What if we didn't have Roe versus Wade?

Criticisms of Barack Obama seem to come in two distinct styles. From the Right, particularly the radio voices which provide the Loony Bin Conservatives with their Weltanschauung, are the usual totally unhinged, clinically insane descriptions of Obama as a Hitlerian Socialist, whatever that is, bent on forcing collectivizaton of the people, herding everyone into FEMA Death Camps, and giving over what little the federal government has left to a cabal of Wall Street Bankers who go to dinner parties with him in Manhattan. Weirdly enough, this is not in any sense an exaggeration of the tone.

From the liberal side of politics, the criticisms focus on Obama's relentless double-crossing of the people who elected him; his abysmal record of refusing to take any kind of prosecutorial action against the thieves and grifters of those same people in his dinner parties at Robert, the trendy Manhattan eatery where he raises money; his free pass to the war criminals and torturers of the previous administration; and his worse-than-Bush record on civil liberties and transparency in government. One could go on and point out his doubling-down on the most pointless and absurd war in American history, the invasion of Afghanistan and our residence there for the past ten years to avenge attacks emanating from Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula - but it all just becomes words.

The question is what to do about it. Despite the increasingly faint-hearted "support" Obama draws from die-hard Democratic partisans, I think he's been a colossal disappointment, almost surreal, movie-like, "Manchurian Candidate" in scope, but there he still is, and he'll be on the ticket next year for the Democrats, matched up against either a guy who believes in a fable about Jesus Christ visiting Native Americans in the Missouri area (according to Joseph Smith's reading of gibberish through the portal of a Magic Box), or a C+ student from Texas A&M who makes George W. Bush look like Charles Van Doren.

So then what? One liberal trope an apostate is immediately hit with, of course, is always the same: what happens to the "composition" of the Supreme Court if we put someone like Rick Perry in the White House? My first reaction is that we'll have much bigger problems than the composition of the Supreme Court in that bizarre eventuality, but the composition of the Supreme Court will suffer yet more, to the extent that a court which agrees that corporations should be allowed to control political elections entirely can get any worse. But certainly one casualty of a court which finally tips over to the definite 5-4 or 6-3 Cro-Magnon majority necessary to reverse Roe vs. Wade is that a woman's right to choose what to do with a pregnancy during the first two trimesters may very well lose its federal guarantee.

I wrote a blog a while back on the subject of Wade reversal, and pointed out that if a future Supreme Court decision decided that the "zone of privacy" reasoning which supports Roe vs. Wade was a bunch of liberal nonsense, that such a ruling would not mean that abortion would automatically be illegal, nationwide, the following day. Far from it. Such a decision would mean that the states were not prevented from enacting laws to limit or eliminate abortion, but it would not compel the states to criminalize abortion. The distinction is very important.

I have long thought that the abortion decision rested on a very slender reed, Constitutionally speaking. Abortion per se is certainly not mentioned in the Constitution (one would not expect it to be), but more fundamentally the "zone of privacy" implied in the Ninth Amendment in the Bill or Rights is also a legal concoction, and it is on this construct that Roe vs. Wade is built. The Ninth Amendment only says,

"The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

Did the people retain the right of abortion when the Constitution was enacted? I don't want to sound like Antonin Scalia (ever), but it is a stretch. Of course, did the people retain the right of back-door sex and other fun bedroom activities all protected as well by the Ninth Amendment's "zone of privacy" (Griswold vs. Connecticut, 1965)? It all depends on whose ox is being gored, or whose....never mind.

Further, Justice Harry Blackmun's neat and tidy analysis based on trimesters and viability has also been superseded by the current state of gestational science. Be that as it may: provided the Supreme Court simply left it at that, reversing Roe vs. Wade on its own terms, and the Clowns of Capitol Hill did not rush into the vacuum thus created and attempt to pass a federal criminal law banning abortion, then those states favorably disposed to choice issues would provide abortions; and those states which are inclined to believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old and will only be around a little while longer until things heat up in Israel can do what they want at last, and we all know what that is. Perhaps a happier country all the way around, for as long as it lasts (the country, I mean). Indeed, abortion has been such a polarizing issue (like forever) in this country, that a state-by-state decision through local plebiscites might accomplish both the goal of local self-determination and a goad to the realization among the states that, you know, we just really don't have that much in common anymore, but we'll always cherish our initial misconceptions about each other. What a relief, however, if the issue of court-packing could finally stop distorting national elections, and we could all blissfully accept that we were throwing away our vote because we just can't stand voting for someone we don't really enthusiastically support simply because the other guy will appoint another Luddite to the high bench and disrupt the delicate Roe balance.

Looked at that way, maybe the Ransom Note approach to presidential elections could be altered somewhat. Forget the Supreme Court; they've certainly forgotten you, my fellow American commoners. If you want to vote for Roseanne Barr, who's running for president (of both the USA and Israel, simultaneously) on a platform of replacing fiat currency with a barter system based on vegetables, restoration of the guillotine as punishment for the obscenely rich, and a return to an agrarian economy in America, then you can do so with a fairly clear conscience, simply remembering that if you want to have liberal rights in the state where you live, you'll have to work for them at that level. Which, now that you mention it, is where there's a chance you could actually affect the outcome.

Arguments Made from Legal Play-Doh

I see where the public relations department for the Obama White House, otherwise known as the New York Times, has published a lengthy, front-page article on the legal basis for the President's decision to kill Anwar al-Awlaki with a missile strike. Such prominent placement in the nation's Newspaper of Record probably reflects some discomfiture in the West Wing about the blowback from civil libertarians and other extremists who thought that
killing an American citizen, even a Muslim troublemaker, in defiance of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause deserved a more thorough legal workout. The White House has refused to discuss the actual evidence against al-Awlaki, other than some very generalized intelligence data about the cleric's "involvement" in terrorist plots, some of which is almost laughably vague and unsubstantiated, such as al-Awlaki's "possible presence" "in the vicinity" of someone (unidentified) who may have been on the phone with the Christmas Day underwear bomber. I'm not kidding about that: that's actually the quality of the evidence, at least to the extent it has been made public, and Jay Carney, Obama's surfer-dude Press Secretary made a point of refusing to answer Jake Tapper's (highly commendable) tenacious questioning at a recent press conference about just what the government had on the guy before they fired a missile at him. Just not something the White House is going to discuss; if we kill you, please rest assured it's for your own good.

Thus, the usual stone wall from the Most Transparent Administration Ever, which never provides any detail, photos or data whatsoever for anything at any time. Their motto is simple, that government is best which operates most in secret. Still, they thought maybe they ought to do something, so they called in the Times and told them to write a story about a 50-page memo in vague, general terms, without the reporter (of course) actually seeing the memo (let alone reading or studying it), but with an outline of what's in it, all as verified by completely anonymous sources who (probably) had seen this memo, and that ought to be good enough. This is what passes for candor and accountability in the Obama White House; they're not even willing to go as far as George W. Bush and the John Yoo torture memo. At least we got to read the damn thing. Now we're reduced to having the New York Times, made to feel special because an anonymous source is giving them the inside dope on why it was okay to whack Awlaki, describe why "precedents" and the "law of war" provided all kinds of exceptions to the Bill of Rights, and so stop worrying, okay? We did the right thing.

From what I could tell (and it's very hard to tell), the legal memo uses the standard connect-the-dots from the September 18, 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to the decision to blow up the Muslim from New Mexico. You can see the obvious nexus if I just reproduce the AUMF one more time:

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

It's a thing of beauty, isn't it? Notice that Congress, moving as far away as it possibly could from its own Constitutional duty of Declaring War, deferred completely to George W. Bush's unilateral right to determine who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the attacks of 9-11, which of course were carried out by an Egyptian, two citizens of the UAE, a Lebanese and 15 guys from Saudi Arabia, based on plans they had developed in South Florida and Hamburg, Germany, probably with financial help from the Saudi royal family. If that's not reason enough to invade Afghanistan and stay there for ten years, then I don't know what is.

So anyway, Al Qaeda. That's what we're talking about. An umbrella term for an umbrella organization. If it's kind of Muslim, kind of terroristic, sort of Arab, involves burnooses, robes, that kind of thing, let's call it al-Qaeda, because the President determined (that's for sure) that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks of 9-11. What's the evidence for that? That doesn't need to be discussed, because evidence is not discussed. It's a State Secret. It was al-Qaeda, Bin Laden is definitely "affiliated" with al-Qaeda, and the Lebanese, Egyptian, Saudi etc. guys were affiliated with al-Qaeda, because we think maybe they went to Afghanistan to train on the Jungle Gym Complex there, or maybe not (what's the difference, and where does Dore Gold get off writing in Hatred's Kingdom that there is no evidence any hijacker ever went to Afghanistan before the attacks, and that it was all Saudi money which funded the operation? Dore Gold, born in Hartford, Connecticut, educated in a yeshiva there, yet a prominent member of Israel's foreign policy apparatus? Sounds suspicious.)

Where were we? Okay, so you can see how much fun lawyering at the highest levels can be. It's like molding arguments out of Legal Play-Doh. Getting from the AUMF of September 18, 2001 to whacking Awlaki with a Hellfire missile in September, 2011, is almost too easy. It's not our fault Awlaki got "identified" or "affiliated with" al-Qaeda. Arabic is a resourceful, big language, and there are lots of terms he could have used (maybe he did, but never mind) to identify himself and his "affiliation," but we decided he was part of what we call al-Qaeda, sort of like SMERSH, and that was that. We "determined" that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks of 9-11, and we define al-Qaeda as basically anything sort of Arabic or Muslim that makes hostile noises against the United States. Arab-Americans who want to dissent without getting blown up by a Predator Drone should be careful to designate themselves something not covered by the AUMF, such as the Koran-Krips, or the Mecca Maulers, or even Muslim Brotherhood, since that was probably an actual organization involved in the attacks of 9-11, but the USA apparently never figured that out.

A Mario Savio for Modern Times

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFz1VVXsWRU&feature=player_detailpage

That is one bright young man. Whether everyone he speaks for realizes it or not, he has found the Gordian knots which must be cut.

Occupying Wall Street

It seems to me that a movement such as Occupy Wall Street is long overdue and was inevitable once it became apparent that the previous, within-the-system approach, electing Barack Obama, was a total bust. If for no other reason, Obama's presidency has at least served the salutary purpose of demonstrating just how fundamentally broken the regular political system has become. As for the usual sneering, dismissive comments by the standard members of the commentariat, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal, many others, it won't matter in the long run, because a movement such as OWS is also about the completely broken system of corporate-owned media and message control involved in the "Manufactured Consent" of which Noam Chomsky has written so many times. (Generally speaking, if you're trying to decide on the bona fides of an argument about how the American political system works, and Noam Chomsky is on one side and Ann Coulter is on the other, go with Noam.)

What guarantees the longevity and durability of such a movement is that the conditions which produce it, a moribund economy and a completely unresponsive, bought-and-paid-for government, are not going away within any relevant time horizon. Things, in fact, are likely to get considerably worse as it becomes increasingly obvious that the strains imposed by the retiring Baby Boom population on the "Entitlements" (I should probably refer to them as the "aspiring retirees," because I don't think they're going to be at leisure very long) are going to make Social Security and Medicare something we used to be "entitled to," but are no longer affordable. This is basically the morality play unspooling in the European socialist democracies even now. I along with most Americans used to marvel at their wonderful system of lengthy vacation, full medical care, paternity and maternity leave, pensions, early retirement and the rest, but it seems that Europe, after integrating itself along United States lines, then plunged full speed ahead into economic globalization, just as we did, and now their whole socialist paradise is falling apart, and for the same reasons. If the world's economic water is seeking its own level, that level is not a Greek civil servant retiring at 52 on full salary and lifelong free medical care. It's somewhere between that and a Chinese factory worker making running shoes and four dollars a day. There, as here, the arbitrage of labor made a lot of plutocrats rich while impoverishing and/or destroying the middle classes.

As in the case of the United States, Europe sustained the illusion of prosperity at the same standard as before for several decades after globalization was in full swing by means of debt, at both the private and sovereign level. Now they're where we are, with economies struggling with sky-high energy costs (much higher there, in fact) under conditions of debt saturation.

Nevertheless, the central bankers and politicians there sound like the Federal Reserve and politicians here, armed with a full panoply of indecipherable acronyms, all of which seem to run afoul of the Complexity Principle, that as things get integrated at higher and higher levels, with ever more Byzantine details and moving parts, that the complexity itself begins to exact a terrible price on the efficient functioning of the system, and, what is even worse, failure correlation is built into the system so that when it goes, the whole thing goes down. As happened in the United States when the process of mortgage securitization had the effect of correlating the entire, nationwide housing market.

At this point the Democrat vs. Republican scenario only has relevance for those in the media who make their living by drawing specious distinctions between the two. The Good Guys versus Bad Guys shtick works well if you're Bill Maher or Randi Rhodes, on the Demo side, or Rush Limbaugh or the Red State blog on the other. By couching everything in terms of thesis and antithesis, as if these two parties represented opposing "philosophies" or fundamentally different visions of the "way forward," the celebrity members of the Commentariat can make a nice buck. It makes a good story line because it meets the dramatic requirement of conflict in the narrative. Thus, Randi Rhodes and Bill Maher can cluck a little about Barack Obama's record on civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, which is probably the worst record of any American president in history, while still vindicating their man because the Republicans, if they were in power, would be much, much worse. (Does that mean when they assassinated American citizens without a trial or due process of any kind, they would kill them twice?)

My guess is that the typical, young demonstrators involved in the nationwide OWS movement understand these things at variable levels of sophistication. They're on the street because there is really no other place to be to make the point. They tried sending (as I did) Barack Obama twenty-five bucks every couple of weeks back in 2008, and this is where we are: with a Democratic Party competing for the affections of the banking and defense contracting industries, with wars proliferating all over the globe, with no energy policy, and with lobbyists crawling all over the politicians like fleas, with money utterly controlling the political process on both sides of the aisle, and with no accountability of any kind asserted against the criminal financial class who profited by the economy's destruction.

Thus, with regard to Occupy Wall Street: more power to them.

UPDATE: I came across this after I wrote the above, a quote from an International Monetary Fund advisor named Robert Shapiro: "If they can not address [the financial crisis] in a credible way I believe within perhaps 2 to 3 weeks we will have a meltdown in sovereign debt which will produce a meltdown across the European banking system. We are not just talking about a relatively small Belgian bank, we are talking about the largest banks in the world, the largest banks in Germany, the largest banks in France, that will spread to the United Kingdom, it will spread everywhere because the global financial system is so interconnected. All those banks are counterparties to every significant bank in the United States, and in Britain, and in Japan, and around the world. This would be a crisis that would be in my view more serious than the crisis in 2008...."

Do you ever wonder what it was we gained by all this complexity and correlation?

Notes & Addenda on Subjective Due Process

Being older has some definite disadvantages, which I feel acutely every morning on attempting to arise to a new day. On the other hand, it does give you historical perspective, and I was wondering to myself, what is so different now versus the Watergate era in terms of responding to frankly unconstitutional acts at the highest level of government in the United States? The answer, I think, is fairly obvious: there is no longer any institutional integrity in Washington, D.C.

With regard to two separate episodes in recent history, the war in Libya and the targeted assassinations of two American citizens a few days ago, and before that the systematic violations of the FISA statute and the Fourth Amendment by the Bush Administration (and we may as well throw in the White House-sanctioned violations of the Eighth Amendment and the Convention Against Torture while we're at it): what you can say about all these events is basically the same thing: (1) everyone very readily agrees that the actions taken by the President were or are illegal and/or unconstitutional; and (2) Congress never does anything about it.

Realistically, each of the illegal actions described above dwarfs by an order of magnitude the actual crimes committed during the Watergate burglary, including the Watergate coverup actions (the illegal spying scandal, the Valerie Plame matter and the torture regime also had very extensive coverup aspects attached to the scandals, at least as involved and criminal as Watergate's coverup).

I think it's instructive that former Senator Russ Feingold attempted to bring a censure motion against President Bush arising fom the illegal spying matter, but he got nowhere and attracted very little support from his own party, in fact. Then he lost his reelection bid in 2010. I'm sure such facts are not lost on the craven souls who inhabit the Congress today; what's in it for me to be a hero? Still, this does not explain the institutional lethargy or passivity in the face of criminality, since if the Congress acted as a body there would be protection in numbers, as there was in the 1970's.

That's about as far as I get with this "analysis:" identifying a key difference between now and 1973. President Obama seems to have internalized this political style and has learned that it's better not to offer any explanations for unconstitutional actions, since the Senators and Representatives don't really raise the point themselves. Any legislative action, such as the brief flurry of harrumphing over the violation of the War Powers Resolution involved in the Libyan war (or, if you're old fashioned like me, the violation of the Constitutional provision regarding the exclusive right of the Congress to declare war), quickly blows over and MediaWorld is on to the next big thing before any damage registers.

I suppose what this really means is that Cheney's concept of the "Unitary Executive," or Nixon's claim that "if the President does it, then it's not illegal," has become the new reality. I suppose that Obama is aware of the federal statutes and Constitutional provisions which he violates, but with no Congressional oversight or restraint, the only remaining criterion for decision is how well his actions will play on the campaign trail. In this regard, I'm sure he's right in his appraisals. Whacking a Muslim troublemaker who records anti-American screeds, as Anwar al-Alaki did, puts the defenders of Due Process into something of a box - are you trying to protect America's enemies? The response, that the defense of a Constitutional principle is important so that we remain a government of laws, not men, sounds weak and insipid compared to the macho action of blowing a terrorist sky-high with a Predator drone.

Congress has bought into the same approach; it's easier, the imagery is better, it doesn't involve complicated legal theory, it plays better to a voting populace with attention deficit disorder on a mass scale. One way or the other, it's the way we've drifted, and I guess we'll find out, in the fullness of time, where it all leads.

Subjective Due Process

Our amiable, enigmatic President made good on one of his new "policies" recently and assassinated an American citizen, Anwar al-Alwaki, in Yemen, dispatching him and some other people by means of a Predator drone strike. Technically speaking, prima facie as we say, this presents a Constitutional problem. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution (part of the Bill of Rights) provides that

"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.^"

<sup>Notice that the Founding Fathers were pretty practical guys. They didn't say you could never off a traitor, with or without a lot of legal rigmarole, serving in the armed forces if he were to betray his fellows to the enemy in the heat of battle, for instance. This exception does not apply to the "Muslim cleric" (otherwise known as an American citizen), however. He would seem to fall into the general category of "person."

Except for the chronic malcontents, liberal bloggers and the like, no one seems terribly troubled about Awlaki's assassination outside of the Muslim community. I watched Bill Maher Friday night and Bill and most of his guests, which included Salman Rushdie and the former governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm (who has accepted a teaching post at John Yoo University in Berkeley), were all fired up about this latest display of vicarious macho by the O Man. Maher loves the difficulties this sort of behavior presents to the Neanderthal Republicans: how can the Republicans complain about a guy who puts out hits on American citizens without Due Process?

One guest, Seth MacFarlane, the creator of "Family Guy," was somewhat more circumspect. He pointed out some of the difficulties that might ensue if we go to a system of complete subjective due process where the national leader can have American citizens killed when he feels like it. One difficulty he raised was the idea that this power could fall into the wrong hands, implying, I think, that the power is currently in the right hands and was appropriately used to kill Alwaki. (As Jack Nicholson said in the movie, maybe that's just as good as it gets these days.) MacFarlane asked how we would feel if Michele Bachmann had such a power.

That's a little farfetched. It's farfetched because Michele Bachmann is not going to get elected President. A more realistic hypothetical is to ask how we would feel if Rick Perry got elected. Rick Petty already has an extensive track record of presiding over the state elimination of people, and he's said that the 234 executions in Texas during his governorship do not disturb his sleep at all. He felt good about all of them. We might add to this factor Perry's statement that if Ben Bernanke "printed more money" before the election, and was foolish enough to cross the Red River after doing so, that Texans "would treat [Bernanke] pretty ugly." I assume Perry meant that Bernanke would be shot, because most things in Texas mean someone is going to get shot.

So let's see where we are here. What would be the distinction in principle between Rick Perry's decision to order the assassination of Ben Bernanke and Obama's decision to order the killing of Anwar al-Alwaki? Just to make the quiz easier, I'll give you a clue: there is no distinction. In both cases a President decided that a person posed a threat to the safety and security of the United States. Indeed, Perry's defenders would point to historical precedent, because "debasing the coinage" of the United States was, at times, a capital offense, as mentioned in the Fifth Amendment. Obama's precedent establishes that a President does not have to prove anything in court, or even obtain an indictment, before he orders an American citizen killed. If the "kill warrant" needs some connection to the War on Terror, well hell, President George W. Bush said the entire world was now a battlefield (that's why he could arrest Jose Padilla, an American citizen, in Chicago, and incarcerate him for years without Due Process), the War on Terror never ends, and therefore anything that happens anywhere which (the President thinks) makes the United States weaker or less able to defend itself (such as devaluing its currency) justifies whatever sanction the President feels like meting out.

A reductio ad absurdum? No, not at all. Anyway, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton had far more direct experience with the perils of tyrannical power than the contemporary politicians dealing with this problem, and for that very reason they "instituted laws among men" built on the principle that subjectivity in due process was much too dangerous. It will inevitably be abused, terribly and irrevocably, as those tyrants of 1930's Europe, who built careers out of ruling with subjective brutality, should have convinced everyone once and for all.</sup>

Abra-cadabra, you're rich again

This flow-chart diagram of the Eurozone bailout plan is fun in the same way that plotting the flow of the Federal Reserve's conjuration of money is fun; to wit, it raises the question and riddle: at what precise point is the money created?

The European scheme is really a doozy in this regard, but that's the whole purpose of the complexity. When you're reaching into your silk top hat and pulling out a trillion or two, you want to make sure the audience is watching the pretty blonde in the leotard as you do so.

I've been giving a lot of thought to the whole business of "fiat money regimes" and sovereign indebtedness lately. In some ways, it seems that "money" is to economics what "energy" is to physics. It's the basic unit of everything, but it's not possible to define it precisely. "Money" has had this quality since the abandonment of the gold standard during World War II and the substitution of floating fiat currencies in its place. Pegging the amount and distribution of paper money according to how much gold was available was itself certainly arbitrary as well (what's so special about gold, other than Spanish explorers used to kill a lot of Native Americans, north and south, to get the stuff?), but at least there was an anchoring principle to the issuance of fiat. Bretton Woods (1944) changed all that, but the emerging dominance of the United States as the world's great military and economic power probably disguised the fundamental nature of the change. The dollar was as good as gold, in effect, and the issuer of the world's reserve currency had no great motivation to debase its own fiat; quite the contrary.

So a kind of "gentlemen's agreement" arose by which the world's central banks agreed that international monetary regimes would keep it down to a roar, as far as wild printing of money was concerned. Unbridled issuance leads to hyperinflation and debasement, and pretty soon it's 1922 in Germany again, and people are burning their marks for fuel because it's cheaper than trying to buy firewood with the stuff.

But now, but now...one point made forcefully in Richard Heinberg's The End of Growth was that the great spawning and proliferation of debt, both public and private, over the last fifty years, which have brought the modern industrial world to the brink of bankruptcy, were enabled by the belief that economic growth would always allow these nations to catch up to the exponential functions of interest-bearing debt. So it didn't matter if we went in the hole now; these debts were an "investment" in future growth of national GDP, and it would all even out. Countries running at a big deficit, the United States chief among them, would simply borrow now and grow our way back to prosperity. And underlying this belief was that cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy, which finds it way into practically every aspect of a modern economy, would remain cheap and abundant.

It isn't going to work out that way. The demand for petroleum and its distillate liquid fuels keeps going up at a rate exceeding the ability of the oil industry to keep pace, driving the price higher (despite the Depression we're mired in) and stymieing all efforts to emerge from the Depression. The United States, as the most oil-dependent nation on Earth, feels the effects most acutely. 90% of our passenger-miles, our just-in-time delivery systems for food outlets and Big Box stores, our international import dependency, our massive, inorganic agri-business practices, the airline industry, the military-industrial complex, all depend for profitability on cheap, abundant oil. Which increasingly doesn't exist. But if growth isn't possible, how can the locked-in costs of the entitlements and the exploding future burdens be paid for?

Thus, whatever that gentlemen's agreement may have been, the Federal Reserve (which is a fine institution, founded in 1913 and dedicated to the prosperity and well-being of all Americans - h/t: Dan - maybe that will throw the Fed's new spy program off the scent, depending on the algorithm) was faced, after 2007, with cratering housing, jobs and stock markets. Such things do not play well in America. One way we could have dealt with such problems would have been a frank and honest assessment of the actual standard of living of the American middle class. If you have borrowed massive amounts of money in the past in order to pay for your "requirements," and it turns out you're going to have to pay all that money back in the future, with interest, and you can't do that because you don't have the money, then it's somewhat unrealistic to say that you were as rich in the past as you said you were. The same thing can be said about the federal government, which has a $3.8 trillion lifestyle based on $2.2 trillion in income.

This is America, however, and whether these are the Days of Awe or not, we don't go in for that kind of truth-telling. It doesn't fit our narcissistic style. My back-of-the-envelope calculations usually arrive at a figure of about 60%; that is, America, across the board, is about 60% as wealthy as it claims to be. This number (like some sort of totemic pi of the national economy) has a way of showing up everywhere; for example, tax receipts furnish about 60% of the federal government's revenue. When the stock market fell in 2007-2008, it fell about 40%. When all the water has been wrung out of the housing market, prices will have fallen to about 60% of their peak level. This symmetry is not accidental, in my opinion. It's reflective of an underlying reality.

Be that as it may, Ben Bernanke's first order of business was to see if he could not re-inflate the housing bubble, the source of imaginary wealth for the American commoner. No go there. Ben was so desperate to do so, however, that he kind of dropped his top hat as the rabbit jumped out of his pants. There was very little artifice in how he went about money conjuration in that case. He declared the existence of about $1.3 trillion and used it to buy mortgage-backed securities from Fannie, Freddie and banking institutions, placing all that dodgy stuff on the balance sheet of the Hallowed Federal Reserve. Blatant, you could say, but unavailing. The next time around, Bernanke was more indirect; in order to goose the stock market, Ben launched QE II, the bond-buying program where he used the Primary Dealers as fronts to purchase Treasury bonds, then relieved the PDs of their temporary burden through the "POMO" routine. All in all, Bernanke has conjured more money out of thin air in the last 3 or 4 years than the Federal Reserve had in its previous almost 100-year history.

Somewhere in that Rube Goldberg contraption up above, the Europeans are planning to do something similar. I haven't found the Sweet Spot yet, but it's there. I commend them on their Old World, Baroque complexity. I'm disappointed they would copy the Americans so obviously, but they got the idea from Tim Geithner, so what do you expect? McDonald's, Disneyland, and now this. Soon there will be no point in going over there at all.

A flash in the Texas Panhandle

It's possible that Rick Perry is just too dumb to win the Presidency. That's an odd sentence to write, because I'm talking about the Presidency of the United States here, not President of the National Academy of Sciences or President of the local chapter of the Rotary Club. You know, a position where some measure of intelligence is actually expected, or the norm. Yet, despite my sentimental attachment to the Perry campaign, the weird basis of which I have described on prior occasions, I'm reaching the conclusion (not reluctantly) that this hayseed is just too dumb even for America. Those who have called Perry "Bush without the brains" are on the right track.

Although I never actually thought Bush was unintelligent, despite occasional bleatings to the contrary. Bush's IQ was definitely higher than the controlling mean for the Washington press corps, for example, and by "controlling mean" I refer to that baseline average of insight and complexity which sets the standard for national reporting. Individual reporters are more intelligent than this average, but they have to dumb it down in order to maintain a job and an audience. Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post was an excellent example of this limiting factor. But Bush's ability to humiliate and bamboozle the press, in general, on a constant basis was actually fairly impressive. As the signal example of Bush's skill, I always think of the Valerie Plame matter. Somehow or other, in ways I can't quite fathom, Bush seemed to convince the moronic Washington press corps that he was an innocent bystander to the "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, even though he talked daily to people, such as Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, who were involved in the matter up to their eyeballs. Bush claimed at the outset that he would "conduct a search" for the people responsible for Plame's blown cover; you know, those people who sat in his Oval Office every day of his Presidency. And yet the Washington press never figured that out, even though Representative Henry Waxman conducted a hearing where Bush's "White House security team" admitted that they were never even asked to open a file on the source of the leak. Why would Bush "search" when Cheney had already told him? That was a master stroke by the Old Bushter, to pull off that caper unscathed, and bespeaks a fairly crafty intelligence. Along with an absolute, complete contempt for the media people he fooled with his lies and evasions.

Perry, on the other hand, has sustained the one wound which is mortal for national candidates: people, including the press, are already laughing at him. This didn't really happen to Bush until after the Katrina fiasco and his "heckuva job" comment to the incompetent idiot he'd placed in charge of FEMA. (Katrina, in this additional sense, was surely an Act of God.) Once everyone started laughing at Bush, his power began to wane, which is why Bush rushed to pass the Military Commissions Act in 2006, with its blanket exoneration of all crimes of war and against humanity which he and his henchmen had committed (that was the actual purpose of the rush job in Fall, 2006, of course; unless I missed something, I don't believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Gurgling Confessor, has been placed on trial yet [5 years later] in Cuba, although that was the ostensible reason for the hurry, and not the impending seating of a Democratic-controlled House in January, 2007). You know, that's actually another instance of Bush being much, much smarter than the Washington press corps - he pulled off that Military Commissions statute, unconstitutional though it was, without anyone noticing his true motivation, which to me was as plain as the Space Needle would be if suddenly moved to Death Valley.

By way of contrast, the C+ student from Texas A&M just looks more and more out to lunch with each one of these painful, embarrassing Republican debates. He can't explain his "ideas," such as they are, with any clarity whatsoever. He's utterly lost trying to think in public. The coup de grace may have been delivered last night by "Saturday Night Live," where Alec Baldwin played a clueless, stumblebum Perry in a debate to oafish, moronic perfection. Even the Washington press corps would wonder how we could have fallen so low if this guy got elected. So I think they're going to cut Ol' Rick off at the pass and stop his run for the White House.

That's actually a pretty good litmus test: when a candidate is too dumb for the media in this country, you know we've got a real lamebrain on our hands.

As the world twists

Today, September 23, 2011, at 9:04 am, Greenwich Mean Time, Earth's axis of rotation was perpendicular to the line connecting the center of the Sun to the center of the Earth; thus, autumn began at that moment.

Meanwhile, down here on the surface of Spaceship Earth, that marvelous blue and white orb which has been infested with a particularly maladapted and hugely destructive species for a tiny fraction of its total existence (and the Earth still has about 5 billion years to go before the Sun begins its fatal expansion to a red giant and incinerates this place once and for all, thus assuring that for probably the last 99.99% of its existence, the Earth will be blessedly human-free), the arguments currently are about how various forms of paper counters of wealth are in conflict with each other, and the various games that can be played to make a given country's money seem as if it is worth more than the paper it is written on. The United States, which long ago gave up productive enterprise in favor of devoting itself to just such paper-manipulating games as the exclusive means of not only maintaining one's vital heat, but of expanding the mansion out in the Hamptons and stocking the garage with several high-number-model Mercedes Benzes, has decided, this time around, to use its central bank, the Federal Reserve, as a means of controlling "long term interest rates."

It will accomplish this ruse by Operation Twist. In this game of make-believe, the Federal Reserve will use part of its stock of Treasury debt by which the Treasury "owes" money to the Federal Reserve, to the tune of about $400 billion, to purchase longer-dated Treasury "debt" in the 6 to 30 year range. The Fed owns about $1.2 trillion of Treasury "debt" (it is the largest "creditor" of the Treasury in the world, and it "purchased" all of these bills and bonds by conjuring the money out of thin air, or, if you prefer, by pulling the money out of its ass). The Fed will "sell" $400 billion of shorter-duration bonds to "raise the money" to "purchase" the longer-dated stuff. The Fed will then pretend to "receive" coupon payments from the Treasury (by making data entries on its computers noting the creation of money representing the payments) and then will use part of this "money" to pay the Fed's operating expenses (this is one of the Fed's sources of "revenue"), and promptly remit the "balance" of the money to the Treasury which it just received from the Treasury.

Once the Fed's big decision was announced, the Dow Jones immediately fell 400 points. A reasonable person might opine that all of this talk about the hallucinatory essence of the American money system might cause rational people to believe that the whole economic situation is too ludicrous to be part of, that one must flee it in favor of something more substantial and real, like a cave and an acre of tomato plants. In such thinking one would be incorrect. Wall Street was freaked out because the Federal Reserve was not hallucinatory enough. Operation Twist simply takes previously hallucinated money and transforms it into long-dated Treasury bonds. The "Quantitative Easing" episodes, by contrast, conjured substantial amounts of new "money" on the Fed's computer, over $2 trillion worth, and most of this money found its way into the rarefied atmosphere of the Titans of Wall Street, to speculate and play dumb big money games with.

However, this time around the Federal Reserve, intimidated by certain know-nothing governors who threatened, in essence, vigilante justice if the Chairman should venture into "money printing" again, kept things on the down-low. Well, hell, that's not going to work. You can't actually expect the American economy to prosper on its own merits. That's not how we do things around here. It's why we liked that magical period between about 1998 and 2006. Money just sort of happened. People got rich while watching "The Weakest Link," chugging a Budweiser and filling out a re-fi form. That's more like it!

How we gonna stay rich if Chairman Ben starts bogarting the punch bowl? This is unnatural. It's damn near unAmerican, as I have come to understand the term.