Knock On Wood

It's Casual Asides' 5th anniversary. Consider (with the new word count feature at the bottom of each post) that at this point, I've written about 260-odd posts and tens of thousands of words, enough to fill a decent sized book. That's gotta be worth something, right?

I pause here to consider that although I like to complain that nobody reads this blog, I have gotten the following things out of it (at least, in part):

• A lot of blank stares
• A Koufax Nomination for Best Writing
• Internet-only friends
• Internet-only enemies
• A job
• A girlfriend
• Several free books to review, which I never get to
• A radio appearance on Sirius
• an embarrassingly small amount of actual visitors over five years, but at least in the six-digit range.

Draggin' The Line II

Just to remind you of my predictions from last week and their current status:

................. Popular Vote ..... Net Gained ... Error
.............. Clinton ... Obama ... Delegates .... Margin
Guam .......... 50% ...... 50% ..... 0 (wash) ..... 0%
Indiana ....... 50% ...... 50% ..... 0 (wash) ..... 1%
N. Carolina ... 46% ...... 54% ..... +9 Obama ..... 2%
W. Virginia ... 53% ...... 47% ..... +4 Clinton
Kentucky ...... 51% ...... 49% ..... +1 Clinton
Oregon ........ 47% ...... 53% ..... +2 Obama
Montana ....... 46% ...... 54% ..... 0 (wash)
S. Dakota ..... 48% ...... 52% ..... +1 Obama
Puerto Rico ... 60% ...... 40% ..... +11 Clinton

I'm doing OK so far. Now, it should be clearer to everyone that Hillary's uphill battle to gain the nomination has become demonstrably steeper. As Republican strategist Alex Castellanos just said on CNN, Hillary has run a Republican-style campaign against Barack Obama, and it's time for her to throw in the towel.

There are now more superdelegates in play than pledged (elected) delegated at stake in the upcoming contests. However, Hillary's going to win Kentucky and West Virginia (and Obama will win Oregon) unless soething changes in the next week. And here's what it should be:

Obama's Gas Plan: Green and Transparent

President Bush himself said that this country is addicted to oil. All McCain and Clinton is offer our the promise of a cheap fix. That's why this pandering is so destructive—if the government is going to help you, we've got to help you get clean.

I support a windfall profit tax on record oil profits. I support the elimination of $18 billion in subsidies to the oil companies. All Hillary Clinton wants to do is launder the money through a three-month tax holiday that will leave the price of oil higher and the roads in dangerous condition. I support a windfall tax, but nothaving that money go right back to the oil companies.

Now, there are a lot of people who are suffering with the price of gas climbind steadily towards four dollars a gallon. Especially working people who depend on their cars for a living. Long distance truckers. Pizza delivery people. Firefighters. We need to do something to help the people who are caught in this crunch, but we're not going to do it in a way that keeps you dependent on more cheap gas.

I propose the money from any oil company tax and reduction of subsidies should go towards a government-issued coupon to replace your gas engine with a hybrid, electric, hydrogen, or biodiesel engine. This money should be retributed to those who are suffering the most from our oil national addiction. Any new cars with reduced gas usage should also be given this credit, of course.

Now, in recent days, I've been examining another part of the kind of challenge we face today connected to our disastrous environmental and energy policies. I'm talking about food prices. Food prices are being driven up by two things—the price of gas, and the price of corn which is being added to gasoline in the form of ethanol. I support ethanol. But we simply cannot continue to use food as a fuel additive. It doesn't make sense. We are getting close to a real breakthrough with other sources of ethanol which will be much more productive than using corn. So I propose we mandate that no human food be used for ethanol production. There is still plenty of demand for corn from people, and we have better ways of helping the small farmers build a sustainable crop than giving fat checks to giant agribusiness.

The cost of using fossil fuels doesn't just hit us at the pump. In West Virginia, coal companies are levelling mountains—literally erasing them from the landscape—in search of cheap coal they extract at tremendou environmental cost and fewer jobs for coal miners. On the one hand, we have enough coal in America to last 150 years; on the other, the burnign of coal is one of the leading sources of carbon in the atmosphere.

In Washington, they look at a problem like this and they see it as an opportunity to play people against one another; coal mining families against environmentalists, Democrats against Republicans, blue collar against white collar. They try to find the angles, look for a way to pander to people by offering short-term solutions. But when your short term solution counteracts your long-term goals, you have a problem.

We understand that what we have here is an opportunity to bring people together. We need to use American ingenuity and the power of the government to make sure that we use the resources we have responsibly and in a way that helps American families no matter who they are. We need a coal industry, but we also need the figure out how to neutralize the greenhouse gases coal produces. There are many exciting technologies Americans are working on, from turning emissions into baking soda, or feeding algae, or using it for natural gas exloration, that we can develop and ensure a sustainable economy and a sustainable environment.

{989 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments[1]

Bulls in the China Shop

It's hard to watch the news lately, because it's just an interminable vivisection and slow broil of the Democratic candidates, thanks to Hillary's stalwart refusal to do the math. C'mon, folks, it's all on CNN's delegate counter game, which has helpfully added a feature which lets you see exactly why Clinton needs a 66% margin of victory in the rest of the contests in order to take back the nomination in the name of bullshit dynasticism.

Giant Gasbags

You can't get a better illustration of what kind of choices America faces in the race for the presidency than John McCain's "Gas Tax Holiday" proposed between Memorial and Labor Day.

The relevant graphs from a relevant McClatchy article:

Obama had backed a similar temporary gas-tax freeze as an Illinois state senator in 2000. So Republicans are tagging Obama as a "flip-flopper," calling his current position "calculating and contradictory."

At a filling station in Indianapolis Friday, Obama said he opposed McCain's plan because it would leave a nearly $10-billion shortfall in the Highway Trust Fund. "You don't know that the oil companies are going to pass the savings on to the consumers, or if you'll just see an increase in prices by the same amount that the gas tax goes down," Obama said. "And it would deplete the Highway Trust Fund that we need for rebuilding our roads and our bridges."

"I don't want somebody to save 25 bucks — that's what the savings would yield for the average driver — and now they're potentially driving over an unsafe bridge," he said.

He's proposing instead long-term changes — a windfall-profits tax on oil companies and "steps to reduce the price of oil and increase transparency in how prices are set."

Obama also rejects charges that he's switched positions since 2000, noting that he voted to keep in place the Illinois gas tax to preserve money for infrastructure repairs.

McCain economic adviser Carly Fiorina called the temporary tax break a "very effective way to give consumers a break when they need it most."

Obama's failure to endorse a summer-long gas tax repeal is one of the many reasons Casual Asides is officially endorsing him for President. But don't you wish he had the temerity to say something like,

"My opponents are guilty of the worst kind of pandering with their proposed 'gas tax holiday' — the kind where they kill you with their supposed kindness. John McCain, who just blamed that tragic bridge collapse on federal spending in New Orleans of all places, thinks that screwing the government out of money it needs to help people is the way to deal with our crumbling highway system. Hillary Clinton's proposal is even more craven because it amounts to making the Federal government launder $10 billion of the windfall tax we've been working on so hard in the Senate and send it right back to the oil companies, and make you the patsy.

If we lift gas taxes for three months when demand traditionally peaks, you can bet your gas cap those oil prices are going to rise more than 18.4 cents a gallon, and there's nothing the government will be able to do about it. This week ExxonMobil posted a record $11 billion profit, which was deemed a major disappointment by Wall Street. They are making more than any company has ever made in history for the last three months, AND THEY'RE NOT MAKING ENOUGH. So what better excuse to raise prices permanently? Come September you'll be paying for all that relief you got, and more."

The average American buys about 500 gallons of gas per year, so three months' worth of tax relief comes out to $23 in savings. And the truth is, no matter what we do, gas will probably keep heading toward $4 a gallon no matter what we Americans do. That's because we are no longer in control of the price of oil; Iraq proved that—the price of oil dipped abit in 2003 during those two months when the war seemed to be going well, and they've shot up ever since.

Instead, it's China which is largely responsible for the surge in worldwide demand, and there is nothing we are going to do about that (unless America follows my suggestion and opens up its renewable energy patents to the world, including China).

And how did we get to this point? In 1993, as Bill Clinton took office, we were importing and producing about the same amount of oil and our trade deficit with China was around $22 billion dollars. By the time Senator Clinton took office in 2000, we were importing 3 million barrels of oil a day more than we were producing, and our trade deficit with China had grown four times over.

Meanwhile, people are gassing up their SUVs and minivans to go to Wal-Mart to buy things made out of oil in China by prisoners. Our trade deficit stood at $256 billion last year, over 11 times what it was in 1993.

In 1994, we were sold a slightly different story by everybody's pal, Bill Clinton:

Clinton had been the subject of heavy lobbying by American business interests and his economic advisers to continue China's trade privileges. With China now the world's fastest growing economy, the United States exports $8 billion a year there, which sustains up to 150,000 American jobs. Many major American businesses see even greater potential in Chinese markets, expecting China to become a massive purchaser over the next decade of the phones, electronic gadgets and thousands of other products made in America.

"I think we have to see our relations with China within a broader context" than simply human rights, Clinton said, adding that the link between rights and trade was no longer tenable. "We have reached the end of the usefulness of that policy," he said.

China gets to intimidate its labor force in ways American corporations can only dream about and not only do we pay the price in trade deficit and jobs going overseas, but we even pay indirectly because of the secondary effects of the massive industrialization we prompted back when everyone was telling us it was a great idea to bring China into the WTO and all that.

Breaking the Bank

Speaking of Bill Clinton and how he screwed us, it ought to be noted that, as I stated before, Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act kicked off this whole speculative mishegas, fueling a series of bubbles which made it appear as though we were building a real economy.

I spent a weekend arguing about this with Elephant, eventually locating a superb article in the American Prospect from last year which made my points as ably as I could about how Alan Greenspan, Sandy Weill, Robert Reich, and Bill Clinton got us in this mess.

Update for the latest financial crisis: the Gramm-Leach-Billey Act which repealed Glass-Steagall is the law which made it possible for our pals the banks to sell and resell the "CDOs" — collateralized debt obligations — which helped bring down a stalwart financial institution like Bear Sterns in a spectacular devaluation/government bailout/takeover by JPMorganChase, a financial hydra created by Gramm-Leach-Billey.

But back when we watched the "New Democrats" plant the seeds for this, you'd hardly hear a whimper of protest. Everybody was buying into this bullshit hook, line and sinker; remember when Wired Magazine put out that issue with the mutant smiley face on the cover saying that America had invented a new kind of capitalism featuring the end of business cycles? It was called The Long Boom; and its cheerful stupidity infuriated me back in 1997—to wit:

We are watching the beginnings of a global economic boom on a scale never experienced before. We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world's economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for - quite literally - billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. And we'll do it without blowing the lid off the environment.

Ha! What morons. But this was the the popular story, and Clinton was skillful and lucky enough a politician to make it look like Bush had screwed up the economy single-handedly. Now Bush took the ball and ran with it, but let's not forget who got us to the Superbowl of economic meltdowns.

The problem isn't just that the unsustainable growth of the 1990's was paper-thin; Bush's America was so fucked up that Clinton became hugely popular after he left office, merely by comparison. Those blue-collar voters who are voting for Hillary because they liked Bill are doing themselves a grave disservice, because the Clintons are going to turn around and screw you again. Really, it does take a remakable amount of skill for the power couple who brought you triangulation, NAFTA, and neoliberalism in America to emerge as the voice of a working class they impoverished.

If they made you, they can break you, I suppose.

Dig Up, Stupid

Speaking of federal fiscal policy, does it bother anyone else that the government's response to a debt crisis is to make it even easier for the responsible parties to borrow money, and from the Federal Reserve, at that? Part of the gospel of 'pro-market' policy is that the government be enjoined from doing anything that might work (see the McCain-Clinton gas tax proposal above—pumping up demand is the only acceptable solution).

I say the government is making a bad investment, and generally speaking, it gets shitty returns on all those bailouts and subsidies. If you're going to get entangled in the marketplace, just go whole hog and nationalize instead of bailing out failing companies. Britain just did this with the failing Northern Rock bank after a good old fashioned bank run. That ought to put some fire into the marketplace—fail and you get bought out by the guv'mint! (Cue sinister music.)

Recently I was in a bar and was talking to someone who worked for Citigroup in some financial racket, and we got to talking about the economy. He said not to worry, the market is just undergoing a correction and everything will be fine in a while.

I laid out what I think is a more likely scenario: the price of oil and the massive private and public debt weaken the dollar first (check) and then our inability to make payments on the burgeoning debts leads other countries to begin devaluing our national credit rating, the dollar is replaced by the euro or renminbi as the global currency.

"What's your plan for that?" he asked with indignant smile. "If that happens we're all fucked."

Tell me about it.

Draggin' The Line

My predictions for the upcoming contests:

.................. Clinton ... Obama ... Net Delegates
Guam ............... 50% ...... 50% ..... 0 (wash)
Indiana ............ 50% ...... 50% ..... 0 (wash)
North Carolina ..... 46% ...... 54% ..... +9 Obama
West Virginia ...... 53% ...... 47% ..... +4 Clinton
Kentucky ........... 51% ...... 49% ..... +1 Clinton
Oregon ............. 47% ...... 53% ..... +2 Obama
Montana ............ 46% ...... 54% ..... 0 (wash)
South Dakota ....... 48% ...... 52% ..... +1 Obama
Puerto Rico ........ 60% ...... 40% ..... +11 Clinton

All this goes to show that Obama should have gone to Puerto Rico instead of the Virgin Islands when he went on a mini-vacation a few weeks ago. But I'd say the odds are 50-50 of this going all the way to Puerto Rico.

{2108 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments

Any Minute Now, Amos 'n' Andy Broadcasts Will Reach Planet X!

Dear readers, exciting things are happening. Here's a quick review of the past few months.

That Book I'm Always Talking About

For the last two years, I've been writing a non-fiction book—it's what I'm doing when I'm not posting here. When people ask me what the book is about, I usualy say something like, "it's about killer robots and globalization." While this is true in some sense, the book is actually about a lot more than just those things, but when you work on something for two years (or longer) the ability to faithfully summarize it kind of falls away.

This book, entitled Why Can't Money Grow On Trees?, is about the open-source movement, the global economy, and the connection between, for example, Adam Smith, Jean-Pierre Proudhon, Howard Scott, and the Unabomber. It is subtitled "A Practical Guide to Building Your Own Utopia."

Now, because the book is about open source and contains a lengthy section about how lethal intellectual property rights can be, I decided to make the book into a wiki. This way, you can actually watch me write the thing in real time (at this stage it is a lengthy proposal and not too much more) in a format meant for your computer monitor, unlike the 50+ page PDF file I have been sending people.

If you are confused about all this, just go visit whycant.org and you will probably become slightly more or less clear about what I'm trying to say.

Catch me on Sirius Satellite Radio's Indie Talk March 13th at 5pm EST

I've had this blog for almost five years now, and sometimes I wonder if anyone is even listening anymore. But occasionally, I will get some random confirmation that I have, in some small way, had an impact in the media universe. Sometimes, I'll get questions from college students asking me to elucidate a point they're writing a paper on; sometimes publishers offer to send me advance copies of suitably "progressive" books to review. Sadly, I no longer get hate mail, which I used to enjoy immensely.

But I found something even more fun than hate mail—free media ops! Sirius, which just launched their new "Indie Talk" channel, asked me to come down to "The Blog Bunker" this Thursday and chat about politics for half-an-hour, after which I will spend the rest of the week trying to figure out how I can leverage this appearance into one on the O'Reilly Factor.

But D. J., I hear you cry, "I don't have Sirius Satellite Radio!" Don't worry. You can sign up for a free 3-day Internet radio trial on their web site. It'll be just like when the whole family used to gather around their gigantic vacuum-tube powered radio cabinet after dinner to listen to Fibber McGee & Molly or Suspense!, only without the family, or the radio.

Free Xenu! Shirts!

The other way I found out that people actually do read this blog is that someone ordered a "Free Xenu" T-shirt from my lonely and neglected T-shirt shop. So I actually had to make one, and now that I spent all the revenue on the first shirt, I implore you, dear readers, to buy one, too.

For those of you who don't know the story, Xenu is the deposed alien overlord who is currently being held in intergalactic superjail by the Church of Scientology, according to court documents. As far as I can tell, Xenu is being held without bail or formal charges, with no method of redress or habeas corpus. I don't even think there was a trial. If any of you give a damn about civil rights, I implore you to wear this shirt so that the CoS knows you will no longer abide by their illegal detainment of what, for all we know, is just a sweet, harmless, 75 million year-old man.

It's Her Party, She'll Cry If She Wants To

I'm less of a Barack Obama supporter than an ABC voter—anybody but Hillary. What's my beef with Hillary, you ask?

Is it that she's a carpetbagger? I do resent the fact that my state is apparently so welcoming we'll let anybody in the President's family who wants to run for the White House represent us. Tempting, but not sufficient.

Is it because she's a hawk? Her stance on Iran is basically the same as McCain's, which is that they would really rather prefer to go to war Iran than not. Both of them have been agitating for this for years, although Hillary's anti-Iran record is long and storied and includes her potential running mate, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana. As a matter of fact, Hillary's foreign policy is remarkably similar to McCain's in many respects. That's getting closer to why I can't stand her, but there's more.

Perhaps it's Hillary's right-wing pandering like her clearly unconstitutional throw-flag-burners-in-Federal prison law, which was fortunately rejected; perhaps its her authoritarian top-down style, presaged by her Wellesely senior thesis dismissing the whole idea of bottom-up community organizing.

Yes, these were all fine reasons to dislike Hillary, and I have made full use of them in the past. But what burns me about Hillary the most right now is her gargantuan sense of entitlement, a thing so huge it was pretty much her platform—before that young upstart upstaged her "get-out-of-my-way" campaign style with—you guessed it—bottom up grassroots organizing.

Barack Obama may be well-spoken (somebody check Lexis-Nexis to see if Hillary's camp has ever slipped up and said it in those terms), but he clearly hasn't suffered enough to win the 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Medal for overcoming adversity. As Aristotle said in Poetics, tragedy works best when the sufferers fall from privilege and fortune, and Hillary's story is characterized by the most fortunate of circumstances.

As I've said before (maybe not in these exact words), when you challenge white people's privilege, watch the fuck out. Hillary's whiteness isn't her sole privilege, but it's clearly working to her advantage. For example—let's look at Ohio, the "firewall" which helped Clinton turn her campaign around:

Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International— respected polling firms — surveyed 1,612 Democratic primary voters in 40 precincts across Ohio on Tuesday. Among other things, the pollsters asked if the race of the candidate was important to them.

Twenty percent of those surveyed said yes, and three out of five of those voters said they cast ballots for Clinton.

As a pundit once said on CNN a while ago, this is the first time identity politics-based attacks have been trained on the identity groups themselves as opposed to, shall we say, hegemonic power. And it's threatening to rend the Democratic party.

It is in this light that we must examine the comments of Geraldine Ferraro, Clinton supporter and former VP candidate:

When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton's rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro's comments took on a decidedly bitter edge.

"I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama's campaign - to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against," she said. "For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It's been a very sexist media. Some just don't like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," she continued. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept." Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

How refreshingly reprehensible! It always strikes me, whenever this meme is floated, that the name "Carol Moseley-Braun" seldom crosses the lips of these Clinton supporters. Moseley-Braun, whose Senate seat was won by Obama when she stepped down, ran for president in 2004, the second black woman to do so after my old Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

While Moseley-Braun did receive a modicum of support from NOW and some other feminist groups, I guess it wasn't too important, because seldom did you see a Gloria Steinem-penned op-ed calling women gender traitors if they didn't support a female candidate based purely on chauvinism.

The forgotten campaign of Moseley-Braun, who dropped out just before the Iowa caucuses, is an embarrassment to the Clinton campaign, and that's why she never talks about it.

When I meet people who hand me that 'if Barack was a woman line," I always counter with, "If Barack Obama was a woman, he'd be Carol Moseley-Braun. And do you know who she was married to?" I ask.

"No..." they say.

"Who the fuck cares?" I reply. (Of course, the answer is "Mr. Braun." They are now divorced, and she founded Ambassador Organics) And that's really the crux of the issue—the only reason Barack Obama is black is because the laws in this country won't let him marry Bill Clinton. Hillary's only doing this well because she is now the most corrupt woman in America. Don't think for a minute that her experience as intern to a few Senate subcommittees was what propelled her to the Senate seat of a state she in which had never resided. It was because she was so inside the Democratic machine, she was married to the president, and so the DLC told all other Dem Senate contenders to get out of her way.

And yet, if this is anyone's party, it's Hillary's party. She is the most invested in the machine, the backroom deals, the money-fueled corruption, the chickenhawk foreign policy. Not only does the Democratic party owe her the nomination, but the audacity of Obama's candidacy is inappropriately inopportune. That's why she's intent on destroying the party.

Take a look at CNN's delegate counter. After one of the dirtiest primary challenege the party has seen in decades, she managed to work her way up to 'spoiler' in the delegate count, but there is no way she will be able to catch up with her opponent without a significant helping hand from the superdelegates. But now, neither will Obama, unless the party spends even more of their war chest redoing the Michigan and Florida primaries.

Is it because, as she has implied on the campaign trail, she'd rather have McCain in office than Obama? The scorched earth, kitchen sink approach Hillary has adopted constitutes a pyrrhic victory, but what does she care? It's this supreme arrogance, the way she offers Obama a VP slot shen she's trailing in delegates, the way she pretends that sleeping in the White House is a qualification for being commander-in-chief, the indignance at being challenged for what she seems to believe is some kind of birthright—that's why I'm an anybody but Clinton voter. Because a victory for Clinton has become, through her machinations and speechifying, a victory for corruption and against hope.

More on this in a few days.

{2115 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments[1]

Casual Policy Suggestions

It's time for me to tell you what's good for you, besides the obvious—cod liver oil, plenty of sunshine, and switching to a 'light' cigarette.

Start Snitching

The greatest thing about the immigration debate today is that everyone involved in debating it in the media is totally full of shit.

You have your Lou Dobbses, crotchety old men whose doctors' orders are obviously the only thing prohibiting them from taking to the streets armed with shotguns and Civil War-era cavalry sabers, ridding the streets of the zombie menace of illegal immigrants. The host will accuse illegal aliens (I will not call them 'undocumented workers! We don't even know what planet they're from!) of doing something to the country, and then the hapless guests respond:

First the Democrat says, what are you gonna do, round up 20 million people? Yes, that what these people want to do, haven't you been listening? Lou Dobbs has a reality show in the works where he personally picks a screaming waitress or construction worker up over his head and tosses them into the ocean at the end of every show. Democrats have little to say about the issue generally because illegal immigrants are, by definition breaking the law. And when these foreigners break the law, they ought to be punished—not like when the President or one of his friends do it. This is serious law-breaking.

So the Republican starts scolding us that these so-called people are trying to take over this country from real Americans! What Indian tribe is this asshole from? Your ancestors came off a boat, get real. They usually send someone vaguely ethnic, too, to let Catholic and Jewish Republicans know it's OK to hate immigrants now because they're all darker than you, thank goodness!

The real reason illegal immigrants can't get a break in this country is because they are unwilling to adopt the simple, honest, God-fearing American ways which won us the West and made us a great nation. If illegal immigrants are ever going to get respect from Americans, they need to change up their whole game plan—guns and horses and broken treaties and disease-bearing blankets! That's how you conquer America!

You think Custer came to Montana armed with a toilet brush so he could sneak into Crazy Horse's camp as a minimum-wage worker? Hell no! He had the U.S. Cavalry! Not that it did him any good, but you get my point. America has a long and proud history of illegal immigration—ask an Oklahoman why they call it "the Sooner State."

But we all know you can't get up in a state or national legislature and say that. Recently, Governor Spitzer and Hilary Clinton were taken to task for supporting and then decrying drivers licenses for undocumented workers. In principle, I agreed with Spitzer's original argument, which was that without a drivers' license, you end up with a lot of uninsured drivers on he road, which only ends up costing everybody more money in the end. But immigration is such a hot-button issue that you can't be soft on it even if you're a Democrat!

So, my proposal combines the parts nobody likes about the other proposals and mixes them all into one perfect plan. It's called The S.T.A.R.T.S.N.I.T.C.H.I.N.G. Act of 2008. I don't know what the acronym stands for, but like any great piece of legislation (U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, I'm looking at you!) I'll figure out the insignificant details later.

Immigration reform that keeps borders closed doesn't work until housewives go to jail for hiring illegals as babysitters. So the plan is simple: we should grant amnesty to any illegal immigrant who informs on their employers to the authorities. Special hotlines with Spanish, Chinese and other language-speaking operators should be set up, and the fines paid will go toward agricultural subsidies for labor-intensive farming.

Dam The Atlantic

It's really wonderful that the majority of Americans are now on the climate change bus, just as it's becoming too late to reverse it. Yes, we need to get off carboniferous fuels, but we have an equally large problem: preparing for the effects of what one environmentalist called "climate chaos" on Fox News recently.

More freak weather, strange patches of drought, and of course, sea level rise. And honestly, as a native New Yorker, I care about sea levels far more than I care about any of the other adverse effects of climate change.

Our mayor, the newly independent Mike Bloomberg, is at a climate-change conference right now. Bloomberg is the kind of guy who's not afraid of large projects, so I implore him: Dam the Atlantic! We need to start building a breakwater between Rockaway Beach, Queens and Sandy Hook, New Jersey now, because the construction of such a massive dike will take just long enough to actually start seeing sea levels threaten Manhattan.

We need to construct a six to twelve mile long sea wall to stop the Atlantic from reclaiming New York City and its harbor. And wile we're at it, why don't we build five miles of tidal barrage hydroelectric plants and a lock system to accommodate commercial traffic? IT will take years to build, so we'd better start now.

I also have a two-birds-with-one-stone aspect to the project—New York City produces an incredible amount of garbage each year, and we have a real problem figuring out how to stash it. Why don't we reclaim as much of that garbage as possible and use it as construction material? That way we save money on landfill fees and supplement the materials budget. In fact, we could double-wall parts of the wall and just start a new, narrow landfill for structural support in some sections.

Of all the mayors New York has ever had, I think Bloomberg would have to be the one who has enough wherewithal to make it happen. Look at his bid for the Olympics—a terrible idea, sure—but you couldn't say it didn't have vision. Now, imagine that you could extend Flatbush Avenue all the way into Route 36 in New Jersey? We could set up rail links in both directions and a new container port on the inland side of the wall that makes New York a real port city again.

The Fairer Tax

A few years ago on this blog, I endorsed a version of the Fair Tax which is being pushed by libertarians and Mike Gravel (my hero!) alike. The Fair Tax proposes that a standard 23% sales tax be placed on all goods instead of an income tax, and to modify the regressive nature of the tax, a "pre-bate" of around $10000 would be give to each American in monthly installments so as to offset the higher cost of goods and provide what Gravel calls "a national wage."

I acknowledge that such a tax would be regressive and it would reduce the total amount raised, which is why I would rework the proposal as follows:

Instead of a 23% sales tax, the Fairer Tax would be a 30% VAT on all goods and services. VATs, or value-added taxes are collected on the value added by each stage of production rather than the total sale price of the item to the end consumer. Businesses actually get a rebate on the VAT they pay by reselling their products to another business which adds value. Canada and France reap major revenue from their GST and TVA, respectively.

From Wikipedia:

VAT is a general tax that applies, in principle to all commercial activities involving the production and distribution of goods and the provision of services. VAT is assessed and collected on the value added to goods in each business transaction. Under this concept the government is paid tax on the gross margin of each transaction. VAT proposes to replace sales tax which in most developing countries trying to shift to some variant of VAT, like India, is the 'only' major revenue source for the regional governments since low per capita income and unemployment render income tax inadequate as a revenue source.

VATs work better than traditional taxes because they're easier for consumers to understand (the increase is pre-calculated into the price of goods) and provides an incentive for businesses to collect and properly file (because they get to reclaim taxes already paid). A properly structured VAT might help close some of the notorious loopholes in our tax system. And the national wage ought to be pegged to the Consumer Price Index.

Oh, and there should also be a whopping estate tax with exemptions for actual family farms.

Ring Around Darfur

I just realized—Darfur represents the end of America's claim to unipolarity in the world political system. I have always seen Darfur as China's mess—in the same way we subsidized the terror regimes in South America and such during the days of Jeane Kirkpatrick's "Double Standard," China is doing to Sudan, which is a key oil supplier and arms purchaser.

If the state-armed militias carrying out the genocide in Darfur didn't get their weapons from China, they'd get them from some other dealer—a Victor Boot or some such—and it would be its own problem, but the involvement of China in Darfur is hard to ignore. Except we do it all the time.

However, the list of divestment options identified by SaveDarfur.org is a virtual who's who of campaign donors: JPMorganChase has given politicians $9,436,814 since 2000; Fidelity gave $8,772,000; the Vanguard Group gave $1,390,330 since 2003. Save Darfur also fingers the Women's Equity Fund and Pax World Funds as culprits).

The bigger problem has always been China, who sit squarely in the way of the UN doing anything about the situation. It's kind of cute—they're doing the same thing we used to do when Reagan was president—they've got the whole "we're doing all we can, but intervention at this time is not prudent" stuff big brother Ronnie Reagan used to pull. (A self-proclaimed Stalinist recently divulged to me his secret love for Reagan as a Stalinist icon in his own way.)

So, how can we solve this problem? I have always advocated taking the high road, which is to open-source all renewable energy patents and devote massive government resources toward a moonshot of global oil independence in 10 years. But in realpolitik terms, why don't we just hang the Sudanese government out to dry by offering an embargo combined with an oil-for-food program for Darfuris backed by UN peacekeepers? China would still recoup its investments in the oilfield while winning a PR victory and a great price for its agricultural exports.

{1930 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments

Why I Am A Pacifist

I missed the anti-war rally last weekend. I'd call it a peace rally, but nobody's really for 'peace' anymore; the majority of the country still thinks the war in Afghanistan was justified, and they're even receptive to bombing Iran. Even the majority of the country who is now against the Iraq war isn't really against it for the right reasons (as I see them), but because the terrorists are on track to kill up to 4,000 American soldiers by years' end.

I used to be a big believer in rallies. I remember marching against Newt Gingrich and the "Contract on America" when I was 14. But as I got older and continued my study of politics, I realized that mass protests weren't as effective as people used to think they were. Sure, if we had a responsive democratic government, there might be an impact, but unfortunately, we Americans live in the worst democracy money can buy.

If you believe in the war, and are able-bodied, the only moral course is to volunteer. At the same time, the only moral course of action for any soldier asked to kill or help kill is desertion. I know these sound like opposing concepts, but see if you can keep them both in your head at the same time while I explain.

Who is responsible for war? Everybody has their favorite culprit—Mel Gibson and his family blames me and mine, conservatives blame foreigners, liberals blame conservatives, charismatic Christians blame the Devil, and so forth.

The War in Iraq, which happened while the whole world was watching, gets pinned on all kinds of people. It's a terrible chicken-and-egg problem—it's deceptively easy to blame George W. Bush, because he was nominally in charge of the war. But those who live to delve a bit deeper have unearthed a treasure trove of culprits, from Dick Cheney to Curveball to the Project for a New American Century to Hillary Clinton to Bill Clinton.

There are all kinds of interesting philosophical questions about where the buck stops, because in this case, it isn't necessarily what you did that caused (or helped cause) the war, but who you were and when you did it. When Hilary and Edwards falsely tied Saddam to Al-Qaeda, it was forgivable in the eyes of the protestors, but when Bush and Cheney did it, it's totally unforgivable. When Bill Clinton bombed Iraq, it was prudent; when Bush bombs Iraq, it's genocide, never mind that roughly equal numbers of Iraqi civilians were killed under both presidents. Conversely, when Barack Obama says he was against the war from the beginning, it gets discounted because he wasn't really in a position to do anything about it as a state senator. And no one will ever really be taken to task for continuing to fund the war even though defunding it is the only way to stop the war legally.

Usually, when it comes to morality, the distinctions are a bit clearer; if you commit act X, you are responsible for its consequences. So, in the end, who is ultimately responsible for war?

The truth is so simple, it hurts. War is the fault of the soldiers. Soldiers on both sides. I figured this out using the "but-for" test, which I learned in a class on the Philosophy of Law; if it hadn't been for a certain action, the result would never have happened. In the causal chain of events, the but-for test helps you figure out the last moment something (usually an injury of some kind) could have been averted.

As I've said before, war is a game cowards play with other people's lives. Today wars are giant abstract board games, from the view of the commanders. The modern military keeps abstracting commanders further and further from he troops they command, reducing them to marks on a chalkboard or dots on a computer screen; and the politicians who engineer war are even more insulated from the reality of war.

But at the most basic level, war is impossible without soldiers. If there were no combatants, politicians would be revealed for what they are—loudmouthed invalids who would rather see you die in uniform than live up to the ideal of the public trust. Without soldiers, Bush can say anything he wants and have no less capacity to kill people with a word than the next citizen. Without soldiers, elites on both sides are can scream at each other all they want without piling up corpses.

It's true that war didn't always work this way; back when organized violence was more of a cottage industry, leaders used to actually lead their troops into battle. I'm reminded of the Genesis song "One for the Vine" which starts:

Fifty thousand men were sent to do the will of one.
His claim was phrased quite simply, though he never voiced it loud,
I am he, the chosen one.

In his name they could slaughter, for his name they could die.
Though many there were believed in him, still more were sure he lied,
But they'll fight the battle on.

Often people will accuse one another of situational ethics, which means that they view the morality of an act based on its context rather than on principle. War is the ultimate case of situational ethics;murder is wrong unless someone in a uniform tells you to do it. And because the state is telling you to kill, it won't hold you responsible for that killing—they'll probably give you a medal for killing enough people. On the other hand, if you get captured by another state, all bets are off and you may be held accountable for the deaths you caused in any number of ways, from being held as a POW to being summarily executed.

As a pacifist and a conscientious objector, I refuse to make a distinction between the battlefield and civilian life, for the simple reason that there is no place on earth exclusively reserved for war. Even if you're in uniform, you're still waking through someone else's town or field or community.

The crux of war is the act of killing. Anyone who demands death but doesn't do the killing themselves is at best a pansy and at worst a deserter. Call me an AWOL wallflower, but that is the uncompromised truth. This is why, for example, the machismo surrounding 9/11 drives me crazy. Susan Faludi, whose recent book examined the impact of 9/11 on gender in America, The Terror Dream, notes how a search for father-figures and manly men like firefighters and soliders created a new wave of misogynistic backlash against the recent cultural gains of feminism. It always mystified me how an ineffectual preppy like GW Bush was suddenly revered as a strong, manly leader—Laura Bush has literally killed more people than her husband if you look at the world in terms of proximal causes. If the President doesn't lead the charge up San Juan Hill anymore, what's the difference if they're macho or not?

As I've mentioned before, putting a woman in charge doesn't cause peace—just ask Maggie Thatcher or Golda Meir. And neither do apparently limp-wristed men; I have it on good authority that Vladimir Putin, who is killing people left and right, was beaten up and teased by the people he was assigned to intimidate as a KGB agent. Napoleon was short and had gynecomastia. Richard the Lion-Hearted was rumored to be homosexual.

I don't bring up these examples or characterizations to be sexist or homophobic—on the contrary, I mention these things because this ridiculous fiction that projecting strength will bring about peace (or war) is killing people. Elites play at war because they can, no matter what they look like.

You can't be a puppet-master without puppets. I can rail about how person X should be killed, but unless I have influence over someone with the means to do so, it doesn't matter. In the perverse logic of war, killing someone in cold blood based on what they're wearing isn't just acceptable, it's demanded.

I've mentioned before that my cause is averting civilian deaths; people with guns can shoot each other in the head for all I care. I know that sounds flip—and most of the people serving in the world's armed and irregular forces are my generation, in some cases even my former schoolmates. And while that makes it hard to blame the soldiers, it doesn't lessen their fault. It's the simplest categorical imperative—if everyone refused to kill, there'd be no way to force them, and no war.

The complement to the willingness to kill for your country is the willingness to die for it (if all you want to do is kill, you're just a garden—variety sociopath). And so, there will never be peace until the last person willing to die for their country is killed.

We're constantly admonished to "support the troops," who in turn are in uniform because they're "protecting our freedom." Neither statement makes sense. If you were really supporting the troops, you'd be one; if getting into uniform had anything to do with protecting freedom, you wouldn't be compelled to kill. Killing Iraqis only makes us less safe, and machismo is hardly a requirement for war-mongering.

To blame the war on the gum-flappers, the elites for whom war is a game, dishonors both the soldier who does the actual dirty work and the conscientious objector for whom killing is abhorrent. At the moment of death, all that truly matters is whose finger was literally on the trigger.

Politicians don't kill people, guns don't kill people. Killers kill people. Let the buck stop there and the chips fall where they may.

{1739 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments[1]

Fall Behind

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.

First of all, 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.

{2994 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments

The Rotting Corpse of King Croesus

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 singles—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.

{1213 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments

Everyone But Thee And Me

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.

But every once in a while, some secondary evidence turns up. According to the latest reports from all around the country:

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:

Allen: Those strapping buck negroes made me do it out of fear!
Glenn Murphy: It was totally consensual. The dude begged me to suck his dick in his sleep!
Pastor Ted Haggard: I like meth, massages, and male prostitutes, but not gay sex with male prostitutes on meth after massages!
Paul Barnes: I prayed to God to cure me and he never answered my prayers!
Mark Foley: I was molested by a priest! Years later, I got drunk!
Ed Schrock: I work out religiously, can assure you. I'm just looking to get together with a guy, we could play with one another, go down on one another, just to have some fun with, nothing hardcore.
Abraham Lincoln: I'm dead and you'll never prove a thing!

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?

The Fighting 69th

The ever-despicable Mark Noonan of Blogs for Bush on gay pride marches:

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!

Selfless Act of the Year

When it comes to Darfur, I don't think any American can top this. I hope we try, though.

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.

{1388 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments

The World Would Swing, If I Were King

The foreign policy spat between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton couldn't have been scripted better for the mainstream media. It's also the reason why watching politics in America drives me crazy. The great triangulation has begun. Lyndon Johnson had the Texas two-step, and the Clintons have the Sister Souljah moment. It's one of their ways of letting the Reagan Democrats know that even though they're voting Democratic, it won't be for a real progressive.

Some have speculated that the first female president or prime minister must be even more hawkish than her male predecessors; look at the examples of Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc, or Boudicca. And so Hillary continues in this tradition, eager to send other people's sons and daughters to die, in part to show that they have equal mettle to the the monsters of the patriarchy. But let's not pretend that the other front-runners, Obama and Edwards, are that much better.

Of course, if you actually have diplomatic experience, your viewpoint is automatically invalidated. Sorry, Bill Richardson, but as your YouTube video demonstrated, you are overqualified to lead America's fantasy charge to regain unipolar geopolitical power. How dare you have a valid point about foreign policy? You think that just because you are the only candidate besides Biden with actual foreign policy experience that you can expect to be taken seriously?

According to the Hillary Clinton theory of electable foreign policy, people don't want a diplomat who has actually had real and fruitful negotiations with dictators by practicing that long-forgotten tool—statecraft. People want idle threats, unilateralism not only in military strikes but in diplomacy. Recently Hillary ridiculed Obama for saying he would meet dictators without preconditions, which is accepted diplomatic practice, something Richardson knows and has always maintained.

The reason Hillary Clinton is so dangerous is that she doesn't get why the rest of the world hates the US. It's not because we torture people or don't have a fair wage for workers. It's because we push our weight around. From a New York Times Interview where she talked about Iraq:

[T]he choices that one would face are neither good nor unlimited. We’re in a very difficult situation that has been made worse by the failures of the administration. So what will be inherited is not completely clear, but likely to be:

Continuing sectarian violence; no real resolution of the political disagreements on the ground among the Iraqis; an unsettled if not unstable region, trying to figure out what the roles they want to play in regard to Iraq might be; a beachhead of Sunni insurgents and Al Qaeda operatives; the Turks being concerned about what is happening among the Kurds.

There’s a long litany of very difficult challenges. What I’m hoping is that with the slight change in policy that I am detecting in the Bush administration, that perhaps some progress could be made over the next nearly two years. Certainly, the willingness to engage Iran and Syria could possibly lead to some changes that would be beneficial to the overall structure of the situation we confront.

The surge, which is ongoing, and obviously if we’re going to do it we hope it is more successful than perhaps I think it could be.

I’m going to root for it if it has any chance of success, but I think it’s more likely that the anti-American violence and sectarian violence just moves from place to place to place like the old Whac a Mole. Clear some neighborhoods in Baghdad, then face Ramadi. Clear Ramadi, then maybe it’s back in Fallujah. It’s just difficult without a consensus on the part of the Iraqis, that they’re going to deal with it in some concerted effort, that we will have any long-lasting impact on the level of sectarian violence.

So come January of 2009, of course, a lot of it depends on what is actually happening on the ground.

At the same time she acknowledges these challenges, she is actively proposing two things as part of her Iraq plan: for there to be large-scale troop-withdrawal, and for the U.S. Army to continue fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) while training the Iraqi military. Sounds like the same mission with better photo ops, but less personnel to carry out the missions.

Either you believe in the mission or you don't. Because if you make a half-hearted commitment to a strategic goal, you're basically sacrificing the resources you've decided to donate to a lost cause. As the Democratic party's second-staunchest Iraq hawk behind Lieberman, I think she never really lost the faith in some sense. She just thinks she can get away with conveniently crafted promises doomed to failure.

The problem with having it both ways is that you end up with the worst of both worlds—a commitment to force to project power, continuing a troop presence but reducing the force-protection for those troops. If we scale back U.S. troop presence, the remaining troops will have an even bigger target on their backs—the occupiers are almost gone, Iraqis will say, let us drive them out on helicopters like in Saigon Ho Chi Minh City. How many casualties will it take before 'the generals' Democrats boast about consulting request additional troops?

Only Biden has the guts to specify a number of troops he thinks should be left behind—20,000—but let's use percentiles instead. If there are currently 162,000 troops in country, Biden's plan allows 12% to remain there. But let's look at it this way: even the most pacifist candidate would agree to leaving behind Marines to guard the diplomatic missions in Iraq. So we can establish a baseline: security personnel for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, to be the largest embassy in the world once construction is finished. A fully functional Death Star Embassy is said to employ 1,000 diplomatic staff.

If we use the combat to supply ratio for the surge analysis by GlobalSecurity.org, which is a ratio of 3:1 combat to supply personnel, we can start pricing our options.

A Marine bodyguard for each diplomatic mission member in the Baghdad embassy alone might mean 1,333 troops guarding a truck-bomb proof compound, or less than 1%. Season as necessary with increased civilian or military personnel to taste. But on the other hand, we have 14 'enduring' bases in Iraq. Not permanent bases. No administration member has ever called them permanent. Our Base at Guantanamo bay isn't permanent, either. None of our bases are, officially. If we maintain these bases only as diplomatic missions, let's say, how many troops might that require?

The military doesn't publish stats about this stuff, but from the closing of Camp Doha in Kuwait, we can estimate a camp large enough to inconvenience the local population is 3,000-5,000 soldiers' worth. 14 camps means between 42,000 and 70,000 soldiers, an overall troop reduction of 74% to 57%.

Are hawks in the Democratic party calculating that reducing the number of troops by three-quarters is enough to placate the American public, which has only recently turned against the war en masse? My guess is yes, considering the rhetoric of the liberal interventionist hawks.

Her interview continues:

I think we have remaining vital national security interests in Iraq, and I’ve spoken about that on many different occasions.

I think it really does matter whether you have a failed province or a region that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda. It is right in the heart of the oil region. It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests.

So I think we have a remaining military as well as political mission, trying to contain the extremists.

Here's the heart of the matter. Liberal interventionalism (which isn't quite neo-conservativism, but not far either) holds that since democratic capitalism needs the lebensraum, liberal capitalist states reserve the right to intervene in the internal affairs of any non-liberal-democratic state as they see fit, militarily or otherwise.

If we want to look at benchmarks for hawkishness, why don't we start with comparing Mrs. Clinton and the rest of the candidates to her husband's regime?

As the election grows slightly nearer, people have begun to pick apart the candidates' actual foreign policy proposals, and it turns out that as we had feared, most of them are not interested in leaving Iraq. It's the classic problem of internal inconsistency for the purpose of pandering to idiots.

As I've written here before, it was only ten years ago that the Democrats had Republicans over the barrel when it came to terrorism. All this criticism about how Clinton managed the threat from al-Qaeda (at which he did a better job than the Presidents Bush, but not by much) seems to gloss over his actual successes in the War on Terror, namely the targeting and containment of right-wing militias after the Oklahoma City bombing.

How did the Clinton administration do it? To hear Hillary tell it, they should have sent in the Army to clear out nests of terrorists, bombing training camps and secluded compounds in Michigan's breakaway Upper Peninsula.

So what changed? Mainly, the skin color of the perpetrators, which gave the issue to Republicans. Why? Because the Republican party is a well-known haven for (white) racists. Americans know that Republicans want to hurt brown people and they're not going to let some namby-pamby notion of equality or multiculturalism get in the way of KILLING US SOME GODDAMN RAGHEADS! U!S!A! U!S!A!

Honestly, I wish these people would just return to fucking their siblings and/or pets and leave foreign policy to people who understand it. Because when the great wave of reactionary knee-jerk armchair murderers go to the polls, they're shopping for vengeance, not viability.

At any rate, today we're going to look at the recent pair of articles in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy: Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney!

Far from a bare-knuckles brawl, Romney's multilateral vision sounds like the kind of speech Hillary might give if the country was still 50-50 on the war in Iraq. His policy suggestions actually sound better than Obama's—and the reason for that is the Romney knows that we need to repair the damage the Iraq war has generated worldwide. He's just not willing to abandon the mission in Iraq (or Guantanamo, most disturbingly).

When reading Obama's piece, it strikes me that for all his rhetoric about being the 21st century incarnate, his actual foreign policy as detailed in he essay seems awfully 20th. when he talks about 'renewing Americas leadership', it seems like he's just talking about a chrome job: "a new vision of leadership in he 21st century—a vision that draws from the past but is not bound by outdated thinking."

Obama's self-identified foreign-policy heroes are FDR, Truman and JFK. "Kennedy modernized our military doctrine," he notes proudly. It makes you wonder—where will Obama's Bay of Pigs be? Who gets to be interned this time around? And of course, who gets the bomb dropped on their cities this century?

Although it's well-practiced and mostly rational, Obama's argument is supported by some grade-A liberal interventionalist bullshit. The most egregious example is the following statement:

"[W]e must lead the world by deed and example."

A fine sentiment, and one I stand behind entirely. It's too bad Obama doesn't. there's an easy way to prove him wrong, and it's called the substitution game.

Would America allow foreign military bases on its own soil? Shouldn't China be able to set up a base on San Nicholas so they can maintain control of the vital shipping lanes into Los Angeles and to check potential American military aggression? Would he let Raul Castro bomb Miami if a Cuban exile paramilitary group was planning a coup in a Dade County training complex?

Last year, Obama, Clinton, Dodd and Biden all voted to unilaterally violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by giving 'dual-use' nuclear technology to India, a non-signatory who is known to have offensive nuclear weapons. You'll notice that Obama is always careful in his rhetoric about the NPT, calling for it to be 'updated.' I sincerely hope he doesn't mean that it should be retroactively changed to whitewash his actions.

If we're going to lead by example, shouldn't we welcome UN nuclear inspectors to our uranium-enrichment facilities and start dismantling our nuclear weapons program?

To be fair, Obama has said, and I think it is actually very brave and laudatory, that he would rule out the offensive use of nuclear weapons.

Americans know that we have one big bad-ass army and by dint of our superior military power, we have become the world's cop. Both Romney and Obama pay lip service to multilateralism while reserving the right to act unilaterally.

Speaking of which, let's look a little more closely at Obama's Iraq plan:

The best chance to leave Iraq a better place is to pressure these warring parties to find a lasting political soution. And the only effective way to apply this pressure is to begin a phased withdrawal of U. S. forces, with the goal of removing all combat brigades by March 31, 2008—a date consistent with the goal set by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. This redeployment could be temporarily suspended is the Iraq government meets the security, political, and economic benchmarks to which it has committed. But we realize that, in the end, only Iraqi leaders can bring eace and stability to their country.

At the same time, we must launch a comprehensive regional and international diplomatic initiative to help broker an end to the civil war in Iraq, prevent its spread, and limit the suffering of the Iraqi people. To gain credibility in this effort, we must make clear that we seek no permanent bases in Iraq. We should leave behind only a minimal over-the-horizon military force in the region to protect American personnel and facilities, continue training Iraqi security forces, and root out al Qaeda.

The rhetoric apes the Bush Administration's with a dove-friendly changes in phrasing, but the rhetoric is fine. The concrete proposals, however, stick out like a sore thumb. As I've pointed out before, the whole benchmark nonsense combines the worst of all possible incentives and outcomes. The only way to 'broker peace' and delegitimize al-Qaeda is to use our withdrawal as a bargaining chip. Unilateral withdrawal doesn't help as much as you'd think in promoting political progress.

Of course, if you consider what we have done to Iraq in the past twenty-five years, you'd understand a) that Bush has already "made it clear" rhetoric-wise that we don't seek permanent bases in Iraq, and b) we have no credibility either way. when you say you wan to leave troops behind to do the exact same thing they're supposedly doing now but with less support, you've put yourself into the "Iraq was just mismanaged" camp, right along with Hillary Clinton.

Here's an idea: you don't need to be in Iraq to train the Iraqi military. Of course, because the ranks of the new armed forces and police are full of terrorist and Islamofascists, training them anywhere is somewhat risky, but why don't we train them SOMEWHERE ELSE, like one of our dozens of military bases, and withdraw to the U.S. embassy?

Obama's project goals for the new American century sound awfully familiar—he just apes Rumsfeld's rhetoric abut updating the armed forces, and demands that we expand he military. Romney's article says almost exactly the same thing; Obama, however, says ne need to recruit 92,000 more soldiers, and Romney says we need 100,000 more. Do 8,000 troops define the momentous differences between neoconservatism and neoliberalism?

As we all know, talk is cheap. But that's all we have to go on at this point. Politicians don't live up to their promises, but analyzing what they're promising can a least tell us towards which group this particular round of pandering is directed.

Obama's far from finished with the textbook foreign policy bullshit:

When we send our men and women into harm's way, I will clearly define the mission, seek out the advice of our military commanders, objectively evaluate intelligence, and insure that our troops have the resources and support that they need.

Great. WHAT ABOUT AN EXIT STRATEGY? Every president has handed us the same lines preceding every military incursion.

At the heart of he battle over America's foreign policy are a few really tough questions: Can America do anything it sets its mind and armed forces to? Is America allowed to break international law because might makes right, or should America be permanently excepted from the international legal obligations we expect of any other country? Is there any justifiable excuse for opposing America's unilateralism—and what can other countries do about it?

There are some candidates for president who do want to join the world community as an equal. But because jingoism is more popular than religion or ideology in American politics, these people can make a case for a moral foreign policy all they like, but they'll never be judged 'electable' by the media.

There are two excellent reasons Obama called Hillary Clinton's foreign policy "Bush-Cheney lite." First of all, it's true—she and Biden are the 'neoliberal' hawks on the Democratic ballot, the ones who find themselves largely aligned with the principles of the Project for the New American Century. The second and more interesting reason is that Barack Obama is, in foreign policy terms, Bill Clinton-lite.

But that's a hell of a lot better than what Clinton, Romney, or Bush would do.

{3251 words} Permanent Link | Archives | Comments

Is Virginia As Lost As Anbar?

Sometimes, it's too easy.

What kind of idiot protests that the surge is working? "AJStrata," for one, who wrote this charming piece of tripe which I cannot help but "fisk." So, let's get into it:

The signs abound that Iraq is stabilizing. The massacres of Muslims that al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Malitia [sic] inflict are because Iraq is the primary front in the global war against Islamo Fascism.

Point for AJStrata—the latest NIE has, in fact, identified 8 signs that Iraq is making progress toward stabilization. Unfortunately, it also cited 10 signs that Iraq is worsening. 4 out of 9 isn't a great ratio, though.

The mass killings of Muslims would be going on whether we were there or not, just as they did in Jordan and Egypt.

Interesting—which mass killings of Muslims is he talking about? Perhaps the triple bombings in Amman in 2005? Nope, can't be, because Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for that bombing.

Now, al-Qaeda did have a failed plot to blow up similar targets on New Years' Eve 2000, but all three worldwide plots were stopped by US and Jordanian intelligence. But then again, that was back in the Clinton administration, so we all know it doesn't count for the purposes of this post.

As for Egypt, it turns out that all the major terrorist attacks (2004, 2005, 2005, 2006) since the 1997 Luxor massacre targeted tourists rather than Egyptians, although of course more Egyptians were killed by Egyptian terrorists than any other nationality.

So... no, there was not, and would not have been the same mass killings of Muslims had the United States not invaded Iraq.

The Islamo Fascists only know base brutality as their form of political expression.

It's funny you should mention that in such close proximity to the words "Egypt" and "Mahdi." Across the Islamic world, democratization has consistently been followed by attempts by Islamist parties to gain representation in government. We need only look to the spectacular electoral success of Mahdi-backed Shiite theocrats in Iraq, or the Palestinian victory of Hamas at the polls to see this in action. Egypt, on the other hand, is consistently cited for human rights abuses and authoritarian defects in its own democracy. But much of the political repression in Egypt is directed at the Muslim Brotherhood and other 'Islamofascist' parties, who have been barred from running for office.

Look at al-Qaeda’s current ’strategy’ - kill as many Muslims as they can so as to cower the country back into submission.

This troglodyte clearly doesn't know very much about al-Qaeda or Iraq.

The brutality of al-Qaeda did something in the Middle East most predicted was impossible - they caused the Muslim street to rise up and ally with America. Take yesterday’s brutal bombings:

Bombings killed at least 76 people in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk on Monday, police said, the worst such violence there in recent memory.

Ethnic tensions have been building in Kirkuk, a city with a mixed population of Turkmens, Sunni and Shiite Arabs, and Kurds, as it approaches a referendum on its future required by the Iraqi Constitution.

No one claimed responsibility for the bombings, but some residents and observers blamed militants linked to Al Qaeda in Iraq who are attempting to sabotage the political process by bringing sectarian tensions to a boil.

Sorry, I didn't catch the part in the article where the Arab street rose up and allied itself with America. Where was that again?

This incident is in addition to two schools being destroyed in Iraq and terrorists in Iraqi Army uniforms killing 29 in Dilaya[sic] Province. More killing of Muslim women and children here.

Still not seeing it.

Yet the SurrenderMedia refuses to recognize that this is not Muslim sectarian violence but a deliberate and bloody effort by al-Qaeda to create civil war in the absence of one.

How quickly we forget that the sectarian militias (like the above-cited Mahdi army) are the actual Islamofascists—killing people with impunity and discriminate violence. These are the people who have a reasonable shot at establishing an actual sharia-based government. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, are about as good at statebuilding as we are; my criticism of the U.S. Army's constructive capacities applies pretty well to Al-Qaeda, too, now that I think about it.

Why does the media continue to admit they are wrong?

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Armchair ‘experts’ with large audiences seem to always feel their success equates to their omnipotence.

Ignorant 'chicken-hawks' with chromosomal deficiencies seldom use English grammar and vocabulary correctly. Hey, AJStrata, where did you study Middle Eastern politics? Lemme guess... Fox News?

But it is a fragile arrogance it seems, one where admitting a mistake is not possible.

Good thing 9/11 killed irony, or that statement would have been hilarious.

It is clear what impact these attacks are having on the people of Iraq. They are shunning al-Qaeda and turning them into authorities every chance they get.

You know, when they're not planting IEDs for food money. Every other chance.

More and more we see stories like this one, where tips led to the capture of Islamo Fascists preparing to kill more Iraqis:

Soldiers of 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) out of Fort Drum, N.Y., and 4th Battalion, 4th Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division, joined forces to clear the villages near al-Owesat and al-Thobat, Iraq, July 14.

During Polar Tempest, tipsters gave the Coalition Forces viable information.

The night began with Soldiers clearing houses, when an Iraqi man who claimed to know where several terrorists lived in the area led them to various places.

…

The Iraqi man guiding the Soldiers said he believed they had encountered the lead element of a larger group of anti-Iraqi forces. As the U.S. and IA forces continued clearing houses in the area, the man pointed out one of the residents as a terrorist. In another house a male claimed to know where a high-value target lived. As Coalition Forces followed him, several local residents began to flee in vehicles. They were stopped and detained.

When citizens are swarming to turn in the brutal animals living amongst them this is not sectarian violence - this is moderate Muslims battling the Islamo Fascists. In fact, the fascists are so bad that former allies who once dreamed of Jihad turned on al-Qaeda when faced with it in all its cruel reality:

In the pursuit of an elusive enemy the US loosely labels AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq), US Green Berets and soldiers in this remote corner of Iraq have enlisted the help of a new ally that they have christened LRF, the “Legitimate Resistance Force.”

It includes ex-insurgents, police dropouts with checkered backgrounds, and former Al Qaeda-linked fighters – all united by a desire to rid Diyala Province of the network’s influence, say US officers.

“A lot of them are former Al Qaeda operatives … but when they saw the stealing, murder, and terrorism, they realized it was not the way forward for Iraq,” says Maj. John Woodward of San Antonio.

That's great, until notice who make up the "LRF"—sounds like they want a piece of the action, not so much to launch a moral crusade. If these are the people we are touting s our new coalition partners, it makes you wonder why we've attracted these lowlifes in the first place. AQI is a gang, basically, with political and ideological cover provided by the occupation. The LRF is another gang who wants AQI's territory.

The SurrenderMedia continues on in this story to create fictional alternatives as opposed to simply admitting the brutality of al-Qaeda is too much for many who once dreamed of Muslim glory – not of killing Muslim women and children.

The problem is this—al-Qaeda doesn't really need the support of the "Arab street." They just need enough to supply a steady stream of suicide bombers, preferably women and children.

It seems the only ones who can still stomach al-Qaeda is the news media. Just about everyone else has seen them as the animals they are and provide them little to no credibility as an ‘alternative’ life style.

Did anyone else just get a visual of Bin Laden in a leather outfit at the Gay Pride parade? Just me? Never mind.

The Iraqi people, in combination with our military’s own amazing efforts, have turned the tide in Iraq. Jack Kelley notes how our forces are actually not engaging much at all with the enemy in Anbar - once the capitol of al-Qaeda’s operations in Iraq and its center of the modern caliphate they planned to create.

One call was from “Bruce in Upland,” whose son is a soldier currently serving in Iraq.

“I will speak for my son who right now is bored out of his mind in Ramadi, because he hasn’t heard a shot fired in combat now in about six or seven weeks,” Bruce said.

There were about 22 enemy incidents per week in Ramadi in April, said Marine Major Jeff Pool. That’s declined to “about two per week.” (An enemy incident is any type of direct or indirect fire, from a sniper to a mortar or an IED attack.) Throughout Anbar province, the number of “incidents” has dropped from about 400 last December to 155 last week, said Maj. Pool, the public affairs chief for U.S. forces in western Iraq.

"Though these numbers are a substantial drop, I believe them to be artificially high,” Maj. Pool said. The increased operational tempo resulting from the troop surge has increased exposure to the enemy as it has increased the number of al Qaida operatives killed or captured, he said.

“Anbar is returning to a state of normalcy, so I consider the soldier in Ramadi being bored a true measure of progress,” he said.

The Surge is working. Anyone but a stubborn fool can see that.

I like to find comparisons so I can gauge things against a known example. So I decided to look at NY City’s violent crime statistics and see how things compare. Here is what I found. In 2003 (a low crime year after 9-11) NY City suffered 597 murders and 31,253 aggravated assaults. No, they did not suffer any car bombs (though they have had one in their past and who can forget 9-11). But NY City is, thankfully, a ways