Opinion-Columns.com

The Guy-Child. Lost In Space?

The girl-child is on a tear, breaking corporate barriers, having children later in life when other goals are met and generally wading into what was once a man’s world with elbows jabbing and knees flying. A derogatory comment by Harvard president Larry Summers that women may not have quite the stuff to compete with men in the sciences, cost him his job. Women are all the rage

But where’s the guy? Dropping out and going home to live with mom and dad, if you can believe the tracking statistics. Leonard Sax writes in the Washington Post that

“One-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents, taking up residence in their old room, the same bedroom where they lived when they were in high school, working 16 hours a week at Kinko's or part time at Starbucks.”

Parents are pulling their hair out. "For God's sake you're 26 years old. You're not in school. You don't have a career. You don't even have a girlfriend. What's the plan? When are you going to get a life?"

One third?

Sax wonders what’s gone wrong with guys and I can’t help but wonder what’s gone wrong with parents? It’s not their job to hector the kid about what he’s got (or not got) in mind, but it is their job to avoid being enablers. Even birds know that. What in the name of god did they expect from all that nurturing?

Let’s face it, it’s not every young boy’s dream to be a doctor or a lawyer. There are those (and I am among them) who believe if a kid’s not deep into drugs, doesn't come home drunk, hasn’t loaded up nine credit-cards to their limit, isn’t breaking the law and is self-sufficient, he ought to be left the hell alone to sort things out.

But parents washing his clothes and setting breakfast on the table as though he was still in high school is ridiculous. Not only ridiculous, but to fall all over themselves catering to his creature comforts and complain in the meantime, is ludicrous.

Another newspaper article, lamenting parents’ unwillingness to let their kids show a little responsibility in (or out of) the classroom, may shed some light on how we came to be where we are. Valerie Strauss, also in the Post, writes

“They text message their children in middle school, use the cell-phone like an umbilical cord to Harvard Yard and have no compunction about marching into kindergarten class and screaming at a teacher about a grade.”

Educators worry about the ability of young people to become independent. Educators would do well to throw miscreant parents into the parking lot and get back to teaching.

"As a child gets older, it is a real problem for a parent to work against their child's independent thought and action, and it is happening more often," says Ron Goldblatt, executive director of the Association of Independent Maryland Schools.

"Many young adults entering college have the academic skills they will need to succeed but are somewhat lacking in life skills like self-reliance, sharing and conflict resolution," said Linda Walter, an administrator at Seton Hall University in New Jersey and co-chairman of the family portion of new-student orientation.

Somewhat lacking? A third of them running back to mom’s sheltering home and you call that somewhat lacking?

"They have been the most protected and programmed children ever -- car seats and safety helmets, play groups and soccer leagues, cell-phones and e-mail," said Mark McCarthy, assistant vice president and dean of student development at Marquette University in Milwaukee. "The parents of this generation are used to close and constant contact with their children and vice versa."

And then they complain when the kid comes home to roost.

It’s a geezer mentality to complain about kids and their constant privilege, been going on since Caesar’s time. On the other hand, modern parents are guilty of entertaining their children beyond any logical limits. The youngster who doesn’t have a cell-phone, iPod, library shelf stacked with video games and a 600 channel TV in his room is underprivileged. He’s been cocooned since infancy and remains, unsurprisingly, an infant.

No wonder they want to come back to have mom wash their socks. It’s cold and lonely out there in the real world compared to the womb of a parent’s home. But why is this almost exclusively a boy problem? Likely because women still have that ‘girl thing’ to prove themselves against and boys have long since given in to the comforts of home, even if it’s not their home.

Women won’t want to hear this Larry Summers-like comment, but women on the way up share apartments. If they get serious about a guy they’re far more likely to move in with him than the other way around. So finances favor the independent woman lifestyle. Adding to the statistical probabilities, a guy is grudgingly willing to put up with his old man’s grumbling, as long as mom provides the comforts. But what woman in her right mind could possibly survive in a house with her mother?

Boys are lazy and spoiled and guess who spoiled them? The same parents who did all that supporting of their fragile little self-images and now lack courage to kick them out of the nest.

On the other hand, have you added up what it costs these days to build a nest like the one they were (unsuccessfully) nudged out of?
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Iran Proposes Nuclear Destruction of the Dollar

All the hoopla, posturing, saber-rattling and rhetoric about Iran and their nuclear threat to the world is smoke. Europe weighs in on the side of moderation, because Europe wants no easy excuse for America to attack Iran. More smoke.

The fire the Bush administration is trying to prevent is Iran’s pledge to create an Oil Bourse, based not on the dollar, as all world oil is sold, but the euro. If that is allowed to happen, the dollar will tank, I mean really tank and the likelihood of American default on its debt is huge, probably unavoidable.

A little history. Krassimir Petrov history.  A nation-state taxes its own citizens, while an empire taxes other nation-states, explains Petrov, authoring an article titled “The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse.” The United States had never been an empire, until 1971, when it pulled off a very special sort of coup against the rest of the world. We still don't think of ourselves in those terms. Foreign governments, demanding their loans to America be repaid in gold (as had been their singular option) were essentially told to stuff it.

No longer backing its currency with gold, the U.S. had to find a damned quick alternative or lose its monetary leadership. That alternative was oil. Every nation in the world consumed oil and if the currency of oil became the dollar, the American buck would be the standard against which world currencies were valued. We pulled it off.

Culminating in 1973, the U.S. entered into an iron-clad arrangement with Saudi Arabia to militarily support the Saudi Kingdom in exchange for Saudi Arabia accepting only U.S. dollars for its oil. Not all that tough a sell. We're going to allow you to become rich beyond your wildest dreams and protect that wealth for you, but only in dollars. Saudi was the tail that wagged the OPEC dog and OPEC had no choice but to go along.

And so, the single acceptable currency for buying oil throughout the world became the dollar. The world must therefore hold dollars, in ever increasing amounts as it used more oil at ever increasing prices. An upward spiral. Gold replaced by black gold as a backing for our currency.

As Petrov proves, we became an empire in ’73 because we ‘taxed’ the other nations of the world and have continued to tax them by providing dollars and redeeming them at ever declining value as inflation devalued our currency. A ’73 dollar borrowed is worth a good bit more than an ’83 dollar repaid.

It’s been a bonnie little scam, allowing us all sorts of economic magic tricks and is one of the biggest reasons America has been so relentlessly willing (and able) to go in debt.

Make sense now that we didn’t go in and mop up the Saudi’s after 9-11? Understandable that oil’s climb from $2 to $60 a barrel didn’t shake us up all that much? More demand for more dollars, redeemed with inflated currency. Is it a surprise that Saudi Prince Bandar had the keys to the Oval Office through several presidencies?

But, should Iran be allowed to actually go through with its marketing of oil for euros, that would heave a hell of a wrench into the machinery of American empire. They would love to do it. And, all things being equal, Europe would love to see them do it. So, probably, would Asia. Asia would no longer be as captive a manufacturer of American-purchased goods as they are now. It’s pretty obvious that, other than our own self-interest, there’s not much support out there for continuing the dollar-oil relationship.

Except, of course, for our debt. Except for all things rarely being equal.

We owe truly fantastic amounts of money to various lender-nations, some $9 trillion at the moment and increasing like a winter thaw in mountain snow. Lenders must be edgy about repayment.  Essentially, when we shrugged off their demand for gold in ’72, we declared ourselves bankrupt. We had guaranteed gold and reneged. The Midas-grab at the Saudi deal was inspired brinksmanship and it placed us securely in a position of world (financial) dominance. Some would say to scratch the modifier.

The dollar hitting a wall, this time around, would no doubt bankrupt our nation. It’s doubtful the rest of the world could survive the ensuing financial destruction, as markets tumbled and various forms of indebtedness became worthless. Now, as before the ’29 crash, value and equity and security are merely perceptions, mirror-images on the ledgers of who-knows-who in who-knows-where? Piles of zeros and ones on numberless computers.

So, the goodwill in continuing this bonnie little scam is not entirely withheld by the players who could force an issue. Theirs are very nervous feet on very thin ice and the unintended consequences of a misstep could ignite a disaster of such proportion as to make our continuing empire seem quite benign.

The row with Iran is over oil-for-dollars rather than nuclear ambitions. But what is not said may well bring a war over what is not backed away from. We have lots of military hardware in the area at the moment and a president with not all that much to lose. It may interest you to know that Saddam was headed in the direction of selling oil for euros before we suddenly took such interest in his WMD.

WMD is always tactical, but not always ordnance. Sometimes it’s currency.
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More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.

Another ‘War’ On This Or That

We’ve had Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, one of those well-meaning Herculean efforts from the liberals that cost who knows what? We are, for all practical purposes, as poor as we were in 1964, when our president declared that war.

And there is the continuation of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, a strange battle that imprisons the poor and hasn’t lessened our thirst for illegal drugs an iota. An iota is a very small amount. Come to think of it, the miniscule drop in the poverty rate may be due to jailing so many of the poor.

We’re excellent at declaring wars on this and that social issue and spectacularly unsuccessful when it comes to the shooting kind. But that’s another issue.

I was amazed to read just yesterday that you needn’t travel to the Middle East to find a War on Christians. Rick Scarborough, a large-caliber televangelist guy (what other kind is there?) hosted the initial declaration of this particular war. Turns out that the Situation Room in his reenactment of Onward Christian Soldiers was a small ballroom in the Omni Shoreham Hotel over in Rock Creek Park. Alan Cooperman reported the two-day strategic session in the Washington Post, artfully titled "War on Christians and the Values Voters in 2006."

The honor roll of kooks playing to his choir included Tom DeLay, who took the "chattering classes" to task for thinking there is no war on Christians. The same chattering classes who seem to think Tom’s a crook. Chattering classes is a new buzz-word. The President used it the other day, so I guess that puts a sort of national stamp of approval on it, although it’s not nearly so clever as Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativity.”

According to Tom, "We are after all a society that abides abortion on demand, that has killed millions of innocent children, that degrades the institution of marriage and often treats Christianity like some second-rate superstition. Seen from this perspective, of course there is a war on Christianity." I clench my teeth and refuse the easy comparisons Tom sets himself up for.

Additional kooksters included Senators John Cornyn and Sam Brownback, as well as conservative Christian leaders Phyllis Schlafly, Rod Parsley, Gary Bauer, Janet Parshall and Alan Keyes. Each and all of them no doubt felt their image needed the photo-op burnishing of a war against something and what better target than their political base? What better year than a mid-term election year?

Cooperman writes “The opening session was devoted to "reports from the frontlines" on "persecution" of Christians in the United States and Canada, including an artist whose paintings were barred from a municipal art show in Deltona, Fla., because they contained religious themes.”

Whar’s my shootin’ iron. Man the barricades. It’s painful to have people wishin’ me Happy Holidays on Christmas and downright sorrowful folks just don’t understand Franklin Graham, when he says that Islam "is a very evil and wicked religion." But damn-nation, when municipal art shows won’t let a good, Christian artist dis-play his good Christian art . . . it’s war! Municipal art shows are the heart and soul of Christian belief.

According to a 2004 poll, three-quarters of evangelicals believe they are a minority under siege and nearly half believe they are looked down upon by most of their fellow citizens.

I know, it’s hard to believe.

K. Hollyn Hollman, of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, takes issue with those who find themselves outraged:

"Certainly religious persecution existed in our history, but to claim that these examples amount to religious persecution disrespects the experiences of people who have been jailed and died because of their faith." 

Further in Cooperman’s piece, Robert M. Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University is quoted,

"This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position." 

The pastor of a Congregational Church in Holland, Mass., said that after hearing about a gay beauty pageant in California, he decided to hold a "Mr. Heterosexual Contest" in Worcester. "It was just an event to proclaim the truth that God created us all heterosexual," he said. But to his surprise, "even Bible-believing churches were not on board. They said it wasn't loving."

I don’t know about loving, but an attitude like that, espoused from the pulpit, might get you looked down upon by most of your fellow citizens.

But then again, war is hell.
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There are lots more Things That Make Me Nuts, all of them on my personal web site.

Senior Fellows, the Cookings at Brookings

I’m all for think-tanks. God knows we have little enough thinking going on today and if we have to fill tanks with something, better fellows than fish. Particularly Senior Fellows.

Michael O’Hanlon is just such a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution (all capitalized) and he’s penned a prescription for How To Stop a Civil War.

Mike’s never actually been in a war, much less a civil one, but he’s got serious think-tank-type credentials; expertise in Arms treaties, Asian security issues, homeland security, Iraq policy, military technology, missile defense, North Korea policy, peacekeeping operations, U.S. defense strategy and budget.

I’m impressed. We all know how well arms treaties have served dealers and both homeland security and Iraq policy are brilliant examples of stunning achievement. Defense strategy and budget are veritable bookends of enlightened thinking, the one having almost single-handedly busted the other.

Michael opens his thesis with this dumbfounding statement

Administration officials have been right in recent weeks to argue that there is no large-scale civil war underway in Iraq. As long as the Iraqi political leadership remains generally united in trying to calm the situation, and as long as sectarian violence remains more sporadic than strategic (with no systematic ethnic cleansing, for example), true civil war remains a threat rather than a reality.

He is correct in that there has not yet been an Iraqi Gettysburg, but of ethnic cleansing we have seen aplenty. Zayed, the blogging Iraqi dentist writes

Please don’t ask me whether I believe Iraq is on the verge of civil war yet or not. I have never experienced a civil war before, only regular ones. All I see is that both sides are engaged in tit-for-tat lynching and summary executions. I see governmental forces openly taking sides or stepping aside. I see an occupation force that is clueless about what is going on in the country. I see politicians that distrust each other and continue to flame the situation for their own personal interests. I see Islamic clerics delivering fiery sermons against each other, then smile and hug each other at the end of the day in staged PR stunts. I see the country breaking into pieces. The frontlines between different districts of Baghdad are already clearly demarked and ready for the battle. I was stopped in my own neighborhood yesterday by a watch team and questioned where I live and what I was doing in that area. I see other people curiously staring in each other’s faces on the street. I see hundreds of people disappearing in the middle of the night and their corpses surfacing next day with electric drill holes in them. I see people blown up to smithereens because a brainwashed virgin seeker targeted a crowded market or café. I see all that and more.

Sounds like ethnic cleansing to me, Michael. Each day that brings a report of 40 beheaded bodies found or a busload of butchered corpses is evidence of sunni-shiite strike and counter-strike, revenge and revenge-against-revenge.

There is a disconnect that comes from too much time spent at Princeton, a mistaken examination by Petri-dish born out of a career spent onlooking. Mike has looked on from Defense and Foreign Policy Analyst, National Security Division, Congressional Budget Office; Research Assistant, Institute for Defense Analyses and Peace Corps Volunteer, Congo. The capitalization is part of the problem. Brookings spread them liberally throughout O’Hanlon’s bio and it says something about the institutionalizing of politics, something bizarre and discomfiting, this taking oneself too seriously in all-caps.

Opinion is anybody’s fair game until someone acts on that opinion and then it better be pretty well founded. Iraqis are dying at the moment because of too much (or too little) screwed up hectoring lecturing.

O’Hanlon continues in his prescription for How To Stop a Civil War;

Much of the American debate has been asking how to handle an all-out conflict in which Iraq has already fractured and violence is rampant. But the more important question is how to quell violence in the early stages, before such a scenario develops fully.

Where you been, Mike, under a rock? Early stages, before such a scenario develops fully? The last time I heard something that wrongheaded, it was Dick Cheney claiming the insurgence was in its ‘last throes.’

Mike again, using the future tense in a description of what is happening this moment,

If civil war begins in Iraq, it will probably consist of increasingly active vigilante justice -- as well as random, pointless acts of violent rage -- by Iraq's powerful militias. They will attack defenseless mosques, homes of important figures from other ethnic and religious groups, and defenseless citizens. They will begin to perpetrate ethnic cleansing with cold, premeditated purpose.

These are the typical dynamics of civil conflicts, as analyzed by scholars such as John Mueller, Barry Posen, Steve Stedman and Chaim Kaufmann.

As analyzed by scholars, well that certainly puts my mind at rest and no doubt reassures Zayed.
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Read more of my musings on the war in Iraq at my personal web site.

Sebastian and Me

Sebastian Mallaby, in a Monday Washington Post editorial, has his finger on the pulse of what makes American business a worldwide success But he paints his diagnostic scenario with too wide a brush for my taste. Mallaby’s a bright guy and I agree with a lot of what he says. But he’s maybe not an old enough guy. We codgers suffer less from enthusiasms of the moment.

He posits that ‘the heyday of American business may actually be now.’ Codgerism (the self-described philosophy of we codgers) makes the case that ‘now’ is not a so much a heyday as a heymoment. We’ll see if it lasts long enough to be called a ‘day.’ Even if it does, heyday smacks of something short-termed and unnaturally effervescent, the peak before a decline.

I certainly agree with Mallaby that American business is seen through individual prisms, each of them throwing only a portion of the spectrum on the wall.

Which may be his point, but he makes it unclearly for me.

Mallaby’s heyday dawned in 1995. He writes,

“in the decade since 1995, U.S. labor productivity growth has outstripped foreign rivals'. Meanwhile U.S. firms' return on equity -- that is, the efficiency with which they manage the capital entrusted to them -- has pulled away from that of Japan, France and Germany.”

My take on it is that productivity growth is gained against our historic competitors because we are able to shed the sticky parts and hold on to what suits us. It’s called ‘offshoring,’ Seb. We are the undisputed leader in sending sticky labor problems elsewhere and keeping only what is smooth and efficient.

As to return on equity, our business model is supported by a government that, with very few strictures, allows constant reinvention. Merge two companies, lay off 20,000 employees and sell off the nasty little leftover hunks that don’t make money. That’s not possible in France or Germany, certainly not in Japan.

In an acknowledgement of codgerism, I remember how American industry crowed and preened and beat its chest after the 2nd World War, raking in all the chips left on the production table. We misread having the only industry that wasn’t in smoking ruins, for being somehow on top of our game. As the industrial world recovered it began sixty years of kicking our American industrial ass.

Wake up, Seb. It may be the dawn of something, but it’s not management superiority so much as it is managerial opportunism. We pay a price for that. The price is an enormous loss of jobs in the industrial sector and a steady, eroding, exchange of job and wage security for an increasing subsistence economy. It’s not management smarts or ‘best practice,’ it’s our American difference in the value system.

I happen to agree with ruthless dictates within the marketplace, but I never confuse it with being on top of our game. I believe as well in certain Darwinian principles that dictate the long-term survival and success of American business models. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for our economic (lack of) policy. America has shed itself of labor intensive work. Darwin insists that labor, in a free market, gravitate to low wage countries.

GM and Ford are going down the tubes, not because car-building is unprofitable, but because they weren’t able to focus on those truths during a sea-change within the auto industry.

We are

• Ruthless, which is not the same as being prescient
• Inventive, which is not the same as productive
• Free of business constraint, which is not anything even close to socialistic

Thank god for it. We've slipped the handcuffs of Japanese and European union and social contracts, agreements that have set the streets of Paris alight and rocked the complacency of an historically complacent French government.

And yet we are not out of the woods, Sebastian. GM and Ford are unlikely to survive. What has brought them to their knees is part hubris and part social contract. I'll leave the percentaging to others, but we've had a whiff of the same smoke that blows across Paris. Every day we are reminded in our newspapers and by our politicians that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are pushing us ever closer to the brink of national (perhaps international) financial collapse.

The difference between us and Europe, perhaps Japan as well, is that we will collapse and, from that collapse, rise again. Our system requires it, reveling in leveling. We’ve done it before and, because we are a free and free-wheeling society, we’ll do it again. But anyone who thinks it’s going to be a cake-walk, just hasn’t a clue.

Mallaby summarizes by writing,

“The best guess about the "X factor" is that America's business culture is peculiarly well-suited to contemporary challenges. American business is not especially good at coaxing productivity out of factory workers: The era when this was all-important was the heyday of Germany and Japan. But American business excels at managing service workers and knowledge workers: at equipping these people with technology, empowering them with the right level of independence and paying for performance. So the era of decentralized "network" businesses is the American era.”

And a ruthless era it is.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Needing the Cash To Keep On Needing the Cash

Ernest (Fritz) Hollings is the former Democratic Senator from South Carolina and he knows from the practical experience of being there, the pressures on a Senator or Representative to stay in the game.

Staying in the game is a euphemism for getting re-elected. Hollings got elected in ’68 and kept getting re-elected until ’98, retiring in ’04, so I guess he should know something about the process.

Fritz was a controversial guy. You can’t spend almost 40 years in the Senate and not have people love and hate you in second-helping quantities. I hope not to get derailed on other issues. Fritz wrote an editorial on campaign money and how the need to keep ever bigger numbers coming in, just to hang on to a Senate seat, is handcuffing legislators. Turning them into beggars on the street, according to Hollings and keeping them out of their Senate offices, where they’re supposed to be doing the nation’s business.

That dovetails nicely with other evidence that suggests the modern-day Congress is actually spending about a day and a half a week at what should be a five-day-a-week job. Which fits neatly into our headlong rush to our first billion-dollar presidency. Which fits . . .

It’s all about money.

Hollings claims our present-day troubles started in ’68, when Maurice Stans was collecting money for Dick Nixon. Millions raised, most of it cash that couldn't be traced. On the basis of ‘government for sale,’ Congress came up with legislation outlawing cash donations in federal elections. Hollings could spend $637,000 on the South Carolina race and not a penny more. By those limits today, Hollings says a South Carolina Senate race would cost $3 million.

But we don’t have those limits today. The Supreme Court threw them out. Claiming free speech violations, the Court gave us the most expensive speech on the face of the planet.

Hollings continues, (italics are mine)

“So in 1998 I had to raise $8.5 million to be elected senator. This meant I had to collect $30,000 a week, each and every week, for six years. I could have raised $3 million in South Carolina. But to get $8.5 million I had to travel to New York, Boston, Chicago, Florida, California, Texas and elsewhere. During every break Congress took, I had to be out hustling money. And when I was in Washington, or back home, my mind was still on money.”

We don’t get guys like Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay corrupting our democratic process because Senators and Representatives are crooks. We get guys like that and the destruction of representative government because our courts can’t tell the difference between free speech and speech to the highest bidder.

Speech to the highest bidder is the most restrictive speech the human mind could devise.

Congress can tinker all it wants with the mechanism of funding, but it won’t make a tinker’s damn worth of difference until the Court revisits the issue of free speech.

Hollings again, (italics are mine again as well)

“When I came to the Senate in 1966, we invariably would have a vote scheduled for 9 a.m. Monday to be sure that we started the week at work. And the Senate regularly was voting Friday afternoon. Now you can't find the Senate until Monday evening, and it's gone again by Thursday night. We're off raising money. We use every excuse for a "break" to do so. In February it used to be one day for Washington's birthday and one for Lincoln's. Now we've combined them so we can take a week off to raise money. There's Easter week, Memorial Day week, Fourth of July week and the whole month of August. There's Columbus Day week, Thanksgiving week and the year-end holidays. While in town, we hold breakfast fundraisers, lunch fundraisers, and caucuses to raise funds. The late senator Richard Russell of Georgia said a senator was given a six-year term -- two years to be a statesman, two to be a politician and two to demagogue. Now we take all six years to raise money.

“There is no time to rest or take it easy. Chairmen and ranking minority-party members of committees are charged with raising $100,000 for their party campaign committees. Regular members must raise $50,000, and senators are expected to attend each other's fundraisers, as well as party fundraisers outside Washington. Political parties now raise money for senators, exacerbating the politics and the standoff in the Senate. You don't feel like talking to a senator when he was at a fundraiser against you the previous evening.”

I don’t think we have dishonest politicians at any greater rate than we have dishonest businessmen or college presidents. But I think we have cast them into the unwilling servitude of money-grubbing their livings. We did it with the best of intentions. Best intentions often give us unexpected consequences and, this time, they’re not only foolish, they’re dangerous.

We’re running representative government on money, and that’s the most dangerous fuel in the world.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Starting With a Clean Sheet

The technology news today talks about Microsoft delaying its planned introduction of the next-generation Windows until 2007. The delay of Vista makes me feel pretty much behind the curve, as I loaf along reasonably happily on Windows 2000.

I say reasonably happily, as it’s a constant challenge to keep upgraded with this or that patch and fingers constantly crossed that my firewall is up to battling the flames of hackers worldwide. Fire extinguisher at my side, I struggle as you struggle, trusting to luck and upgrades to keep me productive, if not relaxed.

I wonder sometimes if Windows hasn’t become something akin to the tax code—so complicated and so reliant on historic versions of its year-by-year upgraded self that it’s beyond any fix. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that delaying Vista until January meant it would be solid as a rock instead of holier than Swiss cheese?

But somehow I doubt it.

Hackers are not smarter than Microsoft’s programmers, they’re just better motivated. Windows, with 97.46% of the world market, doesn’t have much reason to strip down to its underwear and reconfigure. Enormous amounts of money have been lost, due to what can only be called arrogant negligence. It would be interesting to me to see someone introduce a class-action suit against MS, charging money damages for the developer’s unrelenting unwillingness to fix the broken Windows before the burglar sneaked into our homes and businesses.

Not likely.

Botnets are the latest threat to peace of mind. Hackers out there riding the spam range, entice us ordinary folks with a chance at this or that goodie and whammo, the trap is sprung. We’ve become a bot. Each "bot" is actually a computer rather than an individual and, if it’s yours, specialized software has been installed that allows Hacker-Harry to commandeer many of its functions. You won’t notice anything being downloaded or installed, but it is.

You personally are not necessarily the target, but you’ve unknowingly become a partner in crime. Hackers use your PC or laptop to network whatever they’re up to and you’ve become a honeycomb of a sort, to store all that nectar. The world is but a field of flowers. Keylogger programs are the latest and most menacing criminal activity for which your HP or IBM may be the home hive.

Once a keylogging program is running, everything typed (keyed) on the infected computer is collected, letter by letter, number by number, without the user’s knowledge. Worthwhile and profitable things are stored away elsewhere, like social security numbers, access usernames and passwords, bank account and credit card numbers, balances and PIN codes.

Christmas comes to Hacker-Harry and your unsuspecting computer is Santa Claus.

Which, of course, would not be possible if it were not for the incredible vulnerability of Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Apparently, no one at Microsoft recognized the threats early in the development of these various tools and now they are too complex and layered to actually dig down and fix. Microsoft seems to feel the arrogant, yet effective answer to that enormous problem is to wait for the burglar to break in and then fix the Windows.

It would be nice if someone were out there, both willing and capable of designing an operating system from a clean sheet.

From time to time pundits mention Google. I have succumbed to this choice myself, in giddy exuberance over Google’s aparent interest in their users' well-being. They have the money and reputation to take a shot at it and the world would dearly love to have some choice other than Microsoft. A competitor to guard the safety of our personal and business information (not to mention bank accounts) in an increasingly hacked environment.

Another sometimes mentioned fix is to get away from PC’s entirely. Each of us would merely access some great mainframe in the sky for power, storage and programs.

My admittedly naive belief is that the reason we fail individually in our protection against break-ins and spam is our lack of expertise, interest and time. We are not cops, we depend upon cops to keep us safe and enforce the rules. Perhaps a dozen or so mega-providers would police this increasingly wild computer-west. Allow us access to the computer-generated portions of our lives for a fee. And please take over the chore and responsibility for providing safety.

Like gated-computer-communities. An idea whose time has come.

That would turn the income stream for computer access on its head. No more operating system licenses. Good bye to our individual choices of Mozilla Firefox over Internet Explorer, Thunderbird over Outlook. Apple could continue to be Apple and, like France being France, no one would care. Their 1.4% world share isn’t even a zit on the face of computing, but their loyal followers seem to thrive on abuse and will no doubt hang in there.

We would buy simple, lightweight, extremely portable, handsomely designed (and cheap) access instruments. Does that make sense? Is it possible? Is there a business model there? The income stream would be license-based, as it is now, but operating power would be essentially rented. So, for (who knows?) $6.95 a month, you’d have access to enormous power, speed and security from any one of a number of providers.

You need PhotoShop or Dreamweaver for your work, you pay a fee for access to the license, rather than buying the program. Pirating stopped in its tracks. It would be fascinating to see how the business plans all settled out and what true competition might bring to the market, to say nothing of chain-sawing the hacker forests.

So, whether a real competitor to Microsoft or a ‘third-way’ access, either would be a huge relief to our collective vulnerability. Something surely must be done. Internet commerce is suspect, spammers and jammers are out of control and we’re none of us comfortable. The omnipotence of Microsoft has provided the opportunity for Hacker-Harry to make victims of us all.

We desperately need a clean sheet of paper.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Whoa Now, Let’s Back Up a Bit

Is there a collective consciousness from the days before September eleventh?

Do we recall our world and the way it functioned? We had, in those simpler times, an FBI that enjoyed some degree of public confidence, manned by straight-arrow law enforcement professionals, mostly able to solve the crimes that eluded local police structures. Our military was well equipped and capable, although they hadn’t been asked anything terribly dramatic since the seventies. The CIA had what they have always had, reasonably competent agents throughout a troubled world, but less troubled than it had been in recent memory.

Then all hell broke loose and we lost every shred of confidence in ourselves, our government and the various agencies that stood ready to protect us. Since then, in our panic and conflicted needs, it’s been a blame-game and a tearing down of all the structures that worked for us so far.

Time to stop. Catch our breath.

Time to know that we are strong enough as a nation to get through the short-term, deal with the long-term and perhaps even blow the whistle for a short time-out. It’s half-time and we’re putting too much pressure on our government and expecting too much in the way of protection from every shadow on the stair.

Homeland Security is undefined and indefinable, an organization in search of a reason to exist. Let’s let Mike Chertoff go back to the federal bench and undo our mistaken attempt to create another agency to overview all the independent agencies that already share too many of the same responsibilities.

In today’s Post, Dana Milbank pulls a few phrases from recent Chertoff speeches, such as

• critical points of triangulation
• properly risk-managed approach to critical infrastructure
• the need for "total assets visibility"
• favoring "an integrated, sensible, systems-based approach."
• needing "better information about the constituents of the supply chain."
• saying that Homeland Security has "done a lot to elevate the general baseline of security in this country."

And the point is not to make fun of Mike, the point is to recognize that a mission statement so muddled in arcane techno-speak is no mission statement at all. It’s easy to get bogged down in that, but the fact is that DHS has no worthwhile mission.

We can’t make ourselves safe by creating layered bureaucracies. We make ourselves safe by taking what we have and making sure it’s efficient and accountable.

FEMA didn’t fail New Orleans and the Gulf Coast because Mike Chertoff was out of touch or George Bush at the ranch. FEMA failed because it was under the control of a Bush political appointee, in so far over his head that he went looking for Bush to help.

There was no departmental failure there, the disconnect was one of political foolishness that should not be allowed. FEMA employees have taken a terrible hit. Competent people have been made to look incompetent because of flagrant political meddling. The price was enormous, including lives lost.

Understandably, the public looks at the DHS-FEMA fiasco and wonders what would be the price were we to suffer another major terrorist attack? They are right to ask.

A portion of what goes unremembered since 9-11, is New York’s immediate response to an unparalleled attack on a major American city. Fire, police and civil disaster management within the city of New York governmental structure was both heroic and adequate. That’s a major argument for taking what we have and making it answerable. Mayor Giuliani stepped immediately into command and one clear voice governed the process of disaster and aftermath.

There’s no doubt that Giuliani is a strong and capable man. Strong and capable men used to run our institutions. No buck-passing, no panicked look for saviors elsewhere, no ‘properly risk-managed approaches to critical infrastructure,’ just a man in charge of the well-trained and smooth-running tools of governance.

No one was prepared for the horrors of the WTC attack. But New York was prepared to respond to whatever came its way, because the training and discipline was in place. They did not need and have not since layered another bureaucratic infrastructure over what they had and have.

I’m not sure what we do in an intensely political society to prevent former star prosecutors and top Justice Department officials, who have become federal appellate judges, from taking over the responsibilities of nation wide disaster response and terrorist preventions. Where does one find, in that resume, the tools for the job at DHS? Just what is it in Chertoff’s ‘critical points of triangulation’ that comes even close to Rudy Giuliani’s ‘critical understanding of the disaster at hand?’

If it's not against the law for a president to make such appointments, it should be.

And soon.
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More about politics in America at my opinion columns web site.

Janet Jackson’s Breast vs Jack Abramoff’s Bust

It says something loud and clear about our national priorities that we’ve cultivated (and even celebrated) a culture of greed, while narrowing our eyes to pinpoints over lust.

We are at one and the same time a nation that demands CBS be fined for having (however briefly) exposed Janet Jackson’s breast during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and the world’s largest consumer of pornography.

Say what you like about the Janet flap, but pornographic it was not. And all of this would be ancient news, were it not for the recent smutsmanship awards, hosted by the FCC and its shiny new Chairman.

Whatever definitions they have over at the Federal Communications Commission, the dictionary says ‘pornography’ is ‘creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire.’ Left entirely to debate among others in FCC-land, is the question, what in the world is wrong with that?

Thus are we shamed by our nakedness and famed by our greediness.

The United States Senate Select Committee on Ethics lists an address and telephone number on its web page, but makes not even vague suggestions about how to complain concerning ethical lapses among the honorable 100.

Ditto the House of Representatives. If you think Jack Abramoff’s collusion with elected officials and their staffs, had ‘no legislative value other than to stimulate rapacious financial desire,’ you’re snookered when looking for a venue to register your complaint of 'glomography'  (my coining of the word 'glom,' to take by theft).

The FCC, on the other hand, should you Google ‘FCC complaint,’ provides a cornucopia of ready access. Teams of willing eyes and ears bent in the direction of your call, letter, e-mail, snail-mail or pony express complaint. One presumes (but the FCC does not guarantee) these rapid-response teams are not handling your grievance from India.

Naked breasts and naked greed, the untold story of heartbreak and heartburn.

Using complaint as criteria, Republican FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin (39 and looking 17) claims hundreds of thousands complain about material of a sexual or excretory nature on television. Nasty business, that having sex or taking a dump. Hundreds of thousands are against it. Possibly millions, but only hundreds of thousands are literate enough to fill out the FCC form.

Just sign with an X for X-rated.

The naked greed side of the equation remains X. As you will remember from high school algebra, X is an unknown. But it seems we who find offense in glomography are less than ten. Six or eight editorial columnists, myself and Eliot Spitzer. I don't know why that is. The religious right can't stand the human body, but don't seem much offended by thievery.

That the greed factor within our elected government has us sailing over the cliff of financial disaster, institutional breakdown and international bankruptcy, is of little interest. I understand that, it's very foggy stuff.

• Financial disaster is complex. You always knew in your heart of hearts that your no-good brother-in-law would go broke. He has, and he’s taken ten thousand of your savings with him. Your wife no longer speaks to either of you, which seems a bit harsh, but the government will have to muddle through without your personal intervention. You've had it with financial disaster.
• Institutional breakdown is nothing more than a couple of reasonably complicated words that, when combined, become entirely opaque. Institutions themselves are complex and, when they breakdown, no one better look your way to sweep up the nuts and bolts.
• International bankruptcy wouldn’t happen to us if we stayed the hell home like we should and didn’t loan every Tom, Dick and Harry our money. Or is it the other way around, I forget?

But Janet Jackson's breast is understandable. Adorable even, we talked about it for months, but only after the kids had been hustled off to bed. Actually, if you recall that far back, you’d gone to take a quick whiz (a prohibited, but entirely private excretory event) and missed the briefly exposed breast.

But thank god and re-runs, like the Columbia space shuttle disaster, Janet’s breast just kept being replayed and replayed and replayed. So, what 99% of the world missed was brought front and center (because of our weird love-hate relationship to breasts) and got CBS whacked with a $550,000 fine.

Eliot Spitzer (and I) think that Dick Grasso getting $139 million in severance pay for being canned at the New York Stock Exchange is closer to pornographic than anything Michael's sister could or ever would do.

But hey, that’s just us, couple lusty old guys who don't much like crooks.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Hacked To Death, New Notes On the New Terrorism

Tapping away on a keyboard, deep within the maze of a Muslim city, Omar has just walked in to Homeland Security’s documents archives. No mask or gun needed, not even a fake passport. He's not sweating, he's calm, eating hummus and drinking a Coke. It's not yet noon in the Middle East.

Impossible? Alarming? Certainly a posit to make one perk up and pay attention, as we debate the constitutional aspects of tapping phone conversations and ignore the institutional aspects of computer security in shambles.

In an equal-opportunity lack of concern, this administration ignores both.

Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be much of a constituency for either. One wonders why the flaming liberals of whom we hear so much aren’t dominating Sunday talk shows with rants over rights to privacy, but they're quiet. Equally, it’s amazing that Bush's Republican base hasn’t frantically dialed-in to Rush Limbaugh, raging over hacked security, the innermost workings of our government laid bare.

Is everyone out to lunch, before the lunches themselves become illegal?

What’s going on over at Homeland Security, where they got an F for the 3rd straight year on their computer protection grade? Mike Chertoff’s been there for just over a year and Omar’s apparently still able to log in. Homeland Security is our national fire-wall, in charge of cyber-security for the entire government.

Doesn’t it make you just a little bit nervous that the guys who screw up absolutely everything they touch, have their finger in the computer-security dike?

According to the House Government Reform Committee, who hands out the Oscars every year for such things, the departments of

• Defense
• State
• Energy
• Agriculture (all that corn at risk)
• Health and Human Services
• Transportation
• Veterans Affairs

all get failing grades, unchanged inexcusably from their year-ago reviews.

Rep. Tom Davis chairs that committee and has been known to worry that America may face a cyber Pearl Harbor. Tom is a savvy guy and he doesn't know how something that most businesses take as gospel, just seems to continue to elude Mike Chertoff. Can you imagine the mischief Omar can wreak on the innards of the United States government, if he has the keys to State and Defense?

Homeland Security was absolute priority number one after 9-11 and money has been shoveled at it. Somehow or another, the Congress and the people and the administration thought that something useful was being done over there, other than periodic color-tagged warnings. Apparently not.

It’s more than occasionally amazing to me that government hasn’t just fallen over into the streets, in a cloud of brick-dust.

Securing tens of thousands of computers in thousands of offices, most of them on systems incompatible to one another and each accessing varying degrees of sensitive to top-secret files, would seem to be a priority worthy of attention. And it probably is, just three or four notches below the preening of imagery. Imagery has been shot down in flames. One can only cringe at what must be the condition of security.

I wonder what Mike Chertoff actually does every morning, after he’s hung up his coat and sat down to a morning doughnut?

The National Science Foundation, General Services Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Labor, during the same period, brought their grades up from B’s and C’s to straight A’s. Does Mike have anyone's phone number over there?

Coinciding with news of continuing failures, is the stunningly scary news about ‘keylogging’ programs that suck up everything typed on the keyboards of infected computers. The Russian mafia is into this activity big-time, in fact they mostly invented it, grabbing personal identities, account and PIN numbers for various kinds of bank and credit-card theft.

But imagine (if you are Stephen King) the opportunity to wade around in the slush and muck of the Defense and State departments.

I accessed a web site that boldly offers such software for sale. www.ratsystems.org is based in Russia, their use of English is a bit awkward, but 650 euros will get you in the game. A virtual (no pun intended) boutique of additional hacker-wear is there for the downloading. A Google-search of keystroke software brings up over four million pages.

The beauty of these various versions of hacker software is that once you’re in, you’re in. No one knows you’re there. No need to worry about building access (we do that very well in this country), code-restricted doors, stumbling over a wastebasket in the dark or a flashlight battery that's run down. Sit back, have some more hummus and Coke, light up a Marlboro and rest assured that access to drop-down menus of supposedly secure information is but a click away. Can’t get the access you want? Unexpectedly blocked by access-code?

Hop aboard another computer. Like a bus, there’ll be one along in a minute.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.