Yesterday, March 19, 2008 saw the fifth anniversary of the tragic invasion of Iraq by the US, a deliberate act of aggression against a country that had posed no threat whatsoever to it, an action that is going to have serious negative consequences for US power an influence in the world, both militarily and economically. Historians looking back might see that as a watershed event, a peak in the power hubris of a country. Apart from the appalling death and destruction that has been wreaked on the people of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and injured and vast numbers of internal and external refugees, the invasion of Iraq has also brought to the surface the decline of US economic power.
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Presidential elections involve two distinct phases. In the first phase, the Villagers drive out of the race anyone who might even remotely threaten the power and privileges of the pro-business/pro-war single party oligarchy that runs the country. Once that is achieved, then the Villagers create major controversies over personal and social issues, so that the electorate gets really fired up and angry and think that important issues are at stake, and not notice that the game is already over. (See here and here for who the Villagers are and the role they play.)

We are now comfortably in that second phase of the process. There is little to choose from between Obama and Clinton in terms of policy differences and so we have this ridiculous amount of attention being paid to statements made by their supporters and other trivialities. When the Democratic nominee is finally determined, we will then see the same kind of intense attention on trivial issues between the two party nominees.

As I said in a 2006 post on election year politics:

As a result, the overture to familiar strains of election year sloganeering are being heard, following a similar pattern. In the months leading to November, one can expect to hear a lot about the following: gay marriage, abortion, immigrants, flag burning, English-only rhetoric, UN bashing, estate tax repeal, and assisted suicide.

All these issues (except for immigration and the estate tax) share the characteristic that they are largely symbolic and directly affect only a tiny minority of people. They have little relevance to the actual lives of most people, but they do aim straight at the emotional core of the base and provide many opportunities to push people’s buttons and make them angry. And expect to hear lots of talk about god and religion, perhaps involving those old faithfuls such as displaying the ten commandments in public places or the pledge of allegiance or prayer in schools and similar church-state separation issues.

However, I would not be surprised if a completely unexpected, but equally trivial, new issue emerges suddenly, since the ones I have listed are, like, so-o-o-o 2004, and the extremist base loves fresh raw meat.

That has happened. Look at the kinds of media coverage that the race now gets. The big issues that the country faces are the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the threat of a US attack on Iran; the hundreds of thousands of dead and injured in Iraq and the massive number of displaced people and refugees; the large and continuing budget and trade deficits; the rapid decline in the value of the dollar against other major currencies; the threat of an imminent recession; the crisis facing many homeowners due to the subprime debacle; the shakiness of the US banking system because of that same issue; and the spiraling cost of health care and the lack of coverage for over forty million people, a large fraction of whom are children.

These are all signs that the US has gotten itself into a tailspin. Paul Craig Roberts spells out the magnitude of the problems that have been created. All these issues affect each and every one of us, either directly or indirectly, and have major long-term consequences. Whoever becomes president in November will inherit a financial and military mess that will require very tough and unpopular decisions.

And yet, how much coverage do we have of the candidates’ views on these topics and what their priorities and plans are for dealing with them? Take for example the unprecedented actions by the Federal Reserve to bail out the big investment banks that made lots of money but now are in serious trouble. What are the candidates’ views on this situation? What would they do as president? Do they approve of this kind of government intervention in the financial sector?

We are clearly not going to get any kind of adult talk on this issue from the current president. Last Friday, when the Bear Stearns news was rocking global financial markets, Bush talked to a group of economists at the Economic Club of New York who, along with people around the world, were presumably anxious to hear what the government’s response would be. According to a reporter present, what they heard would have given them the impression of a president who was either in fantasyland, oblivious to what is going on around him or completely out of his depth.

[Y]ou had to wonder what the international financial community makes of a country whose president could show up to talk economics in the middle of a liquidity crisis and kind of flop around the stage as if he was emcee at the Iowa Republican Pig Roast.

We’re really past expecting anything much, but in times of crisis you would like to at least believe your leader has the capacity to pretend he’s in control.
. . .
Our credit markets are foundering, and all we’ve got is a guy who looks like he’s ready to kick back and start the weekend.
. . .
[T]his economic crisis has been going on for months, and all the president could come up with sounded as if it had been composed for a Rotary Club and then delivered by a guy who had never read it before.

He then spoke about his Big Plan: sending checks of $600 to everyone! Oh yes, that should definitely turn things around. Oh, and he’s also totally against congressional earmarks now, though he was fine with them while the Republicans controlled Congress. That was pretty much it. One wonders if there are any adults in this administration.

Here is Jon Stewart on the economic mess and Bush’s speech:

Meanwhile, on Friday itself Wall Street investors started a steady drumbeat demanding that the Fed cut interest rates once again at its regular meeting on Tuesday, by another huge amount, perhaps even as high as one percentage point. The Fed duly obliged cutting rates by a quarter point on Sunday, itself a highly unusual action, and then followed with a further cut of ¾ point on Tuesday. The stock markets duly soared upwards again.

Cutting interest rates by large amounts might please Wall Street investors, at least in the short run, but it has consequences for the long term. Doing so while European rates stay high results in the dollar, already at record lows, sinking even further. This will raise the price of oil and other imports, increasing the rate of inflation and aggravating the trade deficit. All this makes foreign investors even more wary of dollar-based investments, which may make it harder to sell them US treasury bonds to finance the deficits.

The investments made by investment banks like Bear Stearns are highly leveraged, meaning that they buy securities with just a small amount as down payment and finance the rest, just like the way we buy houses with a small down payment and finance the rest with a mortgage. The difference is that when buying a house (in normal times) the down payment is usually 10 to 20% and the value of the collateral (the house) is worth more than the loan, so that if the borrower can’t repay the loan, the lender can still recover the money by selling that asset.

In the case of Bear Stearns, it is estimated that the size of its purchases outnumbered its actual assets by a ratio of 28-to 1, meaning that it bought securities for 28 times the value of the actual cash it put into the purchase. The balance was borrowed. Usually these banks sell these highly leveraged securities long before the loan is due to be repaid and thus are able to repay the debt. But in this case, nobody wants to buy their securities. When the bills came due, the banks could not sell and thus had no money, which is why the bank had a liquidity crisis. When the Fed came to the rescue by guaranteeing these securities, it was essentially saying that they would pay up if the value of the securities did not rise again and creditors came for their money.

Hanging over everyone is the uncertainty. How many other big banks are holding on to how much mortgage backed securities? How much did they leverage? How far is the Federal Reserve willing to go in using taxpayer money to prop up these banks?

On Monday the biggest commercial bank in Cleveland, National City Bank, lost 43% of its value in one day, fueled by suspicions that it was holding a large amount of now worthless mortgage-backed securities. Before 1999, commercial banks were restricted by the Glass-Steagall Act from taking the kinds of risks that investment banks take, because the government insured the deposits of those banks and did not want to underwrite excessive risk taking. That act was passed in 1933 in the wake of the Great Depression because banks had been making highly speculative investments and thus caused the crash. But in 1999 Congress and Bill Clinton removed that barrier and now the rot that has infected the investment banks has spread into the commercial banking sector also.

As the days go by, watch for more volatility, fueled by rumors.

POST SCRIPT: The God Delusion Index

Answer this series of questions and calculate the extent of your own God Delusion.

In an article written in 2000, William Greider said something that really stuck in my mind: “An enduring truth, a wise friend once explained to me, is that important social change nearly always begins in hypocrisy.”

This is very true. When we look back at the improvement in our attitudes to race and gender, at some point indulging in crude stereotypes, offensive humor, and derogatory remarks against this or that hitherto discriminated group becomes seen as unacceptable behavior and the people making them are viewed as ignorant and become ostracized, outside the bounds of decent society. As a result, we then go through a long period when people who harbor such offensive views feel forced to hide them or even say things that are opposite to what they truly feel. As Greider says “[T]he powerful are persuaded to say the appropriate words, that is, to sign a commitment to higher values and decent behavior.”
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Today is voting day in the Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island primaries, and is as good a day as any to discuss the nature of the race.

This day is being breathlessly marketed as a crucial, decisive, make-or-break day, just like the Potomac primaries day before that, or Super Tuesday before that, or the New Hampshire primary before that. On the basis of the results, reporters will declare that one candidate has the momentum and start urging the other candidates to drop out of the race just because they think those candidates are unlikely to win. Why do the reporters care? The candidates have every right to continue for as long as they can or want to without being accused of somehow ruining the process by staying in. Why not just let the voters decide when they have had enough of a candidate? As a result of the elections, if Obama or Clinton or Huckabee or Paul refuse to concede and decide to go on to Pennsylvania on April 22 and even after that until the final elections on June 3, let them do so without being hounded to get out. Even if Huckabee (say) has no mathematical chance of winning his party’s nomination, surely the voters in the remaining states have a right to express their preference for him if they want to?

On another point, with the final primary being on June 3, there will be almost two whole months before the party conventions. So as a result of all the leapfrogging that took place with so many states trying to get in early, we will now have the summer doldrums where nothing happens for two months. Couldn’t they all have started about six weeks later?

I have not been writing about the significance of the Democratic presidential nominee being, for the first time, either a woman or an African-American. Not that this isn’t an important development but before we sprain our elbows patting ourselves on the back, it might be good to realize that this is long, long overdue. After all, many other countries have elected both women and minorities as heads of state much earlier. My own country of origin (Sri Lanka) elected the world’s first female executive head of state way back in 1960, when Sirimavo Bandaranaike became prime minister.

Our reaction here shouldn’t be “Isn’t this great?” but “Why did it take so long?”

But progress is progress, however belated, and should be welcomed. At the very least, this development should put to rest tiresome discussions about whether the US is ‘ready’ for a woman or minority president.

But just at the moment when the possibility of a female US President is being savored, along comes this extraordinarily silly article in the Washington Post by Charlotte Allen in which she argues in support of all the absurd negative female stereotypes that we have long striven to eliminate from our discourse, such as that women are dumb, bad at math, looks-obsessed, shoe-fetishizing airheads, governed exclusively by their emotions, who can’t even drive properly.

The editor of the section of the newspaper in which the article ran now says it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but the first rule in humor and satire is to be funny. If you are not, people have a right to take what you are saying as intended to be serious. There are suspicions that this explanation was a story designed to protect themselves from the furious denunciations the article received. What is the Post going to do as a follow up? Run another ‘tongue-in-cheek’ article by an African-American arguing that black people really are stupid and lazy and shiftless?

Charlotte Allen should get some tips from Dave Barry, who is a great example of a writer who exploits all kinds of stereotypes for humor and you are never in any doubt as to his intent. His classic essay The Difference Between Men and Women is a brilliant example of how to use gender stereotypes to humorous effect.

Finally, just the day before the primary elections, we in Ohio were deluged with poll results about the Democratic race, with conflicting predictions. What is the point of such last-minute poll results? It does not help the campaigns since it is too late for the campaigns to do anything with this information. Are the polls meant to influence voters? What kind of voter would choose a candidate on the basis of a last minute poll? Frankly, I cannot think of any good reason to release such last-minute polls except that the polling outfits think that real point of elections is to see which of them is better at predicting election results, so that elections become a test of the polls.

POST SCRIPT: Save the economy! Buy more junk!

Berkeley Breathed’s excellent comic strip Opus comments on the absurd ‘economic stimulus package’ that our wise leaders in government have come up with.

In the previous post, I pointed out the surprisingly strong early backing that Obama has received from Wall Street, which raises the obvious question: Why would Wall Street invest so heavily in him? One reason is that the business sector always covers its bets so that whoever wins, they have ties to them. But another major reason is that the pro-war/pro-business interests in the US cannot get all that they want from Republican administrations. The Republican Party is too closely identified in the public mind with big business to overcome the public’s suspicion that they always are seeking to enrich the big moneyed interests at the expense of the poor. Some of the desires of big business can only be met by Democratic presidents and Congresses, who have managed to convey the impression that they are the party of ‘the little guy’, and thus can neutralize some of the suspicions and do things that Republicans cannot.
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Given my concerns about Hillary Clinton, one might think that I would be an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter, but at this point I must say that I am somewhat underwhelmed by him. I have not been bowled over by his alleged charisma, perhaps because I almost never watch TV, preferring to read about events instead, and charisma is hard to convey with the printed word. I definitely prefer him to Clinton, but on many issues, it is hard to tell them apart. But the key difference with Clinton is that I think that Obama (unlike Clinton or McCain) is not (yet) completely in the maw of pro-war/pro-business party that rules the country, although the process by which those interests swallow up political leaders and turn them into zombie-like creatures that do their bidding seems dangerously far advanced in his case.
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(Due to the unexpected importance of Ohio in the primary process, I am pre-empting the economy series for three posts on the elections.)

Back in November 13, 2006, when Wisconsin’s US Senator Russ Feingold announced that he would not run for the Democratic nomination for president, I wrote the following:

“With Feingold’s departure from the race, we are headed closer to a nightmare scenario in 2008 where the two factions of the pro-war/pro-business party will send their most cynical and opportunistic and unprincipled representatives to vie for the presidency: Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain. The pundits will love them because they play the game according to the debased rules they understand, where the only things that matter are strategy and tactics, and principles are irrelevant.”

Now that the primary season is well underway, at least half of my prediction seems to have sadly come true, with John McCain almost certainly being the Republican nominee. It seems like only Barack Obama can prevent the full nightmare from occurring. The Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4 and the Pennsylvania primary on April 22 will play important roles in deciding who the eventual Democratic nominee is.
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(Today is the official day to commemorate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I am reposting (updated and edited) something I wrote two years ago.)

In reflecting on the life and message of Martin Luther King, I feel there is a need to resurrect an essential aspect of his message that he articulated during the last phase of his life. Over time, layers of gauze have covered this portion of his legacy and blurred the increasingly hard-edged and accurate vision that characterized the last years of his life.
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In my two posts titled Meet the Villagers (see here and here), I argued that the oligarchy that runs the US decide early on who they approve of to be political leaders and then use the media to make sure that everyone else is eliminated from the race early. The high-handedness of the media in deciding what views we should be exposed to was on extraordinary display when MSNBC first invited Dennis Kucinich to appear in the Nevada debate because he had met their criteria, and then at the last minute changed their criteria to exclude him. (I suspect that when they first set the rule about including only the top four candidates, they assumed that the fourth would be a Villager-acceptable candidate like Biden or Dodd or Richardson.) They thus ensured that issues like single-payer health insurance and the immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and the closing of bases there (to name just a few issues) would not be raised in the debate.

Recall that I said that the Villagers want election campaigns in which there is a consensus amongst the candidates to support the issues that the oligarchy care about. We are almost there.

Now a January 11, 2008 Reuters article by Kevin Drawbaugh has actually asked corporate executives which candidates they like and fear and the results bear out what I said. Of the leading candidates, they like Clinton and McCain and Romney and think they can deal with Obama.

The corporate suits fear John Edwards most. In fact, the title of the piece is “Corporate Elite Fear Candidate Edwards.” Mike Huckabee is the most feared candidate on the Republican side. This is because although both their policy platforms are hardly radical, neither is strictly following the pro-business script that gets Villager approval.

The media has, as always, dutifully picked up on these cues, especially on the Democratic side. The Washington Post dismisses Edwards as “angry” (anyone who highlights and attacks the corporate control of US politics is almost invariably described as “angry” or as otherwise irrational) and insists that this is already a two-person race between Clinton and Obama. Unsurprisingly, the more overtly right-wing corporate mouthpiece Fox News also attacks Edwards.

But the best way to undermine a candidacy is by ignoring it, especially in the early stages, the way that the Edwards, Dodd, Biden, Richardson, Kucinich, and Gravel candidacies were largely ignored. If not for the televised debates, these people would have been largely invisible. Another way you eliminate those whom you don’t feel deserve to be in the race is to give extraordinary attention to trivial differences among the Villager-approved candidates so that all the oxygen is used up discussing absurdly unimportant issues.

For example, by focusing heavily on spats between Obama and Clinton (Did she ‘play the race card’?), and on trivialities (Did she really cry after Iowa? Is he secretly a Muslim?), and on topics like gender and ethnicity and Clinton’s ‘likability’ and even the way she laughs (!) rather than on policy issues, the media effectively avoid talking about other candidates and thus give voters the impression that this is now a two-person contest. This despite the fact that some polls suggest that Edwards is the Democrat most likely to beat any Republican in the presidential race, while Hillary Clinton fares much worse than Edwards and Obama.

As the pro-Democratic blog Firedoglake summarizes: “If Hillary’s the Democratic nominee, we could very easily lose to any likely GOP nominee. If Obama’s the nominee, he does OK so long as he doesn’t face McCain. But if Edwards is the nominee, we’re sitting pretty. Which, I suspect, is one reason why Big Media hates John Edwards so much and does everything it can to destroy him. (Speaking of which: KingOneEye at DailyKos pointed out this morning how the NYT is ignoring a key result of its own poll on the race — namely, that as more people get to know him, Edwards’ favorability rating keeps going up.)” Greg Sargent also notes a study that supports the contention that the media is underreporting Edwards.

On the Republican side the Villagers have not been able to narrow the contest as effectively, to focus just on McCain and Romney. Huckabee keeps bobbing up to the surface although they seem to have effectively buried Ron Paul’s candidacy, although the latter is doing as well as, or better than, Villager-approved candidates Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani who still get a lot of media play. It will be interesting to see if and for how long Huckabee can withstand the media pressure to disappear.

David Sirota tries to combat the “just a two-person Democratic race” narrative fostered by the Villagers:

For those of you who think the Democratic presidential nomination fight is just a two-way race between Obama and Clinton, check out this brand new poll from the Reno Gazette-Journal. Yup, that’s right – it shows the Nevada caucus race [which will be held on Saturday-MS] a three-way, dead heat with John Edwards right in the mix.

Interestingly, this poll comes right on the heels of the Establishment viciously ratcheting up its angry attacks on the Edwards candidacy. Late last week, we saw a Reuters story headlined “Corporate Elite Fear Candidate Edwards” detailing how Wall Street moneymen and K Street lobbyists are frightened about Edwards populist, power-challenging message against greed and corruption. We also saw self-anointed Democratic “expert” Lawrence O’Donnell pen a fulminating screed demanding Edwards get out of the race – not surprising coming from a man who made his name running the U.S. Senate Finance Committee – long the most corrupt, lobbyist-ravaged panel in all of Washington (somehow, running the U.S. Congress’s version of a pay-to-play casino now makes people credible “experts” in campaign strategy and political morality).

According to the nonpartisan Project for Excellence in Journalism, Edwards has long faced a media blackout – one that at least some honest media brokers like Keith Olbermann have noted. As I said a long time ago, that Edwards has even been able to compete in such a hostile environment is a testament to the power of his message.

The question we should ask is what the hostility and media blackout is really all about? I’d say the media’s behavior is motivated by the same impulses that moves lobbyists to whine and cry to Reuters and self-important bloviators like O’Donnell to publicly burst a blood vessel on the Huffington Post – the people who have gotten used to the status quo are truly terrified by any candidates who they really believe will change things and threaten their power and status. Edwards is just such a candidate – one who threatens to muck up what the media and political elite want to be a race between two “nonthreatening,” Wall Street-approved candidates. Obviously, it’s a three-way race at this very moment – whether the Establishment likes that or not.

Incidentally, this is why efforts to broaden the base of voters are almost always done by grass-roots activist groups working independently of the major parties. These new voters are unpredictable and hence undesirable to the Villagers. The pro-business/pro-war single party is quite comfortable with the way the current political system works since it gives a huge advantage to the status quo.

POST SCRIPT: Religion and politics in the US

British comedian Pat Condell gives us his take on this topic, in a clip he calls “Pimping for Jesus.” Condell’s home page cheerfully describes his attitude to religion: “Hi, I’m Pat Condell. I don’t respect your beliefs and I don’t care if you’re offended. Cheers.”