Archive for the These United States category
August 21st, 2010
This new ad on the NY subway (like Starbucks) seems asking and aching for a stencil campaign.
The old NAACP (if memory serves) motto comes to mind: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I see it stenciled, shouting, across this wannabe actress’s face.
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The caption up top (clipped as I snapped the photo) reads in full: “Education for the Real World.”
Indeed:
– The world of Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education, who spent the first decade of the New American Century turning five public schools in Chicago into ‘military academies.’ No need to even begin going through the motions of education. Just teach’em how to spit and shoot and salute and send them off to patrol the mideast.
– And the world of our First Lady — who a few weeks ago explained that America’s kids need to lose weight so they qualify for military service.
August 12th, 2010
As a Senator in Washington, Dayton publicly insisted that the official story of the 9/11 attacks was full of holes. Among other things he said officials of organs of the government were lying.
NORAD, for example.
He was run out of Washington (quite literally) with defamation and death threats. Time Magazine included him on a list of the “worst ” senators.
Dayton now running for governor of Minnesota — and two days ago won the three-way Donkey primary there with a photo finish, beating the designated Progressive candidate, Margaret Keliher, speaker of the state’s House of Reps, who had been endorsed by both of its federal senators, Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar.
The Washington Post reports today that the GOP out there is already running ads focused on Dayton’s history of alcoholism and calling him “absolutely, positively one of the worst Senators” in America,” citing the Time piece.
On to November. Dogspeed & protect him.
June 28th, 2010
The administration’s newly announced Space policy, looking mostly to undo Bush-Cheney unilateral militarism and return to the norms of Reagan, Bush pere and Clinton, modest as it seems, echoes a bit ominously.
To begin, it seems intended to put NASA out of the spaceship business.
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NASA in 1963 was a deeply Cowboy institution. And when the president that year signed National Security Action Memo No 271 — headed “Cooperation with the Soviet Union on Outer Space Matters” — the reaction from the national security apparat was pale.
The same day Kennedy signed a less well known memo headed “Classification review of all UFO intelligence files affecting National Security” which referenced NSAM 271 and directed the CIA, which had recently taken over the UFO beat from the Air Force, to begin declassifying UFO files with an eye toward partnered investigation with the Soviet Union.
Jim Marrs, author of worthwhile books on both JFK and UFOs, reports:
In this memo Kennedy stated, “I have initiated [blacked out] and have instructed [then NASA Administrator] James Webb to develop a program with the Soviet Union in joint space and lunar exploration. It would be very helpful if you would have the high threat cases reviewed with the purpose of identification of bona fide as opposed to classified CIA and USAF sources. It is important that we make a clear distinction between the knowns and unknowns in the event the Soviets try to mistake our extended cooperation as a cover for intelligence gathering of their defense and space programs.”
Kennedy then asked for all files on “Unknowns” to be turned over to the NASA authorities and an interim report be forwarded to the White House no later than February 1, 1964.
Kennedy signed the two memos on November 12 and ten days later was dead.
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Werner von Braun and his President
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After running in 1960 as a Colder Warrior than Nixon, then nearly getting sunk by conniving brass and spooks at the Bay of Pigs some 70 days after taking office, after being embarrassed and outfoxed by Khruschev in Vienna then outlasting him at the psy ops battle of West Berlin, and after defusing the Cuban missile crisis by outfoxing his own warmongering brass while brokering a back-channel compromise with the Reds …
After all that, Kennedy during his last summer confirmed his fundamental turn with a commencement address at American University. For a few months it was rather in the news:
“Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique, among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.
“And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
“Today, should total war ever break out again — no matter how — our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours.
Kennedy then voiced clear comprehension of what Eisenhower had been struggling with since making his truce in Korea with Peking and then had spoken of with quiet thunder in his farewell address days before Kennedy took office.
“And even in the cold war [Kennedy said in '63], which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation’s closest allies — our two countries bear the heaviest burdens.
“For we are both devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
“In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. …
“So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
The speech, written by young brain-truster Ted Sorenson, had opened more abstractly, contesting the notion that war was the inevitable condition of modern states, taking clear cue here from FDR’s speech at Chicago in 1937.
Kennedy then broke some surprising news, announcing that the US would henceforth refrain, unilaterally, from testing nukes in the atmosphere, and that talks had been set in Moscow “looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty.”
He then concluded:
“Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. … ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.’
“And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights — the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation — the right to breathe air as nature provided it — the right of future generations to a healthy existence?
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war ….”
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It’s only against JFK in June 1963, and Eisenhower in 1961, and FDR in 1937, that one can fully appreciate the depths to which we’ve been pulled by the Bush-Cheney doctrine and practice of preemptive war. Indeed, the contrasting lines of argument are so strong that Vladimir Putin at Munich in 2007 reminded the world of FDR at Chicago, in long, loyal paraphrases, while trying to organize the international community in opposition to the American warmongering.
It bears repeating that the Baby Bush Doctrine was promulgated for the most part by the American Likud Lobbyists gathered under the umbrella of The Project for the New American Century in DC.
And lo. Unilateral and exclusive military exploitation of space is high on the agenda of the manifesto published by the group in 2000, two months before the failed election. Half a dozen leading PNAC “Vulcans” were then advising baby Bush’s campaign and months later two dozen would take command of his War Room.
And so it’s only natural to wonder what today’s Apparat thinks of Obama’s announcement about peacefully sharing the last frontier.
June 28th, 2010
So much for that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28krugman.html?hp
June 26th, 2010
Brings to mind the Japanese tourist beheaded by a snapping cable on the Brooklyn Bridge footpath some years ago.
April 26th, 2010
The great WWA has just posted his letters from the Civil War years, gathered with responses.
It’s a wonder to appreciate his prosaic mind and voice.
And the colloquies with poetry editors are hilarious, to wit:
Jan. 20, ’60.
Dear Sir,
Mr. House inform’d me that you accepted, and would publish, my “Bardic Symbols.” If so, would you, as soon as convenient, have it put in type, and send me the proof?
About the two lines:
(See from my dead lips the ooze exuding at last!
See the prismatic colors glistening and rolling!)
I have in view, from them, an effect in the piece which I clearly feel, but cannot as clearly define. Though I should prefer them in, still, as I told Mr. House, I agree that you may omit them, if you decidedly wish to.
Yours &c
Walt Whitman
Portland av. near Myrtle | Brooklyn, N. Y.
March 18th, 2010
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more remarkable interview from Washington.
This sad concession signals the death of the movement for health care reform in D.C that began during the Long Campaign and then crested — Who knew? — with Obama’s inauguration.
Poor Dennis looks dead on his feet.
This comes against news stories in the past two weeks reporting that Obama made explicit promises to the insurance companies last summer to reject a bill with a public plan.
The other shoe will drop with the hopeless wars, leaving Obama toast. Romney seems a shoe-in as successor.
Then we revisit Highway 61.
I was talking to someone in Dennis K’s office Thursday, suggesting that he might be more effective in Ohio, as a governor, working the angle he repeatedly holds hope out for in the interview here.
If he thought the same, his argument for voting Yes here would falter. He could go out with a significant NO, like Eliot Richardson and Wm Ruckelshaus in 1973, and use it as a rallying cry back home.
But I guess Dennis still thinks there is a reason to be in Washington. He chairs an important subcommittee. Although that comes and goes with the Donkey majority, and the latter is hardly a clinch in November.
It’s March 2010. Do you know where your future is?
March 16th, 2010
It has begun.
What the Dice Man has joined may none put asunder.
If your brakes don’t work, smile as you go under.
What’s he building in there?
This is actually a conversion of a screenplay, the antepenultimate, my fifth, from 2005, into a novel. Thought about doing it before. Now it seems to have gone and …
Oh brother.
The opening paragraph seems to be:
In June 2004, after five Medecins Sans Frontieres were found murdered in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, Aaron called, for the first time since coming to New York with Maya. Long out of touch had been the pattern of a friendship born and first aborted in Texas, then again at Duke, before settling down to disjointed maturity during years of criss-crossing work overseas. Since the rebirth of History the routine had been that to meet for coffee one went to Baghdad or Bosnia or Berlin.
That, or perhaps:
He would miss his turn.
And so on to the end.
If we shall suppose that writing lengthy bits that no one shall ever read is one of those offenses which, in the providence of Dog, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both Yea and Ney this terrible task as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living Dog always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of lore may speedily pass away.
Yet, if Dog wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the pen man’s sore head and hands and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the quill shall be paid by another drawn by the horde, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as Dog gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
January 21st, 2010
Is Tiny Tim going to cry? Gonna get a spanking when he gets home to Broad and Wall tonight?
Poor Paul looks like he’s STILL not sure the Prez’ll give the word.
January 18th, 2010
Major piece in February’s Harper’s. Hats off to them.
The center does not hold.
Obama has done nothing but talk on this.
January 12th, 2010
Wow. Sounds like a little boy.
His bland loyalty to Daddy perhaps explains North Korea.
January 11th, 2010
Alfred Hitchcock presents …
… a fine elderly unemployed couple, about to be bounced out of their home, try to work things out.
… the trauma of losing your job.
January 10th, 2010
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1. Noam Chomsky talks about Gaza a year after the Israeli attack.
2. Meanwhile Israel complains because George Mitchell has threatened to cut off the cash trying to pressure Netanyahu — a precise echo of the Bush-Baker years.
3. And the Israeli general who once headed their nuclear weapons program says that Iranian nukes are seven years distant.
Team Obama this year has enacted a betrayal of the Cairo speech.
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January 8th, 2010
Another in Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frog interviews on the National Security Apparat.
Very worthwhile — as they’ve all been. This is number 18. She’s leading one of the most important discussions around.
Ellsberg is measured in assessing Obama, and even so the judgments are bleak. Syncs well with my own black-biled broodings.
Touches on the political consequences of allowing high hopes to fail for lack of leadership. Ellsberg doesn’t mention the Carter-Reaganism dynamic, but what he says brings it to mind.
And he puts the puzzle of the escalation decision in clear terms, observing that neither the top Pentagon brass, nor NS Advisor Jms Jones (retired four-star general), nor Rahm Emanuel — with the fine DC instincts and his eye on the 2010 elections — were pusihng the escalation. (Nor Biden.) And some were on record against it.
Is Obama more of a militarist than Petraeus, whose recent interview in Newsweek shows a mind less than persuaded of any successful outcome over there? Where did the decision come from?
Westmoreland and LBJ
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Recall Col. Flectcher Prouty’s history of the Pentagon’s war in Vietnam (which, note, began in 1965) — and which Prouty thinks began almost accidentally, with a big push by Textron and its lobbyists to get the Gov to start buying Bell “Huey” helicopters en masse.
As conglomerate Textron — then as now a major war supplier — was preparing a corporate takeover of Bell Helicopters, a guy from Yale working on Wall Street kept showing up at Prouty’s office atop the Air Force staff in the Pentagon — trying to sell the notion that tactical helicopters would revolutionize counterinsurgency ops …
The Air Force kept saying no. Finally somebody got to somebody on the Nat’l Security Council staff in the White House, and the order came across the river: Let’s buy some more helicopters — and let’s base them across the border from Laos, rather than where all the shootin’s going on. Yeah, let’s put them in Vietnam.
The Huey program was greenlighted — but under CIA auspices. Which perhaps rounds around to explain why a banker out of Yale was lead salesman.
The CIA had opened its first official spy store in Saigon in 1954 (post French defeat at Dien Bien Phu) but our involvement there reached back into the war, when the OSS helped to arm Ho’s nationalists against the Japanese. Some say that the same guys, now wearing CIA badges, including Ed Lansdale, were covertly on the ground again well before ’54, working again with locals but this time to oust the French.
However that may be, Prouty writes that each early CIA Huey base in Vietnam needed some 500 (if memory serves) pairs of Pentagon boots to provide pilots, maintenance, security and support.
And when the bases started drawing fire from local insurgents even more Advisors were needed to Keep the Peace.
Wasn’t long before 16,000 soldiers were in country, under CIA command, shooting at insurgents from behind barricades as the choppers bounced and bombed around the South as Lansdale & company tried to figure out how to win their hearts and minds.
Then, in late ’63, a new President took office persuaded that it was time to let the Pentagon clean house.
Obama and Stanley
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The obvious parallel is the CIA’s drone campaign, based in Afghanistan, attacking Pakistan, which began under lame duck Bush-Cheney, August 2008, rather late — perhaps to be sure it was online fait accompli before the new prez came in.
The latter again brings to mind the Bay of Pigs — in particular the panicked revisions to the plan that went on between November 1960, when Kennedy shocked the planners by defeating Nixon, and January when he took office.
Steps were taken to downsize the scheme (quite consciously beyond hope of success) and to persuade the new White House team that the raid had been approved by Eisenhower (not so — rather, by VP Nixon, who headed the CIA oversight committee in Ike’s White House).
The raid came 70 days into Kennedy’s presidency. He wasn’t quick enough to choke it off, but deserves great credit for frustrating the prime motive by refusing its gambit — ie, refusing to send in the Marines to rescue the raid (and execute regime change).
And, of course, he never escalated with the Pentagon in Vietnam. That came after Johnson won his ’64 election.
Obama within weeks of taking office enlarged the CIA drone program.
And now, against the advice and/or instincts of Jones, Mullen, Eikenberry, even it seems Petraeus (four four-star generals) as well as VP Biden and CoS Rahm, he’s escalating the war.
Ellsberg pointedly compares Obama’s decision to that of Johnson (under whom and closely with he worked) in 1965 — and sadly laughs at the notion of turning on a dime and getting out in July 2011. The commitment, he insists, cannot but be anything but indefinite re both time and manpower.
More than puzzling. Why did subordinate Stanley McChrystal win this policy debate? Why was he even involved in it?
And what is the War Aim over there? I STILL don’t see one, and neither it seems does the senior brass.
Let’s see, who makes the Predator drone? Expensive little bombs ….. Who’s their anchor banker …?
In the Land of the Blind …
January 7th, 2010
This story about AIG and 2008, although in essence not important, could be used by the White House to begin the business of easing Tiny Tim into the dumpster.
If the White House were so minded. No evidence yet that it is. Reactions worth watching.
January 6th, 2010
For files.
QUOTE
It’s just astonishing that given the track record of Blackwater, which is a repeat offender endangering our mission repeatedly, endangering the lives of our military and costing the lives of innocent civilians, that there would be any relationship,” Schakowsky said.
“That we would continue to contract with them or any of Blackwater’s subsidiaries is completely unacceptable.”
January 6th, 2010
Big brain out of the Nat’l Security Apparat adds value re the difficulty of bombing underground:
“It complicates your targeting,” said Richard L. Russell, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National Defense University. “We’re used to facilities being above ground. Underground, it becomes literally a black hole. You can’t be sure what’s taking place.”
Need a second opinion?
“Deeply buried targets have been a problem forever,” said Greg Duckworth, a civilian scientist who recently led a Pentagon research effort to pinpoint enemy tunnels. “And it’s getting worse.”
Laugh or cry or …?
January 5th, 2010
Yesterday’s spectacular debut of the world’s tallest building — twice as tall (!) as the Trade Center towers were — in Dubai, whose related sovereign debt is number six on a recent list of Most Likely To Fails after its corporate sister pleaded poverty in December …
Leaves me speechless.
Floyd Norris managed to say something. Hear him, sigh.
And check out the business prospects for this white mammoth. Those prospects are nil, but Murdoch’s man closes with assurance that the “image of yesterday’s fireworks display” will surely mean alot to Dubai in years to come.
Meanwhile, farther east, into the creditor hemisphere, a single tuna sells for $177,000. In Japan. Our second biggest banker.
Back at the ranch, a prominent finance CEO today accused the Fed and Tsy of steadily buying stock futures during 2009 to ignite and prop the miraculous rally of March-November.
The money-management world is full of serious people who are certain this began in March 2003 — in an effort to support the (world?) war also set in motion that month by Bush-Cheney. “The Market That Will Not Go Down” then ran up despite news and experience in highly abnormal fashion until the weight of the credit crisis finally crushed it in October 2007.
Meanwhile, more mundanely, the media are full of forecasts for the year. Here is a quick summary of twelve prominent money minders, all foretelling doom as Obama cements his administration’s feet in the status quo ante on the finance front.
In same vein, the Times editors today forecasted doom for US real estate this year in light of Team Obama’s Do Nothing agenda.
Finance. Pakghanistan. Health Care. No Change We Need in any of these, and very little change at all.
Who would have thought, fourteen months ago?
“He went down with the ship.”
My own thoughts about the year ahead in the markets are almost entirely neutral, having been neutralized by the odd three years now past. The future is a mist and the postwar’s First World is as fragile as it has ever been. No reason for long-term confidence of any sort. Investments are all trades.
The stock market just had a fabulous, perhaps basically fraudulent, run, so one must be cautious. And yet if the combined forces, public and covert, of the Fed and Tsy and their international investors continue to juice the markets perhaps there’s some profit yet to be had in being long stocks.
My retirement account went all cash in early December, selling its gold fund FGLDX near peak (on the report of the November employment numbers, which juiced the dollar, breaking gold’s uptrend). Had already sold its China and Tech in May and summer (too early). And its energy by September. So the autumn was about 40% gold and 60% cash, until cashing out entirely in December.
Yesterday I stepped back in with some China. About 14% of the account. Rest is still cash.
Why China. Simply because it’s in a fundamentally sound position, bad news is less likely to appear here, or cash in reaction to flee from here, and the chart is somewhat more inviting than the others.
In my mother’s account of free cash I bought some CTL, the fourth-largest telecom in the US last time I looked, something of a takeover possibility, with a very healthy dividend and rather nice chart. I should have bought it before Christmas — had been watching — but was without an internet connection when the opportunity arose. I’m unhappy buying it here — 36.75 — but will be even less happy if it breaks out over $37, which bad news elsewhere is likely to make it do. The buy was a small lot, about a third of what one hopes to buy if things work out.
In short: I’m trying to get my head back in the morass.
Gold jumped the past two days as the dollar (which broke its downtrend late in the year) sank a bit — but then gold sold off this afternoon and its bulls seem flummoxed again, after 36 hours of unrestrained crowing.
The big news here is Friday’s December employment numbers, which will clarify the dollar (and thus gold) picture. I will be looking for the right time to get back into gold. Perhaps already missed the best time, but there’s plenty of upside left if the bull thesis has merit. Gold’s LONG-TERM prospects seem secure, up up and up as the postwar First World continues its descent into the maelstrom for wont of political will to regulate capital and large corporations.
But it’s not clear yet that the dollar’s late-year rebound is done. I tend to think not, and thus have done nothing. If Friday’s numbers are unexpectedly not bad, the dollar should resume its rise and the time to restock gold will have been pushed further into the future. If the numbers are unexpectedly poor, the dollar may roll over and gold go off again to the races.
Finally, if the dollar continues to rise, it will pressure american stocks down in general, although other factors may be countervailing.
Otherwise, there are certainly some inviting tech stories. But for now the macro picture outweighs in my mind any stock-picking enthusiasms, all of which will get funnelled into short-term trades or the trash.
This has been a poorly written report from a mind mostly elsewhere.
January 1st, 2010
“A London taxi driver tied one end of a rope around a post and the other around his neck and drove away, launching his head from the car.
Sarah Palin published a book and Sylvia Plath’s son hanged himself in Alaska.
Scientists in San Diego made a robot head study itself in a mirror until it learned to smile.”
From the Yearly Review in Harper’s.
