December 30,1996

VOLUME
263,NUMBER
22

Let Them Eat Numbers

Katha Pollitt
9 MEDIA MATTERS
High Corporate Baroque
Thomas Frank

EDITORIALS

24 SUCKERINGTHE POOR
Robert L. Borosage
6 INFACT...
COLUMNS
24 IDEAS FOR INAUGURATION
Calvin Trillin
7 MINORITY REPORT
The Green Line Fallacy
ChristopherHitchens

25 GUSTERSON. Nuclear Rites:

28

ARTICLES
ii BARBIES BETMYAL
32
In search of low wages, the toy industry
leaves a host of broken workers.
Eyal Press
34
16 DOWN & OUT: A NUCLEAR PATH

A Weapons Laboratory at the

End of the Cold War
Toin Engelhardt
PIROZHKOVA At His Side:
The Last Years of Isaac Babel
Lynn Phillips
MUSIC: Brilliant Corners
Gene Santoro
FILMS
Jerry Maguire Ridicule
Stuart Klawans
HANS CHRISTIAN OSTRO (poem)
Agha ShahidAli
9.

J.F.K. once determined a route to global

build-down-its time Clinton took it up. 36
Gar Alperovitz,Alex Canpbell and
Thad liYilliamson
Cover: photo and design 0 by Hans
Haacke, computer montage by Peter
20 PROFITING OFF THE
Girardi; illustrations by Steve Brodner,
FAT OF THE LAND
VincentX: Kirsch
Was a new diet pill passed by the
F.D.A. on some very slim science?
WayneBiddle

Helmswoman at State

BOOKS & THE ARTS

8 SUBJECT TO DEBATE

2 LETTERS

3 HELMSWOMAN AT STATE
4 TRANSITION OR TRAGEDY?
Stephen B Cohen
-5 PLUTONIUM REACTION
Harvey Wassermaii

The Nation since 1865.

t has come to this: A Democratic President announces his new

national security team and the first politician to chime in with
bloated satisfactionis Jesse Helms. I believe it is a certainty,
Helms.said,that all four of the nominees announcedtoday by
the President will be viewed favorably by most senators.
Was the election even necessary?
With his nomination of Madeleine Albright as Secretary of
State, William Cohen as Secretaryof Defense, Tony Lake to head
the C.I.A. and Samuel Berger to head the N.S.C., Bill Clinton
has again proved that he is a first-class politician and a third-rate
President. Each of these choicesplays powerfidly with key domestic constituencies.Albright, in particular, is a veritable political
pinball machine gone tilt. In addition to Helmss praise for her
as a tough and courageous lady-as if Helms would know one
ifhe saw one-her promotion was celebrated.bywomens groups,
Cuban-Americangroups, hawkishAmerican Jewish groups, antiRussian East Europeans and Baltic-Americans, and jealous protectors of Al Gores future. Cohens name was no doubt greeted
with relief at the Pentagon, lest Clinton appoint a Republican like
John McCain, who would have demanded serious reform. Lake
will calm troubled waters at the C.I.A. and provide a direct
pipeline to the President, rather than clean house and rethink the
agencys purpose in the post-cold war world. Berger will continue
at the N.S.C. much as Lake has, quietly and with the purpose of
directing foreign policy coordination with domestic politics
foremost in mind. This team gives frightening confirmation of

Tip ONeills famous aphorism that all politics is local.

Of all these choices, Albright is by far the most troubling. Although she was not finally responsible for most of the U.N. decisionsreached during Clintons first term, she can be fairlyblamed
for the often amateurishand contemptuousmanner in which they
were implemented. Clinton spent the first part of his term backpedaling from the positions that Albright had crafted for hira
during the 1992 campaign. The tough talk regarding Beijings
butchers was quickly replaced by quisling compliments. Implied
promises of military intervention in Bosnia were dropped and
picked up so many times that even Clinton seemed not to know
which side he was on. Assertive multilateralism was thrown in
the trash before it was defined, leaving the United States with a
policy of mere assertion. In each of these fiascos, Albright played
a central role in raising false expectations and thereby diminishing U.S. stature and influence. Much like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who twenty years ago used his office at the U.N. to runhis
campaign for the Senate,Albright has campaigned tirelessly for
her new role from her seat in the General Assembly by insulting
member nations unlikely to be popular with the American people.
Her ham-handed manipulation of Boutros Boutros-Ghalisforced
departure, announcedwith virtually no internationalconsultation,
infuriated even those who agreed with it. Utimately, Albrights
tenure, an African diplomat observed, did serve the purpose of
uniting the world-I84 nations against the United States.
None of this bodes well for the future of U.S. foreign policy.
The most challengingissues for the United States in the next four
years relate to economic integration, ethnic and regional conflict
and national disintegration.But Albright, an academic acolyte of

The Nation.

December 30,1996

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Zbigniew Brzezinski, is intellectually ill-suited to imagine the

architecture of foreign policy in a world without superpowers
wearing white or black hats. Like her mentor, she demonstrates
little understanding of geo-economic issues and reverts almost
reflexivelyto cold war rhetoric even absent a credible enemy, On
the delicate issue of Russians acceptance of NATOs expansion,
she tends to reinforce their fears of hostile encirclement. In the
Middle East, where the peace process is unraveling in large part
because of Israels unwillingness to stick to the deal that Yitzhak
Rabin and Yasir Arafat signed on the White House lawn, she has
sounded more uncompromisingthan the U.J.A. On Cuba, she has
exploited rising tensions to cement her relations with the most
regressive elements of the Cuban-Americancommunity, thereby
tightening their stranglehold on U.S. Cuba policy.
A gender (or racial) breakthrough at the top of any p o w e f i
institution is a welcome sight. But there is something distressing
at the sight of the head of EMILYS List exclaiming, I am so
happy, Im like a Cheshire cat. Its fabulous, at the appointment
of anew Secretary of State. Does EMILYSList care about French
reintegration to the NATO command structure, which will undoubtedly be complicated by Albrights deliberate humiliation of
the Quai dOrsay in her recent tour of French West Africa? Does
it ponder the state of U.S.-Egyptian relations followingAlbrights
humiliation of Boutros-Ghali and her expected coddling of Benjamin Netanyahu? The State Department is the last place whose
chief should be subject to engineeringby interest groups.
The big loser in the Cabinet sweepstakes was Director of
Central Intelligence John Deutch, who made the mistake of expecting the Presidents gratitude when he saved the C.I.A. from
the clutches of R. James Woolsey and the legacy ofAldrichAmes.
Deutch didnt want the job-he took it on the understandingthat
he would replace Perry at the Pentagon. He apparently had never
heard how Clinton treated Lani Guinier, Peter Edelman or Harold
Ickes. But he had heard of Richard Nuccio, the State Department
official who lost his security clearance because he refused to
participate in the C.I.A.s attempt to lie to Congress about a suspected murderer on its payroll in Guatemala. Deutch upheld the
recommendationthat Nuccios clearance be revoked and his career effectively ended for his act of democratic accountability.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Transition or Tragedy?
terrible national tragedy has been unfolding in Russia in the
199Os, but we will hear little if anythtng about it in American
commentary on this fifth anniversary of the end of the Soviet
Union. Instead, we will be told that Russias transition to a
free-market economy and democracy has progressedremarkably, despite some bumps in the road. Evidence alleged to
support that view will include massive privatization, emerging
financial markets, low inflation, stabilization, an impending
economic take~ff,)~
last summers presidential election, a sitting
Parliament and a free press.
Few if any commentators will explain that Russias new private sector is dominated by former but still intact Soviet mo-

December 30,1996

The Nation.

mmqm4

nopolies seized by ex-Communist officials who have become

the core of a semi-criminalized business class; that inflation is
being held down by holding back salaries owed to tens of millions of needy workers and other employees; that a boom has
been promised for years while the economy continues to plunge
into a depression greater than Americas in the 1930s; that President Yeltsins re-election campaign was one of the most corrupt
in recent European history; that the Parliamenthas no real powers
and the appellate court little independence from the presidency;
and that neither Russias market nor its national television is
truly competitive or free but is substantially controlled by the
same financial oligarchy whose representatives now sit in the
Kremlin as chieftains of the Yeltsin regime.
In human terms, however, that is not the worst of it. For the
great majority of families, Russia has not been in transition
but in an endless collapse of everything essential to a decent existence-from real wages, welfare provisions and health care to
birth rates and life expectancy; from industrial and agricultural
production to higher education, science and traditional culture;
from safety in the streets to prosecution of organized crime and
thieving bureaucrats; from the still enormous military forces to
the safeguarding of nuclear devices and materials. These are the
realities underlying the reforms that most U.S. commentators
still extol and seem to think are the only desirable kind.
Fragments of Russias unprecedented,cruel and perilous collapse are reported in the U.S. mainstream media, but not the full
dimensions of insider privatization, impoverishment, disintegration of the middle classes, corrosive consequencesof the Chechen
war or official corruption and mendacity. Why not? Why dont
American commentators lament the plight of the Russian people as they did so persistently when they were the Soviet people?
The United States has thousands of professed specialists on
Russia. Why have so few tried to tell the full story of post-Soviet
Russia? Indeed, why, despite incomparably greater access to information, do most reporters, pundits and scholars tell us less
that is really essential about Russia today than they did when it
was part of the Soviet Union?
There are, it seems, several reasons, all of them related to
the American condition rather than to Russias. As during the
cold war, most U.S. media and academic commentators think(or
speak) within the parameters of Washingtons policies toward
Russia. Since 1991, Russias purportedly successful transition,
and the U.S. strategic role in it, have been the basic premise of
White House and Congressional policy.
American business people, big foundations and academics
involved with Russia also have their own stake in the transition. For the business community, it is the prospect of profits;
for foundations, another frontier of endowed social engineering;
for academia, a new paradigm (transitionology) for securing
funds, jobs and tenure. Confronted with the fact that the results
of Russias transition continue to worsen and not improve, most
of its U.S. promoters still blame the legacy of Communism
rather than their own prescriptions, or insist that robber baron
capitalism will surely reform itself there as it did here, even
though the circumstances are fundamentally different.
More generally, Americans have always seen in Russia, for

I
I

5
-

ideologicaland psychologicalreasons, primarily what they sought

there. This time it is a happy outcome of the end of Soviet Communism and of our great victory in the cold war. How many
of us who doubt that outcome, who think the world may be less
safe because of what has happened in the former Soviet Union,
who believe that ordinary Russians (even those denigrated elderly Communist voters) have been made to suffer unduly and
unjustly, who understand that there were less costly and more
humane ways to reform Russia thanyeltsins shock measureshow many of us wish to say such things publicly knowing we
will be accused of nostalgia for the Soviet Union or even of proCommunism? Crude McCarthyism has passed, but not the maligning of anyone who challengesmainstream orthodoxies about
Soviet or post-Soviet Russia. And the presumed transition to a
free-market economy and democracy is todays orthodoxy.
But does it even matter what Americans say about Russia
today? Those ofus who oppose the Clinton Administrations missionary complicity in the transition, and its insistencethat Russia stay the course,may wish the United States would say and
intervene less. In one respect, however, U.S. commentary matters
greatly. Eventually, todays Russian children will ask what America felt and said during these tragic times for their parents and
grandparents, and they will shape their relations with our own
children and grandchildrenaccordingly.
STEPHEN
F. COHEN
Stephen R Cohen isprofessor ofpolitics and Russian studies at Princeton Universiv.

Plutonium Reaction

utgoing Energy Department chief Hazel OLeary is being

heavily lobbied over the burning of plutonium in commercial
nuclear power reactors. She is said to be leaning toward permitting the use of plutonium-laced Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOx),
pushed by military and utility promoters as a nifty way to
keep reactors burning while also making plutonium from retired
warheads harder to use in other kinds of bombs. The Energy Department has 50 tons of plutonium it wants to dispose of, thus
setting up a crucial battle over whether the Clinton Administration will turnU.S. civilian reactors to military purposes. (Alternatives would include encasing the plutonium in glass or shipping
it to Ontario for use in Canadian reactors.)
The dual-purposetechnologythis entails is far more expensive
than conventional methods of disposal and fuel production. It is
also relatively untested, and would militarize civilian reactors by
having them produce tritium for warheads. This is the unholy
marriage of bomb-making and civilian power production the industry always deniev says Paul Gunter of the Washington-based
Nuclear Information and Resource Service (N.I.R.S.). The security and civil liberties implications are devastating.
Ironically, this policy would shore up the nuclear power industry at a time when green victories both here and in Russia,
our nuclear sibling, suggest its significantly dimmed future. In
a stunning rout, Russian voters on December 9 overwhelmingly
rejected an atomic reactor proposed for the Kostroma region,

December 30.1996

The Nation.
f

400 kilometers northeast of Moscow. It was the first binding

public vote on a proposed nuclear project in the former Soviet
Union (no binding votes have been allowed on proposed reactor
projects in the United States, though Sacramentos Rancho Seco
was forced off-line by a 1989 referendum). An amazing 87 percent of Kbstromas voters were against the project. YXS clearly
shows that when people are given a choice, they dont want to live
with nuclear power, said Eduard Gismatullin of Greenpeace/
Russia. The people of Kostroma dont want the threat of a
Chernobyl-accident on their doorstep, and they dont want to
live with radioactive contamination in their rivers and lakes.
Russias tattered federalbudget allocatesbig rubles for new reactors elsewhere,but Gismatullin hopes this could be the beginning of the end of nuclear power inRussia, as it sets a precedent
for local communities to block such projects by referendum.
In the United States five days earlier, on December 4, a referendum by the board of directors of Northeast Utilities made
ConnecticutYankeethe first U.S.,reactorto shut under Bill Clinton (six were shut under George Bush), taking the U.S. total of
nuclear plants down to 109.
Northeast Utilities, supplies much of western Connecticut

and Massachusetts with electricity, and took over the New

Hampshire grid when it bought the utility that went bankrupt
building the embattled Seabrook reactor. Now Northeast itself
is under siege, with its three Millstone reactors also on the brink
of permanent shutdown. Yankees safety-related scandals fed a
growing consensus that, in a deregulated age, it was simply too
expensive to run.Yankee had one of the industrys best operating records, says Michael Mariotte of N.I.R.S. Its shutdown is
a clear sign that atomic technologyjust cant compete. Its unclear whether Yankees demise will open the floodgates on a
long-anticipatedwave of reactor shutdownsin the face of deregulation and increased utility competition.
December 4 also saw a surprise green triumph against a huge
uranium enrichmentfacility proposed for Homer, Louisiana. For
the better part of a decade the largely nonwhite rural community
fought a multibillion-dollarplant with no apparentmarket to feed
except the patronage needs of retiring Senator Bennett Johnston, longtime chairman of the Senate Energy Committee. But
the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stunned supporters and opponents alike by
(Continued on Page 24)

In Fact. .
e

XIHI KILLERS

On December 10-U.N. Human Rights

Day-President Nelson Mandela proclaimed
South Africas new Constitution.Among
other things, the document makes South
Africa one of some 100 countries to abolish
the death penalty. So it is ironic that,a 17-yearold black South African youth, Azikiwe Kambule, sits in a Mississippijail charged by an
ambitious prosecutor with a crime (accomplice to a murder) for which he could be executed. Nowhere is the United States more out
of sync on human rights with the rest of the
world than in sentencingjuveniles to death.
The U.N. Covenant on Rights of the Child,
which the United States signed, forbids execution of people for crimes committed when
under 18. In this decade only five countries
have administered the ultimate penalty to
such persons: Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi
Arabia.. .and the United States. The United
States has executed nine people for,underage
offenses, more than the other four combined
@formation: National Coalition Against the
Death Penalty, 202-347-241 1).

WORKFARE SANTAS, ETC.

John Hess was intrigued to learn that the

Giuliani administration is putting welfare recipients to work in front of New York department stores as SalvationArmy Santas.
Comments Hess: Mayor Giuliani has been
keeping thousands of cops busy clearing the
city of street vendors, the homeless and, particularly, beggars-and now hes forcing

workfare people to learn the mendicant

trade! Perhaps the Mayors welfare enforcers will start issuing St. Nick rigs to the
families that are out on the street as a result
of its hard-line shelter policies. City Limits, a
New York urban affairs magazine, reports that
up to 10 percent of the beds in nonprofit
homeless shelters go empty while the city
continues to jam people into for-profit hotels.
Meanwhile, under a new Giuliani policy,
people who had been doubling up with friends
or relatives were (until a judge stepped in)
being arbitrarily ruled ineligible for shelter.
Medical anthropologist Anna Lou Dehavenon,
who did a study on 122 families at one Emergency Assistance Unit, said most were denied
shelter repeatedly after being told to get this
or that document. In its new report, Mean
Sweeps, the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty finds that criminalization
of homelessness is on the upswing in many
cities in the past two years and that in virtually every city the number of homeless people
greatly exceeds the number of emergency
shelter and transitional housing spaces.
Cities with the meanest streets: Atlanta,
San Francisco, New York, Dallas, San Diego
(information: 202-638-2535).

IBARBIE GIBES

Elsewhere in this issue, Eyal Press gives the

rap on Sweatshop Barbie. Nation intem Beth
Johnson flags a new Barbie computer game,
touted as teaching girls to be more computerfriendly, but for all the high-tech hype, it

stereotypes-channeling girls into feminine

activities. Called Barbie Fashion Designer, it
shows the accesswized homunculus mincing
up a virtual runway. Girls are supposed to
choose her outfits-from trendy sportswear
to career clothes to wedding gowns-and
print out the results on special paper. Barbies
manufacturer, Mattel, is invading the relatively
untapped market for female computer games,
e.g., Her Interactives McKenzie & Co., the
goal of which is to reach the senior prom.
As an antidote, Girl Tech-founded by the
producer of Where in the World Is Camen
Sandiego?-has a book and CD-ROM, Tech
Girl k Internet Adventures, featuring Web
page design and a guide to the best sites for
girls. It will be published by IDG Books
Worldwide in January.

NEWS OF THE WEAK IN REVIEW

Sore-as-hell loser Bob Dornan recently circulated a letter to former G.O.P. colleagues
bemoaning the get-out-the-Hispanic-vote
activities of Neighbor to Neighbor. Tarring
the group as pro-Sandinista (it opposed
contra funding in the 1980s), Dornan quoted
a news story saying it had selected people
with Hispanic names in a,districtwhere
less than 20 percent of the voters had cast
ballots and doubled that turnout. This, my
friends, is exploitation at its worst, Doman
whined. Shelley Moskowitz, Neighbor to
Neighbors legislative director; confirmed
that the group was out to get Dornan and
said his attack is high praise of our work.

24

The Nation.

Plutonium Reaction
(Continued From Page 6 )

opposing the project, largely on economic grounds. (The decision can be appealed, but opponents are optimistic.) This is the
first time any of us can remember the N.R.C. killing something
like this, says Mariotte. Hopefully it will be a sign of better
things to come.
Such signs will be badly needed from the Energy Department
ifthe MOx fuel plan is to be averted. Nuclear opponents are heavily lobbying the D.O.E. and the highest levels of the ClintonAdministration, which are expected to render a final decisionwithin
a month or two. If a civilianreactor is chosento burn MOx, fierce
local resistance is expected. But as they used to say during the
cold war, the United States is not Russia-which now means that
a binding referendumwill probably not be allowedhere, as it was
in &stroma.
HARVEY WASSERMAN
Harvey Wasseriiianis senior adviser to Greenpeace/ USA.

Suckering the Poor

t was Washingtons version of good works: a press conference

criticizing Congress and the Administration for balancing the
budget on the backs of the poorest Americans. An authoritative
report released recently by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that government programs targeted at poor and
low-incomepeople (means-testedprograms) consume about onequarter of all nondefense spending but have absorbed more than
half of all the cuts in federal spending over the past two years.
For clout, the centers director, Robert Greenstein, the closest
thing to a saint inside the Beltway, rounded up spokespersons
from Catholic Charities, from Pete Petersons Concord Coalition
and from the Committee for Economic Development (C.E.D.), a
grouping of high-poweredbusiness executives.David Broder, the
dean of Washington columnists, featured the story in a column
aimed at the President as he prepares next years budget.
Broder used Van Doorn Ooms, senior vice president of the
C.E.D., to make the essential points, While our political leaders have reached a consensus to balhce the federal budget, they
have been unwilling or unable to contain the growth of the popular, middle-class entitlement programs, such as Social Security
and Medicare. As a result of this and wrongheaded tax-cut proposals, Ooms concluded, the burden of budget austerity has
fallen disproportionately on.. .the poor.
Ooms spoke truth with a forked tongue. Spending on Social
Security and Medicare has continued to rise, and the poor have
taken it in the teeth-but notice what is absent when Ooms (or the
Concord Coalition) discusses charitable concerns: the wealthy;
also the fact that the C.E.0.s Ooms represents, and the rest of
Americas richest, are making out like bandits.
Inequality in America, as we know, is at record levels. The income gap between executives and working people is reinforced by
a benefits gap in which executives lavish benefits on upper man-

December 30,1996

agement while cutting them for workers. Wealth has reached levels of concentration never witnessed in a Western democracy.
According to the Federal Reserve, 1 percent of U.S. households
controlled 38 percent of the nations assets as of 1992. Then the
stock market doubling of 1991-96 made the already wealthy seriously rich. And not only do our affluentpay the lowest taxes in the
industrialized world but both the Republican Congress and the
Clinton Administration are talking about capital gains tax cuts to
further line their Armani pockets.
Having slashed support for poor mothers and children and
the disabled and cut food stamps for the working poor and legal
immigrants in what is called welfare reform, conservatives
are now setting their sights on Social Security and Medicare, the
entitlements that provide working people with a measure of security in the dusk of life. What better strategy than to pit the
avarice of the middle class against the suffering of the poor?
Advocates for the poor cannot be faulted for trying to enlist
powerful corporate elites in the defense of the weak. But this is
a fools game. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has
documented, Social Security is the most effective antipoverty
program in the country-sustaining some 13 million seniors,
over 80 percent of the elderly, who would otherwise live out
their lives in poverty. Cutting middle-class entitlements wont
add money to programs for the poor. If the p0werfi.d are not confronted, any savings will be consumed by corporate subsidies or
Pentagon passions.
A simple standardfor anyoneprating about the sacrifice needed to balance the budget: Begin by calling for fair taxes on the
,rich and corporations, for cuts in corporate welfare and in cold
wm-level military budgets. Anyone who doesnt start there is less
interested in balancing the budget than in succoring the powerful.
And the only certain result of that work will be to add to the already dangerous levels of inequalitythat sap this democracy.
L. BOROSAGE
ROBERT
Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the CampaignforAmerica h Future.