Getting Fooled Again

Crooks and Liars is the first political blog that I ever read regularly. The enjoyment/catharsis I found there is at least indirectly responsible for my eventual decision to try the little project you see here. I don't always agree with the points of view expressed there (e.g., 2nd Amendment rights), but I generally admire the quality of writing as well as their perpetual vigilance.

While I was still fighting off the effects of brunch overindulgence, they were [i.e., Susie Madrak was] catching this:

Obama To Appeal Ruling That U.S. Can't Retain Suspects Without Judicial Oversight

I can't wait for the usual comments about how this means the opposite of how it appears, Obama's extended super brilliant chess game, etc.:

The Obama administration said Friday that it would appeal a district court ruling that granted some military prisoners in Afghanistan the right to file lawsuits seeking their release. The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight.

[. . . .]

Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the detainees, condemned the decision in a statement.

"Though he has made many promises regarding the need for our country to rejoin the world community of nations, by filing this appeal, President Obama has taken on the defense of one of the Bush administration’s unlawful policies founded on nothing more than the idea that might makes right," she said.

In 1971 The Who released a song entitled Won't Get Fooled Again. The song is essentially about the futility of political revolution, the unlikelihood of real political change. As the lyrics progress first there is an uprising, then the rebels overthrow those in power, then in the end, the new regime becomes just like the previous one.

The song ends with the depressing announcement: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

I've been trying to combat the feeling that we're seeing life imitating art with Obama for months, since before the General Election. His campaign was almost entirely void of pledges to repair the damage to the Constitution and the rule of law effected by the Bush administration. Then came Obama's concrete act of capitulating to the dark side in his vote on the issue of telecom immunity -- a vote against individual liberty made without justification or even the barest political need.

Since he's been in office, I've seen nothing more than cosmetic changes in many of the worst Bush policies (e.g., "we're not going to call them enemy combatants anymore").

I would dearly love to see real, tangible, verifiable change. Restoring Habeus Corpus would be a nice start. Aggressively pursuing justice by seeking prosecution for war crimes committed by the previous administration -- from the top to the bottom -- would be another.

Instead I see dictionary games being played (terrorist acts now are "man-caused disasters," the ill-advised wars in which we're enmeshed are now "overseas contingency operations," etc.) while the administration wastes its "justice" department resources on endless defenses of Bush atrocities.

Instead I hear the constant mantra of, "we want to look to the future, not the past," as if they want us to believe that objects in the rearview mirror do not really exist.

Santaya, anyone? Most of us have heard some version of: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." It is, however, even more appropriate and more illuminating to look more fully at the passage in his Reason in Common Sense from which the famous line comes:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Paul Krugman and Market Mystique

Anyone who knows me well knows that I like Paul Krugman. What's not to like? The guy has a towering intellect, a Nobel Prize for Economics on his mantle and a great beard. And compared to many of the guys with whom Obama has surrounded himself for economic advice, like Jonathan Mann, I find myself wishing sometimes that he was in the place of the likes of Geithner or Summers.

In his most recent NYT piece, Krugman writes:

On Monday, Lawrence Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, responded to criticisms of the Obama administration’s plan to subsidize private purchases of toxic assets. "I don’t know of any economist," he declared, "who doesn’t believe that better functioning capital markets in which assets can be traded are a good idea."

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether a market in which buyers have to be bribed to participate can really be described as "better functioning." Even so, Mr. Summers needs to get out more. Quite a few economists have reconsidered their favorable opinion of capital markets and asset trading in the light of the current crisis.

But it has become increasingly clear over the past few days that top officials in the Obama administration are still in the grip of the market mystique. They still believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic.

[ . . . . ]

Much discussion of the toxic-asset plan has focused on the details and the arithmetic, and rightly so. Beyond that, however, what’s striking is the vision expressed both in the content of the financial plan and in statements by administration officials. In essence, the administration seems to believe that once investors calm down, securitization — and the business of finance — can resume where it left off a year or two ago.

To be fair, officials are calling for more regulation. Indeed, on Thursday Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, laid out plans for enhanced regulation that would have been considered radical not long ago.

But the underlying vision remains that of a financial system more or less the same as it was two years ago, albeit somewhat tamed by new rules.

As you can guess, I don’t share that vision. I don’t think this is just a financial panic; I believe that it represents the failure of a whole model of banking, of an overgrown financial sector that did more harm than good.

At my peril I've elided here Krugman's sketch of America's post-Depression financial policy. You really should read the whole thing. The reason I left it out? It's with no small amount of trepidation that I say: I think he's a bit wrong about some things.

Dr. Krugman sees the world through Keynesian lenses. That's the macroeconomic model that is his foundation. I'm no economist. A's in Principles of Econ 1 and 2 qualify me for nothing. So to say that I'm not a Keynesian is virtually meaningless. I don't know enough about the subject matter to say that I represent any school of thought. Yet, I do have a distinct feeling for what makes the most sense to me, and at this point in my life (until, perhaps, I become more enlightened) that's the Austrian School, founded by the likes of Hayek (who also had a Nobel Prize on his mantle) and von Mises.

The folks at LewRockwell.com do a pretty good job of breaking down Austrian Economics for the masses (like me), and Bill Anderson disagrees with Dr. Krugman's vision of history without being disagreeable.

You really should read Krugman and then read Anderson to fully understand where the differences lie. The purpose of this posting is maybe more of a personal thing for me -- sort of declaration, a delineation of what/where my "home turf" is as I endeavor to do the heavy lifting involved in coming to an understanding that satisfies ME of the probably causes of and potential cures for our current global economic woes.

See? I didn't call it a "global economic shitstorm" this time. I'm becoming much more mature! And as for Paul Krugman, call me a fanboy if you will, but I (like Jonathan Mann) still think he's an all around cool guy.

Kindred Spirit

I heart Jonathan Mann. O.K., more accurately, I heart every Jonathan Mann song I have heard so far. Below are two fine examples thereof. Watch them both, and by so doing enrich your life for a grand total of four minutes.

A Venti of Truth on Morning Joe

I was delighted (and a little surprised) to see Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital on MSNBC's Morning Joe this [Wednesday] morning. His take on the causes of and the cure for the current global economic shitstorm are about 180 degrees away from the fast-talkers who frequent the show from sibling network CNBC.

In my book Schiff has just a wee bit more credibility than the average talking head on this subject, insofar as he did predict quite accurately what was coming -- back in mid-2006! Just how many times does this guy have to be right when everyone else is wrong before Washington/Wall Street crowd will listen?!?

Absolute MUST Reading

Matt Taibbi is a journalist and political writer currently working at Rolling Stone where he authors a column called "Road Rage" for the print version, and an additional weekly online-only column called "The Low Post". He has also recently been a regular contributor to Real Time with Bill Maher.

There are things upon which I disagree with Taibbi, for example he equates people who think the official story of 9/11 is less-than-true with extreme religious right Armageddonists.

But I will admit that he is intelligent, articulate and occasionally near brilliant. The article he has recently written for Rolling Stone about the current global economic shitstorm is, quite simply, the best thing I've read on the subject.

The title is "The Big Takeover," and its subtitle of sorts is: The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution.

Here's the intro (edited ever so slightly for those with delicate sensibilities). Read this, then go read the whole piece if you have not done so already. Read every damn word of it. Consider it a huge steaming bowl of wake-the-f*ck-up!

It's over — we're officially, royally f*cked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.

Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

There's been far, far too much noise lately about the rising tide of populist anger, the grassroots outrage over the AIG bonuses. Yes, there's plenty of reason to be furious, but please do not spend your righteous indignation on what is a mere single pixel in the true big picture here. If you don't see that, reread Taibbi's article.

Get mad, yes. Before you pick up a sign or buy a bumper-sticker or write a letter to your senator or email your congressman -- to borrow from Howard Beale -- you have to get mad. You need to get mad as hell, no matter how cliched that phrase has become!

Nothing is going to change, certainly nothing is going to change for the better as long as we remain an -- at most -- temporarily irritated nation, accepting the tepid pablum that our current leadership is trying to feed us, all the while equaniminously droning on about the need to look to the future and not dwell on the past.

What we need is justice, and as things stand right now we are not going to get it. As is often the case, in order for justice to be achieved bad people must be punished. We do not seem to have anyone in a position of power who possesses the will to even pursue such.

This situation is not going to change from the top down. Our only hope is to not just swallow it, to spit it back in their faces.

Don't believe the lie that there are companies which are "too big to fail." Any company we collectively accept as "too big to fail" is a company that will perpetually have us by the throat, a company that will continue to operate as above the law, a company whose operational miscarriages will continue to be paid for by us ...until such time as no element of the global economy will lend to us anymore, until such time as our currency utterly collapses and we find China and all our other creditors at the door demanding payment, until such time as this once great country slides into the obscurity of being a third-rate third-world nation.

But if that worst of the worst of the worst-case scenario comes to be, rest assured that a leader will arise then in our darkest hour... and explain that we need to look to the future and not dwell on the past.

Another Sign of the End Times

Sometimes I feel that I'm part of an endangered species, that each plodding day brings me a bit closer to extinction. I saw something on tonight's Colbert Report -- personally verified a short while later -- that is making me think the velocity of the journey toward oblivion has just been accelerated.

There it is.

The new logo for the network formerly known as The SciFi Channel.

The change-over took place on March 16, and like a grazing diplodocus I didn't even lift my head and notice.

The network is seeking to shed their geeky image and attract a broader audience. CEO Dave Howe offered this spin:

What we love about this is we hopefully get the best of both worlds. We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.

I think I just threw up a little bit in the back of my throat.

The network's news site proclaimed the dawning of a bright new day thusly:

"Imagine Greater" will become the new brand message and tagline, inviting both consumers and advertisers into a new era of unlimited imagination, exceptional experiences and greater entertainment.

[. . . .]

By changing the name to Syfy, which remains phonetically identical, the new brand broadens perceptions and embraces a wider range of current and future imagination-based entertainment beyond just the traditional sci-fi genre, including fantasy, supernatural, paranormal, reality, mystery, action and adventure. It also positions the brand for future growth by creating an ownable trademark that can travel easily with consumers across new media and nonlinear digital platforms, new international channels and extend into new business ventures.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to be sick.

I suppose in a way it shouldn't matter to me, shouldn't feel like just another emblem of the end of civilization as I knew it. While over the years there has been some SciFi Channel programming I've genuinely enjoyed, very very very little of that programming was what I would really have rather been watching: Science Fiction.

The SciFi Channel has always offered a watery mixture of the things they claim to be now preparing to add in -- fantasy, supernatural, paranormal, reality, mystery, etc., etc. For the old-school, hard-core, science fiction purist it's been a meager broth from the beginning.

But I know what I like and I'd bet that, though the numbers may be dwindling, I'm not alone.

Back in the early 1990s for a while I was the local Network Coordinator for FidoNet (a worldwide computer network that was used for communication mostly between bulletin board systems that was most popular in the early 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet). FidoNet had a protocol called Echomail that supported topic-based public discussion groups similar to Usenet newsgroups.

One of the Echomail discussion groups I particularly enjoyed was named, "SF." The "SF" stood, naturally, for Science Fiction, and it was a haven for those who believed that in order for a story/novel/movie/whatever to be good science fiction, the science had to be good. This is a purism lost, of course, on the makers and broadcasters of such cinematic gems as Ice Spiders, Mansquito and Chupacabra: Dark Seas.

A "tagline" often appended to messages in the FidoNet SF group ran something like this:

Dear reader, you may wonder why
That it's SF and not sci-fi.
Well, you see, there's a fine line
Between Robert Heinlein
And "Revenge of the Two-Headed Fly."

So fine, "SyFy," go ahead and turn the whole damn channel into a 24/7 reality show featuring vampire ninja ghost lizard-wizards. I just may do what I probably should have been doing all along: read a book.

Accessory After the Fact

Last night Rachel Maddow interviewed professor of journalism at UC-Berkeley Mark Danner, author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.

Mr. Danner has been the recipient of a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross on treatment of detainees held at CIA "black sites" that describes a variety of interrogation techniques which the report says "constituted torture." Danner published excerpts from the report in a lengthy article for the New York Review of Books.

As I understand things, The International Red Cross, while not the decider of guilt or innocence of accused individuals, IS the arbiter of whether torture -- as a violation of the Geneva Conventions -- has been done. This report says rather unequivocally that the Bush Administration DID cause prisoners to be tortured.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of their accomplices are chargeable with war crimes. Further, if we as a signatory nation do not respond and bring war criminals to justice, then are we not accessories to their crimes? I fear that we are, and I have the even greater fear that the current government of our nation does not have the courage, the stomach to do what is right on this.

Below is the text of an email that I sent to Ms. Maddow today.

I enjoyed last night's interview with Mark Danner regarding the International Red Cross report on the Bush administration's use of torture. The excerpts from that report that have been leaked to, and published by Mr. Danner place the final stamp of authenticity on what many Americans have long believed was being done without their consent, in their name. In researching this report today, however, I have become aware of a couple of things that puzzle me, things that I would really, really like to see you address on your show before this story has a chance to fade from the national consciousness... drowned out by the clamor over the AIG bonuses, etc., etc.

I discovered that this report dates from over two years ago -- February 2007, to be precise. If (as I understand it) the IRC is the body charged with determining whether torture has been committed under the definitions of the Geneva Conventions, why did no one act on this report?

Why was this a confidential report?

The IRC is not denying the report's existence, but is saying they regret that the information attributed to the IRC report has been "made public in this manner."

When, if ever, do they intend to make the full report available? And when, if ever, will anyone act upon its contents?!

Even if the proposed Senate "truth commission" becomes a reality, I strongly suspect that at best they will do no more than produce still another condemnatory report upon which no action will be taken toward holding our war criminals accountable for their actions. And that, it would seem, makes the current government -- and by extension, the American citizenry -- accessories.

Thanks for your time and attention. Hope to see you address this further.

Though in the email I made reference to "excerpts" that had been received by Mr. Danner, my understanding was subsequently clarified: he did apparently receive the report in its entirety but only published "excerpts." I still hope to find answers for the questions of why the report was essentially kept hidden for two years, and why no action has been taken upon its findings.

Another One

The fleshing out continues apace of an administration that with each passing week resembles more a third term for The Clintons than a new one for Barack Obama.

Monday it was announced that former Clinton White House Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, has been tapped to be the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. This is change in which I do not want to believe.

Obama's people [now there's an endangered species!] pitched Panetta as a non-controversial choice, a man respected by both sides of the isle in the body responsible for his approval.

It was argued that as Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff, Panetta learned how a president receives and digests intelligence on a daily basis and that this was a qualification for the job. This surreal portrait of DCIA as an intelligence caterer is something I cannot, will not buy. There is so, so much more responsibility called for in this position in an agency (as the NYT observed) that has been notoriously unwelcoming to directors perceived as outsiders.

Also, Panetta is a former Republican. It seems fair to wonder just how many GOP senators have much love for a turncoat.

The only other qualification I've heard mentioned is that Panetta has been an opponent of torture. Hell, so have I, yet I have received no call from the transition team.

All I can see through the harsh lens of political reality is that the real reason for his appointment is that he was and is a loyal Clintonite... or Clintonista, whichever is correct.

I'm starting to suspect that we'll see the rehiring of The Clintons' chef and gardeners as well. Then what, Chelsey Clinton for Secretary of Commerce?

Ron Paul on the Invasion of Gaza

Speaking Saturday, Congressman Paul made this statement regarding the invasion of Gaza by Israel, and its implications for this country.

If the above video does not play, go here.

Dr. Paul called it a sad day for the whole world since (among other things) it means that "the whole idea of preemptive, preventative war is spreading."

Yes, we may not be doing a great job of exporting "freedom" to the Middle East, but we've clearly managed to export The Bush Doctrine™. Pay attention, Sarah Palin, this may show up on a quiz later.

Top 5 Israeli Lies

Make no mistake -- I do not regard Hamas as having clean hands as to what's happening in Gaza currently, but neither do I subscribe to what has been the standard American outlook... best expressed by the mantra, "Israel is our friend and they can do no wrong."

With that preface, here are the top five lies about Israel's assault on Gaza, as expressed by Jeremy Hammond:

Lie #1. Israel is only targeting legitimate military sites and is seeking to protect innocent lives. Israel never targets civilians.

Lie #2. Hamas violated the cease-fire. The Israeli bombardment is a response to Palestinian rocket fire and is designed to end such rocket attacks.

Lie #3. Hamas is using human shields, a war crime.

Lie #4. Arab nations have not condemned Israel’s actions because they understand Israel’s justification for its assault.

Lie #5. Israel is not responsible for civilian deaths because it warned the Palestinians of Gaza to flee areas that might be targeted.

Please read the details at Dissident Voice with an open mind and at least be exposed to what you won't hear from out MainStream Media.