Americo-Fascism, part 2

The official budget deficit for the American government, for the last fiscal year available, was about $248 billion. Thanks to the diligent research of Hale "Bonddad" Stewart and others who actually study federal balance sheets, we know that this number is a fiction. It was concocted in the same systematically deceitful way that the federal government announces its deficits or "surpluses" every year, by pretending the "excess" FICA money paid into the Social Security "trust fund" and then swiped by Congress for war and other worthy causes is general revenue, and not a desperately needed reserve for ensuring the solvency of the system in future years. When the truth is told, or the federal cover blown, the actual numbers can be calculated by simply measuring the growth of the national debt year over year. When this is done, the calculation looks like this:
09/30/2006 --- $8,506,973,899,215.23 --- $574,264,237,491.73, where the first figure is the total national debt and the second (about $574 billion) is the growth in the debt from the previous year.

Thus, the true deficit is over twice the official, rosy announcement. Since Bush's pledge to "cut the deficit in half" by 2009 depends on lying, however, the real number is never used since it makes him look bad. Again, and since his latest "approval" rating is 26%, there is only so much more bad news he can take. As has been said so many times it has at last become part of the national discourse, the money swiped from Social Security is replaced with IOUs. L'il W, with his microencephalic grasp of Big Issues and congenital case of foot-in-mouth disease, nearly stepped in it big time when he derided the security for Social Security as a bunch of pieces of paper in a filing cabinet in West Virginia, the repository for the government bonds representing the total owed on an "intragovernmental" basis by the Treasury to the Social Security Trust Fund. Since the Chinese, Japanese and many other foreign nations have invested their Wal-Mart and Prius largesse in exactly these same pieces of paper, Bush's puppeteers told him to cool it with the "filing cabinet" talk. What Bush was unwittingly disclosing, of course, is that the federal government has no earthly way to pay back all that money it has been routinely embezzling in order to run the Military-Industrial Complex all the years since Social Security was reformed (about 25 years ago). The federal government is exactly like a stressed-out member of the American booboisie overheating in a double wide in Bullhead City with his credit cards totally maxed out and just able to pay the vig on his monthly payments. The federal government has no way whatsoever to come up with the actual cash it needs to retire all that foreign debt it has borrowed on time (over $2 trillion at this point) nor to catch up with the "intragovernmental" debts it's piled up. To the foreigners and domestic investors in T-Bills and bonds, the U.S. pays interest, to keep the game afloat. On its intragovernmental obligations, such as to Social Security, it adds another piece of paper detailing the interest "accrued but not paid."

A few years ago Bush had the bright idea of "reforming" Social Security in order to eliminate it. He would privatize it, and require investments of "retirement accounts" on Wall Street, thus rescuing his friends in that languishing industry and also getting the Feds out from under all the money that would otherwise be wasted on Social Security when the system tips from green to red in about 2017 or so. Understanding the mentality behind this move is the principal lesson in today's sermon about America's version of Fascism.

Congress is quite content with Social Security and Medicare so long as these two remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society do not interfere with its true purpose, which is serving the interests of corporate lobbyists. When the systems more or less pay for themselves, all is well. Indeed, better than that, because the boost of FICA taxes in the early 1980's meant that a hidden tax, off the top, was imposed on American workers that found its way into the general revenue, where it could be added to the $1 trillion or so that is spent annually on military and intelligence budgets. Social Security, in particular, thus paid for itself. True, it was boring to Congress members because there was no way to use its funding as a way to sell influence for money from lobbyists. But it was not a complete nuisance, either, because it was a stand-alone system that Congress did not have to pay for, and it did produce that little kicker of a surplus every year. And all those grateful AARP members, who are such diligent voters. Congress is not big on financial planning, however, and it became apparent that American demographics, at some point, were going to flip; there would be insufficient Gen-X and -Y workers working to support the leisure-loving Baby Boomers, particularly since Americans as a rule did not make much money anymore; and a system that had produced a surplus was not only NOT going to pay for itself anymore - it was going to require an actual injection of cash from the real budget, the play money that Congress earmarks and pays out to K Street parasites. And that time was coming within the next decade.

Alan Greenspan has disclosed the grim truth, surprisingly enough. There is simply no way, at this point in time, with so little time left, that America can grow or tax its way out of the coming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. No. Way. Whatsoever. The problem is an order of magnitude removed from fiscal solutions. When the federal government reneges on all of its obligations to Medicare and Social Security, fresh Hell, as Dorothy Parker said, is going to descend on America. The insiders see it coming and are preparing their getaway, in the time-honored manner demonstrated by Fulgencio Batista when he fled Cuba to avoid Castro's retribution. Asked how he had managed to get all that money out of Havana, Fulgencio answered with admirable concision and clarity: "In suitcases."



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Fascism in America, Part One

fas·cism (American Heritage Dictionary...what a fitting source)
n.

1. often Fascism
   1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
   2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.

Thus, we have begun by defining our terms in the time-honored style of serious academics everywhere. The first thing to note is that this classical definition of fascism does not appear to work as a description of America's current politics. Disappointing, of course, since it's always reassuring to place one's dysfunctional government on a continuum with failed political movements of the past. Like so much in this ingenious land, America's fascism, if such it is, must be sui generis.

I think the term gets thrown around because certain features of National Socialism and Mussolini's tyranny in Italy appear in play in modern America; to wit, the rise of corporatism and the diminished role of a free press in organizing dissent to a centralized power structure. If Leo Trotsky were still around (I call him Leo because "Leon" makes him sound so bratty), he would make short work of the analytical task. Alas, even if Stalin's hit man had not struck him in the head with an ice axe in Mexico City so long ago, it's doubtful Leo would still be with us. So we're left to our own devices. What to call this peculiar political system in the USA?

I suppose we could draw attention to its salient features and see if that suggests anything. The first thing we should note is that the American system today is totally, completely and absolutely dedicated, consecrated and devoted to the service of Big Business. That is its first and only value. The reason we have the leaders we have today is because they are adept at representing Big Money. Bush is little more than a useful idiot for these purposes, but he was effective, because of his name (mainly) and because Americans are suckers for a kind of moronic folksiness, in getting to the White House. Once enthroned, representatives of Big Money who had used the revolving door between Fortune 500 companies and the federal government to build large personal estates (Cheney and Rumsfeld) could then use him, along with the venal horde known as the Republican Congress, to set things up so that Big Money, and only Big Money, could prosper.

It is not difficult to find evidence for these generalizations. Almost the first order of business was a large-scale repeal of the progressive income tax; followed later by a massive overhaul of the bankruptcy laws on terms which favored banks and credit card companies; and then the piece de resistance, the prescription drug "benefit" law which specifically forbade Medicare from negotiating volume discounts with pharmaceutical companies. I mean: do they have to draw you a picture? The Iraq war, of course, has largely served two functions, to control oil for America's domestic suppliers (if by no other means than making sure it stayed in the ground - see Greg Palast's work on this subject), and to allow the funneling of taxpayer dollars to certain inside war contractors, such as Halliburton, Bechtel and Blackwater, as well as munitions and weapons contractors generally.

So one feature common to both National Socialism and modern America is the essential identity between the interests of Big Money and Big Government; however, we arrived at this position along a path different from Nazi Germany. Nazism grew out of post-World War I desperation in
Germany and conditions of hyper-inflation. Hitler promised a resurgence of the commonweal for everyday Germans. In 2000 by contrast, America's standard of living had been on the decline for some 30 years, and its major difficulty was that it could no longer sustain its own post World War II prosperity. The world had caught up to our manufacturing advantage, and increasingly the U.S. had turned to "service sector" jobs, meaning minimum wage or slightly better, which brought about the destruction of the American middle class. The process, if anything, is accelerating, as the U.S. becomes one of the most stratified societies in modern history, with an ever-increasing percentage of total wealth held by an elite.

What was left in America was the wealth of the super-rich, and most of this was derived from transnational corporations who participate in the global economy. Washington D.C. serves this special interest group, and Congress routinely passes laws, such as "free trade" agreements, which facilitate the international nature of the business they pursue. For those who are successful in international business, the rewards are very high, and more of the capital can now be conserved and reinvested because of tax "relief," and taxes other than for the entitlement programs are redistributed mainly to big business through the military-industrial complex.

Thus, the circle is complete. In a fundamental sense the federal government is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Big Business which functions as an operative arm of its international business plan. As a further example, the current immigration proposal is solely for the purpose of guaranteeing a cheap and efficient labor pool for agri-business and other users of minimum wage earners. If proposed legislation in Congress is looked at through this lens, many of their more egregiously counter-productive measures (if considered from the viewpoint of the average American) make perfect sense as the result of business lobbying.

Next time I will look at Social Security reform, which had a brief vogue a couple of years ago, then sank beneath the waves. It will be seen again, and the reasons for it are instructive in seeing what America has become.

Bush, Fearless Champion of the Frozen Blastocyst

A fun game to play while we wait for January, 2009, is to read the words and consider the "reasoning" of the Occupant-in-Chief in the White House, and to pretend they make sense while knowing all the time they do not. Thus, along the lines of this game, you can consider the "implications" of his "thinking" in an effort to determine his "meaning" and the "principles" which underlie it. You may also wish to count the holes in the acoustic ceiling of the next elementary school classroom you find yourself in. Your choice. The reward is about the same. I have sometimes mused, in accordance with modern pop-psych theory, that the entire United States of America and all its people currently suffer from reality distortion caused by having an untreated alcoholic as their Father Figure. Bush constantly tells us to deny the authority of our senses and to treat inane utterances as deep, revealed wisdom. We're all going nuts because this state of affairs has gone on much too long. As one example among thousands, Bush tells us we must win in Iraq (meaning: kill all the Arabs) or they will all "follow us home," even though we know that they "followed us here" on September 11, 2001, even before we "followed" them over there, thus indicating they know where we are already (although the "there" in Iraq's case was not the "there" they were from, but a different there, and the ones we followed were not the "they" we're at war with but a different "they" we picked out of the Yellow Pages, or something).

So Bush is about to veto another stem cell bill, playing the role, as he always does, of the Vatican to the scientific establishment's Galileo. Bush is the ultimate Choke Point for all scientific progress in the U.S.A. But while we twiddle our thumbs, belching out CO2 and falling behind the rest of the world in cutting edge research, we can play the Bush Game just to pass the time. Bush is the fearless champion of all those frozen blastocysts residing in fertility clinic freezers all over this blessed land. While it is not certain how much time he actually spends with them, he clearly feels that he is the only one standing between them and a kind of Frigidaire Genocide lusted after by all the murderous stem cell researchers who want them for spare parts. Indeed, Bush's main objection to stem cell research is that sacrificing a four-day old clump of cells is "murder." So let's consider that claim.

First, homicide as an everyday kind of crime is within state jurisdiction. The Feds can prosecute murder only when federal issues are involved, such as in an armed robbery of a bank (interstate commerce clause) or assassination of a federal official. California, for example, considered the idea of fetal murder and amended the main Penal Code Section, 187, to conform to general dissatisfaction with the outcome of the Keeler case in 1970, where, up in the mountains of Amador County where Gold Rush customs still reside, the husband of a woman 35 weeks pregnant became enraged upon discovering he was not the father and attacked his wife, resulting in still birth. After the amendment, the statute read like this:

187. (a) Murder is the unlawful killing of a human being, or a fetus, with malice aforethought.

Because legislators are not the most diligent and thorough of public servants, they didn't bother to define "fetus," a kind of obvious oversight, when you think about it. What were the odds a clever defense lawyer would not try to avoid a murder charge by arguing that whatever that clump of cells his client knocked off was, it wasn't yet a "fetus?" Sure enough, in 1994 in People vs. Davis the California Supreme Court was forced to read the tea leaves left behind by the legislature a generation earlier to try to figure out what they meant. After going through cases from all over the map, and doing the usual kind of halfbaked analysis of embryonic science that judges usually do, they came up with "7-8 weeks." That's when all the "bodily structures" are present in nascent form, they said. Davis got off, however, because how was he to know the woman he shot in the chest at the convenience store was farther along than that, and that Justice Stanley Mosk of the Supreme Court was going to pencil in a start-date for feticide after he pulled the trigger? Another glorious day in jurisprudence.

Section 187 excepts from its rule any therapeutic abortion or any "feticide" to which the mother consents (subsection c). So, just to use California for the moment, donation of a blastocyst to research could not be "murder" under California Penal Code Section 187. The blastocysts are not 7-8 weeks along in development, and they lack the "bodily structures" in nascent form which Davis requires. And the mother's consent wipes out the "crime" in any event, maybe because she'd like to see an actual human being reconnect the nervous tissue at C-5 and walk again, and values this outcome more than eternal life for her "offspring" in the Jenn-Air down at the lab.

So what do you say, George, while we're playing this silly little game? You know you don't mean it anyway; I've seen few people in public life who demonstrate their contempt for human life more than you do. How about an exception for any blastocyst where Mom says OK? Win-win? Worried the blastocysts might follow you home?


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W's Alternative Futures

John the Baptist, after torturing a thief,
Looked up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief,
Said, 'tell me, Great Hero, but please make it brief,
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?'
-Bob Dylan, "Tombstone Blues"

In January, 2009, the long travail known as the Bush Presidency will at last come to an end. The least interesting, and most grossly incompetent, man to serve as President in living memory will depart the Oval Office and will go --somewhere. He's probably not sure where. I would imagine part of his thinking, if that's the term, will depend on what Laura Bush wants to do at that point, including whether she wants to be anywhere near W. I would surmise that she doesn't. Enough, after all, is enough. If the BBC reports are true, Bush has resumed drinking; the reason suggested by the British investigative reporters (they still do that sort of thing) for Bush's absence with a "stomach ailment" one morning at the G-8 is that he was up late the night before slamming down etwas helles Bier mit Angela Merkel. There are pictures to that effect, dismissed by Bush flacks as nonalcoholic beer. But who would drink nonalcoholic beer in Germany? Angela, the physicist turned national leader, probably egged on the alkie turned world-stage fuckup. "Nur ein Bier, Herr President," she probably teased, seeking some way to steer her one-on-one encounter with this moron in a direction that would at least be perversely fascinating.

So it's possible that one of Bush's fantasies is to resume a true drinking life, and he's in the process now of reactivating his liver enzymes. Probably not, however, down on the "ranch." I think the ranch was a stage prop; most presidents (Clinton was an exception) need some private sanctuary with a pretentious name where they can go and "recharge." W is not going to hang around that place clearing brush and catching bass some Secret Service agent just put in the water, especially if Laura is somewhere else. One alternative future for Bush is to retire some place like Houston and live out a retirement reminiscent of a middle manager from an insurance company. I can't imagine he'll be "consulted" on anything; he's too stupid. The Republican candidates won't mention his name now, and he's still the President. So he'll drink, play golf and watch television. His days as Leader of the Free World will seem like a weird dream, as a life lived by someone else.

That's the optimal outcome for W. The alternative reality is where the world, including the United States, animated by a unmitigable revulsion, rises up against him. I can see that happening too. In that scenario, Bush becomes a criminal defendant, indicted either in U.S. courts or the International Criminal Court, for a long list of war crimes and atrocities. Bush, or his handlers and puppet-masters, have seen that one coming. That was the sole purpose of the exoneration provisions for torture and violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions that we find enshrined today in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Indeed, with respect to the latter statute, we can go further and declare that the sole and only purpose of the Military Commissions Act was to insulate Bush, Cheney and the rest of the gang from the truly scary implications of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, where the Supreme Court (even this Supreme Court) surprised the High Command with the holding that all these Arabs and Afghans thrown into Guantanamo, or into Abu Ghraib, and forgotten about were human beings with Geneva Convention rights! Ach du Lieber, as Eichmann said before his neck snapped.

Something had to be done. Not the right thing, of course. That isn't how Bush operates. The sneaky, cowardly, unprincipled and self-serving thing had to be done. Fortunately, Hamdan came down with a little time left on the clock for Bush's pet Congress over on Capitol Hill, time enough to neutralize some of Hamdan's more disturbing elements before a gang of Democrats descended on Washington, D.C. and foreclosed the option. Thus, all of a sudden, there in the fall of 2006, it became urgent to get that Military Commissions Act passed. I remember watching Bush on a television in the dining room of a hotel in Lyon, France, listening to his plaintive cry for mercy for America's torturers, who only forced glo-sticks up the asses of Afghan opium farmers because they thought it was the right thing to do. The idea of punishing these loyal American servants for just doing their jobs was "unacceptable," Bush squealed.

Well, of course the exoneration provisions went a little farther than that. Nested within similar get-out-of-jail free provisions found in the Detainee Act, like a set of Russian dolls, the new escape clauses essentially let everyone off the hook all the way back to September 11, 2001, and for some things all the way back to 1997, for anything except what was called a "grave" violation of the Geneva Act, and made acting on the "advice of counsel" a material consideration in determining whether anyone could be held liable for anything. You know, like Bush relying on Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo, who assured him you can torture the shit out of these Untermenschen because no law anywhere protects them from anything.

One thing's a cinch: Bush won't try to live in any foreign country after retirement, unless it's a place like Paraguay. An interesting question will be presented if the exoneration provisions are repealed: if, at the time you tortured or ordered the torture of a prisoner, it was a violation of the U.S. Anti-Torture Statute, for example, as indeed it was; and if that crime was later "exonerated" by an ass-covering piece of dreck that you ordered your Congress to pass; and, if further, at some point an enlightened and perhaps enraged Congress repeals the exoneration - well, does prosecution now violate Ex Post Facto? I think the right answer, in Bush's special case, as a Bill of Attainder all for him: let's treat this tricky Constitutional question the way Bush would handle it. Let's give the matter the same grave and serious respect which Bush has always afforded the supreme law of the land.

Founding Fathers Day

Maybe renaming the Fourth of July could revive some of its historic relevance. I get the sense that the holiday has become completely untethered from the Declaration of Independence and the birth of the nation, so that most Americans associate the day with drinking margaritas outside and setting off explosives, but not with the act of treason which got us going. For years on the Fourth of July I used to read the first paragraph or so of the Declaration, along with its stirring call to action at the end, often out loud, sometimes with an audience. It never failed to choke me up. It is without doubt one of the truly great political manifestoes of anytime, anywhere.

It is said, without fear of much contradiction, that every 100 years the Earth is populated with all new people. The United States has thus cycled through about 2.3 complete turnovers. No one who witnessed the Revolutionary War was around to see the Spanish-American War. No one who rode with Roosevelt on Cuba likely watched the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton on C-SPAN. The continuity of America, such as it is, resides in the institutions of the country and in its collective memory and adherence to certain salutary traditions.

I sometimes muse about what the Founding Fathers would think about modern America. I suppose it would be generally recognizable to them; they would be pleased that the three-branch system of government was still more or less intact, that the state/federal scheme was still around, and that an indirect method of electing presidents, the electoral college, survived.

I think they would be most surprised that the system ossified into a two-party colossus that cannot be budged or dislodged by any competing political factions. As smart as they were, they couldn't think of everything. Their careful system of checks and balances begins to break down when only two parties always control everything. If, on top of this, one party is almost always in the position of appointing all the judges, as the Republicans will have been for 20 out of the 28 years between 1980 and 2008, then the Supreme Court, that classically neutral arbiter of power, will become another political arm of the entrenched party. I don't think the Founding Fathers foresaw their delicate machine being thus traduced. They also could not have foreseen that the lasting hegemony of just two parties, who have held unchallenged sway over American politics now for at least 100 years, would be reinforced by modern media, and its tendency to reduce consumer choices to one or two dominant brands.

I imagine Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and the rest of the Big Thinkers envisioned something more fluid and responsive than a huge bureaucracy of career politicians, elected for life, insulated from and capable of manipulating the general electorate, and skilled at co-opting the small number of Big Media companies by rationing access to the rulers. They set up a system that worked at the level of the town hall, where the elected had to justify and defend themselves in front of the people who knew them, who elected them on condition they got the job done, on time and on budget. Thirteen small states spread over a manageable territory.

It is now what it is. The forms, the rhetoric, the ideas still exist. The career politicians intone the principles of the Founding Fathers at every turn, especially when the heat is on. Whether that old system still really works under modern conditions is a different question, but it is academic. The powers that be have learned to use it, and they're not going to vote themselves out of power. If big changes come again, they will not result from volitional development, but thrust upon an intransigent body politic.
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Rethinking Nader

Nader's justifications for acting as a spoiler in 2000 were twofold. First, he claimed that there was no essential difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, that both were simply corporate advocates who depended on lobby money for their continued sinecures in Washington, and that a new party (the Green Party, in his case) was essential to bring back actual representation of the American people. His second argument was that even if Bush were demonstrably worse than Gore, not actually an arguable proposition at this point, the resulting ossification and depreciation of the body politic brought on by having an idiot in charge of the government would bring on more rapid devolution and radical change. Nader, of course, has been vilified and attacked in every aspect of his persona; his liberal critics, if anything, have been more vicious and unforgiving than any negativity from the Paleo-Right, who seem to see him as an attractive nuisance. If you're a blog-type wonk, see, for extreme example, the unmodulated screeds of Eric Alterman about Nader. It is the sort of smear campaign which elevated Rove to national prominence.

It is a commonplace observation that prophets are never honored in their time. Most people concede that, whatever else you say about Nader, he made the American consumer safer. I imagine that without him the Ford Pinto or its successors would still be blowing sky high when lightly tapped from the rear, and legions of additional Chevy drivers would have been impaled on their steering posts. The idea, however, is that in challenging the Big Two Monopoly, he got above himself and tilted the balance of the American Uniparty to the Right. There is no doubt that he did. The remaining question is whether his justifications were correct.

With respect to the first point, the identity between Demublicans and Repugnocrats, one might consider this latest development from the fecund mind of the dynamic Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader:

"The first [plan], sponsored by Reid and Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, would set a goal of beginning the withdrawal of U.S. troops by April 2008, unless the Iraqi government demonstrated political and security progress. However, President Bush would have the power to waive that requirement." [CNN News, 6/12/07]

In what sense is this a "plan?" There is a "goal" to "begin" the withdrawal of U.S. troops about one year from now, unless there is progress in Iraq; however, Bush is empowered to vitiate even this vague "requirement." Deconstructing this "plan," it appears that the Senate majority is suggesting they would like to see Bush start drawing down the numbers of U.S. troops unless the Iraqis get it together over the next year, but it's up to Bush whether he wants to use Iraqi "progress" as a criterion. That's it. That's the bold initiative. Since any third grader knows that Bush can tolerate endless carnage and expense in Iraq, and does not care if his obstinance tilts the Uniparty farther to the Left, the Senate is proposing something they know for a fact to be utterly meaningless. They are hoping it fools the American electorate into believing something momentous is occurring.

The second specimen for dissection is the current "energy bill" meandering around the Senate. Among its exciting new initiatives is to raise American fuel standards to 35 mpg by 2020. In other words, to require American manufacturers to compete with Japanese hybrids, such as the Prius and Honda, by nailing an efficiency number that is only 70% of the mileage one can get right now by buying Japanese. And this bold action is taken after waiting about 20 or 30 years to do anything at all about CAFE standards. The other bold plan is to grow a lot of corn and make ethanol, which will make the agri-business lobby happy, but the Senate might want to consult with physicists familiar with the laws of thermodynamics on whether the rules of energy returned on energy invested can be suspended for the first time in the history of the Universe.

Which leads to Nader's Second Premise: the dismantling of the Uniparty in favor of some legislative body which might respond to actual needs of the American public. The most recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, for the period ending June 10, 2007, placed Congress's approval rating of 27%, and the disapproval rating at 62%. Bear in mind that these ratings occurred about 6 months after the ascension of the Demublicans to control. The numbers are considerably worse than the current ratings for one of the most unpopular Presidents in history. Nader, it might be noted, doesn't have much to do with that. I suspect the 27% making up the approving cohort are either lobbyists, homophobes or Creationists; like E. coli, such organisms are always with us.

I don't know where I come out on Nader. Was he an ego-mad interloper who would ruin America to satisfy his own vanity? Or did he know something -that America was already on the road to ruin, and it took an ego-mad interloper, one without much to lose, to point it out.

Becoming accustomed to tyranny

"A federal appeals court ruled that the president may not declare civilians in this country 'enemy combatants' and have the military hold them indefinitely." New York Times, June 11, 2007.

We've arrived at a strange pass in American history when a ruling such as that of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals is a "landmark" decision rebuking "Bush policy." You may not have been aware that George W. Bush was exercising the power described in the quoted holding from the 4th Circuit (generally, a conservative pro-Bush bastion). If you were not aware, you have not been following along as Jose Padilla, as one notable example, has made his way through a maze of military and civilian jurisdictions, all while Congressional representatives and senators, Republicans and Democrats alike, have sat passively and silently by while Bush & Co. have exercised police state power over ordinary citizens. It's a remarkable illustration of the principle that the only requirement for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.

Once upon a time in a magical land called America, there was a legal justice system. Without question, it was the finest in the world. Founded on the basic ideas of the English common law, it was as fair and effective a system as one would ever find anywhere, at any time in history. I think the legal system, in fact, was the pride and joy of the Founding Fathers. Many of them were talented lawyers, and the awesome edifice of Enlightenment protection embodied in the Bill of Rights stood the test of time. Despite external and internal threats during the first 225 years of American history, it was never necessary to abandon those principles, even if, in the case of Japanese internment and the disgraceful treatment of blacks, the rules were not applied with equal justice. But mostly, and even for the oppressed after the legal system corrected matters during the civil rights era, one could have confidence that, whatever your station in life and despite public outcries against you, you would get a fair shake. Your side of the matter would be heard. You would not be thrown in a dungeon, never heard from again, the doors to the court house locked.

Along came George W. Bush. To say he has been a bull in the china shop of American justice does not quite capture the wholesale wreckage he has inflicted on the system. We now know, from endless examples, that he doesn't know what he's doing. The damage, however, has come from his own personal confidence that he does. He has no comprehension how the whole legal system works, how interdependent the various statutes, rules of criminal and civil procedure, avenues of appeal, extraordinary writs, international law and treaties are. How they all interact in a time-tested, carefully considered system that produces the closest thing we can create to justice protecting society from the miscreant, and the individual from tyranny and mob rule. Bush has invented all kinds of new defendants, new categories, new courts, new jails. Enemy combatants, unlawful enemy combatants, al-Qaeda or Taliban-connected soldiers who become unlawful enemy combatants, American citizens labeled enemy combatants and disappeared into a brig (Padilla) or an actual 9-11 conspirator, a foreigner, tried openly in a civilian court (Moussaoui). Military commissions, offshore prisons outside the reach of habeas corpus (Guantanamo), review tribunals to determine whether an Arab is an unlawful enemy combatant where he is not allowed to challenge the evidence nor even to see most of it, nor to have his own lawyer present; restricted appeals to one designated federal court for an Arab unlawful enemy combatant convicted of a war crime on the basis of hearsay and purchased evidence, by a military tribunal created under the Military Commissions Act. Contravention of the simple and humane rules of the Geneva Conventions at every turn. A giant, stinking mess of contradiction, of open-ended incarceration for years and years without trial, without access to courts, without lawyers, without hope. All these Arabs prejudged as guilty, granted no rights, jailed for life without review by anyone.

That's the United States under Bush. It never would have happened that way before. The indifference of Congress ensures it will be that way from now on. Do you think there just might, someday, be some kind of blowback for this? Simply because Americans, with their famously fatuous proccupation with celebrity, with bulimic cases locked up for drunk driving, can't trouble themselves to worry about this, don't be lulled into thinking that more "primitive" societies, who pass on the message by word of mouth about what happened to their kinsmen, are not enraged. And God have mercy on any American soldier who falls into the hands of another "justice" system after all of this. We've sown the wind.

A china shop doesn't work. The bull, however, suggests shit. That might be the image. The American justice system, after Bush, will resemble a pair of old jockey briefs worn by a fat American pizza-eater. You find them, discarded, in the alley between houses. They are stiff with the skidmarks of shit. Flies buzz all around. The shorts don't look much like they did when they were taken out of the cellophane.

The agony of Paris Hilton

Paris, in a happier moment.

I honestly think I'm in danger of taking things a little too seriously. I blog, and sometimes bloog, about the Iraq war, Bush's non-species-specific intelligence quotient, global warming, while leaving alone those issues that strike closer to home, that define who we are as a people. I speak, of course, of Paris Hilton. There is something pretentious about refusing to engage with her crisis, I see that now. I think I'm too good for all that. Clearly this is an illusion. I'm no better than anyone else; refusing to devote blog space to Paris Hilton, and her ongoing agony, is an act of arrogance. The Sheriff's Department, in transporting Paris from court to jail, from jail to West Hollywood home, from home to court, from court back to jail...the law men can barely do their job because of the crush of paparazzi and reporters. There's a reason for that. People want to know what's going on with Paris Hilton, and they want to know because of who Paris Hilton is. She's Paris Hilton. She's famous for being Paris Hilton, and has been for quite some time.

I've gone to Google and put Paris's name in the browser, then hit Images. I did this because I kept hearing the name, the name "Paris Hilton." There are some amazing pictures of Paris Hilton. Some might make good plates in an obstetrics and gynecology textbook. In the above photo, Paris is dancing in Miami Beach on New Year's Eve. A continent away from the Lynnwood lockup, of course, and I would surmise Paris had two or three hundred of her closest friends at the disco with her. Including someone named Nicole, who may be Paris's sister. If I weren't such an insufferable intellectual snob, I would know for sure. There are millions of Americans, in other words, who know more about Paris's life than I do. At the lockup, Paris is in solitary confinement. She apparently freaked out right away. This is not an uncommon reaction in anyone who is confined. If I had a chance to talk to Paris, and I really wish I did, I would tell her that the first two or three days of her stretch will be traumatic, then she'll settle into the routine and it won't be so bad. Then she can make another fortune giving interviews about the ordeal of being in stir, but first she has to endure that initiation.

It's odd, to say the least, that the Sheriff's Department suddenly took Paris out of a court-ordered jail stretch and drove her to her house in West Hollywood. From what I've been able to gather, however, Paris is actually quite charming, and even though the pundits who take themselves way too seriously (the way I used to be before I loosened up and became a regular guy) talk about how "scrawny" she is, and horsey-faced, I think she's kind of cute, and I'll bet the Sheriffs do too. Plus, I have a feeling Paris really raised a ruckus in that jail. Once that nervous breakdown started to come on, when she realized there would be no sushi or Dom Perignon in her "room," and she was actually supposed to sleep on that mattress and pee in that toilet...I'll bet things got just a little shrill. But what am I doing now? See, I'm slipping into that arch, above-it-all tone, just like all the cable news guys who pretend they're not fascinated by the life and times of Paris Hilton. Do they think Paris Hilton became famous for no reason? That's silly; she became famous, a celebrity, because she's Paris Hilton.

Claustrophobia, which Paris is enduring again right now, as I write this (I can barely stand to think about it - when will it end?), must be especially acute for her. (Paris, reading this, thinks I just called her cute again.) Paris is used to having lunch in the West End, continuing by Gulfstream to Milan to pick up a skirt (total square inches: 14), and then finishing up at a disco in her namesake city. Given the contrast between life before and after incarceration, maybe Paris has already done enough time, in terms of relative deprivation of freedom. See, that's why Paris Hilton is such a staple of People magazine and dinner-hour cable news. Paris is a very privileged young woman who uses all those privileges. We can identify with her, because secretly we know that most of us would behave the same way with all that money, glamor and access. We wouldn't spend our time like Princess Diana, making the rounds of all the land mine victims and disease hotspots. We're just as frivolous as Paris Hilton. Go ahead and call her a disco-dancing, jet-setting, coke-snorting, magnum-swilling, bed-hopping airhead celebutard. She's got a quick riposte for you (it's like "put-down," Paris): I'm Paris Hilton and you're not.

I'll probably write a lot more about Paris Hilton, now that I'm into it. Maybe a legal analysis of the fairness of her sentence. Too lenient? Too heavy, as the judge sought to make a point about equal justice? Or maybe this blog is it. It took about 15 minutes to write. That's all the fame Paris should have had, logically and according to Andy Warhol, but there appears to be no end in sight. This jail stretch is just what Entertainment Tonight was praying for.

Bush in Germany with the Adults

Let me say at the outset that I am generally sympathetic to Americans when they mix it up with the Eurodogs. The patronizing condescension of those descendants of barbarians who gave us the Inquisition, the Holocaust, both World Wars, and even slavery can be difficult to bear at times. They regard us as uncouth, unsophisticated, uncultured. To which I always reply: what's your point? Still, the idea of Bush at Heiligendamm...how many more of these things will he attend? It's excruciating to observe and listen to the reports of his "participation" at these confabs. I think we tend to judge his performance, at this point, by the avoidance of truly humiliating gaffes. E.g., will he grope Angela Merkel? Will he try to walk through a locked door, as he did in Asia? Will he run down and injure a cop while riding his bicycle, as he did in Scotland? Will he barf all over a prime minister, as his father did? The current fear is that he might get into a fist fight with Vladimir Putin.

As I say, there can be something heartwarming about an American proving his mettle against European snobs. Take "Casablanca," for example, where Rick Blaine, dismissed as a "bumbler" by Nazi Major Strasser, outwits everyone and proves himself more noble than any of his presumptuous Continental betters, earning the ultimate accolade from the leader of the Resistance, Victor Laszlo: "Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win." Yep, there was an American who snapped out of his alcoholic stupor and rose to the occasion. Bush, meanwhile, didn't even wait till he got to Germany before he started screwing up.

Consider his "position" on global warming. Angela Merkel, bless her heart, wanted to use the G-8 to hammer out an agreement in principle that the industrialized countries would reduce CO2 emissions by 50% by the year 2050. So that No President Is Left Behind, let me do the math for L'il Georgie, our "special" President. That's 43 years from now. You'll be dead by then, George, and so will I. What terrible thing would happen if we agreed to this framework? We've got 43 years to work with. At least 10 presidential election cycles, at least 20 congressional elections. 43 years. 43 years ago, how many people were blogging from their dens using the internet? How many hybrid cars were on the road? How many cell phones were in operation worldwide? Do you think the world might be radically different 43 years from now? Do you imagine that unheard-of technologies will exist to deal with carbon emissions 43 years from now? Bush says that he can't agree to "binding" caps on CO2 because India and China are not on board. First of all, is it just me or does anyone else think that there is no connection whatsoever between Bush's counterproposal for "aspirational" CO2 goals to be set someday out there in the future at some other meeting and his problem with India and China? How are the two logically connected? How is a meeting someday in 2008 to discuss aspirational goals with the same people who are already in Germany, ready to talk now, a solution to the problem of India and China's noncompliance?

Sometimes I'm tempted to think Bush is an idiot, to tell you the truth. If Rick Blaine were in Heiligendamm, I think he would finesse the matter this way. Go ahead and agree in principle to the carbon reductions Angela Merkel proposes. Some way or other, between now and 2050, we'll get there. We have to get there. This agreement is itself aspirational. We don't know for certain whether it will be met or exceeded. We might arrive in a world of 2050 where the only CO2 emissions are from natural oxidative processes. But it does provide this leverage: if India and China don't agree to the same mandatory restrictions, then the G-8 nations, operating as a bloc, have leverage to enforce their compliance. Because their compliance is essential to a viable ecosphere. Such leverage is completely absent from a purely "aspirational" bullshit session in which Bush runs out the clock on his Presidency while proving only that no one, ever, in Germany or in Crawford, Texas, can ever make him do something smart he doesn't want to do.

Oh hell, George. Go ahead and walk into a wall.

Grand Unified Theory of American Politics

Or: It's my blogsite and I'll rant if I want to.

But admit it. Down deep (if not at the surface, where it drives everyone else nuts), you've got it all figured out. The proliferation of personal blogs is testament to this tendency. I believe it's healthy, for it was obvious to me that the Establishment was not getting the job done. Indeed, that is my thesis. The Establishment has become irrelevant to the actual human condition. It is no longer ameliorative, it is not responsive, it is not anything but a money-making racket. Do I overstate my case? Actually, I think I understate the case. Everyone writing a blog, for the most part (not the ones dedicated to different ways of making zabaglione - maybe), are figuratively that character in "Network," the TV executive who realizes (in Paddy Chayevsky's brilliant formulation) that everything is corrupt and are shouting out their (virtual) windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."

The country is at that brink. Something like 3 or 4 people in the nation "approve of the job the Congress is doing." In effect, everyone hates all of them, all the time. This represents sound judgment. For example, if we were to schematically represent the "range" of viewpoints of all these tiresome people "running" for President (at a point some 17 months before the actual election), we might do it this way: Suppose using the x-axis only we were to group all the "plans" and "initiatives" along this horizontal line, with the "liberal" ideas toward the left and the "conservative" ideas toward the right. Let us confine all the data points which these "ideas" represent to the ordinates 0 through 10. A dark cluster of points, I submit, would be found around the 7.5 mark. You would find nothing to the left of 5, and nothing to the right of 9. This squashing of "acceptable" ideas is what Noam Chomsky termed "manufacturing consent." It is a bias toward the conservative, the "reasonable," the usual, the already-done-that.

In this world, a proposal by a Presidential candidate to actually cut the military budget, by any amount, would be considered radical. The debate is about how much to increase the budget; a "liberal" might say, "Well, how about 3%?" The conservative, after branding the liberal a seditious insurgent, would decry this "starving" of the defense establishment which will make America "less safe." The medical care system is broken. If one-sixth of the populace has no medical insurance now, about 50 million, it is a matter of time (and not much) before the diverging lines of cost (upward) and people who can afford insurance (downward) will double this number, so that 100 million people, a full third, will be uninsured and effectively shut out of all but emergency care. The United States, at the federal level, is doing absolutely nothing about global warming. All it does is talk. The candidates offer tepid ideas about how to "approach" it. No one has the guts to discuss how draconian, how radical the adjustments in American life really have to be to deal with the problem. The nation is bankrupt. The federal government is simply printing money and issuing phony statistics to hide the resulting inflation (it doesn't include "food" or "fuel" in the calculation - do you ever need those?) and devaluation of the dollar. It borrows money like your drug addict relative with the get-rich-quick scheme. It borrows money to continue a stupid war that both parties lack the courage to simply shut down, $100 billion the last go-round, all of it made possible by money the Chinese recycle to us to keep us afloat.

While the government spends $8 billion per day for all its farflung operations (literally: $2.9 trillion/365 days) and never says no to a call to "support the troops," it has let Amtrak die a slow death by refusing, a few years ago, to appropriate the $2 billion its new and enthusiastic director said was essential to revitalize the railroad. Not $2 billion a year, or $2 billion every week, as with Iraq, but on a one-time basis. No, let's drive cars. Big cars with shitty mileage, in fact. The Republocrats run a kind of "guided democracy" of the kind we thought was so laughable in Mexico when the PRI could not be dislodged. Or when the Politburo held sway in the Soviet Union. Options within a narrow bandwidth are considered "reasonable," even if they cannot possibly get the job done, because they satisfy vested interests and are consistent with the psychology of previous investment.

The blogosphere has already produced some "Establishment" sites, such as the Huffington Post, which are mainly propaganda organs for the Democratic Party. Arianna Huffington has produced, in fact, an on-line 'Zine, and its commercial trappings are now smothering its once daring and subversive fire. She must have figured out how to make money, a lot of it, with the site. Once that happens, of course, the radicalism is scaled back. One must not disturb the other passengers on the Titanic. The Democrats, who are doing nothing, are the temporary beneficiaries of Republican revulsion. The Republicans, unchecked, were so bad that the nation mistook the Democrats for avenging heroes. They're not at all. They never make any real noise about the Constitutional atrocities committed by George W. Bush. A few hearings, a speech now and then at a Congressional session. Impeachment is too "radical." Restoration of habeas corpus or the Bill of Rights is too "radical." Ending a dumb and ruinous war is too "precipitous." National healthcare is too "socialistic." Joining the rest of the civilized world in dealing with carbon dioxide emissions is too "green."

Legislators in Washington, D.C. live in an insulated world where they make a decent living, receive the best medical care, have large staffs to do the work, and can flaunt power in feckless ways. They are most drawn to issues which have no impact on the real life of Americans. The "immigration" bill is a clear case in point. Discussing how and when to grant citizenship to millions and millions of illegal immigrants sounds important, but it isn't. The bill will have no economic impact on the United States. It will deal neither with our huge environmental problems nor with our looming financial meltdown. That is why the solons like the issue: they can engage in bombast and oratory about our "nation of immigrants" and tell stories about their granddads, or alternatively can indulge in jingoistic soliloquies about America losing its Americanness. Either way, they can take another few months to produce a "landmark" bill which will have nothing to do with anything. The illegal aliens among us will go on living here, working, paying sales and property taxes if not income taxes, having children and ignoring the law. The Congressfolks will then appear before a bank of microphones and smile like idiots about their important accomplishment, and hope that no one notices that this bill is the direct result of failing to enforce an identical bill passed twenty years ago.

I think the system is beyond redemption, and in fact is no longer even designed to solve problems. Usually, I quit about here, about 350 words in. However, this is my Grand Unified Theory, and an abnormal expatiation may be necessary, if not necessarily in order. It is pretentious, of course, to use terms like "unified theory," which is a term borrowed from physics. It has something to do with Einstein's attempts to consolidate quantum theory with relativity. Or maybe the modern attempt to reconcile gravity within a quantum framework. I don't really know. Writers in the social "sciences" like to lace their writing with references to "rigorous" stuff. Christopher Hitchens, for example, likes to pretend he has a detailed appreciation of concepts such as "punctuated evolution" and cosmology in his "god is not great" book. He doesn't, of course, but it's enough to fool the general reader, and that's all that counts. You should not take my "grand unified theory" seriously for the same reason, because it's all bullshit from the get-go. So what? It's my blog. But theories have theorems, or propositions. I know that much. For example, Einstein's Special Theory dealt with equations for mass under acceleration: dilation of time, increase of mass, decrease of length, etc. So I have them too, because I want to be rigorous, just like Christopher Hitchens.

Theorem #1: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is a dangerous myth. Mark Twain once referred to "Congressional idiots," then said: "but I repeat myself." At this point in history, a career in legislation is like a career in car sales or real estate brokerage, and the entry requirements are about comparable. As a lawyer who has spent his professional life trying to decipher the crap these people write, trust me on this. Think about it: what other line of work can you get into without real credentials, talent or personal capital, solely on the basis of bullshit, and yet acquire a good salary, a staff, and apparent power? The mediocrities in Congress, above all, do not want to give these sinecures up. As C. Wright Mills explained, the first impulse of those in power is to remain in power. This disinclines members of Congress from taking any kind of risky action.

Theorem #2: The Scared-of-their-Shadows-Solons cannot react to uncomfortable impulses from the real world. Global warming is an excellent example of this principle. The real solutions are "radical," in the classical etymology of the word, meaning "root." One must go to the "root" of the issue, the way we produce energy for manufacture, transport and production of electricity and heat. To undertake a real solution, the solons would need to upset vested interests who are more interested in remaining vested than in long-term consequences. Upsetting such interests would violate Theorem #1. Thus, Congress would prefer to tinker and to propose timelines which are politically acceptable but irrelevant to atmospheric science. George W. Bush does not care because he plans to resume drinking on January 20, 2009, at about 3 pm.

Theorem #3: Since Congress cannot react to conditions in the real world, it exists solely to perpetuate itself and to give the appearance of crucial importance. Congress is not important; indeed, it is an impediment. As I said in another post, any cashier could have written George W. Bush a check to continue his stupid war. I will detail in another post the truly revolting game which Nancy Pelosi played in order to pretend to oppose the war. It was her attempt to finesse both Theorems #1 and #2.

Please bear these theories in mind as you go about your quotidian, outside-the-Beltway life. The first principle is to protect yourself from the effects of the U.S. Congress, although, as demonstrated by the draft legislation which Nancy Pelosi's Democrats just unveiled which will invalidate California's global warming initiative (under the "Preeemption Clause" - don't you love it?), this is not always so easy.
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Liberal CO2

Certain events in your life, like the last of your parents to die, bring home inevitable feelings of fatalism. You're reminded that no matter what happens, this is all temporary anyway. We're a temporary species on a temporary planet. If Ernst Mayr was right about the usual survival period for a species, we're already on borrowed time. The Earth, no matter what we do, is going to be consumed along with the rest of the solar system when the sun goes red giant in 4 or 5 billion years. If the human race were still on the surface of the Earth when that amazing convulsion begins to be felt (we won't be), all talk of "global warming" would seem like pretty tame stuff. The oceans will boil and Earth will be consumed in heat death, along with all planetary co-passengers. That will happen with or without, or despite, human contribution.

In this pleasant suburban enclave where I live, where the air is redolent of California laurel and redwood trees, and the usually cool marine air is never too heavy with humidity, everyone carries on their lives much as they do everywhere in this country. On a political map, this region is deep blue. Liberal, concerned, progressive. Because the county is relatively affluent, the houses are big and often sparsely occupied. In the parking lot of the overpriced but charming grocery store a short distance from here, it's difficult sometimes to maneuver your car down the lanes between cars, not because the lot attempts to allocate too many spaces in too small a space (if anything, every space is larger than normal), but because of the size of the suburban transport machines used by the shoppers. Row upon row of Range Rovers, Land Rovers, Toyota Land Cruisers, BMW SUVs, GMC Yukons, Lincoln Navigators and all the rest of the elephantine class of internal combustion vehicles. I suppose on a given day the "fleet average" for the parking lot, if full, might be around 15 mpg. Most of the "cars" are driven by one woman weighing on average (this is a muscle-toned enclave) 130 pounds and traveling a distance of less than 5 miles, round trip. This is unscientific, somewhat anecdotal, yet perhaps telling. Many of these cars display progressive bumper stickers. There are, of course, Priuses and high-mileage compacts hidden in among the Brobdinagian land-crawlers with their high performance AWD for negotiating those tricky dry, suburban streets. But overall...

One reads that the world is beginning to take seriously the issue of CO2 concentrations in the troposphere. Nancy Pelosi, parka encircling her concerned face, has been to Greenland, flying by jet of course, "to see for herself" what was going on, perhaps not trusting the world's finest climatologists to figure it out without her presence. Although in so doing she laid down another gasp of CO2 directly at that level of the troposphere where it does the most harm. La Diva saw that Greenland's glaciers are now running into the sea at the rate of 75 feet per year, about a 12-fold increase over about six years ago. She was, naturally, worried. She is a progressive, however, and her concern is more concerned than the norm. By the same token, I think liberals in general, when they drive their behemoths and heat their oversized houses, believe that their CO2 emissions are entitled to a different regard from that of the unaware. One cap-and-trade system that Nancy might suggest is a greater allocation to rich liberals, who form such an important part of her constituency, under a "Liberal CO2" program. The idea being that Liberal CO2 is different from the CO2 of the unaware and unenlightened. As a reward for their concern, liberals should be allowed twice the amount per capita as opposed to those who do not take the idea of global warming seriously.

The scientists may argue that the real issue is how much fucking CO2 is in the troposphere capturing infrared radiation and heating the Earth's atmosphere. They might go on to point out that while all this palaver among the political class has been occurring over the last few years, since global warming was "discovered," the actual, gross amount of CO2 released worldwide has continued to increase over previous levels. But perhaps this additional CO2 is entitled to a special dispensation; after all, it was released to do its devilish work after we became aware of its deadly potential. So maybe, just like Liberal CO2, it doesn't count.

Actually, we better hope so.

Things will now become very interesting in the good ol' USA

And on the economic front:

WASHINGTON — "The economy nearly stalled in the first quarter with growth slowing to a pace of just 0.6 percent. That was the worst three-month showing in over four years.

"The new reading on the gross domestic product, released by the Commerce Department Thursday, showed that economic growth in the January-through-March quarter was much weaker. Government statisticians slashed by more than half their first estimate of a 1.3 percent growth rate for the quarter." (Source: the real world.)

The economy has not sputtered like this since 2002, when the United States was emerging from a recession caused by the hallucination, and inevitable collapse, of the status quo ante, namely, the Internet IPO craze. Americans, who long ago gave up the idea we could build wealth by manufacturing durable goods or high technology and selling such stuff to the rest of the world in order to raise cash, replaced one racket with another. We began cannibalizing our capital wealth, more or less in the style of an English baron, now gone to seed, who is forced to open up the family castle to tourists, add a gift shop and install a carousel just to make ends meet. For a while, until he's ultimately faced with the necessity of subdividing his heritage, selling the place and moving to a condo in the West End, where he'll still be Sir Somethingorother, but no more liveried footmen answering the front door.

One stat I don't see referenced too much in the mainstream media is an astonishing fact revealed in the pages of Kevin Phillips's book American Theocracy. To wit, between 2000 and 2005 Americans derived over half of their "income" through refinancing of their principal residences. It's not income at all, of course; even an amateur economist like myself knows that. It adds to cash flow, but on a balance sheet it dumps a debit to match the influx of created cash. When Ben Bernanke or Alan Greenspan talks about the economy, I never hear them refer to this ominous development. Add to this disturbing datum the widely-acknowledged reality that the U.S. gross domestic product relies, to the extent of 70%, on consumer spending and you have the macrocosmic picture in focus. Get it? The good years of the Bush Administration, insofar as the economy was concerned, depended to a phenomenal degree on the availability of cheap, not to say promiscuous, credit. All of this was pimped by the Fed, who made cheap money (furnished by China, Japan and other net exporters selling in the U.S. market with fistfuls of dollars at their disposal) available to banks and other lenders, who then used various artful tricks and strategems, such as negative amortization, to "qualify" just about anyone who could fog a mirror. Thus, money from China and Japan flowed through the Fed to the lenders to the consumers to Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Target.

Until everyone hit the upper limit on available "equity," which was itself based on inflated housing prices (in turn based upon easy credit, in a kind of upward death spiral). With re-fi money drying up, the consumers became nervous and edgy and stopped buying so many Chinese electric nose clippers at Wal-Mart, which reported its biggest sales drop in 28 years (which gives you an idea of my sheltered life: I had no idea Wal-Mart had been around that long). When consumer spending dies, a percentage of the U.S. economy equal to the volume of water in the human body begins to expire. Which means recession.

If Bush thought he had problems before, he ain't seen nothin' yet. 72% of Americans thought we were on the "wrong track" when the economy was "booming." I suspect that everyone was a little uneasy about how all of this was being accomplished. Intuitively, it simply made no sense. No one was really doing anything to create wealth in a traditional sense, yet all this money was flowing through the system. It is reassuring, if somewhat terrifying in its prospects, to see common sense vindicated. We were in the process of mortgaging our patrimony, the one built up by generations who actually did a lot of hard work. I think I've got room in my back yard, however, for a Bumper Car Ride.

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Cindy Sheehan and Cognitive Dissonance

One of the country's foremost anti-war activists, Cindy Sheehan, has retired from the field. Her parting remarks were bitter and disillusioned. She concluded that her son Casey died in Iraq for "nothing." I think it is understandable that a grieving mother whose son died in an ambiguous war became an activist. Most parents can understand this impulse; for one thing, it allows one to seek meaning in an otherwise unmitigated tragedy. Then, too, one might hold away, at least for a while, the full impact of the grief a parent would otherwise feel. One can, at least in part, immerse those feelings in a cause associated with the loss. Maybe Cindy Sheehan finally reached the point where that strategy was no longer working. It should not be for us to guess. If the country had any emotional decency, it would afford a compassionate respect for her decision; since this is, however, the United States, her choice will be subject to the usual partisan bloviating.

As to the merits of what she said - I don't think her son died for "nothing." I think he died as part of a military force executing a phase of America's modern business plan. Whatever high-minded rationales have been offered for the invasion of Iraq, I think almost all of us instinctively recognize that Iraq's oil was always the essential cause. The spreading of democracy, the toppling of an "evil dictator:" these rationales can be refuted by noting the selective nature of the battle we fought. Brutal dictators are in abundance in the world; humanitarian crises are everywhere. Any Middle Eastern Arab country could have been invaded if the criterion was our opposition to authoritarian rule. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria would have worked as well. But Egypt and Syria do not have significant oil, and the Saudis already cooperate. That left Iraq, with the second largest known reserves of light sweet crude in the world. So a PR campaign was mounted to justify the invasion on grounds that were more reminiscent of John Wayne-type illusions. Iraq was a "threat." They would attack us with nuclear weapons if we didn't act right away. It was all a huge and intentional lie. Those who told the lie knew it was untrue.

But they also knew that Americans, at base, were not well-situated to contest that falsehood effectively. The reason for that disability is deeply psychological. Almost all of us, everyday, make conscious choices that necessitate foreign, adventurist wars in order to keep the oil pipelines flowing. We were candid about the rationale for Operation Desert Storm back in 1991. We made no bones about invading Kuwait in order to secure a steady and affordable supply of Mideast Oil. But Iraq II involved a "war of choice," and there is something about a premeditated invasion of another sovereign country which has done nothing to provoke an attack which does not sit well with our conscious image of ourselves. So the various, specious rationales were conflated with the 9/11 attacks, and the Bush Administration had a product it could sell.

Congress is now loath to disengage from Iraq; both the Republicans and the Vichy Democrats under occupation by the Bush Administration are avoiding obvious steps they could take to end the war. I doubt that it is a coincidence that the lingering goodbye is contemporaneous with Iraq's "hydrocarbon law" deliberations, and it's probably part of the same gambit that the Iraqi parliament is dragging its feet to see if American domestic politics make it possible to deliberate without Big Brother looking over its shoulder. The production sharing agreements which form the core of the hydrocarbon law are under construction by an American corporate lawyer (a graduate of my own legal alma mater) and will return a Middle Eastern country to the kind of colonial vassalage, in terms of oil revenue, not seen since the days of Aramco and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the vehicles for American and British exploitation of Saudi Arabia and Iran, respectively. It is too sweet a plum to leave behind, especially after America's ruinously costly war. If Bush caves on the demand for withdrawal, he will have to add this loss to the fiasco which preceded it, and America's supply of future petroleum will also be in jeopardy.

There is no longer any essential division between America's private and public sectors; the federal government is an extension of corporate interests. The inability of the electorate to influence this "complex" relates to the monopoly over politics held by the only two significant parties. The remaining means of influence is individual lifestyle, and it is here that Americans are deeply ambivalent. We import about 14 millions barrels of oil a day against a total usage of 20 million barrels per day, out of worldwide consumption of 80 million barrels; thus, with 5% of the world's population, we use about 25% of the world's petroleum. We have not increased fuel efficiency standards for cars since 1986, and the overall efficiency of vehicles in America is approximately the same as in 1981. All Middle Eastern imports could be eliminated by switching to cars which are currently available in the American market. If we added to this a true commitment to mass transportation with a better passenger-mile efficiency than cars (such as trains), we could probably eliminate the necessity of any foreign imports of oil. Since these are consumer choices and the solutions are already here, no reliance on the federal government to implement the change is necessary.

The blame game, however, is practically irresistible to Americans, who would rather look anywhere other than at themselves, where the problem lies. The "Iraq War Debate" is a kind of industry which services this distraction. Huge blogsites, such as the Huffington Post on the Left and Powerline on the Right, have built their reputations on taking sides. Being a "Democrat" or a "Republican" is largely defined by being for or against this war, at least in this day and age. Yet we ignore the obvious solution, both to corporatism and a dangerous involvement in Middle Eastern politics. Change the way we live. Stop believing that unbridled consumerism can be sustained.

I think we're all aware of this, at a limbic-brain level at least. But how do you profess your superiority if you acknowledge you're part of the problem? Without the assistance of the government, we could win the Iraq War here at home simply by reordering our priorities.

Cindy Sheehan, at last, saw through the emptiness of the official rationales for the Iraq War. The war is simply an exercise in servicing America's tendency to indulge itself endlessly in the things it wants, its toys and the energy to run them. Bush and his crew would have no power if we corrected these tendencies in ourselves. I think Cindy Sheehan probably came to see that; it's a shame she did not see it in time to save her son.

The New Adventures of Pancho & Frisco

Scene: Outskirts of a town out West. Frisco, a pretty lady buttoned tightly into her black Armani suit, rides a silver charger. Her little sling-back heels are thrust into diamond-crusted stirrups. A pair of bandoleras cross, and tastefully conceal, her decolletage. A broad pink sombrero shields her eyes from the blazing sun. At her side is Pancho Feingold, her diminutive sidekick. They dismount and seek cover behind some granite boulders, pulling their shiny revolvers from holsters. Frisco breaks a heel as she clambers across the rocky terrain.

Frisco: Damn!
Pancho: Oh Frisco!
Frisco: Oh Pancho, shut up.
Pancho: What we doing here, Frisco?
Frisco: El Malo is holed up in that town over there, holding everyone hostage. We're here to get them out.
Pancho: Oh Frisco! We going to be heroes?
Frisco: Maybe. But El Malo must be held accountable for his hostage taking.
Pancho: What hell that mean, Frisco?
Frisco: I'm not sure. I just like the sound of it.
Pancho: How long El Malo hold people hostage?
Frisco: Four years or so.
Pancho: Oh Frisco! So now we free them?
Frisco: Maybe. I don't want to endanger the hostages. (looks at her shoe...) This damn broken heel! This might not be the time.
Pancho: Hostages in danger now, Frisco?
Frisco: Yes. Every day 5 or 6 get shot because El Malo won't let them leave.
Pancho: Ay caramba! And this go on for four years?
Frisco: (defensively) I'm not responsible for that!
Pancho: So we attack, guns blazing, huh? Ay-yi-yi, arriba!
Frisco: It's not that simple, Pancho. There's more to it than you understand.
Pancho: Your heel again?
Frisco: No. El Malo refuses to cooperate. He says we can't free the hostages.
Pancho: Huh? You expect him to co-op-er-ate?
Frisco: It was his decision to take the town hostage. He should be held accountable for that and not expect us to make the decision to free his hostages.
Pancho: Oy vey, Frisco. You losing me.
Frisco: That's only because you don't pay attention to the politics of the situation.
Pancho: What you want to do, compadre?
Frisco: Well, it will be too hot this summer. We can take another run at this in September. Meanwhile, I can get this heel fixed.
Pancho: Hostages keep dying this summer?
Frisco: Probably more than ever, now that El Malo knows we want to free them.
Pancho: So if we free them, they die, if we don't free them, they die. But one big difference...
Frisco: We live. Saddle up, Pancho.
Pancho: Oh Frisco, this sucks. Heroes not like old days, verdad?
Frisco: Oh Pancho, shut up and ride.

Cheney-Satan '08

Turgidson:
Mr. President, there are one or two points I'd like to make, if I may.

Muffley:
Go ahead, General.

Turgidson:
One, our hopes for recalling the 843rd bomb wing are quickly being reduced to a very low order of probability. Two, in less than fifteen minutes from now the Russkies will be making radar contact with the planes. Three, when they do, they are going to go absolutely ape, and they're gonna strike back with everything they've got. Four, if prior to this time, we have done nothing further to suppress their retaliatory capabilities, we will suffer virtual annihilation. Now, five, if on the other hand, we were to immediately launch an all out and coordinated attack on all their airfields and missile bases we'd stand a damn good chance of catching 'em with their pants down. Hell, we got a five to one missile superiority as it is. We could easily assign three missiles to every target, and still have a very effective reserve force for any other contingency. Now, six, an unofficial study which we undertook of this eventuality, indicated that we would destroy ninety percent of their nuclear capabilities. We would therefore prevail, and suffer only modest and acceptable civilian casualties from their remaining force which would be badly damaged and uncoordinated.

Muffley:
General, it is the avowed policy of our country never to strike first with nuclear weapons.

Turgidson:
Well, Mr. President, I would say that General Ripper has already invalidated that policy. (laughs)

Maybe, at this point, we're going about this all wrong. Reports are that Dick Cheney is running an alt-presidency of a kind that General Turgidson, as depicted in George C. Scott's peerless performance in "Dr. Strangelove," could have understood and gotten behind. Cheney is trying to provoke an attack against Iran, and anyone else who looks at us funny, in order to narrow George W. Muffley's range of choices. So the rumors have it. W has gotten soft in the autumn of his presidency. He's gone all diplomatic, coddling these psycho nut cases in Iran and North Korea with international "sanctions" and the rest of it. What crap. "Dick" Cheney, like "Buck" Turgidson, knows there comes a time when you've done so much damage, provoked so much ill will, stirred up so much resentment, when the gale force winds of blowback flatten all other possibilities -- when that moment arrives, you have but one option left. Total war.

Let's face it. There is no effective opposition to our warmongering leadership. The world hates our guts, anyway. Long ago the Congress, in its weakness, gave away its war power under the Constitution. The Go Code was assigned to the President, while Congress took a backseat, demoting its Constitutional prerogatives to a statutory War Powers Act. They didn't have to; they wanted to. It was a recognition that since December 8, 1941, Congress has been afraid to declare a war of its own. And once you're in, you can't get out. The money has to keep flowing to the "troops." Or you "abandon" them.

So why do we even need a Congress? Wouldn't a cashier work as well? One guy or gal with a green eye shade and a check book. And one collection agency for taxes - how's that for privatizing? Everything else could be military. 100% of the budget. We'll need it, once we start going to war with everyone. We can't back down now. They'll follow us home, and attack my children, yours, and David Gregory's.

In 2008 Cheney could finally have a running mate worthy of his noble purpose. Read Milton's "Paradise Lost" or "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant" if you think I'm kidding. Ol' Scratch is a charming, seductive character, and God knew it. He sent him to Hell probably because Beelzebub threatened his mastery over the Heavens. Satan is devilishly clever, funny, and sharp as the tines on that pitch fork. He would be a huge improvement over the dead weight Cheney currently lugs around. Then with a declaration of martial law under the Insurrection Act (thanks to the foresight of Sen. John Warner's amendment snuck into the military appropriations act last year) and we can finally get rid of all this tiresome dissent. This "blogging" from the Left Wing Blogistan, this Fifth Column for the terrorists. When those in power are right, when they have the perspective of eternity (thanks to the added insights which the Devil will bring to the West Wing), we don't need free speech. By definition you only need free speech when policy correctives are necessary. And we all know how America loves a comeback story. Could anyone top this one? Arising from the darkest depths of the Inferno, from being the most reviled character in history, to a position of supreme power? (I'm referring to Satan.)

Dick Cheney and Satan in 2008. Let's give Hell a chance.

Wake me when it's over

The clear signs are now that the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will give Bush his war money with no strings attached, unless you count waivable, non-binding, precatory suggestions that Bush pretty please tell Congress how things are going in his vanity war. Is the Iraqi parliament passing stuff? The Iraqi army, are they still training to take over? How many people are getting blown to smithereens on a daily basis over there?

One must wonder what Frisco Nancy had in mind in her "negotiations" with Bush over funding. As I suggested in my poker game jape, Nancy has a rather obvious tell in her poker playing. She kept saying the troops would get funded, that we would "support our troops." She kept using the word "accountable" in myriad and bewildering ways, until there was no accounting for how she was using it. In truth, against a president whose veto cannot be overridden, Congress has but one real power, and that is the power not to appropriate the money for the war. Bush cannot compel Congress to do so, and without money his war is over. Frisco Nancy and Harry Mumbles could have announced that Bush would receive, e.g., $20 billion with which to extract the troops, period. If he vetoed such an appropriation, then he could extract the troops with money from the White House groundskeeping budget. However he chose to do it, but Congress was not going to give him any money to continue, let alone escalate, the Iraq war. At the same time they announced this strategy, they would have hammered home the elementary point that Bush, as Commander in Chief, is responsible for the safety of the American military in a theatre of war; as such, he must operate with the available resources to ensure their security. Even Bush, The Great Maroon, would have figured that one out. Indeed, it's the way Bugs Bunny would have played it (after making Bush first set fire to himself, shoot himself out of a cannon, and fall down a manhole, of course).

These points are fundamental. Let us then follow the deductive principle of another fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, who said that when one had eliminated all other possibilities, whatever was left, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Ah, what a fine, rigorous, disciplined mind! So unlike...everyone in public office today. Holmes would tell us, of course, that Frisco Nancy and Harry Mumbles do not want the war to end, at least not because of anything they do. This becomes obvious, when you think about it. It is a delicate, exquisitely daunting balancing act. Frisco Nancy must appear to righteously vindicate the anti-war left, a large bloc in the Democratic Party while at the same time taking no effective action to end the war. Thus: waivable timelines, incomprehensible benchmarks, "reporting" duties and the rest of the gobbledegook. Bush has his eye on the prize: gimme the money. Why? Why ask why anymore? At a secondary level of reality, one hidden from the view of the public, behind closed doors at the Capitol, the Democrats want the carnage and destruction to proceed ad nauseum, ad infinitum. Bush is sending more and more troops into his abattoir arabesque. About three a day are blown up, which means in the remaining seven months of 2007, the total dead will top 4,000. And the Iraqi dead, raped and mutilated? The number is literally uncounted. The middle class is heading for the exits while the parliament dithers over giving the Bush administration the oil confiscation law Cheney & Co. so desperately want.

One is reminded, as de Toqueville told us, we live in a republic, not a democracy. The elected officials have their own agendas, their own set of priorities, the first of which is job security. They get elected not on the basis of their ideas, but because of name recognition purchased through advertising, like deodorant and toothpaste. Or through preexisting notoriety, such as the President of the United States or the Governor of California. They see their jobs as placating an unruly, mostly irrelevant electorate while feathering their own nests. Sometimes, just because the stakes can get so high, it is more obvious than at other times. The Democrats recognize there was a shift in 2006 from Republican to Democrat. And if the voters become frustrated with the Democrats, the Democrats also recognize, there is nowhere left to go.

Poker Night at the White House

Scene: Conference room off the Oval Office. Around a walnut table topped with green baize are seated Texas W, his sidekick Dubai Dick, Utah Karl, and two new players, Harry Mumbles and Frisco Nancy.

W: One more hand? I gotta get a pot to break even, or there'll be hell to pay with Laurie. I'm down 90 bucks, I think. (He takes a swig of single malt Scotch from a 12-ounce glass and puffs away on a half-chewed stogie.)

Dubai Dick (sitting behind an immense pile of chips): That's cause you keep folding your hands. Still 5 card draw?

W: I like Texas Hold 'em better, but we got home field advantage as it is.

Utah Karl deals, mostly from the top of the deck.

W: (to Dubai Dick, gesturing at his chips): Where'd you get that stake, anyhow?

Dubai Dick: (out of the corner of his mouth) That's confidential.

W: I bet. Everbody ante?

Frisco Nancy and Harry Mumbles stare down at their cards, which are face up on the table in front of them. They each throw a chip into the pot, then look up. W, Dubai Dick and Utah Karl look for awhile at their own hands, then over at the cards lying on the table in front of the other two. W throws twenty bucks into the pot. Dubai and Utah do likewise.

Harry Mumbles: See your twenty, raise you ten.

Frisco Nancy (matching Harry's bet): Right back atcha.

W: Whoa! You must really have a hand. (He stares some more at their cards, in fact.) We're at $120, thirty more than I need!

Utah Karl: Cards?

Frisco Nancy (tapping her cards, which consist of a jack, eight, two fours, and a deuce): I'm good.

Harry Mumbles (who holds a six, three, queen, and two fives): Me too.

W: Play 'em like they lay, then.

Dubai Dick (flipping his cards to the center): I'm out.

Utah Karl: Me too.

With a flourish, W spreads his hand face-up on the table, three eights, a king and a ten.

W: Read 'em and weep. (He pulls all the chips toward him.) And to think, Nancy, you coulda knocked me outta the game before it got started!

Frisco Nancy: I've said from the beginning that option was off the table.

W: So you did. So we'll meet, say, again in a year?

Frisco Nancy: That sounds fine.

Harry Mumbles: (mumbles inaudibly.)

George Bush and the problem of climate change

George W. Bush is a tricky and sneaky guy, and routinely overrates his ability to get away with various evasions and shortcuts which have characterized his private and public life. When faced with a challenge, his first instinct is to find some way not to meet it. For example, when summoned to jury duty for a drunk driving case (in 1996 in Texas), he thought it was a better approach to beg off his civic responsibility with a specious objection that he might be called on to "pardon" or "commute" the sentence of the defendant in his role as governor. This laughable "conflict of interest" gave him a way to avoid disclosing his own conviction for drunk driving twenty years before. When he engaged in insider trading at Harken Energy, he omitted the SEC's required disclosure forms. When caught and exposed, he explained that he thought his "lawyer took care of that."

So it goes. As proof the tiger does not change its stripes (or, maybe more appropriate, the ass his donkey ears), Bush has blown the dust off his "20 in 10" idea to deal with global warming. This is his "radical" proposal to reduce the use of gasoline by 20% by 2017, as measured against the sum of current use + projected growth by such date. Catchy. Since even his handpicked weirdoes at the Supreme Court could not bail him out, Bush and the EPA are under High Court order to comply with the Clean Air Act, which has determined that CO2 is a pollutant under Nixon's landmark legislation. You see how far we've fallen: Nixon was a comparative progressive. Nothing can be done, the Smirking Chimp contends, until the end of 2008. In other words, the end of his term. Thus and always, Bush does everything he can to ensure disaster. There is simply no bottom to the evil this man does.

I'm beginning to think it's very late in the game to deal with global warming anyway. As I've posted before, my first thought when it became apparent Bush would be appointed to the presidency in 2000 was that his idiotic obstructionism came at exactly the wrong time in human history. We had to get going on this problem of climate change, and America had to take the lead. Instead - we got him. What does that mean? Maybe the gaia-as-organism people are on to something, satirists like the late great Kurt Vonnegut. Mother Earth herself gave us Bush simply to finish us off. I recall too the haunting words of Inez Fung, researcher and climate scientist extraordinaire at last year's China-U.S. Climate Change conference at Berkeley. The first thing she wanted us to know, as she stood at the podium in a plenary session at Wheeler Auditorium, was that the scientists who studied this matter closely, as their life's work, "were very, very scared." I think it's remarkable that so many of the manifestations of global warming have already arrived. The accelerating loss of the Arctic polar ice pack, the vortex winds in Antarctica and the six-year drought in Australia, the melting of 75% of the world's glaciers, the extreme weather events, the unprecedented off-season wildfires. I would surmise that these events were within the horizon of probability of scientists like Inez Fung and Steven Chu at Berkeley, and James Hansen at NASA. Yet because they have constantly been pushed to the wall by the "skeptics" and their corrupt political accomplices, such as Bush and Joe Barton, the execrable Republican from Texas, and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the Grand Dragon of Apocalyptic Obscurantism, they have been forced to couch their scientific forecasts in moderate terms, conceding minor points and ranges of "error," so as not to lose their credibility. Or their funding. And thus diluting the full impact of the predictions they would really like to make, as intimated by Inez Fung's opening comment.

But as for me, and as for nearly everyone else -- I'm not a scientist, and I'm not seeking funding. I'm a member of homo sapiens with a sensory apparatus who looks around at the world, and I realize that as tricky and devious as Bush tries to be, he is not going to be able to fool the troposphere or the oceans. The ecosphere is not the SEC or the Texas court system, or the compliant Washington press. The atmosphere moves and changes according to its own chemical and physical laws. It is not impressed by numbers games, by the idea that 2017's CO2 concentrations could have been worse. CO2 levels rise, the troposphere traps infrared radiation from the Earth, the oceans acidify, the world warms up. And all hell breaks loose, as an incomprehensibly complicated interplay of weather patterns, albedo loss and solar absorption, pest migration and infestation, torrential rain and nonending drought, descend upon human life. Shuck and jive all you want, Mr. Bush. Yours won't be the last smirk.