The Mound of Sound

Thanks to their brilliantly thought-out constitution, Afghanis are scheduled to go to the polls 11-times over the next 17 years. They’ll be voting to elect presidents and parliamentarians and provincial and district counsellors.

Karzai’s job comes up for a vote next May and most of his parliamentarians face elections the following year. For a country wracked by insurgency, this is a real security nightmare.

But, according to The Economist, Karzai remains the favourite to win the presidential runoff.

“Mr Karzai has not said he will run, though most people expect him to (not least, the Western governments which back him). His popular support, however, is lukewarm at best. His government has been tarnished by charges of incompetence and corruption, while his international backers have struggled to fulfil promises to rebuild the country. Large parts of the south, Mr Karzai’s heartland, have descended into insurgent-inspired chaos. The president has become increasingly critical of the West, and particularly of Britain, the Afghans’ historic foe.

“But, as in 2004, Westerners think Mr Karzai will prove the worst Afghan leader except for all the others. He is from the dominant Durrani federation of the majority Pushtun tribe. He participated in the jihad against the Soviet occupiers but does not have blood on his hands from the civil war that followed. He did not leave his homeland for sanctuary abroad. (Those who did are called dogwashers: the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, said they washed the dogs of rich Americans.)

“No other prominent politician has that mix. Afghanistan may have capable technocrats on call, such as Ehsanullah Bayat, a telecoms mogul, Amin Arsala, a former vice-president, and even, improbably, America’s (Afghan-born) ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad. But they lived abroad. It also has former mujahideen commanders such as Burhanuddin Rabbani and Younis Qanooni, both Tajik leaders, and Gul Agha Sherzai, the energetic major of Jalalabad, whom Mr Karzai dubs the bulldozer. But they are tarnished by warlordism. An excess of would-be leaders, in short. And an excess of ways to vote for them.”

Every now and then a matrimonial case comes along that’s worth a giggle, like the guy who bails out on his missus when he discovers he’s holding on to a winning lottery ticket. It’s good for the soul to see these people get their comeuppance.

And then there’s the former Mrs. Paul McCartney, Heather Mills. A brief disclosure – I haven’t cared much for Sir Paul since the Beatles broke up but I have a lot of sympathy for him at the moment. For some reason he managed to wed the Shrew from Hell. I’m sure that today he figures the 24-million pounds it cost him to rid himself of Ms. Mills was worth every hapenny.

Mills may have walked away with a tidy fortune, the equivalent of 17-thousand pounds for each day of their marriage, but she wound up leaving any discernable shred of dignity remaining to her on the courthouse floor.

Oh, how the judge, Mr. Justice Bennet, laid into Ms. Mills. He had a lot of trouble with a lot of her claims – well all of them to be accurate. For example, she said she had millions of pounds in savings when she met McCartney yet there was no evidence of any of it in her tax records. She said she gave 80 to 90% of her earnings during coverture to charities but, again, not the slightest sign of that in her tax records – or anywhere else apparently. The judge found that her “tax records disclose no charitable giving at all.”

“Having watched and listened to her give evidence, having studied the documents, and having given in her favour every allowance for the enormous strain she must have been under (and in conducting her own case), I am driven to the conclusion that much of her evidence, both written and oral, was not just inconsistent and inaccurate but also less than candid. Overall she was a less than impressive witness.

“If the wife feels aggrieved about what I propose, she only has herself to blame. If, as she has done, a litigant flagrantly over-eggs the pudding and thus deprives the court of any sensible assistance, then he or she is likely to find that the court takes a robust view and drastically prunes the proposed budget.

“She is entitled to feel that she has been ridiculed, even vilified. To some extent she is her own worst enemy. She has an explosive and volatile character. She cannot have done herself any good in the eyes of potential purchasers of her services as a TV presenter, public speaker and a model, by her outbursts in her TV interviews in October and November 2007. Nevertheless, the fact is that at present she is at a disadvantage. The wife would say she is at a severe disadvantage. I think she overplays her hand.”

“In my judgement the picture painted by the husband of the wife’s part in his emotional and professional life is much closer to reality than the wife’s account. The wife, as the husband said, enjoys being the centre of attention. Her presence on his tours came about because she loved the husband, enjoyed being there and because she thoroughly enjoyed the media and public attention. I am prepared to accept that her presence was emotionally supportive to him but to suggest that in some way she was his ‘business partner’ is, I am sorry to have to say, make-belief.

“I have to say that the wife’s evidence that in some way she was the husband’s ‘psychologist’, even allowing for hyperbole, is typical of her make-belief.”

I do pity Mills but I have no sympathy for the situation she’s placed herself in – because she did this to herself, all by herself. She tried to use McCartney’s reputation to manipulate him and to his credit he stood his ground as she repeatedly and unrelentingly defamed him.

Worst Woman In The World – Heather Mills.

Napoleon’s soldiers marched on their bellies. George Bush’s soldiers march on America’s frayed financial future.

America’s trained chimp, George w. Bush, assured his people that he didn’t need 300,000 soldiers to conquer Iraq and fired his top military man, General Shinseki. He assured his people the whole thing would cost $50-billion, $60-billion tops and fired his first economic advisor, Lawrence B. Lindsey who had the audacity to claim the war would cost $100-billion to $200-billion annually.

Then there was Cheney who promised that American troops would be greeted as liberators and Rumsfeld who said the whole thing would take six weeks, six months at the outside.

America has the mightiest military machine on the planet, perfect at rolling up a battered and disabled Iraqi army in 2003, and utterly useless at controlling the country ever since. There is simply nothing quite so pathetic looking as a main battle tank without another tank to shoot.

The conquest of Iraq was supposed to be an object lesson to little, unfriendly nations around the world of what happens when America plays hardball. They watched and learned but the lesson played out wasn’t the one America wanted to send.

Mainstreet America may believe that the “surge” is working and it is until you factor in the dormant Shiite militias and Sunni resistance. They’ve taken a break from slaughtering each other and passing American troops but they’re still there and they’re still ready to go and there’s no reason to think they won’t be heard from again – soon.

The success of the surge has been measured in body counts, a bit of foolishness that America hasn’t been able to shake since Viet Nam. If you want to measure the surge you need to look at other signs – the lack of electricity, water, sanitation, even gasoline; the lack of meaningful political progress; the corruption of the Iraqi government and the infiltration of its security services. If you leave the body counts out of it, this surge has accomplished precisely nothing.

Another object lesson from the Iraq war is how astonishingly ineffecient and profligate America is at this sort of thing. It’s now spending roughly $12-billion each month on direct operational costs alone for its war. That’s money it doesn’t have. That’s money it has to borrow – on foreign markets, money that will be bequeathed in the form of interest-bearing debt to America’s youth and their children.

What happens if Asia and Europe decide they’re not interested in funding America’s wars any longer? Better yet, what happens if they decide they will keep lending money but they want the IOUs in Euros, not American greenbacks?

When you fight an unwinnable, war without end, entirely on borrowed money that you squander like a manic-depressive on crack, you’re playing a mug’s game. It’s something only a trained chimp would consider worthwhile. Happy legacy, President Numbnuts.

He was born a Dick, he’s been a dick his whole life and a dick he remains. On the 5th anniversary of the Great American Fiasco, aka the Iraq War, Dick Cheney sat down for an interview and made clear just what he thinks of his “fellow Americans.” From the New York Times:

Martha Raddatz, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, sat down with Mr. Cheney in Amman, Jordan, one of several stops on a Middle East tour that includes Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Oman, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

After Ms. Raddatz asked about the economy — which he said was in “a rough patch,” not a recession — the subject turned to the deep unpopularity of the Iraq war. Here’s a transcript of the exchange, released by the network:

Raddatz: Two-third of Americans say it’s not worth fighting.

Cheney: So?

Raddatz: So? You don’t care what the American people think?

Cheney: No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. There has, in fact, been fundamental change and transformation and improvement for the better. That’s a huge accomplishment.

You know, he might be right. Under Saddam, after all, the Iraqi people had to endure functioning hospitals and electricity and they didn’t even have any sewage flowing down the streets in front of their homes. There has been fundamental change.

BushCheneyRove set out to defund the government of the United States. It was their policy coming into power in 2000. Like the conquest of Iraq, it had nothing to do with 9/11.

The idea behind defunding government was to dismantle the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” to put America back on an every man for himself basis. Privatize everything, especially Social Security, and by every means keep health care out of the public sector.

Defunding government was a complicated business. One aspect was tax reform to free those who didn’t actually work for a living – coupon clippers – from the burden of taxation, shifting their fair share to wage earners. The next step was to direct big tax cuts for the wealthiest income earners, again shifting the burden of those cuts to those “left behind”, the working and middle classes.

The War on Terror offered enormous possibilities. For the first time, America privatized warmaking itself with billions of dollars shuffled off to Halliburton and Kellog Brown & Root, among others lining up in Baghdad for corporate welfare on the grandest scale.

Defunding government also entails debt and deficits. Run huge deficits funded by foreign borrowings and so burden the government with debt that it has no choice but to scrap any vestiges of New Deal thinking.

But now there’s an even better way to submerge America’s taxpaying classes – the subprime mortgage fiasco. It’s America’s new economy, a legacy of the Reagan years. Grow a bubble, create notional wealth, strip wealth, collapse bubble and clean up the mess with government bailouts.

Now America is in the midst of yet another collapse. The fiscal banditos have made their fortunes and split, leaving the aftermath to society. As ever it’s the government that has to step in to protect the economy from total collapse and, as ever, that means pledging the good credit of the taxpaying classes against the chicanery of the non-taxpaying elite. You see, the US government doesn’t have the hundreds of billions of dollars, trillions perhaps, this will ultimately cost. It’s defunded. That money has to be borrowed and that crushing debt can only serve to suffocate any remaining, reasonable expectations the taxpaying classes may have of their government.

By the way, this is another page that Harper has torn out of the Republican playbook. It’s just his cup of tea.

I believe in rights. I believe there isn’t a single right we have today that hasn’t been bought and paid for – in blood – often several times over. I believe there isn’t a right that can’t and won’t be taken from us unless we defend it. But in order to defend rights, they have to be understood and valued.

One right that’s rapidly being lost is our right to privacy. Our privacy is being invaded, even trampled upon at every turn. Use your credit card and you’re yielding a bit of your privacy. Use the phone, same thing. Hell the grocery store now records your favourite brand of frozen pizza and your preference in feminine hygiene products. Now in British Columbia, the government has our health records processed in the United States which means, thanks to the Patriot Act, our assurance of health care privacy is shattered.

Britain, home of Magna Carta itself, has become astonishingly indifferent to the right of privacy. Britain has become a surveillance society with its precious architecture defaced by batteries of CCT security cameras. In some communities the police operate aerial reconnaissance drones over their own streets. These are things designed to aid the war against al–Qaeda, not to surveil ordinary Britons.

There was a story over the weekend about a proposed new British transit identity card. Leaving aside the right of privacy, it’s pretty cool technology. It functions as a cash card and a security/surveillance device. Want to hop a train, get on a bus or ride the Tube? Swipe your card or else submit to inconvenient human scrutiny. I mean, after all, if you’re not using your card you must be up to something, eh?

In no time they’ve got a detailed history of Charlie Banks of 54 Melbourne Grove, SE 22. They know where he goes, when and for how long – every day, every month, every year of his life. Computers can immediately spot something out of the ordinary and, very quickly, “out of the ordinary” becomes something suspicious, something to be watched. You call extra surveillance upon yourself by choosing to try something new and, Heaven help you if that something new just happens to be in or near a place that’s already being watched.

“If you have nothing to hide, there’s no reason to worry.” That’s the vile excuse they always use when stripping away another layer of your privacy. That’s right, only wrongdoers need to be worried, right? Wrong, dead wrong. It’s a set up whereby defending your fundamental right to privacy becomes analogous with trying to hide something in your dirty, devious and undoubtedly criminal or subversive life.

Surely the onus ought to be on those seeking to narrow your rights, not on those defending their rights. You want to take away my rights then first show that it’s truly necessary. Show the purpose is valid. Show there are no other ways to achieve the same purpose, not just no other ways that are as inexpensive. Show just how much intrusion is actually required and for just how long. No blank cheques. No indefinite powers. The focus has to be on restoring that right as fully and quickly as possible. Figure out who will watch the watchers, who will represent the public interest in monitoring their intrusion of the public’s rights and give those watchers genuine powers to intervene when they detect abuse.

Sadly, this isn’t what happens. After all, it’s so much easier to cast suspicion on objectors when the rest of the public is complacent and all too willing to be herded into the surveillance corral.

If you’ve ever served your country or had a family member who went off to war and maybe didn’t come back, these are rights you have fought for, rights that must belong to your entire society. If you don’t defend them you cheapen that service, that sacrifice. Freedom, after all, is more than just hoisting another pint in The Legion.

I forgot to explain why I consider privacy our “fundamental right.” That’s because the strength of our right of privacy impinges on so many of our other essential rights including free speech, association, assembly, equality; thought, conscience and religion; arrest and detention and due process. Undermining privacy can also powerfully undermine those other rights.

Another concern that arises out of the erosion of our privacy rights is the almost Newtonian rise in secrecy that results from it. It’s an action/reaction process. As our privacy is stripped from us, government secrecy inevitably increases. We don’t know who is watching us, when we’re being watched and what is being recorded and catalogued much less how it will be used on or against us or others, often without our awareness even of that. It sets up government against the individual in an adversarial relationship.

It’s vastly more troubling when it’s done at the same time we are “dumbing down” society, weakening us against the shelling out of our rights. That’s what I meant by my reference to the masses being complacently herded into the surveillance corral.

This might not be a good time to complain about melting to those of you shovelling snow from your roofs back East but – can’t be helped.

Contrary to the nonsense being spun by the hoax climate (i.e. denialist) industry, the world’s glaciers are melting faster than ever.

The outfit that knows is aptly called the World Glacier Monitoring Service. As its name suggests, it keeps tabs on glaciers around the world and it’s not in the business of creating smokescreens for the fossil fuel industry.

The latest WGMS report says the world’s glaciers are melting faster than at any time in the past 5,000 years. From The Guardian:

“Based on historical records and other evidence, the rate at which the glaciers are melting is also thought to be faster that at any time in the past 5,000 years, said Professor Wilfried Haeberli, director of the monitoring service. ‘There’s no absolute proof, but nevertheless the evidence is strong: this is really extraordinary.’

The problem could lead to failing infrastructure, mass migration and even conflict. ‘We’re talking about something that happens in your and my lifespan. We’re not talking about something hypothetical, we’re talking about something dramatic in its consequences,’ he said.

Lester Brown, of the influential US-based Earth Policy Institute, said the problem would have global ramifications, as farmers in China and India struggled to irrigate their crops.
‘This is the biggest predictable effect on food security in history as far as I know,’ said Brown.”

The Himalayan glaciers feed the main rivers of both India and China, providing water essential for agriculture in those massively populated nations. The loss of these glaciers is expected to turn the once mighty Ganges into a seasonal river, dry except during the monsoon season when water isn’t needed for irrigation anyway. The same situation could afflict major agricultural areas of China also.

It’s not just people and rice paddies and wheat fields that need reliable volumes of water. Industry consumes enormous amounts of water and both China and India are moving to industrialize on a massive scale that will only compound their water needs just when those resources are becoming unstable.

Before long, water may be the new oil. Maybe then those of us in coastal British Columbia will stop whining so much about it.

The “D” word has hit the papers. It was only a matter of time. The British newspaper The Independent has come out and used the word “depression” in the context of the current global credit crisis.

Sensationalism, irresponsible fear mongering? Let’s hope so. But that doesn’t change the fact that no one knows what the world is facing from a financial crisis sparked by America’s subprime mortgage meltdown.

Two things to bear in mind. The subprime mortgage fiasco was only the spark to an economic, house of cards that had turned explosive long ago. Second, what we’re witnessing is consistent with the end of great economic empires from the past. We may be on the brink of an economic adjustment of seismic proportions that will see a transfer of economic power from the United States to Asia.

This very outcome was predicted several years ago in a powerfully insightful book, American Theocracy. If you haven’t read it, it would certainly be worth your while to get your hands on a copy.

The author, Kevin Phillips, a prominent Republican, illustrated the transitions taking place within the United States over the past two decades, classic hallmarks seen in the decline of the Roman, Spanish, Dutch and British empires in centuries past.

One of these indicia is the shift in the economy from manufacturing to the financial sector, or financialization. When this occurs, the banking, lending, insurance sector displaces manufacturing in dominating the nation’s gross domestic product. It happened in Spain and in the Netherlands and in Britain before each fell into decline.

In the financialization era, a dominant nation believes it can simply outsource manufacturing to lesser, typically agrarian, states and it will reap grand rewards from investing in manufacturing in these less expensive venues. It works, but not for long.

What’s wrong with outsourcing manufacturing (a.k.a. globalization) is that the dominant nation uses its wealth to grow the economy of other nations instead of its own. Nowhere has this been more powerful than in the transfer of manufacturing from the US to China.

You know those types who warned that WalMart was a place where working people went to shop themselves out of their jobs? They were right.

But I digress.

The financialization of America wasn’t well handled, not at all well handled. Federal Reserve Board chairman Greenspan didn’t understand it. He even dismissed warnings that America was developing a dangerous housing bubble, calling it mere “froth” in the marketplace. Al got out while the getting was good.

In the course of financialization, America was flooded with cheap money. Foreign creditors, notably China, were content to purchase American debt at artificially low interest rates in order to keep their own exports pouring into the US.

This flood of cheap money led to artificially low loan and mortgage interest rates. Low mortgage interest rates stimulate demand for housing which, in turn, sends housing prices up. Soaring housing prices, in turn, provide a powerful incentive for buyers to get into the market and take advantage of the free money a house will generate as its price keeps climbing. Debt became almost irrelevant.

There were two, key warning signs that were neglected by the US government and the Fed. During this period, home equity ratios fell to all-time lows and household debt levels reached record-highs. Savings, as a percentage of income, plummeted too. Warning bells should have gone off, emergency flares should have floated across the skies, but they didn’t.

Yet the cheap money kept pouring in even as the supply of qualified borrowers fizzled. That’s when lenders got creative. Interest only mortgages came to be the favoured choice of first time home buyers in markets like California. Then there were people who were lured into borrowing money they had no means to afford – the subprime mortgagors. They were the fuse in the grenade.

America created a large class of borrowers who staked everything on continuous escalation in housing prices. So long as that elevator went up, they were okay. But it stopped and then began heading down, in free fall.

There were people who got rich off this orgy of fiscal madness. Among them were the hustlers who sold these loans, took the mortgages – good, doubtful and simply bad, bundled them up and sold them as derivatives to mainstream lenders. Everyone was so blind, stinking drunk on notional wealth that nobody heard the ticking sounds coming from those bundled “asset backed commercial paper” derivatives.

The subprime mortgage problem is relatively small – maybe $400-billion out of $11-trillion in mortgage loans – but it’s enough to spread uncertainty and fear throughout the credit industry and, for a nation addicted to debt and foreign loans, that can be and is devastating. What ought to have been good loans can turn into bad loans with nothing more than a loss of confidence and that’s what seems to be happening. Companies that find the credit market dried up can be toppled by even short-term capital interruptions. Expansion plans are scrapped, employees are shed from payrolls, and so it goes. The economy shrinks, yielding to recession.

The financialization of the American economy was bad enough but government and regulatory incompetence made it far worse. The marketplace is self-correcting, obviously, but we sometimes find that those corrections can irreparably damage a nation’s economy, even the nation itself.

These are fascinating times in which we live. Whether environmentally, economically, politically or militarily, history is unfolding before our eyes daily on a scale never before witnessed. New powers are ascending while old powers recede, sometimes unexpectedly. Natural resources are reaching depletion, renewables are past exhaustion, species are nearing extinction, and our climate is changing beyond our ability to control our own impacts.

What we’re experiencing today was unknown just a few generations back. We’re sailing in uncharted waters with shoals in all directions. A lot of the changes we’ll confront in the next two decades have already been put in motion and are now unstoppable.

The America of the Bush Oligarchy has written its own destiny. What remains now is to see how that plays out. It’s bound to be a bumpy ride, so hang on.