2024

No, it’s not the sequel! I am stunned that the news media aren’t all over a statement by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, blurted out during a palace press conference inconveniently timed just as Defense Secretary Robert Gates was visiting the region on a surprise visit. Mr. Corruption – my little name for Karzai who stole his second term as president in an election where UN observers believe that about 1/3 of the ballots were suspect – let it be known that he did not expect Afghanistan to be able to pay for its own security forces until 2024!

President Obama is asking Congress for 30,000 additional troops for a surge in Afghanistan, an expensive ask in trouble financial times, telling the Afghans that there are no more “blank checks” to be expected from American taxpayers. With anti-corruption and anti-Taliban/al Qaeda benchmarks in the air, and even a tentative beginning to our “withdrawal” set for mid-2011, Karzai’s statement should be more than enough to send our Congress into spasms. The December 12^th New York Times understated the conundrum this way: “The timing of Mr. Karzai’s pronouncement was not ideal: … Mr. Gates has been summoned to explain to Congress the expected $30 billion a year it will cost for the escalation of the Afghan war.”

It’s bad enough that Karzai – reeking of the stench of corruption – is the anchor of our anti-corruption policy. Is challenging enough to mount an anti-insurgency campaign with hundreds of thousands of soldiers shy of a necessary force to do an effective job (over half a million troops is the number military strategists say is real, a number we could never afford). That offending Taliban and al Qaeda operatives have safe haven in Pakistan just about any time the heat in Afghanistan from American assaults is too much – they can wait until the US forces are deployed elsewhere and simply return – is just plain untenable. That the US and Afghan governments’ efforts to arm locals against Taliban and al Qaeda marauders have resulted in creating a rising new force of local warlords with little benefit either to the Afghan nation or the local villages they were supposed to protect is bad news.

It’s nasty enough that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, a fairly lone voice is supporting American efforts against the Taliban, is slowly losing power as both his constituency – the local Pakistani voters – and his military, have made it increasingly clear that his support of U.S. policies is a fairly short road to political self-destruction. “Zardari has proved a reliable U.S. partner, even on actions that are unpopular with the Pakistani public, such as the CIA's campaign of airstrikes targeting Al Qaeda leaders and the Taliban in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan... Analysts say that if Zardari loses a measure of control over foreign and defense issues, the winner is likely to be the Pakistani military, which has a long history of tense relations with Washington… The 54-year-old president already has ceded several of his most important powers, including the chairmanship of the agency that oversees Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, to Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gillani. He plans this month to give up authority to dissolve parliament, dismiss the prime minister and appoint military chiefs, leaving him little more than a figurehead.” The December 12^th Los Angeles Times

What’re we gonna do? Capture and hold Pakistan, safe haven to our sweltering enemies? That’s a grand idea! If we want to push the nukes of that “more-than-terrifying-nation” into the hands of America’s opponents in Pakistan, we are doing one hell of a good job. Well, as the litany of horribles regarding our Afghan mission increasingly calls into question why we are expanding a war we clearly cannot win… Karzai reminds us of the obvious: his government is not only morally bankrupt, having to defend his little fiefdom is financially impossible unless the US picks up the tab for keeping him and his failed government in power for the next… er…. decade and a half! Is anybody looking at the obvious anymore?

Some folks are listening: “‘Obama is going to have to do a real sales job [to get Congress to authorize and pay for the troop surge],’ said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who spent years as a senior aide on Capitol Hill. ‘You have people who are uncomfortable with the policy, and people who are uncomfortable with how to pay for it. And [Wisconsin Democrat, David] Obey, as chairman of the [House Appropriations C]ommittee that holds the purse strings, is uncomfortable with both.’” The NY Times.

Pay for extra troops? Why are we staying in light of all of the above? We’re Americans; we hate losing, American soldiers are dying for a lost cause (plus lots of civilian casualties), the folks in a corrupt government there are totally unprepared to fight on their own any time soon, the regional neighbors don’t want us there, and we have vastly better places to spend our money. We may even provoke another terrorist attack on our shores, and if we leave and they still launch an attack on us from Afghanistan, we do have ways to retaliate! Got milk? We know we got deficit!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Down on the Old Farm

Getting old is not for the faint of heart. It’s bad enough when you live in an urban community with access to social services, medical care and your friends (maybe even family), but for America’s rural retirees, life can be hard, very, very hard. Life on a traditional family farm is tough enough, if you are fortunate even to own one; crops and farm animals don’t understand things like vacations, weekends or “I’m too sick to come in to work today.” The hours are grueling, prices and costs are anything but stable, and then there is Mother Nature, who can be downright vicious at times. Farm folks are used to hard, they build up emotional calluses that “city slickers” would be hard-pressed to emulate.

But in retirement, a whole set of new complexities set in. Medical facilities, doctors even, are often very long distances away… turning a relatively controllable medical event into a fatality for lack of action. Power failures are common, and cell phone coverage is, to put it mildly, unreliable. Serious Internet access – assuming you are computer literate enough to make it valuable – is also often limited, so communicating with children and grandchildren, who use the Web as their most convenient communications tool, maybe expensive, difficult or even impossible. With increasing numbers of young people leaving the small rural towns and farms, increasingly, America finds itself with thousands of communities of little more than diehards and elderly. It’s all they really know. It’s all they really understand.

The need for a car, in a world of long distances and increasing fuel costs, is critical… just to buy food, seek social companionship and secure medical help. But as the elderly get older, the ability to drive – even to pass the mandatory driving test – creates new challenges. Lose your license and face harsh enforced isolation. And should you car breakdown, or the a sizzling summer or a snow-bound winter take away the driving option, being stranded, alone and helpless, is often the sad result.

For those without assets, the farm workers and wranglers who came from the land or farmers who have lost their land as real estate prices have collapsed, life can be even more difficult: a trailer, a shack, a rented room or trying to make a living when the hands and body don’t work so well anymore. Small towns are drying up and blowing away; small churches – the heart and soul of spiritual and social life for so many of these farm-country Americans – are closing in droves as there are insufficient remaining residents to make continued operation viable.

The December 9^th New York Times (Kirk Johnson writing) did a heart-tugging piece about this issue that skips right by the mindset of most of us urban dwellers. Here are a few of the quotes and stories from the folks who live in this harsh rural environment:

“I don’t see how these towns keep on going,” [said 92-year-old Frank Robinson], sitting ramrod straight in a housing-project meeting room, a feed-store cap on his head. “Years ago on a Saturday, Main Street was filled solid with people, and there was two or three cafes to eat at — it might be 10, 11 o’clock before they went home,” he said. “Now on Main Street on Saturday, there’s nothing.”

Norma Clark, 80, slipped on the ice out by the horse corral one afternoon and broke her hip in four places. Alone, it took her three hours to drag herself the 40 yards back to the house through snow and mud, after she had tied her legs together with rope to stabilize the injury… On a clear day, you can see across her land and all the way, 60 miles or so, to Laramie Peak [Wyoming]. It is a landscape drenched with the memory, she said, of her husband, Leo, who died last year after a long illness, and the six daughters they raised together on the land. “I sit, and I look,” she said.

Mr. [George] Burgess, who has lived and worked for most of his 96 years in Wyoming and Nebraska as a hired farmhand and in later years as a machinist, still drives his truck almost every day into Torrington, Wyo., about eight miles from his home, for a hot lunch at the senior center. But his driver’s license expires in January, and he is deeply worried that he might not pass the test this time around… Mr. Burgess gets housekeeping assistance under a state program that helps older people stay in their homes and out of nursing care. But if he could not socialize in town, he said, he would be lost… “I might be on roller skates,” said Mr. Burgess, still cowboy-thin in cinched-up Levis, his booming outdoor voice filling his home on a recent snowy afternoon. He glanced around the tiny, cluttered living room — the coal stove, the broken television, the walls lined with pictures of his wife, Laura, who died just over a year ago after more than 60 years of marriage… “I wish it was different, but it isn’t,” he said. “So you endure it.”

This is America too, a part most of us never see or experience. Next time an urban inconvenience riles you or creates a momentary inconvenience, think about how you would endure such dangerous isolation.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Bank to the Future

The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are two powerful instruments of the developed world that offer hope – with lots of strings – to poorer nations in need of external funding. They both were created at the same Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, a meeting that dealt with restructuring the post-World War II global economy. “The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an international organization … formed with a stated objective of stabilizing international exchange rates and facilitating development [that] offers highly leveraged loans mainly to poorer countries.” Wikipedia. D.C.-located IMF operates with a pool of capital contributed by its 186 member nations and benefits it members by reacting to economic imbalances and stop-gapping monetary shortfalls in poorer countries.” The World Bank, also D.C.-based, has a similar mandate, but its primary focus is providing capital to impoverished nations with a goal to build infrastructure, foment growth and end poverty.”

Such nobility? Critics have long-held the belief that these financial benefits to poorer nations were really created (or have changed over time) (1) to provide huge projects for the big nations that fund these organizations (string: if you take the money, you have to use companies from our big fat countries to do the building) and (2) to make these poorer nations politically beholden to their developed lenders. As the debt piles up, the poor little debtor nation is pretty much under the political thumb of the big fat lenders (string: we are nice to you about all the money you owe us, and you vote the way we want at the UN and support our policies in your region). Not exactly an exemplar of Judeo-Christian charity, is it?

Together, these financial behemoths have become incredibly powerful instrumentalities of corporate globalization and are often the steering mechanisms for global economic and market reform. And one of the recent mandates of the World Bank has been to target the disruptive and poverty-inducing issue of corruption within the borrowing nations. Both the IMF and the World Bank have firmly committed to this goal, significantly reacting to two years of hearings by U.S. Senate subcommittees regarding the destructive power of corruption on poorer nations.

One of the architects of the “neo-con” movement, former Bush administration Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, is the head of the World Bank, which is very much influenced by its biggest contributing nation, the United States. According to IPS.com (The British Inter Press Service News Agency, September 13, 2009), “Wolfowitz recently announced a long-term strategy for using the Bank's funds and expertise to help developing countries rid their governments of bribe-taking and other dishonest practices. A key component will be the deployment of anti-corruption teams in many World Bank country offices.” Nice, right?

Well, what one sees on the surface may not exactly be what is actually going on. “[S]ome non-governmental organisations that oppose the pro-corporate policies of the [International Monetary] Fund and the [World] Bank have questioned whether Wolfowitz, a major architect of the U.S. neo-conservative-led war in Iraq, is using an agenda of democracy and reform to squeeze regimes unfriendly to the United States.” IPS.com. It seems obvious to some that if local regimes play ball with U.S. policies, the squeeze on corruption will be relaxed accordingly.

Further, critics believe that the domination of rich industrialized nations (particularly the United States) at the expense of emerging and smaller nations has skewed the decision-making emphasis of both these organizations to favor huge industrial and corporate powers. IPS.com provides an example: “The [World] Bank's plan for clean energy and climate change [was] another major item on the annual meetings' agenda… The plan was drafted at the urging of the world's most industrialised nations last year as they faced spiraling oil prices. The Bank…says it will help combat climate change and expand energy access for the poor. The lender says it committed 871 million dollars to renewable energy and energy efficiency programmes in 2006… But critics argue its mandate is primarily to serve wealthier nations in their never-ending quest for energy sources and facilitate their search for oil outside of OPEC nations. They say that the document largely ignores alternative and renewable energy sources while advocating mega-projects like hydro-electric dams and nuclear plants, which have traditionally come at a high price for local communities and the environment and fat profit margins for multinational corporations.”

As the global economy shifts heavily toward new powers, nations like China, India and Brazil, and as the United States, heavily burdened with massive deficit-induced borrowings and embroiled in military expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan, slips in its global influence, we are very likely to see organizations like the World Bank and the IMF to be significantly restructured back towards their original mandates and be redirected away from any semblance of being the instrument of American policy.

While it is intellectually fascinating to watch these global power shifts, at some level, this forces the U.S. to play ball with other nations – no longer able to dictate global policies without first generating a consensus – and in the end, these seemingly abstract changes in global alignment will have a very real impact on the quality of American lives. While there may be some pain in these realities, perhaps it is a pain we can bear with a smile.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this blog was suggested by my son, Chris.

It Does Not Compute

In China, where 10^th graders do double the homework of American kids (averaging four hours a day), literacy level is around 90% – now ranking four points higher than in the U.S. – Duitch Consulting Bulletin – December 2009

Hard facts: American children will face increasing education and skill-based competition from workers from other nations who are paid vastly less per hour for the same services. Perhaps the dollar will collapse, and the Chinese will no longer tie their currency to ours anymore, to make up for the difference. But then, what would life be like in a country where all the staples and commodities are priced in the international market without reference to the buying-power of the dollar… when we really can’t buy much anymore? Is that really the standard of living we should be preparing our children for?

One of the great defining characteristics of Americans is our willingness to compete. Combine that with a free and open society where bucking the rules and swimming against the current has provided the unique acceleration of invention and creativity to contribute a wealth of new ideas, products, services and all sorts of wondrous contraptions that the world now takes for granted. But in 2010, the world is increasingly being given to those with the ability to deal with sophisticated technologies and economic structures built upon that complexity of American invention. The starting point for much of what we invent requires much more knowledge than ever before.

For faithful readers of this blog, you know my passion for upgrading and expanding the American educational system, from pre-K through the most demanding post-graduate study. I believe in ubiquitous access to any level of education any child in this great nation aspires to and is capable of digesting, and the cost barriers to such children in getting that education are miniscule, in my opinion, to the social costs in not leveling our playing field and finding our best and brightest to challenge the minds in the rest of the world. Indeed, the social costs of an expensive justice system and welfare support required for our long-term failures would be a multiple of the costs of fixing our educational system in the first place… giving kids a chance to earn their way out of potential trouble.

I’ve addressed the schools before, and this evening, I’d like to look at one feature of our primary and secondary educational system that everyone reading this blog probably takes for granted – access to a computer. Pull mobile phones and computers out of your life, and while the peace and quiet might feel good for a while, sooner or later, you can feel the isolation set in and know that those who are competing with you are grateful for your surrender.

According to the U.S. Census, about two-thirds of American households have home computers with Internet access. Great, but that also means that one-third of such households do not, and while many elderly may be counted in that group (one of the fastest growing sectors of computer-users, by the way), the unfortunate reality is that the bulk of such “deprived” households don’t have a computer with Internet access because they cannot afford it and/or because it is not a part of their cultural experience. To make matters worse are those scores of teachers in classrooms where there are sufficient computers but who rebel against “modernity” and rely on old-world, paper-based lesson plans – because that’s how they were trained to teach!

But the “digital divide” is troubling nonetheless. For those students with a driving need to access computers, but whose families just do not have the money, there is always the public library. The December 7^th Washington Post providedes an example: “Most afternoons, it is crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families using the computers. Although [some of these students may] live in one of the richest counties in the United States, these students recount skipping lunch to work at school labs or making long journeys to the public library after school… Such effort is necessary because students are doing much of their work online: reading textbooks, watching podcasts, using discussion boards and creating PowerPoint presentations.”

The Post also provides anecdote that says it all: “Librarians at Woodrow Wilson provided an excuse note for 15-year-old Juan Henriquez after he lost an eight-page paper on the Bill of Rights because his computer session timed out before he'd saved his work... ‘I felt mad,’ Juan said. ‘I didn't know what I was going to do.’… Juan, the son of Salvadoran immigrants, said he prefers working at the library because if he stays after class to work in the school lab he gets too hungry.” It’s not just having a computer in the school… it’s having access when and where a student really uses it.

If our government (national, state and local) cannot provide computers to students to take home, is this a job for corporate America – to adopt schools and students, mentoring them, providing hands-on role models and providing computers for the deserving? When Wall Street racks up record profits and pays out huge bonuses, I simply wonder if their just might be a better use for a big chunk of that money.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I just wonder why those in power seem constantly to miss the obvious.

The Dry Rustle

Maasai tribes have long believed that all the cattle on earth belong to them (I can see the movie now – Maasai in Texas!), and they have a legacy of cattle rustling that has become nothing short of legendary. Migrants from the southern Nile valley, they currently live in northern Tanzania and southern Kenya, almost a million strong. But this tribal affection for raiding cattle has settled down over the years as Maasai have become “better citizens” of their respective countries. These folks live in the southern area of Kenya… but there are desperate troubles – and new cattle rustlers – in the north.

Previously peaceful tribes in northern Kenya and southern Sudan, particularly Samburu and Turkana, were known to raid cattle in times of excessive rains and rapid expansion of the areas herds… big herds simply were too tempting to miss. But those days seem long gone in this time of climate change. Despite the raging debate in the Western world, these Great Rift Valley tribes have witnessed a 5 degree rise in the maximum temperature over the last few decades, and the drought that has plagued the Darfur region of the Sudan has also griped the areas to the south. Scientists predict a further 15% decline in rainfall in the next decades as well. Malaria, once rare in these elevated regions, has spread its deadly cast as temperatures rise.

We all have heard that the ice caps on Africa’s highest peaks, Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mr. Kenya, are disappearing and perhaps that Lake Chad has lost 90% of its water since the 1960s, but the day-to-day existence of the Turkana, Samburu and other tribal peoples in this Sudan/Kenya/ Uganda region has rendered new meaning to the word “harsh.” The barometers of desperation go beyond the rise and fall of mercury in the weather thermometers and pressure gauges; what may have been a small conflict with spears and arrows a few decades ago has turned into a fire fight with AK-47s. To make matters worse, either corrupt officials or misguided regional governmental policies have resulted in official and unofficial supplies of small arms to favored factions. Cattle raids in northern Kenya, once relegated to times of plenty, are now the product of sustained drought and utter desperation.

The United Nations estimates that approximately 400 people have died in this violence in northern Kenya over the past year. The November 28^th Los Angeles Times: “In Kenya, experts say, the violence has become as unpredictable as the weather. Faced with the extinction of their age-old livelihood because of what appear to be permanent changes in rainfall patterns, many of the 4 million Kenyans who survive by raising livestock are embroiled in a fight with one another and with herdsmen from nearby countries for the remaining viable land… ‘The situation is getting out of hand and people are starting to worry about where all this is headed,’ said Mohammed Ahmed, a field officer with the British aid group ActionAid in Isiolo, where scores of people have been killed in recent months… He and others say the violence this year has been more brutal and random than anyone can remember. Women and children have been killed, among them two women slain while collecting firewood in September.”

I am gratified that both the United States and China have made recent commitments to cap carbon emissions. I wish we had all acted a long, long time ago.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I wonder what happened to that small, desperate Samburu village I visited just four years ago.

Can’t Rest on Our Laurels

Ah, the Middle East – cradle of civilization, birthplace of three of the world’s largest religions, the originator of modern mathematics (yeah, they call them Arabic numerals – the Roman kind didn’t work so well in math class – and that very Arab word “algebra”) and purveyor of hummus and baba ganoush – why, oh why, have you fomented so much chaos in the World? It can be little things, like Iran’s recent confiscation of Shirin Ebadi's 2003 Nobel Peace Prize medal, or big things, like the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis over the former’s national identity. Is there no good news in the region?

Palestinians have been thinking about carrying their quest for “independence” directly to the United Nations, mimicking the path that created Israel in 1948. They feel that hardliners, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, have rejected the advances of past Israeli administrations and authorized the construction of even more Jewish settlements on the West Bank, land that the Palestinians believe should be their autonomous and very separate nation. Every new settlement, with passionate Zionist settlers, is salt in their wounds… what the Palestinians see as the honorable quest for independence.

Many Israelis wonder why, when they were attacked by their surrounding neighbors with annihilation in mind, they should release the land they extracted in self-defense and forego the buffer between themselves and a whole bunch of unfriendly nations in the region, letting slide a perpetual bargaining chip in a world of perpetual threats. Why should they “be nice” to Arabs who still want to destroy the Jewish state? Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, whose control is really only over the West Bank and not the Hamas-controlled Gaza region, has threatened to resign in frustration at the stalemate. President Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner himself, has pressured Israel to step back from their policy of allowing more Jewish settlements on the West Bank and to return to the bargaining table with a real agenda of Palestinian statehood.

As Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton, continued to press the Netanyahu administration for a permanent freeze on such Jewish settlements and to consider the Palestinian proposal of returning Israel’s borders to the “pre-1967 line,” it’s clear that the Israelis are wary of… everything. “‘We would prefer language that does not predetermine the outcome before negotiations start,’ said Michael B. Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. ‘One of our objections is that we do not believe that ’67 borders are defensible.’” November 26^th New York Times.

For Israel, having U.S. support is critical. This tiny country, surrounded by hostile forces throughout the Middle East and stretching into Africa and Central Asia, needs our military and diplomatic support just to survive. The U.S. has risked global opprobrium on more than one occasion as it exercised its U.N. Security Council veto right on behalf of Israel. Likewise, despite a few ups and downs, Israel has remained our steadfast and reliable ally in a very difficult part of the world.

In what appeared to be a glimmer of hope, on Wednesday, November 25, Netanyahu announced his intension to place a 10 month moratorium on new Jewish settlements on the West Bank as a gesture to get the stalled peace talks started again, something the U.S. has been pressuring both sides to resume. On closer examination, the gesture offered less than many had hoped: “Israel’s security cabinet approved the freeze on [November 25^th]. It will apply to the West Bank, but will not include Jerusalem. And it will apply to new residential building, so existing construction — nearly 3,000 housing units — will continue, and public structures like schools and community centers will be unaffected.” The Times. Netanyahu described this concession as a difficult and painful step.

The Obama administration, anxious to see any progress in the region, reacted positively: “The administration’s special envoy for the Middle East, George J. Mitchell, said in a briefing that the steps announced by the prime minister are significant and could have substantial impact on the ground.’ … He added: ‘For the first time ever, an Israeli government will stop housing approvals and all new construction of housing units and related infrastructure in West Bank settlements. That’s a positive development.’” The Times. The Palestinian reaction was hardly what the U.S. President wanted to hear. Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad who had previously rejected any such moratorium because it did not include Jerusalem, indicated that the gesture was insufficient to bring the Palestinians back to the bargaining table.

Indeed, the Israeli government did not seem to be catering to the Palestinians at all but was instead trying to provide support towards its relationship with the U.S. Ambassador Oren, echoed with strong resonance from the Israeli press, made that very apparent by noting that the announcement of the moratorium was “a gesture, first of all, to the president of the United States. I can’t stress that enough.” America is mired in the Middle East with no really good options but to keep the pressure on all the factions to resolve the seemingly irresolvable. The Islamic nations eye us with distrust, and now even Israel’s hardliner government is seeking olive branches to the American government, sensing the recent strain on our mutual relations.

These are long, distorted journeys, mired with hate and mistrust solidified over time, fermented with doses of extremism and “ultra-violence” from all sides and incubated under the glaring sun of political opportunism and irreconcilable agendas. Perhaps that a gesture was made at all, for whatever reason, is something to be appreciated and not scorned.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Lackluster, Meet the Jobs Summit

Oh well, we’ve committed all of our stimulus/TARP money and created a massive deficit, we’re escalating a war that we can’t win but will cost billions more, but think of the good news: the folks on Wall Street who are still working can buy even more glorious and luxurious condos and second homes at vastly reduced prices with all the extra money they are getting in bonuses. And while that small or medium-sized business has no real access to normal commercial loans, those denizens of the “Street” were able to borrow money from the federal government at close to zero percent interest to use for pure market speculation, and they are able to buy “distressed assets” at bargain rates. Wow, glorious! We definitely bailed out the big guys!

Although more and more Americans are losing their jobs or getting the compensation slashed, we are told that it is good news that each month the number of additional job-losers seems to be declining. The official unemployment percentage dropped slightly in November to 10% (from 10.2%), but so many people fell out of the statistic (those who have given up looking or who could only find part-time or occasional work) that looking at this lower total percentage as if it were a drop would be inaccurate. However one addresses the issue, unemployment is still very high, and the Federal Reserve projects serious unemployment numbers for years to come. Well, when you live in the real world and don’t happen to have one of those glorious Wall Street jobs, why is it remotely surprising that most working Americans are wary of spending and are unlikely to resume their past consumer practices… for the foreseeable future?

“Black Friday”? Hot pre-holiday November sales? Not exactly. The December 3^rd New York Times: “Overall, the retailing industry posted a 0.5 percent increase in comparable sales for the month from a year ago, when sales declined 7.8 percent, according to Thomson Reuters. Analysts had expected a 2.1 percent increase for the month.” Not surprisingly, value-retailers did fine, but mid-market department stores showed average mid-single-digit percentage declines, and luxury departments stores, forced into deep discounting, fared the worst with double-digit declines, Saks down by over 26% (same store sales comparing November sales in 2008 and 2009). Retail sales are where consumers, who control 70% of this economy, vote on where they think we are headed. And this vote was, not too surprisingly, negative.

In this environment, the President has summoned about 130 business leaders (from corporate executives to small business owners), union heads and economists to the White House to brainstorm over how to create new jobs… the biggest single “voter” issue facing the Obama administration, in my opinion. But the government has already spent or earmarked all the big bucks it is willing to spend to re-ignite the economy, and so job-creation, well, is simply going to have to happen without significant new federal dollars escalating an already intolerable deficit load.

The factions are lining up. The December 3^rd Washington Post: “‘We want to make sure it is not just the public sector doing this in a vacuum,’ said Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama. ‘It's important we engage the private sector as well.’ Administration officials, however, have excluded major trade associations from the summit, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represent many of the country's largest employers… Some of those groups privately complain that their job creation ideas, including enactment of stalled free trade deals that they say would boost exports, are opposed by labor unions, which will be heavily represented at the forum.” Minorities are screaming that the Obama administration is not doing enough for them: “10 members of the Congressional Black Caucus boycotted a House committee markup of a financial regulatory reform bill, a key Obama priority, to protest the administration not doing more to aid minority communities and businesses that are hurting economically.”

Does the White House already have an agenda? Is this “jobs summit” just window-dressing? “It is far from clear that Obama will embrace all the ideas being promoted by his supporters in organized labor, who are making calls for direct funding of federal public works jobs, another round of aid to cash-strapped states and cities, and funding for infrastructure projects... Taken together, those initiatives could cost hundreds of billions of dollars -- a tab Obama seems unwilling to shoulder. The White House has been warmer to ideas to use federal money to leverage private investments. One, dubbed ‘cash for caulkers,’ would offer federal subsidies to people who weatherize their homes. The administration has also expressed interest in expanding financing for export-related businesses, and fast-tracking infrastructure spending.” The Post

In the end, we clearly do not have unlimited resources and the budget deficits are both intolerable and unsustainable at these levels. But at the root of this problem is the seeming violation of the fundamental notion of “fair play” in America. How can we subsidize the mega-wealthy financial firms – who were provided money to restore the credit markets that they destroyed in the first place, and they most certainly opted not make normal credit available as expected – allow their principals to make wild profits generated in significant part by taxpayer dollars, and then tell the rest of American that we used up all the money on these fat cats… and there’s nothing left for the rest of us?!

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Getting the Lead Out

Let’s see… when the government bailed out insurance giant, AIG, the primary beneficiary among AIG clients was… you got it… financial huge guy… Goldman Sachs. $12.9 billion worth of insurance for trading losses! And when the Federal Reserve went into “stimulus” interest rates that hovered around zero to get credit flowing again… it flowed $52 billion in cheap loans to the new “commercial bank” – yeah, Goldman Sachs, which promptly put that money into small and mid-cap businesses NOT. They used lots of that money to fuel their own trading frenzy, borrowing money to buy stock as the market surged significantly higher than its very bottom a few months ago. They paid back the $10 billion in TARP money, not because they wanted to be good citizens; they couldn’t tolerate the compensation caps required by the feds for companies with TARP on their books.

Goldman has joined with financier-billionaire, Warren Buffet, in donating $0.5 billion to help their image, but on the whole, they’re really scared. Yeah, the same investment bank that routinely places powerful voices within any sitting government… Henry Paulson, former Goldman CEO, and then… er… George Bush’s last Secretary of the Treasury. Robert E. Rubin, head of the National Economic Council and later Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, once served as a Goldman board member and Co-Chairman.

Hey, how about Larry Summers, one of President Obama’s primary economic advisors? According to the April 4 Salon.com, Goldman was nice to him… in cash: “That's $135,000 paid by Goldman Sachs to Summers -- for a one-day visit. And the payment was made at a time -- in April, 2008 -- when everyone assumed that the next President would either be Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton and that Larry Summers would therefore become exactly what he now is: the most influential financial official in the U.S. Government.” They knew that if Obama or Clinton were elected, the ability to bribe… sorry… engage and pay Larry Summers in such a flagrant manner would no longer be on the table. Obama even considered Summers to be Secretary of the Treasury!

So why are these bankers so scared? They’re about to be paid so much money as part of their allocated profit pool, what’s to worry about? I mean, we know that Goldman bankers are “doing God’s work.” After all, current Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein said so early last month in an interview with the London Sunday Times. He also apologized for Goldman's role in the financial crisis, saying that the bank “participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” Ya think? Naw, Lloyd, those subprime mortgage bundles were wonderful. So was charging amazing advisory fees to tell companies to borrow themselves silly, to leverage their assets up to their eyeballs. Goldman showed real leadership to pressure on the SEC to end the debt restrictions on the “too big to fail” investment banks resulting in that inexcusably stupid April 28, 2004 lifting of debt-equity ceilings for the big boys. Hey, it worked! You took out two of your biggest competitors, Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. with that one. Okay, there was a little collateral damage to the economy along the way.

So given that horrific track record and the obvious contrast of their profiting wildly at the expense of the American taxpayer, Goldman’s a little wary of flaunting their lifestyle these days while they are receiving some of the highest bonuses they have ever paid… too bad the rest of the country, the tax payers who bailed Goldman out… aren’t having a particularly bounteous time. So, according to the November 30 BusinessInsider.com, not only have they cancelled their mega-Christmas party for the second year in a row, but December will be a particularly low key month in general: “The Business Insider [noted] the voicemail all Goldman Sachs employees received earlier this month. They were told not to organize small parties even if no firm money goes to pay for them… By ‘small,’ Goldman means exactly twelve. Starting tomorrow, they can hang out outside of Goldman in groups of eleven, but not twelve.”

But Goldman bankers are still terrified. Apparently, they recall the angry protests on the lawns of AIG executives when they announced huge bonuses back in May. Dangerous stuff taking barrels full of cash while people are losing their jobs, left, right and center. I recall a statement by Marie Antoinette in the boiling early days of the French Revolution centuries ago: “Let them eat cake!”

Hey, there is only one prudent thing for a terrified investment banker, unsteady hands shaking in fear, to do: apply for a permit to have a gun! Alice Schroeder, for the December 1^st Bloomberg.com, notes: “‘I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,’ said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

“I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that ‘as a preliminary matter’ it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.” Guns and billions of dollars of compensation… maybe even over $20B this year… end of year payments will be out soon! Kinda makes you go all warm and fuzzy inside.

I’m Peter Dekom, and this whole Goldman debacle never ceases to amaze me.

The Golden Hour

To practicing trauma-center physicians, the “golden hour” is the time period between injury and getting a patient definitive treatment. Pretty clearly, there is an inverse relationship between survivability and the length of time between the accident and the proper medical attention (picture a helicopter landing on a battle field versus hand-carrying a stretcher across a war zone). Funny enough, there is also an inverse proportion between whether you have health insurance and survivability. With me so far?

As the battle lines are being drawn between those (1) who oppose the current healthcare reform measures and think we really need to let the system operate with a few minor tweaks (like reducing the rewards for lawyers who sue for medical malpractice) and (2) those who think having 46 million uninsured Americans is a disaster with a system that has increasing numbers of us going bankrupt because of unaffordable medical bills… it might be really good to focus on one tiny little statistic: “uninsured trauma victims ages 18 to 30 are dying at an annual rate 89 percent higher than insured victims with identically severe injuries” according to a study conducted by Children's Hospital Boston research fellow Dr. Heather Rosen and colleagues from three other hospitals and reported in the November 16 Sphere.com.

Federal law makes it very clear: all seriously injured emergency and trauma patients must be given equal lifesaving care, even if they can’t afford it. But somehow, despite the legal mandate, they don’t. The report is based on massive statistical and irrefutable information. Sphere: “The study, published [November 16] in the Archives of Surgery, examines the survival rates for patients brought to about 900 U.S. trauma centers between 2002 and 2006, analyzing some 690,000 patients who had suffered penetrating trauma -- such as wounds inflicted by a gun or knife -- or blunt trauma from vehicle crashes and falls. Earlier research found 18,000 extra deaths a year among uninsured victims of such injuries. Rosen and the other researchers chose to focus on the 18-to-30-year-old subset because they had fewer existing conditions -- comorbidity -- that muddy the evaluation of the cause of death.”

Strange that “right to life” advocates, those dealing with the viability of a fetus in the controversial debate surrounding abortion, tend also to be a large segment of those who support maintenance of the status quo on healthcare reform. Apparently, they believe in a right to life only exists prior to birth, but once a child is born, he or she is simply on his or her own. These are serious moral issues that must transcend the right of pharmaceutical companies and hospitals to make a profit. But somehow the threat of capping certain medical costs, creating a not-for-profit, government-administered very basic plan that competes with private plans – thus interfering with the American free market system – are more of a threat to these Americans than the raw need to save human lives.

If you ask the folks running trauma centers if that’s the reality in their hospitals (that the uninsured get second class treatment), there is nary a soul, not a practicing trauma-center physician in this country, who will confirm that they treat uninsured patients any differently. They’ll tell you that the follow-up care may fall short or that uninsured folks are in worse shape generally than those who are insured (but look at the ages of the victims!!!). Yet the study also shows that the uninsured get a lot fewer X-rays (or MRIs, CAT scans, etc.) and are much less likely to be admitted to the relevant hospital than a comparable person with insurance. Sphere: “[A]s a trauma social worker from Washington, D.C. -- who declined to allow… her name to be used because she isn't authorized to speak to reporters -- puts it: ‘They would never be foolish enough to tell a trauma surgeon to not order this or that test, or cancel a scan or expensive lab work because they found no insurance card in the patient's wallet.” … ‘What surgeon, ER doc or nurse would risk their license and violate federal law to keep the billing office happy?’ the social worker adds…

“Rosen cautions that the definitive cause for the higher death rate for uninsured people remains to be determined. Still, the hard number -- the nearly 90 percent jump in mortality rates for uninsured accident victims -- speaks loudly on its own. ‘Although the lack of insurance may not be the only explanation,’ she says, ‘the accidental costs of being uninsured in the United States today may be too high to continue to overlook.’” Yeah… I would suspect she is right.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

Flush with Pride

American sewage and water systems were installed into the nation’s major cities in phases. The first major phase of such infrastructure development was at the end of the nineteenth century; another surge began in the post-WWI era, and of course, the public works projects of the Great Depression expanded this infrastructure considerably. In the post-WWII era, as the West expanded, there was yet another surge in sewer and water management systems, and as new cities, towns and suburbs grew, modern water/sewage systems grew with them.

But if you think of it, and run some numbers, you can see that some of our systems are well over a hundred years old. New York City is reputed to lose about a billion gallons of water per year in leaky pipes. Contaminants have made their way into so many systems that many refuse to drink tap water, preferring the wasteful practice of buying bottled water (which consumes energy in shipping the water, making the containers – which often become un-recycled waste) instead. But really, given water quality standards “at the tap,” who can blame them?

Combine old systems with population growth, and our nation’s sewer and water systems are in a state of significant disrepair, amplified by budget crunches and “deferred maintenance.” When heavy rainfall crashes systems, overflow often results in the most dangerous failure of sewage systems, in which vile effluents are released into oceans, lakes, rivers, creeks and public waterways or simply back up the existing systems.

Congress passed the Clear Water Act of 1972 in part to deal with upgrading our antiquated sewage systems. Over the next two daces, about $60 billion was poured, if you’ll excuse the pun, into these upgrades, an effort to keep nasty overflows from polluting public waters. But there was so much wrong with old, under-maintained systems, that this seemed to be… er… a mere drop in the bucket. The November 23^rd New York Times: “But despite those upgrades, many sewer systems are still frequently overwhelmed, according to a New York Times analysis of environmental data. As a result, sewage is spilling into waterways… In the last three years alone, more than 9,400 of the nation’s 25,000 sewage systems — including those in major cities — have reported violating the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency…

“As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater. That has contributed to sewage backups into more than 400,000 basements and spills into thousands of streets, according to data collected by state and federal officials. Sometimes, waste has overflowed just upstream from drinking water intake points or near public beaches… There is no national record-keeping of how many illnesses are caused by sewage spills. But academic research suggests that as many as 20 million people each year become ill from drinking water containing bacteria and other pathogens that are often spread by untreated waste…

“When a sewage system overflows or a treatment plant dumps untreated waste, it is often breaking the law. Today, sewage systems are the nation’s most frequent violators of the Clean Water Act. More than a third of all sewer systems — including those in San Diego, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Philadelphia, San Jose and San Francisco — have violated environmental laws since 2006, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. data.”

The costs necessary to bring the aggregate of our nation’s sewage systems up to snuff are staggering. Just stopping the overflows in New York City is estimated to cost $58 billion dollars! The EPA and the Government Accountability Office suggest a wildly conservative number of $400 billion required over the next decade to solve this problem, but environmental scientists believe that the number may well be a multiple of this sum. The stimulus package has allocated a mere $6 billion to this issue.

The Times: “‘The public has no clue how important these sewage plants are,’ said Mr. [Bob] Connaughton of the Brooklyn [Owls Head Water Pollution Control Plant]. ‘Waterborne disease was the scourge of mankind for centuries. These plants stopped that. We’re doing everything we can to clean as much sewage as possible, but sometimes, that isn’t enough.’” Essentially, the confluence (sorry) of an economic collapse, the failure of state and local governments to fund public works, the rise of new superpowers, the taking on of massive public and private debt combined with the depreciation of America’s infrastructure have all hit at precisely the same time. If we truly cannot afford the “big fix,” then we will soon face another serious decline in our standard of living as untreated sewage and unmanaged back-ups and overflows test whatever healthcare system we have at the time. Learning to live with less is not only a bitch… it’s downright scary.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

36 Million Strong and Growing!

At the rate of 20,000 Americans a day. They swipe that plastic card at the local grocery store, dragging home those food essentials that keep America going. They may drive or walk or take the local bus back home, past the “closed” signs, foreclosed homes, boarded up shops, and signs of neighborhood decay accelerated and punctuated by the economic collapse enveloping them. Plastic? Most of us use credit cards for so many of our purchases. What’s so surprising about these 36 million folks – almost one in every eight of us? Those aren’t credit cards; they’re the new and improved delivery mechanism for that ubiquitous symbol of the welfare state: food stamps.

Republicans are honing in on a stimulus package that didn’t seem to have much of an effect on jobs creation and retention, and after months of governmental reports – most recently from the Federal Reserve – that the jobless rate, particularly in those states that were hardest hit, is unlikely to improve to 2007 numbers for five or six years, the Democrats are just beginning to wake up as well. Let any politician believe that a successful foreign policy and a clear (actually, very muddy) march to a military victory will overcome a decimated and hopeless economy on the home front, let them note that there are major Congressional elections coming next year and a Presidential election in 2012. Creating jobs requires lead time, and our elected representatives are rapidly running out of that.

Yeah, we would like the Taliban and al Qaeda operatives to leave Afghanistan, and Sunday’s announcement by the Iranian government “to build 10 industrial scale uranium enrichment facilities, a dramatic expansion of the program in defiance of U.N. demands it halt enrichment efforts.” Washington Post (November 29^th) doesn’t make any of us feel any better or safer, but in the end, “it’s the economy, stupid!” Except for the “fat cat” stock market, there are few signs that the “recession” is remotely over. A few decent holiday sales (but not particularly great) cannot reverse the overall picture.

According to the New York Times (November 29^th), there are 239 counties in the United States where 25% or more of the residents receive the benefits of food stamps. The discrete plastic cards coupled with the shared experience of the recession have all but taken the stigma out of these contributors to “nutritional aid.” But these folks are hit particularly hard by these trying times: “Virtually all have incomes near or below the federal poverty line, but their eclectic ranks testify to the range of people struggling with basic needs. They include single mothers and married couples, the newly jobless and the chronically poor, longtime recipients of welfare checks and workers whose reduced hours or slender wages leave pantries bare.” The Times.

The grassroots working Americans seem to have been largely ignored in the litany of TARP and stimulus money promulgated by the government. That lovely mortgage reduction program, aimed at stemming the tide of traditional mortgages (versus the subprime kind) falling into foreclosure hell? “Last month, an oversight panel created by Congress reported that fewer than 2,000 of the 500,000 loan modifications then in progress had become permanent under Making Home Affordable. When the Treasury releases new numbers next month, it is expected to report a disappointingly small number of permanent loan modifications, with estimates in the tens of thousands out of the more than 650,000 borrowers now in the program…. More unsatisfactory data is likely to intensify pressures on the Obama administration to mount a more muscular effort to stem foreclosures beyond the Treasury’s campaign this week. Populist anger has been fanned by a growing perception that the Treasury has lavished generous bailouts on Wall Street institutions while neglecting ordinary homeowners — this, in the midst of double-digit unemployment, which is daily sending more households into delinquency.” The Times (Nov. 28^th)

We supported the biggest financial institutions, gave them access to cheap fed funds, and watched as they feasted in risk-taking and reaped the rewards of their investments, leaving mortgages at massive foreclosure rates, credit to America’s small and mid-sized businesses further evaporated and unemployment continuing to rise… unemployment spurred by those very same big financial institutions clamoring for costs savings (producing more layoffs) so that the profit margins on those investments could soar. Somehow in all of this, the little guy was overlooked. Tax cuts? Great if you have sufficient income (or any income) where such cuts matter, but they only matter to those with higher incomes. Okay Congress, Republicans who say no to almost everything and Democrats who prefer infighting to problem-solving, what’re you going to do for everybody else?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.

What Would Barack Do?

The Big Speech. West Point. December 1, 2009. President Obama has a little problem: his war in Afghanistan is going anything but well. Eight long years! NATO forces, mostly comprised of U.S. soldiers, are battling fiercely against foes the locals truly hate – al Qaeda and the Taliban – it’s just that they actually like us Westerners a whole lot less… and we are keeping a wildly corrupt Afghan administration in office that even the United Nations elections observers acknowledge was reelected with a vote where as many as one third of the ballots could have been fraudulent.

We keep lobbing missiles, shells and drone-strikes into villages with horrific civilian casualties, almost unavoidable in such conflicts, and the bad guys high-tail it into safe havens in bordering Pakistan – literally autonomous tribal districts that do not report to Pakistani authorities – until the “heat” subsides and our forces turn to fight another battle elsewhere or… they assume… eventually withdraw. Obama’s generals tell him that without 35-40,000 additional troops all is lost (initially, they asked for a lot more, but they knew they would have to scale back), so if the President were to opt for any other path than to comply with his military’s request, any subsequent failure would result in a “I told you so” sequence of blame piled deep upon his head… a big risk with teetering public support and a Congressional election next year and a Presidential election in 2012.

But Barack also knows that the United States is a growing international credit risk, a debtor nation with lots of wary creditors increasingly hesitant to buy more deficit-induced bonds… and a country with lots of hard-hit taxpayers wondering when the red ink will finally stop. He knows we really cannot afford to stay in this war much longer, and the American people have grown tired of this war. A recent Gallop poll pits 55% of Americans opposing the war against 35% who favor our pressing forward.

I heard the President say “costs” a lot, so I guess he must understand that moths are beginning to fly out of our pockets. He also knows that unless we remain in Afghanistan indefinitely, as soon as our troops depart, the old factions will almost certainly return, and if war lords and tribalism do not hack up the country, perhaps a dreaded Taliban dictatorship will smother whatever remains. It’s not really a war we clearly can win. We had a chance a long time ago, as we pledged, to buy local hearts and minds with the construction of schools, hospitals, electrical power generating stations, roads… well, you get it… but we had better places to spend our money in Iraq. We ignored our promises, so the Afghan people really don’t even trust us anymore.

So how do you extract your troops without subjecting yourself to the “I told you so” attacks from the GOP that would likely come, inconveniently, during an election? What do you do to avoid losing a war you really have almost no chance to win? Methinks Barack has come up with the path! First, you tell your generals that they can have the increased forces they say they need (like 30,000 U.S. soldiers he actually announced, the balance from other NATO nations), but les générales have to deliver tangible results by certain deadlines, which “goals” you finesse them into giving you in exchange for the troop commitments. Just for good measure, you throw in some benchmarks for the corrupt Afghani government everyone hates, also a few necessary timelines on them to justify the continued U.S. presence. But you pretty much know the corrupt government really can’t change its spots (they’ll screw up somewhere), and if the war is truly unwinnable, your generals aren’t going to be able to deliver their results either.

Then, you gotta tell your country something like “We must deny al-Qaida a safe haven… We must reverse the Taliban's momentum. ... And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government… [O]ur security is at stake.” Oh, you did. Good work, Mr. President. I mean, you can’t tell the voters I don’t think this is gonna work, but I gotta look like I’m trying! It’s has to be necessary (“national security” has always been a reliable rationale) – but within limits. Hint: Just don’t make it so essential that we really can’t leave.

Assuming that strategy “works” (i.e., that the Afghan government and the U.S. generals don’t meet their deadlines), you announce a clear and sustained troop withdrawal (getting your NATO allies – equally anxious to leave – on the same page) on the dates that the benchmarks are not met (or accelerate bringing the troops home after your mid-2011 “start to withdraw date”… conveniently a year before the next Presidential election), the bulk of which extraction might just take place after the 2012 Presidential election, just in case Afghanistan collapses faster than we suspect. And what happens in the exceptionally remote circumstance that in fact the benchmarks are met? Hey, you take credit for a great decision!

“Okay” speech Tuesday night, Mr. President (even if John McCain didn’t like it – telling your enemy when you’re leaving and all, but I think they already know, and anyway, you didn’t tell them when we really would all be gone), but don’t get caught up when the benchmarks aren’t timely and you are hit by the cries of: “Don’t pull out yet; we’re almost there. We just need a bit more time.” We called that the “Vietnam War.”

I particularly liked the part of your speech about the Afghan government that went “This effort must be based on performance… The days of providing a blank check are over.” And “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home,” … we’ll put a pin in that one, Mr. President, and be sure to follow-up when the time is right. Eighteen months, eh? How long after July, 2011 will all our troops be home, again? A week?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.