Can you reconcile these views on Pakistan?

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/05152009/watch.html


http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/05/18/world/asia/18nuke.html?s=3



Apparently, an US Army colonel seems to do just this, from Afghanistan, of all places:

“Unless Pakistan’s leaders commit, in deeds and words, their country’s armed forces and security personnel to eliminating the threat from militant extremists, and unless they make it clear that they are doing so, for the sake of their own future, then no amount of assistance will be effective,” Mr. Levin said.

Yes, Mr. Levin, you are indeed right. But, to eliminate all the militant extremists would require nothing less than a genocide, or at least the guantanamoesque internment of hundreds of thousands of sympathizers and followers for generations to come. Do you have the stomach for that, good Sir?

The Islamic fundamentalist movement is growing rapidly in that region, not shrinking, and the main reason is because of the perceived inequity and injustice of the system in which the so-called extremists live.

Pakistan has too many poor, hungry, jobless, and very misguided men, young and old, who are offered nothing from their secular government and everything from their religious zealots. Simply put, they're winning the PR campaign, in both deeds and words, as you so perspicaciously put it, Mr. Levin.

And we will never, never, never win them over with guns and bombs and death and destruction. We're merely pouring fuel into flames which are only going to get higher and higher... and more and more widespread.

This is serious business, Mr. Levin, and Washington needs serious, honest, and WISE solutions - not status quo geo-political maneuverings that are leading us in only one direction: nuclear holocaust.

Stop fighting them, stop killing them. You can't and won't kill them all, but the more you kill, the more sympathizers you create within their "mainstream" society, and one of these sympathizers just may someday be one of the tens of thousands of Pakistanis involved in their nuclear arms production.

Actually, it really is only a matter of time before the enemy gets his hands on the bomb. Throughout the course of history no weapon, no matter how big or small or how well-guarded, has been prevented from proliferating around the globe - humans love to kill each other far too much for that.

But nuclear warfare is a different kind of killing all together, isn't it now? It is the great equalizer, in the Cold War it was the even the perfect peacemaker, and today it is the slothfully surfacing nightmare, the slippery serpent that strikes when least expected. And millions and millions and millions will die, perhaps of their people, and perhaps of ours as well...

Unless, of course, we do the right thing. Come to the realization that western-style freedom and democracy will never take root in Islamic societies due to their religious doctrine... and then leave: militarily, politically, even economically. Just walk away... and dry them up so that they can't spend billions and billions of American dollars on the bomb, which they will surely pursue, no matter how much handshaking and grinning you politicians do.

Perhaps it's time we change our perception of the geo-political realities in the world and respond accordingly.

— Col. Michael Stone, Jalalabad, Afghanistan

What do you think, another setup?

on Cheney's positions about Obama and torture

...even on the outside chance Cheney is right that torture, warrantless wiretapping and dismantling of habeas corpus make us safer.......so what?

Who ever promised it would be safe to be an American? It was not safe for the Founding Fathers or the colonists to wage revolution. It was not safe for Lincoln to fight for the Union. Do we really want to be the first generation of Americans to be too scared to stand up for the Constitution?

The Constitution only stands so long as Americans are willing to die for it. What Cheney proposes, an American populace with so little courage that they would cast aside the Constitution to save their necks, is the lowest form of treason.

— 10K walker, New York


George Lucas had it right when asked if Cheney was Darth Vadar. He responded that Cheney was more evil than Vadar, who had been turned to the dark side, but retained an awareness of of its evil. No, Cheney is that much darker, unambiguously evil figure---the Emperor of Evil himself. Cue the Death Star music!

— calyban, Fairfax, California


Cheney and Bush were bin Laden's most valuable force multipliers. I truly believe Cheney was mentally incompetent to serve in office, although that apparently put him right in the center of the Bell curve for GOP leadership.

For at least seven years, this country stopped being the United States, and became Vichy America. Until we take an honest accounting, the social, economic and political forces which took us there remain.

I'm not interested in retribution. I want to see us recover and thrive again. I want my media and airwaves back. I want corporate brand names erased from public places and bowl games. I want pharmaceutical companies to quit marketing and start discovering. I want banking to be boring again, and creative financing to be erased from the face of the earth. I want work and innovation to be the way we make a living.

I guess I want the Reagan revolution to be understood for the hubris it really was.

— Steve R, Phoenix, AZ


Cheney is behaving the way he is because he knows that he is culpable for America's use of torture. The only way to distract Americans from this simple statement of fact - and to escape indictment - is to wrap himself and his actions in patriotism.

How shallow, yet how effective. The discussion has shifted away from whether or not torture is wrong and criminal (it is) to whether or not we should torture people to protect our country (ironic).

I hope that Cheney's sleight of hand, which so effectively coerced us into the war in Iraq, is brought to light by the media, government investigations, and prosecutions.

— Pangaea, NYC


Power is so hard to give up. When you amass it like this it rots your mind and hardens your heart. I wouldn't be too shocked if I heard that Cheney ate his dogs for dinner the day our troops finally withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving his Halliburton stranded and his Brown and Root digging holes with their tongues for a so-called pipeline.

That presidency was all about fuel, and we are reaping those benefits with a 50-year-old infrastructure, a broken health care system, a retrograde education and rampant foreclosures.

Those were the easiest 8 years. No need to make improvements and become more cultured and open-minded. We were attacked and that was the end of progress.

We betrayed our grandchildren. We crushed their eco-system, stomped on two sovereign countries, then treated the Europeans like maggots. "Call them 'Liberty Fries!'" - was the rant of the day.

The 43rd Presidency was the oil industry commodity. Ironically, gas is cheap and we hardly manufacture cars worth driving with it.

But let's not be so pessimistic. Despite those Dark Ages of Bushisms, Cheneyisms and Cronyism, a brilliant man emerged, took over the White House, mended our economy, closed Guantánamo, befriended the Iranians and the Cubans and much much more. He even built a library dedicated to the first 100 days! And possibly placed those "radicals" like Tom DeLay and Gonzalez behind bars.

Power is so fleeting. Cheney is witless scared and has to come out and ruin the honeymoon for all of us. "We are so unsafe" , so exposed, so unprotected, it's as if the only friend he had in the world were a criminal: Scooter Libby.

But where is Cheney getting his intelligence?

— Jackie, Austin


Former Gov Jesse Ventura said it best on Larry King the other night - Give me a water board Dick Cheney and 1 hour and I will have Cheney confessing to the Sharon Tate murders - But I don't think it would take a hour - more like 1 minute

— Michael, Hastings MN

Susan P. Koniak on Neel Kashkari

Last night Mr. Kashkari appeared on Charlie Rose for the full hour. Anyone who listened carefully would have been disabused of any illusion that the administration has a strategy or is competently managing this crisis. As Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, repeatedly says there are 3 options for dealing with the banks: 1) open-ended subsidization (and smushing the facts, the strategy Paul Krugman describes as the wait-and-hope-the-banks-heal-themselves strategy); 2) liquidation (Krugman's let-them-fail); or 3) restructuring (what most people, I think, mean when they use the term nationalization--a temporary government takeover, change in management, plan to get the bad assets off the books and reselling healthier banks into private sector).



Obama's Wall St. status-quo team has chosen option one open-ended subsidization without an exit strategy (except hope for an unlikely quick turnaround) and without an energetic, plan for reform that would fix what went wrong. Consider that the Fed and Treasury are intent on restarting the securitization markets without fixing ANYTHING about those instruments (there is much to fix) that makes manipulation of them easy, risk taking likely, and another calamity down the road.

Last night Mr. Kashkari's explanation for why option 3 (restructuring/temporary nationalization) was a non-starter amounted to this: Krugman and everyone else on the "outside"--all those not sitting in my chair or Geithner's or presumably Summer's--cannot possibly understand the "nuances" that make their "simple" solutions so unworkable. What nuances did he mention? Here are some examples: If you nationalize bank A or banks A,B and C, why not D or why wouldn't the market have a run on D fearing they'd be next? If the vague term "nationalization" means owning a majority of common stock, do we make all debt holders whole? Would the govt take on all liabilities too?

These are not "nuances," they are fundamental questions, one's anyone who advocates restructuring BEGINS with. More important, none of them are big bang theory difficult. The hardest thing about them is political. It's long past time Obama used those out-size political gifts of his to lead with honesty about the economy, hard choices and concrete (not rosy pronouncements). It's long past time he stopped trusting the architects of the current mess, like Summers and Geithner, and hunker down himself.


— Susan P. Koniak, Boston University School of Law

view from the (in-)side

I am very afraid. As one of the people "in the trenches" (full disclosure, I am an attorney, and I represent numerous people who are trying to work out short sales with their mortgage holders), I can see where the banks are counting on making their profits. And, in my opinion, it is not a method that is moral, ethical, and may border on illegal. For example, one of the banks in the stress test (I will avoid using names, since I don't want to be sued) holds a first and second mortgage on one of my client's homes. The first mortgage is serviced by the bank for Freddie Mac, the second mortgage is held in house. We worked out an agreement for the first mortgage holder to take all of the net proceeds from the sale, less approximately $3,000.00, which they would allow the second mortgage to be paid. The second mortgage holder wants $10,000.00. The second mortgage holder has recommended that my client just make "a prepayment of principal of $7,000.00 on their mortgage, prior to closing" in order to accomplish this. The reason for this deception is that Freddie Mac has made it clear that as the primary mortgage holder, they are entitled to all of the money available first. Only after they are paid in full, will they allow the junior lienholders to get any money. That the second mortgage holder knows that what they are asking amounts to 1. a breach of the bank's fiduciary duty to Freddie Mac; 2. potential RESPA violations; and 3. potentially a fraud on Freddie Mac is obvious to me, since they will not put anything in writing! When I pointed out that their request bordered on bank fraud, they claimed not, and that they would get me their in house counsel's opinion to that effect. Never happened.
IMO, what is happening is that these negotiators are being given strict marching orders to get as much money out of the worthless second mortgages as possible (this is one of the banks that is required to raise additional capital). Quite possibly, they are given bonuses based upon the money that they collect each month, which naturally (just like the money they made for putting together risky deals) puts them in the position of making questionable decisions.
This is just more cards on top of the house of cards that is falling. We need regulation, and quite frankly, we need our President to appoint a special prosecutor to look into all of the fraud and deception that went on in the previous administration's oversight of the banking industry, and have people put in jail.

— pjpmgb, Destin, FL

The Great Depression 2.0 to come later...

Perhaps this isn't the Great Depression 2.0, but really the Panic of 1907 2.0 with the Great Depression 2.0 to come later.

At this point, I've lost count on how many trillions of dollars we've given to financial institutions to cover for all their unorthodox investment practices.

What if we would have given those trillions to the bottom 75% of the people who paid income tax? It seems to me the surge in demand would have inflated asset values necessary to make the banks sound.

Ah, but that would have meant giving the median worker money. God forbid we do something like that!

The fundamental problem is the median wage has not gone up in 35 years, while GNP went up 150%.

There isn't enough real demand to help prop up asset values and there isn't enough demand relative to supply to allow investors to make reasonably good returns on orthodox investments.

Because the median worker hasn't gotten a raise in 35 years and GNP has gone up 150%, trillions and trillions of dollars have gone to the 'supply side' of the ledger of our society.

Those supply-siders are supposed to invest, we were told by Ronald Reagan and his ilk, in building factories, businesses and the like to create jobs for the rest of us. Those are the 'orthodox' investment practices.

But what happens when there is no demand? Do the supply-siders go off and build a factory anyway?

Of course not. They are driven by the desire to make good returns. This has two negative effects - it causes bubbles and it induces unorthodox investment practices.

Since their is no demand, supply-side investing rich start eye-balling the unorthodox investment practices they've been roped off from through regulation. Since building a factory won't generate a good return, they want to make payday loans, credit card loans, subprime loans and a host of other things they dream up.

Meanwhile, if some small segment of the economy comes along and starts generating decent returns, like say, a new technology, which brings with it its own latent demand and so reasonable returns, the 'supply-side' money rushes to it like moths to a light bulb, flooding that sector and thus creating a bubble.

Investment bubbles are a sign that society, the economy, have past the 'supply-side' saturation point. That's where we were in 1999 - when the supply-side was at least ten trillion dollars poorer than it is now.

In the mean time, because investors are rich and powerful and relentless at trying to get at unorthodox 'investing' the government eventually relents. Then its just a matter of time before the meltdown and/or implosion begins.

But it all goes back to the supply versus demand economics. When you have too much demand (inflation), supply-side bias policies make sense. Whoopee, then, lets give money to the rich! That was 1979. Such policies were played and should have been turned off by 1985. By 1987 we had signs of supply-side saturation, junk bonds, the savings and loan debacle and Black Friday (or was it Monday). By 1999 we were well past "supply-side saturation" and the bubbles and deregulation efforts confirmed all of this. Yet President Bush spent the next 8 years moving perhaps as much as another $11 trillion dollars over to the supply-side (now that's audacity!) like a drunk with a suicide bent. Making the situation worse. The financial bailout so far has been the same thing - giving more trillions of dollars to the same people Ronald Reagan began giving money to 29 years ago: the supply-side, investing uber-rich.

Throughout all of this I've heard no serious talk anywhere about demand economics - even though demand is the obvious problem.

Why?

Because that means giving more bargaining power (and thus money) to the average Joe at the expense of the investing rich. Gasp! The horror of that!

The average Joe doesn't have a powerful lobbyist working for him. He has only the ballot box which amounts to one day of influence every two years.

The problem today is the concentration of wealth in Wall Street has lead to the concentration of power there as well. The power is so great and so concentrated that neither Obama, nor Republicans, nor congressional Democrats can chance ignoring Wall Street very long, if at all, while they are willing to ignore Main Street with the possible exception of the first Tuesday of every other November. (A good dose of advertising, culture wars and false news hysteria can make half of Main Street forget where it's true interest lies anyway.)

Our economic problems won't end until median wages go up.

The Great Depression dragged on for 10 long years (in most developed countries it was over by 1935) in the United States. Then still, it took a world war to generate demand side economics. I'm not sure if even a world war would shake things up this time around.

This brings to mind a famous quote by Winston Churchill: "American's always do the right thing, after having tried everything else first."

Tim Kane, Mesa, Arizona

Condolezza Rice Doublespeak(s)

She's an academic at Stanford University, just as Douglas J. Feith at Georgetown. What are the Bush people doing to these universities?