Blue Seeing Red

It takes a great economist

2009-09-04T06:56:00.004-04:00

...to show you just what a village of idiots has been in charge of economic and financial policy. You don't have to read my rant but if you would like a panoramic and insightful review of the role of the wizards of the dismal science in our present state of world economic illness, do read this longish essay by Krugman.

Krugman has the vantage point and the level headed delivery I suppose one would expect of a Nobel laureate in economics. You usually have to pay Vanity Fair to hear what Stiglitz has to tell us but Prof. Krugman dishes out insight in the New York times more regularly and for a lot less. I'd pay the Times for this service if I had to.

He gave a good perspective on the health care impasse last week. I already was of the opinion we have too many crooks designing or sponsoring the legislation for any real reform to result but Krugman put a historical context around the picture that cements my disinterest in whatever they may do in Washington.

But even Paul Krugman could dig a little deeper in this week's appropriately critical filleting of how all but a two or three of the elites of economic forecasting missed all the signs of the world's, and particularly the US's looming financial fiasco's. He ends up saying the formerly cocksure enterprise of economic academics is in disarray and must learn humility. He says economists, now that the presumed wholeness of their lash-up of theories has been dashed to pieces, must learn to deal with "messiness" of irrational markets and investors that did not fit their tidy theories. Krugman's best theme in the piece is gently and massively poking holes in the neoclassical idea, beloved of our disgraced neo~~fascist~~conservative pols, that markets are level playing fields populated with rational actors and can do no wrong.

Friedman is dead, so are his ideas. Krugman just touches the surface of the problem that I find with the academic economics that run the real world to ruin.

The birth of economics as a discipline is usually credited to Adam Smith, who published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776. Over the next 160 years an extensive body of economic theory was developed, whose central message was: Trust the market. Yes, economists admitted that there were cases in which markets might fail, of which the most important was the case of “externalities” — costs that people impose on others without paying the price, like traffic congestion or pollution. But the basic presumption of “neoclassical” economics (named after the late-19th-century theorists who elaborated on the concepts of their “classical” predecessors) was that we should have faith in the market system.

Externalities indeed! The entire overworked surface of our planet is just an externality in the models of most economists, abstracted into a few productivity numbers if considered at all. That entire field rarely considers how much of the health of economies is stolen from the earth. It is like cash added to an account but not entered in the ledger: It allows all the leaks and pilfering and mismanagement which are also omitted from the record, to go on yet magically the statements show we still have money in the bank. Krugman is on the record as suspecting that economies are hurting because too many of us using too much of everything have shoved us dangerously close to pumping the last barrel of oil, digging up the last ingot of copper. Krugman suspects but I feel certain.

In the face of what should cause uncertainty and caution, how have our economists advised us? They have consulted the markets. On this, the old quotes are the best and Krugman has all the gems:

...Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets, in which speculators spent their time chasing one another’s tails, dictate important business decisions: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”

Good bye to a lot more than Teddy

2009-08-26T12:10:00.005-04:00

This news, only a little earlier than anticipated, still shocks me and greatly saddens me.

Now and then I start to write posts in which I would grapple with and, mostly for my own sake, try to account for my own transformation from a rather uninformed conservative youth to a self identified liberal. I usually gave up and never posted.

Oh shit, I am actually sobbing as I read the obits.

But I can't say why I will miss Ted Kennedy without describing how my attitude toward his politics and his political skills changed over the years.

When I first moved to Massachusetts in the early 70's, fresh from Nevada and straight from a home of staunch paleolithic republican sentiments, my typical reactions to Kennedy's causes such as health care were un-researched quips. "Oh sure," I would think, "a guy that has never lacked a massive family trust fund thinks I should pay more taxes so everyone can go see a doctor when he wants". I am now in a position to set up our own family trust fund and I can't always see a doctor Its so much easier to be heartless when your ignorance enforces a distance from the realities of hardships and unjust distribution of rewards that Kennedy mustered us to battle. Find any wingnut who still vilifies Kennedy and I will show you an ignoramus.

In 1976, I worked for a consulting firm and had to travel to Washington DC just to be an extra in a show of resumes for a potential customer. On one shuttle flight down there, it happened that the the Senator had the seat next to me. He rode coach without any ceremony at all, just another passenger not hinting any expectation of deference. I was not even positive it was him when he first sat down. I did not speak to him. He was paying a lot of attention to a copy of NY Times Magazine with a cover story on some political upstart who was then the governor of Georgia. It was a crowded field that year.

It was the Viet Nam war that still repelled me from Republicans but Carter has always conjured up hope and decency and I voted for him in hope. Kennedy seemed to me at that time a man beaten by his own bad luck but he resolutely soldiered on. His wary dance with corporate powers while he introduced bill after bill to make life livable for what we used to call the working class simply never let up. He had the big ideas if not the charisma to turn our political hearts. But it takes so much more work and organization and granite-willed persistence to redirect a nation that in its private dreams sees itself as potentially wealthy and independent individualists. Those dreams were exploited easily and have given us the local and the presidential politics of the Reagan revolution. And all through that dark period, Ted strove on, cutting deals, compromising where compromise would at least gain the embattled middle class some small help.

I was so disgusted by the response a self-absorbed electorate and media handed the profoundly decent but unwily Carter that I voted for John Anderson in 80. The national political scene had become an ethical vacuum. Yet all that while Teddy beat the drums for better benefits and programs. Even as I withdrew from the fights over the wrong issues that could have no winners, I recall being impressed how Kennedy could so respectfully engage the barking and repugnantly narrow representatives of One Selfishness Under God. That capacity to remain engaged, to find a way to get any opponent to look you in the eye ...that is the gift of a great politician. I grew to know I was not such a creature and he, with few peers, was.

Not until MoveOn offered me what seemed like a real voice, did I reengage in politics. But after four years of hopeful changes and improvements, my own politics are now nearly ready to walk off the field again. If a Radical Greens party springs up, I might waste my vote on them in symbolic and futile protest. I see a nation that has lied to itself about how bad its economy was until its crooked and faked affluence nearly collapsed. I see a country that has lied to itself about how to live well until it is rife with life style and environmentally induced diseases and wants only a quick cheap fix. I see a country with a pathologically overgrown sense of its place among the economic and military forces that will shape history. Economic and political power will be wrenched from the hands of any nation that poisons itself and lets the mass of ill, poor and unrepresented only grow. I see a nation that has now lost one of its last lions for the little man, one of the unthanked giants who worked to give those dreaming individualists what they needed rather than what they wanted. Without that concern which Kennedy embodied for the welfare of the citizen above the welfare of corporate power, we will be too weak a country to address our real problems.

who gets health care?

2009-08-25T09:54:00.004-04:00

I don't particularly support the outcry for health care. Its not entirely because I have had for decades what most consider a thorough and mostly employer paid health coverage. Are you 60 and can't get your HMO to do a full body MRI or anything beyond a PSA test just to have a baseline? Thats my situation.

We may waste huge amounts of money on administration and on PREDICTABLY futile treatments of terminal patients. Those expenses will be hard to back out of the system and they are snarling the present congressional debates.

But we are barking up the wrong tree. Removing from our health care burdens obesity and diet-induced diabetes and the long years of patching the living yet rotting bodies should not need a doctor's efforts but rather our own efforts. "First, do no harm", goes the doctors oath...why can't consumers be held to the same standard? If we locked the god damned cars in the garage and shuttered the fast food joints in favor of more locally produced and vegetarian diets, as you have all been hearing for most of your lives, we would mostly live longer and be healthier up until genetics pulled the plug on us. I would only really support more prevention, starting with less consumption and wiser more informed consumption. Michael Moore can easily say our health care system is sick ...but how healthy is the portly Mr. Moore? I love the depth of Moore's sympathy and courage in his long crusade for a little justice for victims of the corporate oligarchs but his thinking and arguments are at times as shallow as his sympathy is deep. When he took on GM, it was not to lambaste them for making and convincing us to drive environmentally disastrous cars for the sake of their higher markups. No, he just wanted to save jobs at buick plants. If they had made something more responsible than Buicks at those plants, we might still be buying from GM.

The fears and perceptions that power health care hysteria, made to seem so real by the bounty of pathetic poster child cases among uninsured are none the less an unbalanced view. Rather like our climate crisis, as long as the ultimate causes arising from our personal gratification and convenience are obscured by the final dire effects being so many years and stages of remove from those causes, we will only clamor for window dressing rather than solutions. There is no cure for death. But "living better" is not the consumer orgy you have been programmed to desire.

Does that sound wrong to you? Does this sound right?:

If the authorities "know" Bernie made-off does not have cancer then I know that
Bernie made-off does get better health screening that millions of Americans who did
not steal billions of dollars. What a country this is! Perhaps you too can get a good cancer screening if only you can defraud someone out of a few billions.

Cash for Cluelessness

2009-08-03T11:11:00.006-04:00

I admit that I once owned an 8 cylinder Chevy Suburban, a true gas guzzler...that was 1985. Before then and since, I have driven much lighter cars and since around 1990, I have often left the car home and gotten to work on a bicycle.

That history divulged, I will chance being called a hypocrite to tell you what I have felt about the automobile since my high school days when tail fins and tyrannosaurs roamed the earth.

It is a cheap thrill for some apes, and perhaps a necessary evil for the hapless working class who can not find work where they live or live where they can find work. Buckminster Fuller was one of the more prominent but hardly the earliest voices to question the massive per capita use of petroleum, metals and other resources to which the automotive addiction [and the severely dysfunctional use of land that goes with the addiction] committed us. The vision of the conventional automobile and its usage patterns as arch nemesis of sustainability was not exactly his message. He also thought more technology could be applied to help us live as well on less resources. His book "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" was old news by the time I read it in the late 60's. Having been taken on as a kind of manifesto for the technically inclined hippie and tossed as kookie by most others, its influence is far less than it prescience about our resource-starved present would justify. That is not the only source of my revulsion at the clumsy dirty machines, the love of which we subsidize, but it was important intellectual support. I also have youthful associations of noisy cars with bullies and negligent scholarship. The car was, in my formative years, a cultural institution to rival the black holes of gambling and public drunkenness [the latter has been radically exacerbated in both opportunity and severity of consequences by the illusory freedom to escape that advertisers use to promote car ownership.]

That is not all I can say about my bad reaction to one of the pillars of both our economy and our culture but enough of that. Suffice it to say that since GM and Chrysler are sucking up billions of YOUR dollars on life support, you are owed a moment of sanity: the pillars of life in this allegedly great nation are rotting out from under you. I have not the time nor you the patience for me to explain to you that from a fundamentally economic perspective, the collapse was inevitable. That explanation would be one that puts the whole of our support system: the resources we acquire at severe political cost, the resources do we command: coal, air, water, iron, health and the costs to patch up bodies corroded by lives lived in cars...and the money that makes all those resources fungible... all counted on the ledger. Saying that collapse was inevitable and that any, ANY, reasonable extrapolation of consumption trends since the 60's amounts to a set of tracks ending at an ecological and economic cliff is unnecessary because we are at the cliff now. Plenty of smart and far sighted people already did that explaining...you didn't listen to them either. I am making plans to jump off the train since it won't even slow down.

Won't even slow down. The same psychology as ever quietly commands the body politic: "I don't want to know the ultimate costs of any ploy of government/industry as long as it minimizes my immediate discomfort or protects me from the scary, the unfamiliar effort or privation". The same corporations, oil companies, and automobile companies, that benefited from congressional dispensation will continue to benefit based on the excuse of the jobs they represent in spite of the now obvious fact that the future they represent is one of empty shelves, uprooted lives, dirt and want. The corporations still have vastly disproportionate representation via lobbies and representation that speaks far better for the largest blocks of share holders than for individual workers or families. We will always see congressional creativity in new forms of subsidies overt or subtle. In the past we have had tax funded highways, tariffs on imported cars, tax breaks on car loan interest...a long and varied list to which we now add "cash for clunkers". We seem bent on rewarding the very stupidest behavior. Now, I who can pay more taxes because I have spent far less of my family wealth on cars, will pay more in taxes now and later so that you morons who bought SUVs long after they became the laughing stock of the ecologically minded, can get a do-over. A do-over of the mistake of buying a car at my expense financially and at my expense environmentally...this program sucks.

And if you think you can tolerate the suckage because at least the dupes will be driving more fuel efficient and less polluting cars, please consider:

They will have to buy a Japanese car or a [German owned] "Smart" car to get anywhere above 38 MPG average. American worker's benefit from this will be much less than advertised.
Another ton of iron will be mined or refined and another ton of coal burnt to make the replacement car. A comprehensive analysis factoring in more than job-angst would have us just drive the clunkers more slowly and trade them in when they were really ready to trade.

Its a hoax, folks. The popularity is just a tip-off on how fatuous the fans of this "solution" are.

At one time or another, we have given Detroit and Dallas ^[1]every conceivable advantage using the general revenues of this nation. Now, populism provides a willing if blind alliance of the least conscientious consumers and the least conscientious industries to raid the coffers when they are already empty by the accounting standards that your bank would apply to you.

Did you think XOM was an oil company? If they were an oil company they would need a headquarters in the oil patch but I doubt they drill much oil on K street yet profit spectacularly. Like almost any other corporation, the sole logic of their existence is profit...they are a profit company more than an oil company. Hence the nice HQ office by the beltway. Your government and your oil company are so very much in bed together you probably can't tell who is on top unless you rip off the covers.

UPDATE: I drove a car today. It was someone else's hybrid Honda Civic. It was starting to get less than 45 MPG and I got the chore to have it serviced. The owner has a light foot on the gas pedal but then the dash board of a hybrid is actually a highly effective biofeedback video game to reprogram your driving habits. On the way back from the tune up, I caught this piece on NPR...wha'd I tell you?.

Can I still be simple if the problems are not?

2009-06-06T14:38:00.005-04:00

conservative and liberal as a binarization of all political discourse and category does not serve us well.

I understand having a bill or debt to pay. I do not understand economics. So when bond vigilantes were first brought to my attention by Numerian at Agonist, I responded in full blooded pessimism. I can't be a bond vigilante until I buy some bonds of course. And I do not wish to shear away all the debt my government has signed up for because I know how many are unready for any such change and cling to one precarious niche or another afforded by that debt. But seeing we and our progeny are in hawk to the tune of about $40,000 per person, my intuition is that our government is out of financial steam and our average standards of living must take a hit as the government's debt service marches toward [4% times 40000 = ] $1600 per person per year. The per taxpayer number would be higher. In the past, US administrations have drunkenly looked at these damning numbers and dreamed that an ever expanding economy would tip us toward a net inflow to the coffers. It may have been so briefly during the Clinton administration but it is on the whole still a dream scenario.

But when TPM points me to Daniel Gross's seemingly clear and not too unbalanced recap of the Krugman-Ferguson debates over the signifcance of the jump in rates which the US government is obliged to pay to lure investment in its long term bonds, my simplistic self labeling as a person with fiscally conservative leanings just falls apart. If the optimistic interpretaion of Krugman's, which Gross upholds, is the correct understanding of bond yield trends, then I expect them to level off toward more historically typical values. But if nothing is done in line with Bernanke's warning that the borrowing is getting out of hand, then the long term treasury bond rates ought to remain aloft. And the longer they stay up, the more crushing their effect and the less our taxes will be spent on any thing to benefit citizen's needs in health, education, housing or transportation. In fact, only the brave individuals who continue to hold bonds in the run-away-debt scenario will gain much of anything.

In short, the fundamentals that I understand do not support optimism. There must be other fundamentals.

I need to get a copy of Daniel Gross's new book. Kevin Phillips book Bad Money handily converted me to a view that our economy is so busted and our self deluding tolerance for debt so entrenched that our decline is nearly inevitable. I am wondering if there are any nominally conservative authors [Philips is a special case] who have a book with the same conclusions as Phillips: fiscal policy since Reagan has been a formula for collapse. Pete Peterson? I should look up Martin Hutchinson perhaps. He predicted the Fed's woes a year before freddie and fannie went on treasury life support. He presently thinks "Most government debt markets (including some but probably not all of those in euros) are thus likely to suffer an oversupply crisis over the next year or so. "

I wonder if, like global warming, the US economy is a bad situation we have caused and our better informed students of economics will eventually form some majority warning that its nearly too late and painful corrective action or even more painful consequences await. And I wonder if, like global warning, a coterie of intellectual weaklings will be given equal air time to push a line of denialism?

Who would Jesus shoot?

2009-06-05T10:48:00.006-04:00

Its more sad than outrageous. Pastor Pagano's "deep-seeded belief in God and firearms" [his words!] should cram enough cognitive dissonance into the average Christian's mind to cause an instant migraine. Well, OK, the pastor used to be a Marine. Lots of ex-military have a psychologically unhealthy admiration for what a gun turns its owner into...but a pastor? Who let the dog-face in? Even saloons in the lawless American west of cowboy legend asked patrons to check their weapons at the door. Does he preach in fatigues? Does his Summer Bible School teach marksmanship?

This stupid episode is catching attention as far away as the UK, where they are most probably shaking their heads to learn there is even greater depth to our national sickness than commonly assumed. The Telegraph article is one of the few that emphasizes that expression and support of our liberty in the right to bear arms was the intended message of the stunt. Well, I guess that will have to do for an answer to the question most of us are asking: "What was he thinking?"

People do things to "send a message", you know. But how rare it is when the message intended is the same as the message taken. Here are some messages that are actually coming across as a result of the Pastor's ploy:

I don't mean to comment on the Pastor's reading of his bible because for all I know Christianity does specify that one should go about armed.
But his reading of the constitution is deficient. His job falls under the first, not the second amendment.
Guns, and particularly the neurotic and in-your-face brandishing of guns on the paranoid pretext that your personal deadly weapon might be confiscated, are not about freedom...they are about security and borrowing a feeling of safety that your upbringing could not manage to instill in you. How many of the pastor's flock have been mugged or burglarized lately?
The protection of your faith is inadequate, even in the very seat of its worship and observance...So carry a Glock instead!

If you want something less imaginary to feel insecure about, please consider how unfairly lone men with guns and publicly used middle names have tried to trash the course of history, undoing the hope and will of the people? Thank god Pastor Pagano did not ask his faithful to start using their full names!

I could go on. Others surely will.

Oh, Look! Here , as a formerly living media fossil would have said, is "the rest of the story": In neighboring Tennessee, you may legally go into a saloon packing a gun. I guess there is a little TN-KY rivalry here on who is the freest state. So now its a question of where would you rather have Jesus shoot you: in a church or in a bar?

Is there such a thing as ethics in high finance?

2009-03-16T08:18:00.003-04:00

I would like to think that the general premise under which our government agreed to fork over tens of billions of your and my tax dollars to the insolvent AIG was to pay debts that AIG no longer had the money to honor. Not only should the "financial products" operation of AIG be investigated for fraud, the entire company, and particularly those executives who showed up in congress and the offices of the treasury with their ransom notes and wheel barrows to be filled with money, should be questioned about taking our money under false or fraudulent pretenses since they are also using our money to pay millions in "contractually obligated" bonuses to the geniuses in their financial products operation. Will AIG go under if they don't pay these so called bonuses? We have been hit up for precious billions because the credit market consequences of AIG going into default are purported to be a further freeze-up of lending that hurts us little people. AIG also insures legitimate loans that would not have presented much risk had the economy not gone in the toilet...a condition they did much to bring about.

Bonuses must be the wrong word for these payments. The term strongly implies conditional payment contingent on delivering a higher than standard level of performance. Fucking the investors to the tune of a few hundred billion dollars does not strike me as better than standard performance of fiduciary responsibilities. If the payments are not conditional, they are not bonuses. If they are not debts owed to creditor institutions, they have no claim on money borrowed by our government, money that you and I will toil decades to repay.

Here in the US, most of us are just now looking at our federal tax returns...how unfortunate for the thieves at AIG that they come asking for pork money for their associates at exactly the moment when the average person's notion of the government's money is least abstract and most in focus as OUR tax money.

I am just at working stiff who always had to pay his own bills and always did so. I obviously know nothing about the ethics of high finance.

The robbers are still loose in the vault

2009-03-11T07:24:00.004-04:00

By far the most effective way to rob a bank is to own one.

The banking industry, even after all of the demonstrations that they are as greedy and foolish with money as any yokel whose tax money they now extort, are still asking for more money. The most important thing to be done is really do what Ben Bernanke has at least said should be done: establish regulatory oversight of these captains of cupidity. As welcome as a chaperon at a teenager's drinking party perhaps but we really need adult supervision of the bankers.

Firedoglake has got a campaign going specifically targeted at countering the influence of the bankers on YOUR congress. Those banks took billions from us already and quietly spent millions to influence congressional voting. That would earn the bastards jail time if I ran this country. Sign the petition to demand that congress end the era of blindly trusting a key actor in our well being who has uniformly demonstrated they cannot be trusted. And better yet, instead of sending all your money to the dupes in the legislature, send $10 or $20 to FDL's counter-lobbying effort. Not many seem able to stand up to an industry that has taken our deposits, then a trillion for bailouts and has designs on a trillion more...enough already! I have put my money where my blog is. Your turn.

UPDATE: I find I am not the first to have realized how vulnerable the trusting depositors and investors are. I hope Mr. Black will take it as a complement that strong agreement with his thesis is a natural reaction to the treachery of the intriguers of high finance who realized that vulnerability long before you and I, long before Mr. Black and long before the incompentents who cheered for deregulation of finance.

Now it gets interesting

2009-02-27T07:20:00.004-05:00

I miss blogging. There is plenty to think about and aggitate for these days. For all my complaining, it is simply delightful to finally have a grown up in the white house. His revenue restoration proposals, which many will simply dismiss as tax-the-rich, are going to cost the greensmile household plenty. Preservation of dividend exclusions is actually a significant softening of the blow because capital gains will be scarce for some time to come. I wondered when the bills from the Bush/Reagan years would come due. Sooner is better than later, trust me. If there are enough grownups out here pulling down good salaries, maybe, just maybe, we will get through these hard times. The gauntlet is down, the congress and the people now have to step up to the challenge that real leadership presents. Now it gets interesting.

BTW, its not much but still, it comforts me a little to see that people who should know what political stripes we the netroots wear, have in fact finally figured out that we are liberal. We have crept out of the shadow of four-letter word status that Gingrich, Rove, Limbaugh etc. tried to cast on that word.

Republicans are...

2009-02-21T08:12:00.002-05:00

...those people the founding fathers tried to warn you about when they tacked on the Bill of Rights.

And for my money, any Democrat who votes with these idiots might just as well be called a Republican because they join in whispering to you "Its OK, Big Brother is just trying to protect you!".

Betrayal you can believe in

2009-02-10T09:12:00.005-05:00

I have been biting my tongue, thinking that Obama was being pragmatic in trying to forge a working majority because the work so urgently needs doing. But what is the point of all the compromises when they restore the failed priorities we just voted down in November?

All I can can say is that I hope more senators come around to Obama's message that we really do need to put aside ideology, that Republicans too must make concessions. The continuation of policies that make working people into poor people and poor people into poorer people are going to make the repair of our economy a much more painful and protracted affair than it needed to be. Obama should not have been stampeded. What grief may have come of delay, he could lay at the feet of the Republicans...he is not getting their selfish ignorant votes anyway.

If the economy is going to stay busted for a long time and yet repair bills in the form of sacrificed tax revenue are going to be amassed and left to the next generation to pay, then we are being screwed. Will some alternative economy spring up in the shadows of shuttered banks and brokerage houses after we tire of turning over money to the charlatans of Wall Street? How many of us can find a way to do work others really need done in exchange for food, fuel, shelter? Can individual consumers buy oil and gas by barter alone? Can any significant number of Americans yet get along without these fuels? If conventional jobs, by the millions or tens of millions just go away and cannot be coaxed back, how many of us have a subsistence back up plan?

You might find my pessimism a bit extreme. I hope it is but, as Josh Marshall tries to emphasize in his comments on a CNBC interview of Roubini and Taleb, the picture your press is trying to paint for you is worse than optimistic, it is completely blind. As long as our opinions are being fed by bozos bought into a bogus banking system, establishment of a sustainable [that word applies with a vengence to economics, as if you had not noticed] system... where credit is secured by properly valued real goods and no banker has the power to leverage other people's lives and livelihoods...could only come about by accident

If we won't invest in infrastructure or alternative energy with any vigor, enthusiasm or risk unless and except it is just a way to prop up our car-centric consumer culture, we probably won't make it to the end of this century as a first world economy, let alone as the last seat of anglophone empire. We are not only betrayed in Washington. We as a nation of consumers betray our children by wasting our precious dwindling capital and clout on ways of living, working and moving about that will, in a few decades, be rusted ruins that mock our short sightedness and inability to grasp that there were much bigger changes we needed to endure; changes we did not believe in.

UPDATE: Robert Reich blogs at TPM where he provides a plausible if reprehensible rationale for the Republican sabbotage of the recovery act: they are invested in regaining seats by preserving our misery until the midterms.

Here's to you dubya

2009-01-21T22:08:00.002-05:00

I could never stand him. So long as we all remember that HE is what Republicans stand for, we may not vote so stupidly again. He's gone, a rain of shoes flying toward his vanishing back side. He was voted out only when the cumulative disruptions and damage of his egregiously incompetent and arrogant administration reached a level even Americans could connect to the vacuous ideological causes. But of all his harms, the last I shall forgive is the way he made us a worse natured country than we meant to be, the way he made our meanness, greed and fatuousness nakedly obvious to the world...we did vote for him when many already knew better. We behaved no better than countries we have been cheered for vanquishing.

Better than anything I will ever write

2009-01-20T13:30:00.001-05:00

The text of Obama's inaugural speech:

Thank you, thank you.

My fellow citizens:

I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors. I thank President Bush for his service to our nation, as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

So it has been. So it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land - a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America - they will be met.

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things - some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.

For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.

For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act - not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short. For they have forgotten what this country has already done; what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage.

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them - that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply. The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works - whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our Gross Domestic Product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West - know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the road that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us today, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages. We honor them not only because they are guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service; a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves. And yet, at this moment - a moment that will define a generation - it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

This is the source of our confidence - the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."

America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Thank you, God bless you and God bless the United States of America.

Let me oversimplify this for you

2009-01-18T12:39:00.002-05:00

Debt is just another kind of tax..but one for which we tax payers get nothing in return for our payments, one that is appealingly cameauflaged to those who are just too selfish to pay taxes directly out of their own pockets.

The republicans have no standing to mount any objections to debt: they took it on faster in the last 30 years than any other faction ever did. Debt of record breaking proportions is now held out to be our only short term remedy to the wrecked economy. I hope so but I am stocking up on canned goods and generators just in case. When trying to distinguish between the nearly indistinquishable economic consequences of Republican vs Democratic administrations, it may help to weigh how much of the monies raised and spent came back to you in any material and beneficial form.

Smell the fascism

2009-01-05T22:30:00.002-05:00

If it comes to the point where some bush league toady in a uniform gives orders to reenact the massacre at Kent State, will we finally see how fascism is seeping upward into our most important institutions? That we have people who bother to think about the possibility of regular army units unleashed on their own civilians ought to make all of us a lot more watchful of our military.

My alarm at this bit of news is probably a bit greater than yours because the potential for army regulars to be shooting at citizens is a rumor that should have just blown away on account of its own ridiculous implications and impossibility. But seems it won't go away.

The finger pointing in the aftermath of Kent State shootings did not feel like justice to either the Viet Nam war protest movement or its opponents. The questions we have to ask at the mere hint that we are a nation yet again preparing to kill our own civilians ought to be in more minds...maybe that would lessen the likelihood of history repeating itself.

Who gains from such unrest?
Who gains if the military must be visibly present on our city streets, armed and leathal?
Who wants this kind of control? Who thinks marshal law is good in any way or at any time?
Do those who brought so much economic pain and dislocation on us face gun barrels and tear gas as potential rioters would? Do they even get an indictment?
What will be the dividing lines between common soldiers and those that give the orders? Who are we if we are not all on the same side in this country?
What will voting or economic reforms mean in an era of marshal law?

Boy!, that is Rich!

2009-01-04T21:53:00.002-05:00

Frank Rich spares you from reading some insanely odious propaganda your tax money has paid for. He dispatches with one quick cut a huge pile of shit the desperate Bush crafted to promote his "legacy"...is Bush kidding us? If you collect Nazi memorabilia or Joe McCarthy campaign posters, you could download this document for posterity. I can't imagine Obama would be so deeply sarcastic as to leave it up at its present whitehouse.gov URL.

Rich gives us the gist of the matter in one paragraph:

This document is the literary correlative to “Mission Accomplished.” Bush kept America safe (provided his presidency began Sept. 12, 2001). He gave America record economic growth (provided his presidency ended December 2007). He vanquished all the leading Qaeda terrorists (if you don’t count the leaders bin Laden and al-Zawahri). He gave Afghanistan a thriving “market economy” (if you count its skyrocketing opium trade) and a “democratically elected president” (presiding over one of the world’s most corrupt governments ). He supported elections in Pakistan (after propping up Pervez Musharraf past the point of no return). He “led the world in providing food aid and natural disaster relief” (if you leave out Brownie and Katrina).

There is more well deserved scorn in the rest of the Rich piece and I agree with every word of its tone and substance. The question it leaves in my mind and I am sure many others share this puzzlement: Given that he was so very damaging and slovenly a leader, why did we never impeach him?

Obama in "oh twelve"

2009-01-04T10:59:00.003-05:00

I offer the president elect a campaign slogan for his next election campaign. If Palin is the best the Republicans can do on that occasion, Obama can just stay at his desk and continue sorting out our messes and calming our nerves. But just in case, a bumper sticker may be handy:

KEEP THE CHANGE

A little ambiguous for you? I frankly think the country's fascist hankering, in the form of its now permanent Military Industrial Complex, is resistant to even Barak Obama's persuasions. I fear stimulus only saves economies that are sound except for want of a rational level of confidence...but the US has deeper woes, having run on empty right to the edge of physical exhaustion of some mineral resources and selfdefeating policies involving its intellectual resources. Of only the latter can we even hope for reversal.

I am half way through Greenspan's mea non culpa, Age of Turbulence, and I feel less inclined to hate on the guy than before. He is so much less arrogant than the total pricks like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Dubya with/for whom he worked. The constant surprise to the geek's geek of economics is that anyone took his advice: he claims he never felt anywhere near as confident of macroeconomic forecasts as others who clearly hung on his words...after carefully picking the words they would hang on to. My point is that not even for the smartest of us, do the complexities of our economic world afford any useful transparency. Greenspan only grew more aware of psychology as a determinant of economic outcomes late in his career. Obama is smart and less of an ideologue than Bush league henchmen but the bus is already plunging down the embankment as Obama takes the wheel. Softer landing maybe but only on a lower road. More certainty is not available. I expect that unless someone works a miracle on the ruinous materialism and consumerism that now define American character more than our claimed piety, hard work or intellectual freedom, Obama's hands are tied. We will go on wanting to have more and pay less and history will only accelerate its punishments for our childishness. It is effective politics to work the extreme factions toward the center and to steer middle courses no one faction loves but in which each faction sees some benefit. But compromises between the wishfulness of the entire body politic and fundamental physical limitations of resources are not possible and their simulation by denying reality has been shown to fail painfully.

We hear a clamour, right and left, to borrow on top of our mountain of borrowings so as to fund stimulus programs...yet I hear little of cutting our offensive defense budget. My job would be one lost in such cuts and yet I beg fate to be so good to us. Obama will not stem that flow of money wasted on weapons and world bullying.

In my admittedly dim view, if Obama actually tries to spell out for us just how hard we will have to work and how insecure we are, he will be hated for his message and his reelection in ought-twelve will not be a foregone conclusion.

Econopause

2009-01-02T08:37:00.004-05:00

Economics exhibits business cycles of some regularity or frequency. Stocks form small asset bubbles to the rhythm of these cycles. Other assets may participate to a greater or lesser degree. An engineer would observe that negative feedbacks or restoring forces must be at play some how, working against each other but out of phase so as to produce these oscillations which seem, primarily in hindsight, so predictable. The changing times and the technical resources and the speed of information conspire to change the frequency but one way or another excitements and depressions follow one another in our economies just as they do in some mental disorders of individuals.

What makes mighty sand dunes and the crashing ocean waves? The steadyness of the wind, more than its strength, will find the harmonic of the medium, sand or water, and according to its steadiness, shape mountains in it to suit that harmonic.

Even without the blatant bias of tax law to help the rich and keep the poor in their place, we have always had rich getting richer [how old is that expression?]. It occurs to me that certain habits in commercial behavior or pecuniary personality traits, out of synch with the greed and fear of the mass of economic players, might be the more natural way of the wealthy than lobbying for tax loopholes.

If your habit was to not be caught up in euporias nor anxious to show off as much buying power as your neighbor, you might save liquid wealth while others use it to bid up inflating assets. Wealth defined as "having more money than you need for living expenses" is a definition that finds an alternately growing and shrinking population meeting its standards. What matters is what you do when you are thus "rich".

[btw, note in that Vaknin essay that he was calling "Ponzi scheme" on the whole of our vaporous financial market, well in advance of the collapses of the summer and fall and way ahead of the revelations that Madoff had made off with billions. He is, effectively, agreeing with Krugman that an unregulated market is an open invitation to and ultimately hard to distinquish morally from a Ponzi scheme. I particularly like the essay because it emphasizes the universal emotionalism and intellectual weakness of insecure humans that drunkens and finally unhinges our economy. Until our upbringings are founded on spiritually or psychologically healthy values , our markets will always be a way to stalk each other. A basic econ lesson would suffice to show how irrational market bubbles are, but who thinks in terms of equations?]

If others become needy for liquidity while you have cash, if asset prices decline and by their very decline motivate the needy owners to dump their own goods driving prices lower "before it is too late" to cash in, then your savings can obtain a muliplied quantity of that asset so dearly bought at recent market peaks. It sounds too obvious: "buy low, sell high" but real people have too much herd animal and not enough selling discipline. Plan, on the very day you buy, exactly the condition in which you will sell AND a stop-loss. The wind is steady, the economies have had millenia of hungry people and middle men between the earth's bounty and the gaping mouths and bare shivering shoulders. With your discipline, now go surf those waves.

Is that cyclying behavior the natural consequence of capitalist systems given the limitations of the humans who operate them? The "obvious" superiority and appearant dominence of capitalism as the "end of history" has been pronounced by bullshitting Neocons. But conversion of the world to liberal democracy and capitalism is not a done deal. This reality gap holds with an especially fierce irony for the economic and moral failures of the US, which for the last eight years has idiotically claimed to be the champion of those ideals even as it gutted them. My opinion FWIW, is that democracy is a fine idea and we should try it some time. Capitalism is not an idea so much as a label for the du jour mix of government support and proprietary rights that any given country uses to perpetuate the personhood of wealth...which is more or less the same as the personhood of personal power manifest in political terms. The basic flaw here is still the failure to see the psychological at work. The parties touting the political system do not realize how much they identify that system with themselves and its power with their power. They can promote liberal democracy so energetically because rather than the complex reality of culture change needed to make it work, they are merely promoting themselves.

The end of nature has also been pronounced. Unlike the Fukayammering, that trend spotting has been amply confirmed. With Obama's choice for the head of EPA, climate science has finally, pushed aside the oil-funded deniers. When too many mouths gape for food from a depleted nature, our steady winds become a cyclone, a vicious circle of unmet needs. That time is coming though it will not come all at once like $150/bbl oil. And when it comes, as intersecting trendlines dictate it will, then no amount of money is enough to buy food when one must grow it or yank it at gunpoint from the larder of a more prudent neighbor. When the psychological value of money is no longer the quivelent of power and security, there will be and end to economic oscillating.

feconomics

2008-12-16T23:53:00.006-05:00

Yeah, we had a bad bad ice storm up here in New England but for me, the real news in this mundane and terse report on the storm's lingering effects is that our power companies are owned by foreigners. While Lehman Brothers' Mr Fuld and other captains of the US investment industry were greedily swapping defaults, believing the sales pitches of Ponzi schemers and generally whooping it up waist deep in frothy fecal financial instruments with visions of skyward tilting trends, investors in Spain and London bought up our power companies. You are going to keep needing electricity even if the economy NEVER gets well again. Now who are the smartest guys in the room? Real assets for real investors and paper fortunes for those who will only deserve to be able to wipe their bums.

I admit I am still puzzled as to how a period of near-zero interest rates is going to cure problems partly precipitated by the housing bubble that grew on the fertilizer of a few years of unprecedented 2% and 1% fed funds rates between October 2001 and May 2004.

So is there any good news in the economy? Housing starts and sales are cadaverous, manufacturing activity has fallen off a cliff and price index measures sure seem to signal an incipient deflationary period.

Ah ha! There is one US business sector where the bloom is still on the boom. [It happens to be the industry, I confess, that often pays my salary]. Does that $40 billion in arms sales to dictators and dubious allies make up for the $40 billion that Madoff embezzled? I compare the "good" profits of our one healthy industry with the bad of our worst crook because I see the same ill deep in their hearts. It is all too human a trait to be able to blind oneself morally with the glittering light that shines from a pile of gold. Both the arms merchants and the crooked investment adviser ruin people's lives. They just do it in different ways.

But as Jarecki made so clear in his documentary Why we fight, the arms merchants are so in bed with the government that they are the one industry the government will guard from foreign ownership, even if they have to prevent "wasteful" domestic spending to persevere. We partner and cooperate with other countries in making war but we like to keep the profits for ourselves as much as possible.

There are some who can question the morality of this business:

The New America Foundation, a nonprofit research group, has called on Obama, who will be sworn in January 20, and the new U.S. Congress to consider multilateral efforts to curb "destructive and destabilizing" weapons exports.

More than half of the top 25 U.S. arms purchasers in the developing world were "undemocratic governments or regimes that engaged in major human rights abuses," in 2006 and 2007, the foundation said in a report last week.

But even the French masters of war just come out and say it: the terror they combat is the prospect that the world would become unsafe for war profiteering. Lord, we don't need another jet fighter.

What if the foreign investors go after our last growth industry: the death merchants? Don't you worry now, quick and sloppy death and the constant rattling of sabers in the third world will always have MADE IN USA on it somewhere.

Will the masters of war rescue our jobs as Bernanke has not? I think the case is the exact opposite and Bernanke just isn't aware or won't admit that he is trying to breath life into a domestic economy bled to death by a gargantuan tumor of defense appropriations.

I vote for change IN THE PRESS CORPS

2008-12-15T07:44:00.002-05:00

This "good bye kiss" from the Iraqi press to the source of so much suffering in Iraq is going to get a disproportional amount of air time. As the son of a Bush prepares to slink off off the stage of history leaving blood, shit and ruins on all sides, one Iraqi journalist had the nerve to let him know what many in Iraq think of his nation building. If only our own press corps were so untamed by the adminstration's control of access. Though Mr. Zaidi will likely have his press pass withdrawn by someone in Maliki's tattered little government, there will surely be plenty of others to fill, er, um, ...his shoes. I entertain the thought that the gaggle of pet journalists we call the white house press corp could be a little less cowed by the fear of being excluded from press briefings and photo ops if they understood the esteem the rest of the nation would accord them for chancing a disinvitation in exchange for harder and more pointed questions. We have plenty of journalist who would like to be in the room when the president or the sec of state speak. And when we have run out of the present crop, there are pools of excellent talent in this country who could carry on the new tradition of true press freedom. How could it be worse than the softball our ~~best~~ most privileged journalists played with the white house as Plame was shafted?

Too bad we didn't have a good shoe chucker in 2003.

Screw the bankers

2008-12-14T08:32:00.006-05:00

There are plenty of ways to share the blame for the present poor state of the economy. In particular, I would say the MSM coverage, excluding the outlets owned by and patently inclined to paint the world as seen by uncle Rupert, has been able to sell more papers by making it sound as if the boards of directors and the vice presidents in charge of creatively disguising trashy debts as sound investments are exclusively the devils in this saga. And on my side of the blogosphere, we see plenty of counter arguments against the stupidity of conservatives who try to lay all harms at the feet of "socialist meddling" in bank regulation that required banks which took deposits in poorer neighborhoods to make loans in those same neighborhoods. I don't happen to think the conservatives are actually stupid on this particular topic but observe that their selfishness and willing alienation from have-not classes makes them function as if stupid.

In the middle of an excellent article he as just written for Vanity Fair, Niall Ferguson seems to reach a similar view: plenty of blame to share if blame is what makes you feel good:

This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part in this latest sorry example of what the Victorian journalist Charles Mackay described in his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

You see we have had social conservatives whose numbers were spread over several economic classes for a long time in this country. And for 30 years, the old voting patterns of poor vs rich were successfully breached by the Rovesque strategies of wedge issue politics around social issues. But I think that the fact that until some point in the late 70s or early 80s the middle class had been expanding and average wealth rising was the ironic enabler of the shift in voting patterns. The success of liberal views in raising the standard of living was to some extent then the cause of its own eventual failure at the polls: we never ceased to "vote our pocket books" but our pocket books seemed to be headed toward higher tax brackets. By an equally ironic turn, the last 30 years of "success" of this perverse conservative shift have so ruined our economy that the voting block of people whose dominant issue is a feeling of financial precariousness has expanded back toward the majority that it was in the first half of the 20th century. I say success because the Republicans DID control congress and the White house long enough to significantly expand the advantages of corporations and high income families. Perverse because in 30 years of legislation, [de]regulation and rhetoric ad nauseum about wasteful government spending, they managed to completely expunge that quaint notion that debt is a bad thing and bills should be paid on time from our our nations political dialog.

I mentioned blame. Except for the downward spirals of divisive politics, blame is not a useful tool. Note how seldom Obama named names and how often he spoke rather of hope, change and what to do to make things better. With the pathetic exception of the 2000 election, Americans damn well got what they voted for whether they understood that or not at the time they cast their ballots. Blaming a banker, or a debt rating agency, or a financially insecure first time home buyer who takes an oversized loan is beside the point. Assessing where we have systemic failures should be a first priority. Systemic failure would include shoddy neutered regulatory powers as we now, even Alan Greedspan, all seem to recognize. We should be concerned who knew what and when they knew it regarding the margins of debt and levels of risk and unsustainable or fragile leveraging of debt. Greed being the heart of all actors in this tragedy, our best defense against the kind of fiscal calamity in which we are all now stewing is transparency.

So, getting back to blame, who fights transparency? All of us like to hold our cards close to the vest but who mounts an organized and well funded war on transparency? We who go for a loan to buy a $22000 car get x-rayed for our credit history and lenders can go on line and learn details of our financial past we ourselves hardly remember. Can the nation's tax payers ask the same questions of those lenders who now want trillions of OUR tax dollars? Hell NO! No one less than Bloomberg has been trying to get a little transparency and they find:

Banks oppose any release of information because that might signal weakness and spur short-selling or a run by depositors, Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, a Washington trade group, said in an interview last month.

Kristol Knocked

2008-12-08T23:44:00.003-05:00

Everybody gets it wrong. I don't have high hopes for my country's future. We will probably wind up with a stimulus package that puts a boob job and face lift on an economic model that is more ready for taxidermy. The word "green" will no doubt get used liberally, its all the rage. Infrastructure expenditures at least might, for better or worse, still be facilitating the growth of commerce in our children's time. My misgivings, not to belabor the matter more in this outing, arise from my distrust of growth as an unquestioned economic holy cow. But there is a "stimulus" that will make the money just go away, doing at most nothing better than getting people killed as it goes to oblivion....growth will not be a side effect. I speak of the dumbest response to the stimulus idea and it comes from right where you would expect.

Near the end of his confused confession that, in effect, Republican administrations have expanded government spending [ though he neglects to mention that they did so by borrowing in our names, rather than honestly paying via taxes], the incredibly stupid alien named Mr William Kristol is inexplicably allowed to write the following diaper load in the New York Times:

Similarly, if you're against big government, you'll oppose a huge public works stimulus package. If you think some government action is inevitable, you might instead point out that the most unambiguous public good is national defense. You might then suggest spending a good chunk of the stimulus on national security directing dollars to much-needed and underfunded defense procurement rather than to fanciful green technologies, making sure funds are available for the needed expansion of the Army and Marines before rushing to create make-work civilian jobs. Obama wants to spend much of the stimulus on transportation infrastructure and schools. Fine, but lots of schools and airports seem to me to have been refurbished more recently and more generously than military bases I've visited.

The reader commentary gleefully flings Mr Kristol's poo back in his face

"Unambiguous good". Kristol, you are a disgusting paper peckered twit! Oh what a helpful expenditure the 750 billion already blown on military adventures in Iraq has been for us! Look how we prosper! By all means Mr. Kristol, lets pour more of this money we no longer have down this star spangled rat hole of yours. Even the generals who still have lunch with you for want of any other fan club must feel ashamed afterwards.

Oil: get over it.

2008-12-08T21:32:00.004-05:00

Sen. Dodd asking for the head of the chairman of GM misses the point and sounds personal in the process. Obama himself is the only quoted official who has said anything remotely sane about bailing out the auto industry but it remains to be seen if he is setting the tone for this Bailout.

President-elect Barack Obama, whose transition team has been involved in the talks, made starkly clear in an interview and at a brief news conference on Sunday that any aid to the Big Three auto companies should not come without significant concessions.

"They're going to have to restructure," Mr. Obama said in an interview on "Meet the Press" on NBC. "And all their stakeholders are going to have restructure. Labor, management, shareholders, creditors — everybody is going to recognize that they have — they do not have a sustainable business model right now, and if they expect taxpayers to help in that adjustment process, then they can't keep on putting off the kinds of changes that they, frankly, should have made 20 or 30 years ago."

So we are going to bail out the dinosaurs who lobbied successfully for a "truck" loophole in fleet mileage standards after OPEC gave notice in 73 that oil prices were theirs to set. This industry, for salvation of which labor and shareholders and management alike beg my tax dollars, is the same one that foisted off the SUV on the fatuous American car market and had us all driving "trucks" through their loophole. Mr. Frank, an intelligent representative whom I trust to be well informed about the likely financial consequences of inaction, is nonetheless being stampeded by the dire prospect of double digit joblessness. Pray, do not join us in our financial neurosis, Barney! I would advise Congressman Frank to stand back and let this 8-cylinder, 5 MPG industry be hung, albatross-fashion, around the neck of the departing turd who will soon trudge back to Texas.

We once made great bicycles and were only the more healthy for doing so. But we did not bail out the bicycle companies that faced bankruptcy. [do read that link. It is a short review of a great cautionary tale of how to ruin an industry leader...we better learn its lessons quickly] The companies we are now being asked to give billions to rescue have been merely larger scale examples of the mismanagement and missed markets that sank Schwinn.

Surely we could pick a better industry to save than the one that has lobbied to keep us up to our chins in debt and Saudi oil with only smoke to breath. We should be a bit more grown up. We should face the fact that change is painful and our fortunes have shrunken...NOW is the time to bite such bullets and tighten such belts as are needed to turn us toward a greener and more sustainable economy. If money we will be long repaying must be spent, NOW is the time for us to invest it in things that wean us from our 20th century fuelishness and fondness for fattened asses.

David Brooks misrepresents Obama's stance on salvaging our junkie domestic car industry but his questioning of why we won't let a failure go about its failing so as to make room for whatever creature will prove fitter than the paleocarbonmobile industry are questions we should answer. I would not be much moved by the dissolution of Detroit though my view of its demise as a benign effect comes from a quite different rationale than Mr. Brooks. We who live, live with the "what happened" of our history and the professors and authors live with the "why it happened". Let it happen. How often have you seen Krugman and Brooks in anything like a state of agreement? Do you realize the money sought by Automakers would suffice to retrain most of their workers for greener jobs?

e-petition your ______

2008-12-05T09:32:00.002-05:00

In the last week or two, my in-box increasingly bulges with the flurry of pleas to sign this petition or that. And I have gone along with many of these requests. I used to clean the personally identifying data out of the requests and post them at Daily Cause but its a lot of work. I can however point you to a very useful website I learned of via one of these pleas:

Midnight Regulation

The Bush administration is feverishly f__king the environment, old-growth forests, workers rights and a number of other causes for the benefit of its corporate sponsors. All this goes on while congress is distracted with the fallout of 8 years of financial mismanagement. Whatever rule changes the executive branch can, or at least thinks it can, make without congressional oversight, it is changing full speed ahead.

Go to that linked page to see regulation changes you may care to protest or which are still subject to public comment prior to their adoption. Bush is not dead yet.

Small change

2008-11-18T08:59:00.002-05:00

What is the use of keeping this conflicted nincompoop in power? I understand Obama wants to build a consensus administration but building bridges to the conservative base should be done with steel and concrete rather than balsa wood and pressed yak dung, in a manner of speaking.

Barak Obama, American Political holographic Rorschach

2008-11-11T08:58:00.004-05:00

Let me review for you how many ostensibly distinct constituencies lay claim on Obama as "their man" in one sense or another.

Some folks in Kenya...that is understandable but the politics of that country brought Obama's father here rather than that man bringing Kenya's politics, and we are grateful as we have quite enough political dysfunction of our own making, thank you very much.

Those tears you saw in Jesse Jackson's eyes Tuesday night in Chicago were one eloquent moment of video worth a thousand books that made me forgive TV its generally pandering to least common denominator viewer. There is a constituency, not precisely defined by their skin color, but by the tears they too had in their eyes at America finally living up to it's potential to do the right thing. This is a constituency to watch.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon must have been cleaning the trash or looking for websites where you can find the words of conservatives who have had their distemper shots. He points us to Murdoch's newest newswarper, the WSJ where Scott Rasmusson tells us that Obama got his votes because he had an appeal like Reagan's [NO SHIT, he actually writes:]

He offered voters an upbeat message, praised the nation as a land of opportunity, promised tax cuts to just about everyone, and overcame doubts about his experience with a strong performance in the presidential debates.
Does this sound familiar? It should. Mr. Obama followed the approach that worked for Ronald Reagan. His victory confirmed that voters still embrace the guiding beliefs of the Reagan era.

MoveOn members must have loved Obama. Though I never heard one of them call him a progressive, the hope he stirred was palpable at MoveOn GOTV efforts I attended. At least Obama is fashioning a way to have dialog with progressives...I doubt Bush distinguished MoveOn or other progressive interests from an unarmed communist insurgency he could afford to ignore.

One group I consider the most meaningful constituency to think Obama owes them anything is teh voters: 65,974,960 of them.

But somehow we lib'ruls were all fooled because actually Obama won as a conservative! [how do people get paid to say such crazy crap? I could be rich!]

The coastal highbrows and intellectual elites [all fighting words in our political vocabulary ] according to Kristof at NY Times, see Obama and sigh "landsman!"

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Personally, it is under that, more than my affiliation with liberal politics, that I fix hope and attachment on the president elect. My copy of Atlantic is NOT tucked inside some NASCAR magazine. Have I given myself away by assuming NASCAR fans know how to read?

Well, the list goes on, as you might expect when there is a new king and the old one needs his diapers changed. We do want change.

People voted for Obama out of hope, people voted for McCain out of fear and habit. The decades of wedge issue politics and synthesizing majorities via mastery of corporate media, such as Rove excelled at, have really made fear and habit synonymous in American voters. That era of politics has just failed a contest against a new era. Neither hope nor fear require being highly informed or even being rational.

I watch intently to see what really changes but I doubt much of what now seems wrong in our world will change if we ourselves do not change first.

UPDATE: Not likely the NY Times writers read my blog for ideas but nice to know we see the same patterns.

YES!

2008-11-09T08:53:00.002-05:00

Hell Yes! There are all kinds of reasons so many came together at the polling places to elect Obama but undoing the shitty decisions that the decider enacted unilaterally is one of the best reasons.

I suppose it would have been a bit over the top for Obama to have campaigned with the slogan "change you have been praying for" but it would have worked for me.

We have such a long, long way to go.

What most becomes a democracy

2008-11-09T07:32:00.002-05:00

In Senator Byrd's yielding the power of his role as head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in McCain's concession speech and in Al Gore deciding not to fight the questionable process by which he was done out of the presidency in 2000 there is a sweetly hopeful theme. While we do need regulation in finance and commerce to hold self serving in check and we need checks and balances in government to stave off the ego, the clique and the single interest cabals, those controls alone will not save us from ourselves. We also can be grateful for that quality of character that most becomes a member of a democracy: recognizing when his or her preferences have parted ways from what is best for the common good and letting that good prevail.

Over the years, I have pitched in small donations to help Byrd repel the vile political buffeting from Virginia's reactionaries and said an occasional good word here to point out the clear headed defense of our institutions that he had so often mounted. Though his fight is far from finished and his spirit is still in the fight, he knows when to quit.

By not just relinquishing but doing so with explicit consent, these people exemplify a value that wedge issue politics have bruised and obscured: these leaders are saying to us that they honor the process more than the person, the federation more than the faction. By this they cheer on and steady the toddling gait of our frailer-than-supposed constitutional democracy.

A country within a country and other election fallout

2008-11-06T20:59:00.008-05:00

Map of the new borders of No. Nigrastan

Brad Delong pointed to Matt Yglesias who pointed to a map the NY Times provided to illustrate where the events of the last 8 years caused an increase in Republican votes rather than the much more logical reverse. And as it was passed from link to link each writer made important observations about the meaning of such a map. Of course, it is not a pattern owing to the last 8 years or to the accomplishments of the Bush league but to the prospect of the alternative leadership that sprang up in response. I don't have to be worried about being fired from my writing job so let me spell out its significance in stark and few words: A large factor in McCain's loss is that N0. Nigrastan has shrunken. Palin may not know where Africa is and the benighted denizens of No. Nigrastan have voted their certainty that it could not produce the father of a man of presidential stature. When she comes back out of the woodwork in 2012, Palin should definitely run for president of this disgraceful and irrelevant new enclave.

Why would the Barbie Doll of necon fantasies go into the woodwork after such a bang up job on the Republican ticket? Nothing to wear. And those Republican lawyers were also looking for her integrity but they will just have to settle for the clothes.

I too thought this video was funny. After such a desperately needed victory, the wind naturally goes out of your sails a bit. My serious expectation is that MoveOn members will strive to be a conscience for the president Obama as much as they did to be supporters of candidate Obama. It does mean we will have less to do than under Bush.

There have been some good comments or perhaps self congratulating from quite a few bloggers that new media has made for a new kind of political campaign. I agree. It has gotten harder to make lies stick when anyone with google and a blog can rebut.

And lastly, some digs at a few of the pundits who write stuff I actually read.

Thom Friedman frequently says things I agree with and says them well:

And somewhere they also knew that after the abysmal performance of the Bush team, there had to be consequences for the Republican Party. Electing McCain now would have, in some way, meant rewarding incompetence. It would have made a mockery of accountability in government and unleashed a wave of cynicism in America that would have been deeply corrosive.

...

Bush & Co. did not believe that government could be an instrument of the common good. They neutered their cabinet secretaries and appointed hacks to big jobs. For them, pursuit of the common good was all about pursuit of individual self-interest.

My problem with Mr Friedman is when he says things. For a guy who purports to have his fingers on the pulse of our economic culture firmly enough to project its trends, I find it suspicious that he is only now saying things about the Bush League you could have read from Atrios, or Josh Marshall seven years ago. Turn around and watch where you are going Thom.

David Brooks is a different case. I give him good marks for consistency. He always says a few clued in things and then blunts his insight with some sort of conservative blinders that nothing will remove from in front of his vision. Today he claims to know the "meaning" of the election results and to know where the voters are coming from:

The administration of my dreams understands where the country is today. Its members know that, as Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center put it on “The NewsHour,” “This was an election where the middle asserted itself.” There was “no sign” of a “movement to the left.”

I fear he may have a reasonable fix on the center of gravity of the electorate's sentiments but in typical Brooks fashion, he proceeds to talk as if that is where they should be and bowing to their unenlightened views would be the right course. No, David, its not like that. We are so very fucked up because a 30 year reign of Republicans and a few Democrats thought they were governing as your essay dreams: a little to the right of the sacred cow of centrist appeasing. You are looking at a sacred cheeseburger right now. Your thinking grinds to a useless halt in a pit of vagueness when you approach the matter of how bad things really are right now:

Most of all, they’ll take significant action on the problems facing the country without causing a mass freak-out among voters to the right of Nancy Pelosi.

Significant action but not enough new ideas to ruffle any one's feathers? Yeah, right. In the Obama administration of MY dreams, an inspirational message some how finally soaks in for each of us to take more responsible portions of the cost of paying our debts, living and governing within our environmental and economic means and admitting our place in the world is peer, not master. It will ruffle quite a few feathers if our sense of worry, pain and neediness, which has been used to convince us we need not share more with our neighbors, is flipped and shown to have grown upon us precisely because of how routinely disconnected and selfish we have been with our neighbors.

A far better essay from Mr Brooks was his previous NY Times piece. He said hard words about the broken promise and political underachievement of the spoiled generation we call the baby boom...the Not So Great Generation as I call them. In keeping with his need to mar every good thought he has, Brooks emphasizes the wealth of Obama's backers and ignores how much of his record breaking campaign fund came from nobodies like yours truly. I share Brook's dismay at the frittering away of the spiritual capital with which my generation seemed to roar in the 60's but which eventually climbed into an SUV and drove off to a McMansion in the suburbs where it only voted its fears and stood only for its entitlement to ignorance and uninvolvement.

But much as I agree with Brooks' dire words about how ill prepared this nation is to finally start paying for its necessary services just at a time when we have burnt all our surpluses, I think he is utterly clueless about what a "liberal" response to scarcity entails.

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

They say heaven and hell are identical: Infinite banquet tables where endless rows of souls sit facing each other across a sumptuous spread of food. And in both heaven and hell, the people are manacled in an interesting way that locks their arms straight at the elbows. Every motion is possible except bringing their hands to their mouths. In hell the sullen rows of people complain and starve. In heaven, they simply spoon food into each other's mouths. The difference between plenty and scarcity is as much about our willingness to share as it is about the amount of our provisions.

YES WE DID!

2008-11-04T22:08:00.003-05:00

We have made history, now can we fix history?

We had a rough debate but its done. All sides were heard and we are still one country. If McCain had been half so gracious in campaigning as he was in defeat, defeat would not have been so complete.

There will be, more or less as expected, some new help for Obama in congress. The changing face of congress does have the complexion Krugman foresaw: moderate republicans replaced by democrats but pimpled with reprobates of red meat republicanism still there to sabotage what ever they can. I won't bother linking all the sober op-eds and analysis pieces about the mess Bush leaves Obama: the guy is going to need all the help he can get.

There are still places where progress can be repealed, however.

just do it. do it justice

2008-11-04T11:25:00.001-05:00

Election 2008 Voting Information

Today, November 4th, is Election Day! Remember to vote--not just for Barack Obama, but for Congressional, state and local candidates as well.

Where and when do I vote?

Find your polling place, voting times, and other important information by checking out these sites and the hotline below. These resources are good, but not perfect. To be doubly sure, you can also contact your local elections office.

Obama's VoteForChange site: voteforchange.com
League of Women Voters site: vote411.org/pollfinder.php
Obama's voter hotline: (877) US4-OBAMA (or 877-874-6226)

What should I do before I go?

After you've entered your address on either Vote For Change or Vote411, read the voting instructions and special rules for your state.
Voting ID laws vary from state to state, but if you have ID, bring it.
Check out all the voting myths and misinformation to look out for: http://truth.voteforchange.com/

What if something goes wrong?

Not on the voter list? Make sure you're at the right polling place, then demand a provisional ballot.
If you're voting on an electronic machine with a paper record, verify that the record is accurate.
Need legal help? Call 1-866-OUR-VOTE
Try to get video of the problem and submit it to VideoTheVote.org

Want to do more?

Text all of your friends: "Vote Obama today! Pass it on!"
Volunteer at your local Obama office. Find an office here or here.
Make calls from home for Obama.

Now everybody go vote!!!

Your Choice, America.

2008-11-01T13:40:00.002-04:00

There is nothing I could add to the rising din of news, no outrage at swift boating ads or voter suppression you have not already got coming at you from a torrent of sources. I can report that my MoveOn party to make calls into VA was a fun affair and we found a dozen volunteers among the hundreds of calls we made. I have had robots calling me to urge I vote for this or that republican...don't they have any people in their party? The calls I get for democrats are all from humans. I think there is a message in that.

I post this on the off chance that anyone who reads here before Tuesday is either complacent about an Obama win or actually still under the impression that McCain is more than a shell of the man he seemed to be in 2000. If this nation does not elect Obama, and if it does not do so in a broadly sweeping way that brings in a better congress then we will be lead by our fears and our selfishness. Obama will not save us but he will ask us to save ourselves. McCain will promise us security and give us richer corporations...just going down the path we have been on and which has brought us to a dark moment in our history. 2000 was a mistake, 2004 was a massive show of poor character and cowardice....maybe this is our last chance?

Please, Please do vote and do it for the kind of country you know YOU could restore to your heirs.

the news will be repeated until you get a fxxxking clue

2008-10-22T16:41:00.003-04:00

This AP report, which I found nowhere else but in Huffington Post underscores a point that was perfectly obvious to me before I researched the issue back in 2006. Bush and McBush desperately need fear and terror to consolidate their fascist grip on the mind of the nation. Al-Qaeda know this perfectly well. They are, via this news story, finally on record as admitting that they need a belligerent guns-beat-words leadership in America in order for their cruel and primitive view of Islam to sell well with the so called Arab street. It is a kind of deadly embrace of backward interests we cannot afford to support.

Neoconservative hawks, and other idiots who still support our counterproductive abortion in Iraq should face a few facts. Bush did not fight back in any useful way against the architects of the 9/11 attacks...he just helped them recruit so that they continue to gain ground in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

UPDATE: eventually WaPo and TPM picked up on this "endorsement". Good, the more the better. I'd like it if the facts that McBush campaign are trying to completely reverse by mere assertion and spin got wider exposure. That would make it more obvious that the credibility of the McBush campaign is in the toilet because they put it there. They are pathetic and I doubt they understand what credibility is all about or why their lack of it has only driven them to shred it further with desperate tactics.

Hey! Republicans,

2008-10-14T20:31:00.002-04:00

but then so did Milton Friedman!

2008-10-13T09:01:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to Paul Krugman, and a big grin for all us liberals and progressives who have been cheered by his opinions written up in the NY Times over the last few years: He has won the Nobel Prize in economics for his improvements to models and explanations of international trade.

One more example of how much worse the present administration is at financial leadership than most of its critics outside of government.

paranoia is optional

2008-10-12T22:17:00.004-04:00

In a conversation with a friend last week I heard something about a coup that Bush had pulled or was planning to pull...I happen to trust this person though the story seemed outlandish. So I looked into it.

At bottom, the news fact around which the speculation has crystallized is this vague mention of a deployment of active army brigade to train for a prospective domestic urban counter terror mission. The correction at the bottom of that article bears reading.

When Democracy Now wrote it up, they did not seem too alarmed nor did they read too much into the Army Times piece.

So is this post by Chicago Dyke at CorrenteWire a little over the top?

Not as crazy as she sounds. I thought bringing in the regulars just to have them standing around resting from their year or two of wasting Iraqis was bad enough. And it doesn't actually violate the third amendment. But, as one commenter to the Correntewire post points out, such deployment probably violates the Posse Commitatus law, which is nowadays interpreted as prohibiting the use of federal armed forces to do domestic peace keeping that is the domain of state authorities. That law has a weird history. But even if you don't opt for the conspiracy theory don't you just hate having a president who thinks the national guard is for deploying to discretionary wars in foreign countries and regular army brigades are for riot control? How screwed up is our government?

Yet another day of atonement.

2008-10-10T00:04:00.004-04:00

Duh economy

Well its getting pretty bad here folks. Not sure where to draw the line between buying opportunities and bear traps...$4 GM shares anyone?...the company's liabilities exceed its assets just now according to MarketWatch data. The amount that has evaporated out of retirement accounts in the last year is headed toward 10 trillion dollars: that is about $33000 for each person in the USA which would be enough to pay off the national debt. My consolation at having so shriveled a nest egg will have to be that I have lived to see a Republican administration complete the nationalization of the banking system, which actually began in the FDR administration's attempt to cure the depression's collapsed banks. That Republican administration swore its true belief in the gospel of free and unregulated markets.

I was raised in a home where Republican was the only choice and my dad cursed Democrats and FDR in particular...though I could never get a clear explanation of that stance. FDR-hatred must have been a common ailment among the reactionary patchwork of constituencies that neoconservatism pulled together for Reagan. The end result is that these assholes have made capitalism look like more of a failure than even I believe it to be. And yet, my sense of revenge is sweet.

In its effort to trace the roots of the rot that grips our markets, New York Times casts a critical eye on the wonk-hero of the economy for the previous decade: Alan Greenspan. Genteel enough to grace Time magazine covers 20 years ago and work amiably enough with a Clinton administration as well as a Bush Administration, he even had a grudging fan in Brad DeLong...until recently. But do not be fooled. The guy liked Ayan Rand's writing - a lot - so why do you think his policies would care about YOU? The Times and plenty of other sources cite deregulation of financial markets as the cause of present grief. That deregulation went on since Reagan Administration let the Savings and Loan industry crater while its magnates wined and dined John McCain and then got bailed out with your tax money. When congress was Newtered in the mid 90's systematic removal of oversight went on apace until 2004, when SEC basically said to the investment bankers "y'all can just police yourselves". I understood none of this as it was happening. But I had the queasiest discomfort at 2% prime interest rates making houses seem affordable to people who were in fact NOT getting raises under the bush administration ... which was simultaneously spending ever increasing levels of borrowed money itself. I could not understand why inflation was not worse [that may have been dampened by the shift to foreign labor that went on concurrently]. It just felt like Greenspan was faking a recovery....so I moved investments I control [much of my retirement money is managed and out of my hands] into cash. As of today, those investments are in tact and my tax-free municipals have made a tiny 3% a year since 2003. I admit I felt a bit foolish at first when the market continued up to 14000 but now I lick my chops and smile at all the bargains I can buy into!

Was/is the problem really deregulation? When asked if the complex derivitives contracts that imaginative bankers cooked up to hide the risk in bundles of bad housing loans had been a bad idea, Greenspan said no:

The problem is not that the contracts failed, he says. Rather, the people using them got greedy. A lack of integrity spawned the crisis, he argued

But if you ask me, Greenspan is actually conceding his error by blaming the problem on mere human nature, common old greed: that is EXACTLY why we ever institute regulation. Some check on human failings is vital where our lives and fortunes basically rest on our trust of one person or a small group of people.

But in the end, only a few of the greedy CEO's got what they had coming for not treating deregulation as both a gift to act freely and a burden to act responsibly with everyone else's money.

Desperation of the ignorant becomes a danger to the republic

With so much expert opinion now arrayed on Obama's side of the arguments about what government failures led us to this mess and what steps may rescue the economy, I don't blame the McCain campaign for trying to divert attention to other concerns. I hope McCain's deplorable decision to just go all out negative backfires and disgusts any undecided voters. To those who are paying any attention, the shift of tactics certainly makes a bald lie out of his claim that he would run a civil and respectful campaign.

Who are these rabid McCain supporters that Palin attracts? You might want to dismiss this very unpleasant kind of campaign and the ugly natures it appeals to as fringe politics and desperation on McCain's part. Don't. That was just the attitude of many when the German fascists began to draw crowds in the 30's. Don't go thinking Germans of that era were somehow a different kind of human than Americans of the 2000's...we are all just people and quite subject to fear and manipulation. Have you seen the footage from McCain rallies, that even MSM stations are playing, of extremely agitated ignoramuses venting anger at strawmen and completly misidentified policies and threats they label as Obama's? I predict, or at least hope, that in the not too distant future and for long thereafter, videos of McCain's performances at these rallies will become synonymous with the small minded and the fear-driven themes of American voting patterns...and understood to show empty conservative jingoism in its flop sweat moment of collapse. All of the forgetting that it takes for a nation to retread the worst impulses and mobs of political history may, I pray, be vanquished by YouTube.

The end game for the campaign is at hand. Edsell, insightful as ever, points to the choices Obama now faces. The quandry Edsell raises is, with victory nearly assured by Obama's margin in the polls, will a switch to more realistic speaches about the sacrifices our foxed up economy demands help set expectations or hurt his vote tally?

My cheery disposition deteriorates along with the economy

2008-10-06T10:23:00.003-04:00

A shit-for-brains such as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reily, Sara Palin or Dick Cheney might read things I have said in this blog and try to raise questions about my patriotism. Well, I sure as hell do criticize many of the actions and expenditures made or avoided by the current administration and some of its predecessors and I try to get at the attitudes that enabled such incompetent and damaging government: the predominant jingoism and war lust we use to blind ourselves to economic common sense. But I just came across a prospect that hurts and angers me and leaves a raw bruise on the particular mix of identities and allegiances that make up my patriotism: America has been so financially weakened by its "we can just spend like mad, cut taxes and borrow" leadership that international commerce has become as indispensable for us as it was for other struggling nations. And what strikes an especially sore nerve in me is that we are no longer going to do business by merely selling stuff we make: we are going to have to sell off parts of the farm, as it were, in order to keep our house. Thom Friedman points to our empire's setting sun:

I would also bet that more and more of the foreign investors who come our way are going to want to buy hard, tangible assets skyscrapers, real estate and real companies not just mutual funds, T-bills, bank stocks or other equities. No problem. Americans own assets all over the world; foreigners have long owned substantial positions in U.S. companies. That’s globalization and now you are going to see globalization and financial integration on steroids. It should help us, but also change us.

The next round of capital that comes in from abroad is going to be much more demanding and move into real assets, argued Jeffrey Garten, professor of trade and finance at the Yale School of Management. Being a bigger debtor nation means losing even more of our sovereignty. It means conducting our economic policies with an eye toward whether others approve. It means bearing the advice and criticism that we have dispensed ad nauseam to other countries for over half a century. It means far more intensive consultations with other capitals on our fiscal policies and our monetary policies.

God Damn every last politician and voter who has gone along thinking they would never have to pay for anything. You have gotten and are getting what you deserve but why did you drag the rest of us down? What future do my children have? What do I have to show for my years of forgone luxuries and toys passed up in order to pay off all my debts? I would have been looked upon as an anachronistic economic puritan a few years ago. The dollars I saved have been cut in half by the those of you who supported Bush. God damn you. I never understood grasshoppers could do that to ants.

The next American president will not deal with the world from a position of strength because we have wasted our strength.

How long have we been fooling ourselves? What kind of leaders have kept shafting the next generation of tax payers and getting into office by telling this generation's voters they shouldn't have to pay? Here is part of the story you really need to read.

Present Tense

2008-10-05T20:39:00.002-04:00

and getting more tense.

OK, fine, Palin got through her debut debate with Joe Biden without saying anything grossly stupid though without actually answering 80% of the questions. The polls tell us her performance compared to Biden's left a strong majority of viewers better impressed with Biden's ability and readiness to be VP or, god forbid, President.

So now she is out on the trail, saying things she thinks will staunch the desertions from McCain's base. The crap she lets out of her mouth is about the most vile distortion you could imagine without resorting to completely fabricated "facts". Actually, since she speaks of Obama's meeting with a 60's radical in the present tense, she is fabricating. Her words:

"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,"

That audience in Colorado should be insulted but you know Republicans. Mind you, the source linked here is the Associated Press, a news organization with an ill-disguised preference for the success of the right wing politics of the Republican party...as you will see elsewhere in the article. Whoever took off Palin's muzzle may eventually feel her bite. They can send her to cheer up the Republican donors but they better start closing those meetings to the press.

Kudos to Thomas Friedman

2008-10-01T21:54:00.004-04:00

My elitism will be in evidence here...

That is not a sarcastic title. Mr. Friedman does not always get things right in my view but I have to commend him on this Op-Ed piece. In a valiant stab at public service, he tries to explain in terms even a Republican could understand just exactly why so many people think there is a problem:

This is a credit crisis. It’s all about confidence. What you can’t see is how bank A will no longer lend to good company B or mortgage company C. Because no one is sure the other guy’s assets and collateral are worth anything, which is why the government needs to come in and put a floor under them. Otherwise, the system will be choked of credit, like a body being choked of oxygen and turning blue.
Well, you say, “I don’t own any stocks — let those greedy monsters on Wall Street suffer.” You may not own any stocks, but your pension fund owned some Lehman Brothers commercial paper and your regional bank held subprime mortgage bonds, which is why you were able refinance your house two years ago. And your local airport was insured by A.I.G., and your local municipality sold municipal bonds on Wall Street to finance your street’s new sewer system, and your local car company depended on the credit markets to finance your auto loan — and now that the credit market has dried up, Wachovia bank went bust and your neighbor lost her secretarial job there.

And I particularly enjoy Friedman's turn of phrase, blunt as a 2X4 up side the head:

I’ve always believed that America’s government was a unique political system — one designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots. I was wrong. No system can be smart enough to survive this level of incompetence and recklessness by the people charged to run it.
This is dangerous. We have House members, many of whom I suspect can’t balance their own checkbooks, rejecting a complex rescue package because some voters, whom I fear also don’t understand, swamped them with phone calls. I appreciate the popular anger against Wall Street, but you can’t deal with this crisis this way.

David Leonhardt, a NY Times reporter on finance, gives a more thorough if less ringing lesson on the nature of the problem. That confidence as much as palpable cash is at the heart of the matter became apparent to me last week, Friedman has said it in just so many words and it is looking at us from between the lines of Leonhardt's article:

As a young academic economist in the 1980s, Mr. Bernanke largely developed the theory that the loan officers’ lost knowledge was a crucial cause of the Depression. He referred to this lost knowledge as “informational capital.” In plain English, it means that trust vanished from the banking sector.

I must repeat this question until somewhere I hear the right answer, on many lips: If it was so well understood that trust and faith that deposits were safe is what really makes the world go around, why for goodness sake, would the government eject the minimum regulation needed to maintain that trust? "Greed is good" never impressed me as the lone and sufficient maxim to rule the management of trillions of other people's dollars. But that is all Gramm, Donaldson, Bush or any other Neoconservative has given us.

So, there we have it. All the right things have been said and written...often...and not just in the last week. Will any of that soak in?

The problem here is that I am reading this Op-Ed and you may have, but the constituents of the congress critters [left and right populist wings] who knocked over the hard fought improvements over Paulson's original ransom note...they are not reading. Are those the congress critters that have gained congress a 15% approval rating this afternoon, or is it the ones who voted for the so called bailout. After FCC deregulation and the '76 ruling that money can talk, tox radio and Reagan's cheer leaders have managed to make education synonymous with "elite", any recitation of degrees or non-business accomplishments synonymous with "elite", "intelligent" synonymous with "elite" and finally, "elite" so dirty a word [despite the fabulous financial power of those who have crafted this shift] you can affix to any enemy of conservatism. Obama may break that spell...I fevently hope so. They try to make wealth a mark of elitism but it has backfired at last in the case of McCain. I think it is time that the standard for expert and professional services this country desperately needs be faced up to: we cannot have another administration that bypasses the best candidates for appointment to regulatory jobs based solely on a few litmus test questions or Old Boy connections. It is not likely the protofascist constituency will quickly mend its ways. Still, I hope that a sound drubbing and the spread of actual financial pain to the stiff necked rabble that simply have not learned where their bread is buttered may reduce that constituency, may make a few percent more realize they should have been reading at places like the NY Times and disabuse them of the false comfort of their jingoism in favor of a broader attention to real news. The best elites, of course, are not exactly what the name, or the connotation of class distinction it has been laden with, imply but a wish to do better rather than to be better that has come true by some effort and which invites others to follow and to join.

The rapidity with which poverty trickles down, as compared to the tax gifts to billionaires most of which never trickled down, is stunning. Speaking with Barney Frank this evening, Anderson Cooper asked whether the bailout might pass the house on the second try. Frank answered by saying that reality had bitten share holders, in their retirement accounts almost instantly on Monday and that reality might soak through the skulls of the hold-out republicans who had seen the tax consequences as real and dismissed the economic connectedness we all suffer and occasionally benefit from. CNN reported in that same segment that in a week's time the 55+ demographic, one eye on their shriking 401K acccounts, moved from net approval of McCain to the utterly unlikely stance of favoring Obama slightly...that demographic has never moved for any reason but percieved security. The "socialism" against which the Republican purists were holding out is the security play at the moment, and more comfortable territory for Democrats.

BTW, liveblogginly speaking, Bill Clinton is on CSPAN, stumping for Obama before a crowd in FL and man, are they loving that. He has great delivery and I am pleased at the points he is making.

The R-word has been sighted in the MSM.

2008-10-01T09:54:00.006-04:00

[or, "how to make yourself feel like a financial expert by merely reading"]

``The cards are on the table and a recession is coming,'' Henry Herrmann, chief executive officer of Waddell & Reed Financial Inc. in Overland Park, Kansas, which manages $70 billion, told Bloomberg Television. ``Our focus is going to be on things like dividend yields, solid brand names, consumer staples, less cyclical exposure and those sorts of things. Broadly speaking, earnings estimates are coming down.''

The dreaded R word that Greenspan and all Bush Administration econotoadies bent numerous rules to avoid pronouncing, has not be put off for long, just made more severe.

And Herrmann better not bet his farm on the consumer staples either. It isn't just the deteriorating world of high financiers that is a statistic in support of declaring a recession: the republican party's favorite trickle down theories, the faith that their megarich corporate sponsors would drip dollars into blue collar pockets, work in practice far more swiftly and efficiently when it is absence rather than excess of money to be distributed:

Consumer spending held flat in August as high prices and lower earnings pinched U.S. households and put the economy in line for the first quarterly drop in consumer spending since the 1990-1991 recession.

The Commerce Department said August consumer spending held steady after dropping 0.5% in July. "Consumers are pulling back really across the board," said Bank of America economist Peter Kretzmer, who expects spending to decline at a 2.2% annual pace for the July through September period, following a 1.2% gain in the second quarter.

And consumer spending for the quarter as measured in the reported Commerce Department stats is an overstatement of the economic health: after correcting the dollars spent for the inflation that has taken place in that time period, we actually bought less stuff, not a steady level of stuff. Being 70% of the nation's economic activity, a decline in consumer spending pretty much makes a recession all by itself. When that last happened, in 1991, what did we do the the bush in the white house then? Eh? [The more damning question about us voters is why did we then plant another bush in the white house?]

Will I gloat over bad news like this when Obama is in office? It seems unlikely I will get the chance. We have let the Bush administration screw things up so thoroughly for so long that Obama, if he can merely arrest our downward spiral, would actually be a hero...there is nowhere to go but up.

I hope.

That this low ebb of American economic power is the bottom is not entirely certain but I am a far more optimistic person by nature than evolution usually tolerates. So let me make my prediction that things will worsen in the economy only a little while longer, perhaps until next February...and then level off and begin a slow, hardworking but upward progress...if you and I, fellow citizen, are willing to do the work.

Why not make a prediction? I have been bitching about the neocon economy since at least 2006. I started bookmarking posts by economists around the time of the '06 election because I found my own opinions uninformed on economics. I was drafting but not publishing posts by Nov '07 because plenty of smart people had already been painting a picture of fiscal malaise seeping, despite officials in denial, into most quarters of commerce. I had no trouble foreseeing at the end of last year, in general terms, that Bush and Wall Street would trash our economy by the middle of this year...All I had to do was read the right columnists on the economy. And after all, voters have been worrying about the economy more and sooner than the politicians they elected. But let me hedge a bit: "upward progress" will never return us to the unsustainable excesses of consumption by which consumers helped wreck our economy...our wealth ultimately deriving from an over taxed nature, our life style will hence forth need to be a bit more modest.

The Bailout has a Blowout

2008-09-29T15:25:00.003-04:00

For a week or so, we have heard Paulson and Bernanke blasting air raid sirens to announce what sober economists of both liberal and conservative stripe have been telling us for a year: the financial infrastructure of our nation, and given our size, that of the world to a lesser extent, is being sailed into the rocks by captains of our financial industry in their heedless pursuit of short term profit. And lately SEC chairman Cox admitted maybe he should not have let those captains off the regulatory leash. OK, we little people had our own ways of knowing that already...the economy is busted. Did we bust it? Consumers beside yours truly certainly did their share of the borrowing. I intend by that graphic to illustrate that not just "wealthy people" but about half of America's work force have seen their paper wealth mushroom and then evaporate. And many of the little players can't get out from under a bad investment that is locked up in a retirement plan...unless they swallow the penalties. Given how things are going, that option may not be so dumb after all. One of my 401K's is in Wachovia...its too late for me to crack open that rotten nest egg.

It is supposedly so busted that there isn't time to sort out exactly where the money went and get it all back from whoever took it. But I think we have now seen that something equally important has been broken. And that something is important because it provides the wherewithal to solve the big problems like war mongering enemies and harmful shifts in natural resources and business climate: it is the workings of our democracy. The level of trust in our government has been so damaged by the last 7 years that the administration can neither lead nor command its own political party. How screwed is that? And as Forbes' Joshua Zumbrun and Brian Wingfield write Now What? The Democrats demanded taxpayer equity and assurances in the bill and then reluctantly got behind it. The presidential candidates at least tepidly said they would support it. The preznit has addressed congress and country saying we need to act soon. ....but his own party will not play with him on this one. Could that lost confidence in government and respectful check and balance of congressional interests and administration be resurrected? More likely in an Obama adminstration.

Either those who have belatedly sounded the sirens are wrong and we won't have a collapse, or they have some idea, not understood by the House Republican caucus, that in fact the monetary equivalent of a large hole in a space ship is about to rapidly depressurize the capital flow and credit machinery on which we allegedly depend. Don't ask me which is more correct! The thing is, people with money being almost the same a humans, when there is uncertainty and a threat or rumor of danger, it is their nature to hide the goodies for safe keeping. Banks, bankers have shown us, are NOT safe places to keep money. Much of what is screwed about our economy is the dirty little secret of how it depends on psychology more than on math.

Is your bicycle in good repair? Have you laid in enough root vegetables and canned goods for a long spell? Is your heating oil tank filled up for the season?

the "Who won the debate" debate

2008-09-28T13:53:00.003-04:00

Every web outlet for political news that I had time to scan is replete with the attempts of the entire punditocracy to tell the rest of us who did better in Friday's almost-cancelled debate. I found NY Times and Politico.Com's "Arena" most useful but look where you will, the interwebs are awash with the fluff.

If you ask me, it was the very unpresidential brinksmanship or just dumb vascillation on McCain's part...but whatever the cause, the rest of us certainly have an answer for the pundits: Point to Obama. How do ya like them apples?

A quick roundup of this afternoons news:

2008-09-25T16:00:00.005-04:00

I listen to the news, I have violent reactions...its just been one of those weeks. Today's crop:

--- what seems to be the problem? ---

After listening to NPR try to explain exactly what IS the problem Bernanke and Paulson want us to be in a panic over....I paraphrase but lets see if I got it at all right:
All liquidity was based on confidence of repayment, not actual deposits. And not just for a few mortgage issuers but the entire system. So, its supposedly not the beach-house-in-the-Hamptons, $20 million severance package, Armani clad class from wall street we are saving, or their firms but rather the quantity of cash in the money pool that can be lent/spent to found, expand or just run businesses. In plainer English, we are to swallow the claim that to save our own jobs, we have to save the CEOs and CFOs and the bundlers of moldy mortgages.
I have to ask: if that is how fragile the US financial machinery really is, why on earth did the Bush money mavens leave it so exposed to default? Why did they administer what is in a sense a confidence game in a way that made it so easy for a little greed to undermine a lot of confidence? I read commentary saying Paulsen is no where near as dumb as his boss...but that ain't saying much.

--- republicanism going down in frames ---

Where is Rove when they need him the most? Lakoff pointed, for years, to the way the neoconservatives always got the drop on their opponents, the middle class, by staking out the high ground in the framing of issues in the early rounds. Boy has framing discipline gone to hell in the Bush league! The mess in the markets and the dire measures Paulson and Bernanke offer to clean it up are almost universally referred to in the news stories I hear as some variation of a discussion about how taxpayers are going to bail out billionaires and brokers on wall street...it doesn't matter what answer you come up with if that is the question! McSame can't put enough distance between himself and Bush Buck Bailout Boys if this is the setup. [not saying it shouldn't be the setup, just noting how the chickens have come home to roost for republicans]

--- if he were executive material, he'd have executive class excuses ---

And speaking of McCain's inability to distance himself from Washington, why, at 3pm on Thursday is his campaign saying the debate is still on hold until there is a bailout deal [as if captain crash had anything to do with that!] when as of Wednesday afternoon, Barney Frank...who is calling the shots more than McCain, said the compromises overturning the worst of the P&B bailout's anti-middle class and pro-corporation giveaways were nearly complete? Implicit in that timing is a serious question about McCain's ability to process information or his sincerity in the excuse he gives for postponing the debate: How come mere me out here in the internet boonies knew yesterday the deal would be done and McCain, a senator and presidential candidate with oodles of staffers is STILL claiming he isn't really sure if there is a deal.
What does McCain know that I don't know? He knows the Republicans are going to, or at least he is going to scuttle the agreement...why should Barney Frank get any credit?

--- if not a manufactured crisis, one harvested when ripe ---

I want to point to a modest little post in a diary over at Agonist because it puts facts to a suspicion I find obvious and disturbing: Paulson, Bush and Bernanke have given congress an ultimatum and said there was no time to ponder and yet, they have been drafting their ransom note for months! This makes the power grab accusations more plausible. hat tip to Agonist diarist LeePenn

--- so who ARE the 43% that polls claim favor Capt. Crash ---

People who didn't like Bush, don't like McCain. That should leave McCain at the 30% level. And they think the only way McCain can say something about the economy [or health care or social security, for that matter] that will gain him some favor among voters is to imitate Bush's positions on those issues. But he is imitating Obama's slogans. If Obama can't get a copyright on the words "Change" or "Hope", McCain can certainly dilute their political worth by appropriation and misuse. On the other side of the spectrum McCain has not been able to nail down the votes of racist and religious bigots among America's peasantry or the "no regulation" fundamentalists among America's most greedy Republicans. The unappealing history of his varying positions on abortion/choice are only partly repaired by his choice of bare-knuckles Palin. His moment in the sunshine for having once tried to legislate the lobbyists out of their powerful and often corrupt jobs long since completely eclipsed by his well publicized embrace of lobbyists as advisers and campaign managers, there is nothing left of his record: at 14% behind on polls asking about economic competence, he is regarded at home and abroad as a nincompoop on the economy.

What is left? What has he done repeatedly in his career with some form of success? He's crashed airplanes and lived to tell about it is all I can find. That is why I call him Capt. Crash. Keep him away from the capital lest some horrendous accident might allow him to act out his delusions of being able to pilot our nation.

The last person I want to see in Washington at this time

2008-09-24T21:52:00.002-04:00

...is John McCain. We already have more economic stupidity than we can handle.

He has not been on the Senate Finance Committee. He is not now a member of that committee. His colleagues do not accord him a position indicating their trust of his expertise in economics. Why then does he claim his particular services are so desperately needed to solve the financial crisis that he can blow off a debate that until quite recently he was demanding? The posturing old fart has been clumsily trying to sow doubts about whether Obama is ready to lead and yet, McCain signals loud and clear he is not even ready to debate. As Josh Marshall and a few other veterans of unblinkered commentary point out, all McCain can add to the proceedings is politicizing at a moment when political polarizing would be most damaging.

The guru of deregulation of the financial markets, a man often cited as a key architect of the financial environment in which commodity speculators can double the price of oil in a year or top-10 investment banks can basically write their own rules about how secure their "securities" need to be...is Phil Gramm. Gramm is the architect of legislation that has enabled the explosion of government debt since the Reagan administration. This is the man that John McCain relies on for explanations and advice on all matters economic. And McCain's campaign refuse to deny that Gramm would be appointed Secretary of the Treasury if McCain should win the election. Now is that the kind of proven incompetence we need meddling with this supposedly dire crisis? Wasn't this guy saying the fundamentals of the economy were sound just two or three weeks ago? Has he got a f__king clue?

You want clues? What source do you trust for opinions about financial probity and acumen?
The Wall Street Journal says that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street."... [and that is George Will quoting WSJ...who are McCain's friends if these are his detractors?]
Every writer the Asia Times cares to publish regarding US finances sees no value in the programs McCain flips back and forth on but Muhammad Cohen is particularly blunt in saying so. Askari and Krichene think Paulson and Bernanke overstate the trouble in the credit supply. Martin Hutchinson gives a history lesson showing the long term confidence erosion that accreted from short term bailouts...and warns us beware of "financially illiterate" presidents. Hutchinson has been keeping track of all the bailouts: Bernanke is 0 for 5 at this point. Kevin Phillips, the very valuable apostate Republican now churning out book after debunking book about Republican embraces of errant politics, has an even longer list than Hutchinson. In the International Herald Tribune, Sorkin provides a thorough and informative criticism of Paulson's wildly deficient plan.

Robert Reich on the other hand shows how Paulson and Bernanke have understated the problem by omitting other bad debt on the banks books that will get its turn to swell as foreclosures have: they are low-balling us.

Which deregulation did the damage? What institutions should come firmly under control and scrutiny of the government and tax payers who are asked to make up for their shoddy version of due diligence in lending? Here is a clue from Time writer Justin Fox that its not the "usual suspects" whose names now stream across across the bottom of your CNN news shows. I found the Fox article linked by Brad DeLong who backs the article with an interesting chart showing just who poured bad loans into the magic washing machine of derivative debt instruments and when.

As you can see, there is much to know, lots to learn before one could claim any useful expertise: I was looking forward to the debate as a way to hear what cogent solution McCain has and how he can make clear to voters what that crowd of published experts have not...I have not linked even 1% of the news and opinion on the emergency that Mr Bernake and Mr Paulson just discovered. Since the functional members of congress have by now largely completed the negotiations and since his colleagues don't rank him a great resource in their work on the economy wouldn't it have been smarter for McCain to use the pulpit he already had waiting in tomorrow's scheduled debate? From there, he could lay out his impressive and persuasive and powerfully informed and reasoned plans...that would surely persuade voters to call their representatives and demand the "McCain plan".

Let me put aside my sarcasm and just wonder: what will the world think of us if we elect this disaster of a man to run our country?

I come out of hibernation and what do I find?!

2008-09-19T21:56:00.004-04:00

My savings going up in smoke and the new candidate for the arsonist party only 2% behind in the polls. NY Times, for one, mentions that we who have been saving the last 30 or 40 years for our retirement just took a hit many will not recover from.

There are a thousand things to say about the administration's attempt to use the massive screw-ups of our unregulated financial giants as a cover for taking the last bits of power from congress and the last bits of taxpayer money in the treasury and just giving it to Mr Paulson's former colleagues on Wall Street. Fortunately, these things are being said. At TPM, HuffPo, TruthOut, Brad DeLong and Agonist you will find a flood of facts and contempt for what the administration is trying to do. TPM and Agonist have nice juicy dirt on McCain's connection to the beneficiaries of the proposed bailout via his lobbyists/advisers Carly Fiorina, Phil Gramm and Rick Davis.

So why am I writing? I have soured on politics...it is the sport and distraction of people who have problems they can't ignore but don't understand and who do not wish to deal in person with the shiftless dehumanized bums they hold responsible. Seriously, just do one thing: do not let that senile sell-out, John McCain nor his Bush-in-a-skirt ratings buoy get in to office. Those idiots will plunge us into a dark age and a depression faster than I can get safely to a place off the grid, with low taxes and a climate that would let me feed myself.

I fear this bailout will be no longer lived, in its good effects, than the previous gyrations and heroics with which the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have papered over the stock market's tumbles three times in the last 16 months. How long do you think this nation could go on ignoring all the laws of common sense economics, spending a trillion on useless wars, cutting taxes, letting jobs go off shore with no plan to re-educate the bereft workers and removing all obstacles to head long consumer spending and balance of trade hemorrhaging? How long? You can also ignore the laws of gravity until the moment of impact with the ground. Borrowing to prop up all those losing activities will naturally come to an end. Just as Reagan smirked in 1989 that communism was dead, I suspect Hu Jintao and Putin now smirk that capitalism as Americans do it, is in equally poor health.

It really and deeply hurts me that this country has been so weakened, I can not find an article in any of my reading that overstates how stupid and treacherous the Republicans have been. Even Larisa Alexandrovna seems too restrained.

I have read just one too many of these dooms day scenarios by "America-hating" liberals. I have seen too many of their predictions unfold like clockwork ticking.
Steve Fraser, writing the day before the administration's finance managers, Bernanke and Paulson called their desperate huddle on capitol hill, gave a pretty good summary of how bad things were, how drastic the solutions must be and a gentle reminder that this train wreck of ruined credit vehicles at all levels of the economy was not an accident. It is the largely predictable consequence of dismantling regulation of markets that has gone on throughout Democratic but mostly Republican administrations over the last 30 years. The line in Dubya's speech last night in which he claimed our problems were due to old regulations written for different times is a lie...his party tore up the regulations. There are many things that are meant by regulation but the rules and enforcements that would double check greed-colored decisions that risk other people's money should not be weakened until a species of human can be found that does not sucome to greed. I repeat: Democrats and Republicans have had a hand in weakening such rules and we ought to ask why they did so. I think Fraser's article also points in a good direction for solutions. Rather than these fits of spilled tax monies and deferred debt that suspend consequences for the risk taking of a coterie of bankers and deal makers who amass vast empires of paper wealth, we need to subsidize the creation of education, productive capacity and infrastructure, as the Chinese have been doing like mad for a decade, . You might give Mr. Fraser's remarks a little attention, if not for their appearance in TruthOut, then for their having also been picked up by the generally perceptive editors of Asia Times. Did y'all read Stirling's essay on "penultimate crises"? Are we there yet?

My blogging ceased recently. I found all I was doing was passing on the complaints you have already heard from sources closer to the fray. My excuses for writing have been the general relief of venting my anger at our subjugation by smug, selfish, ignorant and privileged fools, or the claim that every voice counts for something if it adds to the din of outraged hue and cry. But other than my feeble involvement with MoveOn, what have I done to change things? Not much. In my blog as a partisan in the war for sustainability, I have perhaps a more activist, or perhaps more accurately a PASSIVIST, approach to things. I expose myself to chastisement for abandoning a fight that I consider lost. I really don't think Americans, nor Chinese for that matter, in their governments nor in the minute daily struggles and decisions of citizens and consumers, give a damn for whether their strivings amount to a stable long term program for human life on earth. These economic dramas by which we seem to be caught up and swept along, are symptoms of an even bigger collapse that our nearly universal quest for a bigger share of nature's pie has doomed us to suffer.

I am contemplating what I suspect most readers would confuse with the programs of survivalists and the anti-government paranoids. I wont have a rack of guns and boxes of ammunition in a bunker but I do actually consider it likely that most of us will at some point in the next two generations, be forced to fend for our selves personally to gain food and warmth when they are no longer obtainable by the ordinary economy. Corporate greed may be accelerating the ruin and necessitating the occasional revamping of the macroeconomic machinery but the personal appetites, innate or induced by ad culture, on which that machinery has fed is equally to blame and more to blame for the irresponsible way we outstrip the mineral and biosphere capacities to support our life style ambitions.

I am planning a retreat from all this. I am lucky enough to be able to buy arable land at a time when the housing debacle in the US has put a few such acres on the market at a discount. I plan to work at jobs for pay or to otherwise participate in the emerging nationalized-finance economy as little as possible. We have finally heard sensible complaints from pundits who should have said long ago that the wholesale abandonment of fiscal conservatism by the republicans and the suspension of critical economic thought by the electorate are burying us and generations of our children with debt. If I make no money, I cannot be taxed to pay that debt. Take the repayment from the accounts of the chairmen and CEO's of Wall street, please. I will have beans and squash to plant and strawberries and peaches to can. I wonder though, if many take up my strategy, how long before the US income tax would be augmented by a national real estate tax or a "small farm" tax. Would our reduction to serfs in a subsistence agriculture economy be so very different from the present state of the late and unlamented middle class? Only the size of the paycheck and the demands on the earth's resources would shrink. Too many of the little people, the wage earners and workers, their vision diverted by hope that they too will participate in Dubya's mythical "ownership society" have seen that to pursue that participation via debt makes for a "foreclosure society". We are there now. Even before that was visible, it was clear that these workers were being saddled with deferred national debt spent on useless wars and bankers who had ceased to worry about risk. I refuse to carry these fat bankers on my back, no matter how diffuse and indirect the means by which I am hitched to their mistakes.

The day after I drafted this post, I found one Jo Fish at FDL had an inkling of the revolt that attracts me. Larisa is not the revolutionary at all.

I claim to have been a model citizen: If a democracy is a government that derives its legitimacy and its policy directions by consulting all its citizens, then it is an absolute necessity that those citizens actively engage in being broadly informed and recognize their individual obligation to bear the costs of the commons. Biden is right that it is patriotic to pay your taxes. I would go so far as to say it is idiotic not to. It is perverse that one of our nation's last great public investments in those commons, the Internet, had the potential for each of us to finally be constantly and broadly informed but instead our natures lent us the Internet as a means to form balkanized virtual enclaves. Our awareness of the plural nature of our society and the interdependence of its parts has changed to estrangement and an arms length perception of faceless competitors in our midst. We now have a country where the recognition of our obligations is atrophied. When I first began earning a good paycheck as a 20-something engineer, I did resent the chunk taken by the state and the federal government. In the 35 years since my career began, the household income here at Greensmile Acres has grown to 97th percentile and our tax bill is now 50% larger than the median yearly income in the US yet I have grown grateful that I can carry my share of the weight. I should be a Republican but I am not and I only resent the taxes pissed away on warfare and the useless leeches in the Defense and Energy and Fatherland Security departments. What madness is it that permits a man to see himself as a would be savior while lining his pockets with public monies for which greater needs are in plain sight? Our family has saved more and consumed far less than is typical even in our income bracket. We have lived 35 years with a modestly escalating and, we thought, absolutely sound prosperity resting on good paychecks and a value for prudent saving. Our story differs from Sean-Paul's. And that difference may only tell a story of one generation and its successor in this country. We have had money for our children's education. Our checks to the IRS do not mean we will have to do without. Retirement, if we ever wanted it, should have been a fat chest of goodies we were positioning at the end of our working years. We have had no debt for over a decade. But now the rotten condition in which Republican policies have left that chest, and the way the majority of voters in this country have supported, ignored or acquiesced to those policies despite being hurt by them all darken my view of life in this country. Of what have I been a model citizen? Will the feeble mined elders who have clung in their insecurity to the protofascist pitches of Rove and of Bush turn to cling the more fervently to McCain now that their fears and harms have been aggravated by a deeper plunge into financial insecurity? I want no part of such a nation yet I have no choice.

"In the long run" is a phrase that slips in to many a polemical paragraph, certainly in to mine, to warn you the writer fancies he has some perspective or can accurately project trends forward to some eventuality. I don't know how long we have to run before retrospectives of the history of protests against the selfishness exemplified by Republican economic policy can be said to remove doubt and ambiguity from my conclusions: some liberal economists and a few progressive legislators have had a good grasp of what was wrong with those policies. I don't know how long we have to run, period. Now that nothing less than our entire national economy lays bleeding, bled, and broken in a heap before congress, it is a bit late to admit that in the long run, pandering to the selfishness of taxpayers is a fucked up scheme and the most toxic substitute for leadership, however successful it may be in getting you in office for in the short term.

I do not trust these fascists. Though many liberal economists can see clearly enough that Republican deregulation is a cause of the over extension of debt instruments that finally collapsed our entire credit apparatus, I expect to hear daily in the news the bleating of Neoconservatives who will try to hide their matches and gasoline and say we are witnessing a kind of Reichstag fire on Wall Street for which, god knows how, those tax-and-spend liberals must be to blame. Naomi Klein has been mentioned by a few of my favorite bloggers in light of this week's economic events. That is apt. We might have paid more attention to the feckless pursuit of Bin Laden, now gone somewhat into reverse in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we might have looked at the connection between the devastation of Galveston and the disappearance of the polar ice sheets...real problems abound... but now the Republicans can shout "oh! look! An emergency! Quick, give me more power, cede more rights so I can protect you!".

What is being judged then, by all these tribulations? We cast all our judgments on our political champions so they may stand in for us, and we the voters absolve ourselves of blame. My disgust and withdrawal stem from this understanding: voting only dilutes blame, it does not absolve. If we stumble on as we have, electing McCain and otherwise teetering toward fascism, it is not John McCain who should be examined for his failures but we teh people.

I am not talking about somebody else, I am talking about YOU. The "we" who stumble includes me, all who say and do the right things as well as the dangerously ignorant and mislead who foam at the mouth over at TownHall.com. We all have the vote. Everybody says vile things about lawyers except the one who gets them out of jail or wins their civil case. Everyone resents the wealth of doctors...except the doctor who cures their disease. Everyone is saying vile things about bankers...except the one who lent them the money to start their business. Do you not see what a shitty job we are doing of sharing the world?

in my dreams

2008-07-21T08:52:00.003-04:00

Kucinich would get his way and soon. One great bonus of having both Bush and Cheney disgraced and escorted out of office would be that all the bums Bush is sure to pardon on his last day in power would instead face at least some of the justice they have coming to them.

UPDATE: Just like I told you, isn't it? Write your representative and your senator and pester Pelosi: we must tie this bum's hands with impeachment proceedings IMMEDIATELY.

Help wanted, must have strong stomach

2008-07-15T07:16:00.005-04:00

photo credit: runnawaytruck.com
Republicans in desperate need of $ for the Bush Presidential Library.

By the time you read this, the covers may have been peeled off of more of Stephen Payne's web of influence. TPM Muckraker, for one, has a link to the Times of London Jul 13 article which has video of Payne soliciting a bribe...but there is so much more slime on this guy and Lindsay Bayerstein did the digging to find it. You will need a large sheet of paper to graph all the dotted lines of little-disclosed influence and conflict of interest.

If you read Lindsay's post, you will get a sense of the depth and breadth to which influence peddling permeates the Bush administration...so much so that Republicans are inured to it and can't understand what the fuss is all about. The lesson here, as far as I am concerned is not for the Republicans, who are highly resistant to lessons and will be paying for their ethics in government with a long retirement. It is for Obama: he must take an ax and a chainsaw to the list of contractors and the organizational structure of DHS when he takes office. The extent of the connections and of free loading free enterprise advocates that has encrusted our government in the last 8 years will take colossal effort and require those who can temper their outrage enough to effectively deal with the red tape and lawyers that have been wrapped around vital government functions like the windings on a mummy. DHS in particular has become a massive waste of money. I always thought it was a waste of money. How obvious must it be, how much outrageous and scandalous crap do you have to hear of about that department's doings before you have voter's revolt? The last thing that bunch of grafters has done is actually make anyone safer. Ask the survivors of Katrina....if you can locate them. Does DHS actually stand for Department of Habitual Scamming?

How do the Republicans manage to still wield so much unethical influence two years after they lost congress and saw half a dozen of their heaviest hitters indicted or even convicted? For the Republicans there appears to be a corollary of their "less government oversight, less government period" mantra and it might be phrased "more tax money for private and unaccountable corporations and institutions to collect under the guise of providing the services shorn from federal and state mandates". In a word, graft. The mechanism that they seem to use as well as the public offices they took over is a network of shadow government bureaucracies and think tanks: the PNAC did what the State Department should have been doing, Shirlington Limo supplied the babes, Black Water did what no one should do. Oops, those weren't the government services we cut! Sorry America! Vote for McCain, who continues the Republican blindness to where the line should be between private and public interest and maybe some Republican will finally get it right. Whadda ya think? Don't you suppose exactly repeating the ethical tone of the last 8 years could some how improve our nation's prospects?

The remnants of Republican powerful will have all retreated into the woodwork, buried in civilian contracting organizations and lobbying outfits and it will be difficult to touch them in those hideouts because we do have freedom of speech, at least, rich conservatives do. The only salvation will be to ruthlessly cut government use of private contractors, severing the connections by which Republican's shadow government calls many of the shots.

Note the theme: Payne is a long time friend of George Bush the second and Wilkes and Foggo were chums since their high school days in San Diego. One thing to be watchful of then is the use, officially or unofficially of long standing social connections to form parallel connections via which money can flow from tax payers pockets.

Also requiring great intestinal fortitude:
And what, would that bribe sought by Mr. Payne have paid for? Why, its the glorious new Dubya Presidnetial Library!

I hereby open the comments for any suggestions of appropriate materials to place in that library. One way to keep down the costs [and I suspect only a few oil patch buddies are likely to chip in so cost is an issue] would be to limit the books to volumes written by historians in praise of the president's guidance of our nation and books George Bush has actually read.

Of course photos of high points of Bush's illustrious service will be a big part of the collection. I am fond of the image you all may have seen of Dufus in chief yanking on a wall panel in China which he took to be a door. But my current favorite is this touching recent image of Bush finally finding someone who can't say no to him and with whom he can safely do what Fox News considered a terrorist code gesture:

What "too old to run a country" will look like:

2008-07-10T19:06:00.003-04:00

photo credit: Huffington Post

Phil Gramm was never smart enough to run an economy and had a lot to do with ruining one. John McCain was never smart enough to run a country either. Habit replaces vigor. McCain is just snapping back instead of thinking. I say that though I am pushing 60 myself...tough. But being either too afraid or too stupid to admit a mistake shows an ossified soul, a mind brittle with age. Nobody being perfectly smart, I'll take the one who can admit mistakes. The ability to lead with humility or the lack of it is, despite a determined but futile campaign to paint Obama as "elitist", showing up as a strong differentiator between the choices we are offered for president. If it is not elitist to tell voters they are head cases for thinking the economy is in the toilet, telling them in effect that they are to blame, then I don't know what that word means.

McCain sounds like any other senescent old fart: self satisfied with his recollection of his glories and good deeds, his missteps visible to all but himself, striking the poses from memory but grown quite vague on the purposes. You can get a speech like his at many an assisted living facility.

If Politico has unpublished a reaffirmation of that idiotic pronouncement, then the ministry of truth over in McSame land is reaching hard to expunge the "mental recession" remark from every record they can reach. Lets see if they get HuffPo to take it back. Or me for that matter. When I search "mccain gramm 'mental recession'", in Google news, I find 461 matches...the truth machine over at the McSame HQ better get busy. When I first read an AP or Reuters headline on the gaff [it was a mistake? Are you sure? is McCain sure?] I thought I'd got the Onion by mistake and they were coining a euphemism for McCain's intellectual deterioration or the collective IQ of his economic advisers. Hmmm, that latter may be the case, Onion or not.

Its not funny

2008-07-09T09:26:00.003-04:00

Underneath all the gales of laughter among the handful of people who even noticed this news item, there is the nasty little fact that someone in YOUR government actually considered the application of mandatory tracking devices that would treat all air passengers worse than a dog wearing an "invisible fence" collar.
I can't blame people for not taking this very seriously. The WashTimes is a Moonie-owned rag that few bother to read. But their writer Jeff Denning appears to have done his homework, even if he did it at that Halloween party we call the Department of ~~Fatherland~~ Homeland Security.

I eventually noticed that I was adding almost nothing to the general outcry against the corruption, incompetence, war mongering, bankrupting of the republic, pollution and scuttling of science that the Republicans embrace, represent and champion. The look likely to face at least some of the defeats they so deserve without another word from me. I go back and forth about posting at all for that reason. But I have to point out the fit-to-pattern when there is an in the flesh example of the "culture of corruption" with which progressives generally charge the Bush League.

If you read the article, you see the taser bracelet is real, the DHS official's letter expressing interest in the device is real and you have to assume that saner minds somehow prevailed in keeping this contraption from showing up at the security checkpoints of your local airport. Who would be stupid and fascist enough to think this disgusting idea would fly? Who would be stupid enough to hire the person who was stupid enough to entertain the idea in the first place? Who would take a congressional mandate to coordinate domestic security in the form of new cabinet level department and turn it into an opportunity to waste billions by appointing nitwits who have no respect for their fellow human beings?

Its just a symptom, people. You can't laugh it off. You have to clean the wound in your political establishments, cut out the infections of greed and selfishness and corporate privilege. You have bind the wounds with transparency and deep commitments of government, both in its persons and its processes, to work for direct benefits to common citizens [jobs, health care, transportation, education] rather than vague promises to attack abstract synthetic urgencies like "security" that have so far only benefited the purveyors of guns, planes, mercenary security forces, missiles, toxic house trailers and religiously motivated editing services who would censor scientific papers. Its not one damn bit funny.

How convenient for the Republicans

2008-07-07T08:03:00.002-04:00

Lost your house to foreclosure? Guess what! You lost your vote too!

If there's Election Day disorder brewing for 2008, it might well be rooted in the nation's mortgage-foreclosure crisis. In Columbus, across Ohio and in other key presidential battlegrounds, more people losing their homes means more registered to vote from addresses where they no longer live.

And those would be exactly the people Sen. John McSame wants desperately to keep away from the polls: people who have felt the full crushing weight of Republican neglect and screwed up priorities. The stats in Ohio are that less than half of those who are forced to move succeed in reestablishing a proper voter registration.

[hat tip to Mark Crispin Miller's News From Underground.]

Was there a debate on FISA?

2008-06-28T00:17:00.002-04:00

If there was, money was the only one doing the talking. When money talks, your government can listen in on any one of us, any time, for any reason. [and 8500 bucks is damn cheap, I would have thought my privacy was worth more than that!] Take names, folks. Is your congressman in that list of appeasers and whores?

raising money for what?

2008-06-26T00:21:00.002-04:00

So way more people than I expected brought cookies. I was too late to get ads in the paper and didn't even have a sign. MoveOn helped me by making sure anyone who wanted a local bake sale could find one. Who needs the papers? In spite of the competition of over 700 such sales being held that weekend, there was a steady trickle of people all afternoon buying cookies [and one coconut cake that was fantastic]. We took in about $300 to send to Obama and I assume others did far better.

The turn out for the MoveOn bake sale was impressive. I did nothing, I organized nothing, I did not ask for help or volunteers. From noon to four a small crowd, in effect a rotating party, of people who want Obama to win hung out at the table and we talked. I guess either we are all fools for politicians or Bush and his cronies are now, at long last, finally seen for the crooks, despoilers and well armed imperial nincompoops they always were. The sense I got of these people was feelings both of resentment for what has been done to our country and hope but I wonder if the hope is well placed. Are they hoping for a progressive, as MoveOn members are assumed to do, or just hoping to avert a further lurch backwards?

Chris Bowers at Open Left was where I read it first, about a month or two ago: the good news is Obama is going to get elected. But the bad news from Bowers, later echoed by David Brooks' "Two Obamas" piece in the NY Times , and now summarized well at HuffPo by Sam Stein: Obama will take few or no progressive stances in order to accomplish this. When you find agreement from those two poles of the political spectrum, assume its damn near true or the world is about to end and "true" is even less relevant than usual.

I suppose being pragmatic pays...up to a point. Beyond that point, you are a conservative or a thief or both. If electability is your only good, what makes you any different than George Bush...how was he "better" than Kerry?

Meanwhile have you seen Kucinich and his impeachment articles? He has gone missing in the MSM. Dubya has refilled the latrine with fresh doings that ought to make a nice addition to Kucinich's charges and bring the list up to a nice round 20. Bush is trying to pretend his own administration has not been brought to heel by the courts, refusing to read that the EPA has called for reduction of green house gases.

The pique at the pump may be all it takes for the shallow American voters to dump the republicans. Thank god for personal financial pain. The pollsters tell us the economy strongly dominates the minds of voters and the truly gigantic geopolitical blunder and moral nightmare of Iraq is issue number one for less than on fifth of US voters. Good, lets not suffer any honest self examination! But I hope the gathering tide I sensed at the bake sale is not so simple as wanting a fix for a habit we should never have indulged. Neither McCain nor Obama propose adequate energy programs to avert runaway climate deterioration. Here, from a scientist who accurately predicted the general outline of our weather changes for the last twenty years, are some ideas that might save us. Hansen's article echoes my old "feedback"post...which echoed what he has written in Scientific American and elsewhere for decades. Science, you see, can be this trick that equips common sense to operate like great foresight. A pity this country looks down on scientists.

Speaking of down, I clearly am. It doesn't really make a difference whether the effective IQ of the most powerful nation on earth is about 45 or its just that I am crazy...we don't get along too well and don't like listening to one another just now. I have pretty much run out of things novel enough to be worth reading and will probably only type when screaming would be inappropriate. I think more and more seriously about packing up and going where I can feed and warm myself without causing any harm to barrels of oil or bank accounts and living that way with such company as can stand me until I die naturally without any artificial and bloody expensive preserving efforts.

acting out

2008-06-21T09:00:00.002-04:00

not posting lately.

running a bake sale for Obama.

MoveOn is getting out of the 527 business and we need lots of little donations to make up for it.

Go find the bake sale nearest you...the MoveOn page will tell you where.

http://moveon.org/

A dossier full of disappointment

2008-06-17T00:40:00.005-04:00

I just started a subscription to the dead-trees version of Mother Jones magazine. I like what I have seen so far. One of the founders of MJ is Jeffrey Klein. He has just put an ax through the head of whopping big lie McCain has been passing off as part of his resume.

I have mentioned here and commented at other peoples blogs that McCain's war service should not be translated into presumptions about his competence to command or lead the military.
Well, at Huffington Post, Mr. Klein has the facts to make my protests look downright muted. The ~~gutsy~~ gusty Captain Windsock is lying about turning down the offer of promotion to Admiral: he never would have been promoted. If their are anti-democratic elements in the Navy they are probably out shredding records fast as the machines will take paper.

Lets see if more facts come to light, or maybe we will hear nothing more. It seems hard for news of this sort to make it into those TV news outlets that bent over and took pentagon talking points up the a**, passing them off as expert opinion. I was going to and I may yet post on all of the analysis of why the press fawns over McCain and pays little attention to his shortcomings as a potential president: McCain's free pass has been kicked around quite a bit on our side of the blogosphere and squelched elsewhere. But for now, just because its still fresh and very tart, I urge you to get a hold of Walcott's piece in this month's Vanity fair. Walcott links the same New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza that I have..but there is much more.

I have tried to see what ever good I could in McCain. Even if he is half bluster and bullshit, he really did suffer for his country. In the past, he has said the right things about campaign finance reform and lobbyist influence but just not done as he has said. Given the way this nation treats most of its Viet Nam vets, McCain is lucky not to be in a homeless shelter. But while I do not feel bad for the Republicans, who really deserve a phony conflicted order-taker for a candidate, I do feel a bit sorry of McCain. He wants to be president, he probably feels he deserves to be president. But it is becoming clear that, like Clinton, he wants it so bad he will say anything, and contradict anything he had said previously if it has a chance of getting him elected. It is a pathetic outcome of an ambition far ahead of the abilities. That overreaching shows. Maybe they nominated McCain because they needed someone who won't go to pieces when he has lost the fight and is being tortured by the poll numbers???

The right way is not the easy way

2008-06-14T11:44:00.002-04:00

The conservatives fantasize a simplified homogeneous world in which their enemies are killed and eliminated from the scene.

The liberals set themselves the much more difficult task of laughing their enemies off the stage of history.

The former method only leads to discovering that killing enemies merely reveals more enemies. The term "last man standing" is akin to other objectives of social Darwinism and the conservative mindset. Were that conservative program taken to its ultimate extreme the planet would have a population of one, or perhaps literally a last man, having to kill off male children as they come into conflict with their daddy.

Co-operation is so much more difficult when it involves people who imagine freedom is free from responsibility. Its hard enough with groups who understand the need for mutual responsibility but interpret the need in differing ways. But nothing could be farther from nature, or god if you will, or from sustainability than a population of one.

What if you board a swift boat against Obama and it goes to the bottom with you in it?

2008-06-14T11:05:00.005-04:00

Expose yourself! Use your real name and your real zip code ....and hope it will make a real difference.

Firedoglake , Daily Kos and others point us to a travesty in the making: The national press club intends to give a legitimizing microphone to one of the scummiest swift boaters who ever cast lies at Obama. You can sign a petition and let them know what you think of that idea.

I did and enjoyed unloading on these dupes:

Dear National Press Club:
I realize you guys are terrified of a serious and highly competent candidate like Obama because:
1. he won't be appointing FCC regulators who blindly support the business objectives of your MSM masters.
2. he won't close access to your new media and net roots competition
3. he won't be the high visibility laughing stock who is funny enough for Colbert but gladly stages photo ops for you.

BUT, as an occasional consumer of your increasingly shoddy product, I warn you that I will go after the sponsors of your news programming mercilessly if you insist on hatchet jobs like Larry Sinclair being given the implied approval of the podium at your confab. It is up to you not to cheapen yourself and reduce your influence on America's political conversation. It is ironic that your ridiculous excesses in attempting to steer political outcomes will lessen your power to do so. What if you board a swift boat against Obama and it goes to the bottom with you in it? I strongly urge you to dissociate your name and reputation from this sort of smear while you still have a reputation worth saving.

-[my real name never appears on this blog]

Person's confusing satire with lies and innuendo are a ready audience for Fox News and a very significant factor in the stupid outcomes such as the election of 2004.

Republicans mug another energy bill

2008-06-12T00:14:00.000-04:00

Why would anyone want to let a Republican Senator become president?

While McCain tries desperately to scare the selfish with wild ass claims and guess work about Obama, the Republican senators carry the water once again for their oil company masters....and leave you to make up any revenue shortfalls.

Why I half expect to die of a tropical disease...in New England

2008-06-11T07:57:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I don't know where to post: this one is a lament of a gung ho green but the ill is politics that precludes healing the environment...so here it goes:

Or, I might starve to death being unable to grow my own food and unable to buy any. I don't see any reduction in emissions in my future even though I am about $400 a month away from carbon neutrality. The "cap and trade" hoax allows us to go on living in denial of how much we must each reduce our personal demand and our indirect demand on fossil fuels. And in the US, we can't even get it together to take that timid turn away from the abyss.

Today's NY Times has a useful analysis of the dismaying failure of the US Senate, and particularly the stubbornly backward Dubya, to enact any measure to redress our headlong rush to climate meltdown. Senator Boxer is faulted for her coordination of the legislation but at least she tried.

If you want a short recap of the teams that play this game where everyone loses, read the editorial.

The reason I find in this mess for such pessimism about near or long term corrections to the course of climate change is that the most progress my countrymen and their legislators claim they could support are half measures that steal the proposed taxes on dirty energy and use them to fund yet more energy consumption. How stupid is this:

One huge issue that was not even addressed in last week’s truncated discussion is what to do with the enormous sums of money likely to be raised by selling emission quotas to industry. Some senators would invest most of that money in clean technologies — wind, solar, even nuclear power — and in a new generation of coal-fired plants that could capture and store carbon emissions. Others would return a sizable share of the proceeds to consumers to help ease the pain of higher energy bills.

Do we have a problem here?

2008-06-10T21:31:00.004-04:00

I may seem to be going on about a trivial matter of connotation, a drift in the nuances of our political vocabulary. But if we have conventional wisdom then I suppose we have conventional narishkeit too. If the nit I pick is nothing to you, you are part of the problem...

Nedra Pickler is one of AP's name brand writers. In reporting the little that has been learned about Obama's closely held deliberations over a VP choice, she says of the possibility of tapping a former military commander:

A running mate from the military ranks could help address concerns that Obama lacks foreign policy experience, having served just three years in the Senate. It could also provide a counterpoint to the military bonafides of the Republican ticket, which will be led by Vietnam war hero John McCain.

Can we assume the American voter who reads the news is just a bit deeper than that? Since when is military experience interchangeable with foreign policy experience? I am aware the Bush administration and neconservatives in general can't tell the difference, but that is why we are in our present geopolitical quagmire.

I took ROTC in high school. There is no form of military training that presumes less of the trainee than what I took in and even there, they started us out with von Clausewitz: War is the continuation by armed force of those objectives you have failed to achieve through diplomacy. I have paraphrased for clarity but that is the meaning the man intended. That is more or less still militarism 101 for officers trained in the US.

Last I checked, we still had a state department. It has become something of a war making machine in its own little way what with the retention of Blackwater's services and all but still, the basic idea is [1] make friends, [2] with those friends on your side make deals with those who won't be friends [3] when all else fails and that means when they start marching on your borders or those of your friends,THEN start bombing. So, NO, Nedra, foreign policy is only experienced by military leaders in its failure modes. Bush may not have been happy [and I know Powell wasn't] having a former military leader who just happened to have some good diplomatic chops driving the State Department's diplomacy machine but hey, that's republicans for you.

Seriously folks, Pickler is just feeding you back the sickness of our empire: might makes policy.

IF Obama does pick anyone from the military, such as Wes Clark, I still think he is playing it too safe, bending against what should be his better judgment to shore up what he correctly understands is a political weakness when viewed by the weak minds that like McCain. He is up 48 to 42% in the polls. If he is pulling the moral punches he could be landing on the chin of this administration's and McCain's war lust just because it will get him a few percent more votes than he really needs, I think it will haunt his presidency.

Another point of "conventional wisdom" that Pickler passes on without question is the equation of war hero and "military bonafides" to competent war commander. Captain Windsock has suffered greatly for his country and returned to the navy not only a hero but the son and grandson of admirals...yet he was passed over for higher command by the navy because he was not up to the job. He left the navy at rank of Captain to go into politics. His heroism does not make him any more effective as a leader than that of the soldier who throws himself on a grenade to protect others. It is admirable but it is not leadership that sustains us by wise directions. Wise leadership is what we desperately need.

UPDATED June 16...I added the link to a HuffPo story that backs up my summary of the way McCain's navy career fizzled.
UPDATED June 26...HuffPo got someone who does have military command bonafides to say a word or two about McCain's commander in chief potential: Wes Clark thinks McCain's a punk.

Settling for a virtual impeachment....

2008-06-10T07:34:00.005-04:00

Nothing, no scandal, no lie, no abortive outcome of the various failed policies, has been sufficient to tip congress toward the impeachment of the worst president in US history. So we are going to have to settle for trying the Bush League in our gutless "free" press and our blustery blogosphere.

For that less than satisfactory exercise, a larger collection of lesser quality evidence will do as we set firmly into the record, should historians ever re-read the media of these times, the culpability and incompetence of this president and the crew of crooks he drew into the official and unofficial circles of power in Washington.

Today's exhibit I found on TPM: The white house claims the president ~~never met~~ well maybe once met with Jack Abramoff, that maven of corrupt lobbying. But in fact, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has photos of six different occasions of these two chumming it up:

The previous exhibit was the belated Senate committee findings, without consequences, that Bush and co. lied to get us to go to war with Iraq. Doesn't it seem just a little ironic that Hillary Clinton has suffered more [by losing the progressives and anti-war voters who went for Obama] for her vote to invade Iraq than the god-damned liars that set up that vote? This particular travesty has the stamp of pure partisan ship on its timing and its lack of consequences.

In the coming weeks, we can add whatever Scotty sings to the record of deception.

I repeat news, and there is no end of such news to be repeated, because there is a need to flood every other venue with the sorry facts that will not get tried in the one place that would have saved some lives or dollars: congress. It may change a few minds disposed to vote again for the Bush party of grafters and jingoist fools. As long as we don't get another Republican administration, it seems that the default activity left to the successor administration will be summed up by that committee title: Oversight and G0vernment Reform.

How long before McCain starts saying, as Bush has said of Abramoff: "Bush? I never met the man. I hardly know who he is." How long before the ignorant and fearful over at clownhall.com cease to mention the tarnished name and just say all the problems he left us must be the fault of the 2006 election losses?

Give him a pom-pom, send him down to the sidelines

2008-06-09T22:23:00.003-04:00

Kristol is the last McCain cheerleader who still has a national, neutral pulpit. He has just shit in the pulpit. The more's the shame on the New York Timid for retaining this puke in the name of fairness and balance. In Kristol's world, McCain's experience is all that matters. There is never a word about how many times he has changed directions and gone against his own word and his own experience.

After his flops on torture, I knew he was a simple tool. His experience is not worth a thing to me.

His opinion piece in the Times today seems to conclude the only thing wrong with McCain is the style of those who plan his campaign while substance is not lacking. Kristol spins and sifts desperately through the wan Republican campaigning for anything he can claim sets McSame above Obama and finds it in the 2007 senate vote to approve the surge. In WK's world the surge is working. this twaddle sits comfortably in Kristol's selective vision.

Even if the surge did "work", it should be viewed for what it is: a temporary band aid on a symptom of a problem for which our own oil imperialism is a the the cause. Obama went for the cause and all Kristol can say is praise for the band aid.

A few more thoughts on Republicanomics

2008-06-07T09:22:00.006-04:00

I wrote this back in January or February when the most dramatic Fed rate cuts were issued and the cash fix called "economic stimulus" was being enacted. The problems those feeble measures were aimed at are still a grievous wound to the average American family's budget and well being.

The fed chops interest rates...and that almost immediately chops the value of the dollar vs the euro. It was in part the cheap interest that lured the US to run its economy on borrowed money, consumers often borrowed more than they could repay and that helps push us into recession...the lead balloon that Greenspan gave the Bush administration just won't float. So now Bernanke is going to try the same thing and its going to work? Put another way, it strikes me as a race to the bottom. The response to the oncoming recession is to "put money in people's hands" to spend our way out of the impending period of slumping sales and any snowballing secondary effects of the slump. But if you put more dollars in our pockets in a way that devalues those dollars, are we really coming out ahead? The proposals to print 145 billion or free up a real 145 billion is considered an adequate sum to inject into the supply of available cash. And it will be available at 3.5% interest to the best borrowers but no so for you and little ol' me. The Chinese, unlike holders of Euros, have been unwilling to let they yuan float against the US dollar but how far down do they want ride our sinking container ship? If you increase our available cash [and ignore the fact that your children will have to repay whomever we took it from] by 145 billion but dilute the buying power of all purchases made with US dollars? There is a US agency that tracks that buying power with monthly updates. Disposable personal income (DPI) increased $32.9 billion, or 0.3 percent, in November, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Dividing that increase by the percentage it represents produces an estimate of 11 trillion [11 with 12 naughts!] as our DPI as of last November. 145 billion is about 1.3 percent of the DPI. Now to my mind, that means that if you do something that causes the value of the dollar to decline by more than 1.3 %, you had better buy strictly local because your 145 billion of extra spending power just vanished vis a vis all foreign purchases.

And how close to that 1.3% damage are we:

That chart is updated at this link. I read that chart as showing an 11% devaluation against the euro since September . And Bloomberg reports a 1.1% drop in a single day on the news of the fed going back on the "free money" path to recovery. This wild slewing of exchange rates is good for arbitragers but its killing me. By the time it gets so bad that I no longer have to worry about my job going to India, I will be living as well as a typical Indian. I certainly don't mind the Indian, or the Mexicans for that matter, getting rich. In fact that would have been a lot better than me getting poor...but that is not how economics works it would seem.

If one added up the price of all the timber and minerals on federal lands^[1], all the bank accounts and the US stocks and property holdings of US citizens, (those that actually own more than they owe,) it would be a number representing what it would cost the Saudis to buy us out, to buy the land out from under our feet as it were. I have no idea what that number is but I am certain it is staggering figure and far larger than the DPI. That means our dollar-valued assets devalue by far more than the 145 billion that is to be handed out...unless you can raise your prices or get your holdings revalued in, say, euros and quit thinking or earning or spending in dollars altogether. Did I say "raise your prices"? Your gas, sure..oh you don't own the gas. Well then try raising the price of your house. How's that working for us?

That is my back-of-the envelope calculation. It may show better than any other means, just how little I understand of economics...or it may show how screwed we are, likely some of both. Why, oh why, as Brad DeLong would say, did we not impeach and impale this idiot administration back when all they had done was start an illegal war via a tissue of lies? Now they have gone and done real damage [that many saw coming] its too late.

Think that is just the ranting of a liberal blow hard? Consider what Martin Hutchinson, respected and cheerfully misanthropic conservative financial pundit thought of the Federal Reserve's predicament back on Dec. 17th of last year:

Overall, 2008 looks to be a good year for bears. The Fed has been walking a tightrope since August between the precipices of a collapsing financial system and resurgent inflation. With a 3.2% November Producer Price Index rise (7.2% over the previous year) announced on Thursday and a 0.8% Consumer Price Index rise (4.3% over the previous year) announced on Friday, it can now be officially confirmed that the tightrope has vanished into thin air. The United States over the next 12 months will experience both a collapse in its financial sector and a violent resurgence in inflation, and there's nothing whatever the Fed can do about it, no interest rate trajectory that will not worsen one problem more than it alleviates the other.

So gold is up 100% and more in the last few years. Would have been smart to buy it two years ago but now it is just a case in point about how our crafty statesmen and puppet masters have run us onto the financial rocks. Meantime stocks of huge investment banks are priced like ties and watches on a push cart in SoHo. The buying spree by foreign governments that some idiots actually welcome as a life line to our tapped out markets has not impressed Warren buffet. It is, in the opinion of Felix Rohatyn, a spree of politically motivated accessions to influence as much as an "investment". Who made the US so damn cheap? [I am not for sale, though I might wind up looking for a job...I went to all cash two years ago because the suckage was looming ]

"They have different objectives," Mr. Rohatyn said. It may be easy to herald these investments as gutsy, brilliant bets during a turbulent market or dismiss them as foolish — look at how far the value of China's stake in the Blackstone Group has fallen. But according to Mr. Rohatyn, who is now a special adviser at Lehman Brothers, that's the wrong way to look at them.

"The big difference is the political element," he said. Mr. Buffett is seeking the best return when he invests; that's his only goal, Mr. Rohatyn said. For Dubai and China, whether the investment returns 10 percent or 20 percent — or perhaps much less — is almost beside the point, he suggests. What they really want is influence on the world stage, despite their insistence otherwise.

He's right. While government-controlled funds swear up and down that their investments are purely financially motivated, they just can't be.

So now its June, we have a choice, a real choice between whether we will go down the republican spiral of economic decline or whether we will possibly set a new course. We are in a bad place. We, and I mean all of the nation by WE, have been spending ourselves into this mess since Reagan napped in the oval office. Yes we had poor leadership that believed it could get away without making us pay for all the promises made. But we as a country wanted to believe these lies [generally labeled "supply side economics"] that we could get something for nothing...or at least for terms like you hear in furniture ads: "Get your Empire today! No money down, no interest until 2009!". The choice then is between a certainty that things will keep going to hell and a chance, a hope, that we can arrest the deterioration of our fortunes. I hope that Obama does not kid himself and I hope that enough of us have stopped watching Fox news that Obama won't have to try to kid us either: the repair to our economy is going to be hard work, hard negotiation with those who now sit on obscene piles of money made during the republican give-away-to-the-rich period and just generally no fun. We will have to cut back sharply in Offense spending [call it what it is, I say] and find some way to invest in more sustainable domestic sources of energy, more intellectual [colleges] and physical [roads, hospitals, housing, ports] infrastructure upon which to found employment. It will require a tax rate such as grown up countries levy on their citizens. I just hope we the people are grown up enough to say yes when called upon to make sacrifices...and I hope Obama is grown up enough to ask us.

If we don't step up to address our past irresponsible ways, then I suppose we will go on receiving a steady flow of bad tidings followed by worse tidings. That sort of reportage should not surprise and it is a bit late for it to alarm. I cannot call it news because it is too predictable. It is more like our nation's economic policies have been tried, found guilty of short sightedness and corruption and now at the end of the process, it is left to the reporters to read the sentence to the accused.

NOTE:
Tax payers and citizens, US, are the owners via our government, of the lands and resources in federal control. Is it fair to simply give, at no charge whatsoever, the minerals on those lands to one particular party or industry? It certainly is not. But that is certainly what the oil companies wanted and what they got. The value of the foregone royalties on gas and oil in the gulf and elsewhere MUST be returned to the people.

Our Military Imperial Complex in action....

2008-06-05T21:40:00.002-04:00

The refreshing change comes a bit too late for the bush cronieocracy: SecDef Gates is serious about accountability. Today's proof of this, its claimed, is that he is firing the top civilian and military chiefs of the Air force because

...the inquiry found that the latest incident reflected “a pattern of poor performance” in securing sensitive military components...

But Politico blogger Jen DiMascio has a bigger picture of the affair, one which includes the Senator representing the state of ~~Boeing~~ Washington chiming in that the investigation of carelessly handled nuclear weapons somehow shows the Air Force rigs its bidding. I read a few things about the controversy when the AF chose EU-built refueling tanker design over the inferior Boeing offering. Boeing designed a less capable aircraft than the Air Force had specified and that was all there was to it. The smell of pay-back hangs heavily in the D.C. air and will not blow away. It takes a lot more than one competent secretary of defense to unravel the tentacles of the military imperial complex from our congress.

McCain: He really is McSame

2008-06-05T00:18:00.004-04:00

Is there any way or sense in which McCain is likely to promote policy that is really different from Bush? I don't think so. McCain knows he has a huge liability in Bush but closing the doors of fund raisers to the press won't fool anyone. His weird spiel about having the right change is outrageous but for those who need details:

Economic policy: more of same...or worse!

Why has oil price changed 100% in the amount of time that oil demand changed 10% and supply has increased a bit? In testimony before congress yesterday, Michael Greenberger tried to explain how it all got so bad:

He stated that former Senator Phil Gramm of Texas sneaked the Enron loophole through a large piece of insignificant legislation years ago: the result was that regulations upon the futures industry were abandoned. This loophole eventually allowed the current CDO-subprime crisis, and the current energy market crisis because regulations, which once protected the market from manipulation, are no longer enforcable.

Your republican administrations put oil prices out of the hand of car owners and oil well owners. Yes the same Phill "supply side" Gramm that poisoned oil market regulation is now McCain's brains on economic policy. That means not just more-of-the-same Bush policy, it could mean worse-than-Bush policy. That very Gramm had a significant hand in running the economic security of the middle class into the ground over the last 20 years. He got Reagan out of the impossibility of supply side economics [cut taxes but spend more] by initiating the mechanism that encourages congress to raise the nation's debt cieling rather than be fiscally responsible and [god forbid] ask people to pay taxes for all those shinny guns and planes they need more than their jobs, hospitals and roads. You have heard Captain Windsock say he will cut taxes. Now you know where that brilliantly original malarkey is coming from.

Shredding the Bill of rights?

He promises to listen in on your lives same as Krawford's Konservative Kowboy.

The war in Iraq?

Bush says "This is the great war of our times. It is going to take forty years,"
McCain says U.S. troops could spend "maybe 100" years in Iraq. [And one presumes the DoD budget for that is no joke.]

Would a McCain administration be free of the lobbyists that tarred Bush?

Hardly...which is pathetic considering the floppy Captain Windsock's pose as the maverick reformer out to clear the temple of government of lobbyists.

Would McCain retain any pudgy fascist advisers who served Bush?

You bet he would!

So, tell me, how is the ill tempered Captain Winsock one bit different than Bush?
He is a lot older and he once served his country. That's about it.

Looking ahead

2008-06-04T20:01:00.002-04:00

If Obama is as smart as I think he is, he is already thinking of cabinet appointments too. Perhaps some on his list of potential VP running mates are also being checked out for such roles by his VP selection team. And what do I hope he is thinking about his slate of appointments? Not just how to get the most quick-starting and competent team that can execute the agenda of change for which he will win election but to groom, by way of visibility and challenges met, the successors who can build upon the enhanced domestic focus and the shrinking of the defense vaempire. The change is coming but to do lasting good, it will need a lot more than hope and a lot more than one face, one well spoken voice. I hope Obama realizes that he is now on a path that requires him to assemble the future of American administration...if not, there won't be much of a future.

Is that all they've got?

2008-06-03T23:51:00.003-04:00

I used to think George Will was tolerable because he broke with Bush on the war earlier than many conservatives. But what an unthinking, doctrinaire, pompous dolt he seemed tonight. He was on Charlie Rose and Charlie gave him enough rope: Charlie asked him where conservatism could go next having run into the withering combination of Obama's tough graces and Bush's thorough incompetence. Will did not even disagree with Charlie's contention that conservatives seemed to be gasping for new ideas. But even as he conceded that it might be in a fallow period, Will flatly and with no hint of wry or wistful knowing of complexities stated that "Conservatism has a great advantage over liberalism, it has the truth" and so it will prevail. It was a religious faith affirmation but made with a purely political vocabulary. I could not capture the crack-brained inconsistencies of so called conservative thought more clearly if I wrote a novel.

He made that remark, pretty much in those words, in the context of Rose questioning whether the role of conservatives in US affairs might now shrink back to something nearer its cranky minority status from which W. F. Buckley supposedly saved it. I turned the TV off with Will still swinging by that knot of faith and illogic.

Meanwhile over at NY Times David Brooks steps around the end result of conservative thought having grabbed leadership of the US government as gingerly as Gene Kelly might have skirtted a pile of dog poop:

More fundamentally, McCain’s problem is that his party is unfit to govern. As research from the Republican pollster David Winston has shown, any policy becomes less popular when people learn that Republicans are supporting it. If the G.O.P. sponsored the sunrise, voters would prefer gloom. Many Republicans are under the illusion that they are in trouble because they’ve betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they’d been more conservative, they’d be even further behind.
I’ve spent the past few years trying to find conservative experts to provide remedies for middle-class economic anxiety. Let me tell you, the state of free-market thinking on this subject is pathetic. There are a few creative thinkers (most of them under 30), but for the most part, McCain is forced to run in an intellectual void.

In my little menagerie of political freaks, hereby replace George Will with David Brooks in the role of Honorary Ambassador from the Dark Side.

good luck, Senator Kennedy

2008-06-02T08:18:00.004-04:00

Too much of the coverage of the Senator's illness, especially from Massachusetts based media, has sounded like eulogy. I do not want to put that spin on my observations because, after all, Ted is a Kennedy and they have as much fight in them as a Bush has bullshit.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy is undergoing surgery for his malignant brain tumor at Duke University this morning, his office announced today.
...
The surgery is considered the most aggressive approach he could take in addressing his malignant brain tumor.
Kennedy, in a brief but upbeat statement, signaled that he would wait until all treatments were concluded before returning to Washington and the floor of the Senate. That return won't likely take place until September, after the Senate returns from its summer recess.
"After completing treatment, I look forward to returning to the United States Senate and to doing everything I can to help elect Barack Obama as our next president," he said in the statement.

When I first moved to the Boston area thirty odd years ago, I reflexively bristled at each proposal Ted Kennedy brought to congress. I was raised to hate taxes as unnecessary and a redistribution of power out of the hands of those who had earned it. I cannot point to a particular year, or campaign issue or person that made me recognize the injustice of these attitudes and positions I was brought up with. But in all the years that I was growing into the modest political engagement I now exercise, Senator Kennedy was there in the background, rock steady in his efforts and eloquent in his ardor to shape a country where a fair chance at a decent living remained within the reach of most people. I do not say I agreed with every priority he pursued but differences shrivel in the shade of the many ways he transcended his patrician circumstances and his party boundaries for the sake of bettering common lives.

The odds are not good but I fervently hope against all odds that the Senator pulls through OK. He is a vital ally in many of the good legislative causes that still need all the help they can get.

UPDATES: The surgery was deemed "successful" but there is a long road of chemo and maybe radiation ahead.

Also ailing, dear old Senator Byrd, sticking by his guns even when ill. I still admire the moral force and clarity with which he has stood up to bums like Rumsfeld in recent years.

Someone always has to be the last...

2008-06-01T23:38:00.006-04:00

...to see that peace is the only thing that works.

The coalition of the willing now consists almost entirely of its bully ringleader. It was a measure of the influence and sympathy the US commanded that so many countries with legitimate doubts could none the less be yoked with the label "willing". The abandonment of the US in its Iraq adventure is a measure of how the Bush administration has squandered the trust and good will of even close allies by lying and then by mismanaging the lie. My congratulations to Mr. Rudd for paying attention to the good voters of Australia. How I wish the US were so blessed.

...to see that better tools for killing never made anyone safer or even won any wars.

The US is not alone in clinging to cluster bombs the way NRA members clutch their guns: We are in a special league of morally stunted nations. China, Russia, Israel, India and Pakistan join us in tolerating the death of civilians long after the "hostilities" have ceased. 111 other countries hope to shame us into repudiating the use of sloppy weapons that assure collateral damage. Will these sanctions against use of cluster bombs work as well as the Geneva conventions regarding torture? I find it ominous that this gang of countries blind to their own barbarity happens to be a large subset of the nuclear-armed nations.

Lightening up a bit...

2008-06-01T08:12:00.002-04:00

This made me laugh. If you aren't from around these parts [the Konservative Keystone Kop's New American Empire] you can read it for its cryptic and cynical insight into the list of players in our politics. If you are a dog or a Fox news viewer, go chase a car and snap at the post man. The rest of you deserve a chuckle.

Memorial Day

2008-05-27T00:49:00.004-04:00

Euphemisms rarely live up to the Greek root for "good" out of which the word is fashioned. It is cynical and not quite correct to say all euphemisms are lies. A few enable conversation about a touchy subject in the midst of a general audience. But some are lies and most remove critical features of their subject from explicit reference. They make the problem that prompted their invention seem more distant and abstract. Euphemisms can never be the language of solutions.

On memorial day, we go to the beach, burn hamburgers, endure speeches loaded with shallow patriotic platitudes and drink too much all to honor those who have died fighting their country's wars. We have a euphemism for these departed, used frequently in the headlines of the day: "honoring the fallen". Casualty statistics are transmuted into heroism. In order that these dead should not have died in vain, their sacrifice is used to add sacred weight to whatever war is now afoot. Long after the kin have dried their tears we collectively recall. How dare you question the war when the silent testimony of ranks of headstones can only be interpreted to say It was worth any price! There is nothing you can take away from a man who has given all. The questions are for those who mistook what was given. If we remember the fallen but forget why they fought or polish retrospective reasons and rationales to a heroic luster how have we honored them? The illogic of it staggers my mind.

What if they have not fallen but were instead pushed, tripped or just ridden into the ground?

And what to do about the 1000+ contractors killed so far in Dubya and Dick's excellent adventure? How will they be remembered?

A piece of bad news with many sorry connections.

2008-05-20T15:45:00.005-04:00

The information Reuters provides about Senator Kennedy's brain tumor diagnosis only mentions glioma which does not provide enough detail for certainty. But the possibilities include little hope. Glioblastoma Multiforme is the most common of the gliomas and its prognosis with current treatments is a 20% chance of surviving one year. As I said: we don't know that it is that bad. That is simply the worst of a range of unpleasant outcomes.

Eleven years ago, it was known that neural stem cells had an uncanny ability to glide between other cells in the brain to seek out and attach themselves to gliomas. A lot of research funding would be needed to find a way to use these cells as couriers to deliver chemotheraputic substances exactly to target tissue no surgeon would ever be able to safely or completely excise. I happen to know the medical researcher, Dr. A, involved in the study because my son worked in her laboratory briefly in 2001. When the pathetic-mistake-in-chief executed the will of the church to legislate a medieval science policy over the will of the congress to fund stem cell studies, that researcher picked up and moved to California and started over again were federal monies that were drying up could be augmented from other sources. The delay in research means that Dr. A's work in transferring techniques in mice for use in humans is only in the early stages of clinical trials now. Thats too late to do the Senator any good, even though he voted for the measure that was vetoed. Bush would be delighted if he were capable of seeing the connection of his action to this outcome.

By the way, Dr A's parents were both born in Baghdad and fled when the Baathists began hanging Jews in the streets. I have talked with them and they both think Bush is an idiot who won't get the oil he was after and has clumsily destroyed the few things in Iraq for which expatriates might have returned.

a sad and embarrassing confession

2008-05-15T20:00:00.005-04:00

Appeals to paranoia and fear of victimization are not just a Siren political song for Christians, Muslims and Republicans:(

I get an email from Israpundit every day or so. I rarely read them. I went to the site today to see whether the emails were typical of the content of that site. Turns out the content, and the ads, are a real embarrassment to peace seekers of either side and any religion. The site is devoid of religious content save as badge or label. Most of the moral teachings that are common to and, according to more enlightened religious people, central to the Abrahamic religions are no where in sight. Fear, justification of attacking in the present by recollection of being attacked in the past, denying the possibility of negotiated settlement...every weakness of the soul is called upon and enshrined as right thinking. I cannot detect any indication that this particular line of pro-Israel vehemence recognizes that the "other side" is in any way human. I admit that I do not follow all the ins and outs of Israel's neighboring Islamic countries. I know their Islam unites them more in western minds than in fact they are united. US support of Israel's existence and aquiescence to it expansion have begotten more unity among those Islamic neighbors than their native habits and undisturbed politics have ever produced..."the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is an Arab proverb.

I am not unaware of the intransigence of some Palestinians in rejecting the establishment of a Jewish sate...but they are not the majority, just the better funded by outsiders. Bush is in Israel today, tarring Obama any way he can for suggesting negotiation with Iran is preferable to bombing it. The attitude taken by fans and writers of Israpundit, like the dimwitted schemes to which Bush has subscribed, positively guarantee a future of war. It was neoconservative war and oil lust that strengthened the hand of Iranians by making a basket case of their former nemesis, Iraq. Iran's new boldness to prop up antagonists of Israel is a further complication of an impasse that already drove dispossessed Palestinians to murder. How many more years of trading corpses before we admit the ways of the past and present are not working?

Bush is harping on "terror" to the Israelis. Responding to acts of terror by becoming polarized and retreating to stereotyped thinking is exactly the result a terrorist hopes for. When do we stop capitulating on that level that a Bush does not even understand? Certainly not at Israpundit.

As I type this, Ms Greensmile is downstairs with a small committee of my fellow congregants who are struggling to come up with a way to start useful dialog within the congregation: The mess of Israeli/Palestinian permanent war is so painful and brings up intra- and interpersonal conflicts so readily that there have been decades of numb silence or fainthearted and carefully hedged lip service on support for Israel in many reform and maybe even some conservative synagogues. It is a touchy and so much more complex a situation than it behooves politicians like Bush to spell out. So Israpundit thinks it is speaking for more of us than is really the case. They embarrass me.

A new Iranian Hostage crisis.

2007-02-06T17:07:00.000-05:00

I was getting tired of complaining, as I often complain, but the stupidity and blind immorality of the Republican adminstration and its rear guard in the Senate have reached a sort of crescendo this week and the family has gotten darn tired of me ranting. So here is a week's worth all in one go.

Did you notice:

Iran is like the US?
The Senate has some of the yellowest chicken hawks that ever clucked for plucking and stewing?
President Sonofabush is a hostage taker?
We don't give Dubya the credit he deserves.
Pragmatists say talk of impeachment is a waste of energy and frail consensus that the progressive left hasn't the power to pull off. All the progressives have really accomplished, it is said, is moving the power leftward enough to put it in the center of moderate Democratic party establishment. If that is so, who are the voters that are with this establishment? and what truly effective recourse to an unresponsive dictator with advanced war lust do the pragmatists offer us?

Well it is all so. Let me explain.
1.
In one of his typically insightful essays, Paul Krugman wrote in in the NYTimes that there is a strong parallel, and hardly a coincidental one, between the feckless f**kup of Iraq's reconstruction and the corrupting and blunting of the federal government as an agent of any real help to its citizens. Cul gives the essay a better title. The link, as Krugman sees it is that in both the US and in Iraq, our tax money, by the truckloads, has been largely put in the hands of those who could at least feign faith and understanding of the Bush Way and incompetence was no object. For instance, in Iraq this is the sort of deliberation that went into choosing contractors. And in the US, FEMA director Michael D. Brown is just the most easily recalled of thousands of bad, and expensive, personnel choices. But I see an even deeper parallel between the US and the country Bushco have in their sights: Iran. In the US, a once basically democratic government and impartial civil service is now surmounted by an insular power hungry despot and his gang helped to power by a reactionary religious minority. In Iran, a people who had and to some extent still have an inclination to democracy greater than most of their neighboring Muslim countries now have a toy parliament and the shots are really called by a small theocracy perched atop and separate from the elected government. That theocracy is helped to stay in power by the most reactionary elements of the society. Iran also went backward and I do not refer to the demise of the Shah. Would two countries so similar be at war with each other? It could happen if they were not democracies, and neither is properly functioning as a democracy at the moment. And if there were an Iranian front, wouldn't it be easy for Bush to hold more troops hostage?
2.
This was the last straw. The Republicans in the senate being afraid to face a vote about their pet war makes me furious. You could send some money to MoveOn to remind them people other than lobbyists are watching. If your senator is one of the dickheads that is trying to snuff out the wave of reform that broke over them in November, CALL them now and often and remind them that even more cowardly than letting an idiot president scare you with phony stories about a bogeyman Iraqi dictator, even more cowardly than sitting in your plush senate office figuring out how to spend the campaign money from the oil lobby while more young Americans are sent to pointless deaths in Iraq...far more cowardly is being afraid to admit you were wrong.
3.
The sonofabush presents his joke of a budget: slashing ever deeper into vital services in favor of fulling funded warfare. See his cynical plan? He can order troops into the field virtually on his lone say-so and then congress is forced into a position of supporting the troops, the troops for which it clearly has more sympathy than does the administration. Bush is willing to make our soldiers hostages to his sick ends.
4.
I seriously think we owe dubya some gratitude. He is a severe f**kup and neither sees, nor cares to employ anyone who does see, how his little plutocracy is ruining the country. But though the lesson has cost us terribly, consider the alternative: Would the those who were disaffected with political involvement really have showed up at the polls? Maybe we need an obviously arrogant servant of a narrow minded minority to make life hard for us before we yet again rediscover the value of political involvement? When we have thrown over the dictator from Crawford, will we still have the fire in us to make real reform happen?
There are far more who dislike abused power than crave power.
5.
I am not disagreeing with a guy like Matt Stoller, he's got the numbers right there in HTML. And he was the guy who got the perfectly sane and sensitive Ian Welsh a bit wrought up on the topic of impeachment with the same sort of "realistic" view of the power progressives really have. At the time the comments were made, I sided more with Matt. But I was simply unprepared for the depths of murderous insularity to which Bush could descend. Not only does he now show a willingness to pointlessly sacrifice American lives in defiance of popular and congressional wishes, he is rapidly dismantling the last working pieces of a fair and constitutional government. I had said we should get the congress to do the easier jobs first: the domestic crises of neglect could be undone fast. But the threat of impeachment seems like the strength of medicine our malaise requires. How else to get a response from the son of a Bush will listen to no one and is actively destroying America's well being and world peace?

The World Why'd Webb?

2007-01-30T08:11:00.000-05:00

Of all the things Senator Webb could have said in response to the president's SotU address, Iraq was an expected topic but the economy had a few people asking "Why that?" The NYTimes' David Leonhardt asked and could not find simple and clear answers but quotes various observers to the effect that indeed, as Webb asserts, the health of corporate bottom lines means less and less to working Americans when much of the profits shown are owed to increasing amounts of cheap offshore labor going into the products.

Ten years ago already, when the congress was in the grips of the Gingrich-lead contract on America, the often and widely repeated slogan that liberals were guilty of financially reckless "tax and spend" policies was known to be not merely wrong but quite the opposite of the numbers. In a word it was a lie then. The big spenders were the Conservatives up until 97 and in the intervening decade, the Bush borrowing binge has made the claim a yet more pale lie.

Why is that so? Why wouldn't a liberal congress continue or enhance a spending binge if it is aware of Senator Webb's concerns and reads the NYTimes? I am not a particularly well informed political commenter nor schooled at all in economics but I have an intuition: the liberals know who pays the taxes that get spent. Its the wage earners. We who live off of earned money have no place to hide from the IRS. The conservatives get their votes from the likes of NewsMax readership: people who quake in dread of some mysterious "them" who want to steal from trust funds and savings by hiding behind the tax man. Owning a pile of money is so different from hoping to earn a pile of money that it nearly creates two distinct species of political animal.

I grew up in a household where the democratic party and most of the candidates it offered were reviled. And "union" was a dirty word. A full accounting of how I wound up on this side of the Blogosphere would be a ridiculously long post and I have left many attempts at it in the "draft" state, you should be grateful. But just let me share one thing I have noted along my way: the association of organized labor with the politics of the Democratic party was once strong, weakened exactly during the peak years [see the NYTimes excellent chart in the linked article] of real, inflation adjusted, wage income. And now that wages are whittled away labor, though a wan shadow of its former self, has at least rediscovered were its political heart should be. How would I, well paid old engineer who never worked any place where an organizer could set foot, even know this? Simple. When vested money wants advice and its advisers lay out the "enemies list" I treat that list, [which is the conservative adviser's mistake], as the honor roll of liberal forces. Don't ask who your allies are, just check your enemy's target list. One John Browne offers an investment advice column to NooseMax readers. The following is from a recent article:

In our opinion, any further reductions in the prices of residential real estate will prove to be damaging to consumer confidence and therefore to aggregate demand of U.S. consumers.

This will hurt forecasted corporate earnings in certain sectors, raising today’s market average PE ratios to “expensive” levels.

Compounding the real estate crisis, is the bankruptcy-threatening situation facing Ford, one of America’s industrial icons and former blue-chip companies.

General Motors, once the largest company in the world, also faces serious financial problems.

To some extent, both of these giants have been brought low by the unions and their demands for wages and benefits (including pensions and health care) that were increasingly unsupportable by the long-term competitive positions of their products. (In the early 1970s, I was working with Morgan Stanley & Co. and saw first hand how union pressure caused managements to cave.)

Even if his other advice is sound, would you want to live in a country where capital was safe and workers, though no longer guaranteed much of anything in exchange for their work except their wages, were held to blame for all ills? Are you a worker or are you capital? Who votes, capital or workers. Two species of political animal, I tell you.

And let me give you a little more motive to read the Leonhardt article: Back in August he took a look at how the economy was going to work for Republicans in the then-upcoming election. He got it right.

I will not give new smacks the courtesy of an actual link. I take their newsletters just to keep in touch with what the lower half of the old rich people are hearing and fearing. And compared to most of my readers, I AM old and rich...its url is newsmax[dot]com if you must satisfy your morbid curiosity.

And it keeps happening every day ...

2007-01-19T15:43:00.000-05:00

...until we get wise to the problem.

This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address occur on the same day. As Air America Radio pointed out, "It is an ironic juxtaposition of events: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication while the other involves a groundhog."

The dirty sumbitch cannot ignore congressional direction to get out of Iraq without doing something a hell of a lot more impeachable than taking a blow job.

[hat tip to prolific emailer of great political jokes: Joe B.]

Thank you!

2006-12-06T08:38:00.000-05:00

Our meeting drew 10 more people than we expected, we had to set out more chairs until the hall was packed. I continue to be amazed how many people have stories different from mine and yet, when it comes to the hopes that well up because we might, just might, have a congress that can start to rein our country away from its reckless and heartless course, they are so much like me. Good ideas and good energy come packaged in all souls and all sorts of people...sometimes I think all we have to do is just thaw people out with a ray of hope and much more political will and engagement emerges.

Look out congress, here we come!

Main Street hopes to step on K Street.

2006-12-04T15:55:00.000-05:00

Yes, I have been busy. I had spare time before I took up blogging. Lately all that time has gone elsewhere:

You might think the recent election would get the attention of our congress. But now we want to keep their attention on our issues. Come meet the kind of people who turned the election: people like you! The Operation Democracy council serving the western suburbs of Boston is holding an open House [and open Senate is planned] meeting to kick off our "Mandate for Change" campaign to make the congress work as we voted for them to work. Come to a one hour meeting at the John M Barry Boys & Girls Club of Newton at 675 Watertown St. on Tuesday December 5th. Sign-in is at 7:pm. Come see how much fun grass roots politics is. Operation Democracy is affiliated with MoveOn.org but council members are strictly volunteers and make decisions locally. If interested and likely to attend, please let us know by registering for the event via this MoveOn page.

Novemeber 7th should not be the last time your wishes counted so come on down and help us shake things up. We have an in-your-face kind of petition drive that will let you get a lot more impact than just puting your John Henry on a plea to fix healthcare or the environement or get out of Iraq...though we will tackle all those things over the coming months.

Consolidating a grip on power

2006-11-29T12:38:00.000-05:00

This sentiment is a kind of undertone in some of the discussions of "what next now that we have majorities in house and senate" that boil along in every forum: Democrats won't do well if we don't keep or increase our margins of control.

I am not a Democrat and certainly not a Republican, I am a citizen, a taxpayer and a voter. The labels mean little to me if the policies are barely distinquishable. The Republicans had to answer "how do we get a lock on political power" after the Reaganization of political thought culminated in the Contract on America and the mid 90's Republican capture of majorities in both houses. Their answer included hitching incumbency to the wealth of industries and conservative churches via K Street and other unhealthy and anti-democracy tactics These tactics let lobbying budgets blind legislators to the real needs in our country and eventually made some of them blind even to the difference between a bribe and a legal favor...anything goes as long as money goes into the campaign fund.

Republicans outspent their opponents in most of the recent election's campaigns, including the upsets, of which there were quite a few. That would seem to argue that there is a limit to the effects of money on a campaign: If you really are screwing your country or even just ignoring your constituents then no, you can't buy yourself another term for any amount of cash.

If that is the shift that has just hit the fans, if that is how bad things got and how badly the average voter wanted to fix them, then the climate has changed. Climate change is not readily detected by Republicans, if their speeches on the matter mean anything. Thus, there may have arisen here a great opportunity/challenge to the newly elected and possibly more ethical congress: Shouldn't they look into consolidating their win not by sewing up deals with power hungry and favor seeking donors but rather by making the neglected two-way channel with their constituents the loudest and most transparent stream of influence in Washington? Shouldn't they now on a regular basis canvas voters to see whats hurting them and what they hope for? Shouldn't these legislators each frequently and honestly update us on just which laws they study and debate over and of all the laws in play, what their position will be in voting? I think that sort of communication would cement a legislator with his or her constituents and move the debates about what our priorties and means of achieving them should be back where it belongs: among the constituents. We aren't as stupid as the campaign budgets would have you believe and our voting just proved it.

But until this happy state comes about, just watch their votes, keep an eye on when new lobbying and donated money comes to your senator or representative and see if they will respond to your letter or phone call about why they accepted the cash. They may be a little more attentive to voter's letters than they were back in 2004. If you get a non-answer, consider youself as having a non-representative in congress and start looking for a replacement.

The important power that has been retaken lately and which needs to be firmed up is that of the voter over the congress.

Revisiting theater of the politically absurd.

2006-11-21T12:51:00.000-05:00

My first post in this blog complained that "its is 1968 all over again" and in many respects it still is. A small play produced in the 1969-70 season gives occasion to consider what is different between 1968 and today.

There seem to be two reasons that Jules Feiffer's 1968 play, "The White House Murder Case" has all but vanished from the world. Some reviewers fault the production and to a lesser extent the writing. These blemishes do not deter the usual suspects from trying to bring it back.

My play reading group read through it about three weeks before the election. Whatever its weaknesses in the craft of playwriting, its prescience concerning the depraved depths to which power and war-lust will stoop is simply stunning. The play ran off-Broadway and it did win an Obie award for direction.

So what is the other reason? According to no one but me, this play, when first produced the late 60's * was probably viewed by the average theatergoer as absurd. Absurd theater was an acceptable art-house kind of genre but not bound for long runs or stages outside campuses and large cities. Then as now, in America, artsy concepts are mostly a recipe for confining a work to a niche audience. Absurdity is an artsy concept but I think the Bush administration has lived down to the maxim that truth is more absurd than fiction. The times, thus altered by the unrelenting attack of crazed power upon truth in politics and public perception, are ready for a re-reading of this play. Find a copy if you can. It is short and you will gasp more with recognition of present mindsets than at the grim grim humor.

Was the play really such a turkey? Do you know where your president is right now?

Please pass the gravy.

*The variations in records of publication date are a clue that multiple re-writes were attempted but not a guarantee.
No amount of good writing will save the publication of a truth that has come before its time.

two sentences.

2006-11-20T21:57:00.000-05:00

"The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. "

--Gen. McCaffrey

[more extensively quoted at TPM, to whom I am grateful ] Leave it to someone who has served to put in two sentences, most of what I take pages to try to say about how broken our country has become.

Rangel tries to force the issue

2006-11-20T07:59:00.000-05:00

Charles Rangel calls for reinstating the draft. As I have said before, I think the belief that the draft would be political suicide is the one ray of reality that has ever shown in Bush/Cheney's darkened world.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress in June 2005 that ''there isn't a chance in the world that the draft will be brought back.''

Rangel's primary argument is, roughly summarized, "fairness": the proportion of young men and women dying in Iraq who enlisted for much needed pay and training is not the same as their share of the total population of draft-age men and women in this country. That much I agree with. As a secondary or consequential effect, Rangel hopes that when the well off and the powerful think that their kids could be called up, we won't rush into wars on the basis of a little faked evidence.

Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 under a bill the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee says he will introduce next year.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Sunday he sees his idea as a way to deter politicians from launching wars.

That may be true. I would hope that as a prod to our electorate's present unrealistic notion that war is sanitary, this bringing of the war to each and every family in America could affect our choices. But other than congratulating Rangel for being less of a hypocrite than anyone else on this matter, I do not wish him success. If Bush has a draft, he will use it and as a lame duck, use it with impunity. Rangel's hope that a draft will simply reinstate the proper and now missing political consequences of warmongering is not a strong enough reason at this time. And, BTW, Rangel knows perfectly well how draft measures go over so maybe he is just making a statement?

In 2003, Rangel proposed a measure covering people age 18 to 26. It was defeated 402-2 the following year. This year, he offered a plan to mandate military service for men and women between age 18 and 42; it went nowhere in the Republican-led Congress.

An unhealthy collusion of interest and disinterest

2006-11-19T10:59:00.000-05:00

It would seem that one of the most dangerous threats to public knowledge is a story which would both discomfort American readers enough that they don't ask and embarrass the subjects of the story so badly that they keep their doings in the shadow. In between the public and the perpetrator should be the news media. Harsh questioning is in order to expose why MSM ignore these stories.
Truthout brings you stories which otherwise sink from view in the "readers don't care, writers won't share" news environment of MoneyStreamMedia. You should keep Truthout from sinking

If you are tired of this, if you just don't want to hear any more of the kind of news Halliburton buries and Truthout or Project Censored exhume, you are part of the problem. If you wait until something like the following quote is read to you on Fox or CNN, it will be a few weeks after Bush/Cheney order an attack on Iran. How better, after all, for Dick Vader to cover his tracks?

...
Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton Corporation at the time he uttered those words. It was Cheney who directed Halliburton toward aggressive business dealings with Iran-in violation of US law-in the mid-1990s, which continued through 2005 and is the reason Iran has the capability to enrich weapons-grade uranium. It was Halliburton's secret sale of centrifuges to Iran that helped get the uranium enrichment program off the ground, according to a three-year investigation that includes interviews conducted with more than a dozen current and former Halliburton employees.

If the US ends up engaged in a war with Iran in the future, Cheney and Halliburton will bear the brunt of the blame. But this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who has been following Halliburton's business activities over the past decade. The company has a long, documented history of violating US sanctions and conducting business with so-called rogue nations.

No, what's disturbing about these facts is how little attention it has received from the mainstream media. But the public record speaks for itself, as do the thousands of pages of documents obtained by various federal agencies that show how Halliburton's business dealings in Iran helped fund terrorist activities there-including the country's nuclear enrichment program.

When I asked Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, a couple of years ago if Halliburton would stop doing business with Iran because of concerns that the company helped fund terrorism she said, "No." "We believe that decisions as to the nature of such governments and their actions are better made by governmental authorities and international entities such as the United Nations as opposed to individual persons or companies," Hall said. "Putting politics aside, we and our affiliates operate in countries to the extent it is legally permissible, where our customers are active as they expect us to provide oilfield services support to their international operations. "We do not always agree with policies or actions of governments in every place that we do business and make no excuses for their behaviors. Due to the long-term nature of our business and the inevitability of political and social change, it is neither prudent nor appropriate for our company to establish our own country-by-country foreign policy."

Halliburton first started doing business in Iran as early as 1995, while Vice President Cheney was chief executive of the company and in possible violation of US sanctions.

Why, for instance isn't this story about CIA finding lack of Iranian nuke development in today's NYTimes?

Sunday schoolin'

2006-11-19T10:01:00.000-05:00

What is a conservative's favorite Bible passage?

Am I my brother's keeper?

The sermon can never change the sacred text, only the context. Out of its context more than not, the passage gets kindly but thoroughly misused even by the most humane people. The closer the reading stays to the context, the more we get of the original intent of the passage. I like this example of the better usage. The usage I understand is that that question is a sneering lie by a murderer and its not meant to be answered. Anyone who thinks it is a deep question about the lines to be drawn around individualism is a fool and needs to reread Genesis.

The end of an era, [Please bury it. It has begun to stink!]

2006-11-16T20:25:00.000-05:00

Milton Friedman died today. George Bush lands in Viet Nam to participate in APEC tomorrow. The APEC summit being held in Hanoi marks a great milestone and a kind of "coming out party" for Viet Nam's emergence from miserable victim of war and its own centrally planned economy into a bustling economy with enough of the trappings of a free market to enable its membership in the WTO. Not that Viet Nam is quite the equal of, say, the Netherlands in matters of human rights just yet. But then neither is President Bush's country or President Hu's country for that matter. Human rights and the purely economic freedoms Milton espoused don't show up in the same place at the same time on history's stage...just and observation. Professor Friedman was big on observation.

Prof. Friedman was a thorough champion of economic [and probably most other ] freedoms from government, beloved of Grover Norquist and the libertarians at the Cato Institute. And, as pointed out in the NPR coverage [click the "listen" for audio] of Mr. Friedman's passing, he had many critics who thought he took a good idea way too far: the claim is that Mr. Friedman thought an unfettered market, operated by businesses or individuals free of burdens of regulation, could do no wrong. I will have to read one of his books to see if I think that is what he meant. But for now, knowing the folks at the Cato Institute are selfish but not stupid, I'll presume he favored nearly unregulated everything and was a grand daddy of the current blind faith neocons have in market solutions for everything.

Similar to the neocons [except they are still breathing] Mr Friedman is no longer in this world and as he leaves us, he was still thinking his ideas have triumphed. In a 1999 NPR interview he was asked what 20th century event would leave the most lasting effects and he said it was the collapse of communism:

"...Because it marked the philosophical supremacy of the idea of free markets and private enterprise over the idea of collective central planning. ...

Its a good interview and short, read it to see what the man thought. He was not a bad guy. He was privately saying "who cares" about drug use in the years when Reagan's catch phrase was "just say no" [I'd aver that Reagan introduced republican rudeness in that campaign..it should have been "just say no, thank you"]. Friedman helped dismantle the draft and urged economic incentives for recruiting: a mercenary army. The lack of a draft does have a long reach: it was Bush/Cheney's one inkling of "reality based" thought that they could never sell a war on Iraq with Shinseki's and Colin Powell's notion of troop numbers because reinstituting a draft would never fly. So they lied about the cost of the war in money and troops and that problem is very much with us today. But Milton's ideas are easily misused too. He provided strong excuses to people making favor-the-rich economic policy in spite of his own earnest vision that freedom favors even the small players with opportunity. Although I admire empiricism, which Friedman genuinely appears to have stuck too, it lacks the heart and intuition that good government must have.

"Human life requires the balancing of freedom with other goals, including security and equality," said Richard Parker, a senior fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Friedman's repeated neglect of these other values has been the repeated source of error in his policy advice."

If you are going to form world-shaping policies and ideas from evidence, you must take in much more evidence than even the vast studies of Mr. Friedman. He only studied people in their immediate economic settings: money. His empirical bent enables him to sound so wise when the replies to this interviewer:

STAMBERG: Professor Friedman, let's talk some, though, about the human cost of the free market, because we all know that everything free comes with a price, and very often the price has been tremendous hardships and insecurities. I wonder what it would take to make the free-market system work and not take too heavy a toll on the extremely poor, the people at the very bottom rungs?

FRIEDMAN: Well, I can't agree with the assertions you're making. You have to compare one system with another. There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist. I would say that, in contrary to your generalization, the free market has involved less hardship, has imposed far less of a cost than almost any alternative system. Can you compare any of the costs of the free market with the costs that were imposed by, let's say, either the Soviet Union or China?

STAMBERG: You know, lots of people are lucky to get their wisdom by sitting in your classroom over the years and reading your books. Others of us get our wisdom by talking to taxi drivers. Now this goes back to the Russian model again, and I'm sure you'll incorporate that in your answer. But I don't know how many Russian cabbies in New York have told me -- in the course of a really bumpy, pothole-filled ride -- how dreadfully tough their lives are here, having made that transition from a government which took care -- yes, in very brutal, cruel ways -- but took care of most of their human needs, and try to fight it out on the streets of the major city of capitalism.

FRIEDMAN: And why did they come there?

STAMBERG: Gold in the streets, was it?

FRIEDMAN: Yeah. Why didn't they stay in the Soviet Union?

STAMBERG: Of course, they saw more opportunities. That's true, Professor, but in terms of...

FRIEDMAN: Do they regret having come?

STAMBERG: Well, I think they did. I'm not saying...

FRIEDMAN: Don't you think that the most meaningful vote is a vote with your feet?

STAMBERG: So you're saying pack up and go back if it's so tough for you here?

FRIEDMAN: Well, how many have done so?... Don't misunderstand me. I'm saying if you really want to know what they really believe about the relative merits of the two systems, see what they do, not what they say. And what they do is to stay here. They don't go back. I think of my own family. My parents came here from Europe at the age of 14 and 16. And they had a hard time, a very difficult time, but it opened up a world of opportunity for them. And the same thing with these cab drivers whom you're talking about who are bitching about it. Look at what they do, not what they say.

And in the NPR coverage this evening, for which the transcript is not yet on line, Friedman is quoted to the effect that it was the untrammeled freedoms of our free enterprise system that allowed the US to provide so much opportunity to immigrants like his parents and produced that rapid growth of the American economy. I wish I could ask the man if he thought this freedom was meant to include freedom from responsibility for the future. The hidden factor, unvarying until the late 20th century, that invisibly shored up all economic prediction was that nature appeared inexhaustible and human activity had no impact on earth's capacity to warm and feed us. Those days are gone and classical liberalism must be buried with them.

Like I said before: A market is a crowd that has forgiven itself in advance for its avarice, saying greed is the norm. Mr. Friedman came up with his theories based as much as possible on the evidence he found. But he collected all his data in a field where human nature, that sad and sorry oxymoron, was the only "natural" force. The fuller context, the thoughtlessly exploited substrate of all life, our earth, was not a factor in Mr Friedman's calculations. Since a free market presumes all economic actors are indeed free to act it is presumed fair...but the future, our heirs, are not free to act. They are altogether absent unless our consciences or regulations of the market that would be to the advantage of no present player are enforced. [It occurs to me nature actually does get one rather sick sort of consideration: "depletion allowance" tax breaks for mineral resource exploiters]

No parliament however inclusive of the day's political stake holders, no number of bomb laden planes, not even profit itself will sustain a "freedom" that in the long run is just another word for the selfishness of an economics that believes the interests of those present are all that count.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note: The Chicago Tribune has one of the most detailed of the glowing retrospectives of this economist's extremely influential life, fitting in light of Milton's 30 year tenure at U of Chicago. Richard Adams at Guardian Unlimited points out that for all the effusive eulogies, it was a successor, Paul Samuelson, who gave advice to government that stayed in effect longer than most of Professor Friedman's directions.
Of Prof. Friedman's very many quotes, one that I think captures the essence of his errors is this:

“Freedom is the major objective in relations among individuals,” Dr. Friedman wrote in a 1968 essay collection, “Dollars and Deficits,” and “the preservation of freedom requires limiting narrowly the role of government and placing primary reliance on private property, free markets, and voluntary arrangements.”

Because the word "freedom" has become a mantra rinsed clean of the awareness that fairness is a co-equal objective in human interactions without which most freedoms are soon ground away.

We have only just begun to salvage American democracy

2006-11-15T07:17:00.000-05:00

This is exactly what many of us expect and hate: corporate money gets the last word with representatives who allegedly represent us voters. The corporocRATs jump one ship just to get on the other and they had better not make democRATs out of our new legislators. I am watching this congress as I did not know how to watch its predecessor. The same people who were enthusiasticly bumping Republicans out of power will entusiastically attack any legislator who gives much attention to the wishes of lobbiests. A lobbiest is NOT a constitutional post, a branch of government or, in any way, a representative of my wishes. I give money to AAAS, which vainly tried to lobby for science when both industry and the executive were against it. If "we have to lobby because the other guys are buying legislation" is an excuse to tolerate soft money sloshing around our capitol, there is a simple if drastic solution: outlaw lobbying. The very presence of influence buyers ought to be criminalized. A letter, a phonecall or an e-mail from a voter like me and the reports from their own investigative staff, for which they have budgets, are the only inputs to a legislator that I would trust. What kind of laws could you expect if the advice to the lawmaker comes from parties who speak only for a narrow financial self interest?

The real reason we need to impeach Bush

2006-11-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

Strictly speaking, there are several activities that the son of a Bush has participated in with full knowledge which clearly meet the criteria of "high crimes and misdemeanors" that violate the constitution and laws of the US. There are books and newspapers filled with enough evidence and argument written by legal scholars and journalists to make a far more compelling case than any brought against former president Clinton. What punishment would be enough for lying to us in order to get us into a nightmarish war? What punishment would be fitting for condoning warrantless spying on US citizens when the same surveillance could have been as effectively carried out under court supervision via the mechanisms in FISA?

No, we can never "get even" with this man and his cohorts, we can never restore the thousands of lives snuffed out by his unnecessary war. The best reason for dragging the spoiled conniving son of a Bush before a public court is this: We need to officially air his breaches of law and spell out their consequences in the public record. We need to do this so that his supporters are on notice that he really did bad things and denial becomes that much more foolish an escape. This will give the people he fooled into voting for him the scapegoat they need as he is not worthy of even the foolish admiration of a kneejerk conservative. This will remove all doubt and surprise about the monumental and probably unpopular costs of redressing the harms he has done.

The cost of cleaning up, at least in the political sense, needs to remain on the shoulders of the son of a Bush and not be accounted to those who come in his wake and actually spend the money to repair the damage. For the record, we must lay the blame where it belongs and expose the depths of the damage.

Lets make a deal

2006-11-11T11:11:00.000-05:00

It is not an easy thing to be human these days. Few choices don't involve compromises to our integrity or other's well being. And the multiplication of factors that could be included in most important decisions means we leave a lot of pertinent data out of mind or at the edges of consciousness.

Throughout history, but previously in merely local contexts, when men ran out of nature's gifts, they ran up against each other. The conflicted political powers and the constrained natural conditions of our times make it difficult to be a fair citizen of this planet or even to just get by with a completely clear conscience. We all have to make deals to get things done and tomorrow does not bring itself to the negotiations except through our consciences.

Would you be willing to have a finger chopped off if you knew it would suspend the killing in Iraq long enough for diplomats to work out the grievances, disparities and misrepresented intentions that brought the world to today's precarious situation? Would you give up a hand, an arm? To bring even a tense silence to Iraq in place of the likelihood of yet more thousands killed and the constant threat of retaliation by irate Muslims, would you offer your own life?

Any soldier who enlisted to fight or accepted an assignment to fight in Iraq has more regard for the welfare of his country in his little finger than the whole gang of Bush appointees and grafty hangers-on. Anyone who ever was in a combat situation and in uniform knows that from experience. That is the value of valor.

What do you think such a hypothetical trade-off means to the thousands of GI's who have come back from Iraq with shattered and truncated bodies? Leave aside the need for wages, help with tuition and job skills that prompted many to sign up and presume the soldier had some better and less fleeting reason than the missing WMD, Al-Qaida's alleged Baghdad brigade or even democracy at gunpoint. And they do find reasons. One Captain who served there mailed us a ballot. I put it up on the wall. We Americans will pass up an election if it is raining but people in Baghdad went to fill in this ballot when it was raining bullets. It touched that Captain, and it touched me but in the end that hope of democracy was premature or superficial like the rocky crust on a lava flow. But whatever their reason to go there, no one under arms in that country wants more war or expects to serve without risk of grave harm: This is the deal.

When I hear "support our troops" from conservative media personalities, its usage and context makes it clear that the words mean something like "Don't you dare say this is not a legitimate war! Get in line and don't doubt the president and his chain of command." That's funny, I would have taken the phrase to mean "support" as in equip, arm, armor and don't expose to danger unnecessarily "our troops" as in the men and women taking hits in Iraq rather than the corps of gung-ho desk soldiers in Washington who never shot anything except maybe a fellow bird hunter. My understanding of "support our troops" also includes full VA benefits when they come back, especially those who come back because the deal didn't work out so well for them. That is a cost of war Republicans have been skimping on and it takes someone like Senator Byrd to keep them honest. Our soldiers are in Iraq today but when they come home, many of them will have just begun to fight and we owe them support tomorrow as much as now. "Support our troops" is just the other side of the coin by which the soldier bought into the deal: the country must have high regard for the welfare of the soldier.

more laughs in my in box: Doughy defeats Truman

2006-11-09T11:31:00.000-05:00

The panting press for the Pantload party gets it wrong again:

I feel vindicated

2006-11-09T08:32:00.000-05:00

Some of you might not have caught the hints.

Rummy says good bye to dummy. He finally got the hints...or maybe just enough notice to give him time to shred anything that would embarrass his boss even more if that is possible.

To me, this long overdue departure seemed like the most achingly immanent requiting when I sat to write yesterday morning and there was so much good change to contemplate. But I can't fairly claim "I told you so". I didn't know it was coming, I just knew it should come. We have not had a SecDef so reviled by his own generals, not in the history of the repbulic. It was an unprecedented infection of a fool trusting an arrogant fast talker more than he trusted his own citizens. Its over. But the clean-up will take years. Some of Rumsfeld's pet technology projects might be in jeopardy. The annoying need to get men killed in order to win wars has already cut in to the budget for new weapons development. It is so clear to so many outside Cheney's charmed circle that it was an unnecessary war but why would a man of Rumsfeld's intelligence go along with it? Character. Rumsfeld has been the champion of a "transformation" program to put the world's most dangerous superpower on a course to ever greater fighting readiness by fighting smarter with technology. That in itself is not an evil thing but signing on to an evil war just to prove your restyled military could do the job is egotistical. It is tragically and abundantly clear this war was not Rummy's kind of war and what it needs, as was known by the generals from the outset, was massive troop strength, as much as four times the numbers deployed if it is to wind up with anything resembling conventional "victory". The real enemy was never in Iraq until we drew them there. The threats we faced before Iraq were entirely unconventional and would have been better countered by renewed peace initiatives in the Israel-Palestine conflict and by better intelligence with Arab-speaking agents on the ground and commando operations. We know now that Saddam was ready to cave but his concessions were hushed up to keep the war plan on track. I have made a very comfortable living as a technologist on one of Rumsfeld's favorite projects. I think the project has intrinsic strategic value outside the context of this stupid war and for the long term. But if Rummy's going takes a few plush jobs with it, so be it. I will gladly find more honest work if that hardship is the cost of restoring the integrity of military leadership and reasserting the military's role as a defense capability rather than a tool of baseless aggression. The cost that has been born by our fighting men and women, on the other hand, is unacceptable and unfair. How soon will they stop paying for arrogant mistakes?

I have been on this case for a while now:

It will be good to take a rest. Of course the problem is not solved. The retention of Rumsfeld so far past the time when he and his vision of the military were discredited is just one of the many examples of gross managerial incompetence that no president should be allowed. But it is the Bush mistake with the worst consequences.

Next? I hope Bolton goes very soon. The election has shown that Americans are not interested in bullying the world any more and our in-your-face UN embarrassador must go.

Meanwhile in other voting....

2006-11-08T07:44:00.000-05:00

Results

All in all, not a bad night at the polls. Its way too early and way too many instances of voting irregularities to sift through before challenges can be raised over the results in the close races that changed winners in the late counting i.e. VA-Sen, MT-Sen and CT-02. After two national elections in which Republicans made vital gains long after the polls close, I had begun to wonder if perhaps fetuses only come out to vote after midnight. The late reversal against Farrell in CT-04 is unfortunate...I made a lot of calls there and was getting such a good vibe. That flip of two or three percent after midnight is a pattern I was hoping not to see but I have heard of no irregularities in CT, certainly nothing on the scale of the [depressingly perennial ] Ohio election SNAFU or the obvious and definitely criminal vote disruption in CO and voter intimidation at some AZ polling places.

Interpretation

I still maintain that the biggest unreported issue being decided yesterday was whether or not the nation possesses a conscience any more. But you will hear plenty about the "meaning" of it all from better informed commentors than me. For instance, it is being said that as issues, gay marriage lost and stem cell research won. Indeed, gay rights, which shouldn't even have to be a distinct category of civil rights, took a hit from a resurgence of backwardness in several states:

" Residents in South Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho, Wisconsin and Virginia voted to define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman."

What about South Dakotans clearly denouncing their proposed abortion ban? Had you already written places like South Dakota off as backward swamps of right wing ignorance? The vote tells us for sure that everybody is stirred up and paying more attention than before. Would have been nice if the environment were better represented in yesterday's voting. I happen to live in that environment and deeply wish to see it healed. Perhaps others live elsewhere. Perhaps the new crop of Democrats will not be so narrowly focused as the Repbulicans they replace. Perhaps.

News sources, other polling.

Although their network is still in my dog house for airing a wingnut hatchet job "documentary" designed to confuse their TV audience, that left-behind child of the body politic, about Bush administration laxity leaving us open to the 9/11 attacks, I still read ABC News' The Note. I take what I read on any ABC website with a grainery of salt [they count 47 Dem senate seats at this hour, TPM counts 49...we will see who is right as these numbers are live and in flux]. But you need to know what sources like that are saying so that when you talk to the politically "normal" who don't feed their political news addictions from liberal blogs, you know where they are coming from. On their main politics page, ABC generally features oportunites for feedback as video uploads, coments and survey questions. The questions typically leave out options I would want so I don't bother with the surveys most of the time. But the reader opinion shown below was a simple thumbs up or thumbs down for a guy who has had his thumb in the eye of one too many generals. The national vote is often spoken of as a "referendum on Iraq". Then the national vote is not clear enough for me in light of the outrageous flow of lies that got us into this futile bloodbath and continue flowing to keep us there. Given some of the slim margins that are being called victories this morning, these lopsided little survey numbers are beyond a "mandate" and more in the realm of an indictment for manslaugther. The body is in the morgue. The blood is on his hands. My only fear is that he alone would suffice as a scapegoat when Cheny, Bush and their whole coterie of lying chicken hawks should all take the fall.

Politics fair and foul

2006-11-07T08:36:00.000-05:00

Did any of you read this article in the NYTimes?

New Telemarketing Ploy Steers Voters on Republican Path

By CHRISTOPHER DREW

An automated voice at the other end of the telephone line asks whether you believe that judges who Âpush homosexual marriage and create new rights like abortion and sodomyÂ should be controlled. If your reply is Âyes,Â the voice lets you know that the Democratic candidate in the Senate race in Montana, Jon Tester, is not your man.

In Maryland, a similar question-and-answer sequence suggests that only the Republican Senate candidate would keep the words Âunder GodÂ in the Pledge of Allegiance. In Tennessee, another paints the Democrat as wanting to give foreign terrorists Âthe same legal rights and privilegesÂ as Americans.
...

Our November surprise turned out to be how little the Republican party knows or cares about legal or ethical campaign practices. Well, surely someone must be surprised. Plenty of fouls against FCC and other regulations but not enough MSM coverage and a downright peculiar failure on the part of many major media news organizations to point out that Dems are NOT doing dirty tricks. But this technique of probing for a voter's biases and pinning a vote suggestion to either religious intolerance or homophobia does not strike me as an intrinsically unfair campaign tool. Disgusting, pandering, encouraging the very worst in the psyche of the american electorate? Yes. Unfair? Not really. Giving voters the things they need is rare but promising them what they want is politics as usual.

Today the news will be of balky voting machines, mysteriously erased or misplaced voter registration rolls, hostile voter credential challenges in contested districts and just generally a huge sideshow of broken election infrastructure mostly to the advantage of Republicans that distracts from the real story that unfolds today: Can America regain is conscience today? The whole world dreads our elections now.

It is harmful to the prospects of any nation for its leaders to pander to the narrow mindedness, selfishness and fear of voters. These negative traits are simply human and universal pitfalls, not specifically American or Republican. They are a shortsighted toe hold for political ambitions, a dead end. It is the downward path by which fascists lead their nation's to disgrace and destruction. But it is politics as usual. Our vote this year, perhaps a little more so than in other years, is a referendum on whether America is just another "politics as usual" country and therefore destined for the same fates as other "empire as usual" nations that have gone before us.

Beside that long term rot of the moral reasoning among the voters, is there a short term harm in this vile appeal? Can blatant appeals to fear and bigotry rescue the Republicans? I wonder. The harm seems small because the bigots on whom such a phone call would work are the anxious little minds that already know who serves their special interests and insecurities. That phone call is not going to change the minds of anyone whose mind isn't already in a private fog of ignorant homophobia or having Fox News-induced nightmares about islamofascists hiding among the mosques in America. The hope [it certainly isn't facts I can cite from polling] that I am voicing is that the mysterious body of voters we label "undecided" are in fact mostly decent people who feel numbed or badgered or disgusted by the coarse, crass tone and divisive trickery that has become common procedure for getting elected. Or at least, its what got many of our current crop of defective congressmen elected. We may call these potential voters undecided only because of what a few of them told a pollster, but any sample of people who "don't know" who they are voting for seems like a useless basis to infer either indecision, indifference or reticence in service of their privacy. So it is just a hope then that among the mystery crowd there are those who need a nudge to feel that one candidate represents the best hope for all the people and for the long term and need a nudge to care enough to go to the polls. And there is a hope that such undecideds out number the bigots who balance between disgust and fear and could be tipped by an egregious phone trick. That is why I keep making the phone calls.

UPDATE: I just finished an hour of MoveOn calls-for-change into Connecticut congressional districts and maybe I was just having a good day but of the live people I talked to, one hung up and all the rest said they had or would vote for the Democratic candidate. Joe the republicrat will be all by himself among his state's delegation if that was a valid sample.

------------

Note:As you can see from the links, I owe particular thanks to the gratifying speed and authority of Josh Marshall's resources and his contributors at TPM where a handy scoreboard will go live when the first polls close.

Timing the news, good noose and bad news

2006-11-06T08:50:00.000-05:00

I have a hard time getting in all the reading these days in spite of my frequent exhortations to anyone in earshot that they should budget more time for staying informed. In particular, I have neglected Alternet but thanks to Thivai at Dialogic, I came across a good write up by Joshua Holland on the curious timing of the announcement of the verdict against Saddam Hussein. Its not that the timing didn't immediately strike me as the wan November Surprise Rove has been smirking about...its that I was unaware of several of the details of the trial and its failure to follow competent and defensible judicial processes: this is a rushed verdict and thereby a wasted opportunity to hold up in full detail before the world exactly how rotten that SOB was.

The TV news is full of coverage of preparations for the expected surge of violence at the announcement of the verdict. Odd that there would be so much anticipation since we all know damn well he is to be found guilty. I wanted to read the text of the verdict because the news coverage I heard only mentioned Saddam's crimes against Shia populations. Where's the rest of the verdict? I searched for "text of verdict" Saddam and the top of the search hits was the Bush Crimes Commission verdict against Bush. I also found a liberal bashing website making an interesting attempt to spin the verdict, using Chris Matthew's claim that the verdict works against the pro-war Republican party. That was a proof that "Dem outrage" at its obvious timing is over done. Matthew's claim is that any attention drawn to the war hurts Republicans. Yeah, right. That must be why the President got on the news last night talking up his trophy trial's unsurprising outcome. Despite the administration's claims that this trial shows Iraqis are now taking charge of their own country, the fact is that Bush "diplomacy" is exerting as much force as any Iraqi and the real action in Iraqi politics at this point is sectarian militias unfriendly to any Iraqi government that smells of Bush. If this trial were the objective or the proof of any substantial "iraqification" of the war, we'd like to hear the president say "mission accomplished" again and this time mean it and get us the hell out of there before any more people get killed. We aren't going to hear that because trial or not, the place is a bloody mess and the US owns much of the blame for botching the peace and fomenting the insurgency through sheer arrogant incompetence.

The various news reports of the verdict on the web only mention Saddam's guilt in killing Shiites. Nobody on the planet, liberal or conservative, doubts he was a cruel murdering despot. But a show trial that only nets a few of his henchmen and omits vast amounts of evidence is yet another wasted opportunity. Is there justice for the Kurds in a verdict that does not mention the genocide they suffered? Is there even safety or security to be reaped if the trial stops at a handful of culprits and does not ferret out the Baathist party operatives and lieutenants that made Saddam's choke hold on the country possible? No. We have left much undone in our haste here.

Even if you give Bush credit for bagging his Baghdad nemesis, it is by now an overstated and overshadowed triumph. Was this triumph, which may only be a personal vendetta of Bush and a few close advisors, worth the cost? The cost is more than the hundreds of thousands of lives lost. The cost is more than the 200 billion per year that is sapping our economy and starving our urgent domestic health, infrastructure and retirement programs. The cost is not just the bitter division of Americans into camps claiming and disclaiming that trumped up wars make us "more secure". The cost is Iraq itself. The country and its 26 million suffering souls, which Mr. Bush convinced too many Americans he could save from despotism by making war, was in fact a rather fragile arrangement of factions. Iraq was always much easier to break than it was to fix and its obvious now to all. It was obvious to many before March of 2003 but they were purged from Bush's counsels or ignored. That country is now badly broken and in a scary echo of Iraq's fatal factional strife, America too is torn over its involvement in the debacle. Bush the "uniter", indeed. If this concocted "Surprise" hanging lets the Republicans hang on to power, maybe they deserve it: fixing the mess they made will be a much greater effort than the already costly effort of the backfired "war on terror". No popular options I can envision are going just quickly and cheaply set things right. It would be fair, if foolish, to let that thankless job be the work for the Republicans who made it necessary.

This verdict is one of the most actively spun pieces of news I have ever tried to get a grip on. Fisk's more deeply moral analysis of the verdict is rare and refreshing. For now I just wanted facts. I had to resort to a Canadian newspaper to get an article that stuck to quotes and narrative without telling me what to think. Of all the politicians talking, Reid of NV may have best got it down to the simple without loosing the dismaying truth:

Senate minority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said: "Iraqis have traded a dictator for chaos" and that White House policy had left U.S. troops "caught in the middle."

In the most damning fusillade from frustrated military professionals yet, those who can best speak for the "troops caught in the middle" blasted the bungling of the Secretary of Defense who none the less continues to enjoy Bush's unquestioning support. I repeat an old thought: this persisting at false and immoral agendas that characterizes the Bush administration has worked the saddest and scariest detriment to our defense: fracturing the cohesiveness of the military.

Four leading U.S. military publications - the Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times and Marine Corps Times - said in an editorial to be published today Rumsfeld had "lost credibility" with senior U.S. commanders and shoulders the blame for strategic blunders in Iraq.

"His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised," the editorial says.

"And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt."

While I do not have any personal knowledge of whether or not the administration colluded with Iraqi authorities to get a favorably timed release of the verdict, the facts may no longer be the interesting news in this regard but rather the story becomes how deeply cynical this administration's frequent and clumsy lying have led us to become. Pity poor Tony Snow having to fend off all the doubters:

White House press secretary Tony Snow said it was "absolutely crazy" to suggest U.S. influence in the timing of the verdict.

I have had enough of this. This country has fought wars in the past that put all Americans on same side. It is stupid wars and unjust wars that divide countries. In my calls to voters yesterday, I only had time to hear views of a few people. They don't always like the Democratic candidate so much but they all fear keeping one of Bush's yes-men in office. Please understand, if you think you don't need to vote because poll numbers are looking good, you are setting us up for a terrible outcome. Your vote may be the one that exceeds the margins that corrupt vote counting can conceal. VOTE. If you are not sure where to vote or what the polling hours are in your precinct, call 1-866-MY VOTE -1 [1-866-698-6831] . If you know someone who is unsure or uninterested about voting, ask them why. The war is not the only issue but it is draining so much good will and money from the nation that almost every other domestic issue you can name [except jobs in munitions factories] is suffering some neglect and shortage of money. If you hear an admission that vague fear seems to have translated itself into specific wishes for leaders of military action, point out that while the world is not filled with friends of the US:

War has not made us safer, Spain and the UK have already felt the backlash of war.
We are being manipulated into a state of fear by the administration's constant use of terrorism's specter and by media that prosper when viewers are anxious and find themselves in a position to fan anxiety.

If only for that phone number, pass this post around please!

one more time, WHY are we in Iraq?

2006-11-05T20:32:00.000-05:00

~~Because Saddam had the bomb~~. That is a lie the Bush league wrung out of the CIA

~~Because Saddam had Al Qaida contacts and supported them~~. That was news to Al Qaida.

~~Because we were going to bring democracy to those poor Arabs~~. Then why do a higher percentage of Iraqis vote than show up at the polls in America?

~~Certainly not because we want the oil under our control. We can't say that on the air can we, Karl?~~ Lindsay at Majikthise translates WaPo out loud for the hard-of-thinking conservatives.

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2006; Page A06

GREELEY, Colo., Nov. 4 -- During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his aides sternly dismissed suggestions that the war was all about oil. "Nonsense," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared. "This is not about that," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
...
You can imagine a world in which these extremists and radicals got control of energy resources," he said at a rally here Saturday for Rep. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.). "And then you can imagine them saying, 'We're going to pull a bunch of oil off the market to run your price of oil up unless you do the following. And the following would be along the lines of, well, 'Retreat and let us continue to expand our dark vision.' "
Bush said extremists controlling Iraq "would use energy as economic blackmail" and try to pressure the United States to abandon its alliance with Israel. At a stop in Missouri on Friday, he suggested that such radicals would be "able to pull millions of barrels of oil off the market, driving the price up to $300 or $400 a barrel.

The man who put the most pressure and planted the most toadies among the defense intelligence analysts to get his war decision also has close ties to the defense contractor that went on to overcharge millions to provision the warriors under a no-bid contract. [that is over a million google matches, few involving refutations...well? ]

Why are we still in Iraq?

My InBox

2006-11-05T09:21:00.000-05:00

A warning: when google adsense, via your Gmail contents, figures out that you are interested in US politics, it makes its nickel by putting up sponsored ads on the right sidebar. I once clicked on one of them that was asking "what do you think of Ann Coulter?", expecting to get a pop-up poll with radio buttons like:

[] She is a vacuous hate monger,
[] She is a lying right wing provocateur,
[] She is a vicious hussy

But what I got was a guilefully worded invitation to provide my e-mail address in order to receive I-forget-what useful information. Fortunately, I provided the addy of my email dumpster account, a box to which a torrent of commercial and dubious crap flows with scant attention from me. I have ever since then been bombarded by "news" from the publisher of Limbaugh's lambastings and Coulter's calumnies, Newsmax. The inbox looks like this now and you can tell by the subjects that you don't want to open the mail:

Maybe an "easy six-figure income for life" is a credible appeal to the sort of people who buy Limbaugh books. Sheesh!

As you can see, I also take my MoveOn mail here. It makes a juxtaposition of jarringly different versions of reality. I will be making phone calls and stuff from now until Tuesday so there won't be much posting...I am sorry I never got around to my intention of a series of posts on what I thought were the important issues. But who reads me anyway? More than enough to read out there already. I would urge you to read less in fact and do more, like calling voters to go and do their jobs.

What would a real democracy look like?

2006-11-01T23:35:00.000-05:00

The thought of a crowd being able to control itself without some central disciplinary structure has apparently never lodged in a conservative brain. The libertarians yes, but not the people who took over the Republican party. Their talk of individual responsibility is almost endless but they have message police. There also appears to be some confusion of the idea of a strong leader with the idea of a strong government: they call for a weak government but give unprecedented powers to the leader. In my view, a truly strong government would be all processes and rules with adaptive feedbacks rather than authorities and counter-authorities plotting revolutions against authorities. It would have wide civil buy-in of all important stake-holders. It would hardly need leaders but it would need hardy, and well informed constituents. We aren't there. We aren't even going that way.

The very names, when you look into their Greek roots, speak of an important difference between the two parties that dominate the US at this time. One name posits representatives to speak on behalf of the people...leave government to the pros. The other name puts the power, and therefore the responsibility to govern, directly on the people governed. They are just names of course but which kind of government do we have these days? We can't get the power of the vote liberated from "winner take all" electoral mechanics and we are not even talking about direct democracy though we have more than enough technology to pull it off. We are still a nation of people who expect to be governed, and none of us more so than those who speak of shrinking or drowning government. It is only the part of government that costs money [their money!] which they magically think can be abolished. Which part doesn't cost money? Under Bush, Departments have appeared, services to individuals have been reduced yet the federal payout to cronies in business and to a lesser extent, payroll, has grown...and that is not counting the growth of military expenditures. Debt has exploded. Is that a "smaller" government?

A crowd with principles. That is not the vision some of us have. A market is a more favored view or model of society on the part of the neocons who do most of the theorizing for the Republicans these days. I wonder what they mean in characterizing market forces as benign and fair. A market is a crowd that has forgiven itself in advance for its avarice, saying greed, gain and advantage, its principal principles, are the natural norm. I have no quarrel with capitalism as it has harnessed human nature for our material benefit far more effectively than pure socialism but it is NOT to be mistaken or substituted for democracy.

Its not the best fitting example but I wanted to make my little point here by an anecdote concerning the operation of a group who pioneers what may be the near future of democracy. MoveOn.org is going to get a few more evenings of my time for making phone calls, and unfortunately leave me less time for blogging. For all I know, it may look like the bottom tiers of Rove's GOP GOTV machine, but Rove's machine has a top tier of indu$try and religiou$ reactionaries and set-piece messaging you would find missing if you strayed into a MoveOn office. Obviously, I cannot claim complete impartiality. The operation of MoveOn, how it decides what issues to tackle, is based as far as I can tell, on constantly canvassing its members via email and online polls. But that is more of a view from the outside. I have spent one evening a week at a call center, working with organizers and making calls and so I think I can say a little, a very little, about the inside.

It looks chaotic. Visually, the office is not Martha-Stuart-neat and looks a lot more like nerd-messy. The phones work. The computers work. The sign-up sheets and call tally sheets do get filled in, collected and processed. But what do the people say and think as they handle the gazillion little issues that come up?

My illustration of this concerns a troll who commented the last time I mentioned MoveOn. The commenting went thus:

Bill Levinson said...

Before you make any more phone calls on behalf of MoveOn.org, I suggest that you Google on "MoveOn.org" and "anti-Semitism," "racism," and/or "hate speech." I don't think you will like what you see.

Bush may not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier but, as soon as an organization welcomes hate speech directed at Jews and Catholics (as well as put-downs of African Americans), it pretty much closes the door to intelligent and rational discourse.

...
GreenSmile said...

Bill:
I googled as you suggested. That was a surprise.

The Anti-Defamation League was satisfied with MoveOn's official response but of course we want to know if leaders of MoveOn, loose cannons within MoveOn, or really who posts odious crap like that.

If you read the correspondence between ADL and MoveOn officials you would be led to believe that persons intent on harming the reputation of MoveOn took advantage of the openness of the forum on which the offensive remarks were posted.

Numerically, the lion's share of the google hits that derive from what appear to be no more than two spates of foul material from as yet unidentified submitters, were hits on all the posts and pages of persons and organizations that are only too happy to repeat that MoveOn is a hatemongering organization. MoveON has a lot of us refugees from politics-as-usual who retreat from the vile and corrosive process that was introduced largely by Republicans [swiftboating takes $] to replace what used to be campaigning and debating. I see that the spiteful rabidity will hound us wherever we go. So I am standing my ground here and facing you.

Your facts please? Here's all we've got: There is the fact that hateful words and "ads" were put up on the MoveOn web site or forum. Is there more than that? Were the offensive things removed and repudiated? Would you like an apology? The ADL could certainly be identified as an aggrieved party in this and they were satisfied with the apology they got. Do you know who put the posts up? I agree you really did point to a question that needs answering.

I am not a lawyer but I always ask: "who benefits?"...

Leadership of the Democratic party,another organization that fears MoveOn, also tries to make a conflagration out of a spark that has yet to be associated with anyone on staff at MoveOn. Kinda unsurprising to find MoveOn is on Lieberman's enemies list.

Some of the links I find from google are to articles in Israpundit playing up the idea that Moveon is a hatemongering organization, articles written by someone named Bill Levinson. I congratulate you on rising to the top page rank for "hate speech" searches. Its a kind of honesty, I suppose. Since you basically told me where to look, I am wondering if you thought the mere sight of your page would make me toss out experience in favor of assertion. Where is it considered true that MoveOn is, as you put it, "best known for vicious anti-Semitic hate speech? What kind of honesty is that? If I remove the term "hate speech" from the search terms the page match count goes from 50 thousand to 2 and half million. Where ever this place is that knows your special truth about MoveOn, they don't have no internets.

I judge by results, not reputations, especially when the adversaries are desperate and the disrepute is so easily manufactured and so eagerly picked up. Not one communication to me from MoveOn, not one word to me from the organizers I have worked with...not one word that reflects any such bigotry can I recall. I'd be out of there like a shot on as little as one such word. I write about an organization I have experience with, not just some outfit whose write-up on the internets agrees with me. MoveOn has no guards at the portals, no message control police...it has to be the most loosely put together project I have worked with. They actually look like a democracy to me. They are still trying to find out who their real friends are. They are trivial to penetrate but that does not change their values. You will find them much harder to embarrass. And yes, some of the MoveOn members are angry people, angry about stupid priorities of an administration that runs wars and relief efforts corruptly, angry about the removal of the wall between church and state...plenty of things to resent and that was before you signed on to help with their public relations. They will from time to time be the victims of their own openness and lack of control, something that will never happen in the disciplined media of the right.

The google chase you sent me on turned up a lot of things I didn't know about,for instance, funding. The GoP like rumors of foreign financing as well as disclosing MoveOn takes money from the nefarious Mr. Soros. I caught an interview he did with Charlie Rose the other day. I was very surprised to see that he does not have horns. I kinda like the guy actually. I also give money to MoveOn but the GoP did not report this.

Has Rush played this hit on his show yet?

So, you warned me I might not like what I see. I am not terribly different from anyone else out here on this foggy little playground: I tend to see what I expected to see. The class and quality and count of my enemy reassure me. I am dismayed at human nature today Bill, but not by any facts I found.

Since I just winged that, I thought I ought to mention it to one of the MoveOn staffers next time I was at their office. The response was more or less that what I said was fine and they don't have a hand-out of talking points to give me. They all wing it. The scared sockpuppetry and the attempts to break the reputation of an organization by smearing it with ridiculous claims will probably melt away when its clear that the vigor and effectiveness of the organization have much less to do with leaders and agendas and more to do with the volunteers and their wish to speak up for change.

Was this Levinson person spreading the lie because he didn't know better? Even that would be a poor reflection on his enterprise. If his research stops at counting pages and does not proceed to reading them then maybe he didn't know. If he did know, well then I don't think he would be too interested in democracy: he has an issue that trumps honesty. Either way, he was dealing in rumors. Since the writing of the Talmud, the traditional moral teachings forbid gossip [loshon harah] and consider character assasination, even casually or through negligence, on a par with physical and financial damages [ona'ah] but worse in that the damage from verbal ona'ah is harder to repair. Of the many who claim to support Israel, those ignorant of Jewish teachings are often the least helpful.

A real democracy can't look like anything but its citizens. The only way you can hurt a real democracy is by not getting involved.

You NEED an independent news source

2006-10-31T22:09:00.000-05:00

Mike Stark is my kind of Marine: a guy who understands the freedoms he fought to protect and won't back away from using and defending them as a citizen. By the video and accounts in Truthout or at Talking Point Memo, Stark did nothing different than what he's been doing: puting sharp questions to Senate candidate Allen. The video was shown on my local, Tribune-owned, station's ten oclock news. This tv coverage was not a Fox hatchet job, but just the usual MSM slop. According to them, a nameless "heckler caused a scare for the Allen campaign and had to be wrestled to the ground". They said this over the same video we all have seen...Stark was not the instigator and did not put up much of a fight either. He is the one who has a better case if it comes to charges but my TV station ended the piece with "charges have not yet been filed against the heckler".

The truth? You want the truth? Your TV network news can't handle the truth!

November 7th Surprise

2006-10-31T12:39:00.000-05:00

Maybe this kind of stuff is what has Rove so cocky. Doubts about whether manipulation of vote counts have occured simply got to be tiresome to MSM but are still not resolved to my satisfaction.

Causes for Rove's show of smugness that I discount:

I can't imagine even the most desperate peace deal Bush dares to make would lead his new enemies in Iraq to let him claim a victory or even a truce...the insurgents are getting just what they want because the are dealing with an idiotic politician.

The Dow Jones topping 12000 in Octobor may look good to the people who fund the attack ads Rove et al have barraged us with but what does it mean to crowds of voters who used to work at GM an Ford just two years ago? The economic surprise the average american is far more concerned with a pink slip or an uninsured health problem.

The dirt.

2006-10-27T18:55:00.000-04:00

Heeeerrrrrz Republicans!
Through the diligence [ not to mention the generosity] of Chris Bowers at myDD, a list of moderately to thoroughly damaging coverage of the sleazy club that call themselves Republican congress persons. These are links to stories published in mainstream news papers and written by MSM journalists, not KOSsacks. This is their dirt and no body made it up. They own the stink in this sore nation.

To the list compiled at myDD I add a link or two found in comments provided by readers at Majikthise. I will note those additions with a "my own due diligence" annotation.
--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

--WY-01: Barbara Cubin [my own due diligence]

have fun reading!

A great reckoning in a small place

2006-10-27T08:27:00.000-04:00

Did you ever wonder where the Republican party got the hundreds of millions it will spend [so says Herr Rove] in the next week and a half to saturate the media with attacks on its many less wealthy opponents in many races and with appeals to your uncertainties and fears. It takes a lot of money to keep people thinking "If I don't vote Republican, Osama's gonna get me!" How much of that money will you take into the voting both with you? How much of it will you even be aware of as money lavished on you for influence sake?
got to the pages that track campaign finance.
identify all the donors is not possible but some huge ones are:

and where did they get their money?