Agit/Prop in the House of Reps

Mr. Grayson is in the House. Indeed, if it hadn't-a been for Grayson...

I'm not saying I would-a been in Tennessee, but even if Alan Grayson is only providing comic relief with his standup routines in the well of the House, here's a tip of the hat to him nonetheless. His latest 5-minute bit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0_TtYQEDTo&feature=player_embedded#!

That's a great routine, as good as his "Red Roof Inn" sthick, where he detailed the Fed's purchase of a bankrupt motel chain as part of its "quantitative easing." Grayson provides embarrassing details about obvious facts that most of the obsequious, toadying members of Congress will not talk about. Everything that Grayson says about defense spending in the clip is true, of course, but that doesn't mean that the usual guardians of the Military-Industrial Complex will ever talk about this elephant lolling about the living room. Republicans consider the budget entry for Defense an immutable Law of the Universe, and Democrats will simply not criticize it in any systematic way.

Except for Alan Grayson, Orlando, Florida's star diva in the opera buffa art form. What is enormously clever about this made-for-YouTube moment is that Grayson strikes a glancing blow at the problem of defense overspending, placing it in a real-life context of taxation of the American commoner. Of course, Americans making less than $35,000 per year (1/3rd of all earners) tend not to pay income tax anyway, and if we stop appropriating $169 billion per year for "emergency spending" in Afghanistan and Iraq (emergencies which have lasted 9 and 7 years, respectively), it will not actually reduce anything other than the money the United States is borrowing at a feverish pace from all corners of the world.

But those are details which do not diminish the importance of the main point. Grayson uses a circle graph on world defense spending freely available on the Internet from many sources. It's ridiculous that the United States considers itself so imperiled by international enemies that it needs to spend, at the base Pentagon budget of $549 billion, as much as the rest of the world combined, yet also feels the need to wage completely counterproductive and unnecessary wars which run the costs up about 31% more.

Grayson gives these speeches to empty chambers during off-hours. They are of a length and style specifically tailored to YouTube upload. The idea, I suppose, is these clips might go viral, so I'm doing my part here.

A frequent criticism of Grayson is that his legislative proposals are "frivolous" diversions from "real legislation." Such as, I suppose, meaningless health care "reform" and meaningless, toothless financial "reform." You know, like give us a frigging break. There is no real legislative work being done. It is all window-dressing designed to give the appearance of getting things done for the "average American," while avoiding any change that could actually ameliorate the commoner's lot. For a specific example, if Congress was actually serious about financial reform, wouldn't they outlaw any credit card interest charge above 10% as usurious? Wouldn't they at least allow a vote on the Brown-Kaufman Amendment declaring monopolistic financial super-giants a restraint of trade and breaking them up? Wouldn't they prohibit, as Angela Merkel has done in Germany, any credit default swap speculation by a party without an insurable interest in the security "insured?"

They won't do any of these things, and Nancy Pelosi & Company will rubber-stamp Obama's defense appropriation request, after making a bunch of worried noises about "deficits," because that's how the system works. So keep throwing monkey wrenches, Alan, and be as frivolous as hell. You're our Man on the Inside.

Reconstituting the USA

I arrived on the Berkeley campus in the fall of 1966, which means I missed the Mario Savio-led Free Speech Movement, but I was around for most of the other major spasms of dissent which rocked the campus in later years. These included the People's Park riots of 1969 and the Cambodia Invasion riots of 1970, occurring, not so coincidentally I'm sure, in the spring, when the hormonal sap tends to run high, especially among the young, and no one wants to be inside anyway. Besides these two main events, there were various other causes which disrupted the university's normal functioning (or as normal as it got after the FSM), including the dispute over the firing of Angela Davis, the ongoing leitmotif of Vietnam War dissent and other causes.

Whenever one of these events seized the student body's attention, there were generally calls for the cessation of business as usual; to wit, just going to classes and grade-hounding seemed rather bourgeois with all these weighty matters to deal with. The faculty were always put in difficult circumstances by these situations, especially the younger assistant professors; they were, after all, the creme de la creme of the academic world, careerist for the most part, and anxious to stay on the tenure track and publish all the stuff they had to publish to establish themselves as Berkeley-grade intellectuals. On the other hand, they were dealing with the unruly, sometimes gifted, and often spoiled scions of the upper middle class who wanted their causes (and themselves) taken seriously, and regarded professors who wouldn't play along with these aux barricades fantasies as sell-outs and Running Dogs for the Man. Later many of these dedicated activists, such as Jerry Rubin, would run their own hedge funds and enshrine Gordon Gekko as their patron saint.

I drifted through this miasma of dissent, sturm und drang pretty much as the other Madras-shirt-wearing, white-levi-sporting members of the Baby Boom drifted through it: I played intramural sports, went to classes and the library, drank beer on weekend nights, and tried to find girls to go out with. That was the amazing thing: it was actually a pretty normal undergraduate experience. The dissent and the demonstrations were a sideshow. For some experienced activists, such as the Red Diaper Babies of the East Coast who attended Berkeley (and matriculated there because, perhaps, it was a bigger, sunnier version of Antioch), the dissent was a very serious matter, part of a family tradition. The real organizers, I have to admit (and I knew a few), kind of creeped me out. I didn't want to get into any trouble with the law, especially the FBI. There were ways to look "committed," fortunately, without really buying in, and let's face it: the Red Diaper Brigade did not make any real inroads with the Baby Boomers, because it is the vast phalanx of the Baby Boomers who are responsible for the corporatist, corrupt, warmongering, oligopolic, environmentally-destroyed landscape you see around you. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Michael Milken was attending Berkeley at the same time I was. Q, as they say, E.D. As Lewis Black said in a hilarious routine, the Baby Boomers have absolutely got to legalize pot, because that's it, that's our only shot at a legacy. The Greatest Generation defeated the Nazis and the Japanese while building an American industrial colossus, and what do we have? We've got to legalize pot!

But I digress, although I digress from the past to the future. What I meant to say was, whenever one of these spasms of dissent took hold, there were calls for "reconstituting the university," meaning, well, all kinds of things. Such as not using the class rooms, but meeting in people's apartments. I attended a few such "classes," because there was no choice. Co-opted young profs were forced to play along, on pain of not looking cool. Some were asked (and declined) to give the activist students "cover," meaning a moratorium on grading while the students pursued their true calling - the cause du jour. Secretly, I thought it was a shame not to use the campus during such episodes; I mean, those buildings were so pretty, limestone and granite-clad, classical edifices with beautiful Doric columns, old woodwork, double-hung windows, high ceilings, even urinals of vitreous china, you know? All going to waste while we sat on some cheesy wall-to-wall in a crackerbox apartment on Hillegass Avenue.

Anyway, sometimes I think I detect faint glimmers of that old spirit in what is going on in modern America. As America falls apart at the seams, I see some of those same tendencies toward easy "Reconstitution" of the U.S.A. The talk of secession, for example, of busting the country into regional principalities, and a nearly-hopeful anticipation of national insolvency. Oh I know, I see these same things in myself, but hey - I'm part of that Genus: Baby Boomus Americanus. Oddly enough, I think that the legacy of this generation may be greater than that envisioned by the hilarious Lewis Black. The bankrupting of the country actually seems well underway, and it's precisely because the Baby Boom followed its weird toward the idea of something for nothing, for borrowing when you couldn't earn it, for the unearned increment in general, such as the fixation on house price appreciation, toward early retirement, toward leisure as one's principal activity, and all while paying no price whatsoever in terms of standard of living. The Baby Boom has been living that way for about thirty-five years now, and it shows, because this nation, in its present state, is its handiwork. The average age of the Senate is 60 years old: a person born in 1950, also too late for the Free Speech Movement, but just in time for People's Park. And the United States Senate, in its blatant corruption, in its inability ever to tackle anything with thorough-going integrity and effectiveness, with something approaching competence, is perhaps the Baby Boom's most enduring symbol.

I don't think the Baby Boomers really want a "reconstitution," when you get right down to it. They're hoping against hope the American Titanic rights itself in the water. Go along to get along, and make such compromises as you must for la dolce vita. Anything else is just going to be a lot of hard work, and that, as always, is for other people.

The Blob

The Blob I was originally worried about was a piece of protoplasmic, shape-shifting Jello that starred in its own movie in 1958. The Blob's co-star was a young Steve McQueen, although they were mortal enemies in the movie. My older brother saw the horror flick at the Third Avenue theater with a bunch of his no-good delinquent friends, then he couldn't wait to tell me about it.

"It leaps and creeps and slides and glides across the floor," he said.

"I'll just close my door," I said, pretty sure that wasn't going to work.

My brother gleefully confirmed this. "It will just slide under the door," he said.

"I'll stack a bunch of books on the floor." I knew there had to be some advantage to voracious reading, even if I hadn't found it so far.

"The Blob will just eat the books." Great. So The Blob also voraciously devoured books. Not that I thought that Tom Sawyer and a bunch of Zane Grey novels were really going to do the trick anyway.

I had my ace in the hole, Sparky, the collie-shepherd mix with known anti-social tendencies who slept under my bed. Sparky had my back, but a monster which dissolved people, cars and Cleveland probably would not be stopped by a dog.

I was a worried ten year old for a while, meaning I would wake up in the middle of the night for about eight seconds before relapsing into the comatose state typical of my age group. Mom's increasingly shrill and repetitive warnings about being late for school were necessary to arouse me from my nightmarish slumber. The one consolation was that The Blob might dissolve me before the social studies quiz on Friday. I hated social studies. What were the exports from Peru? Llamas, cocaine and misery, I guessed. I could look it up in the World Book later. Right now I have to figure out how to cover all that open terrain between the house and school without being sucked into the digestive tract of The Blob.

I usually walked east on Hemlock to Shoreview, then north half a block to Dale, then up about two blocks to Ocean View, where school was. Mike and Bo lived on Dale, and they were tough kids who could help out with The Blob, if need be. By the way, there was really no shore to view from Shoreview, and the Pacific Ocean was 12 miles due west on the far side of the coastal range, so there was no view of that either. The housing tract didn't have much in the way of amenities, other than sweet-sounding, bucolic names, and it didn't have alleys either, which would have shortened my perilous journey to the safety of the class room. I guess it was safer there; my brother told me the best scene in the movie is where The Blob attacks a movie theater and then its silhouette covers the white screen as it eats the projectionist. Nice effect. That actually made me want to see the movie, sort of. So there was no real safety in numbers. Maybe you were better off on your own, or maybe I could take up residence under the bed with Sparky.

The Blob made its debut in 1958, around the same time as a hundred foot tarantula and mutant giant army ants were wreaking havoc in Southern California. My guess is that The Blob was the result of a lab experiment gone terribly wrong. Usually it was radiation or something like that which produced these monsters; I guess people of the day had an early premonition that fooling around with Mother Nature could result in real-life nightmares, and these were their cinematic warnings, as well as ways for big brothers to scare their little brothers. Technogenic disasters, we could call them.

I didn't worry about The Blob for more than a day or two, of course. I would see it myself during the summer, when they ran movies all day long at the show. It wasn't that scary; in fact, it was hokey, just like the tarantula that a young Clint Eastwood fired at from his F-86. It was better when The Blob was on the screen and not in the Gulf of Mexico, which really is the kind of thing that has me up in the middle of the night.

A fractal look at American society

As I mentioned before, I'm in the process of reading, and trying to comprehend, Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan. Taleb takes issue with the Gaussian bell curve as a means of probability assessment, specifically its incompleteness in accounting for events in what he calls "Extremistan" (as opposed to the everyday variations in "Mediocristan"). All very cute. Taleb's dissatisfaction with bell curve analysis led him to adapt the work of Benoit Mandelbrot, the fractal mathematician, as a means of new insights.

One fundamental insight of fractal theory is the so-called principle of "self-similarity" found in nature. A common example is the structure of a tree. Each constituent part in some way replicates the structure of the whole: the leaf has veins that look like twigs; the twigs supporting the leaves are similar to branches; the branches are miniature representations of the whole tree itself. The human lung is put together along fractal lines, and the observation of a coastline will reveal similarities between the appearance of the shore at the microscopic level and a satellite photo of the entire coast seen at one go. Larger structures in nature are built up, in other words, by simply replicating the tiniest components. People have always been confused about what to do with Mandelbrot's work. Does it belong to aesthetics, to computer art, or to the world of biological mathematics? Well, I had my own idea.

I was thinking that fractal analysis might be applied in an attempt to understand the whole of American society, which is part of the mission statement here at the Pond. I've written before (maybe coined the phrase?) about the "parallax of nostalgia," or the tendency of one of later years (on the cusp of senescence/obsolescence such as myself) to see the society around him through a distorted lens, since his sensory apparatus is connected to an interpretive consciousness formed in another, outmoded era. In my case, and for most of the Baby Boom, the 1950's and 1960's. For example, I wrote once that I thought universal military service might be a good alternative to the professional standing army, since we could train, in effect, a Home Guard without the problems of (a) huge expense and (b) militarization of our foreign policy. This innocent observation was, I realize, an artifact of the Parallax phenomenon, for a recent report in the Washington Post details the insurmountable difficulties of such an approach. To wit, about 75% of America's prime military-age population (between the ages of 17 and 24) are unfit to serve:

One of the main reason recruits don't qualify for the service is inadequate education. One in four between the ages of 17 and 24 does not have a high school diploma, according to the report. And many who do still fail the military's version of the SAT, known as the Armed Forces Qualification Test.

Asthma, eyesight and hearing problems are also factors. But about a third of all potential recruits can't join because they're too fat and out of shape.

"When you get kids who can't do push-ups, pull-ups or run, this is a fundamental problem not just for the military but for the country," said Curtis Gilroy, the Pentagon's director of accessions policy. Many kids are not "taking physical education in school; they're more interested in sedentary activities such as the computer or television. And we have a fast-food mentality in this country."

Sobering observations. I think that the overwhelming majority of my own contemporaries, those who would have reached the age of 17 in the mid to late 1960's, would not have had any problem qualifying for the military. The Army's weight limit, for example, is 259 lbs. for men and 241 lbs. for women, both rather liberal standards, if you ask me. (How does someone between the ages of 17 and 24 even have the time to eat enough to weigh more than 259 pounds? is one question that occurs to me.)

My older brother informed me that one of his contemporaries, a teacher in inner city schools, intends to leave the United States as soon as he retires, because he sees all hell breaking loose as soon as his former students are in charge of things. There's both a wacky humor in his reaction and a very scary portent of things to come. Anyway, using the law of self-similarity, as applied to the American population as a whole, we might extrapolate outward to conclude that if this is the sort of progeny the society is producing (and is there some motivation for the military to denigrate its own recruiting cohort unfairly?), then things must be generally very bad indeed, and it would be miraculous if many more older Americans didn't have retirement plans similar to my brother's friend. It would not be possible to be mass-producing so many dysfunctional younger Americans (the fractally smaller component) unless the larger structure of which they are a part (the whole American society) were not also sick to its very core: uneducated, obese, degenerate.

Not to bum anyone out or anything. So one way to apply such a fractal insight is to consider the future of Social Security in this country. As we know from oft-quoted government statistics, the actual members of the workforce on which a given retiree must rely is dwindling; in the heyday of the Social Security system, as many as 15 or 16 workers might support a single retired senior; whereas as we move forward, this number will shrink to two or three. And two or three youthful Americans of the kind Mr. Gilroy of the Pentagon's Accessions Office is describing.

Hey, good luck, old friends. I'm beginning to miss the illusions of the Parallax.

Chinese menu approach to politics

Liberals, who now call themselves progressives because they were cowed into shaming themselves by Right Wing attacks, are an endangered species in American life, which will do them no good because the EPA itself is under merciless assault. I don't know if there is much to be done about it. My own political belief system might be called Jeffersonian liberalism; I am not a "Big Government" fan, per se, but I think it's unrealistic to think that modern Big Business can be regulated and controlled by a weak central government, and I'm certainly not a Free Market Purist of the Ayn Rand persuasion. That, to me, is the nuttiest approach of all. A completely unregulated business world leads to environmental and economic collapse of any complex modern society. These very days we are seeing the handiwork of unregulated Big Business, and it's not a pretty picture. The Gulf oil spill, which will probably turn into the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the world when its full extent is known and calculated, can be seen as the end result of believing that business, when left to its own cost-cutting devices, will take environmental effects into account. Ha ha. To save a few million in "mud pumping," British Petroleum has destroyed an entire eco-region.

Jefferson was suspicious of the power of government to oppress the individual. Such a wise political thinker. He feared the "tyranny of the majority," which is what the Bill of Rights is designed to prevent. The full power of the central government can crush any individual unless certain procedural rules are put into place to give him/her a fighting chance. It is surprising to me that the present Presidential incumbent is so indifferent to this concept, but that's the way the political winds are blowing. Jefferson (and Benjamin Franklin, another political genius) thought that society should risk some of its precious "security" to avoid tyranny, but if you are witnessing the craven capitulation of Obama and Holder to the calls for "restricting" Fifth Amendment rights of certain classes of criminal suspects, you can see that these particular Democrats do not belong in that Jefferson-Franklin tradition. They prefer pandering to the scaredy-cats. Ironically, once you begin down that path (as Franklin presciently tried to warn us), the central government itself becomes the most serious threat to personal liberty. Hitler, for example, once he consolidated power through "legitimate" means, used incarceration and execution of political dissidents to make sure no one got in his way. All tyrannies, in fact, operate this way. So while Obama nonchalantly allows (or tells) his Attorney General to use this "forum" or that (federal civil courts this week, military commissions the next) depending on how politically popular the move is, you can be assured that such a process, if it goes on long enough, will not be confined to just "Arab" terrorists of foreign citizenship. It will get to the (probably apocryphal) level of Pontius Pilate asking the mob which defendant ought to be executed today, and which set free.

Some of the Tea Party people seem, dimly, to be aware of such ideas, but of course you never get everything you want (or even close to what you want) from a Tea Party "platform." The victory of Rand Paul in Kentucky is illustrative. There are certain things he says with which I wholeheartedly agree; for example, on the necessity of declaring war if the country is going to war. That's what the Constitution says, conferring the power on the Congress and the Congress alone. So how does the United State fight war after war with no formal Declarations since December, 1941? And if the answer is, "the War Powers Act," how can this reassignment to the Executive Branch be Constitutional without an amendment? So Rand Paul is right: it gives everything a completely different feel if we require the President to seek, for example, a Formal Declaration of War between the United States and Iraq. Imagine that, a Congressional Declaration announcing that "a State of War Exists Between the United States of America and Iraq." It looks absurd, doesn't it? Iraq sitting over there in 2003, run by a tinpot dictator with no weapons to threaten anyone with, but we want the oil his country lies atop. So Congress, that mighty deliberative body, convenes and Declares War on Iraq. That means the President must carry out an invasion and wage war, because he's sworn to faithfully execute the laws. I don't think it ever would have happened. But if Congress can simply "Authorize" war, and leave it up to President Bush to decide whether or not to use his "Authorization," then Congress, Pilate-like, can wash its hands of the whole business and claim that the President thought that invasion was best. A slight difference with huge consequences.

I also agree with Rand Paul that the banks should have been allowed to fail in 2007-2008 without bailouts. If one says, arguing contra, that such a course would have caused an economic crisis, then please tell me what we're in right now if not an economic crisis, and moreover one in which the biggest banks have consolidated their power and the public debt has skyrocketed.

On the other hand, Rand is named after Ayn. That's more than just a spooky reference point; he's a dyed-in-the-wool, cradle-to-present Free Market Fundamentalist.

Mick Jagger told us we can't always get what we want, and especially these days. Anyone you can vote for, who's electable, comes with all kinds of baggage you also don't want. You wind up saying stuff like, "I'm for his position on the bailouts, while I recognize that his desire to consign homosexuals to labor camps is regrettable. So on balance..."

It's really a mess, sort of like the country this political scene is part of. November is shaping up to be a real freak show.

California as the Black Swan in the Coal Mine

Okay, partly it's a game: to salt a lot of high impact words into the title so it Googles well.

I've been reading Nassim Taleb's interesting book The Black Swan and trying to get a handle on his allusive, deliberately (I suspect) vague points about the nature of unpredictability in human affairs. He styles himself an epistemologist, and I suppose there's something to that. While he complains about "epistemic arrogance," there seems to be quite a bit of knowingness in his own analysis, to wit, he conveys the impression that he's simply writing at a level one remove above the ordinary mortal's comprehension of reality. Whatever. A "black swan," in his usage, is apparently a rare and unpredictable (or at least not predicted) event which is transformative in nature and alters the course of human nature thereafter. 9-11 was such an event. Key modern inventions (television, the personal computer and the Internet) often serve as black swans. The global financial meltdown has been a black swan.

Taleb is building on neuroscientific thinking about the "inferential sytems" in human thinking, about which I have Blooged in these very pages. Humans evolved to react quickly on the basis of sensory information, to use first impressions as a reliable guide to what's going on. We don't belabor our analysis if the shadow of what appears to be a large animal suddenly looms over the ground in front of us. Sure, it might be a eucalyptus leaning in the wind, but if it's a bull elephant and we guessed wrong, we won't be there tomorrow to "infer" differently. This kind of thinking explains why current weather conditions are cited as evidence for or against the general trend of global warming. At a slightly different level, it explains the tendency toward religious thinking. The artifacts and tools in our possession were "put together" by intelligent beings (us). Thus, if we see a whole interrelated system which functions like a clockwork (the Universe), our first inference is that someone (like us) made it.

Somewhat off the point of today's sermon, but not entirely. There is a financial crisis engulfing the civilizations of the Western world and Asia right now, but the (apparently) normal functioning of the central governments disguise the depth and severity of the problem. The sudden emergence of this crisis, while predictable (especially in the United States), nevertheless constitutes a Black Swan because this much trouble, so suddenly appearing, has that quality of rare, unpredicted but nevertheless statistically inevitable uniqueness characteristic of such events. Such developments simply do not fit under the fat part of the ordinary bell curve distribution of likely events. The limitations of our inferential systems thus tend to lead us to reject the authority of our more complicated cerebral analyses in favor of our reactions to the seeming placidity of the world around us. In a primitive way, we revert to magical thinking and belief in normal "cycles," such as "recovery" following recession, and this tendency in thinking is buttressed by the apparent normality of what is going on around us.

I saw some of this in the recent column by Paul Krugman about "surging" tax receipts heralding the normalization of American government financing. I realize that Mr. Krugman writes some of his columns while sitting in a lawn chair near his condo in St. Croix, and without doing any research, but this particular error was somewhat egregious even by his standards since the Treasury had just published their receipts for the month of April, 2010, and the print demonstrated a significant fall-off in year-over-year tax revenue (on the order of 13%) versus 2009. This is an odd kind of "recovery," and even odder as a source of confidence. 2009 was supposed to be the very depth of the Great Recession; how can 2010 be worse if things are getting better?

Anyway, the Federal government's ability to print money and recycle debt in a never-ending Ponzi scheme allows it to mask, for a long time, its essential insolvency. Which is why a state such as California may serve as the Black Swan in the Coal Mine. California is facing a $20 billion budget shortfall for the current fiscal year. It has a constitutional mandate to balance its budget, and it has no earthly way of doing so. California's GDP makes it the eighth largest economy in the world (about $1.8 trillion a year), and is running a U-3 unemployment of about 13%. Its GDP is about 13% of the entire nation's GDP (five states, including New York and California, make up about 40% of U.S. GDP). California cannot print money. Mr. Krugman recently wrote that California survives because of federal "transfer payments," but what can I say? California's return on investment (what it receives from the federal government versus what it pays in through taxes) is less than 80%. (Are they hitting that pepper-flavored vodka particularly hard in Stockholm these days, by the way? Or is it just that, as Taleb says, economics is a "science" on about the same plane as Tarot card reading? Memo to Krugman: if you've got access to wi-fi from the lawn chair, try using a search engine called "Google." You can learn a lot.) Anyway, Krugman: rely on his rosy predictions at your own risk.

Thus, California is facing now what the federal government ought to be facing itself but chooses to defer in favor of relentless borrowing. The money that California can borrow is severely limited, since the high interest rates it must pay on bonds (because of its diminished credit rating) add inexorably to the outgoes and push against its budget ceiling. The former B movie star and muscleman currently running the state, who has grown into his job although he still cannot pronounce the state's name, says simply that California is facing "terrible" budget cuts. Naturally, Caleeforneeyuh chooses to cut the subsidies for the most helpless of its citizens, such as the mentally ill, those on welfare, inner city students and similar non-politically-connected subsets. California is laying off many state employees, furloughing others on a rolling basis, closing courts one day a month, slashing higher education, letting cons out of prison, selling office buildings, and many other "Draconian" reductions, and taken together, all these changes are still not enough.

Yet outwardly, things still seem pretty normal, at least in the favored environs of the state such as Montecito, where our great leading environmentalist Al Gore just bought an $8 million house with 6 bedrooms and 6 baths and 6,000 square feet to heat (okay, look: he's not Thoreau, okay? He's a modern American with a helluva good image, and that's where the action is.) Forward momentum keeps the ball rolling for quite some time. Yet as things unravel, this huge part of the United States will present a Preview of Coming Attractions for the country as a whole. It's a shame our "inferential systems" don't get it now, but hell, we're not even to summer re-runs yet. We've got stuff to do.

"Meltup," the Viral Video

If it weren't for fearmongering, I wouldn't have no news at all. Still, as a public service I offer "Meltup," the viral video from the National Inflation Association.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb1n1X0Oqdw&feature=player_embedded#!

If you read around the edges of the Apocalypse, as I do from time to time, you encounter certain names over and over: Peter Schiff, Ron Paul, Marc Faber, John Williams, Gerald Celeste, Max Keiser. These are the Heralds of American Economic Doom, and the route they all see, when you boil it down, is basically the same. The United States has painted itself into such a corner in terms of debt and unfunded entitlements, and the maintenance of an overseas military empire, and the destruction of its productive capacity, that there is now no way out. We are going to have to monetize our debt by printing money at an accelerating rate, which will devalue the currency and lead to collapse.

Sigh...our very own Weimar Republic. Anyway, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then perhaps a moving picture is worth a million.. It's curious, as the events in Greece and Europe have focused our attention more fixedly on the nature of sovereign default, that a convergence and truly "nonpartisan" consensus seems to be forming that mainly is characterized by class warfare. This is the golden braid that unites elements of the Tea Party with mainstream liberals. The game is rigged, and there isn't enough to go around anymore. Wall Street bankers are dividing billions of profits into huge bonuses while one in eight Americans are on food stamps and the real unemployment rate hovers around 20%. You can't make any money by putting it in the bank, whereas big banks can borrow money from the government for nothing and make a killing without risk.

As I said in my last brainbelch, perhaps many American "rebels" cannot articulate with consistent precision why they're so angry, but the gravamen of their complaint is not wrong. The differences between factions of the Pissed Off are sometimes trivial and sometimes simply related to predisposition. For example, in this video you can see an argument against the minimum wage and what appears to be a complaint about requiring businesses to set aside facilities for nursing mothers to breast feed their babies in secluded dignity. The video also bitches about "lazy Americans" who expect to be supported by the government. This is all part of the standard Right Wing catechism, of course, but what I've learned (I think) is that the emotional origins of some opinions perhaps matter less than the general accuracy of the main complaint: the Middle Class of the United States has been systematically sold out in favor of offshoring jobs, importing oil, relegating our commerce to Big Box stores full of Chinese crap, destroying tariff protection so domestic multinationals can use cheap foreign work forces, and in general allowing the Middle Class to subsist and wither away on ever-mounting piles of debt.

That reality is what ties the liberals and the Tea Partiers together. One side might favor gun control and the other rail on about gay marriage, but in the final analysis, unless the great majority of Americans can support themselves and buy food and fuel, these issues are the agenda for the Great Debating Society on the Deck of the Titanic. As money dwindles, as Social Security retirement and Medicare become threatened with insolvency, the luxury of basing one's politics purely on "social issue ideology" goes the way of....the American Middle Class.

Politics in the USA, not surprisingly, is becoming increasingly volatile. Ancient Senators are being unceremoniously thrown out of office before they can even get to the general election in their states. Things are going to get more fractious and unpredictable as things get worse, and I think this video explains many of the reasons why. I think we should watch the riots in Athens with a sense of trepidation, for they could well be coming soon to a Main Street near you.

Maintaining vital heat

I suppose if I were going to write a book about the economy, or the transformation of the American lifestyle, I would give it some such title as the above. It's from Walden, of course. Thoreau, that most logical and empirical of thinkers, performed his experiment in rudimentary living, on land owned by Emerson in rural Massachusetts, to figure out just how much of the complications of modern life were strictly necessary in order (a) to stay alive and (b) to thrive, spiritually and emotionally. He reduced the basic necessities to food and shelter, and then deduced that these in turn were essential only because they maintained vital heat.

It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression,animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us — and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without — Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.

[18] The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of grass and leaves at the end of its burrow! The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world; and to cold, no less physical than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails.

Thoreau didn't stop there; he wasn't actually suggesting that we should reduce human life to eating and getting dressed. He was simply attempting to establish the basic framework for existence, and to determine how little effort, time and complication were unavoidable in creating such a framework. Despite claims to the contrary (envy and professional jealousy are always prime motivators of criticism, and we secretly hate people who prove they're right by putting their money where their mouths are), Henry David proved his thesis; he stayed in the cabin on the shore of Walden Pond for 26 months, and figured it all out.

It seems like a reasonable thesis that modern American life is about as far removed from Thoreau's sylvan idyll as it is possible to be. Many of the simplicities of his approach appeal to us, naturally, but we have taken the idea of specialization, and the abstraction of existence, to extreme lengths, so that even our relationship to nature is for the most part mediated through electronic means. We still like the old verities, the ideas of conscience and ethical behavior, but they are hard to descry through the electronic static and Byzantine complexities of modern life.

I was thinking about this the other night while watching "60 Minutes" and its piece on "strategic default," the growing practice of home"owners" whose mortgages exceed the value of their houses simply walking away and starting over. Morley Safer was trying to generate some controversy over this no-brainer by shaming the defaulters into a sense of guilt and not living up to their end of the contract. Such ideas are sort of the vestigial tail of old-fashioned business practices. Think about what this hallowed "mortgage" is that Safer was referring to. It's a loan put together on the fly, immediately sold into the secondary market of the shadow banking system or mortgage bundler, jammed into a mortgage-backed security, then tranched and stuffed with many other such securities into a collateralized debt obligation full of thousands of mortgages, then sold off as a marketable security to the Norwegian Teachers Pension Fund or the California Public Employees Retirement System. Let's just say that the relationship between Mr. & Mrs. Smith in Sun City and CalPERS is a little too "attenuated" for anyone to get too excited about ethics or responsibilities. It's a very remote and impersonal business deal; if it works for both sides, fine; if it doesn't, then one side or the other has its legal remedies. End of story. Leave off with the moralizing, Morley. Go guilt trip the ratings agencies who assigned these stacks of crap gold plated Triple A's. Leave the realm of ethics to two people who depend on one another's performance and fidelity, shaking hands and looking each other in the eye. If we want to do business on the mass, impersonal and "scalable" level we now do things, this is what we get.

Oddly enough, if you read about all the sovereign debt crises, and the looming specter of hyperinflation, it seems pretty evident, almost at the level of virtual certainty, that we're headed toward a form of economic collapse which is going to bring some of Thoreau's ideas back to the forefront of our thinking. Foreclosure, job loss, worthlessness of paper money all fix the mind on essentially one issue: how do we maintain our vital heat in the face of such dislocation? That simplifies and localizes matters in a hurry. The international system of world trade, "globalization," Friedman's "plug-and-play, flat Earth" nonsense, are all pretty useless when that happens. America has so hamstrung itself with income and wealth disparities, with moving its means of production offshore, with corporate farming, with creating a giant cohort of dependent "consumers," that we're almost uniquely ill-equipped to deal with this looming crisis. This is why the national mood is so unsettled; whether the fat part of the bell curve completely figures it out cognitively or not, instinctively humans start freaking out when they see their abstract and incomprehensibly complicated means of support begin to unravel before their very eyes.

That's why I think a new energy regime designed to bring the means of maintaining vital heat to the localized level is the only way out. If the United States moved to a paradigm of a highly local system of solar power (in its various forms, wind, photovoltaic, ethanol from switchgrass and other non-food sources), then we would develop a means of support independent of the inherently unreliable, prone-to-Black-Swan vicissitudes of globalization, which plays against the interests of all but the highly-placed business and government elites.

Which, as a political digression, is why I have been so dismayed by the revelation that Barack Obama is simply another conventional American politician. I suppose it was a matter of projecting my own hopes onto someone who seems, in the fullness of realization, primarily interested in his own ambition and in proving that a slender African-American can pull off a convincing reenactment of the Clinton presidency. He's succeeded in that, but he didn't "change" a damn thing. Now he writhes and thrashes about, attempting to convince us that he's anti-oil drilling this week (since it's politic to be so) or anti-Fat Cat Banker the week before (for the same reason), as his weathervane follows winds blowing from the direction of the Villain of the Moment.

I think we'll eventually get there, to the idea of locally-produced renewable energy and a more basic economy centered on production we ourselves control, but it will be a bumpy transit as we attempt to hang on to the unworkable regime we have lazily allowed to become dominant, with its crushing trade deficits and debt-fueled "prosperity." First, unfortunately, things have to get considerably worse.

My very own Nobel Prize

A Friday joke for the cognoscenti (pronounced "cone yo shentee"):

Descartes walks into a bar and the bartender asks "The usual, Descartes?"

Descartes replies "I don't think.." and disappears.

I salute Paul Krugman for fighting the good liberal fight. He styles his blog, somewhat sententiously, "Conscience of a Liberal." I'm sure he often regrets that; there are many days when I wonder whether "Waldenswimmer" has much to do with what I'm writing about, but at least I'm not rather ostentatiously advertising the precious quality of my "conscience."

Anyway, the noted Princeton economics professor, Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist weighs in today with his insistence that the United States is not Greece. Good to know. Personally, I didn't think we were. Krugman means it in a good way, of course. He gives some passing recognition to the key difference: Greece is locked into the euro, which it can't print on its own, whereas the United States is the paper-hanger of the world's reserve currency, the almighty dollar. Thus, no one really has to worry about U.S. default on its sovereign obligations - if we hold an auction and no one shows up, the Federal Reserve will create the "money" to buy our own debt. It can do this in a variety of ways, such as lending a few trillion more to the so-called "Primary Dealers" of the Federal Reserve cartel, who can then bid this virtually free money into Treasuries and earn money on the spread. If you're wondering how Goldman Sachs, the BofA, JP Morgan Chase and others managed to achieve absolutely perfect trading (no day with a proprietary trading loss) for every day of the last quarter, look no farther than that factoid. You could do it, too, if someone offered to lend you money at 1/2 percent and gave you privileged access to an auction where the instruments pay you 2-3% on your trades. This has been going on for a very long time now, as Bernanke continues to insist that despite the robust recovery underway that "extraordinarily low" interest rates are justified by the "subdued inflation" and tentative nature of our recovery. Something along those lines. He seems to fall asleep as he says it over and over again to Congressional committees, and I can't blame him.

So here's Krugman on another reason we're not Greece, aside from the lack of a Parthenon:

The U.S. economy has been growing since last summer, thanks to fiscal stimulus and expansionary policies by the Federal Reserve. I wish that growth were faster; still, it’s finally producing job gains — and it’s also showing up in revenues. Right now we’re on track to match Congressional Budget Office projections of a substantial rise in tax receipts.

It's naturally predictable that the good professor would salute the fiscal stimulus, since Krugman has staked his professional reputation (and the validity of his Stockholm award) on Keynesian economics. Personally (and it's the basis for my own self-nomination for a Nobel), I think that Krugman's favorite student, Barack Obama, has made a serious mistake. Obama bought into the idea of a huge ($700 billion) stimulus, exacerbating our deficit problems, and then, realizing that he wasn't being bipartisan enough, followed this move immediately with a call for austerity in spending. No, you can't do that. If you're going all in, you need to play your bluff all the way through. You don't shove all your chips into the center of the table and then fold. That's what Prez O has done. As for Krugman's claim, we can look at the Treasury's own recently published spreadsheet for the month of April. April, of course, has a particular, shall we say, significance for tax receipts - I mean, if we're going to rake it in, that's the month you'd expect to do so. So how did we do?

Well, we hauled in $245 billion, of which $68 billion was FICA taxes. FICA taxes tend to be higher in April because it is then that Schedule C filers (self-employed) pony up the rest of what they owe for the prior year. Year to date (since October 1, 2009, beginning of the last fiscal year) we have received $1.199 billion in taxes. In the prior year (deep in the Great Recession, in other words) the tax receipts were $1.255 billion. So what does the Nobelist mean when he says that our prosperity is showing up in tax revenues? It must be in the sense of that key word "projections" of the Congressional Budget Office, and also in the recent job growth figures.

Those job growth figures are interesting, actually. Of those 290,000 new jobs, 60,000 were Census hires. 188,000 are attributable to the "Birth/Death" estimate by the Ministry of Truth (Bureau of Labor Statistics), which refers not to human beings, but to the notional increase in new businesses (Births) versus closing businesses (Deaths). One might reasonably ask, during a Recession, is it actually reasonable to suppose that new businesses are being formed at such a prodigious rate, and if so, why is the commercial real estate market cratering? But never mind. If we subtract the Census and B/D numbers from the 290,000 number (in other words, if we eliminate the numbers the Federal Government itself actually controls), we are left with 42,000 jobs. Since 120,000 new employees enter the job world each month because of population growth, we can begin to see why the actual U-3 unemployment rate went from 9.7 to 9.9% despite the "job growth."

Still, I appreciate the Good Professor's chauvinist cheerleading. Someone needs to be optimistic, even if there is no statistical evidence whatsoever for such optimism. The growth in GDP is not "thanks to" stimulus spending; the GDP growth is government spending, but since it was done on a one-time, save-government-jobs basis, we've probably already seen its zenith of effectiveness. If I'm right, then the "jobs saved" by the Stimulus will begin to disappear, because the conceptual fallacy of spending money the way Congress did (the politically expedient method of supporting employment only for the existing way of doing things) means that the "investment" is short-lived.

In truth, there is no political will to undertake steps which would actually transform the American economy, which depends on a massive reworking of our energy regime. Tepid tinkering with the economy while we await some magical process to "restore" the consumerist Shangri-la built upon borrowing from houses is what the Nobelist actually thinks will happen. I am staking my own Stockholm Dreams on my theory that it will not.

The Elena Kagan Nomination

Not to name drop or to attempt to sound more worldly and sophisticated than I really am, but time and circumstance once placed me in a tour group in Vilnius, Lithuania, in July, 1999. And as part of that experience, I was led around sites of Jewish historical significance by a rabbi/scholar who remarked, in words I still recall, that the inscription on a monument was significant in terms of "Jewish theology, to the extent there is such a thing."

I like that. After Elena Kagan is confirmed, the "religious" tally on the Supreme Court will be five Catholics and three Jews (Breyer, Ginsburg & Kagan for the Hebrew team; Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy, Sotomayor and Thomas for the Papists.) No Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists or Rastafarians. No explicitly proclaimed atheists, either, but that's where the Jewish members always give me hope, because it's possible (and quite common) to be a "secular" Jew, meaning among other things an atheist, while still self-identifying as a Jewish person on ethnic or cultural grounds. It doesn't really make much sense to talk about "secular Catholics," since Catholics, as on the Supreme Court, can be Irish, Italian, African-American or anything else. The absence of Protestants on the highest bench disturbs some people greatly:

"I'd like to offer here... a lament for the passing of American Protestantism," American religion scholar Diana Butler Bass wrote on BeliefNet.com about Obama's decision to nominate Kagan, a Jew.

That is almost certainly overstated. In fact, I think I'll say it's anti-Semitic, just for the hell of it. And speaking of contradictions in terms, how about "American religion scholar." Can one actually be a "scholar" about religious matters? That would seem to have as much meaning as "Jewish theology." If one is "studying" something completely made up, how can there be any scholarship to it? It would be like writing a doctoral thesis on "Puff the Magic Dragon." You can do it, but what do you really know when you're done that you didn't know when you started?

As far as Elena Kagan's credentials are concerned, not surprisingly President Obama has chosen someone who is not ideologically controversial. She's kind of liberal, kind of centrist, sort of like the President himself. Not a boat-rocker, not a firebrand. Sometimes appointees surprise the Presidents who appoint them (such as the retiring Stevens, or Souter, or, most notably, Earl Warren), but I doubt that's going to happen here. The magnificent days of judicial trailblazing are over now, and Elena Kagan should fit right into the new style of mostly deferring to the Executive Branch except when it's just so far over the line (Bush's attempt to eliminate habeas corpus, for example) that even the somnolent, pro-corporate Supreme Court says whoa.

Attempts to compare Kagan to Bush's nomination of his office wife, Harriet Miers, are absurd. Harriet's biggest job prior to nomination and her job in the White House had been as President of the Texas State Bar, a largely ceremonial, inconsequential position mainly attributable to political connections. Kagan has been Dean of the mighty Harvard Law School and Solicitor General of the United States, which means she's been a working lawyer. Miers let her bar membership lapse for nonpayment of dues while she lolled around Bush's White House making ditzy remarks.

Kagan's obviously real smart and she's got a nice smile, and it's just possible she's our third atheist on the bench. Catholics tend not to be atheists, in my experience, and their religiosity often colors their view of the "liberal social agenda," as with Scalia, for example, who is a "Strict Constructionist" only in the sense that Antonin interprets the Constitution in strict conformity with Deuteronomy.

In other words, I think Elena is just fine, and who really cares? Obama could do a lot worse, as Bush tried to do in making a laughingstock of the whole nomination process. I mean, really: Harriet Miers? Why not Matlock? Why even insist that nominees be real people? Kagan will move the Court more toward normality, away from the coven of weirdos represented by Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas. Good enough. That's my new standard of expectations with this Administration: does the latest action make things weirder or more tolerable?

Kagan makes things more tolerable. Case closed.

Bernanke to ECB - Here, Drink Some of My Pee

What a difference a weekend makes. On Thursday night, Brian Williams disclosed to David Letterman that the dirty little secret was that the "world has no money, and the emperor has no clothes." It's Monday now and not only is the world awash in dough, the emperor is draped in more finery than a Harlem pimp.

It was so easy. The European Central Bank came up with one trillion dollars, just like that. All those dodgy PIIG bonds? No problem: the ECB is going to buy them, with help from the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve. Solvency is restored, debt is paid down, and everything is okay.

Why did we wait? I don't get it. Why allow all those CDS speculators betting against European bonds to play their games so long? The solution was always within the Western world's (and that of Japan's) grasp. The central banks make entries on their computers (monetization) with which to buy all of that government debt for which buyers are scarce, and voila!, as Trichet would say (though with the accent on the final ah). We're back in the money.

It's a program pioneered by Ben Bernanke of our own Federal Reserve. When there was no support for the housing market, what did Bernanke do? He "bought" $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities and threw in another $300 billion to buy the Treasury Department's own debt (see where the stodgy old Europeans got the idea? They're not as quick as we are.) Did he raise the money, for example, to buy Treasuries by using the proceeds of Treasury sales, deposited by the Treasury in the Federal Reserve "Bank." C'mon, don't be silly. That's drinking your own pee. Works for a while, but...No, Bernanke declared that the money to fund Quantitative Easing existed, and that was that.

It must have been a tedious and dreary seminar where Bernanke had to teach these European cretins how it's done. Just to be in the room, I mean. They smell funny, with all that cologne, reeking of unfiltered cigarettes. The Eurodogs were talking about dumb things like austerity and belt-tightening, and recognizing the debt and dealing with it realistically. There's no need for that anymore. America always leads the way. We're the Innovators. What you do is, you borrow as much money as humanly possible, until the buyers at auctions start to thin out. Then you start buying your own Treasury issuance, and when that's still not enough, you just print the damn money and say there! (It sounds better in French, actually.)

The alternative is to acquiesce in a mindless, old-fashioned recognition of poverty, the way Brian Williams was trying to do. It's to say, we've borrowed far more than we can ever repay, we're way underwater in debt, it's time to tell the truth about our broken banking system, with all its Mark-to-Myth accounting, it's time to recognize that taking the liabilities of Fannie & Freddie onto the Treasury's balance sheet added another $6 trillion in contingent liabilities on top of the $13 trillion we already recognize, and so very much more. Where's the fun in that? Are we going to revert to an international system where seafaring traders swap beaver pelts for spices? Why did we even come up with a free-floating fiat system of money if we're going to bind ourselves into a monetary straitjacket?

Not on your life. We have computers, and if the ECB types in one trillion dollars, and that shows up on the monitor screen, then everything's okay.

As usual, Joseph Heller anticipated all of this when Yossarian comes up with a brilliant plan for avoiding the dangerous bomb run to Bologna:

"I really can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or snapping your fingers. They really believe we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of the night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."

In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.

I "I really can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a "I really can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."

In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to movedI really can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."

In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.

ve the bomb line up over Bologna. reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."
In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna. can't believe it," Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice rising and falling in protest and wonder. "It's a complete reversion to primitive superstition. They're confusing cause and effect. It makes as much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really believe we wouldn't have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of night and move the bomb line over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones left."

In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.

The only Miranda left wlll star in Sex & the City

George W use to tell us that "9-11 changed everything." In my own, obtuse way I used to resist this, probably because my hangup is an insistence that life be looked at rationally. As a result, and paradoxically, I'm sometimes late to the Zeitgeist party. I tended to think that 9-11 represented mainly a massive breakdown in government security, pulled off by a group of committed terrorists who operated virtually out in the open (taking flying lessons at American schools, for example), overstaying their visas, and in general just being pretty damn obvious about it all. Anyway, some of the main characters involved in the 1993 plot against the World Trade Center were back in action on 9-11, and the idea of a massive terrorist plot using multiple American commercial aircraft had been around for a long time. The Bojinka plot of the 1990's, for example, was another wet dream of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, where as many as a dozen passenger jets were to be hijacked and crashed over the Pacific. Spooky even to think about.

A friend of mine of many years duration and I were emailing recently about what I perceive as an erosion of basic due process rights in America. The whole ideological superstructure is under assault these days, on many fronts, and, as W would have it, you can trace it all back to 9-11. Terrorism is used these days to justify a steady, relentless rollback of the "activist" decisions of the Warren and Burger courts of the 1960's and 1970's, including Miranda vs. Arizona, the landmark 1966 case, the language of which has been quoted by everyone from Jack Webb to Jack Lord (although Lord usually delegated the duty to Dan-O). You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, you have the right to an attorney, if you can't afford one, an attorney will be provided to you, do you understand each and every one of these rights. Then, in the police procedural TV shows, the perp always talks anyway.

The subject has come up again because the usual blowhards (John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Lieberman) are weighing in on whether the Times Square bomber should have been given a Miranda warning. He was, apparently, after an initial delay, and then Faisal proceeded to unburden himself, implicating the Pakistani Taliban and telling the whole story. That often happens in police detention situations. Miranda was a controversial decision even in 1966 (a 5-4 decision, with some highly principled conservative judges, such as John Harlan, strenuously dissenting). I think I can understand that; Chief Justice Warren's gloss on the 5th Amendment was that police detention is "inherently coercive," and thus violative of the 5th Amendment's privileges against self-incrimination and effective right to counsel unless the situation was balanced by informing the defendant of his rights. The 5th Amendment itself does not spell out what must be done, so who knows whether the Constitution's drafters really had something like Miranda warnings in mind. The privilege against self-incrimination simply details that a defendant cannot be compelled to be a witness against himself, as in police use of rubber hoses (or the CIA's use of waterboarding).

I watched Eric Holder today on "This Week," and he discussed the possible need to "codify" exceptions to the Miranda rule through an act of Congress. As far as I know, Miranda itself is not codified, other than as an interpretation of the 5th Amendment, so it's maybe a little anomalous to propose a legislative amendment to a Supreme Court interpretation of a Constitutional right. I mean, how can one be certain that the scaling back of a Supreme Court decision does not result in a legislative reinterpretation of settled Constitutional law? Anyway, I'm beginning to get the picture with Mr. Holder: any and all problems are "dealt with" the same way: by punting the decision to some other branch of government, as with the venue question for Khalid Sheikh's trial.

The interesting point to me about all these Constitutional revisionist arguments, as they apply to terrorists, is their circular quality. A suspect does something kind of "terroristy" (to use a Stephen Colbert kind of word), as Faisal is alleged to have done near Times Square, to wit, build and attempt to detonate a car bomb. Although an American citizen, Faisal is kind of foreign: Muslim, roots in Pakistan, et cetera. Thus, reasoning backwards from (a) the general kind of crime and (b) Muslim attributes, we decide that the Bill of Rights which would otherwise apply to an American citizen should be waived altogether. The thwarted crime (a car bomb) is suggestive of stuff that goes on in Iraq, which we call terrorism, and the defendant looks like someone who would do something like that. Using these facts, we decide (at the front end, or ab initio as the lawyers say), that this is not a garden variety American crime (as committed by someone like the Unabomber, for example), but an act of war which might qualify the perp for Padilla-type detention, or, perhaps, for targeted assassination instead of due process, which Obama has expressly authorized in appropriate cases even where the suspect is an American citizen.

There is no real exaggeration in this analysis, I don't believe. The question I have is: how do we actually know all these things about the crime (its terroristy quality, the foreign connections, the political motivation) at the point of detention, which is when we must know such things in order to dispense, Constitutionally, with Miranda warnings? Giuliani argued this morning that Faisal should be designated an "enemy combatant" because of his connections to Pakistan and the nature of his crime, but the first factor could not be definitely determined at the point of detention.

It seems to me that if you take the cumulative effects of the Bush/Obama reworkings of due process rights, as it applies to terroristy situations, that we've arrived at the point where government officials are arguing as follows: an American citizen, if he commits a certain kind of crime, and if he has certain kinds of connections, can be (1) questioned without Miranda warnings, (2) detained indefinitely without trial, (3) designated an enemy combatant and denied the civilian justice system altogether, and/or (4) shot before trial (even before arrest, as in the Anwar Al-Awlaki example), which certainly streamlines and obviates the previous complications altogether. I understand that the KGB operated along these lines, but I'm continually surprised that we're going down the same road. The curious thing to me is that none of these changes seems to have anything to do with enhancing American security. They are all purely a matter of political posturing, with Right wing demagogues (including Democratic reactionaries such as Lieberman) demanding a "get tough" attitude, and the "bipartisan" White House buying in to avoid being outflanked on the yahoo flank. A dangerous game, a slippery slope we started down, and yet the actual record of convicting, incarcerating and even executing terrorists (such as McVeigh, the Shoe Bomber and Zacarias Moussaoui) using standard due process approaches and the civilian courts is very good, and did not require any of these Constitutional shortcuts.

As W said, 9-11 changed everything. I'm probably being too technical. None of this stuff seems to bother people in general. I am curious about how Holder's legislative proposal would be worded. How would you say it? A Muslim, including an American citizen, who attempts or commits a certain kind of terroristy crime involving possible mass American casualties, can be treated as a prisoner of war, and deprived of life, liberty and due process of law if the Executive Branch thinks that's the way to go? That probably still wouldn't go far enough to satisfy Joe Lieberman, but as far as a repeal of the Bill of Rights goes, it's a damn good start.

It's all Greek to me

I think I've mentioned in the past that I'm the grandson of a Greek immigrant. (And proud of it - you see, I have nothing against immigration into the United States per se; it adds to the vitality and cultural richness of the country, something that acts as a counterbalance against American corporate homogenization and our educational deficiencies. It's just that the situation with our southern border has become a sick joke that has nothing to do with legal immigration or controlled introduction of new people into American society.) Anyway, this particular ancestor, Milteadis of Ayassos, was born in a Northeast Aegean island of the Greek archipelago in 1892, at a time when his birthplace was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, as it had been for the previous 400 years. It wasn't until after World War I that these islands were rejoined with the rest of Greece. I imagine, therefore, that if I were to run for President that Rush Limbaugh would use these facts to prove I was a Muslim, or at least a Muslim sympathizer, and I would spend all my time defending my grandfather's Greek ethnicity, his baptism in the Greek Orthodox Church, arguing that it was not his fault that when the Greek War of Independence ended prematurely in the 1830's because of the meddling of the English and French that these islands were ceded to the Ottomans just to make them happy (another typical English sell-out of the vulnerable, I would insist).

Oh well. The other three lines I can trace through my parents are quintessentially American, people who have been here forever, for centuries, Scots-Irish, Welsh, even a tiny dollop of French. This is, after all, the Melting Pot. But it's the Greek line that has always seemed the most exotic and interesting to me, because it was my grandfather who made the most of the American Dream.

So it's sad to see "Greece" reduced these days to a catchword for "sovereign debt default." I really hate all this "globalization" nonsense, the "integration" of everything into one correlated, highly unstable (yet mind-numbingly boring) system that relegates all of these once-colorful, distinctive, historically-rich actual places into concepts, intellectual constructs related to financial "problems" that must be worked out through the European Central Bank, or through currency swaps with the Federal Reserve, or a bailout initiated through the International Monetary Fund, with "austerity measures" imposed on Greek citizens by the European Union as a condition of rescue, and blah blah blah.

What a mess. What utter stupidity. Greece has always been kinda poor. It's why my grandfather left that little rocky island not too far from the historical location of Troy, where the wily Greeks once bore their equine gift. (Now the joke is, "beware of Greeks bearing debts." Ha ha. Even the jokes of globalization suck.) What happened to the drachma? It's the euro now, and Greece does not control its own fate. Cannot print its own currency, so it relies on the tender mercies of the Germans and French either to bail them out or let them go to hell. I see Greece compared to Lehman Brothers. That's how ridiculous this "standardization of concepts" in the interlocking economies of globalization has become. Countries ("sovereigns," in globo-speak) are like big corporations in terms of their risk of "contagion" and "systemic risk." Lehman went bankrupt, as did Iceland, so now Greece (the "G" in PIIGS, its porcine brethren being Ireland, Italy, Portugal & Spain) must stand as the first test case of ECB intervention that will set the model for the rest of the little piggies. I think, on balance, none of them will eat roast beef and several will go wee-wee-wee all the way home.

At the top of the fiat currency food chain stands the once-mighty United States, with its sacred dollar. Everyone takes us seriously when we run our printing press. Don't ask whether that makes any sense, because that's a dangerous question. Why the hell do you think a group of Senators (from "senatus," Latin for elderly, etymologically related to "senile") are doing everything they can to prevent an audit of the Federal Reserve? It's because it's dangerous to know just how absurd a system is which allows the United States to declare, by fiat, how much money it has. Some really intelligent person (just give him 20-30 IQ points over yours truly, that might do it) will soon write a book about why an interrelated international system of finance based upon fiat currencies must, in all cases, without exception, lead to excess debt, inflation, imbalance and collapse, and that this evolution is tied inextricably into human psychology at the neuroscientific level. I know the proof is out there. With my limited brain, through a glass darkly, here's my intuition about how it happens: it is very much the same mechanism that explains why the volume in a room full of people, say at a cocktail party, inevitably rises to a level where it is difficult for any one person to hear another as the feedback loops drive the shouting louder and louder. It's something along those lines.

So now we've arrived at the point where the entire world is broke, submerged under oceans of debt, and Greece is not Greece - it's now "Greece," the first of many insolvent sovereigns, the Lehman of countries, and not the home of Plato, Aristophanes and Euclid. It's made the full journey from the Cradle of Western Civilization to the Cradle of Modern Idiocy, a sad transit that would have made Archimedes shake his head in wonder and mutter, in classical Greek, we're screwed.

By the time they get to Phoenix...

...they'll be citizens.

I've been traveling around this paved, malled (a pun, I guess) and tracted land of ours a little over the last week. From sea to shining sea, America is pretty much all of a piece these days & years. Walking into a Walgreen's on the East Coast, I had a Twilight Zone moment when I realized I knew exactly where to go to find what I wanted, because the aisles are laid out exactly as they are on the West Coast. Is this reassuring, confidence-inspiring, or just freaky? Makes no difference. It's how it is in the "Geography of Nowhere," as Kunstler wrote.

Plane travel remains an expensive and unmitigated horror of hunger, thirst, discomfort and petty insults to the person. It is almost as if the airlines are daring their passengers to revolt openly, to swear off travel forever. How, they must wonder in board meetings, can we raise the level of discomfort to the point where our customers just freaking give up? How much can they take? We starve them, we charge for literally everything except the virus-filled air they breathe, no matter how trivial the amenity, we don't even allow the seats to recline -- do we have to crash a plane every day to break them? What will it take? More cancellations, more overbooking, more announcements that the plane is "very full today?" I have confidence they'll explore every avenue until their customers capitulate. They've taken it so far already.

Only three stories seem to matter these days, however: Greece's imminent bankruptcy, the Gulf oil spill, Senate Bill 1070 in Arizona. The East Coast news, naturally, is the same as the West Coast news, all of it conveyed by CNN, MSNBC & Fox. I was surprised to see a national poll affirming that about 60% of the nation's citizens are in favor of the legislation. The anti-Arizona parades and demonstrations are more telegenic, of course, so one can get the impression that the entire nation is in an uproar about all the "racial profiling." The most vociferous attacks on Arizona's race-consciousness seemed to come from the Hispanic advocacy group La Raza. Sometimes irony just writes itself.

Neither side in the debate can afford to tell the truth, of course, because the fight for the national soul is not won that way. La Raza and other Hispanic advocates extol the need for "reform," as in "we need immigration reform now." This is, of course, simply another way of arguing that another round of amnesty is needed to consolidate the position of illegals already present in the country. Hell, it worked in 1986 under Reagan; why not now? The main reason why not now is the junior senator from Alabama, Jeff Sessions, who looks remarkably like a ceramic lawn jockey. Immigration "reform" will die in committee, which doesn't matter that much to Obama so long as he can be viewed as fighting for the "civil liberties" of hassled Hispanics and illegals longing to breathe free among the malls, tracts and paving. O Man wants those electoral votes in New Mexico, Colorado and Florida in 2012, and he won't get them if he gives up on this "civil liberties" issue which is suddenly so important to him, although this is somewhat contradicted by his recent, remarkable criticisms of the Supreme Court "activisim" of the Earl Warren years. (Say what, Brother Barry?) Yep, that's what he did.

It's hard to tell exactly how many illegal aliens were naturalized as a result of the 1986 act, but one informed guess is around 3 million. The system, if you're old enough to recall, was based on the principle that the longer the illegal had violated U.S. immigration law, the greater the reward. If one could prove in 1986 that one had been bobbing and weaving under the nose of the Feds since at least January 1, 1982, one was good to go. The other major part of the 1986 law concerned penalties for hiring illegals and the introduction of the I-9 form, honored, of course, always more in the breach than the observance. It seems likely that another round of amnesty, if Obama can lead Congress to contrive it, would at least triple the 1986 effect.

As far as I can tell, the only real difference between the provisions of the 1986 law and the Arizona bill is this: private citizens are given the right to sue the police or enforcement authorities for not enforcing the immigration laws. This is a hammer to force enforcement, since this is what is always missing, and since Janet Napolitano (who, as governor of Arizona, vetoed a similar, earlier piece of state legislation) cannot figure out how to keep known terrorist risks on No Fly lists off American commercial airlines, it's a sure bet the Homeland "Security" chief is not going to get this one under control. Anyway, Obama feels the bill is "misguided" in the sense that America gave up enforcing laws in general many years ago, as enhanced under his Eternal Now Statute of Limitations for (a) all high government officials or (b) necessary voting blocs or campaign donors.

Anyway, it's a thoroughly dishonest debate "raging" within the United States, and no "reform" bill will accomplish a damn thing. It would be interesting if Eric Holder is brought up out of his cryogenically frozen state to challenge the Arizona law in federal court, since ultimately such an issue would be heard by the definitely conservative Supreme Court, who, after all, should not be "activist" in overturning the sovereign will of an individual state, since that's the kind of disreputable thing the Warren Court was famous for. Ain't it fun being President, O?