An open letter to Senator Leahy on the Mukasey nomination

Dear Senator Leahy,

I have read and heard accounts of today’s confirmation hearing for Bush’s candidate for Attorney General, Judge Michael Mukasey. I’ll get right to the point.

You asked Judge Mukasey about the secret Justice Department memo of 2005 that authorized the use of waterboarding (simulated drowning), among other techniques, as interrogation methods. Judge Mukasey responded as follows:

“I'm certainly going to examine the underlying memos and the underlying facts. But I have not been read in—I think that's the Washington expression—to any of the classified information”

Senator, I haven’t read the memo either. I have only read about it in press reports. They all say that the memo claimed that the technique did not rise to the level of torture. I don’t have a law degree, or experience as a federal judge, but if you asked me about waterboarding, I would not give you an answer equivalent to “I’ll get back to you on that.” Waterboarding is torture, period. Anyone with the remotest understanding of the technique and a grain of conscience would say the same.

Any man giving an equivocating answer on that question, indicating that he hasn’t formed an opinion, raises three possibilities in my mind.

He is lying.
He has a stunted moral conscience.
He is uninformed about waterboarding.

Judge Mukasey’s judicial experience with cases involving terrorism and national security makes the last possibility extremely doubtful.

Either of the two remaining possibilities disqualifies him for the post.

I know that his confirmation is supposed to be a “slam dunk,” to borrow a phrase, but please reconsider. If he equivocates now on torture (and, as he has, on habeas corpus and secret surveillance), what will he do with the power of the office? “Better than Alberto Gonzales” is not good enough.

Sincerely,

M.H.

(Update, 10/23/07: Senator Leahy and other members of the Judiciary Committee have sent written questions to Judge Mukasey, describing waterboarding and asking him directly about whether he regards it as torture. Leahy has stated that he will delay any vote on the nomination until he gets an answer. He says that his own vote on the confirmation is in question, along with the votes of other committee members. Is the Senator influenced by the M.H., or is it just a question of great minds thinking alike? Undoubtedly the latter.)

Oil for Yen: the first grain of sand

A grain of sand drops out of place on a steep hillside, hitting two other grains of sand and knocking them out of place. A little slump in the sand evolves, which displaces a pebble. Do I need to elaborate? Eventually the whole hillside comes rumbling down, from sand to boulders.

I think I just saw that grain of sand make its move. The slightly ungrammatical headline in Business Week read, “Japan refiners pay for Iran oil with yen.” Iran wants to lower its holdings of U.S. dollars and so it arranged a deal with the Japanese refiners to pay for the oil in their own currency.

You might well ask, “Why should the Japanese pay for oil in dollars anyway?” The yen is a perfectly convertible internationally traded currency. There is some history involved. (Oversimplification alert – people have written entire books on this bit of history)

Back in 1971, the U.S. government had a big problem. The U.S. was bleeding cash and borrowing to finance the war in Viet Nam and to buy foreign oil. The dollar was backed by gold, pegged at $35 an ounce. Foreign governments started showing up, demanding real gold for their dollars. Of course, there was not 1/35th of an ounce of gold for each and every dollar out in the world, so we had a gold reserve crisis. President Nixon solved this by detaching the dollar from gold and letting it float on the world market. The dollar devalued, and inflation resulted. To counteract this, in the early 1970’s, the U.S. cut a deal with Saudi Arabia, the biggest oil producer in OPEC, to provide military support for the Saudi monarchy in return for the Saudis selling oil only for dollars. Later this agreement was extended to all of OPEC. These agreements established the so-called petrodollar.

Robert Newman explained the petrodollar with a story about the artist Salvador Dali. In his later years, the story goes, Dali never paid a dime when eating out. He would entertain his friends all evening, and when the bill came he would write a check. Then, just before handing it to the proprietor, he would do an original sketch on the back. This made the check more valuable as an artwork than the cost of dinner, and it would never get cashed. So it goes with the dollar. Everybody needs dollars to buy oil, so they keep circulating and seldom come home to the U.S. to buy goods. But what if people started to decide that Dali’s check sketches were worth less than the cost of dinner? His account would be overdrawn almost instantly. If the dollar was no longer necessary to buy oil then dollars would start coming back to the U.S. Our currency would tank, driving oil prices (for us) that much higher.

Some observers have said that Saddam Hussein sealed his fate when he started selling oil for Euros through the oil for food program in 2000. It might help explain our current animosity against Iran. Iran has been taking Euros in payment for oil and is planning to establish its own oil bourse for a few years now, with oil sold for Euros. President Chavez of Venezuela, another non-favorite of this administration, came out in support of this move, and even transferred some of Venezuela's cash reserves out of the dollar.

Of course, Iran can’t sink the dollar all by itself. As long as Saudi Arabia and other major exporters keep demanding dollars, we are relatively safe. However, it is not comforting to think that our financial future depends on the petrodollar. First, it gives OPEC an enormous amount of leverage over us. Second, we are reliant on OPEC maintaining internal discipline, which has already cracked with Iran’s oil for yen move. Third, there is the possibility of an escalating series of opportunistic side deals between non-OPEC exporters and importers in various internationally traded currencies as the dollar declines. This could become a vicious circle, as the declining dollar would drive more oil-exporting countries away. After all, where is it written in stone that there should be only one currency for buying oil? Other commodities sell for an array of currencies in various domestic and international markets.

What I fear is a case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. No oil-producing country wants to upset the political and financial structure that keeps the whole scheme going, but none of them wants to be the last one holding large reserves of devalued ex-petrodollars. As the dollar declines due to our foreign trade and account deficits, and as countries like Iran move away from the dollar for political reasons, others will feel compelled to hedge their bets with other currencies. From the grain of sand to the house-sized boulders, the whole hillside could come thundering down.

(For more resources on the petrodollar warfare debate, try this Wikipedia entry.)

Nuclear Push Poll

I was just on the receiving end of the most blatant and egregious push poll you can imagine. For those of you not familiar with the term, a push poll is essentially an advertisement disguised as an opinion poll. For example, in a congressional race an unscrupulous candidate might commission an attack poll with questions such as “If you knew that congressman John Spineless voted for a bill to lower penalties for child molesters, would you be more or less likely to vote for him?”

The phone rang just after the dinner hour and a woman identified herself as working for the Charlton Research Group.

She asked a few questions about my demographics, plus some questions about how much I knew about the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and its corporate owner, Entergy. There were a few questions about the recent collapse of part of the Vermont Yankee cooling towers. Then the woman started in with a seemingly endless stream of propaganda.

"Entergy has won the Blah-blah-blah Corporate Responsibility Award for an unprecedented sixth year in a row, blah blah blah. Does this make you feel more or less positive about the relicensing of Vermont Yankee? Somewhat or strongly?" "Vermont Yankee provides 218 high paying jobs amounting to (some millions) in payroll per year in Vermont. Does this make you feel more or less positive about relicensing Vermont Yankee?" And so on, and so on, with seemingly endless “Isn’t Entergy wonderful?” questions about baseload power, redundant safety systems, their security force, carbon savings, needing cheap power to keep jobs and our kids in Vermont and on and on. I was waiting for something like “Since Entergy’s CEO is God’s anointed representative on earth…..”

At one point I called the game and pointed out what was going on. The woman on the other end, obviously just trying to make a minimal buck making phone calls, asked me to be patient and told me that my opinion was important. The stream of propaganda was fascinating as well as frustrating, so I persevered.

She had asked me my opinion of relicensing at the beginning, and asked me again at the end, testing the effect of the propaganda assault. Nope. Strongly oppose.

After wishing her a good evening I did a web search on the Charlton Group. They have an impressive client list, including oil companies, chemical companies, agribusiness, tobacco interests, and timber companies. They also have done work for organizations with names such as “Alliance for Reasonable Regulations,” and “Association of California Tort Reform.” In other words, corporate astroturf efforts to gut environmental laws and trample ordinary people. There were a few friendly names in there such as the American Lung Association, but it was mostly corporate PR.

Part of the Charlton Research portfolio is “Issue Management” and “Crisis Management.” I suppose that with a cooling tower collapse in the news and relicensing in play Entergy decided that some crisis management was needed. In practice the “poll” was a clumsy effort. I got fed up with the nonsense less than half way through. I imagine that most Vermonters would lose patience as well.

The State and the power companies need to recognize that Vermont Yankee is a stopgap power source at best. It is a present liability in terms of operational safety and a future liability in terms of radioactive waste storage. Eventually people will realize that our grandchildren’s’ grandchildren will still be tending to those spent fuel rods in Vernon. An aging, overstressed nuclear reactor is not an asset, no matter how many push polls Entergy buys.

Failure

These are depressing, frustrating times for a lot of people. Those of us with a progressive perspective on things tend to feel especially thwarted. For those of you who see your place in this country as being shackled to huge muscular moron bent on destruction, self and otherwise, I offer a real life parable.

Just about anybody who has had a high school education in this country has read the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. The second version, that is. No copy of the first version survives. We only know of it by reading the commentary of Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

Apparently it was a major piece of crap.

And a flop.

One line became a running gag among the wags of Elizabethan London. As far as we can tell, Shakespeare had a much more prominent role for the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who popped up like a white-powdered jack-in-the-box and recited the line “Hamlet, revenge!” ad nauseam. Young Bill was a theatrical joke. (Steven Spielberg learned this lesson during the previews of Jaws. The mechanical shark leapt and chomped so regularly in the first cut that people started to giggle at it.)

So, Shakespeare got discouraged, went back to Stratford on Avon to take up his father’s glove-making business, and didn’t go on to become the greatest dramatist in the history of the English language.

Oh, and for those of you who believe that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays (despite the fact that he died before ten of them ever were produced): That was when Eddie said “Sod it” and went back to pederasty, sucking up to the Queen, flogging the servants, and whatever else passed for light entertainment among the nobility.

John Holt, in his excellent book How Children Fail, wrote that babies have no concept of failure. A child tries to learn to walk by repeated failed attempts. The kid grabs on to something, wobbles to an upright position, lets go, and falls on its ass. Then it does this again. And again. Eventually it manages a few steps, and pretty soon you have to keep a constant eye on the kid. No baby ever decided that it was a worthless failure and spent the rest of its life crawling.

Granted, there is physical and physiological reality. People with a higher percentage of slow twitch muscles will make better marathoners. Good luck with that perpetual motion machine. But within the bounds of natural talent, physical capability, and the laws of physics there is a lot of room for maneuvering.

There was a kid at my school who had what professionals might call a “defiant oppositional” problem. Ok, he had a hell of an attitude. When someone told him he had to do something and he really didn’t want to comply he would say, “All I gotta do is die.” In a way it is a concise piece of existential wisdom. The only real restrictions on your life are the laws of physics and the resulting chemical processes that end in your eventual death. Everything else is cultural programming, personal preference, and the consequences that you are willing to live with. Or, to put it another way, the most high security prison in the world is between your ears.

And no, I’m not one of those dupes who paid good money for “The Secret” and are wasting their time trying to wish things into existence. I’ll quote someone with a better attitude, a neighbor of mine: “The harder I work and the smarter I act, the luckier I get.”

Failure is a momentary condition. Life is an ongoing condition. Take a lesson from Shakespeare and keep going.

Sneering at the French

I am still getting emails with snide jokes about the French. You’d think that since the re-revision of the congressional cafeteria menu from Freedom Fries back to French Fries, that whole thing would have died away.

If we are to dislike the French, then let us do so on a realistic basis: envy rather than condescension. How should we envy the French?

First, on the basis of the situation that started it all. The French are not mired down in Iraq. They thought that the WMD claims were nonsense, that Iraq was contained, and that the invasion was a bad idea. It turns out they were right. (Note: Some of us on this side of the Atlantic realized this at the time as well.) Their government is not bankrupting itself into the pockets of corrupt contractors. Their army is not being stretched to the breaking point. There are a couple of thousand French troops in Afghanistan, a few thousand sprinkled around Africa and South America, and a few thousand unfortunates stationed on islands in the Caribbean. The rest of the French Army is stationed in France, smoking Gauloises and looking cool in designer uniforms.

Free time.

The French take five-week paid vacations. Yes, five weeks, when most Americans fight for two. There would be a crippling general strike in France if this were reduced to four. I have heard that the French lunch hour has actually been reduced to an hour in some cases, but they still drink wine with the meal. Somehow, their economy survives. Please note that in a list including even moderately industrialized countries, only the U.S. has no minimum required paid vacation time. The Finns get seven weeks off from making our cellphones – envy them more.

Decent food.

The French simply would not accept the swill that is shoveled at Americans over Formica counters. France is a country with four hundred varieties of cheese, innumerable vineyards, and artisanal bakers on every corner. The French have specialty and sub-specialty shops dealing in what we would consider gourmet foodstuffs but what they consider the very least a civilized person could expect. Sure, there are McDonalds, but even their McDonalds are better than ours.

Better health.

The World Health Organization rates the U.S. healthcare system (if you could call it that) 37th, right ahead of Slovenia and just behind Costa Rica. France? Numero un. (Number one.) Even with all that rich food (see above) they have a higher average life expectancy. Their death rate from heart disease is 63% lower than ours, despite a higher rate of animal fat consumption. Some researchers think that all that wine drinking might protect their hearts.

The American Dream.

This is the kicker. There is a measure studied by sociologists called intergenerational income mobility. This is the mathematical relationship between the income of one generation and the next. If this is 1, it means that parental income absolutely determines the income of the next generation and there is no upward mobility whatsoever. If it is 0, then there is no parent/child income relationship, indicating an absolutely socioeconomically fluid society. France beats us at what is supposedly our own game, 0.36 to 0.61. A young French person has a far better chance than a young American of earning more than his or her parents.

The French are ahead of us in many ways, including our much vaunted social mobility. The facts of French life throw American exceptionalism back in our faces. For the flag-waving set this must be exceptionally painful. And then, of course, there is their condescension towards us. Perhaps well deserved.