Opinion-Columns.com

BAILING OUT WOODEN ARROWS WITH WOODEN NICKELS

According to the gurus over at Wikipedia, “A wooden nickel, in the United States, is wood token coin, which are usually issued by a merchant or bank as a promotion, sometimes redeemable for a specific item such as a drink. Wooden nickels were most commonly issued in the US in the 1930s, after the Great Depression.”

Which is fine (as far as it goes), although in the sense of the current bailout of fraudulent and specious investment vehicles, it seems the wooden nickel is upon us almost before the fact. We have been snookered out of our underwear before the game began.

Investment ‘vehicles’ are well named, invented as they are to drive off with your money. In case you missed the point of the failure in the House of Representatives to pass Hank Paulson’s giveaway to his former partners in crime over at Goldman Sachs, it was to provide political cover for the coming election, while allowing the Senate to unashamedly lard the legislation.

Seldom does the Senate step in ahead of the House, but paid-off Senators were well paid and only a third of them are standing for reelection. Thus are leaders made. Such is the power of a corrupt two-party system that badly needs a viable third party to disrupt partisanship where stalemate and power-plays have all but replaced representative government.

Hope for a future lies in meaningful coalition governance. What we have allowed in Washington simply will not suffice. Consider what Nancy Pelosi (rhymes with Bela Lugosi) has given us for this month’s monster under the bed;

(Rescue Sweetened With Tax Incentives, by Cecilia Kang, Washington Post)

The House of Representatives yesterday approved $107 billion in tax breaks for businesses and consumers as part of a sweeping financial rescue package designed to stave the credit crisis.

Saddled onto the 450-page bill is a provision to shield as many as 25 million Americans from the alternative minimum tax and $18 billion in tax credit extensions for wind and solar energy production.

Yet to appease lawmakers and make the bill more attractive, several more prosaic tax provisions are included, according to a government budgetary watchdog group.

Saddled. Well chosen metaphor. Indeed, the nation’s economic horse very nearly sank to its knees under the load. Any vague hope that “the best Congress money can buy” would seek anything other than its own unending grip on Democratic dominance (under an Obama administration) sank as well.

Pelosi, who has an absolute majority in the House, said, “We were dealt a bad hand; we made the most of it.” This witless Speaker of the House has made nothing but excuses for the deplorable job she has done since the 2006 mid-term election gave her what she wanted and cannot find a way to use—control.

In the week that was, last week’s $700 billion refusal became this week’s acceptance--larded with an additional $150 billion in earmarks and other buried treasures. Republicans have been watching all year, like cats at a mouse hole, for a bill that could not be refused to which they could attach pet legislation.

They got it this week on a platter, thanks to the Pelosi-Reid dumbo combo. Less able 'leadership' has seldom haunted the halls of Congress. Republicans are not always civic-minded, by by god they are able and showed it by their expansive mood.

(Time Magazine) Paulson's original request was barely three pages long, whereas the bill passed today runs well over 400 pages.

Pork, of course, is not exactly speech-writing, but it does take language and language takes pages. Fortunately, that language was at the ready, loaded, primed and parsed, eager to be fired so everyone could go home and leave the mess to Obama or McCain. With change like this, who really cares who occupies the White House?

(Washington Post again) NASCAR will be able to write off racetrack costs over 7 years and manufacturers of wooden arrows for children will be shielded from an excise tax applied to other shafts. The NASCAR provision was introduced by Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.), who voted in favor of the bill.

Nice job, Mike. That certainly bails out the auto-racing industry, which grosses more than any other organized sport and is awash in profits. A friend of mine, just today, sent me a pretty good idea--that those in Congress be required to wear NASCAR-like uniforms, so we could readily see their sponsorship. I don't know the attribution, it's not original with him, but it's pretty accurate and (would be) funny if it didn't cleave so close to the bone.

The bailout package also provides tax rebates on rum imported from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and tax credits for economic development on the island of American Samoa.

"In the midst of a debate over a historic bailout package, Senate pulled out an old bag of tricks: piling billions of dollars of unrelated legislative provisions into the package and daring the House to reject the bailout again," said Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "Many of these provisions are tax extenders that have been waiting in the wings for months, hoping for a legislative train to leave the station."

The bill passed the House yesterday 263 to 171. It was a last-ditch effort of sorts for proponents of renewable energy to get tax provisions extended before they were set to expire by the end of the year. Those extensions, estimated at $18 billion, had repeatedly failed to pass legislative muster in both the Senate and House over the past year.

The tax breaks in the legislation total $149 billion over 10 years, and are offset by $42 billion in tax increases. The hikes include a new levy on hedge-fund managers who avoid taxes by transferring income offshore, a provision that would raise $25 billion over 10 years.

It was an absolutely bi-partisan effort. Everyone got their hand in the till, regardless of race, creed, gender or political affiliation. No cause was too large ($150 billion in tax breaks) or too small (39 cents on wooden arrows).

(Bloomberg) Senators attached a provision repealing a 39-cent excise tax on wooden arrows designed for children to an historic $700 billion financial-markets rescue that passed tonight by a vote of 74-25. The provision, originally proposed by Oregon senators Ron Wyden [D] and Gordon Smith [R], will save manufacturers such as Rose City Archery in Myrtle Point, Oregon, about $200,000 a year.

Senators Widen and Smith can’t get any more bi-partisan than that.

(Wikipedia) It was during this (depression era) decade that some banks and chambers of commerce in the United States issued wooden nickels with expiration dates to mitigate difficulties faced by merchants in making change at times of instability.

Wooden arrows—wooden nickels—guess we’ve now seen the closing of the circle. We can hope, but not be assured, that the circle is not a noose in disguise.

__________________________________________________

Media comment:

• Houston Chronicle-Equal treatment
• Boston Globe-Benevolence amid an orgy
• National Post-Canada-Bailout bill more about shafts than building confidence
• Guardian-UK-Now Wall Street may shun $700bn bail-out
• The Australian-Australia-Paulson bailout won't impress sceptics

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.

______________________________________________________

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.

__________________________________________________________

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

 

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.

______________________________________________________

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

 

BORDER SECURITY--ACCEPTING THE FABRIC OF FEAR

We are not a fearful nation, nor (if we reject Michael Chertoff’s continuing effort to scare us to death) will we become one. That said, we are certainly and willingly Balkanizing ourselves, dividing a previously United States into a rag-tag and very unAmerican obsession with what are essentially ghosts under the bed.

Derby Line, Vermont is an unfortunate current example.

Homeland Security Comes to Vermont, Changes in Border Town Unsettle Some Residents, blares a headline from the Washington Post;

DERBY LINE, Vt. -- The changes started coming slowly to this small town where the U.S. border with Canada runs across sleepy streets, through houses and families, and smack down the middle of the shared local library.

First was the white, painted lettering on the pavement on three little side streets -- "Canada" on one side, "U.S.A." on the other. Then came the white pylons denoting which side of the border was which. After that, signboards were erected on some streets, ordering drivers to turn back and use an officially designated entry point.

And along with the signposts came an influx of American Border Patrol agents, cruising through the town in their green-and-white sport-utility vehicles with sirens, chasing down cars and mopeds that ignored the posted warnings.

‘ The changes started coming slowly to this small town’ sounds like a badly written voice-over, opener to a Grade B movie. Fade to screaming sirens and white SUVs chasing down—what?—international criminals? Not hardly. A kid on a dirt-bike, rolling through the wooded trail he’s ridden since Dad finally gave in to his pleas and let him buy a used Honda CRF 150.

“Don’t shoot, for God’s sake, that’s my kid!”

Derby Line has peacefully coexisted somehow with its American-Canadian divisions and friendships since 1791. The War of 1812 with Britain caused hardly a ripple of dissatisfaction among American and Canadian neighbors who shared church, the watching of kids and celebration of inter-marriages. The U.S. invaded Canada in that ill-begotten war, but apparently not at Derby Line. Washington, D.C. burned (partially) to the ground, but the New England area kept up a brisk trade with Canada throughout.

According to Wikipedia, the little village shared with Stanstead in Quebec is best known for the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, deliberately constructed on the international border and opened in 1904. The donors were a binational couple: Carlos F. Haskell was a local American businessman who owned a number of sawmills, while Martha Stewart Haskell was Canadian.

It’s not an accident that the line runs down the floor of the library, bisecting it’s reading-room.

The intent was that people on both sides of the border would have use of the facility, which is now a designated historic site. Patrons of the library from either side of the border may use the facility without going through border security.

Does Martha Stewart, the modern-day namesake of that Canadian woman know about this?

For longtime residents accustomed to a simpler life that flowed freely across a largely invisible border, the final shock -- and what made most people really take notice -- was a proposal by the border agents last year to erect fences on the small streets to officially barricade the United States from Canada, and neighbor from neighbor.

"They're stirring up a little hate and discontent with that deal," said Claire Currier, who grew up in this border area and works at Brown's Drug Store, which has operated on the same spot since 1884. "It's like putting up a barrier. We've all intermingled for years."

For the Department of Homeland Security, the changes are part of a gradual fortification of America's northern border that began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has accelerated in recent years.

Well, the stirring up of hatreds is an initial and necessary step toward fascism. Too strong a word? That’s because you and I and most Americans and Canadians have been used to hearing it applied to Hitler’s Germany or Italy’s Mussolini. Calm yourself for a moment before writing me a hot reply about the necessity of protecting our cities. Look up fascism. The definition is: (noun) a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism). Fits pretty well.

Europe relies on efficient police work to track down terrorists, with not always perfect, but less intrusive restraint. During the worst of the IRA terrorisms, England never walled itself off from Scotland and (thereby) Northern Ireland. The United States shares with Israel a less effective, yet far more isolating rationale of walls, barbed-wire and checkpoints.

It has served them terribly and will serve us terribly as well.

The hardening of the northern frontier is unsettling to many in the small towns along the border. For as long as most of these people can remember, the line between the United States and Canada has been little more than a historic curiosity, rather than the hard and fast demarcation that is America's southern border.

Named the Secure Border Initiative, the project calls for more than tripling the number of agents along the northern border, adding boats and helicopters, and deploying sophisticated new technology including hundreds of millions of dollars in new communications equipment, radiation detectors and three different types of camera-mounted sensors in the uninhabited wooded areas.

"It was freer before, but we live in a different world now," said agent Mark Henry, the operations officer at the Border Patrol's Swanton Sector, headquartered in Swanton, Vt. The sector encompasses about 24,000 square miles, extending from the town of Champlain, in Upstate New York, on the east all the way across to the border with Maine. The sector now has 250 agents, up from 180 three years ago, and the number is scheduled to reach 300 next year.

I would submit that we only live in a different world if we elect to live in one. To allow 19 terrorists in hijacked aircraft to change our very form of government and constitutionally protected civil freedoms of movement and protection from unwarranted inquiry is to have already abandoned the game to the enemy.

What are we but our freedoms? Just another too powerful loose cannon smashing the china (small C) in the world order.

The nations of the world, who once looked our way with hope and envy, now see us as disturbers of the peace. Disturbing the peace (the unsettling of proper order in a public space through one's actions) is an American misdemeanor that is about to become (if we continue to let it) a felony against the civilized world.

I am not merely angry at the stupidity enforced against Derby Line and Stanstead. I am outraged at what has been asked of America and how easily it has been given.

Bombed at Pearl Harbor, our entire Pacific fleet on the bottom and 2,400 servicemen killed, Franklin Roosevelt addressed the Congress. That wasn’t three hijacked airliners, it was a deliberate attack by 353 warplanes launched from six separate aircraft carriers. The time was ripe for demagoguery and we had some (Japanese internment camps), but we also had a president who brought the country together in purpose rather than dividing it in fear.

Cicero told us two thousand years ago that ‘endless money forms the sinews of war.’ It was true two thousand years before him, but the writing has been lost.

300 agents now in Vermont alone, eager and ignorant, chase down kids and annoy lifelong neighbors, where there were but 300 along the entire Canadian border before Bush and Chertoff.

Bush and Chertoff? Cheney and Addington? Rumsfeld and Gonzales? Are these the statesmen to whom we offer up our Founder’s sacrifice? These rank politicians risk nothing of personal wealth and power. Washington, Jefferson and their peers risked the very real probability that they would be tried for treason and hanged, their fortunes confiscated. Not possibility--probability.

We have traded a sacred heritage for a handful of beads. Not even beads, this travesty of false preservation is worth less than beads. Will the real America please stand up, less the last of us be left to turn out the lights?

"We're more visible," Henry said. "We've gotten more aircraft, more vehicles, more boats, more ATVs -- pretty much everything, we've got more. And we've got more people to man them."

"9/11 changed everything," said Border Patrol agent Fernando Beltran, the operations chief for Swanton Sector's Newport station, which includes Derby Line. "This may have been Mayberry before, but it's not anymore."

Not in my America. In my America only your ignorance is more visible.

. . . for the border agents, Sept. 11 exposed the vulnerability of America's northern frontier and the ease with which anyone -- a terrorist with a portable nuclear device, for example -- could cross into the United States from Canada using one of the multitude of unguarded back roads or forest paths, or, in a border town such as Derby Line, simply by crossing the street.

Beltran said he instructs his agents to use discretion and "common sense." It goes like this: "If a kid [on the Canada side] throws a Frisbee over here, he can come and get it. But if he got the Frisbee and kept walking down to the Arby's to get a soda, we're going to stop you."

"We can't be wrong once," Beltran added. "If we're wrong once, that could be devastating to the whole country."

No Fernando, actually it’s your being there at all that is devastating to the country. You have already been wrong a number of times, wrong to intervene in small border villages, wrong to cut the streets of that village in half, wrong to disturb the peace along the longest unmilitarized border in the world, wrong to institutionalize what should be low-tech police work.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said it effectively and correctly, if we can take a moment to listen to a word of advice from the past, rather than the fear-mongering of the present:

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Confusing the means and the ends. Sounds right. Ability to do outrunning the reason to do. That, when you sit down, shut off the TV and put your feet up, feels right as well. Guided missiles and misguided men. Bingo, Martin. And for that and the other truths of your illuminated life, they assassinated you.

Illuminate: (verb) Make free from confusion or ambiguity; make clear.

A president that our current president claims to admire, said quite famously; “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Not perhaps as catchy and bite-sized as ‘bring ‘em on’ or ‘we do not torture,’ but a better quote and a better legacy upon which to be judged.

Amazingly, the choice of legacy is not his, but ours. We must choose the Bush legacy and lose our own or choose differently and save our nation.

It is as simple as that.

___________________________________________________

Media comment:

• Vancouver Sun-Canada-Canada needs to be proactive to counter U.S. protectionism
• United Press International-Vermont town decries security changes
• Washington Post-Taking Liberties At Homeland Security
• ASAP News-UK-Security online registration for US visitors sparks controversy
• Associated Press-Homeland Security setting up counterspy unit

“First We Take,” the Lessons of 1933 Germany

As may be apparent from the title, I am going to make comparisons to the early years of Hitler Germany, when he demanded and took various powers by entirely legal and democratic methods. Hitler ended up a dictator, but he was enabled to that ultimate goal by a population terrified by an economic maelstrom and the ever growing lawlessness across Germany.

Conservative, disheartened and increasingly desperate Germans repeatedly went to the polls and elected National Socialist (Nazi) candidates.

The Holocaust has taken Nazi Germany as ‘off the table’ of political discussion as Nancy Pelosi’s unilateral removal of impeachment and perhaps for similar reasons; sensitivity. It’s just too divisive, says Nancy, as though we were frightened children needing to hide our faces in her skirt. Never again, say the Israelis, as 800,000 Rwandans are massacred and Stalin kills (by some estimates) 25 million of his own people, Mao another 35 million and the carnage goes on, uncompared.

Forbidding the discussion of parallels is to make them invisible. Invisibility is the workplace of those who would do us wrong, not in the light of discussion and criticism, but behind closed doors, in secret session. Every attack against our constitutionally guaranteed rights, since 9-11, has been whisked behind the opaque door of ‘top secret’ and ‘national interest,’ thereby kept from the public view.

Comparison? We are denied comparison as well. Nazi, has been made yet another N-word; unspeakable in polite society and therefore far more dangerous to our civil rights and the lessons history has to teach. Author Aldous Huxley cautioned us that "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"

Unable to debate the similarity between America today and Hitler’s 1933 Germany, those who oppose authoritarian presidencies in place of constitutional balance are disarmed. Relegated to the pillow-fights of uncritical media, we stand impotent while our country is slid out from under us. If you value Nancy Pelosi’s sensitivity above and beyond the lessons of history, go turn on MTV and leave this column to the less frightened.

(Washington Post, August 16^th, U.S. May Ease Police Spy Rules, by Spencer Hsu and Carrie Johnson)

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Forget 9-11 and put aside the past eight years of the Bush-Cheney administration, clear your head of various blue-ribbon panel recommendations and recognize that this ruling is made at the exit-gate, by an organization on its way out the door. It’s publicly announced by the Justice Department on a Saturday in mid-August.

With Germanic precision, Bush’s Department of Homeland Security has put the nation’s police departments on the intravenous-drip of federal money. Did you ever suspect that one day America would be called a Homeland. Did you ever in your most Orwellian dream believe that Americans would stand for that? Not only stand for it, but wave the flag?

You guys need night-vision, armored personnel carriers, automatic weaponry, training, anti-terror camps? Line right up at the fed spigot and drink deeply. It’s the nationalist thing to do, patriotic to the core, swinging into step for God and country. Nice new toys, huh? Shiny and cool, you bet. Manly and preparedness-friendly, yessir.

For the Phoenix police? For Detroit? We need armored personnel-carriers and machine-guns for Phoenix and Detroit? This, for a response to a terrorist act? Crowd control against American crowds? Gimme a break.

Now, says the Fed, we don’t want to see you lose all that great stuff and we don’t want to intimidate—not us. But, remember where those toys came from. Quicker’n a sub-prime loan, they can be taken back. 18,000 police departments that grab a part of that $1.6 billion (and more to come), lose most of their autonomy (noun: Immunity from arbitrary exercise of authority: political independence).

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

They are also, without a shred of doubt, setting groundwork and legal precedent to protect Bush administration abuses from actually sending officials to prison. Prior to January 20^th, look for Bush to provide blanket immunity for all acts against terrorism—however that term may be defined. The Reagan administration, choir-boys by comparison, suffered 61 indictments.

Bush, while still president (and, in his own mind, still able to preside by decree) will absolutely protect Cheney, Addington, Rumsfeld, Rice and whatever smaller fish threaten to fall into the nets of American justice.

1933 Germany was a parliamentary republic and thus the Chancellor was subject only to votes of confidence. Wobbly in his hold on office, Hitler chose to burn down the Reichstag (parliament), blame it on his nearest political enemy and take immediate dictatorial control in the heat of public panic. The Bolsheviks were at the gates.

We elect our presidents for a maximum of eight years, but there are those who fear an attack on Iran and a ‘temporary’ suspension of habeus corpus and a ‘necessary’ period of martial law ‘until the terrorist threat subsides.’ Terrorists rather than Bolsheviks at the gates. Easier perhaps, than a bogus fire within the Congress of the United States.

America has already been scared half to death in preparation, but Blackwater stands ready to ‘assist’ local police, should there be any ‘outbreaks of terrorist activity.’ New Orleans was the prep event.

As in 1933 Germany, first we take the public confidence. Then we replace the democracy blamed for losing the public confidence by trains that run on time, a hustling off of dissenters, polishing the apple of modern media and possibly an additional sop such as a holiday on mortgage foreclosures. The banks will be massively subsidized for their inconvenience.

When first we have taken, then all else falls into place. Writers of columns such as this will be gone.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the administration agrees that it needs to do everything possible to prevent unwarranted encroachments on civil liberties, adding that it succeeds the overwhelming majority of the time.

Bush homeland security adviser Kenneth L. Wainstein said, "This is a continuum that started back on 9/11 to reform law enforcement and the intelligence community to focus on the terrorism threat."

Those statements, in and of themselves, ought to chill the most conservative blood.

Under the Justice Department proposal for state and local police, published for public comment July 31, law enforcement agencies would be allowed to target groups as well as individuals, and to launch a criminal intelligence investigation based on the suspicion that a target is engaged in terrorism or providing material support to terrorists. They also could share results with a constellation of federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and others in many cases.

Allowed to target, with no more than a suspicion of providing support to terrorists. We have by that, just given over innocent until proven guilty to its direct opposite. Would be allowed to smash down your door at 2AM and hustle you (or me) off to Guantanamo and no one the wiser.

And last week, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said that the Justice Department will release new guidelines within weeks to streamline and unify FBI investigations of criminal law enforcement matters and national security threats. The changes will clarify what tools agents can employ and whose approval they must obtain.

Clarify. Ja, ve vill clarify, but first ve vill streamline.

Critics say preemptive law enforcement in the absence of a crime can violate the Constitution and due process. They cite the administration's long-running warrantless-surveillance program, which was set up outside the courts, and the FBI's acknowledgment that it abused its intelligence-gathering privileges in hundreds of cases by using inadequately documented administrative orders to obtain telephone, e-mail, financial and other personal records of U.S. citizens without warrants.

Constitution, poof! Ve haff already crossed that bridge and who obcheckted? No von, not von obchecktion from the Reichstag, uh, Congress. Vat critics remain, ve haff means to silence critics.

Jamie Gorelick cited the recent disclosure that undercover Maryland State Police agents spied on death penalty opponents and antiwar groups in 2005 and 2006 to emphasize that the policies would require close oversight.

Ofersight, ja. Ve haff no problems with oversight.

German, an FBI agent for 16 years, said easing established limits on intelligence-gathering would lead to abuses against peaceful political dissenters. In addition to the Maryland case, he pointed to reports in the past six years that undercover New York police officers infiltrated protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention; that California state agents eavesdropped on peace, animal rights and labor activists; and that Denver police spied on Amnesty International and others before being discovered.

"If police officers no longer see themselves as engaged in protecting their communities from criminals and instead as domestic intelligence agents working on behalf of the CIA, they will be encouraged to collect more information," German said. "It turns police officers into spies on behalf of the federal government."

Ja (chuckle), I qvote the vice-prezident; “So vat!” First ve take, then vill be plenty time to give.

Conspiracy theorist? Me? Please, that charge is so 1933.

_____________________________________________________

Media comment:

• Islam Online-Police Allowed to Spy on Americans
• Los Angeles Times-Justice Department eyes domestic spy role for local police
• Baltimore Sun-Police spying prompts hearings
• Hagerstown Herald Mail-Maryland must investigate police spying
• AlterNet-CA-Dissent Is Essential to Democracy

 

 

THE NEXT GREAT IDEA IN THE BUSH DOCTRINE OF PREEMPTIVE WAR

Along comes Walter Pincus, an able enough Washington Post staff writer to disabuse us of any intention by incumbent George Bush to release his death-grip on America’s substitution for preemption over diplomacy. If you thought (or hoped) his eye was on getting back to his cats and favorite pillow down on the ranch, you never counted on Dick Cheney, or Cheney’s attack dog, David Addington.

If one were of a more conspiracy attuned mind than I happen to be, I might would feel the rising hairs at the back of my neck, the hot breath of military coups. An election, a preemptive strike before January 20th and extraordinary measures taken temporarily on a war-footing.

Nah. Couldn’t happen. Troops in the streets? Kent State? Nah.

(Non-Nuclear Warhead Urged for Trident Missile, by Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer, Saturday, August 16, 2008)

A National Research Council blue-ribbon panel of defense experts is recommending development and testing of a conventional warhead for submarine-launched intercontinental Trident missiles to give the president an alternative to using nuclear weapons for a prompt strike anywhere in the world.