The Men Behind The Curtain

International relations are a dance: sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but usually most of what you see is only half the performance.

 

Yesterday, Israel admitted it is just a step or two from open war with Iran. The war is not a full-scale conventional military one, but involves proxies like Hezbollah and is conducted on a limited but unending scale.

 

This is a good confession for Israel to make. It also seems to come in direct response to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's speech at the UN last week on the anniversary of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In that speech, Ahmadinejad warns against sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program.

 

Insanity breeds insanity. You know, you think that the world would have learned the lessons of nuclear weapons, but then you realize that if American exceptionalism makes us feel that somehow the rules of the world don't apply to us, then what's to stop anyone, sane or not, from believing that those rules do not apply to them?

 

Indeed, the Bush (and now Obama) doctrine of pre-emptive military interventions simply give nations like Iran an excuse to flout the rules. As recent events in Times Square portend, Iran ain't the only one. And it ain't only nations.

 

And these doctrines are just the latest in a long series of hegemonic didactisms from a series of presidents stretching all the way back to Truman: the US will throw its weight around if it deems it necessary.

 

Which is fine if there's a genuine threat, in my opinion. The question becomes, then, what term of art is applied to "threat"? Communism was a threat, I suppose, when it was poised just ninety miles off the coast of Florida (it still is). But then the degree of that threat must be taken into account. Yes, when the Soviet Union was at its pinnacle of power perhaps the threat posed by Cuba was more formidable, but it's clear now that the threat from a tiny island off our shores is rather minimal.

 

History teaches us, tho, that the United States will define threats to mean practically anything. We overthrew the elected government of Mossadegh in Iran, and saddled them with the Shah. We paid a price for that, and that should have been the end of it. We overthrew a general in Iraq who nationalized the oil industry and replaced him with Saddam Hussein. We've paid a price for that any number of times, altho Saddam and Iraq have paid a much heavier price.

 

And then we pitted Iraq against Iran.

 

We've sort of earned the contempt of that region, and that's before we get anywhere near the Israel/Palestinian question.

 

And now, it seems, we've pitted Israel as our proxy against Iran, if the comments from Ya'alon are coupled with Hillary Clinton's reaction to the Ahmadinejad speech. It seems like we've played a pawn on the board. 

 

Nothing good can come of this.

God Is In The Details

There's a brand new scientific discovery which might lend a little street cred to liberals like me who got involved in liberal causes because we believe in God and Jesus.

 

To-wit, it seems that randomness is not as random as we've believed:

In 1938, the physicist Frank Benford made an extraordinary discovery about numbers. He found that in many lists of numbers drawn from real data, the leading digit is far more likely to be a 1 than a 9. In fact, the distribution of first digits follows a logarithmic law. So the first digit is likely to be 1 about 30 per cent of time while the number 9 appears only five per cent of the time.

There could be any number of unsettled and unsatisfying explanations for this, and I'm not going to insult your intelligence and expose my amateur understanding of physics and describe them.

What I am going to discuss is structure. The world according to science is a scary place: anything can, and will, happen and randomly.If you can imagine it, then somewhere in the infinite stretches of space and time, it's happened. Cthulhu exists, hell exists, even God exists coincidentally with an atheistic belief system.

Weird, right? All this presupposes one of three things: either the universe is an enormously huge, random, and complex system that not only can we not imagine, we can't even imagine imagining, or the universe is initially a random place but somehow informed by our consciousness and the consciousness of each and every creature capable of forming a thought, or there really is a God.

I think God has gotten a bum rap on earth. Perhaps somewhere in the universe there's a planet that gets Him and so He spends a lot of time there. I suspect this whole "human exceptionalism" thing that we on this planet indulge our egos in...and it doesn't matter if you're Christian or Jew or Muslim or even Buddhist...probably frustrates Him to no end.

 

So He (understand that I'm a lazy typist. God is likely without gender in my view) probably sits on a beach under some perfect sun on some perfect beach on another planet, looking in on us every so often to make sure we haven't blown ourselves up yet. Hell, I wouldn't waste a whole lot of time on a people that can't even sort out skin color easily! Good grief, when was the last time you saw a dog turn up his nose at another dog because he was brown?

 

And the world around us, with all its maze-like traps and the inherent instability and danger, is just one big practical joke on us.

 

There's a joke told in certain circles that when you die, you are confronted with two doors: One is absolutely empty, dusty and dank and in disrepair from underuse, and opens onto a short flight of stairs. The other is sparkling shiny clean, with a red velvet rope and two burly bouncers at the door and an endless line of people waiting to get in, under a sign that says "Lecture On How To Get To Heaven".

 

The sign over the unused door? "Heaven: This Way".

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) First up, the obvious story. The process going forward, as I understand it, is that Brown and the Labourites will have first crack at forming a coalition government. It should happen. The LibDems (funny how that's not a perjorative in England...) garnered 54 seats, which was a disappointing showing given the heat Nick Clegg had generated. LibDems lost 5 seats, but that would put Labour over 300 members. The magic number is 326. Of the remaining 37 seats, a large chunk are owned by small regional parties with social democratic ties (e.g. more likely to side with Labour, but...). Politics is the art of the possible and it's possible they will wait for either a coalition offer from the Conservatives, or to let the Conservatives rule as a minority party.

 

And then things become interesting. The first major bill that gets defeated (say, a budget that calls for spending cuts on healthcare or some such), and a vote of "No Confidence" can be requested. Should that pass, the UK gets thrown back into the election cycle.

 

So basically, the fate of Great Britain rests in the hands of three political parties: Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru, and the Scottish National Party. SNP tends to lean left, and so should support Brown. That would bring Labour one vote away from a majority (assuming LibDems and Democratic Unionist, Social Democratic & Labour, and Green Parties go as a bloc and on form).

 

And then things become REALLY interesting! Of the remaining parties with seats, Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru, only PC has made noise about who they'd support: the Conservatives. However, one of the issues that divides them from Labour is the administration of a policy of establishing block grants to the various states in the UK and letting them distribute them, something PC has said is unworkable.

 

But it's a Conservative policy. Indeed, it's the backbone of Conservative policy. But, PC has traditionally been the opposition of Labour in the Welsh parliament (now Assembly)

 

Which brings us to Sinn Fein. Nominally a Socialist party, they are focused on uniting Northern and the Republic of Ireland into one nation. Obviously, both coalitions would offer them progress on that front in exchange for their support, but like PC, there's no guarantee this would be a bloc move.

 

Even at that, even allowing that Labour somehow wrestles eight other parties to the table intact, it still has the problem of sitting on top of a pile of cats while fending off a formidably large opponent in the Conservatives.

 

Eeesh. And we thought the 2000 election in Florida was a mess!

 

2) And Joe McCarthy rubs his hands gleefully and laughs. I'm not for giving an American citizen a free pass for associating with known terorrists, no no, that's not my issue. My issue is the definition of "terrorist" is not subject to law, but to commissions and committees.

 

3) Yes, Teabaggers really ARE cavemen!

 

4) A typo? The nation nearly came to a standstill yesterday over a TYPO????? A trillion dollars was lost over a misspelling????? What does it say about our economic system that so much money can be lost in the blink of an eye, and yet no one dies immediately, and no guns are fired? A typo? Really?

 

5) Will baseball pull the 2011 All Star Game out of Phoenix? I think they should. Nevermind the uproar in the city when Johann Santana or Alex Rodriguez is forced to produce a driver's license or a passport, Arizona has a history like that of South Africa: they only move on something when there's a legitimate threat to their prestige and economy. So let's give it to them.

 

6) And democracy dies yet another small death.

 

7) There are few nations less deserving of American contempt than England, and yet...

 

8) Racism, sadly, is not just an American thing. That's still no excuse, Teabaggers.

 

9) The best restaurants to be in during the coming zombie apocalypse.

 

10) The ickiest story of the week. I'm not sure if it disturbs me more because some guy got upset about his junk or because your junk will be visible to hundreds of people.

The Whorled Around Us

It's easy in the confusion of the oil spill and the concerns of the environmental impact to lose sight of something even more distressing, that this tragedy only serves to highlight.

 

We live in a toxic soup. Every morning we wake up in our beds, the "fresh" scent of fabric softner on our sheets fills our nostrils. The coffeemaker finishes perking, and the scent of "fresh" coffee wafts thru the house. We get up.

 

We go to the loo, and the deodorizer masks any smells that might linger from the night before: the mildew in the shower, the bit of waste that didn't flush, the mold under the rim of the bowl. We brush our teeth with toothpaste manufactured from things that would seem unlikely to clean our teeth. Indeed, we end up bleaching those to rid ourselves of the caffeine and tobacco stains.

 

We step out of the shower, "freshly" bathed with lovely little oils and soaps that leave our skin feeling soft and supple and smelling wonderful. Maybe we slap on a little deodorant to make our pits smell "fresh". We step out into the "freshly" painted bedroom and inhale the vague scent of paint, also know as volatile organic compounds. Nothing like the scent of "fresh" paint, is there?

 

We walk out to the car or the bus or the subway. We breathe in the fumes of cadmium from passing vehicles, the asbestos brake dust of an old ambulance, the metal shavings of the train wheels grinding down the tracks. We get to the office and sit in our plastic-and-fabric chair, raising a cloud of dust. We turn on the computer and the fan kicks up molecules of whatever heavy metal du jour Dell or Apple or HP saw fit to put into the manufacturing process.

 

And we do all this, and much much more, without giving it a second thought.

 

Think again.

 

I suppose this issue has taken on new meaning for me since September 11. Altho I was never really exposed to any of the airborne crap of that day and the subsequent weeks before the fires and smoke were doused, there were one or two days when the wind shifted onshore and the smell and fumes drifted up my way.

 

I remember specifically September 17. I was walking with a co-worker and was instantly struck by the acrid smell of the air. When I was a kid, I grew up across the river from a fat-rending plant and the smell was nearly identical, and as eye-watering and oily and noxious as I remembered it.

 

Ever since that event I've battled seasonal allergies, something I never had before those attacks. Causitive? Maybe. Or maybe it was just irritating enough to trigger a dormant condition. I can't know for sure.

 

It strikes me odd what we humans will do to ourselves. We'll bathe in poisons, inhale carcinogens, ingest chemicals that would grow our breasts or kill us in sufficient quantities. That, we can't unite on to fight and assess responsibility and punish the culprits for.

 

An oil spill? Yea, that we can get our knickers twisted over.

 

Liberalism and libertarianism, the correct kind of libertarianism, go hand in hand. Liberals fight for the individual right to be safe and secure in their environment. Nanny state? Perhaps, but that same protection allows the individual to flourish, to use his mind and his talents to the best of his ability on a fair and level playing field. Liberalism allows libertarianism to exist.

 

Is it nannystatism to insist that everyone has a vote and that every vote matters? No, but it is liberalism. Is it nannystatism to see a large chunk of our population dying unnecessarily and trying to do something about it? No, but it is liberalism.

 

You see, the core of libertarianism is the freedom of the individual to behave as he wishes, but that implies the individual can survive to use that freedom. Libertarianism as preached by the teabaggers is strangely silent on this point.

 

Lately, this form of "glib"bertarianism has gotten its feathers ruffled over some health news: the possible regulation of salt and sugar content in our foods. How dare they (the government) tell us what to put into our bodies?

 

Leaving the whole illicit drug issue aside, why wouldn't the government do this? Indeed, why shouldn't it? If the government's job, even by the definition of the teabagged is to protect the people of this nation from "enemies foreign and domestic" and the enemy is defined not by bullets and bombs but also by chemicals and diseases, is it not in the national security interest for the government now to protect the health of its citizenry?

 

No one is taking the chemical soup that these jackasses wish to bathe in away from them. They're making that soup optional. In other words, is it not an infringement of my rights as a consumer to not have to make my health optional? And yet, that infringement by the so-called "free market" is wordlessly allowed to pass while even the slightest hint that the government might be concerned about it raises a hue and cry from the Bachmann-Turned-Over-drive that the din practically has a decibel level.

 

Let's turn the free market argument around, the one that always get lobbed at us: if you want chemical free stuff, buy it, and someone will make it.

 

Yea, but here's the thing: the government subsidizes the research that pays for the development of those chemicals, which means the price of the frankenfood is lower than it should be in a free market.

 

So, given that, why not give real food a price ceiling, and as in a restaurant, if you want MSG on your hamburger, by all means, you can have it, but you'll pay a dollar extra for it.

 

Or, you could just go buy a shaker of the stuff and put it on yourself. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have reduced odds of cancer and better odds of bankrupting Social Security.

Between A Rock And A Hard Case

One of the most stunning moments for me in Michael Moore's movie "SiCKO" comes when Tony Benn (I believe. I couldn't find the quote.) tells Moore that in America, the people are afraid of the government while in Europe, the government is terrified of the people.

 

The Teabaggers would be onto something if they didn't hamper the efforts of the left to make the people the most important part of the nation, but I digress. Instead, I want to talk about Greece.

 

You may have heard, or certainly might have been aware, that Greece is in serious financial difficulty. Greece's troubles make California look solvent. As a result, the European Union-- the bank of last resort for its members-- has agreed to lend Greece the funds necessary to bail itself out, but there's a catch: spending cuts and an austerity budget must be enacted.

 

Needless to say, this budget hits workers, particularly public sector workers, hard: wage freezes, tax hikes...yes, even Europeans can have their fill...and deficit cutting to comply with the terms of membership in the EU. Deficits apparently cannot be more than 3% of GDP. On that basis, technically, the United States would have been in default from 1982-1994 (with a couple of exceptions), and in 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, and 2010.

 

Hm, those were mostly Republican administrations.

 

It does make you wonder a) where our money goes, and b) how do Europeans keep their deficits in check?

 

Oh. Right. Taxes.  Again, I digress.

 

It would be an understatement to say the Greek workers are getting a little antsy about this. Three are dead in a bombing of a bank, and workers in the private sector, who understand that as goes the civil servant jobs so go their own jobs, are joining the picket lines. It appears that Greece, which had a long history of instability during the 20th Century, is poised to be upset once again.

 

The government fears its people, for good reason. And Greece is not the only nation that's seeing some unrest among its people: France, for all its vaunted Sarkosian conservatism, has been forced to deal with an Airbus strike. Even Britain had to deal with a 57 day strike by airline workers AND protests by Royal Post workers.

 

Not for wage cuts, as in Greece, but because wage increases have been proposed that are pathetic, on the order of one to two percent.

 

Imagine that! In America, we're told to accept wage cuts and like them. In France, they walk out over a pay raise!

 

What the hell is wrong with us????

Spill The Beans

A side note, before I start the story: you never read about environmental disasters at renewable energy sources very often, but today, you can.

 

First, leave it to US Today to post the most relevant story to the average American: one of greed, self-interest, and panic.

 

Next, leave it to the New York Times to post the political implications of a natural catastrophe. This used to be the purview of the Washington Post, but they've been busy rejiggering their editorial staff to make it appears less liberal. Which is sort of like putting a wolf in wolf's clothing and then calling it a sheep.

 

Meanwhile, heckuva job, Brownie...again! Needless to say, the usual gang of idiots is lining up to try to distract "real Americans" from the terrible tragedy, not just environmental but economic and personal in the Gulf.

 

It's hard to find good news coming out of this disaster, as unmitigated and absolute a fuck-up as it is. But...

 

I suppose there are three bits I can hang out and call "good news".

 

First, suddenly "socialism" is not such a bad word. When David Vitter suggests that the state and Federal government would do a better job overseeing the protection of his state's wetlands, you're losing momentum as a Teabagger. I mean, party.

 

Second, if a "end-o-world" oil spill (hyperbole acknowledged) had to happen somewhere, it should happen in a high-profile, heavily populated area like the Gulf and West Florida coasts than in some backwater bay in Alaska where the impact was many dead seabirds and mammals. Let people see the mess their cars and houses create on a daily basis SOMEwhere on the planet.

 

Finally, if the ultimate end of this mess sees us altering energy plans, then good can come of it. In the past, I've campaigned for more renewable energy sources, improved efficiency of those resources, to the extent that I've proposed Obama offer a one billion dollar cash prize to the scientist who can make any renewable energy source-- wind, geothermal, ocean current or wave, or solar-- at BTU intensive as fossil fuels, and immediate interim steps that would see us stop oil drilling and consumption within a decade.

 

I don't mean switching to tar sands. I mean no more petroleum. It can be done.

 

At the bottom of the ocean is a supply of natural gas that is much easier to pick up, cleaner when both developed and burned, and could provide centuries of our energy needs, more than sufficient time to wean us and the entire planet off fossil fuels forever.

 

I speak, of course, of methane hydrates. The entire proposal would take another column to get into fully, but suffice it to say we'd dive very deep, scrape up a bunch of the stuff and bring it to the surface. On the bottom, it's a very compact solid. It would be great if we could contain it that way.

 

But unnecessary. Through the natural process of sublimation, we could raise the solids off the sea floor, and open up a do-it-yourself pipeline that would both process out the gases while piping it to power plants and other energy dispersal outlets.

 

It seems to me that we can accompish this using existing technology and have it up and running within not twenty years or ten years, but five and perhaps even sooner.

 

But hey, what do I know? I'm just some average Joe, right?

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) North America enjoyed its warmest April on record. This is after the northeast suffered through its rainiest March on record, and the continent enjoyed its warmest January on record. Weather extremes...I'd say it's a sign of global warming, but that's not "settled science", according to the little fraidycats of the right wing. Hope they enjoy drowning in their own hubris. Pity they have to take the rest of us down with them. By the way, that Oregon Petition, that supposedly has 20,000 scientists signed on for? Only 9, count 'em, nine of those scientists have advanced degrees in anything close to climatology and all nine of those are on advisory boards to Big Oil companies.

 

2) It's good that Hillary Clinton reaffirmed this. It's important that Israel understand that the relationship between us and them is more like a parent to an obnoxious teenager than equal partners. We won't abandon them, but we will make them grow up a little.

 

3) Charlie Crist comes out....as an independent.

 

4) I'll be curious to see how many in his party and in the Teabaggers call him a RINO...cuz, you know, The Terminator and all that. It's intriguing to see that even for deeply partisan political hacks, celebrity cuts you an awful lot of slack.

 

5) Would you want to know your entire genome for $1,000? I've registered with a few places that will, as discoveries are made, alert you to whether you should be concerned about a particular genetic disorder or predisposition (along with several deep genetic studies), so my answer would probably be yes.

 

6) Life. It's out there. For real.

 

7) GDP was up 3.2% in the first quarter of 2010.

 

8) Warren Buffett holds his annual BurningStock stockholders meeting for Berkshire Hathaway this weekend. Truly, this is like Burning Man and Woodstock for investors. By the way, don't blame Buffett for Ben Nelson's idiotic stance on financial reform. It turns out Nelson was more self-interested than protecting his largest teat.

 

9) The unintelligible praises the, um, unintelligent. It's not so much that Beck is an idiot. He is. But it's that he's completely uninterested in learning anything and passing it along to his audience that most offends me. Broadcast media, by dint of their entree into our most private spaces, have a duty to not only entertain us, but to inform us with facts and logic. Beck, along with most of FOX News, does neither. If I was president, I'd make 'em fix that.

 

10) If you're in a hit-and-run with a car, and you're driving a plane, you might want to stick around next time, if only for the press coverage.

Surrender, Dorothies!

It seems to me that the "good news" Republicans were having poured into their ears earlier this year about the mid-term elections is quickly turning into Gonzago's poison.

 

Item 1 - Unemployment claims at lowest level in months.

 

Item 2 - Republicans fold like cheap suitcase.

 

Item 3 - Rising star says no way.

 

Item 4 - Arizona law is splitting party.

 

Item 5 - "Drill, baby, drill" backfires-- literally!

 

Of these five items, item number one is most important, followed by item 2. The other three pretty much are current blips on the radar but have potential impact down the road.

 

The key to a Democratic hold on Congress is jobs, pure and simple. When people work, they're happy. When they're forced out of work, they're mad. When they are forced out of work and look down the road and see no prospects, they're terrified.

 

Republican election strategy since 1994 and the Contract On...I mean, "With" America, has been to prey on the terrorising of Americans. The more fear, the more likely Americans will vote Republican. Their strategy has been divide, conquer, and destabilize, but never govern. 

 

The logic is warped, of course. Americans always do better under Democratic presidents. Even in this current recession, American workers have found a haven with Obama that they did not have with Bush. Republicans have run this country with a curious attitude of enriching those that have, a sentiment that should have gone out with the overthrow of the various European colonial empires. Once upon a time, government was for the protection of power for the elite. No longer.

 

Couple the fear over lost jobs with the classist anger over the financial bailouts Bush impressed upon the country and Obama continued, and you see a boiling over of anger, which the Democrats have worked hard to focus on the GOPartisans.

 

Has it been successful? It seems so, but there's plenty of time before November and politics is the art of the possible. It's feasible that the Republicans can come up with a successful midterm strategy that somehow dents this armor that seems to be forming around the Democrats.

 

Surely, however, the Democrats will not lose as badly as many hand-rubbing gleeful rightwingers had forecast even in March when healthcare reform was on the ropes. A few seats? Probably. Lose the Senate majority? Not very likely at this point. Lose the House majority? Hell, no.

 

What the Democrats will have to face come January 2011 is a more radicalized Republican minority, one with more Teabagger support and a more militant agenda.

 

To quote a moron: Bring it on.

The Jaded Monkey Is In The Glove Box

Apparently, Goldman Sachs doesn't get it about both the financial crisis and the Senate hearings:

Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein told legislators Tuesday that when clients approach the investment bank as a market maker to buy or sell securities, they don't care what the firm thinks of the securities or whether it's betting against them.

Now, for some investors, that might be true.  Jaded monkeys like me who have spent 30 years in the underbelly of the financial markets dealing with the cowboys have learned how to read between the lines and focus on specific words and phrases in offerings and private placement memoranda would have hedged the Goldman Sachs offering, asking to get in on the other side of the deal.

 

Similarly, if I was offering to bundle my holdings and have GS place them, I'd want them to minimize my risk and play down the potential for loss. It's just good business sense, if by "business sense" you mean leaving the suckers holding the bag while I sail to Bimini.

 

Which, unfortunately, is precisely what "good business sense has come to mean in America in the 21st century.

 

But, to borrow from another set of hucksters, wait! There's more!

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, lashed out at Blankfein, claiming that Goldman creates conflicts of interest when it underwrites securities while betting against them.

Levin cited examples where Goldman employees described collateralized debt obligations the firm was selling, or assets backing those deals, as "shitty (corrected for impact)," "crap," "junk" and "lemons."

You'd think these morons would have learned from the Enron debacle. Worse still, as an employee of a FINRA registered firm, my e-mails are subject to storage and archiving for possible use in any investigation of my firm's practices.

Let's tie these two together: It's one thing to sell a risky security to an investor and make the blanket disclaimer that it could conceivably go belly up faster than fish after dynamite. It's another thing to know an investment is shitty and still try to pump out a sale. Markets demand perfect information and if your brokers are proudly boasting of selling a pig in a poke, that same braggadocio ought to be shared with the investment community, and not covered up in order to maximize your profit on betting against the very instruments you've sold.

Derivatives serve some purpose, it's true. An airline that hedges its fuel costs by purchasing futures on its fuel is doing right by its shareholders. Further, if it goes out and places a bet that the price will go down below the future contract price, it is mitigating its loss on the contract.

And vice versa for the firm selling the fuel futures contract. It's an entire other thing, tho, for the broker selling the futures contract to place a side bet based on knowledge he or she has with respect to the price of crude, say, that either party or both is not savvy to.

And still, Goldman Sachs are not getting it! As a "market-maker," Goldman Sachs has an obligation to set the ground rules for the market it is creating. It has what's called a fiduciary responsibility (a responsibility not unlike the one a doctor has to a patient or a lawyer to a client) to perform up to certain standards that exceed the expectations of investors. And it has a well-earned reputation to protect.

In one fell swoop, in one release of e-mails about a series of "shitty deals," Goldman has destroyed its credibility, the markets' credibilities, and rejected its fiduciary responsibility. Rather than admit this, however, Goldman has basically gone on the record as saying they acted in accordance with what some fly-by-night shyster would have done: fleeced investors.

There was a time in this country when an investment bank-- Merrill Lynch, Smith Barney, Goldman Sachs-- would have competed for clients based on its reputation and the trust its investors and clients placed in them.

Now, I'll admit one thing: the Internet and the rise of discount brokerage houses has made that aspect of their business moot. After all, why pay 2% of your assets and 20% of any trades to Goldman or Bear Stearns when you can commit the same trade at TD Ameritrade for $9.99? You keep more of your money, and it's the same damned shares.

This forced Wall Street houses to find new and more innovative ways of fleecing people so they can afford to drive their Beamers and fly their Falcon 50s to their beach house on Bermuda. But that same technology that defeated one aspect of their business made this other aspect of their business wildly profitable.

Powerful computers, advanced mathematics, and the ability to sift through mounds of information well-ahead of investors has given the Wall Streeters a powerful leverage over not only investors, but the American marketplace. Wal-Mart no longer sets prices as much as Wall Street does, by forcing Main Street to dig deeper and deeper into its bottom lines and come up with more and more income and dividends.

And this, this is the great tragedy of Goldman's blind spot. They aren't just stiffing investors and clients, they're stiffing the poor shnooks who bought houses and now have lost value in them, and opened shops and had to close those, and tried to keep hold of a job that was terminated because the company lost money directly or indirectly to Goldman's coffers.

 

 

 

All Hands On Debt!

When your national debt is $14 trillion dollars, you want to bring it down quickly but safely. You want to avoid unduly burdening your citizenry for past mistakes (*koffkoff*warofchoice*koffkoff*) but you have to balance that with the simple fact that a $14 trilion dollar deficit already burdens your citizenry for those mistakes.

 

That's why I endorse Erskine Bowles' position: All cards are on the table.

 

Half of our debt is owned by foreign nations. In effect, given that our debt rivals our gross domestic product--- roughly 87%-- we're working for the Chinese, British, Japanese and Saudis.

Half of those nations don't have good redundancy schemes.

 

As recently as 1990, our public debt was around $4 trillion dollars. Bill Clinton was able to shift the tax burden from the middle class to the rich and made significant strides in cutting the national debt. Our debt-to-GDP ratio has not been this high since just after World War II, which saw an enormous expansion of the economy as the wars wound down, and the GI Bill was enacted, which encouraged home ownership and college education, among other benefits for the returning veteran.

 

Roosevelt raised taxes. Rather, he expanded the tax base to include all income, not just wage income, proposed taxes on corporate earnings, and instituted the payroll tax that funded Social Security. And he raised the top marginal tax rate to 91% (!!!). He squarely put the burden of economic recovery on the shoulders of those who both brought the nation to its knees in the Great Depression as well as those who benefited from the increase in economic activity most.

 

In fact, consistently, with the exception of Eisenhower (who these days would probably be a Democrat), every Republican president since World War II has raised the percentage of debt to GDP, and every Democrat (Obama is an incomplete grade) has lowered it.

 

Democrats are rightly called the party of tax and spend. Republicans just spend. Democrats can afford what they buy, Republicans put it on a massive credit card and the bill is now coming due.

 

This is why Obama had to create a debt commission, to correct the mistakes of yet another Bush Presidency. And the solutions are not pretty. There's only so much personal income to be had from the middle class, which has seen its wages stagnate since 1980 and after adjusting for inflation, decline. Yes, more families now have two incomes so there's more income coming in the door, but there's also more debt going out the door: payments for a second car, for example, or disproportionate taxes on that second income (the "marriage penalty"), child care payments, increased spending on clothes and food, and so on.

 

The gap in income between the rich and the poor does give some material for increases in income taxes, its true, but it's not as much as many would think, and certainly not fourteen trillion dollars worth. It may be time for more effective revenue enhancements, to use a cliche: a national sales tax, for example, that exempts staples and necessities, scaled so that the more expensive an item in a class of goods is, the more taxes will be thrown off.

 

If you buy a Hyundai, in other words, you won't pay as much as a Camry, and nowhere near what a Lexus buyer would pay.

 

In addition to raising taxes on the wealthier, I'd like to see some tax cuts that make sense. For one thing, cut taxes on bank accounts, savings accounts, to encourage people to put their money into the bank.

 

Which would encourage lending by the banks. Which would encourage economic activity. Which would generate more jobs and income. Which would raise the GDP. Which would make us a healthier nation once again.

They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha!

I'm really rather upset with this:

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has repeated his long-held belief that intelligent aliens are likely to exist, and that a visit by them to present-day humanity would probably have unfortunate consequences for us.

Publicising a new documentary he has made for the Discovery Channel, the legendary boffin told the Times at the weekend:

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational... If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

I'm not upset because I want to quibble with Dr. Hawking with the usual rebuttal that it's a long way from whatever planet they'd originate from and why would they come all this way to get into our faces?

 

He's right. It's a distinct possibility.

 

I'm upset because, dammit, this is the third piece of science I've read or seen this weekend/week that has anticipated a four novel trilogy I'm doing research on! ThumbPer must be reading my notes and getting in touch with people!

 

Back to the story at hand: Mankind has always had an exploratory nature. If there's a cave, we'll enter it; An ocean, we'll cross it; a moon, we'll visit it.

 

With the exception of the moon so far, none of this has turned out well for the visited. Not the bear in the cave, not the native across the ocean, not the pristine environment we've seeded with our trash and illness.

 

Now, one could make the quibble, which I would, that as we advance as a civilization and grasp a larger understanding of the world around us, we've learned that it's important to co-exist with those around us. We have not learned the lessons perfectly, to be sure, but it is a learned lesson nonetheless. We've learned, because we've recognized the resources are limited and people have a right to be treated as equals.

 

Other societies might view such an attitude as immature at best, and as weak at worst. In America, we've never really come to grips with the historical nature of our more savage side, choosing instead to sanitize our history to show the "Injuns" as at best, our helpmeets and at worst, brutal savages who needed to be tamed and civilized.

 

Echoes of those hegemonic harmonics echo to this day in Arizona, where anyone can be stopped on the street and asked for identification, pending deportation back to Mexico for being an undocumented alien.

 

One wonders how Arizona would handle a full-blown invasion from Alpha Centauri, but I digress...

 

While there's no guarantee that aliens would be peaceful, there is reason to suspect that they'd be more interested in learning what they can from us, and teaching us what they can. The question is, would it be something we'd want to learn? Look at the second and third waves of colonization in human history: it's all about training natives to be more "like us".

 

Just like the more Cro-Magnon element of the United States rails against cultural diversity and tolerance, so would many aliens insist that their way is the right way, no matter how peaceably and palatably they'd offer it to us "in the spirit of intergalactic good will."

 

I don't think the first contact we have with an alien society will be a full-blown invasion, as some movies have suggested. On the other hand, I do think any alien visitation will be made with an eye towards the benefits the aliens can take from our resources. Resources unavailable from easier sources. If they needed metal ores, the asteroid belt would make a whole lot more sense than dropping into a steep gravity well. If they needed water, comets would be much easier to corrall and melt.

 

Which really doesn't leave us much to bargain with. Finished products, manufactured goods, and scientific discoveries are possibilities.

 

After all, even tho physics is the same in this galaxy as any other galaxy, the creative mind demands that we will have made discoveries that they have not. For every nuclear power system they can offer us, we might be able to offer them the Slinky. It's not unheard of for natives to bilk the pioneers, even tho historically it's worked the other way around.

 

It will be interesting, when the day comes, to measure value systems, and to see what the universe has hidden from us on this lonely marble.

 

Nobody Asked Me, But...

1) I hope President Obama considered this when he approved more off-shore drilling. Wait, of course he did! That's why he only approved it off the shores of red states!

 

2) It looks like England has mimicked us once again: Find a charismatic young candidate, then let the old conservatives make up shit about him.

 

3) Good luck with that, Blago!

 

4) I have neither seen nor read about Obama's speech to bankers yesterday, but he must have promised he'd let them use Vaseline  the next time they want to screw us.

 

5) Those were NOT the deposits and assets you were supposed to keep an eye on, you idiots!

 

6) You might not be aware of the latest YouTube kerfuffle which centers around spoofs using a clip of a film about Hitler called "Downfall". Some of them are really very clever. Here's the last one (h/t Sean Paul Kelley)

 

7) Grow your own solar panels! Note: You'll need Silicon Tetrachloride gas, a laser, a taco converter, and a steady hand.

 

8) If you have friends in Bolivia, I'll take a million cases, please.

 

9) Zombie chupacabra!

 

10) Toys you probably won't want to buy for your children (but may want for yourself, you dirty little minx!)

How Green Was My Alley?

If you've been comatose for the past few weeks and this is the first thing you read upon awakening, you might not be aware that today is the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day. Otherwise, I should suspect at some point you've been reminded.

 

As a born, bred and raised New Yorker, environmental issues are second nature to me. You don't live five people in a four room apartment without developing a sense of how quickly trash can build up, how even the tiniest pollutant in one room can affect the entire apartment, and how hard it is to balance supplies with available space to put things in.

 

I am proud that I was among the many who participated in environmental issues from the get-go. My Boy Scout troop helped developed and run one of the first recycling programs in America, for which we were designated what would now be called "Green Troop". I still have my green ecology flag patch with green and white stripes and the Greek letter theta in place of the stars. We wore those proudly to Jamborees.

 

The lessons of those days as a Scout-- see, it's not all about barring homosexuals and promoting Christianity. Most of my troop was Jewish and about half of the patrol I led ended up being gay-- are not lost on me to this day: it's still annoys me when I see litter, and I still advocate for the environment, ecology and on a limited basis, for animal rights. We are all part of a bigger picture, and we cannot afford to think small.

 

I say all that as background to this post: It's important to remember that we can all do more. 

 

But, it's also important to remember that we can only do so much. As with many things in life, it's a delicate balance. We have choices to make, even the most militant tree-huggers among us. 

 

In tough economic times, it becomes even harder to make those choices, but it also becomes more critical. We have to remain acutely aware that there are many well-intentioned people out there who will take the easy way out because they can justify it. They'll drop that wrapper because someone else can get a job picking it up, for example. They'll buy a dollar menu meal at McDonald's because for 99 cents, they can't afford a head of broccoli much less a salad. 

 

Even the easiest choices, like buying CFC bulbs instead of incandescent because they're more economical, become convulted as those savings come over time, and I have to pay out money right now for the hall light. It's hard, I know, and we who can have to forgive those who cannot make the "right" choice, and try somehow to make up for it until those folks can get their feet back under them.

 

There's a real simple rule of thumb to help you decide if you're living your life more or less green: physical effort. The more of you that you put into a process or product, the greener it likely is. 

 

Think about it: you buy a salad at the local grocer, or you can buy the salad makings and toss them yourself after washing and peeling and cutting them up. Which is greener? Likely, the home made salad. 

 

Or you need to go to the corner store: you hop in the car or you ride a bike. Greener? The bike, of course. The balance between what you can do and what you cannot do becomes clearer. If by putting a little bit of you into it you can help make things a little better in your environment, then it's a good thing. And if getting involved means doing more than is practicable and sensible, then you're trying too hard to do too much. 

 

You call the pizzeria: should you walk over and pick it up or have them drive it over? Walk, of course. Not only is the car going to pump out more carbon, but the driver is focused on getting your pizza to you as fast as possible for the bigger tip and to get to the next delivery. Hell, even if you drive to pick it up, you'll have done an incremental good if you watch your speed and take the shortest possible route.

 

In other words, flying cross-country to enter a bike race is not a good thing for Mother Earth. But picking up that wrapper that you're standing over is. 

 

The little bits add up, as New Yorkers are painfully aware. When you have eight to ten million people wandering your streets, if everyone picked up one piece of garbage, the streets would practically police themselves. 

 

And if eight to ten million people each littered, we'd need five times as many sanitation workers. The cumulative effect of many people doing one thing is staggeringly large.

 

Also, the benefits of paying it forward are quite high. If one other person sees you care enough to pick up a piece of paper, they may not pick one up too, but they might think twice about not carrying their wrapper to the trash can. That can make a difference. Leading by example does not have to mean imitation, but emulation.      

Related Stories?

The timing of these two stories is suspect, but either story certainly merits attention:

 

Item 1 - New York State Senator Pedro Espada, a Democrat, is under investigation by the FBI and IRS for siphoning $14 million from a government-funded health clinic.

 

Item 2 - Florida Republicans have had their party American Express records seized by the FBI and the IRS (there they are again!) for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrelated personal charges.

 

Hmmmm. Included in that Florida investigation is Marco Rubio, who is challenging Governor Charlie Crist (who has not been named in the probe) for the Senate.

 

You may remember that it was Crist who angered Florida voters by literally embracing the Obama stimulus package, so much so that the state Republicans have begun to try to force Crist out. Those efforts have not been effective, but Crist has acknowledged the pressure and said he would run as an independent if need be.

 

The sense I get is that the Espada story provides a certain immunity to the Federal Government and to Obama in particular as its chief executive from charges that Obama's entire administrative plan is to embarass Republicans at each and every turn, where possible.

 

This of course differs from the Bush program of, um, "selectively investigating" Democrats using the full weight of the Department of Justice, in that Obama has not demanded a loyalty oath from the Justice and Treasury Department employees involved in the investigations.

 

One is forced to wonder, however, at the timing of the Florida investigation: the revelations about Rubio et al certainly could have waited until a more opportune time (even allowing for the obvious politicization charges). The primary election isn't until August 24. The nearest administrative date to this day's story is the June 14 qualifying date.

 

Unless Crist figures Rubio might be in a Federal penitentiary by then, of course.

 

All of this occurs in front of a backdrop of GOP backpedalling on opposition to the financial reform regulations that are currently under discussion in Congress.

 

Still, the timing, while possibly coincidental, is intriguing. Espada is a leader-by-armtwisting in the New York State Senate, having first brought that body to its knees by defecting from the Democratic caucus along with one other Senator, then returning when it became obvious he was in serious trouble either way he sliced the issue.

 

It should be noted that Espada is only slightly the lesser sleaze of the two defectors. Hiriam Monserrate was recently expelled from the Senate after being convicted for beating his girlfriend up.

 

Too, Espada's counsel, Steve Pigeon, has a colorful history in Erie County, to put it politely.

 

The scalp of Espada would be a big coup for the FBI and the IRS. Espada has ducked several nasty controversies in his career, from non-residence in his district to campaign violations in 2008 that racked up $60,000 in fines. And it certainly is big enough to throw a shadow on the Florida investigation and buy the Feds some breathing room.

 

Cuba Goes Capitalist

Interesting:

Private profits in communist Cuba? This is no joke. It's Havana's latest, limited experiment with the free market. The government is divesting itself of hundreds of state-run barbershops and beauty shops with three workstations or less, turning people who have been wage-earners for decades into small-time entrepreneurs. Like some Cuban growers who are allowed to rent stalls from the government in farmers markets, and some cooks who run modest restaurants out of their homes, these hairstylists and manicurists will be entering the world of free-market competition.

Admittedly, it's small-scale stuff, the stuff of experiments, but considering the Great Satan to the north, this is practically like, I don't know, the state of Texas electing a Socialist congressperson.

 

There's not much to admire about Cuba at this point in its existence. It truly is the lone wolf of the communist experiment, having outlasted the Soviet Union, its satellites and even China.

 

The embargo the US has effected for half a century now is strongly in force, altho you can start to see daylight around the edges. Likewise, Cuba has started to see the wisdom of inviting the west to visit its shores, at least as tourists, and as partners in some limited ventures. 

 

We can marvel at their stick-to-it-tiveness, for sure. And their ability to cope under what must be enormously stressful conditions, taxing even the hardiest souls at times. 

 

But this development is one that should be applauded. China has shown that capitalism is not completely inconsistent in a socialist/communist culture, and has set an example that we can imagine Cuba will follow. I for one am hoping they can work it all out. Cuba has a lot to offer the world, and its a shame its been burdened by an embargo decades beyond its effective purpose.  

 

Making An Ash Of Ourselves

There's a Ludditic element to this whole problem of the volcanic ash spewing from Eyjafjallajökull on Iceland: that God or nature or random chance could so cripple the movement of people across and to and from an entire continent is somewhat poetic. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

 

It's estimated that the volcano has cost New York City $250 million in lost tourism alone. That's in less than one week. Worldwide, 63,000 flights have been cancelled, meaning something on the order of 1 million people have been forced to either sit and wait or make very roundabout travel arrangements. The British navy is being pressed into action to shuttle people across the Channel from the mainland, where some airports remain unaffected for now. The crippled tourism industry into Europe has Greece nervously pacing the floor.

 

I'm a bit surprised that there wasn't a better backup plan in place earlier on. After all, Iceland is responsible for 1/3 of the lava flow on the earth's surface over the past five hundred years, and Iceland has in recent years shown more and more seismic activity and instability. And Iceland is near routes from the New World to most major northern European cities.

 

And Eyjafjallajökull wasn't even considered the main problem on Iceland. That honor belongs to Upptyppingar, which is farther north and much bigger. However, Eyjafjallajökull in the past has been a bellwether, a precursor eruption to at least three bigger eruptions, the last in 1823, of the subglacial volcano, Katla.

 

In other words, to periphrase Donald Rumsfeld, this was an unknown problem we knew about.

 

The moment the April 14th eruption was confirmed, there should have been plans put into effect to bring European travellers home safely and quickly. Cruise ships could have been commandeered-- it's early in the North Atlantic season anyway-- safe harbor airports could have been identified and re-direction of flights initiated (air traffic controllers could have been shifted around: remember, all pilots and ATCs are required to be fluent in English, so it's a matter of logistics, not translation), and a joint private-public effort could have been kicked into gear to try to find housing for the temporarily displaced.

 

Of course, the airlines are already playing the "CYA" game, claiming that it's Europe's fault.

 

Based on previous experience with Iceland's volcanoes, this cloud of ash is likely to spew for months, and some of it has already drifted over Canadian airspace. It's going to be a horrible summer for Europe if that holds true.