Edgewise

Rove calling, again

“Mr. Rove said he had forgotten the call, one of hundreds he participates in each day.”

A repentant Karl Rove admitted yesterday to a grand jury investigator that he could not recall a conversation with a journalist in which he revealed the secret code to White House situation room “nuke” buttons. In a sixteen hour work day, Mr. Rove, commented, he makes a phone call at least every minute. “I have even forgotten that I talked to President Bush a minute ago,” he said, pressing speeddial.

Kill it before it grows?

No one knows exactly what “price gouging” is supposed to mean in a capitalist economy. Price fixing and collusion are a different matter, but that so far does not appear to be the issue currently with gasoline.

There are some relevant things we do know.

As traffic volume increases, private cars become less efficient: traffic jams, higher fuel consumption and GAS PRICES!, problems parking (for 22+ hours daily storage of two tons of idle equipment).

As traffic volume increases, mass transit becomes more efficient: more passengers carried on the same train or bus, lower fuel consumption per passenger, more frequent service (at three-minute intervals, there is no such thing as missing or waiting for your train), more convenient routes and stops, more shuttle service to and from major hubs, little increase in parking/storage burden, lower costs, lower fares. (Indeed, the entire current fare-box revenue of public transit in America could be offset by a few cents per gallon increase in the gas tax.)

(And note, it is the commute we’re really concerned with here. That’s what burns the gas, not shopping trips and family rides in the country. Keep a car! It is second and third cars per household that have dominated the overflow of autos in America. We should at least give more people an incentive to live near transit and ride to work.)

So mass transit is a potential blessing for the public and a horrendous threat to America’s core industrial corporations: autos and petroleum. This caused GM and Firestone to buy up and destroy the tracks and cables of 200 mass transit systems in the US during the 1930s and 40s.

In the Bay Area, this was the Key Line, which ran across the lower level of the Bay Bridge (and through the Solano Tunnel). The agreements under which they sold off the remnant properties forbid reestablishment with anything other than rubber wheels.

For the corporations, the advantages of expanding mass transit are a slippery slope. Can they kill it before it grows?

"Dear Mr. President"

This video “DearMr. President” is very powerful, insightful, and seriously moving. The singer, Pink, is a top-rank music star, and I think it will probably be playing on MTV. She opens it by saying, “This is the most important song I have ever written.”

This second one, “I’m the Decider,” is just very clever, ingenious, and plain funny. It takes off from “I am the Walrus.” The simulation of the Beatles’ vocals is great. I don’t recognize the artists.

Rolling Stone Rolls W.

Was the whole reason George Sr. and company wanted George Jr. to become president just to make Sr.’s adminstration look competent by comparison? Well, on that score at least, mission accomplished. Now Rolling Stone (credit where due, I first saw this mentioned on our beloved dailykos) weighs in on the possibility that W. may be judged by historians as our worst. president. ever.

Michael Jackson Bailout

Michael Jackson Bailout Said to Be Close - New York Times

is it just me that thinks we've lost our minds?

During all the recent news hoopla about the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui I kept trying to remember what he actually did. Did he fly the planes? (No, those guys are all dead). Did he plan the attacks? (Hmmm, wasn’t that Osama bin Laden?). Did he aid and abet any of the dead guys who flew the planes? (Well, Al Queda spokespeople have denied he was a player, and from a group that likes to lay claim to evil doing that would tend to make me believe them). Okay, he was part of a conspiracy to commit the crime. And then, for good measure, he lied about it and therefore caused the deaths of everyone on 9/11 because, if he hadn’t lied, we would have been able to prevent the disaster. Something like that. So the courtroom and the nation are then presented with the spectacle of the horror relived in video, audio, and personal stories of grief. And the jury will probably vote for death for the angry, addled human being whose name will now live in infamy.

Meanwhile, the real masterminds of 9/11 are free somewhere. And a country entirely irrelevant to 9/11 becomes the ill-conceived target of an American president eager to make a hero of himself, and slowly sinks into the hell of sectarian civil war.

P.S. to F.Y.T. PG&E

“The new team” now running Enron, according to spokesman Harlan Loeb, believes a proposed settlement with federal regulators that would prevent disclosure of evidence that reveal how Enron gamed the energy trading markets during the California energy crisis, is “the best deal for creditors.” The audiotapes, email, and other documents detail how Enron’s energy traders deliberately withheld power supplies to inflate prices; the state ended up plunged in debt after a season of power shortages and utility company bankruptcies….(from Mark A. Stein in the Saturday NYTimes)

well fuck you too PG&E

Emerging from the basement where I am on flood watch, I went out to the dripping mailbox to fish out our soggy load of coupons, bills, and bank card come-ons, including the Pacific Gas & Electric Company invoice for the month of March. March, the “40 days and 40 nights” of relentless rain in which the basement flooded daily or diurnally, necessitating use of a portable pump, garden hose, and sponge mop on a 24-7 basis. March, in which my energy-saving scheme to enclose the leaky window frames on the inside with plastic sheeting and strapping tape turned the house into a sodden greenhouse for the perfect incubation of black and green mold. March, which last year was a false summer of 70+ degrees and sunny days.

March did us in. The good-hearted folks at PG&E, after passing on the screwing by ENRON and others to jack up the price of natural gas, took pity on us and promised a rebate on our winter heating if we would reduce our gas usage by 10% over last year. Thus the plastic sheeting. And the setting of the thermostat to 62% for night, 65% for day. Chilly, but cheaper. And the bills arrived for December, January, February: $100, $150, $175. Still, we managed to reduce gas consumption by 20% for January, 13% for February.

Then March came. Last year, during the “March Summer” we used very little gas. THIS March we doubled the gas we used from last March. So we lost the Rebate Gamble. Since PG&E averages the saved consumption for each month—comparing it to use the following year, we didn’t reach the 10% reduction in gas usage that would have gotten us a 20% rebate on three months of our energy bill.

So fuck you, PG&E. (and now, back to the basement….)

My Wild Speculation on Iran

LBJ liked to leak escalations, then deny them—two or three times over. When they actually occurred, it was already Old News. Such sequences can easily have a six-month or two-year time-line, if you wish to align them with elections.

Is there an Iran strike in the pipeline? There is no good reason. It will be some ten years before Iran can have a weapon, during which international consensus will solidify, the physical targets will become more definite and vulnerable, and sanctions—with Iran’s bordering Arab neighbors fully engaged in them—would have plenty of time to work.

It’s true that China and Russia have economic stakes that have made them cautious and deliberate about Iran, but over time neither of them will just forget about a nuclear threat, nor about their reserved parking spaces in the world nuclear oligopoly.

The Bush neo-cons would certainly love to strike/invade Iran, but the difficulties are formidable: guaranteed political catastrophe in Iraq, entailing huge slaughter among US forces—who are, in effect, military hostages there. US domestic resistance, including panicky Republicans, utter diplomatic isolation, and Oil, Oil, Oil—soaring prices and economic free-fall.

On the other hand, US neo-imperialism desperately needs an invasion, because an invasion implies its own necessity. It establishes that unilateral warfare by the sole superpower is indispensable to the safety of the world. Successful UN diplomacy, backed by international sanctions, would, on the other hand, be an neo-imperial disaster. Already the power to affect Iran, the premier global crisis, has been too obviously in the hands of Russia and China, with the US as an impotent bystander.

It has not yet really sunk in politically that sanctions work, but before too long, it must come into focus. Sanctions devastated Iraq and effectively prevented Saddam from pursuing WMDs. It was the prospect of sanctions, not US military threats, that prompted latest softenings in Iran’s nuclear stance. It was sanctions that turned Libya around. And they are the subtext of all current pressures on North Korea.

Sanctions are inherently multilateral, and they make the UN, rather than the US, the center of international power. Effective sanctions and multilateral military pressure devalue America’s uniqueness. They reduce the US to just one among a number of Great Powers. If sanctions and multilateral power should succeed in Iran and North Korea, it will be the neo-imperialists’ downfall.

So, yes, they need to attack Iran. On the other hand, they may not be able do so. So, is it in the pipeline? I guess it would have to be: “Very unlikely, but could happen.”

Key Bush quote decouples two issues

“The Smoking Quote”?

In this item from ABC news, the wording of the quote they cite from President Bush decouples what he refers to as the “leak of classified information”— within this specific context —from the particular leak of Plame’s CIA identity:

“He also spoke out after allegations surfaced that administration officials had leaked the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, who is Wilson’s wife.

“‘I don’t know of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information. If somebody did leak classified information, I’d like to know it…and we’ll take the appropriate action,’ he said at the time.”

watching the detectives

Tony Soprano shoulda thought of it: hiring a couple of NYPD detectives as mob assassins. But it was “Tony” Casso who thought of it first. In today’s installment of an entertaining and wryly horrific series, Alan Feuer at the NYT brings us the courtroom finale to the trial of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, found guilty of 70 counts by a New York jury.

That’s a lota counts. Well, they were mob assassins for twenty years. Both detectives were, in fact, retiredby the time they were arrested “at the coat check of a Nevada restaurant” a little more than a year ago. The cast of witnesses was appropriately Soprano-like: an “arthritic marijuana dealer” who was Capo Casso’s go-between, a sixth-grade drop-out who buried one victim, a Connecticut accountant who was “turned” and secretly recorded the defendents at a strip club called The Crazy Horse Too. A smallish (5’ 4”) witness was called “a gnome” by the defense lawyer who, in a 15-minute summation in support of his client, claimed

on the night before a murder that Mr. Caracappa has been charged with, he worked 16 hours guarding a man who had just shot Rabbi Meir Kahane, implying that Mr. Caracappa had been too tired to kill anyone.

Oh, and Detective Eppolito acted on the side. He was in “Goodfellas.”

Reuters: Bush said likely to replace Treasury chief Snow

I don’t think Bush is really qualified for that position, but the move does show some humility, and at least he wouldn’t be President anymore.

ghost workers of America

I read with interest a review in the Sunday S.F. Chron by Noam Lupu of Louis Uchitelle’s new book, “The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences” which looks at the now common-place American phenomenon of worker layoffs and the effects of these layoffs on ordinary Americans. The statistics are startling but it’s the stories that compel.

A review at TheStreet.com by Katie Benner focuses on her interview with Uchitelle who expressed his frustration with those who would make it all about the statistics - and politics:

“Everyone who talks to me about the book wants to make it about finding an enemy or blaming or politics … they don’t get it, and you don’t either,” he says in an interview. “This is not a book about unemployment. It’s simply a book that sticks to what happens to people after they’ve been laid off.”

Benner herself expresses some skepticism about Uchitelle’s primary thesis.

Like it or not, there are plenty of people who don’t care about the fact that laid-off workers may suffer from depression, are often forced to take a more menial or worse-paying job, or that private lives are damaged by the loss of a job and the esteem it confers.

Thomas Geoghegan at the New York Times has a more empathetic take in his review:

At least 30 million full-time American employees have gotten pink slips since the Labor Department belatedly started to count them in 1984. But add in the early retirees, the “quits” who saw the layoffs coming, and the number is much higher—a whole ghost nation trekking into what for most will be lower-wage work.

One estimate of the real number of Americans who once worked full-time and who are now jobless is 114 million (in 2004). And for those who are working, there is this to ponder:

…. as of 2004, more than 45 percent of American workers were earning $13.25 an hour or less. The jobs that the country has been “growing” the fastest include those like janitor, hospital orderly and cashier.

I am one of those “ghost workers” myself, and I know first hand the psychological ups and downs that come with losing a job to an economic “downturn”. The downturn did not, however, cause the “downsizing” of younger, low-wage employees at my workplace, or affect the few at the top earning three times my salary.

After a year-long series of complicated and exhausting job interviews in my field of expertise, with negative results, it became clear to me that I was not going to be able to re-enter the field any time soon, if at all. Fortunately, others do not depend upon my ability to earn a “Bay Area wage” and I have other skills and interests that I can turn to for both income and emotional sustenance.

But for many Americans, “the Great Depression” is not an historical event of the past, but a personal one that began the day they were laid off from a decent job.