Don't Follow Leaders, Watch Parking Meters

This week I have been swamped with media clusters from AIG to torture. If you plug into the sensorium, is it really just an excuse to feel alive? I have been unable to make head nor tail of the banking crisis despite many able commentaries posted on the web and strange memos appearing from obscure French think tanks. I do get the fact that Obama's decision on the toxic assets will be of monumental importance. What bothers me is that I'm convinced that virtually no one has the faintest idea about what to do or its consequences. Some of the speculation has the derivative blackhole the equivalent of several times the GDP of planet earth. In that case, you can kiss our economic system goodby.

If you think that the financial system simply needs mending and re-regulation, then the measures being put in place should re-assure people and recovery might happen in 2010. But, if you are convinced as I am that everything is busted beyond repair, then we are looking at a decade of steady decline. In the Third World, we referred to these situations as de-development.

The Fed printing of a $1 trillion for the stimulus of new credit was done publicly as a re-assuring move. But what really happened was that the Fed had to buy up its own debt because there were no new takers. This happened recently with Germany, when their auction went without buyers. China is already voicing its concerns about the total of American debt it hold and wants guarantees from the Obama Administration.

Those who argue the current crisis cries out for a New New Deal neglect to understand that FDR's America was a creditor country with a vigorous industrial base. Now we are a debtor country with an ever dwindling industrial base. That's why Obama is right in putting down the foundations for a new economy--but we will not see the results of that for many, many years to come.

The good thing that has come out of all this is the fact that the wealthy are no longer viewed as virtuous. It has become quite evident in the bonus flap that the Wall Street culture is so oblivious to the public good and so immune from actually producing positive results that the best that can be said for them is they act like feudal lords entitled to the yields of others' labor. Max Weber would be appalled at the collapse of the Protestant Ethic. It has now become clear that the rich are the non-productive part of society. For every Steve Jobs, there are hundreds of AIG executives. This crisis may end the days when Wall Street and the Big Corporations command any respect as being authorities on either economic issues or models of conduct. The problem now is that these decisions will have to be made by our political culture, which also boasts a studied ignorance of economic affairs.

Another nightmare surfaced again this week. Mark Danner printed excerpts of the report by the International Red Cross in the New York Review of Books,where they said that the CIA tortured detainees at Gitmo and other black sites. The importance of this can not be underestimated. According to the Geneva Conventions, the authoritative source for determing whether war crimes and torture have been committed is the International Red Cross. The publication of this document, which usually would be reserved, puts added pressure on the Obama Administration and other countries as well to prosecute those responsible. Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post, the author of a definitive book on the Soviet Gulag, wrote an op-ed calling for an investigation into the CIA black sites and the accusations of torture. Ms. Applebaum noted that the Red Cross documents concerned only about 16 persons, showing the United States hasn't become the black hole of Calcutta--yet, but that the details of the torture were such to deserve investigation.

Following last week's appearance of Dick Cheney, commentators have noted that the Heathrow plot he mentioned was foiled by the British and almost completely screwed up by the Americans. It also was made clear that the intelligence about the plot did not come from Gitmo. This means, according to my count, of the 5 alleged plots foiled by intel from Gitmo, according to Cheney, none of them were remotely related to Gitmo detainees or information derived from them. The man is so far batting 100.

There were several important related developments concerning the issue of torture and rendition this week. While the CIA destroyed nearly 100 tapes of enhanced interrogation, over 300 memos about these events have been uncovered. In Britain, a good deal of press coverage has been given to how British intelligence "sexed up" the Iraq threat to persuade Parliament to go to war. President Obama has ok'd Eric Holder releasing the rest of the Justice Department's "torture memos". The ACLU this past week published 4 pages just listing the memos by single-line title and author.

I have not been able to catch up to all the documents and commentary on all of this. But after the release of the second batch of the memos, I hope to address the whole shabang from the torture and rendition issue to the Truth Commission. Right now in the Senate, there is not alot of support for Senator Leahy's proposal. But that can change with more leaked revelations. I wonder how much the Obama Administration is trying to leak as much as they can to create a climate that will support the holding of such an investigation.

The other issue that has draw severe criticism has been the Administration's seeming defense of the Bush Administration's positions in various court cases. How much is this a sincere position or a delay tactic until the final reviews are completed?

Does media matter? On key stories it does but on the drumbeat of criticism concerning President Obama not so much. During his California trip and his appearance on the Jay Leno show, he was criticized from both the Left and Right for not staying home to work on the economy, for taking on too much, for not taking harsh steps on AIG, etc. Today's Gallup approval rating has him at 65%. Apparently, the American people have other things on their mind.