Yet Another Company Faction Forms

Cliff Schecter points to a meeting between Erik Prince, head of Blackwater, and GOP Congressional leaders including Rep. [Patrick] McHenry [R-N.C.] .

Apparently the record of the meeting was scrubbed soon after it was posted.

Although Blackwater has the itchiest trigger fingers in Iraq, it's important to remember the number of mercenaries in Iraq outnumbers the American troops. Nor can it be considered the top billing contractor in Iraq.

Cheneyburton's KBR tops that list.

But virtually every one of the companies providing guns and intelligence for hire has ties to the American government. In fact, they're all compettitors for Uncle Sugar's largesse. Every one of them has a financial stake in Empire.

They're the ones that run American intelligence. So if, for example, the CIA appears to be pulling the rug out from under their Dear Leader, it's not simply a turf war in D.C.

It's the Praetorian Guard having a dialog with Li'l Boots, having decided there's no way to turn profit from Iran.

And they're coming home to keep an eye on you, because there's lots more money in that.

And the parting on the Left is now parting on the right

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

...lately Mr. Obama has been stressing his differences with his rivals by attacking their plans from the right — which means that he has been giving credence to false talking points that will be used against any Democratic health care plan a couple of years from now.

First is the claim that a mandate is unenforceable. Mr. Obama’s advisers have seized on the widely cited statistic that 15 percent of drivers are uninsured, even though insurance is legally required.

But this statistic is known to be seriously overstated — and some states have managed to get the number of uninsured drivers down to as little as 2 percent. Besides, while the enforcement of car insurance mandates isn’t perfect, it does greatly increase the number of insured drivers.

Anyway, why talk about car insurance rather than looking at direct evidence on how health care mandates perform? Other countries — notably Switzerland and the Netherlands — already have such mandates. And guess what? They work.

The second false claim is that people won’t be able to afford the insurance they’re required to have — a claim usually supported with data about how expensive insurance is. But all the Democratic plans include subsidies to lower-income families to help them pay for insurance, plus a promise to increase the subsidies if they prove insufficient...

I'll give you something someone else said who started on the left



...and parted on the right:

"Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable"

Guesswork, Inference, and DisInformation

I'll take one assessment from Team A and two from Team B with a side order of Team C's ideas, please. But hold off on the heavy meme.

An op-ed (because everything there is an op-ed) The Asia Pravda, supported by Team Xinhua:

The flip side to US intelligence

By Jacob Heilbrunn

With the release of the new intelligence estimate debunking the claim that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is earning laurels for puncturing the George W Bush administration's alarms about Tehran's intentions.

But is its new report really any more reliable than its original 2005 estimate, which declared that Iran was marching briskly towards attaining nuclear status? A look at the history of CIA estimates suggests that caution is in order. While estimates are only that - not, as is sometimes assumed, ironclad statements - and the difficulties of assessing clandestine programs are obvious, in no area has American intelligence gotten it wrong more often than when it comes to assessing foreign powers' nuclear prowess.

The CIA's first blunder established the pattern. In 1946, the CIA's Office of Reports and Estimates confidently predicted that Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union was years away from producing a bomb: "It is probable that the capability of the USSR to develop weapons based on atomic energy will be limited to the possible development of an atomic bomb to the stage of production at some time between 1950 and 1953. On this assumption, a quantity of such bombs could be produced and stockpiled by 1956." On August 24, 1949, the office again declared that Stalin would most likely not be able to field an atomic bomb until mid-1953. Five days later, the Soviet Union conducted its first atomic test.

The Office of Reports and Estimates was supposed to prevent a repetition of the blunders and failure to organize intelligence that occurred before Pearl Harbor. Instead, its egregious mistakes, including failing to predict the beginning of the Korean War, meant that it was abolished in 1950. According to CIA historian Donald P Steury, "It had been the object of repeated investigations, all of which condemned its failures without reservation."

In the 1950s, the CIA also failed to anticipate how quickly the Soviet Union would detonate a hydrogen bomb. It began to reverse course, perhaps partly as a result of these embarrassments. Where it had previously downplayed Soviet progress, the agency now exaggerated it. Aware that the Soviets were tapping into the expertise of captured German scientists, the CIA concluded that a missile gap existed between the US and the Soviet Union. Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev had claimed, in the wake of the 1957 Sputnik success, that the USSR was producing missiles "like sausages".

The CIA took him at his word. According to Sidney Graybeal, who was a CIA analyst at the time, "The estimates were based on capabilities rather than hard facts." They were also wrong. After John F Kennedy became president, satellite photography revealed not only that there wasn't a missile gap, but that the US was far ahead in the arms race, one reason that the Soviets backed down during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

A new round of contention erupted in the mid-1970s. Neo-conservatives, led by Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Pipes and other members of the Committee on the Present Danger, charged that the CIA was tailoring its estimates on behalf of detente and soft-pedaling the size of the Soviet missile force.

The famous Team B that challenged the CIA's Team A charged, in what critics later claimed was an anticipation of the bogus claims made in the run-up to the Gulf War, that the USSR was on the march and that the CIA was all wet. Who got it right? In retrospect, the hawks wildly exaggerated the power and coherence of the Soviet Union, but it does seem clear that the Soviet Union was pouring vastly more resources into the military than the CIA had realized. (In addition, the CIA had rather amusingly concluded in the 1970s that East Germany was one of the top ten economies in the world. It remains an economic basket-case today.)

If the CIA had difficulties judging the Soviet Union, it also badly bungled its assessment of another country's capabilities. In the 1950s, Israel's Shimon Peres began dickering with France to obtain nuclear technology. In order to weaken Egypt, then supporting an anti-French insurgency in Algeria, Paris began helping Israel develop nuclear technology. It took the CIA until 1960 to realize that Israel was building a bomb in Dimona. John F Kennedy successfully pressured Ben-Gurion into allowing a team of Americans to inspect the facility there, but they saw what they wanted to see, being unable to find any evidence that it was something other than a peaceful project.

The CIA report on the failure to identify the Dimona project earlier has a familiar ring. It stated: "The general feeling that Israel could not achieve this capability without outside aid from the US or its allies ... led to the tendency to discount rumors of Israeli reactor construction and French collaboration in the nuclear weapons area."

Then there was India. In 1998 New Delhi conducted three nuclear tests. Once again, the CIA was caught napping. According to the May 18, 1998 Washington Post, "six hours before the tests, no CIA warning was issued because the US analysts responsible for tracking the Indian nuclear program had not expected the tests and were not on alert". Congress was apoplectic. "Our failure to detect this shows that India did a good job of concealing their intentions, while we did a dreadfully inadequate job of detecting those intentions", said Senator Richard Shelby, then chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence. In response, the CIA could only state the obvious: "It is apparent that the Indians went to some lengths to conceal their activities and intentions."

Is it that surprising, then, that the intelligence community has found Iraq and Iran to be so vexing? When it came to Iraq, American intelligence agencies radically underestimated the progress that Saddam Hussein had made before the first Gulf War toward a nuclear bomb. This was one of the reasons that it then reversed course before the second Gulf War, furnishing the Bush Administration with what it wanted in the National Intelligence Estimate released in 2003. That document infamously declared, "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Now, in the midst of Bush's mutterings about a possible World War III with Tehran, the CIA has performed a somersault on Iran. Opponents of bombing Iran have seized on the latest estimate to discredit Bush, while neo-conservatives like Norman Podhoretz splutter that it represents a dastardly CIA plot to undermine Bush. Neo-conservative distaste for the CIA is longstanding.

Unless, of course Cheneyburton's Team 'Merika wrote the intelligence.

...It has been voiced by Laurie Mylroie, who believes that Saddam Hussein was behind the first bombing of the World Trade Center; David Frum and Richard Perle, in their book An End to Evil, present the CIA as a subversive institution intent on sabotaging the fight against terrorism. In a sense, such inanities signal that neo-conservatism, which started out as a Trotskyist movement vociferously opposed to American government institutions, has now come full circle.

Neither the boosters of the new report nor its detractors really have it right. The rapidity with which the CIA has reversed course on Iran should itself induce circumspection. Dealing with Iran diplomatically may well be the best option, but the latest intelligence report shouldn't serve as the final verdict on its nuclear intentions. Deciding how best to deal with Iran cannot rest on a single estimate that likely represents guesswork and inferences more than verifiable information.

In the final analysis, it is the duty of every citizen to be an intelligence analyst.

happy birthday

Three years of Singularity today.

Come Together

Right Now
Over Me

What Would Jesus Do Without a Lawyer?

Thank you, Mr. Fish.

Didn't that cost about $10 Billion for DARPA?

It turns out anyone with some engineering skills can build a cylon, v.1.0.

Clogging the Pipes

A number of people are asking why L'il Boots let the National Intelligence Estimate out on Iran right about now, as the Cheneyburton Corporation is trying its best to git its' Iran On.

The ever vigilant Tinfoil Hat Boy has noted that Dear Leader seems to think the NIE isn't a bug in his plan to extend the Free Market Faith to the heathen, it's a feature:

...Once again facing criticism over the handling — and meaning — of intelligence reports, Mr. Bush said the new assessment underscored the need to intensify international efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

He said Iran could not be entrusted with acquiring even the scientific knowledge to enrich uranium for peaceful civilian use, explicitly declaring for the first time what has been an underlying premise of the Bush administration’s policy. He also appeared to rule out any new diplomatic initiative with the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“Look, Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous, if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Bush said, sounding defensive at times, during a news conference dominated by questions about the assessment, known as a National Intelligence Estimate. “What’s to say they couldn’t start another covert nuclear weapons program?”

This is right along the teachings of the Great GOP Guru Rove, who says when Republicans win, they win, and when they lose, they win.

Arthur Silber warns that it ain't over yet, pilgrims, and frankly I agree with this position.

On the observation that perhaps it looks like the CIA won’t light the fuse (this time), let me suggest that it is not altruism that's slowed down the march.

After all, which faction of the CIA do we speak of?

The faction that prefers intelligence gathering, or the faction that loves them some covert boogaloo?

The faction that farms out work to DynCorp, or the faction that prefers Blackwater perfidy? Or has relatives in any of a dozen other companies that do dirty deeds dirt cheap?

Are we talking about the Poppy Bu$h geriatric Reptilicans, or L’il Boots’ NeoCon faithful? Or the Third Way faction of the Clintonista?

It's highly likely that the Big Shitpile (with a tip o' the tinfoil to Atrios, the originator of the descriptor) is starting to clog the pipes all over the world. And the last thing any Company subsidiary wants is a corporate venture that might lead to Pootie-poot or Team Xinhua making off with all the Texas Tea.

But back to Silber:

…with the news of the latest NIE about Iran, many people breathe sighs of relief, believing the danger has lessened. It has not, except perhaps for a tragically brief moment. Their relief, even in the smallest degree, reveals their inability and/or refusal to understand the lethal forces in play, and their inability and/or refusal to comprehend that those dangers continue on their murderous and bloody path.

Of course, a global understanding like that would really bring the Big Shitpile crashing down, and then who would profit?

Krugman says:

...How bad is it? Well, I’ve never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even during the Asian crisis of 1997-98, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.

This time, market players seem truly horrified — because they’ve suddenly realized that they don’t understand the complex financial system they created.

Before I get to that, however, let’s talk about what’s happening right now.

Credit — lending between market players — is to the financial markets what motor oil is to car engines. The ability to raise cash on short notice, which is what people mean when they talk about “liquidity,” is an essential lubricant for the markets, and for the economy as a whole.

But liquidity has been drying up. Some credit markets have effectively closed up shop. Interest rates in other markets — like the London market, in which banks lend to each other — have risen even as interest rates on U.S. government debt, which is still considered safe, have plunged.

“What we are witnessing,” says Bill Gross of the bond manager Pimco, “is essentially the breakdown of our modern-day banking system, a complex of leveraged lending so hard to understand that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke required a face-to-face refresher course from hedge fund managers in mid-August.”

The freezing up of the financial markets will, if it goes on much longer, lead to a severe reduction in overall lending, causing business investment to go the way of home construction — and that will mean a recession, possibly a nasty one.

Behind the disappearance of liquidity lies a collapse of trust: market players don’t want to lend to each other, because they’re not sure they’ll be repaid.

In a direct sense, this collapse of trust has been caused by the bursting of the housing bubble. The run-up of home prices made even less sense than the dot-com bubble — I mean, there wasn’t even a glamorous new technology to justify claims that old rules no longer applied — but somehow financial markets accepted crazy home prices as the new normal. And when the bubble burst, a lot of investments that were labeled AAA turned out to be junk.

Thus, “super-senior” claims against subprime mortgages — that is, investments that have first dibs on whatever mortgage payments borrowers make, and were therefore supposed to pay off in full even if a sizable fraction of these borrowers defaulted on their debts — have lost a third of their market value since July.

But what has really undermined trust is the fact that nobody knows where the financial toxic waste is buried. Citigroup wasn’t supposed to have tens of billions of dollars in subprime exposure; it did. Florida’s Local Government Investment Pool, which acts as a bank for the state’s school districts, was supposed to be risk-free; it wasn’t (and now schools don’t have the money to pay teachers).

How did things get so opaque? The answer is “financial innovation” — two words that should, from now on, strike fear into investors’ hearts...

But the innovations of recent years — the alphabet soup of C.D.O.’s and S.I.V.’s, R.M.B.S. and A.B.C.P. — were sold on false pretenses. They were promoted as ways to spread risk, making investment safer. What they did instead — aside from making their creators a lot of money, which they didn’t have to repay when it all went bust — was to spread confusion, luring investors into taking on more risk than they realized.

Why was this allowed to happen? At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs. We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime crisis.

And free-market orthodoxy dies hard. Just a few weeks ago Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, admitted to Fortune magazine that financial innovation got ahead of regulation — but added, “I don’t think we’d want it the other way around.” Is that your final answer, Mr. Secretary?

Now, Mr. Paulson’s new proposal to help borrowers renegotiate their mortgage payments and avoid foreclosure sounds in principle like a good idea (although we have yet to hear any details). Realistically, however, it won’t make more than a small dent in the subprime problem.

The bottom line is that policy makers left the financial industry free to innovate — and what it did was to innovate itself, and the rest of us, into a big, nasty mess.

But this brings up another point: the distinct possibility the Big Shitpile was a hot potato that simply went bad before its time. The markets may have been 'pozed to head south after Dear Leader's wrecking crew had left the building, not while they were still planting the thermite. nezua limón xolagrafik-jonez points to what was 'pozed to be the direction of the new frontier of the War on Terra. There's all the homegrown cynics who...

...’challenge the intrinsic qualities of capitalism, charging that in the insatiable quest for growth and profit, the philosophy is serving to destroy the world’s ecology, indigenous cultures, and individual welfare.’

Does pointing out the Big Shitpile threatens to completely unravel the global consumerist culture constitute an act of terror?

One supposes, like torture, it all matters whom one informs about it, and how one goes about it.

The principal problem of chaos as strategery is that its effects have a tendency to spin far out of control.

Not to mention the smell.

It Takes an Orc to Sell Torture

Taser International certainly spends a lot of green lobbying, $320,000 in 2006 and over $100,000 reported so far in 2007.

It seems they've got 4 registered lobbyists each on Homeland Security and Law Enforcement & Crime, and one dealing with issues on Finance. These lobbyists have recorded meetings with the Dept. of Defense, Dept. of Homeland Security, Dept. of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, US House of Representatives, and the US Senate.

Like the farmer has noted, Bernard Kerik became a millionaire off of Taser International.

...Kerik benefited largely because the company has enjoyed an extraordinary surge in its stock. Stock options that were worth very little at the time became extremely valuable, in part because of the sales pitch that Kerik made on the company's behalf to other police departments.

The sales driving Taser's growing profits come mostly from local and state governments. But while Kerik has served on the company's board, it has made an aggressive push to enter markets either regulated or controlled by the federal government, most notably the Department of Homeland Security. A White House spokesman said Kerik would resign from the board and sell his remaining stock if confirmed.

At one point, Kerik referred Taser executives, seeking more federal business, to a Customs and Border Protection official of the Homeland Security Department, according to the company president.

"Anyone in a federal law enforcement position is a potential customer," said Thomas Smith, president and co-founder of Taser International, who said he had hired Kerik because of his prominence as New York's police commissioner. "And we are going to continue to go after that business."

Thus, the extensive use of tasers in police departments today is largely thanks to the personal promotion by Kerik.

Darth Cheney is Not Pleased

WASHINGTON, Dec. 3 — A new assessment by American intelligence agencies concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

The conclusions of the new assessment are likely to reshape the final year of the Bush administration, which has made halting Iran’s nuclear program a cornerstone of its foreign policy.

The assessment, a National Intelligence Estimate that represents the consensus view of all 16 American spy agencies, states that Tehran is likely keeping its options open with respect to building a weapon, but that intelligence agencies “do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.”

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is designed for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

But the new estimate declares with “high confidence” that a military-run Iranian program intended to transform that raw material into a nuclear weapon has been shut down since 2003, and also says with high confidence that the halt “was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure...”

Rather than painting Iran as a rogue, irrational nation determined to join the club of nations with the bomb, the estimate states Iran’s “decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs.”

Text: Key Judgments of National Intelligence Estimate (pdf)
Statement by the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (pdf)

Like Lambert sez,

It’s almost like all the sabre-rattling and threats and bullying were designed to get Iran to restart its program, isn’t it?

More and more DINOcrats Sign Up for the Culture of Cruelty

It's doubtless the fashionable thing to do, "but it's okay when we do it!"

Chris Floyd points out that it's not just HHHillary suggesting she'd like to enlisten Colin Powell. She has a significant part of her whole War Cabinet picked out.

Apparently the DINOcrats have enlisted one of the Pentagon's star torturers as a spokesman against L'il Boots.

That's the problem with the Imperial Zombie Virus. It really looks chic, until you realize who you're eating. Of course, if you let someone else eat your frontal lobes first, all those negative feelings just lurch away.

But it seems to have spread everywhere. Case in point: Senior Fellows of the Mighty Corrente Building now include liberal "ex-" cops [yes, more comedy] that think tasing isn't torture.



And get downright insulting when you present evidence otherwise.

And don't understand why people don't trust police more...

And want to know who you are, what you do, and what experiences you had that make you think they way you do.

It seems COINTELPRO is about to regain its zombie legs again, and the informants are making lists and taking names.

Still, the diversification of zombie memes into DINOcrat, Rethuglican, and Reptilican moieties has been anticipated.

Overcoming the Shock

LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached...

The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.

“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

Well, only if we really want to solve the problem. Again, it's not the science that's the problem. It's the economic policy.

...Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 billion metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 billion in 2007 from 1.2 billion in 2005, the government reported.

“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

“The government has taken the bull by the horns and done what farmers wanted,” he said. Some economists have questioned whether Malawi’s 2007 bumper harvest should be credited to good rains or subsidies, but an independent evaluation, financed by the United States and Britain, found that the subsidy program accounted for a large share of this year’s increase in corn production.

The harvest also helped the poor by lowering food prices and increasing wages for farm workers. Researchers at Imperial College London and Michigan State University concluded in their preliminary report that a well-run subsidy program in a sensibly managed economy “has the potential to drive growth forward out of the poverty trap in which many Malawians and the Malawian economy are currently caught...”

The Department for International Development in Britain contributed $8 million to the subsidy program last year. Bernabé Sánchez, an economist with the agency in Malawi, estimated the extra corn produced because of the $74 million subsidy was worth $120 million to $140 million.

“It was really a good economic investment,” he said.

The United States, which has shipped $147 million worth of American food to Malawi as emergency relief since 2002, but only $53 million to help Malawi grow its own food, has not provided any financial support for the subsidy program, except for helping pay for the evaluation of it. Over the years, the United States Agency for International Development has focused on promoting the role of the private sector in delivering fertilizer and seed, and saw subsidies as undermining that effort...

Chicago School free market economics rulez!

...Here in Malawi, bank officials say they generally support Malawi’s policy, though they criticize the government for not having a strategy to eventually end the subsidies, question whether its 2007 corn production estimates are inflated and say there is still a lot of room for improvement in how the subsidy is carried out...

The Ghost of Milton Friedman is not pleased.

Chaos is the Plan, Wall $treet Edition

Ben Stein:

...This all started percolating in my fevered brain last week when a frequent correspondent, a gent in Florida who is sure economic disaster lies ahead (and he may be right, but he’s not), forwarded a newsletter from a highly placed economist at Goldman Sachs named Jan Hatzius.

That worthy scholar recently wrote a detailed paper about how he thought the subprime mess would get worse and worse. It would get so bad, he hypothesized, that it would affect aggregate lending extremely adversely and slow down growth.

Dr. Hatzius, who has a Ph.D. in economics from “Oggsford,” as they put it in “The Great Gatsby,” used a combination of theory, data, guesswork, extrapolation and what he recalls as history to reach the point that when highly leveraged institutions like banks lost money on subprime, they would cut back on lending to keep their capital ratios sound — and this would slow the economy.

This would occur, he said, if the value of the assets that banks hold plunges so steeply that they have to consume their own capital to patch up losses. With those funds used to plug holes, banks’ reserves drop further. To keep reserves in accordance with regulatory requirements, banks then have to rein in lending. What all of this means — or so the argument goes — is that losses in subprime and elsewhere that are taken at banks ultimately boomerang back, in a highly multiplied and negative way, onto our economy.

As the narrator in the rock legend “Spill the Wine” says, “This really blew my mind.”

So I started an e-mail correspondence with Dr. Hatzius, pointing out what I believed were a few flaws in his paper. Among them were his hypothesis that home prices would fall an average of 15 percent nationwide (an event that has never happened since the Depression, although we surely could be headed in that direction), and that this would lead to a drastic increase in defaults and losses by lenders.

This, as I see it, is a conclusion that is an estimation based upon a guess. I found especially puzzling the omission of the highly likely truth that the Fed would step in to replenish financial institutions’ liquidity if necessary. In a crisis like that outlined by the good Dr. Hatzius, the Fed — any postwar Fed except perhaps that of a fool — would pump cash into the system to keep lending on track.

I mentioned this via e-mail to Dr. Hatzius. He generously agreed that there was some slight merit to my arguments and that he was merely pointing out tendencies and possibilities (if I understand him correctly).

But forecasting is tricky, and I have a hard time believing that financial events to come will be qualitatively different from those that have already happened.

I do want to emphasize Dr. Hatzius’s gentlemanliness and intelligence. But I also want to emphasize that, as I see it, his document was mostly about selling fear. A spokesman for Goldman Sachs categorically denies this point and says that the firm’s economic research is held to the highest levels of objectivity and that its economists’ views are completely independent.

As I interpret it, Dr. Hatzius was saying that the financial system would possibly not be able to adjust to a level of financial losses that are large on an absolute scale but small compared with aggregate credit or the gross domestic product. He is also postulating that lenders would have to retrench so deeply that lending would stall and growth would falter — an event that, again, has not happened on any scale in the postwar world, except when planned by the central bank.

In other words, with the greatest possible respect to Dr. Hatzius, his paper is not really what I would call a serious overview of the situation. It is more a call to be afraid and cautious based on general principles that he embraces and not on the lessons of history. (In this respect, he is much like many economic journalists and commentators who sell newsprint by selling fear. The common cause of journalists and Wall Streeters in this regard is a subject I will address in the future.)

Now, let me make a few small points here and then get to my own big point.

Goldman Sachs is a huge name in terms of moneymaking and prestige. I totally understand the respect it receives for its financial dexterity. The firm is a superstar in that regard, and I, a small stockholder, am grateful. But it has never been clear to me exactly why its people are considered rocket scientists in any other area than making money.

Dr. Hatzius’s paper is a prime example of my puzzlement. It shows extreme intelligence but basically misses the point: yes, there are possible macro dangers, but you have to go all the way around Robin Hood’s barn to get to them, and you have to use what I think are extremely far-fetched hypotheticals to get to a scary situation. (This is not to diminish the real risks in today’s economy, I’m just not as gloomy about them as Dr. Hatzius.)

Why, then, is his document circulating? Perhaps as a token of Dr. Hatzius’s genuine intelligence, which is fine. But to me, his paper seemed like a selling document in the real Wall Street sense of selling — namely, selling short. (Dr. Hatzius notes that he has long been bearish on housing, since faraway 2006, but I respectfully note that that is a lot different from predicting a credit catastrophe. The spokesman for Goldman also noted the company’s bearishness on housing since 2006. He also noted that in the recent past, Goldman Sachs has moved to a considerably larger short posture and that the firm is net short.)

More thoughts came to me as I read a recent piece in Fortune by my colleague Allan Sloan, a veteran financial writer. Mr. Sloan traces the life and death throes of a Goldman Sachs-arranged collateralized mortgage obligation. He shows how truly toxic waste was sold to overly eager investors who now have major charge-offs, and he also points out that some parts of the C.M.O. were indeed safe and were either current or had been paid off.

But what leaps out at me from this story is that Goldman Sachs was injecting dangerous financial products into the world’s commercial bloodstream for years.

My pal, colleague and alter ego, the financial manager Phil DeMuth, culled data from a financial Web site, ABAlert.com (for “asset-backed alert”), that Goldman Sachs was one of the top 10 sellers of C.M.O.’s for the last two and a half years. From the evidence I see, Goldman was doing this for years. It might have sold very roughly $100 billion of the stuff in that period, according to ABAlert. Goldman was doing it on a scale of billions even when Henry M. Paulson Jr., the current Treasury secretary, led the firm.

The Goldman spokesman would not comment on this except to note that other firms sold C.M.O.’s too.

The point to bear in mind, as Mr. Sloan brilliantly makes clear, is that as Goldman was peddling C.M.O.’s, it was also shorting the junk on a titanic scale through index sales — showing, at least to me, how horrible a product it believed it was selling.

The Goldman Sachs spokesman said that the company routinely shorts the securities it underwrites and said that this is disclosed. He noted candidly that Goldman is much more short in this sector than usual.

Here is my humble hypothesis, even after talking to Goldman: Is it possible that Dr. Hatzius’s paper was a device to help along the goal of success at bearish trades in this sector and in the market generally? His firm says his paper, like all of its economists’ work, was not written to support any larger short-trading strategy. But economists, like accountants, are artists. They have a tendency to paint what their patrons, who pay them, want to see.

From what I have observed over the years, Goldman has a fascinating culture. It is sort of like what I imagine the culture of the K.G.B. to be. You always put the firm first. The long-ago scandal of the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation, which raised hundreds of millions just before the crash of 1929 to create a mutual fund, then used the fund’s money to prop up stocks it owned and underwrote, was a particularly sad example. The fund, of course, went bust.

Now, obviously, Goldman Sachs does many fine deals and has many smart, capable people working for it. But it’s not the Vatican. It exists to make money for the partners and (much farther down the line) the stockholders. The people there are not statesmen. They are salesmen.

To my old eyes, the recent unhappiness about mortgages and Goldman’s connection with them are not examples of sterling conduct. It is bad enough to have been selling this stuff. It is far worse when the sellers were, in effect, simultaneously shorting the stuff they were selling, or making similar bets.

Doesn’t this bear some slight resemblance to Merrill selling tech stocks during the bubble while its analyst Henry Blodget was reportedly telling his friends what garbage they were? How different would it be from selling short the junky stock that your firm is underwriting? And if a top economist at Goldman Sachs was saying housing was in trouble, why did Goldman continue to underwrite junk mortgage issues into the market?

HERE is a query, as we used to say in law school: Should Henry M. Paulson Jr., who formerly ran a firm that engaged in this kind of conduct, be serving as Treasury secretary? Should there not be some inquiry into what the invisible government of Goldman (and the rest of Wall Street) did to create this disaster, which has caught up with some Wall Street firms but not the nimble Goldman?

When the Depression got under way, the government created the Temporary National Economic Committee to study just what had happened on the Street to get the tragedy going. Maybe it’s time for an investigation of just what Wall Street and Goldman did to make money as they pumped this mortgage mess into the economic system, and sometimes were seemingly on both sides of the deal.

Or is Goldman Sachs like “Love Story”? Does working there mean never having to say you’re sorry?

It seems the Kool-Aid is wearing off for a lot of conservatives.

When Ben Stein channels Naomi Klein, the times they are a-changin'.

No More Big Brother/ Sister $olutions

Yglesias:

...You do hear with a frightening frequency people with green sympathies, up to and including Al Gore, suggest that global warming shouldn't be a "political issue." Drained of senseless rhetoric this seems to reduce to the view that "everyone ought to agree with my favored policies." And, of course, I think everyone really should agree with my favored policies. But, in practice, they don't. And so: Politics.

This is the world, and anyone who aspires to radically alter America's energy use patterns needs to learn to live with it. Achieving the goals requires lots of political change.

Meanwhile, both whatever degree of climate change can't be prevented and whatever prevention measures we adopt will all have different kinds of costs and benefits. Different policies will allocate these costs to different people. The mechanism by which we decide what to do is called "politics" and it exists so that individuals and organizations with somewhat divergent interests and ideas can make collective decisions about how to tackle common problems. The rhetoric of anti-politics isn't just an analytic mistake, it's part of the problem. A public that doesn't believe divergent interests can be reconciled and common solutions devised for common problems -- a public that doesn't believe in politics -- is going to be a public that doesn't believe there's anything that can or should be done to prevent catastrophic climate change.

And that's the central problem with bipartisan approaches. Al Gore does have this idea he can address this problem by bringing billionaires and billionaire wanna-bees on board. Sorry, that's not going to work.

Billionaires are that way for a reason. Their primary interest is in expanding their billions. Whether Al's got cynical reasons for doing this or not, I don't trust "Leaders" who espouse their causes as being moral issues above politics, whether it's Bu$hie pretending to be the Chosen One so he can wage a War to raid the Treasury, or Al Gore (or Clinton or Obama or Edwards or Paul or any of the other more transparent Rethuglican like Hucksterbee) claiming to be Above it All.

The Righteous generally have their hands on your wallet. Whether you knock it away or fall for the old Jedi mind trick is your choice.

As a friend of mine points out, it's not only environmental issues scientist types have a problem communicating to people about. This same kind of argument is a problem in communicating the fallacy of the intelligent design movement.

Many people have treated the evolution/creation controversy (if they think about it at all) as if it were a scientific dispute -- as if the two viewpoints were merely differing ways of interpreting scientific data. (This, in fact, is precisely how the ID/creationists wish to present it.)

Scientists in particular have tended to respond to the ID/creationist movement by first ignoring it in the hopes that it would go away, and then with long technical explanations of how the scientific conclusions of the ID/creationist arguments are unsupported, incomplete or just plain wrong.

All of the scientific refutations of ID/creationism have not, however, lessened the conflict -- if anything, they have heightened it. The reason for this is simple; ID/creationism is not science and it does not have scientific goals. The creationists/IDers are not concerned in the slightest about scientific questions, or about correctly interpreting data, or about forming better explanations and understanding of the natural world. Instead, creationism/ID is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fundamentalist Religious Right -- it is a religious and political movement, not a scientific one, and its goals are entirely religious and political, not scientific. The ID/creationists are a part of a larger Christian Reconstructionist political movement with radical theocratic aims, and their anti-evolution and anti-science efforts are, as they themselves declare, simply the "wedge issue" which they have chosen in order to gain entry for their wider anti-democratic political goals.

Because of this, it will not be beaten by science or by scientific arguments --- these are essentially irrelevant to the real goals of the ID/creationist movement. The ID/creationist movement is a political movement with political goals, and it must be beaten the same way that every other political movement is beaten -- by out-organizing it.

The simple fact is that the creationist/IDers have a clearly articulated, deliberately planned strategy for theocracy, and virtually no one in the US agrees with the extremist political philosophy of the DI or its funders. That is power we can use. People simply don't want a theocracy. Keep pushing the IDers about it, force them to defend it publicly, and watch their public support melt away.

So it doesn't really help to focus on the science. Non-scientists trying to argue over science is a recipe for disaster. On the other hand, scientists arguing over science is a recipe for boredom. Nobody wants to listen to deadly-dull lectures on "pre-biotic polymer chemosynthesis" or "the homology between type III secretory apparatus and the bacterial flagellum" (yawn). This fight isn't a science symposium. Don't treat it as one. Treating this as a "science debate" only reinforces the false impression given by IDers that there is a legitimate scientific debate, with two equally valid sides. There isn't. It allows them to set the agenda and to fight on their own chosen terms. Don't do it. This fight is a political fight. It's simply not about science.

The only thing that will beat ID/creationism (and all its future derivatives) is an informed public that makes it clear to everyone that it does not want a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, won't support it, won't allow it, and will do whatever it takes to prevent it.

Thanks, Woody.

War Zombie Futures

Naomi Klein:

...The idea that capitalism can save us from climate catastrophe has powerful appeal. It gives politicians an excuse to subsidise corporations rather than to regulate them; and it neatly avoids a discussion about how the core market logic of endless growth landed us here in the first place.

The market, however, appears to have other ideas about how to meet the challenges of an increasingly disaster-prone world. According to Lloyd, the really big money - despite all the government incentives - is turning away from clean-energy technologies, and is banking instead on gadgets that promise to seal wealthy countries and individuals into hi-tech fortresses. Key growth areas in venture capitalism are private security firms selling surveillance gear and privatised emergency response. To put it simply, in the world of venture capitalism, there has been a race going on between greens on the one hand, and guns and garrisons on the other - and the guns and garrisons are winning.

According to Venture Business Research, last year North American and European companies developing green technology were neck and neck in the contest for new investment with those companies that focused on "homeland security" and weaponry: green tech received $3.5bn (£1.7bn), and so did the guns-and-garrisons sector. But this year, guns and garrisons have suddenly leapt ahead. The greens have received $4.2bn, while the garrisons have nearly doubled their money, collecting $6bn in new investment funds. And 2007 isn't over yet.

This trend has nothing to do with real supply and demand, since the demand for clean-energy technology could not be higher. With oil now reaching nearly $100 a barrel, it is clear that we badly need green alternatives, both as consumers and as a species. The latest report from the Nobel prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was characterised by Time magazine as "a final warning to humanity", while a new Oxfam report makes it clear that the recent wave of natural disasters is no fluke: over the past two decades, the number of extreme weather events has quadrupled. Conversely, this year has seen no major terrorist events in North America or Europe, there are hints of a United States troop drawdown in Iraq, and, despite the relentless propaganda, there is no imminent threat from Iran.

So why is "homeland security", not green energy, the hot new sector? Perhaps because there are two distinct business models that can respond to our climate and energy crisis. We can develop policies and technologies to get us off this disastrous course. Or we can develop policies and technologies to protect us from those we have enraged through resource wars and displaced through climate change, while simultaneously shielding ourselves from the worst of both war and weather. (The ultimate expression of this second option is in Hummer's new television adverts: the gas-guzzler is seen carrying its cargo to safety in various disaster zones, followed by the slogan "HOPE: Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergencies". It's a bit like the Marlboro man doing grief counselling in a cancer ward.) In short, we can choose to fix, or we can choose to fortress. Environmental activists and scientists have been yelling for the fix. The homeland security sector, on the other hand, believes the future lies in fortresses...

Of course, there is still money to be made from going green; but there is much more green - at least in the short term - to be made from selling escape and protection. As Lloyd explains: "The failure rate of security businesses is much lower than clean-tech ones; and, as important, the capital investment required to build a successful security business is also much lower." In other words, finding solutions for real problems is hard, but turning a profit from those problems is easy.

Bush wants to leave our climate crisis to the ingenuity of the market. Well, the market has spoken: it will not take us off this disastrous course. In fact, the smart money is betting that we will stay on it.

It's the Colonel 'Merika way. "Bon Appetit!"

Working up to $election '08: Zombie Kandidates

After reading a bit about the latest Rethuglican candidate love festfeast- apparently even True Believers walked away from it saying they'd rather vote for John Edwards than any of the officious charlatans- I'll say this for the disaffected rank and file.

You aren't alone.

Jeff Wells manages to capture the hungry surreality of it all (yet again):

...There are a lot of monstrous metaphors available to describe America's descent from pulp fiction superhero to real world arch-villain, but perhaps the most apt is the zombie. There's the relentless and insatiable consumption of goods, fuel and lives which devours entire nations without thought or apology...

A vampire would be preferable. I could see trying to talk things out with one. Probably not successfully, but there's at least the vain hope. A zombie? First of all, it's already dead. And last, I'm only food. Do you explain yourself to your breakfast?



There's no coming back from Iraq. There's no homecoming for Captain America. And don't wait for a hero, because he's only going to eat you.

Another perspective may be found here, from the Rude One himself.

Ask a Silly Question

It's not like I don't take this question seriously.

Don't count on it.

Undead Bipartisan Administration Memes

What exactly is going on among the advisors of the DINOcratic party this week?

..."I'm thinking about Ron Paul" as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters at a house party here, one of numerous stops throughout New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving weekend. A Kucinich-Paul administration could bring people together "to balance the energies in this country," Kucinich said...

It's nice to see that like most of the other preznitial candidates Kucinich either:

1) Is totally clueless about the competition and/or the world he lives in, or

2) Is utterly cynical about his own campaign positions.

Take portions of both possibilities, mix well, emulsify it with T-virus,



and see how well that zombie dog hunts, too.

The Undead Zombie Violence Meme v.2

[Cross posted here, but new and improving throughout the day today]

A few years back Benedictus noted and pulled together a number of posts from a number of people I respect on the increasing acceptibility of violence in society related to the mindless response to the War on Terror.

Except it wasn't just a trend.

It's more like a chain reaction. More like a viral program. More like a meme.

We jokingly referred to the War on Terror as the War on Terra, first because of the fake accent that idiot son-of-a-Bu$h wears.

But soon we found that indeed, we're fightin' the Terra'ists where ever they appear, and don't look now, but that's a scary reflection in the mirror.

We're so beyond lynching. We don't like the idea we, the height of Western Civilization, would do uncivilized things. So Tasers are safe, because it says so, right there on the label. Primarily.

Perhaps we all have conditioned responses, and we are indeed all being conditioned.

Perhaps this is another emergent property, a meme that's become a zeitgeist of eternal war.

Perhaps you can not agree with this, or will not, or find it irrelevant.

But for your consideration, perhaps your mind is not quite your own when you see the suffering of another human and no longer factor human suffering as something to be avoided in satisfaction of your own needs. Even if your needs involve protecting yourself.

Perhaps you are thinking, or not thinking, in a way that benefits some Other, some one who profits from the chaos they've released into the world.

Colonel America says "Bon appetite".

Consider this an indictment of the blind acceptance of violence beyond the needed.

It’s a suggestion that the need for violence is being conditioned into us beyond what is normal. We’re animals. Some violence happens, and sadly enough is normal in life.

I’m no pacifist, nor am I suggesting it’s prudent to be one.

Some of that conditioning is the Law of the Jungle.

Some of that conditioning is “Let’s you and him fight”.

Much of that conditioning makes a great deal of money for the men who would be our feudal lords.

Tasers, for example, are worse than firearms as are most of the new and improved “nonlethal” weapons, because they give rise to the lie you can inflict violence that really isn’t violence.

Wherein HHHillary Loses Her Frelling Mind

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has been talking for some time now about how, if she is elected president, she will ask both Democratic and Republican statesmen to hit the road on her behalf to declare that “bipartisan foreign policy is back” in post-George W. Bush America.

While Mrs. Clinton has pointed to her husband as an emissary, it has been unclear for some time which Republicans she had in mind. But in South Carolina today, speaking to a group of black ministers, Mrs. Clinton dropped a name publicly that she has hinted at privately before.

“I won’t even wait until I’m inaugurated, but as soon as I’m elected I’m going to be asking distinguished Americans of both parties — people like Colin Powell, for example, and others — who can represent our country well, including someone I know very well,” Mrs. Clinton said, according to a Fox News Web report. “Because I want to send a message heard across the world. The era of cowboy diplomacy is over...”

Of course, when she says things like that you seriously have to wonder whether she ever had one in the first place.

Ezra Klein:

...Sigh. I know we're all supposed to like Powell because, without ever saying so, he hinted, that maybe, just maybe, when he was helping to sell the world on the Iraq War and fool Hillary Clinton about those weapons that didn't exist, he had some qualms about what he was doing, and much later, concluded that he'd played a critical role in engineering one of the greatest foreign policy disasters of all time. He's never said so, but occasionally he blinks twice when you bring this up, and so you can sort of tell that he's regretful, unless he just had something in his eye and was trying to get it out.

But you know what? Bringing back key members of the Bush foreign policy team probably won't restore our standing in the world. It's the sort of thing the Washington Post editorial board likes, but little more. And it is, definitionally, the old politics. Powell is an old politician, and all of his fine theories and international triumphs date to the Cold War era. This isn't the sort of thinking that will push us forward, not in the least.

That's probably the idea.

Armageddon on the Back Burner

Len Hart at The Existentialist Cowboy notes the reason for the recently flurry of negotialization by Bu$hCo:

...Two ominous developments have complicated Bush's plans to nuke Iran. One is a warning from Putin. The other --a dramatic demonstration by China. In their wake, Bush has now said he is committed to resolving the "crisis" diplomatically. But the new line was not forthcoming until after Vladimir "Pooty Poot" Putin, stated flatly and without emotion: an attack on Iran will be considered an attack on Russia. "Pooty Poot" has nukes and will use them. High-level diplomatic sources in Tehran were reported to have told the Asia Times Online that Putin and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had agreed on a plan that would nullify Bush's campaign to strike Iran preemptively with a nuclear weapon.

China, likewise, warned America's rogue psychopath. As if to underscore the point, a Chinese submarine popped up --undetected --in the middle of a Pacific Ocean exercise. The Sub was said to be "dangerously close" to the USS Kitty Hawk, having slipped past a US "shield" of a dozen warships and two US subs. US brass are "dumbfounded"!

We can only speculate about US ability to detect "subs". One would have assumed advances since the making of the early 90's film --"The Hunt for Red October". Even so -- that China has a sub that slips so effortlessly, silently past vaunted US detection technology confirms that the sub was of advanced design and equipped with advanced stealth technology. Just recently, in the comments section, I stated that China had the ability to put a nuclear sub undetected just off the US East Coast. China exceeded my prediction. I had not expected to be confirmed so quickly by events. [See: Submarine Detection]...

Bu$hCo again shows how it excels at winning hearts and minds. But please, read the whole thing.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

It takes an effort.

Bill Christofferson: For antiwar Yellow Dog Dems, 1968 looms again

Six months ago, I was confidently telling people that if the Democrats couldn't win the presidency in 2008, we should just disband the party.

Lately, I have started hedging my bets.

And an hour with the front section of Sunday's The New York Times was enough to make me think that we are headed for another heartbreaking and unnecessary defeat.

What did we learn Sunday from the "liberal media?"

1. Violence is on the decline in Iraq.

2. One brigade of U.S. troops has started to pull out.

3. The troop surge has not produced the political progress that was promised, so the Bush Administration is simply downsizing its goals, to make it look like progress.

4. The Democratic presidential candidates appear ready to soften their stances, or at least their language, on Iraq and change the subject to domestic issues.

Here we go again.

We will be fooled again, it would appear. Which brings us to the question: What is an antiwar Yellow Dog Democrat to do, after reading that one of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy advisors, Michael O'Hanlon, is saying:

"The politics of Iraq are going to change dramatically in the general election, assuming Iraq continues to show some hopefulness," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is a supporter of Mrs. Clinton's and a proponent of the military buildup. "If Iraq looks at least partly salvageable, it will be important to explain as a candidate how you would salvage it -- how you would get our troops out and not lose the war. The Democrats need to be very careful with what they say and not hem themselves in."

Ah, yes, caution is certainly called for. You wouldn't want to be too strongly against the war when only 60 to 70 percent of the American people think it was a mistake, want to end it, and bring our troops home.

After four and a half years of bloodshed, it is hard to believe -- no, I refuse to believe -- that any kind of minimal gains and Republican propaganda campaign will swing what is now a silent antiwar majority in the other direction.

A reduction in carnage and fewer U.S. troops in harm's way are good news. The unasked question is always "compared to what?" Troop levels will still be higher than before the surge, and violence levels are said to be the lowest since February 2006, a high water mark after the bombing of a Shiite mosque. But the number of U.S. troops killed in 2007 remains the highest of any year since the war began.

That is hardly a cause to celebrate or for Democrats to change course. The cautious general election strategy of trying to appeal to everyone by saying nothing -- the Democrats' secret plan in recent years -- hasn't worked too well.

It isn't what won them the Congress in 2006. Disgust at the venal, Imperial Rethuglicans sent the Dems to Congress, not quisling strategery.

...While the Dems try desperately to peel a few votes off of the Republican base, the GOP plays to its base, although softening it with a little "compassionate conservative" talk now and then.

The leading Democratic candidates already have refused to say they will have all U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2013. But that's the Big Three -- Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. Kucinich and Dodd would move more quickly. Then there's this: One candidate favors withdrawing all troops immediately and unconditionally: Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico...

Eugene McCarthy didn't win the nomination in 1968, of course. But his antiwar campaign forced a sitting president, Mr. LBJ, to drop out of the race. And the eventual nominee of the fractured party, Mr. HHH, went down to defeat because many in the antiwar wing of the Democratic Party saw him as more of the same, another hawk, and withheld their votes.

Others were horrified by what they saw in the streets of Chicago and in the convention hall, and turned away from Humphrey, too.

So, here's a scenario: Clinton wins most of the early primaries, Edwards and Obama drop out or are crippled, and Richardson -- recognizing that he won't get the nomination -- takes up the cause, on principle, and becomes a strident antiwar candidate, competing for delegates in the many remaining states.

In late August, Democrats at their national convention in Denver are split over the platform plank on Iraq, but Clinton and the voices of triangularization prevail. Maybe there's even a strong antiwar presence in the streets of Denver.

The war grinds on, but it's less of an issue, since the Democratic candidate voted for the war, says she'd do it again, and says there will be no precipitous withdrawal of troops.

I ask again: What is an antiwar Yellow Dog Democrat to do?

Vote Democrat, with the realization that she'll get spanked by the 'thugs in the $election. If by some miracle she wins, figure out the way to make Iraq and Empire really unprofitable for the faction of the Company she really represents. I'd say development of a clean inexpensive biofuel should do it.

Reality is Biased Towards the Real

So the latest main$tream talking point seems to be that Bu$hie knew nothing about bin Laden's plan to crash airplanes into skyscrapers prior to 9/11, and to think otherwise is to embrace unfounded conspiracy theories.

Either that, or to actually be able to read the 9-11 Comission's Final Report...

But Think Progress has summarized the facts on this aspect of things for you:

1) Bush received intel briefing on Aug. 6, 2001 entitled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US.” The briefing specifically warned to “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks,” particularly targeted at New York.

2) CIA Director George Tenet briefing Condoleezza Rice and other top administration officials on July 10, 2001 about a specific urgent and looming threat from al Qaeda.

3) An FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to FBI headquarters on July 10, 2001, which advised of the “possibility of a coordinated effort” by bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools.

David Neiwert at Orcinus covers this in a more detailed fashion.

At the very least, Bu$hie's inaction prior to 9-11 was comparable to his inaction in response to hurricane Katrina. The motivations behind the inaction are a matter of conjecture. Whatever Dear Leader's motivations were, there is no doubt there were and are unscrupulous associates of his that seemed quite ready to take advantage of the chaos to further their own agendas.

Kucinich

Gore Vidal:

...As I pass through the stage door of one auditorium after another, I now hear the ominous name of Darth Vader, as edgy audiences shudder at the horrible direction our political discourse has taken. Ever eager as I am to shed light, I sometimes drop the name of the least publicized applicant to the creaky throne of the West: Dennis Kucinich.

It takes a moment for the name to sink in.

Then genuine applause begins. He is very much a favorite out there in the amber fields of grain, and I work him into the text. A member of the House of Representatives for five terms since 1997, although many of his legislative measures have been too useful and original for our brain-dead media to comprehend. I note his well-wrought articles proposing the impeachment of Vice President Cheney, testing the patriotic nerves of his fellow Democrats, but then the fact of his useful existence often causes distress to those who genuinely hate that democracy he is so eager to extend. "Don't waste your vote," they whine in unison--as if our votes are not quadrennially wasted on those marvelous occasions when they are actually counted and recorded.

Meanwhile, Kucinich is now at least visible in lineups of the Democratic candidates; he tends to be the most eloquent of the lot. So who is he?

Something of a political prodigy: at 31 he was elected mayor of Cleveland. Once he had been installed, in 1978, the city's lordly banks wanted the new mayor to sell off the city's municipally owned electric system, Muny Light, to a private competitor in which (Oh, America!) the banks had a financial interest. When Mayor Kucinich refused to sell, the money lords took their revenge, as they are wont to do: they refused to roll over the city's debt, pushing the city into default.

The ensuing crisis revealed the banks' criminal involvement with the private utility of their choice, CEI, which, had it acquired Muny Light, would have become a monopoly, as five of the six lordly banks had almost 1.8 million shares of CEI stock: this is Enronesque before the fact.

Mayor Kucinich was not re-elected, but his profile was clearly etched on the consciousness of his city; and in due course he returned to the Cleveland City Council before being elected to the Ohio State Senate and then the US Congress.

Kucinich has also written a description of his Dickensian youth, growing up in Cleveland. He has firsthand knowledge of urban poverty in the world's richest nation. Born in 1946 into a Croatian Catholic family, by the time he was 17 he and his family had lived in twenty-one different places, much of which he describes in Dreiserian detail in a just-published memoir.

Kucinich is opposed to the death penalty as well as the USA Patriot Act. In 1998 and 2004 he was a US delegate to the United Nations convention on climate change. At home he has been active in Rust Belt affairs, working to preserve the ninety-
year-old Cleveland steel industry, a task of the sort that will confront the next President should he or she have sufficient interest in these details.

I asked a dedicated liberal his impression of Kucinich; he wondered if Kucinich was too slight to lead a nation of truly fat folk. I pointed out that he has the same physical stature as James Madison, as well as a Madisonian commitment to our 1789 Constitution; he is also farsighted, as demonstrated by his resolute opposition to Bush's cries for ever more funding for the illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More to the point, in October 2002 he opposed the notion of a war then being debated. For those of us at home and in harm's way from disease, he co-wrote HR 676, a bill that would insure all of us within Medicare, just as if we were citizens of a truly civilized nation.

Foreclosure foresight

the farmer has a nice post on how the alarm bells were ringing even in the main$tream media about the subprime charlatans a couple of years ago, while Greenspan and the rest of Bu$hCo were cheerleading it on.

Then, of course, there's Krugman.

I particularly relish this description of the farmer's:

...This woodchuck in the White House isn't a statesman, or a leader, or even a President. He's nothing but a shallow shined up repo-man with a smirk and a sloppy spitter pitch. The entire G.W.Bush&Co operation is nothing more than a well fed puzzle palace inside a Potemkin Village being run by grifters for christ sake. Nothing more than a clan of inbred cheapjack fast talking backdoor preachers and quisling swine.

They need to be run out of town like the rapacious swindlers they are. Before they steal all the goddamned doorknobs and we won't even be able to get into our own house.

Calls

From cectic, with thanks to Pharyngula.

But some are less compelling than others...

What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate

Arrgghh. The stoopid, it burns!

On the op-ed page of The New York Pravda, the key sentence of idiocy:

...The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed...

No, you idiot, the whole system of thought we call modern science continually tests the universe. The universe doesn't change depending on what we think, and it really doesn't matter what we expect. It is what it is.

A rational and intelligible way. Good grief, has the writer ever examined quantum theory? There is nothing rational about a universe that requires string theory to explain it.

Whole branches of mathematics have had to be developed to explain chaos that occurs throughout nature. Of course, the writer never took enough science in college to realize that. No matter, his backdoor appeal to intelligent design pleases the corporate sponsors of The New York Pravda.

This is another case of

Depravity and Dementia

Richard Power gives a good rundown on Depravity in the Village. With links I'm omitting here:

...just think about what it means that Friedman would invoke Cheney as some sort of example of political strength or clarity of strategic thinking.

Such a notion reveals Friedman's depravity, with a chilling finality.

Cheney?

Cheney, the man whose office, according to Patrick Fitzgerald's statement in open court, has "a dark cloud" hanging over it in regard to the betrayal of US secret agent Valerie Plame's identity?

Cheney, the man who cooked the intelligence on Iraq, and is doing so again on Iran?

Cheney, the man whose secret, pre-9/11 energy plans, drawn up with Ken Lay, divvied up the oil fields of Iraq?

Cheney, the man who, according to the sworn 9/11 commission testimony of Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta, sat on his hands as a highjacked plane flew through Beltwayistan's restriced air space? (Was he hoping it was aimed at the Capitol Dome?)

Cheney, the man who threatened Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) with "dire consequences" if he opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq? (Wellstone died in a small plane crash shortly before the 2004 election, which he was certain to win.)

Cheney, the man who, as a member of Congress, voted against Martin Luther King Day?

Cheney, the man who, as a member of Congress, voted against a resolution to free Nelson Mandela from prison?

Cheney, who shot a fellow hunter in the face and then ducked the police for 24 hours?

Tom Friedman says Obama should dial down his "inner Jimmy Carter" and dial up his "inner Dick Cheney"?

Jimmy Carter wanted to get the US off of its desperate dependence on Middle Eastern oil, Jimmy Carter understood that there would be no peace without human rights.

Jimmy Carter understood the 21st Century a quarter of a century before it dawned.

Tom Friedman doesn't even understand it now.

You should read it all if you can, and follow the links if you don't believe it.

McClellan and Tom Friedman aside, Bob Herbert examines a whole different dimension of depravity today:

...I’ve been visiting some of the people who have been most affected by the subprime mortgage debacle. It’s a largely bewildered, frightened group that includes people like Dorothy Levey, a 79-year-old widow who sits alone inside the small house she has lived in for 41 years, afraid to answer the telephone or the door.

She has every reason to be worried. The monthly note on her house in the city of Markham, just outside Chicago, is approximately 100 percent of her meager monthly income. Broke and behind in her payments, Ms. Levey expects a foreclosure notice to show up any day, followed by a visit from “the sheriff, or whoever they send to tell you to get out of your own home.”

While the media coverage has focused on the high rollers who created the subprime frenzy (“If you can breathe, we’ll give you a loan”), the hapless victims have remained in the shadows, condemned to economic ruin.

After faithfully making mortgage payments for decades, Ms. Levey and her husband, Dan, were persuaded to take out a new loan, ostensibly for debt consolidation, in 2002. It was like plunging into quicksand. Dan was seriously ill at the time and he died two years later.

To this day Ms. Levey does not understand what she and her husband of more than half a century had agreed to. The terms might as well have been written in Sanskrit.

But she kept trying to meet her obligation. She exhausted her savings. She lost her car. She stopped buying clothes and cut back on food. But there was no way to keep up with the payments.

“I had to go to the state and tell them I was hungry,” she said.

I heard the same story again and again — decent people enticed, sometimes fraudulently, into loans they never understood and couldn’t afford...

After Countrywide bought our 30 year fixed rate mortgage about 5 years ago we were immediately deluged with offers for amazingly low but "adjustable" rate mortgages. These offers were and are incessant. They have caused a lot of strife in our marriage, since for a few years I was accused of being all kinds of a fool for not taking advantage of them. By my wife among other professional peers.

No more.

But you still see that sort of blind trust in authority, even among people who have no excuse for not knowing better.

You still get their ridicule if you point out the incredible underlying fallacies behind the positions of Hilbama. Or Paul.

You still get the assertion that it's really okay, that some kinds of quicksand are quicker than others, and this must surely be the slow motion variety.

You still get that blind trust when the people who put the shades on you are telling you exactly what you want to hear.

The Better to Write You Tickets With, My Dear

Quoth the Dark Wraith:



Apparently these drones launch off a catapult, and are captured mid flight without needing a runway.

...Oh, good readers, you SO have to read this story out of Houston about police doing a secret test/demonstration of those unmanned military spy drones for use in civilian policing. Not only did the Houston Police Department try to keep the media from finding out about the big shindig, but they surrounded the test areas with cop cars; and when they realized that a news team was filming the whole thing from a helicopter, they even lied through their teeth that the FAA had restricted the flight area. (Knowingly misrepresenting a federal rule is, by the way, not only stupid, it's unlawful; so here we have a police department of a major American city willfully breaking federal law.)

Video here

...Just read the article. By the end, you'll see the Houston police representatives dancing all around, doing everything they can to avoid admitting to what this latest militarization of civilian law enforcement is all about. And once you've finished reading the article, ask yourself which candidates for local, state, and/or national office are promising that they'll stop this whole, Orwellian madness right in its tracks. (PREDICTION: I'll bet you end up saying, "None that I can recall.")

What the gullible Houston police probably didn't realize is that Insitu, Inc., the company that makes the drones, likely regards all the publicity as a plus.

This is the basic problem with all the DARPA-bankrolled projects: even top secret technologies are marketable for the companies that develop them.

And eager to market they are. Here's what they say on their own site:

...Insitu's people and products bring unique capabilities and benefits to our customers:

Experience—Over 60,000 ScanEagle™UAV flight hours in theater since 2004

Service—Our growing team is experienced, seasoned, innovative, and responsive like no other

Endurance—Over 20 hours possible per flight, day & night

Low Cost—Economical operations and systems permit selective expendability

Persistence—Insitu's inertially stabilized camera turret, plus endurance, plus Insitu's ObjectTracker target tracking technology, keep objects of interest in view

Weather—Wide envelope. Reliable operations in winds over 35 knots, through significant precipitation, and beneath clouds

Crosswind—Good. Operates in crosswinds that ground other UAVs, needs no runway

Runway—None. Unprepared terrain or shipboard operations made easy with Insitu's SuperWedge™ Launcher and SkyHook™ Retrieval System

Stealthy—Nearly impossible to hear or see an Insitu UAV even at close range

Modular—Modular design means components are easily replaced in the field

Lean—Small, light weight UAV, compact ground support equipment, no runway, and autonomous operations mean low personnel requirements and very small footprint

Expandable—Avionics bay has available slot for easy integration of new UAV payloads...

Black Friday Working Class Hero

Working Class Hero
by John Lennon

As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and class less and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just follow me
If you want to be a hero well just follow me

50,000 Volt Motivation

Naomi Klein:

The world saw a video last week of Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers using a Taser against a Polish man in the Vancouver International Airport in October. The man, Robert Dziekanski, died soon after the attack. In recent days, more details have come out about him. It turns out that the 40-year-old didn’t just die after being shocked — his life was marked by shock as well.

Dziekanski was a young adult in 1989, when Poland began a grand experiment called “shock therapy” for the nation. The promise was that if the communist country accepted a series of brutal economic measures, the reward would be a “normal European country” like France or Germany. The pain would be short, the reward great.

So Poland’s government eliminated price controls overnight, slashed subsidies, privatized industries. But for young workers such as Dziekanski, “normal” never arrived. Today, roughly 40% of young Polish workers are unemployed. Dziekanski was among them. He had worked as a typesetter and a miner, but for the last few years, he had been unemployed and had had run-ins with the law.

Like so many Poles of his generation, Dziekanski went looking for work in one of those “normal” countries that Poland was supposed to become but never did. Two million Poles have joined this mass exodus during the last three years alone. Dziekanski’s cohorts have gone to work as bartenders in London, doormen in Dublin, plumbers in France. Last month, he chose to follow his mother to British Columbia, Canada, which is in a pre-Olympics construction boom.

“After seven years of waiting, [Dziekanski] arrived to his utopia, Vancouver,” said the Polish consul general, Maciej Krych. “Ten hours later, he was dead.”

Much of the outrage sparked by the video, which was made by another passenger at the airport, has focused on the controversial use of Tasers, already implicated in 17 deaths in Canada and many more in the United States.

But what happened in Vancouver was about more than a weapon. It was also about an increasingly brutal side of the global economy — about the reality that many victims of various forms of economic “shock therapy” face at our borders.

Rapid economic transformations like Poland’s have created enormous wealth — in new investment opportunities; currency trading; in leaner, meaner companies able to comb the globe for the cheapest location to manufacture. But from Mexico to China to Poland, they also have created tens of millions of discarded people, the people who lose their jobs when factories close or lose their land when export zones open.

Understandably, many of these people often choose to move: from countryside to city, from country to country. As Dziekanski appeared to be doing, they go in search of that elusive “normal.”

But there isn’t enough normal to go around, or so we are told. And so, as migrants move, they are often met with other shocks. A treacherous razor fence protecting Spain’s North Africa enclaves, or a Taser gun on the U.S.-Mexican border. Canada, which used to be known around the world for its openness to refugees, is militarizing its borders, with lines between immigrant and terrorist blurring fast.

Dziekanski’s inhuman treatment at the hands of the Canadian police must be seen in this context. The police were called when Dziekanski, lost and disoriented, began shouting in Polish, at one point throwing a chair. Faced with a foreigner like Dziekanski, who spoke no English, why talk when you can shock? It strikes me that the same brutal, short-cut logic guided Poland’s economic transition to capitalism: Why take the gradual route, which required debate and consent, when “shock therapy” promised an instant, if painful, cure?

I realize that I am talking about very different kinds of shocks here, but they do interconnect in a cycle I call “the shock doctrine.” First comes the shock of a national crisis, making countries desperate for any cure and willing to sacrifice democracy in the process. In Poland in 1989, that first shock was the sudden end of communism and the economic meltdown. Then comes the economic shock therapy, the undemocratic process pushed through in the window of crisis that jolts an economy into growth but blasts so many people out of the picture.

Then, in far too many cases, there is the third shock, the one that disciplines and deals with the discarded people: the desperate, the migrants, those driven mad by the system.

Each shock has the potential to kill, some more suddenly than others.

Luckylefty at Common Dreams gives the best analysis:

...IMF/WTO/World Bank = Sugar, Rum, & Slaves. No Middle Class anywhere to be seen. It was the same 3 centuries ago. It is the same now.

Oligarchies always create plantation slave societies. Corporations are always backed by military force. Back then it was the Hudson’s Bay Co. & the British East India Co. backed by the British Navy & the Royal Cumbrians. Now its the Multinationals, the 7th Fleet, & the Screaming Eagles.

It’s the Oligarchy/Plutocracy/Aristocracy - neighbor. They always create plantation slave societies. We can cut around the edges or we can cut out the diseased core.

The Roosevelt Legacy of taxation, corporate regulation, a meaningful minimum wage, support for unions, and a real social safety net - put the Oligarchy on a leash. They were not free to rape pillage and burn our country to the ground...

After 30 years these policies produced by the mid-60’s the greatest distribution of wealth ever seen in the history of our species, and 35% unionization of the private sector.

The end of poverty in this country was in sight. Lifetime stable employment was on the horizon. A house was not a ‘get rich scheme’, it was a place to live and raise your family. And yeah, the richfilth class was nearly moribund. Period . Caput. On their way to the trash heap of history along with the Hapsburgs, the Romanoffs, & the Hohenzollerns.

We had a choice then. We have the same choice now. We can make a place for everyone at the table and reject war and conquest as a way of life - or we get more of what we’ve got right now: Sugar, Rum, & Slaves. Breeds monsters.

Oil, Energy, and Consumers fits the new feudalism about right.

Thanks

I am glad the multiverse is not only stranger than I suppose, but stranger than I can suppose.