Memo to AG Sheldon Whitehouse on Law Revision Commission

To: Sheldon Whitehouse, Attorney General
From: Henry D. Waldenswimmer, Esq.
Date: January 22, 2009
Subject: Law Revision Commission for United States Code Annotated

Dear Shel:

You've asked my ideas on restoring the U.S. Code to some semblance of order after the havoc worked on it during the Bush Presidency/Republican Congress years. I could not agree more that major work needs to be done. Here are some of my ideas on how to proceed after the Commission completes its initial survey of the principal areas of damage:

1. Repeal any and all post facto exonerations: What a mess those clowns made of the criminal code with their paranoid escape hatches for various war crimes and violations of the Federal Anti-Torture Statute. If they all need to flee to Paraguay like their role models from another era, then let them, but don't disgrace the country with excuses for violating Geneva. Look mainly at the Detainee Treatment Act and the incorporated provision in the Military Commissions Act, with that baloney about torture being okay if done "with the advice of counsel." Now that we know all that "advice" was requested specifically so the Bushies and the Pentagon could ignore federal law and international standards of humane treatment, it isn't worth a plug nickel. (Nota bene: if an act, like waterboarding, was a crime when the act was committed, then repeal of the exoneration clause should restore it to a prosecutable offense without violating the ex post facto clause of the Constitution. You're going to be busy.) And restore habeas corpus for anyone arrested or detained by the United States other than in a declared war.

2. Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security: What next, are we going to call America "Vaterland?" Teach the "Horst Wessel" song in our grade schools? Restore FEMA, the Immigration & Naturalization Service and the Coast Guard to their previous places in the table of operations. Believe it or not, a bloated bureaucracy with new titles is not always the way to improve things. And never refer to this country as the "Homeland" again. It's the United States of America. If that was good enough for Thomas Jefferson, it's good enough for us.

3. Repeal the Patriot Act: Allow the CIA and FBI to share information on domestic surveillance concerning foreign operatives and terrorist plots, as they did not before 9/11. The attacks weren't caused because Americans enjoy civil liberties or check books out of the library; they happened because the Bush Administration was disorganized, negligent and obsessed with attacking Iraq.

4. Repeal the Bankruptcy Code revision: Just put Title 11 back where it was before the Republicans hired banking and credit card lobbyists to rewrite it.

5. Repeal No Child Left Behind: I mean, do I need to say more?

Some things are self-executing, such as allowing all of Bush's tax cuts to expire under their own terms. I guess Tom DeLay and Bush outsmarted themselves after all, passing tax cuts which they could call "permanent" when they wanted to look like champions of small government and "temporary" when they wanted favorable forecasts of future deficits. Who's got the last laugh now, with a Democratic majority of 350-85 in the House and 65-35 in the Senate? All these things are a start, anyway. Tons of deferred maintenance in restoring good governance. It's like moving back into a house and discovering that crack addicts have been using it as a shooting gallery for the last eight years.

Oh, and if you want to lighten your own docket, why doesn't the United States just sign on with International Criminal Court in the Hague? Wouldn't you love to be a fly on the wall when they get news of that?

Bush's Knesset Speech

Just when you think perhaps George W. Bush has absolutely scraped bottom, he gets his dredge out and digs down another hundred feet, as he did in Jerusalem a couple of days ago. This is getting completely embarrassing. And scary as hell.

I was thinking recently about the late great Molly Ivins and her book about Bush, Shrub, which I read in 1999 or so where she concluded, somewhat surprisingly but hopefully, that we would find W "sort of adequate" if he were elected President. Writing as she was before the 2000 election and basing her opinion on Bush's largely ceremonial job as Governor of Texas (the chief executive operations are mostly left to the Lt. Gov in the Lone Star State), Molly extrapolated into a forecast of benign mediocrity for the Midland Miscreant. What I wonder now is how someone of Molly's brilliance and penetrating insight could be so far off.

I would surmise that what she probably left out of account was the effect the job of President would have on Bush. Since he had never previously had access to the kind of power which would be his as President, there was no reliable means of foreseeing that the office itself would serve as a toxic environment or incubator for his strange and grandiose ideas about himself. As time has gone on, as we saw at the Knesset, Bush has gotten progressively crazier and more removed from reality. This mental state, combined with such meager intellectual resources, is a truly frightening combination to contemplate, because in the event of a real national emergency, this would be the guy in charge. We saw what happened on 9/11 and in the aftermath of Katrina. Once a real problem confronted Bush and his overblown image of himself, Bush folded like a lawn chair. What if there were a nuclear attack? Oy vey iz mir.

Bush likes to think of himself as Winston Churchill. This is how far out of hand his schizo-paranoid break from reality has progressed. Comparing Bush to Churchill is like comparing Sergeant Bilko to General Omar Bradley. Apparently there's a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, and if so, Winston must have developed an expression of nauseous despair by now. Elaborating his delusion, Bush likens the proposal of talking to the Iranians as analogous to Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" of Hitler in Munich in 1938. In the first place, I can't think of anything more calculated to give offense to a room full of people who probably to a person number a close relative among those murdered in the Holocaust. You don't throw around analogies to "Hitler" when you're referring to a country which presently lacks any means of projecting decisive military power against either Israel or the United States. Iran does not have nuclear weapons, the National Intelligence Estimate at the end of 2007 stated they are not currently trying to develop them, and an even more recent intelligence report concluded that the Iranian "interference" in Iraq has been greatly overstated.

But in the second place, Chamberlain's "appeasement" had nothing to do with talking to the the Nazis. The Conservative Government in 1938 encouraged the effort. What tarnishes Chamberlain's memory is his conclusion of a non-aggression agreement (the Munich Agreement) with Hitler which acquiesced in Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. At that point, Hitler's military parity with France and Great Britain was obvious and giving him the signal that his ambitions to the East would go unopposed set the stage for the later invasion of Poland. That's appeasement. That's whistling past the graveyard.

On the other hand, engaging in negotiations or talks with a Middle Eastern country that does not yet possess a nuclear weapon in an effort to avoid its development is not appeasement, it's smart. I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon; I don't want any other countries to develop nuclear weapons. I like what South Africa and Libya did, and what some of the former Soviet Socialist States did -- get rid of the things. Each time another country develops nuclear weapons, the danger is not enhanced by simply the percentage increase over the countries which previously were in the "nuclear club." You have also complicated the confrontational permutations among them to a much greater degree than the addition of one country. And when nuclear winter and ozone destruction in the mid-latitudes (as detailed in a recent Univ. of Colorado study) are now imminent dangers from even a small-scale nuclear exchange (50 Hiroshima-sized bombs, prox. 500-750 kilotons, according to that study), we have to pull back from the brink. Everything possible must be done to avoid a nuclear war. If, as Hillary Clinton recently suggested, we "obliterate Iran," it is likely (if we use surface blasts against urban areas) we will obliterate somewhere between 25 and 40% of the ozone in the mid-latitudes worldwide in the Northern Hemisphere for a period of at least five years. In other words, we may obliterate ourselves in the process.

If we don't talk to Iran, Russia and China will. We will simply lose control of the situation and what will happen, will happen. The mindless, adolescent idiocy of Bush in congratulating himself on giving Iran the Silent Treatment, and inflating it into national policy, can't end a minute too soon. We have to endure another 247 days or so of this guy. Keep your fingers crossed.

Bush gives up golf

In a silly interview with Mike Allen of Politico, President Bush explained, apparently for the first time, why he had not played golf since August, 2003. He can remember the precise day, in fact, because his decision was prompted by news that U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Sergio Vieira de Mello had been killed by a truck bomb in Baghdad. This induced a spasm of introspection in our beloved leader:

"I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf," he said. "I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

The usual fly-speckers in the blogosphere and cynical press pointed out some discrepancies in this heart-warming story. First, Bush did not give up playing golf on August 19, 2003. He played on October 13, 2003, again sending the wrong signal to grieving American moms and calling into question the depth of his commitment to solidarity. Between these two events (Bush's epiphany about inappropriate frivolity and his round of golf in October), in September, 2003, Bush announced that he had a torn meniscus in his knee, which the buzzkill press is now suggesting might have been the more proximate and efficient cause of Bush's retirement from the golf course.

It's almost like the sucker lied to us. He didn't give up golf because of America's grieving moms; he gave it up because his knee ached. That's disappointing. I thought it was a pretty good story.

The mainstream media are usually all over this kind of trivia, but I haven't seen anything specifically addressing an important historical sidebar: how have other Presidents handled the problem of playing golf during war time? The Korean War, for example, lasted until the ceasefire agreement of July, 1953, which means for about six months Ike, an enthusiastic golfer, was President. I don't know if Truman played golf and I'm too lazy to look it up. Nixon played golf, sort of, although he looked very klutzy (he also looked very klutzy walking, talking or sitting still). Since the Vietnam War was in progress, at varying levels of intensity during the entire Nixon presidency, he must have played golf concurrently. Why didn't Nixon care about showing solidarity with America's grieving moms? Ike gets a pass because he was the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, which means his solidarity was a given.

Clinton was a golfer, but I don't care about him because he was faking the whole Commander-in-Chief thing from the get-go. No one took him seriously as a war president, and he wasn't too involved in war anyway, except for occasional Monica-timed bombing runs over Iraq, blowing up pharmaceutical factories in the Sudan, and Kosovo, and no one could ever figure out Kosovo because Americans weren't dying, only people whom Bush would describe, speaking English "as best as he could," as Kosovasarians.

Anyway, I think Bush, in his usual modest way, is encouraging us to think of him in Christ-like terms. He's taking it all upon himself. While the war drags on and Americans and Iraqis keep dying, and moms here at home and over there keep grieving, we can all shop with our stimulus checks and let him pay the price for us. That he so loved the grieving moms of America that he gave up his misbegotten game of golf so that they might know they weren't alone.

Torture? How unthinkable...

I remember the time well because I watched Bush's speech on television in the breakfast room of a hotel in Lyon, France. So Bush was talking in September, 2006. He was agitated and forceful, hitting the podium with the flat of his hand as he often does when his innate paranoia is in overdrive. Congress, you see, was running out of time to pass the Military Commissions Act; "high value prisoners" were on their way to Guantanamo from CIA dungeons in (probably) Eastern Europe, and it was essential to have procedures in place which would allow trials to proceed immediately. And incidentally, included in that statute was another blanket pardon for anybody roughing up Arabs in the mistaken belief it was okay to work them over because they were, after all, Arabs, and not some higher form of combatant entitled to the full panoply of protections under the Geneva Conventions like, for example, members of Hitler's SS.

Bush went on to explain how valuable all the "tough procedures" had been in interrupting myriad evil designs against America, and how absolutely wrong it would be to prosecute a dedicated U.S. employee (like the President of the United States, as one example) for doing something in good faith which the Supreme Court sort of implied in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld he couldn't do without...well, committing a war crime under international law and the United States Code Annotated. Time was of the essence, and certainly Bush might face the argument by cynics that what made time so essential was that the Democrats were coming, the Democrats were coming, all as a result of the colossal mind-fuck to which L'il George himself had subjected the country during the previous six years or so. No problem; George can handle that kind of static. He can handle anything as long as his retirement plans don't get messed up.

So George got his pardon and America got its Military Tribunals in Guantanamo, and the years passed and we never actually tried anyone. The high value detainees settled in there at the far eastern end of Cuba, still valuable as propaganda trophies from the Great War on Terror, if nothing else. But eventually, after building a new court house and employing all that staff and making all that political noise, and with even people like Robert Gates and Condi Rice saying we ought to close the frigging place, you have to do something. So they put on trial one of the many Arabs who have been called the "20th hijacker." And here's what happened:

"The US has dropped charges against one of the six al-Qaida suspects charged with the 9/11 attacks, bolstering critics of the controversial military tribunal system set up to try the detainees.

"The Pentagon official in charge of military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay dropped the death penalty case against Mohammed al-Qahtani without explanation. Lawyers for al-Qahtani attributed the move to clear evidence that the detainee was tortured while in US custody.

"Mr al-Qahtani never made a single statement that was not extracted through torture or the threat of torture," the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represented al-Qahtani, said."

Thus reported the Guardian (UK) on May 14, 2008. Naturally, you're as confused as I am, because if there is one thing Mr. Bush has been clear about it's that "the United States does not torcher." If he's said it once (and he has), he's said it a hundred times (and he has).

Now I understand that terrorist suspects are not going to get the red carpet treatment we associate in our minds with an American citizen (other than Jose Padilla) who is accorded the whole drill of Miranda rights, the access to counsel, the advice that he does not need to make any statement at all, and the rest of that Warren Court coddling we've all seen a million times, from Joe Friday to CSI: Miami. But here's what I'm also thinking: this whole procedure is happening down in Cuba, a place chosen for its difficulty of access, a place where the prying eyes of the media never intrude, where the lawyers for the detainees (I was about to say "accused," but that doesn't apply to the vast majority) routinely report, in torrents of affidavits and blogging, that the prisoners are subjected to absolutely horrendous denials of due process; where there are insane rules which prohibit an accused from describing torture to his own lawyer because it's a "state secret;" where a lot of the evidence is anonymous hearsay which the lawyer cannot challenge because the attorney doesn't know who said it and under what circumstances (like torture) the statement was made. And that's if the lawyer and accused are even allowed to know about the evidence.

So if that's the context (and it is, in the main), what kind of brutality must have gone on with al-Qahtani to cause an American military commission to throw out a case against a "9/11 co-conspirator"? To conclude that the whole case was so tainted with coercion and violations of fair judicial process that they couldn't try an Arab in Cuba in front of the military brass? Despite Mr. Bush's assurances, is it just barely possible that the United States does, in fact, commit torcher?

Bush and the Neocontractors

"Now, you’ve heard the nonsense which is out there which suggests that Israel or the Jewish community or the Israel lobby pushed this war on the administration. And I can tell you it is nonsense, because there was not one Israeli official and not one Israeli academic who suggested that this war was going to end well. They all warned against exactly the problems we have experienced since this war started…" Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, commenting on Bush's "reengagement" with the Mideast peace process.

Suppose our bold, let-History-be-my-judge President bought a building site adjacent to a steep upslope, a mountain really, and was advised that he ought to do something about the drainage problem he'll encounter when the rainy season comes. One simple idea is to build a culvert which will catch the runoff and divert it to a downslope canal. Bush considers the problem, listens to the solutions proposed by his father, who once dealt with a similar issue, then rejects all such ideas in favor of his own master stroke. Working with a construction outfit called the Neocontractors, who believe in taking preemptive action against a drainage problem which lurks, Bush decides he will simply level the entire mountain. While it's true that neither solution was going to be cheap, the culvert would have cost about $1 billion while the mountain-removal solution will eventually cost $3 trillion, plus thousands of lives lost in the dangerous operation.

In essence this is what our visionary President has done in the Middle East. Try to recall, in the dim recesses of the past, the Road Map. This was something begun so long ago that Secretary of State Colin Powell, he of the phantom poison gas double-wides, worked on it. Waaaaaaaay back. Everyone from Osama bin Laden to William Kristol thinks that peace between Israel and Palestine is the key, the linchpin, to stability in the region. It was so obvious that even Bush saw it. For a little while. Then, like a cat diverted by another shiny, swinging object, Bush decided to invade Iraq instead.

Counseled by a group of complete fools like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby, within the Administration, and urged on by a coterie of journalist-cheerleaders like Judith Miller, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol and Tom Friedman, Bush decided to level the mountain. Using the U.S. military as his backhoe, Bush would invade every single Middle Eastern trouble-making country and force them to become pro-U.S., pro-Israel democracies. Bush was appalled that the rest of us could not see the simple beauty of his plan.

I have a theory about the Neocon journalist-cheerleaders like Kristol and Friedman, and it runs this way. It's a form of survivor guilt. It seems so much more sensible to embroil the Middle East in a war, or a bunch of wars, to ensure Israel's safety if you are promoting those wars from the safety of your Manhattan East Side brownstone, or your Maryland mansion, than it does if you are living in Tel Aviv. They're "concerned" about Israel but they sure as hell don't want to live there. They've got it made here. If you live in Israel, then you must contemplate another effect of an unprovoked invasion, as Ambassador Kurtzer, and many other Israeli commentators (such as Gershom Gorenberg & Haim Watzman in their valuable "South Jerusalem" blog) have pointed out. Neighboring Jordan, once relatively stable, is now overflowing with Iraqi refugees from Bush's stupid war. In effect Bush has created another Gaza Strip, this time to the east, and it was Bush's gross incompetence which led to the installation of Hamas as the Gaza leadership. Lebanon has descended once again into a hell of ethnic and religious factionalism, and Iran, which everyone considers Israel's ultimate arch-nemesis, now exercises hegemonic influence over the entire region, including the "democratically elected" government in Iraq. When Bush screws up, man - the guy simply has no peer.

For all these reasons and others, Kurtzer has become a supporter and adviser to Barack Obama, the one candidate who stops with the war shtick already and proposes that diplomacy become the dominant approach to the region. Let Gorenberg and Watzman take it on out:

"The one candidate who speaks in clear terms of taking a new approach to the Mideast is Obama. This is what scares the small coterie of American Jewish rightists who would eagerly fight to the last Israeli. If you care about Israel, you should hit 'delete' when you get their emails.

"Obama is the one candidate who had the sense to oppose the war in Iraq. He’s the one candidate whose statement on Israel expresses support for a two-state solution, which is the country’s path to peaceful future and is today the consensus position in Israel. He’s the one proposing a clear break from the disastrous Bush policies, and a turn to trying diplomacy."

Hillary Clinton's Plausible End Game

Today I would imagine we will be witness to the demoralizing spectacle of a racist uprising in West Virginia orchestrated by the former First Lady and wife of America's "first black president." So be it. If for no other reason (and I have other good reasons), I favor the nomination of Barack Obama because it will hold a mirror up to American society and force it to confront the issue of racism in an inescapable way. Win or lose, the analysis of his run for the Presidency will tell us a lot about who we are, how far we have actually come from the era of slavery, how much we really believe in this concept of equal protection under the law. If Americans are voting against Barack Obama because and only because his father was African-American, then let's get that out in the open so it will be visible from orbiting satellites. Let's just frigging face it. No more crap about Reverend Wright and other irrelevancies, this idea of "guilt by association" which has been applied in a systematic way for the first and and only time in American electoral history. It is racist McCarthyism and we know it.

Apologists for a racist vote will talk about Barack's "inexperience," which is a neat and ironic dodge under the circumstances. Everyone seems to recognize that the longer a politician spends in Washington, the more corrupt and compromised, the more estranged from the concerns of ordinary Americans, that politician becomes. John McCain and Hillary Clinton are two absolutely prime examples of this degenerative process. They have been so pretzeled by their years in D.C. that they can't tell if they really believe in anything at all anymore, so that, for example, they can simultaneously bemoan the lack of responsiveness of the federal government to global warming and yet propose a gas tax holiday to promote greater CO2 emissions.

"Saturday Night Live" did a completely hilarious send-up of Hillary Clinton's campaign a few nights ago. Amy Poehler's impersonation hit every essential point: her base is racist and she appeals directly to the racism of "white working class voters" (formerly known as the Nixon Southern Strategy); she'll do and say anything; and she has no ethical standards.

When the Clintons left the White House, they took a lot of property with them which had been donated to the National Park Service as part of its refurbishing of the White House in 1993. Eventually, they reimbursed the government about $86,000 (the Georgetown- and Yale-educated lawyers mistakenly thought all this stuff represented "personal gifts" and not donations to the national treasury) and returned the government's furnishings -- lamps, sofas, area rugs, chairs, dining table, all of which had been shipped to their new home in New York, where Hillary was setting up camp in order to become an authentic New Yorker. In a sense, they were lucky it was handled this way -- as a civil matter, I mean. Since we all own the White House, another way of looking at the situation would be to say that tenants to whom we leased the place took all our stuff when they left. You know, -- burglary. This is an insight into the essential venality of these two. It didn't surprise me at all that Bill Clinton made as much money as he did in those years after the White House, nor that he was always strangely accommodating of George W. Bush's systematic destruction of the U.S. Constitution. When did you ever hear Bill go into one of his red-faced tirades about any of that? Quite the contrary, he became George Sr. and Jr.'s new best friend, because that's where the power was, and whither the power goeth, the money followeth.

So here's the deal. Sec. 441, subsection (j) of the Federal Election Laws, as amended in 2002. "Limitation on Repayment of Personal Loans. Any candidate who incurs personal loans after the effective date of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 in connection with the candidate's campaign for election shall not repay (directly or indirectly), to the extent such loans exceed $250,000, such loans from any contributions made to such candidate or any authorized committee of such candidate after the date of such election."

You can see Hillary's delicate dance here. She's got $11 million in the pot. If she folds her hand now, that's it. Her campaign is already $20 million down; I don't know exactly what the rules are on preferential payments to Hillary versus vendor/creditors (if she can pay herself first, she will, of course), but this is a very dicey situation. She's unlikely to get any of that $11 mil back. However, if she gives the appearance of campaigning all the way to the convention (the "election," in the above subsection), she might be able to raise more than she spends. She could buy some token ads, cut her staff to the bone, stay at the Holiday Inn instead of the Four Seasons, and build a surplus she can use to repay herself from the campaign. I think she counted on a big win in Indiana and maybe a surprise in North Carolina to resuscitate her run, but that didn't happen and she doubled down on an already bad bet.

Ah, if only those goodhearted Appalachian folks in West Virginia could surprise us today. Confound the prognosticators. Drive a stake through this invidious Clinton campaign. It would be, I don't know -- Almost Heaven.

Paul Krugman Joins Peak Oil Cult

It's interesting to see that Paul Krugman, ace economist of the New York Times opinion pages, has lent his stately name to the Peak Oil Theorists. For those not already intimately familiar with this concept, "peak oil" (or Peak Oil) is that theory that holds that a moment comes when the practically accessible supply of crude oil is 50% depleted. It can happen in a country, as it did in the United States in about 1971. Or-- and here's the Big Oily Enchilada --it can happen in the world. After peak, the world's supply becomes progressively more difficult to recover. Maybe it happened in 2006; maybe this year; maybe 2011, but soon, and for the rest of your life. Peak Oil guys should be forgiven their current delirium at their new-found credibility; after all, they have often been treated with the same disdain as those claiming to have been proctologically examined in an alien saucer.

No, with oil currently cresting at $125/barrel, up from $20/barrel only seven years ago (coinciding with the start of the Bush years), their heyday has arrived. They even have a society for true believers, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO - although I think they should take two letters for Association (As) and add "Theory" to the acronym, so you get ASSPOT - more colorful). ASPO meets on a regular basis and wallows joyfully in the bad news - we're running out of oil! Their arch-nemeses are the Cornucopian nut jobs, like the late Julian Simon, who advance such ideas as the "creamy nougat" center of the Earth, that we sit atop a vast ocean of oil just beneath - well, way beneath - the surface. If I remember my geometry right, Earth ought to have a diameter of about 8,000 miles, so if we can learn to drill down on a radius of 4,000 miles we can reach any interior point beneath the surface. I've never quite understood how Cornucopians could logically posit the infinite supply of anything on what is, after all, a finite planet. It seems to violate one of those Basic Laws. The Basic Law of Reason, perhaps.

I don't have any geological reports lying about my house, so I lack an independent basis for judging. Peak Oil Theorists (POT Smokers?) and conservatives, as Krugman points out, are at loggerheads over the issue. Conservatives want to argue that their beloved free market system is being gamed by speculators, who ordinarily would be among their Robber Baron heroes. The whole idea of being a modern Conservative is that you get to cheat while receiving the adulation of a meretricious society. As long as you wear a flag lapel pin, as I've said before, you can bet against the dollar, hope homeowners are thrown out on the street so your short-play on the subprime market works, and still be considered more patriotic than a guy like Barack Obama, who, after all, is named Barack Obama. That's because this country is really, really stupid and superficial.

I think I'm digressing. So the conservatives want, nay need, to believe there's plenty of oil and it's just those guys with the goatees and head scarves who are incomprehensibly refusing to pump it out of their "elephant" fields (another swell ASPO term), along with the aforementioned greed-heads who are buying commodities futures on NYMEX. The ingratitude! We sold the Arabs fancy radar planes, we let them buy our banks -- where's the frigging oil, Abdullah? But is the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia still an elephant? Is it more rhino size now? ASSPOTS have wet dreams in which they see the Ghawar sputtering, crashing (their preferred term), as the Saudis furiously (and clandestinely) pump vast amounts of seawater into the wells to force the remaining dregs out. Bush, siding of course with the Conservatives, as always, as he is congenitally programmed, does what he can to importune the Saudis to pump more oil - hugging them, kissing them, holding hands with eighty year old men wearing bath robes -- begging them. Still, they won't pump more.

Because they can't pump more? ASSPOTS, you see, have a vested interest in the total failure and breakdown of a car-glutted society, with its mindless salients of suburban cracker box houses, its mini-malls, its chain motels, its fast food joints. You know -- America. For the ASSPOTS, oil shortages represent the tool, the wedge with which they'll pry this mess apart. It is why an ASSPOT such as the Clusterfuck Man, Jim Kunstler, impatiently dismisses any talk of a substitute form of independent travel, such as an electric car, even though the Israelis are in the process of building an electric grid based on renewable energy to power just such a system. The whole thing needs to fall apart.

And for the Conservatives: the whole thing needs to hold together, because they are making so much money. The super wealthy financial manipulators want oil to be expensive, because it's another place to make money; but not so expensive that the system begins to break down. They can't believe that members of their own tribe would be so selfish as to subject ordinary Americans to an unsustainable burden, just to get rich faster. The Conservatives think just like the Saudis -- the American consumer needs to have the life squeezed out of him slowly, gradually, occasionally allowing him to breathe through a price reprieve. Sort of like a boa constrictor working on his evening's supper.

America's Lousy Greendex

More good news from James Hansen, America's foremost climatologist:

"Our conclusion is that, if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, CO2 must be reduced from its present 385 ppm (parts per million) to, at most, 350 ppm. "

Thus, from an upcoming issue of Science magazine. I think Mr. Hansen, that valiant scientist who has managed to sound the alarm despite all the helpful editing from Bush Administration lawyers like Philip Cooney who, while lacking any scientific training, have learned enough from dealing in unrelated fields like securities law to blur the impact of any otherwise clear communication. We keep getting reminded that we've blown eight years, and in the years to come names like George W. Bush, Cooney and Senator James Inhofe, that Tulsa business school-educated climatologist, will live in infamy because of their obstruction.

But I believe James Hansen has found just the right formulation of the problem to reach all sectors of society with the essential issue we face. It's not really a matter of whether human beings, as a tribe or species, will survive at all if CO2 concentrations keep climbing beyond the present 385 ppm. The point is that civilization in its present configuration depends on a certain set of favorable conditions, including fairly predictable air temperatures, rainfall patterns, an ocean capable of absorbing excess CO2 (not acid saturated as it is now), a functional Gulf Stream and other features of the not-too-distant past. We're now moving past the various tipping points, such as Arctic melting which exposes dark seawater to solar radiation, massive marine die-off, the thawing of trapped methane in tundra areas, and other unhealthy trends. If we want to avoid the worst effects and restore a semblance of the previous favorable mise-en-scene (no accent grave available; je suis desole - no accent agout either; oops, no circumflex accent either; what's up with Microsoft Word, anyway?), we need to reverse the pattern of CO2 increase and move back down to 350 ppm. This level is already 70 ppm over pre-Industrial levels, but 'tis good enough, 'twill serve.

National Geographic has conducted a "Greendex" survey among industrialized countries to determine which of the peoples of the Earth practice the most eco-friendly behavior patterns and leave the smallest carbon footprint. You can take the test individually, too, at http://event.nationalgeographic.com/greendex/. America scored dead last among the 14 countries surveyed, with a score in the 44 range, versus countries like Brazil which are very environmentally conscious. Naturally, it's one of our psychological displacement strategies to go on and on about rain forests in Brazil and pride ourselves on not building an entire house out of Brazilian rosewood, for example, while ignoring simpler issues like not eating so damn much meat. Brazil scores upwards of 55 on the test, but we also lag behind China and India because of our wastrel ways. I scored 57 and I'm really doing a lot of things wrong. In general, all this country would need to do is to get serious about train transportation, place-specific photovoltaics, plug-in electric cars, the cessation of all discretionary airplane travel, and mass development of renewable energy (wind power and photovoltaic desert arrays) and we'd be the best in the world. I mean, that wasn't so hard, was it?

Meanwhile, I pass along the noble effort of Bill McKibben to raise public consciousness of James Hansen's warning with his 350.org.

Triangulating Financial Armageddon

"Cross your fingers, knock on wood: it’s possible, though by no means certain, that the worst of the financial crisis is over. That’s the good news...[however] if we don’t fix the system now, there’s every reason to believe that the next crisis will be bigger still — and that the Fed won’t have enough duct tape to hold things together." Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times, May 5, 2008.

"The U.S. economy is in an intensifying inflationary recession that eventually will evolve into a hyperinflationary great depression. Hyperinflation could be experienced as early as 2010, if not before, and likely no more than a decade down the road. The U.S. government and Federal Reserve already have committed the system to this course through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, and gross mismanagement...The U.S. has no way of avoiding a financial Armageddon. Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover their obligations. The alternative would be for the U.S. to renege on its existing debt and obligations, a solution for modern sovereign states rarely seen outside of governments overthrown in revolution, and a solution with no happier ending than simply printing the needed money. With the creation of massive amounts of new fiat (not backed by gold) dollars will come the eventual complete collapse of the value of the U.S. dollar and related dollar-denominated paper assets." John Williams writing in his "Shadow Statistics" newsletter.

Maybe the reason that such disparate statements of essentially the same problem can exist side by side, one in the highly-modulated, business-as-usual language of an Establishment economist, Paul Krugman; and the other in the inflammatory, sky-is-falling style of a maverick outsider (Williams), owes to the hallucinatory nature of the subject in question. That is, to the unreal basis of the American monetary system. This seems to be Williams's underlying thesis; once the United States abandoned the gold standard under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the fiat system provided an open invitation to the federal government to monetize its way out of all difficulties. As the national debt exploded; as foreign sovereign wealth funds acquired huge stakes in debt instruments such as T-bills; as the trade deficits incurred through mass importations of oil and foreign-manufactured goods ranged out of control, the United States has been left only with the option of default on its internal (Social Security & Medicare) and external (obligations to domestic and foreign bond holders) debts, or running the printing presses full time to create the cash to handle its finances. It is Williams's contention, of course, that the second option leads inexorably to Weimar-style runaway inflation where the dollar becomes essentially worthless.

A precipitating event for financial meltdown could be the decision by a critical mass of foreign governments to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency. In essence, this would break the trance of the dollar's dominance, and the U.S. would experience the collapse presaged by Germany in the 1920's and Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Certainly it's difficult to argue that the preconditions are not already here. The government publishes an artificially low inflation rate in order to keep Social Security CPI increases within the realm of plausibility, but this masks the reality that the inflation-adjusted GNP is already in recession and has been for about two years. It stopped publishing the M-3 money supply figures in 2006 to hide the 17% annual increase in newly-printed cash, a figure which far exceeds any increase rationally based on growth in the GNP. Basic expenses, such as fuel, are becoming unaffordable in large part because the pricing of oil is in a currency (the dollar) which is rapidly losing its value. Airlines are going out of business because fuel is too expensive. Independent truckers can't afford long-haul routes. Residential foreclosures are at an all-time high rate. We lose sight, often, of how extraordinary all these changes are, and attribute them to a "cyclical" problem that will simply resolve as all recessions have before it. I can't tell if Krugman is saying that needed "reforms" in U.S. financial regulation could right the ship and avoid a catastrophe. It may be that he is, but he isn't very insistent. His reluctance reminds me of an old cartoon I saw long ago which stands in for a lot of things that would take too much time. Two archaeologists are standing by the exposed tip of a pyramid, shovels in hand. One says to the other: "What do you say we cover the whole thing up and just forget about it?"

Yet Krugman's approach dominates in discussions of the problem because it is "reasonable." The preference is for worldwide collusion in the faith that all is actually okay with the doughty greenback. To undermine the dollar is seen as some sort of global financial Jonestown; why would the Chinese, and the Russians, and the Saudis want to bring the house down around their own ears by destroying the American economy and its workhorse consumers?

I think that's probably how it always works. It accounts for the reluctance of many Jews in Germany to leave even after passage of the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht. For the French and Russian aristocrats to await their fate in 1789 and 1917. The psychology of inertia lulls us into a complacent belief that even if obvious calculations show no way out, we will cling to an irrational belief in the survivability of the status quo, and, as part of our unconscious defense of that very irrationality, will shout down those who refuse to express fealty to the same delusion.

As Other Options Close, Hillary Seeks Elimination of Basic Laws of Mathematics

Indianapolis (AP) - Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) admitted to some concern today about her deteriorating chances for overtaking Barack Obama, although her face appeared calm and relaxed as she announced her latest initiative (insiders, speaking on condition of anonymity because Hillary would kill them if she found out, indicated that she is no longer able to move any muscle group above her neck). Mrs. Clinton indicated that in light of the uselessness of even the "nuclear option" (her previously preferred route of cheating by including the votes of Michigan and Florida, despite an explicit agreement to forgo their inclusion), she would seek the repeal of the basic laws of mathematics.

"Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division need to go first," she said, referring to the four basic math operations. "I represent the American people, not a bunch of egghead professors or elitists who use 'theories' and 'concepts.' My campaign is about kitchen table issues that affect real folks, and if that means championing them instead of a bunch of dead Greeks and Arabs, then so be it."

Academics in the mathematical fields were stunned. "We need math," said Dr. Samuel Linworth, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Pasadena's Cal Tech. "Without it, it's really hard to do something like count or keep track of anything. I don't think we could have gotten to the moon without calculating stuff."

Other professionals who rely on math concurred. "I think it's a bad idea," said Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. "If we can't count, then we don't even know how much money we have or whether we need more."

Senator Clinton was unmoved by these criticisms, which she deemed "the usual sniping from the groves of academe." "I'm not in this thing to make life nicer for those who already have so much, who have money they have the luxury of counting. The people counting on me to take this thing all the way to the White House aren't concerned with stuff like 'sums' or 'difference' or, God knows, 'subtrahends.'"

Even Bill Clinton seemed perplexed by his wife's sudden decision to eliminate arithmetic, but he quickly recovered and rallied to her defense. "What the folks in the media just don't get is how much my wife wants to serve this country, and how determined she is to win this thing for the people. If that means doing away with counting delegates, or counting anything else, for that matter, then so be it. It's just a good ol' fashioned fight to the finish."

Political observers said that Clinton's novel approach to winning the nomination would leave the Democrats at the convention in August unable to tell who won. Hillary had a quick rejoinder to this criticism: "Then I win," she said. It also promised to alleviate her campaign's mounting financial difficulties.

"No one can say I owe them money," she crowed. "Let 'em try. I'll just say, 'how much?'."

Hillary, Leader of the Know-Nothing Wing of Her Party

It's distressing to see Hillary Clinton, as part of her maniacal quest to seize the nomination at any cost, descend to the level of anti-intellectualism. She's a very bright woman, yet when confronted with the true consensus that practically no reputable economist in America thinks her gas-tax holiday scheme makes any sense, she retreated into a dumb vs. smart routine, deciding to cast her lot with dumb people. All the economists in the country, including Paul Krugman (who obviously was trying to develop a crush on her), were suddenly "elitists" who just didn't care about the plight of the ordinary American the way she does. Anyway, her plan was not like that stupid, identical idea of John McCain. She was going to tax the oil companies to make up for the lost tax revenue because of their "windfall" profits.

Ah yes, the windfall profits. The windfall, of course, refers to the astonishing profits companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron have posted over the last few years. While my own populist sympathies would like to buy into this idea, I'm not sure it's correct to do so. Now I'm sure there have been price gouging, manipulated supply and other ploys from the monopolistic bag of tricks which have marginally boosted Big Oil's profits; yet the larger picture suggests that American oil companies, the remaining cohort of the once majestic Seven Sisters, are kind of hanging on for dear life and making hay while the sun shines and the oil flows. American oil companies now control about 7% of the world's known reserves. Far, far larger and more powerful than ExxonMobil & Co. are the state-owned oil companies like Gazprom in Russia, Saudi Arabia's Aramco and Mexico's Pemex. The day of the great American "concessions" in the Middle East and elsewhere are over, that halcyon period when Standard Oil and British Petroleum carved up the stupendous fields in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf States and paid the owners of the sand dunes a stipend to take away the petroleum underneath.

The big American oil companies are just buyers on the market, and they're paying a ton for the raw product. If they hold their profits at a steady 8-9%, of course the numbers swell simply because of the high price of gasoline, which in turn is attributable to the $120+ price they are now paying for light sweet crude. If you sell a billion dollars worth of gasoline at 8% profit, you make $80 million. If you sell the same quantity of gasoline at a higher price and gross $2 billion, your profit goes to $160 million. But the underlying price is set by a different group of gouging monopolists, OPEC and other national oil companies, who are concerned that peak oil has arrived and that from here on out, they are going to be selling dwindling amounts of their "patrimony," as GWB calls it, probably without knowing what the word actually means. So is Hillary suggesting that Exxon lower its profit margin because it doesn't need all that money? What is she, a Communist who happened to make $109 million over the last 7 years? Whye doesn't Bill cut his hourly rate on his speeches to the Colombia free trade people?

Trying to get our mitts on Iraq's patrimony, in fact, is why Bush won't commit, now or ever, to leaving Iraq, and probably explains the otherwise unexplained reluctance of the Democratically-controlled Congress to stop funding the war (indeed, they're about to shovel out another $200 billion or so to keep it going well into the next presidency). What is always going behind the scenes in Iraq, behind the exploding buildings and the heads rolling in the gutters of Sadr City, behind the rockets landing in the Green Zone and the firefights between militias, is that simple, immutable fact of commerce: America's oil companies are trying to work out the terms of extracting all that precious Iraqi oil from those virgin fields. It's our one oily ace in the hole. What a bonanza! And all those oppressed Democratic voters in Indiana, worrying how to fill up that 8,000 lb. Yukon Denali to get the kids to the soccer game in Terre Haute at an affordable price: help could be on the way! If we don't cut and run from Iraq, that is, before we check the last box on Freedom's Agenda, that freedom being ours to fill the 20-gal. tank in the Escalade for less than a C note.

After all we've been through in Iraq, we kind of owe it to ourselves. You think that little orangutan in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, is going to cut us any slack on selling his stuff to us? Iran won't even deal with us; their new best friends are China and Russia. Mexico's Cantarell field is sputtering out. We've got to have Iraqi oil, the second known largest reserves in the world, and mostly untouched. Our whole lifestyle depends on it! And we've earned it, dammit, we've blown a whole country apart, turned Iraq over to Iranian sympathizers, destroyed our reputation in the eyes of the world, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and a lot of Americans too, but like a crazed junkie with an empty needle and pupils swelling wide, we see that oil and we know we've just got to have it.

That's all I'm saying, Hillary. Step back and let Exxon and Chevron feed the monkey. Don't start messing with the pusher-man, and keep the street price up where it belongs.

Hillary's obliteration of Iran

"The Lord's my shepherd
says the Psalm,
but just in case...
we better get a bomb."
-- Tom Lehrer, "Who's Next?"

The new rules of sound-bite campaigning require a candidate to answer all questions which pertain to war with responses that meet two criteria: (1) They must sound decisive when replayed, and (2) they must be blood-drenched and Neanderthal. Anything else just doesn't sound American enough.

By this standard Hillary Clinton's promise to obliterate Iran if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel was clearly appropriate. A few muted bleats were heard from Iranians, who objected to a suggestion that 75 million people should be vaporized without at least a more nuanced discussion of the point. This is a silly cavil; the whole point of campaigning is that it doesn't allow any kind of nuanced discussion. Barack Obama tried that with his "we would respond appropriately" stuff. Barry, Barry. You just don't get it.

There are, to be sure, nuances to the subject. For example, I would be willing to bet, and have so wagered in saloons and other gaming establishments, that Israel would not need our help. Israel has on hair-trigger alert "The Samson Option," which has been described at great length by Seymour Hersh in his book of the same name and by Israeli historian Avner Cohen. (Samson, rather than endure humiliation at the hands of his Philistine captors, yanked on his chains and pulled the whole temple down on himself and thousands of his tormentors.) Some estimates of Israel's nuclear arsenal run as high as 400 nuclear weapons, which can be delivered by bomber, submarine and Jericho missile. No country with a rudimentary nuclear capacity could possibly disable an Israeli retaliatory strike, meaning: Israel would obliterate Iran. And could they do this with thermonuclear weapons? One must tread delicately here to avoid cultural stereotyping, but what do you think? Hint: of the Nobel Prizes for Physics, 47 have been received by scientists of Jewish ancestry, including Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Max Born, Richard Feynman, and Emilio Segre, and this does not include non-Prize winners Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the Manhattan Project, and Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb.

Further, while I'm plunking down good money on the bar, I would bet the following: the Israeli government's arsenal of nuclear weapons is superior to that of the United States, in terms of accuracy and speed of deployment. Why do I surmise this? Because they have to be. Let's face it, for all its vaunted power and self-adulation, the USA has an amazing capacity for building things that don't work. Recall the performance of the Patriot missile during Gulf War I. These missiles constituted our "fail-safe" umbrella over Israel and Saudi Arabia against Saddam's rickety old Scud missiles. The Pentagon claimed at the time that the Patriots were "94% successful." This was successively scaled down until the General Accounting Office admitted the "success rate" was probably 9%. The Israeli Defense Force estimated the rate at 2%; indeed, in one incident in Tel Aviv, 3 Patriots misfired, fell back to earth and destroyed 4,156 apartments, killing one Israeli and injuring 44. The IDF tactfully suggested that less damage would have been done to Israel if the Scuds had simply been allowed to land where they would, but thanks, you meant well, and mazeltov on your missile system.

Thus, if you were an Israeli strategic planner, how much would you rely on the USA as your main line of deterrence? For all its fulminating, the USA remains a country whose president made a paper airplane out of a specific, written threat of a terrorist attack a month before it happened. I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would have done a much better job than that, but Israel is not counting on America to dissuade Iran from nuclear attack. And as for Iran, one must wonder what suicidal notion would have to seize the leadership before it patched together an A-bomb and wheeled it over to Israel to explode.

"Nuclear opacity" is the official name for deniability in Israel. Hillary is following their lead in assuming a maternal role in deterring Iran. The ayatollah, meanwhile, knows what the real score is.

Time to start holding our breath...

It's May now, and January, 2009, seems to be coming slowly into view around that far bend. It's a nervous time. I can think of historical antecedents -- concentration camp prisoners in Eastern Europe in March, 1945, waiting for the arrival of the Allies. Will they get here before the SS turn their guns on us? Dare we hope?

I think we've been very lucky since January, 2001, that an authentic crisis never faced the United States during W's shaky tenure as head of state. I'm aware of what happened on September 11, 2001, of course; it's not as if the President would ever let anyone forget. I'm thinking of a truly dangerous situation, one involving nuclear weapons, the kind of Cold War scenario depicted in "Dr. Strangelove." My mind recoils from picturing George W. Bush presiding over such a crisis. There is no doubt that he fell completely apart in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; he froze up, panicked, fled the scene aboard Air Force One. He didn't know what to do.

He didn't know what to do before it happened, either. Americans should be proud of the job their intelligence agencies did before the jets were hijacked and crashed into buildings. The CIA was on to al-Qaeda; its plot was part of the CIA's daily briefing to the new president in August, 2001, when Bush had already been on the job for about seven months. The FBI was piecing together the basic plot lines by observing what was going on with young Arabs taking strangely abbreviated courses in piloting jumbo jets in midflight. A smart, diligent, coherent president would have used that month's lead time to coordinate his intelligence services. Reading a headline like "Al-Qaeda Determined to Strike Within U.S.," Bush would have wanted to know every last piece of evidence and data supporting this conclusion; that is, he would have followed it up if he had been serious about his job.

Bush choked; it's that simple. Both before and after 9/11. I was thinking about that while leafing through Herman Kahn's "On Thermonuclear War" recently. One of the pleasures of living near a University of California library, and paying that yearly alumni fee, is that I can delve into the enormous repository of information in those endless stacks of books. Kahn, of course, was the prototype for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," brought to life in Peter Sellers's masterful portrayal of the crazy genius of the apocalypse. Kahn, in reality, wasn't crazy or bloodthirsty; he was simply thinking about things other people didn't want to think about: what happens after a thermonuclear war? Is that it? Will the living envy the dead? Kahn did in fact (as George C. Scott, in a another unforgettable performance as General Buck Turgidson, recreates) present a chart showing "regrettable, but nevertheless distinguishable, post-war environments, one in which you've got 20 million people killed and another in which you've got 150 million people killed." Kahn was mordantly witty about some of the heat he took; in a later preface to the original 1960 book, he wrote that his critics almost made it sound as if a nuclear war was something Kahn found "desirable." Reportedly, he asked Stanley Kubrick for royalties from the wildly successful movie ("that's not the way it works, Herman," is what Kubrick allegedly answered). In his chart, actually called "Tragic But Distinguishable Postwar States," Kahn estimated that full economic recovery from a thermonuclear attack in which 2 million Americans were killed would take about one year. Compare this to 9/11, in which about 3,000 Americans were killed without any radioactive fallout, and the mediocre American economy wobbled back to its pre-attack state in relatively short order. Very, very sad, if you were one of those killed, or if you loved one of those who died. The attack has no other significance. The World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, and with nothing special done for the next eight years, it didn't happen again until Bush decided to ignore the threat, which is what he accused Clinton of doing with respect to the 1993 attack and the bombing of the Cole. Then the same building was attacked again, and Bush, with way, way too much enthusiasm, proclaimed that America had found "its mission and its moment." Well, he did, anway. He would ride that hobby horse all the way to Kabul and Baghdad, without making the slightest dent in the "existential" threat of terrorism. The great irony is that terrorism, by its very nature, is so random and unpredictable that a free society will never eradicate it; but Bush was presented with an incipient plot which was so gaudy and elaborate that it could have been predicted and stopped. He was just absolutely the wrong guy to do it.

Herman Kahn wrote about a very serious problem, the most serious problem humans have yet devised for themselves. Then the Cold War ended and for awhile, at least, we have breathed a little more easily, thinking that at least the two behemoths of nuclear holocaust, the U.S. and Russia, are not going to do anything suicidal. Terrorism, meanwhile, will continue as the byproduct of economic disparity, religious intolerance and the general cussedness in the human heart. George W. Bush can play in his Arab sand boxes all he wants and it won't change that. He's been doing it for nearly two terms in office. Spending vast amounts of money, getting more Americans killed to pile on top of the dead from 9/11, of course, but not engaged in any sort of serious endeavor. The war on terror is a hoax. Something like 8 months to go, and then perhaps an adult can take charge. We've really been pressing our luck.

El derecho de vuelta

I suppose it's because of a spasm of nostalgia that has seized me in the wake of the creation of an alumni website for my high school, but I've been giving more thought to this curious phenomenon of "shifting frames" which confounds our ability to comprehend contemporary reality in, well..., real terms. I think I will call this effect "age parallax" because it's kind of cool to create a term and it sounds erudite as all hell, don't you think? Parallax: "Simply put, it is the apparent shift of an object against the background that is caused by a change in the observer's position. The term is derived from the Greek παραλλαγή (parallagé), meaning alteration".

So, sifting around in old pictures of elementary school classes, in a Northern California suburb where I lived in the 1950s, I found one of a fourth grade class circa 1958. There was nothing special about the subdivision where I grew up, nothing special about the school, nor the weather, nor anything at all, really. It was one of those places thrown up during the post-War building boom on land "reclaimed" from San Francisco Bay (filled in, in other words), and the houses were stuffed up with families as fast as the homes could be tacked together. There was no history or lore associated with this subdivision, laid out on a wavy grid of dog-legged streets, nothing like the colorful associations of old neighborhoods on the East Coast. They were utilitarian and abstract, as opposed to organic. It's special in our memories only because it's where we came of age.

So in that picture there are 30 students, boys and girls. Every single student is white, the teacher is white and matronly, and everyone looks clean and presentable, in that Eisenhower Era way. Looking for a picture of the school on the Internet, to post on the alumni site, I found instead a description of all schools in the city, including demographic composition. For my old elementary school, I found the following. The school is now 12% white, 5% black, 5% Asian/Chinese, a smattering of South Seas (Tongan, Samoan, mainly)...and 65% Hispanic. This shouldn't be that surprising, really. California is about 40% Hispanic/Latino, and those are just the official numbers. My old neighborhood represents a good entrance-level domicile for immigrants, as perhaps the Lower East Side of Manhattan did in another era. It's down at heels now, the curbs crowded with cars, comprised of houses that probably had a useful life of 50 years when they were built and have now been around more than 60. Much of California was built that way, including vast tracts of older Southern California neighborhoods, constructed only to endure the mild California winters, light wood frame construction, asphalt shingle roofs -- it all starts going to hell after a few decades, but it starts becoming "affordable," in the California sense, as a kind of makeshift low income housing.

It behooves us Anglos to remember that America, as a First World nation, is unique in sharing such a long, essentially unguarded border with a Third World country. Look around the globe; you won't find many comparable situations. And unlike the tribal grounds of the Native Americans, whom we mostly exterminated with disease and war, the land we stole from its Mexican owners (who in turn had displaced the California Indians) remains adjacent to a large population of the relatives of the Californios, the people we stole it from. Such luminaries as Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams and Henry David Thoreau (remember his night in jail?) protested the war with Mexico as an unjustified war of aggression, carried out under the fig leaf of Manifest Destiny, whatever the hell that means. It began with the Texas rebellion, supported by Southerners who wanted another slave state to add to their side. There's the glory of the Alamo for you. It then opportunistically spread, about a decade later, to California and the rest of the Southwest, and the United States, at long last, stretched from sea to shining sea.

It would appear that our Mexican neighbors have been exercising a kind of ad hoc derecho de vuelta - a "right of return." No one knows how many Hispanics are actually in California illegally. In a way it doesn't matter, because they're not going anywhere. They're an integral part of life in the Golden State, even if I sometimes miss the full impact of that phenomenon because of age parallax.

A fantasy cross-examination of President Bush

I was watching some of President Bush's Rose Garden press conference a couple of days ago (thought: why don't they call these confabs "Rose Bush" conferences?) and was struck again by the docility and compliance of the press corps and the ease with which they are manipulated and controlled by W. I suppose part of this effect has been achieved over the years by a process of winnowing, denying access, ignoring, browbeating, teasing and intimidating the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate. Bush is an effective bully, that's hard to deny, and these reporters are certainly worthy of his contempt.

Still, however much the liberal blogosphere and other critics like to approach the vexatious problem of Bush by labeling him an "idiot" or "moron" or whatever (and I have succumbed to the temptation myself, out of frustration), in fact he's not. His mastery of the press conference is one indication of his above-average intelligence. One trick he's learned is the rambling, disjointed response to a question which eats up 5 or 6 minutes of a half-hour conference, followed by another extended soliloquy soon after so that any thread in the questioning is lost. There is no rapid fire give-and-take in a Bush "press availability." He controls the languorous pace, and the digressions are an important part of this manipulation. Lawyers skilled in cross-examination know that forcing a witness into an admission or contradiction depends on the ability to move the Q&A so rapidly that the witness can't see where the questions are leading. Before the witness can regain control, he has admitted a series of premises which, syllogistically speaking, permit only one logical conclusion. Bush doesn't really allow follow-ups and he doesn't admit anything he doesn't feel like admitting, which is usually nothing. This has allowed him to escape some very gnarly situations while appearing to answer questions in an open manner, most notably during the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame matter. To a virtual moral certainty, one can say that Bush was fully informed in June/July 2003 about Cheney's program of retaliation against Joe Wilson; yet, despite all the evidence adduced at Libby's trial about what a hot topic of conversation Plame's blown cover was in the summer of 2003, Bush escaped with the lame cover that he was outside the loop, uninformed by his own Vice President and his own Special Assistant (one of Libby's titles) and his own political handler (Karl Rove) about all this critical information.

Suppose, just once, that he'd taken the stand, sworn to tell the truth and was unable to control the pace because of the presence of a presiding judge. Could the transcript read something like this?

Q: Mr. President, you've testified that you had no knowledge, in the summer of 2003, that members of your inner circle disclosed the identity of Valerie Plame to the press; is that correct?
A: Yes.
Q: And that this ignorance must have continued until at least September 30, 2003, because you were making public statements to that effect?
A. Yes.
Q: And you would not deliberately lie to the public, would you?
A: No.
Q: In fact, you promised that you would get to the bottom of the leak, because you disapproved of behavior contrary to the national security of the United States; correct?
A: Yes.
Q: And you did disapprove strongly, did you not?
A: Yes.
Q: In fact, you initially said that anyone "involved" in the leaks would no longer be part of your administration, right?
A: Yes.
Q: We've read transcript excerpts from the Libby trial in open court; would you agree with me that those excerpts prove conclusively that Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, and Karl Rove were all aware that they were the sources of leaks to the press about Valerie Plame?
A: Well, I don't know what you mean about "proving..."
Q: Establish the fact. There's no doubt, is there? They were involved?
A: I suppose that's true.
Q: And since they were sources, they must have known June through September, 2003 who the sources were, because they were the sources?
A: That follows, yes.
Q: And they knew this at the same time you were speaking publicly about wanting to get to the bottom of the leak?
A: I guess they did, right.
Q: Why do you guess? You know, right?
A: Yes.
Q: And they allowed you to state publicly that you didn't know who leaked the Valerie Plame information, didn't they?
A: What do you mean "allowed"?
Q: They didn't correct you, they didn't say, "Mr. President, stop saying those things in public, we're the ones, we know who did it"?
A: No, they didn't.
Q: Other than when you weren't in the White House, away on business, did you meet daily with Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby during the period between July 1, 2003 and September 30, 2003?
A: Probably, when I was in the office, yes.
Q: That's your practice, isn't it, an early morning meeting every day?
A: Yes.
Q: You pride yourself on discipline and regularity?
A: I don't want to talk about my bowel habits..
Q: Regular business habits.
A: Yes.
Q: So that all of these meetings in that period would have completely overlapped the period when you were making public statements about your ignorance of the Valerie Plame leak source?
A: It would have been the same period, I guess.
Q: So that when you found out, in the course of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and the trial of Scooter Libby, that Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove were all involved, you realized that your own staff had engaged in acts of rank insubordination and disloyalty to their superior?
A: They should have told me, right.
Q: And what were the consequences to them of not telling you?

Well, a lawyer can dream. Such a forum, such an interrogation, will never happen. It will all go down the memory hole, a casualty of our sloppy, complicated, indifferent times. No one really cares enough to get at the truth anymore. That's another thing our smarter-than-you-think President has taken into consideration.

The ultimate horror - $4 for a gallon of gas

I'm so grateful to John McCain for proposing a way out of the morass of high gasoline prices. It's this sort of creativity that bodes well for our nation's future in the unlikely event Captain McQueeg takes the helm of the Good Ship USA in a few months. And we've actually got two chances out of three because Hillary Clinton, displaying the same kind of originality that impelled her to sign on to the Iraq War Authorization and the Kyl-Lieberman Bomb-Iran-Now permission slip, has said "me too!" with that trademark toothy grin. It's simple, really: suspend the federal excise tax of 18 cents a gallon for the summer.

Wow. That ought to do it. Let's see, my car has a 14-gallon tank, so every time I fill up I will save $2.52. With prices so high, I've been driving a lot less, so a tank lasts about two weeks these days. So I'll save that $2.52 six times! That's $15.12. You know what? With that kind of bonanza, I think I'll fill up every week so I can save $30.24. If I don't use the gas, I'll just siphon it onto the ground before I fill up, because I want in!

As I understand it, the excise tax is used to maintain federal highways and bridges, like the one that fell down in Minnesota not too long ago. Have you driven on an interstate freeway lately? Try I-5 between San Francisco and L.A. If you hit a pot hole at 75 miles per hour, as I have, you'll need a lot more than $30.24 to put your axle back together. I assume that McQueeg and Hillary, both ready to rock on Day One, are not seriously suggesting that the federal government is going to stop maintaining the roads. So they'll still maintain the roads but without the funding, as with so many federal programs these days, like war. Thus, McCain/Hillary are going to borrow money to fix the roads while encouraging Americans to drive their cars on vacation this summer.

I thought those two were the big global warming experts. America has three hundred million people and two hundred million cars, more than any other nation on Earth. Of worldwide usage of 87 million barrels of oil a day, we use about 20 million because (a) we drive pigs, (b) we drive too much, and (c) we don't bother to provide any other way to get around. If The Maverick is serious about global warming, why doesn't he propose something more lasting to deal with one of those problems instead of a three-month gimmick to make himself look good before the election?

We're envious of the Germans, naturally, because they pay only $2.27. Of course, that's per liter. They pay about $8.60 per gallon. They tax the hell out of their gasoline, but then driving on the autobahn doesn't require a chiropractic adjustment when you're done. And they subsidize mass transit, which they have a lot of. They were once paying about $4.07 per gallon, too. Back in 1996.

The repeal won't happen, even if Chuckie (The Hedge Fund Manager's Best Friend) Schumer says "it's in the works." Here's an idea. Let the worldwide, borderline shortage set the price of oil, and pay the price you have to pay for gasoline. Get used to it, because it's not going to get better on a permanent basis. It's going to get a lot worse. If the federal government wants to subsidize someone (and that's what the "gas tax holiday" is, a short-term subsidy, just like the "stimulus package" of Chinese money sent to American citizens), subsidize the trucking industry. They're the ones getting hammered because they have to drive. Keep collecting the 18 cents and give some of it to them. Tell everyone else they're lucky they're only paying 4 bucks a gallon. Walk somewhere. Ride a bike if you can. Trade in the Yukon EarthDestroyer for a car shorter than a city block.

Look, Captain, I know it's not Day One yet, but try leading for a change.

Obama's Reverend Wright Problem

The way to play the religious angle in these presidential campaigns is Hillary's way. She doesn't actually go to church, she probably thinks (deep in her private thoughts) that religion is a load of crap, but she recognizes that a God-struck country like this one is not going to tolerate any ambivalence about piety. Believe or die, it's just that simple. And no cop-outs with a gauzy "theism" of the sort true intellectuals like Thomas Jefferson were able to pawn off, that kind of nebulous "spiritual sense" that smart people who don't want to go so far as to claim a relationship with an imaginary friend often resort to when pressed on the issue. This is modern America, which is to say, in the main a very obscurantist and anti-intellectual society. So: tell us about your belief in the God of the New Testament or get the hell out of the race.

I was kind of hoping that Barack Obama might have been signaling this sort of ruse when he made his now infamous remarks in that Gomorrah of the West, San Francisco, not too long ago. You know, when he talked about desperate people "clinging to guns and religion." See, if his faith was real he wouldn't put it like that; if you actually believe in God, then He's there whether you're in the chips or not. You "cling" to illusions when reality is overwhelming. I took that as Obama's subtext. So naturally Barack rose in my estimation, the sort of paradoxical effect you'd expect when dealing with a contrary crank like me.

But Barack has tried to have it both ways. Identifying himself strongly with the United Church of Christ in Chicago, even writing up and quoting Rev. Jeremiah Wright in chapters of his book, Dreams of my Father. I've been told I'm wrong, that Barack's faith is real and I'm simply idealizing him as an atheist on the basis of one passing remark. It doesn't matter now, because from here on out Barack is going to spend increasing amounts of his time dealing with the random declamations of a decidedly loose cannon. Bummer for Barry.

I see Rev. Wright as a kind of African-American Noam Chomsksy. He likes wallowing in American iniquity. Here's the main part of the "God damn America" sermon in context: "And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America!"

There's a lot in this speech which is pretty uncontroversial. It all depends on whether you're in the mood to walk down a Nightmare Memory Lane; the United States did effect a genocide and massive displacement of American Indians. The United States, during World War II, did intern Japanese citizens unfairly. The United States did maintain the "peculiar institution" of slavery for over two hundred years, and then supported systematic discrimination for about another one hundred years beyond the Emancipation Proclamation. But after you repeat all of this, where are you? It's too late to do anything for the Native Americans we essentially wiped from the face of the Earth, but we did acknowledge the error with respect to the Japanese in a series of Supreme Court cases (although not with full restoration of property rights) and, in the case of African-Americans with the Civil Rights Act, we codified societal progress in the field of race relations.

Is the point that the United States should get over itself? Sign me up; I think that's the essential problem, often unacknowledged in the controversy. Those like Noam Chomsky and Jeremiah Wright gain a great deal of notoriety because there's something deliciously, refreshingly seditious about forcing the U.S. to acknowledge that it behaves more or less exactly like other great powers which consolidate and extend their material advantages. The war in Iraq is simply a case of using American military might (our remaining hole card) to gain advantages in the largest remaining (mostly) untapped oil field. This doesn't play well in the diner down in Pasacougla, so
we turn everything into a debate about flag lapel pins. Young men are dying, after all; what are we supposed to do, insist that people wear the ExxonMobil logo on their lapels? But for Barack, a guy who has to appeal to the delicate sensibilities of Main Street America and navigate through a blizzard of sound bites, a guy like Wright is a nightmare, especially because Wright obviously venerates the outspoken anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan (if you don't think Farrakhan is an anti-Semite, just read his own words helpfully collected on the website of the Anti-Defamation League - his main beef seems to be that Jewish agents in Hollywood have figured out how to keep black entertainers and athletes in chains. Very ugly stuff, whatever he's saying.).

Do I think Obama is responsible for everything Wright says? Hell no, not at all. Nor do I think the more arrantly loony pronouncements of Wright actually affect Obama's outlook. Barack is too smart and too canny for that; however, the Faustian bargain these nationwide pols have to make with organized religion often come back to haunt them, and this one is biting Obama mighty hard in the ass.

Captain McQueeg, Probably the Wrong Man for this Typhoon, Too

"Ah, but the strawberries! That's, that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and with, with geometric logic, that, that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox did exist."

In the penultimate scene of "The Caine Mutiny" Captain Queeg breaks down under the clever cross-examination of Officer Maryk's defense attorney and reveals himself a combat-fatigued emotional basket case who, in fact, did pose a risk to the Caine during the typhoon where he was relieved of his duty. In the highly choreographed theatre of presidential politics, we're unlikely to see our own Captain McQueeq, John McCain, undergo a similar dissolution. True, he has a bad temper and a querulous personality generally, his inconsistency on key issues looks a lot like mental instability, and he's hiding his medical records, which is ominous given his history of recurrent melanoma and his age. Nevertheless, we would have to wait for the equivalent of a national typhoon to see how Johnny Mac would respond to a crisis, and one thing is certain: between the Januaries of 2009 and 2013, there are going to be a whole bunch of crises.

As far as I can see, McCain's popularity rests on his now legendary ordeal as a POW in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Any reference to McCain must be preceded or immediately followed by the honorific "war hero." It is bad form, except in the "radical" precincts of the Internet, to mention that McCain was shot down over Hanoi while dropping bombs on the civilian population in a war that, in retrospect, is now regarded as useless at best or immoral at worst. Had he not been captured and imprisoned, then his war service record would be vulnerable to Swift Boat tactics of Rovian operators. The North Vietnamese apparently found out McCain was the son and grandson of John Sidney McCains I&II, who were both four star admirals in the Navy, and that they had on their hands John Sidney McCain III. They wanted to release him as a publicity stunt but McCain demurred. His canonization followed.

McCain apparently graduated in the bottom five of his class at Annapolis. His appointment to the Academy was naturally a forgone conclusion, given his lineage. I'm inclined to think that the squandering of his opportunity derived more from native incompetence than a lack of diligence. He just doesn't seem very smart at all. For all the hoopla that surrounds his "maverick" imago, I've never actually heard him say anything particularly intelligent. His questioning of Rumsfeld and the military during Abu Ghraib and the military budget hearings for Iraq was dull, clumsy and feckless, even by Senate standards, and that's saying a lot. He tried for a photo op type moment in his questions ("What were the instructions to the guards?," as if that would trap someone) and he got nowhere. If I had to guess, I'd say he's got less going upstairs than the present resident of the White House, a chilling thought indeed. Other than flying jets and being a fairly easily corrupted Congress guy, he doesn't seem to have had any real life experiences that would equip him to oversee the economy or redirect our technological future. This American infatuation with dumb guys as president seems like a luxury we just can't afford anymore.

There are jarring contradictions between the folksy persona he cultivates and his real life. While he plays the part of a populist, in reality he's rich by way of his second wife, the beer distribution heiress. (I thought beer distributorships were given exclusively to former NFL linemen after retirement.) He travels around in her private jet and bunks down in one of her eight homes, depending on his mood. He rails against corporate influence in Washington while maintaining a campaign staff full of lobbyists. He denies any impropriety in his relationship with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman, but she has disappeared into some sort of private witness protection program arranged by "her" lawyer, Robert Bennett. McCain is the big "campaign reform guy," lending his name to McCain-Feingold, but he was one of the slimeballs caught up in the dirty racket of the Keating Five, going to bat for the serial fleecer Charles Keating during the S&L crisis. His multi-hued positions on the torture question, which was supposed to be one of his signature issues given his background, are nearly impossible to follow. He appeared to acquiesce in Bush's signing statement vitiating the whole purpose of restricting non-military interrogators to the rules of the Army Field Manual. He's called the Evangelical Right "agents of intolerance," but avidly seeks the endorsement of End Times nut jobs like John Hagee. He now characterizes his previous opposition to the Iraq war as simply a disapproval of Donald Rumsfeld's leadership style, and is probably the most hawkish Washington pol found outside Dick Cheney's office.

His economic program, especially the tax cuts, are reminiscent of Captain Queeg's refusal to right the ship during the typhoon. McCain's fundamental dishonesty in calling a scheduled sundowning of the Bush tax cuts a "Democratic tax increase" was highlighted recently in Paul Krugman's column. Bush's Congress lowered the top marginal income rate to 35% from the Clinton era 39.6% and also lowered the effective estate tax. The tax cutting, as passed, was intended to be temporary, expiring in 2011. McCain now says that if the Democratically controlled House does not pass a new bill to make the tax cuts permanent that they are "passing a tax increase." This is fraudulent; Congress is under no obligation to pass new legislation to enable Bush (and now McQueeg) to pretend that temporary legislation was in fact permanent from the get-go, and that, therefore, a failure to change Bush's plan amounts to a bill to repeal the tax cuts. The repeal was built into the original amendment of the tax code. Anyway, if McCain is such a populist, why doesn't he ruffle the feathers of the hedge fund industry and subject their billionaire managers to ordinary income tax rates instead of allowing them to use the capital gains rate?

Everything about McCain's platform is essentially rooted in the failures of the past, and the country can't afford that approach. His strategy will deepen the financial quagmire of the national debt and the Iraq war at a point where we're running out of international creditors to float our boat. The dollar is faltering because its petro-dollar stability is now undermined by global competition for oil. McCain wants to increase military spending at a point where we already outspend all potential threats combined; other nations are moving on to dealing with what is called outside U.S. borders "objective reality."

Just go back to the Senate and roll your ball bearings, McQueeg. The country really can't afford another experiment in faked personality.

Living in the Future

I am indebted to Kevin Phillips for another brilliantly insightful work on the current state of the union (the real one), this time out in a book called Bad Money, which deals with the long-term consequences of a number of converging crises, including the collapse of the housing market, federal debt and trade imbalance, peak oil, and global warming. It's a tour de force.

I've been reading books about the dangers which lie just up the road for as long as I can remember. Paul Erlich's 1968 Population Bomb, for example, which predicted that world population would double every 37.5 years, and that mass starvation would set in within 20 years or so. Erlich was right about population growth for the first forty-year period (3 billion to 6 billion people), but the so-called "Green Revolution" managed to keep pace with the food needs for a rapidly expanding population. It's not surprising that he took a lot of heat from the Pope and from Libertarians such as Julian Simon, who both argued that more humans were a good thing, not a problem.

I first read about CO2 build-up in the atmosphere in Robert Rienow's 1969 Moment in the Sun, who wrote about a 6% increase in greenhouse gases in the troposphere over pre-Industrial Revolution levels (280 ppm). We're now at 380 parts per million, or a 36% rise over such levels.

There have been numerous books about the rapidly increasing national debt and trade imbalances, and lots of others about the phenomenon of "peak oil," that hypothesized level where half the available petroleum has been extracted and the amounts remaining will be increasingly difficult to pump and refine. I've read a bunch of them, too.

Reading the news these days, it becomes apparent we've begun to live in that "future." It's different in many ways from the predictions. The mass starvation hypothesis in the 1980's did not come to pass, but now we're facing serious food shortages worldwide, mainly involving wheat, rice and corn at the moment, but the problem will spread. It would be fatuous to deny that these shortages are related to explosive population growth. The effects of global warming become more patent with shrinking Arctic sea ice, melting glaciers, acidification of the oceans, die-off of marine species and salt water intrusion from rising sea levels. The problem of peak oil is exacerbated tremendously by the emerging (and overpopulated) economy in China, which is now using the wealth transmitted to it by the United States to secure oil access from formerly reliable partners of the U.S., such as Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. The sovereign wealth funds and state-owned oil companies, such as those in the Gulf Arab states, Venezuela and Iran, have eclipsed the former "Seven Sisters" of the American oil heyday and the big investment banks of Wall Street. These titanic business entities (which we have done so much to empower) now threaten our own financial sovereignty.

All of these developments are different in their details from the prognosticators' doomsaying, and in most cases that's because it was perhaps impossible to foresee the interplay between one set of problems (food production, e.g.) and another development such as oil shortages. The writers in the 60's and 70's could not have foreseen Reaganism (a cowboy actor as President?) and his foolhardy decision to run huge deficits while over-investing in the military. Indeed, going back to the era of Erlich's book, 1968, and moving forward, and passing through the Vietnam War and Gulf I&II, along with forays into Panama, Grenada and ten other places -- a serious argument could be made that the huge standing army and conventional armament maintained by the U.S. has been a positive hindrance, with no return whatsoever on money invested, and this misallocation accounts for a large part of the inability to deal with the looming enviromental and energy crises which have gained force. But always, the huge number of variables involved, and the feedback loops among them, leave anyone trying to make an educated guess about what will happen in twenty years vulnerable to large variances in actual outcome.

Those who do not want to change the status quo seize on this inherent and unavoidable inaccuracy as an argument for denying the validity of the futurist's main point. Some technological or "political" fix will solve the problem when it shows up, so calm down. The difficulty is that when the problem finally does manifest itself in all its awful living color, it's not only different, it's almost always a whole lot worse. The "fantasy" bias lulled mankind into thinking the incipient problems would evolve along the gentlest possible path.

So, as Kevin Phillips masterfully demonstrates, here we are. Living in the "future." The United States is seriously broke; we've popped the last bubble remaining to us (housing); the Big Money countries, such as China and the Gulf States, are losing interest in supporting our government or using the dollar as the benchmark for crude oil purchasing; countries which don't necessarily have our best interests at heart (China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran) are forming cooperative alliances; and the U.S.'s one play to carve out a reliable oil supply all to ourselves, the war in Iraq, has turned into a gigantic bust with no payout, while making the problem of insolvency significantly worse.

I'm not even going to mention that we have to deal with all of this while George W. Bush is the President. There's a limit to how many of my own fantasies I care to disabuse.