Been reading a great book...

...that examines the relationship between 3 big personal interests - politics, economics, and t-shirts. The book is a 2004 number by business professor Pietra Rivoli called The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy, and it's been quite an eye-opener for the free market fan in me. Rivoli chronicles the evolution of the global textile industry from the 1700s to today, arguing that the market for t-shirts and other clothing is remarkable because it is astonishingly unfree.

"The textile and apparel trade," she writes, "is the most managed and protected manufacturing trade in U.S. history, or as one writer noted, 'the most spectacular and comprehensive protectionist regime in existence'... Trade flows in T-shirts are the result of economic forces but also the result of thousands of deals cut in Washington, Geneva, and Beijing, and politics are at least as important as markets in understanding the T-shirt's journey."

Rivoli backs this thesis with convincing facts and anecdotes, and her book helps its readers begin to appreciate the complexity of the answer to the question a few Wavelength Clothing customers have asked: "Why aren't all of your t-shirts made in the USA?" I heartily recommend The Travels of a T-shirt to anyone interested in the realities of global trade, and I'll be sharing some choice excerpts in the weeks ahead.

Some WMD hunters haven't given up...

...says this funny-if-it-wasn't-sad story from The New York Times.

For Diehards, Search for Iraq's W.M.D. Isn't Over

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, June 22 — The United States government abandoned the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq long ago. But Dave Gaubatz has never given up. Mr. Gaubatz, an earnest, Arabic-speaking investigator who spent the first months of the war as an Air Force civilian in southern Iraq, has said he has identified four sites where residents said chemical weapons were buried in concrete bunkers.

The sites were never searched, he said, and he is not going to let anyone forget it. "I just don't want the weapons to fall into the wrong hands," Mr. Gaubatz, of Denton, Tex., said…

Some politicians are outspoken allies in Mr. Gaubatz's cause…More than a year after the White House, at considerable political cost, accepted the intelligence agencies' verdict that Mr. Hussein destroyed his stockpiles in the 1990's, these Americans have an unshakable faith that the weapons continue to exist…

The weapons hunters hold fast to the administration's original justification for the war, as expressed by the president three days before the bombing began in 2003. There was "no doubt," Mr. Bush said in an address to the nation, "that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

More on Iran's president...

...who is shaping up to be quite an interesting politician.
From The Wall Street Journal:

Behind Rise of Iran's President: A Populist Economic Agenda
By Bill Spindle, WSJ.com (full article here)

TEHRAN -- Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has grabbed the world's attention with his bombast over Tehran's nuclear program and saber rattling against Israel. At home, however, the president's popularity is soaring thanks to another reason: his enthusiastic embrace of economic populism.

In recent weeks, he has proposed a $4 billion national school-renovation program and has raiaised not only salaries for workers in Iran's vast, government-controlled industrial sector but also the minimum wage for everyone else. He doubled government grants for newlyweds and forced banks to lower interest rates by several percentage points.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is emerging as an Iranian version of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez: a pugnacious politician, buoyed by oil money, whose anti-elite message and defiance of the West is causing his popularity to soar. Mr. Ahmadinejad isn't nearly as powerful as Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But his policies, which interrupt Iran's tentative stabs at economic liberalization, have helped him wield more influence than many thought possible for an Iranian president...

Mr. Ahmadinejad positioned himself as the candidate of the people against a rich and corrupt elite. One campaign ad featured a tour of the opulent mansion belonging to the previous mayor of Tehran, followed by a view of Mr. Ahmadinejad's modest home in a middle-class suburb. Asked whether they have a pool, Mr. Ahmadinejad's son simply points to a backyard too small for one. "See for yourself," he says. "Where's the sauna?" the interviewer asks. The son just shrugs.

Few things appealed more to Iranian voters, especially the working poor, than Mr. Ahmadinejad's promise to "put the oil revenue on the dinner table of every Iranian." Since being elected, he's made frequent trips to Iranian provinces -- political barnstorming previously unheard of in Iran's aloof theocracy. He encourages supporters to write with their requests and has promised funds for thousands of local projects…

His message is giving the Iranian government a boost of desperately needed popularity during a critical period of international tensions, in particular over the country's commitment to developing its nuclear capabilities. In a recent speech to the nation, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, compared Mr. Ahmadinejad's popularity to President Bush's low poll numbers.

I experimented with an ad...

...on a popular, left-leaning blog a few weeks back. For $80, my ad - which consisted of a rotating depiction of a few Wavelength shirts, and some accompanying text - ran for 1 week.

According to the ad provider, Blogads.com, about 98,000 people viewed the page the ad was on over the course of the week, and of these, 174 clicked through to the Wavelength site. This represents a click-through rate of 0.177%, which sounds tiny but is actually respectable in the world of online advertising (a click-through rate of a full 1% would be considered superb).

Did the ad boost sales? Well, with another Wavelength ad running concurrently on AfterDowningStreet.org, it's hard to precisely quantify the number of shirts this new ad helped move. But my rough estimate is that the $80 I spent on the ad ended up pushing about 5 extra shirts out the door. Not quite profitable, but an interesting experiment nonetheless.

On the eve of Busby v. Bilbray...

...news of progressive, impeachment-hungry rumblings within the Democratic Party. Seems a candidate's positions on Iraq and on impeachment are increasingly important to many Democrats. Hey, maybe that's why so many people want "Impeach Bush" and "Impeach Bush & Cheney" t-shirts!

More Democrats Want Their Leaders to Stand up Against Bush, War
By Steven Thomma, Knight Ridder Newspapers

Manchester, NH - Anti-war and anti-Bush fervor is growing among rank and file Democrats, threatening to pull the party to the left and creating a rift between increasingly belligerent activists and the party's leaders in Washington.

Many outside-the-Beltway Democrats want the party to turn forcefully against the war in Iraq and to investigate, censure or even impeach President Bush should the party win control of Congress this fall.

Yet party leaders such as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York have maintained support for the war while criticizing the way Bush handled it, and have shied away from talk of using power to go to after him...

In New Hampshire, the state that will kick off the party's 2008 presidential primary voting, activists gave thunderous ovations this weekend to Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., when he pressed his anti-war agenda, boasted that he alone among potential 2008 presidential candidates opposed the war from the start, and pushed for a censure of Bush. (full article here)

And here's a lesson in activism from Chile...

...a lesson taught by the students, as it were.

Chilean Promised a New Deal; Now Striking Youth Demand It
By Larry Rohter, The New York Times

Santiago, Chile - Less than three months after she took office promising to lead a government that welcomed greater citizen participation, President Michelle Bachelet is facing her first domestic crisis. To the surprise of many here, the challenge comes not from the right but from a group expected to be sympathetic to her center-left coalition: high school students.

In protests that began in mid-May, more than 700,000 teenagers have walked out of classes at public high schools, demanding the overhaul of an education system they say is inferior and discriminatory. They have occupied several hundred schools, sleeping there overnight with sympathetic parents bringing them meals, and last week thousands marched in the streets of the capital here and in other cities in this nation of 16 million...

In a speech to the nation on Thursday night, Ms. Bachelet, who is scheduled to visit the United States later this week, announced a $135-million-a-year package that includes a free lunch program for the poorest students, the repair or renovation of up to 1,200 public schools and the elimination of the $40 college exam fee. "The state will be the guarantor of a quality education for all Chileans," she promised, adding that the nation's youth deserved "to be able to study in dignified conditions."

But on Friday, the main student leaders rejected the proposal, saying it was not generous enough. They said they would renew their protests on Monday, and teachers and university students and professors have pledged to join them. (full article here)

Awesome street art...

...recently spotted within a couple blocks of my apartment in Ocean Beach. Though I don't condone graffiti. There's enough room for tagging on legitimate surfaces - like on t-shirts, for instance! (click on photo to enlarge)

And here's another piece...

...this one appeared right as news of Bush's phonetapping programs hit the news - and on what looks like a phone company box, no less! (click on photo to enlarge)