Not Housebroken

Naomi Wolf has accused the Bush administration of orchestrating a coup d’etat. She relies on evidence for which I have no other explanation. First, in what appears to be a clip from C-Span video of the floor of the House of Representatives, Representative Brad Sherman (Democrat–California, 27th District) complained that some members of Congress were threatened with huge drops in the Dow Jones (which appear to be happening anyway) and with martial law if they did not vote for the pork-laden $700 billion bailout for the financial industry and concentration of new powers for the Secretary of the Treasury. Second, the Army Times has reported that for “the first time an active unit [the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team] has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.”

According to the Army Times, the unit “may be called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control or to deal with potentially horrific scenarios such as massive poisoning and chaos in response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE, attack.” But Army Col. Michael Boatner, USNORTHCOM future operations division chief partly denied this, saying, “This response force will not be called upon to help with law enforcement, civil disturbance or crowd control, but will be used to support lead agencies involved in saving lives, relieving suffering and meeting the needs of communities affected by weapons of mass destruction attacks, accidents or even natural disasters.”

This posting comes late in hurricane season. The troops are only beginning training. According to the Army Times,

Training for homeland scenarios has already begun at Fort Stewart and includes specialty tasks such as knowing how to use the “jaws of life” to extract a person from a mangled vehicle; extra medical training for a CBRNE incident; and working with U.S. Forestry Service experts on how to go in with chainsaws and cut and clear trees to clear a road or area.

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them.

The package is for use only in war-zone operations, not for any domestic purpose.

This is clearly contradictory information. If the first brigade to be specifically assigned to U.S. territory is not to be used for law enforcement, then why in the wake of brutal police suppression of protests at the Republican National Convention, are they being trained to use this “nonlethal package?”

Another possible explanation is that due to the Arctic ice melt, “the Pentagon is eyeing the expanding navigable waters as possible entry points for security threats that must be monitored more closely.” However, this would seem to dictate a posting in Alaska rather than in Fort Stewart in Georgia. Moreover, the Arctic patrols appear to be largely an Air Force mission.

Given the Bush administration’s threats of martial law, Naomi Wolf argues that a coup has effectively occurred. This is a time when the least charitable explanations of developments have proven closer to the truth.

“Horrified motorists on the A55 road near Bodelwyddan said the police officer went for his Taser without even trying to herd the ram, who was meandering in the roadway.”

In a biting reminder that only US citizens are restricted from visiting Cuba, a British naval vessel made a port call in Havana. It could be taken as insult added to injury. In what appears to be a shift to a multilateral world, the “top analyst” in the US intelligence community is forecasting “a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.” This estimation appears not to consider the financial upheavals that have focused the world’s attention and led to passage of a $700 billion bailout. Jennifer Barry at the Market Oracle looks at all the debt swirling around and forecasts doom for the dollar; she writes:

Many commentators claim that the former GSE’s [government secured enterprise’s] liabilities are not like usual government debt, as the mortgages are backed by homes. However, Catherine Austin Fitts indicates that many of the Fannie, Freddie and FHA loans are actually fraudulent, as the same property is sold repeatedly to phantom buyers or the property does not actually exist. At least $1 trillion of Fannie and Freddie’s mortgages are already in trouble, and the data on mortgage resets indicates the problem will not end until 2012. This bailout effectively doubled America’s publicly traded debt overnight.

On September 14, the Fannie and Freddie bombshell was followed by the sale of Merrill Lynch to Bank of America for $50 billion. Paulson admitted he was involved with the Merrill Lynch purchase at a steep premium to the market price. Bank of America is hardly a bastion of stability however, as over half its builders loans “are considered troubled.” The institution is a leading issuer of consumer credit cards, and with the U.S. in a recession, much of this debt will default. Bank of America already bought subprime lender Countrywide earlier this year in a curious deal where the firm refused to take on many of Countrywide’s liabilities.

Perhaps I missed it in the actual article, but from her headline, it is clear she thinks the dollar is doomed. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told a business group in the United Arab Emirates on June 2nd that “The U.S. dollar has been the world’s reserve currency since World War Two and there is a good reason for that. The United States has the largest, most open economy in the world, and our capital markets are the deepest and most liquid.” Since then, it has become quite clear that U.S. capital markets are nowhere deep nor liquid enough; and the “open economy” seems to be undermined by opaque financial instruments and “toxic assets” whose value cannot be determined. If I’m understanding all this even close to correctly, it is now hard to see how the value of any US debt can be determined, which would seem to mean that the value of the dollar cannot be determined. Compounding the problem, this would mean that the dollar cannot be a “reserve currency,” that is, the currency which “the world’s central banks must acquire and hold . . . reserves in corresponding amounts to their [own] currencies in circulation” in order to defend against “speculative and manipulative attacks.” Even worse, oil producers will decide they can no longer accept the dollar, which will mean that the most oil-hungry nation in the world will have to sell dollars and purchase some other currency in order to buy oil.

Clearly the US is headed for a fall. I can’t forecast how hard. But there is nothing any longer sensible about US global military, economic, or political hegemony. And nothing is any longer sensible about our prosperity. We simply cannot afford it and even if Bush hadn’t antagonized the entire world, I don’t think there’s anyone big enough to bail us out. Greed has won, defeating even the greedy.

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David Benfell

September 26, 2008

 

What will I do with a PhD from California Institute for Integral Studies?

Allan Combs sees as a starting place that “the world needs saving,” citing “unsustainable growth, ecological depletion, rampant consumerism and market instability, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, diseases, water shortages, . . . [and] global terrorism.”1  Sociologists point to endemic social inequality and the terrible prices paid in so many ways by the poor.2  Political scientists question the value of the state, seeing it as an obstruction to world peace.3  At this writing, there are grave uncertainties affecting the world economy, some of which stem from environmental concerns such as global warming and the depletion of oil reserves, but many of which stem from a sheer greed in the financial sector that appear destined to drive countless homeowners into foreclosure and countless debtors into bankruptcy while the mainstream media has focuses largely on institutions that fail or are bailed out.

It seems almost trite to write that.  And it almost seems trite to point to what I have called a myth of unlimited opportunity, that anyone who works hard and has talent can succeed and prosper,4 and an idea of the United States is a “shining city on the hill,” entitled if not obligated to exercise hegemony over the entire world.5  And yet the fact of these myths, deeply ingrained in the thinking of U.S. citizens, deeply embedded in their upbringings, arguably leads to a multitude of catastrophes, and I think calls for something beyond preserving and “transforming [the social ship] into a compassionate and sustainable vehicle for carrying us into the future.”6

Rather, it calls for a wholesale shift in social attitudes.  Anarchists see hierarchy at the root of many social problems, but we contend with a dictionary definition of anarchy as “a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority.”  Though the definition also recognizes an anarchist vision as “a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government,”7 the connotation of utopia is of a social structure that is impossible to realize.  Society presumes this utopia as impossible to realize because it has embedded biblical notions of “original sin,” that humans are inherently sinful and selfish, that they can only attain a “state of grace” through divine intervention.

The transformation I will seek thus has at least two parts.  First, to the extent that humans really are greedy, I will be looking for ways for humanity to evolve.  Second, to the extent that humans believe they are inherently greedy, I will be seeking ways for humanity to move beyond the experience that they are.  I doubt it is possible to overestimate the scope of this transformation.  But for as long as we expect humans to be greedy, we create a self-fulfilling prophesy that they will be.  And I expect this to be the focus of my research.

1Combs, Allan, “Integral Conversations for a Better World,” http://www.sourceintegralis.org/IntegralConversations.htm (accessed September 11, 2008).

2Sernau, Scott, Worlds Apart: Social Inequalities in a Global Economy, 2nd Ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2006); Shapiro, Thomas M., Ed., Great Divides: Readings in Social Inequality in the United States, 3rd Ed. (Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005).

3Barash, David P. and Charles P. Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 204-205.

4Sernau, Worlds Apart, 23, 62.

5Gregory S. Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Social Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” Journal of Religion and Society 7 (2005), http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/ 2005-11.html (accessed 9 March 2008); You-me Park and Henry Schwarz, “Extending American Hegemony: Beyond empire,” Interventions 7, no. 2 (2005): 153-161, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=17384917&site=ehost-live (accessed 9 March 2008).

6Combs, “Integral Conversations”

7“anarchy,” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anarchy (accessed September 26, 2008).

I’ve been trying, for a long time now, to explain that Pakistan has been an ally of the United States is the so-called “war on terror” only to protect its own sovereignty. Failing to respect Pakistani territory would therefore have consequences.

So today comes a report that “Pakistani troops and tribesmen opened fire when two U.S. helicopters crossed into the country from neighboring Afghanistan.” Pakistan’s military promised to defend its territory no matter what the odds.

“If somebody comes into your area, will you just sit there and take the beating?” said army spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas, defending the army’s new position. “We will certainly respond to that.”

The Los Angeles Times carried a story, which was picked up by UPI’s Odd News suggesting that the difference between liberals and conservatives is not a function of nurture but of birth.

First, I should point out that social scientists are generally so skeptical of nature as an explanation for behavior–as opposed to nurture–that I tend to dismiss such claims out of hand. But the media accounts of this study suggest other issues as well.

Operationalization can be understood as the meaning attached to each variable in research. It is rare that you can actually measure what you’re looking for, so you use something you can measure instead:

In an initial experiment, subjects were shown a series of images that included a bloody face, maggots in a wound and a spider on a frightened face. A device measured the electrical conductance of their skin, a physiological reaction that indicates fear.

In a second experiment, researchers measured eye blinks — another indicator of fear — as subjects responded to sudden blasts of noise.

People with strongly conservative views were three times more fearful than staunch liberals after the effects of gender, age, income and education were factored out.

But, even if we accept the association between fear and political persuasion, how can we assume from this experiment that the subjects were born more or less fearful? As anyone who has taken a few human development classes can tell you, there’s a whole lot of science demonstrating that nurture has a great deal to do with fearfulness, but the claim one-sidedly relies on “family and twin studies [which] have revealed strong genetic influences both for liberal-versus-conservative views and for people’s sensitivity to threat.” Second, the sample size was small:

The researchers . . . looked at 46 people who fell into two camps — liberals who supported foreign aid, immigration, pacifism and gun control; and conservatives who advocated defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq war.

It is reckless and wildly irresponsible to generalize from such a sample size to an entire population of over 300 million people. Fourth, these issues correspond with simplistic U.S. views of liberalism and conservatism.

I should emphasize here that I have not been able to gain access to the original research from home.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spoke after requesting legislation to help relieve banks of their bad assets. Details have yet to emerge, but the BBC speculates that “a government agency . . . would take on the debt” or that “lenders [would be forced] to renegotiate mortgages that homeowners are having difficulty paying.”

The underlying premise appears to be that the problem is with mortgages. This would ignore problems in other forms of credit, which may be even worse. Over a month ago, former Clinton White House economist Nouriel Roubini warned that “The banks are playing all sorts of accounting gimmicks not to recognize [consumer credit losses].”

Roubini said the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “privatizing the gains and profits, and socializing the losses, as usual. This is socialism for Wall Street and the rich,” at a huge expense (at least $1 trillion) to the taxpayer. The Wall Street Journal‘s David Reilly wrote today that these “moves, especially proposals for a government vehicle to buy troubled assets before institutions fail, smack of an attempt to arrest price declines,” without solving the underlying problem of “excessive lending at unwise rates that led to unsustainable asset-price inflation, especially in housing.”

So the rich, the only people who apparently matter, the people whom Dan Quayle called the “best people,” are being bailed out. Never mind their role in creating all these exotic “collateralized debt obligations” to enable ever more reckless lending that especially targeted people of color and the poor, accepting as much of their money (in mortgage payments) as they could get, and now leaving them with nothing. Never mind the greed that exported well-paying jobs and left low wage jobs that don’t pay rent in their wake. Never mind the growing gap between rich and poor that has meant the only way that consumers could continue to buoy a sinking economy was by borrowing on the inflated value of their homes. Never mind the greed that paid upper managers hundreds of times the amounts paid ordinary workers. Never mind that taxpayers will be on the hook for trillions of dollars.

Never mind that when ordinary U.S. citizens sought relief, they got “bankruptcy reform,” but when these big institutions need relief, “This country is able to come together and do things quickly when it needs to be done for the good of the American people.”

My political science professor last quarter had to explain something to the class that I’ve seen before, and if you don’t believe us, try getting breakfast at a coffee shop in the Central Valley at a table next to farmers ridiculing the need for fish to have water. Or, try a drive over the Sierra to Nevada, and listen to people who hate people and claim to love nature, but whose way of connecting with nature is with a rifle and a fishing rod.

Tara Shively is clear.

“McCain,” says the 35-year-old mother of five, manager of the popular Brick Coffee House Café in downtown Marysville, where local politicians and business leaders are regulars.

“I find him honest, and he’s real,” Shively said. “I appreciate everything he’s been through in his life.

The Bay Area is a lot more liberal than other parts of the world. And we are convinced, as if he had already been elected, that Barack Obama is our next president. They’ve been selling George W. Bush countdown clocks at Bookshop Santa Cruz practically since he stole the presidency for the second time in 2004. Now they’re selling Obama Change clocks as well.

Thomas Friedman writes, “If John McCain can win this election race with a 50-pound ball called “George W. Bush” wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called “The U.S. Economy” wrapped around the other, then he deserves to represent America in the next Olympics in any race he wants — swimming, cycling or track — I don’t care how old he is.” But I’m starting to think that this just might happen.

Marianne Means writes of McCain’s vice presidential pick, “The Palin choice was a political success and all talk of reaching across the aisle and being bipartisan has disappeared. Nobody seems to miss it. This was a very partisan pick, and it is going over well not only with Republicans but independents as well.”

I don’t miss bipartisanship. That’s what shifted the Democrats, including Barack Obama, so far to the right that progressives have trouble telling them apart from the Republicans. It reduces Democrats to irrelevance. If you’re going to vote for a conservative, you might as well vote for the real thing.

Friedman writes, “Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama’s coffee needs to be found and arrested by the Democrats because Obama has gone from cool to cold.” He misses that these are the same Democrats who have collaborated with the Bush administration on everything from support for the Iraq war to torture to immunity for big telecommunications corporations. And Obama is lately sounding like nearly every other Democrat out there. No wonder Obama’s base of young, enthusiastic progressives isn’t so enthusiastic anymore.

But Obama, with the Democratic nomination in hand, is now surrounded by people telling him he’s doing the right thing, not to worry about McCain’s post-convention “bounce.” But a quick search of my mail archives on Trig, Palin’s Down syndrome son, turns up a bunch of hits. Since one of his teenage sisters is pregnant, we’re supposed to keep families out of this campaign, but Trig shows up in his mother’s arms a lot, appealing to a lot of women who face the challenges of juggling motherhood and careers.

But a third and perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the Palin speech [at the Republican convention] was who and what she left out of her picture of Alaskan adventure and small-town values. Palin never mentioned health care, women’s economic issues like equal pay, or showed any empathy for the economic plight of millions who have done very poorly in George Bush’s America — particularly unmarried women, who, by virtue of their single status, tend to fare the worst in economic downturns.

At 26 percent of the voting-age population, single women are also the biggest single eligible voter demographic. And according to a survey by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, they are the most dependably progressive voters in the electorate. In the last two elections, unmarried women supported Democrats with 62 percent of their vote in 2004 and 65 percent in 2006.

With her speech, or rather with what was missing from it, Palin drew attention to the biggest fault line in the election: the huge chasm between mostly white, married women, and the less white, overall less affluent, but far more progressive unmarried women.

The dirty little secret in this election is that the gender gap — which may be as high as 10 percent for Obama — is dwarfed by the marriage gap. In a recent tracking survey by Gallup in mid-August, Obama led 49 percent to 39 percent among women, but trailed 49 percent to 40 percent among married women. Meanwhile, among unmarried women, Obama trounced McCain by 57 percent to 30 percent.

But there’s more to this story:

Although unmarried women are more likely to support Obama than McCain, getting them to the polls is another matter. Unmarried women are underrepresented in the electorate. In 2004, 20 million unmarried women did not vote. Compared to married women, single women are 9 percent less likely to register and 13 percent less likely to vote. To use one striking example, given that John Kerry won unmarried women by 62 percent to 37 percent, not getting unmarried women out effectively left 12 million progressive votes at home — and possibly cost Kerry the election.

Progressives are the very people whom Obama has been distancing himself from, the very people who provided all the energy for his campaign. A “change” vision, after all, is a progressive vision. Distancing oneself from progressives means distancing oneself from the hallmark of Obama’s campaign.

So Shively, a “middle-class mom,” sees Obama as “a good politician.”

Just to be sure, I went up, one more time. The band I earlier said sounded good indeed had a few dancers–I’m guessing 25-30 people clustered in front of the stage on the lawn opposite the Lupin clubhouse. I wandered up to the upper lawn and saw a few more people dancing up there.

I should give them credit. After a blistering hot Indian Summer last weekend, it has cooled off considerably. I actually put on a jacket for this trip. Inspecting the pockets, I found paraphernalia from when I drove cab for Luxor in San Francisco. The last time I drove for Luxor was in 1999.

I wandered through the restaurant; it appeared there was a steady stream of business for drinks (and possibly light meals). The man behind the counter, who has lived at Lupin for probably at least a decade, a good guy with a great sense of humor, said, “It’s crazy.” I laughed.

There were a few people inside the restaurant, taking refuge from the cold, but if there are a lot of people here, they’re huddling in their sleeping bags or in their RVs.

When my cat got off my lap, I wandered up again to see what the “crowds” were like at Lupin for the Earthdance festival.

It was about 10 pm when I went up. An act had just finished, and I saw a few cars driving out. But once again, the clubhouse lawn was virtually empty. I saw the outgoing operations manager (her resignation is effective on October 1) with her husband. She was enthusiastic, saying there were “a hundred people” on the lawn for the preceding act, and that there had been a steady stream of people coming in all day.

First, Lupin’s procedures for admitting people are so inefficient that the office cannot handle a truly large crowd without skipping steps like the sex offender check. Second, even if there were “a hundred people” for the preceding act, that amounts to a pittance next to the likely cost of the bands. It is possible that some bands worked for reduced cost for a non-profit organization; in terms of corporate structure, it wasn’t Lupin Lodge that put this event on, but a non-profit organization: Lupin Cultural Center. (All the money is in one set of hands.)

As I write this, another band is playing–mostly Beatles covers–that sounds good. But while there are still plenty of cars in the parking lot and plenty of tents set up, apparently very few stayed even for this performance. This is an older crowd–about my age, actually–that I’m guessing more highly values its space. I think they don’t crowd in to vehicles like younger people do, so instead of getting maybe often four people per car, you see a lot more couples and even a few single people up here alone. Thus a lot of space gets occupied without a lot of people.

If my analysis is correct, the proxemics of an older, wealthier group that largely shunned the carnivorous fare of the restaurant tonight do not help Lupin on what should be a big weekend. And they won’t help at a planned repeat for the Spring Equinox in 2009–if it actually happens.

I whispered to the operations manager’s husband, as they departed to check out the scene at the upper lawn, that I think Lupin will fold by the end of the year.