In Federal Reserve We Trust -- too much?

David Wessel had a ring side seat on the credit and housing boom and the subsequent financial bust while working as a reporter and economics editor for the Wall Street Journal. He's got a book length account of it all out as In Fed We Trust. The subtitles tell more about the volume: "Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic" and "How the Federal Reserve Became the Fourth Branch of Government."

Like the other journalistic books on the crash that I've been reading (links at end of post), Wessel makes intrinsically drab subjects like balance sheet acrobatics into gripping stories by treating the individuals involved as complex characters, sometimes myopic, sometimes heroic. In this one, the scholarly Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, is The Man, doing "whatever it takes" to save the financial system from its own excesses. All the leading figures, Bernanke, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, and New York Federal Reserve President Tim Geithner come off as hard working, well-meaning public servants. (This is true of most books in this genre; come on writers, there must have been some stupid ones and some grasping ones.)

Sometimes Wessel's metaphors that make the subject approachable verge on too cute. Here's a sample:

The Federal Open Market Commission had a passing resemblance to high school. There were the cool guys, the jocks and the geeks. Bernanke, Don Kohn, Tim Geithner, and Kevin Warsh fell into the first category, the cool ones. The jocks were regional Fed bank presidents determined to show their manhood by talking tough about inflation and economic rectitude... . The geeks included monetary policy scholars who shared Bernanke's view of the world. ... And then there were the wannabes ...

Perhaps I recoil from this style of description because I might stumble into it myself on a bad day. I guess I should again credit Wessel for making these men whose work is so remote from what most of us do a little more human.

But however human they are, something awful happened under their tutelage of the economy. I find it notable that Wessel's language for his overarching subject is "Great Panic" -- not Great Recession or Depression 2.0 as some have suggested. Because his subject is the Fed, Wessel's subjects seem far too oblivious to the fact that a failing Lehman Brothers investment operation mattered a heck of a lot more to the 401k investor who lost a nest egg than to the millionaires who ran the company -- and who are the social counterparts of Wessel's characters. In recent months, the same figures seem to being trying to tell the country that the crisis (a panic?) is over, while for most of us, the worst is actually right now with over 10 percent unemployment and no real vision of how an economy that works poorly for the majority can start humming again.

Wessel knows his picture is missing something. He concludes with this take on the contradiction:

Fed officials and sympathetic academics frame the question reasonably but narrowly: How well did Bernanke and his fellow Musketeers do, given the information and authority they had at the time? To nearly everyone else, outcomes matter, not intentions. It may be said with substantial accuracy, that after some initial hesitation, Ben Bernanke and his team did all they could to defeat the Great Panic. But if the ultimate result is years of painfully slow economic growth and widespread unemployment, they will be judged by many Americans to have failed. Earning an A for effort is not enough.

There's one of those high school metaphors again.

This is a good book, an accessible account of events that most of us figure we can't understand. I'd rank it less enlightening than Gillian Tett's Fools Gold, but easier to read. Right now I'm ripping through Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail, so readers here can expect more commentary on the financial-follies-journalism genre.

Previous posts in this series examine Justin Fox's Myth of the Rational Market, and Liaquat Ahamad's history, Lords of Finance.

Not clear on the concept ...

... this requires reading the fine print at the bottom of the poster. Click on the picture to enlarge. You can get back here by using the back button on your browser.

This remarkable item turned up at scour's weblog among other goodies.

Favorite book of 2009: When conflicting worlds meet

Tamim Ansary's descriptions in Destiny Disrupted of the very early days of Islam when the religion was being revealed by Mohammed and just afterward help me understand what seems very foreign to a member of a pluralistic secular polity such as ours. As the story goes, the Prophet's revelations created an equitable community that approximated the hopes of its members and brought a degree of peace very new among the tribes of the Arabian peninsula. But after his death, local leaders thought they, personally, ought to be able to replace the Prophet as the source of moral authority. Ansary explains:

They claimed they were receiving revelations and had permission to issue divinely authorized laws. These upstarts thought to use the model pioneered by Mohammed to forge sovereign "sacred" communities in competition with the Umma [the Muslim community].

Had Abu Bakr [Mohammed's successor as leader of the Umma] allowed these departures, Islam would surely have gone in a very different direction. It might have evolved into a set of practices and beliefs that people embraced individually.

But Abu Bakr responded to the crisis by declaring succession to be treason. The Prophet had said, "No compulsion in religion," and Abu Bakr did not deny that principle. People were free to accept or reject Islam as they pleased; but once they were in, he asserted, they were in for good.

In response to a political crisis, Abu Bakr established a religious principle that haunts Islam to this day -- the equation of apostasy with treason. Braided into this policy was the theological concept that the singleness of God must be reflected in the indissoluble singleness of the Umma. With this decision, Abu Bakr even more definitively confirmed Islam as a social project and not just a belief system. A Muslim community was not just a kind of community, of which there could be any number, but a particular community, of which there could be only one.

It's worth thinking about the contrast with Western Christianity. For the Jesus movement's first couple of hundred years, it was a blasphemous Jewish cult (on account of denying the Emperor's divinity) that attracted subversive outsiders in the Roman world. When the apostle Paul called the Christian community "one body" in Christ, he was exhorting, not laying down the law because he had no power except persuasion. No Christian leader had state power behind his dictates until the emperor Constantine (306 CE) converted; the early ethos involved individuals turning away (repenting) to form an outlaw community among the Roman empire's many niche groups. Until Constantine and his successors began enforcing credal orthodoxy, probably every bishopric and local group had their own emphases among the traditions.

The era of Christendom (324-1521 CE) did try to mandate a universally authoritative Christian community that enforced peace and justice in addition to providing a path for individual salvation. But the Reformers, beginning with Luther, Zwingli, Calvin -- and abetted by rulers chafing under a declining Papal claim to state authority -- blew the unity of that Christian community to bits. The bits claimed and delved into their particular ways of knowing God in Jesus, but universal Christianity became impossible to imagine (though popes and some bishops still try, anachronistically).

According to Ansary, Muslims not only can imagine a universal community sharing belief and law, but consider the existence of such a community necessary and normative. The Umma community is the embodiment of God's will for humanity.

Modern Westerners simply cannot find mental houseroom for such a conviction. We expect to find our truths individually -- and to maintain whatever social cohesion we value by tolerating the individual beliefs of others. In the realm of religion, we have little room for imposed orthodoxies. In the realm of law, we place our hope in socially negotiated group consensus arrived at more or less democratically. ***Ansary concludes that real differences been the European world and the Muslim world have been so exacerbated by Western domination and contempt that we talk past each other.

One side charges, "You are decadent." The other side retorts, "We are free." These are not opposing contentions; they are nonsequiturs. Each side identifies the other as a character in its own narrative.

... The conflict wracking the modern world is not, I think, best understood as a "clash of civilizations," if that proposition means we're-different-so-we-must-fight-until-there-is-only-one-of-us. It's better understood as the friction generated by two mismatched world histories intersecting. Muslims were a crowd of people going somewhere. Europeans and their offshoots were a crowd of people going somewhere. We the two crowds crossed paths, much bumping and crashing resulted, and the crashing is still going on.

...Islam is not the opposite of Christianity, nor of Judaism. Taken strictly as a system of religious beliefs, it has more areas of agreement than argument... It is, however, programmatically misleading to think of Islam as one item in a class whose other items are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. Not inaccurate, of course: Islam is a religion, like those others, a distinct set of beliefs and practices related to ethics, morals, God, the cosmos, and mortality.

But Islam might just as validly be considered as one item in a class whose other items include communism, parliamentary democracy, fascism, and the like, because Islam is a social project like those others, an idea for how politics and the economy ought to be managed, a complete system of civil and criminal law.

This is a challenging thought within our Western civilization that assumes that our material mastery proves we've got the only way.

Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes was the most interesting book I read during 2009. What's your nominee for that position from your reading?

(Photo is of Ansary speaking at a peace vigil in San Francisco. This is the third of three consecutive posts about this fascinating book.)

Favorite book of 2009: Crusaders impinge (a little); Mongols much more

Ruins of Crusader castle, Byblos, modern Lebanon

For the last ten years of her life, my mother had sitting on her reading table a little book entitled The Crusades through Arab Eyes. I don't know if she ever read it, though she might have. It simply sat there for years; I too thought I might get around to it, but I didn't. When I cleaned out her place, I let it go along with hundreds of other books. I somewhat regret that now.

In Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary explains just what a minor episode the Crusades were for contemporaries in the Middle World who didn't have the misfortune to encounter the Crusaders. After all, the Mediterranean coast was just the far western fringe, a troubled frontier area. He reports on contemporary accounts.

No one seemed to cast the wars as an epic struggle between Islam and Christendom -- that was the story line the Crusaders saw. Instead of a clash between two civilizations, Muslims saw simply a calamity falling upon ... civilization [itself]. For one thing, when they looked at the Franj [Franks, modern French], they saw no evidence of civilization. An Arab prince named Usamah ibn Munqidh described the Franks as being like 'beasts, superior in courage and fighting ardor, but nothing else ..."

...In areas under attack, Muslims did, of course, feel threatened by the Franj, even horrified by them [Crusaders really did boil and eat captives!], but they didn't see in these attacks any intellectual challenge to their ideas and beliefs. ...

What's more, the Crusades stimulated no particular curiosity in the Muslim world about Western Europe ...the Crusades brought virtually no European cultural viruses into the Islamic world.

From the point of view of the Middle World, the real horror of the period was the Mongol invasion from the Central Asian plains. Military chieftains known in the West as Genghis Kahn and Tamerlane swept through the community's heartland, butchering and destroying rather than holding and exploiting. Ansary dates the development of a strain of Islam that demands aggressive purity from the religion's adherents and endorses jihad against other Muslims with whom one has doctrinal disagreements to the Mongol invasion crisis. Religious scholars of that time, trying to explain how barbarians could conquer the land of the faithful even if only briefly, were the intellectual ancestors of today's Saudi Wahabism and al Qaeda terrorists.

Then as now, an aggressive fundamentalism developed as a response to fear of annihilation. That's worth contemplating in all contemporary worlds -- European, Middle and Asian -- in these times of loose nukes, rapid cultural commodification, and impending climate catastrophe. Can we buck that human response to kill one another when facing real, legitimate fears?

This is the second of three consecutive posts about my favorite read of 2009.

Favorite book of 2009: A glimpse into the Middle World

The enduring lesson I'll take from Afghan-San Franciscan Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes is his geographical terminology. What should we call the region where Islam was born and still rules, the region that stretches from modern Afghanistan to the Mediterranean sea?

People of European origin usually refer vaguely to "the Middle East," a locution that assumes we are looking east from Europe -- and does not usually apply to the further eastern parts of an area that nonetheless forms a distinct historical-cultural unit. Ansary names the Euro-Asian Islamic world "the Middle World," referring to the lands located between European, Chinese, and much of Indian civilization.

From anywhere near the Mediterranean coast, it was easier to get to some other place near the Mediterranean coast than to Persepolis or the Indus River. Similarly, caravans on the overland routes crisscrossing the Middle World in ancient times could strike off in any direction at any intersection -- there were many such intersections ...Gossip, stories, jokes, rumors, historical impressions, religious mythologies, products, and other detritus of culture flow along with traders, travelers and conquerors. Trade and travel routes thus function like capillaries, carrying civilizatonal blood. Societies permeated by a network of such capillaries are apt to become characters in one another's narratives, even if they disagree about who the good guys and the bad guys are.

Thus it was that the Mediterranean and Middle worlds developed somewhat different narratives of world history. People living around the Mediterranean had good reason to think of themselves at the center of human history, but people living in the Middle World had equally good reason to think they were situated at the heart of it all.

It is the history of civilization from a Middle World stance that Ansary shares in this book.

One more passage from Ansary's account of pre-Islamic times gives you the flavor of his delicate tweaking of conventional sensibilities:

In the late days of the empire [around 490 BCE], the Persians broke into the Mediterranean world and made a brief, big splash in Western world history.

Persian emperor Darius sailed west to punish the Greeks. I say "punish," not "invade" or "conquer," because from the Persian point of view the so-called Persian Wars were not some seminal clash between two civilizations. The Persians saw the Greeks as the the primitive inhabitants of some small cities on the far western edges of the civilized world, cities that implicitly belonged to the Persians, even though they were too far away to rule directly. Emperor Darius wanted the Greeks merely to confirm that they were his subjects by sending him a jar of water and a box of soil in symbolic tribute. The Greeks refused.

Darius collected an army to go teach the Greeks a lesson they would never forget, but the very size of his army was as much a liability as an asset: How did you direct so many men at such a distance? How do you keep them supplied? Darius had ignored the first principle of military strategy: never fight a land war in Europe. ...

***Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes is simply my favorite of all the books I've read this year. I'll continue discussing it in two further, consecutive, posts.

Off for now

As of noon today, I'll be completely off the grid, away from email, phones and all the paraphernalia of my daily life. For the next two weeks, we are off to trek in Patagonia amid more light, mountains, fjords, maybe some of the guanacos pictured above, and even perhaps some sun. I'm sure there will be internet cafes, but I'll be staying away.

While we are gone, the Democrats will or will not pass their convoluted health care reform out of the Senate. U.S. spooks will or will not try to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar in the Pakistani city of Quetta (a place the size of San Francisco) as they are threatening. The Copenhagen conference will or will not make progress toward averting catastrophic, anthropogenic climate change. And I'll blog about those things when I get back.

And I've already posted for all the days I'll be away. Never fear, there'll be content here. (Maybe I'm nuts!)

Meanwhile, my partner and I are celebrating our 30th anniversary together and the birth of the child whose meaning is Love.

Backson, in the immortal phrase from Winnie the Pooh.

General announces Afghanistan war is unnecessary

Troops in Kandahar City, Afghanistan, Photo by Pierre Gazzola (CC)

KABUL -- The full complement of American forces deploying to Afghanistan under President Obama’s new strategy will not arrive until November, a top commander here said.

The new, more gradual timeline means it will take longer for Mr. Obama’s surge of forces to arrive, thus potentially blunting their impact in the surge’s initial phases and leading to a slower drawdown of forces after July 2011. It comes as the military confronts the realities of deploying such a large force into a landlocked country with little in the way of infrastructure.

Originally, the Obama administration had hoped to accelerate the deployment of the 30,000 additional forces in its get-in-and-get-out approach. The idea was to deploy new forces quickly and then begin a gradual withdrawal in July 2011. Senior administration officials said Dec. 1, the day Obama announced his new strategy, that it would take six months for all 30,000 troops to arrive.

Christian Science Monitor,
December 14,2009

Plueezze -- don't ask me to believe that this little imperial adventure is vital to national security but you can't move 30,000 guys there in a year! I mean if that place is so threatening to our national survival, can't you do a little better than that?

U.S. airlines move 2.3 MILLION people over the Thanksgiving weekend. Now flying people to Afghanistan to kill people is a little further and a little more complicated, but we pay for the largest and most expensive military in the world. It spends $1 million a year for each soldier it puts in Afghanistan. For that kind of money you could rent a fleet of corporate jets and get 30,000 troops over there in a couple of months.

Obviously, Afghanistan is a war of choice, a full employment project for the military officer corps and their corporate cronies getting fat on the contracting dole. Heaven help the grunts who have to get killed to keep it going. And obviously military brass intend to delay any withdrawal date as long as possible to keep their gravy train going.

Can't say it won't work if it has not been tried ...

and certainly we ALL need solutions.

H/t Cogitamus. Much more here.

Health care reform shorts: Who is naughty? Who is nice?

Clergy lead procession in San Francisco calling for health care reform.

Over at Time Goes By, this morning Ronni Bennett pointed her community of elderbloggers to Atul Gawande's current New Yorker article on the cost control experimentation embedded in the health care reform bill. It's a very hopeful take on possibilities we might have missed. Do take a look.

What struck me immediately was that Gawande assumes that most physicians (and by extension others in the health professions)

want to provide good care ..."

I believe this is true. Oh, there are some specialists -- cosmetic surgeons come to mind -- who just want to take advantage of people's desperation for their own enrichment. But before they drowned in school debts, went through the professional hazing that is the residency system, and learned to think they deserved an inflated lifestyle, most doctors had in mind that they were going to do well by human beings.

The health care debate is about who lives and who dies and more and more doctors are among the good guys. You can find some of them at Physicians for a National Health Program.***So who's naughty? Today, it looks like Senator Joe Lieberman. He doesn't care who dies so he can feel important. Matt Yglesias describes the situation succinctly:

The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.

The next few months and years will test whether the institutions of this country can overcome the sociopaths who inhabit choke points on progress and maybe even survival.

Can't we stop it with the phone books?

Yesterday we hunkered down inside against the driving rain, glad to be warm and dry. Eventually I had to pick up some groceries -- and was disgusted to nearly stumble over this:


I don't even remember the last time I used a phone book. But once a year, one or two or sometimes three of these things appear on our doorstep. This morning, between episodes of drizzle, I jogged through the Mission, passing hundreds of yellow and orange lumps.

Okay, I know that some people make a living assembling, printing and distributing these vast hunks of newsprint. And perhaps a very few people still use them. But can't we make them an opt-in item rather than unwelcome litter?

Apparently a couple of state legislators have been trying, at least in regard the White Pages. Their proposed law prompted the San Francisco Chronicle to collect the numbers on the problem:

• 147 million directories distributed each year in the United States.

• 5 million trees destroyed.

• $17 million in recycling costs.

• 16 percent of White Pages recycled each year.

• 660,000 tons in the waste stream.

One action we can all take is to sign the Ban the Phone Book petition which calls for an all opt-in distribution system for this instant recycling.

Why Copenhagen matters

In December of 2007, NASA's James Hansen presented his conclusions. According to climate activist Bill McKibben, Hansen has given a simple measure of what is happening to the planet.

...above 350 [ppm of atmospheric carbon] you couldn't have a planet "similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted."

It's as if we suddenly discovered what normal body temperature was, so we'd be able to tell when we were running a fever. In that sense, it came as a great relief.

But in every other sense, it was a pretty devastating number. For one thing, we're already past it, at 390 ppm and rising two ppm annually--that's why the Arctic is melting. For another thing, it means the work nations and individuals must do to reduce their carbon footprints is much larger, and must happen much more swiftly, than we'd believed...

Are Hansen and McKibben right? Most of us aren't equipped to know. Those of us not on coal company payrolls or angrily dismissive of "smarty pants" opinion have to believe the scientific consensus that human-caused activity is driving global warming.

Are we, collectively, going to do anything about it? It feels insane to even be asking that question.

Looking for immortality?

Your prayers have been answered. Just get on as many charity mailing lists as you can and you can count on living as long as there is snail mail.

My mother died over 10 years ago, but every year in "the season of giving" she gets a deluge of what she called "the begging letters." There seems no end of it. Occasionally my father gets one. He died in 1991.

President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize oration

Listening to Obama, the gentlemen pictured above would have had a right to scream "Liar, liar, pants on fire!" at this line:

"America has never fought a war against a democracy ..."

No, the U.S. empire doesn't go to war with democracies. But if it doesn't like the leaders the people put in office, it just gets rid of them.

Clockwise, from the upper left:

• Mohammad Mosaddeq: was elected to Iran's parliament in 1944 and became Prime Minister in 1951. His platform was expanding democracy and using Iran's oil resources for the benefit of the people. To achieve the later, he nationalized oil facilities that have been held by British companies. He was overthrown by a CIA-organized coup in 1953. Afterwards Iran was under the autocratic rule of the Shah, a brutal U.S, puppet king, until he was ousted by the also-brutal Islamic revolution that remains in power today.

• Jacobo Arbenz: Was elected president of Guatemala in 1951 in the first peaceful transfer of power in the country's history. He followed his predecessor by opening up voting rights and breaking up underutilized foreign-owned plantations to give land to landless peasants. The U.S.-company United Fruit didn't like that policy. The U.S. government falsely labeled Arbenz a Communist and overthrew him in a CIA coup in 1954.

• Salvador Allende: He was elected president of Chile in 1970 culminating a long socialist/reformist political career. U.S. mining companies and other corporations considered Allende a "communist" who would interfere with their uncontrolled profits. The Nixon administration in the U.S. authorized the CIA to destabilize Chile, at that time Latin America's proudest democracy. U.S.-supported army offices rose up against the civilian government on September 11, 1973. Allende died during the coup, possibly murdered; Chile was ruled by a military dictatorship for the next eight years, not fully returning to democracy until the 1990s.

• Manuel Zelaya: served as elected President of Honduras from January 27, 2006 to June 28, 2009 when he was removed by the military and less populist politicians were installed. The United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the European Union condemned the coup. The Obama administration, however, was lukewarm in its opposition. The rest of world continues not recognize November 29 elections held by the coup regime, while the U.S. acts content with the overthrow of constitutional government in Honduras.

Lsten up President Obama: Liar, liar, pants on fire indeed!

Friday critter blogging

Sometimes maintaining the peaceable kingdom is a stretch.

International Human Rights Day in the Mission District

Women from the organization Mujeres Unidas y Activas gathered to speak up for themselves. They may be shivering -- in was a dank 45 F -- but they were determined and cheerful, even if English spelling is not their thing.

The Human Rights Day honors the United Nations General Assembly's adoption and proclamation, on 10 December 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now as ever we need reminders.

Entitlement commission neutered

On a day when Markos Moulitos, proprietor of Daily Kos and loyal Democrat, calls the emerging health bill "a turd of a 'reform' package," here's some good news for a change. A couple of Senators, Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Republican Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, have been fronting for the idea of an "entitlement" commission to "reduce the deficit." This is not going to happen -- at least for now.

The idea is the brain child of Wall Street robber baron Peter G. Peterson; he figures too much taxpayer money is going into the general welfare functions of government like Social Security and Medicare. He wants to cut those programs to "reduce the deficit" -- to pay for endless non-essential wars and military outposts and for the refusal of rich people to pay taxes.

That would be hard for politicians to do directly -- if people could see what their elected officials were doing, they not only would throw the bums out, they might also pelt them with eggs and tomatoes. So the idea is appoint an commission to recommend cutting safety net programs to pay bondholders and make the recommendations something Congress would have to vote on without amendments or filibusters. We can't have health care by majority vote -- oh no, that would violate sacred traditions of the Senate. But we can make the old folks eat cat food by majority vote; that would be wise solons at their work.

For awhile, it looked like Conrad and Gregg were making some headway, but today there are reports here and here, that the terrible twosome have built such a ridiculous contraption as to render it harmless for the moment. Apparently their commission proposal would require super majorities in both the House and Senate to enact anything it comes up with -- not likely.

Still, this is a threat that deserves vigilance. Bad ideas that enable politicians to do bad things without public notice have a way of recurring. Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By has an excellent overview of the issues with many links to relevant articles.

But isn't it true that we have to do something to reduce the federal deficit? Well, maybe in the long term. In the short term as the President is now saying loudly, the best way to reduce federal borrowing is to get the economy moving again so people can work and pay taxes. But also, in the longer term, there are lots of good ideas for reducing the deficit. Jeffrey Frankels from the Kennedy School at Harvard has made ten suggestions. Underlying the best ones are the two principles I've been enumerating over the last few days:

• We need to tax people more who have more money than they need.

• We need to stop paying for a bloated military, especially for non-essential wars and bases in other peoples' countries.

That's all too "radical" for anyone in Congress, but those are principles that could begin to restore community in this country.

Health care reform shorts: well duh!!

Hey, Democrats in Washington finally seem to be noticing the obvious:

[Democratic political operative James] Boyce said the Democrats could very well lose [their] majority next year, and if that happens "none of the reform would happen anyway, and we would have had this whole debate for nothing."

"2013 is an incredibly long time given the seriousness of this situation and the need to reform the health care industry," Boyce said. "If the Democrats aren't even willing to draw a line in the sand and make this happen while they were in charge, they should be humiliated and they would deserve to lose."

TPM

It didn't take much genius to get to that. People elected these people to make health care available and affordable. If all they did was dick around most of the year and pass something from which no one feels any benefit, they deserve to lose big simply for being incompetent idiots.

Steny Hoyer, the Party of No and us

Ezra Klein reports a speech by House Majority Leader Congressman Steny Hoyer (he's Nancy Pelosi's wily assistant and competitor for influence) about the inability of Congress to move on much of anything, mostly because the Republicans are committed to being the Party of No.

Note that his list of problems Congress can't move on suffers from the same myopia I ranted against in the last post on health care reform and the dangerous deficit. Hoyer worries about

...challenges like reforming our massive entitlement programs, controlling the growth of health care spending, and responding to climate change -- issues that are fraught with political risk and so easy to demagogue that it is almost impossible for one party to take them on alone. Those challenges are dangerously likely to stay untouched as long as at least one party is willing to be a ‘Party of No.’

Yes, it is a problem that Republicans refuse at present (and possibly forever as they recede into history as a miserable residue of white people who can't adapt to social reality) to try to solve the country's problems.

But refusing to put the real avenues toward solutions out in the light is deception by misdirection -- as much an impediment to democracy as Republican demagoguery. Insofar as Hoyer is talking about costs to the government, the problems are on the "supply side." The money exists for a safety net (the dread "entitlements") and health care, if the country can be brought to recognize a couple of simple truths about where to get it.

As I argued above, solutions begin with 1) raising taxes on people who have more than they need and 2) cutting the bloated military starting with non-essential wars. When those measures aren't part of the discussion, all we're hearing is a politician shuffling the deck before fleecing the gullible some more.***Paul Waldman makes a similar argument in an American Prospect article entitled The Spending Wars. A sample:

Wars just need to be fought; the defense budget just needs to keep growing; and we don't really care what it costs. The idea that we might ask each other to pay for war through our taxes is so ridiculous as to barely merit discussion. Domestic initiatives meant to improve Americans' lives, on the other hand, are deeply offensive to any notion of responsibility unless every penny is paid for in advance (and maybe not even then).

It wasn't always this way. ...

Just go read it.

Why we need the Copenhagen conference to succeed

This delightful experimenter [2:20] illustrates how human-generated increases in carbon and other greenhouse gases are heating up the planet. Heating up the planet means climate will change. A dependable climate -- predictable weather and atmosphere -- is the set of conditions our species, and every other, depends upon to feed ourselves, shelter ourselves and keep breathing. Muck around with it, and there is bound to be trouble.

Simple enough? Can world political leaders begin to control the human component of climate stability in the meeting at Copenhagen? Our offspring will curse us if current generations fail at this.

Health care reform shorts:Deficits matter more than people?

It has been hard to understand why, having set the health care reform train in motion, the President and administration generally have seemed unwilling to dig in and push to get a reform that people will appreciate. After all, if you take actions that presumably will change how people get their doctoring -- something folks get exercised about since for individuals this can be life or death -- you'd think you'd want to make darn sure most people liked the result. That seems an elementary political calculation. But the administration has been acting as if anything that passes that is labeled "Health Care Reform" will do the trick with the voters.

On Monday, Ezra Klein shared what seems to be the explanation for the White House's passivity.

Generally, Democrats want to reform the health-care system because they want to cut the number of uninsured. The Obama administration's commitment to health-care reform stems from their belief that it's the first step towards cutting long-term deficits.

That is, their eye is on the ball, but it isn't the ball that will provide affordable care to most people. They want reform in order to cut the federal deficit.

Washingtonians are always getting fixated on the deficit, the accumulated amount the government spends that exceeds what it takes in from taxes. And the deficit is huge -- $1.4 trillion dollars, whatever that means. I'm not going to pretend that a number that big actually means anything to me. The government gets the money that it spends but doesn't have on hand by borrowing it through issuing bonds; this costs money in the form of interest paid to the people/countries that buy the bonds.

All this sounds scary, but it shouldn't. Compared to the overall size of the U.S. economy, those numbers aren't so large. And their scale is not unprecedented as this chart shows.


But the real reason that deficit concerns shouldn't be constraining what sort of health care reform we're allowed to have is that the deficit would be easy to fix if the country stopped operating on one or both of two nonsensical premises we are trapping ourselves in. There are obvious solutions that break through false constraints we pretend limit our options.

• We could raise more taxes from people who have more than they need. We used to. In the Eisenhower era, all these Wall Street rip-off artists who've been robbing us blind would have been taxed at a 91 percent rate. In 1986, they would have paid 50 percent of income. But thanks to the best Congresses and Presidents that their money could buy, nowadays they pay only 35 percent of their income for the common good. They could pay more -- really, does anyone need more than $250,000 a year? I doubt it.
  

• We could cut our bloated military budget. In 2009, what with two wars of dubious use to us, some 900 bases around the world, nearly 1.5 million troops, dozens of weapons systems in use or development, and the management structure to keep track of all this, the military sucked up somewhere between $900 billion and $1.1 trillion. Or at least that's more or less what they tell us -- since a lot of secrecy prevails, actual costs may be more, much more. Expenditures on our war apparatus are something like six or seven times those of the country with the next largest military (China). If we really wanted to pay down the federal deficit, we could probably cut half of this without noticeable loss of security. After all, the last set of folks who actually injured a large number of people in this country did the deed with box cutters and scheduled airline flights. This war budget is "patriotic" waste that lines the pockets of "defense" industries and the politicians they buy -- but keeps us from attending to the actual needs of the people.

But no, the federal deficit constrains action on health care for all. This is kind of sickening to contemplate, actually. Everything for greed and war; pennies for sick people. That's not an attractive picture, but it is the country and apparently the administration we have today.

For my Episcopalian friends ...

This afternoon I had a truly traumatic experience. Because I have terrible teeth, I go to the dentist frequently. Fortunately, I have a wonderful, friendly dentist, so the experience is not quite as awful as it might be.

My dentist has a flat screen TV system that looms over you as she drills, scrapes and bloodies your mouth. When she first got it, it was turned to cable news, usually Fox. But she has taken pity on her patients and acquired a set of Discovery Channel environmental videos. Now, blanking out in the chair involves scenery and animals.

This afternoon was going fine -- I was even slightly distracted by scenes of lions on the Tanzanian plain. And then, and then, something awful came on screen, a familiar pair of bushy, pointed eyebrows.


Can't we please escape from this burdensome Archbishop? Apparently not.

The film is Planet Earth: The Future, Environment & Conservation. I'm sure the good Archbishop of Canterbury had meaningful things to say, but right now I really didn't want to see his familiar mug.

(If any of my non-Episcopalian friends want to figure out what this is about, I recommend Sapphic Suffragan Shutdown.)

U.S. isn't going anywhere; Welcome to President McCain's 100 year war!

Just in case anyone was confused about what Obama meant in his Afghanistan speech, assorted poobahs went on TV today to to set the citizenry straight; their message amounted to: "don't go taking the President at his word about that 2011 withdrawal date; it's just talk."

The Obama administration sent a forceful public message Sunday that American military forces could remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that President Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.

In a flurry of coordinated television interviews, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan.

New York Times, December 6, 2009

Wouldn't want mere citizens to think the generals' excellent Afghan adventure might end anytime soon -- or perhaps ever.

If we're stuck with this quagmire for the next couple of decades, we better get used to what it costs. Here's a summary from Travis Sharp of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

In 2010 alone, U.S. military spending on Afghanistan will equal nearly one-half of total spending on the war since 2001.

The United States will spend 92 percent more on military operations in Afghanistan during 2010 than it did during 2009.

In 2010, the troop increase in Afghanistan will cost each individual American taxpayer $195 dollars. (IRS)

In 2010, the troop increase in Afghanistan will cost $2.5 billion per month, $82 million per day, $3.4 million per hour, $57,000 per minute, and $951 per second.

In the time it takes you to read this post, the troop increase in Afghanistan will have cost $85,500.

The figure for total U.S. current military spending in 2010 is around $700 billion. Remind you of anything? -- oh yeah, it is roughly the size of the stimulus package that Congress grudgingly passed in January, the only thing that is keeping nearly 650,000 people in jobs who would otherwise be looking for non-existent work. (USAToday, 11/18/2009)

And how about that "expensive" health care reform we're supposed to be so worried about? It is projected to cost $900 billion over 10 years (and to be fully funded by savings achieved by its provisions.) With inflation, over the same ten years, the military budget will cost something like ten times the amount we might have to spend on health care - and those military costs will have to come directly out of our pockets in taxes.

Something is wrong here. I certainly didn't hear the President articulate any reason to keep throwing the wealth created by our labor down a rat hole for the rest of our lives, yet apparently that that is what our poobahs project. There have to be cheaper ways to work for security -- perhaps by removing the occupying troops that serve as provocations for terrorism.

We can't afford our Cadillac military establishment or its endless brushfire wars.

A jaunt through the hills

These feeding deer didn't bother to run away as I approached through the late afternoon shadow near Rodeo Beach.


These crows didn't see any reason to fly away from a lumbering human either.


I wasn't expecting to find evidence of the stimulus on the trail, but I'm grateful for it anywhere it turns up. The boggy patches I've been dodging around for five years had been filled in a little further up this dirt road. Good. Guess they needed better conditions to get in their tree trimming equipment.


Aside from a few hikers and the "recovery" workers, here's what probably benefits most from the reduced fire danger in cleared parts of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This new house with a sod roof on the park boundary looks out across a magnificent vista of public land.

The incredible shrinking health care reform

According to Brian Beutler, Democratic Senators for and against the public option met last night.

"It was a good meeting, we're making progress," [Iowa Senator Tom] Harkin said. "There's two sides and there's a middle and that's where we're going to wind up."

It's very hard to feel these people are worth their keep.

For most of us, health care reform is about whether we'll be able to go to the doctor without spending our life savings, if any. For these guys, it's about kicking the can down the road until it is invisible. They make me sick, all of them.

It's NOT such a wonderful life!

Apparently the Capra movie is not under copyright. That's good. George Bailey is a national treasure; Mr. Potter was not as slick as contemporary Wall Street moguls, but his ethics would have fit right in.

Gotta keep an eye on Congress. The President may be in hock to Wall Street, but Congresscritters sometimes feel the heat.

However the system itself is stymied. Take a look at this explanation from Jeff Faux, founder of the Economic Policy Institute. He laments that we live under

a system of governance that for the last three decades has been incapable of dealing with the future because its most important financiers are still profiting from the present.

The whole article is a must read to understand where we've gotten to -- and worse, where we are probably going. We ain't seen nothing yet.

Friday cat blogging

It's been a week of hard topics. Let me introduce someone who doesn't give a bird's tail feather about any of them.



Billie only wants lots of cat food and to be admired. If you are cautious, you can scratch his belly, though your hand might be taken for a toy and treated as a pin cushion. I get to visit Billie many Sundays in the fall because his people watch football on TV and invite their friends. Often Billie comes in to receive homage from the guests.

Muslim civil rights report issued

Zahra Billoo, program and outreach director of CAIR-San Francisco Bay Area introducing CAIR's new report: "The Status of Muslim Civil Rights: 2009."

Thursday the national Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a study of complaints it has received of discrimination, anti-Muslim violence and harassment over the last year. In 2008, CAIR recorded 2778 complaints, a 3 percent increase over the previous year. The highest number came from California, Illinois, New York, Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Texas, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Eighteen percent of incidents occurred in California of which over 200 were in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Zahra Billoo has only worked in the Santa Clara-based CAIR-SFBA office for a few months. But she has noticed a pattern in her work. Many calls to her office concern problems Muslims experience in workplaces about negotiating time off for Friday prayers or wearing head coverings or beards. Muslim kids have reported their teachers in the schools saying insulting things about their faith.

But an additional category of apparent discrimination happens all too often. F.B.I. agents have been turning up at the doors of families in Muslim communities, without warning or warrants, and asking to come in and just talk. Since there can be dangerous legal consequences for immigrants and others from what seem like simple conversations, part of her work has been finding lawyers to advise these families and perhaps be present if they do talk with the F.B.I. People who want lawyers, or who don't want to talk with law enforcement at all, are within their rights, but people often don't know they have such rights.

The printed report's recommendations speak to this situation:

Law enforcement authorities have every right to follow up on legitimate leads in any investigation, but a "round up the usual suspects" approach will only serve to intimidate those whose cooperation is sought.

In a community subjected to much suspicion and hostility in the last few years, it is not surprising that many interactions with authorities feel like "religious profiling" unless prior trust has been established.

According to the national organization's press release:

...the report also offers recommendations for action by the Obama administration, Congress and American Muslim institutions.

The Obama administration is asked to 1) review and revise guidelines issued by then Attorney General Mukasey in late 2008 that allow racial and religious profiling, 2) to reduce the size of the watch lists, and 3) to implement effective means by which travelers who believe they have been profiled may seek redress. President Obama is also asked to visit an American mosque.

CAIR is recommending that Congress pass the End Racial Profiling Act (ERPA) and the Fair, Accurate, Secure, and Timely Redress Act of 2009 (FAST Redress Act of 2009), and not offer a 'legitimizing platform" to anti-Muslim bigots.

The full report can be downloaded as a pdf from CAIR.

Where's the hope?

An acquaintance works for the Salvation Army in the Tenderloin, San Francisco's densely packed skid-row-cum-immigrant-tenement-housing-cum-drug-market and human dumping ground, where culture and life struggle against urban neglect. At this season, she is registering families to receive toys for their kids at Christmas.

This is San Francisco -- they are NOT questioning the immigration status of the families, as has been charged about the charity in Houston.

But she reports a huge change among the African-American folks she interacts with (she's Black herself.)

Last year they'd come in. Whatever it was about, the talk would always go round to Obama. They were still on the streets, but Obama was in. Obama meant things would get fixed.

Now it's so different. I think they are in denial. Or afraid they'll feel ashamed for their guy.

The programs get cut and cut. And they never mention Obama anymore, just never.

No wonder Democrats are beginning to wonder where their voters went. There are hurts out there that go far deeper than a smaller disability check or an over-crowded food pantry. And those hurts fester.***UPDATE: Five Thirty Eight highlights a poll that suggests this anecdote may illustrate a widespread reality.

The racial demographics, however, are perhaps even more striking. Whereas 68 percent of white voters told Research 2000 they were definitely or probably planning to vote in 2010, just 33 percent of black voters did.

Although whites have almost always turned out at greater rates than blacks, the racial gap has never been nearly that large, and indeed was at its smallest-ever levels in 2008 with Barack Obama on the ballot.

That's a lot of pain.

A president chooses more war; people yearn for peace

Sadly, our brilliant President has embraced the oh-so-human fantasy that war, once unleashed and escalated, can be controlled. What we've seen over the last few months of "consultations," culminating in the speech at West Point, is war's evil dynamism running away with well-intentioned people. The Bush-Cheney regime grabbed the bait Bin Laden set for them in 2001: they responded to outrageous provocation not by enlisting the peoples of the world to use the force of law against terrorism, but with the blunt instrument of invading and occupying other people's countries. Horror ensued and no one is safer. Much of the world can not see any justice in U.S. wars. Now a successor President finds no way out of the dead end journey of hatred the last administration left him with.

Code Pink in San Francisco marked this sad moment with a press conference at the Federal Building on Tuesday that brought together some of the people who know better.


San Francisco Supervisor John Avalos talked about his seven year old daughter. The Afghanistan war has been underway since before she was born. Will she ever know peace? He fears President Obama has lost his path.


Eddie Falcon served two tours of military duty in Iraq and two in Afghanistan. He fights flashbacks. "This is about OUR humanity."


Samina Sundas founded American Muslim Voice after 9/11 to work for peace and understanding between all of us in this country. She has recently visited in Pakistan where she has many relatives. People are frightened, of terrorist bombings, but also of U.S. drone attacks that kill many from the sky. She described Obama's Afghan war as a "shortcut that will crush other countries." She fears that war and more war prosecuted by this inspiring President will "destroy the hopes and dreams of people around the world."

I fear that too.

In the form of commentary on Psalm 137, Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes about the sadness of war on a Nation magazine blog:

I believe we have already destroyed too much of ourselves and of our so called enemies. I mourn this decision to feed the dogs of war and to bash the heads of babies against the rocks.

***Hundreds of events in response the Afghanistan escalation are planned over the next few days. Check these sites:

United for Peace and Justice (national)
Code Pink (national)

Empire assimilates Obama

What's hard about watching Obama cave in to the imperial military project in Afghanistan is that he has given ample evidence that he's smart enough to know better. Our previous ruler, you could never be sure: maybe he was just excited by flight suits and believed the nonsense Dick fed him.

But this one -- you know he knows that Afghanistan is hopeless. The local clans don't have the military capacity to throw us out. But unless we are prepared to make Afghanistan the 51st state, they can pick off our forces for a long time, keep the place ungovernable, and wait the latest invaders (us) out.

The last few months have provided an endless stream of evidence that the Karzai "government" is a corrupt, illegitimate sham. As Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed out last week, "we don’t have a connection to a reliable partner..." (Wonder if she'll backtrack out of party loyalty or represent her overwhelmingly antiwar constituents for once?)

For goodness sake, Pakistan -- a real country with a real army on the ground and support from the vast majority of its citizens -- can't control the parts of its own territory that are much like Afghanistan. Thinking that throwing more of our troops and some contractors and some reluctant Europeans into the mix is going to change things is delusional. And you know Obama is smart enough to know this.

The best description of the "consultations" Obama has been conducting about Afghanistan for months now came from Rory Stewart, a Brit who is a professor of human rights at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Working for the British Foreign Service, he served as governor of a province in occupied Iraq and also walked across Afghanistan in 2002. He describes the experience of "being consulted."

They listen politely, but in the end, of course, basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: it's as though they come to you and they say, "We're planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?" And we say, "Don't drive your car off the cliff." And they say, "No, no, no. That decision's already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?" And you say, "Why by all means wear a seatbelt." And they say, "Okay, we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart," et cetera.

Unhappily, the realities of the Afghanistan situation -- and having a President who is capable of understanding them -- are having next to no impact on the inertial forces of empire. Once involved, our elites believe the U.S. can and must prevail. Any Democrat must prove he's not a wimp. Upholding the myth of U.S. capacity to shape the world to our elites' liking must outweigh over any realistic assessment of national interest. The military budget must never be reduced. Most countries do better by trying to get along with others, but that's not for U.S.

We'll get some pretty words. Maybe the long suffering women of Afghanistan will be dragged out again as a pretext of occupation.

We can count on Obama to thump his chest and threaten Al-Qaeda. He's shown that he knows that making peace with the Islamic world would undermine these guys more than any number of brigades. But that wouldn't satisfy the drive to domination; empire wins.

Regardless of what cover Obama tries to give himself in the way of "off ramps" and "timetables" and "metrics," the reality remains simple: the way out of Afghanistan begins with not going further in. Every escalation, every new tactical innovation, every hopeful development scheme our military comes up with will only lead this country further in. The way out requires turning back. It usually does when you've gone down a wrong path.

Since apparently we don't have a President who will get us out, once again the people will have to take the lead in opposition to a ruler who chooses empire over us. Oh yes, the U.S. will leave Afghanistan -- that's only a matter of time and national bankruptcy. The people's job (and interest) is to make withdrawal happen sooner rather than later.