Category: Politics

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Politics Technology Thoughts and Comments

The End of Ambition

Today I watched the last Space Shuttle lift off, right up the coast from me. Once the Atlantis lands, 9,000 people will be laid off. One man has worked at NASA for over 30 years, and he has worked on every single one of the 135 shuttle launches since the first one in 1981.

But it’s not just lost jobs. It’s a loss of will. It’s a loss of national ambition. A loss of of our sense of purpose as a country.

It’s been decades since we’ve done anything to build our future. The last big national infrastructure project was the interstate highway system, started in the 1950s. The last big national technology program, manned space flight, ends next week when the Atlantis lands for the last time, and gets shipped off to a museum.

Taxes are the lowest they’ve been in 80 years. But at what cost to our country?

Our train tracks rust. Our highways crumble. Our bridges collapse. Our schools, once the best in the world, rank lower and lower every year against other countries. China builds high-speed railways that whisk its citizens from one city to another at 200 miles an hour. Brazil has managed to make itself completely energy independent, thanks to a massive national program to make biofuels. India has a space program that is rapidly progressing towards full satellite launches and manned missions.

Every other western democracy provides full health care for all its citizens. Many new immigrants to the United States keep a second citizenship, not from loyalty to the country of their birth, but as a hedge in case they get really sick – they can always go home for medical care. Business fail, or never start in the first place, because they can’t provide health care coverage for their employees.

To me, the end of manned space flight is a symbol of everything that is wrong with our country. We have become tight and petty. We care more about keeping the most money in our pockets we can, rather than building a future.

We used to reach for the stars. Now we reach for our wallets and hold on to them tightly, refusing to contribute anything for fear that someone, somewhere, might cheat us. We’ve become a nation of dogs in the manger.

It is said, over and over, that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Just look at the history books – the last time we had ridiculously low taxes, no national infrastructure programs, and a culture that didn’t believe in bringing people up from under? The 1920’s. Ending in 1929. The Great Depression. And it took 15 years and a world war to pull our heads back into the sky and start building up again.

But we don’t learn from history, because we’re doing it again. We keep cutting taxes and cutting programs. The rich have more money than they’ve had since the 1920s, while contributing less and less to the country that made their wealth possible in the first place. We cut or eliminate every program that has a chance of building a new future.

We should be building and spending our way towards a new future, not cutting back and screaming “Mine! Mine!”. We should have a million new workers out right now, building new and better highways. Better and faster railways. Newer and more efficient airports. We should rebuild our entire electrical system, to make it more efficient and modern. We should be running fiber optic internet cable to every single resident of the entire country.

And yes, we should have a cutting edge space program, both to give our children something to look up to and admire, as well as to create all the new technologies and companies that will fuel the future. Without Apollo and the manned space program, we would not have the modern computer industry, many new health breakthroughs like MRIs and laser surgery, and literally hundreds of other things. It has been estimated that every dollar we spent on the space program earned back a hundred times that amount in new jobs, technologies, and businesses.

China has a lock on rare earth minerals, vital for computer parts and medical machinery. Why don’t we fund a national space program to mine those minerals from asteroids? We are beholden to countries we hate, because we have to grovel for their oil. Why don’t we start a massive solar satellite power system to build and beam down energy from space? Refining certain pharmaceuticals in centrifuges is phenomenally expensive and time consuming, while the same drugs could be made in zero gravity for pennies. Why don’t we fund a massive medical and pharmaceutical facility in earth orbit for manufacturing such things?

We spent a trillion dollars invading and “rebuilding” a country that never attacked us, and in which we have no national interest. We spent another trillion dollars invading another country and occupying it for 10 years when what we really wanted was to capture a single criminal. Yet our politicians haggle and whine over amounts that don’t even amount to one ten-thousandth of those figures if it has something to do with issues here at home.

One of our political parties cries and whimpers that they won’t even consider raising a single tax on anyone or anything. “We refuse to pay for our country”, they say. “We want all the money for ourselves”. The other political party dithers and waffles, refusing to set goals or an agenda or object to anything. “We’ll just wait and see”, they say. “The future will be whatever it is”.

Remember when we used to have actual leaders? Remember when John F. Kennedy sparked a nation when he announced the goal of putting a man on the moon, and said, “We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard”? Where is that spirit now?

Everyone who reads this, I beg of you: The next time a politician asks for your vote, don’t ask them how much of your money you get to keep. Ask them how they’re going to build the future. Demand that they look forward, not backward. Tell them to spend every cent they can to make our country the best and the brightest.

In other words… Demand that they reach for the stars.

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Politics Thoughts and Comments

Skeptical Me

I have always considered myself to be a realist, ever since I was old enough to understand the concept. I don’t put much stock in superstition, blind faith, or jumping on the bandwagon. When I first started this blog, before I put up the quote from Erasmus that defines it now, I used to have my personal motto up there instead. Which is, “Question Authority. Embrace Change. Think for Yourself.” One of these days, when I get around to doing a proper site design, I’ll put that back somewhere on the site.

In recent years, a school of political thought has been revived called “Realism “. The political affiliation of Realism – as opposed to, say, Neo-Conservativism or LIberalism or Libertarianism or whatever – is a discipline that teaches that ideologies are basically pointless, and that the only proper study of the world situation is to try to figure out what is actually, really going on. Not what people say they want, or claim they’re trying to do, but focus solely on what people are actually, really doing. Strip all the blinders off as best you can and study the situation at hand, warts and all.

A political Realist, for example, would not have invaded Iraq. Yes, Saddam Hussein was extremely evil. Yes, he killed lots of people. Yes, it was very very sad that he ruled his country with an iron fist. But it would cost too much to oust him, and besides, the “no-fly” policy had kept him pretty well locked tight. He just wasn’t a problem. So who cares? He didn’t affect anything in reality. Realistically, it was not a situation that needed any action.

A Realist would also have questioned all the intelligence reports. Are there any opposing reports? If so, why? Does anyone who is providing intelligence have a particular ax to grind? Have you followed the money to make sure that no one is simply telling you what you want to hear?

A Realist would say, “You want to cut the deficit? Fine by me. So what should we cut from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense? Because that’s 4/5 of the national budget. Oh, you don’t want anything cut from any of those? And you don’t want to raise any taxes at all? Then we will continue to have a deficit. End of story.”

Needless to say, no true Realist has ever won any kind of political office. The electorate doesn’t want to hear reality, they want to hear boastful promises.

Which leads me, finally, to the title of this post. I am a skeptic. I am skeptical. I need to see the evidence. I need to see the evidence from multiple sources, preferably over a period of time, and I am willing to change my mind based on the evidence assembled in front of me. I’m also a great believer in common sense (in addition to being a fan of Thomas Paine‘s Common Sense, but that’s another story). I believe in Occam’s Razor – the simplest, plainest, most logical solution is usually the right one.

For example, what makes more sense: Extraterrestrial aliens, using unknown faster-than-light technology, traverse hundreds or thousands of light-years to anally probe various farmers? Or: Suggestible people black out and hallucinate, based on commonly shared, pop-culture science fiction references? To me, the hallucination sounds a lot more plausible than the alien visit. Add to that the lack of any physical evidence for alien visitation versus the several hundred years of documentation on people hallucinating. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, in other words.

Recently, I had a very invigorating back-and-forth with a friend of mine on Facebook on the basic topic of “skepticism”. I had made a passing comment about the “bogus Toyota recall”. My friend took issue with that comment, asking me what in the world I thought was bogus about the recall. Another friend chimed in to support me, adding in a critique of the recent H1N1 “Swine Flu” scare. Which led to a series of 19 (!) related, threaded comments over a period of two days.

Here was my position: I don’t believe there’s anything fundamentally wrong with Toyotas. I’ve been hearing “The car just accelerated on me!” excuse since I was a little kid. In every case, it was someone who either got confused between the accelerator and the brake, got their shoe (like a sandal) caught on the accelerator at the same time as they were using the brake, or slammed on the clutch and not the brake. The physical way an accelerator works simply won’t allow it to accelerate on its own… an accelerator is a spring that requires constant pressure to keep it depressed. Sure, accelerators can and do break – but they break by no longer accelerating. Not by accelerating on their own!

The claim for a few Toyotas was that the accelerator “stuck”. A very few. Something on the order of 8 cars total. And even in those cases, the cars did not accelerate on their own – the accelerator just failed to return to its default position as fast as it normally would have. In all cases, the brakes on the cars worked just fine. If the car operator had braked properly, the accidents would not have happened.

I believe I’m being realistic here. A very few cars had sticky accelerators. This stickiness would not cause the car to speed up on its own; all it would do, in the very worst case, was act like cruise control was engaged when it actually wasn’t. The mechanics who have investigated the issue say there’s about a one in 10,000 chance of the problem occurring in any given vehicle.

My point is, that’s no cause for panic. It’s just a minor repair. No big deal. Your car is fine. The next time you take it in for service, ask them to check the accelerator to see if your Toyota is the one in 10,000 that might have a slightly sticky accelerator. End of story.

That was not, of course, the end of the story. Quite the opposite. Instead, this was the lead story on the news for nearly two weeks. Toyota recalled millions of vehicles in response to panicked owners. The Secretary of Transportion told people to stop driving their cars. Three nights in a row, the news featured interviews with a doctor who was absolutely certain something was wrong with his car – even though he had taken it in multiple times, and each time mechanics had assured him his car was fine, it was not one of the ones affected. But the doctor refuses to drive the car, and insisted instead that Toyota refund to him the entire dollar amount of the car, plus “pain and suffering”. By the way, he’s been driving the car for three years without any problems.

Now. Going back to my example about the aliens. What is more likely? That 8 people, maybe maybe possibly with an accelerator that was slightly sticky, panicked and crashed their cars? Possibly, in their panic, confusing brake and accelerator, forgetting to break at all? Or: That Toyota somehow, defying all laws of physics and more than 100 years of collected technological research in how to make cars, somehow designed, built, and sold millions of cars with accelerators that sped up on their own? Occam’s Razor, folks. Which answer makes more sense?

Look at the evidence. Not at emotions. Not panicked parents concerned about their children. Not a doctor who thinks “Lawsuit!”. The evidence. What is the hard core, real world, actual evidence? I watched two weeks of news about this story, and not once – not once! – did I ever hear or read any actual, factual evidence about anything associated with this story. No engineering diagrams. No explanations from a mechanic. No testimony from anyone who investigated any of these crashes. Nothing. Just a lot of emotional weeping and moaning and groaning.

When the Balloon Boy story first broke, I said “Bullshit. Something’s going on there”. When Susan Smith reported her children missing, I said “Bullshit. She knows where they are”. And remember the story about the woman in 2008, who claimed that a crazy black man carved a “B” on her face because she didn’t like Obama (the “B”, by the way, was backwards, the way it would appear in a mirror). Why didn’t any news people call these things for the bullshit that they were on the spot? Where are the skeptics? Where are the people demanding, “Let’s see the evidence before we draw any conclusions”?

I’m making a plea here. Question stuff. When a talking head on the news starts out with “Some people say…” or “It has been reported…” you should immediately be skeptical. When instead of evidence, you hear tearful statements from someone not actually involved, you should be skeptical. When a story is based on “estimates”, you should be skeptical. You should be skeptical by default.

And follow up. Part of why I bitched so much about the H1N1 reporting was that the actual, real, tested deaths did not come anywhere near close to the “estimates” that the news reports were throwing around. At the time, it seemed like the media was drumming up panic to boost ratings. After all, “swine flu” has been around for quite a while. And all influenza viruses mutate and evolve every year. That’s perfectly normal. Look at the total flu statistics, for all varieties combined, year over year. Was this past year of 2009, statistically speaking, very different on average from all other years? No. It was not. (Compare each year from 1997 on up through 2009, looking at totals across the board for all varieties of influenza). So why all the panic?

Some people have mistakenly called me cynical. I am not. I believe in the basic goodness of people, and I believe that most people really do want to do the right thing.

But I am skeptical. And you should be too.

Skeptical Me.

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Politics Thoughts and Comments

The Rickety Bridge: A Health Care Post

I haven’t written much in a political vein in a long time. In fact, looking at the dates on this blog, I see that I haven’t posted anything, period, in quite a while.

I blame the length between posts on my current job. Now that I am a partner in my own company (shameless plug: check out Clever Giraffe if you haven’t already), I’m busy all the time. And not just busy, but busy in a creative sense. All day long I write scripts, draw storyboards, edit video, create graphics, and compose special effects and composites. After a full day – quite long days, I might add – I just don’t have the energy or interest to write at night like I used to.

And as for politics, well, since Barack Obama took the oath of office, I really haven’t had anything of significance to say. Like everyone, I’m annoyed with the economy, but there is nothing to be done about that except wait it out. I was appalled at the bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler – I thought they should simply have been allowed to go bankrupt and let that be the end of it – but it certainly wasn’t that big of an issue one way or the other to me.

And of course, I very much wish Obama and the current Democrats would go all out in restoring our essential liberties – close Guantanamo, prosecute the Bush Administration traitors, restore the proper balance between the three government branches, etc. – but sadly, I realize that that is just never going to happen. We’re not Japan or Germany – our citizens will never admit fault, and there will never be any trials or justice for the evil men who destroyed our country over the last eight years. In that regard, I kind of feel like the murdered girl in The Lovely Bones: better for everyone to recover and move on than to fixate on justice. I neither forgive nor forget, but I do accept it for right now.

But this health care debate. I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to this whole thing with astonishment. I assumed that passing a solid health care bill would be an absolute no brainer. We’re in the middle of The Great Recession. More people are without health insurance than ever before. Health care costs are higher than ever before. And, as happened with our financial system, we have learned the hard way that ignoring a problem does not make it go away.

I also have a personal oar to row in this boat as well. Since the beginning of this year, I’ve had to pay for my own health insurance. My company, at two full-time employees plus a few freelancers, is far too small to get coverage from any insurance company. There is literally no way to do it, not at any cost. So our only option is to pay for it as individuals. And for me, personally, that’s $345 a month. Three hundred and forty five dollars a month. Blue Cross / Blue Shield. And the only way I even qualify for that “low rate” is via the COBRA plan, since I had the same insurance company at my last job. So, after 18 months, that rate will go up significantly. And I know damn well that should anything major happen to me – anything at all – that coverage will be cancelled in a split second.

To me, that’s pretty damn unfair. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I’m not overweight. I’m 47 years old, and apart from the regular creaks and sighs of middle age, I am in pretty good health. I should not have to worry every single day about how expensive basic health insurance is, and whether or not I can even keep it at all.

I figured a lot of people are like me. So, when Obama said he was going to champion passing a bill that would attempt to rein in health care costs, guarantee that anyone and everyone could get health insurance, forbid health insurance companies from canceling willy-nilly, and provide a public health insurance program (aka “Medicare for everybody”), I thought, “Well, this will pass quickly and easily”.

How wrong I was.

I’ve listened to more misleading craziness in the past two months that in eight years of Bush nonsense. And every single bit of it is either pure fiction – I’m talking literally made up out of thin air, total and absolute fiction – or else is based on such shocking ignorance that even Cynical Me finds it hard to believe.

I mean, come on. “Death Panels“? Jeez, people, you can read the bill yourself. There’s nothing in there that even remotely, even vaguely, even hints at such a thing. Where did that come from? You can say over and over again “There is no such thing as death panels, there never was, and there never will be”, and yet people still keep insisting they exist, that Obama “wants to kill Grandma”. It’s as if legislation is being judged using the same standards as people’s belief in Bigfoot or UFO abductions.

Then there’s the “Government can’t run anything” fable. Right. So, let’s see, the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, NASA, FBI, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the entire Civil Service… I guess they’re all terribly run and about to collapse at any moment? Because each and every one of those is a government service. And each and every one of those is budgeted and legislated by that exact same Congress and that exact same President.

I grew up in the military. I had government-run health care for my whole life, up until I was 21 years old. And I was in very good health, and so were my parents and brother and sister. In fact, my parents have had government health care for their entire adult lives, up to and including now, and I’ve never heard them complain about it once. Their health care rates never go up. They never get denied coverage. They never have to worry if they’ll have health insurance next month.

My favorite is the meme about “socialism”. Does anyone even own a dictionary any more? The word “socialism” means: the government owns the means of production. Now, the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler? That truly is socialism, since it was the government buying and running a physical means of production. Government regulated or government run health care? Uh, sorry, but no. That’s called a service, folks. A service. It’s even right in the Constitution: “Provide for the general welfare.” Article 1, Section 8.

Every time I hear people say that, I wonder… do these folks think police are “socialism”? Because that’s the government providing a service. How about firemen? The military? Government regulated health care is no more or less “socialism” that are any of those services. Now, you can have a reasonable and logical debate about which services the government should and should not provide. That’s quite sensible. But to call any possible government service “socialism” is just plain ignorant.

To me, our current health care situation is like a very rickety bridge that lots of people travel on. And so, since the opponents of health care seem to love myths and fables, I’ll provide my own:

The Rickety Bridge by Jonathan Henderson

Once upon a time there was a land with a great bridge that spanned an enormous river. The bridge had been built many years ago, at an enormous cost. Thousands of people went back and forth across the bridge every day. The fortunes of this land rose and fell based on how many people were able to cross the bridge.

But as time went on, the bridge got older and older. It began to break here and there. Toll-takers were set up at each end of the bridge, to decide who could and could not cross the bridge. “Sorry, you’re too fat”, the toll-taker said to one man. “The bridge is very rickety, and we can’t afford to fix it if your weight caves in part of it.” “No smoking!” said another toll-taker. “You might set the bridge on fire!”

The bridge, however, continued to rot.

The Experts noticed the bridge was crumbling. They told the King and his Ministers that the bridge needed repairs soon, or else it would collapse. The Kind agreed… but his Ministers did not. “Your highness, it will cost too much to repair the bridge”, one said. “It is not our job to fix bridges”, said another. “The bridge has been fine for centuries,” said a third. “Why should we risk repairing it?”

The Experts pushed hard. They told the King that if the bridge collapsed, the cost to build a new one would be far greater than repairing the existing one. And, of course, thousands of people would die if the bridge collapsed. And, there would no bridge for a very long time, so many people would starve because food could not be brought over the bridge. And business would fail, because commerce could not function without the bridge.

The Ministers did not like people disagreeing with them, so they went straight to the people. “The Experts want us to destroy your bridge!” they said. “They want to put trolls at either end that will eat your Grandmother, instead of letting her pass! The Experts hate you and the bridge!” The people, of course, got very angry, and yelled and threw things at the Experts.

The bridge continued to rot.

The Ministers began holding town meetings. They would invite Experts to the meetings. People would scream at them: “Why are you putting trolls on the bridge to eat my Grandma”? The Experts would sigh, and say they had no intention of putting trolls on the bridge. They just wanted to repair it. “Well, what about the trolls?” another would cry. The Experts kept saying they didn’t know anything about any trolls, but the people would not hear of it.

The bridge continued to rot.

Some people began falling through holes in the bridge. But since most people could still cross the bridge just fine, the people shrugged and said that only lazy or stupid people fell through the holes anyway. “Better than the trolls that the Experts want!” they said.

Big chunks of the bridge fell off.

Now the Ministers told the King that just maybe, possibly, there perhaps could be some rules about who might use the bridge, but certainly nothing more. The King sighed, and said he guessed that would have to do. He did not like to go against his Ministers.

By this time, many people could not cross the bridge at all.

And then, finally, the bridge collapsed. And the once great land fell from grace, and the people became poor and hungry. Only the very, very rich could get across the river now. The people huddled together, and remembered what the Experts had said. Many people wished they had listened to the Experts. Most said the Experts were right, that perhaps they should have repaired the bridge after all.

But the Ministers stubbornly insisted that they had been right all along.

“Well”, they said, “at least we didn’t get eaten by those damn trolls”.

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Politics

President-Elect Barack Obama

Frank and I had settled in for a long night of watching election returns. We had both arranged to take off work the day after the election, since we figured we’d be up into the wee hours of the morning glued to television and internet. Frank had said numerous times that he thought the election was going to be nail-bitingly close.

And, of course, living in Florida, we feared the worst for the balloting in our own state. ivermectin virus

So, there we were on November 4th, 2008, on the couch and all settled in for an evening with CNN and NBC, when right at 11pm Eastern Time – just as the polls closed on the west coast – they called it for Obama. Brian Williams broke the news on NBC, starting with “We are going to have young children in the white house once again…” Barack Obama won by over 300 electoral votes. And with well over 50% of the popular vote. (The final results ended up being 364 electoral votes for Obama, 163 for McCain. The popular vote was 53% Obama, 46% McCain.)

We started screaming and jumping up and down. We danced with the dog. We danced with the ferrets. Frank yanked open the front door and shouted “We did it! Hah!” to the empty street. We raced around, jumping on the couches, throwing pillows into the air. I kept repeating “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it”.

Frank said it was like the end of Star Wars, when Luke blows up the Death Star. “Great shot kid, that was one in a million”. It was exciting and such a huge release. I looked at Frank and said “It’s over. Bush. Cheney. All of the criminals in the white house. The whole shit heap is gonna come crashing down now”.

We listened to the speeches. McCain’s concession speech – which was excellent, no question about it. “If he had talked like that the whole time, he might have won”, Frank said. “Well, that and if he hadn’t picked Palin”, I said in agreement. We both had said we could have lived with McCain as President – but we could not live with the possibility that Sarah Palin might end up in that office should something happen to McCain.

And then the cameras moved to Grant Park in Chicago, an area I know well from my years living in the Windy City. The President-elect looked tired but happy in his acceptance speech that night. It was a moving speech. His family looked so typically American. And then the Bidens came out, and the stage was a mixture of ages and races. As they all gathered together and waved at the crowd, we both smiled. “That’s America”, Frank said. “That’s exactly what it looks like now”. I agreed, adding, “You can’t even tell whose family is whose. There’s just no way to know.”

I could (and have!) listed the many, many reasons why I think Barack Obama should be, and deserved to be, our President. But that night, watching the stage, I think the reason he is our next President was on that stage: He looks like America, circa 2008. His family looks like the families I know. On that stage, I saw black and white adults, black and white kids, and colors that were shades in between. That is America. And that, more than any other reason, is why Barack Obama won. ivermectin manufacturer stock

Now, I’ve followed politics closely ever since the 6th grade, when I had to do a report on Watergate for a Current Events class at A.P. Hill Elementary School in Petersburg, Virginia. That year, when I was eleven years old, I first started to watch the evening news and read the morning newspaper. It was the first year that I read articles in Time magazine. I became fascinated with Richard Nixon that year, and by the time I finished my report, I had grown to loathe him. I felt a tremendous sense of righteous indignation. Ever since then, I’ve had the political bug.

Never in my life has a presidential election affected me as strongly as this election of 2008. I’ve posted articles and links on numerous sites, I’ve written emails to friends and relatives, I’ve donated money, bought t-shirts, bumper stickers, car magnets, and limited edition prints. I tried to attend one of Obama’s rallies, but the forum only held 22,000 people and I was one of the 10,000 left in line outside. I watched every debate. I read articles and blog posts from both sides of the aisles. I watched the Sunday morning talk shows, Anderson Cooper, and Jon Stewart religiously.

I have written here many times about how strongly I feel about learning, and reading, and writing. I am proud beyond reason to have a President who is a man of learning, a man of reading, and a man who has written two books that are not just good, they’re very good. A man who is proud of being “elite” in the best sense of the word. A man who earned his way into two top universities and worked as a professor for 12 years teaching constitutional law. This is the type of man we should be looking up to. This is the type of man who should be President of the United States of America.

So it goes without saying that I am rooting for him big-time. I fervently hope that Barack Obama is a decent and good President. But of course, I have no idea what the future will bring. I don’t know what accomplishments or failures the Obama administration has in store. ivermectin 6mg tablet uses in telugu There will be future scandals, future wars, future economic failures and future crises. And I’m sure there will be a “something-Gate” in Obama’s future as well, probably more than one.

In most of the presidential elections in my lifetime, I’ve voted against someone. Only a few times have I voted for someone. And only this time did I proudly, enthusiastically, and joyfully vote for someone. I have always been proud to be an American, even in her darkest days. But I am especially proud now.

Barack Obama told us “Yes We Can”. And, well… Yes We Did. Yes we did.

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Politics

The 700 Billion Dollar Bailout

It feels like it’s 1990 all over again.

Remember 1990? The Savings and Loan Crisis? It’s arguably what cost George H.W. Bush the 1992 election. It’s what caused the recession of the 90’s that brought Bill Clinton to power. It cost U.S. taxpayers $500 billion to bail out nearly 300 failed savings and loan institutions. It was the financial crisis that was supposed to have taught us that yes, a strong capitalist economy does, in fact, require clear regulations and strong regulators in order to work smoothly.

Remember? I do. But apparently, no one on Wall Street or in Washington D.C. does.

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it”, George Santayana said. We all know that saying. People say it all the time. But very few people seem to pay attention to what it means.

Financial crises, I believe, clearly point out the actual governing differences of Republicans vs. Democrats. It is not, as so many people think, a “conservative” vs. “liberal” thing. That may have been true in 1968. It may even still have been a little bit true in 1980, perhaps. But it hasn’t been true for a long time now.

In fact, I’d argue that Democrats are actually far more “conservative” than Republicans are. When it comes to regulating finance, Republicans are all about lack of enforcement. They want to remove all regulation, and what little regulation remains, they don’t want to enforce it. Democrats, on the other hand, truly believe in laws and regulations as fundamental tasks that government must do.

I saw this current financial crisis unfold right in front of me. For four years, starting in late 2000, I worked for a major financial and real estate firm, one that had a large and very public presence on the Internet. Often, as part of my job, I had to work with the company’s legal counsel, presenting evidence about our compliance with the (then) new Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act . In addition, the main function of our web site was to sell mortgages, home equity loans, and real estate transactions.

I saw the sales tactics that were used to encourage anyone and everyone who was even remotely qualified to get the highest mortgage they could. I met with banks, mortgage brokers, and real estate agencies, and got an inside view as to how all of these transactions were put together and sold. I witnessed the formation of the Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) which had not existed before.

Therefore, I egotistically feel that I have a better than average understanding of what happened, what went wrong, and what we need to not do again. And if you’ve read this post this far, you must think I at least have some chance of explaining something, right? So here we go…

What, exactly, are we bailing out for our $700 billion? Basically, bad mortgages. Specifically, mortgage-backed securities. Mortgage-backed securities did not exist 10 years ago.

A “security” is a bond issue or paper collection of various financial instruments. An investor can then buy these securities in shares, just like stocks, and trade them around. A mortgage-backed security is basically a collection of, say, a thousand mortgages, packaged and sold together as security. By packing them together like this, investors can buy and trade home mortgages on the open market.

Prior to 2000, this was not possible. There used to be strict laws isolating real estate firms from mortgage firms from insurance firms. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (or “GLB”, as it was called by those of us in the business), did away with all of that. Now, the same firm that sold you your real estate could also issue your mortgage – as well as your mortgage insurance!

Regulation for all of this was also made, ah… “voluntary”. Can you guess what happened? Oh, sorry, you don’t have to guess, it’s kinda been all over the news the past few weeks. That’s right. Shockingly, none of these institutions chose to “voluntarily” regulate themselves.

And now the house of cards is collapsing, because this whole circular, incestuous approach to financing worked only if home values always increased, steadily and constantly, every year. Every quarter, in fact. Once they started to fall, well then… these mortgage-backed securities, which contained many new and unusual types of mortgages such as Interest Only, 1-Year ARMs, etc. all started to be worth less and less as more and more people couldn’t pay them.

But while that’s bad, that’s not what actually caused the current crisis.

Prior to 2003, it also used to be a requirement that any financing institution had to have 30% of its assets in cash or cash-convertable form (such as treasury or other bonds), in case of failure of its securities. This 3-to-1 ratio of cash to securities had been finessed over the years as the best balance between profit and security. But in 2003, the Bush administration eliminated this requirement, and let each institution decide for itself how much cash to keep around.

How well did that work? Well, most of the failing institutions have security-to-cash ratios of about… 35 to 1. Whoops. So, by failing to regulate – in fact, by removing the regulations entirely – we were asking for catastrophic failure.

There are places on this earth that do not have any financial regulations at all. To name two examples: Haiti and Somalia. Anybody want to invest money there? No regulations to worry about!

This time, let’s learn the damn lesson. You cannot take an “anything goes, whatever you like” approach to finance. The government needs to have offices full of steely-eyed regulators who pour over every deal, and say things like “you can’t do that”. We need to have strict, enforced laws that put up firewalls between different types of businesses, like we used to.

You want safe investments? You want a strong stock market? You want a high-performing economy? Then you need to have strong and strict regulators, enforcing hard and fast rules backed by the full force of the law.

Now we’ll have to spend the next two to three years rebuilding our whole financial system, just like we did from 1990 to 1993.

I’d like to remind everyone that once we got over that, we had 7 golden years with a great economy, lots of investment, a rolling stock market, and very low unemployment. Then we screwed it all up, starting in 2001.

So I don’t want to hear anybody, anywhere, ever again say that Republicans are the “fiscally conservative” political party. They are not. Democrats are fiscally conservative. Republicans are radical anarchists who want to let greed rule and take laissez faire economics to their illogical extreme. They don’t want to have to pay any attention to laws, regulations, or common financial sense. They hate the concept of government so much that they are willing to destroy our entire economy rather than play by some simple rules.

In 1981, I was spending the summer in Korea, living on an Army base. There was a small movie theater on base, and every Saturday they’d show a kid’s movie at the matinee. One weekend, the movie was some cheesy Disney film called Billion Dollar Hobo. Except, whoever had put up the marquee for the movie had misspelled it, Billion Dollar Yobo. This was, it turns out, a hilarious mistake.

“Yobo”, you see, is Korean for “sweetie”… and common slang for “whore”. Everyone always knew about the “Yobos” who hung around the front gate of the Army base, willing to do whatever a horny soldier wanted for the right price. As you can imagine, the marquee got a hell of a lot of laughs before someone finally changed it.

This week, every time I see that “$700 Billion” figure, in my head I see a movie marquee: “Seven Hundred Billion Dollar Yobo”. I sure hope the American taxpayer enjoys the screwing that we’re gonna get from this one, it’d really be helpful for everyone to educate themselves in the financial field a little bit more. For those who are interested, I suggest visiting SoFi.

Categories
Politics

Politcal Snapshot: Fall 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything political on this blog. To tell the truth, I can only express disgust, horror, shame, and anger so many times before I just burn out.

The worst for me was the 2004 election of George W. Bush. I was in a state of shock for nearly a full week. I just could not believe that the American public had actually voted for the Prince of Darkness, the Anti-Christ himself, into a second term. He had lost the first election in 2000, then was appointed to the office by the right-wing activist Supreme Court. But this time… this time, the evil trickster actually won.

It was months before I could bring myself to pay any attention to politics again. I had decided that if my fellow countrymen were that blind, that stupid, or – worst of all, just simply that plain evil – that there was no hope. To this day, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that over half of the voters in this country of mine knowingly elected an admitted criminal – an admitted war criminal, no less – to the highest office in the land for a second time.

The 2006 mid-term election gave me a glimmer of hope. Maybe – just maybe – the blinders were coming off and America was starting to think for itself again. And almost right away, the 2008 presidential campaign began. From the start, Barack Obama was my first choice.

I had read Obama’s first book, Dreams From My Father, a few months after the 2004 election. I found it a stirring and visceral account of growing up during the late 20th century. What impressed me most was how alike he and I are.

Barack Obama and I are nine months apart in age. His parents moved him around the country and around the world – just like mine did with me (albeit for very different reasons). He did well in high school in an out-of-the-way location (Hawaii) just like I did (backwoods Kentucky, where my father was stationed at the time). He vaulted himself up a notch by going to an expensive private University (Harvard) just like I did (Northwestern). His political values – a conservative fiscal policy coupled with a liberal social outlook – match mine almost exactly. The only difference is that he is devoutly Christian while I am expressly Agnostic. And the skin color, of course, but here in America, we’re all mixed breeds anyway.

Obama is a man of my generation. He grew up watching the same TV shows that I watched, reading the same books I did, experiencing the same events that I did. We graduated from high school and college at the same time. Our paths just missed intersecting: my father had an opportunity for an assignment in Hawaii for two years, 1977 through 1979. If he had accepted that assignment, Obama and I might have even attended the same high school.

Originally, I was also pleased with the Republican Party’s choice of John McCain. The two other leading Republican contenders, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, both made my “crazy sensor” light up bright red. I figured either of them would offer more of the same nonsense that George W. Bush has given us. When Romney said that rather than close Guantanamo, he would double the size of it – oh man. And I’ve always liked McCain, since I felt he was a true Conservative in the proper sense of the word. I liked the way he protested the execution of the war in Iraq while still sticking to his guns about the need to do it in the first place. Even though I didn’t agree with his politics, I respected him.

Either Obama or McCain would be an infinite improvement over George W. Bush, so no matter what, the country and the world will be far better off. But since getting the nomination, McCain seems to have transformed into another person. All of the things that I liked about him have vanished, to be replaced by standardized Republican talking points. Now, I’m not sure whether what we see now is the real McCain, or whether the old one was the real one. Either way, I no longer trust him.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has just gotten better and better. I like his choice of Vice President in Joe Biden. I was quite happy he decided to bypass Hillary Clinton and all the “Bill Clinton Baggage” that would have come with her. I like the way he has given realistic explanations for exactly how he expects to accomplish what he is trying to do. He’s still a little too religious for me – this is a man who attended church every Sunday for the past 20 years – but I understand and accept that I am in a distinct minority in that regard, so I let it go.

I’m baffled by McCain’s choice of Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice President. I lived in Anchorage for 2 years, and I’ve visited Alaska several times since, so I feel an affinity for the state. But by selecting her, McCain has to give up his one real criticism of Obama that resonates: lack of experience. And let’s face it: a 72-year-old man who’s gone through six bouts of cancer had better have a V.P. who is ready to step in instantly.

To me, it seems extremely likely we’ll be saying “President Obama” by early next year – but then I remember 2004. And while John McCain would be a tremendous improvement over The Evil One, it will still disappoint me tremendously if he wins. It’s time my generation had its own President – and Barack Obama is that man.

Oh, and Obama’s acceptance speech at the convention this past Thursday? The best speech I’ve ever personally heard in my lifetime. By anyone. About anything. No kidding.

Unless something earth-shattering happens between now and November 4th, that’s the last I’ll write about this until then. Enough political pontificating, and with my next post I’ll be back to the reviews.

Categories
Politics

American Fascism

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything political here in this blog. The fact is, I figured that after the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress last November, that we would start to see a gradual change for the better. I figured we’d start to draw down our troops in Iraq slowly but steadily, and that the phony “war on terror” would fade away to become just a bad memory, a one-time overreaction to the murderous actions of a few thousand religious nutjobs.

Instead, since then we’ve increased our forces in Iraq, made threats against Iran, revoked the concept of habeas corpus from our legal system, had our Attorney General revealed as a habitual liar, received Supreme Court decisions striking down a number of long-standing freedoms, and just last week had Congress give the President the power to eavesdrop on anyone, anywhere, anytime, without a search warrant or even a court overview of any kind.

I know we’re all waiting out the Bush presidency – as of this writing, it’s got roughly a year and a half left – but I wanted to put some thoughts down here for later perusal. It’s my belief that in the years to come, we’re going to look back on the first decade of the 21st century as being the closest the United States has ever come to almost turning into a fascist dictatorship. Just as we now look back on the early 1950’s as the McCarthy era, and speak of witch hunts based on spurious or nonexistent evidence, so too shall we look back on this period right now and say “What the hell were they thinking?”

President Bush and the current faction ruling the Republican party believe that “democracy” means one election for one office held once every four years. They believe that the President’s power is unitary and all-consuming: the President does not have to answer to anyone, ever. They believe not only that the President can decide which laws he will honor and which laws he will ignore, but that the President has the power to make laws himself.

President Bush has ordered everyone in the Executive Branch to refuse to answer Congress’s subpoenas, and says that he cannot by definition be held in contempt. Vice President Cheney has stated he is not a member of the Executive or the Legislative branch, but that he is an independent authority on his own.

Our Founders believed that the Constitution’s built-in system of checks and balances would prevent a situation like this from ever occurring. But what they did not envision – and what I never expected to see either – was that Congress would actually voluntarily give up all its power directly to the Executive, without argument. And that even now, when the opposition party has a tiny majority, Congress still bows to the will of the president.

This, in essence, is exactly the definition of fascism: the subordination of all arms of government to the will and power of one man. And that is what we have today. President Bush, by stretching the meaning of the Commander in Chief clause of our Constitution, believes himself to be “The Decider”. He has stated on numerous occasions that he will do anything, break any law, override any act of Congress, in order to “protect” the people.

In the past six months, I have re-read the entire Federalist Papers, and read the Constitution very carefully, including a detailed legal analysis of it. As our government is set up, the President is supposed to have control of almost nothing. His job is merely to “faithfully execute” any laws that Congress passes. sportfogadás újság He is never supposed to question or interpret anything – interpretation is to be left to the courts. And only when ordered to do so by Congress is he ever supposed to take any military action: thus the “Commander in Chief” clause, which quite clearly states only that the President is supposed to be the top field commander when our troops go into battle, and nothing more.

I guess Orwell should have titled his novel “2004” instead of “1984”. Now we have a President who has the supreme power to spy on anyone he wants to… who can put anyone in jail for anything without trial or charges… who creates his own laws and makes his own interpretation of laws that Congress makes… who openly states that he will not abide by the decisions of Congress… who makes his own decisions about who we will go to war with and when we will leave… and whose minions state that anyone who opposes him is “with the enemy”.

Our country is strong, our Constitution is sound, and as a nation, we will survive this nightmare. gaminator free coins Despite all that Bush and Cheney have done, they will not extend their power past the end of their second term. And so I’m writing this, to remind myself years from now, once all the inevitable investigations and recriminations and charges and God only knows what else will come to light in the coming years… that I did see at the time what was happening, and at the very least that I wrote it down.

And the next time, in the next election and for all elections to come… let us all remember that whenever some snake oil salesman runs for office promising to “protect us”… we should run him out of town on a rail and never look back.

Categories
Politics Thoughts and Comments

The Wacky Florida Ferret Freak

We truly live in interesting times.

Thanks to my quick email to a popular blog, I’ve apparently become known as “that crazy guy in Florida who loves ferrets”. This is not an accolade I sought out, I can assure you. Certainly I love my ferret girls and am happy to have them as pets, but I’m far from being a crusader for ferret rights or anything like that. Nevertheless, that’s apparently how I’m being perceived.

Here’s what happened.

On Monday, I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Daily Dish, a site that I visit several times a day. Sullivan is one of my favorite bloggers, and I’m always interested to hear his take on daily events, as well as see what he’s linking to on any particular day. It so happens that yesterday, he had linked to an article about a poll in San Diego. The title of the link was “Gays vs. Ferrets?”

I followed the link to a rather silly article that summarized the results of the poll. Basically, it says that when surveyed about various topics, the residents of San Diego ranked “Gay Marriage” several percentage points above “Legalizing Ferret Ownership” (ferrets are illegal in California, as well as in Hawaii). The headline read “Gay Marriage now more popular than rodents”.

Those who know me know what a stickler I am about biological classifications and cladistics. What annoyed me about the article was the comment that ferrets are “rodents”, when they are quite clearly not. موقع المراهنات Ferrets are carnivores, members of the Mustelid family; taxonomically, they’re in between cats and dogs, perhaps a little closer to dogs than cats. لعبة مباشر Rodents are a completely and totally different class of animal.

In addition, I thought it was pretty funny that the article made it sound like they were actually pitting Gays against Ferrets, when in reality all they were doing was comparing the polling numbers of two completely unrelated questions.

So, I dashed off the following email to Andrew Sullivan on my lunch hour:

Dear Andrew,

Gays versus Ferrets? What am I supposed to do with this information? My partner and I own two ferrets, whom we refer to as “our fuzzy babies”, “the little munchkins”, or simply “The Girls”. Living in Florida, we are prevented from marrying or adopting – but at least they’re not taking our ferrets away from us!

If the poll was based on cuteness, I think my ferrets would probably win, however. You can see them here and judge for yourself. Sad that San Diego expresses its wisdom in endorsing gay marriage, but then displays its ignorance by continuing to ban ferrets.

And by the way, the headline of that article is completely wrong. Ferrets are not rodents, not even close. They are carnivores, same family as minks and raccoons. They’re directly related to both cats and dogs, biologically speaking. Ferrets posses the curiosity and resilience of a cat combined with the rambunctiousness and affection of a dog. They are perfect pets for a fastidious gay couple who like things neat, clean and orderly but who also enjoy a sloppy, furry kiss from an animal when they get home.

I thought it was pretty funny, and I was pleased with myself for coming up with the little double entendre at the end. I sent the email, and forgot all about it.

Until later in the day, when I visited Sullivan’s site again to check on the news… to find that he had quoted almost the entire message, and at that moment, it was the lead item on his web site. Well! I was pretty pleased.

Throughout the day, I got a variety of very nice comments from people who had followed Sullivan’s trackback link to my site, and read about our ferrets Sally and Freddie. To a person, they were all humorous and pleasant comments, including a number from fellow ferret owners.

But not everyone, it seems, felt the same way. Later in the day, I checked Sullivan’s blog again, and found that apparently I’d struck a raw nerve with at least a few people. Sullivan had now posted this message from a vocal ferret critic:

Pace your readers from Florida, ferrets cannot successfully be vaccinated against rabies, and have been recorded on multiple occasions to have gnawed the limbs of small babies, thinking the babies are appropriate prey. Ferrets as pets are illegal in 11 US states and in the City of New York. Several years ago, while I served as associate health commissioner of New York City, I was tasked with dealing with the loonies who styled themselves “Friends of Ferrets.”. David Dinkins’ administration quaked before these animal activists, doubting the wisdom of our orders to euthanize ferrets who had bitten humans. Thank God the Rudy became mayor and in one of his early acts, told the Friends of Ferrets where to put their filthy, smelly and dangerous pet rats.

Sheesh. What a nutball. Not a single true fact in that entire missive. And to top it off, there was that damn “rats/rodents” mixup again. Couldn’t this guy at least checked Wikipedia’s entry on ferrets? I wasn’t going to let it end on a note like that!

So I dashed off the following to Andrew Sullivan:

Dear Andrew,

Well, this debate certainly doesn’t belong on the pages of The Daily Dish, but I cannot be “Fox News’d” by a fellow reader without at least commenting. Feel free to forward this email on to your “associate health commissioner”, and I’ll be happy to carry on this conversation in a more appropriate forum.

Ferrets can’t be vaccinated against rabies? That will certainly come as news to any vet. Ferrets, just like dogs and cats, are vaccinated for rabies in a three-shot sequence during their first year. They’re also vaccinated against distemper at the same time. They are also spayed and neutered at the same age as cats.

Let’s at least get our numbers straight, shall we? Ferrets as pets are illegal in 2 states (California and Hawaii), not 11. In addition, a number of municipalities, such as New York City, have local laws preventing legal ownership of ferrets. Your reader comments on the well-known NYC ban, for example. This has mainly caused controversy because the rest of the state, as well as all surrounding areas, has no such ban – thus causing owners great hardship and consternation during moves.

Like any carnivorous pet, a mistreated or abused ferret can and will bite a human. There was one (and only one, despite urban myths to the contrary) case where a ferret was identified as the culprit in eating a baby’s finger – although New York animal control pointed out that the same household had five cats, three pit bulls, and several large snakes as well… so authorities questioned the automatic presumption that “the ferret did it”. That was the reason the animal was not euthanized in this case.

As far as mistaking a baby for “prey”, this baffles me… Ferrets have been domesticated as hunting animals (much for the same purpose as dachshunds) for thousands of years. They have no natural “prey” of any kind, although their ancestors ate mice and birds. Not much chance of confusing that with a human baby. Ours, for example, will eat nothing except for canned food, no matter what we offer. Our one-year-old nephews plays with both of them all the time, and everyone involved seems to enjoy it. Though my nephew has attempted to bite them several times, they have never bitten him in return. They do lick him a lot, however:



My nephew Ethan plays with Freddie and Sally last Thanksgiving

And then there is the concluding “filthy, smelly, dangerous pet rats” comment… if this (alleged) “associate health commissioner” cannot tell the difference between a rodent (rats, mice, etc) and a carnivorous animal (dogs, cats, ferrets, etc) then perhaps he should reconsider his chosen profession. In addition, ferrets, just like cats, are constantly grooming themselves, and I’ve never seen one with so much as a speck of dirt on it, much less one that could be described as “filthy”. In fact, a ferret will wash itself off in water if they get any type of “filth” on them.

I’m no animal nut; I don’t belong to any ferret group; and I don’t feel the need to beat anyone up over their choice of animal companionship. I’ve had dogs and cats, and I expect to have them again. We got our ferrets after our cat of 17 years died of old age, and we just couldn’t face getting another one just yet. Someone suggested a ferret as a “cross between a cat and a dog”, and it’s worked out well for us. If that’s not your thing, fine. But if someone doesn’t like them, at least say so in a clear and truthful manner. We get enough uninformed opinions in our politics. Can’t we at least talk simple truths when discussing the biological traits of our pets? لعبت بوكر

And so far, that’s it. I feel I did my part to defend my pets without (hopefully) sounding like a crazy person. And thanks to all the folks who visited my site this week due to the Florida Ferret Freak speaking out on The Daily Dish!

Categories
Books Politics Thoughts and Comments

In Praise of The Economist

The Economist. Published Weekly by The Economist Group Limited since 1843. Approximately 90 pages per issue.

I’ve subscribed to a weekly news magazine since my first week at college (that would be August of 1980, by the way). My father subscribed to Time Magazine while I was growing up, so that’s what I got as well. In 1995, I finally got tired of Time’s increasing “Time Warner Corporation” parent bent, and cancelled my subscription. I switched to Newsweek, which I still get delivered to my mailbox once each week. Incidentally, my father still subscribes to Time.

Newsweek is better than Time, but neither of them can hold a candle to The Economist – which tellingly is not owned by any giant media conglomerate. I started reading The Economist a few years ago, and finally subscribed right after the 2004 elections. I was getting so tired of the shrieking news of the mass media, where every subject was So Important That You Must Read It Now, and yet no subject was worth more than a page of coverage. I also got tired of the merger of “non-news” into my news, such as celebrity babies, pop culture happenings, etc. Hey, if I want to read about movie stars, I’ll check out People or Entertainment Weekly, thank you very much.

By contrast, The Economist is the closest thing that exists today to unbiased, unfiltered, raw, just-the-facts-please news. There is very little opinion in The Economist, and what there is is measured and very centered in its approach. The print is tiny (looks to be about 10 point to my eyes), three columns of newsprint on glossy paper, with some pages being almost pure text. It is a news junkie’s dream magazine. When graphs or tables are used, they are clean, simple, and without decoration or exaggeration. They would make Edward Tufte proud

I was prompted to write this entry because of this week’s issue, whose cover article is “Five years on”, and includes a good five pages or so of detailed “where we’ve gone since 9/11” reporting. Unlike the rest of the media, however, there’s none of the shrill tone that accompanies the various “5 Years Since 9/11” celebrations that are going on all this week. Instead, just sober reporting and clear-headed analysis. The Economist neither worships George W. Bush nor does it pillory him. In this issue’s introduction, the editors state that they agreed with the Iraq decision at first, then felt that Bush had conducted the war poorly since. This seems like a pretty reasonable assessment to me (a lot more reasonable than my own analysis, but then again, I make no pretense of being impartial).

In the pages of The Economist, you find out about all the other news that’s going on. Yes, other things have happened apart from some nut making a false confession of murdering a child beauty queen, or the surprise death of a well-liked Australian animal enthusiast. This week alone, there are articles about:

  • The U.S. economy and its relation to the upcoming mid-term elections
  • Synthetic biology
  • Presidential elections in Mexico and Brazil
  • The state of the State of North Korea
  • Europe’s Carmakers
  • The economic prognosis for YouTube

There is very little advertising in The Economist, and you can actually read 10 pages in a row without hitting a single ad. There are no inserted AOL CD’s or thick glued-in booklets advertising the latest GM cars. It is a elegant magazine, from a more civilized age. And yet it’s sharper and more relevant today than it has ever been.

The Economist is best experienced in its print form. Pick up an issue – it’s well worth the cover price. This is a magazine where each issue is almost a book in and of itself. But most importantly, this is a magazine that gives you something that is very rare and precious today: an unencumbered window into the goings-on of the world.

Categories
Audio Visual Politics

Why We Fight

Why We Fight (2005). 98 minutes, Sony Pictures Classics. Directed by Eugene Jarecki.

This is a Great Film. I don’t mean that in a “wow, this is cool!” kind of way. Nor do I mean it has great acting, or is likely to win an academy award, or anything like that. I mean “Great Film” in that this is what a documentary is supposed to be like. This is a riveting, 98 minute tour through history, democracy, and war. Although if you need awards to help convince you, well, it did win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005.

I bought this movie on DVD without having seen it before, or really even knowing what it’s about. I had read some snippets here and there, and I had gathered that it was some sort of historical piece about Dwight Eisenhower. I remember that Eisenhower had warned about the military industrial complex, and I knew this movie was more or less about that.

Why We Fight is indeed about that, but it’s also about much more. The film begins and ends with Eisenhower’s farewell address, presented a week before he left office, on January 17, 1961. It is a powerful speech, and presented on-camera by a man who obviously speaks from the heart about what he knows. If I’m not mistaken, Eisenhower was the last career military man to serve as President of the United States – it has been 45 years now that we have had a civilian commander-in-chief.

Here is the key part of Eisenhower’s speech, where he coined the phrase “military industrial complex”:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The rest of the speech is just as good. I highly recommend reading the speech in its entirety.

Why We Fight then goes back and forth in history, using “talking heads” from the military, the CIA, students of history, and everyday people. The premise is relatively simple: For each of the various wars (or engagements, or police actions, etc) that we have fought since World War II – why did we fight? What was the reason? What did we win or lose? Were we in the right, the wrong, or unknown?

Each expert has a slightly different answer, but surprisingly, they all equate to the same thing: We fight because it is part of our culture. It is The American Way. We don’t negotiate, we don’t see subtleties, and most of all, we don’t worry about what will happen in the future because of our actions today.

In fact, as testimony from CIA officials and military students both confirm, every single engagement we’ve been involved in since 1945 – including Iraq – has been of our own making. We created Iran, by deposing its democratically elected leader in the 1950’s and replacing him with the despotic Shah. We created Iraq, by backing Saddam Hussein and supply him with money and weapons to fight Iran. Each time, we have ignored the “blowback” that will be caused in the future by our actions today.

We fight because it’s business. Money. Huge corporations like Boeing, Halliburton, and KBR exist almost solely to supply the government. They have business involvement in each and every one of the 50 states. Jobs depend on it, lots of jobs. Although the film never comes out and says so, I think it’s very interesting that this whole scheme – put in place to fight communism – is the closest thing we’ve got to actual communism today. After all, what is communism? State-sponsored, state-subsidized business. And just what are Halliburton and all the other military contractors? They exist, and they employ thousands of people, solely based on taxpayer money. We pay our taxes to the government, the government uses that money to pay the contractors, and the contractors pay their employees who pay the taxes… and around it goes.

I’ve seen some comments around the internet that liken this film to Fahrenheit 9/11. I don’t see it myself. I thought Fahrenheit 9/11 was just shrill anti-war propaganda, pure and simple. (As a side note, I also think Michael Moore is an A #1 asshole… but that’s a different point, I suppose). Whereas Fahrenheit 9/11 is smug, sarcastic, and snide, Why We Fight is engrossing, human, and intelligent. Both films make a point – but Moore’s film is a crudely disguised campaign commercial, and Jarecki’s is a masterpiece of documentary filmmaking.

Buy, rent, or watch this film. It’s very, very good. The stories intertwine in a seamless, almost organic fashion. If for nothing else, watch the story of retired firefighter Wilton Sekser, whose son died in one of the Twin Towers on 9/11, and how his support for the “war on terror” eroded as the lies and corruption behind it were exposed.

The film ends with a statement from Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski (retired). Col. Kwiatkowski resigned from the Army, and left her post as an analyst at the Pentagon, because she could no longer stomach supporting the intelligence lies that were necessary to sell the war in Iraq to the Amercian people:

I think we fight because basically not enough people are standing up saying, “I’m not doing this anymore.

Let’s all stand up and say… we’re not doing this anymore. There are better ways to make a living. And there are better ways to live.