Opinion-Columns.com

A CHEAP SHOT AT CRAVING CHEAP CREDIT

Don’t Talk to Me About Craving Cheap Credit to Spend on Imported Goods.

It’s our cravings that are at fault, the fraudsters on Wall Street bray. Consumers demanded cheap credit and we just didn’t know what to do except provide it—even at the personal cost of having to take those hundred million dollar salaries. They made us do it, with their lifestyle demands. Wal-Mart wasn’t a scheme to wreck Main Streets across America, centralize all the purchasing in the Walton family private coffers—it was the cry of manic consumer demand for Chinese TVs and toxic toys for the kids.

We had a gun at our head to create credit default swaps out of the whole cloth that used to be collateralized lending. Remember when you went to your bank for a loan? In those creaky old horse-and-buggy days, the banker wanted some reasonable idea you were going to pay him back. He cared about such things, because it was your (and his) neighbors’ money he was lending. Your reputation might count for something back then, because he knew your reputation. But every month at the loan committee meeting, you were smiled or frowned upon.

I never craved cheap credit, worthless goods or seven credit cards. Credit cards weren’t even in common use until Visa and MasterCard rolled out in the sixties. Oh yeah, you might have carried a Texaco or Standard Oil card for buying gas, maybe had a department store charge account, but the swiping of card-readers came with the usury-friendly 18% interest rates for unpaid balances.

Texaco, Standard Oil or the department store merely got angry with you, cancelled the card and hounded you into court. Visa, MasterCard and the other big guys made a profit out of a great new business opportunity. Why make 5% warehousing, transporting and selling a sofa, when you can make three times that loaning out the money and the Congress of the United States will enable the process.

You can’t get a more prominent enabler than that.

Everyone jumped on the band-wagon of marketing and consuming because they had made the actual manufacture of goods a pauper’s business. No longer able to invent and build, the world’s most successful nation of inventors and builders turned to selling each other cheap crap and calling it the new economy. In a scant forty years, the core values of a nation were cored like apples.

So, the race was on and in four decades that race essentially boarded up the Main Streets of small towns, outsourced our jobs to the cheapest offshore producer, transformed us from the world’s largest lender to the world’s biggest debtor, put college educations out of common reach, changed the relationship between worker productivity and reward, busted the unions, set off an advertising based feeding-frenzy of consumption and—now that it has busted the bank—hands us both the bill and the blame.

Unlike your friendly neighborhood bank of forty years ago, the new-age swindlers who arranged a home mortgage or line of credit for the un-creditworthy, needed a place to offload the offal. Bingo, derivatives were invented—not regulated, but invented—the not regulated part was just another low and outside curve-ball lobbed to a well-fed and well-paid-off Congress.

Derivatives were a hedge-fund invention, a way to whistle up large fees and churn the money pump, essentially hiding rotten apples at the bottom of otherwise shining and radiant barrels of produce. The language in these shell-game contracts was so arcane as to be un-understandable to those who took their cut, closed their eyes, held their nose and shoveled them on down the line.

Rating agencies knew of the stink and approved them AAA in spite of it, for (what else) money. Mortgage bankers, investment bankers, rating agencies and insurers—essentially all the guys looking for bailouts now—knew and collaborated and stirred the conspiracy-pot for a classic RICO indictment.

Instead, Henry Paulson is Santa Claus to save the financial markets.

(TARP—Your Money at Work) those unregulated derivative contracts that allow investors to bet on a debt issuer’s financial prospects, loomed so big on balance sheets that they now drive every bailout decision.

. . . “The last eight years have been about permitting derivatives to explode, knowing they were unregulated,” said Eric R. Dinallo, New York’s superintendent of insurance. “It’s about what the government chose not to regulate, measured in dollars. And that is what shook the world.”

Don’t bother to save the co-conspirators, Henry. Rhett Butler nailed it when he looked deep into Scarlett’s eyes and said, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” As a taxpayer, I’m still reeling from the $11 trillion we’ve accumulated in national debt since Ronnie Reagan (the communicator) deregulated me out of my underwear.

Now you guys have come after the underwear.

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Media comment:

• Bloomberg-Treasury Seeks Asset-Buying Power Unchecked by Courts
• Guardian-UK-US Treasury takes on the house in high-stakes game
• Wall Street Journal-Paulson Presses Congress to Act On $700 Billion Bailout Plan
• Reuters-Treasury plan lacks taxpayer protection: Sen.Schumer
• Boston Globe-Can America afford it?

SUNNIS LAYING LOW IN IRAQ AND WAITING FOR THE PULLOUT

A changing of the guard, in the form of General Petraeus handing over the keys to General Odiermo, presages by a couple months the changing of the guard in American politics. No one can really know, in either case, what the outcome will be and/or whether it will be good for the nation.

Take your pick, the political weather is cloudy and tending toward storms in both Iraq and America.

(Reuters) BAGHDAD: General Raymond Odierno took command of U.S.-led forces in Iraq on Tuesday, faced with the challenge of ensuring that security gains do not unravel at a time when American troop levels are being reduced.

Odierno replaced General David Petraeus at a ceremony presided over by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who said the two generals had formed an "incredible team" during the deployment of 30,000 extra U.S. troops to Iraq last year in the so-called "surge."

Odierno served as the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq for 15 months until February.

"He knows that we are at a pivotal moment, where progress remains fragile and caution should be the order of the day," Gates said of Odierno. The ceremony took place in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces, now part of a sprawling U.S. military base.

Handovers are a time of reflection and I aim to reflect on a war I’ve never supported and criticized for nearly a year prior to the Bush plunge from the high-board.

My gut tells me we have been on the wrong side of strategic decisions from the get-go, because our president and vice-president saw this as an awarding of democracy, rather than a Yugoslav style imbroglio. Strong-men (as heads of state) leave bitter rivalries and we need not look to dictatorships for example. Our own near-shattered civic condition is the result of a near-dictatorship on the national political scene.

Near enough. Nearer than we need ever be again, if we are to prevent the unraveling of our national fiber. Much lip-service is given to coming together, to being the nation’s uniter rather than divider. But the fact is that ‘deciders’ are not all that likely to unite.

So, we came with a flawed strategy to Iraq and that complicates our decisions over what is best for that nation, as well as our own. I reflect, I opine. I am an opiner. Everyone seems to be these days . . . no license required.

Odierno and Petraeus came together last year to implement a new counter-insurgency strategy that helped drive violence down, allowing Iraq to begin seeking foreign investment to rebuild after decades of war and UN sanctions.

Petraeus leaves behind a very different Iraq from the one he faced when he took over in February 2007, when Iraq was on the brink of civil war.

Or not. We tend to see things as we would see them instead of as they are, especially from the outside of cultures, the inside of which we know very little. My personal view, standing bravely in opposition to my president and his four-star general, is that violence has gone down in Iraq because it suits the purposes of the Sunni population to get us the hell out so they can climb back in the saddle.

The Sunni minority ran Iraq until we overthrew Saddam Hussein and ushered in the majority Shiites. Remember our American Civil War? You can free the slaves, but you damned well better not walk off the stage after having done so. Exactly what we did in Lincoln’s time and it spawned a hundred years of lynchings, carpetbaggers, Jim Crow and segregation.

We somehow feel Iraqis are different in their ethnic ambitions because we don’t speak their language, move them like pawns on a chessboard and fail to understand their culture (which outdates ours by 4,000 years). Winston Churchill famously (and accurately) said, “America always makes the right decision…. after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”

The coming confrontation between Sunni and Shiite is inevitable, but it will be bloodier and more destructive of the national fabric because of decisions we made in desperation.

We were desperate to show progress—any kind of progress to slow the troop deaths and injuries. Those were described as ‘insurgent attacks,’ because it was politically untenable to call them what they were. What they were was the Sunni army (which we had sent home and pauperized) showing their anger at being sent home and pauperized. Additional anger accrued to street hatreds against the new guys in power—those Islamists who followed a different rightly-guided caliph fourteen centuries ago.

How do you understand that, when you sent everyone home over at the State Department who knew what the hell was at risk?

That’s a hatred of some proportion, an aging cheese of a hatred or, as Saddam himself might have said (before the trap was sprung at his hanging) the mother of all hatreds. Those who harbor that hatred have very little interest in George Bush or his war, but every interest in his weaponry. And therein, the plot thickens.

In order to satisfy our desperation for progress, we didn’t actually make progress, but redefined the enemy instead. A paper-victory worthy of a paper-tiger. We took the guys from the streets that were bombing us, renamed them Awakening Councils, armed them to the teeth and suddenly they were no longer counted as insurgents, but became partners against al Qaeda. No wonder deaths went down, we partnered with the insurgency. That’s an easy thing to do when you don’t actually have a definition of al Qaeda forces and can move them around at will on the chessboard that the Middle East has become.

Now, of course, we’re using that lessening of violence to draw down our troops. We got into this war on false pretenses and are planning to get out by sleight of hand as well. Petraeus is leaving for a promotion. Odiermo is going to oversee our orderly withdrawal, everyone stateside will breathe a sigh of relief, the troops are going to Afghanistan and the fragile Iraqi coalition government is going to get its ass handed to it.

Iraq's Shiite-led government will also soon take control of Sunni Arab tribal units that joined forces with the U.S. military to fight Al Qaeda. Some analysts fear the tribal units, which include many former Sunni Arab insurgents, could turn their guns on the government if their demands are not met.

Which will be ever afterward known in Baghdad as National Getting Our Ass Handed to Us Day.

But America will be out, China will have the first shot at the oil, nearly 5,000 kids will have been killed under false pretenses, Cheney will be either on the rubber-chicken circuit or under indictment, Bush no longer able to chain-saw the Constitution and what’s left of the fabric of America searching for what went so terribly wrong.

But not very hard. There’s a failing economy to deal with. Iraq will quickly become last week’s story—except for Iraqis. They will likely remember for the next fourteen centuries. Islam has a long memory.

My guess is blanket presidential pardons will be served like after-dinner mints on the way out the door.

Can a president do that? Probably. This is a president who gets away with stuff.

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Media comment:

• US News and World Report-Four Challenges Petraeus Leaves Behind for His Successor in Iraq
• New York Times-Odierno Succeeds Petraeus in Iraq
• Associated Press-Bush: 'We are at war with extremists'
• Guardian-UK-The conflict continues
• Irish Times-Ireland-Violence surges in Iraq amid political stalemate as Gen Petraeus departs

 

SEVEN YEARS AFTER 9-11, TIME TO GET OVER IT

The annual national hysteria over the September 11^th attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon is in full cry. Dedication of a remembrance garden at the Pentagon, moments of silence, disclosure of any personal tale of woe that can be dragged out of survivors is fair game.

No matter that survivors of that tragic event have been awarded (on average) some $2 million, no matter that the nation has plunged itself into an unwinnable war on their behalf, no matter that we are near bankruptcy, awash in contractor greed and fraud. Most importantly, no matter that over 4,000 American kids have died in Iraq, nearly 1,000 additional in Afghanistan and tens of thousands bear emotional and otherwise hidden wounds that will change and have changed their lives forever.

All but forgotten, is the brutal fact that we fail almost without exception to care for those who return, relegating them to the same stumbling, mumbling, suicidal lives of Vietnam vets.

Forgive me if I fail to join those who feel we have not done enough, soon enough, in sufficient quantity or quality (or whatever) for those who survived in New York and Washington. Or don’t forgive me. I don’t really give a damn, as I watch a large portion of the world implode by way of American nationalism, patriotism, ignorance and just plain revenge.

Revenge that is, as long as someone else’s kid pays the cost. Revenge as long as it doesn’t impede the trip to the mall, stock dividends or a cozy retirement.

This is the revenge war whose costs are hidden from view, whose caskets come home unmet in the dark, whose troops are 99 and 44/100^th percent of the class that didn’t graduate from Princeton. I’m sick to death of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and that Coulter witch, who rev the engines of hatred over the bodies of decent young American men and women. There isn’t a one of them who ever risked their fat asses on anything more dangerous than a cocaine high, or who wouldn’t risk a kid for a rating or another book deal.

They are trash.

The headlines today are maudlin, self pitying and organized in such a way as to perpetuate the myth of victimhood:

• From Families' Grief, a Symbol of Loss, Hope

The completion of the memorial is not the result of a large-scale government endeavor, but one led by a determined group of victims' family members who have channeled their sorrow into a ceaseless fundraising campaign.

• Lives Shaped by Loss

Children who lost a parent on 9/11 still grapple with what it means to have had a childhood so steeped in national tragedy, so riven with anguish and pain.

• Where They Were on 9/11
• A Sister's Undying Love
• Share Your Story

How about sharing the story of two million Iraqi families who have been run out of their country and threatened with death if they return? What do we say of the undying love that died—the 25 festive, hopeful Afghans at a wedding, blown to (literal) bits, including the bride? Who mourns 60 Afghan children and thirty adults, killed by mistake?

Their stories are not unique among thousands. Their stories are ordinary, among hundreds of thousands.

In case you wondered, on 9-11 they were ending a normal Baghdad day, waiting to cross busy avenues unmarked by bomb craters and barricades. They were thinking of heading home to neighbors they knew and talked with, whose kids played together and headed to the park for soccer and maybe an ice cream. They watched Saddam’s TV offerings and life wasn’t all that great under the pressures of economic boycott—but it was life.

George Bush named al Qaeda responsible and then stumbled over the targeting, missed everyone but the innocents and the not-so-innocent who came out of the woodwork for their own revenge. Muslims understand revenge, as Westerners can’t even comprehend it.

The mistakes along the way to ‘bring ‘em on’ are too many and too pathetic to recount here, but sending Darth Vader outfitted American kids (who speak no Arabic and are scared half to death) to kick family doors off the hinges and terrorize Iraqi women and kids might have been a not-entirely-thought-through message.

“Bring ‘em on,” brought ‘em on in numbers and with intent that put the lie to American shock and awe. But that’s another argument, one about which Ann Coulter no doubt has much to say. Rush never apologized to a single American family for beating the drum with his phallic cigar that brought their kid home in the middle of the night to a silent and press-not-allowed air base. Bill O’Reilly, the mouth-that-roared, skitters off home to whatever gated community can stand the smell.

And all of this in the name of patriotism. It’s Rudy Giuliani’s day, George Bush’s war, Rumsfeld’s mistaken hubris--and the world is not a better place for it.

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Media coverage;

• Edmonton Journal-Canada-McCain, Obama unite for 9/11 memorial
• Bloomberg-Obama, McCain Put Politics Aside on 9/11 Anniversary
• Scientific American-9/11: Can the lingering medical and emotional effects be measured?
• New York Times-More Asthma Among Those Near 9/11 Site
• New York Times-At Pentagon, Bush Solemnly Looks Back at 9/11

FRYING PAN TO FIRE, OIL TO NUCLEAR

No matter that three out of five past presidents are unable to properly pronounce nuclear, they keep making nuclear noise, nuclear threats and (with the current president) seem hell bent upon their own unique brand of nuclear proliferation. The irony is without end; nuclear Pakistan is OK, but a nuclear ambition on the part of Iran is beyond the pale. A nuclear powered North Korea is a precursor to war, but nuclear powered India is just good sense and good business.

The bomb is inseparable in the minds of Americans from the energy technology. Or perhaps not. Or, who knows? Or, it’s all just too complicated.

Mira Kamdar, of the Asia Society, writes in today’s Washington Post that we are “Risking Armageddon for Cold, Hard Cash.”

While everyone has been abuzz about Georgia, the Beijing Olympics and Sarah Palin, perhaps the most important development in the world has been unfolding with almost no attention. India and the United States, along with deep-pocketed corporations, have been steadily pushing along a lucrative and dangerous new nuclear pact, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. Both governments have been working at a fever pitch to get the pact approved by the 45-country Nuclear Suppliers Group, which governs the world's trade in nuclear materials, and before Congress for a final vote before it adjourns this month.

India, huh? The last time I was abuzz, it wasn’t about Georgia, Beijing or Palin. I personally abuzzed wondering if Dick would bomb Iran on his way home from Azerbaijan and Ukraine.

As almost any neocon can tell you, Iran is a terrorist state. Actually, Iran fashions itself a sort of religious democracy, but the point is hotly debated even within Iran. It is however, a nation of 70 million, with the youngest and most pro-American population in the Muslim world. Meanwhile;

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says the deal will let his country, which refuses to sign either the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, take "its rightful place among the comity of nations."

Singh has an interesting take on comity (an atmosphere of harmony, mutual civility and respect). Sign the treaties, Manmohan.

The historic deal will allow U.S. nuclear companies to again do business in India, something that has been barred since 1974, when New Delhi tested its first atomic bomb. (India tested nuclear bombs again in 1998, spurring Pakistan to follow suit with its own tests days later.) The pact will also lift restrictions on other countries' sales of nuclear technology and fuel to India, while asking virtually nothing from India in return. All of that will undermine the very international system that India so ardently seeks to join.

If I have it right, that would be the system that has thus far kept no one from surprising the world with those little unexpected explosions that preface an announcement of parity. No one was turned away who could access Dr. Abdul (Strangelove) Kahn in Pakistan and pay the price. We winked at that one because we needed Pakistan and temporary need redefines dictators on a depressingly regular basis over at the State Department.

But Bush is in a fury to set off strategic imbalances in Asia before January 20th, so that the neocons can profit both politically and economically from another arms race. The administration is frantic to come in on the India side against China (while there still is an India side). Mira concurs;

The deal risks triggering a new arms race in Asia: If it passes, a miffed and unstable Pakistan will seek nuclear parity with India, and China will fume at a transparent U.S. ploy to balance Beijing's rise by building up India as a counterweight next door. The pact will gut global efforts to contain the spread of nuclear materials and encourage other countries to flout the NPT that India is now being rewarded for failing to sign. The U.S.-India deal will divert billions of dollars away from India's real development needs in sustainable agriculture, education, health care, housing, sanitation and roads. It will also distract India from developing clean energy sources, such as wind and solar power, and from reducing emissions from its many coal plants. Instead, the pact will focus the nation's efforts on an energy source that will, under the rosiest of projections, contribute a mere 8 percent of India's total energy needs -- and won't even do that until 2030.

We have, in our ultimate burst of creative reason, elected to begin replacing the planets reliance on oil as a power source. It’s getting just too damned expensive and politically sensitive now that Texas has run dry. The prevailing administration view is that, rather than developing cheap and effective alternatives to fossil fuel, the dangerous, expensive and more politically sensitive resurgence of nuclear power is the answer.

Nuclear fuel, rather than being merely expensive and dwindling, is fatal to mine, dangerous as hell to ship, horrendously expensive to store and impossible to get rid of, once used. What a breakthrough technology. Instead of tapping the earth’s molten core, developing wind or solar power, we seek to proliferate the planets most life-threatening method of boiling water.

Kurt Vonnegut was right—our big brain is trying (with great success) to kill us.

So what will the deal accomplish? It will generate billions of dollars in lucrative contracts for the corporate members of the U.S.-India Business Council and the Confederation of Indian Industry. The Bush administration hopes that it will help resuscitate the moribund U.S. nuclear power industry and expand the use of this "non-polluting" source of energy, one of the pillars of the Bush team's energy policy. The deal will let the real leaders of the global nuclear-power business -- France and Russia, both of which eagerly support the deal -- reap huge profits in India. And the pact will provide spectacularly profitable opportunities to India's leading corporations, which are slavering to get their hands on a share of the booty. How much booty? This newspaper estimates more than $100 billion in business over the next 20 years, as well as perhaps tens of thousands of jobs in India and the United States.

Bush’s solution is so ‘non polluting’ that we have yet to find a state or a mountain within a state, willing to serve as a repository for spent fuel in America. It is so ‘non polluting’ that we expect to offload it to the poorest countries on earth.

In any case, the nuclear deal will not magically transform India into China's economic or military equal. A shocking 42 percent of Indians live below the World Bank's new poverty threshold of $1.25 per day. Even if India managed to match China reactor for reactor and missile for missile -- a long shot at best -- Delhi could do so only at the expense of precisely the investments in human and physical infrastructure that could make India into a truly great power, prosperous and secure. This is the real tragedy of the U.S.-India nuclear deal. It's not too late to stop it.

So,

• the politics are flawed,
• the science is opposed,
• the next Cold War is a likely result,
• India will remain a beggar state,
• China is disturbed
• and Russia (who we claim to be mad at over Georgia) will profit.

All in favor, signify by saying ‘aye.’

The ‘ayes’ will have it, unless the clock runs out.

HOLD THE PRESSES!!! This just in from the NYTimes;

The worldwide body that regulates the sale of nuclear fuel and technology approved a landmark deal on Saturday to allow India to engage in nuclear trade for the first time in three decades, after a pressure campaign by the Bush administration and despite concerns about setting off an arms race in Asia.

Approved, apparently, while I was busy parsing a paragraph. Timing is everything.

Only one hurdle now remains for the deal: final approval by the United States Congress. But passage is likely to be difficult, considering both political opposition and dwindling time in the Congressional calendar before November’s elections.

And therein lies the hope. Congress will absolutely not touch this hot-potato until a new Congress convenes.

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Media comment:

• Financial Times-UK-US races to approve India nuclear deal
• Daily Times-Pakistan-US-India nuclear deal called “foolish and risky”
• Christian Science Monitor-India a step closer to nuclear trade
• Associated Press-Delegates: US-India nuclear deal talks in disarray
• Hindustan Times-India-India waltzes past Vienna, Bush wielded the baton