Ramblings
Ramblings
The Supreme Court’s ruling that gave corporations the same rights as people. In 1886, in Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Supreme Court decided that corporations, under the 14th Amendment, are afforded the same constitutional rights as people. It was U.S. political histories most egregious example of the court reinterpreting the constitution. Aside from the fact that corporations can’t possibly be construed as people, nowhere in the constitution does the word “corporation” appear. As if this decision weren’t bad enough, the court accepted the ruling without argument.
Justice Morrison Remick Waite wrote, “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” The clerk of the court, in two sentences, opened the gate wide for corporations to become the powerful, multinational, and far too often destructive entities of the public good they have time and again, proven themselves to be. The clerk wrote, “The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
This decision needs to be revisited. Republicans, corporate shareholders, and anyone who thinks dictatorships are better than democracy, will howl in outrage when it’s determined, as it will inevitably be, that corporations are not people, and Justice Waite may have been imbibing the day he wrote his decision. Let them howl. Let them twist in the wind. The U.S. either lives under a constitution, or it does not. That is all that must be decided.
Deregulation is the second crippling blow directed against the U.S. public and the constitution that protects them. Deregulation has been sold to Americans as the answer to a meddling, bureaucratic government. It’s been packaged as the magical force that broke the chains of communism and socialism. It’s claim that competition is healthy and will bring lower prices and better quality service to all Americans if only government will get out of the market’s way has been exposed as false time and time again. After each crushing, financial blow that deregulation visits upon the nation, the taxpayers must step in to bail out whichever industry has bitten the dust. Reagan pushed for the deregulation of industry as one of the major goals of his presidency, and the first casualty was the nation’s S&L’s. Before it was over 1,043 thrifts, with total assets of 500 billion, would fail. The new, “Depository Institutions Deregulation And Monetary Control Act” encouraged risks and speculative opportunities. The thrifts, once deregulated, were able to charter themselves as state, or federal institutions. Not surprisingly, they opted for federal charters, where they would be insured by the nation’s taxpayers under the FDIC. Corporate thieves recognized that as long as the FDIC replaced the depositors stolen cash, the heat could be easily deflected. But the experiment in deregulation was only just beginning.
The most public outrage against American consumers was Enron’s rip-off of California’s energy ratepayers. Incredibly, California is once again considering the deregulation of their energy producing infrastructure. It never ceases to astonish how easily people are led to self immolation. But the damage of deregulation is insidious. It allowed corporations to speculate on illusory positions the various markets may occupy at a future date. Wall Street dreamed up lots of new financial instruments with which to hoodwink investors. Beginning with junk bonds, and continuing with credit derivatives, most of them have one essential purpose - to steal money from investors, most often through the inflated share values. By the time the first Bush was elected, deregulation was in full swing.
The high tech bubble burst when the startup companies began sprouting like mushrooms. They were traded for high dollars even though they had little or no assets, and couldn’t show a profit on their books. But the greed driven market, with its carrot and stick, promised fantastic returns on comparatively minimal investments. After a pile of cash had accumulated, the overpriced shares would be sold by corporate managers, often for many millions of dollars. Then the startup would be left to languish, and eventually enter into bankruptcy.
Reagan was Mr. Sunnyside up to many Americans. “Well I've said it before and I'll say it again — America's best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead.” He meant these words, undoubtedly, but he lacked the intellect to understand where his policies would take the nation. Twenty years went by and George W. Bush was appointed president by a fraudulent Supreme Court. After almost 8 years of disastrous policy decisions Bush said, "There is no magic wand to wave right now. It took us a while to get to this fix.” Yes, it did, didn’t it Junior? Reagan could not have foreseen Bush, or the 20 years of republican administrations that brought the nation to this “fix.” Junior criticizes congress for dragging its feet and says he’s open to “any ideas” to boost the sagging economy. Any ideas meaning he hasn’t a clue except opening Alaska’s wilderness to oil field development, and building more refineries. Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Today’s housing bubble is arguably the biggest economic threat against the nation’s economy that has ever been. For years lenders presented home owners unrealistic loan proposals that depended on illusory speculations that property values would keep rising. Consumers borrowed against the rising value of their homes until reality intervened and property began reflecting its true value. The U.S. economy was driven by these loans as Americans went ever deeper into debt and today, the reverse is happening, as property values fall and interest rates rise.
Compounding the problem of unrealistic lending was the investment banks practice of packaging the loans and selling them to Wall Street as Collateralized Debt Obligations, or CDO’s. The banks promised a steady positive income from the interest payments of the loans, but as greedy as ever, Wall Street wasn’t thinking about the soundness of the loans. Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s were supposed to be assessing the loans for risk, but they were in bed with the banks that were packaging the CDO’s. The net effect is now being seen with millions of foreclosures and a mind boggling 739 billion dollar taxpayer bailout of the financial industry. The SEC, so far, has found no evidence of wrongdoing! This is like walking into a chicken coup and finding only foxes, then contemplating the mystery of what could have happened to the chickens. If Americans don’t wake up very soon they’re going to find themselves barefoot and hungry and looking for somewhere to pitch their tents. There must be rules - regulations, if Americans desire civilization.
Between the war in Iraq and the thieves who run the nation’s financial institutions, the American taxpayers are in for a very rough ride. Add the Bush Administrations huge tax breaks to the corporations that engineer these rip-offs, and economic disaster is here. It’s being artificially postponed until a democrat is elected president. The few regulations that are left are administered by industry lobbyists and corporate fat cats - all pals of Junior’s. In other words, there are no regulations. It’s a free for all of who can get their hands into the nation’s treasury and grab the most cash. The banks, before they begin falling like dominos, have rigged up a bailout package worth 739 billion dollars. Bear & Stearns was the first recipient of the taxpayers largess. But the banks don’t want the public to know how much they’ll be paying to pull the banks back from the brink. In this upside down, turned inside out nation, this is good news. It means that banks are still respectful enough of the public that they still feel it’s necessary to lie.
One bank official puts it this way. “We believe that any intervention by the federal government will be acceptable only if it is not perceived as a bailout of the bond market.” The twist of the knife will be when Bush runs the Fairy Tale of how the generous, compassionate banks helped struggling homeowners keep their homes.
The Fairness Doctrine is number three on the list of “Things to make right.” The Fairness Doctrine must be brought back. The public owns the airwaves and the lies spread by conservative republicans must not go unchallenged. The Fairness Doctrine will bring contrasting points of view back into highly partisan and opinionated programs such as the Rush Limbaugh Show, and Fox News. Rupert Murdoch, a foreign national, would not be tolerated in any country except the U.S. His media empire consistently attacks democrats because Rupert knows that democrats, if they ever reclaim their courage, will bring back the Fairness Doctrine, and Fox News will be forced to adhere to some modicum of truth. It’s a disgrace that someone as ignorant and intellectually weak as Limbaugh is in a position to sway public opinion. Imagine him attempting a debate with highly intelligent, well informed democrat. Limbaugh can’t hold his own on the David Letterman Show.
Number four on the list is getting rid of the outrageously partisan justices that perch like vultures on the Supreme Court’s bench. If Barrack Obama wins the general election and becomes the nation’s 44th president, one of his first responsibilities must be in asking Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy for their resignations. These, of course, are the three justices who still befoul the court after handing the 2000 election to Bush. If they refuse to resign they should be impeached. For the first time in the nation’s history the Supreme Court intervened in an election to decide its outcome. That the court was willing to sacrifice its legitimacy to get Bush into office is condemnation enough. The justices who argued for Bush should have the native intelligence to resign.
Rehnquist, being dead, can’t resign. But when he was alive he went after Clinton. He wanted to see him impeached and he didn’t try to disguise the fact. When Gore was elected, it was too much. How dare Americans vote for a man the court didn’t approve of! In a split decision, the justices decided that states have no right to hold elections when it can result in Gore being elected. The court is still carrying on its mischief with its recent decision denying millions of Americans the right to vote if they can’t show proper identification as determined by the court. They are the most disgusting examples of humanity to ever violate the public’s trust. They pick the fleas from each other’s backs, and they know perfectly well that it’s the poor, the black, the homeless, who are most likely to lack drivers licenses, and to vote for democrats.
At some point there must be some accountability. The justices are supposed to be the best, the brightest legal minds in the country. But once again they’ve proven themselves to be nothing more than cheap, partisan hacks, who won’t hesitate to manufacture law from convoluted reasonings. These arbitrarily, unelected and fraudulent imposters pose as interpreters of constitutional law and Obama, if elected, has a duty to get rid of them like the dangerous pests they are. They’ve demonstrated time and again that they are eminently unsuited for the high offices they consistently corrupt. How dare these disgusting old men presume upon themselves to impose Bush, a born loser by any account, upon the American people? They must be unceremoniously run out of office, preferably wearing tar and feathers. “In the United States at the present day, the reverence which the Greeks gave to the oracles and the Middle Ages to the Pope is given to the Supreme Court. Those who have studied the working of the American Constitution know that the Supreme Court is part of the forces engaged in the protection of the plutocracy.” -- Bertrand Russell
The way in which campaigns are financed must end. There is not much to say on this topic, other than it is a terribly corrupting influence on public policy. Fixing it is simple. No more campaign donations from any private parties. Elections will be paid for with government tax dollars. If the public can be fleeced for 739 billion to bailout the nation’s financial institutions, the money is damn sure available to pay for the candidate’s campaigns. The public’s airwaves will be used to broadcast the candidate’s views. Debates will be regularly scheduled and once again, the public’s airwaves will be used to broadcast them. If the airwaves can be used to visit the Rush Limbaugh Show upon Americans, its doesn’t seem a lot to ask that television be used to familiarize Americans with congressional and presidential candidates. As Bush has so clearly demonstrated, it’s of paramount importance who Americans choose as their president. The nation may not survive Bush, and another one like him, for instance John McCain, may hammer the final nail into what was once a free republic.
These problems are not hard to fix, but in a nation where roughly half of the population is ready to replace Bush with McCain, there doesn’t seem much hope. How could so many Americans fail to recognize a buffoonish loser when they had months to watch Bush stumble over two syllable words? When they had months to hear him present ultimatums as if the world were black and white and as easy to understand as Bush perceives it to be. If Americans can only recognize what’s been done to their great nation there is a chance they can put aside their differences and rise to the challenge of reclaiming their nation from the thieves, the rogues, the liars. Corporate television and other corporate media will fight bitterly against any changes, and unless Americans act to turn the quid quo pro around, they can expect to loose what remains of their free, democracy.
Here is a youtube video that talks about this very subject.
If the fight goes to the convention, we know the answer: Unless she totally routs Obama in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, her sole remaining path to the nomination depends on convincing the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters, and convincing the credentials committee to honor the problematic Michigan and Florida elections. So she'll have to practically destroy the party to save it, or more accurately to save herself. Assuming a possible breaking sex scandal doesn't bring down McCain, he already beats Clinton by 12 points in the latest poll, while Obama defeats him by 7. If the young voters, independents, and African Americans who Obama's enlisted in droves stay home in November because they feel they’ve been betrayed, Clinton's chances would be slim to none.
But she still can do real damage to Obama with her negative attacks in the remaining primaries, particularly in swing states like Ohio. Recent match-ups show Obama a solid victor in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, and Oregon, and dead even in Ohio, while Clinton goes down to defeat in all of them. But depending on how negative she gets and how long the primary battle continues, she could cost the Democrats the election by forcing Obama to spend his time responding to an endless succession of petty attacks, and by giving the Republicans ready-made talking points, like Hillary's comment that only "one of us is ready to be commander in chief."
The potential damage is magnified if you count Clinton's surrogates. At the Youngstown, Ohio rally following Clinton's Wisconsin defeat, International Association of Machinists President Tom Buffenbarger called Obama supporters "latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies." That's despicable rhetoric, echoing the worst Limbaugh/Fox myths about limousine liberals, while it dismisses the majority of union members who just backed Obama in the Wisconsin and Virginia primaries, or the members of unions like SEIU, The Teamsters, and the United Food and Commercial Workers, who just endorsed him. It also happens to totally steal its language from the sleazy "latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading" anti-Howard Dean ads of the right-wing Club For Growth, that helped give us the disastrous candidacy of John Kerry.
If repeated enough, though, those myths have the potential to stick. Clinton supporters have just created a new "527" political committee, which while technically independent and issue-oriented, is explicitly designed to allow Hillary supporters to evade the standard $2300 donation limits. The group aims to get contributions of $100,000 or more from as many as 100 Hillary donors, so they can pour $10 million in ads into the next round of critical races. Whether or not this is legal, and that's arguable, no other candidate has done anything remotely similar in this election. And since the ads have no checks of accountability, they'll be as nasty as their backers decide.
Between Clinton's actions and those of her surrogates, they might just stigmatize Obama so much that some of her supporters stay home in November, instead of voting for him. They'll also encourage Republicans and independents who've been crossing over to support Obama do the same, or even vote for McCain despite his embrace of Bush's disastrous policies. I think Obama will still win, so long as his supporters do everything possible to make that happen. But Hillary's attacks will plant the seeds of doubts. And these will diminish the magnitude of Obama's likely victory just enough to make far harder for him to pass the major changes we need.
Clinton's attacks could also make a difference in down-ticket races. Right now, Obama mobilizes huge new constituencies that could elect a wave of new Democratic Senators, Congressional representatives, governors and legislators. But if Clinton manages to damage his appeal sufficiently, he will become far less of an asset even if he still wins. Plus the longer she remains in the race, the more he has to spend money responding to petty attack ads like one in Wisconsin where she accused him of avoiding debates, although he'd already participated in 18 and had two more coming up. It also means, as Tom Edsdall has pointed out, that the Democratic National Committee risks getting so starved of cash because it's all getting diverted to the nomination fights, that the DNC can't develop the critical grassroots infrastructure to implement its 50-state strategy.
Hillary may give up if she fares poorly in Ohio and Texas. Bill intimated recently that she had to win both or she was likely done. But she's talked of fighting all the way to the convention, as have her key strategists, so it's at least possible that she could keep the race in limbo until less than 10 weeks before the November election, making it far harder for Obama to focus on defeating McCain.
One solution, ironically, could come from the superdelegates. They were established originally as a conservative force in the Democratic Party, a bulwark against grassroots insurgencies like McGovern. In 1984, they actually handed the nomination to Walter Mondale, for his disastrous candidacy, despite Gary Hart's lead in elected delegates. But they also have an ostensible mandate to consider the Party's greater good, and if they acted in this fashion, they could play a key constructive role.
Suppose a critical mass of superdelegates did what 400,000 petition-signers just asked them to do in a MoveOn/Democracy for America ad that ran in USA Today—and pledged to honor the will of the voters? Suppose they announced in advance that they'd support whichever candidate had more elected delegates going into the late August convention? Suppose they also came up with a joint solution to the Michigan and Florida mess, where these states lost their delegates by violating a Democratic Party agreement on when states could hold their primaries? It would be a travesty to validate their sham elections given that the candidates couldn't even campaign in Florida, that Obama and Edwards had pulled their names from Michigan ballot, and that Clinton herself told New Hampshire Public Radio that her staying on the Michigan ballot was irrelevant because Michigan’s vote “is not going to count for anything.”
But what if the superdelegates acted now, to make clear that they will not validate those two elections as they stand, and that they'll encourage their colleagues on the Credentials Committee to do the same? As an alternative, they could urge those two states to do what the DNC has already suggested, and rerun their elections as caucuses. Yes, this would cost some money and effort, but if the experience of the states that have held them is any guide, it would also offer a major chance for the party to mobilize and engage new supporters, and it would bring participants together in a way that reminded them of the values they shared in common. If the two state parties, both dominated by Clinton supporters, still refused to go along, the superdelegates could also offer the alternative of simply seating Clinton-Obama delegates 50-50, to make it a dead wash. But they need to make clear that Clinton won't be able to pull out a last-minute victory by gaming the rules.
Facing a relatively united bloc of precisely those superdelegates that Clinton still hopes to win, I suspect she'd be far more likely to quit, and do far less damage while still in the race. Key party elders like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi are already working to ensure a convention process that pulls the Party together, rather than splitting it apart. They and others might play an additional role by speaking out against destructive negative campaigning (whether by Clinton or her surrogates), and making clear that if this goes too far, she will lose their support.
Were Hillary running less of a scorched-earth campaign, it could continue onto the convention without major damage. But she's pursued this approach from the moment Obama emerged as a serious challenger, and seems only to be reaffirming it more in recent weeks. For instance, at the most recent debate, she was mostly all congeniality and smiles (excepting a few snotty comments like "change you can xerox."). The next day, her campaign followed up by pushing the media to cover Obama’s receiving $200 from a former member of the destructive Vietnam-era political group, the Weathermen. (This despite Bill Clinton pardoning another Weatherman from prison as he was leaving office). All this means that if Democrats really want to end this kind of divisiveness, they'd do well to unite around Obama now. He just got the endorsement of the 6-million member Change to Win Coalition (and individual member unions like SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers, UNITE/HERE, and the Teamsters). The United Steel Workers, a national social justice leader, initially endorsed John Edwards, and will make a decision at their next board meeting. It's time for the other major industrial unions and progressive organizations to commit too, or to reconsider their earlier support for Clinton.
That's also true of prominent individuals, like Edwards, who I originally supported. It's now well overdue for him to encourage his supporters to back the legitimate inheritor of his quest for change. Maybe Clinton will still make an improbable comeback, but the longer she keeps campaigning, the more attacks and divisiveness we'll see. The more party leaders speak out to prevent this from happening, the less risk that she'll create lasting damage in her desperation to hold onto a prize that's now almost certainly slipped away.
Those familiar with the Tarot know that the figure depicted on the first card in the deck is the Magician. The Magician is a very powerful figure, for seemingly he creates realities where before there was nothing. A clear indication of this creative power is the presence on the card of the mathematical sign for infinity -- 8 -- representing the possessor of all knowledge (magi), all space, all time going forward.
But those who would ask the Magician to "perform" need be wary of what the response is. In some cultures, the magician is a trickster whose real objective is to deceive--sometime with devastating consequences for the interlocutor. And when that interlocutor is the President of the United States, the consequences of deception can be earth-shattering.
Think back to June 16th, 2001, when George Bush and Vladimir Putin met for the first time in Slovenia. In answer to a reporter's question about whether the U.S. could trust Russia (and by implication, Putin), Bush replied: "I looked the man in the eyeI was able to get a sense of his soulI appreciated so very much the frank dialoguethat's the beginning of a very constructive relationship." At this time, before Russia regained economic strength from rising oil prices, before September 11th, 2001, before Iraq, Bush saw himself as the man who would make things happen. After all, as the new millennium opened, the United States was indisputably the most powerful nation in the history of the world.
In short, even then Bush saw himself as the Magician, as the "decider." In reality, those who see themselves in that role are sure to be deceived, for they are focused on that which is intended to distract attention from what is really happening. The power of any good Magician, after all, is to be able to conjure an illusion that holds the attention of his audience long enough to reveal the reality that has always existed but was hidden.
Fast forward to late 2007-early 2008. With one year left in his presidency, George Bush has no significant positive foreign policy achievements. At the beginning of 2007, he sent 40,000 additional U.S. troops into Iraq to stave off increased sectarian and ethnic depredations. In January 2008, he is sending 3,200 more troops into Afghanistan to try to stabilize conditions there. The attempt to push forward the "roadmap" for Mid-East peace--starting with the November 22nd Annapolis summit, had bogged down and, unless re-invigorated, would likely stall as had all previous efforts.
We may never know who the "Magician" behind the curtain was who kept the props in place while the actors played their parts on history's center stage. But assume he or she finally succeeded in pushing forward one other long-standing issue whose resolution in 2008 would guarantee George Bush's coveted positive mark on world history. It would, if successful, rival the Nixon-Kissinger opening to China in 1972 in its impact.
But like Nixon-Kissinger in 1972, powerful centers in the U.S. would oppose the opening--and the same could be expected in the country to which the opening would be made. The whole project would have to be concealed; the attention of the media, the American public, and most of those in the U.S. administration, had to be diverted. The presidential campaigns in the U.S. would help, but the background rhetoric would have to be steady and highly critical.
What the Magician intended--and Bush finally agreed to do--was to go to Tehran to end 30 years of estrangement with Iran.
The grand distraction would be a trip ostensibly to reenergize the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. But while everyone was focused on that process, the "exploratory" talks about talks in Baghdad between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker and his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Kasemi Qumi, really would be working out details of the visit to Iran.
Among all the warnings of the dangers a nuclear Iran represented to the other Gulf states, despite the charges that Iran was supplying Iraqi insurgents with weapons used to kill U.S. troops in Iraq, the hidden exchanges never faltered--unlike in 2003 when the U.S. abruptly cut contact with Tehran.
It was in his December 4th, 2007 press conference, after release of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear weapons programs, that Bush signaled he was prepared to make the leap: "On the one hand, we should exert pressure, and on the other hand, we should provide the Iranians a way forward. Andour hope is that the Iranians will get diplomacy back on track."
Thirty days passed. Just as Nixon had worried that something would derail his opening to China, Bush could see his legacy disappearing. Then on January 3rd, 2008, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking to a small group of Iranian students, signaled back: "I would be the first one to support these relations. Of course we never said the severed relations were forever. But for the time being, it (restoring ties) (would) provide an opportunity for security agents to come and go, as well as for espionage."
But was this reply a yes or a no? Were the Iranians about to pull the rug from under the secret negotiations for the visit? Three days passed. Suddenly the whole project seemed lost because of what appeared to be a serious incident-at-sea between three U.S. warships and five Iranian fast patrol boats. Someone in a senior position in Tehran, opposed to any rapprochement and having control of military sea craft, must have suspected something was about to happen.
And although the U.S. press played up the encounter's hazards--and began to probe deeper into other incidents that might lead them toward the Magician and his illusion of countries-at-odds--the official Iranian version (after denying that the encounter ever occurred) stressed that the meeting was a routine exchange of ship identities, course and intent and that no hostile actions took place.
Nonetheless, some in the U.S. press immediately equated this modern-day encounter to the August 1964 "Gulf of Tonkin" incident which led to a major escalation of U.S. troop units in South Vietnam. Interestingly, word of the encounter leaked first from the White House, but reporters had to go to the Pentagon for the details--most of which were still murky.
Departure day for the Mid-East trip arrived. As Air Force One became airborne, Bush found himself in a quandary similar to Richard Nixon in 1972: then, when the American president landed in Beijing, he still had no assurance he would be able to meet directly with Chairman Mao.
He did, and changed U.S. relations in Asia and the globe. Then the issues were 55,000 dead in South Vietnam, a looming recession, the price of oil soon to (for then) skyrocket, and the abandonment of the gold standard.
Today the issues for Bush are 4,400 U.S. dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, a looming recession, the price of oil on the verge of skyrocketing, the precipitous decline of the dollar against other currencies, the troubled housing market, global warming, and U.S. Iranian relations. Of these, only on the latter is Bush still "the decider"--or rather co-decider.
If he didn't go to Tehran, obviously nothing in U.S.-Iranian relations would change, and Bush would miss the last opportunity for a legacy.
If he went but Khamenei refused to see him, his "grand opening" would be incomplete and thus his historical stature would be forever diminished. But should he go, and should he and Khamenei meet, even though nothing substantive occurred, the illusion would dominate.
Is there still a Magician in the house?
Yesterday I read an article by Steve Benin on the resignation of Karen Hughes from her post as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a mouthful there, and a job for which she was as ill suited and unqualified as the man who appointed her and in which, during her two year tenure, she accomplished little, if anything.
In truth, she accomplished nothing, unless you want to count convincing large portions of the world that all Americans must be as out of touch with reality, as clueless and unthinking as their current Commander in Chief, and at that she excelled, as anyone might, having been dispatched to the Middle East with the rank of Ambassador, but without knowledge of the language, culture, history, religions, and general pet peeves of the various states and peoples of the region.
But Karen Hughes was tapped for her office for the same reasons as all Bush appointees are chosen, not for expertise or experience, not for performance or integrity in public service but for loyalty, for unwavering belief in the Messianic delusions of neo conservatism, and a willingness to march in lockstep, nah, goose step, against all who might disagree or dissent.
As I read Benin's article I had the thought that he might have written a very similar piece about nearly any federal department and the Bush appointees thereto in the last seven years. Which of the various cabinet level branches of the executive department of this country have not suffered greatly under the politically connected cronyism of the Bush/ Cheney administration?
We witnessed it at Justice, the politicization of the office of the Attorney General, the perversion of law and the resulting descent into the barbarity of denial of human rights and torture.
We saw it at Defense, where the best military minds of a generation were ignored in favor of the views of sychophantic careerists who allowed a lying Vice President and a comic opera Commander in Chief and their apparatchiks to lead them over the cliff and into the abyss of an endless and disastrous war.
We have seen time and again the incompetence, indifference and criminal neglect at "Homeland" Security and FEMA.
We have seen heads of federal departments turned into agents of electioneering, where party politics takes precedence over public welfare and the machinery and energy of the state is turned to the furtherance of private goals.
Agriculture, Interior, Commerce, Treasury and the rest are now run by the industries that they are legally bound to restrain, regulate and control in the public interest.
Executive branch departments have been stripped of many of their most dedicated, long serving professionals and replaced with Bush loyalists from business and industry, or, in many cases directly from the most favored campuses, the ivy leagues of Christian evangelism. Regulatory functions have been curtailed, enforcement budgets slashed, and inspection schedules diminished to a laughable degree in nearly every regulatory corner of the federal system.
But this, after all, was the intent, to create central government that would gladly do the bidding of the corporate structure, throw aside all restraints, all regulation and increase its profits and its power.
Nearly every day I encounter a story in the media, a story of illness, injury, death or disaster befalling unsuspecting citizens due to the inattention, incompetence, lack of inspection and failures of enforcement of existing federal laws regulating consumer products, work place safety, environmental prohibitions or other areas where purity, safety and security were once almost taken for granted.
During the last seven years we have devolved into a country whose livestock, produce and other foodstuffs are ridden with bacteria and other contaminants, whose drugs and medical services are becoming untrustworthy, whose ports and borders are dangerously porous, whose bridges and highways are collapsing, whose military is being misused and abused in continuous illegal and futile adventures on behalf of corporate America, whose jobs have largely been moved to other countries and continents, whose pensions have collapsed and whose Barbie Dolls contain enough lead to write a novella. (Or, perhaps, the last paragraph)
The real problem however, the crux of the matter and what may finally deliver us stumbling and stuttering, quavering with dread at the terminus of the road to Fascist hell is the incredible damage that has been inflicted on the American spirit, the American soul, the American psyche. I may be accused of naivete' but in my world, in my mind and in my memory there was a time when the eyes of America contained a great measure of compassion, of kindness, of simple good will.
Those days are gone. Under the current regime the eyes of America, official America, the America of the ruling oligarchy are now filled with hunger, with avarice, with an insatiable lust for resources and power, for wealth and influence. America's eyes are no longer the warm welcoming eyes of Lady Liberty but the cold calculating gaze of the largest and most dangerous predator to ever stalk the planet, a predator to be feared and distrusted, to be resisted at all costs.
The eyes of Americans, our citizens, our electorate are filled with a mixture of apathy and fear, of meekness, a cowering attitude and a shuffling posture which is all too heavily reflected in their parliament.
America, in the brief span of my lifetime and largely in the span of a single decade has devolved into a killer of humanity, a dream slayer, despoiler of freedom, a destroyer, the destroyer of America.
On Monday, Attorney General Alberto "Seedy" Gonzales quit his post because, uh, it was Monday. Bush added his own insightful thoughts. "It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing his important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons." WTF?
It gets better. Visiting the moon crater that was once called New Orleans, Bush declared, "This town is better today than it was yesterday and it's going to be better tomorrow than it is today." He was later joined by Little Orphan Annie, Daddy Warbucks and Sandy for a rousing rendition of "Tomorrow."
At this point in his presidency, Bush should just wear a Napoleon hat and lisp like Daffy Duck when he appears in public. At least this will give him the opportunity to end a press conference by bouncing up and down, crossing his eyes and shouting, "woo-woo-woo."
Last week, before an audience of veterans, Bush compared the Iraq invasion with our role in Vietnam. His conclusion? We would have succeeded in 'Nam if we hadn't cut and run, leading to genocide in Cambodia. So, we're staying in Iraq. Presidential aides, at the last minute, cut all references regarding Charlie Sheen and squads of flying suicider monkeys from Bush's speech when it was discovered that he fell asleep watching "Platoon" the night before and woke up in time to catch the end of "The Wizard of Oz."
Allan Lichtman, an American University historian, was quite impressed with Bush's Vietnam analogy, saying, "It's not revisionist history. It is fantasy history."
Democratic strategist Paul Begala put it a tad more succinctly on CNN: "He's saying, essentially, that 58,000 dead in Vietnam weren't quite enough, that maybe we should have twice as big a tragic memorial on the Mall.
"And who's saying it? A man who chose not to serve, took steps, used family friends to get out of serving in Vietnam, didn't even show up for his own Guard duty, so that better, braver men could fight that war. He stood before those better, braver men today a coward in the company of heroes."
Bush is to history what Andy Dick is to normalcy.
While flogging our Iraq surge or purge or splooge, he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars' national convention attendees that the U.S. had killed or captured an average of more that 1,500 al Qaeda members in Iraq every month since last January. Most independent military analysts figure that there are a total of 5,000 al Qaeda fighters in all of Iraq. Per Bush, either these guys replicate like amoebas or they're very resilient.
He also claimed that incidents of sectarian violence have dropped since the troop surge began when, according to the Associated Press, it has doubled throughout Iraq. There's an average of 62 Iraqis killed per day this year as opposed to 33 in 2006. So far, this year, 14,800 Iraqis have died. 13,811 died in all of 2006.
Not content to wave his rubber chicken solely at the "bad guys" in Iraq, Bush this week decided to put Iran on notice, stating that Iran's nuclear program would cast the Middle East "under a shadow of nuclear holocaust" and that Iran was "the world's leading supporter of terrorism."
As the Cheney choir sang "Macho Man," Bush got all beady-eyed and said: "I will take all actions necessary to protect our troops. I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran's murderous activities."
Coupla questions. What murderous activities? And how are we going to confront them? Rumors have been spreading that Iranian militants have been waving their testicles in our troops' general direction from their side of the border. Maybe this is a job for Senator Larry "wide stance" Craig.
So, how's Iraq goin'? Apparently notso hotso. Because of our quagmire, local police agencies across our nation are encountering a shortage of ammunition. Seriously. Ya see, troops are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year in both Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving some American police forces to train their rookies with paintball guns. Others train by shooting blanks. (Add your own punchline.)
Which brings us back to Iraq.
Things are going so well over there that last week's rather dire National Intelligence Estimate was "tweaked" by General David Petraeus, softening some of the gloomy conclusions. (This is the same General Petraeus who will give his "the surge is working" report in a week or so and was the man in charge when 200,000 American weapons "disappeared" in Iraq.)
This tinkering made the Government Accountability Office so nervous that someone actually leaked the first draft of the GAO's Iraq assessment before anyone at the Pentagon could turn it into a creative writing assignment. It basically says that Iraq is a mess in terms of combat and that, in terms of the Iraqi government, 13 of the 18 benchmarks designed to judge that government's performance in the political and security arenas haven't been met.
At the White House, officials argued that the GAO report, which was required by legislation President Bush signed last spring, was unrealistic because it assigned "pass or fail" grades to each benchmark, rather than assessing whether the Iraqis have made progress toward reaching the benchmark goals.
"A bar was set so high, that it was almost not to be able to be met," White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.
In other words, the Iraqi government can have a lot more wiggle room than kids trapped in Bush's "No Child Left Behind" automaton approach to education.
If you don't think Iraq has totally altered the fabric of what we laughingly call our society, try these headlines on for size: "PENTAGON PROBES IF US ARMS FOR IRAQ DIVERTED TO TURKEY," "PENTAGON PROBES MISSING WEAPONS AND CONTRACT FRAUD," "ARMY TO PROBE 18,000 CONTRACTS" and "MILITIAS SEIZING CONTROL OF IRAQI ELECTRICITY GRID."
Oh, yeah, Bush wants another $50 billion this fall for his Crusade. That's on top of the $142 billion already requested for fiscal 2008.
To keep all of America up on the good news coming from Iraq, the Pentagon is setting up a 24/7 Communications Desk that will pump out propaganda, I mean, hard news from Baghdad. Heck, if they can't win hearts and minds over t'har, they might as well give it a shot over here...although they might have to use paintball guns.
Iraq-o-mania with all its Orwellian overtones continues to be a crowd pleaser in the halls of the White House, for sure. In a newspaper interview, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, revealed that nosy Americans who wanted to know the details of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with all its warrentless snoopin' and a peakin', are risking the lives of their friends and neighbors.
Of his interview, McConnell stated: "The fact that we're doing it this way means the some Americans are going to die." After revealing some top secret details concerning FISA, he ended his chat with reporter Chris Roberts asking Chris to consider whether enemies of the U.S. would read the interview and scoop up deadly information.
The newspaper printed the McConnell story, leading one to conclude that the terrorists have let their subscriptions to the "El Paso Times" lapse.
How's this for the freedom fries fans out there? In an article entitled "SCIENTISTS DRUG-TEST WHOLE CITIES," AP reporter Seth Borenstein revealed that Oregon State University researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city's sewer plant.
David Murray, chief scientist for the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the idea interests his agency.
Here's another fun piece emanating from a TV station in Daytona Beach: "LOCAL TROOPS DEPLOY TO NATION'S CAPITAL." The article stated that members of the 1st Battalion 265 Air Defense Artillery have mobilized and are headed first to Fort Bliss and, then, for federal active duty in the capitol region where the troops will be deployed for a year.
They've been ordered to D.C. to operate high-tech weapons systems against any potential air threat.
(I guess they got the memo about those flying suicider monkeys.)
Perhaps the ambience generated by our Giggler-in-Chief and all his minions have led to this final headline: "U.S. PAIN-KILLER USE GOES THROUGH ROOF - 5 MAJOR DRUGS UP 90% OVER 8 YEARS." The figures, put together by the Associated Press through Drug Enforcement Administration stats, only track the years 1997 to 2005.
In 2005, more than 200,000 pounds of codeine, morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone and meperidine were purchased at retail stores. That total is enough to give more than 300 milligrams of painkillers to every person in the country...or, as Rush Limbaugh refers to it, "breakfast."
There was no word on the amount of ACME mallets purchased by those with no health insurance.
So, put those Napoleon hats on, guys and gals. Cross your eyes and start hoppin'. Woo-woo-woo! We have a new WTF week to look forward to!
Unfortunately, t-t-t-t-that's not all, folks.
Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn't apply to them.
If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.
Whether because of prudence and pragmatism or mere intellectual inertia, I still have the same opinion on the big question: impeachment. But I think we're moving on to dangerous ground right now, more so than some of us realize. And I'm less sure now under these circumstances that operating by rules of 'normal politics' is justifiable or acquits us of our duty to our country.
No, Josh, I don't think it's ordinary prudence or pragmatism or intellectual inertia. I think some of it is working in an environment that rewards logic and caution; some of it is a belief in logic ("reality based," if you will) as an overriding system. Academics are prone to such things, and are famous for not seeing the forest for the veins on the leaves.
Most of all, it is a blind faith in political process as an inherently self-correcting mechanism. It's a reluctance to engage on substantive issues that may conceivably carry a heavy price.
But the purpose of impeachment is not to convict, nor to score a political victory. James Madison was clear on that: It is to stop the abuses of the political process.
George Mason argued that the President might use his pardoning power to “pardon crimes which were advised by himself” or, before indictment or conviction, “to stop inquiry and prevent detection.” James Madison responded: “[I]f the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.”
I keep thinking about Barbara Jordan's speech regarding the articles of impeachment on Richard Nixon, given 33 years ago yesterday:
My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total; and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.
She was a black woman from Texas who lived long enough to see the Constitution protect and defend her to the point where she became a member of Congress. She knew that the strength of our nation lies in the concept that even the lowliest person in America is equal to us all in the eyes of the law.
These men who have taken over our country and defiled our Constitution are, to use an old-fashioned word, evil. They are covert, hidden. They avoid the light of the day like the vampires they are. It is time to expose the actions they have taken in secret.
"We know the nature of impeachment," Jordan said in a speech that is still considered one of America's finest. "We've been talking about it awhile now. It is chiefly designed for the President and his high ministers to somehow be called into account.
"It is designed to bridle the executive if he engages in excesses. 'It is designed as a method of national inquest into the conduct of public men.' The framers confided in the Congress the power if need be, to remove the President in order to strike a delicate balance between a President swollen with power and grown tyrannical, and preservation of the independence of the executive."
After listing Nixon's alleged offenses, she concluded:
James Madison again at the Constitutional Convention: "A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution." The Constitution charges the President with the task of taking care that the laws be faithfully executed, and yet the President has counseled his aides to commit perjury, willfully disregard the secrecy of grand jury proceedings, conceal surreptitious entry, attempt to compromise a federal judge, while publicly displaying his cooperation with the processes of criminal justice. "A President is impeachable if he attempts to subvert the Constitution."
If the impeachment provision in the Constitution of the United States will not reach the offenses charged here, then perhaps that 18th-century Constitution should be abandoned to a 20th-century paper shredder.
Has the President committed offenses, and planned, and directed, and acquiesced in a course of conduct which the Constitution will not tolerate? That's the question. We know that. We know the question. We should now forthwith proceed to answer the question. It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision.
It's time to answer the question, Josh. Is the Constitution anything more than a piece of paper? Are we a nation of laws - or are we a nation of cronies?
History will not judge us kindly if we let this pass.
Maybe there was some mistake. This web site posting did not even come close to reflecting the president's real Fourth of July message to the nation. That had been quite effectively delivered earlier in the week when Bush announced he was commuting I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's sentence from thirty months to zero months. Apparently confusing his duties as president of the United States with those of a behind-the-plate umpire, President Bush called Libby's sentence "excessive" and threw the prison time out, as casually as if he were calling balls and strikes in a game of sandlot baseball. In so doing, President Bush sent a message to the American people that is as unambiguous as it is unprintable. Expressed verbally, the real message Bush was sending to the people of the United States could have been sent with just two words (the second of which is "you"); expressed physically, Bush's underlying message could have been conveyed with just one finger.
Either way, President Bush has again made it as clear as a Wisconsin lake that he has nothing but contempt for equality and the "rule 'a law" he is so fond of championing. Yes, a president has the constitutional power of clemency. He may pardon a criminal defendant, thereby wiping out the entire conviction and its consequences, or commute the sentence, thereby lessening it to some degree or entirely. But even this power, broad as it is, can be abused and, in the case of United States v. Libby, President Bush has done just that.
Just how egregious was the president's unapologetic and cavalier act of favoritism for a wealthy and powerful friend? To ask the question is to answer it, but to fully appreciate the extent of corruption inherent in the president's recent shameless exercise of noblesse sans oblige, one needs to know a bit about Bush and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.
In the spirit of full disclosure, let me say that many who have worked in the federal criminal justice system, have never been a fan of the sentencing guidelines. Formulated by a commission that was, in turn, created by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the guidelines were specifically intended to promote fairness and remove unwarranted sentencing disparities. In practice, however, particularly in drug cases, application of the guidelines has led to draconian sentences - an inequity that federal judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys have attempted to address by applying various factors that could justify a downward departure from the prescribed range.
But, up until July 2, 2007, when he decided to take the law into his own hands, President Bush loved the sentencing guidelines. Bush and the Republicans have, for years, been insisting that the guidelines be applied rigidly - the president was simply not going to have any of this unseemly leniency that was beginning to infect the federal system under his watch. Indeed, in 2003, during the very same period that Bush, Cheney, Libby and the gang were scrambling to squelch the ever-increasing revelations about the president's fraudulent case for war, Bush's Justice Department, then under the leadership of John Ashcroft - and a posse of conservative Republican members of Congress - decided to take on these wimpy judges and make sure that neither they, nor any equally wimpy prosecutors, could exercise any discretion whatsoever with regard to sentencing. Tom DeLay told judges, "We are watching you" and the Bush administration tacked onto a child pornography law an amendment that required every downward departure from the guidelines to be reported to Congress.
Not surprisingly, this amendment, called the Feeney Amendment in honor of its titular sponsor, Representative Tom Feeney (R-Florida), caused a huge uproar, but its spirit lives on in the Department of Justice today. Right now, in July of 2007, prosecutors are required to oppose virtually all downward departures from the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, except those based on substantial assistance to the government. If a judge does grant a downward departure that was not sought by the government, the prosecutor has to report that to DoJ's appellate division for consideration of an appeal.
What does this mean in the context of the Libby case? With due consideration to the high likelihood that some of the people reading this may have had an extra beer or two the day before, I am going to make it very simple:
Scooter Libby was sentenced in accordance with the sentencing guidelines, to which President Bush has been insisting that prosecutors and judges slavishly adhere ever since he arrived in the White House. The sentencing range required by case law that Bush's own DoJ attorneys have routinely argued for, in cases throughout the country, was 30 to 37 months. Judge Reggie Walton gave Libby the lowest sentence within that range. Legally, the only way the judge could impose a sentence less than 30 months would have been if he had granted Libby's motion for downward departure. Libby had not provided substantial assistance to the government. Therefore, under the rules currently in effect within Bush's Justice Department, Libby had no legitimate ground for downward departure, and Patrick Fitzgerald was required to oppose his motion. If Judge Walton had actually departed downward based on any of these unapproved grounds, Fitzgerald would have been required, per the United States Attorneys' Manual, to report the downward departure so that issue could be evaluated for appeal.
So, forgive me if I started choking on my blueberry cobbler when I read Tony Snow's July 3 statement to reporters: "The President spent weeks and weeks consulting with senior members of this White House about the proper way to proceed, and they looked at a whole lot of options, and they spent a lot of time talking through the options and doing some very detailed legal analysis." Bush, we know, never spoke to any of the legal experts on the case, including, most notably, the prosecutor - even though Department of Justice clemency procedures call for such a consultation. He may well have spent "weeks and weeks" consulting with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and their ilk in order to decide how to handle "the Libby issue," but they were only talking about how to sell an act of clemency ... what their talking points would be. Bush's statement betrays not a shred of legal analysis, which is not surprising, since there is none available to justify his decision.
The bottom line is that Bush's commitment to equality, the rule of law and uniform sentencing under the federal guidelines fizzled like a Fourth of July sparkler when it came to his friend.
Even more important, Bush, of course, never intended to allow Libby to go to prison at all. Indeed, his original plan was to avoid any investigation whatsoever into the unauthorized disclosure of Valerie Wilson's identity as a CIA agent. The president could have, and should have, begun an internal investigation when Robert Novak's column exposed the existence of the leak on July 14, 2003. He didn't; he waited. Once the investigation was announced in late September 2003, Bush was still constitutionally required to ferret out the miscreants in his shop, but he did not do so. Instead, he professed cooperation with the investigation in one breath, but undermined it in the next, commenting famously that he didn't think the leakers would ever be found. And then, most cynically, Bush used the criminal proceedings as a shield to avoid questions about the White House's conduct, a technique that served him well through two national election cycles.
The president of the United States watched and waited as an entire team of federal prosecutors, investigators and support personnel spent years and millions in taxpayers' dollars on an entirely justified and legitimate grand-jury investigation into whether members of that president's own White House had violated the laws of the United States. He watched and waited, hoping there would be no charges, as two grand juries (a total of about 40 US citizens) spent months of their valuable time listening to the evidence.
President Bush watched and waited, hoping the case would be dismissed, as millions of additional federal dollars and limited US District Court resources were expended on extensive pretrial litigation. Hoping next - probably by this time praying - that Libby would be acquitted, the president watched and waited during a six-week trial that consumed additional court time and took twelve additional US citizens away from their daily lives. He watched and waited for the lengthy sentencing process to play out, and then, once the sentence had been imposed, he allowed additional federal resources - including the valuable time of three Court of Appeals judges - to be expended on Libby's motion for release on bond pending appeal.
In other words, well-knowing, despite his repeated assurances to the contrary, that he would never respect any adverse outcome of the criminal case against his and Vice President Cheney's top adviser and friend, the president simply and cravenly waited to reveal his true intentions to the American people until he could wait no longer, all the while hiding behind that very same criminal case.
This extended course of deception does not end the story: The statement Bush made when he emerged briefly from his Kennebunkport estate to issue a reprieve for the wealthy and powerful criminal defendant who happened to be his friend, was, of itself, a multilayered fraud. In his July 2 message, Bush, suddenly Solomon-like, attempted to convince the public that the matter he had been avoiding for four years on the ground that it was a pending legal case is, in fact, nothing more than a political dispute to be resolved through compromise. Clemency, Bush would now have us believe, is a decision to be made by weighing the arguments of "critics" and "supporters" of the investigation as if a pending criminal case could be decided by referendum, or maybe a call-in vote, the way we choose the American Idol. Working from this deliberately false premise, the president then purports to "weigh," as if they were equivalent, the arguments of Libby's defense team, which had already been rejected by Judge Walton and found insubstantial by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, against the actual facts and law of the case.
Bush's decision to commute Libby's sentence was not a compromise between the positions of critics and supporters of the case. The president was not settling a dispute between those who wanted the sentence to stand and those who wanted a pardon. He was simply doing what he intended to do all along - keeping Libby out of jail. The only reason Bush did not pardon Libby was because he wanted Libby to be able to continue to plead his fifth amendment privilege not to testify against himself - most particularly before Congress - based on the fact that the case was still before the Court of Appeals.
From the beginning, with regard to the CIA leak investigation, the president has deceived the American people and abused his power in a manner and to a degree that would be awe-inspiring if it were not so disgraceful. His conduct has been a study in perfidy and disregard for the law - the willful betrayal of the confidence and trust of the American people. These are the very definition of impeachable offenses. It is not enough for Congress to ask the public to send petitions and call the White House to "send a message" that the president's conduct will not be tolerated. It is up to Congress to deliver that message, and they know exactly what they have to do.
Clearly Russia did its homework and proposed a site that was better for missile defense from both an American and Russian point of view.
Because of its more southerly location relative to the original sites proposed by the Bush administration in Poland and the Czech Republic, the Azerbaijan option has advantages from both technical and policy points of view. At that location, the proposed missile defenses can "defend" all of Europe, including south eastern Europe. The Poland/Czech Republic arrangement cannot "cover" all of Europe. Also a radar at the Azerbaijan site cannot "see" Russian missile launches going over the pole towards America, which means that it cannot be used to defend America from Russia.
The Poland/Czech Republic arrangement has raised questions about who exactly it was defending against. Since the U.S. proposal to locate missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic could not cover all of Europe, that raised questions about why the U.S. would chose to "defend" some European countries and not others.
Also, in an actual missile-vs.-missile battle, the originally proposed sites in Poland and the Czech Republic could result in debris falling on Russia if U.S. missile defense interceptors sent hypothetical Iranian missiles careening off course. The Azerbaijani site minimizes that problem, as well.
When discussing the proposed missile defense system for Eastern Europe it's best to put the word "defend" in quotes. This is because the missile defense hardware being deployed by the U.S. in Alaska and California, and proposed for Eastern Europe, has no demonstrated capability to defend Europe, let alone the U.S., from an attack by Iran (or North Korea for that matter) under realistic operational conditions.
For this reason, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency has "dumbed down" the supposed threat from Iran (and North Korea) to be just one or two missiles with no decoys or countermeasures. And yet still the Missile Defense Agency has not been able to demonstrate the effective capability to stop even that idealized threat under realistic operational conditions. Surely the Russian military and scientific establishment knows this. After all, Russia has tried to develop missile defenses also, and knows how truly difficult it is.
(By the way, Russia has so many ICBMs it can overwhelm even the most futuristic missile defenses the U.S. can imagine. That's why the U.S. Congress voted to shut down the Safeguard ABM system in the 1970's, just one day after it was declared operational: Congress knew that Russia could overwhelm it.)
Will the Bush administration agree to President Putin's proposal? The Bush administration has reached agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic that the proposed missile defense sites, if located there, would essentially be sovereign U.S. territory, like an American embassy. Azerbaijan may not agree to that.
The current arrangement with Russia at the Qabala radar station in Azerbaijan is a ten-year lease which expires in 2012, but with an option for renewal.
Also, the Pentagon may feel that Azerbaijan is too close to Russia for comfort, too close from a military point of view. And President's Putin's references to the existing radar site may mean that Putin intends for it to be a Russian managed or controlled site, which the Pentagon may not like. However, if Russia is not an enemy, as President Bush says, he should be willing to seriously consider this proposal. Ever since President Reagan, the U.S. has been saying it wants to cooperate with Russia on missile defense and then it doesn't happen. Maybe this time it will.
President Putin has also proposed locating the U.S. missile defense systems in Turkey, or even Iraq or on sea-based platforms, and the initial reaction from Iraq recognizes that a U.S. missile defense site in Iraq could provide a new target, and new motivations, for insurgents.
By putting forward his proposal to locate U.S. missile defenses in Azerbaijan, in one fell swoop President Putin has effectively questioned the efficacy of the proposed sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and justified recent cuts by the U.S. Congress in the budget for construction at these sites. The U.S. Congress has been skeptical anyway, and Putin has shown that they had good reason to be skeptical.
The Putin proposals may have derailed U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe beyond the time remaining for the Bush administration, saving U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars. It has taken the Missile Defense Agency two years of efforts with Poland and the Czech Republic and questions still remain, and the Bush administration only has 18 months left.
This means that it will up to the next U.S. President to decide whether to push this idea.
Accordingly, the questions that could be asked by the media are:
Q. Why is there a rush to deploy U.S. missile defenses in Eastern Europe?
Q. Do we really believe that Iran would attack Europe with a single missile and then sit back to wait for the consequences? And if, as the Missile Defense Agency says, one or two missiles is the best U.S. defenses can handle is that a realistic, justifying threat?
Q. Since U.S. missile defenses have not demonstrated effective capability under realistic operational conditions, what's the point of deploying them in Eastern Europe now?
Six of the twelve flight intercept tests conducted with the Ground-based Missile Defense system have been successful, but six have failed for one reason or another. Perhaps the two countries, Russia and the U.S., could agree on missile defenses, but if they acknowledge that these missile defenses are not effective under realistic operational conditions, then the real benefit would be to show that Russia and the U.S. can cooperate closely on a difficult matter, not to actually defend Europe.
And if they don't acknowledge that missiles defenses are not effective under realistic operational conditions, pretending that U.S. missile defenses actually might work in an all-out war, then they are also pretending that those U.S. missile defenses might work against Russian missiles. If those defenses are located in Poland, as first proposed by the U.S. where they might be effective against Russia, this is something which Russia cannot accept.
The political calculus being pursued by Karl Rove and the Republican Party with regard to Iraq and the 2008 elections is a simple four-step process:
1. Shift "ownership" of the downside of the "war" and occupation of Iraq to the Democrats.
2. Begin to wind down American involvement in the occupation of Iraq no later than mid-2008.
3. "Claim victory and get out" of direct combat in Iraq by the early fall of 2008.
4. Win big in the 2008 elections by having "won" a "war."
Step one was accomplished last week, when Republicans - particularly those most visible in our corporate "mainstream" media - played up hugely how "Democrats" in the House and Senate had "caved in" to George W. Bush's demand for a "free hand" in Iraq. Bush, of course, is not up for re-election, so it's no problem for him to take the short-term heat for the ongoing death and destruction in Iraq. With $500 million budgeted to re-write history after he leaves office (the so-called "Bush Library" and "think tank" associated with it), Bush has plenty of time to rehabilitate his legacy, much as Reagan's handlers have so deftly done.
With the Democrats "giving the President what he wanted" on Iraq, the average person in our nation now thinks Democrats and Bush are jointly responsible for the current "mess" in Iraq.
Step two was initiated a few weeks ago with diplomatic initiatives by Condoleezza Rice to Iran and Syria. At Bush's news conference about the passage of the Iraq funding bill, he all but laid out this strategy, in citing the Baker/Hamilton Commission, which recommended pulling Iran and Syria (and other nations in the region) into the process of stabilizing Iraq, and redeploying American forces to "safe" places like the Green Zone, the huge military cities ("bases") we're building there, and to nearby countries like Kuwait. A day later, the Bush Administration quietly announced that they were dropping funding for covert destabilization programs against Iran and Syria, and initiating talks with Iran "about Iraq."
Bush will now follow nearly exactly the script the Democrats wrote in the bill Bush vetoed, reducing and redeploying out troops over the next 15 months, all in anticipation of the 2008 elections. Except that the Democrats, having failed to override his veto and having "caved in" to him, can no longer claim any ownership whatever to the successes that will come from it - Republicans in Congress and Bush will claim all of that.
This is the end-game of a political equation that was begun the day after Bush was sworn into office.
We know that Bush wanted to massively cut taxes on his corporate sponsors and people, like himself, with substantial inherited fortunes. He wanted to weaken government protections of the environment, children, the poor, the elderly, the ozone layer, and our nation's forests. He wanted his oil-rig and mining-interest friends to have more access to public lands.
We know he wanted to undo Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal by stripping the American workplace (particularly government and schools) of unions, rolling back "socialist" unemployment and Social Security programs, and eliminating SEC and tort restraints on predatory corporate behavior. He'd even campaigned on this platform - particularly Social Security privatization - back in 1978 when he unsuccessfully ran for Congress from Texas.
We know he wanted to increase the police power of the federal government, gut the First and Fourth Amendments, and thus create a "safe and orderly nation" of people under constant surveillance, who never question those in power.
We know he wanted to give billions of our tax dollars to churches he approved of, and bring their leaders into the halls of government. He wanted to pass laws incorporating religious dogma about when human life begins, what is appropriate sexuality, and free churches to use tax-exempt dollars to influence politics.
It was an ambitious agenda. In order to bring about this neoconservative paradise, Bush knew he'd need considerable political capital. And that kind of capital didn't come from his being selected as President by the Supreme Court.
Such political capital - such raw political power - would only come, he believed, by his becoming a "war president."
Bush wasn't the first to realize how war strengthened a president in power, although the Founders saw it as a danger rather than an opportunity.
On April 20, 1795, James Madison wrote, "Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few."
Reflecting on war's impact on the Executive Branch of government, Madison continued his letter about the dangerous and intoxicating power of war for a president.
"In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive [President] is extended," he wrote. "Its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war...and in the degeneracy of manners and morals, engendered by both.
"No nation," he concluded, "could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
But freedom wasn't the goal of George W. Bush or his neoconservative Republican colleagues. It was political power. And they were willing to lie us into a war to achieve it.
Writer Russ Baker noted in October, 2004, that Mickey Herskowitz, the man Bush had originally hired to write his autobiography ("A Charge To Keep: My Journey To The White House"), told Baker that George Bush was planning his Iraq invasion - to seize and hold political power for himself and the Republican Party - during his first presidential election campaign.
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," Herskowitz told Baker. "It was on his mind. He [Bush] said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
The Senate Intelligence committee released, just in time for the Memorial Day Weekend, the "Part Two" of their report that Republican Senator Pat Roberts had kept from release until after the elections, showing clearly that Bush lied about the intelligence he had in 2002, both to Congress, to the American people, and to the world. Bush lied and people died - and continue to die. But politically - at least so far - it has worked out well for Bush.
It was a lie of political expediency, with the war resolution carefully timed just before the 2002 elections to help the Republicans take back the Senate.
It was echoed and amplified and repeated over and over again to help him and other Republicans get elected in 2004.
It wasn't just a war for oil - cheap oil was just a useful secondary benefit.
It wasn't just a war against terrorism - that was just a convenient excuse.
It wasn't just a war to enrich Bush's and Cheney's cronies - those were just pleasant by-products.
It wasn't just a war to show Poppy Bush that Junior was more of a man than him - that was just a personal bonus for Dubya.
It was, pure and simple, well planned years in advance, a war to solidify Bush and the Republican Party's political capital.
It was a war for political power. That had to be first. Everything else - oil, profits, ongoing PATRIOT Act powers, easy manipulation of the media - all could only come if political power was seized and held through at least two decisive election cycles.
The Bush administration lied us into an invasion to get and keep political power. It's that simple. It's the same reason Richard Nixon authorized Watergate and then lied about the cover-up. The same reason Nixon lied about his "secret plan" to get out of Vietnam.
And now Democrats think they'll be able to claim the high ground, but they just lost it all. Even as Harry Reid declared on the day Bush accepted his new Iraq funding that, "Democrats will continue to insist that this administration accept responsibility for its failed conduct of this war..." the Republican media machine was shoving that responsibility down the throats of the Democrats.
Meanwhile, the Bush plan is imminently clear to the Republicans in Congress. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, about the same time Reid was speaking, was telling reporters that "the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall, and I expect the president to lead it." Republican Senator Jeff Sessions openly said that same day that the "war" in Iraq is no longer a "war," but an occupation, setting the stage for a withdrawal that won't be perceived as a defeat.
The plan is simple. By November of 2008, the "victories" of the Democrats' first hundred days in office will be long forgotten, the "war" will be remembered as "difficult, but at least we won it," and those "anti-war" Democrats will be portrayed as wimps or cravenly anti-American.
The only question now is how placidly the Democrats will continue to play their assigned role in this little drama. And how many more people will die between now and the time Republicans cynically (and finally) execute their strategy in time for the 2008 elections.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is doing much the same thing with George W. Bush when it comes to his presidential responsibilities.
Pelosi has come under fire from the White House for her trip to Syria to meet with the country's leaders and to observe the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which have been all but ignored by the Bush administration.
“As recommended by the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan delegation led by Speaker Pelosi intends to discuss a wide range of security issues affecting the United States and the Middle East with representatives of governments in the region, including Syria,” said Pelosi Spokesman Brendan Daly last week.
And nobody is saying that dealing with Syria, from which the U.S. withdrew its ambassador in 2005, is an easy thing to do. We're not exactly what anyone would call fast friends with Damascus and the hard work of negotiating with enemies or potential enemies is not for the weak or intellectually lazy. Sadly, Bush is both of those things.
Throughout his unfortunate presidency, Bush has shown that he does his best when surrounded by people who give him positive reinforcement, tell him how wonderful he is, deny him nothing and make it easy for him to run from hard work. Sounds a lot like a child, right?
So, when it comes to worldwide diplomacy, the new House Speaker has had to step in because we have an executive branch of government led by a man-child who just has no interest in playing well with others.
Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice have had years to do the right thing and to care for America's security and prestige in the world by reaching out to all countries and, to paraphrase Sun Tzu, keeping our potential enemies closer than our friends. They have failed as miserably as they possibly could have. It can't hurt for Pelosi to go to Syria to open a dialog -- as did Senators Chris Dodd and John Kerry in 2006 -- and it can only help show our strength through assertive leadership, and that Democrats are doing what needs to be done in the total absence of coherent foreign policy from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
And talks such as the one Pelosi had with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have already been fruitful, including discussions about peace with Israel.
"We were very pleased with the reassurances we received from the president Assad that he was ready to resume the peace process. He was ready to engage in negotiations for peace with Israel," Pelosi said. "Our meeting with the president enabled us to communicate a message from prime minister Olmert that Israel was ready to engage in peace talks as well."
Pelosi was also clear on broaching the subject of Syrian involvement in the Iraq war saying "We called to the attention of the president our concern about fighters crossing the Iraq-Syria border to the detriment of the Iraqi people and our soldiers."
And, like the parent that she is, Pelosi calmly dealt with criticism from a White House that comes down hard on her for visiting the Middle East, but says nothing about the presence of Republican Congressmen Frank Wolf, Joe Pitts and Robert Aderholt in Syria this week.
"It's interesting because three of our colleagues, who are all Republicans, were in Syria yesterday and I didn't hear the White House speaking out about that," Pelosi said Monday. "I think that it was an excellent idea for them to go. And I think it's an excellent idea for us to go, as well."
Diplomacy and handling the foreign affairs of the world's only current superpower isn't easy and it's been at our peril that we've had a White House occupant where, when it comes to the hard work of governing and leading, the best we can hope for is that we've left the kids alone in the house for the weekend and we'll come home to find it only slightly trashed.
George W. Bush is a child, a toddler, on the world stage at a time when the American people cannot afford to have things done wrong, or not at all. Nancy Pelosi is simply stepping up, doing the right thing and showing Bush how a grown-up gets the job done.
It was smart, civil discussion that treated the prospect of impeaching the president as a serious matter.
Scarborough took the lead in suggesting that Bush's biggest problem might be that Republicans in the House and Senate who — fearful of the threat Bush poses to their political survival — do not appear to be rallying 'round the president. The host's sentiments were echoed by two other guests, columnist Mike Barnicle and Salon's Joan Walsh.
The impetus for the show was Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel's ongoing discussion of the impeachment prospect — Hagel's not quite a supporter of sanctioning Bush, more a speculator about the prospect — and a new column by Robert Novak that suggests Bush has dwindling support within the congressional wing of the GOP.
Speaking about impeachment on ABC's "This Week," Hagel said, "Any president who says 'I don't care' or 'I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else' or 'I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed' — if a president really believes that, then there are ways to deal with that."
Novak wrote "The I-word (incompetence) is used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to described a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. 'We always have claimed that we were the party of better management,' one House leader told me. 'How can we claim that anymore?'"
Scarborough drew the two statements together for the purpose of asking whether Bush could count on Republicans to block moves by Congressional Democrats to hold Bush to account for high crimes and misdemeanors.
When a conservative commentator who was on the frontlines of Newt Gingrich's "Republican revolution" entertains a thoughtful conversation about the politics and processes of impeachment on a major cable news network, it should be clear that the cloistered conversation about sanctioning this president has begun to open up.
No, Scarborough is not jumping on the impeachment bandwagon.
He is simply treating the prospect seriously, as did CNN's Wolf Blitzer earlier in the day.
What I told Scarborough is what I have been saying in public forums for the past several weeks: We are nearing an impeachment moment. The Alberto Gonzales scandal, the under-covered but very real controversy involving abuses of the Patriot Act and the president's increasingly belligerent refusals to treat Congress as a co-equal branch of government are putting the discussion of presidential accountability onto the table from which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tried to remove it.
Does this mean Bush and Cheney will be impeached? That, of course, will be decided by the people. Impeachment at its best is always an organic process; it needs popular support or it fizzles — as with the attempt by House Republican leaders to remove former President Clinton in a process that, fairly or not, seemed to be all about blue dresses.
While the people saved Clinton — by signaling to their representatives that they opposed sanctioning a president's personal morals — it does not appear that they are inclined to protect Bush.
With each new revelation about what Gonzales did at the behest of the Bush White House to politicize prosecutions by U.S. Attorneys, the revulsion with the way this president has disregarded the Constitution and the rule of law becomes more intense. And citizens are not cutting their president much slack.
A new USA Today/Gallup Poll — conducted over the weekend — shows that, by close to a 3-to-1 margin, Americans want Congress to issue subpoenas to force White House officials to testify in the Gonzales case. Sixty-eight percent of those surveyed say the president should drop his claim of executive privilege in this matter, while only 26 percent agree with the reasoning Bush has used to try and block a meaningful inquiry.
If the president wants to get in a fight with Congress over how to read the Constitution, it appears that the people will back Congress. And that backing is what will begin to restore the backbones of House members who, despite Pelosi's attempts to quiet talk of impeachment, are getting more and more intrigued by the prospect of holding this president to account.
As Hagel says, "This is not a monarchy. There are ways to deal with executive excess. And I would hope the president understands that."
If Bush doesn't recognize this reality now, he soon will.
Gen. Tommy Franks was hailed as the greatest offensive military commander since George Patton. The neocons were popping bottles of champagne. Their march to world domination could not be stopped. America's mighty sword would force democracy in the Middle East.
President George W. Bush was Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt rolled into one. Bush the younger took care of his daddy's unfinished business. Saddam Hussein, the ruthless dictator, was hiding as his regime and statue toppled. Those were the days. We thought they would never end, the Busheviks dreamed.
Demonstrators marched in Washington, D.C., and in communities across the nation last Saturday, reminding us how reality burst Bush's bubble of arrogance, hubris and condescension. They offered a message of simple truth: The invasion and occupation of Iraq brought us the greatest foreign policy mistake in U.S. history. The damage already done will take decades to undo.
As we mark the fourth anniversary of that ignominious day in March 2003, when war began and the lies that got us into Iraq started to publicly unravel, we should remember those who created the disaster will never, under any circumstances, admit what they did was wrong and doomed to failure. They all deserve impeachment and prosecution.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their neocon court jesters, the creators of the fiasco in Iraq, are now setting their sights on Iran. Admission of failure in Iraq, coming to grips with the horrible reality and offering repentance for the disaster will never come from the people who thought it would be "a cake-walk," we would be "greeted as liberators" and war would usher in the spread of western-style democracies throughout the Middle East.
When Sen. Hillary Clinton and others of her ilk -- enthusiastic war-supporters now looking for political cover -- say, as she did, "If we had known then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote ... and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way," the question to ask them should be, what is it that you didn't know then?
Certainly, anyone who can read the English language knew the neocon nuts from the Project for a New American Century dominated all foreign policy in the Bush administration. They were hell-bent on invading Iraq long before the 9/11 attacks.
The gang of 21st-century imperialists included Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his former deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, departed UN ambassador John Bolton and that loathsome minister of propaganda and lies, now a FOX News Channel talking head, Bill Kristol.
What I wrote in a column dated March 18, 2003, the day before the war began, was based on that knowledge and other information easily available to Clinton or anyone else: "This is not a war of necessity. It is a war of choice that will mark the United States as an aggressor ready to thumb its nose at international law, march into Iraq and make our nation less secure in the process."
The consequences were clear even then: "War with Iraq is the best recruitment tool Islamist terrorists like bin Laden could imagine. The violence will radicalize an entire generation in the Muslim world and make Americans at home and abroad increasingly vulnerable."
Bush and Cheney still like to fault "intelligence failures" for not finding the phantom weapons of mass destruction. But the Busheviks still insist, with or without forbidden weapons, invading Iraq was a great idea. The assault on Saddam was already in the neocon playbook.
That was clear on the eve of Iraq's destruction, as I wrote: "It took only a few people with the bad idea and the right ears to create the monster. The idea of taking pre-emptive military action against Iraq and making the United States the dominant force in the Gulf long predated Sept. 11. The plan was hatched by a group of willful men who used the terrorist attacks as the pretext to carry out an agenda of world domination in the 21st century."
What I did was to look at the facts flat-on without the horrible ideological squint the neocons used or the political prism Clinton and other calculating Democrats found so convenient at the time.
I must confess my own serious failures -- again. For the longest time, I believed when a great international crisis came, Bush would turn to his father and his wise men -- former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker -- for sage advice. What a fool I was!
I also believed Bush would accept reality on a world stage, reject the bizarre notion that unilateral aggression would succeed and ignore the neocon wackos who believed western force would transform the Middle East.
Sold with the war on terror is an unprecedented assault on our basic constitutional liberties. The Bill of Rights is rendered quaint, and the Bush administration routinely turns to fascist tactics. What we know they have done is chilling. What we don't know is terrifying. The rule of law means nothing to these people.
One of the major criminals in this vile venture is Alberto Gonzales, Bush's consigliere, whose essential legal advice when he served as While House counsel was that the president could do anything. There are no restraints on executive authority, Gonzales declared.
The sweet-talking Gonzales gave the OK for the torture of detainees, and his lapdog loyalty was rewarded when Bush named him attorney general. When he was up for confirmation before the Senate, I urged a filibuster and criticized those who did nothing but praise Gonzales solely because of his humble background and Hispanic heritage.
I faulted those senators rejecting a filibuster "who simply shrug their shoulders and are willing to capitulate to President Bush's desire to have his longtime legal valet and fixer become the nation's top lawyer."
Now that Gonzales is caught in his role in the firings of several U.S. Attorneys, he's getting the scrutiny he should have had long ago. Gonzales lied when he told a congressional committee the White House had no role in the political executions. His perjury, along with his other crimes, merits impeachment.
As I wrote in January 2005: "This is a man whose rise to prominence has everything to do with his willingness to provide legal cover for anything his boss and patron George W. Bush wanted, regardless of what the law says. Gonzales is a third-rate attorney and a first-rate political hack."
People around the world look at our aggression and assault on freedom and liberties as signs of America's decline.
"There is plenty of evidence that this country's reputation in the world has been destroyed in the last six-and-a-half years," said Rudy Simons, a Michigan-based activist.
Simons retuned last week from a two-week visit to Iran with the Fellowship for Reconciliation, an international organization that seeks diplomacy and dialogue between nations in conflict.
Simons and 23 other Americans met with Iranian government and religious leaders, as well as just plain folks.
"It was absolutely universal. They didn't like our leaders, and many of them criticized their own leaders," Simons told me as we chatted in his office. He added, "They were all seeking peace."
Simons, who is Jewish, visited a synagogue and had several discussions about the anti-Semitic rants and claims that the Holocaust was a "myth" from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmandinejad. He spoke to one Muslim cleric who "told us that that Holocaust conference they had in December was a terrible mistake in every possible respect."
Simons said many Iranian government officials are preoccupied about their plans in "response to a possible American attack."
He said, "There is also a mind set among Iranians which says we are going to build our nuclear reactors because we need it for energy. It is good for our country, and you will either say OK or you'll come after us. And we are prepared for you to make that decision yourself."
Simons said he found the Iranians more free and open than he expected. He and the other citizen-diplomats wore pins of doves with the words in Farsi "Peace Advocates."
The Iranians were curious and even "flabbergasted" to see the Americans strolling down the street and welcomed them to talk about peace, something they don't hear from too many politicians.
"What do they think of George Bush?" I asked.
"Any comment we heard was 100 percent negative without exception," Simons responded. The veteran human-rights activist is urging the American people to read and understand what is going on in Iran. He wants members of Congress to go there seeking to open diplomatic doors.
On one hand, there is no reason to panic. On the other hand, there are lots of reasons to feel queasy, because George W. Bush, trust me, has done for the world financial system what he has done for Iraq.
Let me start from the small picture and work outwards. The small picture is that you are a sheep that is shorn. Every year you put your money into the markets at relatively predictable times through those mutual funds which are defrauding you of your fees in return for subpar performance. Every year the smart money waits for you, in your millions, to herd yourselves in for the slaughter, trying to buy stuff before you do, so that they can sell it to you at a profit, and then get out for the year. Then, somewhere between July and November - it varies by year - the smart money lays the next ambush for your 401k plan.
This is the 2006-2007 rendition of "the smart money is getting out, and watching the dumb money stay in." Every year, you buy at the top and if you panic, sell at the bottom. This is why your 401k plan underperforms the market statistically speaking.
Therefore, while the blood is flowing early this year, there is no reason, because of the stock drop themselves, to panic. It's a normal process. The question is how far down is it going to go, and is it going to rebound on the other side. Let's face it, if this is merely an slaughtering of the lambs, the worse thing you can do is sell now. Instead, better to wait, buy at the bottom, and then sell at the top. Last year I told people to wait, and then to buy the Shanghai at 1600, and it almost doubled from there. Last year's sell off was sharp, but it was also the result of hot money, not underlying forces.
So let's take one step back to look at the medium picture. The economic cycle. Because while this seasonal buy and sell is normal, how big the sell, and how big they buy are, depend, not on the stampedes of 401k money and other micro-effects, but on how long the economic cycle has to run, and the oceans of consumer and investment money. In a phrase, the yearly cycle is at the margins - people selling or not selling, people buying or not buying. But what that yearly cycle looks like depends on whether there is a stream of money to support the whole market. The crash years of 2000 and 2002 were perfectly ordinary in their sell in spring and buy in fall - it's just that the spring to summer sales were massive, and the buy backs were anemic. 2003 was a good year for US stocks, because Bush finally resolved uncertainty about Iraq, and allowed federal stimulus to flow, the buy back started early, and went well for the rest of 2003.
In short, the small picture says that this could just be a sale on stocks, and that it is time to wait, pick your targets, and buy at the bottom. But what that bottom is, and what happens next, isn't the small picture any more. It is a bet on where the money is coming from.
So what is the medium picture?
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The medium picture, is not so good. A business cycle has parts, each one is really shaped by what people are doing to make money. The two meatiest part of the business cycle are the rebound - when stimulus comes in to pick the economy up off the floor, and the expansion, when whatever new kind of business is going to be the story of the expansion is established, and people pour into it to make money. There is also the frothy "bubble" where most of the money is being made making big, speculative, bets on what assets are going to be important for a long time, and which, because of the frothy amount of money, are up for sale. You might ask why assets are for sale at the top, and why buy them there, the answer is that only at the top is there enough money to entice the hardened owners of long term rents to sell out.
Our rebound, such as it was, was driven by Iraq spending starting in early 2003, and our expansion was driven by housing, health care and homeland security. Low. Low. Low. Low interest rates from the federal reserve, a captive American market that has to pay double digit inflation of health care, and the war without end. Housing isn't a bad thing, but we don't put houses on boats and sell them. Health care is a good thing, but is it wise to have 1/3 of all health care dollars evaporate on private overhead? And we don't sell that much health care to the rest of the world. And war? Well we all know that war is only profitable for the people not fighting it, but selling the weapons. And this war has been a dud on the international market. The first Iraq War, actually turned a small profit. Seriously, other people paid us to fight it. Which is why we did what they wanted, and not what we wanted.
However, the housing sector, as it went along, stopped selling bigger houses to people with good jobs, but speculation to people who had less and less money. Just as little people played the market in the dotconomy, little people tried to flip homes in front of the rush. This begat the mother of all sub-prime speculative booms.
Sub-prime means "risky". There is nothing wrong with making risky loans, so long as the person making them knows that they will have to make up the difference. However, very often the game is to find a way to make the risky loan, and have the government clean up the mess when there is a recession. This was the S&L scandal. People like the Chimp's brother made bad loans, and you are still paying off the difference in the form of the debt we took on as a country to clean the mess up and get moving again. If you ask yourself why the very people who messed up Texas were, a few years later, running the place, and then the country - well that's a story beyond the financial picture.
Sub-prime borrowers then, go broke alot even during the boom, but when the bust comes, they get creamed. All at once. At this point the bankers step in and say "no more of that, we want our money back". This means that speculative demand dries up. But that speculative demand was driving housing prices in general.
From this medium term picture - you can see how people, big and small, bet there was going to be a 1990's money flows like water bubble at the end to square the books of the housing market. There was such a boom, but not for little people. Instead, that boom took place at the top of the economy, in Private Equity and Hedge Funds. More on this in a moment.
But the point of the story here is that all the little people who bet that we were going to see hiring and more wages, got it wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong. This means that the housing bust isn't going to be limited to a few high flying lenders like New Century, but is hammering everyone everywhere, because the source of demand for the houses being built - people getting really good jobs and moving into the suburbs from cramped apartments - isn't happening. No jobs, no houses, no houses, no one to sell to. Since the flow of people wanting to retire and move south and sell their home near an economic center hasn't changed, the fact that there is no one to sell to means that they either have to stay put, or take a lower price. Now home prices are still high, but they are way off their peaks. This means that lots of these people will sell now, hoping to avoid the bottom.
So the sub-prime bust becomes a more general bust that ripples through the economy, particularly in spring when the rehiring of construction workers doesn't happen.
So let's look at the streams of money that were driving the expansion. Housing? Gone. Health care? People are topped out. Homeland Security? Peaked and going down, particularly when the bail out from housing starts to come due, and Congress looks to cut something. Private equity boom? Most of the borrowing power of the S&P 500 is now tapped out, and there is very little money on the sidelines based on cash flows. Almost every rich person who wanted into the hedge fund pool, is in.
So the money is drying up. It hasn't dried up, but it is drying up.
This middle picture means that not only will this slide be sharp, but the rebound on the otherside is going to be less. And the odds on a recession this year or next are getting higher, not lower, by the day. Some of this was in place last year.
However, last year, as the bust was starting, business was spending - mergers, acquisitions, commericial real estate - all boomed. However this was a bubble. It wasn't a leaner and meaner economy coming out of creative destruction - that's econospeak for "lots of little people losing their jobs, but the company is more efficient" - but a bloated one, with the highest share of wealth owned by the top 1% since 1929.
This private equity bubble propped up the economy, building offices, selling equipment to an expanding China and India, and the last fat shot of war spending from an undivided government of Republicans and a President whose only veto was to outlaw biology.
This gets us to the big picture. The reasons to believe that while this may not be the crash year, it also might be. The reasons to believe that if the crash comes, it will be far wider than people expect.
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The big picture, paradoxically, doesn't depend on big aggregates. The history of 20th century economics is that the aggregate numbers always look best before the crash. Over and over again recessions have taken economists by suprise, and each time they have come up with a raft of new "effects" to explain them - the wealth effect, sunspots etc.
The reality is that it is not the aggregate, but the composition of the aggregate, that determines what happens when things go sour. The web of connections. Now economists admit this about the past - the Great Depression, it is understood, came from the unravelling of a web of interconnections. The very biggest scale is determined, not by sloshing aggregates, but by the turbulence of risk and volatility. This is because how bad the down turn, and how durable the upturn, depend, not on how much money is floating around, but by whether people are acting out of desperation to save their economic lives, or just their lives period - and conversely, whether they are making merely a good short term decision, or hoping that a new country or new industry is someplace they can make a life.
This is why people like Stuart Holland have argued for "meso" economics. But let's leave the theory aside, and talk about some solid facts on the big picture.
The first solid fact is that the US economy has an energy dependency, and we import lots and lots of it. The second fact is that we use a lot of this imported energy , not for growth, but to maintain the value of what we own. Your house doesn't get any closer to your job, you must burn gas every commuting day to keep the house. So must all your neighbors. This means that one big reason for the price of oil going up over the last 10 years, has been that people have been paying rent at the gas pump, so that they could avoid paying more for their house. With housing prices going up, even if wages weren't really, people could still pay the price of gas. That is why it is almost certain that gas this year will hit $3 gallon. I don't usually call out James K. Galbraith for being dead wrong, but in this case, he was dead wrong - he thought that the inflation spike was all Katrina. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong - Katrina merely laid bare how delicate the situation was.
The second solid fact is that the US is a disinflation junky as well. This is like someone on uppers and downers. The oil gets us up! But that means inflation, and since Social Security is Indexed to Inflation, that would eat us out of house and home. That's why the late 1970's were creating lots of pressure on social security - because we are on the hook for inflation. We import disinflation from lots of places. China is the poster child, but there are two dozen nations whose livelihood is being a cheaper, and often more efficient, place to manufacture. The average Japanese worker uses half the energy of the average American worker to produce the same amount of GDP. We ship jobs from here, to various theres, because either the standards are lower, the manufacturing more efficient, or both.
The third solid fact is that the US must then find someway of buying this oil and disinflation. We used to make both right here. We used to have enough oil, and we used to be the place that was building super concentrated more efficient manufacturing, and high pressure academic research. We do less and less of all three. So we must either sell off pieces of the future to someone else - and that is the national debt people, how much of your future you just sold to fill up your car - or we must loot smaller countries that don't have a choice.
This last causes its own problems - because countries whose assets we are buying up, and using to pay for our gas and disinflation, don't get rich. And you know something? America's best exports are for countries with large middle classes. Other people make luxury goods as well as we do, and other countries make cheap stuff better, but the US is at its best when it is selling to a large active middle class. But no development, no middle class. And China is dead set on keeping its own middle class happy by itself. Thank you very much.
The global trade order - which is "free" in the same sense that "Operation Iraqi Freedom" is free - is based on the American need to scrounge up the money. The black triangle of global trade is the US buying oil from OPEC, and shipping the carbon polluting parts of its economy to China, and squeezing the rest of the world for the difference, and selling its children into debt slavery for what it can't extort from smaller nations. If you wonder why the US isn't as popular as it used to be - look at it this way, we used to export cleavage, Coca-Cola and color television to the rest of the world, now we export Dominionist Revolution and pillage economies. The third richest guy in the world is the guy who bought up Mexico's telephone system, and is charging ruinously high rates so he can leverage into other things. Free Trade? Addicts are never free.
This is putting a strain on the global monetary order. If you think about it, global warming is the way that the inefficient but hopped up on oil economies - Dubai, Shanghai and Houston being the poster childern - dump the cost on the rest of the world. If you count the cost of global warming and health effects, China's value add to the rest of the world is negative.
This is held together by slicing and dicing risk and spreading it over as large an area as possible, and particularly by sticking people with it who don't know they are stuck with it. The City of New Orleans was stuck with the risk of a mega storm, and didn't know it. The National Guardsmen were stuck with the risk of a back door draft, and didn't know it. Industrial workers were stuck with the risk that courts would allow their pensions to be pillaged, and didn't know it. There is an econo-speak word for this kind of risk "systematic risk". Systematic risk is risk that something will come back and bite you in the ass.
You are supposed to get paid for this risk. However, most ordinary people aren't.
Now think on something. Where does the money for all those high flying speculative ventures come from? Ultimately it comes from ordinary people who do the work. I love finance, finance can do wonderful things. But let's not forget the reality that it is only a way of focusing the efforts of millions - billions - of real people on real problems. When it does not do this, it is a burden, not a blessing. And it has been a bigger and bigger burden.
The result of all this cross spreading of risk is that no one really knows which piece of the risk they own. It's all been homogenized. Now, what happens when people get homogenized? Well, it isn't pretty. When things go bad, someone has to step in - a government - and put things on the right track. Basically, if business people have gotten the path from ordinary work to profits so tangled that no one can untangle it, the public, which is those ordinary people, has to step in, cut the tangle, separate the quick from the economic dead, and pay the difference.
This can be good or bad, depending on how wise the public's servants are when it happens. In 1981 and 1990, the public got a bad deal, and in 2001 we got the raw deal. Each time the rich were bailed out, and the rest of us stuck with the bill.
However, what happens when the tangle gets too big? Then things get strange. Some governments may decide to walk away from the table. Others will be overthrown. Some will try and put the boot down and bail out the rich anyway - and spiral everything out of control.
Is this the economic crisis that could start either a massively bad bail out, or worse a downward spiral? The level of public debt, the level of interconnection of financial services - and worse still, the fact that many resources are being extracted at peak capacity - indicates that the world isn't living within its means. Globally we've had the biggest boom in history, because many places that had been outside of the mechanized economy - doing things with muscle rather than machine - have been brought into that economy. However, that means that the oil, upon which everything else rests, is now squeezed to its limit.
Money can only measure real things, and the potential for real things. While it is possible to create large amounts of virtual money - sooner or later two economic events slam into each other and reduce the myriads of would be money, into much smaller amounts of real money. A bear market is the process of returning money to its rightful owners, quoth the sage.
With a highly interconnected world - driven by our need for disinflation, oil and the money to pay for them - meets a housing meltdown is potentially such an economic event.
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So let's recap - the small picture is that this is the normal spring slide. The medium picture says that profits aren't going to grow and there are few new sources of business to replace housing which is going away. The big picture says that the world economy has been booming, but it has feet of clay.
So how bad is bad?
The answer is "nobody knows". Global financial instruments are more or less unregulated, because they can always be split between the least regulated places. This has been encouraged, because the spreading out of risk has been part of the role that the US plays to pay for its oil and disinflation habbit.
However, the indications are that there is no source of ultimate liquidity, partially because the US hinders it - no borrower of last resort as the financial world calls it - to bail things out should they unravel. The risks are too unknown, the ways they have been built into everything to obscure. This scares a lot of very rich people alot. But these paper problems are simply a reflection of the larger unknown - our current world economy is running hot - how long can we find ways of making it slightly more efficient, and therefore avoid the disruption of a big transition?
Nobody knows that either.
However, because that transition isn't going to happen now, this economic crash that is coming isn't going to be Great Depression bad. However, it can be Great Depression bad - in the sense of the late 19th century's "Great Depression" - where for 20 years, the amount of money in global supply didn't grow anywhere near as fast as the expansion of capital. Wages fell, people were squeezed - revolutionary movements such as Marxism grew rapidly. Yes there was a great deal of capital build out, but most people didn't see the benefits. However, in the 1890's new sources of gold, and new technologies for extracting it were found, and since money, then, was based on gold, there was a last mad scramble for it, and for the coal that ran the factories.
In our own moment, the reason this slide may be much worse than people expect, and worse that 2000-2002, is because of money. You see a stock market slide hurts the rich the most - that is why Bush was forced in, because he promised to bail them out of the stock slide, and did. But this only gets ugly when the assets people hold get crunched - the price of whatever they sell, and what they save. The global economy has been propped up by a bubble of US money supply. Money supply is created when a bank can loan money. Since banks can loan money more easily if they can sell off the risk - theoretically they don't have to back this with reserves - and since the housing bubble gave them more market value to loan money too - this created more dollars. Lots more dollars. However, the same process works in reverse - the housing bust means that they cannot make more loans, the global complacency boom means it can't get any cheaper to make loans. This means that M3 - the biggest - money supply will start to slow and even perhaps contract, as banks have to stop making loans because they don't have sub prime borrowers to buy inflated houses with risk shifted dollars at generationally low interest rates.
Each one of these steps is a domino - the low rates made risk very cheap. This meant that all of the world money was put into making big upside bets, and little into real hedging. This meant that there was a wash of cheap credit. The failure of economic policy - war, breast implants and McMansions - meant that wages never caught up to the big bets. Instead, those who sold oil picked the money off the table. This leads to the collapse of the subprime borrower - who in another form is the guy who will get a good job if everything goes right for him. This leads to the bust in housing prices, and that means no more lending, and the people who bought the risk are suddenly going to cut off financial insurance.
Bang. Bang. Bang. The each big drop on the stock market is pulled along after it, as money that had been parked there, now must go to pay off bad loans. At somepoint - and we will know soon - so much money will be pulled off the table, that other people will be forced to sell just because they too, had money parked and not invested.
This means that this could be very much like the financial panics of the 1890's - at the peak of the guilded age - when reactionary forces around the world made a stand against changing how business was done, and the result put the world on a march to a final show down over control of the coal and colonies economy. In short, Iraq will be the Boer War of our economic times - a last small war over the thing everyone will have wanted, even as it is becoming obsolete.
This very big picture says that should we fall into recession here, it will not be the kind of shallow fall and long slow recovery that the last two recessions have been, but instead, the kind of sharp fall of the mid 1970's or mid 1890's - leading to a Japan style "bright depression", where periods of very weak growth are offset by contraction, as the US pays off the mountain of debts acquired for our brief throw at the Persian Gulf casino.
The figures were released on what has become one of Baghdad's deadliest days in recent memory, as a series of attacks in predominantly Shiite areas of the capital have left more than 100 people dead. Seeking to downplay the gravity of the situation in Iraq, some conservatives – most recently, Rudy Giuliani – have claimed that Baghdad is no more dangerous than any major American city.
"Tomorrow I will jam a fork into the top outlet with my left hand and a fork into the bottom with my right hand," he says. "I am confident that will bring us success, and that my enemies have misunderestimated me."
That's George "Captain Ahab" Bush, who the press persists in treating as a sane and rational person worthy of respect. He is not. Nearly four years ago, he either ignored evidence or just plain lied us into a war.
We landed in Iraq, shot a few folks and Tommy Cruise landed a plane on an aircraft carrier and stood beaming, happy as Alfred E. Neuman, before a sign that said "Mission Accomplished." Since then we have destroyed much of Iraq, all of our credibility, and allowed that nation to be ripped by civil war between warring factions of Shiites, Sunnis and who knows what else. The war has been lost; we have botched the occupation from beginning to end. But now we are going to make it even worse. The highly prestigious, nonpartisan Iraq Study Group presented a set of recommendations to President Bush a month ago. They might as well have presented it to my dog Paddy. W grinned, thanked them and then indicated that he plans to do the one thing nobody was recommending: an insane suicidal troop "surge," in which 20,000 more Americans will be flung into the disintegrating hellhole of Baghdad.
Our forces elsewhere will be spread even thinner. If the militant Ghegs and Tosks of tiny fortress Albania have any secr