micah.sifry.com

So, when people are offered a huge reward for their labors (i.e. high pay) they make worse decisions than when they’re offered a moderate prize, Dan Ariely shows in this talk he gave at PopTech in 2009.

Money is a double-edged sword, Ariely argues, it’s a motivator and a stress-inducer. People who are completing a task that offers them a huge reward turn out to be too stressed to work as carefully and well as they would otherwise. So much for the theory that we need to allow for unlimited incomes to motivate innovators.

Now, according to this fascinating essay in the Atlantic, we learn that people who are ultra-rich ($25 million and up) and supposedly ultra-secure, turn out to be deeply unhappy. So much for the theory that money buys happiness.

Before this blog existed, I had an earlier on called IraqWarReader.com, which started out as a place for me and Christopher Cerf to post stuff related to our 2003 book of the same title, but over time it also evolved into covering more of my personal journey into the internet-politics arena. In October 2004, I started this blog, micah.sifry.com, and promised to transfer over the old posts after I managed to clean out the comment spam. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. But now that I’ve finally got this blog on an updated platform, I’m going to go back and figure out how to restore some relevant posts, fitting them in where they belong date-wise.

That said, I wanted to post this item, from my experience at the February 2004 Digital Democracy Teach-in held at E-Tech in San Diego. The Howard Dean campaign had just fallen apart, but there was a lot of talk in the air of what comes next to this net-powered movement. As you can see from the post, I was a bit frustrated by how much emphasis people seemed to be putting on tools rather than organizing. There also was this endemic problem of seeing movements from afar, and thus not really understanding how much they are actually organized by people and institutions with real names and structures. Today, with all this talk of “Twitter Revolutions,” I think the arguments I made seven years ago are still relevant.

Notes on the Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego. [Originally posted on IraqWarReader.com February 10, 2004]

Reality check
It’s wonderful to be immersed in a welcoming community of searching minds, to meet a lot of new and interesting people, and to get such an intriguing peak over the horizon at what’s ahead. (And to bask in the glow of good will generated by my little brother, on top of that!) Thus it’s a little hard maintain distance, and even worse, to have some critical things to say. But this community seems to thrive on strong debate, so here goes. For all the intense discussion going on online and in the hallways about what the Dean campaign did or didn’t do right, and on how social software tools can empower people, I’m amazed by how little interaction this community seems to have with people who actually know something about social movements, political organizing and power analysis. Perhaps that’s a reflection of how new to politics so many of the people here seem to be, and that’s ok. After all, DeanforAmerica (my shorthand for the decision to try to run an “open-source”-style campaign, as opposed to Howard Dean the candidate for President) clearly inspired many people both in and outside of the hacking community and the A-list blogging community to get excited about personal political participation, and hopefully that will be a lasting thing.

But people here talk like all that’s needed is better tools, and then people will pick them up and take back their country from the powers-that-be. There’s almost no sense of how hard organizing actually is, or why. Britt Blaser, who I’m getting to know and like a whole lot, is talking about “one-click politics,” as if mobilizing people for collective action might be made as easy as buying a book on Amazon. Last night at the open participant session on continuing the Dean campaign, someone said something about how change can take place in an instant, as if it were simply a matter of spreading the right meme or something.

Umm, sorry, but change is hard. There are no shortcuts. If this–empowering average people to have a genuine say in the decisions that affect their lives–were easy, it would have been done already. (More on that thought below.) And this isn’t simply because Howard Dean wasn’t what folks hoped he was. (My pal Doug Ireland has a characteristically tough take on that notion here [Note: Unfortunately, TomPaine.com's archive from 2004 appears gone.]) That is, no doubt, a big part of the reason his campaign foundered, but there was also an awful lot of wishful thinking going on about what was happening at the base, too. For example, I keep hearing about the magic of Meetups, how 80,000 people supposedly showed up at Dean Meetups at the beginning of February, and how empowering all this is. There’s almost no empirical backing for these assertions, but they’re accepted anyway. I know for a fact that the number of people RSVPing to go to the Meetups in my area in Westchester, N.Y., dropped dramatically this month, and my local Meetup group was significantly down in attendance, according to the young woman volunteer coordinator who I’m in touch with. Names on a list, even people in a room, do not equal well-organized change agents. The Iowa caucuses were just another example of this, come to think of it.

Also, there’s no discussion or analysis of how you build a coalition to alter power relations in America. The closest we get is general criticism of “broadcast politics”–the webocrats catchphrase for top-down, capital-intensive politics, where the main goal is having or raising enough money to buy broadcast power to send a message to the passive masses. We’re all against that, for sure. But that isn’t the WHOLE problem. If we don’t talk about the enduring facts of racial and class division and act as if they’re not critical to the maintenance of the status quo, any movement for change these well-intentioned folks are going to construct is also going to founder well before it achieves critical mass.

A wise organizer friend of mine, Becky Glass, who runs the Midwest States Center, once told me, “It’s awfully hard to be invited to dinner after the first course has been served.” What she meant was, if you want your movement to be inclusive and diverse, it has to be so from the very beginning. You can’t invite blacks and Latinos and working-class people to join you later, as so many well-intentioned middle-class white progressives so often do. The Dean campaign’s social base was white well-educated boomers and their college-age kids (Jay Rosen and his nephew Zack Rosen, if you will). This isn’t a huge surprise, as high-intensity Internet users are disproportionately whiter, younger and better educated than the general population, and antiwar activists were also very white, middle-class, etc (a truism of antiwar movements in America going back quite a ways). Yet no one seems at all worried about plunging ahead with grand plans and visions, without stopping to think that they haven’t got everyone you need on board this ship, not yet, anyway.

Not that we shouldn’t plunge ahead. But a little more humility and a little more exploration of the insights of others couldn’t hurt.

Why Social Movements are So Rare

I love that Joe Trippi keeps talking about getting two million Americans to each pitch in $100 to build an independent organization to take back the country from wealthy special interests. It’s a valuable echo of Ross Perot’s United We Stand America (1.2 million people who gave $15 each, until they realized what a scam that was), and of Ralph Nader’s call for a million organizers each willing to put in 100 hours and/or $100 to change the country. But Trippi, who I’m sure knows better, talks as if all it would take is people waking up one morning and doing this. Poof! Actually, he’s not thinking big enough.

What I have in mind is something like Solidnarsc (Solidarity) in Poland, which emerged from within the totalitarian Communist system and signed up 10 million members out of a population of 40 million around the demand for a “free and independent trade union,” something they built–in the face of fierce repression. Try to wrap your minds around that!

One of my intellectual mentors, Lawrence Goodwyn, the great historian of American populism, has a book about Solidarity called “Breaking the Barrier,” in which he unearths the real history of that movement’s construction. I wish I could point to a link for what follows, but believe it or not, it ain’t on the web! (The horror, the horror!) The questions he asks are, or at least ought to be, central to the question of the moment,IMHO.

How do people move from thought to action? Goodwyn’s answer is deceptively simple. “Protest moves from idea to action when it becomes social–that is, when it is organized so that people are acting rather than writing or talking about acting.” [hello, fellow bloggers!] But, Goodwyn points out, large-scale social movements for change are extremely rare beasts:

Societies are not routinely afflicted with ‘movements.’ Things are usually ‘normal’ and people behave in conventional ways. A relatively small number of citizens possessing high sanction move about in an authoritative manner and a much larger number of people without such sanction move about more softly. Some among the multitude may be seen energetically to be doing all they can to acquire a measure of status, but in the meantime, they join their less-energetic neighbors in behaving with conventional deference.

Movements disrupt this normal order. A considerable number of unsanctioned people appear publicly in a new guise; they present petitions or voice demands; they suddenly arrogate to themselves the right to criticize inherited customs and may even issue manifestos proclaiming the precise way they intend to rearrange received habits. Moreover, they have a pronounced tendency to conduct activity out-of-doors where everything is visible. People march, they strike, they demonstrate, and they may even suddenly riot and burn down or otherwise dismantle certain physical signs of established tradition.

How do we get large-scale protest?–what Goodwyn calls “unusual acts of unsanctioned assertion by previously little-known persons.” This is where our ignorance begins. We have been trained by decades of received historical tradition to not understand this crucial issue. Our observers–journalists, academics, etc–rarely explain how social movements are created and sustained. As Goodwyn notes, they borrow heavily from the weather school of writing. “Movements ‘flare up’ and ‘gather steam.’ They ‘boil.’ They can then ‘burst into flame’ and ‘burn like a prairie fire’ before, in time, ‘flickering’ out. A social movement can also be understood as a ‘gathering storm’ that when gathered ‘sweeps like a cyclone’ through vulnerable regions.” This, he says, is “a view from afar.” It is, for all the talk of “granularity,” the primary view we’ve been taking of the DeanforAmerica phenomenon.

“Large scale democratic movements do not happen in any of these easily characterized ways,” Goodwyn writes. “Democratic forms are ordered. To function well, they must be experientially tested. Their construction requires overcoming many culturally based hierarchical impediments. They happen, then, when they are organized. They happen in no other way.”

That’s why I think we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Yes, it’s true, I am writing a book, entitled WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, exclusively available from that link. In the wake of a very successful event that we at Personal Democracy Forum did on WikiLeaks on December 11th (see PdFLeaks for details), John Oakes–the ‘O’ in OR Books and an old college friend and a good guy whose been around independent quality publishing for his whole life–suggested a quick short book on the topic. At first, I resisted the idea because a) books are hard hard work, and b) I didn’t think WikiLeaks by itself was a topic I could do justice to.

But then I thought about it, and realized that in fact it would be really useful to place WikiLeaks in context, as part of a much larger transparency movement, one that I know quite a bit about. Time to connect the dots, as it were. So, consider this a placeholder of a note on the book’s progress. More details soon.

Until then, if you’re in NYC and interested in this topic, set aside Jan. 24 and/or Feb. 9 on your calendar, when PdF is doing two more WikiLeaks-themed public events with folks like Clay Shirky, Floyd Abrams, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, Gabriella Coleman, Evgeny Morozov, John Perry Barlow and Deanna Zandt.

I didn’t have blogging privileges turned on.

October 22, 2008
Camden, Maine
Dear Mira and Jesse:
Here’s what it felt like at the end of the world as we know it on one day in October.
This morning, I heard a wise man who knew everything that was possible to know about numbers, and how much energy it takes to run the whole world, describe exactly how much each American’s life would need to change to bring it into balance with what it will take for all 6.6 billion people on Earth today to avoid a climate catastrophe. If we don’t want more than a 5 degree increase in the average temperature of the world by 2030, we have to make big changes now in how much energy we use. I started looking at all the ways I and we use energy, using an amazing new tool this man helped build, and I wondered, could I cut my travel down to no more than three plane flights a year. Could we stop buying bottled drinks? Could we cut how much we drive in half? Could we convince our friends, relatives and coworkers to do the same?
Then another wise man showed me how much the ocean’s life was being depleted by how we over-fish it, and how we pollute it. He showed us a picture of an albatross, one of the world’s most beautiful birds, with a wingspan of up to 11 feet, soaring in the sky. And then he showed us another picture, of an albatross chick that died because its mother unknowingly filled its stomach with detritus from the ocean, like cigarette lighters. He told us that great fish like the bluefin tuna, were in danger of being over-fished out of existence, because humans loved them too much in sushi. I thought about whether we could give up eating sushi. I learned that there was much we could do to help the ocean heal.
Then I heard a third wise man (not sure why there weren’t more wise women speakers by the way) explain how so much human potential is thrown away, and not just because for many people, poverty closes off opportunities at a terribly young age. Sometimes it is human stupidity. Sometimes it is because we ourselves don’t work hard enough, and blame other causes for our own lack of achievement.
And then I heard a fourth wise man explain all the connections between working too hard, eating poorly, not getting enough exercise, being addicted to fast food and coffee, not getting enough sleep, and our out-of-balance economy. He showed how the “invisible hand” that Adam Smith predicted, in 1776, would balance individual self-interest with society’s common good, had broken down. He showed, how our own reptilian part of our brains, which governs our most instinctive actions, didn’t know how to deal with living in a world of abundant everything, and so we were getting fatter, more materialistic, and less healthy, and allowing the balance of our society to spin out of control. I decided I needed to read his book.
You might think by now that I was getting depressed, but I wasn’t. The morning ended with one of my favorite (and your favorite) new musical artists, coming on stage to play three of her songs live. It was magic. Here’s what it looked and sounded like:

I also heard another musician play, someone I had never heard of. He too made incredible music. It reminded me of how much beauty was possible in the world. I thought about maybe spending more time re-learning how to make music, and maybe less traveling.
Then I took a break, and looked at what was happening in the world. The stock market went down 400 points, and then up 500. The number of Americans newly applying for unemployment insurance rose to nearly 500,000. I wondered, yet again, about our house and retirement savings, and then decided not to think about it.
In Washington, one not so wise man, but a very powerful man, was admitting that he had been wrong, for a very long time, about the economy, but only realized it now, with the stock market’s meltdown. In New York City, another very powerful man, was getting his wish to extend his time as Mayor, without a real vote from the city’s voters saying they wanted to give him this chance.
I went back to paying attention to PopTech for the late afternoon sessions. I heard one wise woman (finally) describe how she had decided to change her life doing design work for corporate clients, saying “It’s really depressing spending your life creating landfill. So now I work for love.” Her artistry is amazing. She told us, “Please remember, always write your love letters by hand.” I thought about the letters your Mom and I have shared, and thought about writing her a new one.
I heard a self-styled “perfume critic” walk us through a tour of different manufactured smells. They were beautiful, but I wondered at the luxury and excess of it, especially in these times. $50,000 for a kilo of one of these perfumes?! And yet, the other 500 people listening alongside me seemed to love everything he was showing us.
And then I heard one more wise man, a symphony conductor, who taught us what it means to live in a time of possibility. He showed us how we could sing as if we really meant it, and then he brought a 15-year-old cellist out to play for us, and showed him and us why it’s great to make mistakes and learn from them.
As it always does after a day at a conference like PopTech, my head hurt. On the one hand, I was filled with ideas and hope. I saw, again, how much an individual or a small group of individuals can do, to make a difference. And at the same time, I saw how much we were still caught in forces much larger than us. We had just heard about how we needed to trim our consumption and curb our addictive impulses, but we were putty in the hands of the perfume critic. We had just been shown the power of community, but as soon as the last talk was over we went back to our separate spaces and lives.
I don’t know. We are facing huge challenges, and you deserve to live in a world as good as the one I and your Mom have grown up in. But to face these challenges, we have to make bigger changes in our lives than we imagine–and not just personal lifestyle changes, but big changes in how we, as part of larger communities, behave together.
I think we are living in a time of great change. I think that in less than two weeks, we may be living in a new world. I am looking forward to that future. I hope you are too.
Love,
Dad

“Have the poor suckers of this world ever lived in an age that offered such entertainment? Costly, to be sure, and they are the ones who are going to pay for it, but at least they are getting to watch some wonderful burlesque–first the pirates of a fraudulent system of communism forced to scuttle their own ship, and then the pirates of a fraudulent system of capitalism beginning to do the same.
So long as their focus was on Eastern Europe, our press and politicians couldn’t talk enough about ‘the triumph of capitalism and democracy.’ But now that they begin reluctantly to concentrate on piracy at home, they are–perhaps because so many of them are part of that piratical crew–understandably reluctant to admit the obvious: that our system is just as bogus and corrupt and irrelevant and defeated in its own way, offering neither the risks of true capitalism nor the safeguards of true democracy. Our system is a hoax.
If anyone still had faith in the system, the savings and loan adventure surely must have brought him to his senses and to his knees. The gambling debt of $500 billion ($150 billion plus interest and other incidentals)–or will it be, as some economists predict, a trillion four?–that the S&L industry left with the taxpayers has prompted even that deadpan Tory, George Will, to remark in wonderment, ‘We seem to have a capitalism here in which profits are private and we socialize the losses. Why are we, in effect–if you’re big enough, if you’re a huge bank or a savings and loan–why, in effect, are we guaranteeing everything?…What I’m asking is isn’t there a way to reform the system so that the taxpayers don’t get stuck with what happens when you have deregulation and risk taking that goes wrong?”
The answer to his question is: No, there is no way to reform the present system, because the system is owned and controlled by those who are ruining it. Voters, ordinary taxpayers, have nothing to say about it.”

That is from the opening paragraphs of Robert Sherill’s majestic, troubling essay “The Looting Decade: S&Ls, Big Banks, and Other Triumphs of Capitalism,” which was published as a special issue of The Nation back on November 19, 1990. I was assistant editor of The Nation then, and I had the privilege of working closely with Sherrill on that essay, along with a great group of intern/factcheckers (who amazingly enough included one Nicholas Clegg, who is now the leader of the British Liberal-Democratic Party!).
I’ve been asking my old friends at The Nation to get the full text of The Looting Decade up on their website, but they have their hands full at the moment. So, I’m posting the .pdf here for your downloading pleasure, and making an appeal: if you can help me get the text converted into .html and posted, please let me know asap.

Get your own – Open publication

In the meantime, as I have time I will post more choice excerpts. If you want to understand today’s Wall Street meltdown, you have to start at the beginning, in the 1980s, when the deregulators first started running amok.

I love the FAIL blog, for its mordant and ironic view of daily life. And so every couple of days, when I catch up with it, I typically send at least one link around to my family for their amusement. The other day, I sent them this photo of “SaladFail”:

I also love my wife, Leslie, and her optimistic and compassionate view of daily life. She responded to that photo with this mashup:

Maybe she should start the SUCCESS blog?

Reading the long take-out in this Sunday’s New York Times Business Section on Wall Street’s meltdown, “What Created This Monster?“, I couldn’t help but be struck by a few things.

For example, Rep. Barney Frank admits that it wasn’t until sometime last year that he realized that all the deregulation pushes of the 1990s had loosed the creation of a “shadow banking system” that was undermining the whole financial system. “Not only did Wall Street have so much freedom, but it gave commercial banks an incentive to try and evade their regulations,” Mr. Frank says. When it came to Wall Street, he says, “we thought we didn’t need regulation.”

And then there was this episode, described in the article:

A milestone in the deregulation effort came in the fall of 2000, when a lame-duck session of Congress passed a little-noticed piece of legislation called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. The bill effectively kept much of the market for derivatives and other exotic instruments off-limits to agencies that regulate more conventional assets like stocks, bonds and futures contracts.

Supported by Phil Gramm, then a Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation was a 262-page amendment to a far larger appropriations bill. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton that December.

Mr. Gramm, now the vice chairman of UBS, the Swiss investment banking giant, was unavailable for comment. (UBS has recently seen its fortunes hammered by ill-considered derivative investments.)

“I don’t believe anybody understood the significance of this,” says Mr. Greenberger, describing the bill’s impact.

Oh come on! Back in the fall of 1999, here’s what I wrote in a bulletin I was writing with my colleague Nancy Watzman, for Public Campaign, on the deleterious effects of money on politics. We didn’t come up with this analysis on our own, either, but were relying on many outspoken critics of financial deregulation, who unfortunately were completely outgunned in the one currency that buys attention in Washington.

BRAVE NEW WORLD

Friday, October 22, 1999 should go down in history as the day that big money in politics won its biggest victory ever. That was the day that White House and Senate negotiators worked out a final, late-night deal engineering the repeal of a critical Depression-era law, the Glass- Steagal Act, that for six decades has kept the banking, securities and insurance businesses separate from each other.

The ramifications of this change are huge. First, insurance companies, brokerage houses, banks and credit card companies will be allowed to merge, a process that has been already taking place in dribs and drabs through regulatory waivers, but now will be vastly accelerated. Glass-Steagal had forced commercial banks out of the hyper-risky business of stock speculation and set up the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect individuals from bank failures. Now, despite promises otherwise, the U.S. Treasury and the taxpayers will be in the position of bailing out speculators in the event that their risky plays in the securities business threaten the solvency of the soon-to-be-formed mega-banks. [emphasis added]

….

And, the least-remarked-upon result of the new law: political money will become concentrated to an unprecedented degree. From 1997 to present, contributions from the banking, insurance and securities industries in the form of PAC money, soft money and large individual donations ($200+) to federal candidates and party committees totaled more than $175 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. These three industries reported spending another $163 million on lobbying in 1997-98.

Key players in the final deal are also top recipients of campaign cash from the financial sector. Senator Gramm has raised $2.07 million from it from 1993-98; Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), $1.71 million; Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) $1.38 million.

And who are we relying on now? As Paul Krugman points out today, Phil Gramm is one of John McCain’s top economic advisers. And, he notes,

In retrospect, it’s clear that the Clinton administration went along too easily with moves to deregulate the financial industry. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that big contributions from Wall Street helped grease the rails.

Last year, there was no question at all about the way Wall Street’s financial contributions to the new Democratic majority in Congress helped preserve, at least for now, the tax loophole that lets hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

Now, the securities and investment industry is pouring money into both Mr. Obama’s and Mrs. Clinton’s coffers. And these donors surely believe that they’re buying something in return. Let’s hope they’re wrong.

UPDATE: My old pal Tom Ferguson (working with a new collaborator, Robert Johnson–formerly of Soros Fund Management), extend the story here:

It is high time for someone to start raising questions about the public interest here. The caterwauling from Bears’ shareholders about price is overshadowing a critical point: Since the first deal was announced, J.P Morgan Chase’s stock has rallied smartly. With its enormous market capitalization, that translates into a gigantic increase in market value. If the deal unravels, the stock price might — indeed, almost certainly will — fall again, but that is precisely our point: markets considered the deal that the Fed and Morgan tried to cut a very good one for Morgan.
The question that needs to be asked is why none of that increase in value is ever to flow back to the public, whose money is critical to the deal. This would be easy to arrange and it does not risk reviving the Soviet Union’s Gosplan: the Fed or the federal government could simply have taken some stock in J.P. Morgan Chase. Or, as in the Chrysler bailout, there could have been warrants issued, guaranteeing the government the right to buy stock at a low price. At some point in the future, when J.P. Morgan Chase’s management and investors are again comfortable lecturing the rest of us about the magic of the marketplace and the urgent need to cut the size of government, the stock or the warrants could be sold off or redeemed, to pay for the rescue.

My pal Nancy Watzman forwarded this clip from the Daily News on the travels and trysts of our ex-Governor Eliot Spitzer:

“When disgraced Gov. Spitzer arranged hookups with high-priced prostitutes at out-of-state hotels, he would always have another reason to make the trip. Sometimes it was a campaign fund-raiser.

One city where investigators say Spitzer enjoyed a rendezvous with a hooker was Dallas, law enforcement sources said Wednesday. The source would not say exactly when, but a review of Spitzer’s campaign finance records reveal he held a fund-raiser at Dallas’ elegant Hotel Crescent Court last October.

About 60 people attended, according to Jess Hay, the retired CEO of Lomas Financial Corp., who contributed $1,000 to Spitzer. Hay was surprised to learn about Spitzer’s alleged trysts in Dallas.

Gee, and I always thought that the politician was already prostituting himself. As Mark Green pointed out some time ago in a Nation article called “The Evil of Access,”

Senator Zell Miller bluntly described the daily conversations from fundraising cubicles: “I’d remind the agribusinessman I was on the Agriculture Committee; I’d remind the banker I was on the Banking Committee…. Most large contributors understand only two things: what you can do for them and what you can do to them. I always left that room feeling like a cheap prostitute who’d had a busy day.”

By the way, if you think the analogy is unfair to prostitutes, who are generally forced by dire circumstances to enter that profession, consider this. Politicians rely on private, self-interested, large donors to finance their campaigns because they don’t have any other choice. Either you’re rich or you prostrate yourself before a lot of rich people and interest groups. We have good people caught in a bad system.

Though I’m not suggesting that Spitzer started frequenting prostitutes because he thought he would be in good company. I do think that there may be a connection between his getting away with other questionable moves in his public career, and thinking that he could somehow get away with this…

My friend Marc Cooper puts his finger on exactly what has been bothering me ever since top Obama adviser Samantha Power was forced to step down after she referred to Hillary Clinton as a “monster.” He writes:

In the pungently hypocritical game of American politics, this is just something outside the rules. Whether it’s true, or not, matters little. Nor does it matter that the object of Power’s derision has just finished spending millions on TV ads implying that Obama would be responsible for the countless deaths of millions of American children sleeping at 3 a.m. Tut, tut. Nothing monstrous about that.

Power was rightfully awarded the Pulitzer for her finely written and downright horrifying book “A Problem From Hell” which, in macabre detail, describes the calculated indifference of the Clinton administration when 800,000 Rwandans were being systematically butchered. The red phone rang and rang and rang again. I don’t know where Hillary was then. But her husband and his entire experienced foreign policy team – from the brass in the Pentagon to the congenitally feckless Secretary of State Warren Christopher – just let it ring.

Read the whole thing.