While my guitar gently weeps

I bought the guitar I play most of the time these days at a music shop on Scott Street in San Francisco. It must have been in the mid 1970's, because I have pictures of me playing that axe around that time or a little later. It was a Japanese knock-off of a Spanish classical style, like a Ramirez, made with a Brazilian rosewood back, a German spruce top and an ebony fretboard. It cost about $250, and it came with a hard shell case of brown leather and plush orange lining. The guitar has mellowed with age, the tone actually improving, but it was always pretty good. A few years ago I thought about replacing it. To get a guitar made of similar wood (they're not actually supposed to use Brazilian rosewood anymore because of the rain forest problem), you need to spend at least a couple of grand, so I tried a few out at a well-stocked specialty store south of Market Street in SF. These didn't actually sound as good as mine, and the action (basically, the ease of playability) was no better. I found I needed to go as high as three grand to actually do better. After a while, I just forgot about it and went back to playing the same old guitar.

I have sheet music from my first purchases in the late 1960's, when I first started playing a lot of classical guitar (and learned how to read for the instrument). A particular favorite is a slim, tawny, corny-looking volume filled with the great masterpieces of the repertoire: Tarrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra, Albeniz' Leyenda, Granados' Playera, Bach's Bouree from the Lute Suite in E Minor. Almost every tune in the book is a hit; just a few clunkers in the bunch. It cost $1.95, according to the cover. Cheaper than a Starbucks Venti. I know that I'll die while still trying to master all the music in that book.

Over the years I picked up a music stand and even one of those classical player's foot stools, so you can rest the guitar's curve on your left knee, where it belongs for classical stuff. Or bossa nova, or even Duke's Do Nothin' Till You Hear From Me. It was the Duke, in fact, who said the truth: there are only two kinds of music - good music and bad music. Anyway, that paraphernalia cost about $20, total. We're not at three hundred bucks yet, and we're spanning thirty years of playing.

You have to re-string a guitar regularly if you want it to sound good. You can buy a set of classical strings for six bucks, but I tend to go high end and buy Savarez Carte Rouge strings, which set me back about fifteen. That's every six months or so. You can change them more often, but I'm playing in my den, not Carnegie Hall.

I've made friends with that guitar, played weddings, parties and paid gigs, shown off, courted ladies, jammed with friends and family. Spent hours and hours, hundreds, probably thousands of hours, alone with it, just me and the guitar, working through the polyphony and counterpoint of ancient music, like the music in that buck ninety-five book.

I was thinking about all this while reading a book called Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton, an Australian political theorist, think tanker, humanist, Big Picture Guy. The book's about the essential disconnection between the GDP "growth" of a country and the happiness or sense of well-being of its citizens. Beyond a threshold level of wealth (which the United States crossed decades ago), enough to assure basic prosperity to the citizenry, there's no correlation at all between GDP "expansion" and human happiness. Happiness arises from things in life other than material accumulations after the basics are taken care of. Human relationships, a sense of purpose in life, interesting things to do. America is the richest country but it isn't the happiest, not by a long shot. We lost our way in the fetishistic pursuit of material prosperity, and finally crashed the economy in the desperate quest for acquisition, taking on debts (both government and private) we can't repay, that depended on an insane expectation of exponential growth to sustain. Truth is, as measured by statistically accurate surveys, we were happier in America in the 1950's than we are now, when things were simpler and more egalitarian. That will probably come as no surprise to members of my generation. We remember.

That guitar teaches me the essential truth of Hamilton's thesis. For years at a time, in the pursuit of more complicated endeavors, I have neglected that guitar. I have been out in the world getting the money together to acquire other things. The guitar has sat in the closet, in the case, unloved, unused, with tarnished strings and a dusty sound board. Then I remember I still have it, still know how to play, and I bring it out, re-string it, polish it, and it leaps back to life, better than ever. Then I get in the habit of playing again, learning new stuff or, more likely, re-learning what I already know.

I suppose that if you amortize the cost of the whole guitar experience over the thirty years I've owned that precious instrument, the original price, the books, the stand, the stool, all the strings - it doesn't come to a thousand dollars. Maybe thirty bucks a year for all that enjoyment. 75% of what it costs to fill up the car with gas so I can go out and drive in traffic jams. Without a doubt, playing that guitar has given me more pleasure than anything else I can think of, and certainly more than anything else I can do alone. And as I keep getting older - hell, maybe even more than that.

So what's the deal with Iran?

My guess, frankly, is that Iran signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in order to proliferate nuclear weapons. I think this idea is right even if I haven't seen it worded quite that way anywhere else (which, of course, is one of the reasons it appeals to me). But think about it: if Iran tried to build an enrichment plant outside the inspection regime of the IAEA and the comprehensive gaze of the ubiquitous Mohammed El-Baradei, Israel's Mossad and the CIA (acting on a tip from the Mossad) would figure it out very soon after they broke ground for the plant. Natanz would then have gone the way of Iraq's Osirak: "ka-boom!"

So the Iranians, referring to their well-thumbed copy of Poe's "The Purloined Letter," decided the best way to hide their program was to conduct it in plain view. I don't know if the Persians actually invented chess (or Parcheesi, for that matter), but they seem pretty good at reading between the lines of the NPT. Although they did not tell the IAEA about the second enrichment plant at Qum when they began construction, they claim technical compliance with the rule requiring notification to the IAEA at least 180 days before the introduction of uranium to the facility for enrichment. I've read the relevant parts of the NPT, and I can't find any provision that supports this "180-day" loophole. There is a reference to a 180-day period, but it refers to the period of compliance after a nation signs the NPT in the first place - you sign, then you've got six months to get your act together. Iran's argument has the familiar odor of an argument rather desperately concocted after other events - people found out - forced their hand. It seems more likely that Iran wanted to be far enough along in this underground facility so that it would withstand aerial bombardment, or even to finish it as an undisclosed backup to the Natanz facility which is a prominent feature of Israeli Air Force attack plans.

While it's true that the National Intelligence Estimate of a few years back concluded that Iran did not have a nuclear weapons program, it doesn't really matter because sifting uranium up to the 90+% level is the real "pacing element" in building a bomb. You get the shit, putting the bomb together is not so tough. If you don't have someone local, fly in a North Korean or maybe the Nuclear Amway Man himself, A.Q. Khan of Pakistan. He'll help set you up as an A-bomb franchise.

I know the counter-arguments: Iran is a signatory to the NPT, Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea are not. Iran is simply exercising its rights to peaceful nuclear technology under Article IV of the Treaty. It all sounds good, but I take what I think of as the ultimate Realpolitik view. There is no margin of error for nuclear war. I keep going back to that University of Colorado study (I wonder if we can get Harvard or Yale to duplicate it, so people will take it seriously) which demonstrated that an exchange of about 40-50 Hiroshima sized A-bombs dropped on urban targets will destroy enough ozone in the Northern Hemisphere to make life pretty much unlivable up here. So the only countries I want to have nuclear weapons are the ones who won't use them unless they absolutely have to. I would put the USA, Russia, China, France, Great Britain, Israel and maybe India in this club. It's not really a question of being "fair" or legalistic. A legalistic approach which winds up destroying the human race is useless.

What really needs to happen is that the NPT regime simply gets rid of this "peaceful use" loophole, since civilian nuclear power is a bad idea anyway, and uranium, once it's enriched, is pretty indifferent to whether it's used to boil water in a reactor or destroy the world.

Confusion in the Ranks: Sheetless Klan Meetings

I've been noodling on various alternative names for the White People's Rallies, and Teabagesque meetings everywhere, and haven't hit on anything completely satisfactory. KooKoo Klan was a possibility; also Koo Klutz Klan. Not quite there, but that's the creative process for you: hit & miss.

Jimmy Carter thinks there is something "racist" in these attacks on Obama. Gee, ya think? Along with Jimmy's usual haul of annual UN humanitarian honors, I think he should be 2009's frontrunner for the Duh Award. I'm wondering: can Kenny Chesney update that awful song of his and call it "No Sheet, No Shoes, No Problems"?

Anyway, Frank Rich inspired Glenn Greenwald to write about the Glenn Beck Perplex, and specifically how this highly histrionic, lachrymose, unstable bundle of nerves manages to "lead" a movement when it's obvious Beck himself has no idea where he's going. You might say the Teabaggers and others marching under his banner cannot get their sheet together.

In the bad old days, between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act, the angry white mobs had a tighter focus: anti-Negro, pro states' rights (which, in the manipulative hands of pols like George Wallace and Orval Faubus, were just the two sides of the same coin). Then as now, the reason these mobs tend to look melanin-deprived and basically confused is because they are drawn from the ranks of the white dispossessed. Economically anxious, debt-ridden, grievance-filled. Thus, they hold up signs that say, "I will protect the Constitution by any means necessary." So, in an unfair, slightly-too-sophisticated way, you might be tempted to ask: which part of the Constitution? Glenn Beck and others, operating at a level you might call superficial if that did not imply more depth than is actually there, have encouraged these mobs to think that "Obamacare" is unconstitutional because the federal government has no proper role in health care. Which is confusing, since Medicare is definitely a federal program, as are the Veteran's Administration hospital system and the Center for Disease Control. The issue was settled a long time ago by the Supreme Court through a generous interpretation of the Commerce Clause: the feds can basically do anything they want, such as tell a motel in Mississippi that they cannot discriminate in renting rooms, because, like it or not, they participate in "interstate commerce."

Or the tax thing, which our typical, well-fed protestor above is worked up about. The top federal marginal rate (35%) was brought down to its lowest level since Ronald Reagan under President George W. Bush. He did this at the behest of the plutocratic buddies who put him in office. Among other factors (such as the abandonment of anti-trust laws and the globalization agreements which encourage the shipping of American jobs out of the country), this shifting of the tax burden down has helped skew the wealth distribution to its present ridiculous imbalance. About two-thirds of the national net worth is controlled by 10% of the population; the bottom 40% own much less than 1%. I'm thinking (though I can't prove) that the political activist pictured above is not in the top 10%, and thus his enlistment in the anti-tax shock troops of Fox News is kind of, you know, nuts.

The Teabag Mobs or Sheetless Klan also encourage a "9/12" mentality, which means that they think we're on the verge of succumbing to the existential threat of an amorphous Islamic force. I suppose we could be; but this paranoiac approach to things doesn't jibe well with another Teabag hobby horse, the new-found concern about the National Debt. That's a legitimate worry, to say the least. So why have so many of the same Teabaggers, in the past, supported George W. Bush and his militaristic budget-busting, adding one-half trillion each year to the debt while in office? Why the support for "nation-building" in Iraq and Afghanistan when we're sinking in an ocean of red ink here at home? Or if they supported bank bailouts when Bush was doing it, why the protest over Obama doing the same thing?

You could call all the politics of the Teabaggers and the Koo Klutz Klans chaotic, but that makes it sound more coherent than it really is. The situation does call to mind one of the fundamental problems with democracy. As society gets more and more complicated, the intelligence and education necessary to grasp, even dimly, the precise way in which you're getting screwed increase beyond the level of the people doing the actual voting.

I read a long piece in the Boston Globe about Hyman Minsky, the iconoclastic economist, and prophet not honored in his time, who predicted the precise economic collapse the United States recently underwent in books and articles he was writing thirty and forty years ago. (Hyman even did a short stint as an Associate Professor at Berkeley in the early Sixties.) Minsky took a skeptical view of capitalism; he considered it inherently unstable (sort of like Glenn Beck, but different). He outlined three stages of capitalist development. In the first, borrowers and investors are pragmatic and conservative: they borrow only at a level where they can repay both the interest and the principal. I think of my parents' generation emerging from the Great Depression as representative of this paradigm. As the economy grows, and assets begin to inflate in value on a predictable basis, borrowers take on some risk: they borrow at a level where they can make the interest payments, but the principal is beyond them. Think Baby Boomers. This, of course, is the basic principle of leverage. This is Speculative Borrowing. At the third level, Minsky wrote, the borrowers throw caution to the wind and engage in "Ponzi borrowing," where they cannot reliably pay either the interest or the principal and depend entirely on inflation to make short-term profits. This exuberance (which was built up during the latter part of the Clinton years and into the Bush regime) lasts until some failure of a key component, maybe just one big company (Bear Stearns?) incites hysteria among over-extended, over-leveraged borrowers and investors and panic selling begins, bringing on rapid deflation and a deep recession/depression.

Minsky thought the government had an important role in mitigating the effects of Capitalist Bipolarity. When the bottom falls out, the government should institute a hiring program of the unemployed, enlisting them to work on roads, trails, railroads, clean-up, etc., in an effort to maintain a basic standard of living and to place a floor under the minimum wage. This was his "bubble-up" theory of recovery. In corporatist America, of course, we went the other way and decided to bail out a specific set of boards of directors and management teams at certain well-connected commercial and investment banks, to nationalize none of them, and to spend all of our money there. The Federal Reserve and Treasury are now tapped out.

Obama, out of fear of being called a Socialist, decided to follow the dubious lead of Bush and use a trickle-down approach to the problem. I was hoping, when GM failed, that Obama would try something audacious and nationalize the company, using its factory base and trained workers to build mass transit (high-speed and light rail). The U.S. paid enough to buy the companies outright based on their capitalization at the time. Instead, Obama "reassured" everyone that GM would stay in private hands; America's ownership would remain limited to holding a bad debt. I am now reconciled, or resigned, to the idea that Barack, unlike FDR (who used something like Minsky's idea in his Work Projects Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps), is simply not an audacious person. He tinkers a little (Cash for Clunkers, etc.) and that's it. If he fails, it will be failure based on tried-and-true modes of failure. It's what makes almost hilarious the cries from the mobs that he's a "revolutionary" or a "Marxist." I don't think Karl Marx would have recruited his economic team from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.

You can see, of course, that the Sheetless are not going to hold signs up proclaiming their belief in the alternative approach of Hyman Minsky. For one thing, I suspect there are a lot of anti-Semites lurking in their midst, and the anti-Federal Reserve plank of their "platform" is not so far removed from suspicions about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Teabag people are right that they've been had, and they're lashing out in all directions as a result. Whether what they're for or against has any chance of ameliorating their plight is similar to the probabilities involved in throwing darts at a spinning dart board. Maybe, maybe not. Does anyone represent them? Not really. Is Glenn Beck sincere in his belief in their multi-faceted "cause?" I doubt it. Is their situation going to get better? Uh-uh.

Obama Sets the Stage for Real Fascism?

Thanks to Eastern philosophy, I think I'm getting closer to sorting out my conflicted feelings about Barack Obama. I had fallen prey to the Western logical trap of "duality," of thinking in terms of opposing categories, so that to harbor suspicions about Obama's actual bona fides as a progressive or transformative leader placed me squarely in the yahoo camp of Birther Nation, Glenn Beck Crazies and other perplexing subgroups, with their mystifying, usually ungrammatical signs. (Why the hyphen between "Christian" and "Nation," for example?)

I realize it's not really like that. The Obese/Type II Diabetic March on Washington last weekend (which David Brooks found so inspiring, in his usual clueless way, because he saw some white people talking to black people), in which a large group of the White Dispossessed expressed their rage at Things in General, in its own paradoxical way shed light on the issue. I realize now. looking back over the last decade or so, that I was so shocked by the elevation of a genuine moron, George W. Bush, to the office of the Presidency that I made the mistake of believing that his election was some kind of aberration. Closer to the truth, it represented a trend line in the movement of a government responsive to the"general electorate" toward one which only uses the general electorate as a means of capturing power so that it can do what it sees as its real work, the maintenance of the status quo for the benefit of large multinational corporations. As is becoming increasingly obvious, this is the real constituency of the only two political parties viable in America.

Barack Obama is the head of one of these two political parties. Ignoring the trend line, the general populace (me included) fell for a spiel about "Change," seeing Obama as in some sense the avatar of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Robert Kennedy and wilfully discounting the modern reality that it's simply not politically possible anymore for a true Change Agent to survive in the political machinery essential to maneuvering toward the top. This obliviousness leaves us "shocked" that Obama turns out to be a kind of Bush in sheep's clothing. Obama is just as committed to fighting the "war on terror," choosing Afghanistan over Iraq (because Afghanistan is the "hip" war); he's just as bad and unconstitutional as Bush in denying habeas corpus rights to terror-war captives, creating a legal black hole in Bagram as opposed to the disfavored Guantanamo; worse than Bush in codifying a system of "preventive detention," a major break from a legal tradition begun with Magna Carta; just as craven where Wall Street is concerned; and a complete sell-out on his signature "health care" reform, where it is becoming obvious that he's only interested in the appearance of having passed something, regardless of whether it's actually ameliorative of the problems of the American Middle Class.

While all this is going on, Obama talks and talks and talks. On talk shows, in speeches, in press conferences. He preaches the gospel of bipartisanship while populist rage, in such forms as the 400 Pound/High Blood Glucose March exemplied, is stoked by Media Manipulators such as Glenn Beck, who may not realize (because of his own insanity) how dangerous the forces he's encouraging are.

One thing that is becoming self-evident is that it's highly doubtful the American people are going to fall for the "Progressive Change Agent" shtick again, so that the real danger, which we may see as early as 2010, is that the "progressives" may lapse back into their bitter apathy (which is their actual Comfort Zone, after all), while the Angry Whites (who, unlike the progressives, actually show up at demonstrations and "town halls") will mobilize and begin winning elections again based not on superior numbers but on superior motivation. I see that as the real danger posed by Obama's sell-out: a return of the disproportionate power of the White Religious Right who take to heart Woody Allen's famous dictum that just showing up is 90% of everything.

Meanwhile, the actual motivation of all these town halls and Teabaggers, "Obamacare," is pretty hard to figure out. It is an omnidirectional sort of rage and frustration which is "anti-government," secessionist, anti-immigrant and fearful of being completely marginalized economically. The people doing the demonstrating are actually the ones who would profit most from a radical transformation of health care in this country. In fact, I think health care is going to be the first Big Fail in our society: it's going to break down completely, because it's impossible to sustain the present system. It depends on the solvency of the Middle Class, and the Middle Class cannot afford what we have anymore. That is unique and unprecedented, although it never gets talked about in those terms. Most adverse social conditions in this country simply hit the poor and already marginalized, and then some "social program" (such as Medicaid or AFDC) is implemented to keep them from expiring altogether. The inability of Middle Class Americans to afford ordinary insurance premiums (which keeps adding to the ranks of the uninsured) is not ameliorated by such welfare programs, and yet there is nothing in the present proposals to do anything about this basic problem, because Obama is too timid (and probably beholden) to attack the problem at its root.

Meanwhile, the real estate market is not expected to recover to its 2006 prices until 2020 or so. Should be an interesting decade, in the sense of the Chinese curse.

The noncooperating judiciary

It will be interesting to see how the Kumbaya Kid and the financial section of his cabinet react to the legal hardball currently being played in New York. It's not the White House's style. Obama prefers to defer any sort of punitive measure till the next time that perpetrators do the same illegal things. Maybe the U.S. tortured people during the Bush Administration, but it's pointless to do anything about it now, he argues. One could hear a similar sentiment in his speech on Monday on Wall Street. The next time that investment banks melt the world's financial system down through unchecked, relentless greed, there will be hell to pay by the bank's stockholders and management. This time, however, the same fall guy winds up holding the bag: the American taxpayer. And if Goldman Sachs and others want to pay themselves record bonuses at the end of this year, all made possible by virtually free money from the Federal Reserve, well hell - that's American capitalism, sort of, and in January, 2010, the bonuses paid in December, 2009, will be in the past, where they are immune from scrutiny or prosecution. But Obama suggested that Wall Street bankers demonstrate now that their hearts are in the right place (or that they even have hearts) by putting such bonuses up to stockholder vote, because that may become the law in the future.

I sometimes wonder if Obama himself believes there is any chance whatsoever that his precatory appeals to the better angels of the Banksters can succeed. If he does, I'm sure that Ari Emanuel's brother convinces him quickly otherwise.

Other players on the scene are not quite so easygoing, such as the New York federal judiciary and Andrew Cuomo, the Attorney General of New York state. They're all over the SEC and the Bank of America like a pit bull on a poodle (h/t: Mr. Bookman, the library investigator from "Seinfeld.") It seems that the Bank of America high command was aware prior to its forced-march acquisition of Merrill Lynch that the investment bank had already paid itself massive bonuses (about $20 billion in a year in which Merrill Lynch had lost money) in advance of the "permission" that the BofA told its shareholders in a proxy statement that ML required from BofA as a condition of any such bonuses; and, the losses from ML's mortgage subsidiary were much larger than those anticipated when BofA was ordered at gunpoint by Henry Paulson to save Merrill Lynch. So much so that BoA attempted to back out of the deal, citing the Material Adverse Change (MAC) clause in the acquisition deal.

The Securities & Exchange Commission, arousing itself from the coma it had enjoyed during the Bernie Madoff years (nice work, Christopher Cox!), investigated and found that BofA had indeed misled its shareholders on the advisability of the acquisition/merger, and brought an enforcement action in the lower Manhattan federal court of Judge Jed Rakoff. Such bad luck for the SEC and the BofA; these two parties had worked out a sweetheart deal, a "fine" of $33 million (three orders of magnitude away from the amounts actually involved in the BofA/Merrill deal). They could not have drawn a worse judge, from the standpoint of getting away with this collusive wrist-slap. Rakoff's whole career has been about the detection and prosecution of white collar crime. He teaches a course on the subject at Columbia Law School. Here's what he had to say about the settlement:

“The S.E.C. gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger,” he wrote, and “the Bank’s management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators.”

As it turns out, neither party will get to claim either thing. Rakoff threw the settlement out and told the SEC it was going to trial next year in his court against BofA. Which brings up a question: what will the SEC do? Dismiss the case altogether?

This whole fiasco must be a considerable source of consternation in the Oval Office, where everyone is seen as everyone else's friend, and stuff like war crimes and massive financial fraud must always be considered in context. Rakoff, as judge and private litigator, has seen enough civil RICO, mail fraud and other crime to know this is a very naive view. These were all pigs feeding at the public trough and stealing everything that wasn't nailed down. They used bailout money and anything else coming through the door for personal compensation, with the idea that a panicked public sector would fork over the cash, no questions asked.

It was all going swimmingly, but here come da judge. Now Cuomo is gearing up his state court action against the BofA for securities fraud, and will subpoena its top management in the near future. Can the depositions of Paulson & Bernanke be far behind? It looked so much like a clean getaway, the TARP, the bailouts, all of it. Now what?

The Michael Moore Medical Insurance Reform Act

It occurs to me that as unlikely as it might have been that a fellow with Michael Moore's BMI would have nevertheless wound up being the conscience of the health care debate, such has indeed proved to be the case. The two salient points that might survive the Congressional fiasco currently underway are the foci of Moore's movie "SiCKO:" to wit, insurance companies should not be allowed to do business if they systematically exclude people with "preexisting conditions" and they should not be allowed to drop insureds from coverage simply because they get sick, i.e., need the insurance they've been paying thousands of dollars for.

And then Congress ought to fold up the circus tent and move on to the next town.

I watched Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn) on Real Time last night, a very sharp, genuinely liberal Congressman with a quick wit, combative nature and high IQ talk about Congress's missed opportunity. He made the obvious point that Obama gave the game away at the start by deciding to work within the existing medical insurance framework. Once you do that, there's not much to talk about, although Obama keeps talking, as he did Wednesday night. One thing I've learned about Prez O is that you should wait a couple of days after one of his speeches before you gauge your own reaction. He's so good at speaking, at the art of oration itself, that you forget about content. There was virtually no content, other than the Two SiCKO Points, and those are good ones. So pass a bill that does exactly those two things and forget the rest, because the rest (a) will not bring down costs and (b) will not expand coverage in the "revenue neutral" way that Obama says it will. There is no way to provide health insurance to 50 million uninsured Americans through the existing predatory private insurance industry without some political entity, the federal govt. or the states (through Medicaid), going bust-o.

President Obama said at the outset that replacing the private insurance system "would be too disruptive," although he would like a Single Payer system. It's clear O doesn't like disruption; for example, during the speech he assured the Republican blowhards that whatever plan gets passed, no federal money would be provided for abortions. Thus, for some reason he feels compelled to reassure us that women (and probably the neediest of women) who need this Constitutionally protected, perfectly legal procedure can't have it, because it upsets Republicans when women exercise their Constitutional rights. He was also clear that undocumented aliens will receive no benefits for any notional "public option;" since neither Congress nor Obama has any intention of ever dealing with the problem of illegal immigration, this means that uninsured undocumented aliens will continue to use emergency rooms as their primary care physician. This sounds tough and jingoist and winds up being stupid.

I hope, as we nation build in Afghanistan, that we do it right over there from the outset. The billions that we spend there can include a model universal health care system to provide cradle-to-grave free access paid for by taxes. The years when America might have done that have obviously passed, but it's still a good idea.

Meanwhile, the Obama Wall Street reforms seem to be dying a slow death as the overmatched White House does battle with the legal sharks of Manhattan. It's only because they're doing things out of order. Moore's new movie opens in a few weeks and will outline the sweet spots. Thank goodness somene is still working hard on our problems.

Is America Actually Still Capable of Great Things?

Odd that President Obama even felt the need to reassure us on that point Wednesday night, don't you think? What has been going on that would call our capability into question?

I was musing out loud to a friend recently about the rough congruence of a normal lifespan and big societal changes. Life is change, the Buddha tells us. Suppose, I said, you had been a man born in Dresden, Germany, in 1910. By the age of 4, the Great War would have commenced and lasted until you were age 8. A few years after the that, the Weimar Republic would have succumbed to one of the great episodes of hyperinflation in world history. That set the stage for the rise of Hitler and the Brownshirts in the 1920's, and by 1933 (age 23 for unser Mann) the Third Reich ran the state with murderous, totalitarian control. When this German reached the age of 29, World War II would have begun, and if he were able-bodied, chances are he would have been conscripted into the Wehrmacht. If he survived the war, he would have returned to a hometown utterly destroyed by Allied bombing. The Soviets who arrived in the eastern part of Germany as a liberation army decided not to leave, so now Der Mann finds himself a citizen of the GDR, a Soviet satellite, a Communist government replacing Fascism. At the age of 35 he is perhaps trained in whatever heavy industry the Soviet Central Committee decides is appropriate for East Germany. Dresden is rebuilt, much of it in the inimitable Soviet style. This state of affairs continues until 1989, when the Berlin Wall is torn down, and as our Mann expires in 1990, at the age of 80, talk is rife about reunification with the West, bringing the country of his birth full circle.

So maybe the idea that things must always stay the same through the laws of inertia is something of a myth. America, because of poor, short-sighted leadership and business practices, transmogrified itself from the manufacturing colossus of the 1950's, during my own youth, to its present hollowed-out "consumer" economy, dependent on foreign borrowing for its solvency and for overseas manufacturing for most of its everyday needs. Unlike Der Mann, Americans have never been exactly confronted with some immutable sign that Things Have Changed: when your city is destroyed and your German rulers are overthrown in favor of Soviet stooges answering to Moscow, it's hard to pretend it's the same-old same-old.

It seems likely that during my lifetime, we will witness the end of American financial hegemony in the sense that the dollar will no longer be the world's fiat currency. This fact alone will bring about huge changes, since it won't be possible to print valuable currency as a way out of debt or to control the cost of basic commodities by pricing everything in dollars. China, India, Brazil, Russia, the Eurozone, will all have a lot more to say about how such things are done. These changes are inevitable and are already underway. Our era of "legacy" domination is coming to a close.

So I don't know the answer to Barack's question. I think it's unfortunate, really, that he decided it was the best political course to do "a lot of big things at once." That strikes me as a survival of the old style of American Exceptionalism. It would have been much better to start with a job-creating, sustainable effort to rework the energy grid so we can move toward self-sufficiency. But maybe all these old pols who have been in Washington, D.C. forever, and refuse to see (or are incapable of seeing) how much things have changed need to find out the hard way, and have history happen to them (and to us) as der alte Herr Mann did in his.

Three impossible things after breakfast

As always, a plethora of topics presents itself. I can think of three things, which is not as impressive as the Lewis Carroll character who could think of six impossible things before breakfast. But I try.

For example, and here's a h/t to Dan: in August the Social Security fund went negative to the tune of $6 billion. Were you aware of that? It does not seem to be receiving much play in the news. It is, however, an absolutely titanic (heh-heh) development. The Social Security fund is a piggy bank for Congress. When they run out of money (that is, on Day 1 of the fiscal year), they reach into this fund and take out the FICA taxes you pay in and replace it with an IOU. These IOUs, which presently stretch from here to Neptune, are in lieu of, you know, the cash you paid in. How will the IOUs be repaid (another way of asking: what the flock is the Social Security Trust Fund exactly?) and the difference made up between payments to present retirees and the inflow from cash-strapped workers? By floating more IOUs, of course, what we call "Treasury obligations."

Right now you might be thinking to yourself: is there a material, relevant difference between this approach and what Bernie Madoff is doing a hundred fifty for? Well, let's subject it to a little lawyerly dissection. In both cases, the Perp (the Treasury or Madoff) has the same problem. People who invested earlier want their money back, with interest. The Treasury (and Bernie) no can do - they don't have the money on hand. Bernie spent it on villas in Palm Beach, Montauk and France, the Treasury (through its mafiosi in Congress) on cruise missiles, overseas bases and the F-22. So far we're tracking nicely. So what to do? Bernie kept scamming investors and used their money to pay off the earlier investors. The Treasury floats more notes & bonds to the Fed, the Chinese and Saudi Arabia, although the latter two "indirect bidders" may also get the actual money from the Fed, when the Fed buys the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) which these FCBs (foreign central banks) bought from the Ponzi operations known as Fannie & Freddie.

Is this at all confusing? That's what criminal trials are for, to parse the evidence and break it down into easy-to-follow charts and exhibits. The Treasury & Fed, and their operational arm, Congress, hope you won't go to so much trouble. Still, it's difficult to see, so far, what real difference there is between Bernie and Eraserhead (Tim Geithner). Both are selling investments (in Bernie's case, the Blue Sky itself; in Tim's, the fraudulent promise to pay back what the Treasury will never in fact pay back, i.e., the national debt). All that Eraserhead can actually do is keep adding to the debt the Treasury has already accrued in order to meet the demands of investors who "redeem" and a Congress with a ravenous appetite for huge military expenditures. When Madoff's early marks made demands for redemption, the game was rolled up by the FBI. The federal government, however, is the FBI, among other things, so there's no one to roll them up. Could this explain why the SEC slept through Madoff's 20-year Ponzi scheme? It just seemed like S.O.P.

You can see that the last thing the Treasury needs right now is to discover that a reliable slush fund (your FICA payments) has turned into a really draggy debt. Where the hell are they supposed to steal money now? Going back to the analogy, which seems to have legs, the FICA "trust fund" is a little like one of Bernie's easy touches, a cousin or something, where he could go when the pressure got intense from some stranger who wanted to see the long green. As in Bernie's case, what's causing the tide to go out, revealing a vast shorescape of old tires and broken whiskey bottles, is the Tasered American "consumer" economy. People aren't paying in FICA taxes because they got no income.

The whole Social Security scam wasn't supposed to "go negative" until about 2017 under the fantasy projections of the Congressional Budget Office; that is, the FICA slush fund was supposed to be around till then and not become another dreary obligation. August, 2009, is a little sooner than planned, all must admit. Hey look: they can "seasonally adjust" the deficit and prove there will still be a surplus for the fiscal year ending in about 20 days. Just you wait. And for fiscal year 2010, beginning in 21 days? Well, we've done some projections based on the rapidly improving economy and it doesn't seem to us there's anything to worry about right now, or in 2010, or...look at this glossy brochure! And I can guarantee results, a comfortable 12% return on your money made possible by our proprietary investment strategies which take advantage of, hey, where you going? And who are you calling on the phone?

Manufacturing Consent, Updated

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

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

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

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

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

All of which Greenwald simply reproduces in his own column.

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

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

Vietnam Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love It or Leave It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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