The Dark Side of the Moon 2008-2010: Observing America

By Jim Freeman

About The Dark Side of the Moon Series

The Dark Side of the Moon series is a chronological collection of observations on social, political and occasionally even personal subjects.

Jim Freeman's views of the American scene are salted with irony and lightly peppered by humor, a relief from the unending rants of the far left or far right and reasonably balanced by common sense. They're here as Freeman wrote and published them at the time, unedited and without the benefit of hindsight.

These books are food for thought and Freeman encourages readers to cut into them - use and abuse these books, dog-ear the pages, mark up with highlighter and write in the margins. Make them relevant, make them yours to refer to content that particularly pleased or infuriated you.

The Dark Side of the Moon is a time-machine that brings the blur of events into focus and context. Mark Twain said "Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." Jim Freeman uncovers that dark side and strives to shine light on it.

About the 2008-2010 Book
(Volume 5, the last of the Series)

This fifth and final volume of The Dark Side of the Moon series begins with Welcome to the Ever-Changing, Ever-Same Face of America and winds up, some 546 pages later with Disaster Plans that Don't Bother to Anticipate Disaster. You could pretty much say those 'bookend observations' were an appropriate metaphor for the intervening years.

We had a brand new President who many Americans felt actually seemed to offer The Audacity of Hope to a nation worn thin. What we got was headlock and deadlock, business pretty much as usual and a growing sense that what needed to be fixed was unfixable. These were the years of the near-past and a look back informs a look forward as we face an assessment of how much was hope and how much merely audacity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781937674106

Book preview

Welcome to the Ever-Changing, Ever-Same Face of America

January 2, 2008

As America becomes more diverse, there are edgy calls from talk-show-radio hosts to save the country for white, Christian (mostly) males…as though they had done something (other than kill off the natives) to deserve preservation. It’s interesting, to me anyway, that these Limbaughs and Coulters are a couple generations in from Ellis Island themselves and want almost desperately to slam the door on anyone and everyone else.

America is, in their minds, a gated community.

(Amy Chua, Washington Post) If you don’t speak Spanish, Miami really can feel like a foreign country. In any restaurant, the conversation at the next table is more likely to be Spanish than English. And Miami’s population is only 65 percent Hispanic. El Paso is 76 percent Latino. Flushing, N.Y., is 60 percent immigrant, mainly Chinese.

Chinatowns and Little Italys have long been part of America’s urban landscape, but would it be all right to have entire U.S. cities where most people spoke and did business in Chinese, Spanish or even Arabic? Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying our national identity?

For some Americans, even asking such questions is racist. At the other end of the spectrum, the conservative talk show host Bill O’Reilly fulminates against floods of immigrants who threaten to change America’s complexion and replace what he calls the white Christian male power structure.

Complexion? Power structure? O’Reilly sounds suspiciously to me like an Irish name and there was a time, not all that long ago, when ads (even for household help) stated ‘Irish need not apply.’ Bill O’Reilly gets a lot of kicking around as everybody’s favorite wingnut, but his broadcast and educational credentials are extensive. Power, on the other hand, may be problematic for Bill.

My own name, Freeman, harks back to the Magna Carta, when freed serfs became ‘free men.’ My grandparents (both grandpas English, both grandmas German) emigrated from Canada. Dad’s side in the late 1890s, while Mom’s side (exact same ethnic mix) boasted her own paternal grandfather serving as a corporal in the Illinois Militia during the Civil War. Great grandfather Craven lost a hand in that war, but that’s still not a very deep tap-root for an American heritage. No matter, we Craven-Freemans are damned glad to be here. Chua continues …

But for the large majority in between, Democrats and Republicans alike, these questions are painful, with no easy answers. At some level, most of us cherish our legacy as a nation of immigrants. But are all immigrants really equally likely to make good Americans? Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns, in danger of losing our core values and devolving into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America?

Well, there has to be a Harvard and, if there is a Harvard, then certainly it follows as sunshine after rain that there must be a Harvard political scientist to apply the white, male, Christian litmus paper to a loss of ‘core values.’ I don’t know what the good professor (much less Harvard) takes to be core values, but Samuel Huntington is a pretty WASPy name and one can make the undocumented case that his core may merely have predated O’Reilly’s by a century or two.

And yet Ann Coulter, with whom I seldom agree on anything, writes,

America has a seller’s market in immigration, but thanks to Teddy Kennedy’s 1965 immigration law, we no longer favor skilled workers from developed nations, but instead favor unskilled immigrants from the Third World. Kennedy’s bill promptly cut the number of European immigrants in half and increased Third World immigrants to 85 percent of the total.

Not surprisingly, post-1965 immigrants have sharply higher levels of poverty and welfare dependence. Europeans may not seem like ideal new immigrants, but the truth is, if what they want is welfare, they’ll stay in France.

and it’s a good point, or at least a bit more specific and arguable than O’Reilly or Huntington.

Silicon Valley makes much the same point. We are simply unable to provide visas for the skilled of the world who want to come here and whom we wish to hire. Yet, on the other end of the spectrum, as middle-class jobs slide inevitably toward the bottom of the hiring scale, bringing the poorer in to work looks less and less ‘melting pot’ and more and more a threat to workers. We are not the 19th century America that welcomed all comers.

My suggestion will be disagreeable to both camps, unlikely to satisfy Teddy Kennedy or Ann Coulter:

sq    Overturn the Kennedy legislation

sq    Offer open-visas to the North American continent.

If that sounds counter-intuitive, it may be, but it’s worth debate. With six billion people in the world, immigration without education priorities is just no longer practicable. Equally impracticable is walling ourselves off from historic neighbors Canada and Mexico. Prioritizing is defensible and a needed response to an absolutely clogged immigration system. Walls are so unsympathetic to the American image of freedom and opportunity as to essentially Balkanize our own citizenry into disparate camps of varying degrees of racism.

America is more than a gated community among the world’s nations. We are better than that, but what we have in place is no longer working, immigration-wise. So I propose a two-level solution to a multi-level problem:

First, an immigration policy toward the world outside our continent based, as the rest of the world bases immigration, upon needed skills and individual circumstance; essentially, those whom we value for their talent, be it technical, artistic, economic, etc.

Second, open work visas for all North Americans. Canada is not and never has been a problem, it’s Mexico we’re talking about in this discussion.

A huge number of Mexican aliens are trapped in our country because of their lack of documentation. They simply cannot go back to Mexico for fear of not being able to re-enter the U.S. An open visa policy would solve that, taking an enormous welfare load off our hands. The undocumented are ‘black’ workers, an underground underclass. Among the ‘unders’ are under-paid, under-taxed and under-repatriated. Documents (visas) are the key to both taxing and keeping track of this spectral society.

Mexico, desperate to not lose its access to American jobs, would be required to provide state-of-the-art passports to all who apply. America, desperate to solve the economic and social disaster that has dogged Mexican migrants seeking work here, would be required to visa any Mexican passport-holder appearing at the border.

Visas would be for workers, not families. Visa-holders must hold jobs, pay taxes, have health insurance and remain felony-free in order to remain in the U.S., just as in other nations of the world. Emerging from the shadows of an alien existence should allow sufficient levels of income to support those requirements. Undocumented Mexican workers now hidden in America would have to return to Mexico for appropriate papers and any found not to have done that would be deported without return access for two (?) years.

This will not satisfy everyone. But it will raise wages (both Mexican and American), provide tax income, reduce the load on welfare and education systems and allow Mexicans and Americans to look one another in the eye with a degree of pride and evenhandedness.

Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the hero of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, Mr. Chertoff, tear down this wall.

Not Saved by the Bell, but Saved by the Bill at the FBI

January 11, 2008

All the hand-wringing (a good bit of it by me) over lost freedoms, Big Brother and this administration’s Homeland Insecurity pale by comparison to bad judgment and malfeasance. Jeffersonian democracy may be against the ropes in the 10th round, but it has a far better chance of being saved by the bill than the bell.

I’ll settle for that in these years of eroding constitutional authority. We Americans take what we can and do the best we can with it.

Dan Eggen over at the Washington Post writes in today’s paper;

(1-11-08) Telecommunications companies have repeatedly cut off FBI access to wiretaps of alleged terrorists and criminal suspects because the bureau did not pay its phone bills, according to the results of an audit released yesterday.

The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that more than half of nearly 1,000 FBI telecommunications bills reviewed by investigators were not paid on time, including one invoice for $66,000 at an unidentified field office.

Thank god for small deliverances. We have trillion-dollar government these days, unable to function in hurricanes or prevail against fundamentalist terror forces. Half that dough goes to the Pentagon, where they promptly lose it. The other half splits between actual needs and office-preserving earmarks. Boil it down and that means (in real and unadulterated and gold-backed dollars), the whole thing is worth about ten billion.

No one alive today even remembers gold-backed currency, but even ten billion isn’t chump-change (depending upon how you define both chump and change). No doubt the Congress will find a way—and soon—to do away with Inspectors General. IGs are just too embarrassing to the legislative ego, what with all that reporting and checking-up and keeping of tabs.

The report cited a case in which an order obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- which covers clandestine wiretaps of terrorism and espionage suspects -- was halted because of untimely payment.

"Late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," Fine said in a seven-page summary of the audit’s findings.

Imagine that. The FBI (in kindergarten lingo) failed to work and play well with others. Not once, but a bunch of times. Please have mommy come in to see me. Along with losing their guns and laptop computers, agents have been caught with their pants down and fingers in the cookie jar—not a pretty sight for the federal police. Some of the cutoffs were do to not giving a damn, some to a ‘we’re the FBI" mentality and some to siphoning off funds into agent pockets.

The late payments were part of a broader pattern of lax bookkeeping identified by Fine’s review, which focused on how FBI headquarters tracks special funds that are sent to field offices to pay for rental cars, surveillance and other expenses in undercover investigations.

A review of 35 employees with access to such funds found that half had personal bankruptcies or other financial problems, the report said. In one case prosecuted in June 2006, an FBI telecommunications specialist pleaded guilty to stealing more than $25,000 intended for telephone services.

In another example of the FBI’s administrative difficulties, Fine’s office reported in 2002 that the bureau could not account for hundreds of missing guns and laptop computers. His office noted more of the same in a follow-up report last year.

Administrative difficulties. Sounds like the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar oops. FBI Director Bob Mueller was either too chagrined or too caught up in the endless meetings (that make law enforcement subject to chagrin) to comment. He dropped that duty on Assistant Director John Miller’s desk. John immediately fired off memos and statements to cover various parts of his anatomy, stut, stut, stuttering …

"there is widespread agreement that the current financial management system, first introduced in the 1980s, is inadequate. Miller said the FBI will not tolerate financial mismanagement" and is working to address the problems revealed by the audit.

Widespread agreement does not a solution make. For the first thirty-five years or so of the FBI’s existence, Director J. Edgar Hoover ran a dictatorial and often criticized bureau. But the damned thing worked and by god his agents didn’t lose their guns. The misnamed, misguided and mismanaged Department of Homeland Security exemplifies a unique and self-destructive government structure--an incredibly bloated system devised by those who purport to want smaller government.

It strives to know everything about everyone and thereby knows nothing about anybody. DHS took too many independent agencies (18 or more, depending on how you count), each of which more or less worked, and turned them into one gigantic, ungainly, ineffective and ungovernable statistical stew, stirred by 200,000 employees. Inspectors General like Glenn Fine are the scorekeepers. I wouldn’t say this as proven fact, but they seem to be the only people between the American taxpayer and absolute government chaos.

A breakdown of access is what concentrated the slip-ups that allowed the 9-11 attacks. A fine example of the nail that lost the shoe that lost the horse that lost the general that lost the war. The FBI agent with critical knowledge couldn’t get through. In Hoover’s time, you better damned well have something of value, but you could move information up the chain. Back to Miller’s statement about not tolerating financial mismanagement, the Inspector General first tagged these problems in 2002. Six years of not tolerating? C’mon, John, get serious.

The seven-page report released yesterday was only a summary of Fine’s 87-page audit, which has been deemed too sensitive for public release. The summary did not say which field offices had problems or identify any of the individuals involved.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has been sharply critical of the Bush administration’s surveillance practices, called on the FBI to release the full report. The group’s national security policy counsel, Michael German, also said that the report raises questions about the motives of large telecom firms, which have, in many cases, allowed the government to run wiretaps on their systems without warrants.

"It sounds as though the telecoms believe it when the FBI says the warrant is in the mail, but not when they say the check is in the mail," said German, a former FBI agent.

I love it. Great line, Mike. We all worry, with considerable reason, about who is looking down the front of our metaphoric blouse and for what reasons. But the larger worry is what we gained for what we lost. It doesn’t seem like much of a bargain.

Living outside the United States, as I do, a U.S. citizen’s life is a nightmare of Patriot Act regulation that seems aimed at the innocent. Banking is virtually impossible as Americans are presumed to be drug dealers, money launderers or terrorists—all in the simple pursuit of living abroad and trying to access home. Yet the prosecution of those the government has dragged off the streets of the world and claimed to be terrorists, fails in case after case. We’re losing the keystone of our freedoms to the Keystone Kops of government.

The audit comes as the Bush administration is urging Congress to approve an overhaul of the 1978 wiretap law to grant telecommunications firms immunity from lawsuits for helping the FBI and other government agencies conduct secret surveillance.

Seems we’ve done enough updating of laws. I’d settle (and maybe you would too) for taking our federal government back to 1978 instead of asking Congress to immunize the telecoms. And, if I were the telecoms…

…I’d just as soon have the Feds pay their phone bill.

Free Speech Winnows the List of Candidates

January 13, 2008

Winnow (noun)

The act of separating grain from chaff.

If we are indeed winnowing, then America has been winnowed into three guys left standing on the Republican side and two Democrats. Something like 5 out of 24, depending on who you count. Whether they are wheat or chaff depends upon your point of view. This, with less that 1% of the electorate having had a chance to put their mark on a ballot or finger on a screen. Free speech is not so free anymore.

The latest numbers (always a calendar quarter behind because of reporting regulations) stripped mainstream America of the voices of

sq    Fred Thompson

sq    Bill Richardson

sq    Ron Paul

sq    Dennis Kucinich

sq    Mike Huckabee

sq    Joe Biden

and are about to add John Edwards to the list.

How you feel about that depends upon how hot you are to see Hillary or Barack, Mitt, Rudy or John lead the country. Is it enough to have the choice by dollars raised rather than votes counted? If it is, then why not just do a national copy of that thermometer the United Way used to tell us how we were doing on their fund-raising in town?

Forget the rhetoric. The point I’m trying to make is that the Supreme Court, some decades back, irreparably muddied the distinction between ‘free speech’ and the ‘freedom to speak.’ We are constitutionally protected in our right to the freedom to speak. Stand up and voice your opinion. Write whatever the papers will print. Blame the media if you care to. Along with an addiction to polls, it’s another American need to find blame, to have someone to pin the goods on and then get on with our lives. There’s no convenient evil upon which to blame the hijacking of speech in America.

But the Court made it law. Time after time after time, in a frenzy of dithering, our highest court stood meekly in defense of whoever had the bucks to demagogue the subject of their choice.

sq    Attack ads to defeat gun control—just write the checks.

sq    Anti-gay, anti-conservative, anti-liberal, anti-war, anti-Islam—all you need is enough money to swamp the opposition. Not with speech, with media.

sq    Lawsuits to manhandle your way into this or that issue? You got the money, honey, I got the time.

I am certainly not so naïve as to think that money wasn’t always a weapon for or against public opinion. But it seems prudent to take a look at the longest-running, most ardous, mind-bogglingly unending presidential race (that has been going on for a year and a half already and has near a year left to run). Essentially, it’s been settled for us in five days. By the electorate? Not on your life. Iowa and New Hampshire. What a laugh.

As Jon Stewart quipped, it’s been determined by cold white people and colder white people. Issues will get hot though as this veritable tie among front-runners develops. But they’ll heat up without the voices of Fred, Bill and Ron; Dennis, Mike and Joe. There won’t be a hey, wait a minute voice. No designated hitter in this ball-game.

The front-runners will hedge, slice and dice their bets slicker than sub-prime mortgages. American politics has become a mad rush for the center of the ‘base,’ whatever the hell the base is and however the pollsters define it for us. We’ve become another commodity. Shake us, bake us, tag our ear and ship us.

In two days we will have the results in Michigan and Hillary and Barack need not spend another moment (during the race or afterward) giving a damn about lost jobs and pensions in the Wolverine State. Hillary and Barack have each raised $100 million and John Edwards (out-funded by three to one) will no doubt throw in the towel in a few days.

No matter that John Edwards (probably) best represents Michigan’s problems and the solutions to those problems. He’ll lose in Michigan as he lost in Iowa and NH, because the most expensive speech the nation has seen to date will not let him be heard. We (and Michigan) are only allowed to hear the best speech money can buy.

On the Republican side, Michiganders (what’s good for the Michigoose is good for the Michigander) will hear Mitt Romney boast his Michigan roots. Not to worry that he got the hell out as soon as he could leave that wounded state of his birth behind, his $70 million or so (20 of it out of his own pocket) will drown everyone but Rudy and John McCain. McCain only because he’s waxing instead of waning—money-wise.

Major contributors are afraid Mitt and Rudy are unelectable and suddenly this election looks like it might actually be a horse-race. So money is suddenly flowing to McCain and with money, he can win (at least the nomination). So think the Republican influence peddlers, anyway. And hey, if John loses, he’s still a very powerful Senator. Money like that is always very well spent.

In case you haven’t noticed, ditto Hillary and Barack. Which leaves you and I, Joe Biden, Mike Huckabee, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul and the other poor slobs who stand in the rain to vote, with choices made by others. Limited choice. Choice devoted to the status quo. Particularly the quo.

Don’t blame Thomas Jefferson, he was operating in the days of pamphleteering on the streets and bar-room oratory. Don’t blame Rupert Murdoch, who’s just working by the rules God, his lawyers and his lobbyists gave him. Don’t even blame Chief Justice Roberts or Justices Souter, Alito or Thomas; this misinterpretation began long before they were on board.

But it is a misinterpretation. The freedom to buy as much speech as you are able to pay for is in no way the same as free speech. The ability to swift-boat John Kerry is perhaps the easiest and most egregiously false-flagged example I can come up with.

But if you are a supporter of Mike Huckabee or Joe Biden, know that your access to what they have to say has been taken from you.

Not by a wiser voice, but a louder one.

Seven Billion Reasons for a Fishery Collapse

January 15, 2008

Sharon LaFraniere’s article for the New York Times, Empty Seas, is subtitled Europe Takes Africa’s Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow. It’s another well documented piece about world fisheries collapsing and the roundup of suspects is (as usual) greed, politics (greed in another form) and overfishing.

But the world has always been greedy. The facts seem simple to me, seen from the unscientific perspective of the commentator, that the true cause of collapse is too many people eating fish. Well, duh! What would I have them eat, turkey-loaf instead?

That’s not the point. The point is, when I was a kid there were three billion people in the world and fishing was a viable livelihood for people across the planet, wherever there was access to the sea and a boat. For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, you name it; Mediterranean, Caribbean, Nova Scotia, the coastal areas adjoining the four-fifths of the planet that is water enjoyed the bounty of sustainable fisheries.

(January 14, 2008) KAYAR, Senegal — Ale Nodye, the son and grandson of fishermen in this northern Senegalese village, said that for the past six years he netted barely enough fish to buy fuel for his boat. So he jumped at the chance for a new beginning. He volunteered to captain a wooden canoe full of 87 Africans to the Canary Islands in the hopes of making their way illegally to Europe.

The 2006 voyage ended badly. He and his passengers were arrested and deported. His cousin died on a similar mission not long afterward.

Nonetheless, Mr. Nodye, 27, said he intended to try again.

I could be a fisherman there, he said. Life is better there. There are no fish in the sea here anymore.

There are no fish in Europe either, Ale. I have a personal prejudice about fishing, which is (for me) the brother of hunting. It is this; we hunter-gatherers were forced to give up hunting wild game for sustenance because the one-fifth of the planet upon which we habituated became too small to sustain game in the amounts necessary to established community. So we adapted to farming and the raising of domestic animals for food. No one today would seriously argue that commercial meat industries might as well ravage the last remaining forests for wild game.

Fishing—which is essentially the hunting of wild fish—lasted longer, merely because the hunting oceans were four times the size of the hunting lands and harbored no human communities within them. Coincidentally with the petering-out of the ‘easier’ coastal fisheries, industrialized fish-hunting became possible to lengthen the reach of fishermen. But it was still (and remains today) hunting in the wild.

Whether we are able to replicate the domestication of fish-foods with something that approaches domesticated meat production remains to be seen. Ale Nodye’s ancestral fish-hunting grounds have been picked clean by an industrialized fishing industry that takes everything—metaphorically burning down the forests to harvest the last deer. That model will collapse, is indeed collapsing today. It is a truism that man moves incrementally until there are no more increments.

Many scientists agree. A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.

That has crippled coastal economies and added to the surge of illegal migrants who brave the high seas in wooden pirogues hoping to reach Europe. While reasons for immigration are as varied as fish species, Europe’s lure has clearly intensified as northwest Africa’s fish population has dwindled.

All this happened in the fifty years since I was young. An eyewink in human history, no  more than a pimple on the ass of modern prosperity. And yet we find ourselves collapsing like the fisheries we strive to regulate. Only beginning to understand global warming, our attention is elsewhere. Is it too much to ask that we take the temperature of our own survival?

A case could be made that, as Ale Nodye abandons his hereditary life as a fisherman, his hunting-waters will recover and his grandson may find a way back to such a life. But I will not make it, for it’s a poor case. His grandson will face a world struggling under the strain of feeding fifteen billion and nowhere in the world has a hunter-gatherer society successfully gone back to hunting and gathering.

I have no scientific evidence for this opinion, so sharpen your PHDs and have at me. Yet I believe it and would have you believe it as well. That’s the conceit we commentators allow ourselves, the freedom to express our prejudices and let the reader sort them out for himself. It is in some ways less obtrusive to considered opinion than is the scientist, who insists on having his way.

So we must lay up the scavenging factory trawlers and go to farming the seas—or else cure the planetary cancer that is population-growth before it overwhelms the patient.

Overfishing is hardly limited to African waters. Worldwide, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 75 percent of fish stocks are overfished or fished to their maximum. But in a poor region like northwest Africa, the consequences are particularly stark.

Fish are the main source of protein for much of the region, but some species are now so scarce that the poor can no longer afford them, said Pierre Failler, senior research fellow for the British Center for Economics and Management of Aquatic Resources.

Which may be of academic interest to senior research fellows, but I suspect in the meantime they are eating three meals a day. Just as it makes no sense to argue the caliber of the bullet with which the last wild land-animal will be killed, it hardly serves the hungry to talk to death the planet’s already-collapsing fisheries.

Studies dating to 1991 indicated that Senegal’s fishery was in trouble. In 2002, a scientific report commissioned by the European Union stated that the biomass of important species had declined by three-fourths in 15 years — a finding the authors said should cause significant alarm.

But the week the report was issued, European Union officials signed a new four-year fishing deal with Senegal, agreeing to pay $16 million a year to fish for bottom-dwelling species and tuna.

And so Brussels’ elegantly commissioned report lies a-moldering in the archives and in the intervening years decline has become collapse and another billion and a half have added themselves to the rolls of the world’s hungry. It fascinates me that man is an animal blessed with the academic means as well as the  intellectual curiosity essential to understanding the roots of his own demise. Yet he is so consumer-centric as to be incapable of restraining himself from his own assured destruction. His long term well-being is forever captive to his short term sense of entitlement.

I am the same. I have my little guarded and conspiratorially secreted portion of the Earth’s last-best-places staked out and, from there, I am able to comfortably pontificate upon the shortcomings of my peers. It pains me to see the direction in which we are headed and yet the choices we debate and the time-frame within which we debate them are absurd.

There is no road map to the consensus politics of a promised land. It does not exist. Road maps to this or that hoped-for conclusion are all the rage today, but we have over-bred ourselves into a corner from which there is no plausible escape except to reverse that direction, as have some of the more enlightened countries such as Italy. We know what we need. We need to fight our way back to a sustainable world population and disown the call to cheap labor, ever-expanding markets and exploding pockets of human misery they bring. The goal is (or should be) equitable labor spread across a supportable system of producers and consumers. I don’t mean capitalism is dead. Freedom to self-interest is a benchmark human trait, but the market serves its own interest and it’s not done us well.

Consumerism holds a gun to our heads, threatening social and economic collapse if we do not buy and waste and scatter ever more resources. Politicians exhort us to produce children to support the retirees for whom they were too short-sighted to provide. The European Union commissions reports it immediately discards and the seas as well as African stomachs get only more empty.

My personal choice is for the three billion world population of my youth.

But you and I both know I’m not going to get it.

A $43 Trillion (as in Thousand-Billion) Bet, Gone Sour

January 16, 2008

Caught in a Downdraft and Starting to Panic

By Steven Pearlstein Wednesday, January 16, 2008; D01

Are we having fun yet?

Okay, so maybe the economy has fallen into recession. Maybe house prices are going to decline 12 percent by the time it’s all done, as Fannie Mae’s chief executive said last week. Maybe this won’t be the year for that 13 percent stock-price rebound that Goldman Sachs’s crack investment strategist, Abby Joseph Cohen, predicted only last month. Maybe nearly a million workers were added to the unemployment rolls in the past nine months and a million more will be added before it’s all over. And maybe there’s really not much that the Federal Reserve can -- or should -- do to prevent this painful adjustment.

But, hey, look on the bright side: The country and Wall Street have already made great progress in moving through the stages of economic grief:

Willful blindness. (Bubble, what bubble?)

Denial. (House prices never fall. It’s only those speculators in Las Vegas and the Gulf Coast.)

Rationalization. (Maybe subprime did get out of hand, but it’s really a small part of the market.)

Fantasy. (Things should be pretty much back to normal by the second half of ‘08.)

Anger. (If it weren’t for those yahoos up in structured finance … )

Capitulation. (We might as well take these write-downs now and get it over with.)

Depression. (This is going to get worse before it gets better.)

Now we’re entering a new stage: Panic.

… Despite the brave exhortations from the CNBC Squawk Box, we are nowhere near the end of the financial unraveling that is necessary for an economic bottom to be reached.

… Looking ahead, the final phase of this unraveling is likely to implicate the giant market in credit-default swaps. Those swaps are essentially contracts that allow sophisticated investors to bet on whether a company, a government entity, or even a securitized package of loans will default on its debt obligations.

… Because these contracts trade on unregulated derivatives markets, nobody knows who holds the losing side of the bets. But it’s a good guess that if defaults rise even to historically normal levels, a big hit will be taken by highly leveraged hedge funds, some of which may be unable to pay off on their bets and simply collapse. That, in turn, would trigger even further losses by banks and other investors that, unlike pure speculators, rely on those instruments to insure against default.

The credit-default swap has become so central to modern global finance that its size -- the amount insured, in effect -- is estimated at $43 trillion. If the losing side is unable to make good on even a fraction of a percent of those contracts, it could set in motion a financial chain reaction that could easily rival the subprime debacle.

Steven Pearstein is a business columnist of such clarity and lack of hubris as to be almost unknown among the high-priests of glib econo-speak who usually advise investment bankers and handle the punditry on CNN. He presents financial news with the simplicity of my old daddy’s iconic two nails on the wall--one for what is owed you and one for what you owe.

Daddy understood capitalism. To its chagrin, capitalism no longer understands daddy. Daddy and Pearlstein don’t have Harvard Business School degrees, but they might have saved Wall Street (and you and I) the grief that is surely coming our way. The producer nations are doing what they can for our failed consumer nation but, ultimately, they probably haven’t the cash. $43,000 billion is a lot of dough.

America, for all its faults, has a symbiotic relationship to the rest of the world. We remain the planet’s largest buyer of goods. Once producer to the world, Marshall Plan white knight and Mecca to the hopeful, we’re currently the broke and dissolute (but well armed) uncle, thrashing around in hallucinatory memory of former greatness.

Creditor turned debtor. China, India, Saudi and Japan hope to steer us toward a 12-step program that will keep us from unraveling the world economy. God knows we are raveled. It may be too late.

The planet sucks in its breath and hopes not.

Accepting the Unacceptable---John Thain’s Non Sequitur

January 17, 2008

Merrill takes $14.1 billion write-down

Reuters Thursday, January 17, 2008; 7:37 AM

Merrill Lynch & Co Inc (MER.N) on Thursday said it took a $14.1 billion write-down and adjustments in the fourth quarter as bad subprime mortgage bets forced the brokerage to sell pieces of the company to foreign investors to raise capital.

Analysts expected Merrill’s write-down to land anywhere from $10 billion to $15 billion. For the year, Merrill’s subprime mortgage-related losses totaled nearly $23 billion.

Merrill reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $9.8 billion, or $12.01 a share, the largest in the company’s history. The world’s largest brokerage turned a profit of $2.3 billion, or $2.41 a share, in the year-ago period.

The results eclipse the $2.3 billion loss in the third quarter when Merrill recorded an $8.4 billion write-down.

In a statement, Chief Executive John Thain called the results clearly unacceptable. But in the past month, Merrill has fortified its balance sheet with nearly $13 billion in capital infusions from U.S. and Asian investors.

What does that mean, John? You, as leader of Merrill Lynch, participated in one of the biggest banking and lending frauds ever to be sprung upon the American public and now you find the results of that quasi-criminal activity unacceptable? Isn’t that sort of like John Dillinger finding a jail-term for bank robbery unacceptable?

I understand that it’s embarrassing for you to be standing there in front of all your peers and friends with your pants around your ankles--but unacceptable does not have the same meaning as undeserved.

Diplomatic Dancing---Stepping on the Toes of Truth

January 20, 2008

Canada to Rewrite Manual US Criticized

By CHARMAINE NORONHA The Associated Press Saturday, January 19, 2008; 5:07 PM

TORONTO -- Canada’s foreign ministry said Saturday that it will rewrite a training manual used by Canadian diplomats that lists the United States as a site of possible torture following pressure from its closest ally.

The department document, released Friday, singled out the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay. It also names Israel, Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Syria as places where inmates could face torture.

…We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries such as Iran and China. Quite frankly it’s absurd, U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins told The Associated Press on Friday. For us to be on a list like that is just ridiculous.

He said the U.S. does not authorize or condone torture. We think it should be removed and we’ve made that request. We have voiced our opinion very forcefully, Wilkins said.

What is absurd is for the United States to deny what has been proven, time and time again. The physical evidence has been splattered around the world. If one does not appreciate the reference, one need merely refrain from the act. Pretty simple to me, Ambassador Wilkins.

You got a problem with that?

Air Travel Has Its Place, but It’s Place Is Not Ubiquitous

January 20, 2008

Southern Winter Storm Forces Major Flight Disruptions

By Del Quentin Wilber Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 20, 2008; A11

Hundreds of airline flights were canceled yesterday and thousands of passengers endured lengthy delays after a winter storm showered rain, sleet and rain over major hub airports in the Southeast.

More than 800 flights were canceled to and from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport -- about a quarter of the airport’s total daily operations, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Near-freezing temperatures and a wintry mix of precipitation also caused lengthy delays and cancellations at Charlotte’s airport, a major hub for US Airways.

… Less than an inch of snow fell across much of Atlanta, but temperatures that hung around freezing all day caused other snarls at the airport: Aircraft were waiting 90 minutes to two hours to be de-iced before they could safely take off, Bergen said.

Aha--an inch of snow. Well, there you have it. Reason enough for the travel plans of tens of thousands to be upset. Air travel has become an acceptable (if uncomfortable and inconvenient and frustrating and demoralizing and personally repugnant and unreliable) form of transportation over extreme distances.

But it sucks as a way to get from downtown Chicago to downtown Minneapolis, a less that two-hour comfortable Bullet-Train run and an agony of shoes-off chanciness by plane. But of course, for it to be comfortable and fast, a Bullet-Train would have to exist.

They exist in Japan, where the distances are small, but the intelligence factor is high. They do not exist in America, where the distances are much more relevant to high-speed rail, but the intelligence factor is--well--draw your own conclusion.

Given the choice of a stroll over to the Bullet-Train in Chicago, for a leisurely and comfortable two hour stretch of the legs and easygoing early dinner on board --or-- a hectic and unmanageable ticket line at O’Hare, complete with the tension and snarliness of airport personnel, ending in a lineup at runway A-4, breathing the jet-fumes of the plane ahead…

…ah well, you get my drift. Check out an alternative.

Jews and American Indians---Unequal, but Comparative Losers to History

January 21, 2008

Heirs of Jewish Art Collectors Pursue Works Sold in Nazi Era

By Craig Whitlock and Shannon Smiley Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, January 21, 2008; A01

DRESDEN, Germany -- When the Nazis came to power, Fritz Glaser was a marked man. A wealthy Jewish lawyer, he was also well known as a collector of modern art -- works condemned by Hitler as degenerate and soon banned under the Third Reich.

Miraculously, Glaser survived the Holocaust and the 1945 Allied firebombing of this city on the Elbe River. But his precious art collection was in shambles. During Nazi times, when Jews were routinely pressured to sell property at nominal prices, he was forced to liquidate much of his collection, according to his family. Amid the postwar wreckage, he sold a few remaining pieces to raise cash and saw the others confiscated by the communists before he died in East Germany in 1956.

A half-century later, Glaser’s sole remaining heir is fighting an uphill battle to win back some of his artworks, which are now ranked as masterpieces. Armed with scraps of wartime letters and faded exhibition catalogs, Glaser’s 69-year-old daughter-in-law is trying to prove he was coerced into selling his treasures to unscrupulous Nazi art dealers.

In Germany, we really have difficulty in getting back artwork that was taken during the Holocaust, said Sabine Rudolph, an attorney for the heir, Ute Glaser. It’s a real problem, how to check these records. The museums don’t want to know about any mistakes. They don’t want to give private researchers access to their archives.

Join the crowd, Ute. If you want equity, don’t look to history to find it and if you hope to use Hitler’s holocaust as a starting-point, you’ll have to line up behind America’s Indians, the millions hustled off to Russian gulags, the victims of Mao’s carnage and the Mayans of Central America. Then there are America’s blacks, European gypsies and the peoples from nowhere enslaved by the peoples from somewhere.

Every gallery, museum and national archive is crammed with the loot from someone’s theft. Every great collection is the sum total of an endless list of avarice, greed and crime, even though the present collector may be no more attached to that string of offenses than by the power of his money.

Do you have a position, Ute, on the current theft of priceless art from the very bosom of humanity’s beginnings? We call that ongoing wreckage of individual lives and property, Iraq.

History does not award justice, it merely dispenses history.

Breaking the Law---a Paradigm for American Presidencies

January 22, 2008

White House Has No Comprehensive E-Mail Archive. System Used by Clinton Was Scrapped

By Elizabeth Williamson and Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, January 22, 2008; A03

For years, the Bush administration has relied on an inadequate archiving system for storing the millions of e-mails sent through White House servers, despite court orders and statutes requiring the preservation of such records, according to documents and technical experts.

President Bush’s White House early on scrapped a custom archiving system that the Clinton administration had adopted under a federal court order. From 2001 to 2003, the Bush White House also recorded over computer backup tapes that provided a last line of defense for preserving e-mails, even though a similar practice landed the Clinton administration in legal trouble.

As a result, several years’ worth of electronic communication may have been lost, potentially including e-mails documenting administration actions in the run-up to the Iraq war.

White House officials said last week that they have no reason to believe that any e-mails were deliberately destroyed or are missing. But over the past year, they have acknowledged problems with archiving, saving and finding e-mails dating from early in the administration until at least 2005.

The administration’s e-mail policies have been repeatedly challenged by lawmakers and open-government groups, in congressional hearings and in court. Two groups, the National Security Archive and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, have accused the White House in lawsuits of violating the Federal Records Act because of what they say is its failure to preserve millions of e-mails, a charge the White House rejects.

We’ve all seen it at some time or another in our lives--the confrontational bully, who simply does not back down in the face of law. Amazingly, they get away with looking you straight in the eye, saying ‘no’ and doing as they damn well please. I once knew a horse-dealer like that, who rough-necked his way through the show-horse game and got away with metaphoric murder until he finally committed literal murder by killing his brother, a competitor.

Until shooting his brother, he was unstoppable by the simple expedient of ignoring both the law and common decency. Fortunately, your chances of encountering such a person (other than the occasional road-rage) are small. Unfortunately, we have a president who suffers from ignoring-the-law syndrome.

Like the bully-brother I described, President Bush simply looks the nation, the Congress and the courts in the eye and says ‘no.’

sq    Laws the Congress passes, he negates with ‘signing statements’

sq    International treaties he dislikes, he abrogates, unilaterally

sq    When white turns black policy-wise, he simply denies black exists

sq    He initiates and revels in torture, denying it with the aplomb of a Saddam

sq    He spies (illegally) on his fellow Americans, denies it and goes right on spying

And, like my horseman acquaintance, he gets away with it. This president should be nicknamed ‘The Dentist,’ because of the way he has contrived to make the United States Constitution toothless. And we, whose duty it is to hold our elected officials collective feet to the fire, are busy and distracted elsewhere.

Or perhaps merely afraid to confront the bully.

Holding Our Breath, with a Learner in the Driver’s Seat and a Desperate President Riding Shotgun

January 22, 2008

Fed Cuts Rate 0.75% and Stocks Swing

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and JOHN HOLUSHA

The Federal Reserve, responding to an international stock sell-off and fears about a possible United States recession, cut its benchmark interest rate by three-quarters of a percentage point on Tuesday, an aggressive move that came ahead of a regularly scheduled meeting of the central bank.

The Fed’s policy-making group, known as the Federal Open Market Committee, lowered its target for the federal funds rate, which regulates overnight loans between banks, to 3.5 percent, from 4.25 percent.

The surprise move, unusual in both its scale and its timing, underscored the severity of the current strains facing the economy. And it bolstered world markets that had opened the week with a sell-off. European stocks turned upward on the news, and Wall Street averted the deep losses that had been anticipated overnight.

It’s a once-in-a-generation event, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. In recent years, the Fed has rarely acted between scheduled meetings of the committee, and almost always in increments of one-quarter or one-half point. It was the biggest single cut since October 1984.

… after opening down by more than 460 points, the Dow Jones industrial average regained most of its losses, closing off 128.11 points, or 1.1 percent, at 11,971.19. It was the lowest close in 15 months.

Bernanke bought 330 points for a day. Tomorrow will swallow what’s left of his lack of courage and the dollar (already in virtual free-fall) will pay the price on international markets. Like a dog smells fear, so does the investment community (if such a pack of hounds dare be called community).

Bernanke hadn’t the stature, the background or certainly the experience to let the market find its bottom. But it will. Short of panic, markets always find their bottom and this one has 30 years of chumming the bottom to catch up with.

The major players (Paulson’s Goldman Sachs among them) have been caught red-handed, fraudulently manipulating this market and now they’re scared to death. So are the rest of us. We’re holding our breath, but it’s amateur night over at the Fed and this president, with 10 months to go, cannot be relied upon to grab the wheel if Bernanke takes us off the road.

Bush will make any foolish move necessary to pin this tail on the next donkey. A market down a thousand points is not (yet) a crash, but the new kids on the block are treating it like one and what they will