Obama's Fearsome Foursome
Now Edward Luce, in a scorching article in the Financial Times, has cracked the conundrum: Obama’s circle of advisors is small, tight, exclusive, and geared for electioneering, rather than actually governing. I have long wondered whether or not it has become impossible for any president to see beyond the edited version of reality presented to him by his staff and the rest of the government. The security state imprisons the president in an information cocoon just as it imprisons the citizenry with a tightly-controlled mass media and a militarized police force.
Obama is comfortable with this group, but it appears that it is guiding him towards failure. Surely, he must realize that he has already expended much of his political capital with little to show for it other than financial disaster narrowly averted, at least for a while. As I wrote not long ago, the next six months will tell the tale. The fearsome foursome who helped elevate him to the highest office in the land may have become the anchors that will pull his presidency under.
Two World-Class Concerts This Weekend
Olivier Latry, organist at Notre Dame Cathedral/Paris will perform Poulenc, Jongen and Cochereau with the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra tonight at Galloway Memorial UMC. (Corner of North Congress and Yazoo Streets) in Jackson. The concert starts at 7:30. Rise from the sick bed to hear this. (On second thought, stay at home if you have the flu.) Admission is $15.00.
Saturday night, the Mississippi Academy of Ancient Music (MA’AM) presents the baroque ensemble Tempesta di Mare at St. James Episcopal Church, 3921 Oak Ridge Drive, Jackson. The concert, entitled “From Venice to Leipzig” will feature music of Vivaldi, Bach, Veracini, Telemann, and Walther. The concert begins at 7:30. Single admission is $20.00.
Volcker Prevails, Geithner & Summers Lose
Obama is reacting because he must.
From his comments yesterday, which I missed because of high fever, it appears that the Goldman Sachs contingent, Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, were shut out of a come-to-jesus meeting between President Obama, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and Bill Donaldson, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is further clear from Obama’s remarks that the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression Era statute that separated commercial banking and investment banking, must be reenacted in some form, and that the government cannot ever again allow itself to be put in the position of standing behind banks that speculate with their depositors’ money.
Obama also made it clear that something would have to be done about institutions that are “too big to fail.”
It was only a couple of months ago that the New York Times reported that there was no possibility of Glass-Steagall becoming reenacted, but what a difference two months and the election of a right-wing Republican in a safe Democratic state can do!
As I see it, Obama was expected to do two things in his first year: 1. See universal health care enacted and 2. Take affirmative action to fix the financial system. The first has certainly hit a buzz-saw, and as for number 2, Obama simply did not seem to have the stomach to pick a fight with Wall Street—or anyone else, for that matter. I was aghast when I learned who Obama’s economic team would be and predicted that they would sooner or later have to be cast overboard if there were to be any real hope of reform. The gangplank was prepared at 11:34 AM, EST yesterday. Expect the Goldman Sach contingent to soon discover the importance of spending more time with their families.
The Obama honeymoon is over. The low-hanging fruit, admittedly meager after eight years of Bush, has been harvested. The hard and unpopular decisions that have been put off must soon be made. Obama has been as bipartisan as any president could be and he has been rewarded with snarls, curses, prevarication and stonewalling from his opponents. He will have to use the immense power of the presidency to push through real change. Not to draw too fine a line—he will have to put his foot on the neck of Wall Street and some of the other powerful corporations that are fattening themselves on the back of average Americans. That is not his preferred mode of dealing, but it is the only way that will produce results in the political climate today.
How Obama handles himself and his administration over the next six months will determine the success of his presidency.
Here beginneth the trial—by fire—of Barack Obama.
Haiti: Steel Your Hearts, Folks - The Victims of the Earthquake Have Morphed Into Looters
The same thing is happening in the media this very moment, before the bodies have begun to be buried, and while people are still dying from lack of water and food.
Like the media treatment of New Orleans after Katrina, there is a purpose to this sudden obsession: to erase any compassion on the part of the American People. If people become too concerned about Haiti they might start looking deeper into its miserable history—especially the heavy hand of the U.S. that has played such a large part in creating that misery, from the invasion by the Marines under the southern racist president, Woodrow Wilson in 1915 to the ouster of its first legally-elected president in modern times, Aristide, in 1993.
This column was inspired by a column on tomdispatch.com by Rebecca Solnit, When the Media is the Disaster.
Last Christmas a priest, Father Tim Jones of York, started a ruckus in Britain when he said in a sermon that shoplifting by the desperate from chain stores might be acceptable behavior. Naturally, there was an uproar. Jones told the Associated Press: “The point I'm making is that when we shut down every socially acceptable avenue for people in need, then the only avenue left is the socially unacceptable one.”
The response focused almost entirely on why shoplifting is wrong, but the claim was also repeatedly made that it doesn’t help. In fact, food helps the hungry, a fact so bald it’s bizarre to even have to state it. The means by which it arrives is a separate matter. The focus remained on shoplifting, rather than on why there might be people so desperate in England’s green and pleasant land that shoplifting might be their only option, and whether unnecessary human suffering is itself a crime of sorts.
Right now, the point is that people in Haiti need food, and for all the publicity, the international delivery system has, so far, been a visible dud. Under such circumstances, breaking into a U.N. food warehouse -- food assumedly meant for the poor of Haiti in a catastrophic moment -- might not be “violence,” or “looting,” or “law-breaking.” It might be logic. It might be the most effective way of meeting a desperate need.
Why were so many people in Haiti hungry before the earthquake? Why do we have a planet that produces enough food for all and a distribution system that ensures more than a billion of us don’t have a decent share of that bounty? Those are not questions whose answers should be long delayed.
Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them.
The Clarion-Ledger is running without comment the AP wires that are increasingly turning their attention from suffering to looting:
Pockets of looting and violence also are hindering a slow improvement in getting aid to victims.
Just four blocks from U.S. troop landing at the palace, hundreds of looters were rampaging through downtown.
Even the venerable New York Times has shown its concern over looting.
Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret) put it all together in 1933:
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
Follow the money.
You owe it to yourself to read the Solnit column. It’s an eye-opener.
Boil Water Notice Lifted
Jackson - Water System Update
The Health Department reported that water samples taken yesterday from the city’s surface water system were all clear this afternoon. Residents are still under a boil water notice until a second day of testing indicates that the water is safe. City crews have been collecting samples today for that second round of testing.
The well water system in southwest Jackson’s pressure is still building and when it reaches an acceptable level, testing will begin for it. Residents on that system are still on a boil water notice.
Map of Jackson Water Main Breaks
http://64.66.68.250/parcelsearch3/
Things are getting better, but it’s still not good.
Why There Will be More Attempted Bombings
To start out, we need to address the question that the political class and the media have consistently avoided: why are these people trying to terrorize us? What is driving them to this pathological extremism?
The profound ignorance of the American people regarding Islam and the Middle East has made it easy to avoid serious discussion of how the great European empires (and now the American Empire) have interacted with Islam and the Middle East over the past 800 years to bring us to this point.
We forget easily; the people of the Middle East don't.
Worse—and it is a serious defect in the American character that will someday do us in—Americans don't believe that history matters. We believe that we are an exception and that the rules don't apply to us. History is bunk, as Henry Ford reportedly said.
Thus knowledgeable scholars and historians who could enlighten us but whose opinions differ from the official line are ignored by the media and the government and no one is the wiser.
Unless we learn some Middle Eastern history--especially the history of the last 150 years--and become willing to seriously discuss how we got to this point, there is little we can do to stop terrorists from trying to hurt us. We can search them out and destroy them, but others will rise to take their place if we don't exercise more intelligence and wisdom in formulating our domestic and foreign policies.
None of us wants to hear this, but the actions of this nation clearly had something to do with our problem with terrorism. It didn't arise out of nothing. A circle of Islamic fundamentalists weren't just sitting around drinking tea when they decided out of the blue to hijack some airliners and fly them into the World Trade Center. They had to be provoked in a big sort of way. Has the American public ever been informed of how they were provoked? I've done some studying, and although I make no claims whatever to any expertise in Middle Eastern affairs, I have learned enough to know that the terrorists have ongoing legitimate grievances that the U. S. Government is not addressing and probably never will address because it would have to make major changes in our foreign and domestic policies that would cost some big American corporations some big money.
In short, I am pessimistic. I expect us to be subjected to more and more petty humiliations and more restrictions of civil liberties when traveling—in the name of making us safer—but the threats will continue as terrorists think up new and more ingenious methods of blowing up aircraft, simply because their grievances never have and probably never will be addressed. They will occasionally succeed in their grisly business, and in addition to the tragic loss of life, I predict that the disasters will be used by the authorities as an excuse to further shred the protections of the Bill of Rights, all in the name of protecting us.
And we, who are as ignorant of our constitutional rights as we are of Islam and the Middle East, will meekly submit to all of it, believing that it is being done in our best interest.
Why Oil Companies Haven't Been Constructing Refineries
It was obvious at the time that neither an increase in demand nor a constriction in supply was responsible for the run-up in energy prices. Indeed, reserves were expanding at the same time that prices were making their breathtaking climb. As a general economic rule, prices do not rise when inventories are rising.
As Sherlock Holmes once said, “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
What remains in this case is speculation.
At the time, there was a lot of money seeking large returns—returns far in excess of what investors were then making in the stock market. If enough speculators invest in hydrocarbons the price of hydrocarbons will rise. If the price rises to unsustainable levels, we call that a bubble. Bubbles, unfortunately, end, sooner or later, and like most bubbles created by easy money, the oil bubble, once it reached its peak, declined even faster than it ascended, as investors dumped energy futures and the derivatives based upon them, all of which had become radioactive.
But back to Dr. Shugart: his article in the Clarion-Ledger stated that we haven’t built a new refinery since 1976, in part because of “not-in-my-backyard” attitudes and costly environment regulations. As a result, according to Dr. Shugart, US oil refining capacity was nearly 4,000,000 barrels a day below current consumer demand, a shortfall that must be met by importing petroleum products. My answer to Dr. Shugart at the time was that oil companies had plenty of money to build oil refineries that were environmentally sustainable, and the real reason for not building refineries was that they did not anticipate being able to make a profit by selling their output.
Today’s article in the New York Times, Chilly Climate for Oil Refiners, confirms what I wrote over two years ago and confounds Dr. Shugart and his neoconservative economic arguments. The article begins:
Only a few years ago, a cry went up that the United States needed more oil refineries. The perceived shortage was so acute that George W. Bush, president at the time, even offered disused military bases as sites for building them.
Not only did that never come to pass, but the reverse is now happening. The business of oil refining is mired in a deep crisis, with five refineries being shut down this year, including plants in Delaware, New Jersey, California and New Mexico.
Gasoline demand, which many analysts had long expected to keep rising for decades, is down sharply in the recession. And refiners are increasingly convinced that even after the economy recovers, demand will not grow much in coming years because of the rise of alternative fuel supplies and the advent of tougher efficiency standards for automobiles.
In retrospect, it appears that an ongoing windfall profits tax with a trigger based upon the rise in the cost of living would have been an efficient and fair method of preventing oil and gas bubbles by heavily taxing price increases enabled by easy money and directly caused by rampant speculation. During the bubble, the windfall profits reaped by speculators and oil companies had no relation to the workings of supply and demand and represented no less than theft from the energy-consuming public. A windfall profits tax would have clawed back the spoils for the benefit of the victims.
There is a public interest, however, in preventing energy from becoming too cheap. Ideally, energy prices should reflect the total cost not only of extraction and the return to investors for the risk undertaken in exploration, but also the externalities imposed upon the environment and society in general by the extraction, transportation, refining, and usage of hydrocarbons, including the likely changes in world climate brought about by the greenhouse gases generated.
For 100 years, the energy industry has fluctuated between over-supply and under-supply, boom-or-bust, and these cycles are not directly related to the reserves in the ground but to the fluctuations in demand caused by economic booms, busts, and the consequent over- or under-investment in production. An oil well has an optimum production level, depending upon the producing formation and the technology used in getting the oil to flow out of the rock in which it is trapped into the bore hole. Producing too quickly from the well can cause the well to flood with water from the formations directly underneath the producing formation. Producing too slowly can necessitate additional workovers, thus adding to the cost of producing the oil. If demand slackens, suddenly there are millions of barrels of oil being pumped through the distribution system into reserves that are small in comparison to the total amount of oil produced worldwide. Once the reserves fill up, the oil has no place to go, thus the resulting dilemma of oil tankers forced to sit at anchor in the oceans, waiting to offload their contents.
The US government, through its strategic reserves, has at times been able to moderate prices by releasing oil onto the market when prices were high and by buying up oil for the reserve when prices fell. Unfortunately, this has not worked very well during the oil industry-dominated Bush administration for reasons that are patently obvious. It is in everyone’s interest, however, beyond the narrow interests of a few oil tycoons, that the price of oil and gas remain relatively stable. Investing in productive capital, which entails considerable risk in itself, cannot be made without a minimum of confidence that the cost of doing business will remain predictable. Energy is one of those costs.
Ultimately, fossil fuel will become extremely expensive and we will be forced to not only switch to renewable sources of energy but become far more sparing in our consumption. A national energy policy that succeeds in making the transition smooth should be the aim of energy policy. We already have the science and technology to make the switch. All that remains is that hydrocarbons become too expensive to continue to use them we way we are now.
The Senate Health Reform Bill - Summary
The Senate bill is a pig in a poke compared to what it ought to be, and it will unjustly swell the coffers of the insurance companies and pharmaceutical corporations at taxpayer expense. But it looks very much like something will ultimately pass and be enacted into law. Whatever passes will require much improvement over the next few years, but at least there will be something to improve.
The Republicans know this, so expect them to oppose unanimously any health care reform bill, no matter how bipartisan the drafting process has been. When every single Senate Republican votes against the final bill, the Democrats will be finally and fully justified in telling the Republicans to go to Hell and using the reconciliation process to enact important legislation. It’s clear that (1) the Republican “constituency” is Wall Street, big business, and the extremely wealthy—but not the rest of us; and, (2) they will not negotiate in good faith when the interests of their true constituents are affected.
As for Mississippi....
If there were ever a state that desperately needs affordable health care, it would be Mississippi. Yet our senators and representatives have—with only one exception—demonstrated over and over that their loyalties lie elsewhere. If Mississippi were a sovereign nation, they would be guilty of treason.
And a large percentage of voters in this benighted state are too blinded by right-wing bullshit to figure that out, even as they drive their uninsured asses to the local emergency room because they can’t afford a regular doctor.
Exactly what does it take to wake people to reality?
Praying for Iraq - The Moral Black Hole
neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse
you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
despitefully use you, and persecute you;
—Matthew 5:43-4 (Authorized Version)
The Iraq War is a moral black hole. It’s there, it won’t go away, it’s dangerous, and it has become virtually invisible. Words go in, nothing comes out. Anyone who touches upon it suddenly becomes a non-person because the ears that should be listening dare not listen lest they themselves be drawn into the abyss.
Our Lord commanded us to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us.
Praying for one’s enemies is easy. Forgiving those who unjustly injure us is easy. It often gives us a sense of moral superiority over those with power over us.
Praying for those we have injured—our victims—that is a different matter. Praying for somebody means, at the least, wishing them well. It is quite a trick to oppress someone and at the same time wish them well. Praying for one’s victims (rather than someone else’s victims) tends to shove our own offenses back into our teeth. Until we stop hurting people our prayers on their behalf mean nothing. In fact, they stink.
It recalls the scene on the stairs in which Hamlet forgoes stabbing a praying King Claudius because doing so in the middle of his prayers might send him to Heaven, rather than Hell, where he belongs. Unknown to Hamlet, however, King Claudius has just uttered a desperate and hopeless soliloquy:
—Hamlet, Act III,Scene iiiO, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murther! …
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murther’?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murther-
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain th’ offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law; but ‘tis not so above.
There is no shuffling; there the action lies
In his true nature, and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? What rests?
Try what repentance can. What can it not?
Yet what can it when one cannot repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engag’d! Help, angels! Make assay.
Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!
All may be well. He kneels.
Because he was still benefiting from the crime that he committed Claudius could not find forgiveness.
We might as well acknowledge that even though we personally may not be profiting from the war and occupation in Iraq, some of the most powerful corporations and individuals in the world are profiting handsomely. After the administration announced that it would invade Iraq, members of the administration were openly holding seminars in Washington DC and other locations, explaining to potential contractors how to board the gravy train of war contracting. There was simply no question that the motive for war was economic—that the Bush administration and the contractors involved were bent on plundering both the American taxpayer and the unfortunate Iraqis. Joseph Stiglitz, economist and Nobel laureate, has estimated that the war will cost the American people upwards of $3 trillion. The cost to the Iraqi people in innocent lives, undeserved suffering, and massive economic loss, is incalculable.
Like Claudius, many of us are profiting either directly or indirectly from the war and occupation. So with Claudius, our unspoken song is “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below./Words without thoughts never to heaven go.” Ibid.
May one be pardoned and retain the offense?
Because Claudius’s victim, the elder Hamlet, was his brother—by all accounts, a good king and a virtuous man—Claudius could not solve his moral problem with the usual rationalizations.
Our government invariably seeks to justify its aggression by demonizing the enemy (the victim), whom we are conditioned to perceive as unfathomably evil and utterly unworthy of our prayers. If we believe the enemy is a devil, it follows that prayers for the enemy are not only unnecessary, but actually ineffective, since we have already let ourselves become convinced that the enemy is an inferior sort of human being, left behind by evolution, led astray by evil doctrine, or stunted by some other unfortunate circumstances that are no fault of ours.
Unlike Claudius, who knew his brother well, most of us have little or no personal knowledge of Iraq or its inhabitants. It is therefore easy to demonize the “enemy” through psychological projection, a pathology in which we literally project parts of our own dark side onto people whom we have never met and of whom we know virtually nothing. Most of the faults we attribute to Iraqis actually come from deep within our own individual and collective psyches.
If the victims happened to have given us civilization, as the Iraqis have done, we have another mental trick: the imperial fantasy that our intentions are honorable and that our war of aggression and subsequent occupation is just what the victim needs, a character and civilization-building treatment for which he will one day thank us. The victim, so goes the story, is like a child that needs the discipline of military and colonial occupation, or else he will destroy himself in an orgy of cannibalism, civil strife, communism, tribalism, nationalism, Islamism, terrorism, or whatever ism seems appropriate—in the opinion of the propaganda Pooh-Bahs—to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise unbelievable, if not preposterous, official narrative.
Those who refuse to accept these rationalization can either take refuge in silence or speak the truth to power, with all its unpleasant personal consequences. It is this profound moral and spiritual conundrum that has led to the pervasive silence in the pulpit. The occupation of Iraq has not even been mentioned in my church in months, and I suspect that this tacit agreement to remain silent holds wherever the war is not being actively promoted.
If we pray for our victims, we must think the unthinkable. We must confront our own evil—our lack of concern, our greed and even our viciousness. Officially, this is impossible. Because our intentions are noble, what we are doing is selfless and good. It is we who are making the sacrifice, not the people of Iraq. So goes the official story.
So we sit mute and listen to the Sounds of Silence coming from the pulpit.
God help us.
The End of the Warrior
Piloting a drone thousands of miles distant requires neither courage nor the fever of combat, only technical skill and indifference to the lives of one’s victims.
It converts the warrior into the executioner.
The “pilots” should wear black hoods.
A Great Site to Improve Your Writing
,
the
Plain English
Campaign
is an instructive and entertaining treasure trove of
free hints on writing easy-to-read text.
Supporters of the organization chose (in a 2994 survey) “at the end of the day” to be the most annoying of all clichés. Second was “at this moment in time,” which tied with the constant use of the word “like” as if it were a form of punctuation.’'With all due respect' came fourth.
Their admonition: “George Orwell's advice is still worth following: 'Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.’”
The site also provides a Javascript program, Drivel Defence, that analyzes either pasted text or a web page for over-long sentences.
The site is worth exploring.
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/
Goldman Sachs and the Brother-In-Law Strategy
It is widely and correctly understood that Wall Street, with Goldman as a leader and with regulators in thrall, helped to inflate and profited from a credit bubble that burst and cost tens of millions of Americans their jobs, incomes, savings and home equity. American taxpayers continue to stand behind the bailouts and other government interventions that have stabilized the financial system, including Goldman, enabling the firm to post blowout profits in 2009 and to set aside $16.7 billion for bonuses so far this year.
Goldman, having received $10 billion in the initial bailout, has paid it back to the U. S. Treasury, and now claims that it really never needed the money. Rich points out, however, that $12.9 billion of the taxpayers’ money that went to bail out AIG went immediately to Goldman Sachs, to whom it owed the money as the result of its insuring Goldman’s bad debts.
And we do not know how much money the Federal Reserve pumped into Goldman as part of its efforts to preserve the banking system.
The truth is that Goldman clearly knew what it was doing all along, and calculated that the Treasury would have to bail out AIG, which would in turn reimburse Goldman for losses on its own toxic assets. It may have been legal, but if so, it was a legal scam on businesses and the public.
Think about it this way: Imagine yourself at a party where everyone, including yourself, was so drunk that they could barely get off the floor, much less drive their car home. The neighborhood is swarming with police officers with breathalyzers and there is no way you can avoid being stopped and asked to walk a straight line if you attempt to drive home. What do you do?
Simple. You find the brother-in-law of the police chief (who happens to be a guest) and ask him to drive you home. If your host has been smart enough to invite the chief himself or even the mayor, you prevail upon one of them to drive. They won’t be stopped and you avoid even the risk of being charged with public drunkenness, which is what usually happens when the driver is arrested for DUI and the passenger is too inebriated to drive the car home.
AIG was the brother-in-law. The Goldman veterans at Treasury and the Fed running the show—both in the Bush and Obama administrations—knew they couldn’t let AIG go under, and of course, they didn’t mind helping their alma mater in the process of bailing out AIG.
It’s a ripoff of Bromdingnagian proportions, but it looks like they will get away with it.
Why I don't buy or subscribe to the Clarion-Ledger
Update: Walter Pinkus of the Washington Post wrote a very pertinent article in the Columbia Journalism Review:
Newspaper Narcissism - Our Pursuit of Glory Led us Away from Readers