Volcker Too Dem for Dems

Why Republicans Have More Fun
If you’ve noticed, Republicans allow themselves a lot more space for self-expression than do Democrats. Reps can fly as far right as their dark fantasies will carry them. So, their cohorts are dense with yahoos bent on refighting the Northern War of Aggression, rewriting the Bible to make it more business friendly, reviving slavery, removing fluoride from school books, and issuing Glocks to all newborns.
They can candidly champion Vlad the Impaler because the extreme right, for all of its wackiness, is business friendly. Indeed, their lumpen legions have traditionally provided cheerleaders and strikebreakers for our corporate sector. Thus our body politic accepts them and our media heed them no matter what nonsense they spew.
By contrast, the Democrats are intensely uptight. The uttermost sin in their ranks is any expression of leftism beyond what it takes to persuade voters that Dems are slightly more progressive than Reps. To put personalities on that policy, Pelosi is presentable but Kucinich is poison. Naderism, or anything to its port side, is the ultimate evil.
The obvious reason is that leftism, as opposed to centrism and rightism, challenges corporate rule. And by leftism, I don’t mean Lenin, Mao, Che and bloody revolution. We’ve moved so far to the right in recent decades that even the business as usual we used to practice is now seen as subversive.
Consider the case of Paul Volcker. A literal and figurative Wall Street giant at 6’8”, Volcker spent a lifetime serving the Rockefeller interests and presiding over the Federal Reserve under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Not exactly a pink resume.
President Obama named Volcker as a top adviser on the economy. The problem is that the advice that Volcker is giving the prez is considered a pinch too old-style Democratic for the Obamacrats. Volcker, like FDR, wants to cut the wild bulls of Wall Street down to size by re-restricting banks to banking and brokerages to brokering. It was under such a regime that we enjoyed 60 years of a thriving industrial economy and few financial follies.
“The banks are there to serve the public,” Mr. Volcker says, “and that is what they should concentrate on. These other activities [i.e., trading trash paper and extreme leveraging] create conflicts of interest. They create risks, and if you try to control the risks with supervision, that just creates friction and difficulties, and ultimately fails.”
For its part, the Obama administration prefers to “let the giants survive, but...regulate them extensively.” Its desultory efforts in that direction are said to be “languishing” in Congress while the monster money houses commit usury as usual and lobby against any reform at all.
When Obama named him to the newly created post of chairman of The President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB), Volcker got an office in Washington. The Times says he “rarely if ever” uses it lately, preferring to remain in New York. Published reports have it that “his influence in the administration is fading.” Volcker’s days in Obamaland appear numbered. You can bank on it--at your nearest Goldman Sachs branch.

(All quotes taken from linked article)

In Our Future

Bubbles and Bombs
There are two lame ass apologias for Obama’s miserable record so far. One is that he’s only been in office nine months. The second, supposedly passed on to a journalist by a White House aide, is that “governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult."
The first implies that Obama has been busy cleaning up Bush’s messes and applying fresh policies whose benefits are yet to be felt. The second implies that political division is slowing his efforts. Both excuses conveniently ignore the reality that Obama had done some awful things over these last nine months. Two of them, that will effect us for decades to come, stand out. The first is that he’s signed off on the completion of Wall Street’s takeover of Washington. If you accept the notion that money rules, our government is now run by the bubble manufacturers Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citi Group and their confreres.
The federal outgo for bailouts and war spending are roughly equal to the income from taxes. That means that everything else that Uncle Sam does is financed by borrowing. That borrowing is brokered through the very same financial houses receiving bailouts. In other words, Goldman Sachs et al get money from us for free and then lend it back to us at interest--on their own terms and to the tune of trillions.
Barack Obama received more campaign money from Goldman than any candidate ever. A revealing AP story tells us that the telephone traffic between treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and the top guys at Goldman, JP Morgan Chase and Citi is all but adolescent in its frequency. Geithner is obviously checking with the people really in charge.
The other travesty is that Obama has apparently acquiesced to what conservative bloviator John McLoughlin calls “an orthodoxy of continuous war.” His Pentagon (or is it the Pentagon’s Obama?) is busy opening new military/corporate subsidiaries around the planet. These bases from the Amazon Basin to central Asia are to be garrisoned by both troops and private contractors. In the early days of our empire, it was the military that cleared the way for business, as in 1852 when Admiral Perry’s warships shelled Tokyo to encourage the Japanese to open their economy to U.S. investors. Today, the two are indistinguishable.
There’s more bad news from the Obama administration, such as its decision to reaffirm the Patriot Act and continue Bush’s attacks on civil liberties. But let’s leave it for now.
On July 19, 2008, I posted a blog called Two Scenarios. The first posited that Obama would sincerely attempt to deliver the change he promised. The second worried that he would be yet another servant of business as usual. It looks like we’ve come up snake eyes.

Scandal-navia

A Not So Noble Nobel
I heard this morning that Barack Obama will have to take time out from strategizing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, supervising the Pentagon’s new Africa Command, propping up a murderous military coup in Honduras, reviving the Fourth Fleet to police a peaceful (until now) Latin America, opening a new string of bases in Colombia, calling air strikes and commando raids from the Horn of Africa to the Philippines, and helping America to sell more weapons to more countries than the whole rest of the world combined, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.
I guess the next thing is to give Colonel Sanders the Lifetime Vegetarian award.

Kitchen Magic

The Indispensable Ingredient
I know you expect political rants from me, but sometimes weighty affairs just have to wait.* As some of you know, I’m an ardent fan of cooking shows and devour the Wednesday NY Times Dining Section as if it were a well-seasoned meatloaf. Therefore, I thought I might try my hand at gourmet glamour blogging by exploring trendy and exciting new ways to celebrate a commonplace item available in every kitchen. Who knows, this effort may grow into the next Larousse or Joy of Cooking. One can hope. So, anyway, here are some tips on using this all but magic ingredient.
To start off, it’s amazingly versatile, a complement to any meal and a must for many. Cooks everywhere, be they range royalty or tyro toast burners, can’t praise it enough. And it’s at the heart of myriad ethnic cuisines. Enough build-up. I’m talking about water, the new star of the kitchen!
You can use it not only to boil an egg, but also to clean up your pan and plate afterwards. It’s excellent for washing salads, fruits and even snap peas. Try it hot with Nesquick and enjoy a nice cup of near cocoa.
My grandmother, Matija, who was an ethnic crone, liked to cook fish in it. She would buy baccala (salt cod), and put it in a pot of water with garlic, onion, potato, olive oil and other ingredients. Then she would heat it slowly on a stove. After several hours, it was ready to eat. I recall as a youngster that it stunk up the house for days. I used to lock myself in the bathroom to get away from the smell. By the way, our bathroom had water available from several faucets. There was even a flush bowl of water that the dog used to drink from.
Many claim medicinal or even magical qualities for water. In the hills of Bosnia, not far from the alleged Catholic shrine of Medjugorje, there’s a stream that flows with what the locals call muska voda, or men’s water. It is said to instill male virility. The peasants learned this generations ago when the spaghetti they were boiling stood straight up in the pot.
One of my favorite uses for water is to freeze it into small cubes and then put them in a glass and pour whisky over them. This can be done year round, but tastes cooler on a hot summer day. On the other end of the thermometer, consider that hot water does wonders for JELL-O powder.
The French think it sinful to mix water with wine. In the Adriatic region, by contrast, there’s a summer custom of adding a bit of water, either in its liquid or solid form, to wine, creating a drink they call bevanda that a self-respecting Frenchie would quickly expectorate. Chaque pays à son guise.
However you want to use it, you’ll be happy to know that water is widely available (except in desert or drought areas) and relatively inexpensive. Many stores sell it in glass or plastic bottles. Both domestic and foreign bottled waters are popular with folks on the run, who carry them on their persons in little holsters designed for the purpose. Automobiles often have cup holders that can be used for water as well as gin and tonic.
Additionally, just about everybody has access to water right in their home, rental apartment, condo, coop or even vacation cabin. This water flows from faucets, typically located in kitchens and bathrooms. That makes it extra handy for cooking and washing. This may not be the case in poor countries.
For a wonderful assortment of recipes, I recommend “Cooking With Water” by Hy Drater, published by River Books and available at Amazon.
A word of caution: Though water is generally safe, it should be used judiciously. Too much and you’ll drown; too little and you’ll die of thirst.
Stay wet until next time, when The Karman Turn takes a gourmet gander at the longtime love-hate relationship between salt and pepper.
*Credit for that line goes to the writers of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Mullahs and Morons

Even Our Wars Are Dumbed Down
Remember the Cold War? It was about the future. It was about which modern system of organizing society, capitalism or communism, would win the world. You could read a library full of books by deep thinkers arguing for one side or the other. It was a scary and repressive time, but also an intellectually stimulating one.
Our latest epic conflict with the Islamic equivalent of our holy rollers is all about the past and not nearly so edifying. The other side relies on just one book, the Koran, which one is supposed to peruse only in the original Arabic. Our side reads Tweets.
Their side is characterized by semi-literate theocrats who’ve beamed up from the seventh century to sow stupidity and slay infidels. Our side stands for a decadent empirium that calls itself the greatest when it means the greediest. For all their detestation of each other, both are compatibly reactionary. They clash mainly on eating pork rinds.
The great declaration of this conflict was My Pet Goat, read by George W. Bush as the World Trade Center and Pentagon burned. It was his equivalent of Pope Urban II’s marching orders to the soldiers of Christ back in 1095 “to let the deeds of your ancestors like Charlemagne and his son Louis move you to destroy the kingdoms of the pagans and extend the territory of the Holy Church.”
Our invasion of Iraq and investment of Iran were perfectly understandable. Their peoples resembled, at least to us, the presumed authors of the 9/11 atrocity. What's more, their pagan kingdoms were ripe for conquest and conversion. We wanted their oil and we wanted to use them as bases to dominate the region. We still do.
Afghanistan, however, I just don't get. Bombing its rubble into dust? Killing the survivors of countless massacres? Nation building by way of Predator missiles? For what? Afghanistan is not a state but a congerie of feudal clans who have mastered just enough western technology to fight off the infidelic present. Even if the Taliban harbored Al Qaeda, invading Afghanistan to get at them made as much sense as assaulting Italy to shut down the Sopranos.
After eight years of fighting off the world's most powerful military, the Taliban's elusive Mullah Omar says his side is just getting warmed up. “We would like to point out,” he offered in recent days, “that we fought against the British for 80 years from 1839 to 1919 before defeating them and gaining our independence."
Meanwhile, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, worries that we are losing the battle of ideas in Afghanistan to people who had their last fresh thought fourteen hundred years ago. What an insult to our country!
Back in the Cold War, the righties were glomming onto Burke, Kirk, Hayek and Rand, while the lefties were devouring Marx, Marcuse, Mills and Sartre. There were study circles, teach-ins, free universities, alternate schools. Everyone was an ideologue or an analyst. Brains rather than boobs were on display on campuses. Not any more.
Today our politics are populated by Palinites who don’t know an ideology from an ice cream cone. They say there are also intelligent progressives out there somewhere. If they got involved they could outsmart the cretinous righties at every turn and restore the country to membership in western civilization. One wonders why they’re not marching on Washington, crowding the yahoos out of the town hall meetings, and massively mocking the pols and the media like a million Michael Moores and Bill Mahers? Let’s go, folks!

When Government Is Gone

What If It's Privatna Enterprise?
My morning blat tells me that Mikhail Prokhorov, one of the richest and tallest men in Russia, is dickering to buy the New Jersey Nets. Nintendo and one of its Japanese execs already own the Seattle Mariners, and the Chinese have a chunk of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Rich Russkies are the new Steinbrenners of British soccer.
So what does this have to do with the yahoos who’ve taken to the streets to slag Obama and big government as the mother of all their miseries?
The basic notion of American conservatism is that private does just about everything better, and certainly more profitably, than public. America won’t become a truly free and prosperous nation, intones hard right strategist Grover Norquist, until we shrink government to the size of a baby and drown it in the bath tub.
Being a proudly provincial and putatively patriotic bunch, the righties assume that when this happy day arrives, the private interests that subsume the public weal will be flying the stars and stripes over their corporate HQs and speaking English in their boardrooms. That's not necessarily so.
Like the town meeting harpy who told the tv that she didn’t want socialism “like in Russia” only 20 years after that country had turned capitalist, the American right has apparently missed globalization and the vast run-up in foreign debt that feeds this current economic mess. No doubt they’ve been in church rehearsing for the rapture.
Forbes tells me that foreign corporate investment in the U.S. jumped 88 percent between 2005 and 2007 and now totals well over $200 billion. And that’s a mere tear drop in that bath tub compared to the Treasury and corporate paper held by folks whose passports Rush Limbaugh would have trouble reading.
Wouldn’t it be fun if the right wingers got their wish so that the government disappeared and they woke up one morning to find Russian, Saudi, Chinese, Iraqi and, ugh, even French corporate honchos running the show instead of the Old Glory waving and hot dog eating politicos who now populate the Potomac?
Such a takeover is not likely soon. There’s still plenty of juice in American capitalism, even if it’s leaking out at a ferocious rate. And even if foreign economic dominance did transpire, the nominally nationalist knuckleheads of the right would quickly adjust.
We learned that a couple of decades back when Japanese automakers began opening assembly plants in Dear Old Dixie. One would have assumed that the region’s reputation for conservatism, racism and rebelliousness promised trouble for companies owned by the progeny of those who sucker punched us at Pearl Harbor and were depicted all through World War II in viciously racist propaganda.
But no. Toyota, Honda and Nissan managers praised their southern workers as among the most docile and obedient in their multinational operations. Though paid far below what UAW workers get, they’ve yet to say yes to union, let alone to strike. They’re happy with whatever papa san doles out.
Southerners know how to save their race baits and rebel yells for the weekends. Weekdays, they're pleased to perform for anyone who pays them regardless of provenance or pigmentation. Like other Americans, they supplicate in the presence of spondulicks. So I wouldn’t sweat the transformation of the Nets into the Nyets. The fans will just shout Da! instead of Rah!

Hassles and Missiles

Taking the Public Private
The health care hassle is the latest and biggest example of the unthinking caps we have pulled down over our brows, reducing our reasoning resources to the range of rodents.
Even the pundits who do our political parsing for us are impressed by the depths of the shallowness to which they have mis-educated us. There are countless petty stupidities out there, but one big one stands out for its prodigious and apparently permanent power.
It is that we have agreed as a nation that, in the sacred name of free enterprise, we will not do anything for the public unless its main beneficiaries are private. Or to put it another way, we will not do anything for the public, except to hope, as Kenneth Galbraith so pungently put it, that some of the oats we feed to the horses will fall to the road for the sparrows. Thus we have transmogrified our proud eagle into a cash cow.
We now fight our wars with mercenary contractors. They don’t take orders from our military and are markedly free to rip us off, screw everything up, and make more enemies than they kill. And so we gag at the case of the fabulously freaky private U.S. embassy guards acting as if every night in Kabul was Halloween on Castro Street. Our government, in this case Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, says we have to bend over and bear it because private companies providing such services are rare, if not unique. Remember when manly Marines protected our diplomats?
Despite our faith in God, we have nevertheless turned medicine into mammon even though Jesus never demanded a co-pay for His healing. Where once our health care provided succor, it now fleeces the suckers. Attempts to transform it into a public service as in every other first world country are denounced as devilish.
All those democratic and prosperous nations also provide their citizens with free education through college on the notion that public investment in smarts is smart. Meanwhile we have turned higher ed into humongous debt, graduating armies of beholden BA’s. I don’t see us bragging to the world about the fact that the average American 25-year-old college grad is up to his or her mortarboard in loans that will take years to pay down.
In Europe you can get from anywhere to everywhere on fast, frequent and reasonable public transportation. Here we once sentimentalized big country and small towns as the soul of America. Now we’re happy to let our rurals rot in isolation, watching their main streets blow away because it’s not profitable to serve them with privately run trains, planes, trucks and buses any more.
I could go on and on with similar examples of the collapse of the commons and the rise of the corporate. We are nine-tenths of the way to a society in which public discourse will be reduced to the question, “cash or credit?” Look forward to the day not far away when your house is burning, the kids are screaming, and you’re in telephone hell trying to give your Mastercard number to “Firefighters Are Us, Inc.”

Barack Goes Un-Ballistic
Zeus only knows how many zillions of our tax tributes have already been spent on the European Space Defense, whose abortion was announced today by the Obama Administration.
If you paid attention, you’ll know that the ESD was supposed to be an array of radars and missiles placed by the Pentagon in Poland and the Czech Republic to protect against Iranian rocket raids on northern Europe, particularly Scotland, Ireland and Iceland.
Why we should pay for such idiotic schemes was never noted. Likewise ignored was why Iran, which hasn’t attacked anyone in 250 years, would want to zap those countries. Of course, those things don't have to be explained or justified in our body politic. Our defense contractors have long since indoctrinated us into the illogic that our designated enemies are bound to commit evil everywhere and under every circumstance, thus necessitating our “full spectrum” response everywhere and anytime--regardless, of course, of the cost-plus cost. It’s the same as the burglar alarm sales rep insisting that you buy one for every closet, cupboard and cranny to ensure “total security.”
To be sure, those in the know knew that the ESD was really aimed at bullying the Russkies, who saw those missiles as more of a threat to St. Petersburg than a deterrent to Persia, while at the same time greasing the Poles, cashing the Czechs, and engorging Lockheed and its like.
So, Obama has put the ESD out of its misery. Maybe he even got some concession from Moscow for his troubles. No doubt, the good folks in Donegal and Reykjavik will resume shivvering in their splendid sweaters from renewed Iran-o-phobia.
As I read the early indications, the right people are rollicking and the wrong ones are roiling at the decision. So I guess our smart president has done something smart for a change. He says he favors an alternate Euro defense against the peaceable Persians using smaller missiles. Let’s hope that's just balderdash to hush up the losers. I give him a thumbs up, finally.

Cowardice Confirmed

What a Pill
The blog just below this one was written before the speech last night in which Pres. Obama backed off his “public option” since it faced opposition by Republicans with whom he wished to demonstrate his high-minded bipartisanship and maybe even get them to go along with his bigger and badder war in Afghanistan. His surrender statement said: “The public option is only a means to that end – and we should remain open to other ideas that accomplish our ultimate goal.” And though he said health care was a vital public issue, he didn't call for public support to get it done. Rather, he said compromise with the Republicans, who abhor him and regard any reform as "socialism," was the way to go. Having watched and then read the speech, I see no reason to change a word of what I had written earlier.

From the Chronicles of Cowardice

Glenn Beck 1
Barack Obama 0
Whereas Harry Truman would have no doubt treated the guy to a hearty “give ‘em hell” and a celebratory tumbler of bourbon, Barack Obama fired White House aide Van Jones for insulting Republicans, and, in particular, annoying Glenn Beck. Or to put it another way, Glenn Beck, of all people, became a presidential personnel manager.
By showing Mr. Jones the back door, Obama was sending two signals. The first underlined that Obama is a typical Dem, growling at anything to his left and groveling at anything to his right. It was a warm-up for his forthcoming congressional battle with the Reps over health care. Who wants to bet that the Dems won’t start with compromise and, at the merest hint of opposition, move swiftly to capitulation?
The second was that we no longer have to take Obama seriously. Given our fatuous politics, there comes a time when every president is recast as a fool and gentle parody becomes grisly put-down. Given their awful personalities, Nixon and Bush II got the raspberry almost from the git-go. It has taken Obama, a cooler type, six months to don the clown costume.
There’s an old bromide that says never wrestle with a pig because you only get dirty and the pig enjoys it. Even worse is the pig winning. The Elmer Fudd-faced Glenn Beck was already a farce on his way to becoming a freak. He had dumbly accused our half-white president of hating whites, for which he lost dozens of sponsors. He had begun inspecting old paintings for pinko propaganda. He found subversive depictions of carpenters using hammers and farmers wielding sickles. He sobbed a lot on his show, leading to bets on when he would move on to public pants wetting. And he went on the wacko warpath against the "Bolshevik," "Marxist, "anarchist," "fascist," anti-Christ Van Jones, who was spreading the stigmata of socialism to all and sundry from his White House cubby hole of communism. Surely, Beck was nearing the Joe Pyne-Morton Downey, Jr., moment of self-destruction.
By firing Van Jones in the middle of the night for calling Republicans “assholes,” Barack Obama not only saved Beck from himself, but made him an even bigger star on the right--someone who could bully the leader of the free world. Not even the mighty Limbaugh had such a scalp on his belt. No wonder Obama’s crestfallen aides on the Sunday talk shows looked like they had just been convicted of wimpery with intent to cringe.
Contrast this exercise in pusillanimity to the incident a few years back when Vice President Dick Cheney told Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont to “go fuck himself.” As far as I know, the Reps all had a good laugh while the Democrat Leahy more than likely seriously considered the suggestion.
It looks like despite all the fertilizer that gets spread in Washington, there will never be enough to help Obama and the Dems to grow a pair.

Confronting the Terrace Menace

Cafe Socializing: New York City above. Split, Croatia, below.

Note the difference.

Cafes Harbor Socialization Threat
The Congregational church cater-corner from our house in West Tisbury specializes in ice cream and strawberry socials. Surely, those are not the socializations stirring a storm this summer. The coalition of the ignorant and inane appear instead to have their pitchforks out for European socializing. You can’t surf past Fox News or saunter in the environs of a town hall meeting without hearing some yahoo warn that American politicians are secret agents of Euro socializing and that they plan to infect us with it.
What exactly is this menace? I decided to look into it--at some risk, I may add, to my waist line. Early in the summer I surveilled subversive socialization sites along the Adriatic. This is my report:
Euro socializing consists in the main of sitting in cafes and not worrying about doctor bills, college tuition or scuffling for silver in your golden years. Instead, you schmooze with your friends about soccer, sex and the stupidity of Americans. As in: “Juventus looks great this season, Monique has a new boy friend, and I get a kick out of those dumb Americans paying through the nose so that their doctors can sail their gaudy yachts to Frejus and rent villas in Poggibonsi. Tee hee.”
Europeans are able to accomplish all of this socializing because they have vastly more outdoor tables and chairs under awnings and umbrellas than Americans do. In other words, there’s a cafe gap. Unlike the notorious missile gap from the 60’s, when American worried that they didn’t have enough rockets to blow up the world as many times as they wanted to, the cafe gap is real. And it’s not just patio furniture. Europe has an overwhelming lead in high-tech, multi-spigot expresso machines with awesome latte steaming capabilities.
Crewing these marvels are not just all-thumbs nerd grad students, but professional baristas versed in every trick in the book from infusions to spremutas. They’ve got your pastis coolly clouding on a coaster while their American counterparts are still asking, ‘”like what kind of drink is that, dude?”
It gets scarier. While America’s few socializing spots are relegated to malls or old neighbs turned trendy, the Euro ones have Roman ruins, castles, medieval plazas, and perfect seascapes providing the eye candy.
Can America breach the cafe curtain and deal with the terrace threat? It’s going to be hard. Socialization is anathema in many parts of our country. And cafe crawling is regarded by many as a waste of time more properly spent studying bankruptcy law or mortgage refinancing.
There may be hope. I was having a drink the other night with a right wing friend. As usual, he was damning government as the mother of all evil and private property as the father of all virtue. I was allowing that across the ocean in Christendom, government was regarded more as a comfortably off uncle who’s around to pick up the bills when mom gets sick or Hans heads off to college. He fumed that the welfare state was abomination. Then he thought a minute, perhaps recalling his last toke in Amsterdam or the taste of tomatoes in Taormina, and a small smile broke over his face as he offered, “Yeah, but I have to admit, those Euros know how to live.”