Later On

Mark Kleiman thinks it might be a good idea. He even has a suggested replacement.

To a news reporter who doesn’t get it.

From a commenter at TPM:

The real problem behind the AIG public relations mess is not the tin ears of all the President’s men, or their tone deaf commentary, or their ham-handed approach to decision-making. The real problem is that the AIG situation implies that they, the President’s men, don’t think like shareholders. They don’t act as if their fiduciary duty is to the taxpayers whose money they spend. They don’t seem to put the interests of the public first and foremost and ahead of all the interests of private firms. Instead, they seem to think that their job is to have the non-taxpayer, private shareholders and management of various firms return to normalcy — meaning, doing commerce and making money. This goal is not to be derided, and it is important, but it does not correctly reflect the duties of the government officials who represent the taxpayers in owning or controlling many firms, including AIG. To see the right mirror of those duties, one needs only look to public company boards.

On public company boards, compensation committees do not include any members of management. The members of these committees determine, as a matter of law, the compensation of management in all respects. These committee members, composed exclusively of independent directors, owe their duties exclusively to the shareholders. Ben Bernanke publicly talked about the duty owed by the Fed to the institutions it is helping; when it comes to compensation decisions the duty is owed to shareholders, not to the abstract idea of a corporation.=2 0And when the taxpayers are the shareholders, the duty is owed to them.

The corporation, its management, its shareholders and the directors who represent them, are, of course, closely interrelated. Indeed, the goal of compensation decisions in public companies is to align the interests of top management and shareholders. When the executives do well, the shareholders should do well, and vice-versa. The pursuit of this alignment involves difficult decisions, including but not limited to balancing the notion of doing well in the short-term with doing well over the long-run. But this decision-making starts with a clear understanding of roles. Translating the compensation decisions of public company directors to the decision-making at AIG or any of the many many other companies owned in whole or in large part, directly or indirectly, by the taxpayers, through Treasury or the Fed, at least the following questions arise:

First, who represents the taxpayers …

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This is from a post at TPM:

… Use government muscle (either in dollars or guarantees) to buy the ‘toxic assets’ from the banks at prices pretty close to the high prices the banks want to believe they’re worth rather than the much lower prices that a lot of economists (and let’s remember, the market) say they’re worth. So, if that’s such a bad idea, why do we keep coming back to it.

I posed this question to Joe Stiglitz back in early February. And this is what he said:

You can see the rest of our Stiglitz interview here.

NY Times editorial:

As much as it needs to happen, we never expected President Obama to immediately reverse every one of President George W. Bush’s misguided and dangerous policies on terrorism, prisoners, the rule of law and government secrecy. Fixing this calamitous mess will take time and care — and Mr. Obama has taken important steps in that direction.

But we did not expect that Mr. Obama, who addressed these issues with such clarity during his campaign, would be sending such confused and mixed signals from the White House. Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas.

There are times when the president seems to be making a clean and definitive break. On his second day in office, he ordered the closing of the prison at Guantánamo Bay and directed his cabinet to formulate new policies on detaining and interrogating people suspected of terrorist acts or of supporting terrorists.

Last week, the administration notified a federal court hearing appeals by Guantánamo inmates that it was dropping Mr. Bush’s absurd claim that he could declare anyone an “enemy combatant” and deprive that prisoner of judicial process. The administration affirmed its commitment to the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions and long-standing military doctrine.

But the break does not always seem complete enough. Even as they dropped the “enemy combatant” terminology, Mr. Obama’s lawyers did not seem to rule out indefinite military detentions for terrorism suspects and their allies. They drew a definition of association with Al Qaeda that is too broad (simply staying in a “safe house,” for example). Worse, they seemed to adopt Mr. Bush’s position that the “battlefield” against terrorism is the planet. That became the legal pretext for turning criminal defendants into lifelong military captives.

On Thursday, we were delighted to see Attorney General Eric Holder reverse the Bush policy on releasing documents under the Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, directed the government to assume that documents should not be released and to find pretexts to keep them secret. Mr. Holder directed all agencies to presume that “in the face of doubt, openness prevails.” And he said the policy applied to pending lawsuits against the Bush administration for refusing to disclose information.

It was great news, but also recalled our distress that the Justice Department had abandoned transparency just last month in a case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The case involves five men who were seized and transported to American facilities abroad or countries known for torturing prisoners.

The Obama administration advanced the same expansive state-secrets argument pressed by Mr. Bush’s lawyers to get a trial court to dismiss the case without any evidence being presented. Even the judges seemed surprised, asking whether the government wanted a delay to reconsider its position.

The Obama team should have taken the delay. It should now support bipartisan legislation to fix this problem by expanding judges’ powers to examine evidence the government wants to keep secret and decide whether to admit it based on facts rather than claims of presidential power. It is hard to fathom what signal Mr. Obama is trying to send by stifling cases that must be heard…

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Ben Ehrenreich in the LA Times:

It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with "the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept." For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to "push the hand of God"; and Marxist Jews — my grandparents among them — tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel’s actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism…

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So far, the sentiment seems strongly in favor of continuing to run a single blog of things that catch my eye and/or reflect my interests. One benefit of the eclectic mix is that it serves as a filter on readership to keep readership at a reasonable level. Clay Shirky gave a good definition of “celebrity” in Here Comes Everybody: it’s when it becomes physically impossible to reply to communications that are directed to you. I wouldn’t like that at all, and right now it’s quite easy for me to reply to communications (comments and emails) that I get. I would really hate to get so many I couldn’t respond. Seriously. With the blog as it is, I shall never have to worry about celebrity.

I blogged earlier on this, and now Marion Nestle has a note as well:

The Rudd Center at Yale is devoted to establishing a firm research basis for obesity interventions.  Its latest contribution is a paper in the Milbank Quarterly from its director, Kelly Brownell, and co-author Kenneth Warner, an equally distinguished anti-smoking researcher from the University of Michigan.  Its provocative title: The perils of ignoring history: Big Tobacco played dirty and millions died.  How similar is Big Food?

The paper is getting much attention.  A spokesman for the American Dietetic Association, a group well known for its close ties to food companies, emphasizes that food is not tobacco.  Of course it’s not.  But food companies often behave like tobacco companies, and not always in the public interest.  The Milbank paper provides plenty of documentation to back up the similarity.  Worth a look, no?

From the same column (it’s extremely good):

Atrios has been writing a version of the same key observation virtually every day for weeks — that almost every plan to "solve" the financial crisis involves nothing more than transfers of enormous amounts of public money into the pockets of the same unchanged system and the same people who caused the collapse in the first place:

The issue is that [Geithner] and friends never distinguished between bailing out the system and bailing out the players. There was a way to do that, and they didn’t do it.

In condemning Geithner’s "bank rescue" plan, Paul Krugman notes that — yet again — it enables great benefits for the richest investors, with the public protecting them from the risk of losses (privatize gains; socialize losses), and concludes: "The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system."   When it comes to its primary challenge, the administration elected on a platform of "change" is, above all else, viciously devoted to preservation of the status quo.  Read John Cole’s summary of expert reaction to Geithner’s banking plan.

From that same Glenn Greenwald column:

Matt Taibbi’s new Rolling Stone article perfectly summarizes what the AIG scandal reveals about our political and economic system, and should be read in full.  In sum:  financial elites own the Government and both political parties.  Their money drowns Washington and their lobbyists control it.   They used that ownership of Government to abolish decades-old legal and regulatory protections which previously constrained what they could do.  In the lawless environment which they literally purchased from our political leaders, they were able to pillage and pilfer and steal without limit.  And even now that everything has come crashing down, they continue to dictate what the Government’s response is, to ensure that they — the prime authors of the disaster — are the prime beneficiaries, at the public’s expense, of the "solutions," solutions which preserve their ill-gotten gains and heighten even further their power and influence.  Taibbi:

The real question from here is …

Glenn Greenwald makes a case for the public’s becoming angry:

With lightning speed and lockstep unanimity, opinion-making elites jointly embraced and are now delivering the same message about the public rage triggered this week by the AIG bonus scandal:   This scandal is insignificant.  It’s just a distraction.  And, most important of all, public anger is unhelpful and must be contained or, failing that, ignored.

This anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong.  The public rage we’re finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions.  The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing.

It makes perfect sense that those who are satisfied with the prevailing order — because it rewards them in numerous ways — are desperate to pacify public fury.  Thus we find unanimous decrees that public calm (i.e., quiet) be restored.  It’s a universal dynamic that elites want to keep the masses in a state of silent, disengaged submission, all the better if the masses stay convinced that the elites have their best interests at heart and their welfare is therefore advanced by allowing elites — the Experts — to work in peace on our pressing problems, undisrupted and "undistracted" by the need to placate primitive public sentiments.

While that framework is arguably reasonable where the establishment class is competent, honest, and restrained, what we have had — and have — is exactly the opposite:  a political class and financial elite that is rotted to the core and running amok.  We’ve had far too little public rage given the magnitude of this rot, not an excess of rage.  What has been missing more than anything else is this:  fear on the part of the political and financial class of the public which they have been systematically defrauding and destroying.

* * * * *

These endless lectures from sober, rational pundits about the relative quantitative insignificance of the AIG bonuses are condescending straw men.  Nobody thinks that $165 million in bonuses for the people who destroyed AIG is what has caused the financial crisis.  Nobody thinks that recouping those bonuses or having prevented them in the first place would solve or even mitigate systemic collapse.  The amounts are miniscule in the context of the broader economic issues.  Everyone is aware of that; nobody needs to have that pointed out.  As Armando astutely observed, the attempt now to dismiss the anger over the AIG bonuses as the by-product of simple-minded ignorance and/or ideological rigidity (class warfare!  crass populism!) is quite similar to how anti-war arguments were stigmatized before the attack on Iraq :   ignore the screeching pacifists and let the sober Experts make the decisions, for they know best.

The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because …

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Very good article by Mark Bittman, which includes this extract:

… The truth is that most Americans eat so badly — we get 7 percent of our calories from soft drinks, more than we do from vegetables; the top food group by caloric intake is “sweets”; and one-third of nation’s adults are now obese — that the organic question is a secondary one. It’s not unimportant, but it’s not the primary issue in the way Americans eat.

To eat well, says Michael Pollan, the author of “In Defense of Food,” means avoiding “edible food-like substances” and sticking to real ingredients, increasingly from the plant kingdom. (Americans each consume an average of nearly two pounds a day of animal products.) There’s plenty of evidence that both a person’s health — as well as the environment’s — will improve with a simple shift in eating habits away from animal products and highly processed foods to plant products and what might be called “real food.” (With all due respect to people in the “food movement,” the food need not be “slow,” either.) …

Read the whole thing.

From Glenn Greenwald:

This Haaretz article claims that the U.S. is "furious" at Israel for its latest round of demolishing East Jerusalem homes.  It quotes an Israeli government source as saying that "the matter represents a serious disagreement between Israel and the U.S."   There are now enough reports of growing U.S./Israel tension on several issues to conclude that, however inadequate it might be, there is at least an increased willingness on the part of the Obama administration to insist upon a distinction between American interests and Israeli interests and to criticize Israel when American interests demand that.  It remains to be seen how substantial that change will be, but it’s hard not to notice the shift.

Relatedly, Haaretz continues its excellent investigation of the brutality of the IDF in Gaza by reporting on a note instructing Israeli troops to fire on Palestinian civilians and Red Cross rescue workers.  That paper reported yesterday that IDF rabbis instructed IDF soldiers that the invasion of Gaza was a "religious war" mandated by God to "expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land."  Perhaps worst of all, Israeli officials in Jerusalem yesterday forcibly shut down various Palestinian cultural events after they had begun, including a children’s march at a schoolyard, citing "a ban on Palestinian political activity in Jerusalem."

There’s an aspect of these stories that actually reflect well on Israel.  Its media outlets are the ones uncovering and criticizing these actions because Israel is, albeit imperfectly (like most countries), a generally open and democratic society.  Its undemocratic impulses towards its Arab citizens are often checked by a reasonably well-functioning judiciary.  In fact, there is far more dissent and criticism of Israeli actions inside of Israel than is tolerated in the U.S. (and there is more meaningful criticism within Israeli establishment media circles of Israeli wars than there is of American wars and national security policies within the U.S. media).  Still, with the advent of a right-wing government dependent upon a faction so extremist and racist that even Marty Peretz and Jeffrey Goldberg are offended, the face that Israel is showing to the world with its actions will inevitably worsen even further how it is perceived, and will increase the pressure on the U.S. to cease its decades-long (and self-destructive) policy of uncritically enabling whatever that country does.

Dershowitz, a fan of torture (in fact, of "excruciatingly painful" torture—his phrase), has leapt to defend John Yoo (of course). Scott Harper has a very deft takedown of Dershowitz in this column, which concludes:

Yoo’s problem comes from what he did as a government lawyer, in authoring a series of opinions which were essential in implementing torture policy. More than a hundred individuals died in captivity and in more than two dozen cases, the deaths have been directly connected to the use of torture techniques that John Yoo approved. His work had lethal consequences.

Aside from the ethics and criminal law problems, Yoo’s work is troubling just from the perspective of professional competence. It did not meet basic standards and was in fact rejected by the Bush Administration itself. Moreover, Yoo’s self-defense—that he was asked to render his best professional assessment on an abstract legal issue—appears to be false; the forthcoming report of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which as I’ve written elsewhere, reportedly recommends that Yoo be referred for bar disciplinary action, will furnish more guidance on this.

I marvel over Dershowitz’s new-found perspective on academic freedom. Can this be the same Alan Dershowitz who launched a massive and successful campaign against Norman Finkelstein to deny him tenure at DePaul University because of his criticism of the Israeli government and of Alan Dershowitz himself? In the Dershowitz perspective, academic freedom apparently shields those whose viewpoints are very close to his own, but not his critics.

Daphne Eviatar also has a story on this.

Interesting:

Harvard Law School is hosting seminars in April and November to teach "Public Relations, Communications and Media Strategies for Dealing With an Angry Public." They’ll be teaching techniques for dealing with people who "are angry because you’ve let them down" or who "want to embarrass you publicly," as well as "environmental groups threatening you" over issues such as "the use and disposal of toxic materials." You can visit their website for details. A flyer announcing the seminars carries endorsements from officials with the U.S. Air Force, Federal Aviation Administration, ConocoPhillips, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals. If you’re angry at any of the above, or even if you’re just outraged by the price of the seminars themselves ($1,950 per attendee), you know who to call.

Certainly the US has been an ally of Israel since its founding, but the feeling is not reciprocal. We have, first of all, several spies for Israel who were giving US secrets to Israel. And now this, reported by ThinkProgress’s Ben Armbruster:

On Thursday night, President Obama sent “a special message to the people and government of Iran” on Nowruz, the start of the Persian New Year, an act that has been described as “groundbreaking.” Speaking directly to Iran’s “leaders,” Obama acknowledged “serious differences” but said the U.S. is seeking “engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”

But more importantly and perhaps somewhat overlooked, Obama indicated that he is willing “to deal with the current government” and that his goal is not regime change. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Iran” twice in the message and stated specifically that it has the “right” to exist:

In particular, I would like to speak directly to the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. […] The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right — but it comes with real responsibilities.

Israeli President Shimon Peres also delivered a “special message” to Iran on Nowruz, but “was addressed specifically to Iran’s people and not their government, reprising the tone of [former President] Bush.” And Peres explicitly contradicted Obama and called on the Iranian people to overthrow their government:

“[I suggest] you don’t listen to [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, it is impossible to preserve a whole nation on incitement and hatred, the people will become tired of it. […] I think that the Iranian people will topple these leaders…these leaders who don’t serve the people, in the end the people will realize that.”

The New York Times reports today that “experts” and European diplomats “applauded” Obama’s message “but expressed dismay” that Peres followed with his strictly to the Iranian people. “This is a real shame because the key effect should be Obama, and this dilutes from that,” one unnamed European official said.

Moreover, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday that both messages were not part of a coordinated plan and that the White House notified “allies” (presumably including Israel) of what Obama planned to do. But when asked if the Israelis had done the same, Gibbs suggested they had not. “I’d have to check,” he said.

MJ Rosenberg at the Israel Policy Forum writes that Peres’s goal may have been to “intentionally undermine” Obama and that the Iranians might not view the conflicting messages as just a coincidence. “They would see America and Israel playing ‘good cop, bad cop,’ diminishing the effect of Obama’s remarkable overture,” he said.

Indeed, the super hawks over at the Weekly Standard picked up on the contradiction as well saying that Peres taught Obama “a thing or two,” adding, “Now that’s how a president should be speaking to the prisoners of the Mullahcracy.”

A excellent report on the current situation; I high recommend that you read the entire article. It begins:

Wars rarely end at the first hint of truce. But when the Obama administration quietly announced this week it will halt federal raids against dispensers of medical marijuana, advocates of drug policy reform found themselves in a tickertape mood.

Could this be Armistice Day for America’s decades-long war on drugs? Not quite. Not yet, at least.

But the new government’s reversal of the Bush-era’s zero-tolerance on pot comes amid a confluence of signals that America may be nearing a turning point in its approach to prohibition. Exit “reefer madness” and enter a more reasoned debate on what works, with the goal of targeting deadly cartels who today place drugs in the hands of American children with greater ease than ever before.

With the U.S. economy in shambles and its banking systems on life support, people on all sides of the great drug debate agree on this much: the last thing America needs right now is to get stoned.

Yet stoned it is, in increasingly grim numbers, despite the world’s most expensive sustained effort to use the full weight of law enforcement, prisons and foreign policy to staunch illegal drugs.

American demand today is estimated to be worth as much as $25 billion, a reality that has shredded Mexico’s ability to impose sovereignty along its northern border, where rampant drug violence claims 100 lives a week.

“This awful reality is forcing us toward a debate that for the past couple of decades we just couldn’t have because America’s official drug policy was controlled by wild-eyed ideologues,” said Dan Bernath, spokesperson for the Marijuana Policy Project, a Washington-based reform lobby group.

“But attitudes toward marijuana law reform have changed, even if policy hasn’t. The opposition today is dwindling down to an ideological fringe rooted in a cultural war that doesn’t really matter to people any more. And now, with a new administration, we find ourselves on the cusp of what we hope is going to be a reasoned, fact-based debate.”

The best evidence of changing attitudes is …

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A report from Isikoff and Hosenball in Newsweek:

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos that will lay out, for the first time, details of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration for use against "high value" Qaeda detainees. The memos, written by Justice Department lawyers in May 2005, provide the legal rationale for waterboarding, head slapping and other rough tactics used by the CIA. One senior Obama official, who like others interviewed for this story requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity, said the memos were "ugly" and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a "truth commission" on torture.

Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the interrogation memos classified. But current and former intel officials pushed back, arguing that any public release might still compromise "sources and methods." According to the administration official, ex-CIA director Michael Hayden was "furious" about the prospect of disclosure and tried to intervene directly with Obama officials. But the White House has sided with Holder. Faced with a court deadline in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit regarding the memos filed by the ACLU, Justice lawyers asked for a two-week extension "because the memoranda are being reviewed for possible release." (White House, Justice and CIA spokesmen all declined to comment.)

The debate about torture ramped up again last week with…

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UPDATE: Paul Krugman responds.

Clear explanation, which begins:

Q: What is the Geithner Plan?

A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world’s largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off–in either case at an immense profit.

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money?

A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

Q: Where does the trillion dollars come from?

A: $150 billion comes from the TARP in the form of equity, $820 billion from the FDIC in the form of debt, and $30 billion from the hedge fund and pension fund managers who will be hired to make the investments and run the program’s operations.

Q: Why is the government making hedge and pension fund managers kick in $30 billion?

A: So that they have skin in the game, and so do not take excessive risks with the taxpayers’ money because their own money is on the line as well…

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So far I’ve written two letters by hand on good stationery. My handwriting, through want of practice, has deteriorated sadly, but obviously practice will remedy that. I have decided to write one letter each afternoon, and I noticed that with the second letter/afternoon, my handwriting was remarkably better for about two lines—then my hand started to tire (already!) and the quality deteriorated somewhat. But that does indicate that I will get back in shape, and all the sooner if I write daily. Strange to think of those muscles going out of shape, but of course they do.

Last night I watched an enjoyable caper comedy suspense film, Like a Fish Out of Water. Very pleasant.

I’ve been emailing a high-school classmate who became a Methodist minister. How time flies! At any rate, my discussions with him have sent me back to reading Charles Hartshorne’s fascinating brief book Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. I will type out the introduction to that and post it here, perhaps today.

Dishes have built up amazingly—they reach a tipping point where it seems troublesome to clean up, and then they accumulate. Today’s the day. I find that with my MP3 player and earphones, I can quickly and enjoyable recover a clean kitchen. I will undoubtedly then decide (once more) that I will keep it clean, by washing up after every meal, without fail. (Life is definitely easier with a dishwasher, which I lack.)

I must say that it’s very pleasant to have handwriting to look forward to again as a regular thing. I had forgotten that I actually enjoy the process—and the pen, and the ink, and the paper, and watching the words form. And God knows I have plenty of pens, ink, and paper. Today is an Omas Arco with italic point, Waterman Florida Blue, and the stationery from “les papiers Reymond, depuis 1928.” I generally use A4 stationary and an envelope (C6) that accepts a French fold (letter folded twice, into quarters: folded in half, then that folded in half).

Apropos, take a look at this article (thanks to TYD) on technology’s impact on handwriting.