1 Boring Old Man

Weak on Women’s Rights at Notre Dame
Huffington Post
by Martha Burk
Political psychologist, co-founder, Center for Advancement of Public Policy
May 17, 2009

A few minutes before President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, the CNN anchor was intoning that he supports stem cell research and he supports abortion rights, and that he would not shrink from his positions on either. In fact, she said, he was going to use an email he had gotten on the subject of abortion as part of his remarks.

Good, I thought. It will be from the parent of the mentally retarded high school student who was gang raped, the doctor of an 11 year old incest victim, or possibly a woman with four kids already whose husband has just lost his job and medical benefits along with it.

Boy, was I wrong.

The letter Obama cited in great detail was from an anti-choice doctor who had taken him to task for a statement on his campaign website saying he would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose." The president was quick to point out that while he had not changed his fundamental position [though he declined to reiterate it] he had instructed his staff to alter the wording, presumably so that "ideologue" no longer appeared.

The rest of the speech, insofar as a woman’s most fundamental right to control her own body was concerned, was a big fat silence. Leading off with "Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions," the president detailed all the ways we can reduce abortions. He mentioned adoption, support for women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term, and crafting a "sensible conscience clause" [whatever that means] for health care providers as well as "health care policies grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women."

Coming from a pro-choice president who was elected by women – including a significant number of defectors from their rabidly anti-choice Republican party – it was faint support indeed. Instead of merely asking us to agree that abortion is a heart-wrenching decision [we all do anyway], why not ask us to agree on the fundamental moral agency of women? Why not ask us to agree that government should not interfere in a woman’s most basic right to autonomy in controlling her life? If he wants to follow that with a statement about reducing the need for abortion, I’ll be with him all the way.

But the president didn’t do that. After brushing quickly by respect for the equality of women [and only in the health care context], he went on to extend an invitation to the anti-choice audience to engage in dialogue, where "differences of culture and religion and conviction can co-exist with friendship, civility, hospitality, and especially love." That all sounds great, but if the president buys the idea that those who would outlaw abortion and send women back to the back alleys are not ideologues, and that they want to co-exist in civil disagreement, he’s naive at the very best. And he diminishes women in the bargain…

What’s your reaction to Vice President Cheney’s ongoing [criticism]? He’s not quite twittering your administration [ laughter ] but he’s coming fairly close.

You know, Dick Cheney had a strong perspective about national security. It was tested in the early years of the Bush administration, and I think it resulted in a series of very bad decisions. I think what’s interesting is that, in some ways, Dick Cheney actually lost these arguments inside the Bush administration.

And so he may have won early with Colin Powell and Condi Rice, but over the last two or three years of the Bush administration, I think there was a recognition among Republicans and Bush administration officials that these enhanced interrogation techniques that were being applied — that they had applied early on — were potentially counterproductive; that a posture of never talking to our enemies, of unilateral action, of framing national security only in terms of the application of force, often unilateral — that that wasn’t producing.

And so it’s interesting to me to see the vice president spending so much time trying to vindicate himself and relitigate the last eight years when, as I said, I think, actually, a lot of these arguments were settled even before we took over the White House.

We bloggers get tangled in the contraversies of the day. Most of us didn’t support the invasion of Iraq in the first place. But even if we did, we didn’t support playing it out in this way. Most of us would’ve said "no" to torture back then. Many of us would’ve questioned domestic surveillence with no oversight. But those huge issues aside, we forget to mention that Dick Cheney was a global failure. Dick Cheney loaded us up on our mighty elephants and marched us over the Alps — and came home empty handed, leaving a lot of elephants behind. Dick Cheney took us on a walk on the "Dark Side," and what we came out of it with is a feeling of empathy for the poor souls we abased and abused for no obvious gain. Dick Cheney masterminded an internal coups d’etat for the Executive Branch of our government that left us with the task of rediscovering our own Constitution. Dick Cheney and his friends took a viable Conservative Movement in America and reduced it to the Worst and the Loudest, resembling a Klan Rally on the levee during Freedom Summer. Dick Cheney was a failure.

I feel sorry for the Conservatives of Conscience, people who don’t think like I do but are solid, upstanding human beings whose convictions are strong and well-thought. I know a lot of those people, and I respect them. I hope that goes both ways. Right now, they’re reduced to making a choice between a very sick version of their position and a very healthy version of ours. They can only be quiet or side with the Crazy Contemptuous Conservatives – Cheney, Limbaugh, even Boehner. That’s not really a choice. They worked hard to finally find a winner. What they got was a loser of Napoleonic proportions. At least Napoleon had his moments in the sun before his fall[s]. Napoleon lost big time and was exiled, but he made a comeback, and got beaten again at Waterloo. The second exile took. Let’s hope Cheney’s "comeback" is not so successful as Napoleon.

I, for one, don’t like feeling the way I do about him. It doesn’t feel like me inside. Even with Nixon, I had a sympathy for his afflictions. I didn’t think of Nixon so much as evil, I thought of him as sick – that tragic character flaw that Aristotle wrote about, the one I’m always quoting. I don’t feel that for Dick Cheney. He fills me with the feelings of Cheney’s World — hate, evil, revenge, suspicion, dispair. I once went to a favorite sitting place and tried to find some part of myself that could see things Cheney’s way. No luck. I can do it with George Bush, but not with Cheney. Recently, I tried another exercise. I thought back over the times in my life when I’ve felt passion about something, and lost [no, not that kind of passion]. I think in the after-time, the wounds were ultimately replaced by a reflective curiosity, and I learned something surprising about myself and my own convictions.

That’s not going to happen with Dick Cheney. There’s an equation that most old psychotherapists hold, whether they know it or not. When you have a patient with whom you can feel absolutely no empathy, no matter how hard you try, you’re dealing with a person who does not have the capacity for empathy himself. If you’ve never felt what I’m talking about, you can go to one of those places that collects such people – like a Prison. There are a lot of such people there. Certainly not all, but enough to get the point. They are untreatable, or at the least they are only heroic attempts at psychotherapy. I’ve both seen and had a few limited successes, but they were very hard won exceptions.

Pro-Democracy Leader Goes on Trial in Myanmar
New York Times
By SETH MYDANS and MARK McDONALD
May 18, 2009

BANGKOK —  Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, went on trial Monday in a mostly procedural hearing as hundreds of police officers and army soldiers blocked crowds of protesters, according to reports from news agencies and opposition exile groups. Several foreign diplomats were also prevented from entering the court where Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi faced charges that could bring a prison term of up to five years, according to the reports. A United States Embassy official was allowed to enter because another defendant in the trial is an American man who swam across a lake early this month and spent a night in Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s house.

Though the American, John Yettaw, apparently acted without her knowledge, his adventure led to charges that she violated the terms of the house arrest that has limited her outside contacts for 13 of the past 19 years. The trial, with its peculiar origin, was the most aggressive action in recent years the ruling junta has taken against Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, who has remained the symbolic leader of an opposition that continues to resurface after repeated crackdowns. Most analysts saw the charges as a pretext for extending her latest six-year term of house arrest in advance of a general election next spring in which the junta aims to formalize the dominance of the military under a new constitution.

Some analysts also say the charges marked the beginning of a broader clampdown on political dissent and pro-democracy figures in advance of the election…

I post this article for a reason other than just my own ongoing interest in Burma. When the riots occurred in 2007, and the monks were marching in the streets, I felt a sense of outrage. How could such oppression and injustice still be going on in a civilized 21st century world? But reading this article today, I couldn’t feel the same way. My mind was immediately drawn to the US torture policy, our other "secret" programs, and the way we invaded Iraq. Those policies have taken something away from me personally, some sense of pride that America represented a vision of hope for the rest of the world.

Over the years of treating traumatized people, I learned to avoid the "healing" metaphor. It’s only useful if you recognize that "healing" often leaves a big ugly scar, or a bad limp, or some other disability that must be adapted to. And that’s not what most people mean. They mean those wonderful things that the body can do with minor to moderate cuts and bruises – make them vanish. In something so big as the Bush Years, that option is unavailable. We’ll not be looking for healing here. But the first order of business is diagnosis.

I was disappointed in the outcome of Patrick Fitzgerald’s Investigation of the Valerie Plame Affair. Fitzgerald did a fine job, but the only standard he had was Criminal Statutes. Given the narrowness of the law about outing a Secret Agent, he couldn’t prove that they knew that she was a Secret Agent when they outed her. So, Fitzgerald couldn’t go after the whole gang, nor could he make the general population aware of all the other sleazy stuff that case contained. The real issue, abuse of power to start a disasterous war, was way too far off of the stage. At the time of Fitzgerald’s Inquiry, many of us lamented that crime was too low a standard to measure the behavior of high officials. I was equally disappointed by the 911 Commission. It revealed a lot, but it operated with incomplete information, and its conclusions, if anything, missed the center of the target. They were more like "regrettable" than "outrageous!"

So back to the goal. As a Progressive/Liberal/Democrat etc., I want all of America to share my chronic outrage at what happened. That’s a wish, but not guaranteed. So what do I think is a reasonable goal? I think it’s reasonable to place the whole story in front of the American people – not the debate about what’s right or wrong – but the facts as they unfolded from the day the Supreme Court elected George W. Bush until the day he went back to Crawford – a parallel narrative of what they said they were doing, and what they actually did [and why]. I hope that given the facts, the consensus is close to what I think. But it might not be and I can live with that. I can’t live with what’s happening now. Back to the medical metaphors, the disease is still raging, undiagnosed.

Treatment comes later. I think that the best way to proceed would be a Commission. "Un-partisan" is impossible. The best hope is "balanced." So it should be composed of people not in the fray. How would one construct such a Commission? I think we have a traditional way of doing that. It’s called Voir Dire. One empanels the best group you can come up with. Then representatives from both sides interview the candidates, and take turns eliminating people until the required number remains. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we’ve come up with so far. While it would be bringing the methodology of the criminal courts to bear on an investigative body, I can’t think of a better way to approach the problem.

Obama Can’t Turn the Page on Bush
New York Times
By Frank Rich
May 16, 2009

^{To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions. That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.}

^{There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists.}

^{… But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.}

^{Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go”…}

AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED

^{The GQ article isn’t the only revelation of previously unknown Bush Defense Department misbehavior to emerge this month. Just two weeks ago, the Obama Pentagon revealed that a major cover-up of corruption had taken place at the Bush Pentagon on Jan. 14 of this year — just six days before Bush left office. This strange incident — reported in The Times but largely ignored by Washington correspondents preparing for their annual dinner — deserves far more attention and follow-up.}

^{What happened on Jan. 14 was the release of a report from the Pentagon’s internal watchdog, the inspector general. It had been ordered up in response to a scandal uncovered last year by David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times. Barstow had found that the Bush Pentagon fielded a clandestine network of retired military officers and defense officials to spread administration talking points on television, radio and in print while posing as objective “military analysts.” Many of these propagandists worked for military contractors with billions of dollars of business at stake in Pentagon procurement. Many were recipients of junkets and high-level special briefings unavailable to the legitimate press. Yet the public was never told of these conflicts of interest when these “analysts” appeared on the evening news to provide rosy assessments of what they tended to call “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”}

^{When Barstow’s story broke, more than 45 members of Congress demanded an inquiry. The Pentagon’s inspector general went to work, and its Jan. 14 report was the result. It found no wrongdoing by the Pentagon. Indeed, when Barstow won the Pulitzer Prize last month, Rumsfeld’s current spokesman cited the inspector general’s “exoneration” to attack the Times articles as fiction. But the Pentagon took another look at this exoneration, and announced on May 5 that the inspector general’s report, not The Times’s reporting, was fiction. The report, it turns out, was riddled with factual errors and included little actual investigation of Barstow’s charges… If the Pentagon inspector general’s office could whitewash this scandal, what else did it whitewash?}

^{In 2005, to take just one example, the same office released a report on how Boeing colluded with low-level Pentagon bad apples on an inflated $30 billion air-tanker deal. At the time, even John Warner, then the go-to Republican senator on military affairs, didn’t buy the heavily redacted report’s claim that Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, were ignorant of what Warner called “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.” The Pentagon inspector general who presided over that exoneration soon fled to become an executive at the parent company of another Pentagon contractor, Blackwater.}

^{The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become…}

^{I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.}

I love President Obama. He’s my favorite of all the choices I’ve been offered in my lifetime. And he’s a kind person, who wants to change the divisive and counterproductive attitudes of America. It’s the right thing to want. But Frank Rich is right, he can’t turn the page on Bush. The chorus is too loud. The information that’s finally coming our way is too disturbing. The persistence of the hate media is too disruptive. But more than that, there’s a fine line between "moving on" and "denial" – the former is laudable, the latter is aiding and abetting. That line was crossed for Obama before he was even in the Senate. It had already happened by the time he got to Washington in 2004.

Obama’s only real choice is to either let this thing proceed as a media war with court cases and Congressional Hearings popping up all over the place, or a Truth Commission to channel all this generated energy. If he waits much longer, the latter won’t be an option.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.

 I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.

Conservatives Map Strategies on Court Fight
New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE
May 16, 2009

If President Obama nominates Judge Diane P. Wood to the Supreme Court, conservatives plan to attack her as an “outspoken” supporter of “abortion, including partial-birth abortion.”

If he nominates Judge Sonia Sotomayor, they plan to accuse her of being “willing to expand constitutional rights beyond the text of the Constitution.”

And if he nominates Kathleen M. Sullivan, a law professor at Stanford, they plan to denounce her as a “prominent supporter of homosexual marriage.”

Preparing to oppose the confirmation of Mr. Obama’s eventual choice to succeed Justice David H. Souter, who is retiring, conservative groups are working together to stockpile ammunition. Ten memorandums summarizing their research, obtained by The New York Times, provide a window onto how they hope to frame the coming debate.

The memorandums dissect possible nominees’ records, noting statements the groups find objectionable on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, the separation of church and state and the propriety of citing foreign law in interpreting the Constitution.

While conservatives say they know they have little chance of defeating Mr. Obama’s choice because Democrats control the Senate, they say they hope to mount a fight that could help refill depleted coffers and galvanize a movement demoralized by Republican electoral defeats.

“It’s an immense opportunity to build the conservative movement and identify the troops out there,” said Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative fund-raiser. “It’s a massive teaching moment for America. We’ve got the packages written. We’re waiting right now to put a name in”…

Now, Abortion and Same Sex Marriage are in the same category. They don’t really represent something specific for a lot of people. They’ve become buzz-words for some version of "our way of life." I know that there are people who hold very strong beliefs about Abortion, but the terms still strike me as having the same codified meaning that Segregation had in times gone by – convenient troop rallying terms.

I don’t know if it works the other way? Do Democrats have prepared lists of talking points for all potential Supreme Court Judges when there’s a Republican President? Are there buzz-words like Abortion and Same Sex Marriage? Do Democrats maybe even use the same buzz-words themselves? Is it "a massive teaching moment for America?" Did we "hope to mount a fight that could help refill depleted coffers and galvanize a movement demoralized by … electoral defeats"? I wouldn’t doubt it…

Kristol: ‘Dick Cheney, Most Valuable Republican.’
ThinkProgress
May 16, 2009

While many Republicans are trying to ditch the legacy of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, one pundit is still clinging to the previous administration. In a column today titled “Don’t Wince. Fight!,” Bill Kristol offers a full-throated defense of Cheney, writing that Republicans cringing at the re-emergence of the former vice president have a “juvenile understanding of political dynamics.” Kristol then prescribes that to regain power, the GOP needs to embrace Bush’s policies and listen to Cheney:

The real question any Republican strategist should ask himself is this: What will Republican chances be in 2012 if voters don’t remember the Bush administration–however problematic in other areas–as successful in defending the country after 9/11? To give this issue away would be to accept a post-Herbert-Hoover-like-fate for today’s GOP. That’s why Republicans should listen carefully when Cheney gives a speech this week in which he’ll lay out the case for the surveillance, detention, and interrogation policies of the Bush administration in the war against terror.

Kristol concludes, “Dick Cheney probably won’t be the glamour quarterback of the Republican comeback. But he’s proving to be a heck of a middle linebacker…”

Bill Kristol is a brilliant guy by report. He was a star in college and holds a prestigeous Harvard Ph.D. where he now teaches Xenophon and Socrates. But his writings run along the lines of this piece, monotonously. He’s the erudite arm to O’Reilly, Hannity, and Limbaugh – to name a few. Somewhere along the line, whatever propelled him to academic stardom became subsumed under "Kristol then prescribes that to regain power, the GOP needs to embrace Bush’s policies and listen to Cheney." Everything he writes is aimed at the consolidation of power.  Here, he’s advertising Cheney’s next move, "a speech this week in which he’ll lay out the case for the surveillance, detention, and interrogation policies of the Bush administration in the war against terror." One wonders what leads someone with his brainpower to become a cheap and predictable publicist for the likes of Bush and Cheney. Could it have been Xenophon that lead him down this path? Like Kristol, Xenophon is mostly remembered for preserving the sayings of others. Xenophon was a particular favorite of Leo Strauss, the Neocons favorite Muse:

Xenophon’s standing as a political philosopher has been defended in recent times by Leo Strauss, who devoted a considerable part of his philosophic analysis to the works of Xenophon, returning to the high judgment of Xenophon as a thinker expressed by Shaftesbury, Winckelmann, and Machiavelli. Strauss’s reading has been heavily criticized, notably by classicist Myles Burnyeat, as attempting to force Socrates into the mould of Strauss’s own philosophical views.

Strauss taught that liberalism in its modern form contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism. The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered. The second type – the "gentle" nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies – was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic "permissive egalitarianism", which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society. In the belief that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy, Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. The resultant study led him to advocate a tentative return to classical political philosophy as a starting point for judging political action.

Is what’s gone on in the Bush administration comparable or worse than what went on in the Nixon administration?

Oh, my God. Much worse. Bush is a true radical. He believes very avidly in executive power. And he also believes that he’s doing the right thing. I think he’s a revolutionary, a Trotsky. He’s a believer in permanent revolution. So therefore he’s very dangerous, because he’s an unguided missile, he’s a rocket with no ability to be educated. You can’t change what he wants to do. He can’t deviate from his policy, and that’s frightening when somebody has as much power as he does, and is as much a radical as he is, and is as committed to democracy — whatever that means — as he is in the Mideast. I really do believe that’s what drives him. That doesn’t mean he’s not interested in oil. But I really think he thinks democracy is the answer…

This seems to be something that Bush has in common with Nixon: the White House ignoring everyone and seeking to become a government unto itself.

One of the things this administration has shown us is how fragile democracy is. All of the institutions we thought would protect us — particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress — they have failed. The courts . . . the jury’s not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn’t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring…

"It feels like somebody has put a dent in something that I naively assumed was invincible – not like the dent of racism, or sexism, or homophobia, or anti-environmentalism, or even conservatism. Those are things I understand. This is another kind of wound – people who want to change the way we do business. People who actually have changed the way we do business. It’s more than political wrangling or posturing. It’s things like infiltrating the Department of Justice and using it for political ends. The same with the Defense Department, having its own foreign policy agenda, setting up its own Intelligence alternative to the C.I.A. It’s ignoring transparency, Separation of Powers, Congress – adding signing statements to every bill Congress passes. It’s having a coordinated propoganda machine in the media that runs 24/7. It really does remind me of the methodology so explicitly laid out in Mein Kompf [which my mother insisted I read].The repartee between factions riding up and down the seesaw of our government is a wild ride, but it’s the kind of ride that moves us forward. It’s still not working right. Now we have a Democratic Party essentially in control, yet the news is about Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, John Boehner, Rush Limbaugh. They are very out by every poll, yet they are still in front of us everyday – setting a tone that makes consensus hard to see even when there is one. So, I worry about the dent this kind of institutionalized corruption has put in our daily lives and how it stays on the front burner with the help of its media arm – divisive, sarcastic, contemptuous, ingenuous, noisy."

But why isn’t there more of an uproar by the public at atrocities committed by American troops? Have people become inured to those stories over the years?

I just think it’s because they are Iraqis. You have to give Bill Clinton his due: When he bombed Kosovo in 1999, he became the first president since World War II to bomb white people. Think about it. Does that mean something? Is it just an accident, or is it an inevitable byproduct of white supremacy? White man’s burden? You tell me what it is, I don’t know…

What’s the main lesson you take, looking back at America’s history the last forty years?

There’s nothing to look back to. We’re dealing with the same problems now that we did then. We know from the Pentagon Papers — and to me they were the most important documents ever written — that from 1963 on, Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon lied to us systematically about the war. I remember how shocked I was when I read them. So . . . duh! Nothing’s changed. They’ve just gotten better at dealing with the press. Nothing’s changed at all.

Greed’s Saving Graces
By George F. Will
May 17, 2009

Greed, we are agreed, is bad. It also is strange. It has long been included among the Seven Deadly Sins, which suggests that it is a universal and perennial facet of the human fabric. But the quantity of it, at least in America, responds to political cycles. Greed grows when Republicans hold the presidency. They did so throughout the 1980s, and no less an authority on probity than American journalism named it the Decade of Greed. Furthermore, everyone knows we are in our current economic pickle because greed, which slept through the Clinton administration, was awakened by the Bush administration’s tax cuts and deregulation. The day after the 2008 elections, the New York Times (see above: probity, authority thereon) ascribed America’s economic unpleasantness to "greed and an orgy of deregulation." The political pendulum swings, so Republicans will capture the presidency now and then, igniting greed revivals. Greed is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. That person is greedy who earns, or wants to earn, more than is seemly. Unseemliness is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. A seller of something we want to buy is greedy if the price he is asking is not reasonable. Unreasonableness is difficult to define, but we know it when we see it.

In the secondary market for tickets to entertainment events, an arena of people sometimes called scalpers, greed exists. So everyone knows that government regulation is required. Everyone except David Harrington, a Kenyon College economist. Writing in Regulation quarterly, he argues that deregulated markets punish greed. Markets know it when they see it.

Studying the Internet site Stubhub, which is owned by eBay, Harrington monitored the secondary market in Ohio State University football tickets for the Oct. 25, 2008, game against Penn State that was attended by a stadium record crowd of 105,711. Stubhub acts as a broker, charging 15 percent from buyers and 10 percent from sellers, who can charge whatever they choose. Generally, a ticket’s value depends on the seat’s location — the lower in the stadium and the closer to the 50-yard line the better. Harrington collected two sets of information, one on Oct. 13, 12 days before the game, the other on Oct. 21, four days before. On Oct. 13 there were 346 sellers offering 682 tickets. Eight days later, 411 sellers were offering 845 tickets. In the interval, Ohio State beat Michigan State and undefeated Penn State beat Michigan, intensifying fans’ interest in the game.

Yet the average price of the tickets offered declined from $359 to $304. This was partly because the quality (seat location) of the remaining tickets declined. Also the number of selling days was becoming smaller. Seats at entertainment events are, like airline seats, a perishable inventory: When the plane takes off, or the game begins, the value of an unsold ticket becomes zero.

A greedy seller – one who priced his tickets too high – was less likely than other sellers were to sell them two weeks before the game. Hence he had to resort to much deeper discounts than others did as game day, and the potential worthlessness of his assets, drew near. The larger the number of seats available in the secondary market, and the more transparent that market is, thanks to the Internet, the more likely it is that greed will be punished…

Actually, would-be price gougers are at the mercy of a public armed with information, which is what markets generate and communicate. Greed is worse than a moral defect; it is a cause of foolish pricing. That is why markets know it when they see it. And when markets are allowed to operate, greed generates its own punishment…

Well here on the right are a couple of things from the Internet. It’s the Dow Jones Index and the housing prices. They absolutely prove Will’s point, that greed generates its own punishment. At issue – whose greed? whose punishment? From where I sit, it looks like it’s their greed and it’s our punishment. In the world of macroeconomics, it seems that the players are sometimes able to transcend Will’s Maxim: "Greed is worse than a moral defect; it is a cause of foolish pricing." In fact, if our recent economic woes are any indicator, the whole problem revolves around the joys and profits of foolish pricing.

Were the forces in the marketplace as simple as those described by Will, he would be correct – the market would take care of itself. We wouldn’t need economists or columnists, for that matter. Demand exceeds supply – the prices go up. Supply exceeds demand, the prices go down. But what of those graphs? Things go spiraling up like wildfire. Things crash with equal ferocity. It didn’t have anything to do with supply or demand, and it sure didn’t fit exactly with, "when markets are allowed to operate, greed generates its own punishment." It had to do with "unseen forces" that grossly manipulated the marketplace, drained it of its value by producing waves of "financial bubbles" [falsely inflated markets], and left it to fend for itself. Those forces have been well documented here and elsewhere.