in his place, describing the "political traffic jam" of layers of authority that transcend the presidential remit.

Last night on BBC World TV, Iranian affairs analyst Sadeq Saba (presumably a refugee from the Revolution, now visiting his native land(?)) started the first of a four-part series, "A Taste of Iran: A journey of discovery of a land and its culture through its cuisine."

If I were an Iranian cultural attache eager to project a more nuanced image to the West, nothing could be better than this in-depth look at a society that comes across as rather more complex than George W. Bush's "axis of evil" one-liner.  It's not heavy on political analysis; in fact there is none - Saba does plenty of that in his day job - but viewers can reach their own conclusions.

This February double whammy of significant anniversaries comes at a time when the Obama Administration is looking to explore new ways of dealing with both Iran and Afghanistan.  The latter - "graveyard of empires" - and the former - "Policeman of the Persian Gulf" under the Shah, according to Time Magazine in 1973 - have a way of entrapping big powers into their maw.

As the USSR learned 20 years ago today in Kabul, and as the US learned 30 years ago this month in Tehran.

Robert Capa Remembered in Brussels

Readers who find themselves in Brussels before 19 April 2009 would do worse with a couple hours' free time than going to the Jewish Museum for its Robert Capa Retrospective.  Many of the legendary war photographer's most famous photos - including his "Falling Soldier" from the Spanish Civil War - are on display.  Others, including many from Israel's early days, when refugees were as likely to be Jewish as Arab, show Capa's ability to capture human feeling on film.

Since Capa was instrumental in getting intellectual property protection for photographers, I hesitate to illustrate this post (for aficionados, the International Center of Photography's eMuseum has some 1,500 of his photos here).  But I make an exception by including the poster for "Robert Capa in Love and War," the award-winning 2003 Anne Makepeace PBS documentary of the photographer's eventful life.

One of the biggest treats of the visit was the screening of Makepeace's film, which helps the uninitiated get to know the rakish Capa, who was a legend in his own lifetime.  Indeed the Jewish Museum's retrospective seems to be timed to mark the 70th anniversary of "Picture Post" magazine's consecration of Capa as the "greatest war-photographer in the world" in late 1938.

Capa already had years of wartime coverage to his credit - he was all of 25 years old - and there were more wars to come: after Spain, there was China fighting Japanese invaders; Capa covering fighting with American soldiers in North Africa and Italy in 1943; landing with the first wave on D-Day; jumping with paratroopers into Germany; and the 1948 Israel-Arab war.  He was killed covering the end of the French Indochina War in 1954.

Anne Makepeace found soldiers' testimony on how much Capa was one of them.  Several remembered him being conversational in the foxhole under fire.  Watching her film, I was reminded of my late father's stories about war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who was killed while covering my father's 77th Division in the Pacific.  Capa, Pyle... the tradition of honoring courageous correspondents continues with the Robert Capa Gold Medal.

Capa was much more than a chronicler of his times, he was an active anti-Fascist, his resistance starting in his native Hungary.  His temporary refuge in Germany ended - Capa, born Endre Friedmann, was Jewish - when Hitler came to power.  He continued to document Fascism, triumphant in Spain, defeated with Hitler's fall, throughout much of this life.  Belgium's own wartime collaborator Léon Degrelle was the subject of one of his shots.

I could go on.  With some 70,000 negatives to his name (most of his D-Day pictures were ruined in the lab!), Robert Capa alone constituted a record of much of what mattered in the mid-20th century.  Hurry to Rue des Minimes in Brussels while this exhibit still lasts.

(Image source: Films Transit)

Welcoming a Holiday from Shopping

It being Saturday, February 14, let me wish you all a happy St. Valentine's Day.

By the way, St. Valentine, an early Roman martyr, was clubbed, stoned, and beheaded - not shot by arrows - for, among other things, marrying Christian couples.  The bow and arrow is the symbol of the pagan Roman god of love, Cupido.

The poster is provided by a Brussels-based group of anti-growth activists.  Those are bar code strips, in case you can't make it out.   Cupid, appropriately enough, suggests that you "make love - don't shop" to paraphrase the Vietnam-era slogan.

This week the French TV program "Envoyé Spécial" carried a report about the "Décroissance" movement, which, if you look it up in Wikipedia, was born in France and is essentially a European phenomenon (although the California "Locavores" got honorable mention on the program).

These people - mostly young, primarily urban, definitely "green" - are not a threat to the capitalist system, and many are thriving in the market economy.  But consumerism and especially waste is definitely out - unless it's in your compost bin, where it's put to active use.

Actually, as modern as they are, they have an awful lot in common with people of my parents' generation, people who grew up in the Europe or America of the inter war, Depression years.  Whose married lives were inaugurated by husbands going off to war.  Who had to deal with rationing, bartering, black marketing, and all manner of survival mechanisms.

The good people at Décroissance.org are not to be confused with "décroissance.info," which appears to be a nasty far right ripoff using Google to prey on hapless surfers looking for ways to live sustainably.  On "Envoyé Spécial," a bunch of people who might take pride in being called "cheapskates" jury-rig their plumbing to flush toilets with rain water, make decorations out of plastic trash (sells well), and are not above retrieving discarded, "bruised" vegetables and chopping off the bad parts.

If hard times are coming, we can all take a note from this book.  "Waste not, want not" and lots of other old aphorisms might be ready for a revival.  I definitely don't want de-flation or de-pression, but "de-growth" (as Wikipedia rather awkwardly translates "décroissance") might do us all - and the planet, with its finite resources - a lot of good.

Now it's okay to indulge in that Valentine's chocolate.

Priority Executive Placement: Commerce Sec'y

PPP (Post Partisan Placement) has just been engaged by an anonymous White House personnel director to conduct a priority executive search for US Secretary of Commerce, to replace the latest candidate, Republican Senator Judd Gregg, who dropped out yesterday.  Interested applicants with the following profile should contact the White House by close of business (COB).

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Name: First name and last name should be interchangeable (e.g., Gregg, Judd or Trent, Lott) and preferably one syllable each.  Steele, Trap, Judge Dredd, Biff Spleen - you get the picture.

Experience: Having held elective office, while a preferred competence, is not essential.  Playing politics, like putting your name forward and then withdrawing as a crucial vote is about to happen (see Gregg, Judd) is no longer acceptable.

Haircut: Actual authentic hair is less important than having the Conservative Cut (see Lott, Trent).  Must project the "I'm working for a Democrat but at heart you know I would blackball him at the country club" look.  Blago-hair is, shall we say, way over-the-top.

References: If you're a Republican Senator, first be sure to arrange that your state governor will swear on the Bible and say "cross my heart and hope to die" with all his fingers visible when he agrees to appoint another Republican to replace you.  Then apply to the RNC Chair for permission to "reach across the aisle."

Career Goals: Indicate what you hope to achieve by 2012 and 2016.  If a politician, do you plan to switch parties?  If in the private sector, do you see public service as a good place to weather the Depress Downturn?

Salary Expectations: Don't expect any pay increases.

Job Description: You get to oversee the Commerce Department's 40,000 employees, myriad specialized agencies like the Census Bureau and Patent Office, and preside over palatial digs in the Herbert C. Hoover Building:

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P.S.  Upon reflection, maybe it's that name - Herbert C. Hoover, synonymous with Depression, 1929 and all that - which gives pause to potential candidates.

P.SS. Upon further reflection, maybe it's not such a good idea - right now - to confer this position to another Republican.  They might get the idea that turning the other cheek is fine in the Bible, but connotes weakness in politics.