The Storm-Tossed Sea of Debt

Digby at Hullabaloo devotes a lot of space today to one of the US's scariest and least discussed problems, personal debt. Now that Bush has paid off his campaign contributors in the banking/finance industries by tightening the bankruptcy laws, the highway robbers can reach even deeper into our wallets. Click here to read. Below is a quote that Digby cites from a study by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. Click here to see.

In a survey of 1,000 adults, we find a public widely aware of the problem of growing household debt and overwhelmingly supporting solutions to this issue. The public’s concern over this issue results from perceptions of an economy performing unevenly, from perceptions of rising costs of living, and for a surprising and pressing number, from first-hand experience with excess or unmanageable debt.

Topping most people's list of scary items are catastrophic medical issues. There is no forgiveness, no slack, no margin for error. A case of cancer, a serious accident, or any number of unanticipated calamities can knock even the most frugal and sensible saver right out of the water.

There is also too much spending for toys and items of no consequence. Driving around Silicon Valley, you can see driveways laden with boats, monster (and beyond) trucks with bells, whistles and huge tires, seadoos, huge RVs and none of those come cheap. I'm constantly amazed to see teenagers at the car wash with shiny, new wheels that cost major bucks. Are people paying cash for all of this? Who can say, but those toys can add up to some huge monthly payments.

But what do we expect? I grew up in the 50's and TV was mercifully absent until I was in high school. Now kids are bombarded with commercials before they even learn to talk. Every stage of life is now marked by a "demographic." My mother once complained about a silly car commercial and I pointed out that she wasn't part of the target demographic.

It's almost disappointing how vulnerable and how easily manipulated people are by ads. But having said that, millions of dollars are spent on research, testing and production so that each ad strikes its target with maximum impact. We are a nation being driven to consume. It's almost portrayed as a patriotic duty to consume in order to keep the economy firing on all cylinders, keep the corporate coffers flush with ever-increasing revenue.

So is it any wonder that the pursuit of goods is driving so many deeper into debt? Digby's post isn't easy on the banking industry either, and rightly so:

It isn't taxes that are keeping American up at night and it probably isn't jobs, at least on a massive scale. It isn't even terrorism or the war.

It's debt. People are going to be looking for some help with this problem and one place to start would be to rein in these avaricious credit card companies who got a nice handsome payoff with that heinous bankruptcy bill. This is an issue to which average Americans can relate: greedy credit card companies who can literally raise your rates for any reason at all causing your debt to cascade from manageable to overwhelming overnight. It wouldn't be hard to fix. There used to be laws against usury --- we can just dust them off.

Not a day goes by that I don't get not one, but several pitches from banks to apply for their credit cards. I recently canceled one of my MasterCards because I just didn't use it anymore. I had to actually argue with the representative to get her to cancel the account. They don't let go lightly.

Where is all of this headed? I'm a cycle believer, and I think that if (God forbid) we don't have an economic disaster of some kind, that people are just going to get sick and tired of buying, of getting, of having.

It's ironic that we keep hearing about "values voters" and the rise of religion in the US, while at the same time what we see are "values shoppers" and the continuing upward spiral of consumerism. Materialism is winning so far. It will be interesting to see how long we can sustain this decades-long shopping spree without bankrupting vast segments of the population, as well as the Treasury of the US.

Anger--When All Else Fails

James Wolcott has two very angry columns today. And he makes some very good points and quotes some very poignant narrative from Beirut. To read click here and here.. And Kevin Drum has a very different take. Click here.

In my view there should be more anger over this Middle East savagery. There should in fact be blinding, foaming outrage at the level of barbarism that is meted out in the name of the United States and Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas. It was apparently not enough for Bush and his gang to drive Iraq into an insane and bloody civil war, but now they're urging Israel to rain destruction on Lebanon and perhaps Syria and Iran as well.

Whatever or whomever is nominated as "root cause" of this bloodshed, the delivery service is decidedly the US and Israel and their vicious counterparts Hamas and Hezbollah.

Yes, Hamas and Hezbollah are the original fomenters and the provocateurs. They are not nice people. They are as barbaric and as self-aggrandized a pack of criminals as have ever waltzed across the world stage. And their crimes are magnified by their dispersal among the civilian population of Lebanon. Yet the Israelis, knowing this, persist in killing all in the fashion of Arnold Amaury (Slay them all. God will know his own.)

In fact, it's hard to argue that the Likud (and succeeding) governments in Israel have played their cards very well over the years. While the Palestinians have been near impossible to deal with, Israel has still largely controlled the game. When one extremist group or the other committed an atrocity in Israel, the government made no distinction between the extremists and the rest of the population, but punished all as one, refusing to recognize that the Palestinians are a diverse people with all levels of political involvement from the extremists to the disengaged.

Israel's population is likewise stratified from the most conservative Likudniks and strident settlers to religious Hassidim and secular Russians. Israelis like Palestinians come in all flavors of political orientation. But the Palestinian extremists persisted in wantonly and randomly blowing themselves up in the middle of innocent Israeli crowds, prompting the population to support the most severe reaction.

So due to the actions of both sides, even the marginalized are now radicalized and the disengaged are now militant. It has been a noble achievement to go from the hopes of the Oslo accords to the despair of the intifada in a few brief years.

There are no victories in such an historic failure and few heroes. Both societies bear the guilt of their intransigence. The blood that is shed will linger over their history for generations and will spell hostility and damnation for their peoples for decades.

The Bush Administration's history of blunders and openly enabling Israeli's reactionaries to seize the initiative in the complex dance between the parties has effectively ceded the moment to the most extremist factions on both sides. One hears from all of the talking head "experts" that the situation is spinning out of control so completely and so rapidly that no one may be able stop it now. We may soon see the entire region go up in flames.

Anyone who happily embraces that legacy has sunk so far into barbarism that redemption is beyond all the powers of heaven and earth. God help us all.

On the Same Page as Digby

See my post below and then read Digby. Here's what he has to say on the same subject at Hullabaloo. He sees Rove twittering with delight also because:

Karl Rove must be very happy this morning. He is convinced that "war" (it doesn't matter who or why) always accrues to the Republican party's benefit. And the media agree that when things heat up, they really want the guys with the big swinging members in charge.

Read the whole thing. He puts it much better than I can.

The Summer of our Malcontent or July Surprise

The news for the past week has been déjà vu all over again. Remember 2002?…The last Congressional mid-term elections. It was Iraq then, and in summer 2002 we were being programmed to go to war with Saddam Hussein who was going to have nuclear weapons and all kinds of other Weapons of Mass Destruction real soon. Condi said:

"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Source: Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, CNN (9/8/2002).
Quoted from http://www.bushoniraq.com/rice6.html

This week we hear that we’re already engaged in World War III, or is it World War IV? Newt Gingrich and the ubiquitous haranguing Neo-Cons can’t seem to decide, but it’s “definitely another World War”. (Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich says "America is in World War III and President Bush should say so.")

Come on folks. Are we going to buy into this again? The Repugs launched the Iraq adventure midsummer of 2002, just in time to whip up fervor among the electorate and propel their candidates to an unusual mid-term gain for the Party holding the White House.

On the one hand, I’m thinking that people are a lot wiser and a lot more skeptical now after watching the Katrina fiasco unfold and after months of unceasing bad news from Iraq. But even on Air America, both Ed Schultz and Randi Rhodes still get callers who are fully committed to war with Hezbollah and Hamas and of course Syria and Iran “who are behind it all.”

I guess that there’s that one knee-jerky element of the population that just never gets it. It’s hard not to lapse into pejoratives, but in reading comments to some of the blogs, it’s definitely a less well-educated segment of the population. If they can’t do grammar and they can’t do spelling, you’ve just got to think that they don’t do history or politics too well either.

However, I’m sitting here in front of the TV watching the flames lick higher and higher in Israel and Lebanon and my profound skepticism keeps a close eye pealed for Karl Rove’s fingerprints, as well as a keep-Congress-Republican angle, in addition to a new campaign to spread fear and anger among the unplugged and disengaged electorate.

War drums are already deployed across the Corporate Media. False News, CNN and the NBC conglomerate have all crafted signature screens and martial music for breathless “Breaking News” interrupts. Gabberatchiks are providing the usual talking heads with platforms to relentlessly advance The Agenda.

No doubt task forces are in place with war rooms humming throughout the corporate establishment hatching plans to get in early and grab those government no-bid contracts and suck in billions in easy loot.

Ominously, I keep hearing that Syria and Iran are the “real problem.” The tone sounds a lot like the above remark from Condi, the sort of flat pronouncement framed with infallibility which strikes terror into soccer moms and drives testosterone levels off the charts in NASCAR dads. It’s the perfect prop for generating doubt about the opposition party and providing Republican candidates with a powerful tool to singe their adversaries in the upcoming general election.

So I hope that Howard Dean and Company are watching all of this unfold and are developing a better strategy than the slack-jawed, deer in the headlights confusion that saw us falter in 2002.

Sorry for the Lapse

I'm sorry that I've fallen silent for over a week, but family matters and my pesky day job have reasserted their claims on my time. I'm hoping to be more consistent in my posting. With all the excitement in the world today, heaven knows, there's all kinds of material just waiting to be blogged. Cheers!

What in the World Do We Do with Iraq?

What should we do about Iraq? Should we follow Cindy Sheehan’s advice and pull the troops out ASAP? Or do we listen to Congressman Murtha and redeploy the troops to a nearby staging area where they can respond to ad hoc threats? Or what about the Bush/Republican party line to “stay the course?”

Who knows? How does a random citizen sitting in any corner of the USA gather enough information to know which plan to support given the state of the media? How does any citizen know which of the many options carries the highest promise of success and the least danger of failure? In short, who does one vote for in the upcoming Congressional elections? Those who are determined to stay the course? Or those who want to either pull out or redeploy?

There’s probably enough information around to put two and two together and come up with something resembling four.

The first thing that we have to consider is that George W Bush has never disclosed the real reason for invading Iraq in the first place. It strains credulity to believe that the CIA and other intelligence services didn’t have a clearer view of reality inside Iraq around the time of the invasion. If that is in fact the case, then their incompetence exceeds even the most exaggerated estimates. True, there were many with ample reason to want Saddam gone and Iraq under new management, but for those groups to orchestrate such a successful fraud as presented by Colin Powell to the UN simply beggars the imagination and certanly ain't consistent with their subsequent laughable performance.

So if the WMD tale is camouflage, then that leaves Oil. While an oil grab is not beyond the Bush Administration, that alone wouldn't justify a full scale invasion. It was doubtless a contributing factor, but an oil grab would be too obvious and the rest of the world would be very unhappy. But don't count it out completely, at least not yet. There’s got to be more to the story.

Saddam Hussein was one of the bad guys. Nobody disputes that. He had taken a pot shot at George H.W. Bush and was definitely not an asset to the neighborhood. Given the opportunity he certainly might start reconstituting his WMD programs and thus should be taken out while he was weak, the “oppose Hitler before he marches into the Rhineland” argument. There may have been a glimmer of attention paid to this issue, but it probably wouldn't have been particularly compelling given the huge disparity between the US’s capabilities and anything that Iraq could ever mount.

Yet another side of the oil picture, however, might bring us some clarity. However strenuous Bush and oil companies’ denials, oil is a finite commodity. X-number of barrels of oil exist and once those are found and consumed, they are gone, gone, gone. Oil company executives must have some idea where things stand in the consumption of their product. When you consider the two oil company executives who are respectively President and Vice-president of the United States, then you know that this knowledge is found at the highest levels of the US government.

With India and China industrializing and their economies growing at double-digit rates, the quest for oil has the potential to get real ugly real soon. Consider that pre-World War II Japan resorted to military action when FDR turned off their oil. Oil is the lifeblood of industrial nations. They’ve got to have it or droop and die.

So are we in Iraq because Bush’s Neocons factored in the rising geo-political need for oil thinking that it would be worth weathering domestic criticism and overseas ill-will if that would put the US government in a position to exercise influence over Iraqi oil?


If that’s the case, then that explains Bush’s “stay the course” policy in Iraq. By various reports coming out of Iraq, the US is busily building bases across the country. The cynic would conclude that Bush and the Republicans feel that they can (must) hang on to control of both houses of Congress in the 2006 elections, and then they can fully consolidate their penetration of Iraq; get the US so fully committed that pulling out would be inconceivable no matter which party was in power.

That way, when China, India et al come looking for oil, they will have to do business, not with an unpredictable Saddam Hussein, but with an American puppet government in Iraq.

Plausible? Frankly, I don’t know. But nothing else about Bush’s open-ended commitment to Iraq makes sense either.

The Democrats need to harp on Republican incompetence and total lack of any plan to gain traction against the "conventional wisdom" that the Republicans will keep us safer. The fact that three plus years after the invasion we still don’t have a clear idea why we went there in the first place, what “victory” might look like if and when we ever get it, or how in the hell to get out in any case, tells us that there never was much of a plan. There was a military plan in the beginning and it worked beautifully, but there was clearly no political plan and things went to hell very quickly and have plumbed deeper the depths of hell ever since.

How dumb is that…to invade Iraq against the expressed wishes of most of the rest of the world and not even have a plan for what to do with the country once it is conquered? The mind reels.