At this point there are only two ways I can see for the Republicans to win in November. One would be something very big from Al Qaeda to occur or a Republican move to the hard, hard right.

You don't think they are there already?

In fact they, or at least John McCain, have quite a bit of distance yet to travel.

Read this from Nixon's former speech writer and arch, paleo-conservative, Pat Buchanan:

Philosophically and culturally, we are a divided people. Across the spectrum there are us-versus-them folks who see politics as a zero-sum game between Middle America and a global elite. Below the upper-income brackets and along the center-right are the folks the late columnist Sam Francis, citing sociologist Donald Warren's 1976 study, called Middle American Radicals.(...) In recent years, we have seen the MARs rise again and again in roaring rebellion. But, invariably, when these rebellions occur, John McCain may be found inside the castle walls. In 2007, McCain rushed to Washington to support George Bush, Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post in the drive to grant amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal aliens. A national firestorm killed the bill and almost killed McCain's campaign. A year earlier, a MARs uprising killed the Dubai ports deal. The power elite was stunned by the explosion of outrage over the leasing of six U.S. ports to Arab sheiks. Nationalism remains a more potent force than globalism, and not only in America.(...) These Democrats can still win this race for John McCain. Many admire his war record. But not only is he not one of them, he has taken pride and pleasure in having been their great antagonist. Could McCain win them back in five weeks? Perhaps. Is he willing to do what is necessary to win them back? Probably not. It would go against his instincts and his image of himself. The issues that move these folks are not just the $700 billion bailout of Gordon Gekko's comrades, but the invasion of America from Mexico, the export of their jobs, factories and future to Asia, and the gnawing fear that the country they grew up in is being sacrificed for the benefit of an internationalist elite. In Clinton's first term, McCain stood with the establishment for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and the Mexican bailout. Middle America opposed them all. In the past decade, the MARs have opposed free-trade deals, and lost, but won virtually every referendum on gay marriage, affirmative action or welfare for illegal aliens. Invariably, the MARs are portrayed as bigots, nativists, xenophobes, protectionists and isolationists, and their leaders as demagogues. In McCain's words from 2000, they are "agents of intolerance." This is fine if you wish to be beloved in this city, but it may be a fatal impediment if you want to be president.

Buchanan's text, with a few names changed, would read exactly like a text by European any neo-fascist like Jean Marie Le Pen, Gianfranco Fini or Jörg Haider. It is the same toxic cocktail.

This is the path that much of the European right has been taking in the last few years in France, Italy, Austria and Belgium... even in Germany and it has been paying them huge dividends.

I think a clearer and more tempting recipe for turning McCain's campaign around would be hard to find. Certainly Sarah Palin would be no impediment. Buchanan's former boss, Richard Nixon, would have done it without even blinking, but will John McCain?
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

I would say that this moment is special because, at a time of enormous gravity, with two wars going nowhere and the economy about to melt down, the American people are very likely going to vote for someone about whom almost nothing is known: the color of his skin being practically the only indisputable fact known about him and, unless you are a racist, the color of a person's skin says little or nothing about what is under that skin.

What sort of "Hail Mary pass" are Americans making if they elect someone of no experience at a time like this? Not just the candidate's personal lack of experience, but much more importantly, electing someone that they the voters themselves have no actual experience of, other than hearing a few speeches and reading the candidate's story as told by the candidate.

This I think is the center of the question, instead of accepting their losses, leaving the tables and just getting on a greyhound bus and riding home with enough money left to tide them over till payday, the voters are about to take their last chips and bet double or nothing on a number they saw in a dream.

Watching the debate between Palin and Biden, I couldn't help asking myself why Joe Biden did so poorly in the primaries? What is wrong with him? He gives long winded answers?

To me Joe Biden seems a more reasonable proposition than either Obama or Hillary ...certainly more than McCain, for that matter. What is wrong with the voters?

Biden looks and sounds and has the record of someone who knows what to do and how to do it... In a moment of great doubt and danger, why has someone so sensible, distinguished, experienced and knowledgeable, been of so little interest to Democratic voters?
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

A Spanish friend of ours that runs a very important NGO has just come back from Beijing, where she hadn't visited since 1995. In those days, as she tells it, Beijing was millions of identically dressed people on bicycles and deep fried grasshopper stands on every corner. Today, she says that Beijing makes the isle of Manhattan look like Trenton New Jersey. What has been done in a little over ten years is breathtaking.

I think by now it's obvious that someday China is going to surpass the United States. There are too many of them, they work too hard, they are too smart and there are too many of them... I already said that.

Still, the USA has one advantage that will probably keep it afloat much longer than it deserves. The secret is in this  photo (required viewing, sorry), taken in a KFC in Beijing.

What is that secret?

People like to pretend they are Americans.

China is without any question one of the world's greatest cultures with massive contributions to humanity's treasures in thought, word and deed over thousands of years. However, no matter how much you admire and love their culture, unless you are of 100% Han Chinese descent, it is impossible to imagine yourself being Chinese. Statistically, of course, there is a fairly good chance that you are Chinese already, but if you aren't, there is no way in the world you can become Chinese. You are either Chinese or you aren't.

But, thanks to America's amazing ability to mythify even its most banal idiosyncrasies, millions upon millions of humans all over the world imagine themselves to be Americans several hours a week and have been doing so since the invention of moving pictures. This is usually known as America's "colonization of the world's subconscious".

You don't even have to speak English to participate. Films are dubbed. I remember, when learning the language, that I soon got used to hearing John Wayne speaking Spanish on the screen, but I collapsed in laughter the first time I heard him speak Italian. John Wayne? Italiano? ¡No, hombre, no!

The Chinese man in the picture, happy in his cowboy hat, is our Pyramid of Giza, our Great Wall.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success. A new America is on display, a country that no longer trusts its old values and its elites even less: the politicians, who failed to see the problems on the horizon, and the economic leaders, who tried to sell a fictitious world of prosperity to Americans. Der Spiegel

That is about as cold as it gets.

However, if it is any consolation, America, the land of superlatives has managed to decline at a speed that will impress, fascinate and keep historians (Chinese) busy for centuries trying to figure it out.

I live in a country, Spain, which was the previous record holder for falling from the heights. A country, once the greatest empire in the world, that finally bottomed out in the blood-drunk orgy of its civil war and the hangover of four decades of moldy dictatorship. Everything is fine now, but it was a helluva ride to get here.

The USA seems to have telescoped what it took Spain centuries to achieve into only a few years.

The American 1950s might be compared to Spain's "Golden Age" (Siglo de Oro) and, stretching it a bit, today might be compared to the early 1930s. Think of it, 500 years of splendor and decline crammed into only six decades! ...With the best yet to come.

You go girl!

"A potential calamity," predicts Democratic pollster Doug Schoen. "If the reactions we're seeing hold, we could have real spasmodic anger directed at businesses and corporations." And the timing will have consequences, says financier and onetime GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney: "Unfortunately, politicians have seized on the politics of envy," he told Fortune, "and they are stoking it this election year like I've never seen in my lifetime." (...) Union leaders like the AFL-CIO's John Sweeney suddenly sound as if they're in the mainstream of public opinion with statements like this: "One thing is certain. No one - no politician, no investment banker, no television commentator, no economist - should be able to say again with a straight face that here in the United States we just let markets do whatever markets do and everything works out for the best."  Fortune

We come in one size: extra large. We are sometimes insolent and often quick to fight. We love competitive spectacle such as NASCAR and paintball, and believe gun ownership is the eleventh commandment. We fry things nobody ever considered friable - things like cupcakes, banana sandwiches and batter dipped artificial cheese even pickles. And most of all we are defiant and suspicious of authority, and people who are "uppity" (sophisticated) and "slick" (people who use words with more than three syllables). Two should be enough for anybody. Joe Bageant, author of Deerhunting With Jesus - BBC NEWS

Obama’s “Change” message, Saunders argues, is too abstract, too vague, for the region. “Those people you were with today were screwed by the English in Scotland and Ireland way before they came over here and started getting screwed,” he said. “They’ve been screwed since the dawn of time. And you know what? You ain’t gonna do anything with them, talkin’ about change. You know why? We’re all changed out. That’s all you ever hear, every election. Somebody’s gonna change some shit. Nothin’ ever changes. We get fucked.” David (Mudcat) Saunders - New Yorker

You have to start from somewhere and probably a nascent class consciousness is as good a place as any. A realization that your life is going to be damaged by a few powerful people who don't give a damn about you and your problems and the lives and problems of millions like you, and reaching out to find others in the same fix you are in.

Here we are.

The Reaganite-Thatcherite-Friedmanite, bloom is finally off the rose, innit?

As Sam Cooke sang, "It's been a long time coming, but a change is going to come someday".

Has it come?

Probably not.

Why not?

The culture wars.

Instead of everyone standing together to face a small group of people who it is no exaggeration at all to call our oppressors, we shall soon see all this righteous anger and energy siphoned off into bickering over whether we are descended from great apes or whether Adam and Eve dodged dinosaurs only five thousand years ago in the company of a talking snake. As if any of that mattered when universal health care was hanging in the balance.

As my readers know, I personally am "pro choice", but I would put that on a back burner in order to come to some agreement with those who support the "pro life" position if it took that to get universal health care.

Forty million Americans without health care, who cannot see a doctor except in an emergency room is what I call a "primary contradiction" and all the culture questions for me, at this moment, important as they are, are secondary contradictions: issues to be postponed until the primary contradiction is taken care of. This is also because to get universal health care would reorder the priorities of the entire system and put the final nail in Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman's coffins. This is the issue that a social democratic future of the United States hinges on... It is the primary contradiction.

Obviously this accepting priorities does not mean abandoning one's beliefs, it means postponing those battles in order to make common cause with others who also need what we need most and therefore I think that at present, as badly as women need abortion on demand, they and the children they already have need regular visits to the doctor, glasses and dental care more. So the welfare of children already in the world, who don't have access to a pediatrician, has to be temporarily put first.

In short, I think progressive American politicians should handle rattlesnakes, go into trance, howl like dogs, speak in tongues, join the NRA and eat fried pie, if that is what it takes to get socialized medicine in the USA.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

I post when I get up in the morning in Madrid. Because of the time difference I get the feeling that I am read mostly by California night owls and East Coast insomniacs. According to the blog clock the following was first posted at 2:23AM Washington time. So with your kind permission I'd like to post it again to give the afternoon crowd a shot at it.
____________________________

The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. Nouriel Roubini

Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door. Michael Moore

The government's massive new financial commitments will severely tie the next President's hands in addressing middle-class concerns. "The next President will have to temper expectations a lot," says Middlebury College economist David Colander, "far beyond what either of the candidates has been willing to talk about." Fortune

Both presidential candidates also supported the plan. NYT

A happy society cannot be based on the idea that the life of the community is merely a race with "winners and losers", because in any race almost all the runners lose and losers cannot be happy with that result.

It is well to remember that Margaret Thatcher maintained that "society" doesn't even exist, only individuals and families. In Thatcher's idea it is implicit that these individuals and families have no stake in any common good whatsoever.

There is a huge difference between a "community" and communism (whatever that might be), but for the philosophy of life that Thatcher represents there is little difference at all.

It is also implicit in her philosophy that most of humanity exists only to serve those of their number that have managed to get the levers of wealth and power in their hands. This is not at all conservative; on the contrary it is radical in the extreme... These are the doctrines of Ayn Rand and her devoted disciple Alan Greenspan... perhaps the man most responsible for this mess.

A true conservative knows that real quality of a society is the quality of what is "average". Anyone who has studied our species know that the exceptional springs from the normal and the mediocre. Most geniuses have normal parents and normal children. And many exceptional people have come from the most unpromising backgrounds and their descendants have sunk quickly back into that obscurity. Has anybody heard much from the Mozarts or the Einsteins lately?

I  know the family of one of Spanish literature's greatest poets and playwrights: a name that any educated person anywhere in the world knows as well as his own, and they are the most untalented, if charming, examples of Spain's liberal middle class that you could ever want to meet, unexceptional in every way except their electrifying surname. I went to school with the son of one of America's greatest film directors and one of Hollywood's most interesting actresses and he was without any particular talent except his humor and charm.

The exceptional by definition can take care of themselves. The important thing, to make the world a happy place, is that average people live fruitful, peaceful lives with a dignified old age and can give their children a good education and health care. This only happens on a mass scale in social democracy.

You cannot have social democracy without taxes. That means taxes for working class, middle class and most of all the top earners. At this moment enunciating this unpleasant truth would amount to political suicide in the USA.

The good news is that the American economic model has lost all its shine and charisma for the rest of the world and will no longer be trotted out as the path to take to prosperity. It is now officially a bankrupt ideology.

This means that social democracy will become possible in many places where in the last twenty years or so it was little more than the sin that dare not speak its name... and maybe, someday - finally - Americans, as Churchill always said, having exhausted all other alternatives, will do the right thing.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

The Treasury plan is a disgrace: a bailout of reckless bankers, lenders and investors that provides little direct debt relief to borrowers and financially stressed households and that will come at a very high cost to the US taxpayer. Nouriel Roubini

Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door. Michael Moore

The government's massive new financial commitments will severely tie the next President's hands in addressing middle-class concerns. "The next President will have to temper expectations a lot," says Middlebury College economist David Colander, "far beyond what either of the candidates has been willing to talk about." Fortune

Both presidential candidates also supported the plan. NYT

A happy society cannot be based on the idea that the life of the community is merely a race with "winners and losers", because in any race almost all the runners lose and losers cannot be happy with that result.

It is well to remember that Margaret Thatcher maintained that "society" doesn't even exist, only individuals and families. In Thatcher's idea it is implicit that these individuals and families have no stake in any common good whatsoever.

There is a huge difference between a "community" and communism (whatever that might be), but for the philosophy of life that Thatcher represents there is little difference at all.

It is also implicit in her philosophy that most of humanity exists only to serve those of their number that have managed to get the levers of wealth and power in their hands. This is not at all conservative; on the contrary it is radical in the extreme... These are the doctrines of Ayn Rand and her devoted disciple Alan Greenspan... perhaps the man most responsible for this mess.

A true conservative knows that real quality of a society is the quality of what is "average". Anyone who has studied our species know that the exceptional springs from the normal and the mediocre. Most geniuses have normal parents and normal children. And many exceptional people have come from the most unpromising backgrounds and their descendants have sunk quickly back into that obscurity. Has anybody heard much from the Mozarts or the Einsteins lately?

I  know the family of one of Spanish literature's greatest poets and playwrights: a name that any educated person anywhere in the world knows as well as his own, and they are the most untalented, if charming, examples of Spain's liberal middle class that you could ever want to meet, unexceptional in every way except their electrifying surname. I went to school with the son of one of America's greatest film directors and one of Hollywood's most interesting actresses and he was without any particular talent except his humor and charm.

The exceptional by definition can take care of themselves. The important thing, to make the world a happy place, is that average people live fruitful, peaceful lives with a dignified old age and can give their children a good education and health care. This only happens on a mass scale in social democracy.

You cannot have social democracy without taxes. That means taxes for working class, middle class and most of all the top earners. At this moment enunciating this unpleasant truth would amount to political suicide in the USA.

The good news is that the American economic model has lost all its shine and charisma for the rest of the world and will no longer be trotted out as the path to take to prosperity. It is now officially a bankrupt ideology.

This means that social democracy will become possible in many places where in the last twenty years or so it was little more than the sin that dare not speak its name and maybe, someday, finally, Americans, as Churchill always said, having exhausted all other alternatives, will do the right thing.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

There is an article in today's Financial Times (easily the best newspaper in the English language) by Clive Crook, an Obama sympathizer that I recommend taking a look at, as it outlines the basic reality of the coming (probably Obamite) administration. Here is the gist of it:

For Mr McCain, apparently, nothing has changed.

Mr Obama began more promisingly. “Well, there are a range of things that are probably going to have to be delayed,” he said. Instead of mentioning what these might be, however, he went on: “There are some things that I think have to be done.” What were they? Investment in alternative energy; universal health care; investment in education; investment in science and technology (“China had a space launch and a space walk”); affordable college; investment in roads, bridges, and “broadband lines that reach into rural communities”; a new electricity grid.

Did I leave anything out? Well, he also affirmed his intention to cut taxes for 95 per cent of working families. I don’t know if the country is quite prepared for fiscal sacrifice of this order.

Admittedly, prospects for the budget next year are uncertain. With the economy already in recession, and on the edge of something worse, fiscal policy must be kept as relaxed as possible. But there are limits to what can be safely contemplated. Both candidates are either unaware of this, or unwilling to take the political risk of speaking honestly about it to voters.(...) The budget deficit was already conservatively projected to be $500bn next year. A bad recession would push that up further, not counting Tarp or any further stimulus or targeted relief (both of which may also be necessary). Yet the presidential candidates are promising further tax cuts; neither has anything concrete to say about curbing spending-as-usual; and Mr Obama, especially, has a long list of new plans. The national debate about the next administration’s choices has no connection with reality.

If one idea caused the subprime meltdown and the subsequent financial emergency, it was the belief that house prices could not fall. Nationally, they had not dropped since the 1930s, it was often pointed out: it simply could not happen. A similar complacency now attends discussion of the fiscal outlook.

It is assumed that the US can borrow without limit. In fact, the US has a budget constraint – less binding than that of other countries, to be sure, because of the dollar’s reserve-currency status and other factors, but there nonetheless. This limit is about to be tested, and if the global capital market decides enough is enough, the challenge confronting the Treasury and the Federal Reserve will make even last week’s exertions seem mild.

The next administration’s fiscal options are vanishing before our eyes. Somebody should tell the candidates – and the country. (emphasis mine)

The bailout is the Republican's Trojan Horse. There is going to be no money for health care, education or infrastructure... no matter who is in office and taxes are going to have to go up. As Gerard Baker wrote the other day in The Times:

It is highly probable that that moment, the very hour that he takes office, will be the high point of his presidency. Whoever wins on November 4 will be ascending to the job at one of the most difficult times for an American chief executive in at least half a century. When the votes are counted his people might ruefully conclude that the victor is not Barack Obama or John McCain. The real winner will be Hillary Clinton, or Mitt Romney, or Mike Huckabee, or some now happily anonymous figure whose star will rise in the next four turbulent years. 2008 may be the best year there has been to lose an election. This sobering reality was startlingly underscored this week by none other than Tom Daschle, the former leader of the Senate Democrats, the national co-chairman of Mr Obama's presidential campaign, and the likely White House chief of staff in an Obama administration. He told a Washington power breakfast that he thought the winner of the election would have a 50 per cent chance at best - at best - of winning a second term in 2012. Consider the challenges. The financial crisis and Washington's response to it have transformed the economic and fiscal environment in which the new president will take office. The bailout/rescue plan/ socialisation of the banking system - whichever you prefer - has, in effect, already rendered null and void almost everything that the presidential candidates have been proposing for the past six months.

Maybe when they get together to debate the economy McCain and Obama could try a two part harmony of the Ray Charles classic:

My bills are all due and the baby needs shoes and I'm busted
Cotton is down to a quarter a pound, but I'm busted
I got a cow that went dry and a hen that won't lay
A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day
The county's gonna haul my belongings away cause I'm busted.
"Busted" - Ray Charles

I would give the candidates my granny's favorite advice, be careful what you wish for, you just might get your wish.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

Last night I posted saying that I thought, and have been thinking for some months that Osama bin Laden will try something big in the run up to the US elections.

I base this on the undeniable fact that since things have gone so well for him with the Republicans he would have no reason to want to change. Add to this the delicate situation in which the US economy finds itself and the temptation to humiliate the USA and build his brand are irresistible.

To help make my case I quoted at length an article by ex-CIA agent Michael Scheuer from The Asia Times; the marrow of which is the following:

Today, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda have a chance to deal the United States an enormous economic blow if they can stage a near-term attack in America. Such an attack would serve as a devastating force-multiplier and perhaps push the current economic disaster into the category of a financial catastrophe. Whether al-Qaeda is positioned to stage such an attack is an open question. What is unquestionable, however, is its intention to do so.

Although I received my usual ration of abusive comments, I think that what I am saying is so perfectly obvious that, conversely,  if nothing happens in the coming weeks before the election we might be able to say that the jihadist movement is fatally crippled and that Osama bin Laden should no longer be waved in peoples faces as an excuse to curtail their civil liberties.

So the bad news is that if they still exist, the opportunity is so clear, that al Qaeda will certainly try to do something big and the good news is if they don't try to do something, they no longer exist for all practical purposes.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

Having been responsible for much of the economic bleeding America has done in Iraq and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda now has a chance to significantly advance its bleed-to-bankruptcy strategy. While al-Qaeda had no hand in creating the ongoing, self-inflicted unraveling of the US financial system, al-Qaeda could accelerate that unraveling with a 9/11-like or larger attack in the continental United States. The US political class has often scoffed at or ridiculed Bin Laden's goal of driving America to bankruptcy, assuming that al-Qaeda irrationally assumed it could bring down the US economy through its actions alone. This analysis is inaccurate. Just as Bin Laden saw al-Qaeda as the inspirer of jihad and not the jihad itself, he saw that his group's attacks on the US economy could not cause bankruptcy, but might do so if they worsened other US economic problems. Thus the main economic damage done by the 9/11 attacks resulted from the Iraq and Afghan wars, not from the raids on Manhattan and Washington. Today, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda have a chance to deal the United States an enormous economic blow if they can stage a near-term attack in America. Such an attack would serve as a devastating force-multiplier and perhaps push the current economic disaster into the category of a financial catastrophe. Whether al-Qaeda is positioned to stage such an attack is an open question. What is unquestionable, however, is its intention to do so; the US intelligence community's conclusion that al-Qaeda poses a "clear and present danger" to the continental United States rests on the fact that US borders remain almost entirely open and the weapons of mass destruction arsenal of the former Soviet states and other sources of nuclear-bomb-making material have yet to be fully secured. Michael Scheuer - Asia Times

I'm just in time to refresh my prediction that Osama bin Laden is going to try to do something in the critical month leading up to the election. Here is what I said way back in February:

Everybody seems to have forgotten Osama bin Laden. I wonder what the old boy is up to?

Getting ready to decide who is to be President of the United States of America, I should imagine.

If you stop and think about it, Osama bin Laden owes the Republicans big. If Gore had won the election in 2000, (ok, I know he did win, but you know what I mean) then, when and if the Twin Towers went down, the United States, accompanied by all of NATO, would have gone through Afghanistan like a dose of fruit salts and bin Laden would have been brewed up in some hole in Tora Bora.

But Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld's ineptitude not only saved the sheik's life: by invading Iraq, by opening Guantanamo, by running Abu Ghraib and by supporting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, they made Osama bin Laden's case for the entire Muslim world. Who's your daddy?

Does Osama bin Laden want the Republicans to win?

Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?

Now, even his worst enemies would have to admit that Osama bin Laden is a very focused, scheming, long headed fellow, so it is not difficult to imagine that he is not simply going to trust his fate to the wisdom of the American voters.

The only card the Republicans really have left to play these days is national security. Defense still seems the natural calling of mean, old, white men.

Maybe it's because I live in Madrid and have actually seen it happen that I expect a bomb to define the next US presidential election. In 2004, many observers thought that bin Laden's "October Surprise" video was enough to give Bush a second term. But after "four more years", it will take a bit more than a video to keep the Republicans in the White House.

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/