Manufacturing Consent, Updated

I've been reading Glenn Greenwald's blog for a long time, from the days when it was just a lonely, detached site floating in the blogosphere to its present, prominent position on Salon.com. In the old days it was called "Unclaimed Territory," and that's still the general idea. Glenn has found a niche from which to bedevil and harass the Establishment Pundits, and he has a great time doing it.

I would say that he has two central themes. The first is that Beltway Conventional Wisdom, that consensus of elite opinion formed by the politicians and the toadying journalists who "cover" them, often varies to a marked degree from the general consensus of opinion among Ordinary Americans, that irrelevant cohort the politicians nominally represent but ignore completely when it gets in the way of instructions from their corporate lobbyist masters. The second idea Glenn pounds away at is the general sense that the Media-Political Complex has developed a kind of self-protective ethos which refuses to impose any sort of accountability or responsibility on the elites (Media or Political) so long as the act in question is (a) performed by one of them and (b) consistent with the Beltway Conventional Wisdom.

A couple of examples suffice to illustrate the ideas. On the torture question, the Establishment Punditocracy, such as David Broder of the Washington Post, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek or Joe Klein (famous anonymous author of Primary Colors) argue against any sort of investigation or prosecution of Bush officials (including the low-level CIA interrogators who will apparently be the "target" of Eric Holder's Abu Ghraib style whitewash) is a "criminalization of policy differences," "retributive," and altogether Not Done. By and large, Barack Obama has gone along with the Beltway approach, although he hems and haws as if he were seriously considering doing something else (he won't, under the principle that past criminal acts are not the proper subject of present prosecution; only future possible acts should be punished now through preventive detention of those who are not presently guilty but might be if we give them a chance. If you have any doubt that we now live completely in an Orwellian universe, re-read that last part and absorb that it describes present reality).

The torture in question includes waterboarding, but also many other things which have been done to detainees in the Great War on Terror which clearly violate the Geneva Conventions. These are war crimes and felonies under U.S. and international law. There's no serious debate about that anymore. We're not going to do anything about it, however, and thus the Obama Administration has decided to violate the mandatory provisions of the Convention Against Torture (signed by Reagan) which require that we do.

In that last sentence I previewed the trick (I like to think of it as a technique) which Glenn uses over and over to nail the Beltway Blowhards. Glenn's a lawyer turned writer but he has not forgotten a basic technique of cross-examination: the restatement of the effect of words used by the person testifying. Broder, Alter, Klein, et al write in high-minded prose about the pressing needs of the country and echo (or originate) the call to "look forward" which Barack also originated (or now echoes) rather than back at the past, and to excuse the excesses (as they're daintily called) of the Bush Gang to avoid a partisan fight which spoils the happy camaraderie at the cocktail parties in Georgetown the "journalists" and politicians all like to attend together. This stuff sounds good, I guess, but what Glenn does is to restate their position in ways that make these self-regarding "liberals" squirm with discomfort. Greenwald writes that their position is one of "insistence that there be no investigations" and that political elites must never be held to the same standards regarding criminality which apply to all other Americans. This is what Broder/Alter/Klein are actually arguing, but they can't stand the idea of another journalist calling them on their shit so blatantly, so inescapably. So lately (and this is the fun part) Alter (who's writing a book on Obama and doesn't want to mess up his access) and Klein (at least these two) have begun a kind of vendetta against Greenwald to discredit him as "irresponsible" and "untrustworthy." Of course, what else could he be: he's not one of the Insiders.

All of which Greenwald simply reproduces in his own column.

The other theme running through Greenwald's blogs is similar to the first but slightly different. This is the idea that the actual consensus of opinion in the United States is other than what it is, and the difference results from the refraction of reality through the prism of Beltway priorities. Glenn hilariously dissects a recent "round table" on Meet the Press where Tom Friedman (the neocons' darling at the NY Times), Harold Ford Jr., Rudy Giuliani and Tom Brokaw "debate" the Afghanistan war. As Glenn points out, 57% of the American populace now oppose this dumb war but you would never, for a second, deduce this reality from listening to these guys talk. All that is discussed in such a round table are the nuances of how we should continue the war indefinitely. Friedman, in passing and between Serious Pronouncements, made a point of attacking the Internet, and one can imagine why. Before blogging became so dominant, Porn-Stache Tom (h/t: Matt Taiibi) never had his sacred texts challenged by the hoi polloi at large, such as his shameless cheerleading for the Iraq invasion (in which he said that the real purpose of the invasion was to say to the Muslim world: "Suck..On..This"). Thanks to the many in the Blogosphere who have challenged his poorly written screeds, we now know that he's (a) completely inconsistent and (b) a dim bulb who should not be setting policy for the local Rotary Club, let alone Washington, D.C. The incredible damage he has done with his airhead pontificating in favor of Flat World trade policies and unnecessary, ruinously expensive invasions makes one tremble for the country. This guy is an Opinion Maker?

I don't know if Glenn appreciates how much of the theoretical groundwork for his writing was laid by the erratic genius Noam Chomsky, but I think Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent presaged a lot of what Greenwald is doing. Chomsky was ahead of his time and seemed radical in suggesting that the "range" of opinion among a few corporately-held media outlets and the politicians they kowtow to for access would inevitably narrow until, for example, the two choices for Aghanistan become (1) increasing the disaster with more troops and money or (2) maintaining the disaster by simply doing what we're doing ad infinitum. Doing something sane and logical, like packing up and leaving, is not something, as Glenn says archly, that Serious people in the Beltway ever consider. Chomsky's nightmare vision is now our everyday reality. Prophets are rarely honored in their time.

Vietnam Redux

My guess is that we're fighting in Afghanistan because the military establishment always demands at least one hot war in progress, and now that Iraq has finally petered out (because of Nouri al-Maliki's treacherous snookering of George W. Bush), Afghanistan is the only candidate. The Pentagon needs wars for lots of reasons. They're essential for training soldiers in actual combat, for keeping the vast armies of mercenaries under contract employed (many of the mercenaries are former military lifers seeking an upgrade in pay and working conditions, plus that Bondsian License to Kill), and most of all, as a laboratory for all the weapons and gadgets produced by defense contractors. Officers get promoted, they collect war stories, they acquire battle credibility.

This kind of rationale does not play well on the political scene, of course. We're not that far gone in cynicism yet, though we're working on it. The original Afghan meme, sold to the American public 8 years ago, was that Afghanistan was a "safe haven" for al-Qaeda where it could train terrorists and plot attacks on the United States. In the wake of 9/11, almost all Americans went along with this Dick&Jane story read to us by W&Dick. I can recall that even Al Franken, when he had his radio show on Air America, steadfastly supported the war in Afghanistan, probably with his run for the Senate in mind. It became doubly important to support the Afghan venture after Iraq was invaded: being against both wars was the sure mark of the lily livered liberal.

I was against both wars from the start, as was the Sage of Boynton, the 92-year old veteran of the Pacific campaign in WW II. The Sage thought that we "should do nothing," meaning we should not have used conventional military forces for an invasion simply because this is what we're set up to do. This, indeed, was the rational course. The terrorists who carried off 9-11 were all dead. They did not plan the 9-11 attack in Afghanistan. The central plotters (the four pilots) began their plotting in the late 1990's in Hamburg, Germany, where they attended mosque together. These facts are confirmed in the Report of the 9-11 Commission, which I have read. Rumors of their trips to Afghanistan are most often attributable to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whom we now know was waterboarded 183 times by the CIA. The circumstances of his interrogation are curiously absent from the official 9-11 Report. Even if Khalid was gurgling the truth, there is no particular reason why the four pilots, or the 15 muscle hijackers (who were almost all from Saudi Arabia), needed to travel to Afghanistan for training. What is it about the jungle gyms there that were essential to overpowering unarmed stewardesses or opening unlocked cockpit doors?

As far as Osama bin Laden was concerned, a warrant had been out for his arrest for years prior to 9-11. He was the financier, the money source of a kind of Terrorist Foundation, who passed on terrorism proposals and made funding grants. Peter Bergen's book on bin Laden is the best source of info I have seen on this question. I doubt seriously that bin Laden kept his money in an Afghan bank, with no offense intended for his Taliban "hosts." He was a canny investor and businessman who shorted the U.S. airline and tourist industries on the eve of 9-11 and then cleaned up on the mayhem he caused, a kind of Terrorist Insider Trading. But his "training camps" or his residence could have been taken out with cruise missiles, as Clinton had attempted before. What was the purpose of a full-scale military invasion and an 8-year occupation? Al-Qaeda and bin Laden did not need Afghanistan; it's just where they happened to be (some of them, anyway).

In addition to the rationales given above, Bush&Cheney wanted to give the definite appearance of doing something. They wanted to invade Iraq and desperately sought connections to 9-11, but these connections could only be made in Cheney's mind, and that wasn't enough even for the American populace thirsting, in an omnidirectional way, for revenge. So Afghanistan would have to do, because Big Dog Osama was there and he would suffice for the casus belli. Then Rumsfeld, Bush & Cheney (Moe, Larry & Curly) totally screwed up the invasion and let Osama get away, so there was no one left for the Taliban to harbor.

Eight years on, and we've revised the Mission Statement a few times to keep the Predator drones flying and mercenaries shooting. We're now nation building, keeping an eye on Pakistan, and denying al-Qaeda safe haven within Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan, which somehow have survived 8 years of warfare and siege by the mightiest nation on Earth. But maybe 8 years more will do the trick. Barack Obama supports the war for the same reason Al Franken did: O is the President of a militarized nation, and it won't do to be against even stupid wars if it's the only one you've got going. You can be the Commander-in-Chief of a peacetime army if you're Dwight Eisenhower and have already demonstrated your mettle in actual combat, but not if you're Bill Clinton, W Bush or Barack Obama and left all the combat to others when you had the chance.

57% of the American populace now opposes the Afghan whatever it is. I guess, this being a democracy and everything, we should see a wind-down and a denial of funding from the Democratic House. Yeah, I know. Ha ha. That's a good one.

Love It or Leave It

1	People's Republic of China[5]	1,332,750,000	September 3, 2009	19.65%	Chinese Population clock
2	India	1,168,460,000	September 3, 2009	17.23%	Indian Population clock
3	United States	307,301,000	September 3, 2009	4.53%	Official USA Population clock
4	Indonesia	229,965,000		3.39%	UN estimate
5	Brazil	191,796,000	September 3, 2009	2.83%	IBGE projection
6	Pakistan	167,336,000	September 3, 2009	2.47%	Official Pakistani Population clock
7	Bangladesh	162,221,000		2.39%	UN estimate
8	Nigeria	154,729,000		2.28%	UN estimate
9	Russia	141,862,000	September 3, 2009	2.09%	Russian State Statistics Service
10	Japan	127,590,000	August 1, 2009	1.88%	Official Japan Statistics Bureau estimate
11	Mexico	107,550,697		1.59%	INEGI estimate National Population Statistics of Mexico[6]
12	Philippines	92,222,660	mid 2009	1.36%	National Statistics Office medium projection
13	Vietnam	85,789,573	April 1, 2009	1.27%	Official preliminary results of the 2009 census
14	Germany	82,046,00

I was video witness recently to the unedifying spectacle of that guy named Dennis (Kneale, I think) of CNBC doing battle with "econobloggers" and other doomsayers, meaning (in his focus) the troublemakers at zerohedge, who harp a lot on the Federal Reserve and what its online community think of as the "phony" American economy. Dennis (who looks like the Muppet Big Bird, or maybe Buddy Holly, if Buddy had lacked all charisma and talent) was having none of it. America is back, it's great, and anyone who doesn't think so should leave, because there's no place as wonderful as the USA.

I don't know why conservatives always come back to that: if you think there are problems here, you should go somewhere else. This sounds little better than a formula for reducing the country to a population of deluded people. Anyone with any criticism, valid, constructive or not, should get out. Personally, I've always thought the United States is a pretty nice place, and I've traveled around some, including to off-the-beaten-track places in the former Eastern Bloc, such as Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia. I've also spent a fair amount of time in France and Germany, somewhat less in Italy, a smattering in other European locales.

In making any comparisons, you have to begin with a few caveats. First, there will generally be a bias toward where you're from, because familiarity, nostalgia and connections count for a lot in human happiness. So except in extreme cases, such as, say, North Korea, you're likely to begin with a preference for your homeland. And moving to a foreign country at any point past the "main part" of your life (youth and your prime earning years) means you'll never really experience what it's like to live in a foreign country. So Big Bird's whole thesis is kind of dumb. Americans stay here for lots of reasons unrelated to thinking it's necessarily the one, the only, great place to live.

The second thing is you can't simply compare any country to any other country. For example, there is the population question. The United States is the 3rd largest country in the world, with about 307 million people (600 million if you count illegal aliens). The two larger countries are of course China and India, and I don't want to live in (a) a communist dictatorship or (b) a place where Bollywood is considered a center for the arts. Huge countries are not just quantitatively different from smaller countries, they're qualitatively different. Smaller countries are governable, for one thing, and usually have a strong sense of national identity and common purpose. These features allow such countries (Denmark, France, Germany) to provide general social security and amenities for their populations. These qualities have been lost in the United States, of course, which is riven by partisan, religious and regional divides. In a lot of ways, we're a country in name only, with a militarized security state holding things together through fear, as in China. It's the reason we've always got at least a couple of wars going these days - to remind us of what we're about. This ain't Norway, baby.

But I would say that one must go all the way down to Germany, with a population of about 84 million, before I could find a candidate where, other things being equal, I would consider living. Of course, for reasons already mentioned, other things can never be equal, because there is no other country where I spent my youth and established all my memories. Plus, my German is just not that gut. In the Happiest Place on Earth (Denmark, not Disneyland, with a population of 5.5 million, [again-Denmark, not Disneyland, except maybe on July 4]), one could probably conduct a better test of the Big Bird Thesis: would you leave Copenhagen or the Danish countryside in order to move to Riverside, California? The automatic preference for the United States which the CNBC dork assumes might not be so obvious.

But among the top 13 countries in the world, in terms of population? No contest, I want to be here, in America the Beautiful. Not Pakistan, Nigeria or Indonesia. Brazil? Well, maybe forty years ago...

Congress Tries to Fake its Way through Health Reform

The amazing Matt Taiibi is out with a new take-no-prisoners essay on health care "reform" in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, and it's definitely worth the read. His main point is that our thoroughly corrupt Congress and curiously passive President are now in a quandary about how to wriggle out of this job without upsetting their corporate paymasters, yet while convincing the general public they did something. Unfortunately, there just isn't any way to deny that the problem of health care in this country is MASSIVE, and yet all they're really set up to do anymore is to give a semi-convincing pantomime of "caring" etc., while most of them actually remain solely obsessed with getting reelected.

Taiibi breaks the process down into steps, or stages of degeneration, beginning with Obama's decision at the outset to give the game away by punting on Single Payer. All the Rube Goldberg machinations in the five bills meandering their way through this circus, staffed by what Taiibi calls "second-rate country lawyers and mall owners," are hopelessly complicated because Obama and the Democrats fled as fast as they could away from this obvious solution, out of fear of upsetting gigantic campaign donors from the Pharma, insurer and Wall Street lobbies. Or, more realistically, of alienating the affections of these parasites by pushing them in the direction of the Republicans. The estimable Bill Moyers made this same point on Real Time Friday night: as uncynical as this conscience of our generation normally is, he ventured the opinion that Obama has become convinced by Rahm Emanuel that Obama will need the campaign contributions from these three sources in 2012 in order to win again. Which seems odd, for a moment, when you consider how much money, and what a large percentage of his overall contributions, Obama raised from individuals in this last campaign. But then you think some more and it makes perfect, corrupt sense: Barack Obama knows now that those individual donors are not going to be there because he's turned into something very unanticipated, simply another politician who sees his highest goal as getting reelected, as opposed to one dedicated to the substance of his governance.

So Obama, instead of forcing the Republicans who want to kneecap his health care plan to begin on their own goal line (by presenting them with Single Payer, which he said during the campaign was his preferred approach), gave them the ball at midfield, by halfheartedly, sort of, once in a while, supporting the "public option." So the Republicans, backed up by hordes of uninformed Teabaggers and Dittoheads, as usual determined to support government policies (such as tax cuts for the wealthy) which have as their object the exact opposite effect from that which they think they're supporting, had only to neuter this contraption in order to render health care "reform" a dead letter. And anyone who takes the time to read the actual "content" of these various public options floating around the Capitol will quickly conclude that the Republicans have succeeded.

Paul Krugman todays muses that maybe the country has simply become ungovernable because of the influence of Big Money on the political process. That's one word to use, but the country is in fact being "governed," just not to the benefit of 90% of the population. This was the inevitable result of unbridled and unregulated capitalism, given its greatest impetus during the Reagan years. With the force of a natural law, heirarchical economic systems which have no effective counterweight in the form of a strong, central and regulating government inevitably skew wealth toward a smaller and smaller percentage of the population, and then the government itself becomes simply a vassal of Big Business interests until there is essentially an identity of purpose between wealthy elites and the politicians they control by funding their reelection campaigns. Such a process has happened many times before in world history, and it always ends the same way. At a certain point, the great "underclass" realize they've been screwed and the phony allegiances they feel to Democrats or the Republicans or the Nazis or the Politburo or the French aristocracy begin to fray, and they finally see what has happened. We're only at the stage now where demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, in a search simply for ratings and personal wealth and devoid of any real talent or moral content, can nevertheless exploit the "political" differences and convince the uninformed and dispossessed that Obama is in some way both a "Socialist" and a "Fascist" (Americans are not big on historical accuracy), and that health care reform, which this poor white trash who show up at these town halls armed to the teeth need more than anyone, is a government plot to snuff their grandmothers. "Only a pawn in their game," sang Bob Dylan. Yes indeed.

So Gog & Magog walk into a bar...

I caught the segment on Real Time with Bill Maher Friday night where Sam Harris, arch-atheist and general nemesis of the Pious Majority, talked calmly to Bill about his non-belief. Harris is the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, two of the seminal texts of the New Atheism movement (of which Maher himself, and such writers as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens might also be called leaders).

Harris declines to call himself an "atheist," because he contends atheism is a concept without any content. Rather (though he didn't say it in exactly these words), a lack of belief in religious ideas about gods and whatnot flows naturally from a more general approach to epistemology. We don't, for example, call someone who doesn't believe in astrology an "a-astrologist" (however impossible it might be to pronounce such a term); we're content with the idea that astrology is a superstition (the astronomical silliness of which has been demonstrated by such thinkers as Isaac Asimov), and that no "counter" term is needed for those who don't believe it. It's only the more general acceptance of organized religion (particularly Christianity in this country, where some 80% of the population believe in myths such as the Second Coming) that gives rise to a special name for not buying into a general delusion.

As a prosaic example of how such thinking works, which I'm making up right now: suppose you become intensely interested in the phenomenon of disappearing socks. I've given this matter some thought from time to time, and even done some research. You've probably noticed the problem: over the course of many laundries, you find yourself with increasing numbers of unmatched socks. One reasonable explanation is that socks are among the smaller items routinely washed in washing machines, and they find their way into the drainage hose in the wash tub and disappear. Or they become trapped under the agitator. Or static cling conceals them (after drying) in the sleeves and pant legs of other clothing where they are lost. Of course, one can check out the plausibility of these theses by examining the washing machine to see whether the drainage aperture would permit this, lifting the agitator, and other tests.

A person inclined to superstition might explain the riddle by reference to a "Sock Gremlin" that steals socks and then would defy you to prove him/her wrong. And as proof would note the essence of the mystery: why only socks? This is akin, to my odd way of thinking, to the argument that the universe was designed by a human-like intelligence because of the peculiarities of its perfect "balancing," the complexities of its inter-workings, the perfect fit between its expansionary forces and the countervailing tendencies of collapse caused by gravity. You know the drill: the Argument by Declaration. The argument is "won" at the outset by the positing of a seemingly unanswerable (to the Believer) contention, which no amount of scientific investigation or thinking will be allowed to disturb.

My response, on the more important point of socks, is that I doubt it's really only socks that disappear. Such items as handkerchiefs, men's briefs and women's panties, which when saturated are similar in size to socks, probably also make their way up the tube, under the agitator, or become stuck by static electricity to other clothing. We notice it in the case of socks because they come in pairs - it's obvious when one is missing.

You might call this approach the application of intelligence and logic to reality. By a parity of reasoning, one might say that the existence of the universe, as explained by evolutionary and aleatory processes, can be understood as the result of its very "perfection:" if it didn't work this well, it wouldn't be here, and there would be no evolved intelligences walking around on one planet wondering where it all came from. And in no case do we have any right to suppose that there were not 3,374,287,890,278,458,382,902,983,876,458,429 previously failed universes which did not get it quite right and so did not last long enough to support evolution. Or that there are not currently a similar number of parallel universes where the physical laws are different and are either abiotic or support life forms we would have no way to understand. If such concepts make our heads hurt, and we recoil from the overwhelming images they suggest, it's only because our own limited brains are not really formidable enough to grasp such notions, a truth which has always suggested to me that an anthropomorphic-type god is probably a very unlikely candidate for a Creator of the Universe. I was thinking that as computer science progresses, we will probably be able to design computers which can comprehend such enormous complexity (their vastly superior computational speed, orders of magnitude faster than an organic brain, could do a much better job of handling the data. If you don't believe me and you're, say, just a fairly good chess player, try beating a good computer program. Sooooo humbling.) If we could then program the computer to explain what it knows in terms we can understand, we might get somewhere with these circular arguments.

So, as Sam said, there is nothing special about atheism - it's the natural result of thinking about religion in the same way you think about missing socks. Religious thinking, unfortunately, does have a profound effect on human behavior, as when adulterers are stoned in the Middle East or a U.S. President decides to invade Iraq because otherwise the Gog & Magog alliance (no joke) will get a leg up on the invasion of Israel, although you might read Ezekiel until your head explodes without ever finding the punch line.

The street smart guys who know all the angles

While the argument rages on in Congress and on cable TV about healthcare reform, Chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, as usual finds another mini-cassette player in the bottom of his big bowl of Caesar salad in the executive lunch room of the New York Fed. He cues it up: "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to raise 1/2 trillion dollars over the next two months at Treasury auctions while paying absurdly low interest rates. If you fail, we will disavow all knowledge of this communication. This cassette will crumble into croutons in one minute."

Essentially, that's what the Fed/Treasury has done during July and August - auctioned off close to $500 billion in T-bonds and bills in an effort to keep pace with the exploding deficit. Not so long ago, $500 billion in deficits would have been a particularly bad year, let alone two months. But that was then; this is now.

Who is buying all this stuff? This is a subject of great speculation, particularly among the mordantly funny commenters on Zerohedge.com, "the street smart guys who know all the angles" (Woody Allen, in his voice-over intro to "Manhattan.") The Fed does things like auction off 5-year bonds to participating banks (required by law to bid at auctions, part of their Federal Reserve charter), and then, when a decent interval has passed (say a week or so), turns around and repurchases the bonds from the bidders. Takes them off their hands, you might say. The ruse is necessary because the Fed is prevented by law from bidding directly at an auction of U.S. debt, presumably because it's too obvious a case of the snake eating its own tail. Are the Chinese, Japanese and petro-states still buying Treasuries? Well, that's hard to tell, frankly. The Fed is playing so many games of indirection that it's hard to find directions out (that's for the Shakespeare fans among you).

The purchase by the Treasury's own bank (the Fed) of the Treasury's promissory notes is all part of the "quantitative easing" (QE) instituted by Bernanke to help deal with this unprecedented "liquidity" crisis. It's another way of saying the Fed is conjuring money out of thin air in such a complicated, follow-the-bouncing-ball way that it doesn't quite look like that's what it is. But that is, of course, what it is. It's simply getting harder to convince all those foreign central banks, systematically defrauded and stiffed by government-sponsored entities (such as Fannie & Freddie) to keep pouring money into the gaping maw of the U.S. Treasury with so little in the way of return. And yet the Treasury's need for money has never been more desperate.

Bernanke has announced that QE will end next month, a decision made more no-brainerish, he says, because the economy increasingly looks robust, especially housing. No doubt you've noticed the same thing - the accelerating rate of foreclosures, the decline in real wages, the multi-hundred K layoffs every month, the coming tsumani of commercial real estate defaults caused by the winking-out of the consumer economy - none of this should obscure your clear view of how good things really are. So, having bought about $300 billion in Treasuries on the "secondary" market, the Fed will pack it in.

That should be interesting indeed. Then what will support the Treasury auctions? The merits of buying practically zero-interest paper from a seriously over-extended country (us)? Don't worry, that was covered in another cassette, this time in the bottom of a Cobb salad at the Four Seasons. The SSGWKATA (see title of blog post) figure it this way: the Fed, the Treasury, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and the rest of the power players have been melting the stock market up through S&P index futures, using all the taxpayer "money" the system has been flooded with. This is why the Obama Administration allows the banksters to run wild with bonuses and deregulated horseshit: they're all acting as government agents. It's like combat pay. The Dow and S&P, for example, make no sense in terms of pricing if analyzed by P/E ratios, which are on the order of 23:1, and the volume on the exchanges has been consistently low. When QE ends (next month?), the markets will be allowed to melt down, causing a panic, a 10% "correction" (say, a thousand points on the Dow, one hundred on the S&P), and a "flight to safety," in the form of Treasury purchases, will ensue, as a grateful horde of suckers rushes headlong into the trap laid by their government and their Big Boyz co-conspirators.

Is that not beautiful? Does it make you wonder about the fairness of calling the government "incompetent?" It makes me proud to be an American, in a sick, very twisted way. If the SausaugeWhaKatars (see title again) are right, you can short now and clean up, just like Goldman and Shittygroup.

All investment advice herein is speculative in nature. Past conspiracies are no guarantee of future criminality. Consult your own con man and invest at your own risk. I can neither confirm nor deny that I wrote this. In 60 seconds, this post will fry the zero sector of your hard drive. You've been warned.

Probably the real reason health care cannot be reformed

It's only my theory, but then again, the whole blog's only my theory. When did that ever stop me before?

I cannot quite understand Barack Obama's apparent kowtowing to Big Pharma (whose lobbying group is practically named Big Pharma) or to the health insurance industry, or his mystifying inconsistency on whether he will or will not insist on a public option as part of the medical insurance scheme. I simply find it hard to believe that he's that cynical. My guess is that he's actually a Single Payer advocate who, in better times, would support a Medicare-for-All Program, or an expansion of the VA hospital system to cover everyone including non-veterans, or some form of socialized medicine.

But these aren't better times. It is perhaps a measure of the spoiled and self-indulgent nature of the American populace, and its tendency toward fatuous and irresponsible political discourse, that a graph such as that above from the St. Louis Fed is never introduced into the dialogue. The fact of the matter is that unless all of federal expenditures undergo a massive and fundamental restructuring, there really isn't money for anything new, and barely enough to do that which we have always done. That is the point that is never discussed. And while it may be true that over time a basic change in the delivery of health care to the American populace (freeing it at last from the ruinous costs of monthly premiums and high deductibles) would substantially improve the economy and federal finances, the problem right now is that the United States simply cannot undertake any heavy expenditures on a massive new social program. In a way, it's nearly insane to talk as if we can.

I think Barack Obama is aware of this fundamental lunacy. It has trapped his presidency. He came into office with health care reform a cornerstone of his Change Program, and then he got The Word. I think this happens to all Presidents-Elect in recent times. A story is told of an ashen-faced Bill Clinton, who met with the outgoing Treasury Secretary and the Chairman of the Fed before Clinton took the oath in 1993, staggering back to Hillary with the news that the federal government could afford "nothing, not even lunch." Those times were flush compared to these. The three lines of the graph above tell the story in chilling detail. Tax receipts (blue) are falling below $2 trillion; the budget (green), including the massive stimulus and such crazy expense items as "nation building" in Iraq & Afghanistan, has shot above $3.5 trillion; and the resulting deficit (red) is pushing $2 trillion. The lines are interrelated, of course, and are all going in exactly the wrong direction.

And against this backdrop we want to introduce a huge social program? I would find the "progressive" position, such as that promoted by Nancy Pelosi, more credible if she combined her advocacy with a demand that the defense budget be cut in half, effective now, and that all but the most essential overseas bases be closed. And went further and announced that the House would approve absolutely no more "supplementals" for Iraq & Afghanistan, with all the troops stranded there brought home as soon as possible. Yet one never hears that kind of logic and common sense, because such a position is not "centrist" enough, not militaristic enough, for Democrats who are always afraid of being labeled soft on....something. Take your pick of bad guys -- Commies, terrorists, narco-dealers.

We will be fortunate at the rate we're going to avoid a Black Swan event with the dollar's value, or a default on national debt obligations. Ben Bernanke has been given the task of raising money in a situation that requires the combined skills of Bret Maverick and the magician David Copperfield. Although Gentle Ben is daily vilified, his conjuring tricks are about the only thing between us and Going All Iceland.

So Obama is involved in his own Cash for Clunkers program. He can't deliver that 700 series BMW we all thought we were going to get. Instead, it looks more like a 1985 Chevy with scaly paint and a smoking exhaust, but honest (he's saying at these town halls), it's really just the same, it's a car. You'll get used to the vinyl, trust me. And most important, it's kind of what we can afford right now.

So he's asking the private sector to help him out, because the federal government just can't do it. It's that simple. He could simply tell us that, and then introduce the subject of where we DO spend most of our money, but I don't suppose that's going to happen either. Not Audacious and Hopeful enough. Honest, maybe, but you know how honesty sells in this country.