Sarah "Frodo" Palin and The Cancer School of Economics

Both Democrats and Republicans want America atop the world's economic food chain. After all, it's better to be the Great White Shark than the seal. They differ on what to do to keep us there, of course. Generally, Republicans want businesses operating free of taxes and government intervention, while Democrats believe certain limits on businesses and our financial markets are necessary to keep Americans safe and prosperous.

Republican economic policy is based on the Theory of Natural Law first advanced by Aristotle. Since nature doesn't make intellectual decisions intellectualism is considered artificial, or unnatural. Regulation is an intellectual act, so it's not natural and therefore doomed to fail. Therefore our economy, Conservatives believe, if free of any regulation, will naturally fall into a stable balance of permanent prosperity. Regulations and intervention, they claim, are wholly unnatural and illegitimate.

Conservatives have been working for decades to deregulate markets and businesses. In 1999 they succeeded in removing important regulations set up after the Great Depression to ensure market safety. So why did the markets crash?

Because Natural Law economic theory never existed.

Nature, in fact, places the most severe limits on animals and their behavior to make sure they stay balanced. Sharks don't have a "stop eating" mechanism in their biological blueprint. Under normal conditions sharks can't catch food fast enough to do themselves damage from over-eating. Nature has limited their ability to catch food. A shark in a feeding frenzy, however, given enough food, will eat until it quite literally bursts open like an overstuffed sausage. Its guts just explode out into the water. In some cases crazed, gut-busted sharks eat their own entrails, unable to distinguish between their innards and their kill.

A shark is just a dumb beast driven by a killer instinct. If nature's limits break down, so does the shark. The only thing keeping sharks from eating themselves to death are the physical limits nature places on all apex predators. Because nature has perfected the art of limitation, a shark eating itself to death is extremely rare, and usually occurs only when humans get involved and temporarily throw food supplies out of balance. Nature is nothing if not a series of carefully orchestrated restrictions. True Natural Law economics is not laissez faire it is structured guidance, like the rules in a football game. It's a bad idea to give 22 men pads, helmets and a football and say laissez faire, unless you want every one to get killed.

Animals have a complex system of internal and external limits to make sure they don't outgrow their eco-system either in body or population. In Aristotle's day nature had total control over human beings. His people could only move so quickly, gather and grow only so much food, and had only rudimentary tools. These and other physical limits contained human population growth for millennia. Human economic activity required minimal governmental oversight if any at all, so laissez faire seemed natural.

Today huge groups of human beings are largely free of nature's constraints. We, as a race, can, and will, apparently, out grow our eco-system- something Aristotle did not consider in his extensive writings on natural law. Given the political freedom 21st century human beings could and would extract every fish in the ocean in a few years time. But for nature's limits sharks would, too. Soon genetic engineering breakthroughs will clear away whatever constraints nature has left over humanity. Conservative economic theory, which depends entirely on constraints provided by nature, is fantasy.

Out growing nature's restraints means nature can no longer stop us from destroying ourselves if we get off track. With nothing to contain us we have to assume nature's former corrective role in all our endeavors and provide necessary limits ourselves.

We should not be afraid of limits. Everything growing thing in nature is limited in some way except cancer. Limitless, unregulated growth is disease, not freedom. If we strip our markets of all restrictions and let the sharks go into frenzy we will create cancer not growth.

In 1999, what I call the Cancer School of Economics succeeded in removing entrenched banking regulations created after the 1929 belly burst that triggered the Great Depression. Stripped of structure, predictably, America's powerful economic killer instinct has run amok ever since. America's economic sharks have gorged on fossil fuels, unfettered financial predation, incomprehensible budget deficits and Keating/Enron style corruption. They ate more than their eco-system allows and busted open yet again. Today America is no longer an apex predator in a sustainable food chain but a cancerous tumor on the world's economy.

A few months ago as the world's economic waters began running cloudy with America's guts, Bush, McCain and Fed Chairman Bernanke said the fundamentals of our economy were sound and strong. What else would a dumb beast say with a mouth full of its own entrails? A dumb beast only knows one thing: if it is eating its happy.

And just like a simple, natural, not at all pointy-headed or intellectual shark eating its own entrails, the Republicans and hapless Democrats are incapable of stopping their self destruction. They passed a bail out/rescue package with toothless over sight provisions that ignores the causes of the meltdown and is funded by borrowed money and a massive cash infusion from the treasury created out of thin air by printing dollars. Apparently they believe self cannibalization will stop us from eating ourselves to death. How very dumb beast of them. In effect we now have a bubble propped up by a bubble, or The Weimar Republic.

Conservatives see a Democrat in the character Quint from Steven Spielberg's still excellent 1975 blockbuster Jaws. Quint was a shark hunter. He shot little steel harpoons tied to big, buoyant barrels into sharks which severely reduced their ability to swim. Conservatives see every regulation as just another barrel slowly killing American business.

The Cancer School of Economics doesn't get that forcing Detroit to make cars safer back in the 50's and 60's through Government intervention in the market place made the auto industry more profitable. They can't see that safe cars increased the market for cars and increased dependence on cars which helped create a pervasive car culture and increased sales. That kind of thinking is for pointy-headed intellectuals, not simple, natural folk. All they can see is "bigguvment" got on the backs of poor, poor businessmen and tried to choke the auto industry. They still think we'd all be better off without brake lights, seat belts and turn signals waiting for Detroit to make safe cars.

Republicans don't see health and prosperity in regulation. They see Democrats and their regulations as another kind of shark competing for living space and fish- a smaller, less aggressive, toothless kind of shark who deserves to die, who unfairly restricts stronger sharks who should be allowed to run free and rule the seas. They don't see Democrats as noble or compassionate or evolved or helpful in the least. They see them as whiny, traitorous runts who have turned themselves into un-natural parasites who leech off of their larger, stronger brethren and therefore need to be wiped off the face of the earth lest everything die.

Anyone who wants no rules at all is an adolescent. Like a bratty teenager caught up in a rebellious tantrum, Republicans can't see any limit as healthy. Conservatives point to people who truly are parasitic runts and claim they were created by healthy limits which keep our economy from bursting.

All these Cancer School of Economics financial experts swimming around with their guts hanging out argue the finance, credit, loan and banking system is already the most heavily regulated industry in the nation. Governments don't heavily regulate the greeting card industry. Everything depends on financial stability, confidence, fairness and predictability. The financial markets need intelligent, tough, strictly enforced regulation so our nation's super sharks can do what they were born to do without bursting. Obviously it is the quality of regulation not the quantity that is the issue at hand. Funny -- with all the regulations on the financial industry conservatives targeted just the ones that if removed would cause a meltdown. Weren't interested in all the others, were they?

Republicans, like troubled teenagers, are unable to understand their own behavior is the problem. Conservatives look at the deregulation disaster that is the last eight years of Republican rule and have come to the conclusion that they were corrupted by eight years of power. Power doesn't corrupt. Washington is a petri dish for all one's latent dysfunction. Power revealed who Republicans truly are. They came to Washington and did exactly what they wanted to do and they destroyed themselves. Self knowledge is a bitch.

For all the evil Washington has done to Republicans, they sure don't want to leave. They most definitely want to stay despite the horrible things power does to one's conservative credentials.

To convince Americans they have learned their lesson and should be given the reigns of all-corrupting power one more time, conservatives have brought forward Sarah Palin, someone they advertise as too simpleminded to be affected by Washington's irresistible evil, like some kind of Alaskan version of Frodo Baggins. Basically, Republicans are promising Americans they'll be dumb as hell if we give them another chance in 2008.

The biggest problem Conservatives face right now is that no one has faith in unfettered predation anymore. America's corporate sharks are gut busted and floating belly up. Sarah Barracuda is meant to prove conservative economic ideology is still healthy, wholesome, natural and as dumb as a big fish. Conservatives think just by letting Sarah "Frodo" Barracuda swim into the White House our nation will return to prosperity.

Republicans don't understand there is no Quint slowing them down. Market regulations are not the equivalent of a barrel tied to a shark. The life sustaining financial regulations they greedily stripped away in 1999 were a positive structural force that provided stability, scale, security and confidence. Massive exploitation of resources coupled with an unrestricted financial system is not economic freedom. It is unbalanced, unstructured and un-natural. It is cancerism, not natural law. Limits on risking other people's money is not un-Godly interference, or the life sucking evil of parasitic runts, its protecting the human eco-system, which humanity must do for itself, because, after all we're not dumb beasts. Acting like one won't help anybody, Sarah.

John Cusack, et al, Try to Slip a Big Wad of Hot, Slippery Propaganda Past Bill O'Reilly!

In a recent broadcast Bill O'Reilly called War Inc., the new film starring John Cusack, Marissa Tomei and Hillary Duff, "propaganda".

Propaganda, as we all surely remember from 8th grade, is information or ideas or rumors that are methodically spread by an organized group or government to influence people's opinions, to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc., especially by not giving all the facts or by secretly emphasizing only one way of looking at the facts.

In the solipsistic world of Fox News one is either for the Iraq debacle or he or she is not patriotic. Are we emphasizing only one way of looking at the facts, Mr. O'Reilly? To watch Fox News is to be told over and over one must either suspend Habeas Corpus or one must die in a terrorist attack. Not exactly a full spectrum, there, either. Fox News puts all the news in one context: America is infallible and deserves to have its way whenever and however it pleases. It frames those that disagree in one way only, that is, from the lunatic far lefty view that America is nothing but evil. If this isn't propaganda- methodically cherry picking information to emphasize one point of view in order to influence opinion- then propaganda does not exist in the world.

Does Fox News provide a platform for other points of view? Kindasorta. They offer some facts that don't mesh with their version of reality, but not all the facts required to elevate their broadcasts above the level of propaganda to actual journalism. For example, Fox News does not, to any significant degree, pursue a critique of the Iraq war as outlined by War, Inc., among others. Such critiques are quickly dismissed as un-patriotic or self-hating or some other kind of psychobabble. There is no room for facts or analysis.

When Scott McClellan's recent book critical of President Bush came out Fox News focused on McClellan's motivation and character and quickly side-stepped the credible allegations in the book that Bush and Cheney committed a vicious act of treason. They moved on quickly and re-focused on Rev. Wright, who, despite his gassy, ugly rhetoric has never committed treason. They routinely downplay, falsely discredit or exclude facts and other information that would contradict their entrenched world view. They clearly, easily meet the definition of an organization which dissembles at least some measure of propaganda. So much for Fox News.

Does War Inc. exclude facts in order to emphasize one point of view over another? By its very nature as a feature film, War Inc. must focus on one point of view among many, but does it omit any important facts or relevant points of view in order to support its own view of the world?

John's character is an assassin/business man poised to reap huge rewards in the aftermath of the invasion of a fictional sovereign Middle Eastern country, Turaqistan, by the fictional corporation "Tamerlane", which has strong, deep ties to the White House. In other words, John plays a neo-con. Not that all neo-cons are assassins. Many are not. But there are plenty of guys like that in the Middle East. Seems accurate to me.

Neo-cons believe in using America's considerable economic and military muscle to remake the world's trouble spots into lots of little, subordinate to Washington versions of America. That's straight from the Neo-Con handbook. That's not propaganda. That much is clearly represented in the film without exaggeration or omission.

Halliburton is a corporation with close ties to Washington that is currently slurping up huge, obscene gobs of money servicing the Iraq war. The corporation at the heart of War Inc., Tamerlane, replete with its own army and the ability to manhandle the levers of power in Washington, is a neo-con's wet dream. Tamerlane is what Halliburton wants to be when it grows up. That's not propaganda. That's true. The fact that Halliburton is so absurdly predatory it has become a satire of itself is just reality and too bad for Halliburton. Next time the country is at war show a little restraint.

Marissa Tomei's character is a liberal journalist who seeks to expose the gruesome reality of the hideously botched invasion and paint Tamerlane as a greedy, murderous criminal enterprise in the untrained eyes of the world. That is her character's point of view. The blogosphere is filled with people who see things that way. Seems accurate to me. Nothing left out there. Most people more or less fall in to some version of either character -- Iraq was a good idea and good will come of it or its a disaster.

What about the facts on the ground? In Turaqistan the streets are dangerous and in some places hellish. Just like Iraq. In Turaqistan many people are torn between survival and personal loyalties. Just like Iraq. Turaqi Government officials believe they are puppets and fear for their lives. Just like Iraq. The Americans are hunkered down and under constant threat of attack. Just like Iraq. The list of similarities goes on and on.

Is anything egregiously omitted that if otherwise present would alter the conclusions reached in the film? Does War Inc. show Tamerlane soldiers painting schools and kissing babies? No. You got me there. But it does show a business convention where Turaqi phone rights are sold off to the highest bidder. That's supposed to be what neo-cons call stabilizing the Middle East, right? That's the whole point- give Iraqis a better life. That's supposed to be a good thing. Seems fair and balanced to me.

The crucial facts are all represented in War Inc.'s satire, Mr. O'Reilly; they're just presented in a way that reveals a side of reality not commonly seen in other media outlets, most especially yours. The fact that War Inc. does not shine a flattering light on some of the real world results of neo-con ideology does not make it propaganda. It makes it opinionated if not entirely objective. And personal. That's allowed.

The purpose of the film is not to fully articulate all points of view, which it cannot possibly do, but to frame neo-con ideology in light of the Iraq war. That in and of itself is a whole lot to cram into a feature length film, perhaps too much. Yet, despite its limitations, War Inc. is far more ideologically inclusive and far reaching than anything presented by Fox News, which sees the world and everyone in it as either loving or hating America, or roughly through the eyes of an especially dull child.

Bill O'Reilly is free to be proud of the mess in Iraq and see in it proof of America's unfailing nobility, just as others see grievous but correctable mistakes. Dissenting opinion, however, is not propaganda, and some times, all personal bias aside, as in the case of War Inc., it's richly satisfying.

How To Tell If Your Surge Is Working

If the surge were a success, Mc Cain and Bush would be bringing home the troops. The fact that McCain and Bush want to keep the surge in place means the surge is a failure. The need to keep the surge means there is a need to keep Iraq from falling apart. If Iraq will fall apart without the surge, then the surge has failed. Until the surge is not needed the surge is failing. If a surge in troops does not stabilize Iraq enough for the surge troops to go home, then there is no point in keeping them in Iraq.

If there were the possibility of the disparate forces in Iraq coming together, these forces would be taking advantage of the presence of American troops. That is not happening. Sharing power is not on the agenda for any of the players in Iraqi politics. All sides are planning to wage war on each other once the Americans go home. The surge is only wasting lives, money and resources by suppressing an inevitably violent struggle for control of Iraq. Let the Iraqis create their own future. And let Bush get the credit for whatever results.

Reality and Iraq

A person becomes an adult when they reach the point where they stop hurting themselves. As a nation we will have reached adulthood when we are able to stop doing things that hurt our country.

Immaturity justifies self destruction by blaming others. For example, the immature teenager says "life is confusing and school sucks so I'm going to use drugs." Getting high won't help make life less confusing, nor will it make school suck less. It will, however, decrease one's ability to deal with those realities. Addicts are known for justifying behavior that's clearly self destructive and sticking with it no matter what the cost.

The war in Iraq was created by America's power elite for perfectly logical, even idealistic reasons: to protect ourselves, to spread our noble way of life, to foster peace and security, to liberate an oppressed people and to bring justice to a madman. Not much there to argue against. That is the problem. The fact is our logical underpinnings don't matter. Even if there were WMD in Iraq, we don't have enough of anything required - expertise, money, equipment, expendable lives, allies, time or patience - to invade, control and re-organize a Middle Eastern country. Period. There is no "But..." If America was a mature, sober country we would have said to Bush - "your rationale is all well and good- but we don't have the ways and means. Let's figure out another way to protect ourselves." It doesn't matter if invading Iraq made logical or ideological sense. Reality said it wasn't possible.

Our leaders didn't fail us ideologically- they failed to get real. America supported removing weapons of mass destruction - that's not an ideological motive - but only a country detached from reality - or an addict - could think invading Iraq would make everything all right and stop the world from sucking. Just as addicts must give up the self destructive notion that drugs will make it all better we must give up our national self delusion that believes we can ignore reality because we are America. America can't make it all better. Liberals, neo-cons, libertarians, conservatives, progressives - we all want to use America to make the world stop sucking so much.

Our national America Will Make It All Better ideology has become a lethal drug- and our politicians are our dealers. Our dealers tell us we are far and away the richest, most powerful country on earth, unmatched by any other. Liberals, progressives, conservatives- Americans of all stripes - are found of saying "the richest country on earth ought to be able to..." We Americans have rationalized self destructive behavior and our ability to withstand damage, and, like drug addicts, we have clung to our self justifications in the face of a reality that says we are being hurt and hurt badly.

Iraq has shown us reality and reality says we are not as strong and rich as some of us thought: and now we wretch and moan as we go through ideological withdrawal: increasingly our resources are needed here at home, and there is less and less available for outside problems no matter how pressing. we have just enough strength to defend ourselves against an attack on our own shores - but that's it, just ask anyone from New Orleans - we cannot project meaningful military power around the globe beyond cruise missiles and air strikes. The good news is that should be enough. We should be careful to notice that defeating our real enemy - Osama Bin Laden - was well within our means. As soon as we left reality and looked to Iraq we came up short. We can handle reality just fine. If we stay in reality we will be able to handle whatever comes our way.

Reality also tells us that our government is incapable of creating foreign policy dependent upon understanding cultures not rooted in our own, and, most importantly, despite our sincerity, that it is not at all impressed with our idealism. Bush once said that God told him to invade Iraq. Yes, George, reality trumps even God. I'd rather go fifteen rounds with Bush's God than cross reality any day.

Depending on who you talk to Iraq was a bad idea to begin with or it was a good idea which failed because Bush was incompetent, or it was a good idea but Iraq, a country of enemies forced to live together for centuries, was not ready for democracy - which means invading was a bad idea - unless you wanted to replace Hussein with another Hussein, which is a really, really bad idea.

The fact is nobody knows whether or not invading Iraq was a good idea. Hillary Clinton seems to think we could have succeeded if not for Bush. Certainly Dubya made things horrible. Disbanding the Iraqi army created huge problems, for example, but keeping it together would have created huge problems, too. Incompetence is not an attribute exclusive to the Bush Administration. The boys over at Fox News are delighted to point out past presidential war time blunders-especially Lincoln's. All wars suffer from incompetence and bad planning.

But even if Bush got everything right, as Hillary hoped, it's clear that a higher standard of administrative competence could not have prevented Iraq's long dormant civil war from igniting once Hussein was removed. The question is would 500,000 troops have kept a lid on things? Many say yes. Nobody who says putting 250,000 to 500,000 troops on the ground after toppling Hussein mentions we could never afford to keep such troop levels in Iraq long enough to keep civil war from breaking out somewhere down the road. We couldn't afford any invasion scenario. That was abundantly clear four years ago whether or not we could somehow protect ourselves by saving the Middle East. We didn't grasp this on a national level because we are addicts out of touch with reality.

The addict says driving the car drunk and crashing was basically a good idea mishandled, gets in a cab and vows to drink less when driving in the future. Fat chance. The about to die addict gets back in the car he's just wrecked and says "once more into the breach!" - and tries to make it home. The sober man stopped drinking altogether, rebuilt his life and made amends for the damage he caused while driving drunk. He admits it was never possible to continue to drink and avoid crashing his car. What are our dealers doing? Hillary's gonna keep drinking and driving and vow to be more careful. Bush is back in the car ripped off his ass, bleeding from head to toe whimpering "once more into the breach." That guy is a nightmare. If we are to sober up from this horrible four year bender we must admit it was never possible for an invasion of Iraq to succeed regardless of how much sense it makes, and that no amount of effort and resources can change reality.

Nobody has the foggiest idea how to make Iraq all better, and reality doesn't give a rat's ass whether we figure it out or not. Reality isn't interested in what we'd like to do. The debate over Bush's plan is wasted energy. It doesn't matter what we think we ought to be able to do to protect ourselves. We will just have to deal with Post-Bush Iraq after we leave as best we can, keeping in mind reality rarely if ever overwhelms our ability to protect ourselves. The war in Iraq is doing more to harm us than any attack terrorists could muster at this point. We cannot afford any idea, any mission, any use of force - any strategy in Iraq. We don't get to use Iraq to effect regional security in the Middle East. We don't get to help spread democracy or keep Al Qaeda from gaining a foothold in Iraq. We must stop our national tantrum. We cannot afford to fight the war. End of story. If America stays, America dies. We need to get the hell out, sober up, deal with reality, and learn to stop justifying behavior that hurts our country.