Leaky Boat
The problem is that nobody, not me, not you, not Hank
Paulson has any idea what they're doing. I have a couple questions about this whole 700 Billion Dollar Bailout program.
1. Is it necessary?This is the biggest question. And I think it's quite telling that this is the question the players in Washington LEAST want to address. What would happen if we did nothing? What would happen if we spent significantly less? Shouldn't that that be the very first question anyone asks? How can we determine what we need to do if we aren't allowed to have a conversation about what we WANT to do will accomplish?
2. Will it even work?Honestly, why should it? And by what mechanism? All we have proposed to do is buy a specified amount of grossly overvalued non-performing investment vehicles at some, very likely overvalued price. After we do that, all we know for sure is that the government, and that means taxpayers, has lost. We now own these ridiculous derivative mortgage-backed investments and credit default swaps that never had any real value in the first place. Will that do ANYTHING to improve the position of the firms holding them? Oh yeah? How much of this worthless debt are they holding? What else do they own that is overvalued on their balance sheets? What will be their next demand? Under the current (lack of) oversight regime, we have no idea. It's all guesswork.
Think it through, for
gawds sake. Every bank and investment firm that owns this crap is failing. Why would anyone believe that in a sixty trillion dollar market, 700 Billion dollars will be enough to prop them up? Especially with the immediate history of these firms taking the money and just investing it themselves in safe international funds. Nothing changes.
3. Is it enough?Of course not. They're lying. Again. This is an immense global market that has been generating ridiculous wealth for it's participants for well over a decade. Every new loan product that they could think up, no matter how unsupportable, was greedily snapped up and repackaged and resold. Brokers made millions. Fund managers made tens of millions. Brokerage firms made HUNDREDS of millions. All predicated on an unsupportable basis. And now the chickens have come home to roost. I personally would tell them to eat shit.
4. Will it actually do more harm than good?Since the entire process is a
fait accompli, I guess this is the only real question that matters. If it actually
staves off some kind of
apocalyptic collapse, then it was probably well spent, even if it was overspent. But know what? I am not optimistic. We are going to go significantly deeper into debt. This isn't something that happens in a
vacuum, unilaterally. We have to have partners who will buy this huge additional debt. Ask yourself. Why would they? Our financial system is in collapse, and we're asking these international investors to trust us that in thirty years we'll be able to honor our commitment. Of course, in many cases, they have a significant investment in our ability to continue to support this level of consumer spending, so they might make
questionable investments. But at some point, there's just no justification that can drive further investment. At that point, the US economy is in deep trouble. And yeah.
Nobody's talking about that little problem.
What will happen when we, America, have nothing to offer but the ability to destroy your enemy in a matter of days in exchange for money? What will it mean when the only export we have to offer is the "War Fighter"? What will the world look like when we have to sell "regime change" because we have nothing else to offer?
I honestly never thought I'd see America fall this far in my lifetime. I mean sure, everything ends, all empires and regimes fall, only to be replaced by others, but this last eight years has been breathtaking in it's horror. And make no mistake. It's going to get very much worse. My pity to all you young folks...
But what about ME?
As I was watching the debate, I started to wonder: Do they really not understand what people want? Are they SO out of touch that they just make decisions and spend money and lives and time on what THEY have decided is important, without any consideration of what American citizens might care about.
So I started to wonder.
As a voter, what DO I want?
Do I want more wars? Do I really gain anything, security or peace or ANYTHING, from fighting wars 18,000 miles away?
Do I really gain anything from helping Israel oppress and dominate the Palestinians?
Do I really gain anything from a confrontation with Iran?
What do I gain from a confrontation with Russia over Georgia?
Or would I be better off with guaranteed health insurance?
With a job. A job with a future.
A chance to get to work without being hostage to four dollar gas.
A future for America not tied to an 11 TRILLION dollar debt and a poisoned planet?
How can we convince our leadership we don't care about nuclear weapons and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the bare-knuckles confrontation in the Caucasus? We're not afraid of Iran, we want our law enforcement and intelligence organizations to manage the threat from terrorists, a threat that will diminish as we stop killing their families.
When will our leadership recognize that their job is to improve the lives and meet the needs of their constituencies, the citizens of the United States of America, and not to play stupid games and take self-aggrandizing positions with the lives and treasure of those citizens?
You know what? My problem is actually NOT with a political leadership that acts like a bunch of thugs running away from a smash and grab robbery. Oh no. My problem is with a population that doesn't seem to mind that every year they write a check to the government, and nobody seems interested in how they spend that money.
Bridges and roads and schools that actually work.
What am I getting with the income tax checks I write?
War in Iraq, bombs in Pakistan, madness in Afghanistan, hate and fear and death and murder and torture.
I do NOT want that.
I'd like my tax money to contribute to the well being of americans. Not the murder and domination of people half a world away.
Am I the only one?
That was Then...
So what is it with America's political leadership today? Doesn't it seem that there was a time, not that long ago, when people of dissimilar political and ideological worldviews could come together responsibly and hammer out compromises that actually advanced the nation's agenda and contributed positively to public policy? I've been trying for a year or so to figure out what has changed. Certainly our political positions have hardened, our ideologies have become more rigid, and in many cases more extreme, and the discourse has become toxic.
But why? Certainly those leaders of a bygone era held strong beliefs, and were no less committed to achieving their ideological goals than those of today. And yet, they could find a place, not necessarily in the center, but where the central goals were met without giving away more than was absolutely necessary.
Of course, the drift toward extreme positions is seriously problematic. It's hard to be willing to compromise with torturers, with people who start wars, hold people without due process, run offshore gulags and shred the fourth amendment. How exactly am I supposed to do that? "OK, you can invade and occupy Iraq, but you have to promise to try not to hurt anyone"? I'm not sure I see a way compromise can work. And I'm sure there are elements that feel the same way about compromising with somebody like me.
But I think I've figured out the difference, and it's both smaller and much bigger than I thought it would be. In earlier times, the goals were the same, it was only the methodology for achieving those goals that was argued about. In a sense, ideology defined
method more than it did
outcome. But today, ideology is the primary determinant of desired outcome, and that creates a kind of inflexibility that never existed before.
Take for example, terrorism. If everyone had the shared goal of ending terror attacks on Americans, then we would be more flexible in our methods for dealing with it. We would certainly recognize that fighting terrorists with military force only perpetuates the fighting - indeed, can NEVER end it. We might try using Law Enforcement and Intelligence assets to attempt to prevent attacks while we did all we could to improve our relationship with the source populations, acting as an honest broker and offering genuine partnership. But for much of our leadership, that's not the goal. The goal is to have wars, to have our troops deployed on the oil fields, to create a multi-polar world and to try to ensure that some are winners and some are losers. In that case, the end of terrorist acts against American interests is the farthest thing from the goal - indeed, without the EXCUSE of the terrorist threat, the outcome desired by these factions would be impossible to achieve.
For that matter, consider nuclear non-proliferation. If the goal was to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to any new nations, there would be a relatively straightforward set of methodologies employed consistently and fairly. And as became clear what was working and what wasn't, everyone would work together to deploy the most effective approaches. But clearly that is NOT the desired outcome, despite the rhetoric to the contrary. It seems that anyone in a political leadership position who talks about non-proliferation these days is actually speaking of a specific set of nations and organizations who's development of nuclear capabilities cannot be permitted. Israel, India and Pakistan develop nuclear weapons without much in the way of outside interference, while Libya, North Korea and Iran encounter the wrath of the non-proliferators who couldn't be bothered to complain in the case of the previous nations. And these choices are so arbitrary that we have the bizarre case of NPT signatories being placed under sanction for doing things that the NPT they signed specifically allow them to do, while others blatantly refuse to sign the NPT and develop weapons unfettered.
So it seems that when ideology dictates methodology, goals and outcomes can be agreed upon and specific methods can be hammered out in civil negotiations. It is only when ideology dictates outcomes that the leadership becomes intransigent, and the conversation turns bitter, angry and personal.
You Can NOT be Serious
It appears that what NASA really needs is either a whole lot MORE rocket scientists, or a whole lot less. Because in the annals of painting oneself into a figurative corner, the management at NASA has taken not just the cake, but the entire bakery.
There are exactly two vehicles capable of delivering human passengers and crew to the Space Station - The Shuttle and a Russian Soyuz three-man capsule launched using a traditional disposable rocket motor.
For a whole lot of reasons - economic, political, technical and safety related - the Shuttle will be retired after
STS-133 is completed in June of 2010. But why should that be a problem? NASA is building the replacement to the Shuttle, Orion, so certainly any project manager worth her salt would have the new replacement vehicle ready at the point where the previous system was being eliminated. Right?
Uh, no. This is NASA, one of the most dysfunctional bureaucracies in the long dysfunctional history of bureaucracies we're talking about, and nothing ever just works in a manner that makes sense. Orion's first flight is scheduled for 2014, leaving almost exactly five years without America being able to independently deliver personnel to the
ISS. So after investing 100 Billion dollars and a vast amount of national energy and prestige, America will have to effectively abandon the Space Station immediately upon completion. Of course, the other participating nations including Russia, the
ESA and Japan all have arrangements in place to provide crews to man the Station, so really only America will be left behind. Really.
But not to fear! NASA has a plan. (If there was ever a phrase that ought to cause you to grip your wallet tightly and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction, that one is it.) All we've got to do, you see, is order up some Soyuz capsules from the Russians and we'll just use those to send our crews back and forth to the
ISS. What could be simpler.
Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that it's not that simple. A number of problems plague this "solution", in fact. First, logistically, it takes three years to build a Soyuz. So if they started now, today, there would still be a minimum six months to a year gap between the last Shuttle flight and the first Soyuz trip. So why hasn't NASA placed their order?
Well, they don't actually have the funds. They need to get the money allocated from Congress. And as you might have expected, there's a problem with that. The "Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act". Until Russia is
certified as not assisting any of these nations in building weapons of mass destruction, there are trade sanctions preventing the purchase of Russian rocket technology. Of course, Congress can provide NASA with a waiver and the funds, and that is what NASA is hoping for. And it's not like Congress would actually be concerned about acting in a two-faced, politically inconsistent fashion when it suited their interests to do so, so this actually COULD come to pass.
Of course, Congress is going on recess the end of September, and then there's the whole presidential elections thing, the transition to the new administration, new priorities and mandates, a different way of doing business, a new "100 days" legislative strategy. Along with the 3 or 4 trillion dollars the US does not have just spent preventing a complete financial collapse, it seems somewhat
far fetched that the funds to buy Russian Rockets will be made available in the next year or so, anyway.
So, through a combination of embarrassingly poor planning, political manipulation, economic mismanagement and just out and out blundering, the American investment in that technological jewel in the sky, that pinnacle of scientific achievement, the sole focus of the American Space Program for fifteen years, will have on board NO American crewmen for at least five, and likely closer to seven years.
Not just your tax dollars at work, but an example of the quality of management at the top in America today. We let these people run things, and we keep being surprised when things don't run well. We are surprised by Iraq, by Katrina, by Fannie and Freddie, by all of the ridiculous, predictable failures large and small, over and over again.
It's almost like there's a pattern here...
The Kid Rocks
Damn, I'm enjoying watching this kid. It's not that he's fearless. I've known people who are fearless, and they scare the crap out of me. It's not that he's thoughtless. He understands what it takes to win, and what winning means, and how you compete in the big leagues.
You want to know what it is? He just wants to play. Put your guy at the plate with a bat. I'll try to get him out. There's nothing complicated or difficult about this game. Let's go.
So when he set out to bunt the runner over, and instead got a Randy Johnson fastball on his finger, what did Lincecum want to do?
Look out. Lincecum wanted to throw the ball. He wanted to get on the mound and try to get guys out. Because for him, at this point, this game isn't about money, of which he will make plenty, and it's not about ego, SportCenter Highlights and individual numbers. Nope. Timmy is fun because he still understands that it's about him trying to get hitters out. And that is why I watch the game....
We're all Ghouls Now
I just watched the "Tribute to 9/11 victims" they ran tonight, the last night of the Republican National Convention. And a great deal became clear to me. They present the attacks on America, and on Americans, as if they have no basis, no history, no reason, they are just a bunch of Muslims who hate us for no good reason. Maybe they just don't have anything better to do, they don't drink beer, so when they get bored they think "Hey, I dunno, there's nothing on TV, let's go kill some Americans".
Their response is we have to fight them. But it's so clear that that's stupid. It's so obvious that killing them, invading and occupying their countries, assassinating their leaders and starving their populations will only create more fighters who hate, not America, but American policies, and will continue to try to change those policies. Again, it's obvious that they don't have the leverage, the political or military or economic wherewithal to try to make America and The West and the UN LISTEN to their grievances, so they can see no option but to attack assymetrically, in the only way available to them.
Finally, at long last, to any thinking person, the answer is obvious. To try to kill them is to perpetuate the conflict. To try to find a way to live in peace with them, to respect their rights, their countries and their beliefs, to help them out of poverty, to help them educate their people and eradicate disease and develop their economies, these are a path to peace between our people.
Honestly, this is not really complex. Disgustingly, our governement recognizes these self-evident truths. But to coexist in peace with the Islamic Nations is not the goal. No more than the goal was ever to end the occupation of Iraq. The goal is a permanant state of war, and the costs in lives and treasure don't seem to matter.
What's truly important at this point is we stop providing cover to the parties on both sides who profit in so many ways from eternal warfare. Both bush/cheney and bin laden/zawahiri are quite happy with the current state of affairs. Neither can be concerned with the lives lost, the lives ruined, the hopeless, the homeless, the stateless.
When the answer is easy and it's hard to prolong the status quo, and yet the status quo is prolonged and the people aren't asking the simple, obvious questions, there's something truly wrong with the system. When the war destroys families and families don't actively work to end the war, when people rail against waste and ignore the waste of fighting a war that would simply end if we just quit fighting it - when death, poverty and disease is accepted and any peace intitiative is seen as weakness, it's the society itself that is sick.
Anbar-ing Something Unforseen...
The surge worked, right? John McCain says Iraq is "stable and peaceful" The American military turned operational control in bloody Anbar province over to the Iraqi government today. Everything is going just swimmingly over there, huh?
Not so fast. You'll never learn it from the American media, but Iraq is unraveling faster than Rivers Cuomo's sweater. And there is a certain ennui among the American military leadership, anticipating an Obama administration implementing an orderly withdrawal of American troops. So planning is more short-term, more defensive. Sure, as John Kerry so famously said, nobody wants to be the last man to die for a mistake, but even more than that, nobody wants to die when the whole thing is winding down.
First, Anbar. When the Iraqis were rushed from the battlefield to the ballot box (remember all those purple fingers?), the Sunni dominated provinces boycotted the election, as they could see clearly that there was nothing in the system to provide them with representation. When you have a clear majority, as the Shiite parties did, you don't need to compromise, to offer concessions. You can ignore your opposition, crush them in legitimate voting, and strip them of power and influence. This has long been known as the "tyranny of the majority", and one of the major tenants of democracy has been to find a way to give genuine voice to minority parties. There was no thought of that in George Bush's brave new Iraq.
So now you have a weird condition in Anbar Province. The population is overwhelmingly Sunni, but the political representation at the provincial level is Shia. As is the national government. As a result of the political outcome, along with a radically unfair de-baathification program, a very competent and bloody insurgency developed in Anbar, the heart of the "Sunni Triangle". For a couple years, American Marines fought them to a standstill, taking heavy casualties along the way. Eventually, somebody wised up. A case was made that the foreign Salafi Jihadists that came to the Sunni provinces did not respect either Iraqis nor Iraqi nationalism. Many of the former Iraqi Army and Baathist insurgents were hired to effectively switch sides, and defend the existing political status of the province against the hate and extremism. It was a good deal. For the first time since the fall of the Hussein government, they could support their families and build stable neighborhoods.
Now, of course, there are cracks in the happy tale. There was never any love between the Sunni "Awakening Councils" and the Shi'a provincial government. The government made no bones about the fact that they felt they should have the typical "monopoly on the use of force" that governments are entitled to. The Councils, on the other hand, distrust the intentions of the Provincial government, and expect to have to fight the Shiites after America leaves.
Well, America is starting to leave. al Maliki is supposed to take over the payments to the Council fighters next month. It's pretty clear that's not going to happen. The Iraqi Defense Forces in Anbar want the Sunni fighters to surrender their weapons. The Councils want to to be absorbed into the Defense Forces. Maliki cannot allow that.
Along with the wide open Kirkuk question, the tensions between Kurds and Arabs in the north and the various Shiite factions in the south, this is much less a country than a cauldron. Close to full boil, the rules have to be fundamentally changed before any real stability can be found.
I don't know if he knows it or not, but Obama's right. These issues have to be brought to a head and RESOLVED before there can be any hope of Iraq becoming a functioning nation. As long as they are hanging, open ended threats and challenges, unaddressed like an untreated cancer, Iraq will be dependent upon a third party to keep the factions apart.
Sadly, the factions cannot be resolved from "apart". Once these basic, fundamental issues upon which Iraqi sovereignty depends are resolved, then there will be an opportunity for whatever the final version of Iraq looks like to bring home her refugees, provide services to her people and move out of the stasis she finds herself in.
Of course, she will, for the foreseeable future, be an ally and friend of Iran, and another oil-rich autocracy. But this is one of the things that MUST happen if we are to get beyond killing as a solution to economic and ethnic problems...
The problem is that nobody, not me, not you, not Hank Paulson has any idea what they're doing. I have a couple questions about this whole 700 Billion Dollar Bailout program.
