Cheney's Military Service

I watched the Showtime movie "The World According to Dick Cheney," but was disappointed at its failure to challenge Cheney's views.  My first objection was that it did not say anything about Cheney's failure to serve in Vietnam.  It talks about how he was expelled from Yale and worked back in Wyoming as an electric lineman before resuming his education in Wyoming and then Wisconsin.  This was in the 1960s, prime time for the Vietnam draft.  His Wikipedia page and this Slate article describe how he weaseled out of the draft.  Normally a student deferment was for only four years; Cheney got more.  For his fifth deferment, he reportedly got a hardship deferment because his wife was pregnant.  Wikipedia says he told that Washington Post, "I had other priorities in the '60s than military service."

I don't think that everybody who avoided the draft was a coward, but it certainly raised questions about their patriotism.  I think that Cheney thought he was more important than America.  Maybe he thought he was destined to save America from itself.  If so, it didn't work out.  The wars have probably weakened the US militarily and damaged our image abroad.  The huge costs incurred without increasing taxes to pay for the wars damaged the US economy for years to come.

One new, unfavorable fact about Cheney that I learned from the movie was that toward the end of the Bush administration, he became seriously estranged from President Bush.  Bush thought that Cheney had led him astray on foreign policy and defense issues, and in particular had sandbagged him on the issue of illegal wiretapping by the government.

I think it is safe to say that Cheney has no regrets because he has no heart and no conscience.  While he avoided the draft as a young man, he let young men from Wyoming serve in the wasteful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it looks like only 14 from Wyoming died in Iraq.

Dick Cheney: unpatriotic coward who undermined American greatness.

Government Funding Deja Vu

The sequester episode brings to mind very bad memories of my government service.  I basically quit the Foreign Service because of the government's refusal to fund things I thought it should have funded in the turmoil around the government shutdown in 1995 and 1996.

In the early years of the Clinton administration, before Newt Gingrich and the Republicans came to power in 1994, two years into the Clinton administration, the US had signed a agreement to provide funding for joint science projects between the US and Poland and other former eastern bloc countries for five years.  When I arrived in Warsaw, the US had already provided $2 million funding for one year, and it provided the same amount for the second year, which was the first year of my assignment in Poland.  But Congress refused to provide funding for what would have been the third year of the program.

A fairly senior Polish diplomat repeated called me into the Foreign Ministry to berate me on behalf of the United States for failing to live up to its obligations.  I told him that if wanted results, he should call in the Ambassador rather than me, but at that time Poland was not yet a member of NATO, much less of the EU, and it did not want to do anything that would damage its efforts to join those organizations.  So, he continued to tell me how upset Poland was at the US default.  Having been raised in the South with a heavy dose of lecturing on the importance of honesty, honor, integrity, etc., the fact that I was the representative of a country that failed to live up to those standards hurt me deeply.

About six months or so after the US decision to abrogate the cooperation agreement, the Ambassador decided that the embassy had no need of a science officer, because there was little scientific activity outside of the cooperation agreement.  He said that I could finish my tour, but I would not be replaced when I left.  A little while after that, the State Department in Washington asked if I would be willing to transfer from Warsaw to Rome to take the science job at the embassy there.  I agreed and was scheduled to leave in a few weeks.

It turned out that the day of my departure from Warsaw to Rome was the day the United States Government shut down, November 14, 1995, according to Wikipedia.   My wife and I had moved everything out of our government housing in Warsaw.  Most of our things had been shipped to Rome, but we had a car full  of clothes and two dogs that we planned to drive to Rome.  At about 4:00 pm, while I was saying farewell to some friends in the embassy, Rome called and said not to come because I had been furloughed and there was no funding for travel.  However, we had nowhere to live in Warsaw and everything we owned was either in transit or in the trunk of the car.

Unfortunately, this reminded me of an experience in the Army during the Vietnam War.  My artillery battery was stationed on a mountaintop at a base called Firebase Barbara, west of Quang Tri, near the Laotian border, where we were shelling the Ho Chi Minh trail.  Vietnamization had started; so, we had no American infantry to defend us.  Instead we had two "dusters," old anti-aircraft weapons systems that shot 40 mm rounds like a machine gun.  The duster crews were always stationed in isolated, dangerous places and had a reputation of having gone native and not being very professional.  One night we got an intelligence report that enemy troops were massing at the base of our mountain, apparently planning to attack us.  I got a radio call from our headquarters telling us not to give the dusters any gasoline, because they were famous for not having any, and it was too hard to get it out to us.  However, it looked like if the dusters could not shoot, we were all going to die.  We made sure the dusters had gas; they blew away the area at the base of the mountain where the enemy was supposed to be assembling, and the attack never materialized.

But that's how it struck me -- that the US Government would rather that my wife and I freeze to death in Poland than provide us shelter.  A government that sends troops into the field and then fails to provide them with ammunition and other necessities is a pretty worthless government, and that's what I thought of our government.  We weren't going to die, but for all the government cared, we could have.  Unfortunately, a similar attitude led to the deaths of the American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, a few months ago.

I tended to be just a soldier in the Foreign Service.  I was not an outstanding diplomat.  The assignment in Rome was a plum, but it had fallen into my lap.  Most people who go to nice places lobby hard for the assignment.  I didn't know much of anything about the personnel in Rome.  I was so mad that this time, rather than be the good soldier and camp out in some hotel in Warsaw, I called Rome to complain about being left on the street.  It turned out that the DCM, the deputy ambassador, was someone I knew from a previous assignment in Brazil.  He said to go ahead and travel to Rome and they would figure out the paperwork somehow.  I did, but that basically ended my desire to serve the US government.  I would not serve a government that abandons its troops in the field.

A diplomat is many things: a journalist reporting on the country where you are assigned, a mailman carrying messages from our government to theirs, but also a salesman, both for American products and for the American way of life.  When the government I was representing fell to some mean-spirited, dictatorial, third-world standard, I didn't want to represent it anymore.

I went to Rome.  One reason they wanted me there was that Italy was assuming the presidency of the European Union, which meant that most of the diplomats in the embassy did double duty, they had to deal with the Italian government on the usual bilateral issues, but also on European Union issues.  The presidency lasts for six months.  I stayed for six months to take care of the extra work, but then retired from the Foreign Service and left.

Hegel Confirmed

Chuck Hegel was confirmed today as Defense Secretary according to the Wall Street Journal.  The article cites Hegel's positions on Israel and Iran as obstacles to his nomination.  Iran is really a subset of the Israel issue, since Iran is much more of a military threat to Israel than to the US.  I have been upset that his nomination was being blocked by Jews who were more concerned about Israel than the US.  However, in the final vote, most of the Jews in the Senate are Democrats who vote for Hegel, while the good-old-boy,
Christian, conservative Republicans voted against him.  The one favor that some of them did was to vote against filibustering his nomination.  Many of these conservative, Christian Republicans were responding to urging by the Jewish lobby AIPAC, which represents the conservative wing of Israeli politics.

Jewish Vendetta

This Politico article reinforces the impression that there is a Jewish vendetta against Hegel for his comments about the Jewish lobby.  It says that right-wing Hegel opponents were seeking a video of a speech he made to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination League because they thought it would contain anti-Israel or anti-Semetic comments.  So, the opposition to Hegel seems motivated by those who love Israel more than America and who consider themselves Jews rather than Americans.  But Politico says Hagel said nothing of note to the ADL.  Nevertheless there seems to be a lot of race hatred behind the opposition to Hegel

Gutless Federal Government

Stephen Colbert had great segments tonight on the failure of the US to prosecute anyone in the banks responsible for the meltdown that led to the great recession, although it is going after one rating agency, and Wells Fargo is going after one employee who put slugs in a coin laundry 40 years ago.  But Wells Fargo thinks it is fine to defraud customers of millions of dollars.  No punishment for that!

The S&P rating agency was basically a character reference for the banks, who were the actual crooks.  It was the banks who put together the fraudulent financial packages.  S&P was stupid enough to believe the banks, who lied through their teeth to the rating agencies and there customers.  Is there no penalty for the banks lying in exactly the same way the rating agency did?  The difference is that the banks own the American government, which has become increasingly corrupt.

Bloomberg in London

The N Y Times article about mayor Bloomberg's love for London and his big investment there goes against my hypothesis that Jews secretly love Israel more than America. The same may be true for Ralph Lauren, whose fashion inspiration often seems to come from Britain. I am happy about that, but I worry that there are many American Jews, represented by AIPAC, who do love Israel more than America. But fortunately it is not a universal phenomenon.

Too Tough on Jews

Not all Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States, but the Jewish outcry about the Hegel appointment has aroused my worst fears about Jewish disloyalty.

I really didn't think that much about Israel and the Jews until I was assigned to Poland in the mid-1990s.    First, as part of the acculturation process we went to visit the Holocaust museum which was just opening in Washington.  While it was moving, I was not pleased with the criticism of President Roosevelt for failing to come to the aid of the Jews in Europe sooner.  I suppose we will have more museums on the National Mall that are critical of America's history: museums condemning Washington and Jefferson for being slave owners and condemning the US Army for war crimes against Indians, etc.  But the Holocaust did not even occur in America, and none of the victims were Americans.

Then, in Poland in 1995, it was the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, and Clinton and Gore both came to mark different events.  It was all-Holocaust all the time.  There was no celebration of the Allied victory, in which my father fought.  It was just about the millions of Jews who died.  Of course, it's not clear in Poland what the war meant.  The US lost much less than one million killed in WW II.  The Soviets lost about twice as many killed as the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.  The Jews did not really fight.  One of the biggest Jewish battles was the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but that uprising was insignificant compared to the Warsaw uprising by the whole city's population.  The ghetto uprising was put down fairly easily by the Germans; the Warsaw uprising led to the destruction of the whole city during the fierce battle with the Germans.

Of course, the Allies never made it to Poland; they hardly made it to Berlin.  The Soviet Union ended up controlling Poland.  It's questionable whether Britain and the US could have defeated Germany without the Soviet Union, which suffered horrendous casualties.  So, the Poles didn't have much to celebrate about the Allied victory.  The Jews didn't have much to celebrate either, except of the fact that some survived and wnt on to post-WW II lives, often in the US or Israel.  During the commemorations, I was not put off by those who had actually survived the death camps, but I was somewhat put off by the younger Jews who had not been through the Holocaust.  The survivors seemed to be grateful; the next generation seemed to have an attitude of, "You owe me,"  The West had not responded quickly enough, and they were there to collect for the West's failings.  There was some of the same attitude from the Poles for being abandoned to the Soviets, but in 1995 the were more joyful at finally getting out from under Soviet domination.

In any case, two years in Poland pounded the Holocaust into my head, not always in a good way.  Now Jews want Americans to hate themselves for not invading France sooner during WW II.  And to make up for not doing so, we must pay reparations to Israel, giving them billions and billions of dollars.  And making sure that we do is AIPAC, which is a Jewish lobby as well as an Israeli lobby, because many Jews cannot separate being Jewish from loving Israel.

Many Jews Hate Gentiles, Starting with Hegel

The Hegel confirmation hearings have illustrated Jewish hatred of gentiles.  I don't understand why gentiles like McCain, Graham, and other senators from the South join them in what is essentially self-loathing.  Meanwhile, the New York Times, which is owned by Jews, and which displays its nondiscriminatory policy by running an article about Israeli race hatred directed at Muslims on the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team.   No wonder Republicans hate the Times; compared to the Times they look like Nazi storm troopers.

Chambliss Leaving

I am disappointed that Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss is leaving the Senate because he has been too liberal and cooperative.  I will never respect him because of the campaign he ran against Max Cleland, a disabled Vietnam veteran, questioning Cleland's patriotism.  Chambliss did not serve in the military and received draft deferments during the Vietnam war.  He is a Republican chicken hawk.

Need for Seriousness on Debt

Paul Krugman has been campaigning against taking action on the US debt until the recession is over.  I would be more supportive if there were some plan to address the debt in the future, but I don't see any plan.  Krugman seems to claim that addressing the debt is and will be painless.  We shouldn't do it now while we are in a recession, and when the recession ends, growth in the economy and tax receipts will automatically take care of the problem.  But this is not the government of the 1970s,  Medicare is huge, and tax rates have been slashed.  The recession was imposed on a country that was already badly out of whack.

It looks like Krugman's plan is to wait for inflation.  It is relatively painless to run up debt now, while interest rates are low.  When interest rates go up, or when we decide that our debt is unsustainable, we will just allow (or encourage) inflation to take off.  Then we can pay off our huge debt with dollars worth much less than they are today.  However, that does not  bode well for whoever is living in the US when that time comes.

We need a plan now to address the budget deficit and the national debt, even if it doesn't go into effect immediately.  Obama's decision to accept the Republican definition of $450,000 income annually as middle class does not help.

Schumer Supports Hegel

The NYT reports that Sen. Schumer said after a White House meeting, "I am currently prepared to vote for his [Hegel's] confirmation" as Secretary of Defense.  Although the implication is that this says something good about Hegel, to me it says something good about Schumer -- that he is not as much of a racist as I thought.  I am pleased that the fact that Hegel used the word "Jew" does not appear to have totally disqualified him to be Defense Secretary. 

The idea that there is not a "Jewish lobby" is ridiculous.  There is a liberal Jewish lobby, J-Street, but it has almost no influence compared to the conservative, militaristic AIPAC, which competes with the NRA to see who is the most powerful lobby in Washington.  Because of its power and visibility, AIPAC speaks for all Jews, even if some Jews may not agree with it. 

India, Iran and Nonproliferation

With all the outcry over Iran's attempts to get a bomb, no one mentions that George W. Bush's Republican administration undermined the legal case to limit Iran's nuclear efforts, as I said in a previous post.  India seriously undermined the nuclear non-proliferation regime by developing nuclear weapons.  It did not join the NPT and thus did not violate the treaty; however, it was one of the pariah states like Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and now Iran.  Pakistan still has its nuclear devices, but at least we continue to oppose its possessing them.  Israel flouts the non-proliferation regime, but at least it refuses to admit that it has atomic bombs, thus allowing the international community publicly to preserve the illusion that it does not have them.  At the end of the Bush administration, however, we basically welcomed India into the community of nations that have nuclear weapons.  India's refusal to adhere to the international treaty regime paid off.  Iran has clearly seen that the regime is toothless.  If you stand up to international pressure, as Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and India have done, you will get to have nuclear weapons, and if you are like India, you even get to keep them with the international community's blessing. 

So the US has no legal regime to support its objections to Iran's nuclear program.  Is Iran less responsible than North Korea or Pakistan?  No, it's simply that the Jews hate the Persians, and the Jews have tremendous political influence in the US.  American politicians are willing to engage in race hatred for Jew money. 

The Chuck Hagel nomination for Defense Secretary has brought this issue to the forefront again.  It is sad that Jews who are usually decent and responsible, like Sen. Chuck Schumer are now resorting to race hatred.  The Jews object to Hegel referring to the "Jewish lobby" rather than the "Israeli Lobby," but is Schumer acting as an Israeli or an American?  If we didn't have enough animosity in Washington between Republicans and Democrats, Jews are now creating racial animosity between Jews and gentiles, joined in some cases by gentiles like John McCain and Lindsey Graham.  They, like Judas, are happy to crucify the Christ for money.  The US is not threatened by Iran, anymore than it is by Pakistan, but Israel is threatened, and for Jew money Republicans are happy to send American soldiers to die protecing Israel. 

Emanuel Wants His Money

I was very disappointed in Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel's (Rahm's brother's) op-ed in the NYT.  He says there is no way to reduce the expense of end-of-life care, or any other type of care, for that matter.  His basic message is that doctors deserve to be rich.  Give me my money now!  You taxpayers owe me and my colleagues big time.  Pay up!  And pay us extra if we talk to you about end-of-life care. 

He has no solution at all, except to get his money before the US goes broke. 

Avoiding Fiscal Cliff Not Great

There seems to be almost universal agreement that the decision to avoid the fiscal cliff by raising taxes a little bit on the very rich was not significant.  It merely showed that Congress could do something, not that it could do something serious.  It did the absolute minimum.  It kept taxes from going up on everybody, but it socked it to the poor as well as the rich, by raising payroll taxes.  So, working people will see their Social Security and Medicare taxes go up from 4.2% to 6.2%.  Arguably, that's only 2%, but as a percentage increase, it's an increase of almost 50%.  For rich people, the tax will go from about 35% to 39%, i.e. 4%, but as a percentage increase it's just an increase of about 12%. 

So Obama and the Congress raised taxes on poor, working people by 50%, and taxes on rich people by 12%.  We can see who pays off a corrupt Congress.  Obama seems less corrupt, but so weak and cowardly that he is virtually useless. 

Howard Dean is right that it would be better to go over the fiscal cliff than to have some half-hearted package to avoid it that just makes the long term debt situation worse.  That's what Congress and Obama did.  The debt will continue to escalate as they kick the can down the road. 

Bible Prophecies about Israel 1

Isaiah Chapter 8 verses 13-15

13 Sanctify the Lord of hosts himself; and let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.

14 And he shall be for a sanctuary; but for a stone of stumbling and for a rock of offence to both the houses of Israel, for a gin and for a snare to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

15 And many among them shall stumble, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken.

And Ezekiel Chapter 6

1  And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying,

2  Son of man, set thy face toward the mountains of Israel, and prophesy against them,

3  And say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God; Thus saith the Lord God to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys; Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.

4  And your altars shall be desolate, and your images shall be broken: and I will cast down your slain men before your idols.

5  And I will lay the dead carcases of the children of Israel before their idols; and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.

6  In all your dwellingplaces the cities shall be laid waste, and the high places shall be desolate; that your altars may be laid waste and made desolate, and your idols may be broken and cease, and your images may be cut down, and your works may be abolished.

7  And the slain shall fall in the midst of you, and ye shall know that I am the Lord.

8  ¶ Yet will I leave a remnant, that ye may have some that shall escape the sword among the nations, when ye shall be scattered through the countries.

9  And they that escape of you shall remember me among the nations whither they shall be carried captives, because I am broken with their whorish heart, which hath departed from me, and with their eyes, which go a whoring after their idols: and they shall lothe themselves for the evils which they have committed in all their abominations.

10  And they shall know that I am the Lord, and that I have not said in vain that I would do this evil unto them.

11  ¶ Thus saith the Lord God; Smite with thine hand, and stamp with thy foot, and say, Alas for all the evil abominations of the house of Israel! for they shall fall by the sword, by the famine, and by the pestilence.

12  He that is far off shall die of the pestilence; and he that is near shall fall by the sword; and he that remaineth and is besieged shall die by the famine: thus will I accomplish my fury upon them.

13  Then shall ye know that I am the Lord, when their slain men shall be among their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill, in all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree, and under every thick oak, the place where they did offer sweet savour to all their idols.

14  So will I stretch out my hand upon them, and make the land desolate, yea, more desolate than the wilderness toward Diblath, in all their habitations: and they shall know that I am the Lord.
 

America's Lost Greatness

As the debate about the fiscal cliff drags on, it is becoming clearer to me that the US has lost its greatness.  It is no longer the biblical city on a hill envisioned by Reagan.  Our leaders are no longer concerned about our nation, they are concerned about themselves -- their power, their wealth, their position,  No one puts their country first.

We are supposed to have a democracy that allows the people to choose good leaders, but they have chosen poorly.  Too many of our leaders are stupid, selfish, greedy, corrupt, or worse.  One of the worst things as been the capture of the political system by moneyed interests.  A few years in government are just preparation for making real money as a lobbyist, consultant, or businessman selling to the government.  Another real problem is gerrymandering, making congressional districts safe for incumbents.  The House of representatives should be the most in touch with the people's needs, but it has become less and less responsible to them.  Congressmen's main concern is keeping their donors happy, most of whom live outside of their districts.

So, it looks like we will either continue to run trillion dollar annual deficits, or we will fall off the fiscal cliff into a deep recession, neither of which would be necessary.  Economists have good ideas about how to avoid both disasters, but our leaders are not listening.

Why Obama Failed Me

I didn't want to vote for Obama, but between Obama and Romney, Obama was the better choice. I was going to vote for a third party candidate, but ironically thanks to some Wall Street Journal Internet test of political positions, I found that both of the third party candidates were too radical for me. I have voted for Ralph Nader in the past, because I thought he was a good, honest man, unlike the major party candidates. This year however, I didn't know anything about the Green Party or the Libertarian Party candidates, and according to the Wall Street Journal they both espoused extreme positions. I often agreed with the Green Party on economic issues, but not on social issues. Similarly I often agreed with the Libertarians on social issues, but not on economic/financial issues. I think the Fed has saved the US from a horrible financial debacle brought on by Wall Street, which seems to be run by some of the worst people on earth. I think they are evil, but they may just be grossly incompetent.

So I was stuck between Obama and Romney, both of whom held more moderate positions on both social and economic issues, but I was closer to Obama.  However, I am unhappy with a number of things Obama did or did not do during his first term.
- He did not end the war in Afghanistan, which everybody thought was the "good" war, but it turned out that everybody was wrong (except Joe Biden).
- He did not close the Guantanamo prison, leaving the US with its own "gulag" like the old Soviet Union. It's like having a billboard that says, "The US is no longer a free, democratic country ruled by law." No wonder foreign students are going home when they graduate.
- He continued the Bush tax cuts. These tax cuts have badly unbalanced the US economy, contributing to our running up a trillion dollar deficit every year. They are unsustainable, especially when they undercut financing for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's one of the main reasons Rumsfeld said that you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want. The Republicans were happy to pocket a few thousand dollars in tax savings, although it meant many more troops would die in those wars because they did not have the best equipment.
- He did not try hard enough to get Elizabeth Warren approved as the first head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She created the bureau, and she should have been allowed to get it started. She would have faced fierce opposition from the Republicans in Congress, but Obama should have taken them on. It's possible that the big banks hated her so much that the bribed Obama and Democrats to desert her, too. I'm glad she was elected Senator, but I would have preferred to see her take on the banks in the bureau she created. Hopefully she will be able to do some of the same things as Senator. It will be interesting to see whether she gets on any relevant committees, or whether the banks will bribe the Democratic leadership to stick her in the boondocks somewhere.
- Obama did not give us single payer health care, i.e., Medicare for everybody. He have us expanded health care based on a Republican model that is a gift to the health insurance companies and the medical community. It means much higher costs that a single payer system would have meant.
- He has continued the Bush Administration drone strikes, which in many cases have killed innocent civilians and in some cases US citizens. This is like Guantanamo. It shows the world that the US is not longer an honest, decent, just country of laws.
I am hoping that Obama will do better in his second term. His first task is to do something about the fiscal cliff in a way that will reduce the outrageous budget deficit. So far, I am not optimistic. They may reach some sort of a deal that will allow us to muddle through, but will do little or nothing to redress the fundamental problem of the debt that is destroying America.

Defense Contractors Suck Taxpayer Money

The Republicans complain about all the individual citizens who rely on taxpayer, government money, and there are a lot of them.  But what about the defense contractors, whom the Republicans want to protect from going off the fiscal cliff?  Lockheed Martin works almost entirely for the government, although it sells some weapons systems to other countries, and thus has some income from other sources, but not much.  Yahoo says Lockheed annual revenues are about $47 billion.  Some of its competitors, companies that also make money largely from government contracts funded by the taxpayers include Northrop Grumman with revenues of about $26 billion, Raytheon with revenues of about $24 billion, General Dynamics with revenues of about $32 billion, and Boeing which is only partially a defense contractor has total revenues of $79 billion, perhaps half of which are from defense sales to taxpayers, about $40 billion.  This amounts to an annual taxpayer expense of around $169 billion.  Although we are talking about budget overruns of about $1 trillion, this is a meaningful portion of that. 

These companies are very focused on lobbying.  They often succeed in getting Congress to authorize money for defense projects that the Pentagon wants to cancel.  When Republicans talk about preserving the military budget, many are mainly worried about keeping the money flowing to these companies, who have cleverly located factories and offices in many key congressional districts.  The service men and women stationed in Afghanistan and around the world are secondary to man of these congressmen and senators.  The servicemen are a drain on congressional resources, asking for better medical care, etc., while the defense contractors give the congressmen and senators lots of money for their campaigns, etc. 

One of the biggest concerns about the fiscal cliff is that it would mandate reducing payments to some of these welfare gluttons who suck up taxpayer money.  We'll see how clever their lobbyists are in keeping the money flowing. 

SAC Insider Trading

It looks like insider trading is the rule rather than the exception on Wall Street, most recently illustrated by the SEC case against SAC involving its head, Steven Cohen.  It probably extends to anywhere there is insider information to trade on, the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, for example.  Charlie Gasparino of Fox Business News says that insider trading is a victimless crime.  But the victims are potentially every other stock trader, who because they don't have insider information sell or buy at a price that hurts them and benefits the person with insider information, who knows that the stock is going to go up or down.  In essence, the insider is stealing money from those without inside information.  It's like selling fake Rolex watches while claiming they are genuine and charging the full retail price of a real Rolex.  You think you are buying a good stock, based on all the information available to you, but it's not a good stock and the man selling it to you knows that it's not, because he has nonpublic, inside information. 

Martha Stewart went to jail for what seemed to be a common practice among high-level business people.  Another story in the Wall Street Journal about executives who routinely made money trading in their own companies' stock illustrates that problem. 

It only reinforces the terrible impression created by Wall Street in the great subprime housing derivative fiasco that created the worst recession since the depression.  These guys are crooks.  They are mafioso in suits who will destroy America for a buck.  And it all the big shots who run the financial industry, which Warren Buffet said on the Daily Show last night is responsible for about 20% of the US GDP.  This is basically the figure presented by the government Bureau of Economic Analysis.  And Michael Lewis says that one reason the Germans got suckered into the housing mess was that they thought the derivative salesmen from Goldman Sachs and the other big American banks were honest, when in fact the salemen were lying through their teeth. 

In a Vanity Fair article, Lewis says, quoting a German banker:

“For 40 years we didn’t lose a penny on anything with a triple-A rating,” he says. “We stopped building the portfolio in subprime in 2006. I had the idea that there was something wrong with your market.” He pauses. “I was in the belief that the best supervised of all banking systems was in New York. To me the Fed and the S.E.C. were second to none. I did not believe that there would be e-mail traffic between investment bankers saying that they were selling … ” He pauses and decides he shouldn’t say “shit.” “Dirt,” he says instead. “This is by far my biggest professional disappointment. I was in a much too positive way U.S.-biased. I had a set of beliefs about U.S. values.”

The global financial system may exist to bring borrowers and lenders together, but it has become over the past few decades something else too: a tool for maximizing the number of encounters between the strong and the weak, so that one might exploit the other. Extremely smart traders inside Wall Street investment banks devise deeply unfair, diabolically complicated bets, and then send their sales forces out to scour the world for some idiot who will take the other side of those bets. During the boom years a wildly disproportionate number of those idiots were in Germany. As a reporter for Bloomberg News in Frankfurt, named Aaron Kirchfeld, put it to me, “You’d talk to a New York investment banker, and they’d say, ‘No one is going to buy this crap. Oh. Wait. The Landesbanks will!’ ” When Morgan Stanley designed extremely complicated credit-default swaps all but certain to fail so that their own proprietary traders could bet against them, the main buyers were German. When Goldman Sachs helped the New York hedge-fund manager John Paulson design a bond to bet against—a bond that Paulson hoped would fail—the buyer on the other side was a German bank called IKB. IKB, along with another famous fool at the Wall Street poker table called WestLB, is based in Düsseldorf—which is why, when you asked a smart Wall Street bond trader who was buying all this crap during the boom, he might well say, simply, “Stupid Germans in Düsseldorf.”

Zionism Is Racism

The recent dust up between Israel and Gaza reminds us that Israel is a racist state.  Although it allows some role for non-Jews in Israeli politics, for all practical purposes it is a Jewish state that discriminates against non-Jews, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in huge ways.  Israel may argue that its isolation of Gaza, for example, is necessary for security reasons, but the origin of the security problem is racism. 

Israel is justified in protecting itself from attack by Palestinians and other Arabs, but it should work seriously to reduce the oppression that produces those attacks.  The problem is that the Palestinian Arabs were in Palestine first.  After World War II, the British protectorate ended and the United Nations turned Palestine over to the Jews despite fierce opposition from those living there, mostly Arab Muslims. 

In some respects, it is not unlike what the United States did to the Indians when Europeans came to North America.  However, North America was mostly empty land, occupied by a relatively small population of Indians.  Palestine, on the other hand, was pretty much completely occupied by Arabs, who had to be displaced by the Jews to Jordan, the West Bank, and other neighboring countries.  The Jews have shown zero interest in granting the Palestinians land of their own, while the Palestinians, mainly from force of superior Israeli arms, have largely acquiesced in Israel's occupation of the majority of historical Palestine, although Jews were largely absent from Palestine for 2,000 years.  The Jews lost Palestine shortly after Jesus's time, apparently moving mainly to Europe in the diaspora, although the virtual absence of non-European Jews in Israel makes one wonder whether there is not a form of Israeli racism against non-Europeans.  Palestine was not a Jewish homeland in the 500s, the 1000s or the 1700s.  Jews did begin to return in the 1800s, but before the UN's creation of the state of Israel, they were a relatively small part of the population. 

A Huffington Post article discusses the racism in Israel directed by the European Ashkenazi Jews against the Middle Easrern Sephartic Jews.  It says that for many years Middle Eastern Jews Have lived as stigmatized citizens of Israel.   Although the populations of the two groups are about equal in Israel, the Ashkenazi rule the country.  Furthermore, many Sephartic Jews also come from Europe, but from Spain and Portugal, rather than Germany or Poland.

So, Palestinians have deep-seated, legitimate grievances that Israel refuses to acknowledge, and thanks to the enormous wealth and political influence of US Jews, the US has similarly refused to acknowledge the plight of the Palestinians.  It sometimes pays lip service to Palestinian claims, but meanwhile supplies Israel with hundreds of millions of dollars of military aid with which to kill Arabs.