DIGGING DEEPER, By Ivan G. Goldman

NEW BLOG ENTRY

2011-09-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

Thanks all for checking out my blog. I've pretty much moved operations to http://www.redroom.com/author/ivan-g-goldman

You go there, look to your left and scroll down. You'll be able to click on my latest blog. I now use RedRoom for new blog entries because it actually drives traffic (I hate net jargon) to my site. Although blogspot is fine, I'm pretty much on my own here.

IRAQ BOOBY PRIZE, BUFFETT, FAST FOOD JOBS [LATEST BLOGS ON REDROOM]

2011-08-20T09:56:00.000-07:00

http://redroom.com/member/ivan-g-goldman

REDIRECTING

2011-07-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

For technical reasons I won't get into I'm blogging these days from RedRoom.com. Check it out at http://www.redroom.com/author/ivan-g-goldman

Thanks.

AFGHANISTAN SPEECH USES DEBATE TRICK

2011-06-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

One thing we didn’t hear in the president’s Afghanistan speech is the fact that when he took office there were 32,000 U.S. troops there. He’d already more than doubled their number before the surge. His speech was a masterful costume designed to cover up his nakedness.

We “will bring home a total of 33,000 troops by next summer, fully recovering the surge I announced at West Point,” he said. Exactly. But not recovering the approximately 35,000 troops he added in his first escalation. The speech was a deft bait and switch, using the old debating trick of debating a fact that’s beside the point. In the photo above, notice the middle finger of the soldier in the foreground. An eloquent response to U.S. strategy as it translates on the ground. He was photographed in Iraq, but the sentiment encompasses Afghanistan too, the other morass of choice.

A more germane point than the one Obama tried to make is that he escalated the war in Afghanistan before the "surge" and will sustain that escalation. And the real point is that the war is pointless. The speech had nothing to do with formulating any kind of rational policy because there isn't any. The 65,000 troops that will be stuck in the graveyard of empires at the end of his term (after that the number becomes really murky) will be ordered to tell Afghans over and over that we won’t quit, we won’t let them down. But of course we will pretty much quit eventually, we will let them down, just as they’ve let us down. They failed to welcome our occupation. Imagine that.

We’ll let them down mostly by not quite leaving. Not exactly. The oligarchs who run our war policy from stations inside and outside the government are against leaving any of our war theaters. We’re still in Japan, Korea, Germany, etc., etc. And we’re building permanent bases in Iraq and Afghanistan as we speak. We will leave these places only when we get a president who has the courage to lead us out, because it takes far more courage to take out the trash than it does to let it sit there for the next president.

So our soldiers and Marines patrolling these villages, under orders to lie and say we’re really committed to Afghanistan's welfare, will know that what they're saying makes no sense at all and isn't true. Bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The 9/11 attacks were launched mostly from cells in Germany, not Afghanistan. We have a broken infrastructure and Americans lack jobs and die for lack of medical care. We have no good reason to try to remake Afghanistan into Nebraska. The villagers know this too. They know they're being lied to. We know it, and the president knows it.

So it was a clever speech, but cowardly and ultimately untrue.

PICTURE TELLS US ITS THOUSAND WORDS ON OUR AFGHANISTAN POLICY (MEMORIAL DAY ENTRY)

2011-05-30T13:10:00.001-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

The policy of never-ending war and occupation waged in the name of the American people is not without consequences.

PAYING WRITERS IS SO OLD-FASHIONED

2011-05-04T21:15:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

I'm one of many authors on a Website called RedRoom.com. Today the site managers asked us to blog about writing for free, and the activity was, no kidding, somehow tied in with HuffingtonPost.com, a site that doesn't pay bloggers and is mostly a news "aggregator," a term that, when applied to websites, apparently means it's an entity taking stories from everybody without paying for them. I submitted the following blog:

Personally I find that writing for free is both stimulating and rewarding. Being paid for your work is so 1970. So when RedRoom asked me to blog about the subject and even offered me the possibility of relaying my thoughts on the topic to Arianna Huffington, why heck, who could resist an offer like that?

You know, at the end of a long day of writing for free I like nothing better than to gather with other writers on the lawn of mistress Arianna and sing old favorites for her and her guests while they're out there on the front porch sipping mint juleps in the twilight and talking all that talk they like to talk, which is so much kinder and finer than walking the walk, don't you think? She says we're happy to just keep doing what we're doing the way we've been doing it, and who's going to contradict her? Not little old me.

Look, whenever I need a new banjo string or something like that all I have to do is requisition one through channels and in three or four weeks, presto, there it is, delivered to the back door of our adorable little unpainted, ramshackle cabin -- a pre-owned banjo string, thanks to the kindness of strangers. So who needs cash? Not us. We're all completely taken care of, thanks especially to the generosity of our mistress Ms. Huffington. Why just last week I had a complete meal. I still remember it fondly. So when those damn-yankees come around talking union or the Underground Railroad, heck, we don't even listen. We're just happy as clams at a clambake, if you know what I mean.

Sure, I know in the old days writers used to get money for their writing, but then they had to worry about where to put that money and paying taxes and all that complicated stuff we don't have to put up with anymore. We let Arianna handle all the tiresome details, which, thanks to her unselfishness, relieves us of a terrible burden.

After AOL bought her site for $315 million, right away I thought, darn, she won't have time for us anymore. She'll change and start paying us in money like those terrible corporations she despises, and we'll be dealing with tax brackets and all that. But no, she continues to do what's best for us no matter what, and we don't have to figure out capital gains or royalties or adjusted gross income or any of that devilish rigmarole that writers had to worry about in the bad old days. And you know, Ariannna doesn't even like to talk about this subject. She dodges any sort of publicity for her generous policies that are so touching and in keeping with her Grade A Liberal inclinations now that she's no longer running a Republican husband for public office whether he likes it or not.

Also, when we get sick or something she worries about us terribly and sometimes she even blogs about how awful it is that 40 million Americans have no health insurance and stuff, and I almost cry just thinking about her concern. So I'm tremendously pleased to see RedRoom partnered up with Arianna and also very optimistic about getting another complete meal next week.

TRUMP TO BE REPLACED BY SMOOTHER LIAR

2011-04-29T10:44:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

“I heard he was a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

--Donald Trump in an Associated Press interview

It’s at that point where the interviewer is supposed to stop the interviewee and ask him, “You hear? Hear from where? What is your source?” News isn’t unsubstantiated rumor and it isn’t gossip. Also, interviewers who know what they’re doing take into account what’s known about the person making the comment.

You don’t treat the statements of a habitual liar the same as those of a source that’s been one hundred percent credible in the past. Trump is, in fact, a habitual liar. When he’s caught he goes on to another lie and stops talking about the last lie.

Here’s something else he said about President Obama in an interview last month: “The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him. You know? When you interview people, if ever I got the nomination, if I ever decide to run, you can go back and interview people from my kindergarten and they remember me. No one ever comes forward. Nobody knows who he is until later in his life. It’s very strange. The whole thing is very strange.”

How can such comments be taken seriously by a responsible news media? They can’t. At the very least a real interviewer would have to ask Trump the nature of his effort to find people who knew Obama when he was a child because in fact there are hundreds of people who have come forward to share their memories.

If Trump actually looked for them, he’s an awfully bad investigator. If he didn’t look – and very clearly he didn’t – why isn’t he directly challenged on it? Evidently when you don’t grow up in exclusive circles surrounded by fabulous wealth – as was Trump -- then “nobody” knows you, and there's no reason to question the reliability of the conclusion.

News media need to understand their mission, and it's not to treat garbage with the same seriousness as the results of a competent study. When they behave otherwise we need to hold their feet to the fire. Also, it's worth asking why Trump, thanks to a long history of this kind of behavior, leads Republican polls for the presidential nomination. Partly because he’s enabled by an incompetent, unscrupulous news media. Partly because this is the kind of guy so many Republican voters are looking for. Eventually they’ll settle down and find a smoother liar. That may or may not be an improvement.

WATCHING YOUR BACK IN AFGHANISTAN

2011-04-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

Eight NATO troops and a contractor, probably all Americans, according to the British press, were shot to death today by an Afghan pilot at the Kabul airport.

These ghastly murders are made even worse by the fact that they won’t be reported properly. They won’t be brought into their rightful context by NATO, the Pentagon, or the “journalists” in charge of delivering our information. Repetitious stories of Afghan police and soldiers turning on our troops are reported as isolated incidents even though they’ve become almost routine, part of a pattern that tells us a great deal about our mission over there.

We've learned to forget about finding stories that place these events alongside questions about why these NATO troops must serve in Afghanistan in the first place. The mission, after all, ended nearly ten years ago, when Osama Bin Laden escaped across the border into Pakistan. The present mission, which is to make Afghanistan into a kind of Asian Nebraska, is so excruciatingly stupid it defies serious analysis.

Meanwhile, here are some events I Googled up in a hurry. I assure you there are more to be found:

*Oct 3, 2009, An Afghan soldier on guard at a joint base with U.S. troops shot dead two U.S. servicemen and wounded two others as they slept.

*July 23, 2010, Two U.S. contractors were killed and one U.S. soldier wounded in a shootout with Afghan soldiers during a training exercise.

*July 25, 2010, an Afghan soldier shot a rocket-propelled grenade into a building, killing three British soldiers.

*August 25, 2010 An Afghan police recruit killed three Spanish soldiers.

*March 23, 2011, an Afghan soldier shot and killed two U.S. soldiers and fled.

*January 20, 2011, An Italian soldier was shot to death earlier in the week by an Afghan soldier, not by insurgents as originally reported, NATO said.

*April 20, 2011, An Afghan policeman shot and killed two Americans soldiers.

If I can find this stuff on my laptop in California, where are The New York Times, Reuters, the AP, CNN, and all those other news organizations with casts of thousands? Why aren’t they adding two and two and asking questions about the total sum?

If you seek fairness, a battle zone is one of the worst places to look, but beyond the elementary unfairness of sending troops to fight in a war because we don't have the gumption to end it, there's a nagging murder factor in Afghanistan, making it astronomically unfair to send troops into this pit of betrayal.

I suppose I could be cruel and suggest that supporters of our perpetual Afghan war consider doing a one-year tour themselves, not out on patrol, just hanging around with Afghan police officers and soldiers back behind the lines to help them with the worthy cause of propping up the regime of our crooked, crazy Pashtun pal Hamid Karzai. They'd find there’s lots to do around a military base in Afghanistan. Growing eyes in the back of your head, for example.

AT LAST: A PRESIDENT, NOT A REF (GUEST COLUMN)

2011-04-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

Posted on Apr 13, 2011

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

President Obama has finally decided to take his own side in the philosophical struggle that is the true engine of this nation’s budget debate.

After months of mixed signals about what he was willing to fight for, Obama finally laid out his purposes and his principles. His approach has difficulties of its own, and much will depend on execution. But the president was unequivocal in arguing that the roots of our fiscal problems lie in the tax cuts of the last decade that we could not afford. And he raised the stakes in our politics to something more fundamental than dry numbers on a page or computer screen.

“We are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government,” he declared. “But there has always been another thread running throughout our history—a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation. We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”

There are at least four things to like about his approach. First, without mentioning Rep. Paul Ryan by name, he called out Ryan’s truly reactionary budget proposal for what it is: an effort to slash government programs, in large part to preserve and expand tax cuts for the wealthy. “That’s not right,” he said, “and it’s not going to happen as long as I’m president.”

Second, he was willing to speak plainly about raising taxes, and he insisted correctly on restoring the Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthy. Tax reform, which he also proposed, is a fine idea, though there is ample reason for skepticism as to how much revenue it can produce. It would be far better to return to all of the Clinton tax rates and then build tax reform on that base, in particular through higher taxes on investment income.

Third, he was right to focus on the need to cut security spending. Any serious effort to reduce the deficit cannot exempt defense. It’s laughable for Republicans to criticize defense cuts and then be utterly unwilling to increase taxes to pay for the defense they claim we need.

Finally, he was eloquent in defending Medicare and Medicaid. He proposed saving money by building on last year’s heath reform law. There are two ways to reduce the government’s heath care expenses. One is Ryan’s path, which, Obama said, “lowers the government’s health care bills by asking seniors and poor families to pay them instead.” The alternative, which the president rightly embraced, “lowers the government’s health care bills by reducing the cost of health care itself.”

But a good speech is only a first step. For his allies, the president’s negotiating method has been, well, petrifying: concede, concede and concede again—and then compromise from an already heavily compromised position. That’s why his promised cuts in domestic spending straight out of the box are worrying.

This problem will be even worse if the Obama plan comes to be defined as the “left” pole in the negotiation. It’s not. A truly progressive budget would include more revenue raised in more progressive ways. And contrary to what you might hear on Fox News, the established media wisdom on budget issues is center-right, and Ryan’s extreme budget has pushed the perceived center still further right, aggravating the tendency to locate Obama’s plan far to the left of where it is.

And there is something fundamentally wrong about making the deficit the central issue in our politics. Here’s a little secret: The deficit is actually not a hard problem. Only the taxophobia that Republicans have created and Democrats cower before has made this so complicated. Yes, health care costs are also a big deal. But they are a challenge for the whole economy and too many conservatives demagogue all serious efforts to grapple with them (see “death panels”).

For all that, there was a bigness about Obama’s speech that was a relief after his recent sojourn as a sideline judge. “We believe that in order to preserve our own freedoms and pursue our own happiness, we can’t just think about ourselves,” he said. “We have to think about the country that made those liberties possible. We have to think about our fellow citizens with whom we share a community.” Obama is back on the field, and this is where he needs to stay.

E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

© 2011, Washington Post Writers Group

CHARLIE SHEEN VERSUS MEDICARE

2011-04-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

The civil war in Libya is particularly attractive to the media because thanks to the simple terrain there, the conflict is very much like a football game. The two sides advance and retreat on a level that’s easy to digest. The situation is nothing like the one in Afghanistan, with its tangled zones of control and where Americans are routinely crippled and killed in a war no one wants to think about anymore and no one in power has the guts to end.

With the owners’ lockout threatening the next NFL season, Libyan developments are viewed as a particularly apt filler. The fact that Khadafy is a maniac makes the story that much better.

And speaking of crazy tyrants, Donald Trump has learned that if he occasionally hints he might run for president, he reaps tremendous publicity for his reality TV show, and it’s all free. But now that he’s joined the birther crowd he’s going to have a hard time out-sensationalizing his most recent pronouncements. Maybe he’ll have to publicly consider opting for a sex change. He’ll just have to decide whether he’s more interested in running for president or ratings, although these days the two missions are remarkably similar. Look for Charlie to decide he wants to be somebody’s running mate so he can lead us from chaos.

We’re also being told that Sheen’s traveling one-man tantrum show is somehow improving. But no one asks just who are the people making these pronouncements? If they’re dumb enough to purchase a ticket to one of these hideous events they’re probably about as sensible as snails in heat.

As stupid stories maintain their position at center stage, America quietly returns to Hoover economics, along with the UK and other panicked countries operated by floundering politicians trying to explain why they’re plunging us into deeper mud without admitting that they’re basically just doing what global corporations tell them to do.

At least we’re not stuck with British Prime Minister David Cameron, who, following Hoover’s program to a T, is fiercely digging a deep, deep grave for his nation’s economy with the help of the “Liberal” Nick Clegg. The program is to cut government spending wherever it threatens to pull the country out of the morass. So Cameron/Clegg cripple public education as they prop up the immensely wealthy in hopes they’ll buy an apple from the makeshift corner stands set up by desperate citizens that have no serious education to fall back on.

Allow me to mention down here at the bottom of this column that the Republicans in Congress have introduced a measure to kill Medicare. In ten years’ time their program would dole out some small sum to the elderly that they could present as a sort of coupon to private insurance companies. It’s rather an important story, don’t you think? So the news media gatekeepers don’t know what to do with it because Libya, football, and Charlie Sheen beat the hell out of it ratings-wise.

WHY WE'RE BROKE

2011-02-20T17:05:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

“We’re broke.”

The House speaker says it, the Wisconsin governor says it. In fact, Republicans and their Blue Dog pals use these two words as an excuse for everything from depriving babies of their formula to punishing NPR for occasionally reporting facts. Once they get a slogan working for them, these people stay with it. After all, repeating slogans is so much easier than making sense.

And this time, oddly enough, the slogan is true. Government’s broke, along with at least half our citizens and most of the world. But just how did government get so broke? Well, let’s look at Medicare, for example.

The Republican-Blue Dog Coalition passed a Medicare prescription bill that made it illegal for government purchasing agents to bargain with drug companies. They publish their prices, government pays them. But wait, the same drug companies sell their wares for half-price in Canada and still make a profit. That meant the government must be prevented from making an end-run at the border and re-importing drugs from Canada. So the drug companies that wrote the legislation made that illegal. Their excuse for this was so impossibly stupid I can’t bear to repeat it. Let’s just say it makes sense if you accept the proposition that Canada is an undeveloped country whose products are probably swarming with rat feces.

Some other things that wrecked our finances: Two useless, multi-trillion-dollar wars. In one of them we continue raining billions of dollars on the bandits in the Afghan government and they divvy up the loot with the enemy, so we end up paying both sides. How can anyone as smart as Obama be so frightfully dumb? Meanwhile we keep raising the Pentagon allotment even though we’ve been the only superpower for two decades.

Our pals in Washington cut taxes for super-wealthy folks and made sure they stayed cut, no matter what. At the same time the banks were deregulated and they promptly created packages of worthless mortgages. They managed to sell them by paying off the ratings agencies. When their whole stinking garbage heap collapsed they got away clean. No one went to jail, but millions of homeowners who bought at the wrong time lost their life savings. Because the value of real estate dived, so did property taxes, putting unsustainable strain on local and state governments.

See a pattern? The formula is simple.

1. Perverted thieves pass laws that prevent us from putting locks on the doors.

2. They burglarize us.

3. They complain that “we” are broke.

4. They find patsies that include schoolchildren, disabled people, and organized labor and make them pay the price.

This isn’t Egypt. Not yet. But give the Egyptian demonstrators credit for not only knowing they were getting screwed but also knowing who was screwing them and why they were so broke.

WHY TERM LIMITS AREN'T THE ANSWER

2011-02-07T15:16:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

Petitions to impose term limits circle the Web like mindless birds. Maybe you’ve seen them, maybe you’ve even signed them, which doesn’t make you mindless. It just means you probably haven’t thought this thing through.

We’re frustrated that government doesn’t seem to work in behalf of the people anymore. Health care works for insurance and drug companies, and foreign policy is crafted in favor of global corporations that see America as a farm field growing them dollars. When they’ve picked them all off the stalks they’ll just move on to another field. We also continue fighting wars that few of us believe in, but we can’t seem to get them stopped.

We don’t even have an energy policy.

Extended political terms for office-holders won’t solve any of this. Stopping them from taking bribes would sure help though. The bribes I’m talking about are often legal because the lawmakers made them so. They come in many forms -- not just campaign contributions. They’re jobs, financial opportunities, you name it. Shut down one source of income and twelve more pop up. Here are some you might know about:

* A congressman sponsors a Medicare prescription bill and the very next year goes to work for the corporations that wrote his legislation.

* The federal budget director quits and goes straight to Citi, which pays his salary, bonuses, stock options, and other perks with some of the billions it got from the government in zero-interest loans.

* The wife of a Supreme Court justice openly hangs a red light outside her home and invites in weasels desiring her favors. The justice-pimp fails to recuse himself from any of the cases involving her clients.

* In Los Angeles the mayor recently agreed to rent a huge swath of valuable real estate to a corporation that wants to build a football stadium there. Terms of the lease? The corporation pays a dollar a year. Oh, one more thing. The city’s convention center sits on part of the property. The mayor promises to tear down part of the building and put it on the other side to make room for the stadium. He’ll borrow $350 million to get that done. Incidentally, an NFL team plays about 10 home games a year. The rest of the time the land will be a closed-off, concrete wasteland. Last year he closed down summer school. Lack of funds, he said.

People are so desperate for a cure to these ills that they sign silly petitions, figuring any change has got to be for the better. Not so. Some changes make things worse. California already has term limits and it has one of the worst Legislatures around. The lobbyists who run the capital have no term limits, and their superior knowledge and experience give them even more leverage over legislators still trying to find the restrooms.

Why worry about how long politicians stay on the job? We could change them every month and still be in the same mess. Let’s stop the bribery. Then if we get a good office-holder, let’s hang on to her.

CHICKEN LITTLES SAY SOCIAL SECURITY IS FALLING

2011-02-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
No, Social Security isn’t doomed. That’s just junk put out there by an army of reactionary Rasputins who want all New Deal programs rolled back so we can go back to the good old days when John D. Rockefeller and Herbert Hoover had everything under control.

If we fail to tinker with it, Social Security would run out by about 2041. But why would we be that dumb? We’ve tinkered with the program since its inception. Social Security is a live, successful entity that evolves with our society. Goofballs on the right want us to think the sky is falling so we should go live in caves. But if we didn’t look for ways to make things better, physicians would still be bleeding patients.

The Rasputins tell us we have to reduce benefits, make the retirement age much higher, or do both because they don’t want us to notice that Social Security taxes top out after you’ve made $106,800. Corporate kingpins making $20 million annually pay no more into the program than your average pharmacist. But the Meg Whitmans and Robert Rubins of the world don’t make their serious money in salary anyway because it’s too easy to tax at the maximum rate of 35 percent. They go for stock options and other accounting tricks that allow them to pay no Social Security or Medicare taxes on their earnings and a maximum rate of only 15 percent in income tax.

Incidentally, the maximum tax rate during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years was 91 percent, but that was before politicians began altering campaign financing regulations into a witches’ brew that allowed them to take much bigger tips from wealthy contributors. As these tips got bigger, the tax rates got much, much lower for the wealthiest 1 percent. And it's not over yet. Today’s youth believe Social Security won’t be there for them. That’s not solely based on the belief that America will go broke. It also rests on the savvy understanding that we’re getting screwed, and based on their experience, young citizens see no reason to believe it will stop. After all, it’s all they’ve ever known.

Meanwhile we have polluted air and water, crumbling bridges, no high-speed trains, anemic schools, and an obscenely structured medical care system that even with the new reforms will provide maximum profits to insurance and pharmaceutical suckfish. And now they’re coming for our Social Security. Not long before he died George Carlin, probably the best political scientist we’ve produced in the last century, predicted they’ll get it. Maybe they will. But if we understand it a little better we can make it a lot harder for them. There’s no reason capital gains have to be treated so much better than wages and there’s no good reason to top out Social Security taxes at absurdly low levels.

Obama’s deficit commission recommended that we raise the retirement age to 69 and apply means testing. The Rasputins know that if we turn Social Security into a welfare system it will lose its popularity and eventually they can starve it out, making it a fond memory, like justice and fair play.

Cow Most Sacred: Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable (Guest Post)

2011-01-27T12:38:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER

Ivan G. Goldman

[Astute analysis of Pentagon's place in our society by Andrew J. Bacevich, retired Army colonel and professor of history and international relations at Boston University]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-bacevich/cow-most-sacred-why-milit_b_814888.html

By Andrew J. Bacevich

In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality. Any cuts exacted will at most reduce the rate of growth. The essential facts remain: U.S. military outlays today equal that of every other nation on the planet combined, a situation without precedent in modern history.

The Pentagon presently spends more in constant dollars than it did at any time during the Cold War -- this despite the absence of anything remotely approximating what national security experts like to call a “peer competitor.” Evil Empire? It exists only in the fevered imaginations of those who quiver at the prospect of China adding a rust-bucket Russian aircraft carrier to its fleet or who take seriously the ravings of radical Islamists promising from deep inside their caves to unite theUmma in a new caliphate.

What are Americans getting for their money? Sadly, not much. Despite extraordinary expenditures (not to mention exertions and sacrifices by U.S. forces), the return on investment is, to be generous, unimpressive. The chief lesson to emerge from the battlefields of the post-9/11 era is this: The Pentagon possesses next to no ability to translate “military supremacy” into meaningful victory.

Washington knows how to start wars and how to prolong them, but is clueless when it comes to ending them. Iraq, the latest addition to the roster of America’s forgotten wars, stands as exhibit A. Each bomb that blows up in Baghdad or some other Iraqi city, splattering blood all over the streets, testifies to the manifest absurdity of judging “the surge” as the epic feat of arms celebrated by the Petraeus lobby.

The problems are strategic as well as operational. Old Cold War-era expectations that projecting U.S. power will enhance American clout and standing no longer apply, especially in the Islamic world. There, American military activities are instead fostering instability and inciting anti-Americanism. For Exhibit B, see the deepening morass that Washington refers to as AfPak or the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater of operations.

Add to that the mountain of evidence showing that Pentagon, Inc. is a miserably managed enterprise: hide-bound, bloated, slow-moving, and prone to wasting resources on a prodigious scale -- nowhere more so than in weapons procurement and the outsourcing of previously military functions to “contractors.” When it comes to national security, effectiveness (what works) should rightly take precedence over efficiency (at what cost?) as the overriding measure of merit. Yet beyond a certain level, inefficiency undermines effectiveness, with the Pentagon stubbornly and habitually exceeding that level. By comparison, Detroit’s much-maligned Big Three offer models of well-run enterprises.

Impregnable Defenses

All of this takes place against the backdrop of mounting problems at home: stubbornly high unemployment, trillion-dollar federal deficits, massive and mounting debt, and domestic needs like education, infrastructure, and employment crying out for attention.

Yet the defense budget -- a misnomer since for Pentagon, Inc. defense per se figures as an afterthought -- remains a sacred cow. Why is that?

The answer lies first in understanding the defenses arrayed around that cow to ensure that it remains untouched and untouchable. Exemplifying what the military likes to call a “defense in depth,” that protective shield consists of four distinct but mutually supporting layers.

Institutional Self-Interest: Victory in World War II produced not peace, but an atmosphere of permanent national security crisis. As never before in U.S. history, threats to the nation’s existence seemed omnipresent, an attitude first born in the late 1940s that still persists today. In Washington, fear -- partly genuine, partly contrived -- triggered a powerful response.

One result was the emergence of the national security state, an array of institutions that depended on (and therefore strove to perpetuate) this atmosphere of crisis to justify their existence, status, prerogatives, and budgetary claims. In addition, a permanent arms industry arose, which soon became a major source of jobs and corporate profits. Politicians of both parties were quick to identify the advantages of aligning with this “military-industrial complex,” as President Eisenhower described it.

Allied with (and feeding off of) this vast apparatus that transformed tax dollars into appropriations, corporate profits, campaign contributions, and votes was an intellectual axis of sorts -- government-supported laboratories, university research institutes, publications, think tanks, and lobbying firms (many staffed by former or would-be senior officials) -- devoted to identifying (or conjuring up) ostensible national security challenges and alarms, always assumed to be serious and getting worse, and then devising responses to them.

The upshot: within Washington, the voices carrying weight in any national security “debate” all share a predisposition for sustaining very high levels of military spending for reasons having increasingly little to do with the well-being of the country.

Strategic Inertia: In a 1948 State Department document, diplomat George F. Kennan offered this observation: “We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population.” The challenge facing American policymakers, he continued, was “to devise a pattern of relationships that will permit us to maintain this disparity.” Here we have a description of American purposes that is far more candid than all of the rhetoric about promoting freedom and democracy, seeking world peace, or exercising global leadership.

The end of World War II found the United States in a spectacularly privileged position. Not for nothing do Americans remember the immediate postwar era as a Golden Age of middle-class prosperity. Policymakers since Kennan’s time have sought to preserve that globally privileged position. The effort has been a largely futile one.

By 1950 at the latest, those policymakers (with Kennan by then a notable dissenter) had concluded that the possession and deployment of military power held the key to preserving America’s exalted status. The presence of U.S. forces abroad and a demonstrated willingness to intervene, whether overtly or covertly, just about anywhere on the planet would promote stability, ensure U.S. access to markets and resources, and generally serve to enhance the country’s influence in the eyes of friend and foe alike -- this was the idea, at least.

In postwar Europe and postwar Japan, this formula achieved considerable success. Elsewhere -- notably in Korea, Vietnam, Latin America, and (especially after 1980) in the so-called Greater Middle East -- it either produced mixed results or failed catastrophically. Certainly, the events of the post-9/11 era provide little reason to believe that this presence/power-projection paradigm will provide an antidote to the threat posed by violent anti-Western jihadism. If anything, adherence to it is exacerbating the problem by creating ever greater anti-American animus.

One might think that the manifest shortcomings of the presence/power-projection approach -- trillions expended in Iraq for what? -- might stimulate present-day Washington to pose some first-order questions about basic U.S. national security strategy. A certain amount of introspection would seem to be called for. Could, for example, the effort to sustain what remains of America’s privileged status benefit from another approach?

Yet there are few indications that our political leaders, the senior-most echelons of the officer corps, or those who shape opinion outside of government are capable of seriously entertaining any such debate. Whether through ignorance, arrogance, or a lack of imagination, the preexisting strategic paradigm stubbornly persists; so, too, as if by default do the high levels of military spending that the strategy entails.

Cultural Dissonance: The rise of the Tea Party movement should disabuse any American of the thought that the cleavages produced by the “culture wars” have healed. The cultural upheaval touched off by the 1960s and centered on Vietnam remains unfinished business in this country.

Among other things, the sixties destroyed an American consensus, forged during World War II, about the meaning of patriotism. During the so-called Good War, love of country implied, even required, deference to the state, shown most clearly in the willingness of individuals to accept the government’s authority to mandate military service. GI’s, the vast majority of them draftees, were the embodiment of American patriotism, risking life and limb to defend the country.

The GI of World War II had been an American Everyman. Those soldiers both represented and reflected the values of the nation from which they came (a perception affirmed by the ironic fact that the military adhered to prevailing standards of racial segregation). It was “our army” because that army was “us.”

With Vietnam, things became more complicated. The war’s supporters argued that the World War II tradition still applied: patriotism required deference to the commands of the state. Opponents of the war, especially those facing the prospect of conscription, insisted otherwise. They revived the distinction, formulated a generation earlier by the radical journalist Randolph Bourne, that distinguished between the country and the state. Real patriots, the ones who most truly loved their country, were those who opposed state policies they regarded as misguided, illegal, or immoral.

In many respects, the soldiers who fought the Vietnam War found themselves caught uncomfortably in the center of this dispute. Was the soldier who died in Vietnam a martyr, a tragic figure, or a sap? Who deserved greater admiration: the soldier who fought bravely and uncomplainingly or the one who served and then turned against the war? Or was the war resister -- the one who never served at all -- the real hero?

War’s end left these matters disconcertingly unresolved. President Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to kill the draft in favor of an All-Volunteer Force, predicated on the notion that the country might be better served with a military that was no longer “us,” only complicated things further. So, too, did the trends in American politics where bona fide war heroes (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain) routinely lost to opponents whose military credentials were non-existent or exceedingly slight (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama), yet who demonstrated once in office a remarkable propensity for expending American blood (none belonging to members of their own families) in places like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. It was all more than a little unseemly.

Patriotism, once a simple concept, had become both confusing and contentious. What obligations, if any, did patriotism impose? And if the answer was none -- the option Americans seemed increasingly to prefer -- then was patriotism itself still a viable proposition?

Wanting to answer that question in the affirmative -- to distract attention from the fact that patriotism had become little more than an excuse for fireworks displays and taking the occasional day off from work -- people and politicians alike found a way to do so by exalting those Americans actually choosing to serve in uniform. The thinking went this way: soldiers offer living proof that America is a place still worth dying for, that patriotism (at least in some quarters) remains alive and well; by common consent, therefore, soldiers are the nation’s “best,” committed to “something bigger than self” in a land otherwise increasingly absorbed in pursuing a material and narcissistic definition of self-fulfillment.

In effect, soldiers offer much-needed assurance that old-fashioned values still survive, even if confined to a small and unrepresentative segment of American society. Rather than Everyman, today’s warrior has ascended to the status of icon, deemed morally superior to the nation for which he or she fights, the repository of virtues that prop up, however precariously, the nation’s increasingly sketchy claim to singularity.

Politically, therefore, “supporting the troops” has become a categorical imperative across the political spectrum. In theory, such support might find expression in a determination to protect those troops from abuse, and so translate into wariness about committing soldiers to unnecessary or unnecessarily costly wars. In practice, however, “supporting the troops” has found expression in an insistence upon providing the Pentagon with open-ended drawing rights on the nation’s treasury, thereby creating massive barriers to any proposal to affect more than symbolic reductions in military spending.

Misremembered History: The duopoly of American politics no longer allows for a principled anti-interventionist position. Both parties are war parties. They differ mainly in the rationale they devise to argue for interventionism. The Republicans tout liberty; the Democrats emphasize human rights. The results tend to be the same: a penchant for activism that sustains a never-ending demand for high levels of military outlays.

American politics once nourished a lively anti-interventionist tradition. Leading proponents included luminaries such as George Washington and John Quincy Adams. That tradition found its basis not in principled pacifism, a position that has never attracted widespread support in this country, but in pragmatic realism. What happened to that realist tradition? Simply put, World War II killed it -- or at least discredited it. In the intense and divisive debate that occurred in 1939-1941, the anti-interventionists lost, their cause thereafter tarred with the label “isolationism.”

The passage of time has transformed World War II from a massive tragedy into a morality tale, one that casts opponents of intervention as blackguards. Whether explicitly or implicitly, the debate over how the United States should respond to some ostensible threat -- Iraq in 2003, Iran today -- replays the debate finally ended by the events of December 7, 1941. To express skepticism about the necessity and prudence of using military power is to invite the charge of being an appeaser or an isolationist. Few politicians or individuals aspiring to power will risk the consequences of being tagged with that label.

In this sense, American politics remains stuck in the 1930s -- always discovering a new Hitler, always privileging Churchillian rhetoric -- even though the circumstances in which we live today bear scant resemblance to that earlier time. There was only one Hitler and he’s long dead. As for Churchill, his achievements and legacy are far more mixed than his battalions of defenders are willing to acknowledge. And if any one figure deserves particular credit for demolishing Hitler’s Reich and winning World War II, it’s Josef Stalin, a dictator as vile and murderous as Hitler himself.

Until Americans accept these facts, until they come to a more nuanced view of World War II that takes fully into account the political and moral implications of the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union and the U.S. campaign of obliteration bombing directed against Germany and Japan, the mythic version of “the Good War” will continue to provide glib justifications for continuing to dodge that perennial question: How much is enough?

Like concentric security barriers arrayed around the Pentagon, these four factors -- institutional self-interest, strategic inertia, cultural dissonance, and misremembered history -- insulate the military budget from serious scrutiny. For advocates of a militarized approach to policy, they provide invaluable assets, to be defended at all costs.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Bacevich discusses the money that pours into the national security budget, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

FREEDOM TO SHOOT

2011-01-08T15:08:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER

By Ivan G. Goldman

Last April Gov. Jan Brewer signed loony legislation making Arizona the third state to allow people to carry a concealed weapon without requiring a permit. Proponents claimed this would make everyone safer.

No operator’s license, no sanity test, no rules.

Before the last election Sarah Palin's Facebook page carried a map featuring 20 gun sights, one for each of the Democrats targeted this year by her political action committee. The committee also circulated a matching poster. One of those targeted was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, shot in the skull today by one of those lone gunmen enabled by Brewer, Palin, and other lesser lights of their ilk. The geek shooter was aided and supported by the wide-open gun laws demanded and secured by the cowardly gun freaks who dictate our laws on firearms, such as they are.

Brewer said she was shocked, saddened, etc. by the events at a Tucson shopping center. Apparently her brain is unable to process two thoughts simultaneously, so she’s unable to see any connection between the maniacal wide-open gun legislation she so joyously celebrated and this event. House Speaker John Boehner, another friend of gun crazies, issued a statement saying he was “horrified” by the shooting. As I write there are six confirmed deaths and 13 confirmed wounded, Giffords among the latter.

When Lee Oswald assassinated John Kennedy in 1963 he got off three shots with a bolt action rifle. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons were much harder to get in those days, but now you can find them at any gun show, and the gun shows are protected from any meaningful supervision. Although selling fully automatic weapons remains illegal, sleazy geeks behind the tables at those "shows" will gladly show you how to easily convert their semi-automatic weapons to fire on full automatic.

If you’re not familiar with such weapons, a semi-automatic requires you to pull the trigger for each shot. When you press the trigger on an automatic it will pour out rounds until you run out of ammo. And if you have spare magazines you can quickly slip in another clip and resume murdering innocents. Such weapons have nothing to do with hunting. They are designed to kill lots of people.

The bolt action weapon used by Oswald required the shooter to manually reload the chamber for each shot by pulling back the bolt. Guns are getting much better, but people aren’t, and gun laws are much, much worse. In fact, our Roberts Supreme Court told us in a landmark ruling against the city of Chicago, that it’s unconstitutional for a local government to ban firearms.

Possibly this new bloody spectacle will spark sanity in our gun laws, but we’ve already had dozens and dozens of students gunned down by crazies inside their schools, and if those very preventable tragedies can’t make a difference, it’s difficult to see why this one would do the trick. Gun loons still sit on the Supreme Court, and politicians know that they can support gun insanity at no cost, but if they oppose it they will be handing a ton of money and votes to their opponents.

At this point we don’t know the details, but with so many wounded we can assume some of the Tucson victims will be crippled physically, and more than a few will be badly injured emotionally. Those flesh wounds from the old cowboy movies are rarer in real life. Bullets shatter bones, create blood poisoning, and ruin organs, making them never quite work the way they used to. I doubt any of the Tucson victims or their families will be celebrating the laws, unique among the civilized nations, that guarantee crazies in our republic the right to own and carry these terrible weapons.

OBAMA GIVES AWAY MORE OF THE STORE

2010-12-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Sending the President out to make a deal is like telling Lady Gaga to fix the trade deficit for you. The results won't be pretty. Though he’s erroneously been portrayed as a master Chicago-type fixer, he’s proved over and over again that he’s one of the very worst negotiators west of Iraq. If Obama were haggling for a forty-dollar rug it would cost him ten thousand plus tax, carrying charges, and the shopkeeper’s serving of lukewarm tea.

Recently he froze the salaries of federal workers for the next two years, giving Republicans something they wanted and screwing a lot of Democratic union members in exchange for . . . nothing. He and his advisors apparently never stopped to think that if they really wanted to do this thing it could be part of a deal that would, say, help him extend jobless benefits for the millions who’ve already started to lose them. If LBJ were around to see this he’d ask to return to hell. Not extending these benefits has already started working its way through the economy like a giant dust storm. It’s hard to find sane economists who think it was a good idea, but Republicans and their blue dog allies don’t listen to economists, scientists, and the like, who have a pernicious habit of trying to warn them about facts.

Obama and his people have already signaled he’s ready to cave and let Republicans and conservative blue dogs who claim to be concerned about the deficit to extend tax cuts for millionaires and cost the treasury $700 billion over the next ten years. Don’t expect him to get much out of the deal. If you sent him out to sell your cow he’d probably trade her for a few beans.

We know all abut his quickness to cave on the public option in the health care bill, which meant greed-o-maniacal insurance thieves would be free to continue slicing off their huge mob-sized vigorish from chunks of funds supposed to go toward medical care.

When Obama does try to act like a wheeler-dealer the results are even worse than when he surrenders before sitting down to the table. He owed Janet Napolitano a favor when she campaigned for him against Hillary so he made her Homeland Security secretary. This was wrong for two very big reasons. One, she stinks at the job. When they caught the underwear bomber already on the plane with the explosives she said it shows the system “is working.” Under her wise stewardship we continue frisking elderly white women at airports.

But more important? When Democrat Napolitano joined the Cabinet she stepped down as Arizona governor with two years still left on her term, handing the baton to next-in-line Jan Brewer, a tea party Republican maniac who sees invisible heads in the Arizona desert, who wages personal war on busboys and housemaids, who thinks it’s a good idea for rednecks to carry concealed firearms into bars and churches, and who lately ruled that a 32-year-old father will have to die because the state can’t afford a liver transplant. Remember when the Republicans warned us about death panels? Well Brewer is a one-woman death panel.

Obama appointed a deficit commission loaded with weasels and let ex-Senator Alan Simpson, a vicious lap dog for the financial oligarchy, take center stage to preach in favor of adding additional financial burdens on the bottom 99 percent while corporations and the fabulously wealthy are handed even more breaks. Those who oppose his plan, he said, are the forces of "darkness," and he said it in such a way that news media treated his rap as though it had some element of truth. And where was Obama? Ceding ground.

Democrats in Congress are very much aware that there’s something screwy about the way the president handles these situations, and it robs them of morale and energy, killing any momentum they might have built. Why bust your butt trying to save people’s paychecks, mortgages, and benefits if the president’s going to let them get screwed anyway?

Not all this is Obama’s fault. The public, when it takes its eyes off Dancing with the Stars and such, is fed the Republican line that Democrats don’t care about deficits at the same time Republicans are spilling red ink everywhere to help out their fat-cat pals. And news media either fail to clarify the picture or, if they’re part of the Fox-Murdoch empire or their clone outfits like CNBC, paint one that unmistakably blames everything on the Democrats, including a global financial collapse and subsequent bailout that took place on Bush’s watch. But a president is supposed to be a leader, to make the tough choices and explain them and fight for them and get people behind them. That’s not happening, and after two years of fumbling, looks less and less likely.

PACQUIAO HAS STRATEGY FOR OBAMA

2010-11-15T13:05:00.001-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

President Obama could learn a valuable lesson from Manny Pacquiao, a member of the Philippines Congress and also of course the best fighter in the world. The lesson would be the art of the counterpunch.

All great fighters counterpunch. Just as the opponent tries to throw something, they slip in their own shot first. If it’s executed properly, the counterpunch will come in so fast and hard that the opponent’s punch, even though it went out first, will freeze before it lands because his neuro-biological structure couldn’t handle what struck him. And an opponent is never so vulnerable as when he’s punching. With a fist out there on the attack, he has to be wide open somewhere. And that’s precisely where the counterpuncher lands -- sometimes two, three, four shots. This isn’t chess. You don’t have to wait your turn.

Often the opponent learns, like Pavlov’s dogs did, what sort of reaction follows a certain action. When he throws, he gets punished, so he pulls in and pretty much stops putting out punches. Antonio Margarito, desperate to prove his mettle, didn’t do that. He kept trying, which is why his face turned to dogfood. Pacquiao’s previous opponent, Joshua Clottey, was quickly tamed and basically just tried to survive, covering up, retreating, and throwing few shots.

Now what does this have to do with Obama? You already guessed. He doesn’t hit back, so opponents have nothing to lose by insulting him and his policies and opposing and lying about them. Also, Obama doesn’t, as so many other presidents have done in modern times, send his vice president out to slam the opposition. Obama gives fighters what they call a free lunch, making him, unfortunately, a chump.

In fact, he begins to surrender as soon as the opponent threatens to punch. It’s happened again and again, on the public option part of the health-care plan, for example. Without it, insurance companies can careen down the price road without braking, and if they run over somebody, tough luck. The plan that got passed was an improvement over what we had, but it should have been better. Now there’s early Obama surrender on the tax cuts for the super-rich doled out by Bush the Second and his compliant Congress. And the counterpunch is so obvious. It’s like an uppercut begging to be thrown underneath a lazy hook, but it doesn’t happen.

The Republicans’ main complaint is the deficit. So how do they solve it? By running it up higher to do favors for the people who least need them.

The Republicans vow to repeal “Obamacare,” but the health-care plan cuts the deficit too -- you know, that thing the Republicans claim to despise so much.

Then there’s their cure for banks. Deregulation. A powerless, stupid jab just aching for a right hand over the top. There should be no argument about any of this because there are facts on one side and lies on the other. No economist who isn’t a crackpot will tell you that cutting taxes for the super-rich is a good way to stimulate the economy or be fair to the public. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office states flatly that the health-care act will pare the deficit. Incidentally, it's true that families making $250,00 and living in big metropolitan areas aren't super-rich. We need more tax brackets. People making $5 million should pay a stiffer rate than those making $250,000.

As for personal attacks, it’s correct just to ignore some of them. Others should be addressed by Joe Biden, who can do a couple rounds once in a while for his boss. He’s willing. He knows what his job is supposed to be, but Obama won’t send him out do it. These stories are slow, dumb punches perfect for a vice president to feast on – allusions and downright statements that the president was born in Indonesia or Kenya, that he’s a Muslim, that he’s the wrong kind of Christian, that he’s a fascist, socialist, communist out to undermine America.

Lots of voters loved Obama when he was a candidate, but they didn’t expect him to be a president who goes out there round after round and hunkers down without throwing any punches. People want a leader who fights for what’s right, does it clean, with hard, quick shots.

Obama learned over the years that it’s dangerous to be an angry black man. It stimulates the fear and loathing among many whites that Hunter Thompson discovered in so many places around America. But screw race. We need a Pacquiao who explains the facts to opponents in ways they can understand. They’ll be so busy covering up and getting pasted that no one will be aware of the champ’s race. They’ll just know America won.

For more allusions to boxing and life, click on The Barfighter on the right corner of this page. For more allusions to politics and life, click on Exit Blue.

YOU MEAN STARVING THE GOVERNMENT WON'T PRODUCE EDUCATED WORK FORCE?

2010-09-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
You’d think some of these cold-blooded toads running global corporations would have at least an elementary understanding that causes will produce effects, but no, now they’re complaining they can’t find workers with elementary math and reading skills.

Greed-head companies hand billions each year to political prostitutes in Washington and state capitals to keep their taxes low. Then they’re surprised that public schools, community colleges, and universities starved for cash can’t provide them with an educated work force.

Also, when you strip funding from social service, health, and parks and recreation agencies, you end up with more kids joining gangs and doing crack. Such children don’t generally grow up to be model employees. But corporations can’t seem to make that connection either.

The National Association of Manufacturers, one of the most rabid anti-tax lobbying groups on the planet, recently griped to The New York Times that in one of its surveys, 32 percent of companies reported “moderate to serious” skills shortages despite our republic's teeming population of unemployed workers. That percentage jumped to 45 percent for energy-related firms and 63 percent for companies making life science products. Because manufacturing has become more complex, companies say they can’t find people to read instructions or blueprints or to operate machinery.

The hypocrisy gets worse. In many cases the firms making these complaints put together lobbying groups whose job is to deliberately mis-educate the public so its members will swallow ignorant concepts -- to believe, for example, that polluting activities have no effect on the climate. They also align themselves with anti-science forces that reject evolution, stem-cell research, and even research in general, backing ignorant hacks like Sarah Palin who slam government funding of fruit fly research -- research that’s already reaped enormous benefits to humankind in fighting disease.

You can’t get informed voters to support, for example, an altogether crazy Republican Pledge to America that seeks to keep taxes low for the rich while raving about cutting government debt. So you try to get yourself an uninformed, uneducated populace incapable of the most elementary critical thinking. Then what do you do? Why you complain that employee applicants are uneducated louts incapable of the most elementary critical thinking.

ARMY OF HACKS PUSHES FORWARD

2010-09-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER By Ivan G. Goldman
Ever wonder why we can’t seem to get away from the furor over President Obama’s mild proposal to take back some of the immense tax cuts for the rich that Bush the Second slid through Congress?

We’re only talking about people who earn more than $250,000 a year – 2 percent of the population, and they’d get to keep those windfall tax cuts for the first $250,000 of their income. Someone who earns $260,000 in gross adjusted income would see taxes go up only on that last $10,000. So the only people sustaining any real damage would be those whose earnings are in the millions. But how do you damage someone making $40 million? The answer is, you don’t – not by asking them to pay 39.6 percent on those last few millions. The top rate now is 35 percent. Incidentally, when Eisenhower was president the top rate was 91 percent.

So why all the fuss? Because those few people who sit atop the asset pyramid have, particularly over the last few decades, created a vast army of hacks whose principal job is to convince the rest of us that any legislative moves to establish fairness, by undermining these plutocrats, would somehow hurt all of us. So for the next couple weeks we’re going to hear a lot about how taking back some tax cuts for incomes over $250,000 will cripple the country and wreck “small business” (Joe the Plumbers) even though owners of small businesses are an entirely separate group of people who’d be untouched by the proposal. Don’t expect the corporate media to correct the fallacy. The weak-minded and ill-informed are quicker to accept it, but hammer away at decently intelligent people hard enough and often enough and even they might start to believe two and two is five, particularly when they become desperate, as so many American are these days.

Just who are the hacks spreading this bullshit and where do they reside? Some of their lairs can be found in the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the John Templeton Foundation, thousands of corporate lobbying groups in Washington and state capitals (including sinister institutions that labor for “families,” all the Murdoch enterprises, and thousands of legislative offices in Washington and state capitals. They all pay good wages for spreading propaganda and have recruited an entire army of mercenaries who write unceasing op-ed page pieces, snag “news” show interviews within the corporate media and repeat and repeat their Big Lies. Typically they don't stay in one job but ride a cutthroat career circuit. Their opponents are backed by far less generous resources.

I’m paid nothing for this blog. I started it because I felt I had to do something when Bush Junior sent my son to Iraq (twice). I also use it as a feeble attempt to sell my books (check out two of them on the right side of the page). But when I used to work as a straight-ahead journalist and my political opinions weren’t known, I was offered Dark Side positions on editorial boards and in congressional committee offices. I’d be lying if I said the temptation wasn’t strong, and I know plenty of people who went over. A good friend recently signed on with one of the institutions I named in the previous paragraph. Ethical positions that pay decently are fewer and fewer as print media die. And why try to work on the side of the angels when even a victory doesn’t spell victory? Lately victory just slows down the betrayal. Allow me to explain.

Sorry to keep hammering on this, but why did Obama select Frank and Jesse James (Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers) to drive the economic train? Probably for the same reason the Clintons wrecked the welfare system, rammed through world Trade Organization and NAFTA agreements that enriched mega-corporations at the expense of everyone else and worked closely with Republican Dick Armey to retract FDR’s cherished Glass-Steagall Act that prevented banks from making wild bets with their depositors’ money. But The Republicans still impeached Bill for lying about a few stray blowjobs. You can’t buy these people off. And Obama won't be able to placate them either. The army is in place and the tanks are fueled and on the move.

IS THERE REALLY A ZULU, HIPPIE, ATHEIST CONSPIRACY TO CRIPPLE AMERICA?

2010-08-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
How did it come to pass that Fox News and its screaming pals on the talk-radio circuit have convinced so many Americans to forsake their own interests so they can combat a nonexistent Zulu hippie atheist conspiracy to cripple America?

It’s because our population is more ignorant and poorly educated than it used to be, and the problem grows worse as our trickle-down economy beats up more and more on the shrinking, confused middle class. People incapable of critical analysis are easier to manipulate, particularly as increasingly sophisticated mass media blend news, gossip, advertising, and propaganda into a mess of commingled goo. So voters pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. People barely scraping through the ruins of our economy actually support politicians who vote against saving the jobs of teachers and in favor of tax cuts for the super-wealthy.

As Robert Reich recently pointed out, in 2007, 23.5 percent of U.S. income went to the top 1 percent of earners. They soaked up a relatively more benign 9 percent of income in 1980. Yet if you pay any attention to these statistics you’re considered “un-American” by the zombie minions who favor mindless war and pollution and disfavor medical care for the disadvantaged. Of course there's also a moral question here, but it's something these people either don't see or can't bear to examine.

The College Board recently reported that the U.S., once the world’s leader in the percentage of young people with college degrees, has fallen to 12th among 36 developed nations. The U.S. ranks behind Canada, South Korea, Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, Israel, France, Belgium and Australia.

A growing percentage of students who do get an education here are from other lands. After graduation most of them will return home to enrich their own countries with their knowledge.

But even if we were to regain our Number One status, the problem goes deeper. According to Dan Poynter and Erma Bombeck, only 42 percent of America’s college graduates will ever read another book after they leave school. I consider that statistic reasonably accurate because many respondents lie to pollsters to look better, meaning the truth could be even worse. Many students stumbling through to a degree see it as a social/financial tool and have little intellectual curiosity.

On August 3, 71 percent of Missouri voters approved a ballot measure designed to thwart the federal government from establishing the newly enacted health care plan inside the state. At last count, fourteen states have sued in an effort to escape the terrible tentacles of limited health care reform so they can nestle safely in the bosom of unimpeded insurers and drug manufacturers.

The ability to apply critical thought to the most transparently fallacious propaganda is rapidly disappearing. Yes, Obama is an imperfect leader, but who among us could solve a broken economy, a rigged tax system, two crazy wars, a melting planet, and a nonexistent health policy before the next set of midterm elections?

What this administration’s opponents don’t tell their deluded followers is the true content of their strategy, which is to combine the worst elements of the Hoover, Reagan, and Bush Junior administrations. Republicans like Bobby Jindal, Mitch McConnell and ex-Governor Sarah obtain their ideas from people like dope-addled college dropout Rush Limbaugh. They figure they don’t need to take the time to find out what they’re talking about as long as their contributions keep rolling in. Maybe they’re right.

AN ADMIRAL'S INSUBORDINATION AND OTHER EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS

2010-07-21T12:23:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Here's something extraordinary: Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently echoed the tea-partiers' claim that the greatest threat to our nation is its national debt, meaning that we must kill all programs conservatives don’t like, including Social Security.

Remarkably, no one in the big-time media or the Obama Administration noticed the significance of Mullen’s remarkably insubordinate, gratuitous statement. Apparently this guy's setting up a political campaign inside the Pentagon.

It's also extraordinary that Obama has followed in Nixon's footsteps by expanding a pointless, hopeless war that he inherited from a predecessor, particularly since it's clear if we leave Afghanistan 10 days from now or 10 years from now the result will be the same.

It's extraordinary that the Obama Administration expects Afghans to place faith in Hamid Karzai, someone they’ve watched bungle, cheat, and lie for nine years.

It's extraordinary that Karzai has the chutzpah to demand that all U.S. aid be channeled through him. Can he account for any of the money we’ve given him so far?

It's extraordinary that Karzai would steal over a million votes in an election in which citizens risked their lives to cast ballots.

It's extraordinary that our administration appears to be telling the Brits they’re not giving it enough time when they let it be known that they’d like to pull out of Afghanistan by 2015, which would make it a 13-year commitment.

It's extraordinary that we still have troops in Iraq, Okinawa, and Germany. Is there ever a place we pull out of?

It's extraordinary that Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner call the shots on banking and economic policy. It's like hiring Jesse James to drive the train.

It's extraordinary that the Obama Administration still places its faith in WTO and NAFTA agreements that are nearly bereft of protections for workers and are beating us into the ground by importing junk and exporting jobs.

And remarkably, our tax code still subsidizes corporations that send U.S. jobs overseas.

It's extraordinary that conservative lawmakers believe they can gain votes and support by torturing unemployed people and withholding their benefits. Remarkably, in many congressional districts these lawmakers have gauged their constituents correctly.

It's extraordinary that no one in the media asks conservatives who demand that jobless benefits be offset by cuts elsewhere why they have no trouble voting for crazy boondoggles (Star Wars, for example, 19 years after the collapse of the USSR) and outright gifts to the super-wealthy (killing the estate tax, for example).

It's extraordinary that we must wait four more years for “pre-existing condition” to be wiped out of the insurance-industry vernacular.

JOBLESSNESS, FILIBUSTERS & RENT

2010-07-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

It’s unlikely any of those Republican senators who this week mounted a successful filibuster against jobless benefits thought about it, but they cut off funding just in time to make over a million families miss their mortgages, rent, and car payments for the month of July.

The senators then went home to enjoy another one of their two-week congressional holidays. Incidentally, you’d think someone would start to ask questions about how anyone gets away with taking off two weeks for Independence Day – a holiday whose one-day duration is stated right in its title. This is like quitting your work station for the weekend so you can go on a fifteen-minute coffee break.

It’s impossible to know how many families will go homeless because of the cavalier attitude of senators who make $174,000 a year plus almost unimaginable perks that include using proceeds from their legalized extortion rackets to “hire” family members at six-figure salaries. Just about every one of the fast-buck artists in the Senate who refused help to laid-off workers are the same legislators who killed a proposal to make big banks pay insurance fees against their own failure.

These are incredible back-to-back actions – working in behalf of the bankers who wrecked the world economy and then voting to withhold help from families impoverished by the bankers’ criminal incompetence. You’d think the constituents of some of these senators would catch on, but con men like Saxby Chambliss of Georgia take it for granted that they can get away with murder, and they do. All they have to do is lie about it. Sure, the mass media will also report what the liars’ adversaries say about an issue, but the two sides will be presented as though they’re both valid arguments even in instances when two minutes of Google research would expose the unassailable truth.

Besides which, millions of Americans get their news from Fox and other media that don’t even bother to report the true side of an argument.

Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, etc. claimed, for example, that we would all suffer terribly if we were to alter the worst health care system in the civilized world, and the media presented that side of the argument as an equally thoughtful viewpoint to counterbalance the force of reason.

Senators who cut estate taxes for the super-rich and fund Star Wars and all sorts of other corporate scams only notice the deficit when someone proposes a budget item that might actually do some good. But news stories don’t put two and two together.

As we celebrate a day that commemorates a revolution against tyranny, perhaps we can spend a moment or two thinking about all the Americans who this month will lose their battle to pay the rent.

My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

OBAMA FOLLOWS NIXON TRAIL INTO AFGHANISTAN

2010-06-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

All the bad news out of the Gulf of Mexico is masking another series of awful facts developing on the ground in Afghanistan that could put Rush Limbaugh and Co. over the top, making Barack Obama a one-term president.

Obama’s frightfully imbecilic Afghanistan policy is slowly fashioning him into a 21^st century Richard Nixon. Both men inherited wars from their predecessors that they could have extricated themselves from at the outset of their terms, but neither had the guts. In our topsy-turvy politics it’s easier to ride a mindless war policy downhill toward disaster than it is to slam on the brakes.

Nixon, like Obama, tried escalation for awhile, turning the Air Force loose on Cambodia and bombing the hell out of a jungle filled with innocents in hopes that some of the ordnance would strike the enemy and disrupt his supply lines. Obama has upped his ante from approximately 35,000 troops to almost three times that amount plus lots and lots of extremely expensive private contractors doing jobs that used to be done by people in uniform. And casualties are climbing, with the U.S. death rate now approaching two lives a day.

Eventually Nixon, crippled by Watergate, began to disengage from his war under the cloak of “Vietnamization.” Still, we lost approximately 20,000 U.S. lives during his turn at the wheel. All for nothing.

The Nixonites used to put out the same kind of blather we’re hearing from Obama and Company. Really meaningless crap. If we’re to believe this Administration, the corrupt, blundering Hamid Karzai, a disturbed personality and a hopeless liar, will lead the Afghan people toward democracy. It’s just possible Americans will accept that incredible whopper for awhile, but tell it to the Afghans, who’ve watched this guy up close for eight years already.

We watched Bush for eight years. How many people at the end of his second term would believe he could suddenly turn into a fine leader making wise decisions at every turn? See what I mean? It’s all ridiculous insulting propaganda, junk food for foolish or preoccupied minds. Only one out of ten Afghan police recruits can read. Yet we’re supposed to spend billions and billions turning it into a Central Asian Nebraska? Don’t hold your breath.

Our poor troops on the ground are supposed to convince the Afghans that we’re going to stay. They’re not dumb enough to believe that either. Because at some point we will leave, and when we do, whether it’s tomorrow or ten thousand U.S. lives from now, the result will be the same.

It would be nice to civilize Afghanistan and bring it peace and democracy. But even if those goals were possible, the price would be much too high. The time to win there was right after Nine-Eleven, when we had Bin Laden trapped. But most intelligence people believe he’s been across the border in Pakistan for years. If we pursue wars wherever Al Qaeda establishes a safe house for a while we’d now be at war with the United Kingdom and Germany, among other countries.

Where do you think those 100,000 troops would do us more good? Fighting a stupid fight in Afghanistan or cleaning up the Gulf State beaches? I rest my case.

My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

TRADE OLBERMANNN TO MEXICO

2010-06-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Brave journalists in Mexico and Russia are getting murdered for trying to print real news. But here in the U.S., journalists safe from such atrocities write about who's going to win American Idol and speculate on why Al and Tipper broke up.
Or they behave like MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, the supposedly liberal antidote to right-wing Fox.

Olbermann is a clumsy, would-be clown who mimics Fox and other far-right personalities in a silly voice that has about as much entertainment value as taking out the garbage. Then there’s his MSNBC colleague Rachel Maddow who’s supposed to be a cut above the rest because she reads the news with a smirk.

These and other media gatekeepers are searching frantically for something to take the place of the BP-sponsored disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which is depressing and devoid of sex appeal. They might consider checking out why we're stuck in two wars and being barbecued by huge global banks, oil and drug corporations, and anyone else who knows how to channel legal bribes to political weasels.

This dereliction of duty by the media adds to American confusion on what constitutes news and what constitutes gossip and helps explain why Tiger Woods had to apologize to everybody for screwing waitresses but no one has to explain why they pursue crazy wars or, like Obama’s chief economic advisor Lawrence Summers, slither back and forth between government and Wall Street leaving a slime trail of betrayal.

The giant banking corporations have siphoned off so much of the economy under our klept-o-cratic government that their share now threatens to exceed Limbaugh’s weight. The top four banks have assets equal to 52 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. They didn’t siphon off all this wealth by natural selection or free enterprise. They paid off people in government to put the fix in, fashioning legislation that made it inevitable. These banks need to be taken apart, the same way we took apart AT&T almost thirty years ago.

The AT&T suit was initiated by the Justice Department in 1974 under a Republican administration. In those days Republican leaders were conservative, not crazy.

But the financial reform bills moving around committees in the Senate and House won’t break up the big banks or even re-establish a separation between broker-financiers and plain-vanilla banks that served us well from the FDR years until “moderate” Bill Clinton gave Wall Street free rein in 1999 when he killed the Glass-Steagall Law. His Treasury Secretary (Guess who?) Lawrence Summers was fanatically in favor of the crazy decision to fix a banking system that wasn’t broken.

In his new position Summers is still “fixing” things. And he’ll get away with it too because the global corporations that own U.S. news media spend their resources on clowns like Olbermann and Maddow instead of crusading Mexican journalists like Valentín Valdés, a crime reporter for Zócalo de Saltillo. He was grabbed off the street January 8, thrown into an SUV, tortured, and shot to death. Valdés was 29 years old.

Olbermann gets $7 million a year plus perks. Valdés did a lot more for a lot less.
My recent novel Exit Blue (Black Heron; 2010) is available at Amazon and elsewhere.

THERE'S A DECENT WAY TO CONTROL IMMIGRATION

2010-05-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

During his visit to Washington, Mexican President Felipe Calderon used coded language to assert once again that the best U.S. immigration policy along our southern border is not to have any. That’s been Mexico’s unofficial policy for decades, and all major political parties there support it.

The U.S. is a terrific safety valve for Mexico’s unemployed, and the dollars its displaced laborers send home keeps the place going. Adherents on both sides of the border, Calderon among them, figure anyone who’s managed to get inside the U.S.A. one way or another ought to be allowed to stay, especially if they stop looking for scarce jobs in Mexico and send money.

In my last post, when I juxtaposed Hitler’s infamous Nuremberg laws with the new Arizona law designed to catch and deport aliens, many readers seemed to think I sided with Calderon. I don’t. A country needs to control its borders. Otherwise, why be a country? We’d be attracting not just people looking for legitimate opportunities and freedom but also a wide range of felons and terrorists.

But stopping people and asking them for their papers because they look somehow foreign is a grievous practice that doesn’t reflect what our country is supposed to stand for. The solution to this quandary is in your wallet in the form of your high-tech ATM card. We need Social Security cards that, like ATM cards, can’t be forged and can be plugged into a central data bank. Anyone who employs people who don’t have the card should suffer serious penalties.

Under this logical system many people here illegally would go home and far fewer people would try to sneak in. But this very obvious solution is opposed by civil liberties advocates on the left and right because they fear it would infringe on our civil rights. They’re allied with greedhead corporations that don’t want to pay people what they’re worth.

We all know the current system. Would-be employees produce fake or borrowed Social Security cards printed with nineteenth century technology. They can be produced with a few clicks of a mouse. The corporations wink at these silly cards, record the bogus numbers for the IRS, and eventually, if the worker doesn’t skip to another job, the feds may catch the discrepancy, but then the employer can plead he did exactly what he was supposed to, so don’t blame him. Meanwhile the worker has moved on to another job site with the same bogus card or perhaps another one, starting the process all over again.

The meat-packing industry, for example, pays its lobbyists to keep the system in place so it can continue to hire eminently exploitable undocumented aliens to do dirty jobs for half their economic worth. Working on offshore oil rigs and mining coal that’s deep underground are dirty, dangerous jobs. Americans fill them because those industries pay what the jobs are worth.

If all industries did this it would raise the price of some goods – lettuce, for example -- but it would also create good-paying jobs for people who need them and we wouldn’t be saddled with a system that makes no sense.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) have a bill in the hopper that would create what they call a “high-tech, fraud-proof Social Security card” that would be required for all employees in the United States. But their bill specifically prohibits the information from being plugged into a national data bank, making it pretty much unworkable. The fact is, we need to know that people working in this country have a legal right to do so, and if people like Calderon don’t like it, they can earn the right to influence our domestic policies by applying for U.S. citizenship.

My new political satire Exit Blue (Black Heron Press; 2010) is now available online and in stores.

ARIZONA CAN FIND GUIDANCE IN NUREMBERG

2010-04-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Now that Arizona cops will be stopping people with brown skin and asking to see their papers, there’s consternation among state authorities who must follow the will of the voters. Just how will they fulfill these grave new responsibilities in their brave new white world?

Well, there’s no reason to re-invent the wheel. All they have to do is study how similar governments in the past executed their own citizen-defining policies. For this, there’s no better standard than the German Reich of 1933-45, which also had to identify and deal with a portion of the population whose position was no longer tenable.

There are differences, of course. The Arizona law makes the very existence of some people illegal. In Germany being Jewish wasn’t illegal, just penalized. But there are enough similarities between Nazi Germany and 21st century Arizona to learn from past mistakes and successes.

Also of use to Arizona will be the Nuremberg Laws that defined who could hold certain jobs or study at certain schools and all manner of other matters that will soon come up.

In order to exact the penalties required by law, the German government found it useful to require all Jews to wear yellow stars. This necessitated sending the Gestapo and other thugs out into the neighborhoods asking questions so that all those who ought to be wearing yellow stars were properly identified first. It worked fine. There were always neighbors around happy to cooperate with the process. Clearly there are plenty of civic-minded Arizonans willing to provide similar services to police.

Jews that wore stars could be rounded up because they wore stars. Jews that didn’t wear stars could be rounded up for not wearing stars. After arriving in the camps they received tattoos on their arms to help guards ascertain just who was who.

At first the Reich thought it might be a little touchy if they were to round up Jewish World War I veterans along with the other Jews, so they were given a pass. But eventually the population got used to Jews being rounded up and no longer made such distinctions, so the government, unimpeded, rounded up veterans too. Anne Frank's father Otto Frank was one of these veterans. Similarly in Arizona when the cops stop brown veterans and ask them for their papers it might weigh on the consciences of some white Arizonans, but like the good Germans, they'll get used to it in time.

Yellow stars and tattoos would be particularly useful in Arizona when it comes time to break up those families in which some brown people are citizens and some aren’t. When the state sends people back over the border, if they’ve received the appropriate tattoos it will make the identifying process oh so much easier should any of them try to return.

I hope I’ve eased the minds of Arizonans who feared they may have to solve all these questions on their own.

Exit Blue, a political satire by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron Press; 2010), is now available. See http://blackheron.mav.net/Exit%20Blue.html for more information.

FORECAST CLOUDY FOR TEA-PARTIERS

2010-04-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The political forecast is cloudy with a chance of sanity.

Yes, Sarah Palin gathers big crowds and extracts millions of dollars from her tea-party zombies. At the same time an Associated Press poll released this week found that one-third of those surveyed consider themselves tea-party supporters. A New York Times poll released simultaneously said 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as tea-party supporters.

The difference between 18 and 33 percent is huge, statistically speaking. One or both polls must be way off. But the discrepancy is also understandable. Just look at the placards these people produce. Many crowd members are functional crazies, and their answers to questions are liable to change minute to minute. What remains constant is their unreliability and susceptibility to nutty ideas that have little or no factual foundation.

A Massachusetts tea-party chieftain, complaining about high taxes, was recently confronted with the reality that Obama has cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans. How did she react? She said she doesn’t believe it. You can’t change the minds of these people with mere facts. They’re governed by the fear and loathing the late, great Hunter Thompson found in so many corners of our nation.

It’s a little scary to know loonies walk among us and register to vote. They also get elected to Congress. But here’s another statistic worth noting: Demographers say that 2010 will be the tipping point – the first year in which more non-white babies are born in the U.S. than white ones. Just how many non-white faces did you spot at those tea-party rallies? Exactly. A party and a movement that excludes so many Americans is doomed to fail.

Each succeeding generation is less bigoted than the one before. The world is closing in on these jerks. They know it, they feel it, and it makes them crazier.

Now the bad news: The public is poorly educated, and increasingly, so are teachers and journalists. The public is fed more and more news that runs the gamut from sloppy and puerile to downright false. As resources grow scarce, so does good schooling, and the ignorance builds on itself, making the public easier to fool. Goofy slogans crush thoughtful positions.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck don’t have three semesters of college between them, and they’re not voracious readers either. They appear to secure their facts through bouts of mysticism that, at least in Limbaugh’s case, are heavily fueled by drug use. They don’t seem to know or care that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and their followers (that includes most of the Republicans in Congress) don’t care either.

The recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to spend as much money as they like on political ads is an ax hanging over the heads of politicians who might otherwise be tempted to do good work. Cross Exxon-Mobil or GlaxoSmithKline and they can come after you in the next election with millions of dollars. That threat alone will help these corporations get what they want at the expense of everyone else. I hope I’m wrong, but I expect, for example, air, water, food, and medicine to grow increasingly dangerous while Congress concentrates on decoy issues like gay marriage, which is really none of its business.

My new political satire Exit Blue (Black Heron Press; 2010) is available online and at better stores everywhere.

WHAT ABOUT GIVING SECESSION AOTHER CHANCE?

2010-04-08T11:57:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Republicans and their govnoed legions, crazier than Cubs fans, are so distraught that health care will now become available to more Americans that some of them are pining for the good old days of the Confederacy.

Govnoed, by the way, is what members of the old Soviet intelligence apparatus used to call people dumb enough to believe their bullshit. It means, literally, shit eaters. Govnoed, many of them in the West, would battle against their own self-interest even though, unlike well-placed party officials and KGB/GRU agents, they received no special perks in exchange for their efforts. Kind of an apt word for tea-party-ers and other right-wing goofballs who act as shock troops for the corporate country-clubbers still running the GOP. How do you explain these crazies? As Voltaire pointed out approximately 250 years ago, it’s difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

New York Times columnist Gail Collins recently worried over Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation urging citizens to spend the month recalling the state’s days as a member of the Confederate States of America, you know, back when certain kinds of people he was too polite to categorize more precisely knew their place. The Georgia State Senate recently passed a bill to dedicate April to remembering the Confederacy, and there are similar nostalgic murmurs sweeping across the old Confederacy like the aroma of mint juleps in springtime. It’s becoming apparent that a black president in the White House enacting any of his agenda at all is just too much to take for these folks. And this go-it-alone sentiment isn’t confined to the South. Ex-Gov. Palin’s hubby has been known to pine for Alaskan independence, for example.

Good liberal Collins says she’d worry less about a “national discussion” of Civil War history “as long as we could start by agreeing that the whole leaving-the-union thing was a terrible idea.” Wait. Let’s back up a minute. Why should we automatically assume secession by some of our wackier states is a bad thing? Bear in mind that barely populated places like Wyoming and Utah have two senators apiece. Check out the voting records and character of their senators sometime. Who needs 'em? If any of these backward regions and their shit-eating camp followers elect to leave the union in a fair election, then what, may I ask, are Collins’ grounds for resistance? Think how much sweeter our country would be if we no longer had to try to compromise with right-wing maniacs? We might have a government that actually cares about its citizens.

The Republicans’ answer for the broken global economy, the broken health care system, and virtually every domestic problem we face is to deregulate corporations, mutilate social programs, and trim taxes for the very rich. When it comes to foreign policy questions, their answer is to shoot first and figure the rest out later. Climate change? Easy to fix. Just pretend it’s not there. And think how much more coal we could mine if owners didn’t have to answer to those pointy-headed safety inspectors. Church versus state? No problemo. The church is the state, and visa versa. At least that’s the way they think it oughta be.

In my new novel Exit Blue (warning: shameless plug follows) the union breaks up in another way. A too-familiar Texas dynasty retakes the White House and promptly invades Denmark, calling it the central front in the war on terror. The Blue States, having had enough, secede. How does that work out? I won’t spoil it for you.

But the fact is, the Constitution we’re taught to revere veered off well to the right of true democracy when it established a system that now gives voters in Idaho approximately 90 times the clout in the Senate as voters in New York or California. So should we be surprised that the Senate made things even worse by making sure nothing important can get passed without approval by 60 senators? That same inequality is also reflected in the Electoral College, which is why George W. Bush was handed the keys to the White House even though Al Gore won approximately 540,000 more votes. A key drawback to allowing crazy states to secede is that it would leave their sane minorities at the mercy of the marjority lunatics.

Republicans have veered so far to the right in the last few decades that their long-time friends the British Tories are creating as much distance from them as they can in the looming UK election. That's because Tories are actual conservatives, whereas Republicans, having purged their party of moderates, are mostly reactionaries. They want to return to the pre-New Deal era, and some of them, as Ms.Collins points out, seem to be flirting with the pre-Emancipation Proclamation era.

Note that I don't claim Democratic politicians are pure. Many of them, for example, tickled to pick up contributions from Wall Street greedheads, are helping Republicans block banking reform even as we speak. But if corrupt blowhards like Saxby Chambliss and Orrin Hatch could go do their own thing somewhere else it might breathe some fresh air on our polluted landscape, literally and figuratively. Or at least, as Hemingway’s Jake told Lady Brett, isn’t it pretty to think so?

Political satire Exit Blue by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron; 2010) is available at virtual stores everywhere.

SATIRICAL NOVEL ENVISIONS TWO-STATE SOLUTION IN 2019 AMERICA (And One of Them Invades Denmark! )

2010-03-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

Exit Blue, by Ivan G. Goldman (Black Heron Press; 2010)

Imagine a vice president who conducts business as he paces in front of a Citizen Kane-sized fireplace clutching a shotgun and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Now imagine a White House that plants a friendly male hooker in presidential press conferences. Which idea is more absurd? More factual?

Yes, those of us who were paying attention know that the White House-connected male hooker story is genuine. His name was Jeff Gannon, and he had no prior journalism experience, but he was mysteriously granted press credentials and allowed to range freely through W’s news conferences for years until he was finally, if you’ll excuse the expression, exposed. The president used to call on him by name and then field the absurdly friendly questions that always followed.

With stuff like that going on, it pretty much takes the wind out of satire’s sails. Because it’s next to impossible to invent fiction that’s any goofier than the reality. But I persevered, refusing to give up writing crazy stuff just because the world is crazy.

The image of the vice president pacing in front of the fireplace may or may not be based on reality, but it figures in my novel EXIT BLUE, a roman à clef that comes out from Black Heron Press at the end of this month.

The book is based on the premise that the Bush family retakes the White House and this time declares war on Denmark, which it fingers as the central front in the war on terror. The title is derived from the next shoe to drop – secession by the Blue states. That’s when the story really gets started. It’s all told by a handsome Air Force veteran now working as a ghost writer who gets very close to the president and her twin sister. I can’t tell you any more without ruining it for you. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I had writing it.

Bush Handlers are working on a restoration even as we speak, and I meant EXIT BLUE as a cautionary tale akin to Friday the Thirteenth Part III: Jason Returns. Thanks to a zany electorate and the alarming chasm that continues growing between Red and Blue America, anything is possible. If the most recent Bush Administration taught us anything, it’s that talent and ambition aren’t necessarily meted out to individuals in proportionate quantities.

I took this humorous look at our possible future because after you’ve been hit by a bus, if you’re still breathing, probably the best thing to do is laugh. And when the Supreme Court gave the nod to the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2000, a bus ran us over and dragged us down a ragged road for eight long years. Election results, like lightning and wayward buses, are independent events. Just because you’ve been struck once doesn’t mean they can’t strike you again.

But I don’t let Democrats off the hook either. And as we watch the Obama Administration step gingerly through the wreckage of the previous two terms, many of us are learning once again that candidates can be a lot like those meal photos we see in fast-food ads. When they take office, that’s when we’re handed the real food.

EXIT BLUE is for everyone who watched the Bush-Cheney Administration as though it were a horror movie they couldn’t turn off. But I also hope to reach tea-baggers, Limbaugh fiends, and all the Fox News groupies, male and female. They need vehicles like this in order to keep hopping around purple angry. Besides, I empathize with them. Much of my research involved shouting back at TV news.

Exit Blue is available for pre-ordering at most bookseller sites. Amazon has a special pre-order rate of $16.29. Shipments begin at the end of March.
--- Ivan G. Goldman, Rancho Palos Verdes, California

SCRATCH SURFACE OF THESE 'U.S.' FIRMS & SEE WHAT YOU GET

2010-02-12T17:06:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Some Democratic members of Congress have put together a bill to prevent foreign corporations from buying ads pertaining to domestic political issues. On the surface it looks like an intelligent response to the recent Supreme Court ruling by five Republican justices that proclaims corporations have the right to flood our political processes with all the political ads they want.

The attempt to water down the results of the ruling will run into tough sledding in a corporate-controlled Congress, but you also have to wonder if the lawmakers behind it are really so naïve as to believe, for example, that companies like Merck and Exxon-Mobil, which by their definition could still purchase issue ads, are U.S. corporations. Why? Because they have headquarters in New Jersey and Texas? Let's not get silly.

Merck sells its drugs for half-price in Canada and hands out legal bribes to members of Congress to make it illegal to re-import their products across the border. Does that sound like it’s run by a patriotic bunch of folks who have American interests at heart? Exxon-Mobil sets up phony scientific institutes to claim there’s no man-made global warming so its congressional lackeys can hide behind a curtain of lies as the planet (including its U.S. corner) bakes. It encouraged petroleum creatures Bush and Cheney to invade Iraq so it could grab the oil and sell it to Americans at the same world price it sets for anyone else with greenbacks to barter.

These aren’t American companies. They’re global corporations that care no more or less for us than they do for Bulgaria or Sri Lanka. We could arguably rank the good intentions of Merck and Exxon-Mobil higher than, say, the Chinese companies that seem to have a special fondness for poisoning the food, paint, drywall, and other commodities they ship to us. But firms that get our military kids killed and mutilated so they can make a few extra bucks are not on our side. Neither are firms that put the fix in so they can squeeze the U.S. government and its citizens with discriminatory pricing. Issue ads by these corporations will match their private agendas. There must be some real U.S. corporations somewhere, but it’s doubtful any of them are big enough to be listed among the Fortune 500.

We live in a country where payday loan shops charge their victims fifteen percent interest for a two-week loan. On an annual basis that comes out to 390 percent without figuring in the compounding, and most of their loans do get compounded week after week as the working poor fall deeper into the pit of usury. These heartless bastards can work right out in the open because they paid off our politicians to make sure there’s no law to stop them. They even put up billboards and neon signs to bring in more suckers. Does it really matter whether such companies are American or not? They couldn’t do more harm if they were owned by Al Qaeda.
My novel Exit Blue, a political satire, is set for release in March from Black Heron Press and can be ordered now at Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, Powells.com, and elsewhere on the net.

LESSONS FROM JOE HELLER FOR 2010

2009-12-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Looking at the state of our nation at the close of the year, stuck in two wars with a broken-down economy that deals cards from a stacked deck –- not to mention a crumbling ecology -- I recommend looking back at Picture This, a novel by Joseph Heller that came out in 1988.

By virtue of being a Heller novel, it received good attention at the time. But then it faded into the netherworld of barely remembered art. Picture This is a brilliant, meditative, enchanting work teeming with ideas that very much relate to the situation we’re in right now. The story bounces around even more than Heller’s Catch 22, stopping at times and places that include Socrates’s jail cell in Athens, Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. What ties it together are the stories and thoughts he weaves out of one painting, Rembrandt’s masterpiece Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer.

When we think of ancient Greece we tend to see it as the birthplace of democracy, but Heller, taking a hard look at its principal city state of Athens, can’t help noticing that its society was based on two pillars: war and slavery. The place was run by men who espoused generosity as they put the fix in to pile up more wealth for themselves and screw everyone else, including the thoroughly exploited youngsters they sent off to fight in grim, crazy wars. Heller juxtaposes this abysmal stream of hypocrisy, greed, and violence against the saving power of art, and while he does it he reminds us of the value of humor in our everyday lives.

When we elected Barack Obama as president I, like many of us, looked forward to a more decent society free of what the winning candidate called “dumb wars,” a government that would work toward justice at home and abroad. Where we are now is better than where we’d be under McCain. The odds are good that his blundering administration would have sunk us into Great Depression II instead of the near-Depression economy that’s choking us now. But you don’t need me to tell you we’re not in a good place. People are plunging into joblessness and homelessness. The promise of a decent education and civilized system of health care for our children fades.

Amazingly, we’re still stuck in Iraq while Obama ramps up the nothing-to-win war in Afghanistan, and he does it with a “volunteer” military, many of whose members are in uniform because no one else would offer them a job with benefits. Many of these kids are going batty from the repeated war deployments. There is no end game in Afghanistan. Obama’s generals have persuaded him we must remain as conquerors and call ourselves something else, and if the Afghans don’t like it, we’ll just have to kill more of them.

The statements coming out of this administration on the war there present new contradictions almost every day. We’re not nation building, we are nation-building, we’re there to get Al Qaeda, we’re there to get the Taliban, or we’re there to buy off the Taliban. Or we're in Afghanistan because we want to get the bad guys in Pakistan. We’re there to support Karzai or no, Karzai doesn’t matter. Well, Karzai does matter because he runs one of the most corrupt regimes on earth and has done so for eight years now with our backing. Yet we’re supposed to believe that the Afghans will believe this bandit chief will now rise above reproach along with his heroin-dealing family.

In Iraq, when Maliki postpones an election, we postpone withdrawal. He’s our marionette, and yet he pulls the strings, as does Karzai. Hours after Obama implied something vague about pulling out of Afghanistan down the road someday he was flatly contradicted by his own secretaries of defense and state and also Karzai. No, we never got to vote on it, but Afghanistan is our 52nd state. It and Iraq, which of course is No. 51, eat up more of our resources than any ten states together.
To deal with our economy and the crooked bankers who wrecked it with their greed, Obama hired a bunch of crooked bankers. And guess what? They’re tilting everything in favor of crooked bankers. It’s been more than a year since the collapse and we have no reforms. The crooks are still dealing derivatives with our money, and another meltdown looms. Then there’s health care.

The health care bills in the Senate and House are tilted toward insurance and drug companies and the designs of the conservative American Medical Association. They’re all going to get even richer. Members of Congress who shout the loudest about fiscal responsibility are the very same members who have stripped all pricing controls out of the hamburger meat they’ve made of the legislation. Meanwhile the big "news" media spend their resources chasing after Tiger Woods's mistresses.

That’s why I like to pick up books like Picture This, which remind me none of this is new. That’s depressing and comforting at the same time. I respect people who keep fighting the good fight, who try to save us from the worst of the worst, and I hope for a good outcome. Meanwhile, it doesn’t hurt to follow Heller’s lead and enjoy the art that’s all around us.

The American Library Association has nominated Ivan G. Goldman’s latest novel The Barfighter as a 2009 Notable Book. Link to information at

http://www.thepermanentpress.com/ and do a search. It's there, at Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, Powell's Books, and elsewhere.

And watch for his forthcoming novel Exit Blue, a political satire coming out from Black Heron in March 2010. Link to information at

http://www.amazon.com/Exit-Blue-Ivan-G-Goldman/dp/0930773942/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257984700&sr=1-4

KARZAI IS NO LINCOLN -- HE'S NOT EVEN AN EDSEL

2009-11-12T12:52:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
The Obama Administration is telling wayward, dictatorial, corrupt Hamid Karzai to take on a new persona and become a champion of democracy, decorum, and decent, honest government.

Has anyone examined the premise of this demand with simple logic? What we’re asking is for Al Capone to take over Mother Teresa’s charity work. For starters, Karzai’s in league with his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. Two senior officials in the Obama Administration told the New York Times that Ahmed is a powerful heroin trafficker. You don’t sell heroin in a place like Afghanistan using clean methods. You corrupt some people, you terrorize and kill others. The Afghan government under Hamid Karzai is run like the NYPD of the seventies, when station houses passed around payoffs like precisely measured gumdrops.

Bear in mind that not only are we supposed to expect this guy to change his leopard’s spots. So are everyday Afghans, many of whom risked their lives to vote in the last election, which he then stole with such pathetic obviousness that it was embarrassing. They’ve been watching him govern for eight years. They know what’s possible and what isn’t. Can you imagine George W. Bush, after running things the way he did for two terms, suddenly transforming himself into Abraham Lincoln? Because that’s what we’re all expected to believe will happen in Afghanistan.

Bush handed Karzai a job and Karzai, like so many of Bush’s appointees in his administration, screwed it up beyond our lowest expectations. We can’t ask Afghans to support this guy, and we certainly can’t ask U.S. troops to fight and die for him. And we have no one else to turn to. We could stay there and hope that a massive, terribly expensive effort from us will improve things during the next two or three decades (while our troops keep taking casualties) or we can recognize reality and put our resources to better use elsewhere. Afghanistan is too broke for us to fix.

WHAT BLUE DOGS REALLY WANT -- AND WHY THEY RULE

2009-09-13T11:19:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Blue dogs claim they oppose the “public option” in any health care bill because they defend moderation in spending. In reality, a public health option, by presenting insurance company leeches with price competition, would moderate spending. Blue dog Democrats don’t favor a rational budget. They’re front-line champions of the busted financial structure championed by the corporations that pay them off. If these guys cared about a balanced budget, why did they cut taxes for the super-rich while they supported Bush’s $2 trillion war in Iraq?

The blue dogs’ buddies, their Republicans across the aisle, oppose any health bill in any form whatsoever because protecting insurance company profits isn’t enough for them. They, like their pill-addled hero Rush Limbaugh, want the Obama presidency to fail and the country to sink further into the poisonous swamp of lunacy fashioned from nearly three decades of domination by the corrupt, crazy remnants of what used to be the Party of Lincoln.

What’s fascinating is that the corporate greedheads that form the dominant Republican and Blue Dog coalition can find thousands of brainless foot soldiers to take to the streets in favor of a failed health structure ruled by insur-o-crats. But anything or anyone that opposes Obama is something these “You lie!” zombies can root for. Life was so much simpler when they had their “colored” drinking fountains. The only reason the tea-party nutsos call Obama a socialist is because they understand it’s no longer acceptable to call him a nigger (outside the comfort of their own little enclaves).

Almost equally confounding is how the Big Media can so consistently fail to look into the records and finances of the politicians on the take from the global companies that make the rules. MSNBC (that is, the GE Corporation) provide us with would-be comics like Keith Olberemann and Rachel Maddow to smirk their way through the nightly news, but they don’t hire real journalists who dig up facts. They figure we’ll be satisfied with vaudevillean, liberal counterparts to O’Reiley, Lumbaugh, etc. If these made-up TV clowns on the left or right had to chase down a real story they’d probably burst into flames.

Our country limps along on a constitution that bestows tremendous power on rural constituencies that elect people like the South Carolina governor who figured he could pave his way to the presidency by turning down federal funds to help unemployed people. Montana’s Max Baucus, who’s been screwing around for months to formulate a health plan that would supposedly be acceptable to Republicans, represents a state that has far fewer residents than Brooklyn. But it gets two senators. If we lived in a genuine democracy, a voter in Wyoming wouldn’t have ninety times the political clout of a voter in Long Beach, California. Imposters like Baucus and his blue dog pals wouldn’t be in the catbird seat.

WHY WE’RE IN AFGHANISTAN AND WHAT WE SHOULD DO ABOUT IT

2009-09-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

There’s no light at the end of the Afghanistan tunnel. In fact, there’s not even a tunnel, just a deep, dark pit. We have no clear mission there, and after eight years of fighting we’re suffering more casualties than ever while the place remains deeply mired in violence and corruption.

A British newspaper recently published an interview with Britain's next military chief Gen. Sir David Richards in which he is quoted as saying that the Afghanistan mission could last up to 40 years. As it stands now, NATO has more than 100,000 troops there, 58.000 of them Americans. Another 10,000 U.S. troops will be added by year end. And those figures are misleadingly low because at last count we had 74,000 military “contractors” in country, most of them performing chores ordinarily done by soldiers.

The painfully slow withdrawal from Iraq (We still have 128,000 troops there) coupled with all those additional forces being injected into Afghanistan means that the same soldiers and Marines are deployed over and over again until they come back in body bags or with pieces missing, burned, or otherwise mutilated. Meanwhile the long, frequent absences wreck the emotional health of service people and their families, engendering divorce, alcoholism, and all the related negative outcomes that go with them.

What’s going on? Barack Obama’s not this stupid, is he? So why is he dumping all these troops down the Afghanistan hole? The answer is both simple and ugly. We’re there because if he pulls out and there’s another attack on the U.S. that approximates 9/11-magnitude, his presidency could be toast. Ever since they lost the 2008 election Republican leaders have made it clear that they’re itching for another successful attack on America so they can use it to win elections. And if such an attack were traced back to Afghanistan in any way after Obama had pulled out, they figure they’d be hitting the trifecta. Meanwhile, they took no responsibility for being in charge on 9-11, but that's how they play the game.

If Republican leaders were civilized patriots, Obama could get them to buy into a joint congressional resolution supported by both parties that would give him cover for withdrawal, leaving only intelligence and police operatives plus special forces teams to harass enemy movement along the Pakistan border. But Republicans have moved too far to the right in the last couple decades to even contemplate pursuing a rational, bipartisan agenda. They’ve politicized prayer, sex, and war, among other things, and rather than pull our troops from a quagmire that threatens to dwarf the Vietnam disaster, they prefer to let them die and possibly provide Republican political dividends.

We can expect General Stanley McChrystal, who’s in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, to announce in the coming days or weeks that he’s changing the strategy to one of winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese – excuse me, I mean Afghans -- and to pretend that no one’s thought of that before. In fact, unless Obama changes the script, we can expect a succession of U.S. generals and lots of parrot-class commentators to say this for many years to come.

But the enemy has controlled much of the country for years and is well funded by an abundant opium crop that neither U.S. forces nor the Karzai regime has been able to do much about. In fact, Karzai's clique is itself riddled with opium traffickers and people who play both sides. Al Qaeda-born terrorism will be defeated by good intelligence and police work, not a never-ending occupation in a lost, hellish country whose only real talent is for resisting occupation by foreign troops.

But if Obama is truly convinced we must defeat the Taliban on the field of battle then he should involve all of America, not just that tiny sliver represented by military families. He must explain why victory is so important and then immediately re-establish military conscription so we can field a half a million troops in Afghanistan. Only this time the draft mustn’t be rigged to protect the offspring of the rich and powerful.

If he’s unwilling to do all that, he must withdraw, because anything less will fail and it’s crazy to continue sacrificing our troops for domestic political requirements. Just because Republicans pursue a loony agenda that’s no reason to oppose them with the same measure of lunacy.

HEALTH CARE, GOV. SANFORD & KING OF POP

2009-06-28T16:16:00.001-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Wouldn't it be terrific if the mainstream media gave us such extensive, blockbuster coverage of the travels of Gov. Mark Sanford and the death of Michael Jackson because all the important problems were solved? Wouldn't it be nice if the frivolity of what passes for news meant that we’ve managed to raise Americans' longevity and instant mortality statistics above Third World status?

But no, that's not at all what it means.

Nor does it mean that the global economic meltdown is a problem that's been licked or that we don't have 200,000 troops sitting in the bleakness and danger of the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones.

What it means is that the mass media have become bored with corruption, ineptitude, families thrown in the street, dead babies, endless wars, and related issues. Because these circumstances have become more or less permanent, stories about them are of little consequence to the media gatekeepers. They’re much like the no-longer-so-new White House dog. Learn a new trick or get to the end of the news report where you belong.

Such are the rules of pack journalism, whose methods and results ensured that we couldn’t possibly be tipped off before the banking crisis that wrecked the world economy. Mainstream media don't check out stories like that until it's too late. Did you hear them asking back in 2002 why it was so necessary to kick the U.N. inspectors out of Iraq so we could replace them with a shooting war and an endless occupation that drains our resources and weakens our country?

Reporters and their bosses are still out there chasing each others' tails looking for the next O.J. or Nicole Smith. What's the latest hot story eating up thousands of reporter-hours as we speak? The possibility that John Edwards and his mistress made a sex tape. If it doesn't turn up, they'll just go back to their endless follow-ups on Sanford and Jackson.

“The big question,” I heard one of the CNN buffoons say as I fished through channels, “is whether the Sanfords will reconcile.” I asked my wife, “Is that really the big question? Can’t CNN find bigger questions than that?” But she was already heading to the living room to turn on some music and sit down with a book.

Meanwhile, as real news goes unreported, President Obama is day by day worn down by the “moderate” wing of the Democratic Congress (that is, Republicans with a D after their names) who work in tandem with the relig-o-crat greedhead crazies on the Republican side of the aisle. Who's representing the American public, 72 percent of whom want a government alternative to private health insurance and its deranged pre-existing conditions clauses? You tell me.

Sen. Diane Feinstein and her pals have already proclaimed that health care reform would cost $1.7 trillion over the next ten years. So, they say, its goals and methods must be vastly reduced. They get away with repeating this lying horror story because they and their bribe-master corporations know that mainstream media won't check it out.

So let's just look at the hypothetical case of a child running a high fever whose parents are out of jobs, savings, and luck. The parents can’t afford health insurance or a family physician so they take her to a hospital emergency room because by law it must treat her. There she’s diagnosed with swine flu and treated with Tamiflu. But she had to wait ten hours to be treated, and therefore many more patients and their families were needlessly exposed.

In a civilized country she’d have waited less than an hour at a clinic or physician’s office and been properly treated for approximately $200. That $200 is part of Feinstein’s scary story, part of the phantom $1.7 trillion because after all, the government just spent it to help the child. Feinstein doesn’t mention the $1,200 saved by having a rational system in place instead. Nor is this ever mentioned by the insurance or pharmaceutical companies, the AMA, or any of the other powerful lobbies feeding inaccuracies and perverted statistics to the mainstream media. Nor is it mentioned by CNN or Fox, MSNBC, etc., etc. Meanwhile what passes for U.S. health care takes up one-sixth of our gross domestic product while our health statistics are beneath those of Morocco.

Obama, faced with the real math of the “moderate-conservative” coalition in Congress, will most likely agree to water down a health plan to something that Congress's bribe-masters can live with, and we’ll continue suffering under a health care non-system designed to please the corporations that profit from it. And so it goes.

You know something? Maybe it is a better idea to follow the Jackson and Sanford stories. They’re not nearly as depressing.

'LIMBAUGH' BASHES 'THE BARFIGHTER'

2009-05-31T23:04:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
I imagined Rush Limbaugh recently took time out from his busy day chasing OxyContin to interview me about my recently published novel The Barfighter (The Permanent Press). Here’s how it went.

GOLDMAN: Look, Limbaugh, if you want to cross-dress, that’s your business, but that gray sheath is all wrong for you. What kind of look were you going for anyway?

LIMBAUGH: Tell the truth. Don't I look just a little like Streisand?

GOLDMAN: Well, sure, but why --

LIMBAUGH: I’ll ask the questions. What the hell kind of book was that? I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it.

GOLDMAN: Did you really read it?

LIMBAUGH: Of course.

GOLDMAN: As your half-witted deity Reagan used to say, trust but verify. So tell us the name of the protagonist’s girlfriend.

LIMBAUGH: Okay, so maybe I didn’t read all of it. Why bother? You discovered there’s corruption in boxing? Well duh!

GOLDMAN: The book shows corruption, yes, but that’s not the main thrust at all. Besides, some of what you might call corruption – participation by convicted felons, for example -- isn’t entirely bad. Baseball would never allow an ex-convict to own a team because it’s a sport that tries to present itself as being purer than it actually is. Boxing gives a convicted killer, Don King, a license to promote. He’s still no saint, but the sport gave him a second chance in life. Providing second chances is a fight game tradition.

LIMBAUGH: (Feigns a yawn) Face it. The last thing the world needs is another novel about boxing.

GOLDMAN: Plenty of fine writers have mined the fight world for material, but I felt I had something else to say and did my best to say it. As I wrote I also thought a lot about regret, rumination, and the search for redemption. These are all very human topics that transcend the fight world, and I hope the book does too. My model was Moby Dick, which tells you something about whaling and plenty about the human condition. My premise was based on an experience I had while sparring in a neighborhood gym.

LIMBAUGH: Will we have to suffer through more of your boxing novels?

GOLDMAN: I still write my regular column for The Ring, but when it comes to fiction, I think I said all I wanted to say about boxing in The Barfighter.

LIMBAUGH: Who cares what you have to say? I’ve sold more books than you could even dream of selling, and to me they’re just a sideline.

GOLDMAN: Sure, you’ve peddled ghost-written titles seeped in your own cruel brand of pretentious ignorance, but there’s still room in this world for people who write their own books and for publishers trying to put out worthy titles. I try not to worry about no-talent jerks like you who hit it big. I prefer to focus on fine artists like John Updike and Joseph Heller who achieved great success.

LIMBAUGH: Then why did you choose me to conduct this interview?

GOLDMAN: Because you’re an interesting though repulsive phenomenon.

LIMBAUGH: Listen, climb soapboxes on your own time. I’ve got an appointment to sign some more multi-million-dollar contracts.

GOLDMAN: Proving once again how important it is to keep one’s sense of humor. Did I mention The Barfighter is also humorous?

LIMBAUGH: So it’s not a serious book.

GOLDMAN: It’s a mistake to believe we can take fiction seriously only when it’s devoid of humor. This widespread delusion is what makes it practically impossible, for example, for a comedy to win the Best Picture Oscar. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Kafka – not exactly lightweights – all incorporated humor in their work. Humor is an essential ingredient to living well. I’m particularly aware of this as I look at you, Limbaugh. If we had to take you seriously there’d be lots more people walking in front of busses. But I think I’ll stop right here because I did end up climbing on a soapbox, and when you prove Limbaugh correct about anything it’s time to quit.
(The Barfighter can be purchased at a discount from Amazon.com.)

OBAMA LETS FINANCIAL DOGS OUT

2009-05-03T11:05:00.001-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
When President Obama went looking for a CIA director he settled on Leon Panetta, a smart, tough bird who knows his way around and also had minimal ties to the intelligence community.

But when Obama needed helpers to figure a way out of our economic quagmire, he followed an opposite strategy, choosing Wall Streeters from within the club. Not surprisingly, their lofty perspectives gave them no clue as to what’s going on down here in the financial sludge where the rest of us reside. Timothy Geithner, his Treasury Secretary, and Lawrence Summers, who heads Obama’s National Economic Council, have spent their entire lives inside the same privileged enclaves that gave birth to our economic ruin. They didn’t come into office questioning the structure that suckled them. Like their predecessors in the Bush Gang, they’ve been passing acres of cash to the same scumbags and idiots who gambled away the global economy. Now Geithner and Summers have developed a scheme designed to be so complex that we won’t understand what they’re doing while they pass on more trillions to the criminally insane. More on that later.

In a previous column I zeroed in on Summers. Now let’s take a better look at this Geithner person who supposedly supervises the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Geithner, whose father held an earldom in the Ford Foundation, went straight from college to the sinister lobbying outfit operated by Doctor Death himself, Henry Kissinger. Its primary purpose is to gain influence in Washington for a super-secret list of clients that you can bet never included Mother Teresa. After soaking up lethal doses of amorality there, Manchurian Candidate Geithner joined the entourage of Robert Rubin and Summers, who, with the aid of Alan Greenspan and others, set TNT under New Deal banking regulations, destroying the world economy and making lots and lots of money for themselves and their friends. Inside the sweet circle, Geithner climbed up to Treasury awhile, then the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Federal Reserve. There, as late as 2007, he was working to reduce capital requirements for banks so they could shoot craps for even higher stakes with other people’s money.

When the financial structure he’d helped to debase came apart, Geithner was well-known as a Fed hawk in favor of guaranteeing virtually all the banks’ IOU’s and asking virtually nothing in return. After returning to Treasury, he’s continued the class war against 99.8 percent of Americans. The $6.4 trillion question is why Obama lets Geithner, Summers, and the same old flatulent financiers regulate themselves and call the shots. Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch, for example, the firms that awarded triple-A status to trillions in worthless paper, are still paid by the companies whose financial instruments they’re supposed to rate.

Obama has certain goals he clings to – such as reforming the health-care non-system that forced his mother on her death bed to battle insurance company gnomes contending the cancer killing her was no business of theirs. On other matters Obama often compromises. Only last month he sat on his hands while the banks, after paying their usual legalized bribes to Congresspeople, managed to mutilate a bankruptcy reform bill. Where did they get the money to pay these bribes? From us, of course. Outraged Senator Dick Durbin of Illionis stated flatly that the banks still "own" Capitol Hill. Now once again they focus on their own short-term gains and wreck their institutions from within, figuring the long-term will take care of itself with more public funds. The government owns huge blocks of stock in "troubled" banks that brought on their own troubles, but Geithner has made no move to put individuals representing us, the taxpayer-stockholders, on their boards. Board members are still insiders like Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who used to make approximately $300,000 annually for attending four to five Freddie Mac meetings a year and look the other way while it filed financial reports that were later ruled fraudulent even by the notoriously see-no-evil Securities Exchange Commission.

By blocking legislation that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to jawbone down mortgage principal, banks owned by us the people will continue to torture underwater families. At the same time they create new foreclosures that make their bad paper worth even less, but that's the way they've always done it: Pay off Congress with relatively small bribes so they can harass widows, orphans, and other rabble.

Would you rather let the financially troubled family stay in that house down the block with a reduced mortgage or kick them out and create another vacant house that's a sitting duck for vandals and thieves?

Unlike Obama, Geithner and his ilk don’t compromise. They take all they can get, and without apology. Geithner’s TARP plan is to get super-rich speculators to buy rotten assets by guaranteeing their investments against loss. This will set the prices artificially high, earning profits for scumbags on both ends of the deal. This money, just like the bankers' bribe money, also comes from us.

Yes, we should ask Obama why he loosed the financial dogs on us. But we should also ask ourselves why we allowed him to open the gate. Actually, the answer’s not hard to find. Leonard Cohen already explained it: “Everybody knows the dice are loaded. Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.”

If you still have twenty dollars left to spend, consider buying my new novel The Barfighter (The Permanent Press; 2009).

THE BARFIGHTER EXCERPT AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NOVELS, SOCKET WRENCHES

2009-04-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

The American Library Association just nominated my novel The Barfighter, released this month by The Permanent Press, as a 2009 Notable Book. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 12. Beneath that is a comment on the marketing of fiction in the 21st century corporate world.

The hardest part about being tutored by Philyaw was not staring at him. That’s because he looked like Humphrey Bogart.

Philyaw looked so much like Bogey that no one would believe it without actually seeing it, and even then they had a hard time believing it. It was said he’d caused fender-benders just walking down a sidewalk. Cheskis marveled that Philyaw, rather than trying to alter his looks, embraced them, smoking old-fashioned, no-filter cigarettes and dressing like Bogey --- in a forties hat and rumpled trench coat. In 1985 this apparel would be rare anywhere, but in Southern California it was rarer than bar mitzvah bacon.

“What could he possibly do to look less like Humphrey Bogart?” Lorraine said to Cheskis after she’d consented once and only once to accompany Cheskis to the fights.
“He could wear an iron mask,” Cheskis responded. “Then he’d look like the Man in the Iron Mask instead of Humphrey Bogart. But I guess that wouldn’t improve things much, would it?”
Philyaw had once managed the most promising middleweight on the West Coast. But the kid’s bright future was irreparably harmed the night he carelessly stopped a hail of police bullets with most of his vital organs while running out of a liquor store he’d just held up in the Crenshaw District. It was rumored around the neighborhood that a secret room of a doughnut shop on Pico had photographs on the wall that showed the cops taking turns posing with their ski-masked middleweight corpse as though he were a prize elk. Some even claimed the head was mounted in the basement of the 77th Street Station.

They said Philyaw took the death harder than the kid’s mother. Maybe because she didn’t have to pick up the funeral tab. He’d been shelling out cash for years to build the kid’s career. The liquor store misadventure landed on Philyaw just as he was poised to pull the lever on a middleweight jackpot. Philyaw, who’d heretofore denied any resemblance to Bogart, disappeared after the funeral and eventually came back in his Sam Spade get-up with a Camel dangling from the corner of his lips. No one understood the meaning of this turnaround and no one confronted Philyaw about it directly. It was too easy to envision him grabbing the gat in his trench coat and casually plugging his inquisitor like Bogey did to Major Strasser at the end of Casablanca.

The Barfighter received strong reviews in Booklist, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly, but you’re unlikely to find it on the shelves of either Borders or Barnes & Noble, the two giants that have crowded out most other bookstores. The chains charge publishers for display space, and small publishers that either can’t afford or justly refuse to pony up these kickbacks are crowded out. Chains follow this questionable business practice because they have little to no interest in the content of their wares, which might just as well be cabbages or socket wrenches.

The Barfighter can be ordered from the publisher at http://www.thepermanentpress.com/bookdisp.ihtml?id=528 or at a discount from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1579621821/ref=s9_sims_gw_s1_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0Z5J03STBW17A3XWXKE8&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846
Should you pass this blog around to those who might be interested or ask a store or two to stock the book, you’ll get no grief from me. Thanks.

HOW TO SOOTHE SAVAGE (LITTLE KIMMY) JONG IL

2009-04-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Pipsqueak loon Kim Jong Il, who, like certain previous U.S. presidents we could name, inherited his job from his daddy, is clearly trying to keep himself in the news. He's not willing to settle for the fifteen-minute fame coined by Andy Warhol. He's set on making the big time -- Springsteen- or Bono-class celebrity. Lasting and with a touch of hysteria. This gives us an opening, and if we do a little creative thinking we can use it. More on that below.

Little Kimmy’s missile launch seemed perfectly timed for a news media already bored with the European crowds turning out for Obama yet unwilling to go back to focusing on the same old credit default swaps, bonuses, bailouts, and new batches of homeless people. So they spent two or three excited days stewing over the missile launch out of North Korea even though it appears the test failed. Remember the time Kim’s K-Mart nuke just kind of fizzled like a bad match? Still, we can’t afford to have a poorly triggered nuke carried by a not-terribly-well-engineered missile flying over some civilized country the next time Kimmy finds himself ignored.

Okay, here’s what we do. Kim, reminded of his mortality by a stroke not long ago, clearly yearns to be immortalized in some way that reaches beyond communist statuary. Everybody knows there’s no fame to equal rock star fame. So why not ask U2 or the E Street Band to invite him into the band and go on tour with them? Whoever goes out there next. Intelligent rockers like them will instantly understand it’s better to have a maniac with a goofy haircut banging a tambourine at stage left than to have him blowing up parts of Japan or South Korea.

This is a win-win situation. It won’t hurt the band’s ticket sales, Kimmy finds fame beyond his maniacal dreams, the audience gets a little comic relief along with the music, and the standard news media get themselves a terrific story with loads of photo ops that maybe they can understand. Heck, if Billy Ray Cyrus had put Prince George up on stage with a toy drum we might have avoided the Iraq War.
(Please don't forget to buy several cases of my newly released novel The Barfighter available now from Amazon, The Permanent Press, and elsewhere.)

HOW ONE MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE STILL SCREWS US

2009-03-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
We’re being told, as one Republican congressional member said it, that President Obama is taking America on a hard left turn. Actually he’s trying to take back only a part of what zealous right-wingers have stolen from us over the last forty years, such as union rights and a more progressive tax system. Right now the top income tax rate is 35 percent for the wealthiest taxpayers. As recently as the Kennedy Administration that figure was 91 percent. That is not a misprint.

More on that another time. Now I’m going to squawk about two inexplicable Obama mistakes. The first was making Lawrence Summers director of the White House Economic Council. This powerful position is now filled by a fat fool who leaves a trail of horrors everywhere he goes. Yet he keeps getting promoted to higher positions. He’s like the eye of a hurricane. Nothing personally touches him, but everything around him gets smashed into bloody toothpicks. But that’s not even the worst of it because now he gets to go around defending and perpetuating his blunders. All of which is very, very bad for the United States of America.

As a protégé of turd-mongering bandit Robert Rubin, Summers (pictured above) was one of the principal destroyers of the global economy, but if you ask him about it, he’ll tell you he did everything right. Summers pushed through the emasculation of the FDR-era Glass-Steagall Act that had prohibited investment bank/brokers, insurance companies, and traditional banks from mingling their businesses. That’s because there are inherent conflicts of interests among them. If it ain’t broke, you shouldn’t fix it, but the financial greedheads who hated Glass-Steagall poured money into Congress and into the hands of then-President Bill Clinton to take apart the New Deal legislation. In 1999 they got their wish while Summers, who’d been Rubin’s deputy, was Secretary of the Treasury. "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," Summers announced.

This barely reported giant step into darkness (few journalists understood it) turned loose banks, insurance companies, and brokers to engage in just about any business they wanted – businesses they knew nothing about, including the underwriting of a treacherous vehicle called the credit default swap. It basically insured the losses of crap-shooting masters of the universe even though the guarantors had no way to pay up and no way to disentangle the crazy derivatives they created. Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, possibly the dumbest bastard in America, looked for new ways to deregulate other greedy bastards like himself who were almost as dumb as he is.

Rubin became CEO of one of the grateful hydra-monsters his initiative set loose upon the globe and went on to make barrels of money as his Citigroup traded the new, exotic derivatives made crazier by the legislation he'd spawned as a “public servant.” Unlike some of those AIG execs, he hasn't given back any of his tainted dollars. Meanwhile Summers, basking in the light of greed and idiocy, supported Republican initiatives to cut taxes for the rich, including taxes on capital gains, so we now have gardeners and housemaids taxed at a higher rate than the gazillionaire investors who employ them.
When Enron and other thieves looted California because the looters were able to buy off the Legislature and deregulate utilities, Summers complained it wasn't working out because there needed to be even more deregulation.

As he advises the President, Summers has an agenda in direct conflict with the nation’s, and he’s repeatedly shown his willingness to piss on everybody while he tells us it’s raining perfume. He shouldn’t be let anywhere near a government of the people.

Second thing Obama’s doing wrong: You can’t fix health care if you barely mention the insurance companies taking nearly half the dollars spent on health care. Get real, Barack. Tackle the giants.

In the midst of all these problems, I have a suggestion. Curl up with a good book. You might try my novel The Barfighter, set for April release by the Permanent Press. These books make excellent Father’s Day and Mother’s Day gifts. You might want to buy several boxes and pass them around this Christmas instead of cards. Find out more at http://www.thepermanentpress.com/bookdisp.ihtml?id=528

GIVE OBAMAS CREDIT FOR PICKING UP THEIR OWN CHECKS

2009-01-25T15:30:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
It’s getting less and less likely that big-time news media will notice or point out information we ought to have. For example, when’s the last time you saw any of them try to get an honest accounting of how politicians spend their campaign contributions? A good three-fourths of our congresspeople hold ultra-safe, gerrymandered seats, yet they spend approximately half their workday raising millions and millions they don’t need to run campaigns they can’t lose. Something's fishy. But I’ve already digressed from my topic, which is to point out something telling about Barack Obama that I haven't seen pointed out.
For their well-earned pre-inaugural vacation the Obama family rented an estate in Hawaii. Just about no one noticed the significance at play. Liberal columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, for example, tried to make a point but missed entirely. Krugman actually castigated Barack for taking an ostentatious vacation. But he failed to notice that the Obamas paid for it themselves.
The Bushes, though they loved getting away from the White House, don’t enjoy travel, so they mostly went back to their own place in Texas, (a "ranch" that raises nothing) stayed with Daddy in Kennebunkport, or went to the presidential compound at Camp David. None of that was unethical. We can only speculate how Junior would have behaved if he were intelligent and curious enough to take more venturesome vacations. But let’s skip that topic and go back a notch to the president before him, namely Bill Clinton.
Bill and Hillary would walk a mile to avoid picking up a check of any kind. The Clintons enjoy travel – real travel. They just hate paying for it. The media never honed in on all the vacation freebies the Clintons grabbed – and still grab in their post-White House phase. We always get the destinations, but no one hones in on the particulars that count.
When the Clintons go to Martha’s Vineyard, they stay at the Robert S. McNamara mansion. When they hanker for the Dominican Republic, they take over the estate of Oscar De La Renta. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming they lodge in the elaborate digs of industrialist and financier Max C. Chapman. See a pattern here? The Clintons paid not one cent for any of this. They are confirmed, out-of-the-closet schnorers. That’s a Yiddish word that’s usually translated as “beggars.” But the word means more than that. A schnorer is fifty percent con-artist, fifty percent-beggar, and one hundred percent pain in the ass. A moocher, a parasite, a freeloader. A schnorer is the guy who’s always trying to get something for free, even if he doesn’t want it that much. The pursuit of making someone else pay is his chief delight.
When the Obamas looked for a place to vacation they didn’t pull down the list of ultra-rich jerks always looking for favors and willing to pay for them. (You could argue it's the taxpayers who actually do the paying, since their interests are sacrificed in order to pay off the hosts) The Obamas opened the Yellow Pages and rented the place, fair and square, just like anyone else would do. That’s a strong indicator of the changes we’re witnessing in this White House. The people at the top of this administration must adhere to the strongest anti-influence-peddling code we’ve seen in the modern age, and aides have their salaries frozen. Ethics. What a concept.
So no, the Obamas don’t stay at Motel 6, but hey, they actually earned their money. Most of it comes from Obama’s books, which he wrote himself. No ghost writers. That’s another form of integrity that nowadays is positively unique among public figures.
I won’t try to list all the other admirable things the Obamas are doing at this point. I just wanted to point out that they aren’t schnorers, and for this they deserve credit.

BUSH, CHENEY VERSUS IRAQ FACTS

2009-01-04T11:41:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
As they make ready to slink out of Washington, Cheney, Bush, and the rest of their duplicitous band of blunderers and criminals are burning their documents and preparing the foundations for the fantasy memoirs that their ghost writers will create for them. And in a series of pre-departure interviews they’re giving us their latest talking points on the centerpiece of their disastrous rule -- the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Their preposterous claims can be disproved just by looking at the facts, but oddly, the journalists interviewing them never do that. Asking all the wrong questions, they just sit at the feet of these lying fools wagging their tails like spaniels.
Cheney, for example, says everything worked out fine, including the policy of torture, and Bush blames everything on bad intelligence. Neither is challenged by the TV “journalist” across from him.
This makes it all the more important to look at the facts now while they're still warm. When General Eisenhower's troops came across the Nazi death camps he immediately understood that the perpetrators and their apologists would later try to deny the facts and alter history. So within hours of the discovery he ordered his troops to shoot film, gather evidence, and seek out those responsible.
We need to do the same about the Iraq War. So let’s look at the record, which, by the way, gives some absolution to those members of Congress who originally authorized the invasion.
"A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is (sic) a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration," Bush told Charles Gibson.” (ABC's Gibson is the same phony imbecile who decided Barack Obama's nonexistent link to the Weatherman radicals of the 1970s was the central question of the 2008 election and devoted much of a Democratic debate to mucking through this delusion) Bush also told tail-wagging Gibson, "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." He also no doubt wishes the facts were different. Here they are.
Congress authorized the attack on October 11, 2002. The administration claimed at the time it needed to show its teeth in order to get inspectors in there. The joint resolution, the Bushies told Congress, was necessary in order to avoid war. On November 8, the U.N. imposed tough new arms inspections on Iraq. Now here’s the really interesting part. Ten days later, weapons inspectors dispatched by the U.N. returned to Saddam-land for the first time in almost four years. Meanwhile, Bush and Cheney passed the word to the Pentagon to prepare for an invasion, and by March 2003, had 200,000 troops surrounding Saddam.
But the inspectors led by the experienced Hans Blix couldn’t find anything. Saddam, growing more frightened, steadily gave way to Blix’s demands. U.N. inspectors could travel anywhere they liked without giving advance notice, and they could do it in helicopters so there could be no phony traffic jams to impede them.
Blix still couldn’t find anything. Increasingly skeptical and verbally attacked day in and day out by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their flunkies, Blix publicly asked the Bush administration to share its intelligence so he could dig up these phantom weapons of mass destruction. No response. Something was very fishy.
On March 14, Bush and Tony Blair gave up on securing enough Security Council votes to invade. Bush told the inspectors to leave so they wouldn’t get in the way of the invasion. Blix and his able crew left under protest, and March 17, Bush gave Saddam 48 hours to leave the country. The invasion commenced.
For years afterward the Bush-o-crats claimed they had to invade because Saddam wouldn’t let in inspectors. And the mainstream news media failed to challenge them. It felt like we were living in the old Soviet Union, where news was bent so drastically by the country's media that it was a running joke. Now Bush, buttressed by this crazy reporting he's grown so used to, blames faulty intelligence. But how could “intelligence” filtered through his propaganda machine trump inspectors who were there on the ground? Had he let the inspectors continue their work, many hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed might instead be living the lives they had a right to.
In 2005, the Downing Street Memo came to light, the smoking gun that revealed Bush and Blair had already decided to invade Iraq sometime before the memo date of July 23, 2002, using WMD as an excuse. The case was “thin,” but “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." This ultra-secret memo was never contested by Blair.
Why did Bush really invade? Alan Greenspan, an expert on global privateering and a booster of same, conceded the war had always been about oil. Bush talked about invading Iraq ten days after inauguration, at his very first meeting of the National Security Council. That was eight months before the Nine-Eleven attack he liked to blame on Saddam. Most of the time he used stylized sentences written for him by his handlers that implied the accusation without quite uttering it.
All the above is hard fact, not supposition, and of course should be the basis of interviews with the seedy, lying psychopaths at the center of this demented, wrecking ball of a war that turned out to be a snipe hunt.
What follows is mostly theory, but with plenty of evidence to back it up ---
The war decision had much to do with the November 2004 elections. Bush Junior desperately wanted to show up his Daddy, who’d invaded Iraq but left Saddam in place. Also, Junior, who harbors a hard-core Oedipal love-loathing for his father, was conscious that the murderous Saddam had once plotted to assassinate Bush Senior.
Bush Junior liked to brag he was “a wartime president” and assumed he would score a great victory (even though there had been virtually no planning for post-Saddam Iraq) and cement his place in history at least above Daddy and possibly alongside Lincoln and Washington. Junior also seemed to really believe that it was his duty to attack America's enemies. Though a history major at Yale, evidently he'd remained uninformed about the Cold War of nearly fifty years that never led to an all-out hot war between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.
There’s more than enough evidence to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rice et al for their crimes so no future administration will try to repeat them anywhere at any time. And in the future, any "journalist" who even touches on this subject should use the facts or be fired because such gruesome media incompetence is as indefensible as the crimes themselves.

HOW BANKS BECAME FREE TO LET MAGIC OF MARKETPLACE KILL EARTH'S ECONOMY

2008-12-05T09:36:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The following CNN article from Nov. 12, 1999 sheds crucial light on just how the banking deregulation that spawned the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression came about. You'll find some familiar names, and they're not all Republicans. Phil Gramm is joined by Democratic luminaries such as Senators Charles Schumer and Christopher Dodd as well as Bill Clinton. All boasted of their work at the time.

They'd learned nothing from the deregulation of thrifts under President Reagan that ultimately cost taxpayers about $300 billion. The political pygmies of 1999 that took legalized bribes from the institutions they unleashed on us repeated the mistake of 1982, only this time to the tune of trillions. Most of those crooks and buffoons from 1999 are still running our economic affairs

Clinton signs banking overhaul measure

November 12, 1999

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The biggest change in the nation's banking system since the Great Depression became law Friday, when President Bill Clinton signed a measure overhauling federal rules governing the way financial institutions operate.

"This legislation is truly historic and it indicates what can happen when Republicans and Democrats work together in a spirit of genuine cooperation," Clinton said at a White House signing ceremony. The event brought together the president and several Republican members of Congress who have been among Clinton's sternest critics -- a sign of the bipartisan support that eventually developed for the package.

Congress passed the bipartisan measure November 5, opening the way for a blossoming of financial "supermarkets" selling loans, investments and insurance. Proponents had pushed the legislation in Congress for two decades, and Wall Street and the banking and insurance industries had poured millions of dollars into lobbying for it in the past few years.

"The world changes, and Congress and the laws have to change with it," said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Phil Gramm (R-Texas), who has fought for years for the overhaul. Gramm said the bill would improve banking competition and stability.

Financial Supermarkets

"This is a bill that is bipartisan, bicameral and tri-institutional," said Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), chairman of the House Banking and Financial Services Committee. He noted that the House, Senate and White House had worked together on the compromise that became law.

Clinton said the measure will "save consumers billions of dollars a year through enhanced competition." He said it also would protect consumers' rights and require banks to expand the availability of funds for community development.

At stake is an estimated $350 billion that Americans spend annually on fees and commissions for banking, brokerage and insurance services. Proponents say the legislation will save consumers some $15 billion each year, offering them greater choice and convenience and spurring competition. Consumer groups and other opponents maintain it will bring higher prices and jeopardize consumers' financial privacy.

The overhaul measure is one of the few major pieces of bipartisan legislation to emerge from the Republican-controlled Congress this year.

Clinton's support for the legislation comes despite warnings from Democratic critics and consumer activists that it could lead to price-gouging of consumers and the erosion of their privacy by newly formed financial conglomerates that are too big and powerful.

"The bill is anti-consumer and anti-community," advocate Ralph Nader declared. "It will mean higher prices and fewer choices for low-, moderate- and middle-income families across the nation."

In addition, he said, "Personal privacy will be virtually eliminated" under provisions allowing affiliated businesses of the newly merged companies to share customers' personal financial data as they offer one-stop shopping.

And up until a few weeks ago, the Clinton Administration itself had threatened a veto of the legislation as it took various forms that raised a series of White House objections. In recent months, the administration objected most sharply to the issue of rules requiring that banks make loans in minority and low-income communities where they operate.

Gramm, an outspoken conservative who opposes the rules, last year managed to kill a similar bill that would have overhauled the community lending laws. The White House insisted that banks be required to have a strong track record in local loan-making as a condition for being allowed to expand into other financial activities.

The big breakthrough came in the wee hours of October 22 when administration officials -- including Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers -- and key Republican lawmakers reached a compromise after negotiating for days behind closed doors. The White House then lifted its longstanding veto threat.

"It was sweaty, it was tense, but it had momentum," Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) said of the final bargaining session. He and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) whose states are home to Wall Street and the banking industry (New York) and the insurance industry (Connecticut), helped broker the agreement.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

OBAMA AND THE DEGRADED STATE OF THE NATION

2008-11-05T10:30:00.000-08:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The Republican propaganda machine has added a new paragraph to its manual. Instant word went out to all the Fox-o-crats and their allies to predict that President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi will now make war on each other. That’s just wishful thinking.

McCain and Bush agreed on 90 percent of the issues. Pelosi and Obama will beat that by a mile. Neither is a deluded simpleton, which makes common ground much easier to find. But delighted as I am that Obama-Biden crushed the team’s misguided opposition, I regret not being able to watch Constitution-challenged Sarah Palin on the day she showed up to -- as she promised while stumping for votes among the misinformed -- run the Senate. That would have been a sight to see.

As it turned out, defeating McCain-Palin was a piece of cake. In a nation where millions have already seen the value of their 401K’s and home equity chopped to splinters, where those who haven’t lost their jobs fear that they will, and owners of small businesses are frightened and barely surviving, it became harder and harder to convince Americans they should choose more of the same. The hard part was already accomplished --- taking down the national Clinton Machine.

We’ve become so accustomed to a government warring on its citizens that it will be tough to get used to an administration that, for example, might actually take the needs of patients into account when it fashions Medicare legislation. But the pharmaceutical lobby is still out there, along with oily oilmen, the anti-health HMO's, anti-missile-missile alchemists, the arbitrageurs, hedge-fund managers, and all the rest of the corrupters that have been dribbling out tips to “public servants” in exchange for vastly disproportionate favors.

Observe that it was a Democratic Congress that, asked to approve $700 billion to save the self-destructive banking industry, tacked on another $150 billion for its biggest contributors. So yes, there’s a steep road to climb. Obama knew how to turn the corrupters’ weapons against them, raising so much money that they surrendered, unwilling to pour more crooked dollars into the election cruncher. But money is a hermaphrodite. It’s happy to switch sides.

Meanwhile the fourth estate, which is supposed to monitor the players, is in steep, steep decline. Billionaire Sam Zell, for instance, is at work as we speak gutting the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and all the other former watchdogs he purchased with leveraged dollars. Many of us, aware of this sorry circumstance, now look to the Internet for information. But it’s also a mine of misinformation. The Internet and talk-radio crazies were instrumental in spreading the McCain-Palin-Rove message to deluded bumpkins that Obama was a terrorist, socialist, Muslim non-citizen.

With all the twisted factoids, lies, and half-lies flying around, it will take a revived educational system to produce more responsible citizens who can cut through the crap. But Obama and the Congress have inherited an exhausted economy. Revenue from sales, property, and income taxes are all headed down. As recently as the Kennedy Administration the top tax bracket, now 34 percent, was at 91 percent, but the plutocracy hires high-priced accountants and lawyers, plus Democratic and Republican office-holders who for relatively small gratuities will continue to impede reform.

And thanks to stupidity and torpor, the Democratic Congress continues to pour $10 billion a month into Iraq for no rational reason that any fair-minded person can determine. As he looks for resources to pull this country out of the pit, Obama should look there first.

McCAIN, ECONOMY IN ACCELERATING FREE-FALL

2008-10-09T13:35:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
As the world economy collapses around us it’s hard to take our eyes off the spectacle of the increasingly unstable, 72-year-old cancer survivor John McCain, who won’t release his medical records, barnstorming around the country with the message that Barack Obama is dangerous and untested and that only McCain and Palin can save the world, conquering greed, creating jobs, paying off everyone’s mortgages, and defeating whatever else ails us too.

When they stop in one place they stand outside their respective covered wagons loaded with tonic bottles and pledge to do it all because they know how.

But their bottles are empty.

Meanwhile, Palin has that frightening combination of stupidity, ignorance, and unbridled confidence that we’ve seen work so well for Bush Junior. She couldn’t name one publication she reads? Here’s another question for you, Sarah. Got any books in your home? Name them.

Back to McCain. At least he still has the presence of mind to know he’s lying, which may be why he looks so damned angry all the time. When he does smile it’s in the form of a Charles Manson grimace, except beady black dots take the place of Manson’s big zombie orbs. McCain’s lips spread horizontally as a smile should, but the eyes are pure batshit. In yet another spurt of self-righteous anger, he wouldn't even shake Obama's hand after the second debate. Maybe on some level he's convinced himself that the accusations he and his Rasputins have invented must be kind of true in a generic sense even if the facts have been twisted into a tangle of coat hangers.

But what's really scary are those supporters of his.

Stay safe, Barack.

HARD RAIN'S GONNA FALL

2008-09-29T16:34:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Voters who believed there should be no bailout were wrong. Barney Frank and other Democrats removed much of the language in the bill giving Paulson and Bush an open-ended license to steal. So by depriving the Treasury of funds to buy up bad debt, the House probably (I hope I’m wrong) triggered a storm of horrors, beginning with bank failures, that, ironically, will leave the very Wall Street fat-cats the voters wanted to punish high and dry anyway. The rest of us will suffer due to what economists call the snowball effect. Banks fail, businesses fail, the customers of those businesses fail, government cash flow dries up as joblessness rises and the value of real estate continues to dive. There should have been much more in the bill to help the little guy, but there's a limit to how much decent legislation you can squeeze out of an indecent white House and Congress.

If we had a President who’d proved his/her character to the voters over the last seven and a half-years, most of them would have believed his/her appeal to support bailout legislation. But of course if we had a decent, intelligent president, the promise of deregulation paradise concocted by Phil Gramm and other highly paid thieves would never have made it through Congress and the White House.

As it stands, not even hard-core Republicans believe George Junior anymore. Most of us know him to be a liar and a fool. So when he entreats us to do something, as he did earlier this week when he asked us to support the bailout, we pay little to no attention and try to find out what grown-ups think about the subject.

Americans who re-elected Bush, a man aptly described by Democratic insider Paul Begala as a high-functioning moron, have yet to learn the consequences of their folly. FDR, facing a similar economic disaster in the thirties, told people the truth. So when he addressed them on the radio, most of them believed what he had to say. But in 2008, the voting majority of 2004 left us leaderless and rudderless.

No one knows what happens next. As the folly of doing nothing becomes clearer, the ensuing destruction might spur Congress to act, but once the glue is out of the tube there doesn’t seem to be much chance that this Administration of fools and crooks will figure out how to get it back in.

Our legislators, for the most part, don’t put the nation first. Members of Congress have showered themselves with so many perks and legalized kickback schemes that they will do almost anything to get re-elected, including triggering Great Depression II. They’re like dirty cops. They might start out with ambition to serve the country, but their morals gradually deteriorate as day after day they man the phones to raise money for themselves.

Our ghastly predicament will probably prod voters into electing Barack Obama, but it’s hard to say how much he can do for us now. He and Biden are vastly preferable to madman McCain, who facilitated both this global panic and the thrift disaster of the eighties, and to lipstick Sarah, who wouldn't know a Wall Street derivative from a walrus. But it would have been nice to choose sanity before, not after, the hard rain fell.

PAULSON DEMANDS LICENSE TO STEAL

2008-09-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Only a thief demands a license to steal. What am I referring to? Here’s a sentence from the legislation demanded by Treasury Secretary Paulson:

Decisions by the Secretary [of the Treasury] pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

That gives Paulson the right to buy up paper from his Wall Street pals for $1.50 on the dollar and sell it back to them for 2 cents on the dollar, and we couldn’t touch him for it. He demands at least as much deference as the Vatican pays to the Pope. He’s telling us he wants a check for 700 billion, no questions asked, have it by Tuesday or the world comes to an end.

Think Katrina. Think Cheney, who dreams up a war, then hands out the contracts for that war to his own firm. The firm gets caught stealing --- blatantly making up services and merchandise it didn’t provide and sticking it on the invoices. And the firm retains the contracts. And nobody lays a glove on Cheney, who’s busily destroying evidence as we speak and preparing a wall around the evidence he can’t get rid of that will last into perpetuity.

This administration is dedicated to the proposition that the rich can’t get rich enough and everyone else can go screw themselves. Paulson’s incredible demands are a part of that program. In fact, it's their best scam yet, born of ineptitude, unwarranted conceit, and their thieving hearts.

When he went before a skeptical congressional committee today Paulson said he never intended to escape oversight. Then why did he invent an escape clause? It’s only a two-page piece of legislation. Are we supposed to believe he skipped that sentence? An honest broker could never dream up a sentence like that. Paulson, Bush, and their ilk think they have a divine right to steal. They'd pass any lie detector test when they proclaim innocence because they're so crazy they believe it.

When Congress is skeptical of legalized skulduggery, we should pay attention because no one in the world knows more about legalized skulduggery than our members of Congress. Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who convinced building contractors to do hundreds of thousands of dollars in free work on his property, then handed out government contracts to those same companies, now claims he did nothing wrong. And you know what? He probably believes it. He’s been pulling this crap so long he’s convinced himself the laws don’t apply to him. He’s mostly right. Only some of them do. And now Paulson and his pals want to cut themselves in for a bigger piece.

I guarantee you when the dust clears on this bailout legislation Congress will have cut itself a generous tributary from the new gravy train, one of the biggest ever. Congressional oversight means the profiteers will have to pay Congress to stay in business.

Let’s face it. We’re stuck. The American people refused to impeach and remove Bush and Cheney for their high crimes and misdemeanors, so we’re still dealing with these larcenous nitwits now that one of their many deregulation scams disintegrated into mush. So barring a wave of sanity that removes them from office, we’ll be putting up with their Treasury secretary another four months, only it will seem much longer. And they may be succeeded by the equally grotesque McCain-Palin duo, or, to hear her tell it, Palin-McCain. Meanwhile the watchdogs over Administration chicanery will be beak-wetting Congressional members.

We’ll have to keep watch on all this ourselves because it’s unlikely the big media’s pretty faces will do it for us.

I know a car dealer in Orange County, California who sold 137 cars in August 2007 and 7 in August 2008. There's a big shitstorm of a recession coming in after the Wall Street collapse. We need to help real people with needs, do what we can to curtail the thievery, and work to earn outselves a President Obama, who just might get something done to counter the corruption and endless war of our government -- a government that continues to make war on 99.5 percent of its citizens.

QUESTIONS BIG NEWS MEDIA DON'T ASK

2008-09-08T21:49:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Major U.S. news outlets present the same puzzle that boxing officials present fans when we see particularly inept decisions by judges and referees. Are these guys corrupt? Or are they just that stupid?

Example: Sarah Palin, who proclaims herself ready to be the Number Two steward of the U.S. economy, gives an acceptance speech at the convention that fails to mention the banking and foreclosure crises that have already dragged down millions of American families and may just swallow the entire economy. These are man-made crises caused by the Republican insistence on deregulation so their corporate pals can work their swindling voodoo without government interference. Remember how they told us to get government off the backs of thrifts and we ended up with a savings and loan meltdown that cost taxpayers $300 billion? This new one apparently will cost us much more.

All Palin has to say about the economy is that John McCain will see to it that American companies sell all kinds of stuff all over the world, creating great jobs for everybody. And Obama won't. No word on how McCain will bring about this great turnaround in an economy entirely dependent on the cheap Chinese junk that has taken over our retail stores like alien spores.

Moments after Palin concludes her ignorant, xenophobic diatribe about why soccer moms make great statespersons, I hear CNN’s Wolf Blitzer describe the speech as “great.” Amazed, I flip the channel to MSNBC, where seconds later I hear Keith Olbermann, a self-proclaimed prince of the liberal media, describe the speech with the same word –-- “great.” I spare myself the horror of hearing the Republican propaganda machine's interpretation straight from the bowls of Fox News. Instead I turn off the TV altogether.

When I raised these points with a friend later, she wondered whether Blitzer and Olbermann meant that the delivery was great. That may be a good guess. Another reason Palin might get a pass is because when a book-burning, anti-intellectual nut job can appear almost normal, she's surpassed expectations. When thoughtful, articulate Barack Obama does a great job, they figure so what? He cheated by already being thoughtful and articulate. But can’t these TV guys explain just what they mean by "great" in precise English? Or is that too much to expect from big-cheese, network interpreters paid millions per year to speak their thoughts?As it stands, we're left with the same puzzle. Are they corrupt? Or are they really that stupid?

Okay, Olbermann and Blitzer may get confused from time to time, and life is hard, their hours stink, and they need help once in a while. So here's help --- questions to ask their interview subjects. Olbermann, whose MSNBC network is owned by General Electric, chief contractor in charge of building the Star Wars anti-missile network, might consider a query to Secretary of State Condi Rice and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden. Why is it so necessary to re-ignite the Cold War by placing these G.E.-built contraptions that have only a marginal interception rate anyway inside Poland? Isn’t this precisely the sort of corruption of American policy by the military-industrial complex that Ike warned us about in his farewell address? Weren't we better off when we were helping the Russians dispose of their old Soviet-era warheads?

Second question I have is for Wolf Blitzer. Just him. I don't want to confuse Olbermann with too many issues at once. Blitzer should keep posing this query to administration higher-ups until he gets an answer. Republican icon Alan Greenspan, who knows a thing or two about why people in this administration do things, said in his book that the Iraq War is clearly about petroleum. For a moment let’s skip over the more than four thousand U.S. war dead, the uncounted hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, the millions who are displaced, homeless, jobless, or permanently maimed. Let’s just look at the $10 billion check signed each month by U.S. taxpayers to pay for this nightmare. Now bear in mind that the oil companies don’t give us a price break on the petroleum they plan to extract from Iraq with these new drilling and exploration contracts of theirs. They always charge Americans the same world price they charge everyone else. In fact, they’re not even American corporations anymore. They’re global corporations. Why don’t we tell them to put up the monthly ten billion smackers themselves?

And here’s a question for big U.S. media. Instead of wasting our time with the kind of crap you routinely present as news, why don’t you pose truly pertinent questions? Are you corrupt? Or just stupid?

McCAIN-PALIN ADMINISTRATION COULD HAVE US LOOKING BACK FONDLY AT BUSH-CHENEY

2008-09-02T10:49:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Too many of us are taking these Sarah Palin revelations too seriously. Instead we should all sit back and appreciate the entertainment value of the McCain-Palin ticket. This is like being fed the very best reruns of the fabulous Jerry Springer Show.
And I don't believe McCain made his running-mate decision at all hastily. He used every bit as much care as the Palins did choosing their self-described redneck of a future husband and in-law. Seriously, I feel sorry for both those kids. It's bad enough having to deal with an unplanned teen pregnancy without having the facts splashed around the world media.

As for other revelations, the facts that have come out on Troopergate so far are not terribly flattering to Palin and may involve lawbreaking. Her husband's very old driving mishap is of no consequence. Was she supposed to dump him because he had a DUI conviction 20 years ago?

But Governor Palin, we've recently learned, says the war in Iraq is our mission from God. That strikes me as being more germane to our elective choices than her husband's driving record. Some of these characters drawn from the Springer show apparently aren't terribly thoughtful in the foreign policy department. We already know McCain's mission: victory. Victory over who or what remains vague.

Let's look carefully at the substance of what McCain and Palin have to say at their Twin Cities convention. Then let's cut their bullshit campaign to pieces and save America from the kind of trouble that could have us looking back fondly at the Bush-Cheney era.

DAILY KOS, REPUTEDLY TOP-NOTCH, PLACES PALIN STORY ON SITE WITHOUT VERIFICATION, AND THIS BLOGGER WAS SUCKED INTO SAME MISINFORMATION MORASS

2008-08-31T16:47:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The Daily Kos placed an utterly strange story on its well-regarded site Saturday claiming that Sarah Palin's latest child was actually born to her teen-age daughter. Then it proceeded to ignore its own story, leading me to believe it was phony, but not before I'd leaped down the same hole of unverified information. This does not excuse me, but we have been so slammed around over the last several years by under-reported news and non-reported news from the standard media, that we've been led to believe we can get superior workmanship out of media outlets such as Daily Kos and HuffingtonPost. But these sites are run on a shoestring, often by people who are poorly paid and not terribly well-acquainted with professional standards. I apologize for mimicking their behavior, but I'd actually come to think of the Daily Kos as a legitimate information source and paid the price for it. Even if this story were to prove true, the Kos's odd lack of follow-up is evidence that the people there just put the story out there without checking it. Governor Palin's teen-age daughter is in fact five months pregnant, which the family announced today. But assuming Governor Palin bore her own child, her daughter's pregnancy of course has no bearing on the governor's suitability for office.

McCAIN CANDIDACY AN ACCIDENT OF HISTORY, GIVING OBAMA, RIGHT MAN AT RIGHT TIME, A SHOT AT VICTORY

2008-08-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
As a presidential candidate, John McCain is an accident of history, just as Hubert Humphrey was in 1968. Back then the Democratic candidate would have been California primary victor Bobby Kennedy had not Sirhan Sirhan changed history in the kitchen of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel.

And in 2008 the Republican candidate would have been Virginia’s George Allen, if not for his videotaped “macaca” remark. He had the contributors, the babbling-right-wing editorialists, and pretty much the whole world primed. But after Allen allowed us a quick look into his ugly mind, there weren't many GOP alternates ready to go for the prize. McCain, who’s too old and too ornery to be nominated under ordinary conditions, just happened to be the last man standing. Republican voters weren’t about to pull the switch for Mitt Romney, who’d abruptly switched virtually every political stand he’d ever taken as Massachusetts governor in order to sign off on all the hard-core positions a candidate must take to win GOP primaries.

McCain had also re-tailored most of his positions in order to pass muster with Mr. and Mrs. Right-Wing, but his switch had been a gradual one over approximately eight years. McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin for the No. 2 spot is an interesting one, but not likely to peel off nearly as many Hillary supporters as he’d hoped.

I’m not going to claim relatively untested Palin couldn’t possibly fill the role of president because if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last eight years it’s that the country can stumble along with virtually anybody in the Oval Office, even a lazy little bastard who can’t put six grammatical words together and never asks any questions because he already knows everything.

But Barack Obama is not an accident of history. He’s the logical president for a country weary of a government that cares for the interests of only the very, very rich and their natural allies, the big global corporations out to buy favors.

Obama’s the logical president for a country that wants to get past its crazy concern over race. But of course not everyone in this country wants to get past race. When voters tell interviewers they don’t know enough about Obama, they’re basically saying they’d need to know an awful lot more about a black man in order to vote for him and they don’t really want to know too much because then they might want to vote for him. This is a man who wrote his own informative, revealing autobiography, writes his own speeches (as did Lincoln), and who told us in his acceptance speech exactly what he plans to do, who he is, and where he comes from. And they don’t know enough about him? Where do they live? Saddam’s old spider hole?

After what we’ve been through the last eight years either Al Gore or John Edwards --- both white Southern men with brains and decent instincts --- would have won this general election 58-52 percent. But Gore lost the fire in his belly and Edwards couldn’t get through to enough Democratic primary voters and ultimately self-destructed.

Naturally it’s going to be more difficult for an African-American with a funny name, particularly since a black man, as Jesse Jackson noted, isn’t allowed to get angry. And when the McCain-Rove machine really starts throwing mud, he’s going to have to be our new Jackie Robinson, the university-educated black man who promised Branch Rickey he would remain composed when taunted by racist ball players and fans. Robinson pledged to just play his best and pave the way for others. That’s what Barack is going to do for all of us.

OBAMA'S FOREMOST MISSION IN DENVER SHOULD BE TO RUB McCAIN'S NOSE IN BUSH'S STINK

2008-08-25T21:02:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Even John McCain would have to agree that Michelle Obama was extremely poised for a Muslim, America-hating bomb-thrower from the Weather Underground. And those two daughters are triple-adorable. Trouble is, when the Republicans come to bat in Minnesota they will unleash TV sharpies like Fox’s Roger Ailes who will fill their precious time slot with vicious, anti-Obama venom that will take its toll. That’s why Fox News doubles the viewership of tamer CNN. It knows how to get eyeballs fastened on what it's doing.

The first night in Denver avoided disaster. Teddy was quite moving, and Michelle proved to be one of the finest public speakers in memory. Very few members of Congress can come close to her in terms of intellect and communications skills. But we now suffer under the worst president in American history running the most inept, venal, corrupt administration since Nero. Obama and his people must rub McCain’s nose in Bush’s stink. They must remind us over and over, using McCain's very own statements, asides, voting record, and senior moments as supporting evidence, why his administration would be a continuation of our present nightmare.

Positive campaigning is great, but Americans' hatred and distrust of the Bush administration are fantastic gifts to Obama. In Denver we should be hearing about McCain and Bush every fourth or fifth sentence. Cheney is hated from sea to sea, but I didn't hear one prime-time word about him. Also, that ex-GOP congressman from Iowa is one of the ten most boring people in America. He had to drive off millions of viewers with his dull, nearly pointless history lecture. Didn't anyone bother to check up on this guy? Listening to him was like tuning in to golf on your radio dial.

Democrats have all sorts of media experts they could call on – Rob Reiner, Spielberg, etc., etc. But whoever ran this show for Obama was far from first-rate. That may not be fatal, but it can’t help. There’s a saying in boxing: if you don’t train hard, remember your opponent will. It’s a concept Obama’s people clearly didn’t understand when they put together their first night in Denver.

COLD WAR PART II -- A LOOK BACK

2008-08-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
No one gave it much thought when Prince George marched into the Rose Garden in December 2001 and announced, "Today I am giving formal notice to Russia that the United States of America is withdrawing from this almost 30-year-old treaty." He was referring to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Why was this country unilaterally pulling out of one of the most successful peace initiatives in world history?

Nobody really asked. In December 2001, three months after 9-11, Bush was America's darling, a "hero." So if he was pulling the plug on this hugely significant pact, it was assumed he must have a good reason. He'd even gotten away with running away in Air Force One on Nine-Eleven, making a panicked, circular flight around much of the nation that lasted several hours, then journeying three days later to Ground Zero to take up a bullhorn and cheer the workers who were (unbeknownst to them) being poisoned by toiling day after day in the killer dust. The media played down and mostly ignored his retreat from responsibility and played up his cautious, long-overdue foray to New York as somehow being courageous. And when he declared a “crusade” against (Muslim) enemies, he was forgiven for being an ignoramus who ratcheted up the rhetoric to make new enemies of those Muslims that had been sympathetic to the U.S. after the Twin Towers came down.

But in November 2001, Vladimir Putin, on his first visit to America, had said through an interpreter that Russia intended "to dismantle conclusively the vestiges of the Cold War." He meant the thousands of Soviet-era nuclear warheads. Then when Bush double-crossed him only one month later and made him look like a fool, the KGB alumnus took another look at his policy and pronouncements. Members of the Russian Duma immediately called for an end to the country’s then-ongoing destruction of the old warheads.

To execute intelligent foreign policy, you have to use empathy. After Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 and subsequently hanged its leader, Russia saw that the U.S. was capable of attacking a country just to show it could, and that the U.S. media, Congress, and public would swallow it too. The president could even keep his troops in that country after his stated war aims – knocking out WMD and crippling an Al Qaeda supporter – were proved bogus. Meanwhile, Bush-Cheney had pulled out of the ABM treaty and were encircling Russia with new NATO allies from the old Soviet Empire. What were the Russians to think?

Of course the U.S. “defense” industry was merrily proceeding on its dubious Star Wars mission. Its biggest players, including big-time Pentagon contractor G.E., owner of NBC and, let's face it, the late Tim Russert, saw that the end of the Cold War was very, very bad for them, and that this war on “terror” might not consume enough advanced military hardware to keep top defense executives in eight figures. The science behind Star Wars involves trying to shoot down a bullet with a bullet. Once you figure out how to do it, the enemy can change the nature of its bullets much more easily and inexpensively than you can alter your anti-bullets. Doesn't it make more sense to get rid of nukes using careful, mutual inspections?

Make no mistake. Al Qaeda is a beast. Putin is a cold-eyed dictator whose agents murder pesty journalists. But there are better ways to handle them than to place moronic chicken hawks in charge of U.S. policy. McCain might not know how many houses he owns, but he does know that any opportunity for war makes him look strong. If chicken hawks like Bush and Cheney can look heroic for sending other people to their death just for laughs, how much better can he look by pursuing the same policy? Because despite his many disqualifications for office, McCain is no chicken hawk. So now he's taken time off from snarling at Arabs to snarl at Russians. If he's lucky, maybe before Election Day Cheney and his Little Bush sidekick will manufacture even newer enemies for McCain to snarl at. Oh happy day.

STAR WARS PERSISTS; REMEMBER IKE'S WARNING ABOUT MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX?

2008-08-19T10:41:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Have any of our corporate media outlets bothered to ask just why it’s so important to place an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic? Of course not. They’re too busy checking to see who is or isn’t wearing an American flag lapel pin. But plenty hangs on the answer to this unasked question.

Ever since the Reagan administration the government has been slicing billions upon billions out of the defense budget to develop Star Wars missiles. Though the program has always rested on shaky scientific ground, it survived Daddy Bush, Clinton, and Little Bush administrations plus all those Democratic- and Republican-led congresses. But after the military industrial complex finally put together some dwarf models, it looked around to discover there was no more Cold War.

No problem. All we have to do is start a new one. Why not ignite one with the rotting rump of the old Soviet Empire - gangster Russia? Because Bush-Cheney managed to triple the price of petroleum, they’ve made oil-rich Russia wealthy enough to stand in as a credible threat.

Bush-Cheney tell us repeatedly that the ten anti-missiles to be deployed in Poland are aimed at “rogue states,” not Russia. When Putin invaded Georgia, (Georgia initiated hostilities by sending troops into its two breakaway provinces) he was angry at the West for quite a number of insults, but chief among them was the plan to place Star Wars in Poland, with radar installations in the Czech Republic.

Anyway, as soon as Putin sent tanks rolling into Georgia, first somebody had to explain to Prince George about the existence of this other Georgia. Then the newly informed Little Prince retaliated by getting Poland’s quick okay, after years of resistance, to accept the system. Another question our media never asked: If the missiles are aimed at rogue states not to include Russia, how could their deployment be a tit-for-tat tactic to punish Russia?

More questions: Does this incremental Star Wars shield work? Does it make us safer? It's not designed to stop ABM’s, by the way, only shorter-range missiles. Poland never thought it would be made safer by this Strangelovian system, which is why it refused to accept the thing on its soil all this time. It requires only a few pennies to beef up offensive capability in relation to the dollars it takes to develop defensive missile capabilities. In simple terms, it’s much cheaper to develop a gun that shoots bullets than a gun that shoots bullets designed to stop bullets.

Bin Laden is a maniac in a cave with no air force. Putin commands thousands of nukes that Russia was once eager to destroy. But that was before Bush unilaterally pulled out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty (another barely noticed event that had huge repercussions)

What's going on is a classic enactment of precisely what Eisenhower warned against in his 1960 farewell speech, when he coined the term “military-industrial complex.” When this complex gets big and powerful enough, it drives U.S. policy away from its true interests. Now it's feeding on itself to grow even bigger. And feeding on us.

OBAMA'S PATRIOTISM -- IS THAT REAL ISSUE?

2008-08-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

The Karl Rove attack dogs that have taken over the McCain campaign have already managed to choose the chief topic of the 2008 presidential race: Why does Barack Obama hate America?

Republicans aren’t much good at governing, but they know how to run an election campaign in a nation that loves simple, ugly scandals even if they're untrue.

McCain and his creatures can’t say out loud what their two-part program is for this country, which is to make the rich richer and screw everyone else, paying particular attention to punishing the downtrodden. Consequently, they stay away from issues of substance or skulk up to them with tangential asides that pose as issues. The thrust of their election strategy is to replace the topics that matter by substituting personal attacks, often leveling charges that are totally invented and repeating them even after they're proved false.

The media, trained to look for the sensational, rather like this sort of campaign and reflexively become its tools. A few of their members question why they do things they way they do, but for the most part they fall obediently into line rather than focus on what the campaign should be about. The global corporations that employ them naturally lean right, and they’re pleased they don’t even have to put out directives to get the kind of election coverage they hanker for.

Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC (Disney, Inc.) knew their work would be applauded in the executive suites, when, for example, they spent much of a nationally televised “debate” blaming Obama for violent attacks made by the Weather People when he was ten years old.

It’s not that Obama doesn’t try to press forward on the issues; it’s just that almost no one pays attention. His statements on reforming Social Security, health care, energy, and ecology policies fall unheard in the forest, as does his determination to at least modify America’s expanded role as Soldier of Oil.

Instead he has to explain he’d never intended to bring in cameras while he visited with wounded service people, as McCain, Inc. claimed. In this case McCain didn't twist the truth a bit but just made something up. Once you start answering such charges, you’re sunk. The charges stick. But the real indictment is broader – that he’s a non-white, secret Muslim agent seeking to destroy America. The New Yorker cartoon cover was only kidding, but McCain and his people aren’t. They’ll keep hammering out the Big Lie, a strategy perfected by Joseph Goebbels when he and his boss came to power in Germany 75 years ago.

Somehow Obama has to figure out a way to push the issues into the spotlight – not easy in dumbed-down America, where so many voters can’t name their congressional representative but will readily tell you about the latest loser on "So You Think You Can Dance".

DO VOTERS NOTICE McCAIN'S POLICIES?

2008-06-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

John McCain’s domestic and foreign policies are opposed by an overwhelming majority of Americans.

His economic policy is to soak everyone but the very, very rich, whose tax cuts he favors preserving and extending into perpetuity.

His health care plan? He has none, other than to preserve socialized medicine for him and his family and to leave as many people as possible at the mercy of insurers and drug companies, who paid him and his Senate colleagues handsomely for that privilege.

Now he says he wants to rip up the coasts for more oil so when we run out we’ll not only have no oil, but dead beaches.

He wants to send police after women who choose abortion even when pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. He also wants to criminalize the doctors who treat them. To ensure this he will dig through the sludge to find more people like Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, etc. and get them lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.

He intends to maintain Iraq as a colony even though the elected government there wants us out. At the same time he claims he wants to foster democracy there.

He equates military duty in Iraq to the occupations of Germany and Japan, where G.I.s were treated, for the most part, decently, and could walk the streets alone without being harmed. Despite his military heritage he doesn’t identify with the enlisted men who must carry out mad edicts from above. A good officer looks after his men and women, but this grandson and son of four-star admirals has other ideas.

Bush and Cheney have succeeded in arranging sweet deals for pet oil companies to move into Iraq. And they've also succeeded in quadrupling petroleum's world price. But even if McCain were to get at all the oil in and around Iraq through Exxon-Mobil and other global corporations, you have to ask whether they would share it with Americans. Of course the answer is they would sell it to Americans at the same world price anyone else would pay. The oil companies, through the special tax breaks arranged by their lobbyists, don’t even pay their fair share of the ten billion a month we pay to occupy Iraq for them. But McCain does favor giving us a gas-tax holiday, which would save the average family a couple dollars a month and further deprive our broken-down insfrastructure.

But our hopelessly inept and corrupted corporate media don’t even try to get at such issues. They consider it more important to corner politicians into wearing American flag pins.

Americans, who for the most part are able to see the Bush administration as a gang of law-breaking, lying incompetents, are almost evenly split when they’re asked to choose between a candidate who will continue the Bush-Cheney policies and one who won’t. That’s quite a disconnect.

But ignorance reigns during this perfect storm of failing education and failing media. An increasingly ill-educated public doesn’t notice the failures of the news media so much as long as new “American Idol” segments are provided each week.

BUSH QUOTE OF THE WEEK: There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal.

EVERY WELL-INTENTIONED HILLARY VOTER CONSIDERING McCAIN NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT DEBBIE SHANK

2008-06-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Debbie Shank is the reason I would have voted for Hillary had she been the Democratic nominee. Yes, I who have railed against this devious royalist for reasons I won’t repeat now, would have pulled the Hillary lever. And Hillary backers should pull that Obama lever for the same reason -- Debbie Shank.

Mrs. Shank was the Wal-Mart employee from Jackson, Mo. who was brain-injured by a truck that collided with her vehicle. She and her husband got $417,000 from a lawsuit against the trucker’s insurance company (all that was left after legal fees, etc. from a $1 million judgment). But then Wal-Mart demanded back the $470,000 its health insurance had paid toward Mrs. Shank’s hospitalization.

Mrs. Shank is permanently brain-injured, and her husband works two jobs. Like most Wal-Mart employees, they’re perilously clinging to their low place on the economic ladder. In fact, they're broke. Oh, and their son was killed in Iraq.

When they protested the Wal-Mart demand they lost in court, and took it all the way to the Supreme Court. But the high court, five of whose members were appointed by the Bush family, refused to even hear the case. The court concluded justice had been done.

That’s what Hillary and Barack supporters have in common. We don’t even want to think about what will happen to the country if John McCain fills the next life-time vacancies. John Paul Stevens, one of the last of the liberal justices, is 88. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has had health problems. McCain has already said he’d nominate the same sort of justices that George Junior did. That would be Roberts and Alito, two justices that never saw a ruling in favor of a global corporation against actual people that they didn’t like.

Next time a friend tells you he/she is too upset over Hillary's loss to pull the Obama lever, tell them about Debbie Shank. Ask them to look her up on the Internet. It’s all there. I wish I’d made her up. But unfortunately, I didn’t.

HILLARY TO OBAMA: CHOOSE ME OR I'LL BURY YOU

2008-06-04T14:05:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

When it comes to a spot on the Democratic ticket, that’s no signal Hillary is sending to this upstart who dared to defeat her. It’s a Mafiosa-style message. Put me on the ticket or your presidential campaign will sleep with the fishes.
A signal is something you send out privately. But Hillary broadcast her demand in a conference call with a group of congressional Democrats, which is like shouting it out on the Larry King show. The purpose was to communicate with her supporters, especially the zombies who'll follow her across the River Styx. Now they know what she wants, so she can drive them into further fits of rage when she doesn’t get it. If Hillary can keep them from pulling the Obama lever in November, she can set herself up for 2012.

But here’s the clinker, the true Clinton-esque twist. If Obama gives in, he’ll appear weak to the independents and wavering Republicans he must have to beat McCain, which also sets Obama up for defeat this November and gives Hillary a boost for 2012. The mantra would then be, Well sure we lost. That 2008 ticket was upside down. Obama’s too black, too untested, and worst of all, he’s not even a Clinton.

Meanwhile, Bill has already signaled he’s going to stick to his foundation from now on. The implied promise to Obama is that if he gives Hillary the Number Two spot he won’t have to worry any of those red-faced Bill outbursts will soil the campaign. But anyone who believes that is naive enough to believe Hillary really wants an Obama victory in November. Narcissist Bill never saw a TV camera or a microphone he didn't love.

Obama and his strategists understand all this. The question now is, what to do about it. What they have going for them is they've grown used to figuring out the Clintons, who've succeeded in making themselves the biggest impediment to a Democratic victory in the fall. That's been their purpose ever since they realized months ago that their 2008 campaign was a walking corpse. Defeating a 71-year-old mini-Bush ought to be relatively easy for Barack, but not when a couple of Doberman Clintons have their teeth sunk in his ankles.

FORMER BUSH SPOKESMAN CASHES IN, SEEKING CREDIT, BIG BUCKS

2008-05-28T11:12:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Prince George's former press secretary Scott McClellan, who now proclaims himself a truth-teller in his soon-to-be-released, tell-all book, ought to have his head placed in one of those eighteenth-century stocks so passers-by could throw apples at it.
"Bush is plenty smart enough to be president.” McClellan wrote in What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, according to the Washington Post. McClellan, in his capacity as White House press secretary, was supposed to be a word wizard. The fact that he defends a man’s intelligence with an ungrammatical splotch of junk English that closely resembles the way his boss murders syntax, language, and reason tells us just how reliable his judgment is in such matters.

But McClellan also writes that the Iraq war didn’t need to be fought and that the administration used propaganda rather than facts to justify it, and of course that's what the general news media are jumping on, thereby giving McClellan a jump in sales. In his media marketing blitz, McClellan, unused to dabbling in the truth, often contradicts himself within a single sentence, telling us Prince George is an honorable and intelligent leader served by honorable and intelligent people and that all of them routinely lied and deceived to get what they wanted.

Now here’s the problem: wasn’t he obliged to share this hugely important inside information about the war with his employer the American public before the tanks went in? Now, more than five years later, after several hundred thousand people are dead, millions are terribly wounded, homeless, and in exile, McClellan cashes in with a multi-million-dollar book deal to reveal what he knows.

Somebody pass me an apple, a really rotten one.

CLINTONS FORM THIRD PARTY

2008-05-09T16:25:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," Hillary Clinton said in an interview with

USA

TODAY. As evidence, she cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There's a pattern emerging here."

WASHINGTON -- Hillary and Bill Clinton shocked the world yesterday when they mounted the steps of the Capitol and declared Mrs. Clinton will run for president in November on the newly formed Hard-Working White Americans ticket.

Asked whether they were implying blacks don’t work hard, Bill’s face turned redder than a radish as he proclaimed, ‘I was America’s first black president and I've worked hard all my life. That’s why I’ve got so many damn houses I can’t even remember all the addresses. I’m rich, see? Richer than you."

Hillary patted him on the hand as she nodded to his handlers to take him somewhere he wouldn’t hurt himself.

"Look,” she continued, “the name of our ticket has nothing to do with whether we believe black people work hard or whether Obama is a Muslim, which he isn’t, as far as I know. We’re just saying white Americans who work hard now have a place to go in November, a party that will be working every day for them, from Day One. But we still count Barack Obama as a dear friend even though everybody knows an untested black person can't possibly win in November.

“Also, the new Hard-Working White Americans Party, which was formed in response to the Democratic Party's unwillingness to give hard-working white Americans in Michigan and Florida a voice in the process, won't like certain parties I'm too polite to name, ignore the votes of hard-working white Americans in Michigan and Florida."

At this point she paused to bite off a huge chunk of a Krispy Kreme doughnut that she washed down with a swig of Bud, after which she wiped her mouth with her sleeve, nearly scratching her face with her $80,000 wristwatch. "And," she continued, "you won’t see anybody on our ticket who attended a terrorist madrasa, either."

Exactly, what, she was asked by George Stephanapolous, was she trying to imply? She leaned down from her makeshift podium, petted him like a spaniel and said,“I’m implying nothing. I’m just saying, is all. You didn’t see me planting terrorist bombs with the Weathermen either. At the same time, notice that our party is inclusive. We welcome the support of white Americans who've been to college so perhaps aren't as receptive to our message as hard-working white Americans. "

“But Senator Clinton," said Miss Alabama 2007, CBS’ new news anchor, “aren’t you afraid your new message is explicitly racist and that you’re also helping John McCain by trying to drive Democrats apart?” Miss Alabama 2007 read this from a script placed in her hand by another dumpy woman who'd attended Wellesley.

“Let me explain it to you,” Bill said to Miss Alabama 2007 as he broke away from his handlers and led her toward his limo. At that point Hillary let loose a fake smile that cracked several camera lenses, but news people weren't paying attention because they scurried after Bill and his new friend so they wouldn't be cut out of the new sex scoop.

“Wait,” Hillary hollered. “I haven’t finished my statement! . . . Damnit, I’m still a big story!!!”

GAMES VS. LITERATURE IN 21ST CENTURY AMERICA

2008-04-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
The newest version of video game "Grand Theft Auto" comes out Tuesday, and experts say it should sell at least 6 million copies the first week. Amazon lists the game at $49.99. Most copies will be purchased by young adult men, some of whom will line up outside stores Monday night.
If they decide to vote, their vote is as good as yours. So is the vote of the 10 percent of Americans who think Barack Obama is a Muslim and the millions of Americans who voted to re-elect The Decider in 2004.

Fact: If you can sell thirty thousand copies of a novel within a few weeks -- that's one-half of one percent of 6 million -- you'll almost certainly hit the best-seller list. Hardbacks sell for about $25. Find the right literature and it can change your life forever. You'll relive that awakening over and over with delight and understanding. Did you know that back in Dickens' time thousands of readers waited at the New York docks for the latest installment of his novels?

Short stories are dead, buried alongside poetry, and literate novels are expiring. The stuff is being written and sometimes even published, but readers are dying off and younger minds prefer to anesthetize themselves with video games, sitcoms, and sequels to films written for the least aware minds in the Western world..

The link between literacy and clear thinking was mapped out precisely by George Orwell in his great essay "Politics and the English Language." The spike in the games industry, the ascendancy of moronic political ideas, the American Idolization of the news media, and the deterioration of schools well serves global corporations that buy what they want from our politicians without being asked too many questions.

TAKE CLOSE LOOK AT CLINTON DYNASTY ISSUE

2008-04-25T10:42:00.001-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
It's commendable that thoughtful N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman actually tries to examine issues and positions as opposed to personalities as he studies the presidential sweepstakes. This analysis has clearly brought him over to Hillary. But Krugman and others like him should pay more attention to the dynasty issue. The Bushes have appointed five Supreme Court justices, the Clintons two. Do we really want two families to have appointed the entire court? That's just one example of why this whole idea of two families swapping the presidency back and forth is dangerous.

Many of the people supporting Hillary will flat-out tell you they support the Clinton family & seek its restoration. Sometimes I get the feeling we're living in 19th century Austria defending the Hapsburgs against the Bonapartes.

Plus, Bill/Hillary are a terribly untruthful duo of dubious moral fiber. They tell lies & half-lies on a regular basis. Recently Hillary lied repeatedly about being shot at in Bosnia and fessed up only after videotape was produced to prove the falseness of her version. Lately she claims she has more votes than Obama. Half-true. That's only when you factor in Florida and Michigan, where all Democratic candidates pledged not to campaign. Obama, believing Hillary was telling the truth, actually took his name off the ballot in Michigan. Now she's claiming those Mich. votes should be counted. And Bill backs up these lies and half-lies with new ones.

These two are an odd couple and not a particularly attractive one in terms of character. The impeachment drive was a farce, of course, but beneath it lay the reality that Pres. Bill was getting blowjobs from a 21-year-old intern. I used to be a professor sending out interns to the workplace so I find that particularly disturbing. Couldn't he have found a more suitable mistress? Of course. But he didn't have the character.

Inviting Bill & Hillary back into the White House with their lies and corruption and contradictory positions (on Iraq, for example, we're all supposed to erase from our memory the 2002-06 Hillary who thought invading Iraq was a grand idea) is a stupid move. James Carville is just one member of the same sleazy cast that would trail them inside the corridors of power like hungry rats.

Obama is an intelligent, thoughtful, personable man of character. And I don't think he's plotting to set up the Obama family as our ruling monarchy. Let's give him a shot. An Obama-Edwards ticket would roll over McCain, and supporting the Clintons on the basis of their announced positions is ridiculous because what they say about anything is barely linked to the truth.

HILLARY'S FOUND CLEVER WAY TO GET NOMINATED AFTER ALL

2008-04-17T12:14:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Anyone else notice in the last Pennsylvania debate that Hillary's angling to be McCain's running mate? How else do you explain her strategy of trying to spray Obama's candidacy with such heavy toxic poisons that no one will ever touch him again?
Who'da guessed that Barack's a Weatherman who hates America, white people, and especially White Americans? Served on a board with a Weather guy? Gimme a break. Anyone ever check out who served on the union-busting, small-business-destroying, Communist China-loving Wal-Mart board with Hillary for 15 years? She stepped down only when hubby ran for President in '92.
ABC even assigned one of the Clintons' favorite pooches, George Hairball Stephanopolous, to chew up the black man along with one of George's hyena friends. While they're at it, why not resurrect one of Bull Connor's police dogs? You can't let major news media "moderate" these debates. They're deeply entangled in Medici politics and peculiar corporate angles. They're out to create phony explosions, not explore real issues. Did they ever examine the fact that an oil guy and a defense industry guy ran on the same ticket and started a war that benefited nobody but the oil and defense industries (plus al Qaeda and Iran, but whose counting?)?
I used to think Hillary's running her '12 campaign against old man McCain now, figuring that even though everyone will hate her for wrecking the Democrats' chances in '08, she can make them all forget that in '12 by completely distancing herself from the '08 Hillary the same way she's distanced herself from the 2003-06 Hillary that was crazy about invading Iraq. Now I see the truth. She's looking to run on McCain's ticket against Commie Mau Mau Obama who's gonna hand us over to the Muslims.

DISSEMINATING THE TRUTH: SO WHAT?

2008-04-15T09:37:00.001-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
I used to think it was vital to communicate to the public just how much harm our Iraq adventure is doing to this country, not to mention Iraq. But after five years of madness seventy percent of Americans and seventy percent of Iraqis want our forces out fast. So changing attitudes doesn’t appear to have any effect on the lack of any policy because the “surge,” at least in a mutated form, goes on even though the Army is having a nervous breakdown and all the generals minus Patraeus say this just can't go on. Clearly there’s a systemic failure within our democracy.
Multi-millionaire John McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, married to a beer heiress, and working hard to destroy the middle class while making the rich richer, calls self-made Barack Obama elitist. Corporate news media, failing to notice the irony, act as though there’s some substance to Bittergate. What about McCain's Let-Them-Eat Cake-Gate?
And it’s pretty clear that neither Obama nor Clinton would pull out of Iraq, not really. Try to pin them down and they talk about “trainers,” use the word “residual,” and recite a “withdrawal” rate, that, if pursued, would leave many thousands of U.S. troops there for many years to come.
Meanwhile, the dollar has collapsed, and Americans failed to notice.
Our educational and news-presentation processes are so broken that politicians and their corporate employers can get away with just about anything they want. The immigrants that Lou Dobbs and his ignorant legions scream about are actually key gears that keep our wheels turning.

CATCHING UP

2008-04-02T10:56:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
No, I don't mean I think Hillary will catch up. I'm talking about what's going on in my life. But as long as people are actually for some reason asking my opinion on some of what's going on in these politically tumultuous times, it's this:

Hillary knows she has almost no chance to win the nomination but hopes to damage Obama to such an extent that he'll lose to McCain and she can run against the 100-year warrior in 2012. A dangerous strategy, because it will increase the number of Hillary-haters, but she figures she has nothing to lose because if she can't be president then what does anything matter? So what if the Republicans put a few more crazies on the Supreme Court who won't even hear the case of the lady brain-damaged by a truck accident who has to pay Wal-Mart back its $400K for her medical bills? It's of no consequence compared to achieving the dream of restoring the Clinton dynasty to the throne.

And while I'm rambling, allow me to point out that I'm in Costa Rica for 2 weeks and like lots of turistas I sometimes turn to CNN in my hotel room, where I see it repeats the story over and over of Hillary uttering a line written by her handlers that likens her to Rocky Balboa. Plus we learn -- wow! -- 2 people and counting have asked Princess Chelsea about Monica!

Meanwhile there's nothing on, for instance, the terrible descent of the Republican Party into right-wing lunacy thanks to crippled campaign reform laws that have put Republicans officeholders on the side of their paymasters -- the minute slice of Americans who can grab $100 million parachutes and bid for Picassos. And screw health care and the more humane practices of the Western democracies minus our schizo-monarchy that loops around from Bushes to Clintons and back again. The rabble can wait in emergency rooms if they need help with their ongoing illnesses. If they need pharmaceuticals, they can always turn to Christian Science. And CNN is supposed to be the moderate 24-all-day-and-night news channel. Hey, in all those 24 hours can't they dig up and interview the political scientists who have no doubt researched what's really going on in the world and why our republic is crumbling as we speak?

I heard Lou Dobbs pronounce the domestic policies of Clinton, Obama, and McCain as practically identical. The man's out of his fucking mind. Don't they have executives over at CNN who can at least demand he read a book once in a while? He spoke with a maddening combination of ignorance and assertiveness. Where did they get this sonofabitch? Kick his ample butt over the border with nothing but ten bucks and a serape. Maybe it would educate him.

Anyway, back to catching up. I haven't been around my own blog because I'm concentrating on writing fiction. My novel The Barfighter will be out from Permanent Press in April '09. It will be followed around December or January by my novel Exit Blue from Black Heron. They're both small but respected publishers. The first deals with Vietnam, boxing, remorse, the power of love, and of course other issues. The second is a political satire set in the near future. Both these novels make excellent presents. Send them instead of Christmas cards.

Meanwhile, I haven't forgotten the cheated families tossed out of their homes, the hopelessly indebted unemployed who are no longer able to declare true bankruptcy, the disabled veterans who go home to nothing, the service people who get stop-lossed into the funeral pyre of our Iraq policy, the hungry semi-employed citizens who aren't eligible for food stamps because they've managed to hang on to their homes or cars. I know you haven't forgotten them either.

Peace.

LAURA BUSH CALLS FOR DEMOCRACY -- OH BOY

2007-12-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

BULLETIN: Laura Bush Calls on Burmese Junta to Allow Democracy

As Channukah comes to a close, it appears our darling First Lady has been eating LSD-laced latkes. As First Lady of all the people she has developed Chutzpah, and now if she and her hubby will step down and stop stealing elections, maybe we can return to some form of democracy in the U.S. too.

Also, take notice that Venezuela's sanity-challenged Hugo Chavez nevertheless obeys the voters when he loses a close one, as opposed to some people who call up their daddy's pals to put in the final fix.

WHEN WE GET TO MARS MAYBE WE CAN FORGET ALL ABOUT IRAQ

2007-09-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Maybe you're wondering why all those members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats both, are preparing to give Bush the funding he needs to continue the war. Well they just might feel everybody's being too demanding of a President who's been forced to spend much of his energy putting together the glorious trip to Mars he promised us in 2004. Did you forget all about that? Well, he didn't. He's just not that kind of guy, and Congress knows it, even if the rest of us don't.

So Congress must figure that as soon as he gets the space thing out of the way, he'll solve these little Iraq glitches with his usual flair and incisiveness because the fact that we have no mission there and Iraqi citizens overwhelmingly say it's OK to kill U.S. troops and our people are dying and being maimed and crippled for nothing and the average Baghdad family is sitting each night in the dark without running water or a working sewer system, and gangs of freaked-out gunmen are running around outside abducting and torturing people and this Maliki government we're supposed to root for is closely tied to the murderous, psychotic Mahdi Army that's been bombing and shooting our troops for year is dwarfed by our glorious leader's ability to take care of the whole mess as soon as our astronauts set up a Martian golf course.

I guess it turns out when they voted Bush permission to go into Iraq and seize the WMDs these people in Congress also voted to garrison the place forever, all of which apparently makes terrific sense to Democrats like Diane Feinstein who routinely give Bush everything he asks for in Iraq and then complain about his policy. I'm growing a bit weary of the Feinsteins of this world, but I'll just try to focus on how great everything's going to be when we get to Mars.

BEYOND THE SURGE -- A TIDE OF BULLSHIT

2007-09-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Reality Weather Service put out a bulletin today warning of a surge of bullshit sweeping out of Washington. Residents around the globe were told to wear raingear, particularly when digesting media interpretations of this astonishing weather pattern, which had conventional meteorologists baffled.
CBS, CNN, et al were preparing to inform us the bullshit surge smells like a rose, making it terribly dangerous for anyone who still hasn’t developed some kind of bullshit detector.
Don’t panic. Stay in your homes unless you have the gumption to take to the streets because enough is fucking enough.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress already slavishly accepting the surge as a successful strategy even though the doctoring of the statistics have already been unmasked, were preparing to surrender to this bullshit without a fight. Bush’s’ revived threat to withhold supplies from troops in the field gave them their clearest path to his impeachment and removal from office, but they lacked the brains, imagination, and guts to make the journey.
If Congress refuses to fund the war and our chicken hawk-in-chief leaves our troops out there without supplies, Congress should of course exercise its constitutional authority to send him packing within 24 hours. So Congress would lose a little sleep. Big deal. The seven U.S. troops killed in Anbar during one day last week gave up more than that. Then it would be Deferement Dick’s turn to pull the same crazy bullshit, and then Speaker of the House Pelosi would be president. She’s a craven Pelosi, but at least she knows the difference between Australia and Austria, making her a big improvement over what we’ve got. Besides, impeaching and jailing her predecessors just might light enough of a fire under her ass to prompt her to do what’s right.

I know the accompanying photo is upsetting. It upset me too. But we should all understand what they're doing with our tax dollars as we continue to let the same people who got us into this mess -- the same people who've never been right about this war -- tell us what to do next.

QUESTIONS ON WAR, PEACE & HILLARY'S BUTT

2007-08-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Consider me still on a blog break, but here are questions I've been asking myself, and I wondered if anyone out there could help me answer them:

The Democrats won control of Congress, and very quickly we had 30,000 more U.S. troops in Iraq, our casualties increased, and Democrats continued funding the war. So what did we get out of it?
If Hillary and Obama really opposed the war, wouldn’t they spell out when they’d pull our troops out?
If all the Sunni states in the Mideast know Maliki is just a stooge for Iran, how come the U.S. government doesn’t get it?
Isn’t there a law anywhere that says Dick Cheney can’t continue fixing no-bid contracts for Halliburton while he hangs on to its stock?

Why aren’t all those administrators at the FCC who took free vacations from the corporations they were supposed to regulate in jail?
Why do all those people in Congress get away with accepting “donations” from fat cats and then letting them write legislation like the Medicare prescription clause that fixes into law the concept that drug companies will wholesale their products to the government at retail prices?
Does Bush still consider himself a compassionate conservative while throwing $8 billion a month at his war to nowhere and promising to veto $7 billion a year for a children’s health care program that's proved its worth a hundred times over?

Nancy Pelosi took Bush’s impeachment “off the table” after his administration had already admitted tapping phones and intercepting mail and email without warrants. He and Cheney are still repeating the same lies about Iraq that were refuted years ago. His avalanche of signing statements tell us plainly he refuses to enforce acres of law. What’s a guy have to do to get impeached around here?

After the Bush dynasty hands the presidency back to the Clinton dynasty will the throne have to be retrofitted to handle Hillary’s butt? (That's her on the right in the accompanying photo)

GOLDMAN BEGINS HIATUS -- WORLD DOESN'T STOP

2007-06-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Hi Readers. I started this blog not so much because I was enraged by the everyday actions of this criminal regime in Washington. What really got to me was the reaction of our citizens -- or the lack of it. About 28 percent are hardcore fascists who'll follow Bush into the gates of hell, and almost all the rest are strolling through the mall and watching American Idol.

Also, I was personally pinpointed by these ongoing horrors because I have a son in the Army who's already done one tour in Iraq and is set to do another. The worst predictions in 1984, Brave New World, and a host of other fantasies are being realized, and most people don't care enough to react as long as no one in their family is being sent to Iraq by the likes of Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, and their Washington entourage.

I'm not so egocentric as to believe that those people not reading my blog are automatically wretches. But I've sold non-fiction commentaries to some pretty substantial publications over the years as over-the-transom submissions, so I know my stuff can't all be substandard. But the New York Times, L.A. Times, etc, and even publications like The Nation are operated by jealous cliques and impose certain rules and boundaries I found increasingly tiresome. I really haven't figured out this Internet marketing thing, and I've had fewer than 2,000 "unique visitors," according to the free service that measures this stuff for me.

I don't want to put crappy stuff on this blog under my name, but right now I don't have the time or the inclination to put up polished stuff for such a small audience (for the great people like your who are reading this).

I recently sold my novel The Barfighter and am working on another, and will continue to focus more of my attention on my novels because oddly enough you can write more about the truth as you see it under the umbrella of fiction. I'll also continue doing boxing commentary in The Ring magazine because it's still a joy -- except when I'm on deadline. The accompanying photo is fairly recent. I'm eating free grub supplied by Shane Mosley. If you don't know what Shane looks like and so can't figure out which of us is which, he's the one with lots more money and a great attitude.

For now I plan to put stuff up on this blog from time to time when I come across something that I believe is really worth your attention. But I'm told if you don't put up new stuff all the time you lose your audience. We'll see. I'm also going to Europe pretty soon -- just for a few weeks -- and I'll see how I feel about this blog when I return. Maybe I'll find some magic formula to build a bigger audience. Thanks for sticking with me.

Best wishes & up the ass of the ruling class,

Ivan G.