What should Obama do with McCrystal?

First of all he should regard this as a gift.

Second he should fire McCrystal.

And third he should comb the available replacements for someone who understands that politics always trumps military.

Helen Thomas

What do I think about the Helen Thomas fiasco?  Whatever may be anyone's opinion, the Jews living in Israel/Palestine (choose your political slant) are not going to leave voluntarily.  Getting rid of Israel would require a massive blood bath of unparalleled proportions.  If you want that, then I don't understand.

War

A recent news item seems to think that the Afghan war is nothing more than an extension of the almost constant war between India and Pakistan.  Geographically this makes sense.  The Taliban are people sent in to infiltrate from Pakistan.  This is all quite logical.

Of course that means we are fighting on the Indian side while heavily subsidizing the Pakistani military.  I think it is best to stay out of things you really don't understand at all.

This also probably means Al-Qaeda is an arm of the Pakistani military as well. Remind me again what we are doing there.

Meddling

I was entertained by the exchange between the Pakistani ambassador and Hilary Clinton. As everyone knows, we have been heavily subsidizing the Pakistani military for decades. The only reason we would do this is so that they could support our military objectives. Why else? We are giving them money because they are so much nicer than others? Give me a break. We are giving them money so they can invade India? I don't think so.

So the US has gotten a bit bold with them and pointed out that our enemies have been living and operating with impunity within the borders of Pakistan. We would like it if they would please use some of this money we have been giving them to hunt down Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

So the ambassador said we were "interfering in the internal affairs of Pakistan."

Cute. So Hilary says they may of course feel free to just refuse to take the money. You don't like the strings, don't take the money. Easy decision. Love it. That's my girl.

health care

I admit that I am puzzled by the debate on health care in the US. I understand clearly why everybody needs health care. I don't understand at all why anyone needs health care insurance. Just make them all civil service employees, assign them pay rates and get on with it.

Iran

I think they won't be able to blame this one on anyone.

It's a good thing I'm not president

If Ahmadinejad had told me to stop meddling in their internal affairs, I would have replied, "Fuck you." This is only one of a long list of reasons.

Emigration Policy

It should be possible to calculate America's labor needs and extrapolate immigration requirements based on this calculation. This sounds like a task for the labor department. It would be my guess that any legitimate such calculation would show that we have plenty of high end people. Plenty of people would love to run the Bank of America. It's the low end that needs people. Why have an emotional breakdown over the fact that immigrants legal or illegal fill a real requirement?

It's true that I have been completely unable to see this issue. I want to know what the problem is before I start proposing solutions.

Iran

It's hard to know what to say about this. It strongly resembles the overthrow of the Shah, and is probably run by the same people.

It meets our ideals in a mysterious way. We once held that the power of a government derives from the consent of the governed. What happens if they rise up and say that they do not consent? Do I think this means we are required to go in and rescue them? We have no idea if either side represents anything we would be for.

I think it must mean that large portions of the country don't like what their country has become any more than they liked what the Shah made it. The impression is that extraordinary force is being used to stop entirely peaceful demonstrations. Such forceful suppression of dissent can only mean dictatorship. Why is an Islamic dictator superior to a civil dictatorship? For me it's a meaningless distinction, but it isn't my country.

It isn't my country. We did the same things here when demonstrations we didn't like filled our streets.

It reminds me of the time of the Iraq invasion when I thought seriously of emigrating to Canada. I'd like to live somewhere where the country I lived in didn't think it had to decide about every goddamn thing that went on in the world. It's just not my country.

Bowing

It certainly does look like Obama is bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia. My question is, Has he been there before? If he met the king before he was president, he may just have been doing what it did before. The president does not bow to anyone.

Terms of Use

Does anyone ever read the terms of use? I know I don't. I just assume that the terms of use of anything are whatever you say they are. I assume that if I am doing something I'm not supposed to be doing, someone who gives a shit will tell me, and I will say, "Oops. OK. I won't do that any more." I no longer have space in my brain for lawyer talk.

The terms of use for Netflix are
a. I pay you money at regular intervals.
b. You send me dvds one at a time
c. I send them back when I get around to it.
d. Whereon you send me another one.
e. I am authorized to look at them, not copy and sell them.

Why does it have to be more complicated than that?

Bonuses

Bonuses are given in February so a company will know how much profit was made in the previous year. A bonus reflects a distribution of portions of these profits. Get it, dim bulbs? No profit--no bonus. This is a handy rule of thumb. Especially when the bonus comes out of public bail out money, which I am withholding judgment on. For the time being.

If you go hugely into debt over the course of a year, and I, Uncle Sam, give you money to tide you over, under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever may you regard this as a profit. You have to earn the profit yourself. Why is this so hard to grasp?

Understanding Capitalism

It is the duty of capitalists to spend all their waking moments thinking about how to make as much money as possible. To work properly this must be a completely unfettered activity. Worrying about bad effects isn't really part of the process.

It is the duty of government regulators to examine the activities of capitalists and make judgments about which are in the public interest and which are not. Nothing should be omitted from this examination process. Some activities should be forbidden and others strictly controlled, depending on how they are seen to affect the overall economy through up and down cycles. Particular attention must be paid to down cycles.

As a young person I read Theory of Countervailing Power by Galbraith. If you haven't read it, you should. Thinking you don't need both pieces is just plain dumb.

Simple path to nuclear disarmament

Step one. I don't really intend to go past step one, but why not take step one and get it over with.

Calculate exactly how many megatons are required to completely destroy all life on earth, and then reduce our own stockpile to that level. Doesn't require negotiating or farting around with other countries. Doesn't require acting all superior and self righteous.

Just do it and get it over with. I understand this would save a ton of money.

Why it has to be called marriage

I was listening to the radio today and it was reported that a gay marriage advocate and a leader of the opposition were reported to have reached a compromise. Everyone would be happy with a form of civil unions which they then described. Christians would be protected from having to recognize these "unions" as marriage.

The fundamental and in my opinion primary reason for promoting gay marriage GAY MARRIAGE is respect. Repeat respect. Yes the legal benefits are nice, but what one wants is that ones relationships are treated with respect. This is only achieved by calling it marriage.

Why American Cars Don't Sell

In my youth in the fifties American cars were the sexiest things on the planet, and each year the car companies fought to make them even sexier.

Nowadays the only sex appeal the car makers can think of is to make huge ugly trucks and SUVs. Macho is the only kind of sexy. If the car is intended to be small, efficient and economical, they hate this and go into a kind of furious suicide wish. They make them as boring and ugly as possible. Remember Emma Peel's cars? Small cars can still be sexy. All that's required is for you to believe.

Bipartisanship

Bipartisanship isn't really to be expected. Politics is about getting elected, so the best thing to do when your side is out is to lay back and wait for the in party to fall on its ass. Inevitably. You snipe from the sidelines and try really hard to make it look like the other side is to blame for everything that goes on. This isn't rocket science.

Setting Goals

Logically life should proceed by
a. setting goals
b. trying to achieve them.

Do I have to mention that this is not the normal course of events?

The problem with modern day economic policy lies in step a. What is the goal of economic policy? Is it
a. maximizing global product or
b. maximizing domestic income?

I am definitely on the side of b. I could give a shit that China and India are thriving under free trade policy. The only thing I care about is
a. the maximum number of Americans are employed and
b. they are receiving the maximum possible salaries.

That's it. When those two things are achieved, I'm done. In order to evaluate the effects of free trade, I need to see that my two goals are in any way served by it.

As far as I am concerned, other countries are entirely on their own.

From Huffpo

Here is the link. This is so much what I think that I have copied it to here. We have been systematically looting the ordinary citizens of American to support the global economy. It's time for serious rebellion:

Commentators like to beat up on ordinary Americans. They're accused of borrowing mindlessly, of greed and materialism. Yet high levels of debt and consumption were not the result of millions of individual decisions by consumers. They were the result of a deliberate economic 'regime change' in the 1970s -- that transformed the US economy, and cut American incomes as a share of GDP.

The Great Depression 2.0 is just beginning to unfold. Bankers are bailed out while making a grab for bonuses. Ordinary Americans by contrast, are already being bankrupted, made jobless, homeless and hungry -- in huge numbers. But until recently it was these Americans that were heroically driving the global economy forward.

They did this by borrowing and spending. But they were not 'naturally' inclined to borrow. They were driven to it. By stagnating incomes, and by the deliberate policies of government, regulators and bankers.

While wages and salaries shrank as a share of the economy -- to the lowest level since the government began recording data in 1947 -- banks showered Americans with credit cards. 'Easy money' was spread around like confetti. And government urged Americans to spend. George Bush famously said "Shopping is patriotic" in late September, 2001.

Then Bush-Cheney doubled the deficit, bankers gambled and Americans borrowed and shopped. Consumers maxed out on their credit cards and mortgages and worked harder and longer -- squeezed by the demand for higher productivity. By so doing, they played a gallant role in driving forward the engine of US economic growth.

They did more. They powered global economic growth. China owes a great deal to American consumers -- as does Europe.

Today these same consumers are punished mercilessly for their heroism.

Take the latest jobless numbers. A rise of nearly 600,000 in January. Electrifying. The highest in the US for 27 years -- and we're just at the beginning of Depression 2.0 -- courtesy of George Bush, the Federal Reserve and the reckless finance sector. There are now about 13 million Americans unemployed or under-employed. That's an awful lot of people. And a frightening level of individual and household stress, isolation and anger.

But it is worse than that. Not only have Americans lost jobs, income, health care and self-esteem -- they've lost their homes too. Last year there were 3,157,806 foreclosure filings -- an 81 percent increase from 2007 and a 225 percent increase from 2006. That's millions of Americans losing their family life, their comforts, their investments and their security. RealtyTrac projects another 2 million homes will be lost in this way over 2009.

And it gets even worse. By November, 2008, 31 million Americans needed government help for the most basic necessity of life -- food. This is an increase of 14% in just one year. And as the data is slow to catch up with layoffs, hundreds of thousands more will have joined the food stamps queue by now.

From 1945 to the 1970s Americans produced and manufactured food, goods and services -- in the post-war period called 'the golden age'.

They were dull but prosperous times. Sundays were Sundays. 24/7 was a distant reality. People had jobs. Companies made profits. Bank managers talked to their customers. And there were no financial crises -- at all -- between 1945 and the 1970s.

But this 'golden age' was to be overturned. The revolution was launched by a highly ideological group of economists -- mainly of the Chicago School.

Decision-makers in government and at the Fed, seduced by their economic theories -- decided that it would be better and more profitable if Americans stopped producing and making things. They argued that there was no harm in the United States relocating 4.5 million jobs abroad -- mainly to China -- between 2001 and 2009. US workers could switch to service jobs such as hairdressing, retail and real estate -- with long working hours.

The revolution was started by Chicago's first convert -- Richard Nixon in 1971. It was carried forward by the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Soon it became more profitable to grow money from money than to grow maize, textiles or steel.

Building up debts and deficits became acceptable. During the Bush-Cheney years the national debt doubled from $5.7 trillion to $10.7 trillion. 'Reagan proved ...deficits don't matter' said Dick Cheney in 2001.

Making money from money became the aim of economic policy. Chicago economists argued that private bankers could be trusted to create and distribute credit. That the US economy could safely be held aloft by a credit-fueled shopping spree. Shopping became the major economic activity.

Today the finance sector grabs more than 30% of domestic corporate profits -- double its share 25 years ago. And fully 75% of US GDP is down to personal consumption expenditures -- up from around 60% in the 1960s.

Today millions are jobless, homeless and hungry.

Their discontent threatens social upheaval and radical change. Another economic transformation will no doubt take root. But will the architects of America's financial collapse be identified and held to account for the suffering inflicted on millions of heroic and innocent American consumers? Or will it be the victims, once again, that will be blamed?

Economics

I think when I am reading about economics that I see a lack of focus, a lack of standing back and looking at the big picture.

Why did America become an economic powerhouse in the first place? This was the result of the American state of mind, a place where it is believed that anything is possible. The American economy has always been extremely volatile. Businesses come and go. A store front might say "Since 1965," for instance. That's because in American terms that's a long time for a business to stay in the same location. In Italy one could imagine a sign that said "Since 1465." That would be something to brag about in old world terms.

I am writing these things because I am not seeing any sense in the media treatment of this subject.

In the larger picture volatility is good. If a business isn't cutting it, it is best for everyone if it fails and makes room for someone else. This logically includes General Motors.

I confess I am not comfortable extending this volatility to banks. Is it good for everyone if Bank of America fails? I'm honestly not sure. But then I am also not sure the government should extend loans so they can buy Merrill Lynch.

The superiority of the American economy derives from the individual American. We invent freely. We embrace the new. We both make and consume innovation with great enthusiasm. This is what makes us strong.

It is now almost 30 years since Ronald Reagan began the by now conventional wisdom that all economic objectives can be obtained by cutting taxes. This has resulted in huge growth by large corporations whose taxes have been cut and very little growth in the welfare of ordinary Americans whose taxes have generally not been cut.

I judge economic success solely on the basis of how well off the individual American is. I see the ordinary American trying to retain the sense of prosperity through increasing emphasis on borrowing. We want the illusion of prosperity and achieve it on credit. In the past people borrowed to purchase houses and cars. Now they borrow to purchase everything.

I think current free trade low taxes economic theory ignores the importance of the individual. We the ordinary American consumers are what drives the global economy. If our needs are perpetually ignored in favor of the needs of large multi-national corporations, can the global prosperity survive?