As always, the devil in the details. Or, more precisely here, there is a devil hidden in the deails.
Section 128 of the House bill would have sped up the enactment of a provision of a 2006 law from October 1, 2011 to October 1, 2008. That same provision, same section, was in the bill the Sentate passed, the one the House is going to reconsider perhaps as soon as Friday at a time when GOPper opposition there is supposedly "softening" in the face of all the pro-corporate goodies festooning the Senate version of the bill.
It's a short section, in fact it's only one sentence. Here it is:
Section 203 of the Financial Services Regulatory Relief Act of 2006 (12 U.S.C. 461 note) is amended by striking October 1, 2011 and inserting October 1, 2008.
What would that innocent-sounding, seemingly merely technical change mean?
First, bear in mind that after the depression of the '30s, banks were required to maintain a certain minimum level of reserves. The idea was to protect against catastrophic failures born of, for example, the bank's outstanding obligations being called in at a time of tight credit when there proved to be insufficient reserves to cover them. It was intended as a protection for depositers.
Yeah, yeah, fine, what does that have to do with this?
Well, because of the effect of that provision of the bailout bill, immediately upon passage, banks would no longer be required to hold any reserves on deposits. As Pam Martens says in Counterpunch,
[b]anks already in trouble for lack of capital would get to hold as little as “zero” capital for transactions.
Part of the "solution" the bill offers, it seems, is simply to define the problem out of existence. After all, banks can't be regarding as failing due to a shortage of capital if they're not required to hold any. Oh, but don't worry! The upper limit on deposits covered by FDIC insurance has been upped from $100,000 per account to $250,000! So it's all A-OK!
But it's not. Besides the fact that very few of us live in a world where that difference will mean a freaking thing, the net result is to shift the burden of risk from the banks to the public. Another case where the gains stay private while any losses go public. It's a variation on what used to be called "lemon socialism," the process where failing or mismanaged enterprises got taken over by the government - so the public got the lemons while the sweeter fruit remained in the hands of the corporations. And we've certainly seen a fair amount of that of late.
So I go away for a little while and the whole world goes in the crapper. We're surrounded by doomsday scenarios of another Great Depression, complete with references, some stretched but some spot on, to 1929.
Well, okay, first things first. This is a problem, a very real one; I suppose you could even call it a crisis, although I shy away from that because the word gets so overused. But when there is a big enough credit crunch that banks are getting antsy about extending loans to each other, yes, we do have a situation on our hands.
It's a cliche to say our economy runs on credit, but sayings only get used often enough to become cliches by expressing some truth. (Have you ever seen a wet hen? They really are pretty pissed.) I'm not even talking here about mortgages and individual credit card debt, it goes deeper than that to the overnight loans and other such instruments that banks and investment houses are constantly taking in, paying out, advancing and collecting. Those shut down and banks, needing capital to cover their own outstanding obligations, start issuing consumer credit under the most stringent conditions - if they do it at all.
That, in turn, affects not only things like the housing market but car sales, major appliances, travel, any sort of purchase, even ordinary ones, where cash up front is not the usual means of payment. Declining sales lead to retrenchment leads to unemployment leads to recession and maybe worse. So yes and contrary to some voices I've heard, this does affect us.
Ultimately, this will require some sort of bailout. The real question is what sort and, more importantly, of who.
The roots of this whole mess lie in one place: the greed of the financial industry. An industry built entirely on greed, on go for the big bucks, on you're either a player or a loser and being "just" a millionaire makes you the latter, has reaped the results of its own tunnel vision.
What happened in a nutshell is that in their world, everything seemed to be going up. Even as most struggled, they prospered. Even as bankruptcies grew, they were safe - and when they grew to be too many, they simply got Congress to change the rules in their favor. So - just like in the 1920s, it seems almost banal to note - they started acting under the assumption that it would always be that way. That things would always go up for them. Significantly, they assumed the housing market would always go up in the long term. It might stall temporarily, but ultimately it was a profit machine.
That was why the subprime market, giving mortgages to people with less-than-sterling credit, took off: The thinking was that even if you have to foreclose, you can resell the house for more than enough to cover yourself. It was a huge potential market for new mortgages with little, if any, risk.
Or so it seemed. But of course it wasn't and the housing boom went bust, foreclosures climbed, and because of the bad market the foreclosed homes didn't prove to be the hidden gems they had been assumed to be. And guess what: You've got a "liquidity crisis."
Something to be dealt with right here is the right-wing attempt to push the blame off the greedheads of Wall Street and onto the backs of liberals - particularly, it seems, Barney Frank. The argument, if you can call it that, is that Frank and others lead the effort against "redlining," the practice where banks would refuse to extend credit to people living in certain - almost exclusively minority - neighborhoods. Those advocates supposedly "forced" the banks to make loans to "underserving" people.
But of course the complaint about redlining had nothing to do with not loaning money to people who couldn't afford to pay it back. It was about not loaning to people because of where they lived - their creditworthiness didn't even enter the picture. Only their address did. It was a blatantly racist practice. Contrary to the bullshit being tossed out now, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 outlawed redlining but did not require making risky loans, in fact it required "sound practice."
Still, the rightists persist in trying to blame an act for racial and economic justice for our current troubles. Some, such as wingnut columnist Jeff Jacoby, even specifically linked the old practice with the new claims, saying in a recent column that
[t]he pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless.
That is, minorities equal "weak credit histories" equal minorities. It doesn't get more direct than that.
However - and getting back to the main thread - that doesn't mean there isn't a problem here. It was the stupidity of the financial industry born of its institutional culture of greed that is the cause. More fundamentally, it was the failure to realize that the "business cycle" has not "been repealed" and in a capitalist economy where "more" is not only an economic philosophy, its a moral imperative, this kind of stuff is going to happen. The only reason it hasn't happened more and worse is not because of the so-called "self-correcting market" but because we do not have a "free market," our economy is partly socialized, helping to ease both the highs and the lows and reduce the pain of the latter.
Which means first the answer now is not less control, less regulation, but more control and more regulation - especially since, as noted in a link above, something over 80% of the problematic loans were not made by banks subject to FDIC oversight under the Community Reinvestment Act but by "financial institutions that operated with little or no federal regulatory oversight." (Original emphasis.) It was neither the CRA nor regulation that caused the problem, it was the lack of regulation.
So with that classic capitalist combination of short-sightedness and hubris, the institutions took idiotic risks that didn't look risky to them and when it all fell apart they came crying to the public to save them from the effects of their own greed-driven stupidity. Which leads directly to my single biggest gripe about the bailout: It proposes to have the public buy the bad mortgage debts of the lenders, thus giving them the public teat at which to suckle and taking them off the hook for collecting those debts while leaving the mortgagees, the people trying to hold onto their homes, on the hook for paying them. Indeed, one of the arguments used in the bailout's defense is that the $700 billion (or whatever the actual figure would be, no one claims to know) would not be the net cost to taxpayers because some of that outlay would be recovered when the feds subsequently sell the debts to other institutions, which will of course go about collecting them.
(Which means, parenthetically, that the deal is "we're going to spend a huge amount of money but we don't know how much or just who it's going to, some of which we might get back but we don't know when, how much, or over what period of time. Sign here.")
Screw that. Screw it right down to the ground. And screw the claims like that of Barack Obama (who, it appears, had been "actively whipping" the bill in the Senate) that "if we only had time we could do better, but we don't" so members of Congress must, he said, "step up to the plate." We don't need "more time," there are better ideas out there already. One example:
A group of liberal Democrats, backed by unions, proposed an alternative measure calling for more oversight by the Securities and Exchange Commission over Wall Street and a $61 billion stimulus package to aid working families.
Representatives John Tierney and William Delahunt, both Democrats from Massachusetts who helped defeat the [bailout] package, said yesterday they want to give bankruptcy courts the power to help people facing foreclosure by rewriting their mortgages.
There's also the "No BAILOUTS Act" sponsored by Peter DeFazio.
[T]the measure would impose a securities tax equivalent to one quarter of one percent of profits and empower the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to deal more effectively with bank failures.
The plan is based on a proposal made last week by former FDIC chair William Isaac, who recalled that in the 1980s Congress enacted a "net worth certificate" program – which allowed the federal agency to shore up the capital of weak banks to give them more time to resolve their problems – and the FDIC resolved a $100 billion insolvency in savings banks for a total cost of less than $2 billion.
Another: Ian Welsh at Firedoglake proposes to give Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson $150 billion now (since he never said the 700 big ones would be needed all at once) and tell him "come back in January with a real plan." He also lists several facets of what he considers a better plan, too long to quickly summarize here.
For me, there are three things I think should be part of any package. One, repeal that evil bankruptcy bill.
Two, as other have suggested, instead of giving the money to Wall Street, give it to the homeowners to pay off their mortgages. Or at the very least take up the suggestion of former Federal Reserve vice-chair Alan Blinder, and others, to re-create something like the Depression-era's Home Owners’ Loan Corporation to renegotiate troubled mortgages on owner-occupied homes at sharply lower rates, with the intent of heading off as many foreclosures as possible.
And three and the biggie in my mind, in order to get their part of any bailout money, a firm has to agree that by buying up these bad debts that the government is buying that much equity in the company. Which means that wherever the debt is big enough, the firm will essentially be nationalized.
And once that happens, the government keeps those firms. It doesn't resell them at a loss to some other outfit of greedheads looking to gain by our self-sacrificing, self-flagellating, devotion to the mythical "free market," instead it operates those firms under new management on a non-profit basis to serve any and all communities underserved by the financial markets. Oh, those lenders and their wingnut sycophants will whine and squeal that it's "unfair competition," but the reply should be "you have always claimed that government couldn't do anything right and the market was inherently superior. Here's your chance to prove it. So shut up."
You want a bumper sticker version of the principle involved? How about "We deserve an economy built on need, not greed." The rest follows from that.
There's a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the Chinese character for "crisis" combines the characters for "danger" (or "risk") and "opportunity." If that is true, the word "crisis" does fit here. We face a danger but we do have an opportunity for a - well, I can't say a just economy but I can say a less unjust economy. It's too bad that with "leaders" like Barack Obama we won't take it.
Footnote: The fact that the CRA outlawed redlining does not mean the practice has stopped. It hasn't. It merely has changed forms.
Okay, here it is, the very brink of October 1. The new old - or old new or maybe the ... never mind - Lotus. My promise is to have something posted every single day. It may be long or short and it may be serious or sarcastic or a geek post. But dammit, there'll be something.
I went missing these past two weeks because moving proved to be more of a hassle than expected and we're still some time away from being settled here. Sometimes the short moves, which this was, are harder than the long ones.
More to the point, moving required a shift in our internet access, with the result that for the moment, only one of our two computers can be online at a time. Unfortunately for me, that one is my wife's so she gets first dibs on its use. So until I get a router, I'll have to choose my times. More importantly, all my cool programs for rapid links to news sources are on my computer. I do expect that just a few days of having to locate the links and enter them by hand will inspire me on that router business.
On weightier matters, I have my own thoughts on the wildfire in the financial industry, which I'll lay out later today. Bottom line on the cause, though: The banks and investment houses got greedy.
(Did he say "got?")
More banal insights this afternoon and/or evening.
From Eli over at Left I on the News I hear that the National Park Service is poised to put into place new regulations affecting the possibility of public protests during the inaugural procession in January.
It seems that back in March, the US District Court for DC ruled that the NPS's practice of exempting the corporate-funded Presidential Inaugural Committee from the ordinary permit process was unconstitutional. The effect of the exemption was to give a private organization exclusive rights to determine who could be present along the parade route along Pennsylvania Avenue - and, Judge Paul Friedman ruled, "the Inauguration is not a private event."
The NPS did not appeal the ruling. Instead, it is now issuing re-written regulations in what I see as a transparent attempt to circumvent the ruling and thus still give the PIC the ability to limit those along the route to "invited guests," guests which, it's safe to say, will not include protesters.
More information is available at this link, including how to make a public comment on the proposed regs. (Use the link toward the bottom; the ones at the top don't work.)
Admittedly, I'm not sure this is a big huge deal (although it does have the potential to become one if the use of such permits creates more or less permanent "no protest zones" in public spaces) but it's just so... so... so low, so cheap, so slimy, that at the very least it shouldn't pass without objection.
Be quick, though: The period for public comments ends September 22.
Footnote: The original suit aimed at protecting the right of protest along the route was filed by the ANSWER Coalition, that group that all right-thinking, sober, serious liberals reject for its radicalism because they know in their right-thinking, sober, serious minds that their own right-thinking, sober, serious approach to issues such as stopping the war has been shown to be much more effective than, you know, making a fuss about it or anything.
Updated No. Not one. Not one more fucking word about Democrats or even about "more and better" Democrats.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, facing political pressure from high gas prices and a struggling economy, has backed off her emphatic opposition to offshore drilling.
Instead, she's advanced a proposal that would allow drilling 100 miles of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts - a distance reduced to 50 miles if a state approves.
Even though analysts have pointed out that offshore drilling will not have any effect on energy prices any time in the near future, congressional observers said that with the November election approaching, high gas prices and a sour economy have put political pressure on Democrats to go along with Republicans who have been pushing an expansion of drilling.
Pelosi "doesn't want some of the Democratic members - especially from the more conservative districts, and there are a lot of them - to lose their seats," said former congressman Mickey Edwards, a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University.
Expanded offshore drilling has been banned for more than 20 years. That ban is to expire on September 30 but instead of moving to renew the ban, Pelosi and company cravenly capitulated to GOPpers and the oil industry out of sheer political cowardice. They don't give a damn about the environment, they don't give a damn about the fishing industry (too many small owners equals not enough big contributions), they don't give a damn about the public or the public interest, all they care about is getting and staying elected, protecting their perks, securing their sinecures, preserving their pensions.
No, I am not going to say that every single Congressional Democrat is a scumbag. But the leadership is composed of scumbags. The leadership is composed of cowards. There may be individual Democrats worthy of support, even of your vote. The leaders of the party - and therefore the party as a whole - are not among them.
Countdown: Fifteen days to the Lotus SurgeTM.
Updated to note that I wrote that very quickly and a main point I wanted to make is probably too well hidden: Nancy Pelosi and company were supposed to be the "more and better Democrats" we were (and are) supposed to focus on electing while ditching other forms of activism.
This is, naturally, a day late but that's how the month is going. Still, since some other folks noted the anniversary of the September 11 attacks - I particularly liked this one from James at Never In Our Names - I figured I would, too. What I've chosen to do is to post some things I wrote in the aftermath of 9/11 to see how my thoughts and predictions have stood up to the passage of time.
The first is an email, September 13, 2001, in response to an online friend asking how I was feeling in the wake of the attacks. The part in brackets is from the friend.
[ How are you doing? ]
I’m hanging in there. Stressed and sad like most, I expect - and fearful of what happens next, wondering what’s going to be the next loop in the cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation, a cycle in which everyone (including us) views themselves as the wronged innocents. And, as the reports of attacks on, harassment of, and threats against Arabs and Muslims in the US begin to come in, as people equate Arab with Muslim and Muslim with fanatic (much as if they equated American with Christian and Christian with the KKK) and as cries of, in one form or another, “kill them all” start to rise, reminded of the dictum that those who deal in vengeance tend to become that which they say they oppose.
“We will never be the same” is an instant cliche. And it’s certainly true - the question for us as a people now is what the change will be. I’ve been thinking of the last verse of “There But For Fortune” by Phil Ochs:
“Show me the country/Where the bombs had to fall./Show me the ruins/Of the buildings once so tall,/And I’ll show you a young land/With so many reasons why/There but for fortune may go you or I.”
We have indeed been fortunate, and still are. A good question now is when faced with misfortune (not in the sense of bad luck but of bad events) will we as a people act as mature adults who will think about what we do and what it will accomplish or as spoiled brats flailing wildly at any convenient target within reach?
The magnitude of the event remains a little hard to grasp, perhaps (perhaps) more so for those of us who grew up in or around NYC, for who the twin towers were a natural part of the skyline. I’ve been told that the closer people are to NYC, the more the shock hasn’t worn off and the further away, the more anger there is. If there’s a silver lining at all, maybe it’s that the magnitude of the tragedy will keep us focused on the task of rescue and rebuilding long enough for the unreasoning anger to dissipate at least a little.
The second is another email reply to another friend on the same day.
[ Such sad news. Hope no-one close to you is caught up in this. ]
No, no one I know personally. But there’s always more of an impact when it’s something you know, something you can picture. I remember when the World Trade Center was built. Now I’ll remember when - and how - it came down.
Apparently, the delay between the first and second hits enabled a good portion of the second tower to be evacuated. Nonetheless, the loss of life will be huge; I wouldn’t be surprised if it ultimately reached 5 figures.
Now what happens? I’m afraid of what this could mean to the future. Already there have been incidents of violence and threats against Arabs (who are ALL Muslims, of course, as we all know) and mosques (because ALL Muslims are rabid extremists, of course, as we all know). Even someone I know online who would usually be considered rather liberal said she has “no problem with that” when I expressed a worry about “anti-Muslim xenophobia” because “I never met a nice Arab who wasn’t a Jew-hating racist at heart,” using the attack to justify her own concealed bigotry.
Meanwhile, the White House is promising an “extended military campaign.” We may be in for hard times, times which will not include asking any questions about why it happened that don’t involve “security lapses.” Even wondering about motivations beyond “unreasoning hatred” and being “uncivilized” simply won’t be allowed and risking such a thought is liable to get you branded an apologist for terrorists.
We’re headed, I expect, for more cycles of retaliation and counter-retaliation, everyone insisting their enemies are subhuman devils and they themselves are the offended innocents. It’s gonna get worse.
This is the big one; it's an unpublished op-ed piece dated October 2.
In the wake of September 11, a blunt truth: Barring divine intervention, and I for one do not count on that, we will never “rid the world of terrorism.” As long as there are people there will be those, both individuals and governments, prepared to commit the most venal cruelties against innocents to gain political ends. What we can hope to do is control terrorism, limit it, minimize it.
But if the history of the Middle East over the last 30 years proves nothing else, it proves beyond question that neither terrorism nor “counter”-terrorism, neither retaliation nor counter-retaliation nor counter-counter-retaliation will stop the circle of death - particularly not so long as those on each side insist on seeing themselves at the wronged innocents only defending themselves against unreasoning violence or oppression or exploitation (or all three) while viewing their adversaries as evil brutes fully aware of their own brutality. Another cycle of mayhem is simply not an answer.
If we want to limit, to minimize, terrorism, we have to understand the roots of it, understand what produces it, understand what moves people to embrace such desperation-driven fanaticism. And that in turn requires seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, which is where most of the mainstream commentaries attempting to answer the question “Why do they hate us?” have failed. The authors have projected themselves into the Muslim world and tried to think of what they might resent about the West in general or the US in particular. That is, they have changed their imagined location but not their eyes, still seeing the world through the filter of their own perceptions and desires. So they wind up producing answers like “They hate us because we’re rich” or “we’re modern” or “we support Israel.” Such answers are so removed from context that even to the extent they’re right, they’re useless, the more so because they add up to the unintentionally-revealing “They’re backward, jealous, anti-Semites who hate us because we’re better than they are.”
So for a moment, just for a moment, try to see the world through the eyes of an average person on the ground in the Middle East. This is how the world might look to you:
For centuries the West has looked down on you, regarding you, your culture, and, if non-Christian, your religion as inferior. (There is a reason bin Laden keeps referring to American “crusaders.”) They think of you as “ragheads” or “towelheads.”
Every time a strong Arab leader rises and tries to become independent of the West, they get slapped down. The only regimes that survive are those too weak or too corrupt to threaten Western interests. (One such “threatening” government was that of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, who was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup in 1953 after he attempted to nationalize oil reserves. The result was the 26-year reign of the Shah, whose army was practically stamped “Made in the USA.”) Yes, you resent the West’s wealth but it’s not so much that they’re rich and you’re poor, it’s that they’re rich because you’re poor, that their wealth is built on exploitation and economic domination.
In just the past 20-plus years, you’ve seen the US pick a fight with Libya in the Gulf of Sidra, bomb Tripoli, openly try to kill Moammar Khadaffi, bomb a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan on the spurious claim it was a chemical weapons factory (leading to thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of deaths due to inadequate supplies of medicines), stand by along with the rest of the West while Muslims were slaughtered in Bosnia (stepping in only when European interests were threatened), shell Beirut, shoot down a civilian Iranian airliner, and fire cruise missiles into Afghanistan.
Then there’s Iraq, it’s infrastructure systematically destroyed in a war which it seems to you had nothing to do with the West except to humiliate another strong Arab leader. In the runup to that war you saw foreign troops stationed near the holy sites of Islam at the insistence of the US despite Saudi Arabia’s reluctance and warnings that doing so would be deeply offensive to conservative Muslims - which it was. (One thus offended being Osama bin Laden.)
For 10 years you have seen the bombing of Iraq continue, so much so that a few months ago a Pentagon press representative referred to one such raid as “routine.” Sanctions imposed by the West have cost the lives (by UN estimate) of 500,000 Iraqi children over the last 10 years, a death toll which then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright described in 1996 as “worth it.” Worth it, yes, you say - as long as it’s Arab children who are doing the dying. [I noted later that some sources dispute that total, saying it may have been “only” 370,000.]
And you see the US justify both the bombing and the sanctions on the grounds that Iraq “defies UN resolutions” while at the same time it pours billions of dollars in economic and military aid into Israel despite the fact that for 30 years Israel has openly defied UN resolutions about Palestinians and the occupied territories. It’s not even so much that the US supports Israel, it’s that the US does it to the detriment, the denigration, the denial, of the Palestinians.
If that was your world, what would the West, what would the US, look like to you? Like a noble friend? Or like a selfish, conceited, arrogant bully which figures it can do as it damn well pleases without cost to itself? And amid all this, what is the only force that has offered you hope, offered you help, offered you a model that has defied the West, offered you self-respect? Islamic fundamentalism. Seen through such eyes, the question “Why do they hate us?” answers itself.
This doesn’t mean excusing the terrorists who brought such ruin and pain to the streets of New York on September 11. We are all responsible for what we do and their acts deserve nothing but condemnation: Understanding does not mean approving.
What it does mean is that our best targets for “attack” in this “extended campaign” are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way to minimize terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don’t see us as grasping bullies - and the best way not to be seen as a grasping bully is not to be one.
These last two aren't complete pieces but excerpts. The first is from a letter to The Nation dated October 16, replying to a column by Eric Alterman in which he condemned some unnamed folks for their reactions to 9/11, saying they should be “rejected for reasons of honor and pragmatism.”
In any political dispute, it is a dreadful tactical mistake - one of which the left has been too often guilty - to let your opponents define the terms of debate. By decrying “the refusal to draw [a] line” between “principled dissent” and an ill-defined “‘Hate America’ left” Alterman effectively acknowledges that questions about our patriotism - however we individually define the word - are proper ones and thus repeats this same blunder. His proposed course of action does not defuse the right’s attack, it legitimizes it.
If “patriotism requires no apologies,” neither should it require conscious demonstration. Instead of trying to prove we are part of “responsible debate” by slicing others out of that range, we should simply assume that we are and act on that basis. I’ve long maintained that the left in this country has been at its strongest and most influential when we have spoken the truth as we understand it without giving a flying damn if anyone was offended or not. Our task must be to present ourselves and what we believe, clearly, strongly, unreservedly, and unashamedly. Time and energy wasted defensively declaring what we don’t believe are just that - and we’ve little enough of either to start with.
Finally, an excerpt from a December 24 letter to Mother Jones. Todd Gitlin, still living off his radical credentials from the '60s, had written a piece blasting what he called the "blame America first" crowd, the single requirement for membership seemingly being not sharing his resurgent sense of flag-waving patriotism.
As deeply as I mourn the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, as much as I admire the dedication of the firefighters and rescue workers, the EMTs and RNs, who rushed to get to the place everyone else rushed to get away from, as hard a wrench as I felt the first time I saw the post-attack profile of New York (with sky where the twin towers should’ve been), I still insist that the question for us as Americans is not, cannot be, what Osama bin Laden could have or should now think or do differently, but what we could have or should now think or do differently. The clock of history did not start on September 11 and refusing to face our own complicity in creating and maintaining the conditions of desperation-driven fanaticism in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow (and continue to recruit) is the surest way we as a nation can guarantee a continuation of terrorism directed against us.
I have to say that on the whole I think these thoughts and predictions have held up pretty well. Certainly better than those of Alterman and Gitlin (and a fair number of others we could name, I expect). Do you disagree? Say so and say why.
Footnote: For another perspective on patriotism, try this.
I just wanted to quickly repeat what I said a few posts down that posting here will be very scanty for the month of September and folks probably shouldn't bother looking here more than once a week.
Every time I think "I should say something about that" - such as Barack Obama's nauseating assertion that the "surge" has "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams" or the news that a county in Virginia is actively misinforming college students about their voting rights - I immediately think "But what I really should be doing is packing."
So I pack.
As I also said earlier, I do intend a renewed commitment to this thing come October 1, a commitment to having something posted every day, even if it's just one of my famous geek posts. I do think that what I put up here is worth reading (at least for the most part) but I also think there hasn't been enough to keep people coming back. I'm going to do my best to remedy that.
One thing that won't change is my tendency to focus far more on topics and events that are not filling the pages of the Big Blogs unless I think I have something to say or a perspective to add that is noticeably different from what is already out there. Put another way, I don't want to just be going, either directly or by implication via essentially carbon-copy content, "me, too" or "what so-and-so said." If I can't add anything, I'll just let it slide.
Just after 1 AM today, someone in Austin, Texas (I have a fair idea who) became my 50,000th hit.
A small thing, I realize, but I still felt like making note of it.
(Actually, I passed 50,000 a while ago because I had a few thousand hits before I hooked up with Sitemeter, but this is the "official" crossing of that line.)
And BTW, yes I am both furious and frightened by what's been going on in St. Paul - frightened, I will say, less by the brutality, illegality, and conceited arrogance of the cops than by the cavalier attitude of the mainstream press (which is largely content to limit itself to what the cops and the city government hand them) and the almost ghoulish indifference to the implications displayed by way too many among the public (who either shrug it off as not worth noticing or, worse, celebrate the cops' assaults on both conscience and the Constitution).
There is one thing that keeps me going at times like this: historical perspective. I have recently read two books about the battle for civil liberties in 20th century America, one spanning the majority of the century and using the history of the ACLU as an organizing theme, the other concentrating on the debate over free speech in wartime during and after World War I, with the case of Eugene Debs the central focus.
The lesson I take from those two books is that things can be worse. Indeed, things have been worse and not all that long ago in historical terms. But we survived and even managed to expand our rights over time. Sometimes it was the result of the "aroused populace" we so often invoke. Other times it was legal battles. Other times it was just that it was other times and society had changed until the legal details had no choice but to get dragged along.
So yes there are dark times ahead, made darker by the pompous dismissal of "old styles of protesting" by some who damn well should know better but are too wrapped up in their sense of "importance" to the campaign of Barack Obama (or whoever would be the "liberal" Democratic standard-bearer of the moment) to think it through. But remember that the title of this blog includes the phrase "surviving a dark time." Ultimately, I think, I believe, we will. But it will not be easy and the darkness will not be lifted by an Obama win. It will be a struggle.
Even so, there can be happiness in the fight. Let's make sure that at the end, we can say with Joe Rauh, "tell them how much fun it was."
[T]here was a line in Michelle Obama's speech that also showed up in Nancy Pelosi's, and these things don't happen by accident: "Barack Obama will end the war in Iraq responsibly." And I can't help but suspect that within that one word qualifier lies a world of hurt.
And which just reaffirms my contention that independent leftists will be needed more than ever come post-election time.
Apparently, we're on the road again. No snags appeared, so now we have to pack up and get out. A colleague told me this evening that the thought of packing and moving everything was so intimidating it was a big reason why she and her husband were still in the same house even though it's no longer big enough. Damn I know how she feels.
Between packing and extra work shifts to help pay for this madness - the route from the living room to the kitchen is already becoming circuitous for all the boxes - plus various other assorted personal and financial crap I have no intention of getting into, this space will inevitably suffer.
What this means for Lotus is that posting will be sparse for the next few weeks. I'd even suggest to folks that they don't bother checking more than once a week during September. There will be stuff up, I'm sure, but I imagine it'll be commentary, not time critical stuff; if you read it a few days after it was posted, it won't matter.
However, I also intend to make a renewed commitment to this thing come early October - October 1 if no unexpected hassles intervene. Maybe even a change in appearance, I dunno about that yet, but I do know I intend to commit myself to posting something worth reading or at least interesting enough to note every day. The more I see people wrapping themselves up in the Obama campaign - Jeebus, is there anyone who is not going on about the damn convention? - the more I'm convinced that the relatively few of us who are independent left voices need to raise our banners ever higher.
In the wake of the 2004 election, I noted an essay by William Rivers Pitt of TruthOut.org, who wrote of a loss of morale among progressives, marked by an "odd silence" in the face of ongoing outrages. I said at the time that
yes, it's true, there is an odd silence. It has fallen over us at least partly because, foolishly but predictably, we tied everything to John Kerry, to "Anybody But Bush".... So of course when the election was over, win or lose but worse lose, there was nothing to do, no next step to take.
I see the same future for 2008: Everything is being tied to Obama and the Dimcrats. How bad is it? The folks running a local weekly peace vigil, who've been at it week after week for nearly five years now, have announced they are going to stop after the election because "if Obama wins, it's Mission Accomplished. If McCain wins, all is lost." Whatever happens, come November a significant portion of the supposedly "progressive" community will simply have no idea what to do next. Not just about the war but about the economy, about health care, about civil rights and constitutional liberties, about energy and the environment, about the list goes on. In their minds, if Obama wins, they need do nothing; if McCain wins, they can do nothing. They are leading themselves into logical and moral paralysis.
I believe that after November, the voices of independent leftists and radicals will be needed more than ever to avoid the twin evils of complacency and despair. We may just be candles in the rain, just flickers in the night, but we need do what we can. And there is that bit about lighting one candle - and since I've done a couple of music references, there's also the song about one voice. So raise your voice and your candle against the increasing darkness.
Footnote: It has nothing to do with the post, but since I included a Willie Nelson song I thought what the heck, I'll link to this one, too. It's one of my all-time favorite songs. Loving, hopeful, and a touch melancholy all at the same time: my favorite theme.
On the other hand, this is kinda related. Worth a look.
I'm sure you've heard about the case of Paul Stephens, the San Marcos, Texas cop who stopped a couple for speeding only to learn that their dog was dying in the back seat and they were racing to get from San Marcos to an emergency veterinary clinic in New Braunfels, something under 20 miles away. Showing absolutely no sympathy - "It's just a dog. You can buy another one." - Stephens kept the couple there for 20 minutes, some of which time he spent chatting with two other cops who arrived on the scene. And during which time the dog died.
Now, just to make sure it's clear and contrary to almost all the defenses of the cop I've seen, the issue here isn't that Stephens stopped them. It's what he did after he stopped them, which went beyond callousness and into the realm of emotional cruelty.
There were calls for the cop to be fired or otherwise disciplined (my favorite was the proposal that he be forced to do community service at an animal shelter) but the outcome was that he was "reprimanded" by being required to watch the video of the incident while being "counseled" on how he could have handled it better. And police have dismissed the speeding ticket. BFD, frankly.
The story has shifted somewhat since the beginning: Instead of going "over 100 miles per hour," it's now said the couple was doing 95; instead of them being held for 15 minutes, the time has stretched to 20 minutes. Minor changes perhaps, but another is more significant: Police Chief Howard Williams said
he believed his officer's assessment that the dog was not alive when he pulled over Michael Gonzalez....
“This dog was already dead,” Williams said. “That is one of the reasons the officers showed no urgency. Nothing the officers did or said caused this dog to die.”
That is bullshit. The video released by the San Marcos police shows Stephens looking into the back seat of Gonzalez's car with his flashlight - but at no point does he say anything about the dog being dead or appearing dead and he did not examine the dog. It was utterly impossible for him to reasonably conclude the dog was dead. So if he did in fact decide from what was little more than a cursory glance in the dark that the dog was dead, he's an idiot. But I think a more likely explanation is that he just didn't give a damn if the dog was alive or dead and this after-the-fact claim is just cheap CYA.
But that CYA is just the point here. Williams called it "a rookie mistake" but I think that's more bullshit. I don't think it was a "rookie" mistake and I don't think it was a rookie "mistake." I don't think it was a mistake at all. I think, rather, that it's exactly what is to be expected when a cop gets their ego bruised, in this case by the fact that the car didn't stop at once. Stephens was going to prove that he was the boss, that he was in charge, that he could make them do whatever he wanted, including punishing them for implicitly challenging him by making them stand by while their pet suffered and died.
The couple pleaded with Stephens to allow them to get the dog to the clinic and then turn themselves in later, or to let Gonzalez stay and get his speeding ticket while Hernandez completed the trip alone.
No and no. No alternatives, no sympathy, no offer of help. They were going to sit there until he was damn good and ready to let them go. Because he was the cop and they were just - just not cops. So they had to just shut up and do what he told them. Because, goddam it, his ego was at stake and no damn crap like a dying family pet was going to keep him from showing that he had the power.
The tragedy of police work is that all too often the kind of person who is attracted to it is exactly the kind of person who shouldn't be doing it.
Oh, and don't give me any of the "they risk their lives every day" crap; when it comes to dangerous jobs, cops don't even make the top 10.
Footnote: The fact is, when you're a cop, the rules are different. If they exist at all. Continuing on the subject of dogs, what do you think would happen to you if you left your dog in your car for 13 hours until well after its brain fried because you "forgot" it was there? If you were a cop, you'd be acquitted of animal cruelty. Not only acquitted, you'd be interviewed by the local media to whine about how you were led into "a modern heart of darkness" by a misdemeanor charge and to express your deep shock at
the way the sheriff and his publicity team handled the whole thing - holding a national news conference on the arrest, publicly disgracing the veteran sergeant and stonewalling his defense team on information nearly every step of the way.
You'd get to have it described as an "ordeal." Because really - the police humiliating the accused and stonewalling the defense? Who ever heard of such a thing?
And what do you think would happen to you if you shot at a dog without any indication in the record that the dog was threatening you? If you were a cop, you'd get to "voluntarily resign" with a $75,000 cash payment, a clean record, and enough months added to your time of service to make you eligible for a pension.
I expect that later on we'll get to how the rules are different in the case of people - tasers aren't the only issue in that case. Even murder can be forgiven - if you're a cop.
Footnote to the footnote: I will be completely fair. Regarding the first incident in the footnote, the cop in question
said the experience has changed the way he looks at police work and suspects on the street.
On traffic stops and interactions with the public, he said, the thought of being a defendant for a year is fresh on his mind.
"I certainly got an education of what it's like to be in the defendant's seat," he said, "and a little bit of what a defendant's feeling."
I suspect that's an experience from which a hell of a lot of cops would benefit - and which a good number deserve to have.
Something else that has disturbed me is the dismissive attitude some have taken, the verbal shrugs of the shoulders to be found around. I realize these discussions are focusing on the political aspects, but still it makes me uncomfortable. For example, Kevin Drum said this a couple of days ago:
I'm willing to bet that a decade from now, far from being seen as the first step in reassembling Russia's old empire, the Russo-Georgian war will be virtually forgotten, a tiny, weeklong border conflict over a couple of unimportant territories that had been in limbo for 17 years and were bound to blow up sooner or later.
As part of his remarkable 1980s 7-part TV documentary on "War," Canadian journalist Gwynne Dyer discussed some wars from ancient history, noting how even though they seemed to those living them to be all-consuming events that would shape the entire human future, now we would be hard put to find any difference that the outcome has actually made. That is, in terms of the world in which we live now, who won and lost those wars is by any discernible measure irrelevant - and thus so are the wars themselves.
Even in the event of more recent wars, the impact can be hard to find. Who remembers the "Soccer War" of 1969? Can anyone demonstrate a long-term significance? Even the wars over Kashmir between two bigger opponents - India and Pakistan - don't seem ultimately to have affected anyone beyond those in the region.
So I'm sure that Kevin is right: Ultimately, this really won't make much of a difference, if any at all. Still, the phrase "anyone beyond those in the region" echoes. Yes, it won't affect anyone beyond those in the region. But what about those in the region? On a geopolitical scale, this is a blip, a hiccup. But that doesn't change the fact that there are scores, maybe hundreds, of people dead, hundreds, maybe thousands, wounded and maimed, whole families destroyed, whole villages burned down, whole city neighborhoods leveled.
Even as I agree that on a world scale this is small potatoes, even as I agree that there are places, many too many places, where things are as bad if not worse and many where people suffer outside the gaze of the world media, still, still, I can't think about this and go "hey, BFD."
Updated I will take a moment to make two related observations about the Georgia-Russia war, with perhaps more to follow (no promises):
At the very top, though, I want to note on my own behalf that some people were surprised by the outbreak of hostilities. Some others weren't. But to the comments:
First, South Ossetia is a breakaway province of Georgia which has been striving to be unified with North Ossetia (and therefore become part of Russia) for some time. Many of the people there are ethnic Russians and think of themselves as Russian rather than Georgian. It has been de facto self-governing since the 1990s.
However, when the USSR broke apart, the borders of Georgia were established based on the borders of the Georgian SSR, of which South Ossetia was part. South Ossetia has never been independent and as far as I'm aware, no nation on Earth recognizes its independence from Georgia, not even Russia.
For that reason, it is just wrong to describe the initial Georgian assault, as some have, as an "invasion." This does not in any way - nor is it intended to - justify or defend the fact that the Georgian assault apparently involved heavy and perhaps indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas, causing hundreds of casualties. It is, rather, the rejection of a bias demonstrated by too many supposedly progressive bloggers.
That bias is the second point. I also reject the contention by some among that same number that the Russian invasion - and yes, that was an invasion - of Georgia was a "humanitarian rescue" or "simply" a protective measure for ethnic Russians. More broadly and more bluntly, I reject the contention that drives that assertion, the usually-implicit but sometimes-explicit conviction among some that in any conflict, a side which has US support is by definition "the bad guy."
A clear example of what I mean was provided by Richard at American Leftist:
The Russians have won a decisive victory in Georgia, one that will probably lead to the removal of the Georgian president by either the Russians or the Georgian populace. It is a huge defeat for the US, NATO and Israel. They sought to transform Georgia into a sort of Israel of the Caucasus, a country that would enforce the edicts of the US throughout the region.
The Russians have mercilessly exposed this lunatic scheme, and no amount of belligerent bleating by Bush and Cheney can revive it. From a tactical standpoint, it is a positive development for the global left. A US military outpost of the "war on terror" has been overrun, an outpost created for the actual purpose of extending the reach of a neoliberal capitalist order with global aspirations.
He went on to say the crisis "has exposed the hyperaggressiveness of US foreign policy" [emphasis added]. Earlier he had insisted that Georgia "invaded" South Ossetia and the Russians "responded" to "protect Russian citizens."
Note first that Richard, a vociferous (and well-informed) opponent of the Iraq war approves of overthrowing foreign governments so long as he gets to decide the targets. And exactly how Georgia was going to be capable of "enforc[ing] the edicts of the US throughout the region" is a mystery to me and I suspect would be to Richard, too, if he came out from behind his sloganeering.
But the point I really wanted to make was that describing a massive invasion that has destroyed and seized military bases, occupied cities, blockaded port facilities, and effectively divided Georgia in half as a "protective response" for Russians in South Ossetia is outrageous. That becomes even truer when it's considered that Colonel-General Anatoly Nagovitsin, deputy head of Russia's general staff, declared the purpose of the invasion was "to weaken the military potential" of Georgia. What's more, Russia has hinted - in fact done more than hinted - that the ultimate intention is to absorb South Ossetia and perhaps the other breakaway region of Abkhazia. Consider statements from Russian officials over the past few days:
- Sergei Ivanov, Russia's deputy prime minister, declared "We recognize the sovereignty of Georgia ... but territorial integrity, it's another matter."
- Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said "One can forget about any talk about Georgia's territorial integrity."
- Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said it's "unlikely" that Abkhazia and South Ossetia could remain part of Georgia.
- In a statement issued after meeting with representatives of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, who had gone to Moscow seeking formal recognition of their self-declared republics, Medvedev declared that Russia will act to "guarantee" any decision the two regions make about their future - as if there was some question as to what that decision would be and, it could well be noted, an option apparently not available to Chechnya.
So while I certainly don't buy the paranoid rantings found on a couple of wingnut sites claiming that Russia "has been planning this for years," do spare me the claims that there was anything "humanitarian" about this or that Russia was not taking advantage of an opportunity to advance its own selfish interests or that it's driven by such interests any less than the US is.
Finally, thinking of what "taking advantage of an opportunity" entailed brings me back to Richard's post, wherein he says the events are a "positive development for the global left." Well, I say that describing the Russian invasion, which multiplied civilian casualties, generated thousands of refugees, unleashed ethnic cleansing by ethnic Ossetians against ethnic Georgians, and involved shelling cities - including the use of cluster bombs - in such terms is utterly appalling.
I find nothing positive in ever-higher piles of bodies or ever-more crowded refugee centers. And I refuse - utterly refuse - to regard human lives from the "tactical standpoint" of geopolitical analysis or to join in the yes-and-no, us-and-them, light-side-and-dark-side, style of argument, one best suited for two-year olds, in which all too many - including Richard here - engage.
Note well: This has nothing to do with whether or not South Ossetia (or Abkhazia) should be part of Georgia or part of Russia or independent. Certainly people are free to argue the people of those regions should be able to choose their own path; certainly they are free to argue that all peoples should be able to do so. That is an entirely honorable and defensible position, albeit one rarely applied evenhandedly.
But that is not what I'm seeing being argued. What's being argued is that the justice, even the morality, of a conflict can be decided in advance based solely on who backs who. Deciding in advance of events who's right and who's wrong, dividing the world into white hats and black hats, angels and demons, may be comforting, it may relieve the stress of ambiguity, but it does not reflect the real world and just as importantly it will not create "positive development[s] for the global left."
In the wake of the first Gulf War, I wrote in response to a criticism of my analysis of that war, that I believe
[t]hat humanity cannot be conveniently divided into our friends, the victimized innocents, and our foes, the venal infidels. That war does not bring peace, that hatreds do not produce love, that a river of blood, no matter how thick, deep, wide, or red, does not, cannot, will not mark the path to justice. ...
Having at long last dumped the fantasy that war is a grand, glorious, and honorable adventure, having finally dumped what Wilfred Owen called “The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est/Pro patria mori,” it’s time - it’s well past time - that we dumped our remaining fantasy that we can slash and burn our way to peace and justice.
Learning that lesson, now that would be "a positive development for the global left."
Footnote: Human Rights Watch has on its home page several reports from its observers in Georgia, including in South Ossetia. In those reports, both Georgian and Russian forces are charged with indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas. But what I wanted to mention was something I found interesting in one report:
A doctor at Tskhinvali Regional Hospital who was on duty from the afternoon of August 7 told Human Rights Watch that between August 6 to 12 the hospital treated 273 wounded, both military and civilians. She said her hospital was the only clinic treating the wounded in Tskhinvali. The doctor said there were more military personnel than civilians among the wounded.... As of August 13, there were no wounded left in the Tskhinvali hospital.
The doctor also said that 44 bodies had been brought to the hospital since the fighting began, of both military and civilians. The figure reflects only those killed in the city of Tskhinvali. But the doctor was adamant that the majority of people killed in the city had been brought to the hospital before being buried, because the city morgue was not functioning due to the lack of electricity in the city.
And then there was this, from another:
A doctor at the Java hospital told Human Rights Watch that on August 9 and 10 the hospital treated about 50 wounded (both military and civilians), and on August 8 had already treated 60 (also military and civilians)....
The doctor also said that five bodies were delivered to the hospital between August 8 and 11, all military personnel and South Ossetian volunteer militias from outside of Java. Representatives of Java town administration told Human Rights Watch that over the last four days, four people were killed in the town. The administration initially said that all of the casualties were civilians, but later clarified that in fact three of the dead were members of the militias, and one of them, a woman, was a civilian.
Taken together, that's 53 killed and 383 wounded, the majority of them military personnel. Which would surely seem to support the assertion in an NPR report from South Ossetia that Russian claims of over 2000 killed in the initial Georgian assault were seriously inflated - and therefore (I'm saying this, not NPR) that it's early claim that that's what provoked the invasion is seriously doubtful.
Except to some, of course.
Updated with a clarification: Vladimir Putin has obviously been itching for an excuse to do precisely what he did. As Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly pointed out,
You don't think Russia was able to mount a highly precise counterattack within 24 hours just by coincidence, do you?
So when I referred to the idea that Russia had been "planning this for years" as wingnut paranoia, I did not mean there was no planning on the Russian side for such an opening. I was rather referring to the claims by some that the entire crisis was engineered by Russia, which somehow tricked or induced Georgia to launch the assault on South Ossetia in order to create the excuse for the Russian invasion.
I haven't been around much lately as I imagine is obvious to anyone who can read a date on a post which I assume is all of you. The thing is, there's been some serious personal stuff going down recently and I simply haven't had either the time or the inclination to vent scream analyze or otherwise pontificate.
Part of the deal is that we're moving. Again. There's good and bad about this, the good being that the new place is both bigger and cleaner than this apartment and it's a short move, just to the next town rather than a thousand miles like some of the last moves have been.
The downside is moving. We don't really want to move, we like where we are, it's convenient to both work places, it's on a quiet street in walking distance of downtown and the harbor. But for some reason our landlord has suddenly gone truly weirdly ballistic over our pets (of which he knew when we moved in), claiming the Health Department will condemn the property because of things like a cat litter box in the corner of the kitchen by the basement door.
Given the choice between the place and the pets, we choose the pets.
And so we have to move again. Which has meant finding a place and coming up with the requisite cash and all in short order. That's now been accomplished - we hope and assuming no last-minute snags - but then comes the actual process of moving.
We hope this will be the last one but we hoped the most recent one would be the last one, too. For me, I decided I did not want to move again when I realized I had spent each of the previous five Christmases in a different place.
But as it falls out, after less than three years, here we go again.
So I'm neither gone nor sick nor giving up which I do from time to time but never completely so I wind up trying again, but I am somewhat occupied for the moment.
August 9. "The days pass by, too quickly it seems." And here it is, three days later. And just so the day does not pass without notice, this is a link to a post from one year ago today, a post on the second crime, in many ways the greater crime.
And again, if any among us are tempted to think this is all of the past, simply a matter of history, be aware that just this past January, while we were all distracted by the initial FISA fight, a manifesto by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists, including former JCS Chair General John Shalikashvili, declared that NATO
must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction....
[T]he former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument"
of military policy. We may have forgotten nuclear weapons, but the generals and the rest of those who refer to them as "instruments" and value pride and politics above people, have not.
It was after 11:30pm when it suddenly registered with me that it's August 6.
August 6. A date that we now tend to pass over without thinking, without considering. Without remembering.
Memory is a fickle thing; it can trick us into believing that what we don't regularly call to mind no longer exists (or at least is no longer important). But reality is not fickle, it just plows ahead. And while the reality has shifted and changed its nature over the years, it has never ceased to exist and has never lost its importance. It has only slipped from frequent memory.
Even as we fail to remember them, there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world today, some of them stockpiled but still many thousands deployed. Most all of those, as I'm sure you know, are in the hands of the US and Russia. Pretty much all we've heard about those arsenals over the last several years has been how they are being reduced - but what we don't hear is how the present-day weapons are more efficient, more accurate, in every way "better" than those in those old massive arsenals of a few decades ago, how today's weapons, those designed and built since the 1980s, are, as one person put it, "more for use than deterrence."
Beyond that and likely of even greater danger of being used are the nuclear weapons held by the seven other members of the "nuclear club." Those countries each possess anywhere from a handful to a few hundred such weapons - and the issue of their potential to create a hair-trigger regional arms race, particularly in the Middle East, is very real and very current.
So having almost failed to remember the day myself and finding time too short to do much but unwilling the day to pass without remark, I'm going to repost something I put up here three years ago on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945: an examination of the lies at the root of the atomic age. The only changes were to kill dead links.
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This week marks the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the week there will be, if past experience is any guide, a few news stories recalling the events, a few photographs of paper cranes showered over the monument in Hiroshima's Peace Park, and a few "it must not happen again" editorials all expressing with appropriate regret the "necessity" of the bombings. It will, in short, be a week of comforting, reinforcing, oft-told tales - that is, of myths.
That is perhaps more fitting than we realize, because the nuclear weapons age was born in a myth: the myth of the Nazi bomb. Most people date the start of the American nuclear arms effort to a famous 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, written by Dr. Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein (because it was thought his name would be more impressive), noting the possibility of developing an atomic bomb. By the time of Pearl Harbor, the US already had a small nuclear bomb project going that had made real progress.
The political argument given for building the atomic bomb, for investing the enormous amounts of time, money, resources, and scientific talent in what became known at the Manhattan Project, was that some intelligence reports said that Nazi Germany may have been working on one. If so, we had to have one and we had to have it first. Although it must in fairness be noted that it may not have been known at the time, the fact is that although the Germans were indeed doing some experiments in that direction, they were going about it in an extremely inefficient way and it would've taken them decades to develop a bomb - if it was possible at all.
Some of late have tried to resuscitate that threat by claiming the Germans were "closer than we knew." The argument, however, is based on their progress in enriching uranium and relies on the supposition that in the 1940s scientists working on the project could have suddenly changed gears and adopted a different approach - that is, do exactly what they had decided against doing years before. At least one writer added the argument that a commando raid that destroyed a enrichment facility in occupied Norway set back the project significantly. That undoubtedly slowed production, but it didn't affect the problems with the process itself. That is, the "closer than we knew" assertion in based on a series of "what ifs," which makes for interesting speculation but not a persuasive argument.
But no matter what you think of that point, what's important here is that it was the claimed threat from Germany that supposedly provided the logic, the argument, the purpose of the Manhattan Project. And yet, and yet....
By late 1944 US intelligence knew that the German nuclear experiments had failed. The Manhattan Project didn't even slow down.
Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945 - 10 weeks before the first successful test explosion of an atomic bomb. (Code-named Trinity, it took place at Alamogordo Testing Range, 230 miles south of Los Alamos, NM on July 16, 1945.) With the surrender, the entire founding logic of the Manhattan Project evaporated. But instead of stopping or even slowing down, the project accelerated, in part because some on the staff were afraid the war would end before they got the bomb built. We simply switched myths: from the myth of Nazi atomic bombs to the myth of the fanatical Japanese. The weapon that was supposedly designed for defense against Germany now "had" to be used on Japan.
And here is what's probably the most important myth of all, because it provided the logical (if you can call it that) underpinnings for actually carrying out the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for actually vaporizing tens of thousands of human beings in the flash of an instant and opening the door of the atomic age, a myth that gets replayed, reproduced, repronounced, reproclaimed every time Hiroshima and Nagasaki are mentioned, a myth that people continue to believe today, as a Gallup poll shows 57% of Americans approving of the bombings: the myth that the Japanese were so fanatical that the only possible alternative to the devastation of those cities was a bloody land invasion of Japan.
It's just not true. It's more than a myth, it's a damned lie. A 60-year old damned lie.
To begin with, the yearly claims, sure to be heard again this week, that such an invasion would've cost 250,000 or 500,000 or 1,000,000 American lives (the numbers vary unpredictably) is utter nonsense. Even President Truman originally cited an estimate of 250,000 casualties (not deaths) - although in later years he doubled it, then doubled it again. More to the point, the War Planning Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff never expected more than 40,000 American deaths, and thought they might've been as low as 20,000 because they thought it a fair likelihood that Japan would surrender during the first part of the campaign.
Which in turn raises the more important question of whether such an invasion was necessary at all.
It wasn't.
By the spring of 1945 Japan was already a defeated nation. It no longer had any navy to speak of, its air force had been decimated, its army driven back to its own shores. It was incapable of mounting any offensive action or even of defending itself against US air raids. Critical materials and even food were in short supply. The situation was so bad that even attempts to justify the bombings wind up confirming Japan's desperate condition: Several years ago I had an email debate with a man who tried to project the classic image of a well-defended Japan bristling with military forces. At one point, trying to show the determination of the Japanese to defend the homeland no matter what the cost, he said "Japan pulled some 500 loaded ships out of China and not one of them made it back to Japan," because of attacks by high-altitude bombers. In response, I noted that he had thereby agreed, if unintentionally, that Japan's air force was so thoroughly destroyed that it couldn't even provide air cover to get its own retreating troops back safely.
In fact, the situation was so bad that before - before - the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan had already made secret overtures to the United States through Sweden and the Soviet Union stating that it was ready to surrender. All of this was known to the US military, all of this was known to Truman, who rejected the offer because it wasn't unconditional: Hirohito would've kept his throne.
What was also known to Truman was the USSR's intent to declare war on Japan and its likely impact: In his journal about his meetings with Stalin at the Potsdam conference, Truman wrote on July 17, 1945, "He'll be in Japan War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about." (Sidebar: Truman stalled at the beginning of the conference because he wanted to know that the Trinity test had been a success before he dealt with Stalin.)
The atomic bombings were simply unnecessary. But we refused to accept the idea, refused even to accept surrender - because by then peace was not enough, even victory was not enough: It had to be utter, smashing, devastating, total victory.
So we destroyed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki when Japan didn't surrender fast enough. We destroyed them even though military leaders, including "Hap" Arnold and Dwight Eisenhower (who at the time called nuclear weapons "those awful things," even though he himself was later to give serious consideration to their use during the Korean War), declared it unnecessary. That judgment was proved correct by US analysts sent to Japan in 1946 who concluded it would've surrendered before November 1, 1945 "even if atomic bombs hadn't been dropped, Russia hadn't entered the war, and no invasion was planned."
And just as victory had to be total to satisfy our national psyche, our pride and arrogance, it had to be now - now to hold off the demon of our postwar mythology: the Soviet Union. Truman's note about "fini Japs" when the Soviets entered the war against Japan was not enthusiasm; it was a reflection of concern about Soviet influence in the post-war world. We had to finish the war in the Pacific so Stalin could take none of the credit. And for one other reason:
Before the bombings, some officials urged that we stage a "demonstration" blast on a deserted island or in an uninhabited area of Japan to show the Japanese the power of the weapon we had and to give them a chance to surrender before we actually used it. (Among those pushing such an idea was Leo Szilard, who, perhaps having second thoughts about his role in all this, pleaded with Secretary of State James Byrnes not to use the bomb on people and circulated a petition to Truman to rule out its use because it would open the "door to an era of devastation of an unimaginable scale.")
The idea of a "demonstration" blast was supposedly shelved. But, in fact, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstration blasts. They were intended to show the awesome power we held in our arsenal - only the target of the demonstration wasn't Japan. It was the Soviet Union. US officials, including Byrnes, presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, and top military leaders, had urged the bombings as a means of warning the Soviets not to challenge American plans for a postwar world dominated by US interests, to make them "more manageable," as Byrnes put it, by showing both our power and our willingness to use it.
Which means, ultimately, that hundreds of thousands of Japanese were destroyed, disintegrated, as sacrificial lambs at the start of a decades-long campaign to "contain" the Soviets if not to bully them into submission. From Nazi bomb scientists through wild-eyed Japanese fanatics to intractable Soviet deceivers, the mythmakers had constructed an image of the United States as appointed to protect and shape the world, with the atomic bomb, as President Truman put it, the weapon given us by God that we were to use "for His purposes and His ends." The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the last shots of World War II, they were the first shots of the Cold War, and the Japanese the first of its many victims.
For better or for worse, it was likely inevitable that dissidents in China would use the occasion of the Olympic games to move aggressively on behalf of their causes, the better being the hope of gaining the attention of the world at a time more eyes would be on China, the worse being increased bloodshed. The BBC says that
[u]nidentified attackers have killed 16 policemen in an attack on a border post in China's restive Muslim region of Xinjiang, state media report.
The attackers drove up to the post at Kashgar and threw two grenades, which also wounded 16 members of the border patrol armed police division.
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, said that attackers used a dump truck to break into the police post Sunday evening, US time.
Xinjiang is home to the Muslim Uighur (also Uyghur) people, who for some time have been subjected to "a crushing campaign of religious repression" according to Human Rights Watch, a campaign that gained both strength and cribbed legitimacy after 9/11, when the Chinese government could present the repression as past of the "worldwide campaign against terrorism."
Still, resistance continues. In April, Chinese officials had to admit that they were facing ethnic unrest in the region. As many as 500 Uighurs had demonstrated in Hotan on March 23, the New York Times reported. The government accused the protesters of "splittism" and while some local sources said the demonstrators called for independence, others said the protest was against cultural restrictions, such as a ban on Islamic scarves.
This is not to say that the long campaign waged by Uighur separatists has not included or at the very least claimed acts of terrorism: A group called the Turkestan Islamic Party claimed responsibility for three explosions on buses, one in Shanghai in May and two more two weeks ago in Yunnan province, that killed a total of five people. Chinese officials denied there was any connection to terrorism, but so far as I've been able to find, have offered no alternative explanation for the explosions.
The Turkestan Islamic Party also has released a video in which it threatens the Olympics, due to start Friday. It can be expected that the Chinese government, having used the War on Terror(c)(reg.)(pat.pend.) as a handy excuse to repress the Uighurs, will now use the "threat to the Olympics" born of the very failure of that effort to redouble its attempts to oppress them into passive submission to their gradual disappearance.
I finally have an excuse to say this: Developing....
...back in the part of Iraq to which most major US media actually pays some measure of attention,
[a] minibus packed with explosives detonated in northeastern Baghdad on Sunday morning, [CNN reports,] killing at least 12 people and wounding 22 others, according to an Interior Ministry official. ...
Another roadside bomb wounded four people when it exploded in southwestern Baghdad, an Interior Ministry official said. The official said the bomb was targeting an Iraqi police patrol but missed its target.
Another roadside bomb exploded near eastern Baghdad's al-Kindi Hospital, wounding nine people, the official said. Three police officers were among those hurt, he said.
Two people were wounded by a bomb that targeted but missed a convoy of SUVs in southeast Baghdad's al-Ghadir neighborhood Sunday morning, the official said.
So that's 12 dead, 37 wounded. Does it matter if "violence is down?" Not to them, it doesn't.
Remember what I said just over a week ago, how Kirkuk remains a potential "flashpoint for ethnic conflict?" Juan Cole brings the goods: First, he cites Reuters for Friday, which reports that Kurdish councilors
called for the city [of Kirkuk] to become part of the largely autonomous region of Kurdistan. ...
Thursday's decision by Kurdish councilors at a provincial council meeting was symbolic because other factions boycotted the session. The council's head, himself a Kurd, also noted the call was unconstitutional.
But tensions have been rising over the city's fate, with demonstrators taking to the streets several times this week.
The central Iraqi government rejected the councilors' call while urging calm:
"The Iraqi government calls upon all parties and groups in Kirkuk province to refrain from carrying out any [actions] that might harm the national unity," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement. "The Iraqi government is stressing its [opposition to] any unilateral measure to change the status of Kirkuk."
Kurds regard Kirkuk as their historical capital and demand that it become part of the largely-autonomous Kurdish region. The central government's opposition is likely based not only on questions of "national unity" but concern over the prospect losing direct control over the oil-rich region of which Kirkuk is part. Another significant player, Turkey, is also watching warily: For its own internal reasons, Turkey fears any strengthening of Kurdish interests and expressed "anxiety" over the proposal.
But the real source of potential conflict comes from a third source: The non-Kurd residents of Kirkuk, particularly the Turkmen (also Turkomen), who also regard Kirkuk as home and fear ethnic oppression if the city becomes part of Kurdistan. This is something I first brought up over four years ago. Over a year ago, I noted that the leader of a Turkmen group in Kirkuk said "all the Turkmens will become suicide bombers to defend the Turkmen identity" of the city.
The intensity of that feeling remains, as evidenced by an interview with Narmin Al-Mufti, an official of the Turkoman Front, published in the Kurdish newspaper Chawder. Juan Cole posted the translation done by the US federal government's Open Source Center.
In the interview, Mufti called the Kurdistan Regional Government "not a lawful region but an internal administration." That is, the Front accepts the Kurdish area as an administrative region but does not accept autonomy, charging it is contrary to the Iraqi constitution. In fact, he said they do not recognize the constitution itself
because it has been forced upon us without our agreement. We prefer and recognize the older constitution, which contained 39 articles and did not contain Article 140,
which relates to the future of Kirkuk.
He also said the Turkoman Front does "not believe the Kurdish leadership," who "are only concerned about, and work for, their own interests" and that
[t]he Turkoman Front does not agree with elections, because balloting would be in the interest of the Kurdish political parties and they are always carrying out vote fraud.
Fraud such as, he charged, moving hundreds of thousands of "non-residents" to Kirkuk to affect potential elections. Kick those "non-residents" out, he said, and the Front could accept elections, because then "the Turkomans would have the majority vote in Kirkuk."
"I want to tell the Kurdish leadership," he concluded, "that we would rather be part of China than Kurdistan." The Kurds, every bit as determined on the matter, would probably be willing to grant that wish.
The chance of any short-term breakthrough on this impasse seems unlikely, especially considering that
Iraqi parliamentarians failed on Sunday to pass a law on provincial elections, putting the date of important polls in doubt and leaving unresolved a political standoff that has stoked ethnic tensions[, Reuters reports].
After struggling for hours to reach a quorum, lawmakers indefinitely postponed a special session they had called to pass the law, which has come unstuck over plans for the disputed northern city of Kirkuk and angered minority Kurds.
Lawmakers did not say when they would reschedule the debate, but political leaders continued meetings to seek a compromise. ...
Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish lawmaker, said a compromise was close at hand and parliament would hold another vote when faction leaders signal they have reached a deal.
The trouble is, when we see the smoke rising, will it mean what Othman wants it to mean? Or will it signify a heat that is starting to do more than just smolder? Or even an impending explosion?
A friend of mine was fond of saying "Life sucks and then you die." I've been feeling that way a lot lately, which is largely responsible for the erratic posting - but then again, there's always stuff like this to make life seem kinda cool. It's from the BBC, today:
The world's smallest snake, averaging just 10cm (4 inches) and as thin as a spaghetti noodle, has been discovered on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
The snake, found beneath a rock in a tiny fragment of threatened forest, is thought to be at the very limit of how small a snake can evolve to be.
It is so small it could curl up comfortably on a US quarter.
The snake has been labeled Leptotyphlops carlae by its discoverer, Dr. Blair Hedges - "leptotyphlops" meaning "small blind snake" (with over 80 species known previously); "carlae" in honor of his wife, Carla.
The reason for the conclusion about size limits is that while other, larger, snakes lay multiple eggs in a single clutch - as many as 100 - in this case the female lays just one massive egg at a time, producing a hatchling half the size of the its adult body weight. That may be the largest egg-to-body-mass ratio in nature: The San Diego Zoo says the kiwi lays the largest egg in proportion to its body size - in that case an egg that can be up to a quarter of the size of the adult. Proportionately, that's only about half the size of that produced by this snake. So it would not seem that the snake could produce a larger egg. But if it produced just two eggs at a time, the two would have to occupy the same total space as the one, which would mean each hatchling would be half the size, with the result that
[t]he hatchlings might then be too small to find anything small enough to eat.
But just as you're thinking cool and score another one for evolutionary adaptation, comes this:
Researchers believe that the snake - a type of thread snake - is so rare that it has survived un-noticed until now.
But with 95% of the island of Barbados now treeless, and the few fragments of forest seriously threatened, this new species of snake might become extinct only months after it was discovered.
And life re-emerges. Damn.
Footnote: A few years earlier, Hedges, together with his colleague Richard Thomas, found and described the world's smallest known lizard. It can rest on a dime.
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About Lotus
Lotus has been at various times the newsletter of a local peace group, a column in a different group's newsletter, a stand-alone monthly, and now a blog. Posts appear bi-weekly; posts are drawn from my weekly cable-TV show "The Erickson Report," which can be found here.
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Our lives are not our own, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. - author David Mitchell
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