NEW YORK – A federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court’s approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said the government orders must be subject to meaningful judicial review and that the recently rewritten Patriot Act “offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers.”
More at AP.
The sub-prime debacle rolls on:
“American Home Mortgage joins more than 50 lenders in bankruptcy this year.”
~MSNBC – Aug 6, 2007
~Bloomberg, Aug 10, 2007
“Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s $8 billion Global Alpha hedge fund has fallen 26 percent so far this year…”
Check out this piece I wrote in Money Week about Goldman Sachs
I kind of jumped the gun on it, but the fact is the big bank is in trouble over the credit crunch, something few people would have once thought possible.
Hedge funds are keeling over all over the place as well:
“Hedge fund operator Sowood Capital Management said Friday it would return $1.4 billion to investors after losing an estimated 60% of their money last month…”
~LA Times, Aug 4, 2007
Hedge funds are taking a hit for 60% in a month.
Home mortgage lenders are going belly up, 50 this year alone.
Meanwhile, the “plunge protection team” at the Federal reserve is on the job with soothing words:
On March 28th, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress he believed that sub-prime defaults were “likely to be contained.”
On June 20th, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsonsaid the fallout “will not affect the economy overall.”
On June 27th, Merrill Lynch CEO Stanley O’Neal claimed the defaults were “reasonably well contained.”
In August, $40 billion in credit had been pumped into the financial system over two days – more than anything the Fed has done since 9/11.
But can the economy stay on keel?
Today, Sept. 6, there are announcements of terrorist warnings as dire as any since September 11…
Are we near a crisis?
Who knows? The point is when you have a situation this large and this complex, all bets are off.
In response to the gentle souls who think harsh criticism of Thomas Friedman is “mean,” here is Glen Greenwald, author of the NY Times best seller, How Would a Patriot Act? on what it is that makes the columnist a richly deserving target. in his public persona, of course. We have nothing against Friedman personally, needless to say. He may be the nicest of human beings in private life – but his public views are as lethal as any weapon of mass destruction. They need to be defused….
(Friday, Dec. 1, 2006 – later updated
Someone e-mailed me several days ago to say that while it is fruitful and necessary to chronicle the dishonest historical record of pundits and political figures when it comes to Iraq, I deserve to be chastised for failing to devote enough attention to the person who, by far, was most responsible for selling the war to centrists and liberal “hawks” and thereby creating “consensus” support for Bush’s war — Tom Friedman, from his New York Times perch as “the nation’s preeminent centrist foreign policy genius.”
That criticism immediately struck me as valid, and so I spent the day yesterday and today reading every Tom Friedman column beginning in mid-2002 through the present regarding Iraq. That body of work is extraordinary. Friedman is truly one of the most frivolous, dishonest, and morally bankrupt public intellectuals burdening this country. Yet he is, of course, still today, one of the most universally revered figures around, despite — amazingly enough, I think it’s more accurate to say “because of” — his advocacy of the invasion of Iraq, likely the greatest strategic foreign policy disaster in America’s history.
This matters so much not simply in order to expose Friedman’s intellectual and moral emptiness, though that is a goal worthy and important in its own right. Way beyond that, the specific strain of intellectual bankruptcy that drove Friedman’s strident support for the invasion of Iraq continues to be what drives not only Tom Friedman today, but virtually all of our elite opinion-makers and “centrist” and “responsible” political figures currently attempting to “solve” the Iraq disaster.
In column after column prior to the war, Friedman argued that invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam was a noble, moral, and wise course of action. To Friedman, that was something we absolutely ought to do, and as a result, he repeatedly used his column to justify the invasion and railed against anti-war arguments voiced by those whom he derisively called “knee-jerk liberals and pacifists” (so as not to clutter this post with long Friedman quotes, I’m posting the relevant Friedman excerpts here).
But at the same time Friedman was cheering on the invasion, he was inserting one alarmist caveat after the next about how dangerous a course this might be and about all the problems that might be unleashed by it. He thus repeatedly emphasized the need to wage the War what he called “the right way.” To Friedman, the “right way” meant enlisting support from allies across Europe and the Middle East for both the war and the subsequent re-building, telling Americans the real reasons for the war, and ensuring that Americans understood what a vast and long-term commitment we were undertaking as a result of the need to re-build that country.
Only if the Bush administration did those things, argued Friedman, would this war achieve good results. If it did not do those things, he repeatedly warned, this war would be an unparalleled disaster.
Needless to say, the Bush administration did none of the things Friedman insisted were prerequisites for invading Iraq “the right way.” And Friedman recognized that fact, and repeatedly pointed it out. Over and over, in the months before the war, Friedman would praise the idea of the war and actively push for the invasion, but then insert into his columns statements like this:
And so I am terribly worried that Mr. Bush has told us the right thing to do, but won’t be able to do it right.
But: Despite the Bush administration’s failures to take any of the steps necessary to wage the war “the right way,” Friedman never once rescinded or even diluted his support for the war. He continued to advocate the invasion and support the administration’s push for war — at one point, in February, even calling for the anti-war French to be removed from the U.N. Security Council and replaced by India, and at another point warning that we must be wary of Saddam’s last-ditch attempt to negotiate an alternative to war lest we be tricked into not invading — even though Friedman knew and said that all the things that needed to be done to avert disaster were not being done by the administration.
Put another way, these are the premises which Friedman, prior to the invasion, expressly embraced:
(1) If the war is done the right way, great benefits can be achieved.
(2) If the war is done the wrong way, unimaginable disasters will result.
(3) The Bush administration is doing this war the wrong way, not the right way, on every level.
(4) Given all of that, I support the waging of this war.
Just ponder that: Tom Friedman supported the invasion of Iraq even though, by his own reasoning, that war was being done the “wrong way” and would thus — also by his own reasoning — create nothing but untold damage on every level. And he did so all because there was some imaginary, hypothetical, fantasy way of doing the war that Friedman thought was good, but that he knew isn’t what we would get.
To support a war that you know is going to be executed in a destructive manner is as morally monstrous as it gets.. ……”
I am a republican and I have been for a bunch of years now. I voted for Harry Browne in 2000, I was a big Alan Keyes supporter and I couldn’t vote for GWB. In 2004, I supported the war in Iraq and I voted for President Bush because of that and the tax cuts.
I had a real eye opener when I heard about Ron Paul’s candidacy on C-Span and when I heard him in the debates. I believed Rush and Sean when they said that the liberals wanted to, “cut and run”. I still do think that much of the opposition to the war from the liberal side is aimed at the President and that a democratic President, (Clinton, Obama, Edwards etc…) would not leave Iraq. When we went to war I believed it would be a cakewalk it was predicted to be. Up until this year I believed, “stay the course” was our only option. The people who predicted easy victory now said that if we left it would be genocide and a vacuum would soon fill with Al Queda.
I decided it was high time to stop believing the people who were wrong and start believing the man who was right from the beginning, Ron Paul. What Dr. Paul has been saying since well before 9/11/2001 is that wars ought to be declared, per the constitution. The track record of our declared wars versus our undeclared wars tells the sad tale. Dr. Paul believes, and I agree, that looking for the motive for a crime is not blaming the victim but an attempt to prevent future crimes. We should remember that we once supported both Bin Laden and Saddam and we should wonder who we are supporting now that we will fight later.
While we are off nation building and intervening in the internal affairs of “certain” other nations, we should be careful to preserve our freedoms at home. What are we fighting for in Iraq if we still lose liberties at home? Ah, safety, that’s it… But is it so important to be safe? The info about the attacks of 9/11 was in our hands. The bureaucracy was too large to allow the info to get to the correct hands. What solution did we offer to make sure this wouldn’t happen again? We added a monster bureaucracy on top of the existing one in an effort to “streamline” information.
The real threat to our freedom is the idea that we should give up freedom and rights at home in order to keep us safe. By accepting this premise we forget the reasons this nation was founded. We are under a more oppressive tax system than the one that led to the Boston Tea Party. We can’t reduce these taxes without changing our welfare/warfare government policies. If the second amendment was fully honored we could have prevented the attacks of 9/11 and the VTech massacre.
“Give me liberty or give me death” has been replaced by “Take our liberty and keep us safe”. This is not American. We are throwing our rights to the government like a wallet to a mugger. The terrorists can only kill us, the government can do far worse. The Army, Navy, Air force and my fellow Marines are bravely risking their lives for our country. Let us, safe at home, have the courage to take a little less security at home and attempt to restore the republic.
August 31, 2007
This week, Larry Kudlow and others strongly chastised Bernanke for his failure to read the writing on the wall and urged the Fed Chairman to quickly slash the Fed Funds rate. Methinks the pundits doth protest too much. For years, Kudlow, who practically coined the term “Goldilocks economy,” has dismissed with scorn suggestions that the American economy was anything less than ragingly healthy. If our economy is really so strong, why does he call so loudly for the artificial stimulus of a significant rate cut?
In truth, the writing has been clearly on the wall all along. A credit bubble has been steadily inflating for at least the last six years, which in its final frenzy produced some of the most absurd mortgage funding products the world has ever seen. To anyone not dependent on the hysteria, a no-doc, no money down, negative amortization, interest only, adjustable rate jumbo mortgage was just as clear a sign of pending catastrophe as was $200 for a share of Pets.com, or 5,000 Dutch guilders for a single tulip bulb.
The one thing all bubbles have in common is that they eventually pop, and ours just did. Unlike the popping of the last bubble in 2000-2001, this one will fall directly to our economy’s bottom line. And this time the Fed can not step up to the plate with unlimited liquidity injections.
A record percentage of our GDP is comprised of consumer spending. The source of this spending was the housing bubble. Would our savings rate really be negative were it not for housing related “wealth?” Could consumers really have spent as much as they did without the benefits of temporarily low teaser rates and the ability to extract equity from their homes? How many service sector jobs are directly related to that extra spending? When the low mortgage payments and home equity disappear, so too will the spending and jobs they engendered.
Those who feel that the economy will keep growing must believe that discretionary consumer spending is unrelated to wealth or expenses. In other words, they believe that individuals will spend as much with no home equity and $3,000 per month mortgage payments as they did with $200,000 in home equity $1,500 monthly payments. Factor in other rising expenses; such as food, energy, insurance, and taxes and discretionary spending will not just slow, it will completely collapse.
With the ugly truth laid bare, many now prod Bernanke and Bush for solutions. Unfortunately there are none. Based on absurd assumptions about real estate, we simply borrowed more money than we can ever hope to pay back. There is no magic elixir we can swallow to cure what ails us. The free market is the only force that can fix this mess. Unfortunately, the fix won’t be pretty. Prudent lending standards will return, guaranteeing that real estate prices collapse. This is an important connection that very few have made. There is no way the average American can afford to buy the average house at today’s prices with a mortgage he can afford. Assuming that the lax standards of 2005-2006 do not return, the only way this can happen is if real estate prices collapse, which is exactly what is happening.
The financial institutions that are calling most loudly for a bailout claim the Government must act to protect homeowners. However, the most severe losses will not be born by homeowners but by those who loaned them the money. Therefore any bailouts will ultimately go to lenders not borrowers. Homeowners who offered no down payment and who have no equity in their homes will in reality lose nothing in foreclosure, except perhaps a debt burden on an overpriced house. In addition, even those homeowners who made down payments likely extracted larger sums in subsequent refinancings or home equity loans. With plenty of available foreclosed homes on the market to rent it is unlikely that these former homeowners will become homeless……”
This post is not, I hope, an example of the “three parts of ego” that one reader finds in “Mobs,” though he grudgingly admits it was a “great read,” which missed being even better because of the heaping scorn it poured on a variety of people and things.
I wonder about that.
Bill and I had many discussions about the levels of snarkiness the many-headed would take before throwing some of it right back in our face.
We were warned it would offend reviewers. It might. We took out a lot of things. And we put back some. We thought about softening a lot of it. I tried numskulls and nitwits, instead of idiots — just to be nice and all…..
But the herd we are talking about…..is not something outside any of us. That’s the point of the book.
Some people seem to have missed that. The mob isn’t really “out there” — it’s something we all struggle against within ourselves. The urge to conform, to follow, to do as others do, to obey senseless orders, turn on the outsider, commit judicial murder.
The heroes of our book are the individuals who don’t turn their back on the defenseless and the voiceless. But we aren’t about to confuse that kind of goodness with the professions of corporate journalists, public policy wonks, and verbose politicians.
So let me say this. Except for some modest Bush-bashing ,and of course, the mandatory Thomas Friedman festivity (this is a cottage industry not only down at the Daily Reckoning but on some academic and left-wing sites), I really don’t know who or what it was that we ridiculed that was so sacrosanct….or didn’t deserve it.
It’s apparently OK to commit mass killings, despoil countries, lie, cheat and swindle, but mentioning that fact bluntly is altogether just too, too terrible. Next, I am going to hear — mean-spirited!
Our critic doesn’t seem to have figured out how hopeful the book is. It has nothing offensive whatsoever to say about those who really do good — the Sophie Scholls and Dr. V’s of the world. Its venom is directed at the great ones who so richly deserve it, but are protected by our platitudinous culture from public scorn.
As for James Surowiecki – we criticize him a bit, but only tangentially. Proving a thesis is not what this book is about. It’s exactly what it’s not about.
“Mobs” is not a pop sociology tract. It’s simply our report on the state of affairs in what we call the public spectacle. Wars, manias, swindles — don’t any of these call for some excoriation?
They do.
No apologies.
Lila Rajiva (co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets,” on being Married to the Mob on The Michael Dresser Show tonight, September 5 at 6:00 p.m. EST)
What is it about Ron Paul that attracts as many and as diverse a group of people as are repelled by him?
For a number of people, right and left, it is his consistent opposition
to the Iraq war.
It is a good reason. Moral courage allied with wisdom is as much in short supply these days as chastity at a political convention.
For others, it is Paul’s fiscal responsibility.
Dr. No has been pursing his lips at every form of political candy offered by the junk food vendors at the Capital. While many of his colleagues are letting out their belts, the wiry obstetrician is running marathons at 71.
While they keep getting caught in what used to be called “indiscretions,” he has been married for fifty years. We would be foolish to judge people by the externals of their lives, for saints and sinners, puritans and bohemians not only cohabit, they frequently snuggle under the same skin. Nonetheless, it’s a relief to have a few people around in politics to remind us that it’s also perfectly all right to live uneventfully, even stodgily.
I say this as someone who has spent a large part of her life among musicians, writers, and now, financial newsletter writers – whose professional lives depend on their eccentricity and even contrariness.
There is however one critical difference between selling financial advice and intellectual nostrums on the one hand and delivering babies on the other – which is what Dr. Paul has done for most of his professional life. The success of obstetrics is pretty easy to verify. Either the child breathes and lives – or it doesn’t.
One can’t be a good obstetrician on theory alone. The practice is all.
Check the track record of the average stock tout and you might find nothing but bankruptcy filings and credit card debt. That, of course, will count for little with the tout’s avid customers who would mortgage their four walls and roof for his advice. And toss in their wives as a bonus.
As for the pedant, you wish he’d trip over one of his obtuse, meandering sentences and break his scrawny neck before he stuck it into the real world. But does anyone care? No. His pet theories may have driven the nation into premature recession if not down-right impotence, but the expert will be given not only an institute of his very own at some Ivy League, but the whole Earth along with it……. to run as he wishes.
There, winsome coeds will no doubt ornament every step of his way to a Nobel Prize.
Theory is easy. Any biped with a larynx and functioning synapses can come up with one.
It is practice that separates the goats from the sheep.
And that is the principal reason that the pundits are afraid of that revolution of the people that is the rise of Ron Paul.
Ron Paul wants to put the practice of citizenry back in the hands of citizens and take it away from the theorists.
Oh, the critics will tell you differently. They will tell you that Ron Paul is a theorist himself – and a crack-pot theorist as well. A patron of fringe economics. A gentlemanly loon. Or at least, dangerously far out on the right bank of the mainstream.
Since the mainstream has just finished wrecking a whole country abroad in a manner that Genghis Khan would have been proud of and is busy adding yet another to its sights; and since, in the meantime it’s also managed to find the time to dismantle several centuries worth of legal structure at home, you wonder why anyone would worry about that, anyway.
But there you have the sad truth about man. He isn’t much concerned about anything besides how other people think of him. That’s all he thinks about all day long. For that he sweats and schleps, roils and toils.
Status. Image. In groups. Out groups. Pariahs. Brahmins. The sum total of it all is — what does the other fellow think of me?
Right or wrong counts for far less. His conscience or soul — for nothing at all. If he feels a pang, he swigs gelusil and turns on the hypnotic lights of his TV set.
And why? Because with no real, concrete practical knowledge anywhere between his ears, his skull rings with the lethal chatter of newspaper headlines and talk shows.
The patter of Those Who Know Better.
Hedge-fund managers who promise that all risk can be ironed out of your portfolio and make you pay for the wrinkles that aren’t.
Political scientists who invade a country from their desktops, but don’t know how to boot it up again when it crashes.
Hucksters who dream up great stories for their products — and make a punch-line out of the patsies who buy them.
We live in an empire run by experts.
But in the empire of experts, the man with horse sense is king.
And Ron Paul has horse sense.
The horse sense of mustangs, not geldings.
The kind of horse sense that bucks and sends you for a toss just when you thought you had everything under control. The horse sense that stops you from thinking about things so far off you couldn’t possibly have spotted them — while tripping over things so close by you shouldn’t ever have missed them.
The experts would have you believe that they can control your life and the life of entire nations by thinking long enough and hard enough about it. This is a theory so full of holes it puts Swiss cheese to shame.
Studies have even shown (Philip Tetlock, “Expert Political Judgment – How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”) that canny laymen do as well as experts when it come to predicting the future. In fact, many do even better.
But it’s the experts who have broken us in.
The reason is simple. Experts promise us a simple, sharp tool to dissect the complexity of the real world.
But a dissection that thorough can only be a post-mortem. Cut through the warm body of society that fiercely and you turn it into a cadaver.
Gray is all theory, says Mephistopheles, in Goethe’s Faust. The golden tree of life is green.
Here, we will improve on the devil. Between book covers, theory may be gray – but it is an intricate gossamer of gray – like the tracery in a Gothic cathedral or the mysterious depths of an engraving by Gustave Dore
I have no quarrel with theory. In fact, I have a weakness for it, as I have for all rich, superfluous things.
But a map is not a road, and a silhouette is not a human being. The trouble begins when experts begin to take their expertise so seriously that they forfeit their own road sense and their readers’. When they are so neutered by their reasoning that they cannot act – or worse yet, cannot stop acting. And the trouble grows into disaster when their credulous followers, junkies of every news and TV show, rush behind them like rats behind the Hamelin piper — into every frippery and fad, every financial folly and military madness.
And that is what we have today in our empire of experts. Worse than any war – which must at some point end — is the ideology that makes for war.
That tells us that “what is” is also “what must be.” You see, empires are made for experts as experts are made for empires. Without their theories to hold it up, the flimsy scaffold of government would fall of its own feebleness. And without that scaffold, the little men on top would be cut down to the same size as the rest of us.
And that, my friends, is the real reason why the experts fear Dr. Paul and the people love him.
Update:
This article was one of the top 10 articles on LRC. First time I made it. They all look like good pieces too.
CLEVER CAULIFLOWER – LILA RAJIVA &BILL BONNER
(from my book with Bill Bonner, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets – technically the copyright is held by both of us, but since his crew promotes the entire book as his, I decided to start putting my own stuff (stuff I wrote entirely) on the net as mine. It’s actually already been published in my name before the book came out in a slightly different form. But what’s sauce for the gander…is sauce for this goose [Since then, they have added the credits so since the message got through, I have added back Bill’s name here as you can see: (the original post had both names – the change was simply to send a message….):
“What most men don’t understand is that most of our beliefs about the economy – and everything else – are forms of self-medication — “Stocks for the long run,” “Globalization is good,” “Dow 36,000.” We repeat slogans to ourselves because everyone else does. Man is first of all a herd animal and fears nothing more than not being part of the herd.
In fact, the reason lies even deeper, in the deceptive nature of thought itself, even for instance, in the way we think about risk. Our thinking seems to be skewed only to certain sorts of risk – where what ends up happening depends only on a few stable factors. But often the abnormal event is the one that happens so rarely that it isn’t even reckoned with most of the time.
What we are talking about here is fat tails AN OUTLIIER – AN EVENT that lieS so far outside the normal course of events THINGS that we tend to push them equally far away in our consciousness, events that are so devastating that when they do occur, they cancel out every other consideration. There may be only a very slim chance that the human race will be wiped off the face of the earth, it is true. But it would probably pay us to take that slim chance very seriously.
And here we run into the problem with slogans about something like global trade in genetically modified food, for example. Just because a fat-tail disaster might smack us in the face at any moment, does that mean we are in favor of more, say, government regulations on food production?
Here, we are forced to hem and haw. Government regulation tends to be ineffective, in many cases. And since regulators are frequently drawn from the same industries they are supposed to be regulating, we think they tend to be counterproductive in all the others.
So, we are neither prescribing policy nor proscribing it. We are merely grumbling in our curmudgeonly way that we liked the old genetically unmodified world better. We have no desire to eat strawberries armed against frostbite with herring genes or cauliflower with an IQ higher than ours. We like our food au naturel, unrefurbished, unhedged, and in default drive. Unless it is communion wine, any transformations of nature need to pass the smell test first. We need to be protected from them, as surely as we need to be protected from bad checks, assault, murder, and another Michael Jackson trial.
You see our problem, dear reader? We would like the state to stop telling us what to do-whether it is in airports, in our schools, or in our bedrooms — but we dig in our heels equally at efforts by global corporations to improve our water, our potatoes, or our boeuf bourguignon at the expense of our local culture and with subsidies from our tax dollars.
This is unlikely to win us any popularity contests today when there are only two acceptable positions on globalization: It is A Very Good Thing. Or, it is A Very Bad Thing. But slogans don’t always do the trick. Each problem has to be thought through in its own terms. Not only is globalization neither entirely good nor entirely bad, it is not even one single thing. It is several. It is about free trade and costly subsidies, about gourmet water and junk food, about hard capital and soft drinks — all of which have their own reasons for being and their own consequences, and all of which are mislabeled, poorly understood, and constantly confused. In fact, the only thing you can be sure of about globalization is that it provokes extremes of two emotions in the mob — greed and fear. In other words, the only thing that is certain about it is that it is a public spectacle.
Naturally, like all public spectacles, globalization is wrapped up in a huge amount of cant. For instance, if you are a poor country, you are supposed to take to the thing as eagerly as a diabetic to insulin.
Now, if it was just a matter of freeing up trade between countries, we would nod our heads in agreement. The exchange of goods and services between people is, and always has been, a good thing. It is, so far as we can see, a far better way of getting what you want than hitting your fellow man over the head. But for it to really work, trade – like driving – needs a set of rules everyone follows; otherwise you are liable to crash or be run over.
And this is where it gets complicated. Because it turns out that many of the rules of global trade are set by the very people who are weighing down the market with all sorts of subsidies, sweetheart deals, perks, pork, and privileges, in the first place.
Take the World Bank, which is in the business of telling countries what they need to do to play the global trade game. In the lumpen imagination, the World Bank is not too different from the local neighborhood savings and loan – a kind of multicultural version of the friendly bank in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But the real World Bank is headed up not by Jimmy Stewart, but by people like Paul Wolfowitz, a man whom his best friend wouldn’t call a soft touch. Confirmed as the bank’s boss in 2005, Wolfowitz immediately proclaimed he was on a mission of mercy:
“Helping the poorest of the world to lift themselves out of poverty is a noble mission or, as former Secretary of State George Shultz said, ‘a beautiful mission.’ ”
But, the Sisters of Charity do not have to worry about the competition. Wolfowitz has been one of Washington’s biggest hawks, ever since the days when he argued for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. To this day, he likes to praise Indonesia’s Suharto, who in his 32-year reign looted $30 billion from the public treasury and turned his country into one of the most corrupt in the world.
Of course, on second thought, that might be the perfect resume for the World Bank…..
*********
Lila Rajiva is the co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets”
(Wiley, August 31, 2007) and the author of the ground-breaking study, “Abu Ghraib and the American Media,” (December, 2005). She blogs at The Mind-Body Politic. She can be reached at lrajiva@hotmail.com.
and is that most of our beliefs about the economy – and everything else – are forms of self-medication — “Stocks for the long run,” “Globalization is good,” “Dow 36,000.” We repeat slogans to ourselves because everyone else does. Man is first of all a herd animal and fears nothing more than not being part of the herd.
In fact, the reason lies even deeper, in the deceptive nature of thought itself, even for instance, in the way we think about risk. Our thinking seems to be skewed only to certain sorts of risk – where what ends up happening depends only on a few stable factors. But often the abnormal event is the one that happens so rarely that it isn’t even reckoned with most of the time.
What we are talking about here is fat tails AN OUTLIIER – AN EVENT that lieS so far outside the normal course of events THINGS that we tend to push them equally far away in our consciousness, events that are so devastating that when they do occur, they cancel out every other consideration. There may be only a very slim chance that the human race will be wiped off the face of the earth, it is true. But it would probably pay us to take that slim chance very seriously.
And here we run into the problem with slogans about something like global trade in genetically modified food, for example. Just because a fat-tail disaster might smack us in the face at any moment, does that mean we are in favor of more, say, government regulations on food production?
Here, we are forced to hem and haw. Government regulation tends to be ineffective, in many cases. And since regulators are frequently drawn from the same industries they are supposed to be regulating, we think they tend to be counterproductive in all the others.
So, we are neither prescribing policy nor proscribing it. We are merely grumbling in our curmudgeonly way that we liked the old genetically unmodified world better. We have no desire to eat strawberries armed against frostbite with herring genes or cauliflower with an IQ higher than ours. We like our food au naturel, unrefurbished, unhedged, and in default drive. Unless it is communion wine, any transformations of nature need to pass the smell test first. We need to be protected from them, as surely as we need to be protected from bad checks, assault, murder, and another Michael Jackson trial.
You see our problem, dear reader? We would like the state to stop telling us what to do-whether it is in airports, in our schools, or in our bedrooms — but we dig in our heels equally at efforts by global corporations to improve our water, our potatoes, or our boeuf bourguignon at the expense of our local culture and with subsidies from our tax dollars.
This is unlikely to win us any popularity contests today when there are only two acceptable positions on globalization: It is A Very Good Thing. Or, it is A Very Bad Thing. But slogans don’t always do the trick. Each problem has to be thought through in its own terms. Not only is globalization neither entirely good nor entirely bad, it is not even one single thing. It is several. It is about free trade and costly subsidies, about gourmet water and junk food, about hard capital and soft drinks — all of which have their own reasons for being and their own consequences, and all of which are mislabeled, poorly understood, and constantly confused. In fact, the only thing you can be sure of about globalization is that it provokes extremes of two emotions in the mob — greed and fear. In other words, the only thing that is certain about it is that it is a public spectacle.
Naturally, like all public spectacles, globalization is wrapped up in a huge amount of cant. For instance, if you are a poor country, you are supposed to take to the thing as eagerly as a diabetic to insulin.
Now, if it was just a matter of freeing up trade between countries, we would nod our heads in agreement. The exchange of goods and services between people is, and always has been, a good thing. It is, so far as we can see, a far better way of getting what you want than hitting your fellow man over the head. But for it to really work, trade – like driving – needs a set of rules everyone follows; otherwise you are liable to crash or be run over.
And this is where it gets complicated. Because it turns out that many of the rules of global trade are set by the very people who are weighing down the market with all sorts of subsidies, sweetheart deals, perks, pork, and privileges, in the first place.
Take the World Bank, which is in the business of telling countries what they need to do to play the global trade game. In the lumpen imagination, the World Bank is not too different from the local neighborhood savings and loan – a kind of multicultural version of the friendly bank in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But the real World Bank is headed up not by Jimmy Stewart, but by people like Paul Wolfowitz, a man whom his best friend wouldn’t call a soft touch. Confirmed as the bank’s boss in 2005, Wolfowitz immediately proclaimed he was on a mission of mercy:
“Helping the poorest of the world to lift themselves out of poverty is a noble mission or, as former Secretary of State George Shultz said, ‘a beautiful mission.’ ”
But, the Sisters of Charity do not have to worry about the competition. Wolfowitz has been one of Washington’s biggest hawks, ever since the days when he argued for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. To this day, he likes to praise Indonesia’s Suharto, who in his 32-year reign looted $30 billion from the public treasury and turned his country into one of the most corrupt in the world.
Of course, on second thought, that might be the perfect resume for the World Bank…..
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Lila Rajiva is the co-author with Bill Bonner of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets”
(Wiley, August 31, 2007) and the author of the ground-breaking study, “Abu Ghraib and the American Media,” (December, 2005). She blogs at The Mind-Body Politic. She can be reached at lrajiva@hotmail.com.
Call for a Coalition Against Arming Theocratic States
By Lenni Brenner
It is time for enlightened Americans, religious or unbelievers, to unite in a coalition against arming theological states. Its immediate task would be to help defeat both parts of President Bush’s scheme to sell $20 billion worth of satellite-guided bombs, fighters and naval vessels to Saudi Arabia and five other Persian Gulf states, and increase US military grants to Israel by 25%, to $30.4 billion over 10 years.
No mincing words: Since the beginning of the cold war against ‘godless Communism,’ one of Washington’s overriding Middle Eastern strategies, arming religious states, has been catastrophic for the region’s people. Bush’s extension of it guarantees more disasters for them and Americans.
The 7/28 New York Times described his strategy:
“[T]o contain the growing power of Iran in the region and to demonstrate that, no matter what happens in Iraq, Washington remains committed to its longtime Arab allies.”
Everyone old enough to cross streets alone knows that oil is the consideration. After WW ll, the US replaced Britain as the Gulf’s imperial overlord, and he seeks to dominate the economically crucial region. But the vast majority of Arabs and Iranians know, thru experience, that official Washington remains their nonstop enemy.
In 1948, Democrat Harry Truman, needing campaign funds from wealthy pro-Zionist Jews, recognized officially Orthodox Jewish Israel. He loaned it money used to buy weapons to drive hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians into exile. In 1953, Republican Dwight Eisenhower shifted gears. He brought Said Ramadan of the Muslim Brotherhood to the White House. The US patronized Islamic fundamentalism against the Soviets and those Iranians and Arabs seeking to nationalize their countries’ imperialist owned oil industries.
That year, Eisenhower’s CIA overthrew Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddegh for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. It restored Shah Muhammad Reza Palevi’s “For the Shah, Iran and Islam” despotism. Regime opponents were tortured and murdered for 26 years. Eventually the Shia clergy broke with the US puppet, bringing him down in 1979. That’s their valid domestic claim to legitimacy. But their Islamic republic is brutal. Nevertheless, its millions of internal opponents, anti-regime Muslims, atheists, drinkers, feminists, gays, Marxists, Baluchi and Kurdish nationalists, etc., don’t want the US or Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear installations, or the US trying to replace the Ayatollahs with yet another marionette.
The US learned nothing from its Iranian debacle. That same year, Democrat Jimmy Carter secretly started arming Afghan Sunni fundamentalists against the Soviet-imposed regime in Kabul. They won under Republican Ronald Reagan, who allied with the Saudis in a jihad against ‘godless’ Communism. The first thing America’s fundos did was take away rights women had under the pro-Soviet regime. Then they fought among themselves, with the Taliban winning.
In 1991, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and old Bush sent thousands of troops to Saudia to protect the pro-American regime. Osama bin Laden, a leader of bipartisan Washington’s terrorist allies in Afghanistan, finally realized that the Saudi dynasty were American dependents. He broke with them and the ‘Crusaders’ and, in time, blew up the World Trade Center, killing thousands of innocents.
“Blow back” is CIA slang for unforeseen negative consequences of its plots and 9/11 was truly the inevitable result of Washington’s using religious fanatics in its imperial machinations. Although bin Laden had broken with the dynasty, post-9/11 Saudia is absolutely unpopular here. Fifteen of the 19 plane hijackers were Saudi citizens. Americans, right to left, understand that they were inevitable end-products of the regime’s indoctrination.
The country’s male chauvinism is spectacular. Women must wear veils in public and can’t drive cars. They need their father or husband’s approval to leave the country. There is blatant discrimination against Shia Muslims. Open Christian churches are forbidden. So it isn’t surprising that the proposal to further arm this ultimate high-tech medieval regime has generated A to Z opposition to Bush’s scheme.
American Atheists, Inc., founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who got prayers tossed out of US public schools, warns that
“Bush’s plan to sell $20 billion of advanced military hardware to Saudi Arabia and five other Persian Gulf states, and provide more aid to Israel threatens to further destabilize the region and fuel religion-based terrorism.”
Ellen Johnson, AA’s President, added that
“Creating jobs and economic opportunity, securing full rights for the region’s women, encouraging an authentic civil society with personal rights — all of this is needed to challenge the rampant clerical terrorism that plagues the Middle East.”
Israel, worried about Shia Iran’s nuclear ambitions, backs Bush’s sales to Sunni Saudia. But some pro-Zionist Congressional Democrats are opposed. They claim that the Saudi regime backs Sunni terrorists in Iraq, killing American troops. More important. they fear for Israel if the dynasty were to be overthrown. Alternative regimes, left or Al-Qaeda, would be serious foes. They feel that increasing US arms to Israel can’t compensate it for the risk that the weapons sold to the Saudis would ultimately be used by its determined opponents.
When Israel is denounced for its crimes, Zionists typically respond by asking ‘why is Israel being singled out? Why aren’t people also crying out against Saudi Arabia’s crimes?’ Israel shouldn’t be singled out. Americans must oppose arms going to all governments violating human rights. But aren’t these Democrats now singling out Saudi Arabia? Why aren’t they likewise excoriating Israel for its political sins?
Moshe Katsav just resigned as Israel’s President. The Attorney General announced sufficient evidence to indict him for raping his office manager. Eventually he pled guilty to committing an indecent act under coercion. This is usually punished by up to 10 years imprisonment but he got a one-year suspended sentence. Twenty-thousand people demonstrated in the streets, demanding that he go to prison.
Katsev was President of an Orthodox Jewish state. Every morning an adult Orthodox male thanks God for “making me a man, not a woman.” Women thank him for “making me what I am.” They are segregated in Orthodox synagogues. Wives can’t divorce their husbands in the country’s religious courts and there is no civil divorce. If their husbands won’t divorce them, they can’t remarry. There are thousands of women in this situation.
“Reform Judaism” is America’s largest Jewish sect. “Conservative Judaism” its 2nd largest. Orthodoxy is 3rd, ca. only 10% of US Jews. There are Reform and Conservative Israeli rabbis, but they can’t perform legal marriages. Only Orthodox rabbis can. And of course there is no Israeli civil marriage. Israel’s Palestinian minority must also marry in religious ceremonies. In the ultimate theocratic state comedy, an Israeli supreme court judge had to go to Cyprus to marry a Conservative woman.
Theoretically, all Israeli male Jews must serve in the military. Some Orthodox become regular soldiers. But others do their hitch in Orthodox-only units, shielded against contact with Jewish women soldiers who might be menstruating. Another 11% of 18 year olds are completely exempt from the military so they can study theology, while Israel’s many atheists must kill or be killed, fighting for a state rooted in their legal inequality.
Orthodox superiority over rival Judaic sects is superimposed on massive colonial inequality for native Palestinian Muslims, Christians, Druze and atheists. In 1948, Israel drove hundreds of thousands from their homes. The truth is in the uncensored University of California edition of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s Memoirs, published after his 1995 assassination by a Zionist:
“‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring. Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the ten to fifteen miles to the point where they met up with the legion. The inhabitants of Rami watched and learned the lesson. Their leaders agreed to evacuate voluntarily, on condition that the evacuation was carried out by vehicles.”
Religious inequality went further after Israel’s 1967 victory. All ‘Israeli’ settlements in the West Bank are Jews-only, even though 1.4 million of Israel’s 7.1 million citizens are Palestinian. Some of these, male members of the Druze sect, Muslim Bedouins, and some Christians, fight in Zionism’s wars. Yet none can live in the settlements. And some Jews-only settlements are Orthodox-only. Not even atheist Zionists can live in them.
Bush just signed an “Advance Democracy Act,” requiring the State Department to develop strategies helping tyrannies turn into democracies. No one takes it seriously. The pro-Bush NY Sun reported that “passage into law comes as Mr. Bush himself has abandoned most of his democracy promotion agenda.” The Gulf arms deal means the end of “any remnant of public pressure for these states to afford their citizens the rights to assembly, free speech, or petition.” And Bush and the Democrats wouldn’t dream of applying the law to Israel. To hear them tell it, ‘Israel,’ with its legal ethnic, religious and sexual inequalities, ‘is the only democracy in the Middle East.’
The proposed coalition’s constant task must be education. Few Americans are familiar with Washington’s Middle Eastern history. Few know their party’s role. Even fewer understand the theological distinctions between Sunni and Shia Islam, or know that Israel has no civil marriage or divorce. The young never heard of the Shah. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was Reagan’s favorite among his Afghan anti-Soviet “freedom fighters,” but how many voters know that he is now killing American troops? How many can explain the conflict between Palestinian Hamas and Fatah or why the US backs Fatah?
The coalition must establish a “just the facts, ma’am” website where everyone can get the details re the above topics and more. Among other things, the public should be able to conveniently read the program of the major political players in the region, theological or secularist.
Members must agree to its prime demand, no weapons to theocratic states, anywhere. But disagreement is inevitable re how to get to a democratic secular Middle East in a democratic secular world. That’s good because debates between members, and with supporters of Washington’s policies, would attract attention to the coalition message.
Every wannabe presidential candidate of every party expected to be on the 2008 ballot should be questioned, ASAP, re arming religious states, and the public should be informed of their answers or failure to answer.
Given the disastrous history of Democratic and Republican arming of religious fanatics, the coalition and the public would benefit from debating whether it should endorse a candidate of a 3rd party committed to ending arming religious states, particularly Saudi Arabia and Israel, but with the proviso that individual members would still be free to vote as they wished.
There are existing rival coalitions dealing with aspects of the Middle East. Many demand that the US get out of Iraq. Others call for justice for Palestinians, others oppose war with Iran. US gays speak out against gay executions in Iran. Feminists demand equal rights for Afghan women. The proposed coalition should always act as a catalyst trying to unify the broad movement in action. In general, it should ask to speak at anti-war rallies on issues related to its mandate and, where invited to do so, help build such actions, especially among secularists.
Allow me a personal theological/political point as the proponent of such a coalition. I’m an atheist. But the new movement shouldn’t be an atheist front. There are atheist Zionists. There are atheist Arab nationalists who use terror against Israel. But every July 4th, Americans remember Thomas Jefferson, a deist, not an atheist, who did his best to separate church and state in his new republic. The new coalition can end arming of bigot states if it educates America about what he meant by religious freedom.
Some readers are atheists, some are religious. That’s fine. His last written words were about his Declaration of Independence and its meaning for the world. If you are interested in scrolling him up to our times and building such a coalition to operate in their spirit, contact me:
“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.
The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
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Lenni Brenner was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. He became an atheist at 10, and a left political activist at 15, in 1952. He was arrested 3 times during civil rights sit-ins in the San Francisco Bay Area. He spent 39 months in prison when a court revoked his probation for marijuana possession, because of his activities during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement at the University of California in 1964.
Immediately on imprisonment, he spent 4 days in intense discussion with Huey Newton, later founder of the Black Panther Party, whom he encountered in the court holding tank.
He was an antiwar activist from the 1st days of the Vietnam war, speaking frequently at rallies in the Bay Area. In 1963 he organized the Committee for Narcotic Reform in Berkeley. In 1968 he co-founded the National Association for Irish Justice, the American affiliate of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association.
He worked with Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), the legendary “Black Power” leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the Committee against Zionism and Racism, from 1985 until Ture’s death in 1998.
Brenner is the author of 4 books, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Jews in America Today, and The Lesser Evil, a study of the Democratic Party. His books have been favorably reviewed in 11 languages by prominent publications, including the London Times, The London Review of Books, Moscow’s Izvestia and the Jerusalem Post.
He has written over 120 articles for many publications, including the American Atheist, New York’s Amsterdam News, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, The Atlanta Constitution, CounterPunch, The Jewish Guardian, The Nation, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Middle East Policy, Middle East International, The Journal of Palestine Studies, The New Statesman of London, Al-Fajr in Jerusalem and Dublin’s United Irishman.
In 2002 he edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis.
It contains complete translations of many of the documents quoted in
Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and The Iron Wall.
In 2004 he edited Jefferson & Madison On Separation of Church and State:
Writings on Religion and Secularism.
He blogs at www.smithbowen.net/linfame/brenner and can be reached at BrennerL21@aol.com.
I don’t have to do any promotion on this book. Read the news and you can’t get away from the theme of “Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets.”
Here’s the mob mind at work in the President’s latest speech on Iran. Haven’t we heard it all? Lies, damn lies, and not even a statistic in sight. It’s WMD in Iraq, Volume 2. No mushroom clouds this time — the threat is nuclear holocaust, nothing less. Who could possibly believe this? It’s not even clear where the Iranians have got in their nuclear research; meanwhile the U.S. has enough nuclear weapons to blow up the planet several times over. But no — the government tells us we need to be afraid — oh so, afraid.
Why do people buy this stuff? Over and over?
Here’s Glen Greenwald at Salon, via blogger, Firedoglake (thanks for the tip to Ali Eteraz)
George Bush, speaking before yet another military audience, yesterday delivered what might actually be the most disturbing speech of his presidency, in which he issued more overt war threats than ever before towards Iran:
The other strain of radicalism in the Middle East is Shia extremism, supported and embodied by the regime that sits in Tehran. Iran has long been a source of trouble in the region. It is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran backs Hezbollah who are trying to undermine the democratic government of Lebanon. Iran funds terrorist groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which murder the innocent, and target Israel, and destabilize the Palestinian territories. Iran is sending arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan, which could be used to attack American and NATO troops. Iran has arrested visiting American scholars who have committed no crimes and pose no threat to their regime. And Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust. Iran’s actions threaten the security of nations everywhere. And that is why the United States is rallying friends and allies around the world to isolate the regime, to impose economic sanctions. We will confront this danger before it is too late (Applause.)
Leave aside all of the dubious premises — the fact that the U.S. is supposed to consider Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” because of its support for groups that are hostile to Israel; that Iran is arming its longstanding Taliban enemies; that Iran is some sort of threat to Iraq’s future even though it is an ally of Iraq’s government; and that Iran’s detention of American-Iranians inside its own country is anything other than retaliation for our own equally pointless detention of Iranians inside of Iraq, to say nothing of a whole slew of other provacative acts we have recently undertaken towards Iran. Leave all of that aside for the moment. Viewed through the prism of presidential jargon, Bush’s vow — “We will confront this danger before it is too late” — is synonymous with a pledge to attack Iran unless our array of demands are met. He is unmistakably proclaiming that unless Iran gives up its nuclear program and fundamentally changes its posture in the Middle East, “we will confront this danger.” What possible scenario could avert this outcome?
By now it is unmistakably clear that it is not only — or even principally — Iran’s nuclear program that is fueling these tensions. As Scott Ritter and others have long pointed out, the fear-mongering warnings about an Iranian “nuclear holocaust” (obviously redolent of Condoleezza Rice’s Iraqi smoking gun “mushroom cloud”) is but the pretext for achieving the true goal — regime change in Tehran. Bush all but said so yesterday:
We seek an Iran whose government is accountable to its people — instead of to leaders who promote terror and pursue the technology that could be used to develop nuclear weapons.
In other words, we “seek” a new government in Iran. Are there really people left who believe, with confidence, that Bush is going to leave office without commencing or provoking a military confrontation with Iran? Bush also added: “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.” To underscore the fact that this is not mere rhetoric, the U.S. military in Iraq, following Bush’s speech, arrested and detained eight Iranian energy experts meeting in Baghdad with the Iraqi government — handcuffing, blindfolding, and interrogating them — only to then release them when the Iraqi government protested. The path we are on — with 160,000 of our troops in Iran’s neighbor, escalating war-threatening rhetoric, and increasingly provocative acts — is obviously the path to war….”