Recycled Politics

I've been reading the last full book by David Halberstam, written before his recent, unfortunate death on the San Mateo Bridge in an auto accident.  A major loss to humanity and to the field of contemporary history.  This book is entitled The Coldest Winter, and it's about America during the earliest years of the Korean War, particularly 1950.  But one of the joys of reading Halberstam is that he believes in digressions and context, so that if he's discussing Douglas MacArthur he's sure to tell you the story of MacArthur's father, another general who not only fought in the Civil War but was the viceroy of the Phillipines following the Spanish-American War, in much the same way that Douglas MacArthur was viceroy of Japan following World War II.  Suffice it to say that Halberstam sides clearly with Harry Truman in the great controversy surrounding the decision to relieve MacArthur of his command of the Korean War, and that Halberstam agrees with the historians who believe MacArthur got a lot of American GIs unnecessarily killed in the north of Korea because of huge misjudgments about the intentions of the Chinese to intervene in the war.

Halberstam fills in context on the domestic front by describing the usual squabbling between Republicans and Democrats in the post-World War II years.  After the singular reign of FDR, the only president ever elected to four consecutive terms, the nation finally turned Rightward again in 1946.  The GOP picked up 50 seats in the House and 11 in the Senate.  It seems likely that the GOP would have won the presidency in 1948 if they had run Ike then instead of waiting four more years.  In that freshman class of 1946 the likes of Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin came to town, and the Right wing criticism of Truman's liberalism reached a fever pitch, fueled by the long frustration of the GOP.  They had been kept out of power since 1932.

In those days the GOP was quite frankly the party of the well-to-do, the country club set, big business.  They believed in low taxation, hated all of FDR's social programs (which they called either "socialistic" or "Communistic" depending on mood and who was complaining), and favored big government spending only for defense.  Truman, on the other hand, worked hard to drastically reduce military spending in an effort to pay off the WW II debt.  The total national debt stood at $250 billion, a quaint number by today's humongous standards, but it was intolerable to the fiscally conservative Truman.

In other words, the political tango was danced much the same in 1950 as it is today.  The main difference is that the United States has lost most of its great middle class from the post-War era. The GOP, running out of fat cats to fill out their electorate, were forced during the Nixon years to employ the so-called Southern Strategy, in which they conned the Evangelicals and other non-pluocrats into voting Republican on the basis of "social issues" such as abortion, homosexuality and, most important of all, racism.  Prior to the "sell-out" of the Southern Democrats by Kennedy, Johnson and other turncoats who insisted on enforcing the 14th Amendment, even if it meant allowing black kids to go to school with white kids in Alabama, the Democrats could count on a solid South voting bloc.  Now the Deep South is actually the only remaining reliable stronghold of the quasi-theocratic Republican Party.  Even the uber-rich are probably evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, since the wealthy own equal numbers of each in Congress.

One might call this "stability" through the generations, this pattern of recycled power traded back and forth between the Donkeys and the Elephants.  I'm more inclined to think of it as late-stage stagnation.  There is nothing in the Constitution, after all, which mandates or suggests that specific political parties must exist forever.  But they do in the U.S., and it's been these two parties for a long, long time, with no meaningful competition.  They never have any new ideas, and I think it's a direct result of this stagnation.  They have the same arguments, decade after decade, and they always use the same solutions.  Taxes go slightly up, then they go slightly down.  The defense budget goes slightly up, then slightly down.  We keep fighting wars of intervention, always on the same basic principle.  If we don't, whatever problem we're fighting will "spread."

The talk now is of the "death" of the Republican Party.  This won't happen.  The American people got tired of FDR's activism and internationalism and they voted in a bunch of isolationist, small government-big defense politicians.  The American people were appalled by the stupidity and incompetence of George W. Bush (they couldn't really believe they'd elected this clown) and they turned on the GOP with a vengeance.  But the American people will tire of the Democrats in turn, and then the other exhausted, ossified, no-idea party will be back running things again.

I think this is all a failure to adapt, of decadent processes which choke off real innovation and invention.  These parties limit their "initiative" and strategy to the preservation of power, which they pass back and forth on a fairly predictable schedule.  But it will take a generalized meltdown, not just an economic downturn, to get rid of them.  I think, however, they're quite capable of producing such an event, if not much else.

Land O' Prudes

Maureen Dowd in the New York Times wrote the political obituary of John Edwards today.  She didn't seem to regret it, really.  You might say she relished the opportunity, since scolding men for their wayward marital ways won her a Pulitzer Prize way back in the days when she was attacking Bill Clinton relentlessly for his shenanigans with Monica.  It's obviously a thing for Maureen, this all-too-common phenomenon of powerful men with a roving eye.  I suppose at some point she must have written about women who cheat, but if she has I missed the column.

Anyway, Maureen's elegy over John's political grave:  

John Edwards’s political career is over, and he’s being investigated by the feds about whether he used campaign funds to underwrite his affair. Nobody — except Rielle — has any interest in hearing from him again. Americans would have been relieved if the last we heard of him was that cringe-inducing “Nightline” interview last year, when he made the argument that he was a helpless narcissist and that he hit on Rielle when Elizabeth’s cancer was in remission.

Actually, Maureen should speak for herself and not all "Americans" and should not presume that "nobody" has any interest in hearing from John again.  I think that's a case of bluenose projection. Gary Hart survived his sexual escapades to become a kind of eminence grise of foreign policy matters, for example, so second acts are possible.  Bill Clinton is now widely revered as a political statesman by most Americans despite all the scolding he took from Maureen Dowd and the Republicans.

Still, there's no serious doubt that Dowd is right about Edwards's political career; as any kind of candidate for major office, he's through.  In that sense Maureen Dowd knows her America.

Recently, I was reading about Italy's Premier, the 72 year old Silvio Berlusconi,  and his marital difficulties.  Maria, his wife and 20 years his junior, has decided to seek a divorce in a very public way from Silvio because il cano antico has apparently become smitten with an 18 year old actress, on whom he dotes and lavishes gifts.  It's all like a cheesy Italian opera.  Maria might have known; after all, Silvio was 42 and she was 22 when he met Maria, an aspiring actress at the time.  And Silvio was married then, too, to the woman he left for Maria.  Silvio and Maria then carried on an affair for 10 years and had three children.  Then they got married.  And it was after all of that carrying on that Silvio was elected to Italy's highest office.

In recent memory we also have the case of Nicolaus Sarkozy of France, who was getting divorced so he could marry supermodel Carla Bruni virtually at the same time he was running for office.

So here's the question: why don't the Italians and French care?  Why are they able to make such a clear distinction between private "morality" (if that's even involved) and fitness for public office?  Asked another way, suppose it's all true about John Edwards.  Let's say that Rielle Hunter is the mother of John's baby and that they carried on an affair during his campaign, and that Rielle is a well-known party girl, as Maureen sniffs.  What is it about such a situation that would disqualify John Edwards as presidential timber?  And why is it only a disqualification in the United States but not in Western Europe?

I sometimes think that by imposing yet another artificial barrier to public office, the requirement that a person have a squeaky clean private life, that we're selecting for bloodless, epicene androids with dull personal histories and not much juice for life.  A complicated love life can be a pretty rich learning experience, after all; I would think that Silvio and Sarkozy probably know a helluva lot more about certain types of human motivation and passion than, say, Dick Cheney.  Just a guess.

Anyway, Maureen will be out of a job pretty soon, along with the rest of the print journalists, so maybe we shouldn't begrudge her the self-appointed role of Puritan Enforcer.  It's a gig, for now, and one of her reliable memes.  And no doubt her small-mindedness accurately reflects the attitude of her ever-dwindling readership.

Facing Other Unpleasant Facts

I've been reading a new collection of George Orwell essays entitled Facing Unpleasant Facts which includes a lot of Orwell's hoary best such as "Shooting an Elephant" and "Such, Such Were the Joys."  I quote Orwell on the masthead for this blog because the sentiment expressed there, which I applaud, actually did guide the way he wrote.  He was generally Socialist in his outlook but it was a practical kind of Socialism built upon his revulsion against capitalist exploitation in such industries as coal mining (thus his Road to Wigan Pier).  He obviously was no pie-in-the-sky idealist or pacifist; he was openly critical of Britain and France's appeasement of Hitler, and he personally fought in the Spanish Civil War.

The collection is prefaced with an introduction by George Packer of The New Yorker and there's a nice irony in that.  If there's a publication on Earth which typifies the kind of vague, on-one-hand-on-the-other-hand, excessively complex, under-edited type of prose which Orwell abhorred, I don't know what that magazine would be if not The New Yorker.  It's kind of amusing that Packer tries to rein it in a little in the intro and write a little more like Orwell: simple sentences, active verbs.  Orwell could write like that because his ideas were so powerful. He didn't let words get in the way of the clarity of his thinking.  Whereas in modern political writing, as one might find in the columns of the media stars at the New York Times and the Washington Post, the writers are so afraid of offending authority and thus spoiling "access," that no clear opinions dare be stated. Thus, the resort to "style" and the kind of mishmash which Orwell pilloried in "Politics and the English Language" [which Packer didn't dare include].

Orwell wasn't like that.  For example, in reflecting on the Spanish Civil War and why the elites in Great Britain and France simply left the Republican Army to its fate and its annihilating defeat at the hands of the Hitler-backed Franco forces, Orwell stated clearly that the reason was that the governments of Great Britain and France were pro-Fascist.  They liked what was going on. It suited their economic purposes to allow a Left-leaning government in Madrid to fall to the Fascist Franco. It was only when it became obvious that Hitler had designs against them that the Allies got serious about resisting Der Fuhrer.

It's interesting, to say the least, to mull over how Orwell would have written about the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.  It's doubtful that Orwell would have seen the putative rationale, that "freedom was on the march," as in any sense genuine.  It seemed to be in America's economic interest to overthrow Saddam and install an America-friendly regime headed by Ahmed Chalabi.  That would ensure a favorable government overseeing our oil industry in Iraq.  Afghanistan presented a tempting target because of the oil pipeline that could be built across the country with the right government in place, such as one headed by the former Unocal consultant Hamad Karzai.  It would provide steady work for Halliburton, the oil field contractor.  It sounds good to throw in the stuff about the Taliban "harboring" bin Laden, but I doubt this kind of specious nonsense would have fooled George Orwell.  These wars served the purposes of the governing class.  They didn't turn out very well, but that's because the head guys in that governing class were pretty stupid.

One striking thing in one of the lesser-known essays: Orwell recommended keeping a diary or journal of one's ideas about politics and social matters.  That way you could track the development of your own thinking, watch it evolve, catch the errors in your understanding and logic.  I guess that's what a blog actually is, when you write about the stuff I usually write about.

Meanwhile, back in the troposphere

UPDATE:  I can't get the graph to size right. Blogger is not always the most adaptable graphic arts medium. So if you want to see the whole graph, the URL is http://www.realclimate.org/images/carbon_NV.jpg

The good people at RealClimate.org, a site everyone should consult periodically (link to the right) to see what the latest is on atmospheric science (as opposed to the pop-nonsense of uneducated pontificators such as George Will), have cited a couple of extremely elucidating studies in the current issue of Nature, from which the above graph of probabilities is taken.  Computer modeling of the climate continues to improve, and the bad news continues to pile up.  This is one of those situations in human history (perhaps unprecedented) when the doomsayers were simply not shrill enough. But everyone likes to appear "reasonable" at all times, I suppose, and not venture opinions beyond the available evidence.  The problem being, as pointed out by many, is that by the time conclusive proof arrives, the damage will be completely irreversible.

Actually, as the above graph demonstrates, the damage is already irreversible; it's now a question of whether we want to build on this catastrophe and take things all the way to nonviability.  Even if mankind were to cut CO2 emissions by 80% between now and 2050, there remains a possibility, projected as somewhere between 10% and 46% as I read the graph, that global average temperature will increase by more than 2 degrees C, which is about 3.6 F.  We've increased the average temperature so far due to AGW (anthrogenic global warming) by about .8C, or 1.44 F.  Thus, total warming of greater than 5 degrees F above preindustrial temperatures cannot be ruled out even with a "slam on the brakes" scenario, which, as you've probably noticed, is not exactly happening.

Business as usual is modeled as a 100% probability (virtually) that global warming will increase by more than 2 C.  Most of the projections based on business as usual lead to global warming of more than 5 C, or 8 F, which is a Game Over scenario.  

Since we have about 40 years to slam on the brakes to avert the worst of the possible outcomes (or minimize their likelihood), it would be good if Prez O and Steven Chu of the Dept. of Energy frankly admit that there just isn't time to reinstate the energy-profligate, consumer-oriented economy and that the upside of the recession is that it catalyzes a change that absolutely has to be made anyway.  

Then all that Barack has to do is explain to the Senate Gerontocracy what "global warming," "CO2," and the "atmosphere" are, and we're on our way.

Give Me That Old-Time...Waterboarding

First, I begin with a disclaimer: I am no grizzled war veteran, and I certainly have no desire to engage in the elaborate combat fantasies of chickenshits like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who did everything possible to stay out of harm's way when a war in which they firmly believed, the Vietnam conflict, was raging.  As in the case of, say, 99.9% of the American populace, and even 90% of uniformed cops, I have never fired a shot at a human being and I hope I live my whole life able to make that statement.  I've read a lot of World War II history, and it's my understanding that a majority of even combat troops never actually fired their weapons in an actual battle.

So I'm strictly using intuition and my imagination on this torture thing to create a hypothetical. I am imagining that I'm with a squad of American soldiers and for some reason we become trapped behind enemy lines during World War II.  We're in France, say.  Something like this actually happened to my uncle, who was a glider surveillance pilot in advance of D-Day. Anyway, we're disoriented, lost, and we come across a lone German soldier.  We capture him. What we want him to tell us is where the Germans are and the right way to move to get back to our own lines.  Under these circumstances, I don't think we're going to worry about the Geneva Conventions.  We need him to talk right away.  If it means pointing a revolver at his head, we'll do it.  Whatever it takes.  We'll also watch him closely to see if we can gauge whether he's telling the truth, because the truth is what we're after.  We're not going to rough him up just to rough him up.

I would not expect my buddies and me to be court martialed or tried as war criminals after the war is over.  I would not expect anyone ever to give it a condemning thought.  There were exigent circumstances and we did what any sane, self-regarding, even compassionate person would do.  I certainly would never think of "prosecuting" such soldiers for anything, so long as what they did was not gratuitous or sadistic just for the hell of it.  But that becomes an atrocity unrelated to the business at hand.

Let's imagine another scenario.  It's 2002 and George W. Bush, at the height of his Unitary powers, decides that Millicent S___, a Jefferson City, Missouri third grade teacher, a pale blonde woman about 28 years old, is an enemy combatant.  American patriots such as Charles Krauthammer, Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court, John Yoo of Cal's law school, Jay Bybee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Rush Limbaugh, John Cornyn of Texas - they all think this is bold and great.  For some reason, Millicent is involved in international terrorism - so Bush says, and that's good enough for them.  She is captured, stripped, hooded, placed in an orange jumpsuit and shackled in the hold of a transport plane, then flown to Guantanamo.  She won't talk, however, other than to keep repeating there's been some terrible mistake.  Typical terrorist evasion, of course.  So she's stripped again, placed in a hypothermia cell where the temperature is kept at about 50 degrees, and left there with the lights on for about eleven days.  Occasionally she's brought out, shackled in a stress position, or a towel is placed around her neck so her head can be slammed against a wall repeatedly.  Then she's locked in a tiny box where she can't move, can't see, and can hardly breathe.  Still proclaiming her innocence, she's tied to a waterboard over and over and water is poured into her lungs.

Eventually she starts to talk.  Sort of delirious, she describes Afghanistan by saying it's a "mountainous area" and she wouldn't be surprised if bin Laden is still up there, and if there aren't more plots being hatched by a lot of the Arabs the interrogators have mentioned over and over during the last two weeks or whatever it's been.  She signs a confession and then is placed in a cage where she awaits...the end of the war on terror.

Well, we cracked Millie, at long last.  She was tough, she held out, but we got to her. 

"White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."

Pew Poll, April 30, 2009.

I would assume, therefore, that a majority of white evangelical Protestants in the United States would have no problem with our treatment of Millicent S____.  They would not see it as a sadistic fantasy from a pornographic magazine but as effective interrogation work.  Because, after all, this enthusiasm for torture must be based, in the final analysis, on principle and not on some retributive instinct or prejudice.  Note the similarities: Millicent was never tried and convicted of anything before her brutal treatment, exactly as in the case of the Arab detainees we have tortured.  All the rough stuff, the punishment, has preceded any form of judicial process in a court or tribunal.  No determination of evidence by an impartial judge has ever been made or sought.  We assume they're all guilty.  This was the logic of the Inquisition: we would not be burning your eyeballs out with a white hot poker if you were not an infidel, and if you say you're not an infidel, that only proves that you're a lying infidel entitled to even worse punishment, if we can think of something.

But the key word, the distinction, slipped into my comparison.  "Arab" detainees.  That's the real difference.  What is unthinkable for our demure ingenue from Jefferson City is okay if it's a Muslim Arab, because the profound racism of our white Evangelical population, that backbone of the modern Republican Party, provides for a clear distinction in the justice to which a white female American and an Arab Muslim are entitled.

It's an old story in American history.  It justified the internment of the Japanese, and only the Japanese, during World War II, although we were also at war with Germans and Italians.  Bush and Cheney knew it was okay to pick on Arabs because they could count on their party's base to look the other way.  These weren't Christians we were beating up; they were, to Bush/Cheney fans, untermenschen.  That's why, whenever I have blogged about this, I always specify that Bush and Cheney reserved the right to torture Arabs, or to deprive Arabs of habeas corpus, or to render Arabs to countries where torture was assured.

It's not a coincidence and it's not because all terrorists are Arabs.  It would have been unthinkable to waterboard Timothy McVeigh, or the Unabomber, or members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, or Bill Ayers and the Weathermen.  And here's the interesting part:  this prejudice has not gone unnoticed in the Muslim and Arab world.

This Week in Al-Obama©

I mean, I'd like to copyright that but Google would surely name me as a defendant in its "reverse class action" and declare itself the owner of Al-Obama© and that would be that.  So for the nonce, as the old-timey wordsmiths used to say, I'll declare it my own.

Other than the continuing Depression II and the near-term bankruptcy of Social Security, Medicare and the federal government, Al-Obama is holding up well, I think.  These are all problems which Barack indicated in his last press conference can be "handled."  I actually like his sunny optimism and can-do attitude.  Occasionally his answers betray an underlying grasp of the intractable nature of the problems he's dealing with, but this is in reality a good thing. For example, in Missouri (which he was careful to pronounce Missoura - he's a natural crowd pleaser), Barry copped to the coming insufficiency of current FICA payors to support the lazy-ass Baby Boomers who are beginning to retire in droves.  That small surplus paid in since the reforms (FICA tax hike) of the early 1980's created a delusional "trust fund" which Congress was quick to steal and spend on hi-tech weapon systems, replacing the looted cash with "government obligations," meaning T-bonds which the government promises to pay itself.  That is to say - Congress replaced the $2 plus trillion with nothing at all.  The trust fund does not exist.  It does not mean anything to use the term "trust fund" when there is no fund and there is no basis for trust.

What this means is that beginning in about 5 or 6 years, depending on how long the Depression lasts, the Social Security fund will go negative, and instead of a situation in which FICA receipts are a source of largesse for Congress to use in pleasing arms manufacturers in districts where races are tight, they will become the biggest of all drags - another debt.  Well, so what - Barack says it can be handled.  It can't, but that kind of thing doesn't matter anymore.

I did think that O did a better job both with his unscreened audience in Missoura and in his press conference of making the case that Bush left him the equivalent of a flaming bag of dog doo on the desk in the Oval Office.  Since the media-addled attention span of his subjects can't remember last week, let alone a year ago, this sort of proactive self-defense can't be used too often.  Just keep repeating that he inherited a government in financial ruin and an economy on life support, and blame it on Bush.  Otherwise, it won't be long before everyone begins arguing that the problems in Al-Obama© began on January 20, 2009.

A good case could actually be made that our descent accelerated in January, 1993, when Clinton took office.  Between 1993 and 2006, you won't necessarily be surprised to learn, the accumulation in wealth in the United States was allocated this way: 50% to the richest 1% of the populace, and 50% to the other 99%.  With money comes power, of course.  I do note that now that the Democrats are firmly in control of both Houses of Congress (although Harry Mumbles Reid claims, as always, that he just doesn't have the control he needs to do anything), they seem less inclined to pass laws of a populist nature.  Defeating the bankruptcy reform bill with its "cramdown" provision yesterday is a vivid case in point.  Suddenly, from the halls of the legislature, we hear cries about the "sanctity of contract" and the Contract Clause in the Constitution.  Article 1, Section 10 does forbid the "States" from passing laws which impair contractual obligations, but the clause has been interpreted loosely, like most things in the Constitution, to permit whatever the hell government needs to do in a specific situation, such as the 1934 Supreme Court case of Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell 290 U.S. 398, which, during the Great Depression, allowed the courts to suspend foreclosures In fact, bankruptcy courts, in Chapter 11 cases, order "cramdowns" (reduction in the principal of a contractual obligation) all the time, every day, 24/7.  It's nothing new.  So when the Democratic Senators who work for Wall Street banks proclaim their devotion to the Contract Clause, it's completely bogus.

Bringing us back to the observations of Our Man From Russia, Dmitry Orlov, who has told us for years that the United States has two Center Right political parties, not a "right" and "left" party. The reduction of the "righter" of the two, the Republicans to a kind of freak sideshow has actually made it easier for the remaining viable party, the Democrats, to fill in the conservative vacuum, which they're anxious to do because that's where the money is.  So if ShittyGroup or BankstersofAmerica need work done by their Senators, they call on the Dems like Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer, because the Republicans are frankly embarrassing to deal with at this point.  In yesterday's vote on the cramdown amendment, Schumer and Dodd could vote with the pro-little guy faction because they knew the amendment would lose, thanks to "liberal" Democrats like Nelson, Tester, Landrieu, Pryor and Our Newest Democrat, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.

It only makes sense that as money becomes increasingly vital to sustaining oneself in Congress that the conservative agenda of the donors with the most money (that upper crust 1%) would exert greater and greater control.  Political phenoms like Prez O are somewhat immune, since Obama can raise money directly from that large group called "American citizens," but he has to work with a thoroughly corrupt Congress, most of whom are about as charismatic as a bowl of oatmeal left out in the rain for a couple of weeks.

All things considered, I think Barack is about as good a President as we could possibly hope for in this country, which is why I favor a Constitutional Amendment changing our name to Al-Obama. He's conservative, really, he can't act boldly enough to actually deal with the dire problems we face, such as global warming and insolvency and mass unemployment, because the Washington Establishment would rather see a mass die-off in the United States than any reform which will negatively affect their Big Business paymasters.  But he's as good as it gets - rational, sane, adaptable, and doggone it - people really like him.

FAQ on Swine Flu

(Inspired by breathless reporting on CNN & other cable news outlets.)

Q:   Will everyone die?

A: Unfortunately, no.  The best we can currently hope for is massive social dislocation and panic, and maybe a few thousand deaths.  "A few thousand deaths" represent a rounding error unless they're caused by Arabs in hijacked airplanes.  Then the world must be changed completely to deal with the attack.  Even the Spanish flu of 1918 and the Plague of the Middle Ages failed to kill everyone, so this swine flu is likely to disappoint.  "Pandemic," however, is a cool word.

Q: Is swine flu a conservative or liberal issue?

A: Technically, it's a health issue, but we understand where you're coming from.  Efforts to deal with it through, say, medicine make it a liberal cause, because of the science involved.  However, it also has conservative bona fides in the sense that Mexican illegals can be blamed and hopefully shot by border vigilantes, particularly if the killings occur midday in time for the evening news cycle.  Swine flu may also be a sign of End Times in which case conservatives may argue against dealing with it at all based on the idea it's God's will. See, response to global warming.

Q: Why did pigs give it to us?

A: I'm surprised you have to ask.  Have you seen what we've done to them?  The average pig is smarter than the family dog and realizes he's being bred as a side dish for scrambled eggs. We're actually getting off pretty easy.

Q: How will we decide who gets Tamiflu and Relenza, the anti-viral drugs?

A: In the United States the life-saving drugs will be allocated based on how much money you have.  Poor people can use aspirin and Nyquil, if they can find a place to steal it.

Q: Why won't Republicans let us have a Secretary of Health & Human Services?  Wouldn't that be a good thing to have during a pandemic?

A: Probably, yes, but the idea of having a Cabinet-level person to direct an all-out effort to deal with the crisis must be balanced against Governor Sebelius's known preference for compliance with federal law in the form of Roe vs. Wade.  Understandably, this has upset Republicans who thought the Constitution was revoked in January, 2001.

Q: What's up with a virus that's part bird, part pig and part human?  Isn't that kind of freaky Frankenstein stuff?

A: We think so.  Also, an excellent metaphor for modern times.

The Dick's Faulty and Tortured Logic

America's most overrated smart guy, Dick Cheney, has been taking to the airwaves lately to insist that if the Obama Administration is going to release the quack legal memos which justified the Bush Administration's lawless reign of torture and mayhem, then the CIA should also declassify the reports of the "testimony" "elicited" during the torture chamber sessions.  So that we get a balanced picture.

The Dick never fails to amaze me.  A lawyer somewhere, knowing he's going to have to defend Cheney someday, is squirming right now, wishing the Dick would just shut the f*** up, head to some ranch in Texas and shoot someone with a shotgun.  Whatever.  Just stop talking to The Dick's "friends" at Fox News, because this is not helping.

In a very dark way, there is something comical about Cheney.  He never loses that growling gravitas, that heavily serious way he has of taking himself absolutely seriously; and yet, over and over and over again, he's wrong.  Not just sort of wrong, either.  Fundamentally, hilariously, unbelievably wrong.  And still, there he is again, holding forth.  Setting the record straight.  The guy who was Vice President when the worst terrorist attack in American history occurred lectures everyone on how to keep America safe.

The Dick is missing a very fundamental point with his justifications for torture: the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is a signatory, does not permit any form of justification. 

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever may be invoked to justify torture, including war, threat of war, internal political instability, public emergency, terrorist acts, violent crime, or any form of armed conflict. Torture cannot be justified as a means to protect public safety or prevent emergencies. Neither can it be justified by orders from superior officers or public officials. The prohibition on torture applies to all territories under a party's effective jurisdiction, and protects all people under its effective control, regardless of citizenship or how that control is exercised."  

Summary of Article 2 of the Convention.  What The Dick has done, by extolling the benefits of pouring water into the lungs and wall-slamming the heads of various Arab captives, and stuffing them into tiny boxes with bugs and the rest of his Marquis de Sade wish-list, is to establish the necessary mens rea (state of mind) for convicting him (and Bush) of war crimes and violations of various anti-torture statutes in the federal code.  He has established that the torture was deliberate and calculated and achieved the effect he was after; yet, as noted, the "justification" he offers cannot be used to defend, exonerate or even mitigate his crimes.  It's not even admissible.  Not a bad day's work for The Dick.  

So he's left with a single defense: all this stuff he and the High Command put into action, probably as early as the summer of 2002 as part of an effort to establish the nonexistent link between Saddam Hussein and 9-11 -- you see, it wasn't really torture.  Thus the flurry of legal memos after the fact, attempting to define torture out of existence.  Thus the reinvention of history, pretending that the United States has not itself prosecuted as war crimes the very acts which Bush and Cheney authorized.

Bush is either being smarter or his lawyer is better at client control.  He's not saying anything. Bush & Cheney missed their chance on January 19, 2009; they should have done the Pardon Two-Step.  The Dick is doubling down on that mistake by running his mouth (or at least one side of it).  For what they authorized, ordered and approved was in fact torture.  And now the Obama Administration is administering a water torture of its own: the slow drip of disclosures. First the release of the legal memos.  Now the additional photos of detainee abuse.  And the Big Enchilada will happen when one of those videotapes of a screaming, struggling captive finally gets smuggled out and scores one billion hits on YouTube.  And then The Dick will see it never really mattered whether he could convince Sean Hannity or not.

Has Obama Seen the Light?

So what's this about Barack Obama suddenly being "open" to the idea of prosecuting Bush Administration officials for waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 283 times in one month?  Of course, that's just the headline story designed to fit within a limited public attention span.  Probably much, much worse was the American practice of rendition, where terrorist suspects were delivered to countries, such as Egypt, for the express purpose of subcontracting out murder and mayhem that Americans find repugnant, yet still cheer on when other countries do it.

Before leaving Khalid, the Gurgling Confessor, behind, I pause to bring up a question I have adverted to before.  If one takes the time to read the 9-11 Commission Report, and particularly the novelistic, highly readable Executive Summary concerning the plot, one may be struck, as I was, by how much of the Commission's investigation depended on the testimony of this one man. References to things that "KSM" said run throughout the narrative, including tales of meetings between Osama bin Laden and the actual hijackers.  As I've written before, Dore Gold wrote a book about Saudi Arabia's involvement in terrorism in which he specifically opined that "there was no evidence" that any of the actual 9-11 hijackers ever traveled to Afghanistan or ever met with Osama.  Quite a bold statement for a reputable, esteemed author and statesman to make if he was not sure of his ground.  You have to wonder how a guy who is waterboarded 283 times in one month had the chance to gargle up information about anything; but one thing's certain, it's ludicrous to imagine that such evidence is reliable.  With that many sessions where people are putting a hood over your head and pouring water into your lungs (12 minutes at a time), you're going to say anything they want to hear, and it's obvious if you have a war going on in Afghanistan premised solely and exclusively on the "harboring" of Osama bin Laden by the Afghanistan government, then the most valuable thing that KSM could possibly gurgle about would be all the connections between OBL and the hijackers.  

If the 9-11 Report had not been so demure and sanitized, we might have learned, for example, that Atta's meeting with Osama was described in Session #177 of KSM's waterboarding torture. This would have given a different "feel" to the whole narrative, would it have not?  What are the odds, however, of our lazy-ass press ever going back to the Commission Report and lining up KSM's "testimony" with these new revelations?

But back to the idea of prosecuting Bush "officials."  First, I hope Prez O sticks with the idea of laying off the actual field operatives who poured water or stuffed people into boxes.  That's how Bush, Cheney, Rummy & the Gang got away with Abu Ghraib: by pretending it was a bunch of out of control "bad apples" instead of official policy dreamed up by the barbarians hanging around the Oval Office.  Second, I think Bush's bad luck comes from the dawning realization in the Obama camp that this Depression we're in is not going away anytime soon.  Leaking out of the banking underworld is the news that the big mortgage companies are maintaining a "shadow inventory" of foreclosed homes which are vacant but which they are holding off the market in an effort to arrest the steep decline of housing prices.  This shadow inventory measures in the hundreds of thousands of empty homes.  Since the housing slump is the root of this malaise, since without equity in their homes Americans lack the wherewithal to get the consumer economy going again, we're in a vicious cycle of deflation and unemployment that is going to consume most if not all of Obama's first term.  

So, quite counterintuitively to O's naive pronouncements about the "distraction" of Our Own Private Nuremburg, Barry needs a circus and he needs it bad.  And absolutely the very best circus he can bring to town is the highest of high profile prosecutions: a "Commission" to try Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gonzalez for war crimes and systematic violations of the Convention Against Torture.  (I actually don't care about the lawyers who wrote those pathetic memos; those were opinions for hire which reached preordained conclusions.)  

Wall-to-wall coverage, every night of every week for a year or more.  Boffo ratings!  An entertained public!  Come on, O: man up.  We need this show.  More to the point, you need this show.  Listen to that little angel whispering in your ear, who happens to be named Rahm: go get 'em!

The Judge, the Coffin Box and the Stinging Insect

He certainly looks like a nice guy, this Judge Jay Bybee of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.  I guess his judgeship was a reward for his tireless work in providing legal cover for the CIA's torture regime, particularly when it came to Abu Zubaydah and Khallid Sheikh Mohammed.  The recently disclosed "torture memos" written while Judge Bybee was working in the Little Shop of Legal Horrors (the Office of Legal Counsel) are case studies in pushing things to the brink of absurdity, such as Judge Bybee's solicitous attitude about what kind of stinging insect could be put into a coffin-like box with Abu in order to get him to start talking.  

Abu, it turns out, had a morbid fear of stinging insects, which, I have to say, doesn't really surprise me.  I think most of us share a similar phobia.  My guess, based on the idea that most of these great legal thinkers despite their gaudy credentials are actually dumbshits, is that Judge Bybee really wanted to talk about stinging "arachnids."  Certainly there are insects which sting, such as the honeybee or wasp, but for downright fear, give me an eight-legged entomological specimen anytime, such as a tarantula, scorpion or brown recluse spider.  We'll get the facts on that 9-11 plot in no time.

Well, who cares about precise classification of arthropods?  It could be a centipede too, for that matter.  I can't help but feel that the CIA and the OLC got their ideas from Nineteen Eighty-Four and Winston Smith's morbid fear of rats.  Nothing about the Bush-Cheney crowd ever struck me as being very original. 

"In addition to using the confinement boxes alone, you also would like to introduce an insect into one of the boxes with Zubaydah. As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar. . . . [Y]ou must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain...An individual placed in a box, even an individual with a fear of insects, would not reasonably feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering if a caterpillar was placed in the box. . . . Thus, we conclude that the placement of the insect in the confinement box with Zubaydah would not constitute a predicate act," [i.e. violate the anti-torture statute. (p. 14)] "[T]hough the introduction of an insect may produce trepidation in Zubaydah it certainly does not cause physical pain." 

That's the OLC's version of reading a suspect his rights: he must be told whether the insect spending time in the coffin with him for a couple of hours can kill him or not.  If you don't say, then he could "reasonably" feel threatened with severe physical pain or suffering of a lasting nature, and now you've violated the Convention Against Torture.  On the other hand, if Zubaydah (who was recovering from wounds at the time) chooses to go ahead and "unreasonably" fear being stuck in a box so cramped he can't move for a couple of hours with any kind of insect -- well, that's his problem.

After this sophistry, waterboarding and banging someone's head against a wall were really easy to laugh off.  The key is "specific intent:" the CIA operative (or sociopathic contractor hired for the well-paid job) must not only intend the predicate act of messing with someone, he must also have the specific intent of causing great physical or mental harm of a lasting nature.  Legal reasoning is great, isn't it?  If I pick up a baseball bat and take a swing at your head, I must not only intend to swing the bat and knock you into next week but intend that this harm be lasting and severe.  This approach, as far as gaining the greatest possible latitude, would seem to favor hiring the dumbest, meanest interrogators you could find, to go along with the dumbest, meanest lawyers you can find to stock the Office of Legal Counsel with, which Bush certainly succeeded in doing.

Bybee may get impeached.  I can kind of feel that one coming.  Impeaching Bybee, disbarring him, disgracing him, would placate a lot of people who want Obama and Congress to do more, which they're not going to do.  There is really only a small band of Americans who actually care about this stuff, or at least pretend to care.  In reality they just like writing about it.  Glenn Greenwald is up in arms, but hell - he lives in Brazil.  Torture is interesting as a subject because it's full of legalisms, international law and relative precision.  Bush also wrecked the world economy, but that's too diffuse a topic.  Denouncing torture allows American critics to wax self-righteous (such as Keith Olbermann) without actually doing anything about it, because they can't.  And Obama has made it pretty clear he's never going to prosecute anyone.  It would upset people, and that's too much for him.

We should just face it and realize we're a nation which tortures people, a lot, and we have a lot of company in the world. And after we torture people, we don't care if the Convention Against Torture, a ratified treaty and supreme law of the land, requires us to investigate and prosecute where appropriate.  So we don't follow the Treaty or our own Constitution? What else is new? At least we write memos before we slam your head into a wall or pour water into your lungs.  How civilized can you get?

James D. Houston, 1933 - 2009

Novelist, essayist, classical guitar virtuoso, ukelele kahuna, ragtime piano player, standup bass standout, poet; devoted father, loving husband, inspirational cousin; philosopher, lover of life, bigger than life, deep seeker of the Truth; kind friend and all-around good guy.

Tea bags and other signs of disintegration

In general, it seems that the country is losing even that marginal social cohesion, such as it was, that existed during the "heyday" of the Bush Administration.  This "tea bag" stuff, borrowed by right wing zealots from wholly inappropriate sources, such as the Sons of Liberty and Thomas Paine, is an ominous sign.  Egged on by the modern-day Father Coughlins, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, a kind of free-form and omni-directional rage is being stirred up.  I imagine (based on some close-in anecdotal evidence) that the members of this "movement" are the disaffected Evangelicals and unemployed millions who used to align themselves with the Republican Party, but the GOP is falling completely apart.

So, nature -- and the political world -- abhor a vacuum.  One might think, as a rational person, that those hundreds of thousands of American workers added to the unemployment rolls every month might naturally see that if they have a common enemy, it's the "financial sector" of the economy.  That's where the collapse started - AIG, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, et alia.  Those are the companies who played all the games with America's mortgage market and set the world's economy, integrated so tightly through "globalization" of finance, on the path toward destruction.  But, of course, that's not what happens here in America.  That would be logical, natural, even appropriate, so we can be sure nothing like that is going on. Instead, the "tea bag" movement and Right Wing agitation in general, centers around the "Socialism" of Barack Obama.  One might search high and low for evidence that Obama is a Socialist and never find a thing.  He wants to raise the top income tax rate from about 36% to 39.6%, or where it was during the Clinton Administration (and much lower than during the Reagan Administration).  This will be accomplished simply by allowing Bush's tax cuts to expire on schedule; it would be far too sophisticated an argument to point out to the pitchfork wavers that Bush built a sundown into the tax reductions so he could dishonestly argue that his future budgets would be "balanced."  Bush intended, however, to avoid sundowning (and balancing) by extending the same tax cuts, counting on the short attention span of his subjects to get away with his complete inconsistency.

That doesn't help Obama, because for the Tea Bag Brigades, 39.6% is Socialist and 36% is right where God intended the top marginal rate to be.  Or something like that.  

I would think that Prez O is not having that much fun.  The subject matter of his Presidency - a disintegrating economy - manages to be both painfully boring and scary as hell all at the same time.  The central question on which everything will depend remains unanswered.  America's financial situation, as Gore Vidal said recently on Real Time, places it "somewhere between Argentina and Brazil" in terms of First World/Third World status.  Congress has "appropriated" trillions and the Treasury and Fed, using a variety of tricks to avoid Congressional involvement (describing many of its purchases of worthless crap as "investments" instead of hand-outs), have promised trillions more to bail out the banks and financial institutions deemed too big to fail.  As Nouriel Roubini has pointed out, however, the market for raising all this money is in bad shape; the Chinese are not increasing their holdings of the dollar, nor are the Russians.  They can't lend us the money because the same "globalized integration" has caused their own economies to tank along with ours.  So where do we get the dough?  

One route is to melt down the domestic securities market - the Dow, the S&P, what's left of the NASDAQ.  Free up all that equity so Treasuries can be purchased.  To entice the purchases, maybe the payout on Treasuries will get raised, which, of course, will cause a general interest rate increase.  But can Wall Street survive another meltdown, say to Dow 4000?  The other is to simply print the money and "buy" Treasuries from ourselves.  (I wonder why we even bother to print it, in such a case.  Why not simply declare it exists?  A friend of mine, speaking from the next bar stool, came up with a plan to allow Americans simply to print their own money at home, which might be a better idea.)

The hyperinflation implied in the untethered creation of money may also lie down the road.  It's the reason that at the G-20, ominous noises were made from China, Russia and other affiliates of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) about creating a new reserve currency.  If that happens, all bets are off for the American economy, because running the printing press for the world's fiat currency is what gives us our remaining viability.  It's what makes our Treasuries internationally marketable; it's what allows us to conjure wealth.  Without it, we're screwed.

Our new currency might devolve to commodities, like trading in tea bags.

You're Welcome America

I caught Will Ferrell's act on HBO the other night, his one-man Broadway show about George W. Bush.  I thought his performance was as significant for what he chose not to do as for his actual choice of material.  Ferrell avoided most of the easy jokes about Bush, the usual, worn-out ones about his malapropisms and garbled syntax.  There were a few of those, but where he used them, as in a sequence on the meaning of "where wings take dream," Ferrell used them to great comic effect.

Ferrell's best comic persona involves the projection of anger, as in one hilarious skit from SNL where he plays the part of a victorious political candidate who, for some reason, keeps running attack ads against his defeated opponent.  His mystified opponent takes to the airwaves to ask what's going on, and then Ferrell attacks him for "whining" and being such a "poor loser."  There is real menace in these portrayals.  So Will's choice of Bush as an alter ego is a natural, because Bush is the same kind of bully.  Ferrell gets inside Bush's head, somehow, and plays him as a man absolutely devoid of self-awareness.  Ferrell's Bush thinks that the completely trivial, mundane things he's saying, his patient explanations of the obvious, are important and, furthermore, necessary because it's unlikely anyone in the room can keep up with him.

The Bush Ferrell portrays isn't stupid.  His monologue is intelligent, coherent, occasionally witty, but the brilliant trick is that thing about Bush that Ferrell has isolated: he is a person totally cut off from the effect he is having on the public.  He just can't imagine that he could be wrong about anything, and it is this insulated, narcissistic quality that is the surest proof of Bush's mediocrity. Bush can't see that it is the combination of his unwarranted self-confidence coupled with his weird, skewed judgment that leads him over and over again into disaster.  At one point Ferrell goes through Bush's list of "accomplishments," from freezing up on the day of 9-11, through his Katrina non-reaction, to launching a war against Iraq on completely mistaken premises, to "destroying the world's economy," and sort of sniggers at the whole idea it's his fault.  He can't see a connection between this awesome list and the 71% disapproval rating he carried on leaving office.

Ferrell allows Bush, amid the frat-boy humor and nickname-giving shtick, a few moments of dignity, as when he talks about his feelings concerning American and Iraqi casualties in the Iraq War.  I thought the funniest moment in the show happened early, when Bush is out at the ranch in Crawford  (which he claims Rove made him buy so he'd seem folksy, but he actually hates it and prefers the "whites only" gated community in Dallas).  His brothers are there, and Poppy Bush too, and W gets them trapped in an old abandoned mine on the property.  At one point during their panic, Poppy gets frustrated with Bush and yells, "And why are you the only one in the family who talks with a Texas accent?  It just doesn't make sense!"

That was the thing about Bush.  Nothing about him made sense, including those 8 years he served as President, 40% of which he spent on vacation. I guess we can thank him for leaving and Bush, as oblivious as ever, will just say you're welcome, America.

The Financial Crisis, A Pathological Report

Anyone deeply interested in the nuts and bolts of the financial crisis, including a pretty lucid explanation of the ways in which we have gotten ourselves into one helluva jam, would be well-advised to read the always entertaining Matt Taiibi's takedown of the Wall Street bailouts in Rolling Stone, the URL for which is: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover.

It's utterly hilarious to the extent that it's not absolutely infuriating.  Matt does what the dilettantes of the Brainfart Brigade at the New York Times never do, get on the phone and talk to people who can describe in detail how mortgage-backed securities were devised; how they were sold; why they were created; and how they were insured by AIG at the Casino Division of the (formerly) world's largest insurance compnay  And then, after this indispensable research, Taiibi actually thinks through how the system works and why it has come to the awful pass it has.

I recall that narrow escape we managed a few decades ago when we discovered that CFCs in the atmosphere were destroying ozone.  We reversed that folly just in time to avoid utter catastrophe.  What made it all the more chilling was the subsequent revelation that had the makers of refrigerants decided to use bromine (in molecules termed halons) instead of chlorine, discovering the source of ozone depletion at the point we did would have been too late.  The greater ozone destroying capacity of bromine would have made attempts to ameliorate the situation futile.  And the difference in choice between the two elements had to do with a slight marginal advantage in cost in using chlorine instead of bromine; the fate of the planet hung on this trivial choice.

It seems to me that the United States has probably come to something like such a pass with the current financial crisis.  It's a one-time fix that we may be allowed to implement with the world held in a state of co-dependent pretending along with us as we hallucinate the necessary money to fix the system.  I appreciate the comment of my highly intelligent fellow alum and Erstwhile bandmate of a few days ago about the Treasury/Fed's plan to create money out of thin air by (a) running the printing presses to create currency to (b) purchasing our own T-bills, which I have likened before to an ability to cure a bounced check by depositing a check from the same overdrawn account into the account and claiming "solvency."  The United States is "borrowing" money, in other words, from itself, akin to reaching the roof three feet away by lifting the ladder on which you're standing with your own two hands.

We're the only country in the world, for the time being, who might be allowed to get away with this conjurer's trick, simply because we run the printing press for the world's reserve currency. And now China and Russia are making noises about changing that, which is very, very dangerous and scary, and probably the reason that Nouriel Roubini thinks that gold may go to $2,000 an ounce by this summer.

Chief Wizard of the Brainfart Brigade, Paul Krugman, thinks the whole problem with the banks can be cured by nationalization.  Krugman has never much liked Obama, and takes potshots at him whenever he can.  Krugman, in his once-over-lightly research way, cites the Swedish example as the way to go.  Of course, Sweden has a population of about 9 million, or about the size of the metropolitan area of New York.  By an order of magnitude, its problems in the 1990's are not comparable to what's going on with B of A, Citigroup, AIG, Wells Fargo and the rest of them.  Nationalization, in effect, is what the FDIC does when it takes over an insolvent bank. Krugman is proposing that the U.S. take on banks with deposits literally thousands of times larger than the biggest bank failure the FDIC has ever handled in order to "clean up their balance sheets."  After all, it's what they did in Stockholm; should work here too.

The addiction to conspiracy theories of all branches of the media at this point, mainstream press (while it lasts) and all the hip blogs, leads everyone writing about this situation to assume, automatically and a priori, that the only reason Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner favor of an outsider's approach to clearing the balance sheets is because they're in bed with the big Wall Street banks.  I doubt this.  Nouriel Roubini (a guy who does not share the conspiracy compulsion of these others, probably because he does a little homework) notes that probably $1.8 trillion in toxic assets infects the books of the big banks.  That's what I like about Nouriel; he uses actual, comprehensible numbers, instead of the qualitative junk Krugman uses habitually. So the question becomes, do you actually have to take ownership of the banks in order to get rid of these debits on the books, or is there a way to leverage federal money to clear the debt? That's what Geithner is trying to do.

Interesting that the Dow jumped 500 points when Geithner and Bernanke announced their plan. Almost as if there are people in finance who don't take all their cues from the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times.

I don't know what to say either

I've been perplexed (and bored) by the torrent of uninformed commentary concerning the "financial crisis" in the United States, so much so that I've been unable to formulate any sort of coherent comments of my own. I was finally moved today to say something by the truly dazzling display of stupidity offered up by Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column of even date.  In effect, Dowd accuses the Obama Administration of allowing AIG, that nefarious financial craps table, to shovel money out the 'back door" to Goldman Sachs, other Wall Street "counterparties" and even (gasp!) European banks, such as the Deutsche Bank. Thus, bailout money "intended" for AIG winds up in the hands of outfits with "insider connections" to the Obama Administration or with foreigners.

Well, look: when you were learning to read in school, especially if you had decent teachers, you were taught to "read critically," weren't you?  So let's do that with Dowd.

First, the only intelligent thing I have heard anyone say recently about the state of the U.S. financial system is what Prez O himself said: we got into this mess, mostly, through people doing legal things.  And when you think about it, that's the most frightening aspect of all.  What it means is that the natural, intended consequences of our financial system, for about the last ten years at least (say, from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act) have been what we're seeing now. The sorry state of collapse was simply waiting for a big downturn in the value of underlying assets (in this case, the housing market) in order to blow up. And now it has. 

It was legal to bundle up mortgages into bond securities which could be sold here and abroad.  What was not necessarily foreseen was that the underlying "rationale" for this practice was the presupposition that the housing market could only go up; this supported the practice of dubious loans, since the houses could "always be sold" or "refinanced" when the market was better. Was it fraudulent to sell MBS on the theory that the housing market would continue to go up?  It was probably not clear enough to support a 10b-5 action under the Securities & Exchange Act, although many lawyers will try it anyway.

Plus, only the savviest of the insiders saw that minor perturbations within a MBS would sink the whole instrument.  Smart guys like John Paulson, who saw that about a 5-6% decline in the value of a MBS would make the whole thing worthless and unmarketable.  In retrospect, elementary logic supports his analysis.  Say that a group of bundled mortgages of the subprime variety pay on average 8%.  With front-end fees and servicing costs, it makes sense that the pass-through to investors (such as big pension funds and foreign banks) would equal about 6% net.  If the face value of the bond is premised on a 6% return, then one can see that a fairly small failure rate among the mortgages supporting the bond will result in a return less than this notional rate.  When that happens, the bond quickly degrades in value.  If, in addition to this factor, the "tranching" and intermixing of MBS has so obscured which bonds are good and which contain many failing mortgages, then the whole class of security becomes suspect, leading to a dodgy market for the things in general.

Which is where we are.  Because the buyers of these MBS realized they were entering, to a certain degree, terra incognita, they insured the bonds they purchased.  These are the so-called credit default swaps.  AIG ran the biggest business in CDS notes.  The difficulty here was that the federal government (led by such free marketeers as Ayn Greenspan) did not require that purchasers of CDS notes have an "insurable interest" in the underlying MBS.  By analogy, to buy life insurance on a person, one must have some sort of relationship, at the point of purchase, which makes the insured life a matter of personal importance.  A spouse, for example.  If members of the general public were allowed to place bets on the death or survival of anonymous people to whom they had no direct relationship, we would, among other things, encourage the practice of killing-for-hire in order to improve the "odds."  No such requirement existed for CDS instruments. Anyone could bet "pass or not pass" on a MBS bought by someone else.  And AIG wanted all the action it could get, since it considered the premiums free money. It certainly did not retain sufficient reserves, you know, in the quadrillion range.

Thus, the "counterparties" that AIG is paying off, such as those suspicious foreigners, include Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, hedge funds, and the Deutsche Bank either as insureds holding MBS or people placing side bets at the CDS craps table.  This latter category, while legal, was a yawning loophole which has brought the world's financial system to the brink of disaster.

But it has nothing to do with Maureen Dowd's moronic take on the situation. If you want to declare all the CDS contracts null and void, then a plenary conference of all the world's industrial countries must be convened to sort out all the debits and credits of these "financial weapons of mass destruction," the notional value of which has been pegged at $1.4 quadrillion, which is probably even more money than Timothy Geithner wants to commit.

General Motors, To You We Bid Adieu

As much as it's become a pariah in recent decades because of its infamous failure to adapt, which is to say, to understand that the introduction of the Toyota Corolla and Datsun way back in the 1970s into the American market represented the wave of the future - still, someone my age can't help but be nostalgic about General Motors.  GM built the cars that symbolized American affluence at the height of its dominance, in the 1950s and 1960s.  Who can forget those eyebrow fins on the 1959 Chevy Impala?  The inverted Nike Whoosh on the side of the 1955 Oldsmobile (nothing new under the sun, including Phil Knight's ideas).  Those bullet holes along the fenders of the late Fifties Buicks. The most ostentatious and ridiculous gewgaw of them all, those tail lights on the Cadillac hung like two alien eyes atop a vertical fin.

And the engines: massively overpowered, yet very inefficient.  300 horsepower capable of propelling the tank-like mass of a Buick Century maybe 120 miles per hour.  No safety features, either. No seatbelts, steel dashboards (to dash your brains out on), hood ornaments to impale pedestrians with.  Death traps, as the yearly statistics on traffic fatalities demonstrated.  Well, that's what America was like - big, muscular, powerful, and we left the wounded behind on the highways to fend for themselves.

'Tis said you can now buy a house in Detroit for a buck.  Full retail price is maybe 18 grand, but you can take one off the hands of a bank, relieving it of the tax burden and "maintenance," for much less.  Just put the sucker in your name, please.  We'll pay you a buck if you'll accept this deed.  Then the city of Detroit can foreclose a tax lien on a squatter, put the house up for auction, receive a buck against the accrued back taxes, and start the whole rigmarole over again.  Such data points surely spell the end of GM.  The workers are all leaving.  Well, car sales are down 50% anyway, and not just for General Motors.  No company can survive that kind of contraction for long.

The Congressional Clown Troupe will hold more hearings on GM, no doubt.  We can put these proceedings in the same category as their occasional meddling in major league baseball.  The steroid hearings are held periodically so these dweebs can finally sit in the same room with their boyhood idols, albeit abusing the privilege by browbeating the players, all to no good purpose other than the vindication of their own nostalgia.  Back when baseball was pure and unsullied! Other than the drinking, whoring and Black Sox scandal, sure -- as the driven snow.  But the aging solons also remember the General Motors of their youths, and they need to appear in public to blame the current executives for the passing of an age.  It can't really be gone!  What about that turquoise and cream '57 Chevy with three on a tree?  With the slick bench seats and AM radio?  All gone, just like GM.  GM's golden age didn't really last that long.  It's odd when the parentheses of your own years surround an entire epoch, but so it was with General Motors.

Kind of sad.  See the USA in your Chevrolet.  How do you like your Buick?  I think it's wonderful.

All the news that's hard to take

697,000 jobs were lost during February, according to the Department of Labor's preliminary estimate.  This will be revised upward later, of course; you can see the propaganda effect pretty easily in the number.  Ju-u-u-s-t shy of 700,000.  Odd how often that seems to happen with the first number that comes out early in the month: 595,000, et cetera.  Does anyone even have a job at this point, aside from (a) TV news people and (b) government employees, such as the President?In a few months will the Dept. of Labor simply announce, "The rest of the American people lost their jobs last month," and that will be it?

Here's a wiseass from Russia weighing in: 

"MOSCOW — If you're inclined to believe Igor Panarin, and the Kremlin wouldn't mind if you did, then President Barack Obama will order martial law this year, the U.S. will split into six rump-states before 2011, and Russia and China will become the backbones of a new world order."  

Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC and the remaining federal employee in the financial sector with any credibility left, says the FDIC may become insolvent by the end of the year.  I don't see how that can happen.  Wouldn't the Treasury Department simply "replenish" its capital by "injecting" a few trillion to keep it going?  I think that's our operative principle for everything these days.  A bulkhead buckles, the water starts pouring in, and we patch the hole with more federal "money."  That's why I'm concerned about this guy Panarin; it isn't so much that I see him as some kind of spot-on Cassandra for the West's misery.  It's simply that he's saying it at all.  Like G.K. Chesterton's horse who could play chess: it isn't so much that he plays well, said the wit; it's that he plays at all.  Sort of like that.  Russia, while floundering itself, still has a lot of stuff to sell, namely, oil and natural gas, so they can raise cash.  And we're counting on that cash, and a few trillions like it from China and Saudi Arabia, to keep the party going at the Casino at the End of the Universe.  So we don't want these guys drooling over the prospect of our collapse.  We need the money.

So this outbreak of Schadenfreude is disconcerting, to say the least.  These other... people, as Daniel Plainview says in "There Will Be Blood:"  what are we to do with them? Or without them? Are they going to drink our milkshake?  They are well aware, because they are educated at least as well as we are (okay, better, but I'm looking for a silver lining here), that the immediately precipitating cause, that which gave impetus to a long process of decline in the U.S., was the last great Casino game we could come up with: mortgage laundering.  Mortgages were sold to anyone who could pass the mirror-fogging test, then lumped together into gargantuan pools of "diversified risk," then sold as jigsaw-puzzle bonds.  It's important to remember that what looks like the actual and efficient cause of our problem is really only a symptom of something far more dire.  We had run out of ways to make money in any productive way, in any way that the plutocratic class could use to maintain an extravagant lifestyle, and so the final resort was made to the hocking of the very land of America.

And we've come up snake-eyes.  The Grim Croupier is raking in all the chips and looking askance at our furtive effort to pass off crude chips made of particle board as the real thing.

What's the guy mean by "rump state," anyway?  That sounds like some sort of Commie-speak. They're forever using such terminology in their dialectical analyses.  Bourgeois, proletariat, stooge, apparatchik, rump state.  I think he means some kind of regional federation thrown together in a state of panic.  Not to worry: one of George W. Bush's "secret memos" covers that, the memos containing what Bush/Cheney considered the Real Constitution.  The one without the Bill of Rights, and that allowed the U.S. military to operate within the country to "quell insurrections," even citing the Civil War as an example or a provocation.

Could be Dick & George were on the same page as Igor.  What may be hard for us to accept is that there are situations too dire to get out of.  They happen regularly in world history, often as the result of imperial overreach.  Everything seems okay, manageable, just a rough patch. But it just keeps getting worse, and it gradually dawns on you that you're running out of options. There's no money, no credit, and too many people are beginning to operate independently to save themselves for a cohesive center to hold.

Barack running a regime under martial law?  I was kidding about that Sheriff Bart thing, you know.

America's Sheriff Bart Gambit

In Mel Brooks's immortal "Blazing Saddles," the gentle townfolk of Rockridge get their first glimpse of the new sheriff, a hip freed slave foisted upon them by Governor Lepetomane ("the leading asshole in the state"), and decide to string him up.  In the late, great Cleavon Little's achingly funny rendition of Sheriff Bart, the new law man pulls his own gun on himself and begins dragging himself toward the safety of the jail.  "One move and the n___r gets it," Sheriff Bart tells the stunned crowd.  One of the morons watching announces that they'd better do as they're told, because "he's not bluffing."

For reasons that probably say more about my peculiar thought processes than they do about reality, I was thinking of Sheriff Bart while contemplating President Obama's (our hip, sharp, first African-American President) budget of $3.5 trillion.  With a $1.75 trillion deficit.  This makes for pretty easy mathematics: half of the money the federal government needs in fiscal 2010 (beginning Oct. 1 of this year) will be borrowed.  50%.  

The budget was announced after last Tuesday night's speech, where Prez O was as sharp, masterful and on top of his game as Sheriff Bart.  ("Baby, you are so talented," Bart says to himself after he sits down in the sheriff's office.  "And they are so dumb.")  More than to a little extent, the budget verges on the unbelievable (even though, as I've admitted, I love it).  While it's presented as business as usual, I think we can admit one thing.  If any other country in the world presented a budget where it proposed to spend $3.5 trillion while borrowing half of it, we would realize that country had gone fully belly up.  It would be seen as the last gasp of a hyperinflationary, completely out-of-control banana republic on the verge of complete collapse. No one would go near the place with a loan.  Foreign countries doing business with the nation would pull up stakes and head for the exits one step ahead of expropriation.  Terrified visitors would clog the airports, as in "The Year of Living Dangerously."  The government would fall, to be replaced by a military junta run by guys in green fatigues.

But not here.  Borrowing half the federal budget from...well, whom?  Or from what?  Where do you come up with that kind of dough?  No matter.  We remain serene.  The Sheriff Bart gambit works, or has worked so far, because the rest of the world stands in for the Rockridgers that Gene Wilder's Waco Kid called the "simple people of the land...you know, morons."  We're holding the gun to own heads and the world doesn't want to take the chance that we're bluffing.  Everyone is suspending belief, and credulity, in order to wish along with us that the United States escapes this self-inflicted hostage crisis.

"Do what he say-ay, do what he say-ay," the terrified Bart yells to the town folk as Bart drags himself off to the safety of the jail.  That's right, World.  Do what we say-ay.  Otherwise, we gets it.  And we're not bluffing.

Echoes in the Left-O-Sphere

Bill Maher had a lively crowd at his table Friday night on "Real Time," including Gavin Newsom and Alan Cumming, the Irish comic actor.  At one point in the discussion, Bill Maher made a point which has occurred to me over and over again, that the entire case against Afghanistan and its role in the attacks of 9/11 seems to be built on the complex of dreaded jungle gyms (which Maher may have called monkey bars) which show up in the standard stock footage every time we hear about bin Laden's training camps.  Maher had ealier inteviewed Robin Wright (the journalist, not Mrs. Penn), and she had confidently assured us that we cannot allow Afghanistan to become a "failed state," or it will become a breeding ground for terrorists.  Thus, we have no choice: we have to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely to nation-build even though, as with Iraq, this was not part of the original mission statement or war authorization.

Maher wondered to his panel (which also included P.J. O'Rourke) whether the world actually needs a whole "failed state" in order to breed terrorists, or in order for them to plot an attack against the United States.  I think a fair reading of the Report of the 9/11 Commission, which gave full credence to the testimony of Khallid Sheikh Mohammed at a point before we knew he had been systematically tortured, leads one to the conclusion that the actual plotters of the attack were in no need of Kandahar, Afghanistan or even a children's playground in order to put together a successful conspiracy.  Atta & the other ringleaders were apparently radicalized by contact with the West while attending school in Hamburg, Germany, and held their meetings at the local mosque and in their apartments.  If bin Laden was a funding source, and if Khallid Sheikh was actually the mastermind, it nevertheless does not follow that they needed a whole "harboring country" in order to proceed with their plans to enter the United States, train in American flight schools and hijack the aircraft.  It seems also doubtful whether the prior attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 in any way relied on the existence of a "safe haven" for terrorists; similarly, the attacks on American embassies in Africa in the 1990's did not require the Taliban or a whole country full of radical Muslims as preconditions.

In his speech on Tuesday night, President Obama emphasized, to deafening applause, that Afghanistan would not be used to "launch" attacks against the United States again.  This is more or less the standard formulation of the thesis, but it points to an almost superstitious approach to anti-terrorism in this country.    If Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan when the attacks of 9/11 occurred, then the U.S. military must fight, for seven plus years and counting, in that country so that bin Laden can't use that country again.  I'm sure this plan, as formulated, will probably succeed.  There are, however, two billion Muslims in the world; the largest Muslim population anywhere is Indonesia, where we are not fighting any battles at all.  And what is it about fighting a land war in Afghanistan that would prevent another group of 15 Saudi "muscle" hijackers from going to work for another Egyptian (probably radicalized originally in the Muslim Brotherhood, not al-Qaeda) and UAE national (Mawran al-Sheihi)?  What would have worked in 2001 was to act on the good work of American intelligence agencies which discovered clear evidence of the plot, and all without (a) a "war on terror," or (b) an invasion of Afghanistan.  The clearest rationale I can think of for the war on Afghanistan in the first place was that it distracted the American people from thinking about these fundamental, obvious facts.

The problem of "bad conditions" in Muslim countries is simply far too diffuse to approach the problem by pacifying every trouble spot with the U.S. military. Added to this difficulty is the widely acknowledged problem that "collateral damage" in the form of civilian casualties in Afghanistan probably results in greater risk to American security.  

I think it's unfortunate that President O, who is beginning to find his stride in very positive ways in other areas, feels the need to double down on this original American mistake. I can understand the political exigencies; it's more important to appear tough on terror than it is to make any sense.  But Maher's simple question reflects what I think is a lucid perspective on Afghanistan. One looks at the war and can find no rationale, no matter how far your gaze. Alice in Wonderland looked down the road and said she could see nothing.  The King complimented her on her vision; one must have astonishing eyesight, he said, to see nothing at such a great distance.