You remember Franklin. He's the only defendant imprisoned in the abandoned "AIPAC spy scandal". A Defense Department functionary and part of Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans staff, he took the hit for passing on secret information about Iran to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, while co-defendants (and AIPAC honchos) Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman walked.
This week, in a Foreign Policy post, My Secret Plan to Overthrow the Mullahs, Franklin offers part apologia and part rabble-rousing from his lonely prison cell.
]]> Interestingly, he reveals his own reservations about the infatuation Feith and his cronies had for Iraqi Shiite (and, as it turned out, Iranian agent) Ahmed Chalabi in the run-up to the Iraq invasion:In fact, I knew from my sources that Tehran had already prepared an entire network of operatives, proxies, and weapons ready to challenge the United States as soon as it toppled Saddam Hussein. I also knew it would be foolish to assume - as many in the Bush administration did - that Iraq's many pro-Iranian political and religious leaders could be trusted to cooperate with the United States' stated goal of building "a peaceful ... democratic, and united Iraq." ... I suspected that many of these individuals were essentially Iranian agents -- including the opportunistic "man for all factions" Ahmad Chalabi, a suspicion eventually confirmed when I was later told he had encouraged the pro-Iranian Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to "dig in" against the U.S. Marines in Najaf.
Franklin maintains his whole part in the AIPAC "information sharing" was to slow the rush to war in Iraq - and push the U.S. to move against the Persian republic. For the neocons in the White House and Pentagon, the battle order was just the opposite.
And still is. Just as those cockroaches have stayed the course, little changed by evolution in 200 million years, so, too, the neoconservative soul (and regime-change template) remains durable:
I often wonder what would have happened had we fully committed to overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Inside the Pentagon, I had long argued that regime change, not accommodation or war, would be our best policy... My plan was designed to shake the foundations of Iran's mullahcracy without resorting to military action. I urged the United States to recognize a government in exile, perhaps in a nearby Central Asian country with a Persian heritage. I proposed a sophisticated propaganda offensive, planting stories both true and otherwise in the Persian-language media to undermine Iranians' confidence in their leaders.
We can be pretty sure that strategy is at work today in Iran. Opposition so lionized by the Western media in June's still-disputed national elections even has its own color code - green - just like the Western-tweaked "democracy" movements that triumphed - and now stagnate - throughout eastern Europe and southwestern Asia over the past decade or so.
Trouble is, Iran's opposition isn't exactly warm and cozy regarding Western ambitions in the region. Former prime minister Mir-Hussein Mousavi, who's current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's chief rival, supports Iran's nuclear program and detests Israel with all the passion of the everyday "Arab on the street". That keeps up, and we'll eventually have to regime change the changed regime.
That faction also knows how to play the U.S. like an oud: The Obama Adminstration clearly wants the Iran opposition movement to shift away from those troublesome policies on nukes and Israel, but as soon as the U.S. announced it was suspending funding for Iran opposition, the "green" camp said it would mark the 30th anniversary of the Iran Hostage Crisis this week by apologizing to the U.S. for that inconvenience (and Reagan boon in 1980). How can we let such nice folks twist slowly in the wind?
Obama is stretched to the limit on domestic issues like health care and the economy, and Afghanistan is the biggest foreign policy cesspit with which he must deal, so he seems willing to let Iran's Mullahs fade on their own; if that's the case, history shows he may be in for a long wait.
On the other hand, Israel's seizure of a purported arms ship this week shows that long, drawn-out cold war could go hot any moment. Israel claims weapons it recovered came from Iran and were destined for Lebanon and Hezbollah and/or Palestine and Hamas; everyone else denies it, evidence is sketchy, blah, blah, blah. At the same time, the Israeli defense minister vows threats to attack Iran are sincere, there's a much-ballyhoo'd "report" that Israel will attack next month... blah, blah, blah.
In the event of war with Iran - a petroleum-producing dynamo sitting atop the maritime bottleneck through which most Gulf Oil transports - we can look forward to gasoline at $10-$15 a gallon, blowback in the form of terrorist violence in our own backyards and more enmity from the rest of the world. Israel may attack, but you can be damn sure we'll be left to clean up the mess.
That's one handicap, I think, that's stymied such a bomb run on Iran's nuclear facilities so far: We simply can't afford it. Maybe it's the blessing from the ongoing recession - we can't very well launch a new stage in the neocon/Likud Mideast pacification plan on a maxed-out credit card. Perhaps, if Wall Street news gets any brighter, we should get ready to duck.
Franklin's own fever-dream war game would be less pyrotechnic, and have us supplying the opposition with GPS and high-tech video technology to spur a stealth regime change; he even suggests hiring opposition snipers to take out Iranian military snipers (!) that so plague anti-establishment marches. Some eggs must shatter, after all.
Finally, let's play with fire and provoke a government backlash:
U.S. action might well precipitate a massive crackdown, though such a move by the clerical-military junta could spark widespread resistance. At last, the great majority of Iranians who oppose tyranny might rebel. In one scenario, the regime would end with a bang of terrible bloodshed, chaos, and reprisals. But if Iranians were coaxed into mobilizing a long-lasting general strike, the regime would end in a whimper. Then, we could finally toss Iran's vicious Islamic Republic -- a regime that has murdered and wrongly imprisoned thousands of its own citizens -- on the ash heap of history.
As Lenin put it, "worse is better".
But... better for who?
]]>I became impressed with him in February 2007, when I watched him announce his campaign on a cold Saturday to a small crowd at the old statehouse in Springfield, Il - where Lincoln once worked, pundits never tired of telling us.
I liked what he said. It was 180-degrees from the reality we were living, four years downwind of the Iraq invasion, 19 months from the meltdown plunge, six years into the meanest, most infantile administration of physical and moral cowards with which, thankfully, we've ever been burdened in this country's history. If ever we wondered how the country would fare should ultimate authority fall into the hands of obnoxious, coddled frat boys, we discovered, too late, that fate would be a disaster generations mending.
For simply not being Geoge W. Bush, Barack Obama will always have my affection and gratitude, both as voter and American.
]]> Not to cheapen my support, though: I admired and heeded the message, aside from its incandescence in our political cesspit, well apart from the misery of our time. There was something in his words that strengthened, something that convinced me our collective vision could be aimed at a higher elevation. He sounded absolutely sold on liberal democracy, so I was, too.I believed.
But judging him by two key indices in the year since his election, the first months of his administration have been disappointing. And the disappointment has been underscored by the grand hopes and blessed relief anyone with any regard for this country and basic human decency felt one year ago Wednesday night.
On the economy, his advisors and underlings, who seem to hail mostly from Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular, apparently are committed to reinstalling the crap-game eoncomy that failed spectactularly 14 months ago. On foreign policy, it now can be said: Nothing has changed, and there is little indication it will.
That second point has real resonance, since Barack Obama overcame both Hillary Clinton and John McCain by appearing, more than any other candidate, the president who'd end our pointless, quagmire wars. Up to now, he has not.
Obama has withdrawn some troops from Iraq - very few, not enough to matter - and seems paralyzed in uncertainty whether to beef up our presence in Afghanistan, or draw down and quit that fruitless slaughter altogether. He's urged to try a surge strategy, since such troop escalation in Iraq two years ago has attained such mythic - and utterly undeserved - status in our lickspittle media. Even the stupidest American notices that once troops withdraw from Iraq's cities, violence there spikes to pre-surge levels. If we deepen the commitment in Afghanistan, we deepen ourselves in that quicksand, as well. Time is on the side of the insurgents, or rebels, or terrorists... whatever they're called this week. The reason is simple: They're fighting close to home. In fact, they are home. Their countries are the battlefields.
His Secretary of State visited the area and managed to browbeat and insult our paid-off Pakistani "allies", reminding them they are corrupt lackeys, and at the same time disavow that we've been killing innocent civilians in our "surgical" killer-drone attacks:
Clinton told a group of journalists in Lahore that she found it "hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to." Al Qaeda, she said, "has had a safe haven in Pakistan since 2002."
I understand the motive behind appointing a former opponent to office, but this arrogant woman, utterly callow to the life-and-death horrors she can help alleviate or intensify, seems hellbent on maintaining our catastrophic foreign policy.
John Bolton in a dress, indeed.
Speaking of patching up our worn-out, shabby status quo, no better summation of how toothless are efforts to re-regulate the financial industry than last Friday's Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan, in which he also pointed out the world derivatives bubble is worth about $500 trillion, while America's net worth is around $17 trillion. "So... you can do the math," he added as a post-script to a show that lambasted the re-establishment of a casino market that makes short-term side-bet killings on derivatives and other crap-shoot "financial instruments" rather than encourage productive investing. Remember that? Remember when investments actually provided capital to make things, or build them?
I guess it makes sense to hire insiders like Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers and the rest of the "free-market" hacks. Maybe the thinking goes like this: We're so deep in the hole over these trillions in losses, we're just biding time until the other shoe falls. Maybe these money-out-thin-air alchemists can breathe some life back into this Ayn Rand nightmare before we crash through the 1929 floor.
Maybe they're like me, and just hoping for the best.
I'm not soured on Obama, in spite of all this. Dammit, I still believe. This I now know: Hope began a year ago, but change will take time.
]]>It means that non-existent lobby is taking the upstart opposition group seriously.
]]> This week, the 18-month-old organization wound up its first conference, notable more for the no-shows redacting its attendance rosters than the national media coverage it relentlessly failed to attract (given the timid nature of our media, no surprise at all). As The Politico reports, way too cheerily, adding John Kerry to the flake list:So far, about a dozen of the original 160 hosts have rescinded their names from J Street's list, including: Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), Rep. Mike Castle (R-DE), Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR), Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA), Rep. John Salazar (D-CO), and Rep. Ed Towns (D-NY)... Jane Harman (D-Calif.) isn't attending, but still backs the group.
Sin of sins, J Street is attempting to unite progressive and, yes, younger Jews in an alternative to the traditional lobby, which, if it existed - and we're not saying it does, mind you - would be made up of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Christians United for Israel, and a whole host of other groups, fellowships, think tanks and chummy clubs hellbent on making sure American policies in the Mideast at large and toward Israel in particular virtually mirror and rubber-stamp those of the Likud Party, no matter how brutal its initiatives. Also, and this is most important, they work real, real hard to assure American largesse to Israel hits its annual nut - more than a third of the entire U.S. foreign aid budget. Any American politician making a peep about that flowing spigot faces de-election... if, of course, such a lobby should, theoretically, exist.
You could read about all the players and their Capitol Hill methods in The Israel Lobby, an hysterically controversial essay and book by American academics Stephen Walt and John Meirsheimer. But doing so could put you on the fightin' side of J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami:
However, when the analysis of that lobby veers over a line and essentially says that all of American foreign policy is controlled by this one lobby and this one interest group, to me, personally, this does smack of the kind of conspiracy theories contained in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This notion that somehow Jews control this country, they control our foreign policy, that there is some diabolical conspiracy behind the scenes, this is when you cross that line. I believe that the analysis in the Walt and Mearsheimer book and article crossed that line, but this doesn't take away from my view that this is an incredibly effective lobby.
That's from a remarkably hostile, baiting interview in the Atlantic Ben-Ami granted to neocon stalwart Jeffrey Goldberg on the eve of the J Street conference. While at times Goldberg's questioning technique seems to come from an old Cheka interrogation manual, and Ben-Ami proves remarkably level-headed and measured in his responses, the J Street chief seems to disavow the obvious a lot - and ignoring this Levantine elephant in the room has for decades been a bane to American foreign policy, and toxic to our relations with the Muslim world.
Another stunning development is Ben-Ami's refusal to accept the United Nation's Goldstone report, which certified what was already known by a world availed of unedited coverage of the Gaza insursion earlier this year: Israel committed war crimes against defenseless Palestinians in a military foray which had all the sophistication of a gangland, revenge-killing "policy whack".
In a column today at Antiwar.com, former CIA case officer Philip Giraldi comments:
On many of the specific issues, J Street is AIPAC lite. It accepts an Israeli state based on religion, not on equal rights for all citizens, specifically supporting the apartheid-like right of any Jew to "return" without affording similar rights to Christians or Muslims who resided in Palestine before 1948. Its Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami calls a one-state solution to Israel/Palestine with all citizens having the same rights a "nightmare."
For myself, the jury is still out. Certainly, it's laudable to launch an organization intended to counter the all-too-real Israel Lobby, which is enormously powerful and directly connected to a foreign country; on that we all agree. But now isn't the time to start denying the obvious. And the era for "sensitivity" is over. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Frankly, I can't see how, when the rest of the world as multicultural mixing bowl is inevitable, a geographical homeland based on any particulars, any grounds of uniqueness, can survive without constant combat. And, so, I can't see how a "one-state" solution would be that nightmare to which Ben-Ami refers.
Israel and its supporters have pled its victimhood so long they believe their own, obsolete propaganda. This bizarre proposition that past suffering absolves an individual or group from present responsibility, or that it conveys some otherworldly dominion over moral issues, has distorted our judgment and recent history to absurdity. Enough. Come down here to terra firma with the rest of us, and talking eye-to-eye, maybe we can come up with some answers, relieve some critical stresses, before we combust ourselves to ash.
Here's the key topic and crucial question: Why can't peace for Israel and its neighbors be secured here and now?
]]>Lately, as I revel in the tepid, dreary pleasure of my drive to and from work in the urban garden that is downtown L.A. - anonymously monolithic and reeking of poverty's urine - I've become annoyed at all the far-Right talk radio cluttering up the airwaves. So much so, that I've started punching the 'scan' button to find something less recklessly heartless.
Edging in amid static, and fading easily, are a few "Radio Free Los Angeles" stations hammering a political line from the far, far other end of the spectrum. Between badly recorded garage punk triumphalism, disembodied voices shout denunciation of all fearsome evils wracking our nation and time - racism, class warfare, counter-revolutionary activity, dogfighting, dog eating, the persecution of Mumia, Palestine, etc. If you're over the age of, maybe, 25, it's all stuff you've heard before. A lot. But a new scare issue has popped up in time for Hallowe'en:
The H1N1 vaccine.
]]> Wendy Davis contributed a good post yesterday on this emerging conspiracy theory, using it as a jumping-off point for rumination about that recent tendency of our most paranoid fears to come true. The script goes something like this:Big pharma, in league with... whoever... Tri-Lateral Commission... somebody, y'know... have cooked up a plot to release the deadly virus that caused the 1918 global flu pandemic as a eugenics weapon to thin world population. The vaccine will spare necessary breeders, who can look forward to a horrid Death Cheese existence as capitalist-zombie flu cultures.
Like most of these dystopic visions, the Flu Plot mixes just enough truth to make the hogwash plausible. That 1918 catastrophe was real enough, killing more than 600,000 Americans in a global outbeak with a still-indeterminate death toll, although it's been estimated as low as 20 million, high as 50 million.
But another side to this dark scenario is the billions that supposedly will be made off the H1N1 innoculations, once the vaccine becomes as rare as europium and expensive as a CEO's wastebasket.
That part of the story really scares me witless - the commercially viable aspect of this nefarious, shadowy (and, of course, supernaturally efficient) scheme. As we know from our experience living here on the big blue marble, and especially downwind of the first Bush II inauguration, quibbling details like right and wrong or good and evil are no obstacles to sound moneymaking opportunities:
If parts are being sold for profit, it's mostly because it's such an easy thing to do. Each year, up to 8,000 donors in the U.S. may leave their bodies to science, and while most people like to think of their mortal remains being gently dissected by respectful medical students, the fact is that cadavers might just as easily be sawed apart and scattered to pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms, or even used as flesh-and-blood crash-test dummies... A whole body might cost $1,400, but a harvested heart valve may go for $9,120, and knee cartilage for $14,000. "[Tissue brokers] claim they're only recovering costs," says Arthur Dalley, director of the anatomical gift program at Vanderbilt University. "But if you were trying to build a human being by buying those parts, you'd find it very expensive."
The radio swami spinning the H1N1 terror tale I heard is some doctor connected somehow to an Ivy League school - can't remember, traffic was actually moving at the time, so my concentration uncharacteristically shifted to driving - and, naturally, he's written a book about all this. And that got me to wondering about the Doomsday Industry itself: How big a goldmine is it? How deep does it go? And, sure, is there a way for me to bust off a chunk?
Most of the Armageddoneers take advantage of our contemporary American credence in rattle-brained conspiracy theories. Somebody out there is setting us up, somebody or something is gonna get us. Or they've already gotten someone just trying to do the right thing - be it battle for the freedom of his people or twist the night away with Jackie.
The History Channel, which takes some pretty specious approaches to the past, has made a cottage industry out of some Mayan prophecy of doom arriving the first day of winter, 2012. This seems to be yet another in the revolving "Y2K" End Times fiesta, but the network sells a lot of commericals during each airing and... I've... seen... just about every one of 'em.
Long ago, CBS "60 Minutes" filed a report on dangers of a commercial orchard insecticide which supposedly did everything to the human genome from cause birth defects to render normal people impervious to the powerful temptation of onion dip. Sales of apples fell through the floor, and although the durable commodities were soon back on the shelf, there was a sharp slump on the futures exchange. When the whole story turned out to be hooey and the insecticide, Alar, no more toxic than any other poison we pour on our food, it occured to me that an unscrupulous network could engineer such a market panic on the strength of a false report, buy up the apple futures, make a financial killing and stymie all lawsuits with the "freedom of press" prerogative. Later, there was another notorious, baseless food scare involving Oprah and hamburger.
I know - it's crazy. But, truth is, the H1N1 vaccine has been awfully lucrative for Glaxo, and the market at large:
GlaxoSmithKline Plc said third- quarter profit rose 30 percent after currency gains and orders for the Relenza flu drug boosted revenue. Vaccine sales declined because of a "phasing" of shipments including swine flu shots... "After 11 straight quarters of declining sales growth, it's good to see sales growth is positive," Royal Bank of Scotland analyst Michael Leacock said in an interview. "I'm a bit cautious though because of the one-off nature of swine flu products, and I recognize 2010 will be challenging because of the loss of Valtrex," an antiviral medicine that faces generic threats as soon as the fourth quarter, he said.
Moneymaking itself seemed going the way of the dinosaurs for the past year now, so anything booming is a bright spot, even a product designed to arrest mortal human fear as much as any potential pandemic. Things are down, and some sources see nothing ahead but... well... gloom and doom:
Trends Research Institute founder Gerald Celente's record of predictions is nearly flawless. His accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the sub-prime mortgage scandal and the latest economic downturn caused by the breakdown of major corporate giants.
Dubbed as the world's greatest trends forecaster by CNN, USA Today and CNBC, Celente insists that despite the latest market bounce, and increase in consumer confidence, the economy's fundamentals are broken...."Washington is inflating the biggest bubble ever: the bailout bubble," Celente said. "This is much bigger than the dot-com and real estate bubbles. When the bailout bubble bursts, it should be understood that a major war could follow."
He had me going, right up until he makes a trendy, tea-baggie "Obamageddon" crack. And, of course, he has a book out.
Trick or treat!
]]>It's hard to picture such international combustion today, on the quiet edge of the Chihuahuan Desert plateau, where deep red, ore-rich earth and dark green mesquite scrub dress the rugged countryside almost perennially in festive color. But the bullet holes and deteriorated trench lines falling back into the earth at the outskirts of town echo fairly sophisticated conflict that itself encapsulated the clash of old and new so much a part of that blood-drowned decade: cavalry charges and machine guns, sabre duels and long-range artillery barrage. The spectacular, set-piece battles drew huge crowds of Americans to hillsides on their side of the fence, to watch the carnage, and, to their credit, aid many of the refugees.
And we think border violence is bad today.
Well... maybe it comes close.
Gunmen have carried out another attack on a drugs rehabilitation centre in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, killing 10 people and injuring two others. The shooting follows the deaths of 18 people in an attack on a separate rehab centre in the same city this month. Such shootings have been blamed on drug traffickers who accuse the clinics of protecting dealers from rival gangs.
The long, torturous, capitalist venture to supply drugs to affluent gringos north of the border has all but rendered Mexico a failed state. In many areas of the country, the military has been forced to take civil control, simply because local law enforcement is too corrupt or too intimidated to take action against the cartels. Sometimes, it's hard to figure what keeps Mexico going. Sometimes, it's easy to imagine that the drug combines - los narcostrafficantes - are themselves the de facto state, supplying whatever order there is, however brutal.
Next month is the centennial of the 1910 Mexican Revolution that produced names and places which still resonate, at least in this part of the world - Villa, Huerta, Pershing, Vera Cruz, Emiliano Zapata. And from this side of history, it's hard to see where the upheaval ended. Mexico is still saddled with a government at best negligent and at worst corrosive, it still must endure a greedy, derisive - and decidedly unneighborly - neighbor to the north. It must tolerate the voluntary evacuation of its best and brightest, its strongest and most industrious, to "el Norte", where dwindling, meltdown opportunity still beats that at home.
But by how much? It's getting hard to tell. How far are we, here, from becoming a failed state?
On the web, I came across a student essay that boils down in simple terms the causes of the 1910 revolution that toppled the regime of the old Juarista Porfirio Diaz:
This government created severe poverty with their corrupt system that caused a severe separation between the classes and created tension between the classes, finally the Mexican economy (which was already suffering) was completely dependent on (loans from) foreign nations... This foreign dependency caused the Mexican economy to have no stability or control of either its growth or decay. Prior to the revolution these nations began to demand that Mexico pay back its debt to them. This was absolutely devastating to the already crippled Mexican economy.
Huge debt held by foreign creditors and a ruling elite utterly detached from its citizenry. Hmm. Sounds familiar.
In the processes of our economic meltdown, and especially in "revovery" efforts by our government, it isn't hard to feel common Americans - the famous "little people" that are so much the national bulk supporting from far below that airy tip of our political and economic pyramid - have been left out of the equation. Left behind. Efforts to re-establish investment markets, and even install a new health-care system, are power lunches by insiders, by a detached minority firmly in control of what should be, in a democracy, our commonly designed social and political mechanisms. Everything is pitched to those who stand to gain the most from any public intervention, any avenue of official control or aid; the rest of us... dwindle. We pay for it. That's all.
Paul Craig Thomas is a Libertarian columnist who's sometimes a little dotty, but capable of real insight and vivid reasoning. In a piece this week he proposes, The U.S. Is a Failed State:
Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war's financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400...
While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks...
The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington's wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar's value reduces the purchasing power of Americans' already declining incomes...
Maybe 14 months ago it would have been easy to write off Roberts' alarms as ravings of a dime-store Cassandra, as grudge-fueled nonsense. Now? We have reports the TARP recovery money probably won't be repaid fully by our banking system, too big to fail, and that after all that taxpayer revenue was handed out, and helped lace bankers' pockets in the form of bonuses, the U.S. financial system is "shakier than ever." Those tidbits come on top of an August report that estimated U.S. banks will collect a record $38.5 billion in overdraft fees this year. ...Just overdrafts.
How narrow a margin are we on... right now? If we're shoved to the wall long enough, hard enough, will we push back? Will our own Villas ride? Will we find our own "La Cucaracha" to march to? And if that nightmare comes, how long before we set right our failure?
Ever?
I guess I should be real impressed the Obama administration has drawn a line in the sand and told seven banks they couldn't pay their executives kings' ransoms out of the bailout kitty. It's an emotional issue, after all. Why should already-rich, overpaid crooks who got us in the meltdown jam profit with taxpayer money? As current affair, it's like episodic TV and freeway driving: There are good guys, bad guys, dumb folk and bang-up excitement. Maybe even a little blood and some broken glass.
Meanwhile, though, efforts to plug up the crumbling dike that is the derivatives market with safe-and-sane regulations are fading away slowly under cover of the bankers' salary smokescreen.
]]>There's been a big push by Democrats in Congress, reform advocates and the Obama administration to bring federal regulation to these deals. At the very least, advocates wants these contracts to go through clearinghouses or be traded on exchanges in order to make their terms public.
...But there are exemptions. In an effort to protect companies like airlines and manufacturers that use derivatives to hedge against things like price fluctuations and currency exchange rates, these so-called end-users would not be required to make public the terms of their contracts. Rather, they would continue to operate in the dark.
But (Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin) Peterson on Wednesday amended the bill to extend the exemption to big banks and financial institutions, as long as their contracts were with these end-users... Peterson's amendment "fatally weakens the bill," said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America. [Source: HuffPo]
Since Peterson is a committee chair in the Hope and Change Congress, you may have guessed already that he's a Democrat, and evidently one of many who didn't get the Blackberry tweek about that big push by the party to re-regulate.
Regulation was dropped from derivatives late in the Clinton era, when this relatively new "financial instrument" began picking up steam as an upper-level investment money-maker. From the same hothouse that gave us the oily, treacherous "junk bonds" in the '80s, derivatives are basically side-bets on how investments will perform, or not perform, as the case may be.
Here's what I would do to game the set-up: If I had an investment that was a mediocre performer, I'd bet on it doing badly, sell it off at its premium price - pocketing the sale price and my side-bet that it would take a sell-off hit. That kind of gaming almost crashed Wall Street itself in 1910, so our bright forebears outlawed "bucket shop" wagering... until the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Today, the dice-roll is a little more sophisticated - a lay bet that a stock will lose is paid off with a "credit swap", a form of insurance not called such because, of course, insurance is regulated. Because such swaps are unregulated, nobody has bothered to actually fund the "policy", and over the past eight years, all this gaming tore a hole in worldwide investment markets estimated to be in the trillions of dollars.
Since the other shoe hasn't fallen on all this debt, banks are sitting on their earnings and starving small businesses that live on short-term loans. Nevertheless, the investment industry wants the wide-open, crapshoot system back, and our Congress is more than willing to do just that:
Representative Barney Frank's central role in drafting new regulations for the US financial industry has dramatically boosted his power as a political fund-raiser, helping him increase campaign contributions by almost a third more than at this point in the last election cycle.
As chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Frank was a major player in the $700 billion Wall Street rescue package last year, and is now the point person working on legislation proposed by the Obama administration to prevent another economic crisis like the one that plunged the nation into a recession.
Frank's place in the thick of economic policy making has made him the focal point for a variety of executives, unions, advocacy groups, and individual supporters who have poured $1.2 million into his campaign account since January. That is 32 percent more than the $907,000 he raised during the same three quarters of his 2007-2008 reelection campaign.
Hmm. Could that 'splain why he's been such a laggard in tightening up regulation of derivatives markets? He's even been lauded on conservative blogs for this "pragmatic approach" to regulation.
On the West Coast, in the '90s, the Russian mob had a pragmatic approach to gasoline it sold to convenience stores - by mixing the fuel with water!
Frank is a perennial favorite of what passes for the progressive media these days, taking his slobbery hound-dog Baahs-tin persona to the mike stand every time we need a no-nonsense, urban perspective. Wonderful! It's like watching William Bendix gargle with hippie jug wine.
The "regulations" bill made it out of committee this week, so we'll see. Timothy Geithner seems to like it. That's never a good sign.
]]> And Military.com has an interesting story on the Edmonds saga, with first-time feedback from Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, two stalwarts of the neoconservative cabal (Feith's term) in President Bush's Pentagon - who nurtured and coddled the Iraq occupation from its inception in the 1990s to its "cakewalk" realization almost seven nightmarish years ago. These two gemstones have figured prominently in Edmonds' story of deceit, treason and, yes, back-stabbing, during the unlamented Bush Era. Perle, naturally, slags her:This is, of course, the precise sort of thing which FBI linguist-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has been alleging concerning both Turkish and Israeli interests for some time. In her case, she has testified under oath to nearly-identical behavior by U.S. scientists, military personnel and academics at top-secret nuclear and military installations who are alleged to have done precisely what Stewart David Nozette has now been busted for...
"This woman is a nutcase. Certifiable," Perle said. "She makes wild accusations. She was fired from her job, and has been on a vendetta against ... imagined demons ever since."
Feith, in an email to Military.com, said: "What I've read on the Internet about Ms. Edmonds's claims about me is wildly false and bizarre."
We're living in interesting times, though, Doug. Interesting times.
Edmonds was fired after she reported to FBI managers various incidents of misconduct and incompetence, involving her supervisor and others; an internal FBI investigation, however, has concluded that she was fired after making "valid complaints". The subject of a series of Justice Department national security decrees spanning two presidencies, Edmonds has been called by the ACLU "the most gagged person in the history of the United States of America."
Finally, in all this spying, a reminder from today's Justin Raimondo:
Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard - now serving a life sentence - stole secrets so vital that an attempt by the Israelis to get him pardoned was blocked by a massive protest from the intelligence and defense communities. Bill Clinton wanted to trade Pollard for Israeli concessions in the ongoing "peace process," and he was only prevented from doing so by a threat of mass resignations by the top leadership of the intelligence community.
The reason for their intransigence: among the material Pollard had been asked by his Israeli handlers to steal was the U.S. attack plan against the Soviet Union. According to Seymour Hersh, then-CIA director Bill Casey claimed Tel Aviv handed over the information to Moscow in exchange for relaxation of travel restrictions on Soviet Jews, who were then allowed to emigrate to Israel.
This was when Russia was still the Soviet Union, and our sworn enemy. The U.S. attack plan. WWIII. Full exchange of nuclear weapons. Friends? Enemies? Difference?
See, Mr. Feith: interesting...
]]>Say... what?
And we can expect, perhaps, the next exceedingly bright idea down the 'pike an anti-gang task force for Martha's Vineyard?
Iran?
]]> Not that any dolt this side of Michele Bachmann bought that whopper. The missile shield was designed to pressure Russia to pressure Iran to roll over, play doggie and become our vassal in the Mideast. Like our Iran crusade in general, it's an on-again, off-again project. Obama dropped this Bush-era vestige when Russian President Medvedev indicated last month he'd OK Iran sanctions, then it was back "on" in a new, mobile-missile configuration when Russia cooled on the hardball idea (Iran is a key trading partner). Now Poland says it likes the new pocket-rocket layout, and on and on.That "we'll protect you from Iranian missiles" ploy must've gotten big laughs in that part of world not contained in the Washington Post editorial pages; it's the definition of geopolitical overreach - trying to kill two birds with one expensive, unpopular stone. We sling Russia on the wall and emphasize the "danger" of an armed and "nuclear" Iran at the same time. We've evolved, diplomatically, to the point where we can't determine reality from our own perfervid fictions.
Speaking of international pie-fights, as if we don't already have enough egg creme on our face, there's this:
The splits inside NATO over the Afghan war have turned the alliance into a rotting corpse that will be virtually impossible to revive, says the former head of Canada's armed forces. General Rick Hillier also said the 28-member alliance was "dominated by jealousies and small, vicious political battles" and bemoaned its "lack of cohesion, clarity and professionalism" at the start of the Afghan mission.
Is this the end of NATO?! Can we be so lucky?!
Here's the bigger question I have for Gen. Hillier: Why in the world does this Cold-War relic still exist? Created after World War II to protect Europe from the Soviet Union, it goes cranking along, two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain and 18 years since the USSR toddled off to the ash heap of history. Why? What is it's function? What are the reasons it occupies real estate throughout the world, prints its own letterhead with its own logo, and blows money like a Jeep full of GIs on whorehouse patrol?
In the field, when the cumbersome dinosaur has sallied forth to slay our dragons-du-jour, its performance has been straightforward: It sucks. Even in terms of member countries honoring their troop commitments, NATO's record in the Afghanistan quagmire apparently is so bad, we even duck assessments, so no one here back home will note the general crappiness, and perhaps wonder about its overall value.
To top it all off, our dues for staying in the ponderous, obsolete old-soldiers' club is about half a billion a year - chicken feed, really, if you're a Wall Street hedge fund manager or mid-size banker.
But, why?
Is NATO also there to protect Kosovo drug cartels and Polish pig farmers from... Iran?
Bwah-hahahahhahahahaha!!!
Sure... there are interests in America's still-potent military-industrial complex who are mighty nostaligic about the Cold War - to the point of wanting to reinstall it. Islamo-Fascism just doesn't have the heft, as perennial foe, that does a nuclear-armed colossus. China's out, for now; those international military appraisals haven't upgraded the People's Army since it was ass-kicked in a border skirmish with Vietnam 30 years ago.
Nope. The aerospace R&Ds and big contractors want back the fat days of the Evil Empire, when they got huge, huge federal contracts for weapons systems that didn't have to work, or, at least, would never be put to any ultimate tests, God help us all. It's gotta be Russa. And... that means NATO must bucket along. Sure.
Or... we pull the plug. Not only on our "Western Allies" club, but on the whole idea of playing with fire in international affairs.
Unlike Iran's phantom arsenal, some nukes are real...
]]>I could tell from the trail of unpaid TARP receipts left behind on the front walk this morning.
For all the hardball squeezing banks put their customers through, compounding costly penalities and late fees on every tardy payment, they sure don't bust their asses reimbursing federal bailout money they've gotten over the past year.
The number of banks that didn't make their monthly dividend payments on TARP funds skyrocketed to 29 in August, up from 18 in May. Banks can choose not to make payments during a given month, allowing the dividends owed to accumulate unpaid. Failure to pay may be a sign of financial distress. Obviously banks that are short of capital may decide to retain funds rather than pay off the TARP. [Source: The Business Insider]
Try this sometime: Tell your bank you can't make the mortgage payment this month because you're short of capital on, say, the grocery bill, and you need to retain funds. Next, get a stopwatch and time how soon it takes the bank to begin foreclosure process on your address.
Easy bet - it'll be faster than you can say "too big to fail".
Those titans that have emerged from the post-9/15/08 wreckage to be our new Croesean Overlords of Amercan Finance have been trumpeting their own swift TARP repayment schedules, although, oddly, none have fully repaid. The May "stress test" didn't exactly show the banking sector booming back after the meltdown, muting boasts by Goldman Sachs and other banks that they'd pay off the government money real, real soon. BB&T's yappy self-congratulation that it's on the verge of making it's final repayment installment has been repeated so long it's been relegated to the "believe it when I see it" cellar, along with bug-eyed alien anal probers and an NFL team for L.A.
Truth is, it may never be paid back. As Robert Reich points out today, Wall Street's current boom is nothing more than a Ponzi facade, a flimsy rally boosted temporaily by cheap money and shrinking overhead caused by... job cuts. That's right, the brokers are toasting unemployment lines as short-lived boon. But when the companies continue shrinking because jobless consumers can't buy their gimcracks, the high-rolling pyramid scheme will fall flatter than Bernard Madoff's credit rating.
The market coughs, the banking industry catches a cold, and we taxpayers come down with cholera.
In Senate testimony last month, TARP watchdog Neil Barofsky said,
Treasury is unlikely to get back the full amount of money lent under the Troubled Asset Relief Program despite a recent spate of repayments from large banks... The program "played a significant role" in rescuing the financial system from a meltdown... But it was "extremely unlikely that the taxpayer will see a full return on its TARP investment," according to his prepared testimony.
(Yale Finance Professor William Goetzmann) said "The intent of TARP investment was not that it was a great investment for the U.S. taxpayer," Goetzmann said. "The intent was to save the U.S. financial system, and that was going to cost some money." He said he expected to see differences in repayment emerge among banks of different sizes. Larger banks such as Goldman Sachs, which returned $10 billion in TARP money in July, are all likely to pay back the money fairly soon, but Goetzmann warned that many smaller banks may end up defaulting on their obligations.
Thirty years ago, the federal government began taking caps off interest rates to help American banks recoup losses they'd racked up the previous decade making bad loans to shaky foreign nations. Our banks were left holding the bag when those countries - many of them our banana-republic "allies" - defaulted. But with cooperation of visionary leaders in Washington, the sorry sack was passed to consumers in form of now-legal loanshark "vigorish". Forcing those least likely to afford such a burden the "obligation" of underwriting bad decisions by overpaid, larcenous jackasses has a long, storied history as permanent fixture in American essentia.
Now, big players in the financial industry can go directly to the public till to cover losses, this time for the crap-game "instruments' they sold and couldn't redeem. There are more shoes left to fall, more losses to be posted.
Get ready to be squeezed some more.
]]>Test time.
]]> Would you rather:A. - Pay extra taxes for a pubicly administered health plan that would insure all Americans have access to care?
- or -
B. - Be required by law to buy private insurance that will insure you have access to care?
Obviously, for both choices, you're going to be out some money. But A will feed the socialist monster our government has become under Dear Leader Obama, while B will insure (heh-heh) that private enterprise does not vanish from the face of the earth. (That such a forced-payment scheme would be a f*ckin' goldmine to already-plush insurance companies is none of your silly little beeswax.)
If you make over $100,000 a year, likely you already have insurance, so B wouldn't be bug-smack on the windshield of your S-Class. However: A could spell... trouble... since a larger slice of your income would be parsed out to help the undeserving poor, writhing aimlessly in their guttersnipe misery.
Why should you be penalized for someone else's poor life choices?
For you classless rabble making less than a hundred large, the choice also is obvious. Of course, you'd probably prefer to pay some higher tax for a so-called "public option" - assuming your paltry income would qualify in this proposed supplemental-tax bracket. Over the past 75 years, you've put misguided trust in the unwise Social Security and Medicare plans - federal programs that opened the door to the dread, Eurotrash-style nanny state.
Let's be frank: Many of you find this option attractive simply because it would keep your "hard-earned dollars" out of the hands of insurance companies, which you see as endlessly greedy and inhuman.
Well, how's this for frankness: The ultimate law is the law of the jungle. Survival of the fittest. Occasionally, the herd must be winnowed, and the weak allowed to... fade. In a capitalist system, we break down this food chain in economic terms. There is no arguable reason, when we think about it logically, that anyone unable to afford to live should do so.
Capitalism, in its pristine state, commodifies everything. All components of our lives, big and miniscule, must be purchased, must be paid for. Your chewing gum. The clothes on your back. The privilege of flushing away whatever you flush away down your toilet. When you think about it, even "God" is owned. He's "our's" - the big, judgmental property in the sky. Correct?
Private insurers, by storming alone, proudly, the red barricades, are really battling for your right to live a life worth living.
A strong society requires sacrifice. And strong people never have to sacrifice themselves.
Someone else can be paid to do that...
]]>Our subsequent conflicts, including the current, never-ending nightmare in the Mideast, I as well watch from sidelines, involved only to the extent of noticing how they all seem uniform: pointless sacrifices of many forced by safely remote few. Can there be any doubt that our hyperviolence in, say, Grenada, is little more than grown men and women in positions of responsibility playing God?
Do they beat their enervated chests, wrathful and brave in stateside comfort, securely absentee? Henry Kissinger once famously linked libido with this titanic power, which he called "the best aphrodesiac". So... is their bedroom performance improved, assuming age hasn't shriveled those ambitions?
And afterwards, how well do they sleep? If some puffball is sick enough to throw away lives for a hard-on, does the question even apply?
Finally, of course, do they profit from the bloodletting? Do they make money off it?
I know I reference this guy a lot when I'm posting about our Imperial disasters, but Justin Raimondo, over at Antiwar.com, has some good background on Sen. Dianne Feinstein's astounding appearance on yesterday's ABC's This Week With George Stephanopoulos, in which California's celebrated progressive pushed for implementation of the "McChrystal surge" in Afghanistan.
It's a position most Democrats reject, rightly sussing out such a troop escalation would mark Afghanistan as "Obama's War". The President's own campaign rhetoric argued the Afghan front was the "real war" - not Iraq - and indicated his approach would more resemble a police investigation than a rolling howitzer barrage. It was music to ears of a war-weary electorate, but has left him in the position of "damned if he does or doesn't" in that faraway quagmire. Now, even if he ditches and moves out U.S. forces, Republicans would accuse him - as they did with Truman and Democrats over China 60 years ago - of "losing" Afghanistan to the Taliban foe.
Let's give her all the benefit of the doubt and posit such political ass-covering was foremost in Feinstein's mind yesterday; it may be misdemeanor-disgraceful as strategtic motive, but her reasons could be much worse. And maybe they are, as Raimondo points out in today's column:
[Excerpting "The Bohemian"]: Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee...
Blum and Feinstein are laughing all the way to the bank as URS Corp and Perini grow fat on the military appropriations gravy train - the only sector of the U.S. economy that seems to be thriving. Perini, in which Blum owns a controlling interest, is the Democrats' Halliburton - indeed, Cheney's old corporate digs is Perini's chief competitor. Blum bought it when it was nearly broke in 1997. In 2005, Feinstein's membership on the subcommittee was "routinely" rotated, as the Soros-funded shills over at Media Matters made sure to point out, contrary to Bryne's assertions that she might have resigned under pressure. By that time Perini was raking in $1.7 billion in annual income.
It's Raimondo's suggestion that the kind of "neighborhood" and infrastructure tactics McChrystal would initiate would be a substantial cash boon to Blum's Perini, which specializes in that kind of support for combat-ready outreach. Does that play a part in Feinstein's unexpected hawkishness? Is she that far gone? That soulless?
In a column last week, Raimondo lambasted Code Pink chief and perennial dark cloud, Medea Benjamin, over her flip-flop on the Afghanistan war. Apparently, this year, supporting our endless, pointless conflict in the shadows of the Hindu Kush is practically as fashionable as Darfur; I suppose we can expect Angelina Jolie to copter into the Khyber Pass for a photo op with one of our preschool killer-drone casualties.
Benjamin's public excuse is that staying in for the long haul and defeating our Islamic-fundamentalist foes will elevate the status of Afghan women, implying our global crusade is propelled by truly revolutionary ideals. Womens' rights? Pack up your Kate Millet in an old kit bag and smile, smile, smile? It's one of the silliest and least believeable reasons I've yet heard for international bloodletting - but is emblematic of this blinkered, tendentious fool.
Not being a Libertarian, I can't follow Raimondo's points on many subjects. But on this nation's wars, and the motivation behind them, the views of the noninterventionist Right are refreshingly free of the Left's dated dogmatic baggage; it is clear-eyed and passionate in a way we'd expect the antiwar movement to be in general.
But, it seems, those we'd normally trust are missing in action, confused by sideline issues. Or they are hypocritical... and float along with political trends.
Or they are corrupt sell-outs.
]]>- Albert Einstein
After years in the hocus-pocus fantasy land of the Bay Area, where the margin separating straitjacket dementia from New-Age revelation is virtually nonexistent, I discovered in the mid-'90s Michael Shermer's Skeptic magazine. And it saved, if not my life, then certainly my sanity.
]]> Every issue investigates each wild assertion, silly delusion and crackpot development in what has become, downwind of '60s counterculture, an ever-rolling medicine show of popularly accepted "counter-reality". By the last decade of the 20th century, some medical plans offered deductables for aromatherapy, and a friend of mine is convinced, through years of "holistic analysis", that many of his emotional problems are caused by bad spiritual vibes emanating from past lives of old girlfriends. If that's true, he's damn lucky to have avoided dating the reincarnation of Lizzie Borden.Shermer, a science historian who recruits some of the world's top researchers to contribute articles, has been at this "candle in the dark" business some time. No better summation of his brand of scientific skepticism exists outside his "Skeptic's Manifesto" in his book Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time:
Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, which involves gathering data to test natural explanations for natural phenomena. A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent that it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement. But all facts in science are provisional and subject to challenge, and therefore skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions... The key to skepticism is to navigate the treacherous straits between "know nothing" skepticism and "anything goes" credulity by continuously and vigorously applying the methods of science.
At the heart of his book, it's Shermer's proposal that we believe in things unseen because such superstition simplifies explanation and comforts us. "God works in mysterious ways" can be the answer to any fortune or calamity, any indescribable loss - even the death of a child. I've long thought people still believe a huge conspiracy/coverup surrounds the assassination of President Kennedy because, perversely, it's the most comforting scenario. Kennedy was big-time, he was Camelot-glamorous; it must have required a huge plot to kill him. More than anything else, in the conspiracy framework, there's order: Good guys and bad. The President's nemeses had reason to want him out of the way. The idea Oswald was a solitary gunman puts power to change history in the hands of one malcontent with a cheap rifle, and is the very definition of chaos.
Such imponderable, chaotic motive and action are terrifying, especially in a nuclear age.
I'm not sure about the motivations for people who fell victim to a Sedona sweat-lodge death trap this week. SPQR has a fine post today on this tragedy of misplaced trust and curiosity, in which two people died and 19 were hospitalized after hours in a relevatory steambath apparently operated by self-appointed guru James Arthur Ray. He peddles something called "The Secret" and is a favorite of Oprah Winfrey, who sometimes reveals a startlingly counterintuitive (and powerfully influential) vetting process.
The stereotype of belief in witchy nonsense is that it's always current among rural hayseeds and the poor. But reality confounds that class arrogance: Superstitious hogwash has real coin among people possessing bounteous time and money. Scientologists here in Los Angeles are some of the wealthiest members of the community; there's a cable show called "Celebrity Ghost Stories" or some such hooey, in which haggard "Love Boat" castaways recount their encounters with the unknown.
Over the past few decades, we've been confused by a lot of "anti-reality" - pie-eyed nonsense our parents and grandparents would laugh out of town. Is this stuff propelled through society by folks who really believe it? By interests who can make money off it - or even utilize the ignorance and bafflement it leaves in its wake?
Well... all of that.
A debate topic as foolish as "death panels" built into heath-care reform wouldn't have traction in a social dynamic that prized logic and evidence. But one in which a sizable segment of the populace believes enormous conspiracies can operate without leaving behind a shred of evidence, or that we can sweat out our inner warrior - easily can be fooled and sidetracked by such crap.
On the other hand, dismissing real schemes as "conspiracy theory" is useful camouflage for real conspirators. The inane counter-proposals of the "911 truthers" obscure valid questions about the terror attacks, and unresolved issues about that remarkable, tragic day.
Our spiritual side is deep and mysterious. It's always unmarked ground, prime for new discovery, but that leaves it ripe for misdirection, for lies. We want to believe. But what? At what point do our defining dogmas turn toxic and begin destroying us? Today, in the Middle East, a long, complicated blood-letting pivots on which unprovable... fairy tale... will dominate the region.
How deeply can we love the unknowable? How much can we risk to the invisible?
]]>Sure looks like the "hawks' nest" pushing for shock and awe revival - joined, of course, by our spongy media - have done their work well. A poll released today shows not only that Americans favor military action against Iran, should talks fail, but also indicates most of the country gives chances for success in seminal U.S./Iran negotiations at roughly the same odds as Kermit the Frog winning the Tour de France.
]]> On my way into work this morning, I heard David Harris parrot the overheated hysteria of Israel's Likud Party, framing Iran as the greatest threat to world peace since... Saddam Hussein. For Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, discovery of the anything-but-secret Iranian nuclear facility at Qom late last month calls for sanctions at least, and a new Mideast war front at best (for him).The survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found... 61 percent (of Americans) say it's critical to stop Iran, even if it takes military action, while 24 percent say it's more important to avoid military action even if it means Iran becomes a nuclear power... But Americans are skeptical about the prospects - 64 percent say the talks will not succeed at getting Iran to stop its suspected work on a nuclear weapon while just 22 percent believe the talks will eventually pay off. [Source: McClatchey Newspapers]
Israel has called Iran its "existential threat" and Harris' group, well-connected in the webwork of what's become known as the Israel Lobby, has used every opportunity to push the United States to take out this nemesis. In this morning's broadcast, he legitimized part of his argument that Iran secretly is building nuclear weapons by citing the IAEA "annex" - a spurious addendum to last year's International Atomic Energy Agency assessment apparently originating from many of the same folks who stovepiped and cherry-picked Iraq "WMD" lies. It was hastily cooked up - a'la Niger "yellow cake" - to counter the agency's absolution of Iran's nuclear research.
And if fabrications don't work, there's always the bust-out spooky. In a Huffpo post last week Harris wrote:
...The Iranian leadership, worrisome enough with its messianic belief in hastening the coming of the Hidden Imam and reaching the End of Days, is on the ropes from revelations of fraud and state violence in connection with the June elections. Nothing like the possibility of cooking up a little foreign distraction to try to unite the people and divert attention from the regime's true nature.
Wow! With all our quandaries, at least we don't have arcane prophecy to deal with. At least, most of us. Harris and his cohorts - notably the ever-energetic chickenhawks at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee - constantly push for military action to destroy an Iranian weapons program dismissed by international inspectors and even our own National Intelligence Estimates; failing that, they want imposition of draconian sanctions they hope will spur the Persian republic to its own belligerence. It's an old, still-viable Likud/Lobby project: Enlist American power to remove or subdue Israel's enemies in the Mideast.
But now crises seem to be popping out all over. President Obama's case-hardened, battle-tested advisors, each of 'em able to bring in a shot-up crate on a wing and a prayer - Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton (oh, boy) - pump him with clashing expertise on what to do about the deteriorating Afghan theater.
In purely political terms - decisions aimed at issues here at home - Democrats want to steer clear of a troop escalation; they rightly smell "quagmire". Republicans want such a "surge" - since it will forever mark Afghanistan as "Obama's War", and should he decide against a troop increase, they can blame him for losing the flea-bitten pesthole to its homegrown warlords and terror fanatics. In his campaign last year, Obama branded Afghanistan as the key battleground in our Mideast debacle, so it may be the foreign-policy dealbreaker of his regime. As TPM itself notes this morning:
There are 68,000 troops there already, thanks in part to the change in strategy Obama announced in March. He said then he wanted to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" al Qaeda and nearly doubled the troops deployed to the region as he started to implement a drawdown in Iraq. That was following up on a campaign promise since the president has said Afghanistan is the "war we need to win."
But wait... there's more! A new front could open with Pakistan, an old, reluctant ally and now regional bullseye for our killer-drone ordnance. The troubled, fractious country - in some ways, it makes Afghanistan look like Monaco - has The Bomb. It also, reportedly, plays host to Osama bin Ladin, and sports an intelligence apparatus as trustworthy as a new start-up fronted by Michael Hilton, Clark Rockefeller and Sir Allen Stanford.
State department and intelligence officials delivered the ultimatum to Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, last week as he visited the US for the United Nations' security council sessions and the G20 economic summit... Last week Anne Patterson, America's ambassador to Islamabad, told the Daily Telegraph that the (Pakistani) offensive in Swat was not targeting the insurgents posing the greatest danger to NATO forces in Afghanistan... An official told the Daily Telegraph: "...The Americans said 'If you don't take action, we will.'"
US unmanned drone strikes have so far been confined to Pakistan's federally administrated tribal border regions where Islamabad holds little sway. But attacks in or around Quetta, in Baluchistan, would strike deep into the Pakistan government's territory and are likely to cause a huge outcry in the country. [Source: Daily Telegraph]
If we pressed Pakistan, I doubt war would break out. On paper, at least, it could be absorbed simply in a coup accompli - a quiet, de facto overthrow of civilian rule with the aid militant pressure from Pakistan's hostile neighbor to the south. This week, India is bracing forces on its border, in what could be a glimpse of things to come:
To beef up air defence capabilities and react in quickest possible time along the international border with Pakistan, the Indian Air Force has decided to station all its MiG 29 squadrons at Adampur, the second largest Air Force base in the country.
India and Pakistan have hated each other since the 1948 partition, have fought a "generational war" for decades over Kashmir, and India is still smarting over that Pakistan-based terror attack in Mumbai in November. One advantage to an American alliance with India: They're not Muslim. Downside: Such geopolitical puppetry as assuming control of Pakistan by subverting its internal structure would damn-sure land us in a hornet's-nest insurgency that could make Fallujah look like our much promised, never-pranced "cakewalk".
So many conflicts, so little time.
...Or calm reflection.
]]>So now I'm hot, since my dreary drive-time up the 101 has been ruined - ruined - by some jackass named Roger Hedgecock, yapping away the afternoon on what had been my favorite all-news radio station.
]]> First clue he's broadcast nationwide came with his references to "out in California" - like we're on the far side of sun out here, living on a urine/ammonia diet, with eight tentacles and a deep hankering to stick long pins in whimpering earthlings. "Well, I'm sure you folks out in California can understand blah, blah, blah..." Why is this type of geographical patronization so exclusive to the East Coast? Know what? West of the Mississippi, we can slip on socks without adult supervision and even wipe ourselves after a dump!But here's the gag: If you click on the link to his website (atop every page is Hedgecock's smiling, supremely arrogant pose) you'll discover he's a former mayor of San Diego - and evidently still resides in Jarhead Central. So all this "ah... yes... Californians... I've a few pinned to styrofoam in my bug collection" is just a cheap ruse to get cozy with all you pump-handle rubes out Adirondack way.
Hedgecock is kind of a junior-league Limbaugh, wrangling to panic-level the confused and scared out there in vast America. The blogs on his site vary from a useful link to a Money magazine article about Bush's dishonesty on the health of banks last year to bacon-drippings from Orly Taitz. This hot and cold, up and down texture mirrors the anger and sporadic insight of the riled populace "out here".
So, it's Hedgecock's mission to shape this zeitgeist, to sculpt it into a form amenable to right-wing invidiousness. One of the first things I notice about his callers is that many of them aren't poisoned on Obama. Most actually believe the President is trying to do the right thing, a good job, with an enormous pile of problems set before him. Each one, in turn, has these naive delusions smashed by Hedgecock's almost rote recitation of the teabagger playbook: Obama is incompetent, he knows nothing about foreign policy and so overseas heavyweights play him like a cello, he's an academic, he's out of touch with "middle America". Underneath it all, truly, is Right radio's soft racism: Obama is not one of us.
Evidently, Hedgecock is one of us, especially if our life-paths have swerved damn close to pastoral, white-collar lockups. Here's an excerpt from his Wikipedia entry:
In 1985 he was forced from office, after a retrial convicted him (later overturned on a technicalilty) on one count of conspiracy and twelve counts of perjury involving, then-District Attorney Ed Miller asserted, improper campaign contributions; his first trial had ended in a mistrial due to a hung jury. Hedgecock was alleged to have illegally failed to report over $350,000 in contributions from former Del Mar mayor Nancy Hoover, confidence man Jerry David Dominelli, and the last's eponymous J. David Company. (The J. David Company later imploded, after bilking investors of more than $82,000,000, in what at the time was one of the largest Ponzi schemes in the nation's history. Dominelli would later serve twenty years in Federal prison.)
His on-air promo mentions his views are seasoned with a "sprinking of pachouli oil", and here's some background on that:
In his early years, entrepreneur Hedgecock tried his hand at music concert promotions. One notable co-production of his was the 1969 Mother's Day concert at Aztec Bowl (now the site of Viejas_Arena, SDSU). Performers included Canned Heat, Grateful Dead, and Santana. In the naive months before the infamous Altamont_Free_Concert, security was provided by the local Hells Angels motorcycle club, to whom Hedgecock paid a signing bonus of a case of Jack Daniel's.
Wow - send the bikers to Iran! Well... it's a colorful past, although Hedgecock's own foreign policy and military expertise must be leavened with a draft deferment from the Vietnam War for severe acne - but he's a California attorney, so professional arrogance probably informs him he's possessed of world-class worldview. Downside, upside.
His show is part of the Radio America network, airing luminaries as varied and mottled as Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy. (Full disclosure: I once had an acting job on a television detective show guest-starring the old Murcius of Watergate.)
Against this, just one conservative network of many, there's Air America, a lonely voice for the other side. Bet they don't get invites to the nostalgia fests up at Sonny Barger's place. Makes you wonder how Obama got elected in the first place.
And maybe wonder just how much juice these puffballs really possess.
Gimme shelter!
]]>...The man who prosecuted her for first-degree murder said Friday that one of his lasting images was that of a "heartless, bloodthirsty robot." Vincent Bugliosi, however, said that image has become more ambiguous with the passage of time. [Source: Los Angeles Times]
Her death brought up a panoply of names from the filmy past - Manson, "Tex" Watson, Patricia Krenwinkel and Bobby Beausoleil - all still serving time for those dark crimes committed so long ago, in the twilight of the '60s. In fact, no one convicted for their roles in the two nights of almost ritualistic bloodshed called the "Tate-La Bianca murders" has ever been released from prison.
They've been "inside" much longer than most domestic monsters. In Florida, which rivals Texas for the death penalties meted out for first-degree murder, an inmate fortunate enough to avoid walking his last mile to the injection theater serves an average of 19-21 years in the slammer. By those lights, the Manson family should have been out in time to toast the end of the Reagan era.
One big difference is the rigorous activities of Tate's mother and sister, who have attended every parole hearing for every member of Manson's bloody band, and have made sure the State of California remembers just how blood-stained are their hands.
So it was a little jarring to hear Debra Tate popped up on the Today Show this week, defending her one-time brother-in-law, now facing extradition to the U.S. from Switzerland for assaulting an underage girl in 1977:
"There's rape and then there's rape," (Tate) said. "It was determined that Roman did not forcibly have sex with this woman. It was a consensual matter." Leaving aside the principle that under California law, a 13 year-old girl is legally incapable of consenting to sex, Tate said that discussions with Los Angeles prosecutors led her to believe Polanski would not get a fair trial there. "I do believe that our system is extremely broken on [multiple] levels," she said.
That "rape and 'rape'" distinction - like pornography, something we all recognize but can't adequately define - got Whoopi Goldberg in hot water, when her feminist ideals seemingly clashed with her... what?... professional loyalities, and led her to defend the fugitive filmmaker by accurately noting his guilty plea was not for "'rape' rape." Seeing the video from "The View", it's easy to see in her eyes that she realized she'd stepped in a deep pile of repulsion as the words left her mouth. Rarely have terms for rape been drawn so exactingly, this side of the Boston Strangler's legal team.
Right-wing pundits accuse Goldberg and other Hollywood celebrities of evincing elite prerogative in their defense of Polanski. Heavyweight (literally and figuratively) producer Harvey Weinstein, who's circulating a petition to free the director, refers to the charge in an Independent op-ed as a "so-called crime". Sympathetic media tends to paint the controversy in terms of progressive, bright creative types battling inbred, bible-thumping morality of backward snake-handlers.
On which side would you want to be?
There are strange cross-currents here to that iconic celebrity-crime sensation, the O.J. Simpson case, in that progressives, and oddly feminists, seem to set aside their own issues for the sake of combating some overarching injustice that only can be perceived faintly by the rest of us. In Simpson's case, in work like In Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case, credentialed leftist writers and activists like co-editor Toni Morrison, Claudia Brodsky Lacour and others go out of their way to defend a man who was at very least a wife-beater, on the pretext that Simpson - via his Bronco hejira and agonizing trial - fits their template of put-upon African-American victim.
Like Simpson, Polanski's case seems to pivot not on the crime he's accused of, but of who he is. Of course, the reverse of that, accusing someone not for what they did but for who they are, is the essense of bigotry.
Based on his life story and his resume of truly monumental films, Polanski's defenders seem willing to excuse a crime by which normally they'd be... well... repulsed. I don't think its really violation of anachronistic, provincial morality that angers their opponents. It's the obvious flaunting of a hypocritical double-standard that so inflames them.
Here's the nut of any such double-standard: Its downside ensnares far more people than those surfing the 'upside'. No one knew that better than Susan Atkins. Can anyone doubt she would have been freed long ago, had her victims been Hollywood Boulevard street hustlers, or fellow hippies? That she and her cohorts came into the Hills, into the haunts of the rich and powerful for their prey, doomed her to life in prison. Tate's survivors have help in the parole hearings, and it's this message: There are certain people, in this society, not to be killed. Not to be victims. And, so, not to be perpetrators.
There is a recent, superior documentary on Polanski's case, called "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" that I caught last year on HBO; from it, I took away a deep sense of ambiguity about his story. Although I have no evidence for it, I think the film's makers originally intended it as an apologia for Polanski, as a plea of forgiveness for what Weinstein termed a trivial, "so-called crime". That's before they encountered and interviewed Polanski's victim - the woman now and the frightened 13-year-old she was three decades ago.
The film covers, extensively, her grand jury testimony, in which she testifies she resisted his advances and asked him to call her mother before he drugged, raped and sodomized her. In 1978, the L.A. prosecutors allowed him to plead to lesser charges to spare her what likely would be a torturous cross-examination. Did you know that? Balancing that are the screwy legal irregularities of the case, and a judge every bit as L.A. eccentric as Zsa Zsa Gabor. But while it's obvious the system treated Polanski unfairly - by making a deal for him to plead guilty and reneging with a sentence likely to entail prison time - does that mitigate the heinousness of his crime?
At one point in his op-ed, referring to the tragedies Polanski faced in World War II, Weinstein clumsily asks, "How do you go from the Holocaust to the Manson family with any sort of dignity?" Well... Mr. Weinstein... I've met people who faced vast tragedy and kept their dignity, because dignity can't be taken away by anything or anyone outside ourselves, no matter how debasing the treatment we face. Like each of us, high and low, rich and not, only Polanski can shed his own dignity, and it's evident, one dark night long ago, he did just that.
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