What would He do?

[Originally posted on goofyblog 11.03.06]

This article is for Republicans who’ve thought they were voting for officials (from Bush on down) to deliver principles of compassionate conservatism or any kind of conservatism other than that of a Christian Taliban. As George Washington said in 1796:

The government of the United States, is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.

Any idea that we were a Christian nation at inception is an idea of fiction. However, our government became a Christian government at Bush’s inauguration and continues to this day. Kay James, former dean of Pat Robertson’s Regent University was made head of the White House Office of Personnel. She then placed evangelicals throughout the Federal government bureaucracy. Evangelical organizations were allowed to draft bills that were then passed by the Republican Congress.

Below, I’ve created a synopsis of specifics (this comes form much longer article in the New York Review of Books found here):

Faith-Based Justice. Pentacostal Christian John Ashcroft, in a speech at Bob Jones University the separation of church and state was a “wall of religious oppression.” One of his first acts was to put an end to the task force set up by Janet Reno dealing with violence against abortion clinics. He did nothing when attacks on clinics went from 215 to 795 in the first year as AG.

Ashcroft used the Civil Rights Division, which had always focused on racial injustices, to protect religious discriminators such as The Salvation Army, which was requiring all employees to embrace Jesus Christ or be fired.

Faith-Based Social Services. Under the guise of “faith-based initiatives,” large grants were given to such religious causes as abstinence-only forms of sex education and to groups headed by Chuck Colson and Pat Robertson.

James Towey, the second director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (the first director resigned, complaining that the office was being used for political purposes) appeared at Republican-sponsored events in close races in 2002, showing African-American ministers how to apply and receive grants, in an effort to influence the black vote there.

Faith-Based Science. Bush urged schools to teach “intelligent design” along with Darwinism. Intelligent design is a religious, not a scientific concept. It would be the same as urging schools teach the Ptolemaic system (all planets revolve around the Earth) next to the Copernican system.
The National Park Service authorized the sale of a book at the Grand Canyon that claimed the canyon was formed by Noah’s flood. When scientists protested this, James Dobson’s Alliance Defense Fund threatened suit if the book was pulled.

In 2003, the White House had cautions against global warming removed from a 2003 draft report on the environment as it apparently conflicts with evangelical doctrine concerning the end times and Jesus’ return.

Faith-Based Health. Although abortion is still legal in the US, the President has used his powers to curtail abortion in the Third World by controlling the dissemination of aid. He restored the gag rule on organizations that counsel women in those countries. 30% of the AIDS money sent to Africa was solely to promote sexual abstinence while 0% was for condoms.

Meanwhile in the US, $170 million was spent promoting “abstinence-only” policies in schools in 2005 alone. And the CDC removed findings from their Web site that “abstinence-only” programs do not work. A study showed the “a-o” programs exaggerated the failure rates of condoms, spread false claims about abortion’s health risks and perpetuated claims that HIV could be transferred via sweat and tears.

The promise of embryonic stem cell research had to be beaten back and Bush was the go-to man for that. He spent time with Jay Lefkowitz, the White House liaison to the evangelicals, to find a way to cut off research. When Bush decreed that only stem cell lines already in use could be funded, he claimed there over 60; there were at most 16 and even those mostly unusable. Bush’s only veto blocked the stem research bill passed by Republicans.

Faith-Based War. When Gen. Boykin started giving lectures in churches (in full combat uniform) saying things like “[Bush’s] in the White House because God put him there for such a time as this” and calling all Muslims satanic, did Bush remove him (as Kennedy had done to Gen. Walker when he started promoting the John Birch Society to NATO troops)? Evangelicals rallied around him and no, that didn’t happen.

Those recruited to serve in the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) were asked if they had voted for Bush and for their view on abortion and capital punishment. The head of personnel of the CPA trolled conservative foundations, Republican congressional staffs, evangelical schools and relatives of prominent Republicans for staff. Instead of competence, the right moral attitude was what mattered.

Case in point: the first director of Iraqi health services, a veteran of disaster relief in Kosovo, Somalia and Kurdish Iraq, was replaced by James Haverman, whose experience consisted of running a Christian adoption agency that discouraged women from having abortions. Haverman’s first emphasis was on preventing Iraqis from smoking while ruined hospitals went wanting.

Evangelicals make up 1/3 of the population. Yet they are everywhere in our government. Now while a vast majority of Americans want a different direction, they are there to insure the US is headed to a theocracy. Think about that on November 7^th.

Every 40 Seconds

[Originally posted on goofyblog 10.24.06]

Reading Jacob Sullum’s weekly column, syndicated in the neo-con daily, New York Post, I was surprised to see that both Nevada and Colorado are attempting to legalize marijuana by referendum this November. In Nevada, the group opposing this move is called The Committee to Keep Nevada Respectable, which is funny since gambling and prostitution is not only legal, but keeps Nevadans from having a state income tax to pay. As Sullum says, the Committee seems to be saying: “Smoking pot is less respectable than a drunken gambling spree followed by a visit to a hooker.”

The measures have the backing of religious leaders, thanks to the help of the Interfaith Drug Policy Initiative, a religious group devoted to reforming the inhumane sentencing laws (787,000 arrests last year, 1 every 40 seconds).

But the prison/law enforcement/military complex is on the case. When Mexico passed a bill legalizing all drugs for personal use in April and Presidente Fox declared he would sign it, they went to work. By May, Fox declined to sign saying, “[Congress needs to] make it absolutely clear in our country, the possession of drugs and their consumption are, and will continue to be, a criminal offense.” Likewise, something called the Colorado Drug Investigators Association has declared: “proponents for legalization eat away at society’s resolve and moral fiber.” Right.

The War on Drugs is essentially a war on our citizens by other citizens, the sober ones, I guess you could call them, or the Puritan ones. In US history, there is only one Constitutional Amendment that has been repealed. The Founding Fathers made the passage of Amendments to the Constitution hard to do. That’s why we don’t have amendments against flag burning or gay marriage–yet.

But Prohibition was repealed. Not before there was a thriving gangster culture of bootleggers and smugglers, deaths from illegal booze and open disrespect for law and law enforcement personnel. But in those days, there were no urine tests at the work place, no draconian prison sentences for possession.

Shortly after repeal, the first marijuana laws went into effect. Could all the monies wasted on enforcement and punishment be better used for education, counseling or rehabilitation? Our homegrown drug “warriors” are at war, but what’s at stake is really their own job security, nothing more.

“The government spends an estimated $4 billion a year arresting and prosecuting marijuana crimes — more than it spends on treating addiction for all drugs — and more and more of those busts are for possession rather than dealing.” RS Article

Our Way of Life

[Originally posted on goofyblog 10.20.06]

In honor of the loss of habeas corpus in this country and Keith Olbermann’s intense editorial last night on MSNBC about it, everyone needs a quick review on what rights we still have left as U.S. citizens. The above film is from a group called flexyourrights.org.

Several years ago, I read the excellent book, Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters with Law Enforcement, written by Harvard Law School graduate, Katya Komisaruk. This youTube vid is a short, graphic representation of the concepts detailed in the book. It’s an eye-opener. [NOTE: This short is no longer available. It has been withdrawn because the complete video is being sold here, but you can still see the whole thing here.]

In these days of the futile, wasteful “War” on drugs, now in it’s 4^th decade (whose only purpose is to prop up the prison/law enforcement/military complex), the “no knock” search warrant and the rise of SWAT teams (leading to citizen as well as police deaths during mistaken-address/identity raids such as the Corey Maye case), the largest prison population on earth, the move in California to make certain citizens wear GPS bracelets at all times, this current move of the President is just more of the same “safety/security” bullshit that we’ve been consuming for, well, 40 years now. You may think “this won’t ever happen to me” and you might be right who knows what the future brings, but at the very least, you’ll be entertained and informed.

You’ll never learn this info from the hundreds of cops shows and movies that seem to be about 70% of the “entertainment” on television and in movie theatres. Good luck.

In closing, a few quotes for ya:

“It astonishes me to find … [that so many] of our countrymen … should be contented to live under a system which leaves to their governors the power of taking from them the trial by jury in civil cases, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce, the habeas corpus laws, and of yoking them with a standing army. This is a degeneracy in the principles of liberty … which I [would not have expected for at least] four centuries,”
- Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Stephens Smith, 1788.

Found on the Andrew Sullivan’s conservative blog, the Daily Dish.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-Ben Franklin

We will not allow the enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms.
-George W. Bush, September 12, 2001

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.
-Adolf Hitler

Housing & Oil

[Originally posted on goofyblog 10.14.06]

James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, recommended by Porter in the sidebar, writes frequently regarding our future energy needs and prospects.

It’s clear that unless a miracle energy source appears in the next decade or sooner, much of what he predicts will occur. This week, he posted an article about oil production, stock markets and housing/mortgage issues, excerpted here:

Against the background of everything else happening in the financial markets is the apparent circumstance of peak oil.
No more increasing capacity = peak oil.

It’s as simple as that. We now have nine and a half months of “rearview mirror” action to look back and see that world oil production has retreated from its all-time high of just over 85 million barrels a day (m/b/d) achieved in December 2005 (just as geologist Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton had predicted). For 2006, production has remained in the 84 m/b/d range every month reported so far, while demand has exceeded that.

Texas oil man Jeffrey Brown, a commentator at TheOilDrum.com, the outstanding oil discussion group on the Internet, makes the point that Saudi Arabia is at the same point statistically (in terms of ultimate recoverable reserves) that Texas was at in 1972 when production there peaked. The world’s four greatest oil fields are in depletion (Burgan [Kuwait], Daqing [China], Cantarell [Mexico], and Ghawar [Saudi Arabia]) and these have accounted for over 14 percent of the world’s oil production. (Ghawar alone accounts for over 60 percent of Saudi Arabia’s production.) The North Sea has peaked and production there is “crashing.”

Venezuela has peaked and its oil is low-quality heavy crude. Indonesia (an OPEC member) has peaked and is now a net oil importer. Nigeria’s political chaos is making production increasingly difficult-to-impossible.

Production in the Canadian tar sands is not making up for losses elsewhere. The United States is down to about a four-year supply of conventional crude and condensates while we import 70 percent of the oil we consume. Discovery of new oil (including Chevron’s largely hypothetical deepwater “Jack” finds) is barely covering a fraction of the world’s consumption. So it goes….

Where finance is concerned, the basic implication of peak oil is pretty stark: an end to industrial expansion (i.e. “growth”). All the alternatives to oil will not keep the industrial economies expanding - they can only slow down a contraction, and only marginally so.

The trouble with this picture is that finance is a system that uses paper markers to represent the hope and expectation for the expansion of wealth. These markers are currencies, stocks, bonds, option contracts, derivatives plays, and other certificates that are traded in open markets. If there is no longer any hope of increased wealth in the world, then all those tradable paper markers become losers. Their value unwinds and imagined piles of wealth evaporate into thin air.

The unwinding process depends on the psychology of the people who own these certificates. If they do not understand the global oil situation and its implications, then they will continue to hope for and expect expanded wealth, and thus continue to regard their paper certificates as credible markers of value. And that is largely the case at the moment, since most of the playas in the financial markets are not paying attention to the peak oil story, or don’t believe it is for real.

Two special and transient circumstances are now propping up the financial markets. One is that for practical purposes the world is virtually at peak, meaning this is an extra-special time of strange behavior (like the point in the apogee of a steep sub orbital flight in which passengers become momentarily weightless).

The main false signal is that all is well on the global oil scene…there’s no real supply problem…and hence no threat to the continuing expansion of industrial production and its associated wealth-generating activities. This signal just tells the playas to buy more paper markers. Thus, the stock market goes up.

The second special and transient circumstance is that so much wealth has already accumulated along the way to peak, that financial markets take on a life of their own - as existing wealth “invests” itself in more paper markers hoping and expecting to “grow” into even more wealth.

Some of this “liquidity” - say, in the checking accounts of people who work for Goldman Sachs - has found its way into Manhattan condominiums, or Aspen McMansions, and filtered through the system to everyone from the lawyers who write up the pre-nuptial agreements to the guys who sell the furniture to the people who drive the delivery trucks that bring it to the door, to the men laying tiles in the new bathrooms.

The basic insanity of a system that presumes vastly increased wealth where none will occur, has led to further distortions in finance. The most obvious one is the so-called housing bubble. The misplaced extreme expectation in the ever-increasing value of paper wealth, led to the hijacking of mortgages bundled into odd lots of tradable debt (promises to pay) and used to leverage abstruse bets (hedges) on the behavior of other kinds of paper markers (currencies, interest rate differentials, commodity prices) - very profitably as long as all playas believed that industrial societies that run all oil would continue to grow, to produce more wealth. The level of abstraction in these rackets - their distance from the reality of productive activity - is self-evident.

But they were so successful that the profligate creation of ever more mortgages became an increasingly reckless and irresponsible enterprise.

Contracts were made with house-buyers who had no record of credit worthiness and often no real proof of income. Contracts were made on terms (interest payments) that were deceptive, even ruinously false, for the house-buyers…allowed millions of ordinary people to acquire real property on unrealistic terms, which had the affect of bidding up the price of houses that these owners will eventually have to surrender for nonpayment.
That process is now underway. The reckless creation of mortgages had the further effect of stealing demand for house-building from the future. So many new houses were built and then sold to people who will probably have to surrender them, and then so many more beyond that were built in the expectation and hope that reckless mortgage creation would continue forever, that there is now a massive over-supply of total existing houses while the pool of suckers for new ruinous mortgages has shrunk to zero.

Similar excesses in all the other lending and debt sectors, including “non-performing” credit card obligations and government deficits, will also unwind and thunder through the system.

Meanwhile, the false signal from the oil markets that has been broadcasting for eight weeks will come offline and a new signal will come on as prices go back up. The pause in bidding for future oil induced by the panic over-buying of the summer will end. The heating season is here.

It’s 40 degrees out in upstate New York this morning and the furnace is cranking. The Chinese and the Indians and even the people in France have not stopped using oil.
As the price of oil goes back up, the financial markets will get a new signal that running industrial societies has just gotten more expensive again. That will dampen hopes and expectations for increased wealth from these societies. Meanwhile, the air will be coming out of millions of mortgages, and the loss of value will spread among playas holding these bundles of mortgage debt (i.e. promises that money spent on houses is being paid back, which it won’t be). At the same time the houses themselves will lose value as the pool of potential buyers shrinks to nothing. That is, the inflated value (high price) of these assets will deflate.

As this occurs, there will be far fewer wage earners putting up additional houses, fewer furniture sales, fewer trips by delivery truck drivers and fewer tile-jobs in the McBathrooms.

This is why I view the fall melt-up of the stock markets as a swan dive.
We’re at the apogee now, just as the world is at the apogee of its oil production. I confess, I thought the reality of our economic predicament would be recognized by the playas and their markets sooner than it has. It turns out the chief luxury of the final cheap oil blowout has been the artificial support of unrealistic hopes and expectations.

More of Kunstler’s postings can be found here.

The Empire Strikes Out

[Originally posted on goofyblog 10.13.06]

A few weeks ago, I finished last year’s Empire of Debt, written by Baltimore financial advisors Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin. Their take on American history and current events is, to the say least, unique. They can be snarky at times and over-the-top, but the book is definitely something worth checking out.

The final page refers to their website, which has daily articles about world financial markets and events pertinent to the US. Some of their writers are visiting/living in France & Ireland right now, and there are also works on financial markets and conditions in South America & Asia.

This week the following appeared, excerpted here:

What are the serious challenges America faces? ‘Terrorism!’ comes the cry.
Terrorists are a nuisance, not a menace. We can’t think of a single major power…let alone a single empire…that was undone by terrorism.

But right now, the United States is spending a fortune on this nuisance.

The total bill for the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to top $1 trillion. The whole business is no more than an invitation to squander money and lives in a campaign against nobody-who-really-counts…an invitation the Bush administration gladly accepted!

So, we ask again - what are the serious challenges faced by the U.S.

The empire is going broke. The federal government is on the hook for some $55 to $65 trillion in expenses, beyond what it can reasonably expect in revenues.

There’s nothing especially novel about this bankruptcy. Empires usually go broke…and then they collapse - or are destroyed by enemies.

But why do thriving empires go bust? Why can’t they make a profit? Well, of course, at first they usually do. Either by force of arms or force of commerce - usually both - they grow and expand. But there must be a flaw in the human character. Once it is set on course for expansion, it doesn’t seem to know when to stop. More and more conquests lead to more and more battles…more territory to administer…and more military expenses. The United States now has more than 100 bases all over the world, and a military budget equal to that of all the rest of the world’s nations combined.

Meanwhile, institutions age and wither like old trees. Gradually, they are taken over by parasites, freeloaders, and hustlers. In military matters, the defense establishment shifts from actually defending the nation…to expanding the empire…and then to expanding itself. Contractors grow fat and rich. Politics and profits dictate which weapons are put into service, not military necessities. Even wars are chosen for reasons other than their actual military benefits. Politicians need enemies. The military/industrial complex, as Eisenhower called it, needs a raison d’etre. The people themselves need to be scared and bullied into cooperating with the imperial agenda.

George W. Bush is supposed to be a ‘conservative’ president, but he has actually expanded social spending programs more than any president in history. The old ‘conservative’ program has been corrupted by neo-conservative shills who serve the interests of the empire…along with their own interests, not those of the Old Republic.

Check out more of their writings here.

On Location - 10/06/2006

[Originally posted on goofyblog on 10.06.06]

Fall is here: breezy, sometimes rainy, then back to hot and humid, but not so hot and humid as in July. New Yorkers are already wearing sweaters and light coats, even in sunny, hot weather. Go figure.

Just finished Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume 1 (there is no Volume 2—yet), which makes very little chronological sense but is engrossing. His telling of both the physical experience of being an artist and the creative process was enlightening to me. Why he did this or that, what the scene was, his reaction to other artists, etc. Great book!

I was down in the Village and mentioned I was reading the book to a guy at a bar. He said he’d been a bartender in those days that “Bobby” had lived around the corner. I asked him how much a studio apartment would go for in the area now. He said a room not even big enough for a double bed would rent for $1,700.

In the book, Dylan does finally take an apartment (just down from the bar I was in) after months of sofa-surfing: a 2-room place for $60–in 1961. That would make rental inflation about 6,000% in 45 years (you would double 2006’s 1-room price).

I was also struck by the empty (or emptier) artistic landscape Dylan found when he started out. He came to New York to do something new. There were other artists sure, but the field seemed somehow more sparse than today. An older artist I talked to recently voiced the same opinion: when he started out, an artist’s calling was rarer. I know from reading the autobiographies of directors John Houston and Elia Kazan that actor’s used to be looked down upon by society as ne’er do well’s. It wasn’t something you would do or want to aspire to unless you had a calling.

That’s all changed now. Everyone is an artist or wants to be. Dylan may not be everyone’s idea of an artist or a singer. I personally think he was most vital in the first 6 years of his recording career and after that he just lost it. Some really hate his voice and that distracts them. Whatever your opinion, his description of his creative processes is fascinating for those interested in the creative arts.

On Location 9/28/2006

[Originally posted on goofyblog on 09.28.06]

When I was 20, I was living in a residence hotel in San Francisco on Pine across the street from the Bank of America building with my girlfriend, Janice. We had been there a week when the manager asked us to leave. Why? We had been honest and told him we were not married. This should not have surprised me. All my coupled-up friends had that same difficulty when trying to rent an apartment in Berkeley and San Francisco. Most of them dealt with it by wearing phony wedding rings and lying. I didn’t think that would be an issue in a weekly hotel, but it was.
That was in 1969. In the next 5 years, that issue disappeared completely from the social horizon in the Bay Area and in other parts of the country. It was as if somehow the whole issue of couples living together had suddenly become none of anybody’s business, which is what it should’ve been always anyway. Everybody just moved on.

Or did they?
In 1966, my first girlfriend in Berkeley told me about something relatively new: birth control pills. It meant we had the freedom to have sexual relations without the onus of potential pregnancy and having to consider getting an illegal abortion. I was astonished and greatly relieved. She told me that anyone could get them at Planned Parenthood. Indeed, the times were changing.

Or were they?
A year later, a good friend of mine, Cathy, called me over to her dorm room at the new co-ed housing off-campus. She answered her door, her face red from crying. She was pregnant, but she wasn’t ready. It had been an accidental pregnancy and she was in her second year studies. Becoming a mother at this stage felt to her like the end of her ambitions and dreams. The father hadn’t been able to deal and had backed out. I agreed to go with her to Mexico so she could get an abortion. Illegal abortions were being done somewhere in the Bay Area, but we didn’t know who and where. Before I could leave with her, her boyfriend decided he needed to do the right thing—he went with her to Mexico.

In the next 5 years, abortion in California first became quasi-legal (similar to current California medical marijuana law: the pregnant woman had to go to a doctor and explain that having a child at that particular point in her life would cause significant psychological damage. The doctor was then allowed to prescribe a legal abortion.). Within a year, the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, granting nationwide legality. I breathed another sigh of relief. A woman’s right to choose when to have a family or more family was just basic common sense. So glad that issue was settled!

Or was it…