Columbia and Venezuela go thru motions of burying the hatchet

Raise your hand if you think this is the last we will hear of border problems between Columbia (the only solid US monkey in South America) and Venezuela (the most effective antagonist of US rule of the western hemisphere).

The Times article on yesterday’s peace plainly states the problem: Columbia continues to assert its right to pursue the FARC wherever they take refuge. While Venezuela continues to assert that a Columbian violation of its border would mean war.

Columbia’s adventure in Ecuador a week ago, and Venezuela’s martial reaction, certainly juiced the price of oil this past week, helping it to its all time high over $105 per barrel.

Venezuela exports chiefly to the U.S. One wonders how crazy Bush-Cheney may be in their last months. If we see Columbia enter (with their blessing) Venezuela, we’ll know.

A third panicked week in the credit markets

There is no exaggerating the carnage and panic in the credit markets these past three weeks.

Friday morning (minutes before the February employment numbers (63,000 jobs lost) hit the wire, persuasively arguing that the US is in recession) the Federal Reserve offered to lend another $200 billion to US banks under very favorable terms, including anonymity, and (again) expanded the list of acceptable collateral in such loans to include more of the wounded bond classes that have been more or less illiquid since the blow up in July.

In essence this isn’t far from the price control idea I’ve been hawking here since August. Ie the Fed is willing to recognize near-face value (ie $1.00) on the wounded bonds, while the market, when a buyer shows up, is trading them (according to several spot reports this week) between 70 and 80 cents.

So, rather than have a broad price control declaration that would allow the banks etc to mark these bonds on their books near face value, the Fed is temporarily taking the bonds off the banks’ hands in exchange for cash credits (based on face value). THe common thread is artifice and pretense trumping the faux market value, in an attempt to thaw the credit freeze.

Here’s a slightly different angle on same from Naked Capitalism (great site).

Attack Iran movement again stirring?

Here’s a new piece at Salon re the prospects for an Israeli and/or American attack on Iran.

April 2008 was often mentioned last year by Israeli authorities as the Point of No Return beyond which they (said they) believed they were at risk from the Iranian enrichment program they (said they) believed was still in progress.

The Salon piece features a former (?) Mossadist who scoffs at the shocking US National Intelligence Estimate from the early winter that “found” that the Iranian nuke weapons program, such as it was, had ceased in 2003.

I’ve wondered aloud recently if the sudden and sharp reversal in the price of oil in the past weeks might have something to do with Iran and the approach of the April deadline.

(Oil, recall, had plummeted in early February — the dead of winter — from $100 to $87, with many industry pundits looking for $70, on the theory that the US (and perhaps European) recession meant that oil demand worldwide would plummet. But three weeks ago the trend reversed, despite worsening economic news, to close yesterday at an all time high over $105 per barrel, with the likes of Goldman Sachs raising its target to $150.)

The Salon story offers evidence that McCain sympathizes with the militarists in Israel. With not only the US economy but also the western finance system melting, melting, I wonder if the only way the American-Israeli war party will be able to keep a GOPher in the Oval Office may be to set the world aflame anew before November.

Bush affirms torture with veto

Times story, filed here for reference during the war crimes trial.

9/11 truth leak on CBS radio

Steve Alten, the author of a fictional novel about the attacks, The Shell Game, apparently made some progress on CBS radio.

The fellow writing this up also says that Bob Kerrey (former 9/11 Commission member) is moving to set up a permanent commission to deal with the continual inflow of evidence and the like.  ??

Iraq: Guns or butter

The $2 Trillion Nightmare, from Bob Herbert at the NY Times today:

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Donkey vulnerabilities: Dukakis Redux?

Friends and I were sure heading into 1988 that after eight years of Reaganite chaos and abuse the Donkeys were a shoe in.

Instead we got a moderated echo of Reagan’s administration, headed by wimpy lap-dog CIA fellow traveller George Herbert Walker Bush. A rather boring fellow in the public eye.

I can still taste the disappointment of November 1988.

Then when Bush launched the Gulf War, the shock that first night, as television broadcast the bombardment of Baghdad in prime time, made clear the cost of underestimating boring GOPhers and fumbling an election.

I remember standing that night on 7th Street near Avenue A in the East Village, gawking at a television thru a storefront window with poet-friend David Abel. It took several speechless minutes to believe what we were seeing … as ten years later it was hard to believe, gawking west from my roof in Brooklyn, that one of the Twin Towers had just collapsed like a house of cards.

McCain at the moment seems as unlikely a winner as Bush pere did twenty years ago. Should he pull it off he would (internationally at least) be a moderated echo of Bush-Cheney. It seems prudent to worry about history repeating.

Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis was the Donkey in 1988. Ran and won an exciting primary campaign, coming out of nowhere. Then got clubbed like a baby seal in the fall.

Hillary and Barack are much stronger candidates. But the Donkeys remain vulnerable, especially if we have a blow up overseas. And indeed, Bush-Cheney in the past ten days have been stoking the Iran business again, in the UN and out of the Pentagon. April is still on some calendars for an Israeli air strike.

Dukakis, feeling light on foreign affairs, famously made a fool of himself by dressing up in army gear and riding in a tank. He looked ridiculous. (Dubya five years ago on the USS Lincoln, declaring Mission Accomplished in Iraq, was an echo.)

Obama if nominated will feel the same pressure, and have little to say except that he has confidence in his judgment and would appoint experienced people. Not that Hillary is immune on this. But she’s much stronger.

Then again, the economy (stupid) and financial system are melting before our eyes. Perhaps that means no GOPher can win in November, and, thus, that now is the time to back the greater, riskier hope for real change.

The end of a Cycle
of American History?

Maybe Reaganism is melting, melting before our eyes in both the political and economic spheres.

(“Neoliberalism” as they call it in Europe …)

Politics

– Rush Limbaugh’s comment that if McCain is the nominee it means the end of the GOP reshaped and empowered by the Gipper. The end of the Reagan coalition.

– The Clinton restoration (which I was looking forward to happily enough) falling to Obama’s spirit song. Hillary seems to have been pinned to the mat, fairly and squarely, by association with NAFTA and her vote for the Iraq War.

(It seems to me legitimate but also tragic that she and the femme hopes she represents may get passed over in this way — hoisted in part by the petard of Identity Politics that our familiar neo-feminism, first and foremost, advanced with Academic ploys in the 80s and consciously applied to splinter the traditional American Left constituency. Helping Reaganism take root.

Barbara Jordan, whom Hillary has been admiring aloud in Texas this week, famously and thunderously said no to Identity Politics — “Separatism is not allowed!” — during her (second) keynote address, at the 1992 Democratic convention. “Change: From What to What?”

Our neo-feminism is not a child of the 60s but, rather, a reaction against them — a Special reaction against the Universalism of Marx and Woodstock — which came into the world about the same time as Disco and MTV (the latter which splintered the integral, pansocial rock of the 60s and 70s, a prime medium of the politics of the day, into a thousand sounds and furies signifying nothing ….).

I shrugged with disappointment when Bill Clinton caved in to the megacorps on NAFTA. And was disappointed but not surprised when both NY senators in 2002 (Hillary and Chuck Schumer) gave Bush the blank check on Iraq. Barack’s pressing on these points is the strongest moment in his stump speech. If Hillary now misses her tide because of them, there seems little basis for complaint. Yet each might be defended as sensible tactical concessions to the world Reagan left behind, particularly for a woman aspiring to the White House.

I do see her as the better sort of feminist, a true child of the 60s, a fellow traveller of Barbara Jordan. Her focus on economic justice bespeaks that. A Camille Paglia feminist, one might say, rather than the now typical university fare.)

Economics

The deepening credit crunch has people in money-center banks and Congress talking this week about Uncle Sam buying billions worth of homes and/or mortgages to stave off the foreclosure crisis. Unheard of since … FDR and the Home Owners Loan Corporation. Imagine that.

Then add to that my ridiculous idea that price controls on wounded classes of structured finance bonds may be the only way out of the credit crisis, which in the past two weeks has gone broader and deeper, leaving Bernanke nearly weeping this week before Congress.

(As for Paulson … A hopeless bonehead raised on Reaganism. Dinosaur. But he’s not alone. The business world, and the business press, are inhabited entirely by shallow (ie historyless) Free Marketeers. “Capitalism” they chant, as if it still exists …)

In any case: as this crisis swells it becomes increasingly clear there is no market cure for what ails the markets. Laissez Faire is dead, again.

Cycles

To the point:

Arthur Schlesinger, R.I.P., wrote a famous book called a The Cycles of American History — charting the story by observing regular, quasi-generational (Oedipal?) pendulum swings in political dogma and public opinion.

? Perhaps the reactionary swing that Reagan inaugurated, both nostalgic and fearful, which has polluted my entire adult life (graduated from undergrad in 1982), is about spent?

One can easily lay the Schlesinger idea over Hegel’s spiralling cycles to restore a picture of progress.

Might spell relief.

The End, beautiful friends?

Can you picture what will be?
So limitless and free
Desperately in need
Of some stranger’s hand
In a desperate land