Maybe these guys prop us up because, dumb and brawny as we are, the US is the hired cop, the tough but not too dangerous guy who will make the world safe for business even if you have to fool him into it by not correcting him when he says he is making it safe for democracy. It is an inversion of the relationship we used to have with minor satellite nations: proxyhood. We use to ship money and arms and the occasional adviser to places like Afghanistan and Israel and the actual fighting and dying to advance our interests would be done by our proxies. Now we spend far more money and send OUR brigades and fleets. Who's interest is served? The business-as-usual flow of oil from the middle east and money to the oil producers is clearly being protected. And it is breaking our bank to do the dying that enables the Saudis to make a living. If I look at it that way, then what are normally poor choices by financial criteria are still taken by oil billionaires because, geopolitically, they prop up a proxy in a fight that affects them. The terms of this relationship are not even so different from foreign aid in the form of loans that we used to hold over the heads of countries whose Marxist guerrillas we did not want to tangle with personally. We gave military aid to our proxies. The sheiks LOAN money via investments, a bargain compared to the deals we struck with our proxies. When its all over, if it ever is over, the sheiks will own us lock stock and 6 million barrels per day.
Relationships based on power, the uneasy dance where one party has a greater ability to dictate behavior, do not flip unless the relative power of the parties that underly their relationship also reverses. We still sell arms to the Saudis but they also buy Bentleys and Lamborghinis and they aren't getting those scratched up either. Wouldn't our lives be so much simpler if we didn't give a shit about oil? We are not completely upside down yet but all signals point to our continuing to borrow until someone else cuts us off. The prime is 2% today and the fed is auctioning to make life easier for the banks...debt will just keep going up. When you borrow money, you lend power. If you are wondering what mechanism will turn the dollars held by oil sheiks into an ability to dictate behavior, it might go something like this. I had heard rumblings of oil producers decoupling from the US dollar but I had no understanding of what the consequences would be.
A rambling monologue of one man's views on society, politics, business, environment, consumerism etc. If you want to know which trash can to put this in, "dissident American independent with liberal and tree hugger tendencies" will do.
Friday, May 02, 2008
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Be all that you can be
And when that is not enough to win our stupid war, kill yourself. This country doesn't want to deal with psychologically damaged veterans. It doesn't want to face the fact that it owes something to vets who have gotten seriously messed up being told they are the good guys and the fight is a good fight and then finding they have to go berserk or park their conscience while they pretty much shoot anything that moves. As a nation, the US, not just some hippies or some liberals, but the whole damn lot of us, wanted to forget the war in Viet Nam by forgetting the men who came back. Its clear we are set to do it again...to turn our backs on the long tail of consequences of our dumb decision to invade Iraq And we are starting with the immediate worst consequence: tens of thousands of wounded and PTSD cases on the doorstep of a negligent Veterans Administration. Now Iraq vets will start to replace the Viet Nam vets in shelters for homeless, haunted men who could never fit back in to society. The VA makes a good political football to throw at the heads of the most hypocritical hawks that ever ran a country. Are there actually enough voters pressing for effective and fair rehab for vets to get us beyond mere finger pointing? How do you feel about the veterans you run into? Did any of them come home to the welcome John McCain recieved? Do you ask them how welcomed they feel?
McCain felt vindicated for his enduring. Even now, even I have to admire his toughness and courage as a POW in sticking to what he thought was right. But I have to wonder at the selective way he deploys that courage and what, if anything these days, he holds to be true. Before he was against lobbying, he was a lobbyist.
To do right by these men and women would require admitting that the real cost of the war dwarfs the minor expenses and hardships portrayed to us by a lying president and Secretary of Defense. To take full responsibility for our obligation would require noting the broken men in our midst, their lost ability to control rage and their confusion in returning from the harrowing mayhem and daily uncertainties to a Disneyesque PR blitz that passes as our understanding of that war by the average American. How uncomfortable when news of these vet suicides intrudes on our practiced unawareness of the one reality of that war that is in our face: its victims among us? And how soon can we change the channel, pick up the funnies, go back to worrying about our credit card balance?
I say this from time to time, but looks like not often enough: Don't go numb to the soldier. Don't let your silence be taken as blaming them for a loss that our own stupidity and the arrogance of our leaders doomed us to endure. I recognize that there could come a time when we do need to send men to fight some real enemy. But I also recognize there is no glory in the deed but our talking otherwise is a vital salve to our consciences. I recognize that to have to risk death and to kill not only are unnatural conditions. Some of us can survive messed up childhoods and go on to great success. Some of us are unaffected by stress and others made mad by it. War could bake the given rationales for fighting to a diamond hardness or it could turn them all to gray areas and nuances such as plagued a mind like John Kerry's. That ideological side of PTSD is what puts some men in the VFW halls and Veterans day parades and other in Veterans for Peace.
The numbers who have ideological PTSD are large but less than the total number of vets. For Iraq, the numbers with actual PTSD are estimated between 1 out of 5 and 2 out of 3. That is staggering. And the longer tours and duty forced on national guardsmen who never expected to effectively be used like regular combat units all add to the stress. And now, we find that the numbers who are driven to kill themselves have been hidden from us.
UPDATE: Jude points to a crisis hot line that has been set up for veterans.
McCain felt vindicated for his enduring. Even now, even I have to admire his toughness and courage as a POW in sticking to what he thought was right. But I have to wonder at the selective way he deploys that courage and what, if anything these days, he holds to be true. Before he was against lobbying, he was a lobbyist.
To do right by these men and women would require admitting that the real cost of the war dwarfs the minor expenses and hardships portrayed to us by a lying president and Secretary of Defense. To take full responsibility for our obligation would require noting the broken men in our midst, their lost ability to control rage and their confusion in returning from the harrowing mayhem and daily uncertainties to a Disneyesque PR blitz that passes as our understanding of that war by the average American. How uncomfortable when news of these vet suicides intrudes on our practiced unawareness of the one reality of that war that is in our face: its victims among us? And how soon can we change the channel, pick up the funnies, go back to worrying about our credit card balance?
I say this from time to time, but looks like not often enough: Don't go numb to the soldier. Don't let your silence be taken as blaming them for a loss that our own stupidity and the arrogance of our leaders doomed us to endure. I recognize that there could come a time when we do need to send men to fight some real enemy. But I also recognize there is no glory in the deed but our talking otherwise is a vital salve to our consciences. I recognize that to have to risk death and to kill not only are unnatural conditions. Some of us can survive messed up childhoods and go on to great success. Some of us are unaffected by stress and others made mad by it. War could bake the given rationales for fighting to a diamond hardness or it could turn them all to gray areas and nuances such as plagued a mind like John Kerry's. That ideological side of PTSD is what puts some men in the VFW halls and Veterans day parades and other in Veterans for Peace.
The numbers who have ideological PTSD are large but less than the total number of vets. For Iraq, the numbers with actual PTSD are estimated between 1 out of 5 and 2 out of 3. That is staggering. And the longer tours and duty forced on national guardsmen who never expected to effectively be used like regular combat units all add to the stress. And now, we find that the numbers who are driven to kill themselves have been hidden from us.
UPDATE: Jude points to a crisis hot line that has been set up for veterans.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
But it wouldn't sell if we called it
..."making the world safe for hubris in a hummer"!
The NY Times editorial board has the awesome job of producing thoughtful and thought provoking commentary on the issues of the day...every day. There is a whole team devoted to the task and all in all they aren't bad at it. They are better than typical bloggers, a little. And they accept comments to the opinion pieces. Todays topic is how unwelcome and/or unsuccessful US attempts to force democracy on other countries has been. I provided the comment below but it had not appeared for over 12 hours.
Eventually it showed up, and so did a lot of other comments most of which complimented the editors on calling BS on the "giving democracy to other nations" line of crap. The thanks they get for this? I did not take the refunded balance of my "Times Select" subscription. And they get to wear the proud label of "liberal east coast establishment press" while retaining Mr. Kristols talents.
[This post was modified slightly to reflect developments in what I took to be a static situation]
The NY Times editorial board has the awesome job of producing thoughtful and thought provoking commentary on the issues of the day...every day. There is a whole team devoted to the task and all in all they aren't bad at it. They are better than typical bloggers, a little. And they accept comments to the opinion pieces. Todays topic is how unwelcome and/or unsuccessful US attempts to force democracy on other countries has been. I provided the comment below but it had not appeared for over 12 hours.
Whatever your particular culture's notion of fair self-rule is, [we call ours democracy because of its deep roots in Greek culture...but that is OUR history], it is the height of arrogance and stupidity to presume that notion is right in other nations with vastly different cultures.
One of the most harmful of the mistakes made by neoconservatives is to compound the garden variety jingoist "we are better than those guys" by going on to "and we ought to do something about it for there own darn good". Trying to analyze their real motives for passing such thinking off as a basis for foreign policy is nasty fun and I shall refrain here.
I found this statement leading an opinion piece by Jonah Goldberg in a certain west coast newspaper [What rule obliges otherwise excellent news organizations to publish words by these fellows?]:
"Promoting democracy throughout the
world has been a driving force in U.S.
politics since the country's earliest days."
That is so wrong in so many ways that I don't have to write a word against it but point readers, and that bewildered commentator, to George Washington's Farewell Address. In that document, which ought to be as good a text to cite as any regarding the politics of the country's earliest days, there is clear admonition to do no such butting in to the political lives of other nations.
What was good enough for Washington then is good enough for me now. We have problems as it is just living up to our *own* constitutional ideals and cultural claims about granting the rights and exercising the responsibilities of citizenship by all Americans. Perhaps when we figure it out, we can show it to the world...they might follow if only we would lead.
I honestly suspect that we began to feel the need to force others to adopt our ways when our failures to adopt them ourselves crept into the back of our consciences, unsettling some of us greatly enough to cause us to compensate.
Eventually it showed up, and so did a lot of other comments most of which complimented the editors on calling BS on the "giving democracy to other nations" line of crap. The thanks they get for this? I did not take the refunded balance of my "Times Select" subscription. And they get to wear the proud label of "liberal east coast establishment press" while retaining Mr. Kristols talents.
[This post was modified slightly to reflect developments in what I took to be a static situation]
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Talk about "out of touch", an open letter to McCain
Oh how original, McCain would 'put families in charge' of health care. Don't you get the picture you old fart? RIGHT NOW we are virtually in the following scene:
THAT is the picture you should have in mind. Families that have any health coverage at all, are already being abandoned by employers to fend for themselves against the big guys unless they have a union. Once in a while a John Edwards sits on our side of the table. McCain's parroting of the Bush nonsense spells out a policy that could only exacerbate the situation: it is a position based on nothing but republican faith and ignorance. Why would it appeal to any working class family?
Did you perhaps mean you wanted to put families in charge of their own living wills and life insurance plans? Health care costs more each year because there is more of it and much of it is devoted to remedying preventable but increasingly prevalent health problems of a fat, sedentary nation. Health care costs go up with the number of middle men between me and the physician...the mighty bureaucracy for obscuring responsibility. Health care coverage choices are shrinking toward nil even as we speak.
Even USA Today found it difficult to write unsarcastically. Their two lead paragraphs:
Oh great! A yet bigger federal budget deficit! In exchange for what? We will get only the dissolution of the last vestiges of collective bargaining power on the part of health care customers, leaving the HMOs as the last corporate powers and the monopolists of health services. The dumb dream of individual families "shopping" for health care is the same old neoconservative market magic unctuously chanted in the face of yet another mounting catastrophe. Those who are awake may know that TODAY most families will be lucky if they can find one provider through their employers. Those employers leave a growing portion of the premium to the worker. When it is even possible to sign up for coverage outside of a group plan, we pay a significantly higher premium or get less service.
I will illustrate the unreality of McCain's imaginary world with an anecdote from someone I know. He is a 50-something engineer paid quite well for his services by one of the worlds largest defense contractors. Like its brethren in the Military Industrial Complex, it is enjoying boom times with several recent years of yet greater profits and stock price growth in each successive quarter. AND YET, last year the menu of health plans was cut from three providers to two. On top of that, a set of hurdles was instituted, via an outsourced agent who is to verify employee's marital status, to deny coverage of spouse if sufficient documentation of marriage is not provided. It will allow them to peel a tiny handful of people off its coverage eligibility rolls. I don't wish to finger the guy by the particulars but despite nearly three decades of Married-filing-jointly IRS returns, he doesn't actually have the documents they want. Why would McCain's borrowed and tired ideas even appeal to an upper middle class professional family?
Your advisers are idiots, McCain. But you are stuck with them since you have no idea what it is like out here in the real world. You should watch Moore's Sicko if you want a hint what it is like on the outside of your limos and jets. Did Bush teach you to stand in front of shuttered factories to console the suckers? Were your feet clean when you got back to the motorcade? You looked as out of place as the helmeted Dukakis peering from a tank. Go back to your own side of the tracks and waste someone else's time.
We already are in charge of our health you republican fool: We don't DARE get sick any more.
| The doctors, their lawyers, the HMO and their lawyers sit on one side of the negotiating table. I and my family sit on the other. In the distant background, a gaggle of senators is strolling toward the putting green on the 7th hole, hosted by a lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical industry. My employer has just gotten up from the chair beside me and moved over to an empty chair on the other side of the table because [1] it IS costing them a pretty penny to buy their share [even though it is a declining share] of my health benefits and [2] they are getting encouraging signals from the administration and each other that depressed labor market forces me to be less picky and unable to just get up and go talk to some company that DOES offer what was once a standard attraction in the competition for talent: a comprehensive and fully paid health plan. In some cases, the picture includes a union representative, his dentures loose, sitting beside me in his wheelchair and weakly piping up now and then that a "living wage" minus modern health care premiums is now a starving wage and having no coverage for catastrophic illness assures that I risk at some point having to choose between dying and knocking my family from precarious middle class security into the economic gutter. |
Did you perhaps mean you wanted to put families in charge of their own living wills and life insurance plans? Health care costs more each year because there is more of it and much of it is devoted to remedying preventable but increasingly prevalent health problems of a fat, sedentary nation. Health care costs go up with the number of middle men between me and the physician...the mighty bureaucracy for obscuring responsibility. Health care coverage choices are shrinking toward nil even as we speak.
Even USA Today found it difficult to write unsarcastically. Their two lead paragraphs:
John McCain spent much of last week emphasizing how he's a different kind of Republican. This week, he focuses on his plans for health care, which are more aligned with President Bush and other Republicans.
McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, wants everyone to get a tax credit to either buy insurance or offset the taxes on health care coverage obtained through work. The Arizona senator says variety and competition will help bring down costs. Bush has a similar tactic, offering tax deductions for health care costs.
Oh great! A yet bigger federal budget deficit! In exchange for what? We will get only the dissolution of the last vestiges of collective bargaining power on the part of health care customers, leaving the HMOs as the last corporate powers and the monopolists of health services. The dumb dream of individual families "shopping" for health care is the same old neoconservative market magic unctuously chanted in the face of yet another mounting catastrophe. Those who are awake may know that TODAY most families will be lucky if they can find one provider through their employers. Those employers leave a growing portion of the premium to the worker. When it is even possible to sign up for coverage outside of a group plan, we pay a significantly higher premium or get less service.
I will illustrate the unreality of McCain's imaginary world with an anecdote from someone I know. He is a 50-something engineer paid quite well for his services by one of the worlds largest defense contractors. Like its brethren in the Military Industrial Complex, it is enjoying boom times with several recent years of yet greater profits and stock price growth in each successive quarter. AND YET, last year the menu of health plans was cut from three providers to two. On top of that, a set of hurdles was instituted, via an outsourced agent who is to verify employee's marital status, to deny coverage of spouse if sufficient documentation of marriage is not provided. It will allow them to peel a tiny handful of people off its coverage eligibility rolls. I don't wish to finger the guy by the particulars but despite nearly three decades of Married-filing-jointly IRS returns, he doesn't actually have the documents they want. Why would McCain's borrowed and tired ideas even appeal to an upper middle class professional family?
Your advisers are idiots, McCain. But you are stuck with them since you have no idea what it is like out here in the real world. You should watch Moore's Sicko if you want a hint what it is like on the outside of your limos and jets. Did Bush teach you to stand in front of shuttered factories to console the suckers? Were your feet clean when you got back to the motorcade? You looked as out of place as the helmeted Dukakis peering from a tank. Go back to your own side of the tracks and waste someone else's time.
We already are in charge of our health you republican fool: We don't DARE get sick any more.
What Peak Oil means
This article has a theme you should get used to. Its headline is precisely and concisely what Peak Oil is all about. The things those damn liberal fear mongers say to take away your umurkun liberties...they are coming true.
Now.
We have just sped away from the era of "normal" and lurch through territory history cannot illuminate for us. So, as they say in a metaphor that will become increasingly anachronistic: fasten your seatbelt.
Now.
"According to normal economic theory, and the history of oil, rising prices have two major effects", said Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the International Energy Agency in Paris. "They reduce demand and they induce oil supplies. Not this time."
We have just sped away from the era of "normal" and lurch through territory history cannot illuminate for us. So, as they say in a metaphor that will become increasingly anachronistic: fasten your seatbelt.
Monday, April 28, 2008
No new Texans
positive investment: you put money into something in expectation of getting back money or some valuable enhancement of your situation at some point a stated number of years in the future. [eg your tuition]
Negative investment: you get money from some place with the certainty that you will have to cough up that cash plus fees and interest at some point a stated number of years in the future. [eg your college loan]
A government that borrows money to undertake some public program when it lacks cash in hand to pursue that project is engaging in both investments.
We have some awareness that the payoffs of the positive investments are not as certain as the fact that the money in the negative investments will come due. We choose to ignore this painful fact of life at our peril, a deferred peril but crushingly real and inevitable in its diffuse impact upon both our individual and collective financial well being.
Then we ought all to be highly concerned, and particularly our political leaders who instigate these investments should be almost obsessed with the balance of risk and reward that can be assigned to these projects. Instead, industries seeking exclusive benefits and ideologues arrogating pooled monies as the right and due resources of their peculiar views and causes line up at the doors of congress.
What we have lately got instead of monies spent with a reasonable hope of benefiting us is a fraud. To be sure it is a fraud milder, more genteel and more heavily coated with high sounding justifications and appeals to our insecurities than the bald corruption of African and Arab states and all the disgraced regimes of history. But think how the unprecedented scale of the United States Federal budget amplifies these well vetted boondoggles into harms at home an abroad that make all other nation's corruptions pale by comparison.
The negative investments, in the form of our national debt and our decreasing power to borrow publicly or privately now suck the oxygen out of our nation's financial atmosphere and weaken not just today but for decades any hope of undertaking further projects.
Some positive investments have paid back: NASA generated technology and weather satellite images and climate data that save lives and money every day. Internal commerce of the US has exploded in the decades since goods could move cheaply by truck on the interstate system. [Though now, the fuel economy of rail ought to have us rethinking what transport we subsidize]. Social Security and Medicaid with all their leaks and imperfections have made the life of our elderly more uniformly comfortable across the aging population than some haphazard patchwork of state, employer and personal retirement schemes foolish to frugal would have managed.
The fraud by government is however the greater part of many recent "positive" investments. The pretenses for going to war in Iraq included security to be gained from eliminating WMD and Al-Qaeda which were out and out lies. The net effect is in fact negative: we have strengthened the hand [and the oil export income] of our old nemesis Iran and put their veiled intentions to acquire WMD closer to fruition. We have provided fresh affronts to Arab pride that multiply terrorists and make Al-Qaeda's recruiting a breeze. Even if you presume, as I do, that an unstated investment goal of our abortive Iraq strategy was to gain a foothold in the oil rich middle east just as peak oil effects would be emerging from the fog of oil company lies and into the view of the common man...that has backfired. Iraq signs oil deals with the Chinese as it does with us, terrorists blow up Iraqi oil pipelines and we are soon to be paying $4/gallon at US pumps. NOTHING good has come from this poor bet made by the Cheney gang using our money. But as Stiglitz points out, the bill for the borrowed trillions has hardly been fathomed even though it is already having its slowly starving effect on our economy. The negative investment is severely negative.
The main thing your government does, in the end, is spend your money.
any customer in the shops at your local mall who took so little heed of what they got for their money would be instantly recognized as crazy or an idiot. Which are you America?
Negative investment: you get money from some place with the certainty that you will have to cough up that cash plus fees and interest at some point a stated number of years in the future. [eg your college loan]
A government that borrows money to undertake some public program when it lacks cash in hand to pursue that project is engaging in both investments.
We have some awareness that the payoffs of the positive investments are not as certain as the fact that the money in the negative investments will come due. We choose to ignore this painful fact of life at our peril, a deferred peril but crushingly real and inevitable in its diffuse impact upon both our individual and collective financial well being.
Then we ought all to be highly concerned, and particularly our political leaders who instigate these investments should be almost obsessed with the balance of risk and reward that can be assigned to these projects. Instead, industries seeking exclusive benefits and ideologues arrogating pooled monies as the right and due resources of their peculiar views and causes line up at the doors of congress.
What we have lately got instead of monies spent with a reasonable hope of benefiting us is a fraud. To be sure it is a fraud milder, more genteel and more heavily coated with high sounding justifications and appeals to our insecurities than the bald corruption of African and Arab states and all the disgraced regimes of history. But think how the unprecedented scale of the United States Federal budget amplifies these well vetted boondoggles into harms at home an abroad that make all other nation's corruptions pale by comparison.
The negative investments, in the form of our national debt and our decreasing power to borrow publicly or privately now suck the oxygen out of our nation's financial atmosphere and weaken not just today but for decades any hope of undertaking further projects.
Some positive investments have paid back: NASA generated technology and weather satellite images and climate data that save lives and money every day. Internal commerce of the US has exploded in the decades since goods could move cheaply by truck on the interstate system. [Though now, the fuel economy of rail ought to have us rethinking what transport we subsidize]. Social Security and Medicaid with all their leaks and imperfections have made the life of our elderly more uniformly comfortable across the aging population than some haphazard patchwork of state, employer and personal retirement schemes foolish to frugal would have managed.
The fraud by government is however the greater part of many recent "positive" investments. The pretenses for going to war in Iraq included security to be gained from eliminating WMD and Al-Qaeda which were out and out lies. The net effect is in fact negative: we have strengthened the hand [and the oil export income] of our old nemesis Iran and put their veiled intentions to acquire WMD closer to fruition. We have provided fresh affronts to Arab pride that multiply terrorists and make Al-Qaeda's recruiting a breeze. Even if you presume, as I do, that an unstated investment goal of our abortive Iraq strategy was to gain a foothold in the oil rich middle east just as peak oil effects would be emerging from the fog of oil company lies and into the view of the common man...that has backfired. Iraq signs oil deals with the Chinese as it does with us, terrorists blow up Iraqi oil pipelines and we are soon to be paying $4/gallon at US pumps. NOTHING good has come from this poor bet made by the Cheney gang using our money. But as Stiglitz points out, the bill for the borrowed trillions has hardly been fathomed even though it is already having its slowly starving effect on our economy. The negative investment is severely negative.
The main thing your government does, in the end, is spend your money.
any customer in the shops at your local mall who took so little heed of what they got for their money would be instantly recognized as crazy or an idiot. Which are you America?
A short read about the longest time scale
I recommend reading this essay by Nick Bostrom at MIT's Technolgy Review. It is much faster than reading a book by Carl Sagan or Fred Hoyle on extraterrestrial life or any of these . This essay brings home strongly the most important part of the questions of where the aliens are to be found: does their absence hint that we too must inevitably parish before we can carve our initials on far flung suns and call out to the universe saying "Here we are, where are you?". Don't ever let the believers think they have cornered the market on the most teleological of concerns...they are pikers beside a good astrophysicist.
or astrobiologist.
Not that I expect much comment but if you are inclined to question some of Bostroms leaps and assumptions make sure you have properly considered how fleeting our species rise has been in the scale of all the existence of the universe...some 13 billion years at least. Assuming we are nothing special means there has been more than enough time for the half of galactic life that came before us to have evolved and conquered all the distances we can see. There has definitely been time. And the lack of evidence of such conquests means there never will be any.
or astrobiologist.
Not that I expect much comment but if you are inclined to question some of Bostroms leaps and assumptions make sure you have properly considered how fleeting our species rise has been in the scale of all the existence of the universe...some 13 billion years at least. Assuming we are nothing special means there has been more than enough time for the half of galactic life that came before us to have evolved and conquered all the distances we can see. There has definitely been time. And the lack of evidence of such conquests means there never will be any.
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