Comment Archives at Provisional Truth

Evidence of the firepower of international reserves already is registering in various commodity indices, and in our daily lives in the form of higher food and fuel prices:

But countries seeking to quell any possibility of social disorder can explain only a portion of the dramatic disruption of global commodities markets in the last 12 months. As the residential mortgage bubble began bursting a year ago, a tsunami of speculative liquidity seized on commodities markets as the next great bull market opportunity for huge profits.

Led by fast-money hedge funds, Wall Street isn't far behind as new "financial products" are rushed to market to capture the ultimate source of liquidity necessary in all bubbles: the gullible finances of Main Street. A number of commodity indexes now are widely followed, including the energy-dominated Goldman Sachs index, a Dow Jones-AIG index and the (Jim) Rogers International Commodity Index, and a couple of dozen or more Exchange Traded Notes (ETNs) have been introduced in the last year or so. (See Elements ETNs, iShares Commodity Indexed Trust, iPath DJ-AIG ETNs.)

Not to be outdone, this month Morgan Stanley is introducing its Commodities Alpha Fund to "high net worth" investors, which it describes as "an actively managed mutual fund that offers high net worth investors the opportunity to gain direct access to the potential return and portfolio diversification benefits of the commodities market and the expertise of MSIM’s Quantitative and Structured Solutions investment team."

No doubt the phrase "potential return and portfolio diversification benefits...and the expertise of MSIM’s Quantitative and Structured Solutions investment team" figured prominently in Morgan Stanley's promotional literature to clients for previous investment products such as Structured Investment Vehicles, Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (hey they're AAA-rated!) and Collateralized Debt Obligations.

Other Wall Street firms soon will follow with similar offerings to its "retail" clients, of which these firms require an abundant supply to suck up even more casino liquidity to blow this emerging bubble into stratospheric proportions.

These clients, as in the dot.com bubble fewer than 10 years ago, and the currently deflating housing bubble, will scramble en masse to throw money at the latest get-rich-quick investment opportunity, only to be burned yet again when the commodity bubble pops (and it will). " 'Deal faster,' cried the losers," I once overheard in Las Vegas. Some things will never change.

Noland concludes the world's forces of speculative finance today are focused on energy, commodities and the “emerging” economies:

And so we proceed from bubble to bubble to bubble. Now that the Federal Reserve and other central bankers have provided the illusion the impending global financial meltdown, which reached crescendo in mid-March, has been stanched and the crisis has passed, its back to business as usual as Wall Street scrambles to take advantage of this latest opportunity for big-time profits.

Wall Street cannot create more oil, gold or grain, but - watch out - in can create the paper necessary, and in vast quantities, to give its ~~dupes~~ very good clients the illusion of a new source of easy wealth.

Top

I used to think that the fastest way to become worried about markets was to stare into the bowels of a monoline. No longer. A few days ago, I happened to hear Goldman Sachs discuss the state of the global financial system with European clients.

And what struck me most forcefully from this analysis - aside from the usual, horrific litany of bank woes - was just how much trouble is quietly brewing in corners of the commodities world.

Never mind that oil prices are high; that problem is already well known and reams of ink have been spilt debating that, along with the pressures in metals and mineral spheres.

Instead, what is really catching the attention of Goldman Sachs now is the outlook for agricultural prices. Or as Jeff Currie, head of commodities research at the US bank, says with disarming cheer: "We think we could go into crisis mode in many commodities sectors in the next 12 to 18 months . . . and I would argue that agriculture is key here."

Now, to some readers of the Financial Times, that observation might seem odd. After all, inhabitants of the western world typically spend far more time worrying about the price of petrol for their car, rather than the price of wheat or corn. And when western investors do think about "commodity shock", their reference point typically tends to be the 1970s oil crisis.

However, as Mr Currie observes, this is a dangerously blinkered view. Back in the 1970s, famine touched a much bigger proportion of the world's population than the energy crisis, he says. And even today, rising food prices pack a powerful political punch in the developing (or partly-developed) world, to a degree that is sometimes underappreciated by the pampered west.

Indeed, there is already ample evidence that political tensions are building: the World Food Programme, for example, now thinks a third of the world's population lives in countries with food price controls or export bans.

However, Goldman Sachs thinks this is just part of a much bigger problem of capital and resource misallocation. After all, Mr Currie argues, if the world today was a rational economic place, then regions such as the Gulf which are food-constrained ought to be investing heavily in agriculture. And since the US is the world's biggest agricultural supplier, this implies that the Saudi Arabians, say, should be snapping up farms in Wisconsin - as America secures oil in the most efficient manner by sending teams of Texans to Riyadh.

But in practice numerous investment controls prevent Saudi Arabians from buying Wisconsin farms and Americans owning Saudi oil wells. And these controls are not being dismantled now. On the contrary, mutual mistrust is now rising. Hence the fact that Gulf leaders are currently considering desalinating sea water to plant wheat in the desert - while the US and Europe are trying to turn corn into fuel. Such exercises might make sense in domestic political terms; but they are apt to be fiendishly expensive. Thus the upshot of this misallocation, Mr Currie would argue, is even more inflation - even if the world does experience some form of growth slowdown.

Now, for any investor who is long on commodities right now (and I would guess that club includes Goldman Sachs), such trends might seem to smack of good news. For anybody who is dirt poor in the developing world, however, the picture is disastrous. A WFP official, for example, recently showed me the red plastic cup that was used to dole out daily rations to starving Africans - and then explained, in graphically moving terms, that this vessel is typically now only being filled by two-thirds each day, because food prices are rising faster than the WFP budget.

But leaving aside this very real human tragedy, what should also be crystal clear for investors is that this is not a picture that points to 21st-century capital markets progress; nor is it likely to breed stability in the medium term. Anyone who thinks this decade's problems start and end with credit, in other words, may yet receive a rude shock; sadly, we live in a world where soyabeans may yet pack as painful a punch as subprime.

Top

A head cold lasts a week if you treat it, seven days if you don´t. Chicken soup often makes one feel better, as do some medications, but they do nothing to cure an illness caused by a constantly mutating virus. A cold´s symptoms, the sneezing, runny nose and congestion which make one feel miserable, are not caused by the infecting virus, but, in fact, by the defense mechanisms employed by the body to rid itself of the infection.

The U.S. economy has caught cold, and it will last the usual amount of time, about half a year for a mild case. Symptoms only now are beginning to be evident: slowing economic growth, rising unemployment and jobless claims, a weakening dollar and falling asset prices in residential real estate and the stock market. The Federal Reserve is ladling out economic chicken soup as fast as it can in the form of liquidity injections and slashed fed funds target rates, but the economy still is starting to feel lousy.

We view the current recession as that seven-day cold (and it sure seems like we´re in a mild one now, with preliminary 4th Quarter 2007 GDP falling to +0.6%). Annoying, frustrating and to be ignored only at a greater risk of developing something far worse from a weakened immune system, but not something to be overtreated. But, of all the luck, we´re in the middle of an election year.

And so we are seeing a concerted effort to "treat" the symptoms which have
been caused by the economy´s own infection-fighting mechanism designed to wring excesses from the system. The Fed and the U.S. Treasury have run to the Congressional drug store for a strong dose of good-old-fashioned fiscal stimulus, which may mask some of these symptoms but will do nothing to cure the disorder. That the economy must do for itself. Whether it can, or lapses into something worse, is the trillion-dollar question.

The proposed $150 billion or so tax rebate, a moderate "helicopter drop" of money on the U.S. economy, won´t take effect until summer, but unless patients follow the dosage instructions exactly and spend every dime of their rebate checks instead of saving the money or paying down debt, this over-the-counter medication will have little effect.

Alternatively, it could protract the illness since all $150 billion must be borrowed, increasing the budget deficit and adding to $9.2 trillion of national debt. About half will be borrowed from foreigners, and if we buy imported merchandise, including imported oil, there is some debate as to exactly whose economy ultimately is being stimulated.

As former Fed chief Alan Greenspan observed in unusually understandable English nearly a year ago, economies are cyclical and, all things considered, given the duration of the current U.S. expansion (since early 2002) "we are in the later stages of a cycle." The "maestro of money" then gave one-in-three odds of a U.S. recession by year-end 2007, which now looks like a winning bet.

On occasion, cures may be worse than the illness, so we must be vigilant for other symptoms of a worsening condition, namely stagflation. Once thought eradicated by central bankers, as no cases have been observed since the mid-1970s, stagflation could make a virulent comeback, if commodity price increases escalate out-of-hand, affecting not only us, but other economies as well.

Some think the Fed should prescribe Dr. Volcker´s patented cold-turkey economic shock therapy, a dire treatment which calls for much higher interest rates and constricted money supply, resulting in an immediate depressionary deflation: crashing asset prices, high unemployment, a stronger dollar, widespread bankruptcies and financial sector failures. It has not been prescribed since 1980.

But as one economist recently observed, "When a man is in the middle of a heart attack, don´t lecture him about his diet. Fix him, get him on his feet again and then try to modify his habits. Mr. Bernanke´s Federal Reserve likely will not reach for Dr. Volcker´s inflation-fighting tonic, believing wholesale asset deflation to be a far more sinister malady than the present ailment.

Let´s wait and see the Fed seems to be saying. Take a tax rebate, two more rate cuts, get plenty of liquidity and call us in October. And don´t forget the trip to Disneyland after you receive your check this summer, the economy is depending upon you.

Coordinated, ongoing efforts by the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, Congress and the Administration to "do something" about the economy may mask emerging recessionary symptoms. If mild and if, in fact, it already has begun, we´ll only know it was a textbook recession officially long after the fact, perhaps closer to election day or after a new president is inaugurated.

If we are at the beginning of something more serious, say an economic heart attack, more potent medicines such as Dr. Volcker´s elixir, despite its foul taste and terrible side effects, may be necessary to shake off a quarter-century of accumulated bad fiscal habits.

It would be the unthinkable, and yet could be the first crisis of a new presidency.

Top

Pop. That would be the sound of a bubble bursting. From gushing liquidity to credit crunch in two weeks.

Thursday, July 19th, Wall Street celebrated a closing Dow Jones Industrial Average above 14,000, concluding a four-month, 2,000 point run-up.

Private equity fund and hedge fund managers were riding a tsunami of global liquidity with which no takeover deal would be left behind and every opportunity would be leveraged to the hilt.

Friday, August 3rd, as the Dow was plunging 280 points in the wake of Bear Stearns' CFO proclaiming bond market turmoil the worst in 22 years, fears of a global credit crunch gained traction.

From “What, Me Worry?” in mid-July to CNBC clown prince Jim “Boo-Yah” Cramer Friday afternoon screaming the Fed had to “do something” to keep the liquidity engine from seizing.

Cramer effectively was lobbying for a federal bailout of Bear Stearns and Countrywide Financial and other lenders, and for the Fed to lower rates to lower interest rates on the ridiculous premise that lower rates would allow troubled mortgages to be refinanced, ending the sub-prime mortgage meltdown.

“If the Federal Reserve lowers rates,” according to Cramer, “people will refinance, the liquidity will come back, and not only will this problem go away, but we'll (the Dow) will go up a thousand points. (See it here.)

Please note, Mr. Cramer, sub-prime and Alt-A homeowners granted “liar loans” for overpriced real estate using dubious, or outright fraudulent, documentation will NOT be able to refinance their mortgages under any conditions which would allow them to keep their homes.

That's how the mortgage bubble was created, by tricking ordinary working people into thinking they could afford a 1,900 square foot, nothing down, $400,000 home with a payment of only $1,000 a month for the first year.

That's the essence of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown: the point at which teaser-rate mortgage payments “reset” at higher, market interest rates, which make the monthly payments unaffordable. The meltdown is the aftermath of homeowners in arrears, in default, being foreclosed, or, more likely, just returning the door keys to whichever company services their loans.

That popping sound, audible apparently only to some of us the last year or two (see anything on iTulip or Doug Nolan's Credit Bubble Bulletin as well as my own commentaries), perhaps now has become loud enough to be heard by the most disconnected, delusional bubble economy cheerleader.

Larry Kudlow heard it Friday, parroting Cramer by calling for Ben Bernanke's Fed to reaffirm its traditional role as lender of last resort and "reassure the world it is on top of the situation." (See it here.)

Are you kidding me? Wall Street, the mortgage industry and major banks made BILLIONS of dollars in the last six years on the backs of these people, providing them, if only temporarily, a seat at the table of the American Dream.

Now Cramer and Kudlow think the Fed, or worse, taxpayers – including some of who had their seats forcibly removed from the table – should shoulder the burden? I think not.

Keep in mind we only are at the beginning of what may be a long period of shocks and aftershocks including the very real likelihood of economic recession, as The Maestro, Alan Greenspan, predicted, giving one-in-three odds in March for a downturn by year-end.

As you will recall when the last bubble popped, the stock market peaked in March 2000 and didn't bottom for more than two and a half years (October 2002).

Soon it will become a issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, as candidates become forced to address the economy in debates and press conferences. Whomever is elected in November 2008 may inherit a real mess.

Bear Stearns likely will not survive the aftermath of what it, and many others, have wrought, having become the poster child for the excesses of this decade's credit intoxication bubble and Wall Street's exceedingly well-paid and lavishly bonused executives may find the next several years somewhat leaner.

Bear Stearns eventually will be the maiden sacrificed to appease this volcano, much the way Prudential-Bache/Prudential Securities became known for the excesses of the 1980s limited partnership fiasco and ultimately disappeared into Wachovia Securities after sticking parent Prudential Insurance with a many-billion dollar tab.

Bear Stearns also likely will not survive intact.

It becomes obvious once again our entire financial system is based on confidence. Confidence in prices, assets values, interest rates, solvency.

When confidence falters, as it officially now has, investors begin a rush for the exits. Until Friday, August 3rd, the move was mostly slow and orderly. Now it will be a stampede. Cramer will not see a thousand points up from here, Fed rate cut or not.

Top

This story by Mark Gilbert of Bloomberg News appeared in the May 18, 2007 edition of The International Herald Tribune (Read complete story here).

Top

02/05/2007
February 5, 2007: The Agenda Restated by James Howard Kunstler www.kunstler.com

Since discovering James Howard Kunstler's website a year or so ago, and reading his gripping book The Long Emergency, I have admired his straightforward, almost calm approach to presenting solutions to the problems of everyday life in a localized world emerging from the messy end of a hydrocarbon-based economy, quite likely in a future near you, sooner than most are aware or are willing to contemplate.

Far from the "doom and gloom" which his critics focus upon, Mr. Kunstler offers practical recommendations for change which could, in fact, result in the simpler, more meaningful life so many of us pretend to desire.

I have reproduced his commentary from February 5, 2007, which summarizes his view of a post-hydrocarbon America, and world, and the opportunities therein.

February 5, 2007 James H. Kunstler http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary20.html

The Agenda Restated

Out in the public arena, people frequently twang on me for being "Mister Gloom'n'doom," or for "not offering any solutions." I find this bizarre because I never fail to present audiences with a long, explicit task list of projects that American society needs to take up in the face of the combined problems I have labeled The Long Emergency. That the audience never hears this, and then indignantly demands such instruction, only reinforces my sense that the cognitive dissonance in our culture has gone totally off the charts.

Insofar as I just returned from a college lecture road trip, and heard the same carping all over again, I conclude that it's necessary for me to spell it all out a'fresh. I think of this not so much as a roster of "solutions" but as a set of reasonable responses to a new set of circumstances. (Not everything we try to do will succeed, that is, be a "solution.") So, for those of you who are tired of wringing your hands, who would like to do something useful, or focus your attention in a purposeful way, here it is.

Expand your view beyond the question of how we will run all the cars by means other than gasoline. This obsession with keeping the cars running at all costs could really prove fatal. It is especially unhelpful that so many self-proclaimed "greens" and political "progressives" are hung up on this monomaniacal theme. Get this: the cars are not part of the solution (whether they run on fossil fuels, vodka, used frymax™ oil, or cow shit). They are at the heart of the problem. And trying to salvage the entire Happy Motoring system by shifting it from gasoline to other fuels will only make things much worse. The bottom line of this is: start thinking beyond the car. We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.

We have to produce food differently. The ADM / Monsanto / Cargill model of industrial agribusiness is heading toward its Waterloo. As oil and gas deplete, we will be left with sterile soils and farming organized at an unworkable scale. Many lives will depend on our ability to fix this. Farming will soon return much closer to the center of American economic life. It will necessarily have to be done more locally, at a smaller-and-finer scale, and will require more human labor. The value-added activities associated with farming -- e.g. making products like cheese, wine, oils -- will also have to be done much more locally. This situation presents excellent business and vocational opportunities for America's young people (if they can unplug their Ipods long enough to pay attention.) It also presents huge problems in land-use reform. Not to mention the fact that the knowledge and skill for doing these things has to be painstakingly retrieved from the dumpster of history. Get busy.
We have to inhabit the terrain differently. Virtually every place in our nation organized for car dependency is going to fail to some degree. Quite a few places (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Miami....) will support only a fraction of their current populations. We'll have to return to traditional human ecologies at a smaller scale: villages, towns, and cities (along with a productive rural landscape). Our small towns are waiting to be reinhabited. Our cities will have to contract. The cities that are composed proportionately more of suburban fabric (e.g. Atlanta, Houston) will pose especially tough problems. Most of that stuff will not be fixed. The loss of monetary value in suburban property will have far-reaching ramifications. The stuff we build in the decades ahead will have to be made of regional materials found in nature -- as opposed to modular, snap-together, manufactured components -- at a more modest scale. This whole process will entail enormous demographic shifts and is liable to be turbulent. Like farming, it will require the retrieval of skill-sets and methodologies that have been forsaken. The graduate schools of architecture are still tragically preoccupied with teaching Narcissism. The faculties will have to be overthrown. Our attitudes about land-use will have to change dramatically. The building codes and zoning laws will eventually be abandoned and will have to be replaced with vernacular wisdom. Get busy.
We have to move things and people differently. This is the sunset of Happy Motoring (including the entire US trucking system). Get used to it. Don't waste your society's remaining resources trying to prop up car-and-truck dependency. Moving things and people by water and rail is vastly more energy-efficient. Need something to do? Get involved in restoring public transit. Let's start with railroads, and let's make sure we electrify them so they will run on things other than fossil fuel or, if we have to run them partly on coal-fired power plants, at least scrub the emissions and sequester the CO2 at as few source-points as possible. We also have to prepare our society for moving people and things much more by water. This implies the rebuilding of infrastructure for our harbors, and also for our inland river and canal systems -- including the towns associated with them. The great harbor towns, like Baltimore, Boston, and New York, can no longer devote their waterfronts to condo sites and bikeways. We actually have to put the piers and warehouses back in place (not to mention the sleazy accommodations for sailors). Right now, programs are underway to restore maritime shipping based on wind -- yes, sailing ships. It's for real. Lots to do here. Put down your Ipod and get busy.
We have to transform retail trade. The national chains that have used the high tide of fossil fuels to contrive predatory economies-of-scale (and kill local economies) -- they are going down. WalMart and the other outfits will not survive the coming era of expensive, scarcer oil. They will not be able to run the "warehouses-on-wheels" of 18-wheel tractor-trailers incessantly circulating along the interstate highways. Their 12,000-mile supply lines to the Asian slave-factories are also endangered as the US and China contest for Middle East and African oil. The local networks of commercial interdependency which these chain stores systematically destroyed (with the public's acquiescence) will have to be rebuilt brick-by-brick and inventory-by-inventory. This will require rich, fine-grained, multi-layered networks of people who make, distribute, and sell stuff (including the much-maligned "middlemen"). Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet will replace local retail economies. Internet shopping is totally dependent now on cheap delivery, and delivery will no longer be cheap. It also is predicated on electric power systems that are completely reliable. That is something we are unlikely to enjoy in the years ahead. Do you have a penchant for retail trade and don't want to work for a big predatory corporation? There's lots to do here in the realm of small, local business. Quit carping and get busy.
We will have to make things again in America. However, we are going to make less stuff. We will have fewer things to buy, fewer choices of things. The curtain is coming down on the endless blue-light-special shopping frenzy that has occupied the forefront of daily life in America for decades. But we will still need household goods and things to wear. As a practical matter, we are not going to re-live the 20th century. The factories from America's heyday of manufacturing (1900 - 1970) were all designed for massive inputs of fossil fuel, and many of them have already been demolished. We're going to have to make things on a smaller scale by other means. Perhaps we will have to use more water power. The truth is, we don't know yet how we're going to make anything. This is something that the younger generations can put their minds and muscles into.
The age of canned entertainment is coming to and end. It was fun for a while. We liked "Citizen Kane" and the Beatles. But we're going to have to make our own music and our own drama down the road. We're going to need playhouses and live performance halls. We're going to need violin and banjo players and playwrights and scenery-makers, and singers. We'll need theater managers and stage-hands. The Internet is not going to save canned entertainment. The Internet will not work so well if the electricity is on the fritz half the time (or more).
We'll have to reorganize the education system. The centralized secondary school systems based on the yellow school bus fleets will not survive the coming decades. The huge investments we have made in these facilities will impede the transition out of them, but they will fail anyway. Since we will be a less-affluent society, we probably won't be able to replace these centralized facilities with smaller and more equitably distributed schools, at least not right away. Personally, I believe that the next incarnation of education will grow out of the home schooling movement, as home schooling efforts aggregate locally into units of more than one family. God knows what happens beyond secondary ed. The big universities, both public and private, may not be salvageable. And the activity of higher ed itself may engender huge resentment by those foreclosed from it. But anyone who learns to do long division and write a coherent paragraph will be at a great advantage -- and, in any case, will probably out-perform today's average college graduate. One thing for sure: teaching children is not liable to become an obsolete line-of-work, as compared to public relations and sports marketing. Lots to do here, and lots to think about. Get busy, future teachers of America.
We have to reorganize the medical system. The current skein of intertwined rackets based on endless Ponzi buck passing scams will not survive the discontinuities to come. We will probably have to return to a model of service much closer to what used to be called "doctoring." Medical training may also have to change as the big universities run into trouble functioning. Doctors of the 21st century will certainly drive fewer German cars, and there will be fewer opportunities in the cosmetic surgery field. Let's hope that we don't slide so far back that we forget the germ theory of disease, or the need to wash our hands, or the fundamentals of pharmaceutical science. Lots to do here for the unsqueamish.
Life in the USA will have to become much more local, and virtually all the activities of everyday life will have to be re-scaled. You can state categorically that any enterprise now supersized is likely to fail -- everything from the federal government to big corporations to huge institutions. If you can find a way to do something practical and useful on a smaller scale than it is currently being done, you are likely to have food in your cupboard and people who esteem you. An entire social infrastructure of voluntary associations, co-opted by the narcotic of television, needs to be reconstructed. Local institutions for care of the helpless will have to be organized. Local politics will be much more meaningful as state governments and federal agencies slide into complete impotence. Lots of jobs here for local heroes.

So, that's the task list for now. Forgive me if I left things out. But please don't carp at me, by letter or in person, that I am not providing you with anything to think about or devote your personal energy to. If you're depressed, change your focus. Quit wishing and start doing. The best way to feel hopeful about the future is to get off your ass and demonstrate to yourself that you are a capable, competent individual resolutely able to face new circumstances.

Top

01/18/2007
January 18, 2007:
Social Insecurity 2007 and the Coming Intergenerational Battle Over Entitlements

Well, there you have it - again. Fed chief Bernanke admitted in Congressional testimony - again - that "deficits do matter" and that changes to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will have to be made or dire economic circumstances will result. (See transcript of AP wire story dated 01/18/2007 below.)

In my November 2006 essay Faith Based Money, I wrote, "...Bernanke warned Congress in July 2006, 'Deficits matter because they represent additions to debt that our children and grandchildren will either have to pay through higher taxes or reduced services.' Bernanke's key word is “pay,” not borrow more, and the result of higher taxes and reduced government spending generally would be a shrinking economy, which, ultimately translates to a lower standard of living."

The "transfer programs" as Bernanke refers to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid actuarily are forecast to bankrupt the nation with nearly $45 Trillion of unfunded liabilities in the next three decades as 80 million or so Baby Boomers begin drawing on the wealth transfer tap.

As we know there is no fund or "lockbox" from which to obtain this staggering amount of money, Boomers will be expecting their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to fund their retirement and medical expenses through much higher wage withholding and employer matching contributions if no changes are made to the current programs.

Those alternatives are drastic and - at the moment - politically untenable, which is precisely why Dr. Bernanke offered no solutions and deferred to Congress and the White House to make the "difficult choices."

There are seven painful alternatives from which to choose, most likely requiring a combination of several, if not all:

*Uncap Social Security employee withholding and employer contributions. The 6.2% rate for both employees and employers is now not withheld for incomes greater than $97,500 for 2007 (the Medicare withholding rate of 1.45% already is uncapped). This would be viewed as a tax increase on higher-income, "wealthy" Americans and on all employers and is estimated to raise $1.4 Trillion over 10 years (not even a dent in the deficit). Reportedly the now lame-duck Bush Administration has engaged in secret bipartisan talks to do this.

*Increase the standard withholding rates for both Social Security and Medicare, now at 6.2% and 1.45%, respectively. This would be a tax increase on everyone.

*Further delay retirement age benefit eligibility, now 62 for reduced Social Security benefits and as high as 70 for younger Americans. (My full-benefit eligibility date, with a 1956 birth date, is 66 years, 4 months.)

*Eliminate the age-62 reduced-benefit Social Security option completely.

*Stop indexing Social Security payments to inflation, essentially a benefit reduction (political suicide at present).

*Reduce Social Security and Medicare benefits (also political suicide).

*Institute a "Means Test" for Social Security and Medicare benefits. This will be the most controversial alternative, which, in effect, will "punish" those Americans who have successfully accumulated or inherited a pile of money deemed sufficient by the Government to deny them any return of the Social Security and Medicare tax money they have paid into the systems over their careers. It will "reward" those who foolishly have saved no money or lost their 401k funds in stock market crashes. Benefits will be scaled from 0% for the very well-off to 100% for the destitute and some percentage in between for the rest of us. So when it's time to visit the Social Security office to begin the process of collecting benefits, in addition to a birth certificate and other ID, retirees also will be required to bring tax returns and audited financial statements of assets and net worth and a government clerk will input your financial data on a computer and calculate what percentage of the "normal" benefit you will be eligible to receive. (And don't try to hide any assets or income! The penalties will be severe.)

I think our children and grandchildren collectively will say to us Boomers, "Sorry about your luck, you should have saved more money when you had the chance. Maybe you shouldn't have bought us all those iPods and X-Boxes and designer jeans and expensive vacations and useless college educations." The next two generations already cynically believe they will see no retirement benefits when it's their turn, and perhaps with valid reason as Dr. Bernanke observed.

January 18, 2007 Transcript of AP wire report

Washington (AP) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on January 18th that the economy could be gravely hurt if the nation's fiscal house is not put in order and Social Security and Medicare aren't revamped. "If early and meaningful action is not taken, the U.S. economy could be seriously weakened," Bernanke said in prepared testimony to the Senate Budget Committee.

It marked the Fed chief's most extensive comments to date on the challenges facing the United States with the looming retirement of 78 million baby boomers, the oldest of whom will start retiring next year. This huge wave of retirees will hit the U.S. budget as well as the economy, he said.

Absent policy changes by Congress and the White House, rising budget deficits are likely in the years ahead to increase the amount of federal debt outstanding to unprecedented levels, Bernanke said. That could propel interest rates for consumers and businesses upward, which would be a worrisome development, he said. "Thus a vicious cycle may develop in which large deficits lead to rapid growth in debt and interest payments, which in turn adds to subsequent deficits," he said.

The budget deficit last year totaled $248 billion, a four-year low. But forecasts call for the deficit to worsen for the 2007 budget year. The Congressional Budget Office is projecting $286 billion in red ink, while the White House is predicting an even bigger shortfall of $339 billion. Bernanke said that economic growth alone is unlikely to solve the nation's impending fiscal problems.

The Fed chief steered away from offering solutions. Fixing the problems, he said, will take persistence and a willingness by Congress and the White House to make difficult choices.

"In the end, the fundamental decision that Congress, the administration and the American people must confront is how large a share of the nation's economic resources to devote to federal government programs, including transfer programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid," he said.

Top

December 20, 2006: The Age of Mammals 12/20/2006

TomDispatch.com posted this year-end 2006 piece, "Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century," by Rebecca Solnit (© 2006 by Rebecca Solnit) which offers her fascinating, plausible look at what might be our near-term future.

Well-researched and thoroughly documented, Solnit's alternate future presents a detailed account of life on Earth in 2025, "gone-local" following a global energy resource war in 2009 and a severe economic dislocation which followed.

The Age of Mammals

Looking Back on the First Quarter of the Twenty-First Century
By Rebecca Solnit

[For Solomon Solnit (b. Oct. 18, 2006)]

The View from the Grass

I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since 2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year, we've decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the twenty-first century -- but it was creatures from sixty million years ago who reminded me how to do it.

The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world: age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw; and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids -- inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the clash of the titans.

That's exactly why mainstream journalists spent the first decade of this century debating the meaning of the obvious binaries -- the Democrats versus the Republicans, McWorld versus Global Jihad -- much as political debate of the early 1770s might have focused on whether the French or English monarch would have supremacy in North America, not long before the former was beheaded and the latter evicted. The monarchs in all their splashy scale were the dinosaurs of their day, and the eighteenth-century mammal no one noticed at first was named "revolution"; the early twenty-first century version might have been called "localism" or maybe "anarchism," or even "civil society regnant." In some strange way, it turned out that windmill-builders were more important than the U.S. Senate. They were certainly better at preparing for the future anyway.

That mammal clinging to the stalk had crawled up from the grassroots where the choices were so much more basic and significant than, for instance, the one between fundamentalism and consumerism that was on everyone's lips in the years of the Younger George Bush. If the twentieth century was the age of dinosaurs -- of General Motors and the Soviet Union, of McDonald's, globalized entertainment networks, and information superhighways -- the twenty-first has increasingly turned out to be the age of the small.

You can see it in the countless local-economy projects -- wind-power stations, farmer's markets, local enviro organizations, food co-ops -- that were already proliferating, hardly noticed, by the time the Saudi Oil Wars swept the whole Middle East, damaging major oil fields, and bringing on the Great Gasoline Crisis of 2009. That was the one that didn't just send prices skyrocketing, but actually becalmed the globe-roaming container ships with their great steel-box-loads of bottled water, sweatshop garments, and other gratuitous commodities.

The resulting food crisis of the early years of the second decade of the century, which laid big-petroleum-style farming low, suddenly elevated the status of peasant immigrants from what was then called "the undeveloped world," particularly Mexico and Southeast Asia. They taught the less agriculturally skilled, in suddenly greening North American cities, to cultivate the victory gardens that mitigated the widespread famines then beginning to sweep the planet. (It also turned out that the unwieldy and decadent SUVs of the millennium made great ecological sense, but only if you parked them facing south, put in sunroofs and used the high-windowed structures as seed-starter greenhouses.) The crisis spelled an end to the epidemic of American obesity, both by cutting calories and obliging so many Americans to actually move around on foot and bike and work with their hands.

Bush, the Accidental Empire Slayer

For a brief period, in the early years of that second decade of this chaotic century, a whole school of conspiracy theorists gained popularity by suggesting that Bush the Younger was actually the puppet of a left-wing plot to dismantle the global "hyperpower" of that moment. They pointed to the Trotskyite origins of the "neoconservatives," whose mad dreams had so clearly sunk the American empire in Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of their proof. They claimed that Bush's advisors consciously plotted to devastate the most powerful military on the planet, near collapse even before it was torn apart by the unexpected Officer Defection Movement, which burst into existence in 2009, followed by the next year's anti-draft riots in New York and elsewhere.

The Bush administration's mismanagement of the U.S. economy, while debt piled up, so obviously spelled the end of the era of American prosperity and power that some explanation, no matter how absurd, was called for -- and for a while embraced. The long view from our own moment makes it clearer that Bush was simply one of the last dinosaurs of that imperial era, doing a remarkably efficient job of dragging down what was already doomed. If you're like most historians of our quarter-century moment, then you're less interested in the obvious -- why it all fell -- than in discovering the earliest hints of the mammalian alternatives springing up so vigorously with so little attention in those years.

Without benefit of conspiracy, what Bush the Younger really prompted (however blindly) was the beginning of a decentralization policy in the North American states. During the eight years of his tenure, dissident locales started to develop what later would become full-fledged independent policies on everything from queer rights and the environment to foreign relations and the notorious USA-Patriot Act. For example, as early as 2004-2007, several states, led by California, began setting their own automobile emissions standards in an attempt to address the already evident effects of climate change so studiously ignored in Washington.

In June of 2005, mayors from cities across the nation unanimously agreed to join the Kyoto Protocol limiting climate-changing emissions -- a direct rejection of national policy -- at a national meeting in Seattle. Librarians across the country publicly refused to comply with the USA-Patriot Act, and small towns nationwide condemned the measure in the years before many of those towns also condemned what historians now call the U.S.-Iraq Quagmire.

It was the bullying of the Bush administration that pushed these small entities to fight back, to form local administrations and set local regulations -- to leave the Republic behind as they joined the journey to a viable future. And when their withdrawal was finished, so was the Republic.

Now, the thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste that pro-nuclear-reactor Washington policies had brought into being are buried in the granitic bedrock underlying the former capital -- known as the Nuclear Arlington in contrast with the Human Arlington to the south, which will receive the remains of a few more nostalgic officers from the Gulf Wars, then close for good. The whole history of armament, radioactive contamination, disarmament, and alternative energy research is on display in the museum housed in the former Supreme Court Building, though many avoid the area for fear of radiation contamination.

In hindsight, we all see that the left-right divide so harped upon in that era was but another dinosaur binary. After all, small government had long been (at least theoretically) a conservative mantra as was (at least theoretically) left-wing support for the most localized forms of "people power" -- and yet neither group ever pictured government or people power truly getting small enough to exist as it does today, at its most gigantic in bioregional groups about the size of the former states of Oregon or Georgia -- but, of course, deeply enmeshed in complex global webs of alliances. All this was unimagined in, for instance, the dismal year of 2006.

By the time the Republican Party itself split in 2012 into two adversarial wings dubbed the Fundament party and the Conservatives, the American Empire was dismantling itself. Of course, the United States still nominally exists -- we'll pay a bow to it this year at the Decolonization Day fireworks on July 4 -- but it is a largely symbolic entity, like the British Royal Family was for a century before its dissolution in 2020.

A similar death-of-the-dinosaurs moment was at work in the mainstream media -- the big newspapers and television networks of that era. During the early years of the century, as Bush the Younger dragged the country deeper into the mire of unwinnable wars and countless lies, most of the big newspapers and television news programs lost their nerve, their edge, or even their eyesight, and failed dismally to report the stories that mattered. Some fell to scandal -- the New York Times was never the same after the Judith Miller crisis of 2005. Some were sabotaged from without, like the Los Angeles Times, undercut by its parent corporation's "cost-cutting" programs. Some withered away as younger readers fled paper pages for the Internet. But behind them, below them, in their shadow, regarded as puny and insignificant back then -- even though their scoops kept upstaging and prodding the print media -- were bloggers, alternative media such as small magazines and websites, the glorious Indymedia movement, progressive radio, even the text-messaging that had helped organize the first great Latino march of the immigrant rights movement at its beginnings in April 2006.

The Latin American Renaissance

The Latino-ization of the United States had brought some long missing civic engagement and pleasure back into public life and tied the country (and Canada) to the splendid insurgencies of the southern hemisphere. The era of post-communist revolution that would explode from Tierra del Fuego to Tijuana in the second decade of the century is usually traced back to the entrance of Mexico's indigenous Zapatistas onto the world stage on January 1, 1994.

One bold reflection of a changing continent in those years was the election of progressive leaders -- including leftist Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Michele Bachelet in Chile, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales of Bolivia, all by 2006 -- even eventually Alicia Ponce de Leon in Columbia in 2014, three years after U.S. war funding dried up (along with the America that paid for it). Chavez (president 1998-2013) termed this the Bolivarian Revolution.

As a group, they were not bad as national leaders then went, but one great blow against nationalism proved to be the British seizure of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998 for crimes against humanity and his in-absentia trial in Spain, a saga that dragged on until the blood-drenched dictator's heart failed at the end of 2006. The new world is both more transnational and more local than the one it eclipsed, and nobody will ever be so beyond the reach of justice again. (Africans, for example, recovered from Swiss and offshore bank accounts the hundreds of billions of dollars stolen by their former dictators, which gave a huge boost to the fight against AIDS and desertification.)

Whatever the names of their leaders, the real force in Latin America -- and increasingly elsewhere -- would be in the grassroots activism that the Zapatistas heralded, which, in the view from 2026, clearly signaled the fading relevancy of nation-states. Latin indigenous movements, labor movements, neighborhood groups, worker-takeovers in Argentina's factories from 2001 onward, and the Argentinean ideology of horizontalidad (or horizontalism) that went with it, were just early signs of this development.

Like the regionalist policymaking entities of the United States, these movements undermined even progressive presidents to set more radical policies and grew to include many indigenous autonomous zones across the hemisphere. For example, in late 2006, the 8,000-member Achuar tribe (whose region spans what was once the Peru-Ecuador border) took hostage and defeated Peru's main oil and gas-extraction corporation in a mode of victorious resistance that would become increasingly common. In Mexico, the stolen presidential election of 2006 that resulted in the inauguration of PAN Party candidate Felix Calderon was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. In the years to follow, the Second Mexican Revolution spread from Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Mexico City, slowly dissolving that nation into a network of populist regional strongholds. Seventeen of them reinstated a local indigenous language as their official tongue.

Global Justice and the Drowned Lands

The Latin American Renaissance also created a network of communities strong enough to take in some of the climate-change refugees from Central America and Southern Mexico, who fled both north and south, along with Sunbelt -- and what came to be called Swampbelt -- émigrés from the southern United States. The great population transitions thus went more smoothly in the western hemisphere than across the Atlantic, where Europeans engaged in escalating anti-Muslim confrontations before realizing that only immigration could prop up the economies of nations whose native-born, white-Christian populations were rapidly aging and, thanks to ultra-low birthrates, declining.

The end of those bloody squabbles is generally considered to have been marked by the election in 2020 of Chancellor Amira Goldblatt Al-Hamid by what was then only a loosely federated association of German-speaking bioregional principalities. Similar crises -- and, in some cases, bloody cross-community, cross-religion bloodlettings --took place elsewhere, especially as populations moved away from increasingly desertifying, ever hotter hot zones in Africa and Southern Asia. Some historians have regarded the devastating global bird-flu pandemic of 2013 as fortunate in relieving climate-change population-shift pressures; others -- including the noted historian Martha Moctezuma from the University of San Diego-Tijuana's Davis Center on Public Luxury -- discard that perspective as callous.

Every schoolchild now knows the Old Map/New Map system and can recite the lands that vanished: half the Netherlands, much of Bangladesh, the Amazon Delta, the New Orleans and Shanghai lowlands. And who today can't still sing the popular ditties about those famed "fundamentalists without their fundamentals" -- the senators who lost the state of Florida as it rapidly became a swampy archipelago. Most schoolchildren can also cite the World Court decision of 2016 that gave all shares in the major oil companies to Pacific Islanders, mainly resettled in New Zealand and Australia, whose homes had been lost to rising oceans (a short-lived triumph as the fossil-fuel economy ebbed away).

More creative responses to climate change included the tree-traveler and polar-bear collectives. These eco-anarchist clans -- now popular contemporary heroes -- first nursed plant populations on their unnatural journeys north by means of extensive rainy-season nursery cultivation and summer planting programs that have since become huge outdoor festivals. Today, many city parks and town squares have statues of Cleo Dorothy Chan, who organized the first small tree-traveler collective in southern Oregon and is now hailed globally as the twenty-first century's Johnny Appleseed. ("You can't choose between grief and exhilaration; they are the left and right foot on which we hike onward," said the t-shirts of the tree-travelers.) As for the polar-bear folks, they were initially a group of zoologists and circus trainers who, inspired by the tree-travelers, mobilized themselves to teach young polar bears to adapt to changed habitat. They are often credited with saving that one charismatic species in the wild, even as thousands of less emblematic ones vanished.

The Principles of Change

A mature oak tree always looks significant; and, when we look at it, we're willing to respect acorns -- but the rest of the time the seeds of the next big thing are just trodden upon and overlooked. The ideas that made our era and pulled us back from the brink, the stakes that went through the hearts of the dinosaurs and the more incremental forces that rendered them extinct were all at work in the 1990s. They just didn't look very impressive yet, and people were intimidated by the heft of those dinosaurs and swayed by their arguments.

The World Court and related human rights, environmental rights, and criminal courts became more powerful presences as the sun set on the era of nation-state. Multiple changes often combined into scenarios impossible to foresee: for example, the belated U.S. recognition in 2011 that the International Criminal Court did indeed have war-crimes jurisdiction over Americans coincided with the worldwide anti-incarceration movement. This explains why, for example, former President Bush the Younger, extradited from Paraguay and found guilty in 2013, was never imprisoned, but sentenced to spend the rest of his life working in a Fallujah diaper laundry. (People who are still bitter about his reign are bitter too that the webcam there suggests, even at his advanced age, he still enjoys this work that accords so well with his skill-set.) His assets -- along with those of his Vice President, and of Halliburton, Bechtel, Exxon, and other war profiteers -- were famously awarded to the Vietnamese Buddhist Commission for the Iraqi Transition. After almost a decade of the bitterest bloodshed, Iraq, too, had broken into five nations, but by this time so many nation-states were being reorganized into more coherent units that the Iraqi transition, led by the Women's Alliance of Islamic Feminists (nicknamed the Islamofeminists), was surprisingly peaceful when it finally came.

"As I've said many times, the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed," said the sci-fi novelist William Gibson in 1999. In retrospect, the arrival of the Age of Mammals should have been easy to foresee. On every front -- family structure and marriage, transportation, energy and food economies, localized power structures -- everyday life was being reinvented in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. From India to Indiana an interlocking set of new ideas began to emerge and coalesce, becoming in the end the new common sense that new generations of thinkers and activists were guided by. Who now thinks it's radical to advocate that decentralization is better than consolidated power, that capitalism's worldview is vicious and dishonest, that the public matters as much or more than the private, that enforced homogeneity is not a virtue either on a farm or in a society?

The basic tools were already in place long before our era; here and there, a few at a time, people picked them up and started building a better future. Some new inventions mattered, such as the super-efficient German and Japanese solar collectors and methane generators that revolutionized energy production, but much of the march toward a more environmentally sane future didn't require fancy scientific breakthroughs and technologies, just modesty. We scaled back on consumption and production. For example, the collapse of the U.S. military put an end to the world's single most polluting entity, while the near-end of recreational air travel also made a significant contribution to rolling back greenhouse-gas production.

The law of unintended consequences continued to prevail: When touristic air travel withered, so did Hawaii's tourist economy -- making the retaking of the islands by indigenous Hawaiians via the King Kamehameha Council a piece of cake. Of course sailing ships still travel the triangular trade-winds route between Latin America, Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest.

Everything was changing then, is changing now, and some years back the Principles of Change were codified. These simply recited the history of popular and nonviolent resistance from slave uprisings (Hochschild '05) and Gandhian tactics (Schell '03) to the principles of direct action (D. Solnit '09) and social change (see Marina Sitrin on horizontalism, '06) and drew the obvious conclusions about how change works, what powers civil society has, how war can be sabotaged from below, and why violence ultimately fails.

Believers in authoritarian power had prophesied a globalized world of corporate nation-states (and indeed the 2012 Olympics featured teams identified by branding rather than nation, such as the Dasani and Nokia track teams and the Ikea Decathaletes); but even as the polar bears survived, a different kind of change in the global climate doomed most of the large corporations. The outlawing of corporate personhood was launched in Porter Township, Pennsylvania, in December of 2002 and gradually became the law of the land.

By 2015, the "human rights" U.S. courts had given to corporations in the 1880s had been globally stripped away from them again. Of course, there were revolts against the new world -- just as the Republican dinosaurs led a long rearguard movement against women's rights, queer rights, the rights of the environment, and science education, so there were corporations that resisted the new order, most spectacularly when Arkansas was taken over wholesale by Wal-Mart for seventeen months in the early teens.

The heavily armed Arkansans rose up, Wal-Mart's private army changed sides, and what was once the world's biggest corporation joined the dung-heap of history along -- most famously -- with Monsanto, derailed by the Schmeiser verdict, the precedent-setting World Court decision to award all assets in the genetic-engineering corporation to small farmers previously terrorized for not paying royalties on crops contaminated by Monsanto's genetically altered strains. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who had been appointed ambassador to the United States from the Republic of Wal-Mart, was sentenced to three years as a sweeper at an Arkansas farmer's market and became locally beloved in the role.

In the American Middle East (known as the Midwest until modern geographers pointed out that the west starts at the Continental Divide), sectarian feuding, which kept the region in a state of subdued civil war for almost a decade, still flares up occasionally. Periodic sorties by the Fundaments against new programs and lifestyles are considered part of normal life, though Kansas's John Brown Society provides a degree of protection against them.

The Republic of Northern Idaho was another outpost of different-sex-only marriage laws and creationism, but the need to work with downriver communities on salmon restoration and dam removal eventually dissolved the breakaway half-state into the Columbia River Drainage federation. Other historians claim that the tattooed love freaks of the Seattle region, who found common ground with the ex-truckers and elk-hunters of Idaho, dissolved the Idahoan Republic via bicycle races and beer fests. Some also say the same-sex desires of elk hunters were legendary and led to negotiations for a direct rail link to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In 1996, the Pentagon prepared imaginary scenarios describing five potential futures by 2025. Most of them were based on the belief that a better world was one dominated by American military power -- which is to say, by the threat of state violence. That they came up with five possible futures demonstrated, at least, how wide-open the next two decades seemed, even to a Tyrannosaurus-Rex bureaucracy that thought it was soon to own the planet.

Some of their technological, corporate, and militaristic futures could have come to pass. Had people not come to believe strongly enough in their own power, in a horizontalist society, and in a planet-wide ability to work with the environmental changes the Industrial Age had loosed on us, we might be living in a very different, unimaginably catastrophic world -- one in which the mammals would never have proliferated. They might even have breathed their last without ever emerging from under the fern fronds and out of the grasses.

The future, of course, is not something you predict and wait for. It is something you invent daily through your actions. As Mas Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first century: "One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being." We make it up as we go, and we make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more elegantly put it, "Walking we ask questions." What else can you do?

Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to which we all belong.

Rebecca Solnit lives in and loves the peninsular republic of San Francisco, where she is working on a new book. Her most recent books are still Hope in the Dark and A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

December 07, 2006: Malaise Anyone? 12/07/2006

Webster's offers "a vague sense of mental or moral ill-being" as a definition of malaise, as in "something's bothering me but I'm not exactly sure what." President Jimmy Carter never used the word malaise in his July 1979 "Crisis of Confidence" speech which marked the beginning of the end of his presidency, but it forever became known as his "malaise" speech.

As some remember, he remonstrated us, especially those with short tempers from long gas-pump lines, to "snap out of it" and to be prepared to accept limits and restrictions in our consumer-driven lives beyond adjusting the thermostat or driving less.

Top

November 8, 2006: The Real Winners of Election 2006 11/08/2006

Although Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter may be among the happiest citizens in the American empire this week, what with the prospect of apoplectic ranting at Nancy Pelosi in particular and the Democrats in general for the next two years, it is the American people who are the real winners in Tuesday's elections.

Nationwide it is estimated only 40 percent of eligible Americans bothered to keep the torch of democracy brightly lit at home by showing up at the polls (once again denying the privilege to complain anytime during the next two years from the remaining 60 percent who did not vote, as in "Didn't vote? Don't bitch").

Top

November 6, 2006: The Privilege of Voting 11/06/2006

We are so keen to export liberty, democracy and voting rights throughout the world, sometimes by force, yet more unlikely to practice it here at home. Nearly half of eligible adult Americans each year refuse to vote, nonetheless still making a choice, if only of one of expressing apathy or frustration.

Turnout for presidential elections is not much better, about 60 percent in 2004, which was the highest in nearly 40 years. Yet the number of eligible adults who did not vote - 78 million - outnumbered the votes garnered individually by each candidate (Bush: 62 million, Kerry: 59 million).

Our voter turnout is pathetic by comparison to other countries. In fact, more than 110 democracies around the world have better voter participation, a number that doesn't include the compulsory democracies where voters are presented only one choice. Add those and in 130 countries more citizens turn out to cast ballots for the candidates of their choice.

Top

October 27, 2006: Embracing the Subtle Upside of Terror 10/27/2006

By Garrison Keillor
Published October 25, 2006
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
Link to Original

We are engaged in a struggle between freedom and the forces of terror, my little macacas, and mostly I side with freedom, such as the freedom to look at big shots and stick out your tongue and blow, but of course terror has its place too.

The dude strolling down our street at night does not break into our house to see what's available because he is terrified that if he's nabbed, his girlfriend Janine will run off to Philly with her ex-boyfriend Eddie who's been hanging around. She's the best thing in Benny's life right now. So he walks on by and leaves our stereo be.

The terror of everlasting hellfire kept me away from dances until I was 12 years old and away from smoking cigarettes until I was 15. So that's good. Dancing was briefly thrilling, and then I caught sight of myself in a mirror and I haven't gone to a dance since. Fear of ridicule is powerful too.

A lack of terror may encourage crooks to operate brazenly, knock over the candy stand, trip the nuns, hurl garbage over the balcony, and that's why you have cops, and also to keep the college kids from getting sick in our shrubbery.

But now the federal government is extending the frontiers of terror with the Military Commissions Act of 2006, legalizing torture and suspending habeas corpus and constructing a loose web of law by which you and I could be hung by our ankles in a meat locker for as long as somebody deems necessary. "Any person is punishable ..." the law states, "who knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States" and when it comes to deciding what "knowingly and intentionally" might mean or who is the enemy, that's for a military commission to decide in secret, with or without you present. No 5th Amendment, hearsay evidence admissible, no judicial review.

People came to America to escape this sort of justice. The midnight knock on the door, incarceration at the whim of men in shiny boots, confessions obtained with a section of hose, secret trial by star chamber. One is reminded of Germany, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give the chancellor the power of summary arrest and imprisonment, a necessary tool for the defense of the homeland against traitors, Jew-lovers, terrorists.

Not that this is a bad thing. Who am I to say? Maybe we've been too lenient with enemies of the state. A period of stark repression might be a rich and rewarding experience for all of us. But when the Current Occupant signed the act last week, the difference between freedom and terror did suddenly shrink somewhat. It makes you wonder: What if Vice President Dick Cheney does not wish to give up power two years from now? Maybe he has other priorities. If an enemy of the United States--a Democrat, for example--appeared to be on the verge of election, perhaps Mr. Cheney, for the good of the country, would be forced to take the threat seriously and head for an undisclosed location and invoke his war powers and shovel a few thousand traitors into camps and call up his friends at Diebold and program the election results that are best for the country, or call the whole thing off.

OK by me if it's OK by you. I don't imagine that coffee sales will be affected or that Paris Hilton will be, like, "Whoa, this is so not cool," and, like, text-message her buds to join her on a hunger strike. The greeters at Wal-Mart will still smile and the football season will go on. They might flash a bulletin at halftime, "Terror Threat Forces Postponement of Election," and most people would be OK with that. If Mr. Cheney thinks it necessary to suspend the Constitution for a while, surely he has his reasons. The man inspires trust.

They won't have to torture me to get a good confession. I am a professional writer of fiction, my little monkeys, and if they turn the bright lights on yours truly, beans will spill by the bushel, names will be named, and dates, and stories will be told one after the other. Everybody who ever done me wrong, I am going to implicate them up to their dewlaps. A trial with hearsay evidence allowed and no cross-examination is tailor-made for a novelist. Throw me into that briar patch, Br'er Bush.

Garrison Keillor is an author and host of "A Prairie Home Companion."

Top

October 17, 2006: Earl Doherty's Essay: Götterdämmerung 10/17/2006

Earl Doherty's essay "Götterdämmerung" (The Twilight of the Gods) appears on one of two of his websites, Age of Reason, and describes in terms of Richard Wagner's opera of the same name, last of his four-part epic "The Ring of the Nibelung," the "insight and acceptance that the gods must pass away in order to make room for something new."

Along the same lines as Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Fu

From the Financial Times, London: Forget credit and oil - the next crisis will be over food

The Age of Mammals

From the Financial Times, London:

Forget credit and oil - the next crisis will be over food