Criticizing Bush and Obama

Here is a very well put criticism by Barry Ritholtz pointing out how both Bush and Obama have failed the American people by not rising to a historic occasion with a grand vision and an agenda that would reorganize the country to face the problem:

One of my regular criticisms of George W. Bush as President was, when presented with an opportunity to achieve greatness, he repeatedly failed to rise to the occasion. Indeed, his presidency can be viewed as a long series of missed opportunities:

“Once in a generation, the stars align for a political leader. There is this perfect moment – too often based on some enormous danger of long-lasting consequences for generations to come . . . the perfect combination of leadership and threat, of challenge and response meet. The leader – imperfect, fallible, yet ready to rise to the occasion – grabs the brass ring.”

That was what I wrote following 9/11. There was a moment to transcend politics. Restructure global alliances, refocus military spending away from its cold war footing, force some sort of Israeli/Palestine deal, wrestle structural US deficits to the ground. Rather than dare the nation to rise to the challenge, to make personal sacrifices for the greater good, to step up to greatness, the country was told to . . . go shopping.

Barack H. Obama seems to be following W’s footsteps. He has failed — twice — to is rise to an occasion of great import. In the words of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, he has “wasted a good crisis” — for the second time. The financial collapse was a grand opportunity to undo three decades of misguided decision-making and radical deregulation. He chose to focus on . . . Health Care.

Now, we have another crisis — the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster. And yet again, we see another missed opportunity. The Oval Office speech last week was just that — a speech, filled with platitudes and mere words. Where was the challenge, the sense of national need, the urgency? It was the same tired energy speech that, as The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has pointed out, every single president since Nixon has given.

For the greatest orator of his generation, our president appears to be lacking in imagination.

History will judge both of these presidents severely. Bush will be among the bottom dozen, a complete incompetent, while Obama will be in the bottom third as a promising politician who simply failed to rise to the challenge, a politician with a golden tongue but no vision and insufficient leadership qualities.

Go read Ritholtz's full post. He lays out his vision as a ten point program.

1. Energy R&D


2. Gas Taxes


3. Mass Transit


4. CAFE Standards


5. Alternative Energy for Homes


6. Upgrade the Grid


7. Campaign Finance Reform


8. Lobbying Rules


9. Corporate Donations


10. Transparent Disclosure

This is solid stuff. This is what Americans needed to hear. But Obama hasn't made this speech. That's a tragedy.

Fiscal Austerity, the New Fashion of the Day

From an article in the Washington Post by Harold Meyerson:

Liberal Democrats know what they're for: a second stimulus to create more investment and jobs.... Republicans... know what they're against: anything the Democrats are for. That leaves the centrist Blue Dog Democrats, who don't really know what they're for or what they're against. Earlier this year... Blue Dogs... were saying they would welcome an end to the debate over health-care reform so they could turn their attention to jobs, jobs, jobs. But now that President Obama and Democratic legislative leaders have done that, the Blue Dogs have largely turned skittish. Efforts by the leaders in both houses to pass bills that would save the jobs of teachers and police officers, maintain states' ability to make Medicaid payments and extend unemployment insurance have hit not only the expected bumps in the road (unified Republican opposition) but also fresh potholes: Blue Dog resistance to countercyclical spending....

The downside of not passing any further stimulus legislation is clear.... In today's economy, alas, the government remains the only source of significant investment.... [N]onfinancial companies are hoarding cash -- a record-high $1.84 trillion... they are not using it to expand....

Until recently, virtually every Democratic member of Congress could be counted on to support some level of countercyclical spending. That was one of the basic ways Democrats distinguished themselves from the laissez-faire right.... The problem here is that the Blue Dogs, like much of the public, conflate the issues of the nation's long-term fiscal sustainability with the short-term deficits created by the worst downturn since the '30s. Thus the Democratic imperative of creating jobs in 2009 became, earlier this year, one of creating jobs and reducing the deficit, and now, for some Blue Dogs, has become chiefly one of reducing the deficit. In polls, meanwhile, the public rates "jobs" as its chief concern, with the deficit lagging far behind....

[T]he Blue Dogs' short-term deficit hawkery is more than bad economics. It's bad politics, too. Even pragmatic centrists -- especially pragmatic centrists -- have to be in favor of something. The Blue Dogs don't seem to know what exactly that might be.

When I was a kid I was wildly idealistic. I thought I was lucky to be born in the "modern" era when people were educated, learned from the past, used scientific methods to learn about the world around them. I've spent the last 50 years unlearning the illusions of youth. I came of age as the baby boom started to enter the workforce and discovered that policy makers hadn't planned for that event despite the demographics being utterly obvious. I watched innumerable wars fought over supposedly "life and death issues" that looked odd 20 or 30 years later when sworn enemies fell into each other's arms as "dear friends". I saw the waste and folly of war while politicians turned a sharp eye toward expenditures that would aid ordinary people: infrastructure, education, health, scientific research.

I had always puzzled how so many could party through WWII while the soldiers carried the burden of terror and dying. But I've now lived through 50 years of watching the elite party "like there is no tomorrow" while they download the burdens of taxes and responsibility onto the middle and lower classes. I thought George Orwell's book 1984 was a quaint allegory about the foolishness of people for political messages, but I've now lived through 30 years of right wing propaganda where I've had my nose rubbed in the phrase "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others". This is the motto of the elite. Yes, we are all democrats now, but don't expect the elites to pay for civilization, as Leona Helmsley famously pointed out "taxes are for the little people".

Anybody who kept their eyes open during an Economics 101 course, and even a guy like me who never darkened the door to an economics class, knows that John Maynard Keynes diagnosed the Great Depression and called for counter-cyclical spending to get the economy out of the rut. Production lost because of a depression is never regained. It isn't a morality play in which 15 million in the US must now be long term unemployed to "atone" for the sins of the profligate. For one thing, the profligate were the ultra-rich, not the working class and the middle class. Why would anybody with a shred of decency expect these classes to suffer in order to "make up for" the sins of Wall Street sharpsters? The mind boggles. But that is exactly what is being prescribed.

I never thought I would live to see such idiocy passed around as "sound" judgement. Mind you, I never thought I would be forced to live through a harrowing 30 year dominance of right wing ideology. Sadly, I have.

Shouldering Responsibility

Funny how it is so obvious that the other fellow should shape up and shoulder responsibility for his actions instead of blaming others.

Here's an example identified by firedoglake in a post on that blog:

Will the Bushes please just go away?

For months now, Jeb Bush has been listening as President Obama blasts his older brother’s administration for the battered economy, budget deficits and even the lax oversight of oil wells.

“It’s kind of like a kid coming to school saying, ‘The dog ate my homework,’ ” Mr. Bush, this state’s former governor, said over lunch last week at the Biltmore Hotel. “It’s childish. This is what children do until they mature. They don’t accept responsibility.”

Oops. Jeb! just called his brother an immature child, because during the Bush/Cheney years, everything was everyone else’s fault–especially Bill Clinton’s. Just for starters…

If you have forgotten how George Bush blamed everybody but himself for his screw-ups, go read the whole post in firedoglake.

Alexia: The Brain and Its Odd Disorders

I've always been intrigued by mental disorders. They are so strange. Some of my favourite books are of mental disorders, such as Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or Richard Cytowic's The Man Who Tasted Shapes. This interest in oddities slammed into reality two years ago when my mother had a brain tumour operated on and came out of the surgery with left neglect. I was left with the horror to realize that I was seeing a condition I had read about theoretically now realized in the flesh. Oh how I wish my interest had remained purely theoretical. But the real world has a way of intruding into our theoretical interests. The world is cruel and indifferent to our sense of justice or fair play. Mental disorders are unwelcome but that doesn't stop them from seizing some people and leaving them ravaged.

Here's an interesting video from NPR on alexia:



There are so many other interesting mental conditions:

• I have an interest in autism and love the books by Temple Grandin that unveil the world of autism.


• The book Born on a Blue Monday by David Tammet gives insight into synesthesia and life as a high-functioning autistic savant syndrome.


• The idea that you could have a stroke and suddenly no longer recognize people, prosopagnosia, is frightening. My mother suffered this impairment after brain surgery.


• The oddity of Tourette's syndrome is interesting, i.e. you can be a surgeon and continue in your career despite having uncontrollable tics, or that you could suddenly be given to cursing or gesturing obscenely because you suffer from coprolalia. Bizarre but true.


• The sad world of H.M. a sufferer from severe epilepsy who underwent surgery to remove most of the hippocampus and consequently lost his ability to retain any new semantic memory or episodic memory. He retained the working memory structure and the ability to store procedural memory, but in effect he lived 55 years as an amnesiac.


• The tragedy of aphasia that has so many strange forms: inability to speak while still comprehending, speaking abut without comprehending, ability to write but not speak or to speak but not write, and so on. This condition shows how complex the mind is because it separates out faculties that we see as seamless.


• The strange world of bipolar disorder. Kay Redfield Jamison's book Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament looks at interesting historical figures and the question of whether "artistic" or "creative" types are abnormally afflicted by bipolar disorder.

McChrystal and Military Discipline

McChrystal is lucky to not be in jail...

From Wikipedia, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice:

"Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct."

Maximum punishment:

Dismissal, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 1 year.

Instead of punishment, McChrystal will "retire" from the military.

It appears that actions have no consequences. Nobody is responsible. Everybody claims "the buck stops here" but when it stops it is quietly put away and nobody says or does anything. Odd.

For a dissenting viewpoint, here's a bit from an opinion piece by Thomas E. Ricks in the NY Times:

In the longer term, the Army has to return to its tradition of getting rid of leaders who are failing. The Navy has shown more fortitude; in the first two months of this year alone it fired six commanders of ships and installations. On Tuesday, it fired the skipper of the frigate John L. Hall, two months after it collided with a pier at a Black Sea port in Georgia. The Navy stated simply, as it usually does in such cases, that the officer’s superior had lost confidence in him. That is all that is needed.

The Marine Corps has also largely kept the tradition of relieving officers — most notably during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 when its top ground officer, Maj. Gen. James Mattis, fired the commander of the First Marine Regiment. During his tenure, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has fired secretaries of the Army and the Air Force and an Air Force chief of staff.

Back in World War II, the Army had no qualms about letting officers go; at least 16 of the 155 generals who commanded divisions in combat during the war were relieved while in combat. George Marshall, the nation’s top general, felt that a willingness to fire subordinates was a requirement of leadership. He once described Gen. Hap Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, as a fine man, but one who “didn’t have the nerve to get rid of men not worth a damn.”

Marshall had plenty of nerve: in 1940 and ’41, as war loomed, he forced into retirement several hundred officers he deemed too old and slow to be effective. When the commandant at Leavenworth, Brig. Gen. Charles Bundel, told him that updating the complete set of Army training manuals would take 18 months, Marshall offered him three months, and then four months, to do the job. It can’t be done, Bundel twice responded.

“You be very careful about that,” Marshall told him in a telephone conversation.

“No, it can’t be done,” Bundel repeated.

“I’m sorry, then you are relieved,” Marshall said.

We tend to remember those who were nearly relieved but ultimately weren’t, most notably Gen. George Patton, who came closest to being fired during the war after slapping two American soldiers suffering from combat fatigue. But that sort of exception illustrates another aspect of the lost tradition of relieving commanders: the military had some flexibility in enforcing it. Patton was seen by his superiors as having unusual weaknesses but equally rare strengths, so he was kept on.

Go read the whole article, Ricks speaks directly about McChrystal's indiscipline as well as that of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and the special envoy, Richard Holbrooke.

Ricks is very caustic about the rot inside the US military:

The tradition of swift relief provided two benefits that we have lost in today’s Army: It punished failure and it gave an opportunity to younger, more energetic officers who were better equipped to adapt to the quickening pace of the war. When George Marshall heard of a major who really was doing a general’s work, he stepped in to make the man a brigadier general overnight. Under this audacious system, a generation of brilliant young commanders emerged, men like James Gavin, an innovator in airborne warfare who became the Army’s youngest three-star general.

But that tradition was somehow lost in the Korean War and buried conclusively in Vietnam. Nowadays, dynamic young leaders can’t emerge as quickly, because almost no one is fired. In a much-discussed 2007 article in Armed Forces Journal, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling wrote that “a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.”

My experience in the workaday world was that guys at the bottom paid a price for mistakes and failure. The bosses were given a "lateral promotion" if they screwed up. And the real clincher is that big pay for the guys on top is "appropriate" because they bear the "heavy burdens" of responsibility. What a joke! Look at the greed SOBs on Wall Street who have created an economic mess that leaves 15 million unemployed. They walked away with tens of millions of bonuses and "separation pay" for causing the economy to implode.

Breaking News: The US Supreme Court Redefines 'Murder'

In a breathtaking decision, the US Supreme court today has decided that the definition of 'murder' is too broad. It has helped 'tighten' the legal definition. No longer will the use of just 'any' weapon to take a life be considered murder. The justices have decided that only a killing with a 45 calibre weapon, or larger, is required to meet the tightened definition of murder. In a surprise move, they have ruled that any weapon less than 45 calibre isn't a 'serious gun' and therefore there could be 'no intent or expectation of murder'. At best, a person who plugs another with 7 or 8 shots from a 32 calibre gun would only be guilty of 'winging' a person and any any death that ensued would be completely 'unexpected', so the death must necessarily be judged as 'manslaughter' and not murder.

The above is nuts... yes I'm kidding...

But that is an analogy to what the right-wing, crazed US court has decided today with respect to Jeffrey Skilling. From Reuters:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday set aside a ruling that upheld the conspiracy conviction of former Enron Corp executive Jeffrey Skilling, and sent the case back for more proceedings.

Skilling is the guy who mocked conventional morality and led Enron into such nefarious schemes as playing 'hide the losses' and created the fantasy game of pick your own profit number since under Skilling, Enron adopted mark to market accounting, in which anticipated future profits from any deal were tabulated as if real today. He's another example of his utter contempt for honesty and the law (from Wikipedia):

Skilling joked about the California energy crisis at one meeting of Enron employees by asking "what is the difference between California and the Titanic? At least when the Titanic went down, the lights were on".

This from a man running a company that squeezed electricity providers to shut down generation stations so that Enron could charge more and profit from extortionary rates in selling power to energy starved California.

Fraud, what fraud? The US Supreme Court has defined fraud to only occur when there is a bribe or a kickback:

Section 1346, which proscribes fraudulent deprivations of “the intangible right of honest services,” is properly confined to cover only bribery and kickback schemes. Because Skilling’s alleged misconduct entailed no bribe or kickback, it does not fall within the Court’s con-finement of §1346’s proscription.

Oh yeah, so the next time a used car salesman tells you that "this baby only has 100 miles on it, it was driven only once a month to and from the store by grandma" when in fact it was used in stock car races and had 300,000 miles on it and been through a dozen major crashes, this isn't fraud!. No siree. The Wikipedia article on fraud which begins:

In the broadest sense, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent.

is completely misleading. That 'interpretation' is way too broad, says the Supreme Court. Deception isn't enough. Personal gain isn't enough. You only get fraud if there is bribery or a kickback involved.

What will be the next move by the Supreme Court? I'm expecting them to 'tighten up' the definition of bribery. Take note criminals! From now on, when you buy off the police, make sure you aren't just handing them money in a bag to get complicity in some criminal conspiracy. No siree! Make sure they sign a contract. That way, you are 'honestly' making a business deal to acquire their time and effort and no longer sinking to the contemptible crime of 'bribery'.

The US Supreme Court has sunk to a new low. In 2000 they stole an election from Al Gore and gave it to the idiot George Bush which led to a number of disasters for the US. Apparently the ultra-rich and their bought-and-paid-for minions on the US Supreme Court haven't had enough of this kind of ideological idiocy. The Supreme Court has given new impetus to judicial tomfoolery -- also known a strict constructionism -- with this latest 'interpretation' of the law. Sadly, this mucking around with 'legal interpretations' has thoroughly corrupted the US legal system by turning it into a plaything of right wing ideologues.

Lies My Government Told Me

I live in a country where elected officials in Canada making blatant, disrespectful statements toward a sizeable portion of their constituents:

Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore delivering a keynote address at a conference sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce's IP Council :



Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law, asks: Who are these radical extremists?

So when Moore warns about radical extremists opposing C-32, who is he speaking of? Who has criticized parts of the bill or called for reforms? A short list of those critical of the digital lock provisions in C-32 would include:

• Liberal MPs


• NDP MPs


• Bloc MPs


• Green Party


• Canadian Consumer Initiative


• Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada


• Canadian Association of University Teachers


• Canadian Federation of Students


• Canadian Library Association


• Business Coalition for Balanced Copyright


• Retail Council of Canada


• Canadian Bookseller Association


• Documentary Organization of Canada

Of course, criticism of C-32 is not limited to the digital lock provisions with groups such as ACTRA, Writers' Union, Access Copyright, and the Canadian Conference of the Arts among those criticizing fair dealing or other elements of the bill. Moreover, at the event Moore was speaking at, an entertainment industry representative from Vivendi criticized the notice-and-notice approach in C-32.

In other words, all opposition parties, consumers, universities, teachers, students, business, and many creator groups are all seeking changes to C-32. Does Moore really believe that they are all radical extremists? Who is he referring to?

Micheal Geist left me off the list. I'm one of the many private citizens who "took part" in the government sponsored "discussion" about IP and changes to the law. The government solicited my views, then promptly threw them away. The whole "public consultation" was a dog-and-pony show to pretend that the government was open to input. It had no interest in my input and did nothing with it other than turn around and throw it away.

I took time to spell out where I stood. I am for property rights, but constrained to reward the originator with a reasonable reward for the invention without giving license to big corporations to rape and plunder the public for decades and centuries. I argued for reasonable use of intellectual property to allow civil society to freely talk about its cultural assets. Not to allow piracy, but to allow "fair use". A concept that James Moore deems "radical" and "unreasonable".

Here is one of my favourite examples of corporate bullying over "intellectual property rights". I've added bold at key points...

McDonald's corporation sued a restaurant in Scotland. From a watchdog organization, McSpotlight:

1996: McDonald's threatened the owner of a UK sandwich bar called "McMunchies" with legal action for breach of trademark. A retired Scottish school-teacher called Ronald McDonald, and the chief of the McDonald clan in Scotland were both outraged at this further attempt by McDonald's to claim global dominion over the prefix "Mc" and the name "McDonald" which has been an Irish and Scottish family name for centuries.

This incident is reported in Wikipedia as:

In 1996, McDonald's forced Scottish sandwich shop owner Mary Blair of Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire to drop McMunchies as her trading name. Mrs. Blair did not sell burgers or chips. She said she chose the name because she liked the word munchies and wanted the cafe to have a Scottish feel. The cafe's sign reflected this, featuring a Scottish thistle and a St Andrew's flag. But in a statement to Mrs. Blair's solicitors, McDonald's said if someone used the Mc prefix, even unintentionally, they were using something that does not belong to them.

This kind of bullying is what James Moore means by "reasonable" ownership rights. You can push around small Mom & Pop stores that are not treading on your rights except in the minds of lawyer. You can dispossess generations of the McDonalds clan by usurping their name if you have the money and the lawyer and know how to play the "intellectual property" game. Shame!