Today, while clean­ing house, I came across a cache of older mag­a­zines ripe for recy­cling and spot­ted this head­line on a copy of the May 2006 Harper’s: “The New Road to Serf­dom: An Illus­trated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Col­lapse, by Michael Hudson.” Curi­ous, I looked inside, and sure enough found this item of star­tling prescience:

With the real estate boom, the great mass of Amer­i­cans can take on colos­sal debt today and real­ize colos­sal cap­i­tal gains–and the con­comi­tant ren­tier life of leisure–tomor­row. If you have the where­withal to fill out a mort­gage appli­ca­tion, then you need never work again. What could be more invit­ing–or, for that matter, more egalitarian?

That’s the pitch, anyway. The real­ity is that, although home own­er­ship may be wise choice for many people, this par­tic­u­lar real estate bubble has been care­fully engi­neered to lure home buyers into cir­cum­stances detri­men­tal to their own best inter­ests. The bait is easy money. The trap is a modern equiv­a­lent to peon­age, a life­time spent work­ing to pay off debt on an asset of rapidly dwin­dling value.

Most every­one involved in the real estate bubble thus far has made at least a few dol­lars. But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a land­lord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servi­tude of debt serfdom.

It doesn’t sur­prise me that this arti­cle left no mental trace if and when I came across it two years ago. Its sub­ject and style are so com­pletely of a piece with the the kind of eco­nomic arti­cles that one expects from Harper’s that I prob­a­bly gave it no more heed than I’ve given sim­i­lar exam­ples from this month’s issue (Wen­dell Berry’s “Faustian Eco­nom­ics: Hell hath no limits” and Kevin Phillips’s “Numbers Racket: Why the econ­omy is worse than we know”). In fact, if I’ve got one real crit­i­cism of the Harper’s edi­to­r­ial approach to policy sub­jects, it’s this: their authors cry wolf so often that it’s nigh impos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the sig­nals from the noise.

And yet you’ve got to hand it to Hudson: writ­ing two years ago–one full year before anyone had really begun to wonder about the state of the real estate market–he got things exactly right. Check out his web­site for some of his more recent work.

Scott Horton has a post on the state of the tor­ture debate at his Harper’s blog. Horton argues that we now have actual evi­dence that the CIA was able to invoke the per­sonal author­ity of George W. Bush to sanc­tion its use of torture:

This week, a CIA agent, John Kiri­akou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an inter­view with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to tor­ture some­one (and it is tor­ture he said, no one involved with these tech­niques would ever think any­thing dif­fer­ent), we have to write it up. The team leader of the tor­ture team pro­poses what tor­ture tech­niques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Oper­a­tions at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hier­ar­chy of the Com­pany. Then the pro­posal is passed to the Jus­tice Depart­ment to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Secu­rity Coun­cil in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose per­sonal author­ity is invoked for each and every instance of tor­ture autho­rized. And, accord­ing to Kiri­akou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find tor­ture was appropriate.

Horton goes on to spec­u­late about how Attor­ney Gen­eral Michael Mukasey fits in to the picture:

As I noted pre­vi­ously, there is a strong basis to fear that Mukasey came up through a litmus test under which he was required to do two things: (1) to give his com­mit­ment to con­tinue to pro­vide cover for the tor­ture system, and (2) to block any effort to have a mean­ing­ful crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion that would dis­close the tor­ture system or any of its details. As things now stand, it looks like Mukasey is deliv­er­ing on these test points.

Here are some excerpts from the tran­script of the Kiri­akou interview:

[Read more]

This week’s New York Times Book Review fea­tures a number of books that have appeared here­abouts in the last couple of months:

+ Guy Martin reviews Patrick Symmes’s The Boys from Dolores, call­ing it “a mas­terly account of Cuba’s pathology” and “a rich, per­sonal, metic­u­lous, deeply lay­ered work of nar­ra­tive journalism.” Follow the linked title for more reviews.

+ Ben­jamin M. Fried­man reviews Gre­gory Clark’s A Farewell to Arms. Fried­man seems attracted to Clark’s genetic hypoth­e­sis even though he can’t find much evi­dence for it:

One frus­trat­ing aspect of Clark’s argu­ment is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mech­a­nism by which the sur­vival of the rich­est fos­tered new human attrib­utes and insists on the Dar­win­ian nature of this process, he repeat­edly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actu­ally genetic…. Nor does he intro­duce any evi­dence, of the kind that nor­mally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capac­ity for hard work are her­i­ta­ble in the sense in which biol­o­gists use the term.

Click here for my pre­lim­i­nary take on Clark’s argu­ment, which Ken Sil­ver­stein men­tioned favor­ably on his Harper’s blog.

+ David Orr reviews Michael O’Brien’s Sleep­ing and Waking, which he describes as “a qui­etly star­tling col­lec­tion that ought to earn O’Brien not only poetry-​world atten­tion, but actual readers.”
[Read more]

1/ From the cover of the Novem­ber 2007 Harper’s. Photo by David Graham:

2/ From “The Mission,” in the Octo­ber 29, 2007 New Yorker. Illus­tra­tion by Steve Brodner: