More On Jews and Arabs (3)

So Israel has pulled back in Gaza, and her Arab assailants are offering another truce—their time honored tactic for getting time to regroup and rearm. And Jimmy Carter looks at us through the TV screen with doe eyes and assures us they have promised him peace and harmony this time.
This is one more chapter in a 2500 year old story. It began, really, about the time the Babylonians (586BC) forced the Hebrews who stilled lived in the land of Israel (Palestine now) to relocate to the east. The land was left empty and the Nabataean Arabs, coming out of Arabia, moved from the area east of the Dead Sea—where they had encroached upon the ancient Edomites and Moabites—into southern Judea.
When the Persians overthrew the Babylonians and sent some Judeans (Jews) back to the area around Jerusalem, the returning Jews found much of their land gone. Assyrians (729BC) had filled the northern and central parts (think west bank) with non-Jews after carting off the northern tribes of Israel.
The Edomites had moved west from what is Jordan today into southern Judea. The Nabataeans were pushing in behind the Edomites. The Jerusalem Jews found themselves in control of a relatively small rump state. It didn’t help that by the Second Century BC Jews began to fight savagely over religious differences—do we worship in the temple only or can we worship in synagogues?
Eventually an ambitious Edomite, Antipater (father of the King Herod who appears in the Christmas story), allied himself with Rome and allowed the Romans to end the civil war in their usual efficient manner. Now Judea was a client state of Rome, ruled by a non-Jew.
(Herod, son of Antipater, had to spend a good bit of his time fighting off Arabs who kept moving up from Arabia and west from Nabataea. This threat briefly stopped when Rome conquered Nabataea as well.)
The Jews revolted twice against Rome. The first time (AD70) got them a nasty head slap, complete with a lot of crucifixions. The second revolt (AD135) earned them some serious Roman retaliation. Jerusalem itself was so completely flattened that an entire Roman legion could pitch its tents on the ruins.
Besides that, Rome decreed that no Jew could live in Judea (the land around Jerusalem) and the Roman Empire remained in charge of that area for roughly 500 more years. The Romans (Byzantines) were driven out by Muslim (Arab) invaders in AD638. The land would remain under Arab/Muslim control (with a brief Crusader interlude in the 1100s) until 1917.
That’s a long time to be out of your own house—AD135 to 1917. But the Jews never forgot their ancient city—dwelling place of their God, Yahweh, and the site of their holy temple. Muslims added insult to injury by building one of their holiest mosques on the site of the Jewish temple that had been destroyed in AD70.
By the 1800s, the land we call Israel today had become an inhospitable desert. Wells had caved in; trees were cut down and not replaced. Only a few Bedouin hung around, living in tents near the occasional oasis. The Muslim Turks who ruled the land did nothing to develop it.
Pogroms arose in Russia in the mid-1800s. Harassed and endangered Russian Jews fled, many to the United States. But a wealthy French Jew—a Rothschild—began buying up land that no one wanted in what was then called Palestine (to show their hatred of Jews, Romans had renamed Israel/Judea Palestine—after the Jews’ ancient enemy, the Philistines).
Jews trickled in to Palestine. Rothschild was persistent. They puttered around looking for ancient wells—using the Biblical record as a means to locate them. The land began slowly, painstakingly, to turn green again.
Arabs sat up and took notice. “Hey, look guys, this isn’t such a bad place after all!” They too began to move in. World War I came—the British promised Palestine to both Jews and Arabs. They needed everybody to fight the Turks. They took physical possession in 1917 when Palestine became a British protectorate.
Jews in Palestine had a few friends in London (notably Churchill), but the Arabs had oil, and His Majesty’s Fleet definitely needed that. So the balance of power in Judea and Galilee (areas of major Jewish settlement) began to tilt clearly toward the Arabs.
Jewish immigration was sharply limited—even when it became obvious that Jews in central Europe were in real danger from the Nazis. Laws were applied leniently to Arabs; harshly to Jews. Unstated British policy became: “Better a thousand Jews should die in gas chambers than one Arab become offended by their presence in Palestine.”
Oil. It was the key—then as it is now. As long as we have no real substitute for it, it will continue to tip the scales on our business in the Levant and beyond.
Arabs will continue to offer truces—and, as soon as they are up, the rockets will fly. Then the oil thirsty West will demand that Israel stop threatening their oil supply and send more diplomatic missions to assure that it continues to flow. And Israel will just have to wait until the next truce is up.
While they continue to eat and farm from the wells their fathers dug and they redug.

More Economic Land Mines For Obama

Are we gearing up to spend ludicrous amounts of money to keep some zombies walking while risking starving our few healthy business sectors to death? That’s the question raised in this week’s “Newsweek” Magazine—in a column called “Silicon Valley’s Fork in the Road”.
It points out that less than fifty years ago, Detroit automobile makers dominated the world car market. They weren’t called the “Big Three” for nothing. I recall personally that at the same time Kodak film dominated the world’s film market; Japanese workers at Fuji Film called it “Kodak San” as a term of great respect.
American textile workers and shoe manufacturers were also sitting on top of the world. In the 1950s, whoever heard of anyone buying a Japanese or Korean television? Life has changed just a bit.
Textiles are gone; consumer electronics are gone; shoe manufacturing is gone; before we went over to digital, Kodak film was considered greatly inferior to Fuji. In 2009, GM and Chrysler (which is now 40% owned by Italy’s Fiat) and Ford are gasping for breath.
All of these industries sneered at the prospect of foreign rivals ever taking over their place in the American market. Like the sleeping hare, the European, Asian—and watch out for parts of Latin America—tortoises have passed them by.
Huge earth moving machines from Japan; eighteen wheelers from Sweden can be seen all over our construction sites and highways. “Hit by a Mac Truck?” Don’t you mean Volvo? Are these foreign companies just being mean to us? Are they somehow picking on us?
Nope. We just left the door open and they walked in. We stopped innovating, stopped thinking about the rest of the world (or even the American West and East coasts) and left huge sectors of the market to them. They walked in and ate our lunch—which we handed to them.
There’s one area of development and manufacturing in which we, in “Newsweek’s” terms, stand head and shoulders above the rest of the world. But for how long? We’re so used to being dominant in technology (just as we were in autos, TVs and film) that we’ve stopped thinking about it.
That could bite us. Companies like Hewlett Packard are afraid it could be sooner rather than later. What’s wrong with American technology today? Too little money being spent on grants and innovation. That’s too little government money being spent.
Our technology businesses were birthed by government spending. The computer I am writing at owes its entire existence to government spending. Let’s go back to the beginning. The first computer ever was built by the United States Navy to determine the trajectory of naval shells.
That was in 1939, in a depression. By the beginning of the war (long before transistors and other miniature tech devices) the military had developed a 20mm (1-1/2” wide) anti-aircraft shell that packed enough explosive and electronics in it that it could detect a target in near proximity and detonate a few feet away. Churchill, no small devotee of technology himself, expressed astonishment at this feat.
Then came atomic energy: your government dollars at work.
The government brought German rocket and jet plane scientists over after the war to create more new weapons—and the technology that went with them. Out of their work came the space race which was entirely government funded and, out of that, came the entire computer revolution.
Take a lot of brainy Ph.D.s, give them a big (government) budget, new laboratories and time to think—and you’re soon going to lead the world in technology. As we do now.
Over the past few years, says Silicon Valley, we’ve been cutting back on government funding for R&D, for grants to universities and major labs. We are not educating students well enough to create new versions of the gadgets they so love to play with.
As we cut back on government funding, who’s spending money on research in technology? The whole rest of the world, especially China and India. “Newsweek” says a top scientist in China can get a research grant for $100 million. A 28 year old kid (Ph.D.) can land $5 million. An American researcher will sweat to get his hands on fifty thousand.
In many US labs, reports “Newsweek”, the majority of scientists are foreign born. That’s nice as long as the people who come here to get Stanford and MIT degrees STAY here to do their research. But these grads are starting to take their Ph.D.s and go home with them—for better opportunities to do research in their home countries.
We aren’t producing American scientists; we aren’t keeping foreign born scientists. Is this a ticket to a lost industry or what? If we let technology go the way of General Motors or Kodak film, we haven’t just lost a lot of jobs—we’ve lost huge revenues AND everything that gives our military their edge over the rest of the world. That will be a scary movie, indeed.
Spend money to keep GM hobbling along, if you will—but make sure to also spend it in the area where it really, really counts: technology. Keeping the auto industry doddering along is a nice charity—but somebody is going to have to come up with the cash to pay for that charity. That’s been high Tech. Let that go down and both the auto industry and the tech industry will wind up in the same pauper’s grave together.
Then the United States joins Portugal and a few others at the “has-been” table. Believe me, we won’t enjoy the service there. That’s something President Obama needs to give major thought to.

Obama--What Kind Of Bailout?

Obama has already shown us that the advancement of his political (some might use the hackneyed word, “liberal”) agenda means more to him than his plans to improve the economy. He did that yesterday when he created an unbridgeable divide between himself and those whose votes he might need for the bailout package by abrogating Bush’s executive orders on abortion—before the vote was even in on the bailout. Wretched timing—if he was serious about a bi-partisan bailout.
Obama didn’t cause any of the huge economic problems we face. Today I watched an independent film called “Maxed Out” on credit card debt and how it is promoted. As one senior executive of a credit card issuer put it, “We make our money on people who cannot pay.” Talk about a scary movie.
It suggests without saying a word about it that we have another tens of millions of Americans who may need a bailout from their credit card debt. Otherwise, as the film says explicitly, their only way out of debt is to die and leave it behind. Assuming they can avoid bankruptcy by servicing the debt that long.
We have home owners in structures they cannot really hope to afford—even with help unless the help includes massive debt forgiveness. They have already bought them, owe thousands upon thousands in mortgages that they simply cannot hope to pay—along with the necessary cars and taxes and appliances and maintenance—let alone college tuition and medical bills.
As long as they can open another credit card or borrow a few more thousands here or there, the dance will go on. How long can banks and lenders afford to go on subsidizing customers who can never hope to pay them back? Even if they’re making money on them today.
Oh, and there’s a new credit card coming out. If you fall behind on your payments, no problem. It just pulls the cash out of your retirement funds. So what if trillions of dollars worth of those funds have already been lost.
Do you see bailout? Do you see lots of bailouts coming? Do you see a Democratic President and Congress who have the votes to force their version of bailout without a concern from what any loyal opposition might say? He’s perfectly willing to stick his finger in Republican (and a few conservative Democratic) eyes by going ahead on abortion and fetal stem cell research.
What kind of bailout does Obama really have in mind. As I reflected on what Obama has said and what he is proposing, a story came to mind out of ancient Egypt. It’s far from a perfect analogy, but there are some interesting similarities.
Once upon a time, Egypt enjoyed several years of incredible prosperity. Crops were unbelievably good; there was no room to store all the grain (note that private individuals didn’t store grain in good times. They wanted government to do that for them. They just enjoyed the good times). Then came the inevitable “bust”, a famine that lasted several years while crops didn’t grow.
People got hungry. They turned to the government. “Feed us (bail us out),” they begged. An alien who had faced serious discrimination and even done time in jail was running Egypt at the time. He probably had no love for Egyptian culture, but he gave them the bailout they begged for. He fed everyone. No one, even if he hadn’t stored anything himself, went hungry in all of Egypt.
Just one catch. It may have looked like a government giveaway, but the ex-convict wasn’t giving the Egyptians any real break. He sold food to them until they had no more money. The famine went on. They pleaded for another bailout. He gave them another bailout.
This time he took all their cattle (real wealth in an agrarian society). The famine went on. They begged for another bailout. Now he took all the privately owned land in Egypt in exchange for food. But the famine went on. Another bailout was needed.
In return for food, this last time he made slaves (sharecroppers) of all the people in Egypt. Their money was gone, their equities were gone, their real estate was gone, and they were slaves in their own country—all in return for desperately needed government bailouts. (Genesis 47, the story of Joseph in Egypt.) For the next few thousand years, that’s how Egyptians lived—property of Pharaoh.
This just might be a cautionary tale for us as we watch the political party that has never loved capitalism (which did make America rich) gear up to do surgery on our economy. We might want to keep an eye on the kind of bailout they have in mind for us. Some things really need to go away, some things really need to be changed and regulated.
Let’s be careful that we don’t find our “lands, cattle, money and freedoms” all nationalized.
The more I watch Obama, the less I am sure that he has any use for the notion of balance in our economy—government working in its sphere, private industry working in its—each helping and restraining the other in order to grow the economy. (This kind of division has worked in our government.)
Bush may have been way too tilted toward the private industry side—but Obama seems far too tilted in the other direction. Certain freedoms—as the ancient Egyptians learned—once lost are terribly, terribly hard to get back. Bailouts can come at a heavy price.
After all, as the Egyptians lived like the proverbial grasshopper in good times, individual Americans made most of this mess. They’re the ones who didn’t store up in good times. They just bought and bought and bought. Don’t compound the mess by accepting bailouts that could destroy you. Be wary.

Bad Timing Kills Even Good Policy

I question Obama’s wisdom on rushing to reverse Bush’s anti-abortion executive orders. The Catholic Church and the so called “religious right” are going ballistic. That’s no surprise and, considering Obama’s stated positions during the campaign, he has to take them on sometime.
My question is, Why now? He’s got a stimulus package before Congress that faces a lot of conservative doubt both within and out of Congress. In fact, in some quarters it faces almost universal doubt and questions.
This package will work better if Obama can say that it is truly bi-partisan, that large numbers of conservatives support it too. That is precisely what he is endangering by stomping on conservative and religious toes at this early point—when his concentration is supposedly the economy.
Watching this brings back a memory of another American leader who blew his message and his program by being radical (and, in his case, right) at the wrong time.
It was 1965. After decades of filibuster, foot dragging, defiance and legal twists, Civil Rights was suddenly “in”. The Republican leader of the Senate called it an idea whose time had come. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was law—and it was being implemented. The Voting Rights Act of ’65 had the power of the Federal Government behind it. The world was changing.
A decade of Freedom Marching, bus boycotts, standing up against the Bull Connors of the South had seemingly won the day. It was an awesome moment in our history—one I am still proud to have been even slightly involved with. But then, … then … .
In March, 1965, Lyndon Johnson sent American combat troops into Vietnam. It was just like Afghanistan in 2001, Kuwait in 1991, Iraq in 2003. The vast majority of Americans cheered the troops on. We were stopping Communists back then, but they seemed as dangerous and evil as terrorists do today.
At this crucial moment—when the entire Civil Rights movement was poised to move on—Martin Luther King, Jr., single handedly blew it off the tracks. He did it by being absolutely right—at the wrong time. He proved he was a great Leader—but a lousy politician.
By that summer, when American enthusiasm for the war was still high, King began publicly to question our involvement. He questioned the morality of the war, the need for the war, the effectiveness of our intervention—he even threw in the fact that black soldiers were disproportionately at risk because they made up most of our front line troops.
If there was a toe to step on that summer, he stepped on it. (Completely incidental that every one of his points was valid—and that the bulk of the people he offended in 1965 would be anti-war in five years or less. His timing was wrong. The American people didn’t want to hear it THEN.)
The Civil Rights unity that had sent Episcopalian clergy from New York, the mother of the governor of Massachusetts, housewives from Detroit and college kids from all over down south to march for equal rights, and even die for them, quickly dissolved.
I remember sitting at my desk in downtown Washington, staring at the newspaper stories in front of me. “Why, Martin, why?” I kept asking myself. I wasn’t totally sure at the time that he was right (it would take me a year or two to conclude that Vietnam was a mistake), but I knew that speaking out against it was hurting his Civil Rights Campaign.
Former allies of his—in Washington and out—were outraged by his “unpatriotic” comments. After that year, the non-violent Civil Rights movement never had the momentum that created The Civil Rights Act again. Now people who, for whatever reason, did not like the movement felt free to speak up and even obstruct. They could do it in the guise of patriotism.
Following this came the impatience of the Black Power movement in which young black men flashed guns and threatened to use what they had learned in the Army to disrupt society. The Watts riots broke out that same summer. King had lost his grip on the movement.
By 1967 the map in the “war room” at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed riots in nearly every major American city. Two cities, Newark and Detroit, were surrounded by armored military vehicles that you had to pass to get in or out.
By early 1968, the Johnson administration concluded that there was no way it could hope to get re-elected without slashing back Civil Rights initiatives across the nation. Schedule C employees who had backed Civil Rights were fired outright. I was Civil Service—they merely called some of us in and told us to find other jobs. Immediately.
King’s supposed lack of “patriotism” was a fabulous gift to those who hated the notion of equality. To some minds, his killer was a patriotic hero.
Has Obama given a similar gift to the demoralized fans of Reagan/Bush conservatism? He might reflect on that possibility before he rushes in where even angels might hesitate.

"Valkyrie"--Self-serving Twaddle

“Valkyrie” is probably a good movie; I don’t think I’ll bother to go out to see it. I’ve known the story for over fifty years—and it doesn’t do a thing to prove the nobility of Germany’s resistance to me. Sorry, guys, the circumstances and facts of the actual situation do no such thing.
I understand that the film director, an American Jew named Bryan Singer, was eager to find proof that at least a few Germans were better than Auschwitz. I, born of German parentage (and occasionally called “Nazi” during World War II as a result), am equally eager. But this story doesn’t do it.
The plotters who tried to blow Hitler up at his Prussian Headquarters were far more self-serving than they were either heroic or humanitarian. They took terrible risks and many (including Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox) paid a ghastly price, no doubt.
Hitler had battled the German nobility (upper class) throughout his twelve years in power. Look at the list of conspirators: “Von” here, “von” there—that means basically “ruler of”—or “Baron” this or “Count” that. They despised him as an uncouth agitator from the slums of Vienna.
This was the historic class from which Field Marshalls were chosen. These were the Junkers who had waged German wars for over a thousand years. They had used Hitler to counter the Communists back in the 1920s (sort of a German Joe McCarthy)—but they had no respect for him.
Their reasons weren’t moral; they were social and class based. Hitler was delighted to finally have an excuse to wipe this class out. His Gestapo arrested, tortured and executed thousands of them after July 20, 1944. One could almost say that Hitler did not cement his power in Germany until nine months before the Reich was finished.
They could have gotten rid of Hitler in 1938 when they realized his bluff at Munich might destroy Germany and their precious army. (The Czech border defense would have stopped the badly equipped Wehrmacht cold, leaving only eight half-trained German divisions to face the entire 600,000 man French Army in the west.)
As Chamberlain and Daladier flew to Munich, two panzer divisions were dispatched by German Generals to take Hitler into custody. Only when they learned that the British and French would do their job for them—and force the Czechs to give up their forts without a fight, were the divisions recalled.
When Hitler won spectacularly in Scandinavia and France in 1940, the German resistance went quietly to sleep. (We’re winning; don’t rock the boat.) They were lockstep with Hitler during the bombing of London, the reinforcing of Italy in North Africa.
It was here, in North Africa, battling to expand the German Reich, that Claus VON Stauffenberg (the bomber who tried to kill Hitler) was wounded and disfigured. But Hitler was still winning. Next Spring he took Yugoslavia and Greece. Not a peep. That summer there were worried mumbles as Hitler took on Russia.
But he drove to the gates of Moscow, surrounded Leningrad, and the following year drove deep into the Ukraine taking the Crimea. The murmurs grew louder as Hitler stalled out in 1943. For the first time since the dangerous days of 1938, there were serious thoughts of removing a failing CEO—after all, a corporate CEO is often forgiven anything as long as he’s paying good dividends. It’s when they stop … .
The year 1943 brought a string of disasters worthy of the recent Wall Street meltdown. Three hundred thousand Germans were taken prisoner in Russia, an equal number in North Africa. Mussolini fell; Sicily and then Italy were invaded. The Russians went over onto the offensive.
Next year was worse. Bombs rained on every city in Germany. The Allies established a secure base on the shores of France. They took Rome and were racing north to the Alps. The Wehrmacht was driven out of Russia and the Soviets were in turn driving on Warsaw, just east of Germany.
To save Germany from the fate it had meted out to nearly every other country in Europe, the German resistance decided to get serious the summer of ‘44. The object was to protect Germany, not save lives. They tried, failed, and those that lived watched Germany reduced to rubble. There was no moral high ground here. Their motives were no different than those of any other criminal who finally turns on his confederates in hopes of a lighter sentence.
Oh—“but they also wanted to save Jewish lives from the ovens”. Don’t tell me they didn’t know something nasty was going on. They couldn’t get munitions shipped to the front because Himmler was reserving the trains to ship Jews to the gas ovens.
The time for the resistance to worry about Jewish wellbeing was after Krystallnacht in November, 1938. Or even before, when Jews got yanked out of better schools and were made to sell their businesses for a pittance and wear yellow stars. That’s when the real heroes of World War II stepped up. The year when vengeful Russian and Allied Armies were at the door was a little late.
I understand the great desire to pluck some nobility of spirit out of the murk and muck that became the Germany of World War II. I wish this sometimes moving story did just that—for my own sake, if no one else’s.
But it doesn’t.

"Stimulus Plan"--A New Definition of Insanity?

Stimulus—it’s a wonderful word. Wonderful concept, political and economic panacea. Let’s see, didn’t we have a big stimulus plan last spring designed to jog the consumer into high buying gear? I think I recall a few hundred bucks coming our way last summer. We spent it.
But somehow consumer spending is down at unprecedented levels. All sorts of consumer oriented emporiums are going out of business. Chain stores, chain restaurants, local stores, all going bust. So what happened to the promised stimulus?
Then came the banks, hat in hand. Billions more for stimulus—get the banks lending again; make it easier for those with insecure (or no) jobs to borrow more freely. Help businesses that are already drowning in debt borrow more; get business back on its leveraged feet.
It’s harder to borrow now than it was before the lending institutions were bipartisanly stimulated. So what did all that stimulation accomplish? (Would it be morbid to remind those who favor yet another trillion or so worth of stimulus that dead frogs react to stimulus more actively than this economy has to the previous two attempts at economic stimulus?)
Obama is telling us that HIS stimulus plan is URGENT. We must pass it RIGHT NOW or permanent damage will be done to the economy. That was the same argument Paulson used last fall. Bush used the same argument last spring. For all those urgently (and quickly) passed stimulus bills, this looks like a pretty much bunged up economy to me.
What about stopping to think this time? Oh, Obama would say, but my advisors spent the last six weeks mulling over the plan. How about a little broader base? Might even a few Congressmen and Senators have some good ideas? Some scholars? Even some people outside of government.
I con’t help being reminded of former Soviet Premier Gorbachev’s plaint as the Soviet economy collapsed around him. “I have a hundred economic advisors; one of them has a good idea. But I don’t know which one.” How about trying to figure out which one—rather than redoing the same package that didn’t work the last two times?
We aren’t quite at the point Roosevelt found the country at in 1933. People aren’t quite ready to literally starve to death if we don’t feed them this second. (No unemployment insurance, no federal welfare, no food stamps in those days.) We have a few moments to think this over.
The last two stimulus packages just plain didn’t work. What’s the point of a third package with more of the same? (If yelling “Boo” didn’t scare the bear away the last two times, why do we think he’ll be frightened if we yell one more time?)
I just listened to a Congressman tonight saying on MSNBC that the present stimulus package “guts” infrastructure reconstruction in favor of more tax cuts and more money for failing businesses. (Business Week defines many such companies as “zombies”—you can’t bring them back to life, but they consume vital resources as they keep hobbling around. So your bailouts actually wind up hurting healthy businesses that could make constructive use of the resources.)
One thing Roosevelt’s New Deal did for the country that is still paying major dividends today is to build infrastructure. It gave people work (it did not cure the Depression, mind you), and it made a lasting contribution to our well being. Obama talks that line, but his new Stimulus Package doesn’t actually do it.
(It’s almost as if he’s trying to pacify tax cutting Republicans—who don’t seem capable of imagining another solution to a major economic collapse than to cut more taxes—rather than do any original thinking. He told the Republicans today, “I won”, but he doesn’t act as if he believes it.)
In the end this new, hugely expensive Stimulus Plan HAS to remind us of the old definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over again—and expecting a different result.

Ponzi Would Have Loved This Market

We’re reading more and more stories about money managers and investment gurus committing suicide or disappearing suddenly. People who invested with these managers, some of whom are into their seventies, complain of amounts up to a million or more simply gone.
What proof of the power of the human mind to fool itself. Just because American financial instruments have stayed balanced on thin air for decades, both investor and seasoned manager convinced themselves nothing would ever fall down. In investing, gravity and good sense were repealed. I’m not talking about dishonest people like Madhoff here.
Has anyone stopped to think that the entire American stock market has been essentially nothing more than a Ponzi scheme for years? It certainly has been every since the Dow took off in the 90’s and cracked the ozone barrier somewhere above ten thousand.
How so? Well, first of all look at the figures. The World Trade Center is attacked. The Dow stays around ten thousand and quickly shoots above that. War in Iraq turns sour—the Dow climbs to 14,000. Oil prices zip from a dollar to two dollars and on up to three—the Dow stays around 13,000 or 14,000. The news reports that General Motors is spending through its cash (two or more years ago), and the Dow stays right up there.
Asian Markets collapse in the 90’s—suggesting that, like Japanese pre-war housing they are essentially made of paper. The Dow goes on climbing. What effect did the collapse of the Tech Bubble have on the Dow? Did the early stages of the Housing Bubble bring the Dow down?
Oh, you say, that was just because the market had confidence that American business fundamentals were sound. (Now, who was it that said the same thing last year?)
I’m willing to be told that you have a bridge to sell me that runs to Brooklyn. I’ll even believe you if you tell me that little bottle of pills you’re selling will cure cancer and prevent heart attacks. But, please, don’t try to tell me it was VALUE that kept the American stock market up through what even Greenspan called “an excess of exuberance”!
I’ll tell you what it was. They privatized retirement. Suddenly pensions were no longer invested in the company you worked for. The companies dropped their pensions. The prudence you might have expected from a stodgy old company pension investment plan went by the way. Some of these plans weren’t even funded—limiting the amount of investing going on to zero.
These pensions were not forcing the market ever higher. The market stayed at about the same level (speaking of the Dow) for decades, all through the company/government pension era.
Then the companies began looking at the overhead they had committed themselves to. Even government began talking about handing Social Security funds over to individuals for them to invest on their own. Companies went ahead and did that.
Suddenly, every week, there were, first, hundreds of thousands of well paid employees investing madly in their own IRAs, Roth Ira’s, etc. etc., all going through mutual funds and private accounts. Then millions.
Where else was them to go but into the market? Never mind that Tech (and the World Trade Center) was falling down. Never mind what a rational person might have thought of what the market was doing—there was simply no place else to go with all that cash.
Week after week—no matter what the fundamentals might actually be saying—or warning about—the money poured into Wall Street. It drove it up, up, up. And, unlike Ponzi or Madhoff, these investments didn’t even have to pay immediate returns. Nobody was expecting any money back until they reached age sixty or even later.
So there was no need for the Stock Market to face a day of accounting. (It hasn’t yet—it’s not deemed a crime when a trillion or so dollars vanish on Wall Street.) It just took in more money each week and went higher and higher and higher.
It is just possible that we could be looking at the day when some little kid looks at the stock market and shouts, “But he’s naked!” Maybe someday soon. Then Emperor Dow may have to admit, like Madhoff, that there really weren’t any clothes to put on.
Then the stock market will have to seek its own actual VALUE level. We—and millions of people who hope to retire—don’t even want to think about that.

Farewell To "W"

He’s gone, he’s gone. In some quarters I can imagine them dancing in the streets. George W. Bush has left the building. He’s no longer the man that can make every phone answer, that can make every warship fire a twenty-one gun salute.
He may have to start driving his own car and even answering his own phone. (When Eisenhower left office, he realized he hadn’t done any of those things in twenty years.) It can be a whole new world. They’ll still call him “Mister President”, but it won’t matter, really.
Historians are starting to call him the “worst President ever.” All I can say to them is, Don’t be in quite such a rush. I remember going to grad school at Georgetown in the mid-1960s. Eisenhower’s reputation, especially in foreign affairs, was so low it might have required a Hubble telescope to locate it.
The professor—a young, liberal hotshot who was soon on his way to the Ivy League—gave us a choice of topics in his seminar class. The disdain in his voice was thick as he sneeringly threw out the challenge: “Defend the Eisenhower/Dulles Foreign Policy”.
I didn’t know much about it, but I knew if I made any kind of a decent effort the man would sit up and take notice. I took up the gauntlet. Hours of reading and researching later, I went into the seminar class with my treatise ready.
Hours later, after he battered me with every question, insult and challenge he could muster, he walked out of the room muttering, “I didn’t think it could be done.” We were at least an hour past class time, and I had a splitting headache—but I aced it.
Now everybody’s doing it. Ike’s reputation is quite decently restored—especially after the fiascoes of his Kennedy/Johnson successors. People realize that he was not a puppet for Dulles; rather, Dulles was a puppet for Ike—a master string puller. General of the Army Eisenhower knew when to hold himself in reserve and let the front battalions take the initial hits.
In his resurrection, Ike had one thing going for him that Bush doesn’t. He was a much better people person (anybody who can keep Stalin, Montgomery, Patton, Churchill and Roosevelt all pulling in the same direction is some kind of a human relations genius). If someone was wrong, Ike didn’t sneer and make sophomoric jokes, he just patted Montgomery on the knee and said, “You can’t talk to me that way Monty; I’m your boss.”
As even last week’s Newsweek pointed out, it’s not so much what Bush and Cheney DID, it’s the arrogance with which they did it. (The magazine went on to suggest that it would be well worth Obama’s while to study carefully what Cheney/Bush did and why. There was good sense to a lot of it.)
But mere arrogance is not quite a good enough reason to deny a man his place in history. (It may be grounds for hating him, but a man can be arrogant and also right.) Even real jerks can make great inventions. Look at Steve Jobs.
I’m not saying that in twenty years we are going to be rating George W. Bush right up there with Lincoln and FDR! Not even up there with Ike, Reagan or Teddy. Maybe not even up there with Wilson, Jackson or Jefferson. But he may not be rated down in the sewer with Harding, Buchanan and Grant.
We simply don’t know how affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to play out. Can we say that the Bush national security policies did or did not protect us after the World Trade Center? Will he look wise and decisive after the fact? Will anyone come up with a better way to protect us from terrorists than some of the Bush/Cheney initiatives?
Look at the way Truman’s reputation has come back. I can still remember some of the anti-Truman jokes with which I regaled adults in 1948. Their thrust was that the man was a brainless idiot. When he fired MacArthur in 1851, my whole sixth grade class wanted to march to Washington and hang the man. We’d have had a lot of company.
His polls were horrible when he left office. (He could have run again, but he wisely didn’t try.) We live in a world today very much formed by Truman and his advisors. (Some of them, like Acheson, were unbelievably arrogant as well—some were very corrupt.)
If Truman and Ike’s foreign policy can look so good in hindsight—anything’s possible.
Even the Second Coming of George W. Bush. Just give final judgment a few years. He may be as bad as we think now. He may not. It’s a bit like trying to judge which novel or which song is really going to live on. The legs of a show or a politician aren’t that easy to spot in the heat of the moment.
If I’m still around, talk to me in a couple of decades.

Obama--Farewell to Dred Scott

He got sworn in. He jumped the gun on the oath. The Chief Justice bobbled the lines of the oath right back at him. He grinned. They somehow finished it, and Obama was the 44th President (and the 43rd man to serve—Cleveland served two terms four years apart; he counts twice.)
The world has indeed turned upside down. We live in a nation where no less an authority than the US Supreme Court has ruled that Barack Obama (“no black man”) has any rights that a white man is obligated to respect. (Dred Scott case, 1857, Roger B Taney, chief justice—who, four years later swore Abraham Lincoln into office.) Nor could Obama, under that ruling, become a citizen of the United States.
The man who wrote that all men have a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” sent a note back to a brilliant black mathematician that his calculation was fine but his skin was simply the wrong color to be taken seriously in any field of human endeavor.
Then there was Lincoln who, six weeks before Lee surrendered, called the Hampton Roads conference where he made a final offer to the slave holders of the South. If they would lay down their arms, he would make certain that their senators were restored to the Senate in time to vote down the 13th Amendment. That would certainly have made Michelle Obama’s life different.
Lincoln is also said to have written to Frederick Douglas to the effect that even if he, Lincoln, considered blacks to be his equal, the American people would not hear of it. Before the war if any black wanted to live in Michigan he or she had to post bond for his good behavior. Several other northern states as well.
(Douglas may have felt slightly vindicated when he became the first black American to receive a vote for the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention of 1888. But probably not too much.)
The modern Ku Klux Klan came into being in 1915. Life in fact and theory didn’t get better. Sammy Davis Jr. in his autobiography, “Yes I Can” talks about life in a segregated army during World War II. A tall white Texan kept mocking and tormenting him. Sammy finally got mad (he had been raised in show business and didn’t really understand the rules of subservience) and lit into the man.
Davis punched him out so badly he couldn’t get back up. But he looked up at Davis and muttered what was the theme of American relations for three-and-a-half centuries: “But you’re still a nigger.”
Too bad Jefferson, Taney, Lincoln, Dred Scott, Sammy Davis Jr., and that G.I. couldn’t have been in Washington today.
Obama made a good speech. I listened afterward as the news commentators tried to decide who he was most like. I heard “Kennedy”, “Roosevelt”, “Reagan”, and a couple of others mentioned. That didn’t quite ring right to me. Then it hit me. His speech really cannot be linked to any other American or period in American history. It was pure Churchill.
I have listened and read most of the speeches Winston Churchill made during the period immediately before the war and during the war. These were the speeches President Kennedy referred to when he made Churchill the second man in history to ever have been granted honorary American citizenship.
“He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” In his own way, Obama attempted to do the same today. It was a battle speech. It was both a promise to us and our friends and an implicit threat to our enemies.
It was an unequivocal admission that we have major problems. It was a harsh reminder that no one man or institution got us into these problems. It was, Obama said, time to stop acting childishly and pull ourselves up short and change course. That’s more Churchillian than American.
No more eloquent statement could have been made—that the day of American economic and military hegemony has certainly changed if not ended. He’s going to have to keep repeating that. Almost no living American has known anything else but the unquestioned power of the American Imperium.
For good or for ill, President Obama leads us into a new and very different era.
It’s also a new racial era. Don’t you wonder what Jefferson and Lincoln might have thought?

It's "No Fire Day" For Obama

A “news” headline on AOL’s “Welcome” page asks what Obama is doing today (George Bush’s last full day in office). For Heaven’s sake, what should he be doing today besides resting up? Any good athlete knows better than to practice hard the day before the big game.
Anyway, what could he do? He doesn’t have clearance yet to use the White House Phone. He has no authority to give a command or issue an Executive Order. If he’s as sane as I hope he is, Obama has figured out that he’s listened to all the expert jawing that could possibly do any good, he’s talked to all the Congressional chieftains, he’s done everything a non-president can do. So stop. Sufficient unto the Lame Duck period is the evil thereof—or something like that.
Hopefully he’s doing what a smart athlete would do—resting. You know, a nice breakfast, a long shower, saying Goodbye to the kids as they leave for school, going back to bed with his lovely wife, a quiet lunch with her… . (A nap if he’s really smart.)
When the kids come home, taking a final pre-presidential moment to talk to them, read to them, play a game with them—order in something that the whole family enjoys as a treat. Eat it privately—and THEN put on the professional smile, the elegant suit and go out to greet the adoring mob.
But the hours before that should be spent in a way that reminds me of a custom we have in Michigan. Our biggest holiday is November 15—the opening of deer hunting season. It dwarfs days like Christmas or July 4. The interesting day is November 14. Leading up to that the air is full of sound and lead as hunters sight in the weapons that have lain unused since last year.
It usually sounds like a small war. It intensifies until the 12th and 13th when it sounds like a fairly major war. Obama has conducted his entire post election warm up as if he and aides from every sector of society were warming up to hunt. He and his experts have been firing off their political and economic guns at every imaginable target. (No deer of course; hunting season doesn’t start until January 20th.)
What he should do with the 19th is declare it a personal “No Fire Day” and take it off. In Michigan, the silence on November 14 is almost spooky. It’s a quiet day. (One last peaceful day for the deer, as well.)
I don’t know if Obama did that—but I hope for his sake and ours he did. A little quiet reflection might be in order as well. Yes, they’ll be cheering madly tonight. They’ll be adoring. If it were a modern custom, they would strew the ground in front of him with their coats—lest Obama might have to walk on pavement like an ordinary mortal.
They’ll cheer tomorrow. They’ll adore tomorrow. And for most of next week and very likely beyond. But I remember February, 1965—one month after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in.
They adored him on inauguration day. An incredibly vast landslide of Republicans and Democrats had voted him into office. He represented in his flesh the very embodiment of the hopes and dreams of all Black Americans and white Americans of good will and civil rights orientation.
One month later those same Black and Liberal Americans (who had cheered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its promoter so lustily) would be parading back and forth in front of the White House chanting, “LBJ—you just wait ‘til ’68!” (This was BEFORE he sent troops into Vietnam!)
I listened to the hatred in that chant and thought, “You’re done, Johnson, you’re done.” (He had decided not to back King on one more march.) He was indeed done. He didn’t even try to run in 1968.
The Romans would put a slave in the chariot of a conquering hero as he paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome. “Sic transit gloria mundi”, the slave would keep repeating, trying to be heard over the cheers. “Thus passes the glory of man.”
The Christian tradition could remind Obama that the same crowd that shouts, “Hosanna to the King!” can shout “Crucify him!” the very next week.
All Obama has to do is walk on water, turn debt into asset, bring universal peace and give everybody his $17.00 an hour job back. Oh yes, and sell a few million Fords and Chevys and turn everybody’s quarter into a dollar so that huge mortgages can be paid on McDonald’s wages.
To do all of that, he certainly needed a day of rest today. They’ll be lots of firing Wednesday.

Inauguration--We've Been Here Before

I’ll never forget the Kennedy inauguration. The nation was agog with hope and expectation. Jackie and he were such a lovely image of America as it saw itself in 1961. The youth of America seemed to have left off the apathy of the 1950s. So much excitement; so much hope. “Change” was in the air.
It was as if nature tried to warn us. The day before, Washington got hit with one of the most hellish snowstorms in memory. A friend later told me that it took him four hours to travel four blocks only half a mile from the White House—before he ran out of gas and walked.
I was living in Manhattan at the time. I left Newsweek (where I was an editorial assistant in the Make Up Department) after dark. I walked down to Times Square. It was so strange to stand in the middle of the street in the midst of what bragged itself to be the busiest intersection in the world—and not see a single moving vehicle. The mayor had ordered all vehicular traffic off the streets of New York.
A day later I was back at Newsweek where we turned on the television to watch the swearing in. Frost was there. Hatless Kennedy was there (thereby changing men’s fashions forever). And the impressively massive looking Cardinal Cushing was there.
The old Cardinal looked like the kind of man you wouldn’t want to try to push around even if he weren’t wearing the black and scarlet of a prince of the church. He came up in the days when a successful Irishman went into politics or the church. His choice had been the latter—but he was as tough as any political boss ever minted.
(He is wonderfully depicted at the end of Edwin O’Connor’s 1956 novel, The Last Hurrah. In the book, the two choices for the Irish—church or government—are highlighted along with the rivalry this created between churchman and politician. If you haven’t read it, read it.)
He began to pray. The podium began to smoke. He gripped the edges of the podium, unmoved and unmovable, and continued to pray. No one but the Secret Service dared to move. They went ballistic. It was comic to watch them try to reach around the old prelate to get at whatever was billowing smoke. Cushing went on praying. The Secret Service tried to see past him. He did not move.
They crouched; they reached. He ignored. He finally finished his prayer and let go of the podium. Whatever smoked was now easily handled and Kennedy was allowed to give his inaugural address. “Ask not…,” and so forth and so on. But as for me, a chill went up my spine there in the Newsweek offices.
Is this what one calls an omen? I wondered.
Within weeks everything he had said about the “missile gap” in his campaign was exposed as pure fabrication (that Ike and Nixon could not refute with evidence they possessed because of National Security). In three months he stumbled cluelessly into the Bay of Pigs fiasco.
The Soviet leader, Khrushchev, found Kennedy’s action in Cuba so incredible that he literally summoned the young president to a summit in Vienna. Having access to a photo morgue with its hundreds of pictures of that trip was priceless. You could see the contempt on Khrushchev’s face grow.
Khrushchev, convinced that the young man had neither guts nor brains, put missiles in Cuba. This came as close to World War III as we ever got. Kennedy had no choice but to react. He finally did after months of warnings. He had to give important trade-offs to the Russians to get the missiles back out. If there had been no Bay of Pigs and no Berlin Wall—which Kennedy waffled over (Ike would not have)—there would have been no Missile Crisis.
Kennedy had normal to above normal smarts. He was a man of decent courage (PT 109), but he was just completely out of his depth. Eight years as a largely absentee senator had given him no experience. He spent two years blowing it—and nearly killed us all.
Do I see another Kennedy here? Smoke or no smoke, will this man fulfill all the hopes that are centered on him? I don’t see how a single human being can. I especially hope that Obama doesn’t believe his own press. We could be in real trouble if he does.
I am more nervous about this inauguration than I have been about any since the old Cardinal stood—against the Secret Service, the elements, and the smoking podium—and finished his prayers.
I’ll stand with Irving Berlin: God Bless America.

The "Afford" Word

There’s a dirty word just starting to gain currency in government circles. It’s a word that neither citizens nor national legislators nor bureaucrats have used in polite Washington company for over a century. During my lifetime most people haven’t even thought of it, certainly not in regard to national policy.
It’s the word “afford”. In my life time, money has been the last consideration on anyone’s mind when we decided to do something as a nation. Go to the moon? Reallocate here. Bail out the Savings and Loans? Print some more money there. Build coast to coast highways under the National Highway Act of 1922? Just do it. Create a PWA or WPA or CCC to fight the Depression? Order it done.
Money was never an issue. We fought World Wars One and Two on the cuff, with the help of school children bringing in their dimes and pennies to buy War Bonds. During the Cold War, if national security demanded a new fleet of bombers or a grid of super highways, we simply built them.
About forty years ago, someone went to the Speaker of the House (where all “money bills” originate) and asked him if he had any idea of the cost of such and such a program. The man looked blank. The writer noted that the question of money had never come up in the Speaker’s mind while discussing policy. It didn’t have to.
I remember when I was quite young reflecting on this phenomenon. Did anyone in America realize, I wondered, that there were whole nations where thousands of children died very young because they COULD NOT AFFORD medicine, staff and hospitals to care for them? Let alone adequate food.
(Or that many war torn nations could never have afforded to keep troops in the field if we or the Russians didn’t supply the munitions?) The word “afford” has been a major consideration in matters of life, death, nutrition, health, national defense and infrastructure in nearly every other nation except the United States throughout human history.
We have no idea how blessed we’ve been in this past Twentieth Century. Even in the Depression, the word never had to come up. What’s all the wrangling about deficits and “big government” you may want to ask. Smoke and mirrors. One side wanted to give money to this stratum of society and felt it immoral waste to give it to another stratum; the other saw it in reverse.
There was never a serious question of just plain not having ANY money to spend on anyone.
Now, for the first time in living memory, the issue stares us in the face. (All the Chinese have to do is pull one plug and the issue will smack us hard enough to knock us down!) I really wonder if Mr. Obama realizes how uncharted the waters are that he will start sailing next week.
There are going to come times in his administration when, very likely, on some vital need his minions will have to say to him, “No, Mr. President, we cannot afford that. We’ll just have to let some people die or live in tarpaper shacks like the rest of the world.” Is Obama prepared for that very real possibility? Is anybody? That really is how much of the world lives.
The last time such an issue arose, J.P. Morgan stepped in and bailed out the government. There’s no one big enough to do that now. Happily, we haven’t needed another one since that day. No wonder the word “afford” never comes up. No wonder it’s such a dirty word.
An example was brought to mind this morning. I was in a large, suburban, consolidated school district office. We were talking about how, fifty years ago, when the little neighborhood schools were all blended into one super high school and middle school the question of future affordability never came up.
Here, suddenly, was a geographically huge school district totally dependent on vast fleets of gas burning school buses (kids could walk to the little two or four room neighborhood schools they shut down). No one ever asked, “Will we always be able to buy and maintain all these buses? Will we always be able to pay the drivers and put gasoline in them?” Not then, they didn’t.
Believe me it’s an issue today. As is heating and lighting the huge buildings that we’re still paying the bond issues on. Just locally here, where we never asked, “Can we afford?”, where the walls are lined with posters proclaiming, “Nothing is too good for our kids”, the person I spoke to pointed out that this year’s budget is cut to the bone—next year’s will have to be slashed far more—and the year after? The person just rolled her eyes and shuddered.
Pick up a science text book in your high school. Don’t be shocked if it was printed more than (in some cases FAR more than) ten years ago. In some areas of science, that’s nearly antediluvian. Teachers are rarely issued the extra pencils and pens that they were even five years ago. “Nothing is too good for our kids”—if you can afford it.
Or how about the master teacher who truly knows the subject he’s taught for thirty or more years? “Every time I step out of my room,” one told me recently, “the principal is there asking, ‘What can we do to get you to retire?’” The “kid” they’ll replace him with won’t know half as much—but he’ll be cheaper.
Mr. Obama will face something no president in the past hundred years has faced. He may not even know what he’s looking at (would Clinton, either Bush or Ronald Reagan?). But he may have to figure it out fast.
Thenl come the cruel choices.

How Many Terms For Obama?

Jose Serrano, a Congressman from New York’s Sixteenth District (Bronx County, New York City) has spent three years pushing a Constitutional Amendment that would repeal the 22nd Amendment. That’s the amendment that was added back in the 1950s in response to FDR’s four terms.
It limits all future presidents to two terms. Since then, at least one president could easily have won a third term—Eisenhower in 1960. Whether or not he would have wanted it, he was stopped by the 22nd Amendment.
The 22nd Amendment codified the custom begun by George Washington that all presidents stop after two terms—“lest”, as Tennyson wrote of the death of King Arthur, “one good custom should corrupt all the world.” That was possibly the best gift Washington ever gave his country.
Washington was popular enough he could have become “king” and served in the office for life as so many revolutionaries since have done. People around him were perfectly willing to address him as “Your Majesty”. He said, “No” and went back to his farm.
Before Washington, only about two or three men in all of recorded history ever voluntarily gave up power. Power is addictive. I cannot think of many things I’ve done that were as exciting as exercising the power to make a phone call and have a multi-billion dollar agency jump at my request.
Imagine being able to do that to the entire federal establishment—from the pentagon to the Social Security Administration. Wow. Then, suppose you were popular enough that you could get re-elected for a third and a fourth term so that you could go on and on making those calls!
President Taft, a judicious man not known for his love of power was asked after he left office in 1913 what he missed most about the presidency. His answer was succinct: “The Power”. Imagine, in a single noon hour, going from a man whose phone calls must be answered by anyone on earth to somebody who now must drive his own car and wait to be called back.
It’s a rare human being who wouldn’t be tempted to avoid that let down. When Roosevelt became the first president in American history to allow the temptation to win—and ran for a third term—he violated something very deep and basic in the American psyche.
Oh, there were all sorts of good and necessary reasons why he—and he only—was needed in the presidency in 1940. World War II was raging. The fleet he had built for eight years to crush Japan wasn’t quite ready. There was a chance the Japanese might attack before we were ready to destroy them (they did, a year later). He had an excellent personal relationship with Churchill, etc. etc. etc.
Someday in the future, there may seem to be all sorts of good and necessary reasons for some future president to stay in office, for term after term after term … . However competent he or she may be, what Lord Acton wrote over a century ago holds true. “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Power can become absolute in all kinds of ways. Sometimes nothing more than longevity is required. (Note Hugh Capet who was selected by French nobles to be “King of France” in AD 987. He was pretty much picked because he was just about the weakest of the French nobility. They figured they’d have nothing to fear from such a puny dukedom. But the House of Capet had one gift—they kept producing heirs. This went on for centuries. (They are still around today.) In that time they added to their domain and estates acre by acre until a descendent (Louis XIV) could accurately claim to be, in his person, the entire state of France. His was a most corrupt form of absolute power.)
A man who serves as president for twenty years may well have acquired far more power than a man who leaves after eight. I think Washington intuited this. Some extremely powerful Congressmen and Senator have stayed around for decades—with power that not even a president dared defy.
J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI stayed as bureau chief for around half a century. He literally died in office because no one could get rid of him or induce him to retire. Few men in American history have had more absolute power. We don’t need another one like him. Ever.
However good and popular a president Barack Obama may turn out to be, however beloved he may be after two terms, it would not be good for us—or him—to entrust the power of the modern presidency to him or anyone on an open ended basis.
The 22nd Amendment is a powerful protection—sometimes needed despite ourselves.

Al Qaeda--Now Play Nice

Obama has vowed to shut Guantanamo’s prison down. He has also pledged no more torture. California’s Willie Brown says that this is the price of democracy—we cannot stop someone until he has actually committed a criminal act. We have to wait until he actually kills someone.
Um hmm. Carry that argument to its logical conclusion: if an F-16 had had one of the airliners that flew into the World Trade Center on 9/11 in his sights, would we have required that he hold fire until the plane actually flew into the building? So says Willie Brown, purporting to speak for Obama.
Or, what if we knew in advance that the planes were going to destroy something, somewhere—but we didn’t know exactly what or where? What if we had captured one of the terrorists in the airport? Would we eschew all forms of pain inducing tactics to convince the prisoner to tell us exactly where the target was so that we could stop the attack?
I heard a television guest commentator today assert that we cannot violate the Constitution, that Barrack Obama will find a way to get them to talk without torture of any kind. If that’s possible, we’d better dig up the bones of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR and burn them for their violations of the document.
Lincoln threw out Habeas Corpus (a vital Constitutional right) and imprisoned anybody, anywhere without proof or process. Roosevelt absolutely shredded (he didn’t violate; he shredded) all laws of neutrality on the high seas—ordering neutral American warships into hostile waters with orders to shoot on sight. The “good Rueben James” opened fire first. The U-boat was defending itself.
Under Wilson, German and Dutch speaking (they sound a lot alike even though Holland was neutral) got a lot of privacy violating scrutiny during World War I. Union organizers and protestors went to jail. There were threats that German/Dutch speakers would be denied the “civil protection of the law”.
But, you say, that was wartime. In war you even hire Mafia hit men to teach OSS assassins how to kill with Tommy Guns. Isn’t it war when whole nations open up camps to teach terrorists how to kill Americans and Europeans? Or is this something more innocent like gaming on computers?
Another commentator made a point today. If you shut Guantanamo down, what do you do with some really dangerous people locked up there?
(Let me make a point here. I’ve ridden with police officers; I’ve known several. They can take you through your neighborhood and point out the muggers and thieves. Why don’t they arrest them? No evidence that will stand up in court. All they can do is wait until somebody commits a serious enough crime so that there’s DNA evidence and witnesses talk—and then, after the fact, they can arrest.)
Same problem at Guantanamo. Where do you send the really dangerous types that you don’t have enough formal evidence to convict? Shall we deport them to another nation that’s likely to release them in a year or two? How many dead Americans might that cause?
Someone today pointed out that no Congressman calling for closing Guantanamo has volunteered to accept any of the prisoners in HIS district
Then comes the question of non-lethal torture, the kind that doesn’t maim or disfigure. Oh no, we can’t do that. Inhumane. Violates Geneva. (So does flying a plane into a building full of civilians in “peace time”.) Let me offer some practical reality for a second.
We took pain inducing tactics out of our schools years ago. What do we have now? We have buildings full of kids who feel free to do everything from pouring urine into heat vents to slashing tires. If a school official so much as walks toward them, the instantaneous response is “You can’t touch me!”
He’s right. We can’t. The worst thing we can do to the kid is send him home to watch TV and play video games for a few days. You can’t even threaten to keep him after school—he might miss his bus and have to walk home.
To keep some semblance of order (I’m talking suburban schools), we have armed police walking the halls. Take away the paddle and you can’t keep sixteen year old American kids in line. Ask teachers if they think bringing back the paddle might improve life and learning in school.
Take away the paddle and the water board, and how on earth are you going to learn anything from a suicidal terrorist? Shall we send him to the school counselor for a lecture on “good citizenship”?
No, we’ll just turn him loose. Somebody will probably risk violating the law by wagging a finger at him (that’s absolutely illegal in Michigan schools). And we’ll say, “Now, play nice.”

Ciminal Neglect

For the last few days the local paper has been full of stories about “elder abuse”. Specifically the one that is drawing ink around here pertains to an eighty-five year old woman who was discovered in her home, unbathed, covered with her own filth.
The son who was supposed to be taking care of her is being charged. The son who “hadn’t visited in years” eventually discovered her and called the police.
The last two sentences say a lot. They should be reread and thought about. They tell us that, of whatever family she had, the woman had only ONE caretaker. The other brother who hadn’t bothered to come by for a long time obviously took no responsibility for her care. At all.
That left one. Does anyone stop to think what a job—literally a 24/7 job with no vacations, no days off—it is for one man, very likely in his sixties himself, to take care of someone so elderly she has lost continence and is unable to get to the bathroom herself? (He was obviously feeding her.)
If you were hiring that kind of care, it would legally require a weekly staff of eight or ten, with fill-ins for holidays, sick days and vacations. (If a patient needs to be lifted onto the toilet, it legally requires two caretakers.) That’ how many people that one man—now being charged for criminal neglect—was expected to fill in for. Anyone who charges the man with a crime had better first be willing to take his place for six months or so.
Well, you’re likely thinking, if he couldn’t handle it, why didn’t he call in the welfare people? I’m sure the judge and prosecutor will spare no amount verbiage to tell this miscreant how vast a system of social services we have available in the State of Michigan, and how it was his legal and moral duty to call upon them.
Let me tell you a personal story. By the early 1970s, my own mother became almost totally incapacitated by Multiple Sclerosis. My father who turned sixty then took over the duty of assisting her with her bathing, eating, dressing and personally lifted her on and off the toilet several times daily. (I his only son, lived 50 miles away.)
He did not leave the house for more than four hours at a stretch for twenty-five years. The rest of us could see that he was wearing out and, at the least, needed a few days off. He located one of the most highly rated nursing facilities in the country, only a mile from his home. This was in 1985.
It had assisted living quarters that were fully as luxurious as their home. There were people who could step in and assist if he needed time off or to rest. The home was run by the same religious denomination as they had attended all their lives—and several of their life- long friends were already living there.
The money was right—proceeds from their home would pay for the new condominium apartment, dollar for dollar. My dad was so excited he could hardly contain himself. He asked my wife and me to accompany him while he brought the matter up to my mother.
My mother heard us out and then lashed back. “You don’t love me!” Terrified of leaving her home, she ripped at every feeling and emotion we had. He dropped the issue of assisted living and resigned himself to life-long imprisonment. We could not talk him into taking any steps on his own. When home nursing services were located, he refused them. She had broken him.
Depression set in, but he did his duty—determined to prove that he did too love her. When he was not actively assisting her, he just sat and stared blankly. She would allow no medical personnel to enter the home—perfectly aware of what a professional might see and report.
Alzheimer’s set in. He began referring to her as his mother; he lost his driver’s license, dependent on others to get to the grocery store. She would not acknowledge he had any problem (her fear was palpable by now). She directed his most minute actions, but sometimes when he had put her on the toilet he forgot where she was, let alone who.
She, in the meantime, became blind. The weekly maid was writing out the checks (I was not permitted to see the books). Queries from the Internal Revenue Service begin piling up on her desk.
I called their pastor. He refused to help—even telling concerned parishioners to “stay out of it”. I called all manner of acquaintances and friends involved in senior services or adult protective services (by now we were afraid he would burn the house down). I got the same answer, even from practitioners as far away as California.
“There is nothing you can do. Go into court now, and the judge will side with them. All you can do is wait until there’s an emergency and they collapse.” My father lost continence; the house reeked; the carpet was ruined. The weekly maid would throw open all the doors to air the place out.
I finally bit the bullet, paid the $2500 legal fee and went to a lawyer. He took it to court. The court sent a Guardian ad Litum to inspect their home. Her report was appalling. When she arrived, my father could not find my mother. A judge took one look at her report and appointed me guardian and conservator. Even now, other relatives were calling me and berating me for trying to push them out of their home.
I had kept up contact with the nursing home. We made an appointment to talk about removing them from their home. The day before that appointment, they collapsed. A neighbor called the police and cut his way into the house. The police called me; acting on my three-day-old legal authority, I told them to take my parents to a hospital.
They were checked over (malnutrition, broken bones, Alzheimer’s, MS, and my father’s foot so badly injured that they considered amputation) and immediately put in full time nursing care (1998). Until she died two years hence, my mother never stopped berating me for taking her out of her home and stealing her money.
I strongly suspect that the man in the current news story did not have the education or the contacts that I had going for me. He may not have had the money for the lawyer or court. All of that availed me nothing. Let’s think long and hard before we convict this poor man for “elder abuse”. From the condition my mother and her house were in, they could have convicted my dad—or me.

The Fear We Have To Fear

We’re coming up on the beginning of the Obama presidency. As I watch this happen, there are a few contrasts that come to mind, not all of them comforting.
When Franklin Roosevelt took office, the American gross national product had dropped 50% in four years, international trade was all but dead, and the possibility of a radical revolution in the United States was real. As he sat through Hoover’s lame duck period (November until March), I do not recall him ever saying anything like, “This recession could last for years. We’ve got to have a plan fully implemented by the day I take office. His situation was much worse than Obama’s.
He didn’t say, “We must pump billions into the economy NOW or this will become a catastrophe.” Roosevelt never said anything like that—before or after March 4, 1933. His inaugural address pointed out many difficulties facing the nation, but he wound up saying, “All we have to fear is fear itself.”
That was admittedly simplistic. But it showed the attitude of a man who was far from paralyzed by any fears of his own. Roosevelt was not a terribly bright man. Walter Lippmann coined the phrase: “A second class intellect; a first class temperament.”
Roosevelt shared with several other members of his class a sensible attitude toward experts and very intelligent people. He saw them as useful “tools”. He was not impressed, awed or frightened by them—and he had people among his advisors and cabinet members who could have intimidated many men.
He intuited their limits and understood that it was his job to direct them—as one might direct any useful implement. The Kennedys, Rockefellers and men like Ronald Reagan—none of them equipped with mighty intellects—intuited the same thing. They valued the brilliant, often highly, but they never lost sight of just who was boss, who had the final say.
A story about Roosevelt absolutely delights me. He landed on the president’s desk on March 5 without any real plan in view. He sat down at his desk knowing only one thing for sure—he was boss. There was a row of buttons on the desk, one of the first hints that the electronic age had dawned in the White House. Each button was wired to a different White House office. If he pushed one, that person came.
Just for the fun of it—with the entire national bank system sliding into collapse around him—Roosevelt gleefully pushed all of them. He roared with laughter as his entire staff rushed into his office.
I wish I could see more of that in Obama. At first, after Election Day, we thought he was being terribly wise in surrounding himself with teams of high powered economic advisors. Then even members of the media began to sense that he was spending a lot of time listening to some of the same people who got us into this mess in the first place.
Every so often, the president-elect would stick his nose out and tell us how dreadful things really were. When he came to Washington he had already devised an economic rescue plan that, if it were not enacted by close of business January 20, would leave us forever shipwrecked.
I rather appreciate the Democratic members of Congress who are saying: “Wait a minute, we allowed ourselves to be panicked into right now—do not think or ask questions—action last October and it hasn’t done anything useful (the Paulson bailout).
“Let’s take a moment to ask some questions this time. Let’s us do some analyzing and evaluating of what needs to be done—and whether this plan is the proper course of action.” After all, the Constitution requires Congress to have input—and mandates that money bills originate in the House.
What I sense is that, like Paulson in October, several of Obama’s chosen experts on fixing the economy are essentially scared to death. I sense also that some of their panic (the urgency to act RIGHT NOW, THIS VERY SECOND) has rubbed off on Obama himself.
(Roosevelt never took his advisors all that seriously. He listened to them, but he stayed above their fears. When he gave a speech on going off the gold standard, he had two written—one by an expert in favor, another by an expert against. Then he had a third speech writer combine them. I see nothing of that kind of detachment –from the advisors—in Obama.)
I’m concerned—and this is going to sound paradoxical—that Obama, a very bright man, has too much respect for his intellectual peers. His own intelligence makes him too self-assured to be able to allow himself to look at other, equally clever men and imagine that they could possibly be wrong.
After all, they are like me—how could they be wrong? If they are afraid, I’d better be scared. Roosevelt (or Jack Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller, or Ronald Reagan) would never have fallen into that trap. Obama may not even realize that such a trap exists.
If he has absorbed their fears—then he must remember what Frank Herbert wrote in his novel, Dune, “Fear is the mind killer”.

Time to Get Tough on Israel -- ?

As gas prices start climbing again in my neighborhood—up to $2.00 a gallon (regular) for the first time in weeks, there is less and less doubt in my mind. How easy would it be for the people who take American dollars and buy rockets and guns for Hamas to tell Hamas to start a shootout with Israel? The dust up will put oil profits at least part way back to where they were this summer.
Use rockets bought with American money (spent for oil) to kill Israelis and, when Israel shoots back, get the same Americans to pressure Israel not to retaliate. Newsweek Magazine has a cover headline this week that reads, “Time to Get Tough On Israel.”
The author of the piece insists it just isn’t nice of Israel to make life miserable for civilians in the Gaza strip while the insurgents among them are left unrestrained to send Israeli citizens into their bomb shelters a dozen times a day. Oh Pish and Tosh.
This nonsense comes from a nation that made life hell on earth for civilians in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki after their military bombed Pearl Harbor. A nation that may have killed as many as half-a-million women and children in a single day of bombing Hamburg after the Nazi military bombed London and Rotterdam.
We invented unrestrained retaliation. Going back to the Indian Wars and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Carolina’s, American military doctrine has been: Discomfit and kill enough civilians and their military will become discouraged and quit. (Didn’t always work, but we never stopped trying.)
And our World War II retaliation didn’t just raise our oil prices, it got us rationed to something like two gallons a week. The Japanese took over Indonesian oil fields; German subs sank oil tankers from the Middle East and Latin America. Now there’s an argument for restraint in dealing with the Axis. Maybe if we’d been nicer to Hitler and Tojo, they’d have kept our oil supplies plentiful.
Just as an aside—since we went into Iraq in the first place, the traditional American strategy of making war on the civilians might have been a better strategy than the one we employed (assuming we had one). MacArthur and Napoleon both had a point when they said, If you’re going to send your sons to fight and die in war—win it. At whatever cost to the enemy.
The blood of our boys is too precious to be sprinkled about willy-nilly, in confusion. If we feel we must spend it, let us be certain we get a terrible return on our investment—one that will make others fear to open that account. Caesar, Grant, Roosevelt, MacArthur, Genghis Khan and nearly any military commander in history worth his salt understood this bitter reality.
War should be an absolute last result; but if it must be waged, it is waged most successfully completely without restraint. Wars in which you must restrain yourselves probably should never be fought.
Oh, how I would have loved to have been a fly on the White House Wall the day after Pearl Harbor had some coalition of uninvolved nations decided it was time to “be tough on Roosevelt”—that it was his duty to show restraint.
Let’s understand that in a tiny nation like Israel, rockets exploding over every inch of their territory is an even more serious attack—for them—than Pearl Harbor was for us. For them, restraint means more Israeli death. American talk isn’t going to stop Hamas rockets.
Oh, but there must be a political solution, they say. Well, if a political solution is so possible, why didn’t we seek one after Pearl Harbor or Fort Sumter? Why didn’t Churchill seek one after Dunkirk? When the Arabs have announced in a dozen Arabic Mein Kampf’s that they will accept no other political solution but the destruction of Israel, what political solution do you suggest for the Jews? Mass suicide?
THERE IS NO POLITICAL SOLUTION POSSIBLE in the Near East until the Arabs renounce the Islamic faith that forbids any lands once claimed for Allah to fall into Infidel hands—or the Jews get on a boat and sail off somewhere.
Or, God help us (and our oil prices), one side or the other wins such a total victory that the other is no longer capable of getting back on its feet. That is, admittedly, too a grim a possibility to contemplate. But the other two are equally unlikely.
You want to be President Obama for a week or two? That’s only one of the sheer impossibilities he faces. I’ll pray and hope for the man, but I wouldn’t be him for the world.
Next time, (I did say it would be this time—but other considerations intervened) let’s take a look at the genesis of Arab/Jewish hostilities. You can go back about 4,000 years to when Isaac’s mom got Ishmael’s mom kicked out of camp, left to starve with her child in the desert. Hagar and Ishmael, progenitors of the Arabs, survived—but it is doubtful there were any warm feelings left for Sarah and Isaac, progenitors of the Jews.
But we’ll start tomorrow with the Arab incursion on Jewish, Ammonite and Edomite lands after a Babylonian king carted everyone off to Babylon (Iraq). That was in the sixth century before Christ.

Herod, Jews and Magi

Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas (Twelfth Night—beginning the night of January 5) or the Feast of The Three Kings (who weren’t kings), Russian Christmas or The Epiphany (the revealing or unveiling). That’s a lot of names for one miserably wet and slippery day in winter.
It commemorates the arrival of Magi (magicians, Zoroastrian priests) from Persia (modern Iran) to salute the recently born Christ Child—or, as they called him, the King of the Jews. They were astrologers who read in the stars that a new king was born. They came to honor him.
Herod and his Jewish subjects had seen them before. Their arrival caused King Herod, “and all Jerusalem with him”, to be troubled. Those are wonderfully diplomatically nuanced words. They must have rocked with something very close to pure terror.
Two things tell us they weren’t looking at three old crocks sitting on a camel. It’s very safe to say that these Magi had with them as escort more troops on the ground than Herod had. After all, the Roman legions were up in Syria and down in Egypt. In Judea, all Herod would have had is a battalion or two of auxiliaries—think National Guard.
The Magi would have been escorted by battalions of the finest cavalry of their time. The first thing that tells us this is so is that the Magi—following a star’s direct path—would have come across the Arab-held Jordanian desert. The Nabataean Arabs were tough customers.
They had conquered parts of modern Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. They had licked Jewish armies, Roman armies and held their own against Alexander the Great. In their spare time, they enjoyed raiding caravans that crossed their territory. You didn’t cross it without a large, formidable escort—like battalions of Parthian (Persian) cavalry.
The Parthians were nasty customers too. They fought a seven hundred year long cold and hot war with Rome, giving as good as they got. Forty years before the birth of Christ they had gone on an expansionist kick. They overwhelmed Marc Anthony (one of Caesar’s top generals) and drove him out of modern Asiatic Turkey. Another column conquered Jerusalem and Judea, sending young Herod running for his life.
During this episode, the Parthians (the Magi were very important figures in their culture) killed Herod’s father, tortured his older brother so badly he beat his own brains out on the walls of his cell, and nearly captured Herod and his mother. Herod escaped—in a run worthy of an action movie—and found his way to Rome.
Here he was given an army, made “King of the Jews” (under Roman authority), and sent back to recapture Jerusalem. He besieged Jerusalem for three years, before Anthony—who had recaptured Asia Minor—came down to help. During the siege of Jericho, the Parthians killed Herod’s younger brother.
The Herod family remembered the Magi very, very well. The Parthians had kept dabbling in Judean affairs, leading an ever more suspicious Herod to kill his favorite wife and several of sons to head off plots against his throne—some of which were real.
By the time the Magi came, about two years after Christmas, Herod was a sick old man, wracked with excruciating pain and paranoia. (His staff wouldn’t even let him have a bread knife for fear he would kill himself with it.) Someone was always trying to take his throne away, his subjects hated him because he was not Jewish, and back came the Magi to announce a NEW king of the Jews (read threat).
A truce with the Parthians had been signed by Augustus at Damascus twenty years earlier. There was official peace between them with a DMZ stretching from modern Georgia to Arabia. The Magi and their escort had slipped through a lightly guarded stretch along the Jordan River.
One more thing tells us they had more troops than Herod. Bethlehem, where the Magi were told to go look for a promised savior/king, lay a mere six miles from Jerusalem. Herod had the finest intelligence apparatus in the Roman Empire—he could track anyone anywhere.
Herod had to ask the Magi to, pretty please, come back and tell him where the new king lived. He couldn’t get a single spy through to watch where the Magi went. The Magi threw out a formidable screen of cavalry that nothing could penetrate. That’s a lot of troops.
So they came to the house where Mary and Joseph lived with their son. The Magi worshipped. They gave royal gifts—enough so that Joseph and Mary could support themselves after they escaped to Egypt to prevent Herod from killing their child. They probably had enough left to buy a business when they returned to Nazareth after Herod died.
The Feast is called the “unveiling” or “revealing” for here was the first time that the Christ Child was shown to non-Jews, to the Gentiles. It was deemed to be an “epiphany” for the entire non-Jewish world. That is why non-Jewish Christians celebrate it to this day. In the Eastern (Greek/Russian) Church it is considered to be THE Christ Mass celebration.
And that, boys and girls, is why Herod was so “troubled”. I had always wondered about that verse. There was a lot of history involved, some of it not so flattering to Rome, and Matthew being a good Roman bureaucrat (tax collector) trod very lightly when he told the story.

Jews And Arabs--An Ancient Feud

Two thousand years is a long time for a fight to go on. As Israeli troop push their way into Gaza in response to Hamas’ rocket fire, it’s here we go again. Actually, the first time Israeli troops pushed into Gaza was a bit over THREE THOUSAND years ago. But those weren’t Arabs. (Try Philistines.)
Hostile forces from Gaza have been a thorn in Israel’s side for millennia. Hostiles on the West Bank have harassed and threatened to cut Israel in two for even longer. Today’s headlines could have been written in Sumerian and ancient Egyptian dispatches.
In those days, marauders came on camel back and raided Israeli settlements; now they sit back and fire rockets. It probably feels all the same to the Israelis—whether you hide in caves from sword wielding raiders or hide in today’s mandatory cement reinforced bomb shelters in your basement.
Today’s Israeli forces face one disadvantage that their ancestors could never have dreamt of. No foreign powers or United Nations were around to urge “restraint”. (Can you imagine what Churchill’s response would have been to someone who urged British restraint in 1940 while German bombs were raining down on London and Coventry? Or Stalin’s a year later when the panzers were at the outskirts of Moscow? But we feel free to tell the Israelis, “Never mind those silly little rockets that blow up your houses and kill your children—show restraint.” How much would we show?)
We were all much happier with the Jews when they did show restraint—and lined up quietly for Hitler’s gas ovens. This was the Jew we had learned to deal with in the Middle Ages—when they had no means to resist the stake and the knout. We haven’t gotten used to Jews who act like King David (1000 BC).
If the Israeli don’t show restraint and if they go after the sites and people who shoot the rockets, our oil prices could go way, way up again. So we beg them to endure the shelling quietly and do nothing to seriously antagonize the oil-rich Arabs who buy the rockets for Hamas.
They had an interview on Fox News the other day with a young man who had once been privy to all of the inside information in Hamas. His father had run the outfit. He told the interviewer flatly that Hamas will never agree to any permanent peace with Israel. They follow the Koran.
Land that was once Allah’s can never, ever be allowed to go back to the adherents of any other religion. Jews must forever leave the area—or die. Hamas will call for truces, the young man said, so they can regroup and rearm—but just as this latest one ended with Hamas violence, so will they all.
Arafat used to talk peace when he spoke publicly to the Western World. But insiders know that he never stopped calling for the total destruction of Israel when he spoke privately, in Arabic, to his Arab friends. Hamas and Hezbollah have the same policy. Starting with the murdered Abdullah of Jordan (1951) and going through the assassination of Sadat (1981) it can be a lethal thing for an Arab leader to talk peace to Israel.
The irony is that this land of Israel that the Arabs want back so badly had been largely abandoned by them in the 1800s. When a relative handful of Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms showed up in the 1870s and started buying land from the few remaining Bedouin, they had to re-dig long forgotten wells and work desperately hard to make desert yield crops.
When Arabs saw that these tiny Jewish settlements were green and thriving where only bare sand had been for centuries before, they returned. Many “Palestinian refugees” have antecedents in Israel that are no longer than the modern Israelis.
They came back, said, “Oh, you can make it work? Well, then, it’s ours—now that it’s fertile.” By the 1920s and on into the 1940s they rioted and killed to make it so. British overlords, desperate to quiet the Arabs where they had oil wells, denied the Jews means to defend themselves.
It was, in many ways, Medieval Europe all over again. Unarmed Jews, armed assailants—with the cops definitely biased in favor of the thugs. Then came World War II, with the Arabs largely pro-Hitler (the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem raised two divisions of Waffen SS in Bosnia and ordered the slaughter of Yugoslav Jews and Serbs that directly led to the troubles of the 1990s—when the Serbs finally paid the Bosnian Nazis back.
The British were forced to turn to their one sure, pro-democracy ally in all the Middle East—the Jews in Israel. Jews were allowed to form a single brigade—but that was enough to teach Jews modern warfare. Officers from that brigade led the Israel Defense Force for decades.
(What happened to the murderous Mufti? After Hitler fell, he escaped to Cairo. There was talk of hauling him up before the Nuremburg Tribunal, but the Arabs threatened oil retaliation. He lived out his years sending a nephew to kill Jews in his old stamping grounds, a kid named Yasser Arafat. A lot of Arab leaders coming out of that era had strong Nazi connections: Nasser, Saddam Hussein, etc.)
I’ll leave you with a question for today. Do you think oil prices that declined from $140 to 40 a barrel in less than six months (and put Dubai out of business) have hurt Arabs in general? Could it be possible that the folk who have financed the Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah for decades, said to Hamas, “Your truce with Israel ends in January, go mix it up, fire a few rockets and raise our oil profits.”?
As Lenin and Samuel Adams knew so well, if you can get a few civilians killed in the process, it makes such wonderful anti-Tsarist, anti-British or anti-Jewish propaganda. For those who seek the destruction of Israel, the present crisis seems to be win-win. (We’ll pay more for oil to buy more rockets.)
When did this hatred between Arab and Jew begin—when did Arabs begin to encroach on Israeli territory? (Arabs began moving in on Jewish territory around the time of Alexander the Great.) This is one of those stories that goes on and on and on. More next time.

Housing--Who Can Really Afford One?

The kid next door wants to build a house. I call him “kid” because I’ve known him since he was tiny. He’s actually almost twenty-three, has a good job—secure as a five year government contract can make it, owns a piece of land, and has thousands in the bank.
The contractor is raring to go, but the kid cannot find a loan. Two years ago, with less seniority and cash, his brother built on the land next to his at a very favorable cost. (Contractors around here will build for around cost, just to keep busy.) The same contractor is ready to build—but no loan.
Things around here seem to have gotten worse since the Paulson bailout. Last May and June, I watched five houses near me sell within weeks. I almost said to myself, “What real estate crisis?” Nothing has moved since—and I walk, look, ask and watch.
A fellow near me took a job in Florida last September. His house stands empty and for sale—there’s no sign in the snow that anybody has driven up to look at it. (I’m sure he’s sell a house that he’s a thousand miles away from on very favorable terms if you want to buy it—it’s only two years old.) A group of three houses, one to four years old, stand for sale a block away. Another elderly man who wants to move into assisted living has had a sign up since summer, just around the block.
We certainly aren’t out of the real estate woods yet. By now it’s so dark under the trees, I suspect some folks can’t even see the path any more. If the tax assessor tells you your house is worth $180,000 or a quarter of a million, let alone a million, just laugh. It’s very funny money indeed.
Which brings to mind a question: exactly when did the cost of a house become funny money? Three months ago? Three years ago? At the end of the 70’s when housing costs began a violent escalation in places like New York and California? I remember a friend of mine from San Francisco saying to me then, talking about rising California housing prices, “The American dream is dead.”
He was wrong. The dream didn’t die. We stretched higher and farther to reach it—with the help of a lot of foreign loans. When I was a boy, banks felt that no more than 25% of income should go toward housing. Helped by an infusion of foreign cash, we stretched that figure ever higher.
We bought what we couldn’t afford to furnish. So we took second mortgages for that. And vacations, and college educations (when I was in college, a kid could earn his tuition with a summer job), and whatever else became necessary for the good life.
I’m not talking about the working poor and unemployed who were encouraged by zero down and teaser rates to buy expensive housing, I’m talking about middle and even upper middle class folk—like those trying to sell houses in my neighborhood. This is the class that found itself in such trouble last fall that the demographic spread that had given Republicans victory over the past 30 years went up in electoral smoke—in a brief week or two.
Conservatives do make a valid point ONE of the causes of the housing misery is a law that demand banks act like welfare agencies instead of banks. (Note I did not say this was ALL of the cause—like many conservatives do.) Specifically this charge is brought against the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. It was given teeth in 1994 and, under its provisions, banks were forbidden to redline.
Redlining was the practice of banks looking at the census data for neighborhoods to determine who could afford to pay back a mortgage. Neighborhoods with income and employment levels too low for reasonable loans had red marker lines drawn around them—and no loans were made there.
That sounds mean and discriminatory from the point of view of residents, but it is sane lending from the point of view of banks that are required to get their money back in order to have sufficient cash to stay in business. But the government was having none of it—lend to anyone who is in need, regardless of income level or employment. No more red lines indicating high risk areas.
That may be a worthy cause—but it’s not banking. The government persisted. Between 2004 and 2007, 40% of all housing loans were made by banks that were guaranteed by and under the direction of the CRA. This was called “fair lending”, and mortgage money poured into minority communities.
A worthy goal for a straight out welfare program, no doubt—but it wasn’t banking. Banks were under orders to comply with the “fair lending” programs of the government—and the subprime mortgage was made to order for that kind of compliance.
Some of the banks most heavily involved in “fair lending” were: Freddy Mac, Fannie Mae, Washington Mutual and Countrywide—all basically out of business as independent banking organizations today. But at least they avoided one of the worst consequences of not adhering to “fair lending” guidelines. Bankrupt they may be, but no one is calling them racist.
There are certainly many Americans who need help with decent housing. Requiring private banks to make loans that make no banking sense isn’t the best way. Ask the people who owned stock in some of the institutions that went down under the subprime collapse. Ask the tax payers who will be paying for that collapse for decades to come.
Let’s let charity be charity—and banking be banking. If you think for a moment, you realize they cannot be one and the same thing. (Should we require car companies to give them away to people who cannot afford to buy? How about grocery stores? Or clothing stores?) It can’t work.
But since this housing collapse is by no means limited to ghetto neighborhoods, could it be that there is a more fundamental problem here—one no one is talking about? Is it possible that housing prices had climbed to such a level that NO ONE could really afford one.
Some of the people living near me are hanging on by fingernails. Is it possible that they overbought and over borrowed just like those old redlined neighborhoods did? Have we got several billions in mortgages out there—in all sorts of neighborhoods, under all sorts of mortgage devices—that NO ONE could really afford to pay for no matter how extensively readjusted?
That’s a horrible thought that no one—liberal or conservative—has really addressed yet.