Waldenswimmer

Saturday Morning Essay: Michael Hastings & "The Operators"

2012-01-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

Brought to you by Peet's Coffee, as always.

I'm finishing up a very good read, The Operators, by Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer who achieved quite a media buzz a couple of years ago when his disclosures of "off the cuff" remarks by General Stanley McChrystal, who was then the commanding officer in Afghanistan, caused the sacking of McChrystal by an embarrassed White House. Hastings is a good, lively writer in the Hunter S. Thompson/Matt Taiibi mode, and had the courage to exercise the license he was apparently given by McChrystal's entourage to write his story any way he saw fit. The way he saw fit was simply to reproduce the scenes in Afghanistan, Paris, Berlin and elsewhere in which McChrystal and his "Team America," a rowdy, hard-drinking, profane staff of somewhat iconoclastic career Army guys spoke at length about what they thought about Obama, Hamid Karzai (the President of Afghanistan, elected under very dubious conditions), Gen. James Jones, the National Security head (called a "clown" by Team America), the various ambassadors and envoys to Afghanistan, such as Holbrooke and Eikenberry, and the counterproductive nature of the war in general. Indeed, some commentators thought this was the real reason McChrystal had to go, his "counterinsurgency math," by which he calculated that every innocent civilian killed in Afghanistan produced ten more insurgents against America and Karzai. Obviously, President Obama can't have that kind of logical deduction, coming from his own theater commander, on the cover of the Rolling Stone.

Hastings probably seemed like a tame mascot and Boswell to McChrystal's Dr. Johnson, but in fact Hastings has a keen mind and deep powers of observation and analysis, which proved McChrystal's undoing. McChrystal himself is an interesting subject, a liberal Democrat by inclination who is nevertheless a supremely ambitious careerist; it's just that his career is in the Special Ops section of the Army, and counterinsurgency in particular. Tall, gaunt, ascetic when he's in the combat theater, and a two-fisted drinker when he hits the bars in France and Berlin, McChrystal is a hard guy to pin down. He inspired intense loyalty among his Team America entourage, was considered enlightened and innovative in his approach to Afghanistan, yet he was involved in both the Pat Tillman and Abu Ghraib scandals

One scene stuck with me. In Berlin in 2009, McChrystal gave a lecture on Afghanistan to a group of German media figures. In the account given by Hastings, the lecture was a tour de force, an historical exposition of Afghanistan's thirty years of constant war, and in a country where about two-thirds of the population is younger than 25 (life expectancy in Afghanistan is 44), this fact alone means that the vast majority of Afghans have never experienced peace during their lifetimes. McChrystal described the tribalism, the drug trade, the corruption in the central government, the nature of the insurgency, the Taliban, everything. At the end of the lecture, one German reporter asked McChrystal a question that stunned Hastings; the reporter pointed out that McChrystal had mentioned Al-Qaeda only once.

This is a question, as Hastings notes, that an American reporter would never ask, nor probably even think to ask. Yet this is the putative reason we invaded in 2001, over ten years ago. What is somewhat reassuring to one's sanity (and to the reliability of one's own perceptions) is that Hastings, who had the privilege of an insider's perspective on the top command in Afghanistan (and was allowed to write about it), winds up asking the same common sense questions that occur to everyday Americans. Such as: why do terrorists, Al-Qaeda or otherwise, actually need a "safe haven" from which to plan attacks on America? Especially when one considers, as confirmed by the Report of the 9-11 Commission (which, I repeat, apparently no one has read, in or out of government), that the 9-11 plot was actually put together in Hamburg, Germany, Cairo, South Florida and Phoenix? Why is Afghanistan, the sixth poorest country in the world with a population of 30 million, with no real military capability and no nuclear weapons, actually any sort of threat to the United States?

The answers to these questions are obvious, and Hastings provides a valuable public service in lifting the veil on all the nonsensical propaganda which Obama and others use to justify this "necessary war." It isn't necessary at all, it's counter-productive, and it is carried on for two principal reasons:

1. As a money-making venture for the military-industrial complex, and for all the lobbyists the MIC supports (who in turn support their employees in the Congress and White House).

2. As a theater of operations where Army commanders can advance their career ambitions by participating in an actual war, sort of. It's a war in the sense that lots of people, Americans and especially Afghans, die violent deaths.

One could add that Afghanistan is also a political meme. By being for this war (again, sort of), President Obama can be Presidential and tough on terror. The war has no connection to American security, in reality, or even to the "war on terror" (whatever that is), as even Team America would probably concede; indeed, the book cites official studies by the Rand Corporation (best read with one's Dr. Strangelove voice) and by the CIA which demonstrate convincingly that combating terrorism with the ordinary criminal justice system is more effective than launching wars against countries that supposedly "harbor" terrorists. But the meta-reality of Media Discourse, a stupid and dumb beast, in which the Afghanistan war has a totemic or emblematic essence connected to America's righteous revenge for the outrage of 9-11, is the one that is debated on the campaign trail and among the regular toadies of the press (excluding guys like Hastings and Taiibi).

Why did we invade Afghanistan? That's a question that first occurred to me in the fall of 2001. Now Hastings has written a book which sheds a lot of light on that question. The impulse to invade (as an act of misplaced or impotent revenge) is probably distinct from the institutional reasons that have kept the war going for a period nearly three times as long as America's involvement in World War II (3 years, 8 months, versus 10 years, 3 months), but it still adds up to complete nonsense. I suspect that the answer, at bottom, is that we fight many wars because we have a huge military establishment that wants something to do and wants to justify its existence and all the careers attendant to it. You can't give those answers as the official rationale, so we torture logic to create propaganda that sustains these misbegotten adventures.

My Favorite Economic Factoid

2012-01-11T10:18:00.000-08:00

I apologize in advance for bringing this topic up so often, but I just really can't get enough of it. I think it's because it absolutely encapsulates and epitomizes the fundamentally fake nature of the modern American economy.

To wit: the Federal Reserve has just reported that it has remitted $76 billion to the Treasury Department of the Fed's earnings on its $2.9 trillion portfolio of Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, and other trash. Relative to this number, the Fed maintains a very low overhead (on the order of 1/2 billion), so the Fed's gross earnings essentially equal its net. The Fed is a lean, mean, phony-money-generating machine.

I think what I love more than anything is the learned discourse about this topic among all the major economic thinkers: Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Brian Sack of the New York Federal Reserve, as they ponder this awesome contribution to American solvency. They honestly take all this shit seriously, the "money" the Fed is paying into the Treasury, the money the Fed uses to "purchase" Treasuries on the "open market" from the In Crowd Primary Dealers, the "Quantitative Easing" programs that enabled the Fed to take all that dodgy mortgage paper off the hands of its troublesome children in the banking community in the first place. They consult graphs and charts, talk about the "expectations for inflation," note with satisfaction that the U.S. Treasury market remains saturated with offers for the Treasury's promises to pay money in the future on the paper it sells today, and at such a low cost! The Treasury barely pays anything for the privilege of accepting over a trillion dollars a year in new issuance.

Of course, the Federal Reserve is itself the largest holder in the world of Treasury bonds, which it purchased on the open market, as noted above. The Primary Dealers participated in auctions, bought Treasury bonds, then held most of this paper for a few weeks before flipping it to the Fed. The Fed thus avoided violating the rule which prohibits the Fed from simply buying the bonds directly from the Treasury at the original auction. You see, if the Fed did that, it would be directly "monetizing the debt," and the Fed would never do that. Instead, the Fed waits until someone else, a big bank or broker-dealer, first purchases the Treasury bonds; then the Fed conjures money out of thin air with a few keystrokes on its computer, takes possession of the bonds, and credits the reserve account of the Primary Dealer with a few billion, on which the PD earns a quarter of a percent in interest.

The Fed isn't really operating a Quantitative Easing ruse right now; it's running "Operation Twist," whereby as bonds in its portfolio mature, they are exchanged for bonds with longer duration. Thus, 2-year bonds become 5-year bonds, 5-year bonds become 10-year bonds, and so forth. Bernanke wants to lock in the super-low rates on which the Treasury is "obligated" to the Fed for as long as possible, because the Fed's big stash of Treasuries achieves a dampening effect on bond rates in general.

It's quite a high-wire act, the business of running a phony economy. Bernanke knows that he is engaged in a titration problem, analogous to the swimming pool metaphor I used a few posts back. I mean after all, if the Fed can really support the Treasury not only by purchasing bonds with conjured money, but can push the issue by then reporting "earnings" on these bonds and remitting them back to the Treasury to the tune of $76 billion per annum, then why not a reductio ad absurdum whereby the Fed simply buys all of the Treasury's issuance? And why not eliminate all taxation and support the Federal government entirely with Treasury issuance, all of which is purchased by the Fed with conjured money? But no need to stop there. Why not simply put the entire Gross Domestic Product on the government's payroll, all $15 trillion of it, and finance it all with keystrokes from the Fed's corner office computer?

Well, of course now I'm simply being ridiculous. However, in my ironic defense I would say this: if the logic of a proposition can be extended to encompass the absurd conclusion of the reduction in question, then the logic of the actual reality is also absurd. It is only a question of degree. Bernanke has gotten away with it so far because he tries to keep it down to a roar. He asks himself, when considering yet more "quantitative easing:" will this be the pillar, when I yank it out, that finally brings the entire temple down on my head?

I note with grim amusement that Russia, China, Iran and other countries are now actively seeking ways to work around the dollar-dominated system for settling oil deals and other commodity purchases. It's not hard to see why this would happen. Russia is selling real stuff, oil and natural gas, in exchange for paper originating on the computer in Bernanke's corner office. When China and Russia reinvest the dollars they receive from commodities, they must "repatriate" this money in America in exchange for Treasury promises that pay virtually nothing, with a negative return, in fact, when inflation is factored in. And the paper they buy is with actual money earned from selling real stuff, whereas Bernanke can buy his Treasury paper, with precisely the same value and return, simply by tapping in numbers.

Thus, at some point the foreign buyers will be gone. They won't need dollars anymore because they will find another way to settle their accounts. Not this year perhaps, not next, but soon, and for the rest of America's life. The American government will continue to run its massive deficits, of course, and with our savings rate effectively locked in at zero, it will be up to the Primary Dealers to buy it all, every piece of dubious paper emitted by the Treasury. To attract the foreign buyers, the recipients of all that money we use to buy all the stuff we used to make, or can't produce ourselves (such as most of the oil we use), we would have to pay them a real rate of return. But as the national debt hits $20 trillion and beyond, a rise in interest rates will be disastrous, and it's doubtful that the world's remaining producers of essential commodities (oil, most specifically) are going to be interested in American funny money anyway.

It is all very much like the myth of Narcissus. American leaders feel trapped by the expectations of the electorate; despite all evidence to the contrary, no one who values his favored position in American politics can afford to admit the awful truth, that this whole system is phony, made up out of thin air, fumes if you will, and we are running on those fumes and nothing more. We are transfixed by our own image, by our beauty and self-regard, and we cannot tear ourselves away from the reflecting pool. And one day we will take a header.

Through A Glass Darkly: The Republican Debate

2012-01-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

I think Diane Sawyer is cute, always have thought so, and to think she's got the neurons to hang in there with an intellectual/creative guy like Mike Nichols. She's even cuter than George Stepho-etc. thinks he is, and that's very cute indeed. Looking at Diane was the only mitigating factor in the hour of life otherwise wasted watching the Republican "debate" last night. Sometimes, when I have subjected myself to a heinous experience like watching Republicans compete for Luddite of the Year Award, I get an inkling about Barack Obama's actual strategy, and it starts to look pretty clever. If you don't vote for him, then this is what you're looking at.

There are five pasty-white boring guys left now on the Republican side: Huntsman, Paul, Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Perry. I guess that's six; somehow it doesn't matter. Ron Paul, increasingly, seems like a set of attitudes, borrowed from sources as diverse as Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, about how the world ought to work. He thought the Supreme Court decision of Griswold v. Connecticut, which was a 9th Amendment case about privacy rights, and specifically the constitutional right of a couple to use contraception in defiance of Connecticut's "blue law" to the contrary, was a Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure case. Then building on his error, Ron restated that that's one of the reasons he's against the Patriot Act. Here's the alarming part: Rick Santorum, who won some sort of distinction as the stupidest man in Congress when he represented Pennsylvania as a Senator, analyzed the case correctly. Of course, Rick Santorum believes that the states ought to be free to ban contraception if they feel like it, because the "right to privacy" is not in the Constitution.

Mitt Romney, sitting on his razor-thin lead and enjoying no real base of support in the modern Republican Party (a contradiction in terms, I realize), declined to answer the question directly from Cutesie George: does Mitt support the right of states to ban contraception? Well, gee, Mitt said. No state wants to ban contraception, so why talk about it?

That's how weird the Republicans have become. Their leading candidate cannot answer definitively that contraception is a good idea and ought to be available to people. What on Earth is the objection to contraception? Are the Republicans at the point where they think that the biological destiny of each and every ovum to become a (full-grown Christian) human must not be interrupted on pain of a murder charge? Does even God think that every spermatozoa has a soul?

Okay, to be fair, what these antiquarians are squirming to avoid is the recognition of any right to privacy under the 9th Amendment in the first place, because that's the foundation for Roe v. Wade, and that's the real quarry they're gunning for. They all want (Huntsman may be the exception) the unfettered right to a first-trimester abortion overturned, and they know they're only about one vote on the Supreme Court away from the prize. If Huntsman can figure out a way to relate the abortion issue to his years as an Ambassador to China, we'll get a clearer picture of his position.

Romney's the kind of Republican mannequin who would have been a shoo-in for the party's nomination even four years ago, but the ideological miasma of present-day Republicanism is getting in his way. He doesn't actually have any opinions or principles. You can tell he doesn't care if gays get married, if women get abortions, if people copulate with aardvarks on the street. They're all stupid issues, the government should let people do what they want sexually and socially, and he knows it (although now I think we need an Aardvark Rescue movement). He just wants the fricking nomination. He's a Republican like his father before him, and apparently you have to make a lot of dumb statements now with feigned passion in order to get this band of lunatics to let you sail under their banner. Thus, he's unable to attract more than 25% of their support, which must represent the magnitude of the vestigial sanity in the Republican Party.

Rick Perry continues to impress me as perhaps the dumbest person ever to vie for national public office. I don't know why he keeps showing up. It's over, Rick. Mitt Romney misses him most of all, because when Rick was considered tenable, it kept the attention away from the truly awful Rick Santorum and the quirky insurgence of Ron Paul. If Mitt could have maneuvered the race into a final match-up with Rick Perry, so that just the two of them would have been debating, the idiocy of Rick Perry would have become so patent and painfully obvious that Mitt would have won by acclamation. As it is he has to stagger through these debates with the idiosyncratic Ron Paul and the sanctimonious Rick Santorum offering stark contrasts to the empty-suit nothingness that is Romney's position on everything.

The debates do accomplish some things. In the first place, I'm beginning to see that Ron Paul is essentially a Human Bullet Point Announcer. His ideas are civil libertarian, highly idealistic (unrealistically so, in some cases), jarringly impractical (Medicare, access to health care in general), regressive (private ownership rights as superior to civil rights for minorities), and enlightened (the closing down of the American empire and its ruinous cost). The man behind all these ideas seems a little sketchy when you watch him in action, and as I've said, I don't know how he would function as an actual chief executive. The world could very well end on his watch.

I think Obama, of course, will just keep doing what he's doing, tuning in occasionally to watch, and relish, the Republican Circular Firing Squad as it moves from state to state, like the freak circus it is.

Saturday Morning Essay

2012-01-07T07:45:00.000-08:00

Brought to You By Peet's Coffee.

As I've said before, if Barack Obama is reelected, then Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis should win the Most Valuable Player award going away. The official unemployment rate, U-3, keeps dropping, now down to 8.5%, despite two facts that would appear to make such a development mathematically impossible. (1) The actual number of jobs in America has not increased, holding steady at around 140 million. (2) The working age population continues to increase, month by month, year by year, and is now about 250 million. Using our fifth grade math, we can simplify terms and create the fraction 14/25. To convert this to a percentage, we divide the numerator by the denominator, and we get about 56%. 56% of the working age population in the United States, other than those in prison, the military or mental hospitals, have jobs.

I would guess that a very large percentage of those with these jobs hate their work and wish they didn't have to work. Such thoughts usually bring me around to thinking about Emile Durkheim, the famous social theorist who gave us the term "organic solidarity" to describe the economies of advanced industrial nations. Durkheim was referring to specialization, that rat-race arrangement that Henry David Thoreau, writing around the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, tried to warn us against. Society in modern countries has become a kind of "organism," a complicated, interrelated contraption in which we perform specialized functions to satisfy our various "needs," such as the need to undergo a weekly spiritual lobotomy while watching "American Idol" or "Dancing With The Stars."

Nevertheless, despite this proliferation of "needs," the actual requirements remain those of the evolved homo sapiens, as described in Walden: maintaining one's vital heat. With modern technology, this is not really that hard to do. For example, I wear clothes, as all non-nudists do. I buy mostly discount clothing at Costco, stuff arrayed on the big tables. Khaki pants, jeans, polo shirts. It's all cheap and it gets the job done. You don't have to spend more than 12 bucks for a pair of pants made in India or Vietnam. I have shirts in my closet that I've had for 20 years. They're in good shape, too; I'm easy on stuff. America makes about 7% of its own clothing these days, down about 80% over the last 40 years. At the next layer of heat maintenance, I have a house. It's about 50 years old, in decent shape, and it retains heat, not as well as it should (it's an American house), but it's warmer in here than outside. I heat it with a furnace fueled with natural gas. America produces a lot of its own natural gas. The electricity for the lights and the various gadgets in the house is furnished by PG&E, and this utility (very hip and committed to the battle against climate change) produces power through natural gas, hydroelectric dams and nuclear power, for the most part. I use compact flourescents for the lighting.

I eat fairly low on the food chain, and much of the food, including the beef, is produced locally. We have a big "local food" movement in my county, and it works fine.

So that's it. All of my needs are met. I can stay alive with what I've just listed above. When you think about it, America needs far, far fewer than 140 million people with jobs to get the things done I've just listed. Farming, for example, has mostly become agri-business and is not labor intensive except for certain crops at harvest, and probably more Mexicans and Guatemalans do that work in America than Americans. As noted, we don't make our own clothing anymore; 12 year old girls in Asian countries handle that for us. The energy industries hire a lot of people, but increasingly that work is mechanized as well. Auto manufacturing and sales in the USA are on a steady decline; the 250 million cars and trucks we already have are increasingly being kept for longer periods of time as the economy stagnates. You can fix your beater instead of replacing it every three years just for show, and avoid investing a ton of dough in an immediately depreciating hunk of metal, leather and rubber.

We need trades people, of course, plumbers and carpenters. We need doctors (far fewer than we have and better allocated to useful specialties), accountants and lawyers, although we could probably get by better with about 1/4th the number of attorneys we have. We need teachers to train people in the skills they will need to participate in the "organic" society, an admittedly kind of circular logic.

I really wonder what the "core" number of workers that we need to make society function actually is. It's pretty easy to list completely superfluous professions and occupations: nail salon workers; cosmetic plastic surgery people; tanning salon owners; party planners; wedding planners; florists; financial planners; workers in luxury car factories; personal trainers; 90% of the movie stars and movie makers; radio "personalities;" 90% of the politicians; professional athletes; NASCAR drivers; runway models; anyone named Kardashian; tabloid publishers, editors and writers; 85% of the real estate brokers; the lower half of the island of Manhattan; 80% of federal employees, most of them duplicating work that could be done at the local level; 80% of those in the military, many of whom simply serve because the "organic society" doesn't produce any real jobs; everyone in the fast food industry; all workers in the defense industry other than those making nuclear bombs and the means to deliver them, just to show the world we should be left alone (the only meaningful "national defense"); hundreds of other occupations and preoccupations. My guess is that the common estimate that 20% of the people do 80% of everything necessary is not far wrong, so that 80% of everything could be accomplished by about 28 million people (20% of 140 million, the work force) strategically and intelligently placed in American society, and the remaining 20% is probably, after all, not necessary. So 222 million working age Americans are just kind of futzing around pretending to do something necessary that we don't actually need.

I'm serious, actually, and you probably sense I'm not far wrong. Most jobs in Durkheim's world are completely unnecessary, and many of them (when you consider the extreme degradation of the environment, to the point of human nonviability) are positively harmful and dangerous (consider this list from Desdemona Despair, a depresso-blog about ecological catastrophe: www.desdemonadespair.net/2011/12/50-doomiest-stories-of-2011.html). We're living on the edge because of our calamitous overuse of the Earth.

I think this is why we became a "consumer society." There's really not enough to do of an essential nature, so we just make shit up to do and call it "necessary." Thus, when the total jobs number stays stuck for years and years on end, we try to figure out what's "wrong" with the economy. What's wrong with the economy is that it doesn't make any sense to begin with. What we're trying to do, again, is to create the excess wealth within the economy that will allow millions and millions of people to pursue the superfluous and unnecessary occupations they used to have, and we're having a very hard time doing it. For about 30 to 40 years, we did so by leveraging the existing capital stock of the country (debt and mortgaging against bubble prices) to disguise the fact that the economy had run past its actual usefulness.

Thus, if humanity survives (a very iffy proposition), we will do so either along the lines of the Buckminster Fuller fantasy, where the vast majority of people do not work and are maintained in their vital heat by technology and a small cadre of workers, or we will revert to Thoreauvian, generalist competence, abandoning Durkheim's World. Either way, the times they are a-changin'.

And Now the Presidential Race Really Begins!

2012-01-06T09:25:00.000-08:00

One must begin somewhere.

"He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. 'This is a dangerous world,' he said for no apparent reason, 'and this cat [Obama] isn't remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you'." Quote attributed to George W. Bush in 2008.

It's 2012 now, a leap year, and thus a Presidential election year. I'm sure we're all on the edge of our seats. The chief protagonists in the drama would appear to the incumbent; Mitt Romney, former merger-and-acquisition hatchet man for Bain Capital; and Ron Paul, a country obstetrician from Texas. If Obama is reelected, nothing will change. If Romney is elected, nothing will change. If Paul is elected, things will change in dramatic and unpredictable ways.

Most liberals actually want Ron Paul to win, without saying so out loud. They go about saying this in different ways, such as announcing confidently that Ron Paul has no chance of securing the Republican nomination, let alone winning the whole shebang. Once you have safely sidelined a candidate, marginalized him out of the Reality Zone, you are then free to speak wistfully about what it would be like if he were actually the President without saying, you know, that you want him to be President. This is how the game is played in our politically correct culture. Ron Paul has some dodgy things on his record concerning white supremacy and abortion, not to mention his unrealistic ideas of trading brain surgery for a dozen eggs, et cetera, and these positions mean that liberals must always be careful not to endorse him. Out loud, that is. Liberals can only support someone who agrees with them on absolutely everything - the slightest deviation from the liberal catechism means the candidate is out. I have observed since my earliest days of familiarity with liberalism, on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley in the Roaring Sixties, that liberal orthodoxy is enforced far more stringently than its conservative counterparts. Everyone must think the same thing about everything.

Still, liberals know that only Ron Paul is saying things that make any sense whatsoever. Liberals realize that Paul is savaged by the Mainstream Media because he threatens their meal ticket, the USA as a colossal empire. America as the Big Deal of the world is the basis of life in the Imperial City of Washington, D.C. The USA can't become France, or something. Thus, Paul is criticized as an "isolationist." Think for a moment about what this means. What other country in the world has 750 military installations worldwide? What other country has been fighting wars in as many as six countries during the last five years? What other country began and maintained two large-scale ground wars halfway around the world with troop commitments in excess of 200,000 soldiers for years at a time? What other developed country spends over two-thirds of its income tax revenue on the military, espionage and security?

It is only because we have become accustomed to the insane that a commonsense idea such as closing all of the foreign bases, bringing all soldiers home and scaling back the defense budget by 25% (all ideas of Ron Paul's) sound so "extreme" and "radical." Naturally, one can see that what is actually extreme and radical is the status quo. A person who argues for the alteration of the insane status quo is criticized as unrealistic and "kooky." Similarly, Ron Paul believes that American citizens should not be assassinated by their own government without presentment of charges and some kind of hearing, at the very least.

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are totally fine with American citizens being assassinated by their own government without charges or hearings of any kind. It's the New Normal in America, so it's okay with them. In Barack's case, he might have qualms but I think George W. Bush, bless his heart, had the O Man about right. Obama simply lacks the inner resources to push for anything different, so he goes along with the hyper-conservative flow of modern Imperial Washington. Wherever that leads, secret drone missile attacks on faceless enemies, killing of civilians, assassination of Americans, indefinite detention without trial, it doesn't matter: if this is what the country does now, it's okay with him because it's just way too much trouble to oppose it, and more crucially, people might not think he's tough enough.

Ron Paul doesn't mind being a kook. This is his great strength. I really have no idea what his personal qualities are beyond that, what it would be like if he actually had to govern the country. In that sense, he is the same mystery that Barack Obama presented. What Ron Paul mainly is can be characterized as a series of startling positions that are way out of the mainstream of the dominant Center-Right politics in this country. The other two guys will just float along in the mainstream and change nothing.

Gee, if only Ron Paul had a realistic chance, which of course he doesn't, it would be a tantalizing opportunity to effect real change. Glad I'll never be faced with that choice.

The Tenth Amendment Party, Part 1

2011-12-25T09:02:00.000-08:00

In line with the wise dictum that it is better to light candles than to curse the darkness, I propose (modestly enough) a complete and total transformation of the American government.

I hold these truths to be self evident, that we have devolved into a nation dominated by Big Money, with a bought-and-paid-for, bankrupt government, and an imperialist, warmongering foreign policy which serves only the interests of the Military-Industrial Complex, precisely as foretold by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address; that the nation is dedicated and consecrated to the mindless and profligate waste of energy, that it is environmentally obtuse; that it has subjugated the legitimate needs of its populace for good jobs and decent educations to the demands of Big Business, the Empire, and the banking cartel; in short, that we have become a degenerate and profoundly undemocratic nation.

In other words, things need to change. Strangely enough, the means of change are plainly and obviously at hand: adherence to the Constitution of the United States of America, as brought up to date to reflect the quantitative and qualitative changes in the body politic since the adoption of the Constitution in 1789.

To bring the Constitution up to date, we need to do the following:

1. Change the provisions relating to the Executive Branch (Article 2) to eliminate the (indirect) election of the President through the college of electors. Instead of a President elected on a nationwide basis, we will switch to a leadership system modeled on parliamentary systems; to wit, the President will be elected by the single (unicameral) House members from among their own number (primus inter pares, as in Great Britain). The Senate will be abolished; its existing members can be transferred directly to an assisted living facility in Virginia, where the senile among them (most of them at this point), can be installed in a mock-up of the Capitol building where they can gas on till their final days, complimenting each other and passing "laws" designed to destroy the civil rights of the American commoners. They will never notice the difference.

This change in election method will preserve the great legacy of President Barack Obama. He will forever be remembered in American history as the chief executive who finally broke the back of the electoral system. Americans simply gave up after Obama; he was "the End of the Hope for Change" (h/t: Barley). A man engendering such profound, inimitable, life-altering disappointment in his former supporters that they became ready for something that would really work, instead of an electoral system based completely on Madison Avenue techniques. It is no small thing, Mr. Obama, to be the historical figure who prepared the American people for a return to a Constitutional form of government. Your caving in, your sell-outs, your abandonment of principles, your 180 degree reversals on virtually everything - none of this needs to be in vain. Thank you, Mr. President.

2. The new House of Representatives will consist of about 1,000 delegates, elected from districts among the states on a "one person, one vote" basis, to the extent this can be devised. The powers of the House (or Parliament) will be strictly limited to those enumerated in Article One of the Constitution. This is an extensive list, but the abuses of general language (particularly the Commerce Clause) will be rolled back by legislation in the form of a Constitutional Amendment so that power is reallocated to the states and local government wherever possible to diminish the encroachment of the central state on local sovereignty. This will probably be the main work of the new Constitutional Convention.

3. The 16th Amendment (passed in 1913) will be rescinded, eliminating the national income tax. Instead, the new central government, with its vastly curtailed functions, will be financed as it was during the first 124 years of the Republic, mainly through tariffs on imports and excise taxes. If it is considered necessary to supplement the income of the federal government in order to maintain a decent defense, a value added tax (which does not interfere with the right of states to levy sales taxes, a main source of revenue at the local level) should be added.

In my next manifesto, I will go through the Article One powers of the House and demonstrate (a) how easy the changes actually are (and how wise the Founding Fathers were) and (b) how far over the line the central government has gone with its ceaseless expansion and endless meddling into local governance.

Ron Paul as the Nemesis of Big Government Liberals Everywhere

2011-12-23T05:22:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am aware that Dr. Paul, as with many "purists," sometimes ventures into the realm of the completely fanciful and unrealistic. For example, in one of the Republican "debates," he argued against any form of socialized medicine and suggested that "private charity" might fill in the (gaping) hole left in access to medical care if we repealed Medicare/Medicaid, as if a person with a treatable form of cancer, e.g., might rely on the kindness of strangers to get him through his rough patch, and that such a paradigm is an acceptable substitute for an actual health care system. Maybe Dr. Paul (who is 76 and from Texas) can remember the days of trading a pig for an appendectomy, or something like that, but I don't think his idea is practical in modern times.

Does that mean that Medicare is practical? This is where Ron Paul is pretty indispensable to the national debate. Nobody else really says the stuff that he says. If the federal government has devolved into a huge "insurance company with an army," Ron Paul is the one guy who is willing to point out the absurdity of centralizing so much power into a remote, inefficient bureaucracy, financed by the money-hallucinating machine of the Federal Reserve. It is in this larger context that his philosophy has to be assessed.

Big Government Liberals (Paul Krugman, for example) see Ron Paul as a huge threat, and mercilessly belittle what they describe as Paul's lack of realism, or ignorance about modern economic theory. For the power of the Big Government Liberal depends upon the continuing reliance on the federal government to solve all problems, both national and local, even if there is no serious doubt anymore that the federal government cannot afford nearly half the things it is attempting to do (it can afford about 58%, in point of fact).

In a conversation recently with the Distinguished Professor of a Great Southwestern University, I adumbrated my view that the recent piece of atrocious legislation passed by the Senate, the Let's Throw Americans in A Dungeon Act, was actually a kind of desperate job-justification attempt; to wit, The Insurance Company With An Army (TICWAA) needs to justify that huge Pentagon expenditure (around $700 billion) that was passed along with the Dungeon Act, and formally known as the National Defense Authorization Act (all these grand names are another clue - this used to be called simply budget appropriations). Thus, even if terrorist attacks in the United States are a very, very minor cause of death compared to...well, just about anything else, but certainly compared to disease and auto accidents, Congress is not going to be able to lavish $700 billion on itself, and thus place itself in a position to dole out huge favors to military-connected contractors and lobbyists, by talking about auto safety or the obesity epidemic.

So the trick is to make the world seem as dangerous as humanly possible, to portray America as under siege, and the one resonant means for doing so is Terrorism, because while North Korea might be a bigger problem, we're not going to do anything about North Korea except hope the situation gets better, somehow. Terrorism works because of 9-11; without 9-11, all of this constant emphasis on Authorizations for Use of Military Force, and invasions of Muslim countries year-by-year, would seem like the obvious insanity it obviously is.

Thus, Congress has made a theme out of 9/11. 9/11 is the core of the Congressional Mission Statement. Congress just can't get enough of 9/11. As a realistic matter, it's the best thing that ever happened to the modern Congress. TICWAA really has nothing else. Congress does not want the American people to keep looking over there at the mustachioed clown behind the curtain.

If we consider how the Founding Fathers really saw things happening, the federal government was supposed to do things that the "several states" delegated to the central authority. These were logical functions: defending the national borders (an army and control of immigration); relations among the states (border disputes and interstate commerce); bankruptcy (to make uniform the discharge of debt across state lines); and maritime law, which follows naturally from defense, immigration and border issues. As I've written previously (sometimes to a chorus of boos), Big Government Liberalism came into favor because it reined in the injustices of the Southern States. It did this twice, the Civil War (to the extent the War was about slavery, which is not very extensive according to Leon Litwack, Professor Emeritus of the University of California and perhaps the leading Civil War scholar in the country), and the Civil Rights Movement. This is where Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul, goes off the rails when he follows his father into excessive "purism" and argues that a motel in Kentucky ought to be able to send the nice Negro family on down the road to an establishment that caters to their kind. (There is nothing wrong with enforcing Equal Protection by the federal government; that's one of its good functions.)

But in order to assure ourselves of this beneficent function of the feds, we have given away too much sovereignty which should have remained local, as the Tenth Amendment states and as the True Liberal, Thomas Jefferson, intended. Under the guise of national security, we have allowed ourselves to slide into a police state, among other problems. And for what? So the TICWAA can recycle money generated by the citizens of the several states into two big liberal programs, Social Security and Medicare, while Congress pockets the Fun Money, the trillion or so for the military, the homeland security apparatus, and spy agencies (increasingly used to spy on Americans). The "liberals" in Congress are just as much in favor of this state of affairs as the so-called Conservatives, because their power depends on it. Liberals and Conservatives alike love to inculcate in Americans a sense of dependency, and that dependency is based entirely on fear, because Americans, in point of fact, positively loathe Congress.

Now we are beginning to see the failure of these centralized programs because of the inexorable rules of Complexity Theory - the marginal dis-utility of piling on ever greater levels of rules, regulations, and bureaucratic control. No one, and certainly not the average American voter, can figure out how the whole Rube Goldberg contraption even works anymore. Thus, democracy becomes meaningless, other than as a once-every-two-years convulsion of revulsion where the bums are thrown out in favor of new bums.

Underlying the whole mess is the simple question: if that's all the TICWAA does, recycles money from the states in inefficient programs and spends money far in excess of what's necessary on defense and security, why do we even have this system? That's what Ron Paul is actually saying. That is his context. He argues for closing ALL foreign military bases. For ending ALL foreign wars. For returning power to the states and localities to handle state and local issues. For abolishing the federal income tax so that local revenue is retained to deal with local government problems.

You can see why he is hated and reviled by Big Government Liberals and Conservative alike. Whoever heard of anyone in national politics actually saying all of these things out loud? He must be a kook. We'd better dig up some of those old videos about abortion and civil rights. This asshole is getting a little too close to home.

Will the President Kill You?

2011-12-21T06:57:00.000-08:00

Things are getting a little hysterical these days. Take this appearance on CNN by law professor Jonathan Turley, wherein he states:

It's even worse than coming into your house. President Obama has just stated a policy that he can have any American citizen killed without any charge, without any review, except his own. If he's satisfied that you are a terrorist, he says that he can kill you anywhere in the world including in the United States.

I will not quibble with Jonathan's summary of the President's powers, which the President first arrogated unto himself before noted liberal Carl Levin of the Senate helped him along by codifying our right of "self defense" against a broader array of terrorists, or "associated forces" of terrorists, or people in general who might "substantially support" "associated forces" of terrorists (or the Taliban - I'm not technically sure that they are "terrorists;" it's possible they are an indigenous people resisting a foreign invasion, but I hasten to add that I do not support, substantially or otherwise, the right of indigenous people to defend themselves against any invaders when those invaders are Americans, because then those indigenous terrorists are acting contrary to our right of self defense, which is why we undertook the invasion of their country in the first place).

Anyway, note the qualifying language: if he's satisfied you are a terrorist. All these so-called experts make it sound so arbitrary. He has to be satisfied first that you are a terrorist. Granted, as Congress keeps broadening the categories of those against whom the President is empowered to take action under various Authorizations for Use of Military Force, the definition of "terrorist" keeps expanding. In a sense, this might seem surprising, here in the waning days of 2011. Bin Laden is dead, the government tells us Al Qaeda has been rendered essentially "inoperative," it's been over a decade since any kind of serious terrorist attack occurred here in the Homeland (the "Homeland" being what we used to call "America.") I know that in our culture we equate sequence with causation (we try, whenever possible, to avoid statistical rigor in our public discourse); thus, if there have been no major terrorist attacks (other than the many instances of mass murder on campuses, at 7-11 stores, various other venues in Shooting Gallery America, but those don't count unless there is a kind of Muslim/political connection to the mayhem), we assume it is because of the War on Terror. It's true, of course, that about 8 years passed between the first, half-assed attack on the World Trade Center in 2003 and 9/11, and those years of calm cannot be ascribed to a Department of Homeland Security or War on Terror that didn't exist yet, but, you know...what the hell's the point of all this logic?

It's actually easy not to be a Terrorist, after all. I don't know what criteria the President uses to "satisfy" himself that someone is a Terrorist (and no criteria are published or even exist, for all I know), but I have a hunch that if you just shut up, vote for one of the two major parties, and stay away from Occupy demonstrations, or Tea Party gatherings - you know, just don't cause any goddam trouble - the President will be satisfied that you're not a Terrorist, and the odds of your being assassinated are probably less than being killed by a lightning strike. If you live on a golf course in the Dallas area between the months of April and October. Even if the 5th Amendment and Due Process have been repealed, let me ask you this question: if you're not guilty, why do you even care about the 5th Amendment? Will anyone accuse you of anything (thus activating your need to invoke Due Process) if you haven't done anything at all? Okay, someone might, but I don't see how that's the point. Let me rephrase that: yes, it is the point, that's exactly when you wish you had some process for determining your guilt, when you're not guilty and someone accuses you of something, but in order to be safe from those once-a-decade attacks (they don't really occur that often, but for the sake of argument), we should certainly be willing to tolerate the occasional, mysterious annihilation of Americans who behaved in ways that satisfied the President they were doing something covered by one of the new vague standards of terroristy things. Surely that's exactly what John Adams had in mind.

Anyway, Winston Smith came around to seeing things that way, but why go through all the miseries of his learning experience?

A Reply to Barack

2011-12-18T10:03:00.000-08:00

"Waldoswimmer-- Early this morning, the last of our troops left Iraq. As we honor and reflect on the sacrifices that millions of men and women made for this war, I wanted to make sure you heard the news. Bringing this war to a responsible end was a cause that sparked many Americans to get involved in the political process for the first time. Today's outcome is a reminder that we all have a stake in our country's future, and a say in the direction we choose. Thank you. Barack"

Dear Barack,

First of all, you're welcome. My mother did not raise an inconsiderate son, and it's important to be polite. With that out of the way...

Since you're my President, I would like to mention a few of my concerns and ask for your comments:

1. My understanding is that the December 2011 departure date was negotiated between George W. Bush and Nouri Al-Maliki a number of years back as part of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) talks. That is the case, isn't it? I think it's fine to reflect on what our military has been through in this awful war (it's something we should do), but there has been plenty of false self-congratulation surrounding this departure and maybe it's time for that to come to an end, too. Specifically, if Maliki had negotiated a different SOFA arrangement whereby American military personnel had continued to enjoy their immunity from local (Iraqi) legal jurisdiction, wouldn't you have pressed for a longer commitment in Iraq? From everything I've read on this point, it seems to me that the wily Nouri withheld this concession precisely because he knew that it would propel the Americans out of Iraq. That's the way it goes; it's important to remember that chess was invented in that part of the world.

I'm not suggesting that you're trying to take credit for a withdrawal from Iraq that was written in stone before you ever took office. On the other hand, I'm not suggesting that you're not.

2. "Bringing this war to a responsible end was a cause that sparked many Americans to get involved in the political process for the first time." Okay, here's my feeling on that one. Personally, I got involved in the 2008 campaign (even journeyed to Florida to work as a Voting Rights Lawyer for you) because I thought you were serious about returning the United States to a Constitutional form of government and one of laws, not of men. The drift toward lawlessness, disregard of the Constitution and open defiance of international norms of decency became very pronounced under your predecessor. The Iraq War was certainly part of that, but it was apparent before the election of 2008 that the occupation of Iraq had an expiration date.

Be that as it may, here is what I think is really necessary for a "responsible end." The news reports use the "standard statistics" for describing the costs of the war. The number cited for Iraqi deaths is always "100,000." It seems to me that if a country, such as my country, really wants to regain the ethical high ground that we ought to leave off with such convenient calculations and really go at the problem. The Johns Hopkins - Lancet study, using standard methodology for such epidemiological problems, calculated the number of Iraqi deaths at much higher levels, as many as one million "excess deaths" over and above normal mortality even under a dictator such as Saddam Hussein. George W. Bush dismissed this study with his famous "flawed methodology" comment, but of course (and with all due respect to our brilliant ex-Commander in Chief) this is not exactly definitive. We spend lots of money on "commissions" and panels of Blue Ribbon experts. How about just one more: a group of scientists and statisticians, modeled on the panel led by Richard Feynman to study the Challenger disaster, to delve very deeply into the question of "excess deaths" in Iraq. Let's find out how many people actually died. If we don't determine the true cost to the local population of these military adventures, it's just way too easy to justify interfering in a foreign locale whenever we perceive some interest of ours is being disturbed. I also think we owe the Iraqi people this measure of respect. If a million people in Iraq died as the direct result of an invasion built on false premises, let's own up to it. It's not as if they're not going to notice if we don't.

3. While we're at it, let's determine and publish a real number regarding American military casualties. This part is easy. We already have all of the statistics. Let's make public a full accounting of the injuries caused to American personnel as the result of the war, by body part, severity and life consequences. How many soldiers are brain damaged? How many lost one or more eyes? How many amputations? How many third degree burns? How many disfigurements? How many cases of post traumatic stress and/or insanity? Put it all out there as a counterpoint to the nonstop glorification of war once and for all.

I think doing all of those things is the minimal requirement of "responsibility," don't you?

4. "Today's outcome is a reminder that we all have a stake in our country's future, and a say in the direction we choose."

No question about that. As I exercise my "say" next year, I'll be watching to see how you handle my suggestions.

Merry Christmas, and by the way, basketball is my favorite sport, too.

Waldo

Notes & Errata on the Indefinite Detention Bill

2011-12-17T15:17:00.000-08:00

Perhaps I spoke a little too soon in condemning the Mainstream Media for its silence in the face of the repeal of the Bill of Rights through the "Indefinite Detention" provision that passed as part of the Defense Authorization Act in the Senate this past week. Since our touchstone here at the Pond is intellectual honesty, I hasten to point out that the august New York Times, usually an unflagging admirer of the "practical" and centrist policies of President Chance the Basketball Player, used markedly harsh language in condemning what it called Obama's latest "cave-in." To wit, in an Op-Ed entitled (tellingly) "Politics Over Principle":

The bill has so many other objectionable aspects that we can’t go into them all. Among the worst: It leaves open the possibility of subjecting American citizens to military detention and trial by a military court. It will make it impossible to shut the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And it includes an unneeded expansion of the authorization for the use of military force in Afghanistan to include indefinite detention of anyone suspected of being a member of Al Qaeda or an amorphous group of “associated forces” that could cover just about anyone arrested anywhere in the world. (NYT Op-Ed.)

Not bad, as rousing defenses of the Bill of Rights go. One cavil is that the McCain-Levin amendment doesn't just "leave open the possibility of subjecting American citizens to military detention and trial by a military court." One can rest assured that with this thing on the books, the next time the feds pick up someone like Jose Padilla, there won't be an 11th hour diversion of the case to a civilian court. Still: Big Up to the Times, even if they are seen as part of the Liberal/Criminal-coddling/ACLU/Civil Liberties/mostly Jewish complex. Doing the right thing is doing the right thing.

The actual amendment is all theater, of course. There is no need for the McCain-Levin gizmo. Domestic law enforcement and the civilian courts can handle any American actually arrested (as opposed to blown to smithereens by a Predator in some distant, sand-filled land) and placed in jail, on the basis of actual probable cause. As I wrote some time back, all of these terrorist fantasies, and this need to revisit the ghost of 9-11 more than ten years later, when the actual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are winding down, are simply intended to (a) keep the American populace in a perpetual state of fear, the better to (b) sit still for a tremendous diversion of very scarce budgetary resources to the Pentagon, even as the country slides into a Banana Republican state of poverty. A big Pentagon consolidates power at the federal level, and without this clothing, the Emperors in Washington stand out in their irrelevant nakedness. They have not quite enough money to do four things: (a) re-route money coming in from FICA to Social Security beneficiaries (about $800 billion per annum); (b) pay for Medicare/Medicaid ($900 billion); (c) service the interest on the national debt (~$400 billion); and (d) invade and blow up other countries (~$700 billion, officially). Those four outlay items add up to $2.8 trillion.

In its sunny way, the Treasury Statement forecasts over $2.6 trillion in revenue this year, which I believe would be an all-time record. Yet the first two months of the fiscal year are only about $20 billion ahead of last year's pace. That suggests (extrapolating forward) that this year might produce 6 x 20 = $120 billion more than last year's ~$2.2 trillion. With the economy again hitting stall speed, and with actual average income falling according to Treasury withholding reports, it does not compute. So it appears that we'll probably fall half a trillion dollars short of even covering the Big Four of the federal government's raison d'etre.

This is not something the power addicts like to talk about too much. Troublemakers like Ron & Rand Paul, of course, talk about it all the time, and so does Michele Bachmann. As you can see, it's not that hard to figure out that we're broke. Thus, it's much better to emphasize that even though we can't possibly afford about 42% of everything the federal government does, we've simply got to keep funneling dough into defense and security, or else we're doomed, doomed, I tell you! Carl Levin and McCain are big mucky-mucks in the Armed Services Committee, and zealously guard the Pentagon's gargantuan budget, the better to bask in the reflected glory of the military. They've done so for the 80 or 90 years or so that both have been in the Senate. So if we have doubts about the military's mission(s) overseas, well hell, here's another job they can do: capture, jail and court-martial regular ol' Americans right here at home! Pretty logical, huh?

Just out of curiosity, I looked up the Senate Democrats who voted for this legislative monstrosity, to see how the "liberal" stalwarts were protecting our civil rights to due process. Sheldon Whitehouse, I noticed, voted for it, while Rand Paul of Kentucky voted against it. A total of 60 Senators voted for passage, and since the Democrats arguably "control" the Senate, it took a lot of cross-overs to give the President the unconstitutional "tool" he wanted. Rest assured, however, that the actual vote tally was a mirage, an "arranged" lineup of yeas and nays to give cover to the fake liberals who could have stopped it before it ever came to a vote, but chose not to. And our ever-compliant President will sign the bill with no hesitation whatsoever.

Bill of Rights, December 15, 1791 to December 15, 2011: R.I.P.

2011-12-15T12:30:00.000-08:00

There is a beautiful symmetry to this sad development: two hundred and twenty years to the day between the birth and death of the landmark charter of civil liberties conceived by some of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment in the early days of the Republic. And now thoughtlessly tossed aside by a decadent Congress and a craven President. Things change over time, I guess.

The Levin-McCain amendment to the Defense Authorization Act, which allows American citizens to be arrested within the United States by the military and confined indefinitely in prison without trial, if, in the opinion of the President, such American citizens have engaged in some kind of "terrorism" by offering "substantial support" to Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or to "associated forces" of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, is, in my view, the official death knell of the Bill of Rights. Once a people decides to give a president, or a king, or a dictator, the right to silence the opposition by applying a label to dissidents or others, and to thereafter send such dissidents to a concentration camp (Guantanamo or a military brig), with no time limit on detention and with no requirement of a trial, a power which Congress has now given to the President of the United States, then a Constitutional democracy no longer exists.

As always, there is virtually no reaction in the Mainstream Media. One would not expect any. Would you have expected Pravda to criticize Stalin for liquidating his political opponents or sending them to Siberia? The official position of the Serious People in the media or in politics is that this power will only be used against people who deserve it, and that we can trust President Obama not to abuse such a tyrannical power because, after all, he's a good guy. And the next President, now that this power has been codified by Congress? Well, they'll all be good guys, too, I'm sure. So we can safely dispense with Due Process, or the Fifth Amendment's right to a speedy trial, and the right to counsel, or anything else that gets in the way of the President's fast and efficient determination of guilt based on his opinion.

For example, in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen assassinated on the order of President Obama, I am sure you concluded, along with the President, that he was guilty, and that the accusation, sentencing and execution (all carried out at the same time) were fully justified. You concluded this on the basis of a detailed examination of the evidence against this American citizen, which you obtained from American media reports. While in many instances you are aware that the mainstream media often exaggerate or simply misrepresent the facts of public life (you'll recall how helpful certain reporters at the New York Times were in establishing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that we must invade), in this case, given that Awlaki was the worst of pariahs, a terrorist (as you were told), and given the consequence of being wrong about that (we killed the man, after all), you have very little doubt that Awlaki got the punishment he deserved and that would have been meted out to him after a trial. Of course, in that trial the defendant would have been allowed to present himself and other witnesses on his behalf, his lawyers would have been able to cross-examine the witnesses against him, the reports in the media would probably have been placed in a different context (as always happens when the fine-grain detail of a trial is presented), and a sentence other than death might have been rendered. What a lot of messy detail compared to just dispatching him with a Predator drone guided by a technician in an Air Force base in Nevada!

To say that it's surprising that this very bad development would have reached its culmination during the Presidency of Barack Obama, with his enthusiastic support, must go down as one of the great understatements of the new Millenium, although we're only a few years into it.

Adopt-A-SSA-Beneficiary

2011-12-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

I read somewhere recently that 10,000 Americans (or at least 10,000 people holding Social Security numbers) sign up for benefits every day. This makes intuitive sense, using that "first approximation" approach favored by the serious mathematician. The Baby Boom Generation, spanning birth dates of about 18 years from 1946 to 1964, is that infamous, self-involved demographic cohort comprised of about 75 million souls. 10,000 people per day extends out to 3,650,000 per year; multiplied by 18 = ~65 million, but I doubt that the birth rate was absolutely smooth over the whole period. My guess is that babies really started popping during the Eisenhower years, when the schools became over-crowded, the demobilized military settled down to the American dream, and suburbs sprouted like mushrooms all over this once-verdant land.

Meaning, under this tentative analysis, that the fiscal problems will get worse in the years ahead, as the Boomers, in larger numbers, keep aging, determined to stay alive and vibrant in their Peter Pan way, and to retire to that life of sublime leisure to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God supposedly entitle them.

Except, of course, it's not going to turn out that way. In part exacerbated by this gimmicky payroll tax cut which the O Man has thrown out as a sop to his supposed supporters (in lieu of anything real), the Social Security fund is already running a $46 billion cash on cash deficit, 6 years ahead of schedule. Over the next ten years, the deficits will add up to $1.2 trillion; if this number rings a bell, it's because it's the same number the so-called Super Committee was seeking to cut from the federal budget over the same decade (they weren't really cuts, of course; they were reductions in the rate of increase). Yet the SuperDuper Group never even considered Social Security, since Obama & Co. decided ahead of time that none of the big drivers of the deficit could even be considered as part of the program of reduction (Social Security, Medicare-Medicaid/Defense/Interest Expense).

Dmitry Orlov said something interesting recently in his talk at Orcas, Washington (which you can find in mp3 format at cluborlov.com, his website) about the perceptive biases of humans when faced with change. It went something like this: humans find it very difficult to imagine very different circumstances, a fundamentally changed contextual reality, so to speak, which lies in the future; yet when that new context arrives, everyone assures everyone else that they knew all along it would be like this. We can see a lot of that in the reactions of Americans to the Depression we've been in since 2007. Things have really, really changed a lot during that time period. All of our language about the future, our plans, have all been altered. We've become inured to the idea that our economy is centrally planned by a private banking cartel (the Federal Reserve), that the monopolistic control of the market by a few surviving large banks, by a few surviving large telecommunications companies (which also own the media), by a few large surviving Big Box retailers, are now the way things are. That the federal government will run $1 trillion-plus deficits each and every year (an amount absolutely unimaginable even five years ago), that bank accounts earn absolutely no return, that your house will just keep losing value year after year, are all now in the natural order of things.

Thus, when we think of something like Social Security, the same perceptual bias (this homeostasis preference) makes it difficult for the Boomers, who are diverting the headwaters of Social Security to themselves the way Los Angeles sucks the Owens Valley and the Colorado River dry, to think there might come a day when the younger generation rebels at the idea of supporting their tennis and golf activities with a brutal, off-the-top tax that this younger generation can barely afford because of the crappy economy, all while the younger ones live with the certainty that the system will die before they can draw a penny in benefits.

When I put it that way, you have to admit that the Baby Boomers, those classic narcissists, are pretty freaking stupid. Just because AARP is swollen with Boomers now, and the average age in the U.S. Senate is about 105 years, does not mean that these conditions will prevail indefinitely. The younger generation of workers and job seekers (more of the latter than the former these days), knowing the whole dumb system is headed for extinction, are going to get rid of Social Security as soon as their voting bloc comes into dominance.

It's just the way it is. Socialism doesn't work because human beings are fundamentally selfish assholes (I'm kidding, kids - you're just doing what I would do - although see below for the meaning of this comparison). All psychological studies support this view. Humans have no sympathy for humans (or any other life form) at a distance, unless the situation is personalized. For example, I blew twenty bucks at breakfast this morning. My guess is that this is enough dough to furnish a basic staple to a West African family for about a month. So why didn't I just eat a couple of eggs at home and mail a check for twenty bucks to a relief organization? Because I'm fundamentally a selfish asshole interested in "self actualization" and "living the good life." A kind of "duh" moment there.

The only way I can think to change the Social Security dynamic, therefore, is to change its impersonality. We're at the point where only three workers support each beneficiary. I've mentioned before that I'm old enough for Social Security but I just keep on working, like the fool I've always been. That means that me and two other guys are supporting someone, somewhere, in this great land of video-viewers. We're a wage-slave team, me and these two guys. It's possible that the person I'm supporting is younger than I am. What I'm proposing is that I be given a name, and a picture, and maybe a letter once in a while from My Beneficiary, thanking me for continuing to harden my arteries and blow out my liver for his sake.

That's what I would like to call the new program, My Beneficiary, modeled on some of those adopt-a-child deals you can get in on. Suppose my guy is a retired fellow living in Omaha, Nebraska. Let's say his name is Earl Jones (that's a good name for a retired guy - Earl). Earl used to work in a farm equipment store, till he got sick of it and quit at age 62, which is pretty easy to do in Nebraska, what with the the houses costing a couple of hundred bucks now. Earl's drawing about $900 a month now, him and the little lady, who's also on the dole (but she's not my adoptee - some other team has that honor).

See the beauty of this? I'm not paying taxes into an amorphous, faceless bureaucracy. I'm supporting Earl Jones, who just wants to rest his old weary bones amid the corn fields of Nebraska, maybe pitch some horse shoes or go bowling on the weekend (or any day of the week, thanks to me and My Team). Now I have a mission, a purpose, for my work. It's to keep Earl in Geritol, Budweiser and Viagra. I think I could happily work for years more, knowing now that there is a Higher Calling behind that damn form SE. Earl Jones: My Cause. And then, of course, it's also good karma. One of these days I will myself be up for adoption, when we're probably down to two workers per freeloader.

So a big shout-out to Gens X & Y: I'm available. Adopt me now and avoid the Christmas rush.

An American Citizen's Guide to Protecting Oneself from the American Government, Part 2

2011-12-06T05:43:00.001-08:00

"When the government fears the people, there is democracy. When the people fear their government, there is tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson.

(Just as an aside: if the current crop of politicians, the ones sporting a sub-10% approval rating with their own electorate, had been in power in 1776, does anyone have any doubt we would all still be enjoying high tea at 4 pm, riding to hounds and saying things like, "Jolly good!" ?)

But now on to the exciting caffeine-driven conclusion: Yesterday we were considering the Senate's decision (by the way, I'm talking about the Senate with the Democratic majority, where no legislation can pass without the enthusiastic support of these great "liberals") to turn the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001, the one used to retaliate against an Egyptian, 15 Saudis, a guy from the UAE, and a couple of other non-Afghan Arabs, by invading, logically enough, Afghanistan - that piece of legislation passed in a fevered rush in that mangled autumn of 2001 - into an authorization to use this same military force right here at home, against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Including Americans, because now the "whole world is a battlefield." Thus raising an interesting question or two, such as, how did a President who signed an order fast-tracking the closure of Guantanamo as his first order of business turn into a leader who is enthusiastic about using Guantanamo as a prison for his own people?

Anyway, while they were at it, "broadening the scope" of the AUMF, the Senators, including those liberal Democrats, decided to upgrade the kind of people we ought to use military force against. Well, here we go:

"renews the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) with more expansive language: to allow force (and military detention) against not only those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and countries which harbored them, but also anyone who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces” (Sec. 1031); "

As we said yesterday, in fact. Now, I'm a lawyer, so I'll let you in on a little secret, a trick of the trade: lawyers read statutes carefully. Every little nook and cranny might come in handy in an argument. Everything might turn on the use and meaning of one little phrase, artfully deployed. So when I read language such as that last sentence, my mind begins by seeing how far you can extend the meaning while still observing the intent of the legislation. And when you do that, where you wind up is an "enemy of the state" under this expanded AUMF is anyone, including an American, who "substantially supports" a force "associated" with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. It behooves us all to figure out what this sloppy language just might mean, because while travel restrictions to Cuba are still in force, there are exceptions for certain circumstances.

Now, what does "substantially support" mean? And what is a "force" "associated" with Al Qaeda or the Taliban? Not to sound too paranoid, but if a SEAL team shows up in your living room at three a.m., you might want to have a tentative answer on the tip of your tongue. Let us take an example: let's say that you are concerned about all of the Iraqis displaced in the period between 2003 and 2011, the millions exiled or forced out of their homes by the civil war that broke out as the result of the American invasion. You decide to give to a charitable organization named Dar Es Salaam (House of Peace), which putatively provides aid to Iraqi orphans.

Okay, stop right there. I wouldn't do that if I were you. These charities are notorious for operating as funding mechanisms for Al Qaeda. Or so I've read. In fact, if I were you, I would stop giving to charities altogether. Okay, maybe the March of Dimes, or something recommended by Nancy Reagan. But that's it. Nothing with a funny sounding name. Generally speaking, criminal statutes are supposed to be kind of specific, so you are forewarned if you're going off the rails, but "substantially supporting" something "associated with" something else, when none of these terms gets defined, does not comport with this general rule, and the consequences of being wrong could be pretty dire.

How about simple dissent? Suppose you're in a conversation (or, God help me, write a blog) in which you describe your opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Does that "substantially support" the Taliban? In regimes such as the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany, dissent itself was criminalized, and you can imagine how far you would get splitting hairs about whether your support was "substantial" or not. The truth of the matter is that is how police states work. You don't know whether you have any rights or not, because the system has moved from one where the laws are clear and well-defined to one where we allow individuals, such as the President, to determine unilaterally who is and who is not an enemy of the State. Whether you become a target of the U.S. military, with its new mission, probably depends less on what you have done than on whether you have drawn attention to yourself, because we have eliminated due process. The accusation is the same as a conclusive finding of guilt. That is what is meant by "indefinite detention" without trial.

We have arrived here by a very strange path, but arrived here we have. The spirited opposition to this AUMF expansion was led by Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. He actually wanted to repeal the AUMF for Iraq altogether, given that its mission of eliminating Saddam's weapons of mass destruction had already succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The liberal Democrats were having none of that. I just throw that out there in the hopes of clarifying your voting tendencies.

An American Citizen's Guide to Protecting Oneself from the American Government

2011-12-05T17:32:00.000-08:00

To get right to it, the Senate, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the American penitentiary system, the American court system, and all the police departments in all the cities and states throughout this great land are insufficient to protect us from, you guessed it, terrorists. If we didn't talk about terrorists, what would we talk about? Our bankruptcy? Public approval of Congress might fall below its current 10% if they start in on that.

Now on a personal note: I'm almost as American as they come. If I trace my lineage back through four grandparents, three strands (both paternal grandparents, my maternal grandmother) run very deep into the American soil. Indeed, the arrival of these ancestors from Europe is lost in the mists of time, but it was hundreds of years ago. My "people" (as my people say) have long made North America their home. I really would not know how to be anywhere else, so I feel the need to adapt, right here, to changing circumstances.

And man have those circumstances changed. I suppose the simplest way to say it is that as soon as the first jet hit the first tower at the World Trade Center, on September 11, 2001, the country completely lost its mind. I don't know how else to put it. Yes, a lot of people died that day, somewhere around 3,000 souls. To put this number in perspective, about 1,100,000 (one million one hundred thousand) Americans die every year as the combined total for heart disease and cancer. If you divide that number by 365, you get the number... ~3,000. In the same way that the deaths of 9/11 were tragic for the loved ones of the victims, all of these deaths, happening every single day of the year in the same number, are tragic losses for the loved ones of the newly deceased. Yet the country goes on. The loved ones mourn, pay tribute to their lost relatives and friends, and go back to the process of living their lives. That's how life is.

So what ia it about 9/11 that has forced the United States government, and two consecutive presidents, to wage holy war not just on Terrorism, but on the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights, its most important charter? Was it the existence of civil liberties and legal due process that led to the attacks of 9/11? I don't think so. I've read the Report of the 9/11 Commission, and the reasons the 19 hijackers succeeded are pretty obvious. The higher-ups at the White House, at the Immigration & Naturalization Service and at the FBI (in particular) fell down on the job. George W. Bush and Richard Cheney were totally negligent and derelict in their duty to protect the country. The field agents, particularly of the FBI and CIA, did good work. They suspected something was up, detected the mysterious presence of Arabs taking flight lessons in American schools while omitting instruction on taking off and landing, and reported it up the chain of command. But no one in the White House did anything.

With such an embarrassing breach of duty to explain away, Bush & Cheney did what politicians usually do: they created a distraction by starting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What is harder to understand is why, ten years after 9/11, we're still going insane. Thus, we have the Levin/McCain bill in the Senate, which will formalize and codify the madness. Here's what it will do:

"renews the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) with more expansive language: to allow force (and military detention) against not only those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks and countries which harbored them, but also anyone who “substantially supports” Al Qaeda, the Taliban or “associated forces” (Sec. 1031); "

Now, when they say "anyone," they mean anyone. This law will permit the U.S. military to deal with Americans whom the President, in his discretion, designates a suspected terrorist. An American can be taken into custody by the military, detained indefinitely, sent to Guantanamo, and disappeared forever. Or an American can simply be shot dead. It is a repeal of the concept of Posse Comitatus, which used to forbid the use of the military in domestic law enforcement; indeed, the concept of "law enforcement" has actually been superseded by this bill. Realistically, was the Gestapo engaged in "law enforcement" or something else entirely?

To give you an idea of how bad all of this is (in case the above isn't bad enough), Senator Carl Levin, a co-sponsor of this bill (working with the deranged senator from Arizona, John McCain), has, I suspect, good motivations for this legislation. Under this bill, an American will at least receive the protections of a "prisoner of war," and thus be entitled to the Geneva Convention's accountability rules. An American (if he survives the initial encounter with the military in his front yard), will have the right of habeas corpus. The nebulous designations of suspected terrorists as "enemy combatants," etc., the netherworld which allows for so much extra-legal mischief, will at least be reined in somewhat. I think this is what Levin is doing; he's a guy I've generally respected, and he's probably thinking this is as good as it gets. We've arrived at the point where we allow the President simply to gun down Americans who are designated as suspected terrorists, so any kind of "formality," even something as nuts as this, is better than nothing.

Our President and former Constitutional law instructor, Barack Obama, has threatened to veto this bill. If you're deluded enough to think he would veto it because it deprives Americans of civil liberties protection, then I hate to disturb your sweet dreams, but that's not it. No, he's concerned about his "flexibility" in dealing with terrorism, and if Americans, at the very least, can claim to be "prisoners of war" then it will be harder to ship them off to black sites in torture-friendly countries to "extract actionable intelligence."

I trust this was the Change you were Hoping for. I think I'll do a Part 2 to discuss the vagueness of the actual charging elements of the new, expanded Authorization for Use of Military Force -- including Americans this time.

My country, 'tis of thee

2011-11-17T16:24:00.001-08:00

I thought as much:

Eighty is the new 65,” Joseph Ready, executive vice president of Wells Fargo Institutional Retirement & Trust, said in an interview at Bloomberg headquarters in New York before the survey was released today. “It’s a real sea change.”

"Sea change" is a good phrase - not entirely worn out yet, despite its antiquity. I think it's one of those imported Britishisms that have come into common use here in the States. Like, "at the end of the day." Nevertheless, I can't see how 80 can be the new 65, since 80 is beyond average American life expectancy. This whole Peter Pan thing can be carried too far. The point Mr. Ready (-or-Not) seems to be making is that retirement may become a thing of the past except for the "1%." And they won't retire for long, either, since they'll be eaten for food by the working 99%. Another "sea change."

I am only an amateur Doomsayer, however, so don't take my word for it. Doomsaying is a crowded field, and there are many, many practitioners these days, especially on the Internet. I read a few every day, just to keep my spirits down. The latest roiling fiasco is the financial insolvency of Europe. Here I must register a slight disappointment: it was one of the pleasures of my youthful years to favorably compare Europe's more gracious, socially-secure living to the Darwinist bloodbath more typical of life here at home. It was one of the ways we could get a dig in at this country that systematically deprived us of 6-week vacations, wall-to-wall free medical care, a year of "paternity" leave, retirement for everybody at 55, and so much more. I wasn't sure how Europe did it, but it sure seemed nice.

It now seems possible the same laws of thermodynamics apply in Europe as here Stateside, not surprising since most of the early important work in physics was done in Europe. What a come-down all this has been. Is it possible Europe was doing it all with mirrors? They're in hock up to their eyeballs now. Really, when you think about it, the U.S.A. is in better fiscal shape. That sounds strange to say about a federal government which borrows 42 cents of every dollar it spends, but consider: the total U.S. national debt of $15 trillion (about 100% of GDP) is considerably better than Italy, which is at 120% (equivalent to $18 trillion here). Further, the $15 trillion in the U.S. is not real. $4.5 trillion could be written off tomorrow simply by repealing Social Security and Medicare, and the finances of Social Security are now so ridiculously dismal that its days are surely numbered. For example, last month (October, the first month of the new fiscal year 2012), Social Security took in $39 billion and paid out $61 billion. The phantom interest paid by the phantom Trust Fund was, for the first time I noticed, inadequate to cover the shortfall. That is amazingly dire. When the hallucinated money is still not enough, what do you call it? A failure of imagination?

As I say, however, that's the bad news. The good news is that the U.S. national debt can be reduced by $4.5 trillion if the Super Committee simply drops acid and gets jiggy with it. Just eliminate these programs. Now we're at $10.5 trillion. Yet it gets better still. Of this remainder, about $1.3 trillion is held by the Federal Reserve, which only pretends to collect interest on its "holdings" so it can "credit them back" to the Treasury who supposedly paid...oh hell, we've covered this. So knock it down to $9.2 trillion.

Damn it feels good to be a gangsta. We're the toast of the OECD and NATO, as opposed to being, you know, toast. We're in good shape, in other words, with debt at 60% of GDP. We have more control over our debt than these Eurodogs, with their stinky cigarettes and silly pointed men's shoes. We are better prepared for the coming austerity than they are because we're already living the insecure life - our health care "system" sucks, the Social Security pension was always inadequate, we never got more than a couple of weeks off, no one ever heard of Dad taking a year off to be with the kids (the last place this hard-working threshing mill donkey would ever want to be anyway), and, in general, it's always been that big-fish-eats-little-fish situation that Woody Allen once described, in trying to come to terms with how the natural world works, "as one enormous restaurant."

So yeah, there's a retirement "plan" they can't take away from you. Work until you die. Wherever the human race is going, America always seems to get there first.

Dick & Jane Encounter the Fractional Reserve Loan System

2011-11-06T11:11:00.000-08:00

True, what he said, you know:

All money is debt because we have allowed banks and the fed to create all our money through interest-bearing loans by using the fractional reserve system. The details are unimportant, the main point is that our money supply is created by interest-bearing loans of banks and the fed. Therefore, the economy must always grow in order to pay back the interest. When the economy can't grow anymore...collapse. -Dmitry Orlov, from a presentation at ASPO 2011 (Peak Oil Conference in Washington, D.C.)

See Dick. See Jane. They are riding in the back of the green 1948 Chevrolet. Father is driving. Mother is in the front seat. Spot is home with Grandfather.

They are on the way to the Bank, to see Mr. Smith, the Banker. Father wants a new loan to buy a new house. He will sell the present house, probably with Grandfather & Grandmother still in it.

Father has a bank account at Town Bank. Many of the neighbors also have accounts there. See all the money. See it all pile up. The Bank has one million dollars in deposits! The Bank has loaned money to many of the neighbors, too. All of its loans add up to ten million dollars!

"WTF?" exclaims Dick.

"Watch your mouth, Dick-face," says Jane.

"The Bank makes many loans," says Father. "The Bank must have one dollar for every ten dollars it loans out."

"Where does the Bank get the rest of the money?" asks Jane.

"It creates it when it makes the loan. It is called fractional reserve lending," answers Father.

"We do fractions in school," says Jane.

"Big whup, brown-nose," says Dick.

"We will pay the money back," says Father. "With interest of 6%."

"Why do they call it interest?" asks Dick.

"It's what makes it interesting to the Bank," answers Father. "We will pay it back over 30 years. We can use the rule of 72 to see how much the Bank will get from us. We use the rule of 72 at the Company, where I work. We can divide 6 percent into 72 and get 12. That means every 12 years the money will double. We can divide 12 into 30 years. That tells us that the money will double two and a half times. That means we will pay the Bank $250,000."

"That's a buttload," exclaims Dick.

"Fuckin' A," agrees Father.

Father and Mother get the loan. They make payments on the new house. Grandfather and Grandmother still live in the old house, wondering where everyone went. Father gets into a thing with Miss Jones, his secretary at the Company. Father gets canned. Uh-oh, he doesn't have any money anymore!

Soon many of the neighbors also have trouble making payments on their loans to the Bank. There is a Recession. This is bad news for the Bank, too. Oh, oh, see the Bank become a financial zombie. We can do another fraction to see what kind of trouble the Bank is in now. The Bank has only 10% equity for all of its loans. If 10% of the loans go bad, the Bank is bust-o. Uh oh! Thirty percent of the loans went bad. Tits up for the Bank!

Mother meets Jack the Milkman at the back door. Mother is wearing only a pink nightie. Oh, oh, see Mother leave and go to live with Jack the Milkman. Jack is now a pimp. Lots of Mothers now live at his house and turn tricks for Jack.

"Where is Mother?" asks Jane.

"She is with Jack the Milkman," answers Father between hits on Dick's bong pipe. "She a ho now."

"Oh oh," says Jane.

"Oh oh is right," answers Father.

"Where is the money for our loan?" asks Dick.

"Gone," says Father. "It disappeared, along with the Bank. Along with the country."

Glenn Greenwald at the Hillside Club

2011-11-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

Went to see Glenn Greenwald in Berkeley last night. He was speaking at the Hillside Club on Cedar Avenue on the north side. It was a very packed house, all come to hear Glenn talk about his new book With Liberty and Justice for Some. Or at least that was the ostensible reason. Glenn is something of a folk hero of the civil liberties Left, and I am one of his admirers.

He's a little shorter than I imagined, a little stockier, and I had the strange, slightly out-of-body perception as I listened to his hard-driving, uncompromising style of oration (he is hyper-articulate, and forms complete sentences together in his head as he speaks so that it is almost like reading a ticker tape from the brain), that this must have been a little like things were about 235 years ago when the somewhat nervous Revolutionaries of the Colonial Period heard John Adams get up and give the Brits hell. Which is to say, this guy is a formidable intellectual presence, and infused with passion for what he does.

One interesting aspect for me particularly was that Mr. Greenwald began blogging about the same time I did, and apparently for many of the same reasons. That is, he was a lawyer concerned with civil liberties, and he simply could not believe that the country was sitting idly by while the Bill of Rights was torn utterly to shreds, amendment by amendment, right by right, with the lamest possible excuses given by Congress and Big Media for letting it all go by. That the years after 9/11 were now so "special," that we were in such mortal peril, that a country which had nurtured the founding precept of a "government of laws and not of men" since the Declaration of Independence could now let it all safely go in favor of an arbitrary, case-by-case, subjective rule by elites, who could grant or withhold Due Process at their whim.

That process has continued unabated since the arrest, imprisonment, denial of counsel, and merciless torture of Jose Padilla, an American citizen detained on American soil and abused to the point of insanity by the Bush Administration, all while Congress sat idly by, afraid to challenge any injustice taken in the name of the Holy War on Terror. I wrote at the time that the Bush/Cheney Administration knew that Padilla had not credibly been involved in any "dirty bomb plot," and that the sole purpose of violating every known precept of the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendments with respect to Padilla was to see, quite simply, if they could get away with it.

Well, they did get away with it, and after that illegal wiretapping (another felony, committed thousands, maybe millions of time), torture, denial of habeas corpus, indefinite detention and now White House-sanctioned murder of American citizens were very easy to get away with. Once the populace gets used to the idea that there are simply no rules, they take the next logical step: they look out only for themselves, and the State simply becomes something to protect yourself from. If that sounds more or less like the stories we used to hear of life behind the Iron Curtain, the resemblance is not coincidental. Both Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's NKVD were unconstrained by principles of Due Process; whatever the state wanted to do to you, it could do, and it was pointless to talk about "rights." Why is it that Americans cannot see that starting down a road where the President is given an unquestioned right to murder fellow citizens, without presenting any evidence, let alone an indictment or conviction, is already a long way down the road toward a similar tyranny? I simply do not understand the naivete that permits such a devolution.

As Mr. Greenwald relates, America has 5% of the world's population yet incarcerates 25% of the world's prison inmates. Although the United States is always careful never to inconvenience the political, military or economic elites with prosecution or even investigation. The greatest financial crimes in the history of the world (systematic violations of the criminal aspects of Rule 10-b5 of the Securities & Exchange Act, to give a specific example) were committed on a massive scale in the previous decade, but not a single Wall Street banker has ever faced prosecution or imprisonment.

Mr. Obama says it is because what the banksters did was "immoral but not illegal," but in this Mr. Obama, as in so many things, is just completely, absolutely wrong, leaving one with one of two (and only two) unpalatable choices: he is either (1) in way over his head or (2) a complete stooge. That he might be both is, of course, not logically eliminated. Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama, with his mantra of "Looking Forward, Not Backward" as the "answer" to all questions about why we never did anything about financial crimes, or war crimes and violations of the Convention Against Torture which were admitted on the record, before Congressional panels, and in television interviews, is, as Mr. Greenwald sadly relates, simply part of the problem.

Thus, Glenn's enthusiasm for the Occupy Everything movement. With his rigorous logic, Mr. Greenwald points out that if the Occupy movement had anything to do with support for Obama, the assemblers would take the much easier, nicer step of going door-to-door and canvassing for Mr. Hope&Change, sending him those frequent donations as in 2008, and not facing down billy clubs and cold weather. The Occupy Movement is all about a rejection of that, a statement that the Commoners are not going to be taken again by a smooth-talking phony, a bag man for Big Money, without an ounce of sincerity in his body, nor a spark of fire in his belly. Deficiencies not shared by Glenn Greenwald.

Leaving the question, of course, what's left? Personally, I don't think there needs to be an answer right now. Grasping at "answers" has accomplished nothing except to change the oversight of the economic and constitutional destruction of the country, as the voters, in bipolar spasms, throw out first one group of scoundrels and replace them with another, then grow restive and disappointed and do it all over again in two-year cycles.

Something else needs to happen, which is why it's so interesting to listen to a mind as protean and resourceful as Mr. Greenwald's. Real hope, real change, begin with first realizing where you are.

Econothermodynamics

2011-10-28T12:43:00.001-07:00

I confess that I don't quite get it. Money is supposed to be a representational medium - it stands in for wealth, but paper currency (other than the value of paper as fuel for a Franklin stove or maybe as wall insulation after the gas service is shut off) is not intrinsically valuable itself. I realize that this contradicts the ideas of the so-called Modern Monetary Theorists or Chartalists - if I understand the ravings of this quasi-cult, they are convinced that the creation of money out of nothing, whether or not offset by debt, is a useful economic tool in and of itself. Further, I was not aware, until I read some of his recent columns and blogs, that Paul Krugman has apparently come under the sway of the MMT people, although he likes to draw specious, irrelevant distinctions between his particular brand of cash conjuration and the MMT cult.

Just as an aside: the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times are in a real sense dominated by cultists. Thomas Friedman, the porn-'stached (h/t: Matt Taiibi) major domo of the columnists there, is a globalization freak, for example. It doesn't matter that globalization does not work toward the well-being of the United States. All that globalization has ever done is to enrich the U.S.-based multinational corporations who use it to arbitrage cheap labor and environmental destruction, at the expense of the American middle class. Nevertheless, Friedman, who is taken seriously for reasons I have never remotely understood, is so ga-ga over flat earths, and plug-and-play platforms, and taxi drivers in Bangalore who explain to him how international trade works, that he keeps the global meme coming, book after poorly-written book.

And now Krugman, whose colossal intellectual arrogance is such that he looks with pity on any other analyst who fails to see that America's economic problems are not even necessary, that they all result from the universal failure to appreciate that he (and he alone) is right -- declares that salvation for America and Europe is at hand, through the simple mechanism of money creation by the central banks. He's at a loss to understand why everyone can't see that this is so clearly the way to go.

As I said, I don't quite get how that works. Economics is certainly not a hard science, I understand that. It's full of "principles" and "laws," but they don't mean anything. In a field such as physics, laws such as those for the conservation of matter and energy have to be observed. For example, let us suppose you decide to drive from Ely, Nevada to Tonopah, Nevada on U.S. Highway 6, a distance of 168 miles. It's desolate out there, but as you leave in your Buick Riviera you are aware that you have one gallon of gasoline in your fuel tank, and your gas-guzzling car gets about 16 miles to the gallon. Moving the mass of the Riviera (and you) requires energy supplied by burning gasoline in the engine. Since you are scientifically inclined, you are aware you can conserve gasoline by coasting on downslopes (so that the engine is at idle RPM) and keeping the speed down, since wind resistance increases on the square of velocity. These sophisticated adjustments allow you to go 18 miles before you run out of gas, which means that your scientific acumen actually placed you two miles farther from help than you otherwise would have been.

At this point, I assume that Krugman and the Chartalists would simply declare the existence of more gasoline and be on their way again. Lesser mortals would have to thumb a ride back to Ely.

When the United States ran out of money in 2008, the Federal Reserve stepped into the breach through the first of its quantitative easing episodes. The "quantity" in question was the monetary base, which at the time was about $800 billion, almost all in the form of Treasury securities held by the Fed. The Fed decided to "purchase" mortgage-backed securities to the tune of about $1.2 trillion, not by exchanging the Treasury notes and bonds in its vaults but by declaring the existence of money sufficient to take the MBS off the owners' hands. The Fed further "purchased" about $300 billion of Treasuries through "POMO" operations, that is, Treasuries purchased mostly from Primary Dealers on the secondary market. In QE II, the Fed extended the POMO operations and "purchased" another $600 billion in Treasuries on the secondary market. These exercises in artifice increased the "monetary base" of the Fed to its present roughly $2.7 trillion.

Krugman and the other Keynesian Kultists have been taking relentless victory laps because of the failure of Weimar-style inflation to break loose in the United States, and because the interest rates on U.S. Treasury securities have remained very low. Of course, one needs to point out that even the Fed's roughly $1.3 trillion in mortgage-backed securities represents only about 10% of the total American mortgage market of $13 trillion. By physical analogy, if one were to pour 8 fluid ounces of sulphuric acid into an Olympic-sized pool 50 meters in length (with an average depth of 2 meters), and allowed time for dispersion and dilution, it is doubtful that any harm would come to any swimmers using the pool.

I think this is why we have "gotten away with" wholesale money conjuration by the Federal Reserve. Compared to the total capital stock of the United States (about $50 trillion), the money which Bernanke has pulled out of his silk top hat is not a lot of cash. It's heavily diluted by the preexistence of all the money and credit aggregates already in existence; however, if fiat creation becomes a standard way of doing business, it will, at some point, tip the balance so that anyone swimming in the pool will suffer a third degree burn.

This is why I think cash conjuration is so fundamentally insane. It seems obvious that introducing fake money into the system can have a marginal effect on real wealth, as for example, the "support" which the Fed's MBS "purchasing" program has had on the real estate market. The Fed, by becoming the New American Century of the post-crash era, has created a small secondary market for all the mortgage trash floating on the surface of underwater America. The goal, as with the suspension of FASB 157, which allows banks to pretend that all the worthless encumbrances they hold on real estate (the value of which is less than the loan, or, worse, stand in second place behind an underwater loan), are nevertheless worth 100 cents on the dollar, is always the same. The particular set of politicians and banking chiefs in charge at a given time do not want to be the ones in power when the remnants of the economy spiral down the toilet. Thus, rather than face the music, the goal is to use any means, fair or foul, visionary or extremely short-sighted, to keep the contraption huffing and puffing along on the road to Tonopah for as long as possible.

It stands to reason that creating money out of thin air, and then using it to buy something "real," cannot by definition actually create any new wealth. To the extent that the real estate market, for example, has been slightly levitated by these tricks, this anti-gravity maneuver represents a form of disguised inflation (too subtle for Krugman to see), since the delta between the "real" value and the values maintained by counterfeit money is a form of inflation. Again, this idea is borrowed from physical science: you could call it "negative deflation."

But here's the problem: you can only do this to the point where, by definition, it's not enough to matter. At the threshold of non-triviality, you must introduce so much fake money into the system that in fact you completely debase your currency (pour too much H2SO4 into the pool - I suppose that's acid rather than base), and then Weimar, 1922, does ensue. As soon as the existence of all the extra fake money becomes perceptible, in a tangible way, to the general public, as opposed to the little klatch of insiders who fatten their binary accounts at the Federal Reserve courtesy of the Fed's favoritism, the game is over. However, the charade has the intended effect of extending the game of make-believe a little longer, while meanwhile doling out something of a "moneyish" character (lots of 1's and 0's) to computer entries of Primary Dealers, which are then payable as bonuses. This is the actual "threshold" used: can the Federal Reserve do its magic trick just enough so that the moneyish, digital flow keeps moving to the owners of banks which were in reality bust-o long ago.

The Ungrateful Nouri shows us the door

2011-10-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

A comment thread on Facebook recently explored, in a revealing way, the various attitudes that a certain cross-section of liberals display when it comes to President Barack Obama. His die-hard partisans wanted credit for Obama's "decision" to finish the Iraq War by bringing home all combat troops by December 31, 2011. The usual cynics (who, me?) pointed out that the Exit Sign was flashing red because time was up: the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) expires on December 31, 2011 and under the express terms of the agreement negotiated years ago by the Bush Administration, we have to be out.

The O Man did not actually want to leave; in order to stay, however, the USA needed continuing immunity (as currently enjoyed by U.S. forces) from the criminal justice system of the Iraqi courts. A lot of stuff has happened over the last eight-plus years, involving U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians, and it is highly probable that the continued presence of American soldiers in 2012 and after would engender more such unfortunate incidents. Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about a 2006 incident in the central Iraq town of Isahqi, where a group of at least ten Iraqi men, women (including the elderly) and children were massacred in a raid by American troops, and a U.S. airstrike was called in after the fact to obliterate the evidence. A coverup of the true nature of the event was then engineered by the military. The damning details were revealed by some of the Wikileaks cables voluminously released in May, 2011, to the great consternation of Message Control Central at the White House.

The Iraqi citizenry, on the other hand, are not subjected to the same level of Pravda-like propaganda as their American counterparts receive courtesy of the New York Times and Washington Post. The 2006 incident has become common knowledge in Baghdad, and if Maliki had any lingering misgivings about the SOFA and the 12/31/11 exit date, he lost most of his negotiating latitude when the Wikileaks cables hit the wires. Although I don't think that the Ungrateful Nouri actually had any such hesitations. It seems that even Mr. Greenwald has forgotten that the "immunity issue" has been around for years, and Maliki (and I confess here that I have long marveled at how this clever politician, involved as he is in completely "asymmetrical" negotiations given the disparity in power between Iraq and the U.S., finds ways to level the playing field) has used this issue precisely because he knows there is no way the Americans are ever going to turn over their own GI's to the tender mercies of the Iraqi mullahs.

Thus, Obama's "announcement" of a troop pullout was simply presidential campaigning, an extremely cynical exploitation of the profound ignorance of the American voting public concerning the historical record in Iraq. The Big Media went along with the gag, of course, except for some of the usual complainers.

We'll still have lots of "contractors" and mercenaries in Iraq, of course, but they will be taking their chances with the local legal system. It remains to be seen what happens with Iraq's oil, which was, after all, the main reason we invaded in the first place. The removal of all combat troops would seem to place our ability to direct the outcome of this vital resource in serious doubt. It also opens the door to much greater Iranian influence, and it should never be forgotten that Maliki spent a great deal of time in exile in Iran when he worked with the Dawa Party to undermine Saddam Hussein.

4,500 American soldiers dead; multiples of ten thousand grievously wounded, maimed, crippled; maybe a million Iraqis killed, millions more displaced; a trillion dollars spent; a huge burden added to an already unsustainable national debt.

This is the way the war ends: not with a bang but a whimper.

On the other hand, Moammar, you only missed one day

2011-10-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

I'd nearly forgotten that tomorrow is It. Despite suffering a stroke in June, Harold Camping, noted East Bay eschatologist, tinkered with his End Times algorithm, crunched the numbers, and came up with this:

"I do believe we're getting very near the very end," Camping, 90, said during a podcast recorded earlier this month and posted on his Family Radio website. "Oct. 21, that's coming very shortly, that looks like it will be, at this point, it will be the final end of everything." SF Chronicle, October 20 (gulp), 2011.

Just as a style note, I think if you're going to be in the end-of-the-world prediction business, you owe it to your public not to use weasel words like "very near the very end." In terms of the age of the Earth (6,000 years, of course), very near the very end could be a year away from the blowing of the Trumpet and still be "very near," since we only have 1/6,000th of our allotted time left. Also, the "final end of everything" doesn't really "look like" anything else except, you know, the final end of everything. Sui generis, as they say. A unique occurrence. (I suppose; I mean God, who always "just was" according to the tenets of Abrahamic religions, could easily have created a lot of these diversions. This time through, He invented quantum theory, introducing the element of chance into causality maybe as a means of concealing from Himself what was going to happen next. After 6,000 years of watching the incredible suffering of all the sentient beings He created, He figured it all out [He is omniscient, you know, and it's up to Him to decide what He doesn't want to know and for how long] and the fun went out of the game. Even if Einstein said that God "did not play dice" with the Universe. Au contraire, Albert: He is the Croupier in the Sky.)

Still, I think the operating instructions for the Universe are very, very complicated, and I am willing to bet one million dollars against a buck that the sun will rise as usual on October 22, 2011, and that Harold Camping is not actually some version of a modern-day Nostradamus but is instead a senile fruitcake.

Anyway, Moammar, sorry you won't be around for the day after the Final Day. Our bloodthirsty foreign policy as conducted by the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, in which we "capture or kill" all the Bad Guys, and yet never seem to do any of the "capturing" part, requires periodic, and increasingly frequent, instances of murder and mayhem to keep the folks riled up back home, sort of like Aztecs with virgins. Two years ago you were shaking hands with President Obama, you were a big player in the oil markets, you were on our list of Most Favored Dictator-Thugs. Unfortunately, Facebook and Twitter brought down the strongmen in Tunisia and Egypt, and we let it happen since there's no oil to speak of in either shithole sand pile, and then this "popular democratization" thing just sort of got out of hand. And with assurances from the rebels that they wouldn't do anything wild and crazy, like nationalize the oil industry in Libya, we got on board with our newly-found love for the "common Arab" (as long as those Arabs don't live in countries like Saudi Arabia, which attacked us on 9-11, or Bahrain, where we supply the autocrats with weapons and airplanes to suppress the "freedom fighters" there). You had to pay the price, Moammar, because we could use you as the exception that proves the rule, and if you can't figure that out now, well, what possible difference can it make to you.

A few notes on attending the local OWS

2011-10-18T03:20:00.001-07:00

Ours had Roy Zimmerman performing, so that's already a good start (see picture).

It was a low-key affair, as one might expect in our community. No one gets too worked up about anything, especially on such a nice day. I would say the mood was overwhelmingly "liberal," but then so is the county.

Just a few ideas: I don't really think it's wise to cast the OWS movement as class warfare, or to use lines of demarcation such as 99% versus 1%. The real break points are not so much income-related; in our culture, where medicine is practiced for profit, for example, many of the high earners are in such fields as neuro-and cardiovascular surgery, and other arcane specialties. Depending on how you feel about allopathic medicine (with its exorbitant waste and poor efficiency), you may or may not think surgeons pulling down high six-figure or low seven-figure incomes "deserve" what they make, but their incomes do not present a political problem, per se. They pay a lot of income and FICA tax, in fact, as do rock stars, superstar athletes and other social icons. But this, again, does not have much to do with the fundamental problem, which is the disenfranchisement of the American electorate through corrupt politics. The politics in Washington, D.C. are completely unresponsive to the needs of the American commoner, as the Empire simply acts to serve its own interests.

I think that's the major issue. Until money is removed as the driving force from politics, there is no hope for reforming the American political system. I'm very dubious there is any hope anyway, simply because the reason that money became the controlling force in politics was the hyper-concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands through monopolization (mergers, Big Box consolidation, etc.) and the rise of the multinational corporation, on one hand, and the "financialization" of the American economy on the other. The latter tendency (by which about 40% of all corporate profits are generated through the paper-shuffling work in the FIRE industries of finance, insurance and real estate) has joined Big Finance to federal government at the hip - all these businesses are "too big to fail," and yet are now dependent on the money-creation games of the Federal Reserve in order to survive. How does the economy, acting through its elected officials, go about the orderly redistribution of wealth so that the economy is again diversified without a complete collapse? Something to ponder.

And would a system of publicly-financed political campaigns actually work any better in the United States anyway? As I've said before, the United States is the one Western democracy which has Third World size (over 300 million people) joined to a modern economy. The country is simply too big and the candidates running for office too remote from the electorate for anything other than the election of imagery. The last couple of presidential elections are probably good evidence that the system simply doesn't work anymore.

If I were an OWS honcho writing a platform, I would revive the idea of a Constitutional convention which would completely revamp the electoral system. Get rid of the direct election of a President and move to a parliamentary system (a unicameral legislature) where a primus inter pares system, as in Great Britain, is used whereby the representatives themselves elect one of their number to serve as Prime Minister (or President) for one term not to exceed six years. Such a system could encourage the formation of additional parties, since all politics, in effect, would become local. The general populace would only vote for members of parliament and leave the executive decisions to those (closer-at-hand) representatives. The single legislative house could be increased to 1,000 members or so, so that the anti-democratic tendencies of the present system were smoothed out somewhat (populous states being under-represented on a per capita basis).

Anyway, the OWS movement does need an agenda at some point, because otherwise it will devolve into pointless anarchy or will be hijacked by special pleaders in its midst. People in OWS are doing the right thing, but they are people and subject to the usual foibles.

Texas Used Car Salesman Brings World to Brink of WW III

2011-10-12T13:41:00.001-07:00

For the hell of it, I read the federal complaint against Mansour Arabsiar, the Persian American allegedly behind an Iranian plot to blow up the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. I confess I have a weakness for such reading - it's always interesting to me to see how the other guys try to get mileage out of the very little evidence usually available at the outset of a case. This one did not disappoint in that regard. In essence, the case against Arabsiar and his Iranian confederate (Gholum Shakuri) comes down to this:

1. Mansour was a used car salesman in Corpus Christi, Texas, with a history of financial problems and minor run-ins with the law. Over the last several months, he got involved with a guy called "CS-1," which stands for Confidential Source 1, a paid informant working for the Drug Enforcement Agency in the Texas-Mexico border area. CS-1 worked a deal with the Department of Justice where he got a narcotics rap dismissed in exchange for working undercover for the FBI.

2. The complaint does not tell you how Arabsiar found or encountered CS-1, other than they met in Mexico on one of Mansour's trips down there. By itself, that is a very interesting (and perhaps telling) omission. One way or the other, Arabsiar and CS-1 began discussing a plot to blow up the Saudi Ambassador, in Washington, D.C., with C-4 (no relation) explosives. Both Arabsiar and CS-1 then began blowing voluminous quantities of smoke up the ass of the other (inter sese, as we say in law). Mansour said he had a cousin in Quds, the bad ass corps of Revolutionary Guard paramilitaries in Iran. CS-1 said he was tight with Los Zetas (Drug Cartel #1, in the complaint), a Mexican drug and gun-running gang with a major rep for what you might call excessive, even wholly gratuitous, violence.

3. Mansour (or maybe it was CS-1) then suggested that this group of Mexican bandidos would be the perfect outfit to blow up the Saudi Ambassador in Washington, D.C. Personally, I would think that this hit would be somewhat beyond, and a little too subtle for, their usual skill set, which normally involves blasting away at local police, judges and other Mexican citizens with weapons of awesome firepower, then decapitating the victims and placing their heads in the local zocalo (see, "Murder City," an excellent book about life and death in Laredo).

4. CS-1 told Mansour that killing the Ambassador was no problem, but, lamentably, such things cost a lot of money, and suggested the figure $1.5 million. Of course, there would be the requirement of a down payment, or earnest money, to show that Mansour, the failed used car salesman who was so disorganized that the guy who bought him out of the car lot said Mansour often had trouble finding the titles to cars he had just sold (he sounds a little like the Bill Macy character in "Fargo"), could command this kind of cash from the villains back home in Tehran.

5. There are a bunch of references to "international travel" by Mansour in the complaint, but they aren't really place-specific. Did he go to Iran over the summer? I wasn't able to tell. What you can be certain about is that Mansour arranged for two wire transfers to a bank account set up by CS-1, each in the amount of $49,960 or so (there must be something about keeping it under 50 grand). This made the FBI's job easier, since it provided the "overt acts" in furtherance of the conspiracy necessary to nail Mansour, and, in a twist of luck, the money was routed through New York City, establishing a nice, convenient venue for filing the complaint in Federal Court in Foley Square (who wants to spend next summer in Houston, you know?).

6. The money was wired in from a "foreign country" by a foreigner. Was this Gholum Shakuri, Mansour's co-conspirator? I presume so.

Well, there you have it. Two Persians, money changing hands, plans to blow up the Saudi Ambassador. It seems to me the Feds have their conspiracy case fairly well made. An agreement to commit a felony, a couple of overt acts (wire transfers). That's all the Feds need; no one actually has to get detonated.

As to the reality of the plot, what I notice right away is that you can't find anything in the complaint which describes "planning" of the assassination between any two people other than Mansour Arabsiar, the used car salesman, and CS-1, the guy who beat the drug rap by becoming a snitch.

Also, since the FBI knew that the plan was not in any sense real or even close to fruition (after all, CS-1 was not really a honcho in a Mexican drug cartel so no one had actually been enlisted to carry out the assassination), why did they interrupt the plot when it had been funded only to the $100 K level? See, this is how lawyers think: if the Republic of Iran was actually behind this Robert Ludlumesque plot, then the balance of $1.4 million would surely have been forthcoming, and the actual payment, in such size, would be impressive evidence that it wasn't just Mansour and Gholum playing out a reckless fantasy with a bunch of (nonexistent) Mexican desperados. But maybe a hundred grand could find its way from Iran one way or another, with or without the Iranian government, Quds, or the Ayatollah's petty cash drawer.

I suspect this one will sink beneath the waves pretty soon. It looks suspiciously like a Wag the Dog Op, the way it instantly became front page news with really so little of substance to actually connect it to the Iranian government. It's curious, as to the question of the hurry-up timing, that all this comes to light just as Eric Holder, the Rip Van Winkle of Attorneys General, had his boredom-induced coma interrupted by cries of "perjury!" from Darrell Issa and others in the House concerning the "Fast & Furious" controversy, where Mr. Holder stated (under oath, to a House panel) that he only lately found out about the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms & Tobacco (ATF's) role in allowing the sale of AK-47 weapons to criminals (mainly sales in Arizona gun shops), and then permitting the guns to "walk" across the Mexican border to, uh, drug cartels. Part of a tracing operation, I guess.

Well, you certainly would not want to harass your own Attorney General about some gun-running program, harebrained as it might have been, when he's busy unraveling a plot involving those same drug cartels and the Evil Republic itself, Iran. Would you? So even if an old Iran hand like Robert Baer says unequivocally that it's ludicrous to imagine that Quds and the Iranian government would get involved with a couple of small-time losers and a Mexican gang to carry out an embassy assassination - well, I say, wait till all the facts are in. That's my legal training talking. Although that same training tells me all the facts are probably already in.