Upon sober reflection, the bailout is beginning to look more and more like a huge gift to the banks and Wall Street.

Dean Baker in the Huffington Post writes that The Banks Have a Gun Pointed at Their Head and Are Threatening to Pull the Trigger:

The basic argument for the bailout is that the banks are filled with so much bad debt that the banks can't trust each other to repay loans. This creates a situation in which the system of payments breaks down. That would mean that we cannot use our ATMs or credit cards or cash checks.

That is a very frightening scenario, but this is not where things end. The Federal Reserve Board would surely step in and take over the major money center banks so that the system of payments would begin functioning again. The Fed was prepared to take over the major banks back in the 80s when bad debt to developing countries threatened to make them insolvent. It is inconceivable that it has not made similar preparations in the current crisis.

In other words, the worst case scenario is that we have an extremely scary day in which the markets freeze for a few hours. Then the Fed steps in and takes over the major banks. The system of payments continues to operate exactly as before, but the bank executives are out of their jobs and the bank shareholders have likely lost most of their money. In other words, the banks have a gun pointed to their heads and are threatening to pull the trigger unless we hand them $700 billion.

Michael Moore puts it even more bluntly on his mailing list:

Let me cut to the chase. The biggest robbery in the history of this country is taking place as you read this. Though no guns are being used, 300 million hostages are being taken. Make no mistake about it: After stealing a half trillion dollars to line the pockets of their war-profiteering backers for the past five years, after lining the pockets of their fellow oilmen to the tune of over a hundred billion dollars in just the last two years, Bush and his cronies -- who must soon vacate the White House -- are looting the U.S. Treasury of every dollar they can grab. They are swiping as much of the silverware as they can on their way out the door.

As usual, the taxpayers are getting screwed.

Remember, Mississippi Republicans, you voted this gang of thieves into office and kept them there. Now all of us are going to pay hell for this folly.

It pained me last night that Obama was quoted as saying that the surge has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. That’s the message of the Bush administration, the Pentagon and the mainstream media who haven’t bothered to investigate.

Project Censored has helped to pull back the curtain on the awful truth about the invasion and occupation by listing as the Number One censored storie for 2009: Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation:

Over one million Iraqis have met violent deaths as a result of the 2003 invasion, according to a study conducted by the prestigious British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB). These numbers suggest that the invasion and occupation of Iraq rivals the mass killings of the last century—the human toll exceeds the 800,000 to 900,000 believed killed in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and is approaching the number (1.7 million) who died in Cambodia’s infamous “Killing Fields” during the Khmer Rouge era of the 1970s.

As a result, the flow of refugees has not abated. Iraq is a hellhole:

Iraqis’ attempts to escape the violence have resulted in a refugee crisis of mammoth proportion. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, in 2007 almost 5 million Iraqis had been displaced by violence in their country, the vast majority of which had fled since 2003. Over 2.4 million vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq, up to 1.5 million were living in Syria, and over 1 million refugees were inhabiting Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and Gulf States. Iraq’s refugees, increasing by an average of almost 100,000 every month, have no legal work options in most host states and provinces and are increasingly desperate.

Yet more Iraqis continue to flee their homes than the numbers returning, despite official claims to the contrary. Thousands fleeing say security is as bad as ever, and that to return would be to accept death. Most of those who return are subsequently displaced again.

Maki al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail quote an Iraqi engineer now working at a restaurant in Damascus, “Return to Iraq? There is no Iraq to return to, my friend. Iraq only exists in our dreams and memories.”

Eventually the truth will rise up and hit us in the face. That time is coming.

Obama, in my opinion, came off as far more presidential than McCain, and therefore Obama won the debate. He held his own against a snarky and condescending veteran senator whose only real points were his Hanoi Hilton stay, Obama’s relative inexperience, and the fact that he received military briefings when he visited Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and therefore is an expert on the middle east.

What a candidate promises in a debate, however, can come back to haunt him years later, and Obama’s emphasis on capturing bin Laden and pacifying Afghanistan has exactly that kind of potential. The idea that our military forces should be doing in Afghanistan what they have been doing in Iraq, that is, propping up a corrupt and unpopular regime in the middle of even more difficult terrain, against some of the world’s toughest fighters in their own homeland halfway around the world, is precisely what the voters are rejecting.

Just as Sun Tzu predicted—that fighting a remote war impoverishes the people—we have already been watching the wealth of this nation squandered in an illegal foreign war. Only those profiting from war and a few out-and-out wingnuts want this nation to engage in needless combat. No citizen who loves his country wants to see its blood and wealth wasted on a war that can be avoided or that has no compelling cause, which is why the population must be manipulated by lies and propaganda into supporting military adventurism.

Sinking further military resources into Afghanistan is a trap that could sink Obama’s presidency, much as it did Lyndon Johnson’s. Obama has already stepped into the trap but its jaws have not quite closed around him. Let us hope that he does not doom his presidency even before he takes office.

The Kyber Pass

Photo by John Burke 1878. From the Wikimedia Commons.

Tonight, Bush once again told the American people to be afraid. Everything’s at stake. All is lost unless the nation goes along with what we want to do. We know what is best. Trust us. Give us unlimited power with no accountability or limitations.

Sure.

To think that in 1962, it took federal troops to force the entry of James Meredith, a black man, into Ole Miss. With McCain’s threat to cancel the presidential debate with Obama scheduled Friday at Ole Miss, the folks around here are highly pissed off that a black man might not be debating there.

Times have changed, haven’t they?

The crisis currently roiling the financial world is the result of greed, ingenuity, stupidity and arrogance, all in large portions. Like all disasters--and it is a disaster--no one knows precisely the correct procedure to limit the damage, because history never repeats itself exactly.

Clouds have been forming on the horizon for at least 15 years. Whenever a CEO can continue to be paid millions while running a corporation into bankruptcy, there is a severe disconnect between performance and reward which bodes ill for the corporate world, as well as for the entire economy.

Opposition to Treasury Secretary Paulsen’s request for virtually unlimited powers is mounting, even among conservatives, who are suddenly worried about unaccountable executive power. Funny, it hasn’t bothered them for the last seven years, as Glenn Greenwald points out.

Economist Dean Baker writes the most intelligent suggestions I have yet seen on the subject, Progressive Conditions for a Bailout.

Perhaps his most logical proposal, which would be resisted by the banks to the last man, is to reform the governance of the Federal Reserve:

The structure of the Fed should be changed so that all the officials with a direct say in monetary policy are appointed by the president and approved by Congress. The Fed is supposed to act in the public interest, not in the service of the financial industry. It is disturbing that the public is being represented in this debate over the restructuring of the financial industry almost entirely by top figures from the financial industry. This would be comparable to having national policy on the auto industry determined by former top officials with the United Auto Workers. It is difficult to believe that the views of Treasury Secretary Paulson and other government officials from the financial industry are not influenced by their long association with the industry.

This problem should not be worsened by giving the banking industry a direct voice in the conduct of monetary policy, by allowing it to appoint Federal Reserve district bank presidents who take part in open market committee discussions. There should be a strict separation between the conduct of open market policy, which should be done exclusively by people appointed by the president and approved by Congress and the responsibilities of the district bank presidents. The banking industry deserves no special voice in the conduct of monetary policy.

Social Security is a moral issue, not an exclusively economic or financial one.

Read the article. PDF version.

Wordle is a free web-based tool to create artistic word clouds by pasting text into a window and selecting the style, font, color and a number of other attributes. I created 4 wordles below the fold for the acceptance speeches of Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin at the Democratic and Republican conventions. I leave it to the reader as to whether Wordles of these highly-processed and vetted speeches tell us anything about the character of the speakers, but it was fun creating them.

For those not familiar with tag and word clouds: The relative size of each word in the cloud is based upon the number of times the word appears in the text. Unfortunately, the software does not take into account the various forms and inflection of a word, so the Wordle may understate the number of times words with the same stem appear in the text. Read More...

While it may be true that the Republicans have been reading Sun Tzu for election strategy, it is equally obvious that Bush and Cheney have not read it in connection with the Iraq invasion and occupation.

Throughout The Art of War, Sun Tzu manifests appreciation for the awsome costs of military engagement. He especially warns against a prolonged war, which brings about the ruin of a nation.

Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished. (II:10)

* * *

When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength.

Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor damped, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue." (II: 2-4)

Governor Palin disappeared this afternoon, purportedly to work on her VP acceptance speech. My guess is that she will withdraw this evening or in the morning.

The revelations about Palin’s abuse of the gubernatorial power in Alaska (Troopergate) will be the impetus and the desire to be with her family will be the public reason.

The biggest casualty of the Palin matter: McCain’s judgment.

If he insists that she stay on the ticket, and she agrees, then McCain will confirm not only his lack of judgment, but his inability to change course in the face of disaster.

Update (9/20/2008): Time to eat crow. I grossly overestimated the intelligence of the Republican rank and file, as well as its leadership. Its embrace of McCain and Palin simply goes to demonstrate the utter unfitness and unworthiness of today’s Republican Party to lead the nation.

The Clarion-Ledger reports today that the majority of justices on the Mississippi Supreme Court are contemplating overruling the current law that automatically designates as chief justice the senior judge on the court and replacing it with an internal rule that makes the chief justice selected by the nine sitting justices.

Since 1848, the Mississippi Legislature has determined how the chief justice is selected. The current statute, most recently amended in 1976, has the following wording:

The judge of the Supreme Court who has been for the longest time continuously a member of the court shall be chief justice; and, the two (2) judges of the supreme court who have served continuously for the next longest time shall be presiding justices. In case of the absence of the chief justice, the presiding justice who has been for the longest time continuously a member shall preside. In the event that two (2) or more judges of the Supreme Court shall have served as members of the Supreme Court for equal periods of time, then seniority shall be determined according to the length of time that such judges shall have been members of the Mississippi State Bar.¹

This is not the first time that the court has claimed the power to write its own rules.

The Mississippi Constitution of 1890, the one in effect today, states that “The judicial power of the state shall be vested in a Supreme Court and such other courts as are provided for in this constitution.” ² The court has, since the 1970s, interpreted the phrase “judicial power” to include the sole power to determine the rules and procedures of the judicial branch.³

Such an interpretation has the effect of shutting the legislature completely out of the judicial rulemaking business, even though there are numerous statutes, some going back 100 or more years, that do precisely that. On the federal level, the authority of Congress to approve the rules governing the procedures and operations of the courts has never been seriously questioned.

In 1981, the Supreme Court adopted, sua sponte, a modified version of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a major change in the way the courts of Mississippi handle cases. The new rules drastically raised the cost of litigation and thereby tilted the playing field in favor of clients with money and large corporations. There was ranting from some legislators and commentators at the time, but changes in court rules are not the kind of acts calculated to arouse outrage in the public, and so the matter was soon forgotten.

Of course, the effects of the rules have persisted and our civil judicial system has changed radically since 1970, in large part because of the changes in the rules. Injured plaintiffs and their attorneys know very well what the Rules of Civil Procedure have done to make it more and more difficult to get justice from the courts.

One of the annoying phenomenon in the legal community is the incessant whining over the clogged court dockets by the very lawyers and judges that were responsible for the rules that caused the clogging. It reminds me of Republicans complaining that the government can’t do this or that, when the Republicans themselves crippled the very agencies that were supposed to do the job.

Katrina, anyone?

Now the hard-right majority on the court wants to select the chief justice. Clearly, the purpose is to either prevent Bill Waller, Jr., or—more likely--Gerald Diaz, who is next in line after Waller, to become the chief justice. Diaz is known to be opposed to the hard-right corporatist majority, so it makes sense that the majority would consider changing the rules when the outcome doesn’t suit them. When Jim Smith, the current chief justice, retires, they can agree among themselves to elect Waller as chief justice, but eliminate Diaz as presiding justice and later as chief justice.

I am reminded of the threat by U. S. Senate Republicans a few years ago to abolish the filibuster, a move they would deeply regret today had they been successful then. There is a mentality of the hard-right that regards rules as something to be changed whenever a different outcome is desired, but without thought to the almost certain eventuality that the worm will turn and they themselves will be hoisted upon their own petard. Of course, that is when we will hear a paean to the virtues of bipartisanship and fair play.

____________________________________

1. §93-3-11 Mississippi Code Ann. (1972)
2. §144, Mississippi Constitution (1890)
3. See, for example, Newell v. State, 308 So.2d 71, 76 (Miss. 1975)

Addendum:

The majority recently voted not to allow publication of a Diaz dissent but changed their mind when the media called. This is a first. Things are getting really nasty up there.

I was a law clerk at the Supreme Court in 1979. To think that I once aspired to sit among that crowd!