So the President unveiled his health plan(s) to what I thought was an incredible display of bravery on the Republicans’ part, and I’m jealous. I remember what it felt like to torture the substitute teacher from the back of class, yelling out “you lie!” and holding up signs and so forth. These people are really exploring new boundaries in civil discourse. Talk about exercising their liberties—if Joe Wilson had been Cynthia McKinney, they’d have dragged him out of the Capitol in handcuffs. Often behavior is perceived in ways that have more to do with the perpetrator than the crime.
If the Democrats had been as vehement over the plan to invade Iraq as the Republicans are about health care reform, we’d never have gone to war. But then again, criticizing the President used to be treasonous merely by virtue of the office; now it seems like a lot of plain ol’ folks out there think Obama is committing treason merely by being the President.
So health care reform will be a valiant and pointless struggle, because the Democrats don’t need Republican support to pass the bill. In fact, the President ought to say to those Blue Dogs who think they’ll be vulnerable in the coming elections, “vote against it if you think your constituents won’t like getting health care, run as a maverick and see how far it gets you.”
And so, of course, a conservative Democrat comes out with a plan that does not include the public option, and the left is howling because it doesn’t go far enough while the right howls about the government taking over healthcare. At least we have achieved one great accomplishment already: making sure no one can ever propose a single-payer option ever again. It worked! Hooray! Idiots.
Let’s be clear. This is not about bringing down “costs.” I get sick to my stomach whenever people talk about the need to control healthcare costs, because if the problem were costs, the whole debate would be over already. The crisis is not about healthcare costs. It’s about healthcare prices. Medicare costs aren’t what’s bankrupting Americans, it’s the profit margins collected by for-profit medical care. When the government runs the plan, prices and costs are roughly equivalent—about 2-3% off. When a corporation runs health care, the prices are whatever they can get you to pay and the costs are as little as they can spend. The greater the gap, the more money the corporation and its employees make, typically about 30% (i.e., a gap 10-15 times larger than government-run healthcare).
Obama’s common-sense rules about requiring insurance companies to behave like human beings are great, but it will end up increasing prices unless there is a real public option. Insurers make money by eliminating risks; when it comes to healthcare, that means eliminating people from coverage. “But won’t insurance companies make more money because now they’ll be insuring tens of millions more people?” Not if those are the people who they have very carefully figured out are going to end up costing them money. Healthcare is expensive now and isn’t going to get any cheaper any time soon, no matter how much “cost-cutting” we engage in. If the government’s plans end up offsetting the losses by insurance companies who must now insure unprofitable patients, we’ll be lucky, but we all know that no matter what happens, prices for healthcare consumers will go up.
If you want a glimpse into the minds of the people you trust to run your healthcare, you should be watching the debate play out on CNBC or Fox Business Channel. There, it’s the poor beleagured insurance companies that are the victims, only trying to protect themselves from vicious, lying packs of diseased hustlers who sign up for insurance knowing that they have a preexisting condition. Insurance prices are going to go through the roof (just like they did in Massachussetts, where Romney instituted mandatory coverage) and we’re all going to get screwed, all because Obama wanted to make nice with people whose votes he does not actually need. Inelastic markets don’t work the same way elastic ones do, and nobody shops around for healthcare providers after their heart attack.
Repeat after me: a corporation cannot take the Hippocratic oath. Would you take your healthcare from someone who is barred from taking the Hippocratic oath? I’d rather not, entrez-nous, because it means that by definition they don’t have my best interests at heart. The incentives are misaligned; which is no surprise considering that we are the only Western nation that has an “employer-pays” system. I mean, sure, employer-pays would be a fine idea, if your employers were prohibited from firing you. But they’re not. These health plans were introduced as a substitute for wages in the postwar boom period, but now it’s clear that companies are no longer reaping any benefits from running their workers’ health insurance plans. And now we’ve gotten to the point where one sixth of America’s economy is holding the other five ransom.
If you want to make a meaningful compromise—that is, with the insurance and healthcare companies directly, as opposed to their stooges in Congress—take a page from the President’s playbook when dealing with a real sensitive issue; federally-funded abortions. With characteristic subtlety and nuance, Obama flat out said we weren’t ever going to cover abortions. Well, where does that leave people who need abortions? At the mercy of the market, I suppose, and that’s the idea I want to examine.
If the healthcare industry simply cannot bear to compete with government-run healthcare, it shouldn’t have to. Instead of including a para-governmental “public plan” in addition to the panoply of existing government health plans and having it compete with private health insurance, the government ought to assume control of some parts of healthcare ought right, and let private insurers compete for others as long as they meet federal guidelines.
I say this because as I watched the President chicken out on abortion, it occured to me that I feel the same way about New Age “medicine” as I suspect pro-life conservatives feel about Planned Parenthood. The thought of federal dollars going to fund acupuncture or healing crystal treatments makes me, well, sick. At the same time, if you listen to health care reform opponents, America has the best system in the world because everybody’s getting LasikTM surgery nowadays.
So, here’s my proposal: the government should cover all catastrophic illnesses and emergencies (like they do now anyway in ERs across the country), all surgeries and medications. Private insurers, coops, sewing circles, witch doctors and other HMOs would compete to cover doctors visits, wellness, testing and preventative care, but most importantly, all elective surgeries, all ‘non-traditional’ medicine, all vitamin supplements, placebos, palm readings, gender reassignments, urinalyses and tattoo removals. It’s not exactly single-payer, but it is unlike it enough to qualify as “unique,” which is much more important to politicians than whether or not it works.
Like you, I was very concerned about the well-being of crazy right-wingers this summer. Their favorite party out of office, a Democratic super-majority in the Senate, the stock market dragging its feet—how were we, as a nation, going to keep these people off the streets? By staging a gigantic nation-wide debate about healthcare, that’s how. All over the country, the McCain vote had evolved from staging ridiculous “Tea Party” protests to staging ridiculous rants about healthcare. If Obama had proposed legislation declaring puppies are cute, these people would be out there burning stuffed animals and talking about how he’s some kind of tree-hugging fascist. If he had signed some executive order endorsing NASCAR, they’d be storming the tracks with pitchforks.
The healthcare debate has so little to do with the issues at hand that of course we’ll end up with some largely worthless bill that shies away from addressing the actual problems with healthcare while preserving the structures which got us into this mess in the first place. That’s fairly normal, but the rhetoric surrounding the debate would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Our healthcare system kills people every day, and there’s no dearth of anecdotes to underline the point.
The status quo is always good enough for some people, provided they have some financial or political stake in it. What’s so ingeniously stupid about the health-care protestors is that they aren’t actually fighting on anyone’s behalf—they just feel threatened by Democrats regaining power. Yes, theoretically they are fighting on behalf of the impoverished healthcare industry CEO, but it isn’t clear that some new healthcare regime will actually kill upper-management (like it does their victims). Shock jocks and cable news hosts tell people to jump—and the audience asks, “how high?” And because most of these earnest American patriots don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about, their outrage becomes more ridiculous every day.
Like any good self-fulfilling prophecy, the media are now reporting that Obama’s healthcare plan (whatever that may be) is in trouble because Americans are turning out en masse to shout down their Congresspersons in the name of democracy and freedom. Most polls see the country split pretty evenly down the middle on ‘health care reform,’ and—surprise!—we’re divided in an eerily similar fashion to the 2008 presidential vote—along age lines. Old people hate government health care! Unless they’re on the receiving end, of course. According to a recent CNN poll, the majority of Americans over 50 are now opposed to Obama’s nefarious and somewhat nebulous plans to change healthcare. The majority of those under 50 are for it, of course.
Every other Western democracy had a moment (not unlike ours) where they finally figured out that the government runs health care better than anyone else, and then those entitlement programs become politically untouchable. For example, no matter how far to the right Canada’s ruling coalition may move, they would never think of dismantling the single-payer system. But that system has only been in place since the early 1960′s. The United States, on the other hand, was fighting a Cold War and had too much pride to let even the slightest whiff of Communism waft across our borders until that old pinko President Johnson instituted Medicare and Medicaid alongside Social Security.
In light of all this, you have to wonder about the people who are fightin’ mad about “socialized medicine” when the government’s single-payer healthcare runs a tighter ship (costs-wise) than the most profitable HMO. In the war of bullshit, this battle could be easily won by pointing out to those fearful seniors and working class parents who are being rallied against healthcare reform that their leaders have literally come out against their Medicare and Medicaid. If you want to fight fear with fear, you could very reasonably say that the same Republican and medical industry strategists are trying to kill Medicare and Medicaid on purely ideological grounds. How do we know? Well, we can start with the fact that (as reported by Media Matters):
On August 14, the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, and O’Reilly Factor guest host Laura Ingraham featured a recording of Ronald Reagan speaking in 1961 against “socialized medicine” for the American Medical Association’s Operation Coffee Cup Campaign against Medicare. Neither Drudge, Limbaugh, nor Ingraham, however, noted that Reagan was speaking out against an early version of Medicare, which has become very popular since it was enacted 44 years ago, or that Reagan’s dire predictions of curtailments of freedom were never realized.
(Side note: if every major liberal news outlet played the same clip with the same message on the same day, right-wing media would be foaming at the mouth with conspiracy theories. Liberal media knows that there’s a right-wing politburo coordinating the message and we’re already bored by it).
This is not to say that I am a supporter of the president’s proposed health care reforms. I am not. Because even though the president has readily admitted that he prefers, ceteris paribus, single-payer healthcare, and the fact that there is a Democratic House and Senate and the midterms are over a year away, he still wants to pass a defanged bill that won’t help Americans more than the debate is hurting us. I want to be clear: any system that is not single-payer (or at least universal with subsidized coverage) just isn’t sustainable. Furthermore, there are people with valid concerns about how the hell we might pay for any expansion of coverage (although, to be fair, if this were a war, anyone asking how we’ll pay for it is some kind of fifth columnist).
To hear almost any elected official on either side of the aisle tell it, because single-payer wasn’t invented in America (like television, or the pet rock) Americans want nothing to do with it. We need a “uniquely American” solution, says Obama. Well, here it is:
If those people who are truly opposed to any kind of healthcare reform Obama tries to pass on the grounds that he’s some kind of Nazi-Communist, the true believers who know that the government is the Devil and socialism is evil, those dyed-in-the-wool Reaganites who are homing in on the retirement age—if they would simply pledge to abstain from any and all single-payer healthcare for the rest of their lives, we could pay for it all by getting such louts off the rolls while these proud patriots can remain spiritually and physically pure. Everybody wins!
In order to help keep the peace nationally and make lots of money like Jesus wants me to, I’ll be selling high-quality embossed medical alert bracelets for healthcare reform protestors. Pictured below, these 100% metal-plated and attractively brushed accessories are lovingly embossed using the timeless and elegant Comic Sans typeface to let your EMT or physician know that nothing is more important to you than your health except their bottom line! Just sign a binding legal pledge never to avail yourself of Medicare or government-run hospitals and this wonderful keepsake can be yours for only $129.99:
In all seriousness, people tend to consume the most healthcare in the last six months of their life. So the operative question when it comes to healthcare is, how much do you want to pay to die? Call me selfish, but I dream of a world where I can die for free.
Dear readers, you may be wondering what I’ve been up to, since lately dispatches are few and I never call anymore. Well, I’ve been working on a book. If you want a copy of the proposal, e-mail me and I’ll send it to you. For the purposes of this website, the proposal is to be distributed under the terms of the Godfather Intellectual Property License: If you want to take a look at the book proposal I’ve spent the last three years working on, you may do so free of charge as long as it never redistributed in an incomplete form (i.e., without my name on it). However, in return, know that someday—and that day may never come —I’ll call upon you to do a service for me.
If that’s too much for you, you may enjoy this little video clip I did for MediaChannel a few weeks ago (during this blog’s autumn vacation):
Did I mention I hate what the web does to video? No? Never mind. Let’s just say that as an editor, I deeply resent the reduced frame rate of web video, because all that time I spend making sure the cuts are exact within a thirtieth of a second is essentially wasted. Sigh.
Good For the Gander!
Remember how I used to complain about torture? Well, I have put those fears to rest. The President himself has assured me that the United States does not torture. We merely apply psychological or physical pressure, nothing that leaves marks (never mind that these exact techniques rendered Jose Padilla unfit to stand trial).
Donald Hebb—who worked my old alma mater—helped the CIA figure out that basically, you can drive anybody crazy with a bare minimum of equipment:
From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan project of the mind with costs that reached a billion dollars a year. Many have heard about the most outlandish and least successful aspect of this research — the testing of LSD on unsuspecting subjects and the tragic death of a CIA employee, Dr. Frank Olson, who jumped to his death from a New York hotel after a dose of this drug. This Agency drug testing, the focus of countless sensational press accounts and a half-dozen major books, led nowhere. But obscure CIA-funded behavioral experiments, outsourced to the country’s leading universities, produced two key findings, both duly and dully reported in scientific journals, that contributed to the discovery of a distinctly American form of torture: psychological torture. With funding from Canada’s Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis in just 48 hours. What had the doctor done—drugs, hypnosis, electroshock? No, none of the above.
For two days, student volunteers at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was chair of Psychology, simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory stimulation by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs.
Ironically, Hebb was the one pioneered research into the physical manifestations of thought patterns in the brain, but as Dana Perino said, “The bottom line is, we don’t torture.” Principally because torture, as we are now defining it, isn’t supposed to leave marks.
And whom do we torture er, ‘legally and successfully interrogate,’ again? Only the most important suspects are tortured in the name of national security, as the television keeps reminding us. We’re talking high value targets here, the Justice Department assures us. Which brings me to point here: if these techniques are truly legal and effective, the next Attorney General really needs to use them on Alberto Gonzalez.
You’re probably thinking, who’s Alberto Gonzalez, and what’s his connection to Bin Laden? Well, in keeping with the ‘eat your own dog food’ principle, it’s important for Gonzalez, if he truly steered the United States government away from committing war crimes (i.e., torture) on a systematic level as he claims, ought to be able to let those same safe, effective techniques help him jog his memory. You may recall the countless (OK, 64) times he said he didn’t recall things during Congressional testimony. What he needs is a little help from his friends, and afterwards, he can testify to Congress about those techniques as part of their ongoing torture investigation. I mean, don’t you think his testimony will be enhanced by a little real world experience?
They Love That Dirty Water
The comic book villain potential of Erik Prince is truly awesome, as noted by the Daily Show—a wealthy, secretive ex-Marine who runs a wildly corrupt mercenary outfit above the law. But while it’s easy to blame Blackwater for the awful things that they do (routinely), let’s look at why Bush needs Blackwater so much in the first place.
Private contractors are needed to protect high-value targets, like American State department employees or drive fuel trucks from Kuwait. Now, Iraqis, including lawmakers and police, get killed all the time. But private contractors—mercenaries— who occupy the kind of legal grey zone that lets you shoot first and ask questions later.
When you can’t distinguish between civilians and assailants, you have to get aggressive, otherwise, you’ll get hit. And we can’t afford that kind of PR. When a Congressional delegation visits Iraq, you need the kind of security detail that plays offense as defense, no matter how many civilians you kill. The Iraq body count website is full of civilians who got shot travelling too close to Americans on the highway.
Running an occupation requires a certain amount of brutality, because the citizens there are never going to view your troops as legitimate. In fact, the only time you get suicide bombers is when you have a foreign military presence. And the kind of targets Blackwater protects are huge gets for an insurgency, because it makes foreign higher-ups wary of visiting the troops.
If you want to wage war, you have to kill as many people as possible—that’s why soldiers make bad peacekeepers. An occupation like the one we’re running in Iraq requires war crimes. And that is just one more reason we need to leave.
Not So Noble
Videos like this one make me ashamed of our side of the global warming debate:
First of all, I appreciate using a chart and all, but this guy needs to stop talking to people who agree with him, because it’s affecting his ability to make an argument.
The biggest flaw in the argument is the assumption that whatever measures we take will work. Now, I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible for us to curb or almost stop global warming. After all, the Montreal Protocol was able to repair the damage to the ozone layer within a relatively short time. However, it is apparent that Al Gore is in fact a pollyanna who’s sugarcoating the situation.
I say this because Al Gore, Nobel and all, is not calling for a reduction in greenhouse gas production. He’s not even calling for a freeze in greenhouse gas production. He’s calling for a reduction in the amount of projected emissions growth. In other words, he believes that the planet can absorb much more carbon without catastrophic effect.
But the range of scientific projections for global climate change scenarios include all sorts of catastrophies, and we’re discovering new ways global warming is going to fuck us every day. I saw a documentary on volcanoes which posited that the 300% increase in volcanic eruptions in the Ring of Fire (home to the majority of the world’s volcanoes, actually) in the past few hundred years may be connected to sea level increases, which put greater pressure on the underground magma chambers causing more eruptions.
If it were truly a moral issue, as simple folk like the guy in this video want us to believe, the answer is simple: stop using gas. I don’t have a car myself for exactly this reason. However, all kind of things I purchase use gas, from transportation to plastic extrusion. The most obnoxious parts of An Inconvenient Truth by the way, re the ones with Gore looking pensive while being chauffeurred around in a stretch limousine.
The reason we don’t get off gas, as the president says, is because we’re addicted, and he should know. The Bush family oil company, Zapata, literally put the “Z” in “Pennzoil” when they merged with Penn Oil. We could raise the CAFE miles-per-gallon standards from the thirties to the thousands (effectively banning gasoline-powered cars)—I just saw a Chevy commercial for a fully electric vehicle, and BMW has ads for a hydrogen-powered car, too. We could even bring back American automobile jobs by following the German model, requiring in-country conversions for all gasoline-powered engines to renewable fuels within a certain time-frame. But then again, transportation only accounts for about 60% of petroleum consumption in developed countries and is actually the minority of petrol use in developing countries, according the Department of Energy’s “Outlook 2000” projections.
When Gore buys “carbon offsets” from a solar plant in India to ‘make up’ for his jet-fuel usage, he isn’t being as clever as he thinks. Then again, neither is his audience; scientists have basically been convinced already. Over the last 20 years, I’ve watched scientific opposition to the threat of global warming wane to the point that the few remaining holdouts have shifted so far from their original position on the issue you can tell they’re just being obstinate.
I’ve watched global warming skepticism (which is important to have, by the way) move from “there is no global warming” to “there may be global warming, but it isn’t human-caused” to “there may be human caused global warming, but it’s insignificant” to “there may be significant human-caused global warming, but let’s wait another generation before we act.” As more data is uncovered (starting with the ice-core samples from Antarctica) the connection between human activity and climate changes since the Industrial Revolution becomes less and less ambiguous.
If Gore is serious about maintaining greenhouse gas emission levels, which is what cap-and-trade is supposed to do, then he should really start talking more about adapting to a world scarred by global climate change instead of pretending we can stop it by flying around the world “raising awareness.”
And this brings me to my second point: let’s grant the other side the benefit of the doubt and pretend that taking action to solve global warming through government expenditure will be bad for the economy (which is patently ridiculous). If regulation is supposed to cause a massive worldwide depression, why is it assumed by the idiot in the above video that taking the same measures while actually saving the planet won’t lead to the same thing anyway? For free-market zealots, it doesn’t matter if government programs work, they’re illegitimate and should therefore be opposed prima facie. (Cf. Bush’s SCHIP veto.)
So you’re not going to peddle this outside of those who have already bought it beforehand, buddy.
Speaking of people who aren’t scientists but pretend they’re just as smart; I’d like to address those people who have glommed onto the fact that the sun has a sunspot cycle which has an effect on the global temperature. Please note—sunspots are not the same as human-caused global warming. They are a separate cofactor in a large and complex system. Climate scientists already know about sunspots. It’s not like there are IPCC researchers who caught the Fox News global-warming-is-a-hoax show and said, “Oh my god! We forgot about sunspots! Erase all the equations from the chalkboard—we have to start again from square one!”
“Forcings,” as scientists refer to them, mean that there are inputs which push a system toward a certain outcome. That’s why the worst of all possible worlds is one where the sunspot-fueled skeptics and the human climate change proponents are both right, and both factors contribute to our suffering. If humans force a natural process to go off the rails, it’s not necessarily a safe assumption to think that we can right the process by contributing as much repair as harm caused. The curve has been irreparably changed.
If you want to talk about the issue with global warming skeptics, you need to talk about the strategic value of renewable energy. I wonder sometimes if Germany is leading renewables research because they remember the Axis was finally brought down by a gasoline blockade. Fossil fuels are strategic resources. Renewables are even more strategic. Everyone has much easier access to them than to oil or natural gas, which, as I’ve pointed out here before, is a major cause behind wars. Even giving our enemies renewable energy helps us, as we are no longer an oil exporter.
Save Arts Education
Has it occurred to these people who are flogging all this increased math and science education spending that the real, enduring legacy of America is cultural—the domain of the liberal arts majors? Even when the DVDs are made in China, they’re still of Hollywood movies. Our culture is the ultimate export. Al-Qaeda sends its video dispatches using American-made software on former Defense Department networks. Can’t we just be satisfied with that and call it a day on all sides?
No, we need to ramp up our math and science programs because lead exposure and television are lowering the collective IQ of American youth.
Now, I didn’t go to college in the U.S., but Elephant is always telling me it’s America’s last real stronghold, our university system. It has become the model for the rest of the world (at least, in terms of secular education). We’ve kind of mortgaged everything else—we’re not the strongest, richest, smartest etc. anymore. Being on top is tough that way, because unipolarity in a system as large as the entire world is very difficult to maintain in the long term. Harvard University, on the other hand, was here before the United States and will probably be here after it, too.
Back to our moron brood—wouldn’t you rather live in a country with more defective three-chord country songs and angsty poems than defective bridges and automobiles? Think of the future, people. Think of the children, so they won’t have to.
R.I.P., Dean Johnson
Dean Johnson, lead singer of the New York band The Velvet Mafia died in Washington last week. It isn’t clear what the immediate cause of death was, but Dean was HIV positive; I don’t know whether his death was a direct consequence.
In high school, my friend was a trumpet player in the Velvet Mafia’s “Mormon horn section,” which was code for the fact that the horn players wee mostly straight, while rest of the band was gay. Dean himself was a giant drag queen who would come out onstage in six-inch heels and sing sort of retroish NEw Wave rock songs about David Geffen and picking up boys on the PATH train.
My friends and I would go see him at CBGB’s a lot. We’d be in the front row; I’d be yelling at Dean—”Dean, have my love child!” or “Freebird!” or something else in drunken teenager, and my other friend, who was literally joining the John Birch Society, would hoot and cheer along. We were the band’s most dedicated groupies—not that we were gay or really had much contact with Dean for that matter, but we were very supportive.
It’s so strange to think that CB’s went only a few months before its legendary owner, Hilly Kristal, and then a few weeks later Dean went, too. The New York of my youth is dying out. The Lower East Side where my new, out-of-towner friends drink is so different from the place where I hung out as a handily-mustachioed underage drinker, even though they share the same latitudes and longitudes. No more Second Avenue Deli, no more Rocky Horror at the Village Cinemas, no more squatters and most of all, no more cheap anything.
Dean is gone and we’ll never get him back. And so, in some ways, is New York City.
Now that News Corp has all purchased the Wall Street Journal and late capitalism is experiencing yet another paroxysm—er, market correction—I think it behooves us all to consider the fate of the lowly Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
You see, way back in the 1920′s the market was booming—everybody was getting rich speculating in the market or on real estate, it seemed. After a series of bombings, notably one on Wall Street, the government was doing some ‘awareness raising’ of the threat of a small group of radical foreign terrorists to destroy America, but then again, this was before television, so you may not have heard of it.
Everything was going smoothly until the middle of September ’29, when investors started to sell off some of those speculative gains. An alarmed array of prominent tycoons and corporations (some of the very same people who would later try to overthrow President Roosevelt and establish a Fascist dictatorship) tried to stop the hemorrhaging by making very public bids to buy blue chip stock at prices above market. This worked, for about two days, and then on the 29th there was a famous and precipitous crash.
Now, Glass-Steagall was one of the measures instituted to make sure this sort of nonsense didn’t happen again. In addition to establishing the FDIC, the Act separated commercial banks from investment banks and insurance firms, because, to quote PBS’ Frontline, the Act was
seeking to limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors.
The Glass-Steagall Act was repealed in 1999 by a Republican congress and that defender of the poor and downtrodden, Bill Clinton, after a massive grassroots movement whose spirit of civil disobedience echoed the civil rights movement of the 1960′s.
The only problem was that these were the world’s largest financial institutions who were breaking the law en masse, and they’d bought enough elected officials to get them to legalize a slew of illegal mergers after the fact. The Citibank-Travelers Group merger in 1997 will always be noted as “technically illegal,” which is kind of a tip of the hat to the army of corporate lawyers who decided to just be as brazen as possible about it and see what happened.
What happened was that every commercial bank bought an investment bank or vice versa, every single one of which embarked on a massive campaign to do exactly what the act was supposed to prevent, as described above, pumping up stocks in order to screw the small investor out of some dough.
Ultimately, we don’t know exactly how much of this overvaluation occurred, but we do know that the financial industry was doing well enough such that when New York’s attorney general (now Governor) Spitzer caught them, ten major banks decided it would be cheaper to settle the case with the government to the tune of $1.43 billion dollars. And as any businessperson will tell you, if the scheme ended up being profitable with the fine included, you pretty much have a fiduciary obligation to do it again. Which they did and continue to do.
As I’m sure you know, the concept of “conflict of interest” went out with the millennium. Now we have ‘synergy’ instead.
Fast forward to last week. A friend of mine had been recommending buying JPMorganChase (JPM) and Blackstone Group (BX) stock. I countered that the financials are all way overvalued, particularly JPM. We’ve all been seeing the ripple effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis; layoffs in the lending industry, hedge funds bleeding cash, even bank runs—for nostalgia’s sake, I suppose.
I don’t own stock on principle, but I bet I’d make a fair analyst. The only caveat is that I have no talent for spotting good buys; I can only forsee impending disaster, because those are the signs few people want to find. This brings me, incidentally, back to the News Corp/Dow Jones buyout. As there’s no such thing as a conflict of interest anymore, there’s no longer a problem with the way market information has been commoditized and tailored toward the investor.
Watch any business channel for ten minutes and it’ll become clear that the “news” being presented works in much the same way MTV used to deal with music—continuous advertising for the product broken up by short sustained bursts of commercial interruptions. The anchors are always talking about your portfolio, how to help you—the investor—ford the dangerous currents ahead and so forth. This is not to say that business news doesn’t report bad news, even though they try not to call it that. There’s always an upside to every tragedy, some opportunity to capitalize on one tragedy or another—wars, epidemics, rising gas prices.
All you need to know about financial stocks, I told my friend the other day, is in a little chart you’ll never see on CNBC or the upcoming Fox Business Channel. Here’s Productivity vs. Real Wages for the past decade or so:
Notice how productivity, a measure of total economic output per worker, has become completely uncoupled from the actual value of workers’ take-home pay (adjusted for inflation). But consumer spending has generally followed the same curve as productivity, which begs the question: how are Americans spending more with less money?
The answer is that the average American family is in five digits’ worth of credit card debt, their home is worth less than it was at the top of the housing bubble, and if the family experiences job loss, a medical emergency or divorce, they’re likely headed for a new brand of bankruptcy (courtesy of Joe Biden) where the credit card companies can seize your assets even if you’re dead.
As the chart demonstrates, it’s not like people are ever going to make enough money to pay the balance of these bad loans off. So, investors, here’s a market tip: anyone who has exposure to the financial crisis happening to poor and middle-class people is screwed, including but not limited to people who are exposed to such exposure and so forth fdown the line). You’ll notice that ‘gadget’ stocks, like RIM (the makers of Blackberry PDAs) are doing great. They’re not tied to the people the financial industry has spent so much time and effort screwing over.
By the way, my friend Anya, who writes about debt, beat me to this by linking to a Harvard Magazine piece making similar points. She knows much more about this than I do.
Welcome to another edition of actual casual asides, seasoned as usual with gotchas and I-told-you-sos.
Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls…
The United States and our allies have no rational interest in disclosing how many people we’ve killed in Iraq and Afghanistan if that number is inclusive of civilians. “We don’t do body counts,” said General Franks. We may publish figures of enemy killed and captured (we actually don’t take prisoners anymore for the most part), in order to show how effective and accurate our troops are in combat.
Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages at police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.
More than 1,000,000,000 bullets a year, to the point where it literally puts the squeeze on so-called “homeland security.”
How many people can you kill with a billion bullets a year? Let’s run some projections:
The Jack Bauer all-time low (2.57 shots per death): 389 million (more than the populations of the U.S. and Canada combined)
The Amadou Diallo standard (41 shots per death): 24.4 million (comparable to the whole Iraqi population)
The A-Team standard (infinite shots fired with no casualties): 0 deaths, billions of fools pitied.
The practical upshot of all this analysis is that B. A. Baracus may well have been the latest incarnation of the Buddha.
Who Would Jesus Go Down On?
The essential friction of theocracy is that nobody can live up to all that bullshit all the time. Theocracies are, in fact, the ultimate expression of religion’s desire to normalize its social conventions and taboos. We’d like tot hink that there are some concepts which are universal, but in reality, each religion and ideology merely has different standards for who is allowed to break that taboo and when.
Murder is taboo unless you’re killing an unbeliever or for revenge; homosexuality is inexcusable for laity but tolerated among priests; it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eyes of a needle than for a rich man to pass through the gates of heaven, unless that man is a televangelist.
So another bunch of Christian Patriots are caught same-sex canoodling, which isn’t so shocking, but in these two cases, the public found out because Florida GOP congressman Bob Allen and Indiana Young Republican Glenn Murphy managed to involve the police in the debacle.
Bob Allen’s arrest for solicitation is one thing, because it allegedly involved what he thought were two consenting adults… and a $20 payment from Allen so that he might perform oral sex on an undercover cop. But Glenn Murphy allegedly raped a guy in his sleep after a YR party where the victim’s sister bade the Murphy to stay over after drinking too much.
The best part of these scandals is the inevitable excuse proffered by the newly fallen Republican angels:
Now Karl Rove resigns ‘to spend more time with his family.’ The whole country is wondering why he’s leaving now, and nobody can figure it out… or can we?
Proud of being gay? Am I supposed to have a Guys Under 5’8″ Pride Parade? How can one be proud of one’s genetics? We’re firmly assured that gay people are born that way – being proud of it is as silly as being proud of your hair color. So, what gives? What, exactly, are they being proud of? Their ability to engage in lewd behaviour without being arrested? Their ability to strong arm the political establishment into helping them seem mainstream? Pride goeth before the fall, good people – you might want to think on that a bit between now and the next pride parade – especially as things like this are going to turn more and more people hostile to public displays of homosexuality.
I submitted the following comment under the pseudonym “Martin Luther” which I was surprised to see approved by the blog’s moderator:
Exactly! It's like those damn Irish with their so-called St. Patrick's Day Parades. You didn't choose to be Irish, so stop blocking traffic! Who do they think they are? Honestly, the Irish weren't even considered 'white' until a few dozen years ago. These palefaced Papists' pathetic attempt to convince mainstream Protestant America that they're the same as everybody else is so transparent it makes me want to vomit green.
Have you seen these parades? I've seen them in New York and Boston. Talk about lewd displays of public indecency! Drunkenness, lasciviousness, brawling, and public urination! And the worst part is, since the Irish seem to have infiltrated the police and firehouses, they just stand idly by while Europe's red-headed step-children run amok!
US actress Mia Farrow has offered her freedom in exchange for that of a respected rebel figure in Sudan. Suleiman Jamous, a co-ordinator for Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), has been confined to a UN peacekeeping base near Darfur for more than 13 months.
Although he needs urgent surgery, the 62-year-old faces arrest if he leaves.
In a letter to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Ms Farrow has offered to take his place, saying his continued absence was an “impediment” to peace.
“Before his seizure, Mr Jamous played a crucial role in bringing the SLA to the negotiating table and in seeking reconciliation between its divided rival factions,” she said.
“I am therefore offering to take Mr Jamous’s place, to exchange my freedom for his in the knowledge of his importance to the civilians of Darfur and in the conviction that he will apply his energies toward creating the just and lasting peace.”
War is a game cowards play with other people’s lives. Making peace is truly courageous.
Let me state at the outset that I am a huge, huge fan of both Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales. I own several O’Reilly books, and obviously I use wikipedia all the time. I respect them immensely, and we should all bow before their superior technological wisdom.
Except in this case: A widely forwarded New York Times article about O’Reilly, Wales, and a group of others who are calling for some kind of new age of “civility” on the World Wide Web, namely in the blogosphere:
The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.
Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.
Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.
I know what you’re all wondering—in the name of civil public discourse, ARE THESE PEOPLE FUCKING STUPID?!? No, really, are these whore-mongering, baby-eating, paint-huffing, shit-stained, baboon-faced, coke-addled RETARDS serious?
Part of the fun of the Internet is that it’s practically made of free speech and built on a certain degree of anonymity. Not only does nobody know you’re a dog, but everyone can tell you’re an asshole, too. And that’s the way it ought to be. Sorry, ye shrinking violets and withering wallflowers, but if you can’t stand the heat, get the hell off the Internet. Go xerox a zine or write poetry in your journal. Don’t put things up for public consumption and act surprised when the public consumes them with varying degrees of receptiveness. The best thing about the Internet is that it gives everyone freedom of the press, but that freedom comes with various strings attached.
It seems as though these bloggers want their fifteen minutes (or fifteen people) but not any of the consequences thereof.
None of these solutions solve anything, and not just because these codes of conduct are voluntary. Let’s start with the issue the policy is designed to address, anonymous comments.
It seems like these people are investing an awful lot of effort into something we all know is destined to fail—but it’s even worse if it succeeds. Regular readers familiar with my M.O. can see where I’m going with this—let’s look at the premise expressed above, namely that there is not a single human being “able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.” Sorry, when your initial premises start with A = not A, you’ve pooched it from the get-go, my friends.
If you think someone is making a credible death threat against you, call the cops. Disallowing anonymous comments isn’t going to stop it. If someone is libeling or slandering you, file a civil lawsuit. But nothing you do will be able to stop people from posting derogatory things about you, whether it’s on your blog or their blog or a another person’s anonymous comments allowing blog or a bathroom wall.
Let’s continue with the article:
“Any community that does not make it clear what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who is welcome to join the conversation is at risk of finding it difficult to help guide the conversation later,” said Lisa Stone, who created the guidelines [the O'Reilly-Wales proposal is based upon] and the BlogHer network in 2006 with Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardins.
A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors.
Talk about opening up a can of worms… trust me, there’s no blogger worth their salt who wants to have to verify every comment made on their blog for legal indemnification. What if someone lies about something and you don’t catch it right away? or if they’re posing as someone you trust?
Right now, the solution is simple: it’s your damn blog and you can delete comments at will, anonymous, non-anonoymous, whatever. If you’ll notice, my own problem with comments was that I received literally 15,000 spam messages from evil robots in the past six months. Did I feel any compunction about deleting them? No! Did I institute a keyword-based filter? No! I want people to be able to make Bob Dole/Viagra jokes without my interference. I just don’t want them to be able to sell Viagra on my site. So what did I do? I implemented a simple technological solution—an arithmetic question. But I am fully aware that as soon as robots figure out what the sum of 2 and 3 is, I’ll need to shift tactics slightly. It’s just how it works—I’d rather deal with that problem than verify every claim my commenters make.
One of the thornier problems with this proposal is the lack of enforcement, which is fatal to any regime. In the arms race between the great unwashed and the blogging elite, who’s going to pay for the mechanism of enforcement or dispute arbitration? if you feel your comment was unjustly deleted, are you going to have an avenue of appeals? will other people involved in the guideline program be able to kick you out for violating standards—and how?
Now we get to self-contradicting statement number two from the article:
Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”
Heavens to Murgatroyd! It looks like I’m doomed to continue to make that mistake. Free speech might conceivably be “enhanced by civility”, for a short time, but it certainly isn’t engendered by it. You’re free to call black as white as you please, but it’s still oxymoronic. There is no speech ‘freer’ than free speech. It’s also hardly “civil” to hamper the basis of civil rights—free expression.
There’s a larger problem, though. what these people are trying to do is effect a caste system, where people who pay to be credentialed are privileged over those who wish to remain anonymous—like dissidents and whistleblowers.
Look, I’ve been using computers to talk to people I’ve never met in person since I was 11. Before there were blogs, before there was even a world wide web, there were BBSes and FidoNet. Most importantly, there was, and will always be UseNet.
UseNet (you may also know it as ‘newsgroups’ if you have an accomodating ISP) was the first global conversation that used the Internet to connect strangers with common interests. You would subscribe to a newsfeed, which was basically just a list of threaded messages within a hierarchically named topical group. I used to hang out in groups like talk.atheism, alt.politics.socialism, and alt.sysadmin.recovery, for example.
UseNet has been dealing with “incivility” for over twenty-five years. Wales would do well to look up his own site’s explanation of the Internet term “eternal September”:
Eternal September (also September that never ended, perpetual September, or endless September) is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993. The use of these expressions implies the belief that standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet have declined since 1993 due to an unending influx of new users.
Usenet originated among universities. Every year, in September, a large number of new university students got access to Usenet, and took some time to acclimate themselves to the network’s standards of conduct and netiquette. After a month or so, the new users would (it is supposed) learn to comport themselves as normal Usenet users. September, thus, represented the network’s largest regular influx of newbies.
“Right now it’s summer, and most schools are on vacation, and a sizable percentage of other people are in the same state. So the net is quieter. Yet it’s still growing. Will the return of all these people, plus the usual growth, be the final straw for the net?”
— Brad Templeton, posting to net.news, July 12, 1984[1]
And did the net end in 1984? Usenet wasn’t even getting started, folks.
According to UTC, the Eternal September date as of the time this page was loaded was September 4969, 1993.
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In 1993, the online service America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, later millions, of users. To many old-timers, these “AOLers” were far less prepared to learn netiquette than university freshmen.
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Whereas the regular September freshman influx would soon settle down, the sheer number of newbies now threatened to overwhelm the existing Usenet culture’s capacity to inculcate its social norms.
It boils down to this: creating these voluntary methods of social control will never work, and it only engenders that inevitable evolutionary arms race between malefactors and ‘upstanding citizens.’ Not only that, but trying to privilege ‘credentialed’ communications over anonymous ones will only result in extending the exact social controls the Internet is so good at defying.
Furthermore, credentialed systems all suffer from the same flaw, which is that the more they rely on credentials, the easier it is to fool them once you can fake those credentials.
The whole effort is fundamentally misguided. The only sensible solution I’ve heard was from some technologist whose name I cannot remember or find on the Internet; he was talking about this issue a few years ago, and said that the solution to this is simple: blogs should not allow comments at all, only trackbacks. If you want to make your voice heard on the internet, get your own damn blog and link to the people you want to insult.
Bush’s October 6th speech at the National Endowment for Democracy was so close to self-parody that for once, Bush’s smirks were actually humorous. It was like a Friar’s Club Speech, if the friars were experts on Middle East affairs.
The theme of this speech is the comparison (more precisely, the equation) of Islamist terrorism to Communism. Way to set up your upcoming ‘we will stay the course in Iraq and Afghanistan’ speech where you ask for more money for the war effort. Hey, if you think about it, every billion in mysteriously ‘lost’ funds to contractors like Halliburton is a billion the taxpayers don’t have to spend on education! Everybody wins!
A small aside to those intrepid “Porkbusters” who want to cut various services in lieu of reversing tax cuts for the wealthy to pay for Katrina aid: How about the 9 billion Bremer lost in Iraq’s oil funds which could have helped the reconstruction effort in a time of dire need? Or at least helped to foot the burgeoning war bill? Can we go after government contractors who are constatly misapproriating funds, like Halliburton? I mean, it’s only a billion dollars here and there, but maybe that could pay some of the reconstruction costs. Just a shot in the dark there, especially considering how KBR just got a bunch of contracts to protect New Orlans militia-style. The future of warfare is truly the mercenary army; if they weren’t so damn expensive everyone would have them. Sometimes I wonder; if every GI were being paid as much as the government-contractor private security armies in Iraq, would we have been so quick to rush to war? Could the market pressure of occupation be a force for peace? Not likely, as we keep paying assloads of money to be in Iraq all the time, but it does kind of make you wonder about ‘business conservatives’ who might apply a cost/benefit analysis to the Iraq war.
Anyway, here’s the first half of the speech–I’ve been really busy lately and working on this piece since the 7th. The rest will have to come later, sorry. I swear I’m not consciously invoking Festinger’s theory of Cognitive Dissonance. However, while we’re at it, I would like people to think that when, say, I don’t post for a week, that in the words of Kibo’s brilliant FAQ:
KIBO HASN’T POSTED ANYTHING FOR TWO DAYS. IS HE DEAD? No, he’s just busy writing a carefully-crafted one-line posting which says “DOIDY. DOIDY. DOIDY. DOIDY.” only a million times better ’cause it’s taking him days to write it.
Back to our the terrorism speech. There’s a theme Bush develops in his speech, although he doesn’t do it consciously. What he’s really decrying are the beliefs, the ideology of radical Islamists. But as for their goals… well, you’ll see. At any rate, it shows you something about how the neocon moral system works: it’s wrong if they do it, but not if we do it. But more importantly, might makes right. We have the means to pursue global hegemony, and by God, we’re going to do it. Even if it means costly military engagements, or war crimes, or anything else we have to do
.Seriously, if you want to have a serious discussion about ideology with the Arab world, don’t send the great theologian George Bush. Send someone ‘sensitive,’ like a chick. Maybe send PR queen Karen Hughes, they love that shit over there. And the worst thing you can do is to quote the other guy’s brutality as evidence of their evil aims–you don’t even mention our brutalities. Didn’t you want to make the argument that their war crimes justifies ours, like you do in US courts? It just makes the choice for Iraqis and Arabs around the world more muddled; our hypocrisy doesn’t help us in the slightest. The news media around the world aren’t under Bush’s thumbs they way they are here.
So, the speech. Our illustrious presdient–who has previously said, mind you, that he gets his news from the most objective people he knows (his staff), said (emphases mine, of course):
All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness; innocent men and women and children have died simply because they boarded the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane.
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When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple — the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion.
Coalition forces have killed the following civilians (and these are only a few examples excluding those killed in crossfire with insurgents): a family in car driving too close to US convoy (Karbala, Sep 2005); 56 people in ‘suspected safe-houses’ (Husayba, Karbala, Qaim area, Aug 2005); 9-15 people, including 3 or 4 children outside a mosque (August 2005); 12 bricklayers from Abu Ghraib, who suffocated in a police van (July 2005); TV producer Ahmad Wail Bakri, Maha Ibrahim, a local television news editor, and an unnamed Iraqi news reporter (Baghdad, June 2005); a family of six, including 4 children (Hit, 6 May 2005), 14 people killed by laser-guided bomb targeting the wrong house (8 January 2005); A family of 4 in a taxi near Abu Ghraib (23 Dec 2004); 20 people–demolishing four houses by air raid, 1 child playing soccer–and eight of his friends (al-Fakhirya and Abu Ghraib, September 2004); countless civilians in the destruction of Fallujah: “Americans did not have interpreters with them, so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English! They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and shot people because they didn’t obey their orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English. Ninety-five percent of the people killed in the houses that I saw were killed because they couldn’t speak English” (November, 2004); another family of 6 with four children in an air strike (Fallujah, October 2004); at least 30 people in air raids on (Fallujah September 2004); up to 84 people in air strikes (Al-Sharkia, Kut, August 2004); 15 people in an air strike on a suspected safe-house (Shuhada, Fallujah July 2004); 29 people during air-strikes of suspected Zarqawi hideouts (Fallujah, June 2004); 9 people in air strikes (Karbala, May 2004); 42 people at a wedding party by air strike (Makr-al-Deeb, May 2004); 9-15 people by gunfire, including ABC cameraman and 3 children (Fallujah, March 2004); 2 people in a station wagon including a 10-year old (Baghdad, January, 2004); 4 people in a taxi by heavy-calibre machine gun fire (near Tikrit, January 2004); 4 policemen, 5 demonstrators, 1 vegetable seller, and one “70-year-old man ‘died of fright, apparently a heart attack’ when U.S. troops put a bag over his head in preparation to detain him’” (Mosul, Samarra, Baghdad, Sleiman Beg, December 2003); 3 people at a market by “gunfire from passing armoured vehicles,” possibly testing recently purchased guns (Sadr City, Nov 2003); 6 people by gunfire at an “unnanounced U.S. checkpoint” (north of Basra, August 2003); 7 people by gunfire during the hunt for Saddam Hussein and family, including 14-year old son of Qusay (Baghdad, July 2003); 1 child run over by U.S. convoy (Basra highway, June 2003); 1 child run over by U.S. convoy (Ramadi, May 2003); 85 people in air strikes (Rashidiya, April 2003); 78 people in coalition bombings (Hillah and surroundings, March 2003); 1,473-2,000 people who ended up in 19 Baghdad hospitals (20 March-09 April 2003); 2 people in aerial bombardment of a children’s hospital (Rutbah, March 2003); 201 people in the aerial bombing of Baghdad’s General Hospital “incl. consequent loss of electricity” (March 2003); 226 in air raids over Nassiriya (March 2003); 22 in air attacks and cluster bombs (Manaria, Talkana and Zambrania villages, Mohammedia district, March 2003); 2 people in the Palestine Hotel by tank fire (Baghdad, April 2003); 5 people in a Red Crescent Maternity Hospital (Baghdad, March 2003); 22 people in the vicintiy of Khurmal by air strikes and bombardment (March 2003); 5 people in a Syrian passenger bus by air-to-surface missile (Al-Rutbah, March 2003).
The list literally goes on and on, but you have to remember, these people are less dead than those killed by insurgents. Therefore they have less power to sway Iraqis to the Dark Side, q.e.d.
Many militants are part of global, borderless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, which spreads propaganda, and provides financing and technical assistance to local extremists, and conducts dramatic and brutal operations like September the 11th.
If only they would incorporate in Delaware (or Bermuda), they’d be under the aegis of a multinational corporation–then they could act with impunity! Al-Qaeda’s real problem is they haven’t fully realized the benefits of Westernization–they get the Internet and cell phones but haven’t quite figured out corporate structuring. Wait until they discover outsourcing.
The militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments.
Why bother using a vacuum created by an American retreat when the one caused by the American presence is working so well for them? Iraqis are embracing radical Islam because the U.S. is fighting so hard against it–the enemy of my enemy is my friend-type thinking. It doesn’t help that our hypocrisy and deceit are so bold-faced. And the fact that the whole world is watching means that insurgents and Al-Qaedaists are coming from “bases” all around the world, including terrorist strongholds like Britain and Jamaica.
Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, and Jordan for potential takeover. They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. Now they’ve set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated: “The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It’s either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.” The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.
Does Bush even realize the bin Laden quote he uses disproves his (much earlier) point about Saddam being in league with the terrorists? It is precisely the chaos caused by America’s invasion which makes Iraq such a tempting target for Islamofascism. Having rebooted Afghanistan’s cycle of violence, we decided to bring a new terrorist training ground online in the most visible failure of our understanding of global political realities to date.
Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region,
Cold war references complete with domino theory! Of course, the neoconservatives who launched this war have been advocating “democratic domino theory” so that presumably we can rally the Muslim masses to overthrow their ‘moderate’ governments…
and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our government into isolation.
Good thing we delivered all those weapons and fresh recruits to the terrorists, because otherwise they might actually have to shop around for a state to support them. You know, besides Iran.
As Zarqawi has vowed, “We will either achieve victory over the human race or we will pass to the eternal life.” And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.
You know, for a second there I thought he was quoting Zarqawi as an inspiration. Bush, are you burdened by conscience?
Defeating the militant network is difficult, because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustration of others.
On the other hand, the job of America seems to be provide, or at least exacerbate, this nourishing suffering and frustration, so that we can continue to fight the terrorists abroad and not at home.
The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution. They exploit resentful and disillusioned young men and women, recruiting them through radical mosques as the pawns of terror. And they exploit modern technology to multiply their destructive power.
Except for the radical mosques, this is a farily accurate description of our military recruiters’ job. In fact, it’s a pretty accurate description of our military. I mean, I can’t even tell the difference between them any more…
Instead of attending faraway training camps, recruits can now access online training libraries to learn how to build a roadside bomb, or fire a rocket-propelled grenade — and this further spreads the threat of violence, even within peaceful democratic societies.
…oh, right, al-Qaeda has a more cost-effective basic training program.
Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals.
Some of these so called “experts” have even infiltrated the CIA.
I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 — and al Qaeda attacked us anyway.
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The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.
Master of logic! Behold, an excerpt from bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa establishing The Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders where he lists those unaddressable grievances:
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.
Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
So, not only are their grievances mostly about America’s foreign policy before the Iraqi war, it’s also about the embargo of Iraq which, all will agree, killed at least a million civilians. Call it a “conspicuous abscence” from Iraq, then.
The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 180 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan.
It’s called Chechnya, numbnuts. You have to be banking on a pretty ignorant public to hope this line resonates. Talk about bald-faced bullshit.
Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers — and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.
“Ooops, that wasn’t bin Laden, it was Reuel Marc Gerecht in The Weekly Standard (May 14, 2001). My mistake.
On the contrary: They target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.
And that’s just wrong. Unless we do it, because we’re on a mission from God.
Our enemy is utterly committed.
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Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory. (Applause.)
He better hope there aren’t any impressionable young Muslims listening.
The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, “what is good for them and what is not.” And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that his — that this is the road to paradise — though he never offers to go along for the ride.
The strain of comparisons to Communism aside, bin Laden has always vowed he will never be captured alive. But then again, even money says he’s already dead.
Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life.
Remember Secretary Albright’s response when she was asked about the million Iraqis killed by the embargo? She said, “It’s worth it.” And we’re not even talking about casualties from air strikes.
These militants are not just the enemies of America, or the enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and the enemies of humanity. (Applause.)
I’m going to take a small break from humorously skewering our sneering dunce of a President to agree with the above statement. Anyone who kills civilians is the enemy of humanity, whether those civilians are American or Iraqi. The insurgents, terrified and frustrated with the U.S. occupation, have chosen the worst possible response to their predicament, to kill innocents and destabilize their country in the name of god-knows-what. But the alternative isn’t all that appetizing, either:
We have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before, in the heartless zealotry that led to the gulags,
Hey, look, he worked in a Guantanamo reference. Very classy.
I’m going to stop here and pick this up again, but I leave you with one more tibdit:
Last week, I pitched a TV show to a certain famous filmmaker and TV producer, and I have yet to hear a response. So, I figure I might as well share it with you, dear readers, because based on the horrified responses I get from other people I tell about it, it’ll never get made. Much like my pitch for the Brown Bunny remake, it looks like another one of my brilliant ideas will never see the light of network TV. Anyway, enjoy:
Dear Mr. Xxx,
I was arguing with some conservatives about our use of torture on detainees in the "War on Terror," and a brilliant idea struck me as to how to explain the situation in terms the American people understand--reality television.
Since so many are convinced that our 'stress and duress' techniques and systemic sexual humiliation couldn't be that much worse than a fraternity hazing, the only way to address their argument is to have them put their asses where their mouths are--for money!
The show would be called "A Day at the Beach in the Gulag," and in it, contestants would compete to outlast each other in a private 'detention facility' run by the show's producers. Playing the parts of detainees who are eventually released without charges (as most of them were), participants would have to last a minimum amount of days to qualify for any prize money; then the remaining contestants try to outlast each other for the largest share of the prize pool. Contestants would be treated according to the minimal dictates of Bush's policies, but no specific type of measure could be applied without two videotaped testimonials from former prisoners or officers that such measures were used. Once a contestant cries uncle, they are immediately taken to the "Geneva Convention camp" where "[p]risoners of war shall be quartered under conditions as favourable as those for the forces of the Detaining Power who are billeted in the same area." As the contest goes on, we'll be seeing as much of the Geneva Convention camp as the torture chambers. (Of course, the losing contestants have to stay detained until the winner cries uncle.)
The torture techniques the military uses now are designed to survive description by soundbite (sleep deprivation doesn't SOUND that bad), but actually watching people go through them is a different matter. (In Hollywood parlance, think 'Crossfire' meets 'Fear Factor' by way of Milgram's famous prison experiment.)
Your ideal contestant is a militant right-winger who would love to get their hands on a few thousand bucks for proving that the conditions at Camp X-Ray are no big deal. The appeal of this show is cross-factional, because conservatives will root for the contestants and liberals will root for the producers, but either way our human rights abuses will be well-detailed and widely known.
In order to get the right kind of contestant, we'd put out the call for this show as "the McCain-Hussein Challenge" and play up the opportunity for participants to soapbox about liberal whiners, etc. (perhaps a meme will be planted in the right-wing blogosphere?).
The most fun segments of the show will be the psychological torture. Think Red State POWs at the hands of Blue State troops; those who scoff at interrogators playing Christina Aguilera might feel differently when we blast NPR or hire the local Communist party to yell at them 24 hours a day, etc. The psy-ops possibilities are endless--celebrity torturers? Sexual humiliation on national TV? Bible abuse? Flag desecration? The sky's the limit, really.
It would be a great way to hold people at their word when they're being flip about torture, but it would also be riveting entertainment. Long story short, this would require a fair amount of money in consulting fees for lawyers and doctors (we'd need them on staff and on camera during the producers' televised torture strategy sessions), but otherwise the actual production costs are pretty low. I raided my living room sofa, but it looks like I may need some help.
When I mentioned this idea to a roomful of people at a party last night, one of them said to me, “you just want to torture conservatives.” Not true–I just want to torture people who approve of torture. I couldn’t think of any better way to get my point across, do you?
Cheap “Iraqi solidarity” posturing or evidence of a terrorist plot to crazy glue $20 bills to the toilet bowls of the Republican Congressional offices?
Some may be puzzled with the President’s choice of Laura Bush to head up his surprise anti-gangbanging initiative. Those people need only read Kitty Kelley’s account of Laura’s drug-dealing days at Southern Methodist University. She’s actually killed a guy. I mean, of the two of them, she’s seen more action than her husband.
It makes me wonder whether this seemingly random initiative is a way for them to whitewash her in preparation for 2008? Scary stuff.
We’re watching CNN just now, Kerry and Clinton campaign in Philly. Clinton just closed with an brilliant line about one candidate wanting you to fear and one candidate wanting you to think. Kerry: “Isn’t it great to have President Clinton back on the trail?”
D. J.: “Yeah, what the hell took him so long?”
Roommate: “Um, triple-bypass surgery?”
D. J.: “Oh, yeah. Whatever.”
Dear readers, I implore you to purchase the latest issue of Heeb Magazine (Issue #7), which is on the newsstands now. Below is the original draft of the piece I did about esteemed (I think perhaps a bit too esteemed) actor Norman Fell. It's not exactly the version which ended up in the magazine, but I think you'll enjoy it nonetheless.
<big>AMERICA, FELL IN LOVE</big> <br>Hollywood's real-life Zelig finally gets his due.
If it's true that there are no small actors, only small roles, then Norman Fell is the champion bit-part player in Hollywood. Born Norman Feld in Philadelphia, Fell made a name for himself as a perenial bit part player in over a hundred and fifty films and television series. Not that it was a big name, but a name nonetheless.
Yes, wherever there was a non-descript cameo to be cast, Hollywood often turned to Fell, because a) brother can pass for Anglo Saxon, and b) you could count on good old Norman to never steal a scene. It's as if the studio execs got together and said, "he studied with Stella Adler, he ought to be able to pull off a twelve line part. But any more is pushing it!"
Of course, Fell will forever be known as George Roper, the nosy and undersexed landlord on Three's Company. His one shot at a starring role was the ill-fated spin-off, The Ropers, which lasted one-and-a-half seasons. Why one-and-a-half? It seems Fell had made an agreement with the studio that if The Ropers ran less than a season, he would still have an option to return to Three's Company. Those wily studio execs had screwed him yet again.
Doing the research for this article involved many trips to the video store. The first time I did this, I requested three movies: <i>Transylvania 6-5000</i>, <i>C.H.U.D. II – Bud the Chud</i>, and <i>The Kinky Coaches and the Pom Pom Pussycats</i>. The clerk looked at me like I was some kind of pervert, so I said, "I'm doing a piece on Norman Fell for a magazine."<br> "Who's he?" aksed the clerk. <br> "You know, he was Mr. Roper on Three's Company. He's in all of these movies…" <br> "Oh yeah! He's in everything! He's like the most famous guy who's not famous!" <br> It doesn't get any more succinct than that.
I present to you the most comprehensive analysis of Norman Fell's extensive ouevre to date, and by "extensive ouevre" I mean "the only Fell movies they had at my video store."
<b>Ocean's Eleven</b>: Fell probably has the most on-screen minutes in this Rat Pack flick out of all his movies. Not because he's a particularly important character (OK, he's one of the Eleven), but because the movie is about fourteen-and-a-half hours long. Fell has the least amount of lines of any of the title characters; while almost every other character has some sort of on-screen backstory, Fell is just… well, around. It seems like they threw in his character because Ocean's Ten didn't sound as good as Ocean's Eleven. Basically, what I'm saying is that Norman Fell makes the entire premise of the film possible.
<b>Inherit the Wind</b>: Fell plays the radio technician for WGN. Never has a six-line cameo been imbued with such monumental symbolic significance. Fell's are the hands who whisk the microphone away from the blustering Brady as it becomes clear the crowd has lost their interest (and faith) in him. Then Gene Kelly makes a crack about loudspeakers. Norman Fell, ladies and gentlemen, is the future.
<b>Bullitt</b>: Fell's role in Bullitt as one of many cops is about as pointless as the movie as a whole. This could just as easily mean his performance is about equal with the balance of the film.
<b>It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World</b>: As much as I love this movie, the truth is that the best gag occurs in the first ten minutes. Immediately following this climax, Fell's character (one of the detectives who chases Smiler Grogan off the road) appears, playing the straight man to Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Jonathan Winters, Mickey Rooney, and Sid Caesar, delivering a crucial twenty-line exposition. Who else but Norman Fell would get stuck playing the only serious role in a movie in which every other actor is a bigshot comedian?
<b>Catch-22</b>: Fell plays Major Major's secretary, Sgt. Towser–the only character who is neither mad with power nor mad from the abuse of power. Sgt. Towser unquestioningly follows orders, no matter how absurd. Apparently, the man prepared for this role by being an actor in the Hollywood studio system for a decade or so. Also, Fell actually was a tail gunner in the air force during WWII, but it was in the Pacific, which was a completely different theater.
<b>The Graduate</b>: The first of Fell's great series of roles as 'the landlord.' Why is it that Fell's best roles are playing nosy landlords? Usually the man has basically nothing to work with in terms of lines (and, to be frank, he doesn't do much with nothing). But his portrayal of Benjamin Braddock's paranoid landlord is really Fell's finest hour on film, and it's only fifteen lines.
* Sorry, that is not Norman Fell doing an uncredited cameo in the original Thomas Crown Affair. If you read this footnote, you likely checked the Internet Movie Database and thought I forgot to include it, didn't you. It is merely an actor who bears a passing resemblance.
<b>Acting By Numbers With Norman Fell</b>:
Fell had a simple philosophy as an actor–pick the three emotions you convey best, and use them as the pallette for all of your future roles. In his case, these are either a) exasperation, b) curiosity, or c) unamused annoyance. For example:
<b>Exasperated + curious = Policeman</b> (e.g., <i>Detective </i> in It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, <i>Captain Baker</i> in Bullitt)
<b>Exasperated + unamused = Army Sergeant</b> (e.g., Sergeants <i>Coleman, Dell, Towser, Wadley, Wilentz, or Winkler</i>)
<b>Curious + unamused = Landlord</b> (<i>Mr. Roper</i> in Three's Company, <i>Mr. McCleery</i> in The Graduate) Ever wonder why Fell shines as the landlord? You try playing curious and unamused at the same time… not so easy, is it? That's why he has a Golden Globe nomination and you don't.
I don't really aspire to be wealthy, but I was thinking that what I would really like to do is to be able to throw things away over my shoulder when I'm done with them–you know, books, magazines, shotglasses, breakfast, laptops, tax returns, that kind of thing. That'd be sweet. And I suppose it would be pretty expensive.
Now that he's presumably dead and buried, three thoughts about Reagan are constantly recurring in my mind:
<ol type=a><li>Did you know that Ronald "Ketchup Is A Vegetable" Reagan was the only president of the United States to have been president of (or, for that matter, been a member of) a labor union? Worse than that, the second closest is Dick Cheney, who joined the telephone repairmen's local in Wyoming when he got a summer job as a teen, working for Ma Bell. <li>You know what's going to happen, they're going to name even more stuff after Reagan. He's already got an airport, a federal building, and a cruiser. They'll put him on the money next, I bet. Then the question becomes, who are they going to bump? I hope they start printing three-dollar bills with Ronnie Ray-gun's face on them, that'd be pretty funny. <li>I've said it before and I'll say it again: Reagan should have been in the box at the Agnew funeral. </ol> Update: My friend Amy reminds me of the extreme irony invovled in the headline, "<b>Reagan Remembered.</b>"
Last week's edition of the Weekly World News (you know, the one with "TWELVE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS ARE SPACE ALIENS! on the cover) contains a very interesting article entitled, "SADDAM WON IRAQ WAR … then CIA time travelers reversed his victory!"
Yes, according to America's most widely read newspaper, <blockquote>Madman Saddam Hussein really did have weapons of mass destruction — and he used them to kill nearly 200,000 U.S. troops and defeat the Coalition!
But CIA agents who commandeered the dictator's secret time tunnel used the device to alter history so that the ghastly chemical weapons employed in the attack never existed… </blockquote> This story is actually a followup from a previous WWN story last year about how Saddam had built a time tunnel, described as looking "uncannily like the portal in the cult 1960s series <i>The Time Tunnel</i>."
For those of you who have never heard of the WWN (do such people exist?) it's the original Onion, a tabloid filled with the most amusing fake articles. The only difference is that many readers take the WWN seriously, whereas when people take the Onion seriously, it ends up in the news.
The reason I bring all this up is because the author of the article, one Mike Foster, has accidentally stumbled on the kind of explanation that could reinvigorate Bush's stumbling PR effort with the war!
I was in a bar last night, and I ended up talking to a veteran about the war in Iraq and how much bullshit it is. I know I keep referring to the article I wrote about the WMD issue, but let me restate my case more succinctly:
When you look at the decision to invade, you have to assess what we knew at the time, and what our ultimate objectives were.
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the Bush White House was absolutely certain there were WMDs in Iraq. So they threaten Saddam with invasion if he does not disarm, giving him several weeks to do so. Faced with Iraq's refusal to disarm, the Coalition forces are sent in to overthrow the government, doing so in about a month.
The question I asked the vet was, "if Iraq actually had WMDs, what did we expect was going to happen when we invaded?"
You have to think about the nature of WMDs here, particularly the chemical and biological weapons Iraq was supposed to have. The reason states develop such programs is that they are cheap equalizers in the face of attack by a better-equipped enemy. Nuclear technology is expensive and difficult to procure, but chemical and biological weapons are much easier to make and have more bang for your defense buck.
As defense analysts pointed out, the most likely scenario in which Iraq's WMDs would be used is in self-defense in the face of an overwhelmingly better-equipped enemy, like, say, the invading U.S. Army. Let me tell you something; when the U.S. Armed forces show up at your door, it's pretty much over. Unless you're China, there is no way you can win a conventional war with America. The only hope is to use WMDs to repel them.
Getting back to the Weekly World News, we see a somewhat likely scenario about how the war might have gone had Saddam used his purported WMDs on the Coalition troops; it could have been really disastrous. Was this the plan, to force Saddam into using his WMDs on our troops?
Or, was it to give Saddam and the Ba'ath party about six weeks to sell or smuggle the weapons out of the country?
