Your flushable dollars, Part 2

We began a cranky rant about the fall of the U.S. Dollar last October when, for several days in a row, the dollar kept hitting new lows.

Well guess what?

Right, your dollar today is worth even less to the rest of the world than it was in October. As of 10:10 AM January 7th, according to Bloomberg News, you’d have to cough up slightly more than $147 toilet paper bucks to buy 100 Euros. That’s before the banks that convert the currency for you add on their own commissions, of course.

Which means that if you haven't done so already, you can probably cancel your low-budget trip to Paris. Or even your medium-budget trip.

Magical thinking,
Republican-style

Republican apologists for laissez-faire Bushonomics keep saying the collapsing dollar is a good thing. A cheap dollar, they say, encourages people to buy American products. It encourages foreigners to come here and spend money. So it’ll make us all rich.

Yeah, and I’m the tooth fairy.

I’ve already pointed out here that we make hardly anything in this country any more except for partly hydrogenated corn oil. Cars? Almost nobody abroad wants to buy a GM or a Ford car. The car makers, buoyed by the lack of government pressure to come up with really fuel-efficient cars, is running on the innovation equivalent of empty. Chrysler is such a mess that its foreign owners dumped it.

Computers? Most of the stuff in them is made and assembled someplace else, even if the brand name is American. Ditto cell phones. Don't even get me started on kids' toys.

As for tourism – well, some very well-to-do European friends came to New York the other week. They were just the kind of money-dropping, shopaholic tourists who could perhaps could help to restore the U.S. dollar by converting a counterbalancing load of Euros into dollars and leaving them here. So guess what happened?

Tour-onomics 101: The tourists come.
The tourists spend. The tourists leave.
So does their money.

They spent roughly $750 a night for a hotel room here. Times seven nights comes to $5250. Good, right?

Wrong. They stayed at the Peninsula Hotel, one of the many U.S. hotels that’s now foreign-owned. In this case, owned by a group in Hong Kong. So where are all the profits going? Right.

But…but…aren’t a good many of those dollars going to the hotel’s employees?

Right, and as low-wage workers taking jobs that "Americans don't want," a good many of them are here to work and send money back to their families in Mexico, Ecuador and other places in Latin America. Once again, you can hear the loud sucking sound of money draining out of the U.S. economy.

Well, what about hotel taxes that go to the City of New York?

Fine, the city can use the money to repay its bond debt, a good deal of which is held by…guess who? Uh huh.

But the visitors shopped, didn’t they?

You betcha! They were after high-end, super-fashionable merchandise so they quickly trooped off to find it at the palace of chic, a high-fashion department store called Barneys.

Umm, small problem. Barney’s ownership these days is ensconced back in the good old UAR. That’s the United Arab Emirates, folks. And the clothing itself was made in China, Indonesia, Mexico -- anyplace but the USA.

Will they buy your home
out from under you?

While they were here, the visitors looked into buying a little pied-a-terre as an investment that they could at least for now rent out to New Yorkers. It’s condo buyers like those who are helping to keep New York real estate prices unaffordable for many New Yorkers even while real estate prices in the rest of the country are plunging. (The other source of apartment price support is American bankers who can devote most of a barely-taxed $12 million bonus to an apartment purchase without blinking. But that's a story for another day.)

Anyway, foreigners buying real estate here is good, right? If they buy some little not-particularly-special Manhattan flat, they’ll leave a cool $875,000 here, give or take a little, for a one-bedroom apartment. We’ll all benefit from that, right?

Wrong, because some desperate New Yorker will end up renting the space from them for roughly $4,500 a month, and guess where most of that money will go? Right. Straight back to the land of the Euro.

The man with the
gangrene leg

Somehow, all this brings to mind a TV spot currently on the air in New York. It features a one-legged ex-smoker, standing on crutches, who describes how he tried to ignore the fact that his smoking led to diabetes, which led to a time when one of his legs became infected with gangrene. He ignored it when his leg changed colors. He ignored it when it began to smell. Now he's a one-legged anti-smoking spokesman.

That’s an almost perfect metaphor for the Bush administration’s management of the U.S. economy. Plunging dollars? Z-z-z-z-z! Something in the economy doesn't smell right? Z-z-z-z-z!

But wait, you say – isn’t the President about to “do something” by moving for a tax cut again?

Here’s what that’ll do: It’ll make the U.S. less able to repay its staggering $9 trillion-and-counting national debt. Which will further reduce the incentive to invest in America. Which will further reduce the value of your toilet paper dollar.

The fallout from Republican-Bush laissez-faire is cascading into self-evidence like dandruff on a dark suit. Wait until I start ranting about America's secret inflation. Maybe later this week or early next.

But the Republicans come close with Fred Thompson

Link

Mike Huckabee becomes a strike breaker

Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas Republican governor who wants to be the Republican nominee for President, is scheduled to go on the Jay Leno show tonight.

If he does, he’s probably going to need a Secret Service detail to shoo away members of the Writers Guild of America, the union that is picketing NBC studios in Burbank while it fights for the rights of writers to get paid when the studios and networks use their stuff on the Internet.

It essence, we’ll have an arm of the Federal government stopping a legal labor protest give partisan assistance to a Presidential candidate in his election campaign.

Power to the networks. But none
for you, you inkstained wretch.

Worth noting: networks and studios are part of the same mega-media conglomerates that want to sue you into oblivion if you so much as think about transferring a tune from a CD to your own computer, or lift a song or a movie off the Internet without paying for it.

You don’t need more evidence than the militancy of the studios and networks to know there’s big, very big money there, and that the greedy bastards don’t want to share it with the people who create it. That’s why the writers are striking.

Remember, just a handful of owners who control the likes of Fox, ABC, CBS and other media giants decide what you may or may not see in the movies, on TV news and elsewhere. Fox, for example, is not only the owner of a news network but also a major movie producer and distributor thanks to its ownership of 20th Century Fox. Ditto ABC, which owns Disney. And so on.

To exacerbate the situation, the mostly Bush-appointed Federal Communications Commission has made mergers of media companies easier than ever, concentrating more and more communications power into fewer and fewer hands.

Now Ham-Handed Huckabee, hungry for public exposure, even if it means appearing on comedy shows, has jumped into the situation with both left feet.

“9 munths ago I culdn’t even
spel Prezidential candydate
– and today I are one”

Huck is the Arkansas governor with the “nice guy” image, but not the vaguest clue about matters such as whether Iran has nukes. In essence he's a foreign policy ignoramus in a dangerous world.

On top of that there's his bizarro notion that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation." Or his weird statement that “I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives."

Clearly, foreign policy isn’t Huck’s only weakness. He also evidently hasn’t read the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Not to mention that Ham Handed Huck’s opinion on religion in America insults the founding fathers, a good many of whom were deists; not to mention an insult to Tom Paine, the Deist who wrote “Common Sense,” the pamphlet that helped inspire the American Revolution; not to mention the Quakers who were pretty much responsible for the founding and administration of one of the original 13 colonies; not to mention the Jews who helped to finance George Washington’s army. The best known of them was Haym Salomon.

Now “nice guy” Huck from Arkansas is getting into union busting. The Hollywood writers, being largely peaceable folks, will probably allow themselves to be shunted off to some distant point in the San Fernando Valley while Huckabee is in town, rather than risk becoming a replay of a massacre in Pakistan.

But with the all the crazies running and seeking power in the Republican party, this almost could be Pakistan.

Spoiler

So the other day the New York Times finally got around to all-but-announcing that New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg has all-but-decided to run for President.

Which means – despite denials from his camp – that he’s running as a spoiler. Whether he’ll do more to screw up Republican or Democratic chances for the presidency remains to be seen. What’s clear is, he’s going to screw up the election, drawing votes from candidates on both sides.

Bloomberg’s position will be that he’s a “centerist” – whatever the hell that means. Does it mean he’ll favor the war in Iraq or oppose the war? Hard to say, because so far he has seemed remarkably disinterested in taking a stand on the issue. Ditto universal health care. Ditto, matters of making the income tax more graduated, caring for injured war veterans, ending or continuing inheritance taxes and other issues.

As I’ve in one way or another said here, here, here and here, Michael Bloomberg is a Class A phony. And a Class A spoiler. He won’t win, and heaven help America if he does. The only real reason he has for wanting to be president is, he wants to be president.

As the TV spots might say, "Tell 'Mike' Bloomberg to stop throwing monkey wrenches into the gears of Democracy."

Pass it on.

You now owe nine trillion, 136 billion, four hundred and eighteen million, sixty-two thousand, 457 dollars and twenty nine cents. Thanks to this guy.

Hey, you want nightmares? Here’s a nightmare for you. Your share of the unpaid and growing national debt means that you or your heirs owe the IRS $30,000. Right now. Tomorrow it'll be worse. Matter of fact, it'll be worse by the time you finish reading this post.

The cause? Well, actually there are two causes – cutting taxes, and simultaneously firing up a war over nothing in Iraq. In other words, the two key features of the Bush conservative administration.

“Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day -- or nearly $1 million a minute,” said the Associated Press, in an article quoted in this revelatory horror story.

More from the nightmare tale:

"In short -- we're issuing debt like it's going out of style. That means the Bush's tax cuts were in fact tax deferments because they'll have to increase in order to pay for the spending for the last six years. It also means that further tax cuts should be off the table. It also means the further spending for new programs are off the table."

But do leading Republican presidential candidates get it? Nope. George Romney wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, while Rudy Giuliani wants even more of them.

That’s like trying to stave off foreclosure on the house by maxing out your credit cards.

But wait, it gets worse!

The "conservative" Bush financial policies are driving all of us into such a hole that foreign investors are snapping up – as if it's Halloween candy – all kinds of American property, American businesses, and the rights to control American technology. Others include investors in fairly undemocratic places like  Dubai, Saudi Arabia the UAR, Russia and China. Click here for an example.

That means those folks are gaining more and more control over everything from the water you drink, to tolls collected on some of the highways you may drive, to the Pentagon's supply chain, to the U.S. Government’s staggering debts. If those foreign investors ever call in their chits, friend, chances are you’ll be on a breadline the next morning.

Somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden must be thanking Allah for giving the United States the reign George Bush and the so-called conservative policies that are sabotaging everything we have.

Merry Christmas, kiddies. Guess what’s in the toys Santa left you? And just lay off calling me a grinch, willyuh?

I woke up this morning wondering: To grinch? Or not to grinch?

I’ve decided to Grinch. So get off my case about it. I don’t need you to tell me I’m in a bad mood. And now for the reasons I took the trouble to post today:

• Hundreds of different kids toys – made in China for the likes of American “manufacturers” like Mattel – are lead-poison poisonous.

• All kinds of fish products from – you guessed it, pal, China – are poisonous. And we don't even know which ones.

• Earlier this year, it turned out dog food containing ingredients from China were poisonous. The key ingredient was wheat gluten, which is also in your bread, spaghetti, cookies, soups.

I could go on and on. Do you know where the wheat gluten in your breakfast toast came from?

It’s easy to blame China. To tell you the truth, they deserve a lot of the blame. But our own government, yours and mine, deserves a lot more of the blame.

The imbecile-in-chief we somehow let get elected and re-elected believes in unfettered capitalism. The idea is supposed to be, just get government out of commerce and the marketplace will fix all ills. Poison toys? They’ll go away. Poison fish? It’ll go away. Poison dog food? It’ll go away too, thanks to the wisdom of the unfettered market.

And how does that work? Easily. After you discover your kid is dead, your dog is dead, and you yourself are dead, you’ll stop buying the poisoned stuff. The market then will say to itself, “Hmm, we’ve lost three customers. We’d better get the lead out. Oh, and also the melamine, the antibiotics, the bacteria, the viruses, the mad cow prions and other toxins.”

Do you see a slight fallacy in that reasoning? Me too.

Even if you can keep on making rational purchasing decisions when you’re dead, it’s pretty hard to purchase anything rationally if you don’t know where it came from. Besides, once you're dead, why should the poison sellers wonder whether you'll boycott them or not – unless the government puts enough people with policing authority in there to bop the malefactor marketers over the head with the threat of a prison sentence?

I bet you can’t answer any of the following questions:

•Where did the fish that went into your last fried fish sticks dinner come from? Not the company that sold it to you. The raw ingredients.

•Where did the wheat gluten in your “healthy” 7-grain bread come from?

Where did the food eaten by the turkey that you’re eating from Christmas come from?

And how come the U.S. Government isn’t testing any of this poisonous stuff before it gets unloaded in American ports?

The U.S. Government belongs to the American people. That, pal, means you and me. It’s time to take the government back and put it to work for us. National defense means defense against poisoning and unscrupulous profiteers here and abroad, as well as against Al Qaida.

But tell that to a Republican! Tell them we need more government inspections of goods and services. Tell them the government needs sharper teeth to bite off the ears of any company that purchases and redistributes poison. Tell them we need a labeling law that will tell you where not only your kids' toys and your dog's food came from, but also your own fish, and steak, and the mucilage you licked the last time you mailed back a bill to the phone company.

Feeling sick yet?

Okay, enough for today.

Merry Christmas.

And watch what you stick in your mouth.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush does a little business with a New York bank. Next thing you know, Florida taxpayers are holding the bag for billions.

Corruption, thy name is Bush! This story has the makings of another Carl Hiaasen novel. All it still needs is a sexy blonde and a fisherman who finds his bone-fishing grounds occupied by a politician fellating a banker.

Remarkably, it appeared here on Bloomberg.com.

The nub of it

Here are a few choice excerpts from the Bloomberg News story:

Jeb Bush, who incorporated Jeb Bush & Associates in February 2007, a month after completing his second term [as Governor], had been hired as a consultant to Lehman Brothers in June. Bush is the brother of President George W. Bush.

`Do Something Quickly'

In November, school districts and local agencies that kept their cash in the state pool rushed to withdraw $12 billion, or 46 percent, of the money in the fund. On Nov. 29, the state froze the fund to stop all withdrawals. ``If we don't do something quickly, we're not going to have an investment pool,'' [Carl] Stipanovich [executive director of the state board of administration] told the board that day.

Until November, the Florida pool was the largest public money market fund in the U.S. It held cash for about 1,000 school districts, towns and local agencies in Florida.

Stipanovich resigned on Dec. 4. He declined to comment.

And furthermore:

What Stipanovich, 58, hadn't told his boss, Florida Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink, was that Lehman Brothers was the same firm that had sold the state fund $842 million of mortgage- backed debt in July and August. Those securities defaulted within four months, and totaled more failing debt than any other bank sold the state, Florida records show. `

`At the time, I never knew it was Lehman Brothers that actually sold us these investments,'' Sink says.

Florida CFO Sink is riled up about more than Stipanovich. She says JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Lehman Brothers were offloading tainted debt on Florida and other states at a time when those assets were plummeting in value.

So now, if you’re still following all this:

Ex-governor Bush, the President's brother with deep political ties in Florida, sets up a consulting business. Lehman becomes his client. Next thing you know, the taxpayers are stuck with a bunch of nearly worthless paper from Lehman. The public is screwed.

You don’t suppose George Bush’s new U.S. Attorney General appointee, Michael Mukasey, will bring corruption charges, against Jeb, do you?

Nah, I don’t think so either.

New York Senator Charles Schumer (Democrat), who rammed Mukasey’s approval through the senate, please take note. After all, the AG is now your boy.

Okay, struck TV networks. You "Axed" for it!

New York: Stunned by the fallout from the Screen Writers Guild strike that threatens to make television an even-vaster wasteland, the networks have begun to consider asking advertising agencies to develop their own programming with non-union advertising copywriters.

The networks may consider promising that in turn for useable scripts, the ad agencies will be permitted to work generous plugs for their clients’ products into each show.

First the respond was an agency seeking to steal the AXE Deodorant account, currently at a different agency. The upstart agency put its best creative team on the job. Here are the first fruits of their fertile minds:

From: Axe Creative Team
To: Dave Whetstone, Creative Director

Dave,
We’ve been working all weekend on these. We think they're really cool.

The Armpit Show: This one’s a real charmer, kind of kooky, kind of droll. It’s a sitcom about a family’s adventures and little conflicts, as told by their armpits.

Now don’t get grossed out, Dave. we don’t want to show real armpits. We're talking about sock puppet armpits. They can sniff each other, talk about stuff like body odor problems, and of course always turn to Axe Deodorant to solve their deepest problems.

Continuing characters might include Bob Armpit as Father, Melissa Armpit as Mother, Bart Armpit (or if that’s too close to the Simpsons we could change his name to Brad Armpit) as the teen-aged son, Madison Armpit as the Little Sister, and a nosy neighbor, Mrs. Grungy Pitts.

Armpits In The News: Dave, I really, really think this could be serious competition to the Daily Show. The idea is to get laughs about the news by taking the people in the headlines and zooming in on their armpits. Sometimes you’ll be able to show wet armpits, but just as important, we’ll be able to rate the probable wetness under their clothing by the tenseness of whatever situation they happen to be in, on a scale of 1 to 10.

For example, if Barry Bonds has to answer questions about steroids and starts to look a little bit sweaty, that's an eight. If George Bush gets asked a question and gets that deer-in-the-headlights look again, that’s a nine. If Jessica Simpson gets asked about her love life – well, I think you get the idea. I foresee this adding a new phrase to the American idiom, “This looks like a number 10 armpit moment.”

The Scent Of Love. No, no, no, Dave, this is not a show about people. It’s kind of a Nature Channel show that each week features the scent of a different animal or bug and how that scent leads these wonderful creatures to find each other and reproduce. I figure our target audience would be adolescents, who are interested in sex but who can watch this show as an excuse to do high school biology term papers and feel they’re learning something.

Of course, adolescence is when a lot of brand preferences for things like underarm deodorant get formed, so this is a perfect show for the Axe people. We could even give it an intellectual atmosphere with scientific experiments. For example, we could coat a female fruit fly with Axe and watch how she gets ignored by male fruit flies.

Smelly Friends. The idea is, we have this co-ed apartment in the middle of Manhattan with a cast of continuing characters that include a guy and gal who are in love with each other but don’t know it, two gay guys who are in love with each other but also don’t know it and only one of them knows he’s gay, a real trampy-looking blonde who’s always bringing home guys she picked up in a bar or on the subway, and her two kids by an annulled marriage.

The big idea is, because it’s a New York apartment it’s always too hot, and there’s no way of turning off the radiator, so of course body odor becomes the main issue in all their lives. We keep seeing how body odor affects their romances and career prospects and how Axe comes in from time to time to solve various lifestyle problems.

The Axe Factory would be a program about a factory that makes electric guitars, and the musicians that buy them. Each week we follow a new guitar from the factory as it makes its way into the life of a different musician.

We see musicians on the road, sweating on stage, climbing back into cramped busses and so on. We learn a lot of inside stuff about musicians – for instance, that they have problems with expensive costumes that they can’t afford to replace very often – and that’s why they worry a lot about sweat stains. We have the tensions that arise on the bus when one or more of the actors get a little gamy. And of course we see how all these tensions get resolved with the help of Axe deodorant.

Axe Me Anything. This is a show about hip hop America, and the growing role that Axe deodorant plays in it. Each week, various up-and-coming hip hop stars get called to the stage and told an anecdote about body odor and Axe deodorant. They must then immediately do a rap song about the anecdote. The idea is to see which of the contestants can come up with the coolest rap number about body odor and Axe.

The audience gets to vote by keying their cell phones, and only Axe consumers who have a special phone number printed on the side of their Axe Deodorant know how to call in and vote. I see this as a kind of cross-cultural, or maybe multi-cultural kind of viewing experience with African-American, Spanish-American, Asian-American Indian-American and of course Caucasian-American rappers all doing their different numbers, so we can appeal to the widest possible audience.

Actor’s Apprentice: A group of waitpersons working in a restaurant on the Upper West Side vie to understudy Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. The audience votes via cell phone whether to keep the actors on or throw them off the show. Once again, only Axe Deodorant consumers will have the phone number.

The waitpersons have to sing, dance, do love scenes – and of course there’s this great tie-in to Axe. See, they’ll have to do a lot of running, climbing and other adventure-type scenes and then pass an armpit dryness test. Of course, only those waitpersons using Axe pass. The rest get told, “You’re fired, Stinky!” It’s a great way of demonstrating on camera the efficacy of the product

The Odornos: I don’t need to explain this one to you, Dave. It’s like the Sopranos, but with body odor.

Divine Micromanagement: Jesus Christ goes to the Circleville (Ohio) Pumpkin Show – and picks a winning beauty queen

“I want to thank my family, everyone at church, everyone at school, my savior, Jesus Christ, and everyone who puts on the Pumpkin Show and makes it happen.” – Andrea Turner, Winner, Circleville Pumpkin Show Queen, 2007

Tis the season to be kind to car thives, election fraudsters, and extractors of defense contract kickbacks

Washington: President Bush today granted pardons or commuted the sentences of an assortment of thugs, petty crooks, drug dealers and other sleazy smallfry.

Maybe next year, on his way out the door, he’ll finally commute Karla Fay Tucker’s death penalty.

Posthumously.

If only they were Russians or Mafiosi, we’d send out armed cops to destroy them. Instead, we pay them with your tax money.

Look at these goons. They’ve got “Police” written on their helmets and their uniforms. Think they’re really career cops?

Nope, they’re a bunch of thugs seeking to make big money by working as mercenaries. They’re part of the Blackwater team, a U.S. private enterprise mercenary outfit that’s taking billions of the taxpayers’ money to murder people, including U.S. soldiers and innocent civilians.

According to an article running in the current issue of The Nation, some of the current controversy swirling around Blackwater includes:

• Gunning down seventeen Iraqi civilians in an incident the military has labeled "criminal."
• Multiple Congressional investigations. A federal grand jury. Allegations of illegal arms smuggling.
• Wrongful death lawsuits brought by families of dead employees and US soldiers.
• A federal lawsuit alleging war crimes.
• Charges of steroid use by trigger-happy mercenaries.
• Allegations of "significant tax evasion."
• The US-installed government in Iraq labeling its forces "murderers."

In other words, they're just your average lovely guys.

The rise of Blackwater is one of the most formidable indictments of the Bush Administration, its incompetence, and its callousness. Even supposing you have no interest in morals, and murder and tax evasion you ought to be concerned that these killers have been contributing mightily to wrecking the USA’s image abroad.

And despite a so-called attempt to “soften” their image, they make menacing little gestures such as parachuting into San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium during a football halftime show. The message to law-abiding Americans is clear. “Don’t screw with us, Dude. We can parachute into where you live, too.”

Where does Blackwater recruit these guys? Why do I have a suspicion it’s from the classified pages of Soldier of Fortune magazine?

Whazzat? You don’t know “SOF?” Well, if you’re into war stories, justifications of torture, and news about where you can go to meet people and kill them, this is your pub, dude.

Do read the article in the Nation. Here, again, is the link. It’s important to do this because, well, one of these days Blackwater might make the United States an offer we can’t refuse.

All that's needed to put the economy here is a bunch of leaders who believe Ayn Rand

Dude, don't look now but the Bush economy is headed exactly where you secretly fear it's headed.

I'm grateful to my pal Buce at Underbelly for calling attention a piece from the Washington Post that points out we may be one flush away from drowning the economy.

But it's even worse than that. With the Steagall-Glass Act now history – it was enacted during the last major round of bank failures during the Great Depression and killed off by Iago lobbyists whispering in the ears of Ayn Randite anti-regulation idiots – we're all in for a drubbing.

Thanks to the Steagall-Glass Repeal, when a bank fails, the brokerage house attached to it fails. When a brokerage house fails, so does the bank attached to it. With no Steagall-Glass the economy now can double your trouble in half the time.

What we need is more regulation, tighter regulation, and fast. What we're going to get under Bush and the somnolent Congress of Cautious Democrats is zip.

Nope, I take that back. We're gonna get shafted.

War? Or no war? The dangerously stubborn fool in the White House is bruising for a fight with Iran. Any reason will do. Or no reason.

Say one thing for President George W. Bush. When it comes to war, he sticks to his guns.

He called for war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein was supposedly harboring weapons of mass destruction. Remember?

When an American inspector said there were no weapons of mass destruction, George Bush said uh uh, they really were there and we had to send in troops to find them.

When the troops discovered there was nothing to find, the reason we were in Iraq changed. We were there to topple Saddam Hussein.

When Saddam toppled, the reason became that we were fighting Al Queda. Nevermind that there hadn’t been an Al Queda in Iraq until we jumped in there.

Oh, and now we’re there to give Iraq democracy. Well, they’re not exactly interested in democracy, but we’re there to give them stability.

Stability? Saddam Hussein gave them stabililty.

Now we’re up to our necks in an Iraqi morass. The nation is broke because Genius George cut taxes and started a war in almost the same breath. So what does he want to do? He wants to invade Iran.

First the reason was that Iran was building nukes. Now our own intelligence says the Iranians discontinued their nuke program four years ago.

So now the excuse is, Iran wanted to build nukes before they decided not to build nukes.

Or if that doesn't work, the excuse is that Iran could build nukes if they ever decide to.

The same could be said of Uganda, Norway, Latvia, Poland, Ghana, Japan, Brazil, South Africa, and just about any other nation you could name. Not to mention a very bright kid in a basement somewhere. So what’s different about Iran? George Bush feels like starting a war with Iran, that’s what’s different.

His philosophy of national security got articulated on this blog a while ago. It’s time to reiterate his brilliant philosophy:

“We won’t be safe ‘till everybody’s dead.”

Looks like George Bush can read Pooty-Poot-Poot about as well as he can read “My Pet Goat”

Remember back in June of 2001 when President George Bush met President Vladimir Putin of Russia?

Putin got nicknamed “Pooty-Poot-Poot” by our dim bulb president who said, “I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”

Well hey, it’s possible Georgie-Duh-Duh’s sense was based on a heartfelt admiration of evil, which given the White House view on matters such as torture, warfare, healthcare and taxes may well be the case.

Or it may be that Bush’s sense of character runs as deep as his sense of diplomacy – in other words, about as deep as a puddle left on a sidewalk by someone’s pet poodle.

Thanks in part to President Bush’s stubborn diplomatic stances, President Pooty-Poot-Poot has just in effect torn up a painfully negotiated arms treaty, “a move which could allow it to deploy more forces close to western Europe.”

Cold war, here we come again! And say, isn't that exactly what we need to contend with at the same time we’re dealing with Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and a collapsing economy?

It takes a special kind of person to drag this nation back into the cold war, but Pooty-Poot-Poot’s pal Georgie-Duh-Duh managed to pull it off.

What comes next? Revival of 1950s school nuke drills where the teacher barks “Take cover” and the whole class dives under their desks to protect themselves from atomic radiation?

Well, while we’re all down under there, I suppose we all could read “My Pet Goat” again. Maybe with the book rightside-up this time.

So long for a (little) while

I'm outta hee for a week or so. I'll be visiting the Upper Left Coast. Sort of a cranky semi-vacation, semi-family-get-together thing. I should be blogging again on or about November 30th.

Meanwhile, I'd hate to miss anything. So nobody move. Nobody say anything. Nobody make any ham-handed statements from the campaign trail. Nobody stick your foot in your mouth. Nobody invade any countries (Iran, for instance) at least until I return.

This means you, too, George, Dick, Hillary, Rudy, Barak, John E., Mitt, Mike, John McC and the rest of you. Oh, and you, too, Condi. Got that? Good. Then I'm on my way.

“Proud” of torturing prisoners yet? Well, I guess you’re just not a loyal reader of The National Review. But here's a song to bring you up to speed.

I come to this late, but nevertheless amazed by a disgusting excuse for a human being named Deroy Murdock, a National Review Online Contributing Editor, who on November 5th of this year wrote, “Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.”

Boy, if there was ever a need for a patriotic song about waterboarding, Deroy Murdock has the reason nailed. I propose the following, more or less to the tune of "Varsity Rag." Put on your clown suit and sing away, Deroy!

Hang by their thumbs,
Hang by their toes
Force lotsa water
Into their nose
Everybody does the Torturers Rag

Hotter than hot
Colder than cold
Climate control
Makes ‘em feel old
Gets as much applause as waving the flag

You can pass
Many a class
Here at the CIA
Just get ‘em tased
You’ll be amazed
The info they’ll give a-way
('though you can’t trust it.)

Hotter than hot,
Meaner than mean,
Staged executions
Make quite a scene
Everybody does the Torturers
Everybody does the Torturers
Everybody does the Torturers Rag
(I love that scrrr-eaming)
Every body does the Torturers Rag.

While I've got your attention, please note a few other bizarre points that Murdock made. Specifically:

• Waterboarding is not torture. (Fine. In that case, in the interest of convincing us of his point, will Mr. Murdock please volunteer to undergo the procedure for an hour or so – preferably on TV so that we all can enjoy the experience with him?)

• Waterboarding should not be discussed because then terrorists will know “what to expect, if tortured.” (As if they don’t know by now, anyway.)

• People who get waterboarded talk. (True, although it’s not clear either that what they say always can be trusted or that they wouldn’t have talked otherwise. Besides, if it’s so effective, how come we’re afraid of telling those captured terrorists – or innocent bystanders who sometimes get swept up in the net – what we’re going to do to them? Does that make water torture less effective?)

They say that nothing cures supporters of torture like a taste of their own medicine. But no, I’m definitely not advocating water torture for Deroy Murdock, unless, as I just suggested, he volunteers. What I do advocate is that whenever he shows up to speak in public, or just shows up in a restaurant, we all burst into song and treat him to a rendition of Torturers' Rag.

Or would that make him complain that we're torturing him?

Fortunately for them, Hamas and Fatah have Israel and the US to hate...

Otherwise they'd be spending all their time hating each other.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday called for the overthrow of Gaza's Islamic Hamas rulers, his first explicit call that they be removed.

"We have to bring down this bunch that took over Gaza with armed force, and is abusing the sufferings and pains of our people," Abbas said in a speech in Ramallah...

Hamas also rounded up more than 400 Fatah activists, and on Wednesday announced media restrictions and plans to curb public gatherings.

How to keep the whacked-out Bush Administration's free enterprise purists from plunging us into the next Great Depression

Suppose you went to the bank to take out some of your money and learned that you couldn’t get it. Not today. And not ever again because the bank was broke.

That’s what happened in the Great Depression of 1929, and it’s one of the factors that helped make the Great Depression so “Great.” Thousands of people lost not only their jobs and their homes, but also their savings.

Could it happen here again? Before you answer, consider this appalling tale:

The brat who destroyed a bank

In 1995, a 27 year old whiz kid with too little supervision and too much responsibility brought down an international London merchant banking company that had been doing business since 1762.

The bank was Barings and the whiz kid was a too-smart-for-his-own-good trader named Nick Leeson. Before he got tangled in his own elaborate financial knitting, a bizarre scheme involving markets in London and Singapore, a bit of arbitraging and a bit of financial fudging, he had managed to lose $1.4 billion of the bank’s trading capital. Another bank snatched up the chaff that was Barings for about two bucks.

The Bank of England tried a rescue attempt but failed. Employees around the world lost their bonuses, their livelihoods and in some cases their ability to retire with any degree of security.

As for Leeson, he did okay. After doing six years in the clink, he wrote a book called Rogue Trader that sold to the movies. Hey, it’s hard to keep a good story down.

So what’s this got to do with
your future? Pal, take a deep breath,
bite hard on a stick and listen up.

This country used to have a law called the Glass-StiegelAct. It was one of those laws that closed the barn doors after the horse got out, but at least it kept the barn door closed against future financial disasters.

Glass-Stiegel, signed into law after a long string of bank failures, prevented banks from doing stock brokerage business, or stock brokers from doing most forms of banking business. What I’ve just said is admittedly something of an oversimplification, but the principle of this law was to compartmentalize America’s financial institutions.

Think of it as a giant ship called The U.S. Economy. If the ship springs a leak and there’s only one huge compartment below, the ship is going to sink. But if there are lots of little compartments in the ship and one of the compartments springs a leak, the ship still will be able to make it back to shore.

Poking holes in the life boats

Alas, starting in the 1970s Congress started undoing Steigel Glass, essentially taking the compartments out of the ship’s hold, and poking holes in the life boats while they were at it. This was initiated by people who knew more about Ayn Rand’s brand of free enterprise fiction than they did about real financial history, and by bankers and brokers with influence, who saw a short term opportunity to make a bundle through mergers that would put them in two or more businesses instead of one.

The result is a banking system that’s a disaster waiting to happen. You don’t even need a super subprime mortgage meltdown. All you need is the next Nick Leeson, suffering from the same kind of gambling fever that drives people to keep plunging quarters into Las Vegas slot machines until their pockets are empty. When an event like that does happen to an American bank, it will bring down not only banks, but also the U.S. Economy.

Imagine being insured by
a bankrupt insurance company

How can a giant bank’s failure impact the U.S. Government and all of us taxpayers? Here's how:

Bank deposits up to $100,000 are insured by the Federal Government. If a bank with deposits of, say, $500 billion goes down, it’s the taxpayers who have to pay off the depositors.

That’s the kind of money the U.S. Government doesn’t have on hand, thanks to the insane Bushonomics theory that you can start a war, cut taxes at the same time, and drive the deficit into the trillions without horrible consequences. It’s like being insured by an insurance company that’s essentially broke

When a giant bank failure eventually comes, the U.S. Treasury will be forced to print money even faster than it’s printing it now to cover the insurance payments. When that happens, the value of your money will shrink, and the government will be forced to raise interest rates to attract borrowers. This will result in a cost of everything that’ll make today’s prices look like chickenfeed, followed by a national economic collapse.

In pre-Nazi Germany, inflation of this kind literally led to people taking a wheelbarrow full of money to the grocer for a loaf of bread, and eventually led to the rise of the Nazis.

Hiding the disaster potential

The potential disaster in the United States is masked by the fact that the government hasn’t hiked the FDIC insurance rate in decades. Today, that $100,000 limit is the equivalent to only $10,000 a few decades ago.

So if you can’t stash your cash in the bank, and you want to keep it safer, what can you do? Some people are buying gold, which has inflated in price nearly 300 percent in less than 10 years.

But there are risks in buying gold, too, not least of them the risk that I’m wrong about all this.

At any rate, the purpose of this post is not to encourage you to buy gold, but to encourage you to demand financial reform. The USA needs to bring its finances under control by ending the war and by restoring tax brackets that deserve to go into the 50- or 60 percent bracket for individuals with incomes in the millions and above, and into the 90 percent bracket for individuals with triple-digit millions in annual income.

And once that happens, we’ll need FDIC insurance up to $1 million per depositor, not a paltry $100,000.

Who does he think he’s kidding?

By gum, New York’s U.S. Senator Charles Schumer must be reading The New York Crank, and yesterday's post here, just below this one, made him break out in a sweat!

Only kidding, of course. But clearly Schumer must be feeling the sting of a furious backlash from his former supporters, like me, for his endorsement of Michael Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General. Why else would Schumer feel the need to rush into print with a New York Times op-ed piece defending his support of Mukasey? Republicans certainly aren’t upset by it.

Mukasey, it’s impossible to forget, is George Bush’s U.S. Attorney General nominee who swore under oath that he doesn’t, umm, understand what waterboarding is or whether it’s torture. Schumer’s brief in his own defense and that of Mukasey is a masterpiece of verbal legerdemain. It's one of those I-was-against-it-before-it-was-for-it-but-now-I’m-still-against-it flip-flop numbers.

Schumer’s arguments are all easily refutable:

1. Says Schumer, the Justice department is in a shambles and has become an agency that prosecutes people for political reasons and allows ideologues to infect decision making, but Mukasey would fix all that. Oh yeah? And what do you think the White House would do if Mukasey started upsetting the setup? They’d whack his hiney and sent him back into judgeship emeritus, is what. Oh, pardon me. They wouldn’t actually fire him. They’d “accept his resignation.”

2. Says Schumer, if Mukasey gets rejected we’ll have a “caretaker” Attorney General who could function without the advice and consent of the Senate. You mean, the way the previous two attorneys generals have functioned under George Bush? There’s still a House of Representatives that could cut off funding, and strangle various Bush programs – including the Iraq war – in the bathtub. There’d still be your Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck, which still would have subpoena power, and the ability to stir up a hornet’s nest under the President’s chair, especially if you pass anti-torture legislation as your op-ed piece promises and the caretaker Attorney General defies it. Heck, some would say that would be grounds for impeachment.

3. Watch this Schumer Shuffle carefully: “I deeply oppose this administration’s opaque policy on the use of torture – its refusal to reveal what forms of interrogation it considers acceptable. In particular, I believe that the cruel and inhumane technique of waterboarding is not only repugnant, but also illegal…” Oh yeah? So if Chuck is so strongly against dungeon interrogations, how does he account for this contradictory statement (allow lots of time for it to load) heard on ABC Radio. Schumer offers a wild hypothetical supposition about an atomic bomb hidden, more or less, under somebody's bed that would be a justification for "fairly severe" torture.

And if Senator Schumer feels waterboarding is an unacceptable form of torture but he won't rule out torture what form "fairly severe" would he accept? Branding with hot irons? Yanking out fingernails with a pair of pliers? Raping a child in front of its parent? C'mon Chuck, give us a few specifics.

4. Says Schumer, “Even without the proposed law in place, Judge Mukasey would be more likely than a caretaker attorney general to find on his own that waterboarding and other techniques are illegal…” Right. The man who can’t seem to imagine what waterboarding is or whether it's illegal today would suddenly have a change of heart and turn against the President who appointed him.

He must think we were born yesterday

The Senator titled his op-ed supporting Mukasey “A Vote For Justice.” Please, I want to puke. Schumer began his career as a high school politician in Brooklyn. This stuff might still fool the freshman class. It isn’t fooling most of the rest of us.

But when even a few Dems fall for this stuff, thus almost assuring that Mukasey will be the next Attorney General, there isn't much left to do. Except maybe stand under Chuck's window and protest with a song about waterboarding. Maybe Paul Hipp, the composer, would be willing to rename it The Chuck Schumer Waterboard Shuffle.

Franco’s fascist Spain, unconscionable torture, Diane Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and the utter repulsiveness of their political hackwork.

Why is Senator
Schumer smiling?

During the “transition” from Generalissimo Franco’s fascist dictatorship to democracy after the dictator’s death, filmmakers in Spain still had to be careful what they did.

It was known that people had suffered brutal torture in Franco’s dungeons, and that in 1975, a young student who later was found to be innocent, had suffered the awful form of Franco’s capital punishment – death by slow strangulation using a garrote.

One still didn’t come straight out in Spain under the fascists and talk about such incidents – not even for a while after Franco was dead.

Speaking in code of torture

Instead, in 1975, director Pilar Miro directed a movie about another case of false accusation and torture that occurred in 1910. But this was a subterfuge. People in Spain understood what other event the film might parallel.

Entitled El Crimen de Cuenca, the film tells the story of two peasants who were accused of murder. There were no witnesses to the so-called murder and no physical evidence against the men at all. There wasn't even evidence that a murder had occurred. Consequently, a hard line prosecutor who derided his predecessor for being “a liberal” suggested to the police that they somehow or other get a confession out of the two men.

Torture so brutal it’s painful to watch

What followed – I saw the film this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – was difficult to watch. It involved not only brutal beatings, but also techniques – shall we call them “rough interrogation?” – such as hammering wedges of wood under fingernails, ripping off fingernails with a pair of pliers, “strangulation” of testicles, and “non physical rough treatment” such as denying water to the parched victims.

Not surprisingly, the two peasants eventually gave the police the confessions that the prosecutor wanted. However, the two confessions weren’t consistent with each other.

Moreover, a police theory about where the men had hidden the body, which the brutalized peasants parroted after sufficient torture in a police dungeon, yielded no body.

Finally, the police concocted a theory that the bones of the alleged murder victim had been burned, pulverized and scattered, accounting for the inability to find his remains. The peasants then were made to confess that this new theory was in fact what had happened. Eight years later, the murder “victim” showed up alive and well, and the two falsely accused peasants, who had been spared death at the garrote by a last minute plea deal, went free.

Like the Inquisition and Franco Spain
– except that it’s happening today

What’s remarkable about this film, now more than 21 years old, is how pertinent it is to the current debate over torture presided over or done at the behest of Americans in Iraq and elsewhere. The Cuenca case supports with an historical case study the claim that torture produces, at best, highly unreliable intelligence.

Torture someone enough, by any of a variety of methods, and your victim eventually will tell you what he thinks you want to hear. Anything to stop the pain. That is true of torture whether it happened in Spain before and during the Franco era, or in some secret CIA dungeon today.

Relying on the unreliable

Relying on completely unreliable torture techniques such as waterboarding for intelligence may help explain why after six years, the Bush administration has still failed to capture Osama Bin Laden. Or why, in the pursuit of terrorists in Iraq, we’ve managed many times to massacre innocent civilians instead while the intended target somehow "got away."

Just as bad – and perhaps more horrifying to us as Americans – is the sly acknowledgment that we torture people even as we deny it. (Officially we don’t torture people but we can’t or won’t confirm that we don’t waterboard them or that waterboarding is torture. Wink wink.)

Horrifying, brutal and coy

Judge Michael Mukasey, who now seems inevitable as the next U.S. Attorney General, took an even more outrageously coy stance in his U.S. Attorney General confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in effect saying that he couldn’t speak to torture by waterboarding because he doesn’t know what waterboarding is. If true, he may be the only person in the United States who hasn’t heard all about it.

It has come to the point where you simply don’t expect more from Bush administration nominees, not to mention the President himself. In the end, history will remember them primarily as a bunch of thugs and accomplices of grand larcenists who funneled money from the U.S. Treasury into the big business equivalent of racketeering scams. Unfortunately, I'm beginning to fear that they will find company on the other end of the political spectrum

Two nauseating senators
– sad to say, both Democrats

What I find nauseating is that the likes of Senators Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein, both Democrats, would in effect wink at some the worst human behavior mankind has committed short of mass extermination.

One day, some American kid in uniform will suffer similar torture. The justification the enemy uses will be that the Americans have been doing the same thing for years.

Schumer adds to the outrage by declaring, according to the New York Times, that he “had obtained Mr. Mukasey’s promise to enforce laws that banned any of the harsh interrogation methods known to have been used on Queda terrorists….”

That “promise” from a man who refuses to answer similarly under oath before a U.S. Senate committee isn’t worth the piece of paper it’s not written on. And the Schumer statement itself all but screeches with escape clause weasels.

I have made it a practice until now to avoid heaping negative criticism on Democrats on this blog. They suffer, frequently and unfairly at the hands of right wing bloggers, commentators and editorial writers.

But I find it unfathomable that Schumer and Feinstein have agreed to confirm Mukasey. Perhaps somebody offered them a bone – funds for their states that the Bush administration will decide not to block, for example. Or perhaps – since their reasons for confirmation are so incredible I am forced to imagine a reason – they made an agreement not to reveal some skeletons someone has found in their political closets.

If so, they have made a deal with the devil, and the fruit their deal will bear will be brutal torture in some Franco-like CIA or CIA proxy dungeon.

Odious political hacks

You can compromise over matters like taxes, water rights or criminal penalties. But there is a certain moral place where decent people ought to draw a line and say, "I will not agree to let this to happen." If there ever was a matter that shouted against compromising, it's the matter of torture.

Sad to say, Senators Schumer and Feinstein have revealed their true nature and the truth about them is both surprising and unpleasant.

They are both odious little political hacks.