The Mound of Sound

John McCain gets goofier by the day. He’ll say anything that suits him at the moment and, to be charitable, he probably can’t tell fact from fiction any longer. The guy who would be POTUS has completely lost touch with reality. Here he is discussing why Palin is capable to handle national security issues:

Palin knows more about energy than anybody else in America?

Last week, Sarah Palin told Charlie Gibson of ABC News that her state, Alaska, produced “nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy.” She only overstated that about six fold. Alaska actually produces 3.5% of America’s domestic supply of energy, ranking ninth behind Pennsylvania.

This begs the question of the veep would-be’s educational background. After all, she has precious little real experience and is astonishingly ignorant of her own government’s policies. Well, relax, she has a degree. From WikiAnswers:

She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and attended five schools before graduating: University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, University of Idaho, Matanuska–Susitna College, and University of Idaho again.

Five schools to get a lousy journalism degree? My, that’s certainly impressive. Of course look at the current veep – he scored five draft deferments to keep his ass safely out of harm’s way in Vietnam. Is five their lucky number?

The most influential women’s organization in America, the 500,000-member National Organization for Women, has come out in support of Barack Obama and Joe Biden over McCain-Palin. From The Independent:

“The addition of Sarah Palin gave us a new sense of urgency,” Kim Gandy, the head of NOW, told National Public Radio. “She is being portrayed as a supporter of women’s rights… as a feminist when in fact her positions on so many of the issues are really anathema to ours.
“A lot of women think it’s a great thing for a woman to be running for vice-president,” she continued, “but they are completely dismayed when they find out her positions. The idea that she opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest – those kinds of positions are completely out of step with American women and once they find out about those positions, they get a little less excited.”

In Alaska at the weekend, a Welcome Home rally for Mrs Palin was dwarfed by a demonstration organised by Alaska Women Reject Palin, which was held on the lawn of a downtown Anchorage library.

…Wasilla resident, Phil Munger, a music composer and teacher, says she pushed an evangelical agenda in the town. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the [school] board. I bumped into her after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God [a church]. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism – your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’ I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

Mr Munger also asked Mrs Palin if she believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime’.”

No wonder Palin doesn’t flinch at the idea of war with Russia. She’s a complete, Rapture-lovin’ nutjob.

I read an article recently speculating that the American people were in the grip of some sort of mass insanity – actual lunacy. You have to wonder.

What lies behind madness like the Dot.Com bubble or the subprime mortgage fiasco or the Iraq war?

Now greed has played a significant role in America’s succession of bubbles but even the greedy don’t have to be stupid. Imagine a startup company with a dozen employees that had never turned a dime in profit selling for millions upon millions of dollars. Imagine investing your life savings in that sort of “new economy” industry. You would have to be stupid.

The Enron/WorldCom fiasco was somewhat different. That was fraud effected through dodgy accounting.

The Housing Bubble, however, that in turn spawned the subprime mortgage disaster and the derivative meltdown was perhaps the most powerful example of greed blended with stupidity – at all levels of American society.

Homeowners actually believed the value of their properties would soar indefinitely, transforming the family home into a real life goose that laid the golden egg. Want a holiday? Refinance. New trucks and a fancy car? Refinance. Money was all but free anyway and, in the US, mortgage interest is tax deductible.

Free money, free money, free money. Who thinks that way? A lot of people, apparently. Now, of course, greed played a big role in it but there had to be a huge amount of stupidity fueling it too.

The banks rolled the same dice only they played in derivatives – asset backed commercial paper – bundled chunks of a mess of mortgages. So mixed up, in fact, that they weren’t sure just who owned what. When that paper began to turn bad they couldn’t even tell who was in how much trouble. Stupid, stupid and stupid.

And then there was the government, the people paid to govern the country, to keep its people safe and protect their prosperity. What did they do? Nothing. They were afraid to upset the apple cart. They were riding high on a country whose people had the appearance of comfort and prosperity from an economy dominated by people selling their homes to each other.

You know, when you’re the ground crew of a hot air balloon and the balloon gets swept away in a gust you don’t want to be the last guy holding on to the ropes and, if you are, you want to make sure you too let go before it takes you too far off the ground. In America, everyone was hanging onto the rope, leaving the ground (reality) further and further behind. Go on the internet and you can find videos of what eventually happens to people that stupid.

But it’s not just in the stock market and housing market that Americans have been running flat out on stupid. Cheap foreign money has allowed Americans to literally wallow in debt. From the federal government down to the lowly taxpayer they’ve been steadily stumbling deeper and deeper into debt.

Imagine running deficits and then deciding you can wage an enormously expensive foreign war on borrowed money and create massive tax cuts for the rich. The clue is war on borrowed money. If you have to borrow money to kill people on the other side of the planet that means you’ll also have to borrow money to cover the revenues lost by those tax cuts. How astonishingly stupid is that?

Then, as the US Comptroller General pointed out in a speech last year, there’s the federal government’s unfunded liabilities, IOUs if you like, that add $440,000 in debt to the average American household. By now that could be half a million. How do they get away with it? Simple, they haven’t sent the bills out yet. Out of sight, out of mind.

Would you get into a car with a driver who was so drunk he couldn’t stand up? If you would, find something else to read. If you wouldn’t, though, apply all of this stupidity to the issue of continental integration – the deal that Harper is pursuing very quietly with the Americans.

Would you want to buy your way into a junior partnership where the majority partner is on the verge of bankruptcy or beset by an uncontrollable gambling addiction or is just plain stupid? No, there are better deals to be had and now’s a good time to start casting about.

We’ve become much too economically dependent on the United States and that’s a real vulnerability. We need to look elsewhere, to revitalize our trading relationships with Europe, Asia and South America. We can’t save our American cousins from themselves but we can sure get dragged down with them if we’re not diligent about protecting our own interests.

Now, if you ever needed a reason not to vote for Steve Harper, there it is. You see, he’s hoping to get us running on stupid too.

Wow, and we’re right there to see it too, the Afghanistan-Pakistan War featuring cameo appearances by US Special Forces and maybe, before it’s over, NATO too.

Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, talks about the terrorist bombing campaigns being waged against both Afghanistan and India by Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence agency.

Now Islamabad has announced that Pakistan’s military has ordered its forces to open fire if US forces launch another air or ground raid across the Afghanistan border. From the Associated Press:

…army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press that after U.S. helicopters ferried troops into a militant stronghold in the South Waziristan tribal region, the military told field commanders to prevent any similar raids.

“The orders are clear,” Abbas said in an interview. “In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.”

John McCain has turned into the guy who fell out of the Stupid Tree and hit every branch on the way down.

For weeks and weeks McCain has insisted that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong, strong enough in fact to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich despite the government’s debt crisis.

Now that Fannie and Freddy have been nationalized, Merril Lynch snapped up and Lehman Brothers tossed into the latrine the Old Fool is dancing around trying to squirm out of it. From Salon.com:

On NBC’s “Today” show, Matt Lauer, from the floor of the New “bloodbath” and asked Mr. McCain how he could say that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” while his campaign released an ad saying that the economy is in crisis. “Clarify this for me,” Mr. Lauer said. “It doesn’t seem as if both things can be true.”

Mr. McCain replied by saying that when he spoke about the fundamentals of the economy, he was referring to the workers — which is different from how he has described the term before.

“Well it’s obviously true that the workers of America are the fundamentals of our economy, and our strength and our future,” he said. “And I believe in the American worker, and someone who disagrees with that — it’s fine. We are in crisis. We all know that. The excess, the greed and the corruption of Wall Street have caused us to have a situation which is going to affect every American. We are in a total crisis.”

It’s hilarious to see McCain rise up against the greed and corruption of Wall Street given that the late, great Merrill Lynch has been his Numero Uno campaign contributor. McCain is up to his Jockey shorts in Wall Street.

And just what has the crusty old bugger been smoking to make him believe that the workers of America are doing all that well? Their government has every American household in hock to the tune of $440,000 (read my earlier post “Right Wing Meltdown”). Savings are at all time lows, debt at all time highs, folks are losing their homes in foreclosures and their jobs to outsourcing.

John McCain is saying whatever comes out of his backside without even trying to reconcile the persistent contradictions. Jeebus, I sure hope the American people aren’t dumb enough to put their country’s future in the hands of this guy. He’s like Dan Quayle minus the intellect.

I’ve decided not to post much, if anything, on the federal election. A couple of reasons for this: One, I live in an area where nobody really cares or even notices. The Reform/Alliance/Conservative incumbent doesn’t even appear to have a challenger, Liberal or New Democrat. The second reason is that I don’t want to say things about my party or its leader that may be discouraging to others.

So, instead of commenting on the election, I’ll just keep on with my favourite axes – the hollow hypocrisy of conservatism, environmental issues and global instability.

See you when it’s over.

True Conservatives worship at the altar of the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace. They believe if they just get government off the back of business, all will be well. Adam Smith told them as much in Book IV of his Wealth of Nations back in 1776.

The past century has shown that Smith’s theory was about as realistic as Disney’s castles. The economy does not function well when unregulated.

Brian Mulroney deregulated Canada’s airline industry. That pitted two, reasonably good airlines against each other to the benefit of neither. They slashed themselves to ribbons, the winner being the one that bled out the slowest.

America has been hit with a succession of jolts since the Reagan era of deregulation: the Savings & Loan scandals (there were many in case you forgot); the “Dot.Com” bubble; the Enron/WorldCom et al meltdowns; and, now, the subprime mortgage/derivative fiasco that is already being felt around the world. In each of these disasters small investors got wiped out in droves and, in most, small taxpayers wound up saddled with the cleanup bills. In each case regulators looked the other way until it was too late. Their reliance on the Invisible Hand was misplaced.

The uber-right, including our own Furious Leader, often and loudly warn of “massive transfers of wealth” caused by the pernicious ways of those lefties. Where? When? The previous paragraph details four – count them, four – massive transfers of wealth that devastated the life savings and retirement funds of hundreds of thousands of little people – aided and abetted in each case by right-wing deregulation and lack of oversight.

Now, imagine what would have happened had George Bush succeeded in privatizing his nation’s Social Security, funneling all those worker contributions into the very stock markets that are now in meltdown. Had he got his way this crisis could well have been both far deeper and more widespread.

The globalization hatched by Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney has likewise effected an enormous transfer of wealth. Western wealth stopped being invested in growing our own economies and, instead, was diverted into growing the economies of places like China. We surrendered the factories and the jobs that went with them in order that the rentier class could temporarily maximize their investment returns abroad.

In his book, American Theocracy, Republican notable Kevin Phillips outlines the inevitable collapse of American economic domination by illustrating how the changes underway in America since Reagan directly parallel the changes that led to the end of the Dutch, Spanish and British empires.

In each case the dominant nation outsourced its manufacturing sector and moved, instead, toward financialization. In the United States, the financial sector has long been the dominant economic engine. But, in outsourcing, what happens is that the dominant nation’s wealth is gradually invested in growing another nation’s economy. The dominant nation steadily weakens itself even as it strengthens its successor. This is another side of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. Short term gain, long term pain.

Globalization has taken on such a degree of fiscal intractability that no one dare challenge it, especially none from the conservative ranks where it was hatched. It stands as the fatal contradiction in conservative ideology. Surely conservatism is about preserving the status quo above all else. Since the Nixon/Reagan era that foundation has been perverted to make growth the dominant and guiding force. The status quo is founded on sustainability. Growth, by contrast, is not bound by any such criteria. It looks, instead, to immediate and short-term rewards while diminishing the significance or even ignoring long-term consequences.

Here’s something to chew on. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House, America was the world’s largest creditor nation. When he left, America had become the world’s largest debtor nation. One president, two terms. Does that sound very conservative to you?

Since we’ve hitched our horse to America’s wagon it would probably do us no harm to notice that all four wheels are beginning to fall off. These wheels are the four American deficits discussed by the United States Comptroller General, David Walker, in a 2007 speech given at the US Naval Academy. This is a bit long but it affects each of us directly and it’s worth reading:

The truth is our country faces not one but four interrelated deficits. Together, these deficits have serious implications for our future role in the world, our future standard of living, our future domestic tranquility, and even our future national security.

The first is the federal budget deficit. Thanks to a combination of out-of-control federal spending, several major tax cuts, and expired budget controls, federal budget deficits have returned with a vengeance. Depending on which accounting method you use, the federal deficit last year ranged from $248 billion to $450 billion. The $248 billion number reflects the unified budget deficit—net of the Social Security surplus—which is the most commonly reported measure. This largely cash-based figure represents the difference between revenues and outlays for the government as a whole in a given year.

But it you look at the net operating cost of the federal government on an accrual basis, which is how companies report, you get a deficit of $450 billion. This number is more useful and, I would suggest, more realistic. Among other things, this number excludes the Social Security surpluses.

While these annual deficit numbers get a lot of press coverage, it’s the federal government’s mounting liabilities and unfunded commitments that pose the real threat. I’m talking about things like unfunded Social Security and Medicare benefits. In the last six years, the estimated total of these accumulating burdens has soared from about $20 trillion to about $50 trillion, primarily due to an increase in unfunded obligations associated with Medicare.

Fifty trillion dollars translates into an IOU of about $440,000 for every American household. Keep in mind that the median household income in this country is less than $50,000 a year. For the typical family, it’s like having a mortgage that’s 9½ times their annual income. And that mortgage doesn’t even come with a house! This burden is outpacing the net worth of most Americans and the growth rate of our economy.

Finally, there’s America’s leadership deficit, which is probably the most serious and sobering of all. At both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and on both sides of the political aisle, we need leaders who will face the facts, speak the truth, work together, and make tough choices.

http://www.gao.gov/cghome/d07600cg.pdf

Anyone who believes that the right is the party of sober, fiscal management would do well to review its record of the past four decades, both in the US and here in Canada. The record speaks for itself.

Mulroney, in his scant two terms, added 40% to Canada’s national debt even though the economy was relatively strong during that period and his government had the added revenue stream of the Goods & Services Tax. The Canadian economy was left on the ropes and had to be turned around by Liberals John Chretien and Paul Martin. Common Sense Mike Harris left Ontario awash in deficit. Conservative Grant Devine left Saskatchewan on the verge of bankruptcy to be rescued by New Democrat Roy Romanow.

On both sides of the line the right-wing clown car keeps running around in the same circles and yet we keep buying the line that they’re the ones who are responsible. And so we now find ourselves at the edge, staring down into the abyss of Right-Wing Meltdown. Oh when will we ever learn?

Business doesn’t like the idea of carbon tariffs. So, what else is new? That didn’t stop the National Spot from heralding the warning of falling skies received by the OECD from… why, from 36 business associations.

The Stain gleefully points out, in the first sentence, that carbon tariffs are favoured by the Libs in their Green Shift plan.

Apparently citing no particular evidence for the claim, Big Biz nevertheless warns that imposition of carbon tariffs aimed at punishing (make that “reforming”) big emitters like China could lead to trade wars. Not quite the same sort of wars predicted by the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defence should global warming not be stopped but at least some sort of war, almost, – war by the seller against the buyer. Think that one through for a minute.

Now in the Fantasyland of globalization, the new home of Big Biz and the National Spot, the distinction between land of the buyer and land of the seller is heavily blurred. Vast confusion and boundless uncertainty. In the real world we know this is so much bunkum.

Carbon tariffs might just create jobs back at home again, levelling the playing field for domestic industries. Who knows, they might just compel countries like China, with their gigantic sovereign wealth funds, to invest a portion of their windfall on cleaning up their own industries.

Naturally, neither the one-dimensional business associations nor the equally one-dimensional National Stain championed any other means to achieve the same objective targeted by carbon tariffs. What they want is no action at all. Nothing that might impede the free flow of profit regardless of lasting environmental impact.

Dion is essentially right on the Green Shift and carbon pricing/carbon tariffs. It’s too bad he’s done such a lacklustre job of explaining and selling the policy that he’s left it vulnerable to agitprop from second-rate outfits like the National Spot.