Author Archives: oinsketta

Who Zaskin’?

It’s a funny thing, in a way, writing here.  I like to write, and I write everyday anyway, mostly in the form of smoke signals sent via emails that blow away in the virtual breeze.   Hopefully what I’m writing will be of interest or help to someone, but, it’s still a funny thing, to be writing here.

Admittedly not “ha-ha” funny, you know.  I mean, here and there I have a little jest, like pretending to love Paris Hilton (though she was very endearing with her boyfriend in that video, I truly thought), or calling for the Republicans to let Dick Cheney speak at their convention.  But these are, admittedly, very little jests, more gestures of a jest than jesters in their own right.

Outside, some St. John’s students have a powerful speaker mounted and they are blasting what sounds like a witless live or robot DJ, punctuating the pulsating beat music at exactly the wrong moments.  If Kissinger rapped this is what he’d sound like.   Outside the window of Sekhnet’s bedroom St. John’s University has placed a red banner with a cross and the words Ecce Agnus placed where Christ’s heart would be.  I assumed, incorrectly that the Latin meant “behold the agony” but it means “behold the lamb of God”.  Either way, we are wondering what it is doing on a public lamppost, positioned to be seen from our bed.

At the university the beat goes on.  I’m wondering who I’m actually writing to, as I also wonder “who zaskin’?”

Let Dubya Speak!

Oh, you fickle, hard-hearted Republicans!  How quickly you cast aside the charismatic wartime commander and two-term president who, one sunny September day in 2001, after an unprecedented catastrophe on our Homeland, set the US and world record for American presidential popularity.

Sure, his popularity may have declined slightly after that day in September 2001, when it soared from 51% to 90%, and you can track the graph here, but what happened to your famous loyalty?   Republicans are known for sticking together through thick and thin.  Look at your 100% opposition to the Democratic president during these last four years.

I say, Let Dubya Speak.  Or, if not Dubya, at least let Dick Cheney have his say, I say.  OK, maybe not Cheney, who left office at a 13% approval rating, after mixed approval for his  visionary patriotic stance during his two terms.  Come to think of it, Bush left at 22%.  But it still doesn’t excuse you for excluding him from your convention, in my book.  Many of the people who opposed him were Independents, Democrats, Undecideds and worse.

Let Dubya Speak!

Political Research 2

I really don’t have the stomach for it today (a surgeon’s scalpel yesterday is but one reason) but I would love to write a 500 word post that I could send to the Grey Skank, America’s paper of record, and see as an op-ed.   Those 500 words would lay out the numbers, in the frame of that Political Research post of the other day.  The numbers need to be laid out as simply and directly as possible, and be from a source like the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

They would provide a quick view of  the last twelve years of the budget deficit.   Every year’s deficit, it appears, gets added to the national debt, a sum now over fifteen trillion dollars.  When George W. Bush became president, for example, there was a record budget surplus of  236.4 billion dollars $236,400,000,000.00.  I am relying on this website as my source, though I have no idea who Dave Maunel is, except that his site, according to him, is referenced by the NY Times, PBS, CNNMoney.com and others.  Suspiciously missing from his list are such trusted news sources as Fox News and The Onion.  The reader should take that into account.

But if we take Dave Manuel’s numbers as true, and we assume the NY Times would fact check an op-ed at least as scrupulously as they checked Judith Miller’s stories about Saddam having WMD, we see that in the first year of President George W. Bush’s administration there was a surplus of 127.3 billion or $127,300,000,000.00, more than half of the surplus of the year before.   The following year, as the War on Terror began, and the first round of The Bush Tax Cuts kicked in, there was a record budget swing of  285.1 billion dollars.  The deficit for fiscal 2002 was 157 billion dollars.

It is hard to conceptualize how much money a billion dollars is.  Take a minute to look at this wonderful animation to get an idea, on the way to a trillion, in stacks of hundreds.

The Bush administration, never running a deficit lower than 162 billion, set a record for U.S. budget deficits in 2008, 455 billion dollars.  It would seem that Bush’s $700,000,000,000.00 stimulus package (TARP) to Wall Street, to prevent its collapse after the mortgage backed derivatives scandal, was not included in that 2008 deficit.  If it had been part of the 2008 fiscal budget, it would have more than doubled the 2008 deficit, to well over a trillion dollars.

Then we have President Barack Hussein Obama, who, although unanimously opposed by Republicans, doubled down on the TARP bailout, and promptly shattered the record deficit of his predecessor by racking up an unconscionable 1.42 trillion dollar deficit for fiscal 2009.  Let’s look at that one in numbers:  $1,416,000,000,000.  Nuff said?

Till the next time, boys and girls.

(454 words)

The Dog Still Cries

The suffering dog is still crying two hours later, now under brilliant sunshine.  I made my way through the wet leaves to see if he was OK.  “Hey, Hercules, are you OK?” I called and he stopped crying for a moment, turned briefly to regard me with sad, wolfish eyes.  A second later he resumed his post at the gate, mewling with all his heart.

I called the neighbor, Joe, a native Chinese speaker with a working knowledge of English. I introduced myself and told him his dog was in the backyard crying for the last two hours.

“My daughter?” he asked with great concern.

“No, no. Hercules,” I said.

“Ah, he is crying cause I put him in the cage.  I have people coming to the yard.  He doesn’t like to be in the cage, but I had to put him in because I don’t want trouble, you know?  So he’s crying to get out of the cage,” Joe said, then imitated the exact cry of his watchdog.  Then he thanked me several times and told me he’d call his wife, tell her to let the dog out now.

Sekhnet was relieved when I called to give her the news.  The dog is still filling the humid afternoon with his soulful calls.

Political Research: Who Owns the Deficit?

This post is in the process of revision, as I struggle through more conflicting facts and figures.  I wish the numbers were simpler, smaller, easier to make a point about.  The complexity, of course, is as much the problem as the sure-handed oversimplifications that are often offered instead of real discourse.  I’ll give a heads up in a later post when I’ve learned enough to make this as comprehensive and understandable as I’d like it to be.

DRAFT ONE

There are two numbers that should be part of the discussion as a TV hypnotized America goes about choosing a new president.  2.4 trillion dollars– the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan plus the Bush tax cuts to the top 5%  (see below) and 1.1 trillion dollars, the projected deficit for 2012 (see fair and balanced source).  These numbers are largely unknown while politicians negotiate over how to economize on a scaled down New Deal safety net without raising additional revenues during these hard economic times.  

Why don’t Americans know these numbers?

The amount being spent for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, (excluding the projected cost of long term care for thousands of grievously disabled twenty and thirty year-old veterans) is $1,367,222,688,159 and counting — (source:  http://costofwar.com  )  Note that this figure excludes long term cost of caring for wounded veterans, which probably more than doubles the number.  A study at Brown University concluded the total cost of the wars will be as much as 4 trillion.

Lost revenue in tax breaks to the the top 5% of Americans during the more than decade of the Bush Tax Cuts:  $1,034,424,338,581, with 70% of that, or 700 billion dollars, going to the top 1%. (source)

This sum, wars plus tax cuts, a conservative two trillion four hundred billion dollars, must be part of any serious discussion of the deficit and how to fix it.   This 2.4 trillion should be a number every American can cite when discussing the responsibility of our current president for the grim economic backdrop to what Bill Moyers referred to as the auction for the presidency.

But further research shows how difficult it is to present the exact numbers that all Americans should know.  The 2012 deficit is different than the cumulative deficit, which is different than the national debt.   Look at this graph, if you want your head to spin, 

We talk in terms of billions, we might as well be talking in terms of gazillions or quadrillions.  These abstractions are so large that the eight or nine billion dollars that disappeared in Iraq, under the watchful nose of  L. Paul Bremmer III,  Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, early in the occupation of Iraq, slips quietly under the radar while politicians seriously debate cutting the heating subsidies to just over the poverty line old people here in the US.  It would save millions of dollars, they argue.  And old people can always put on sweaters, scarves, hats, gloves, parkas, etc.  It’s easier to stay warm than to stay cool, think of it that way.

Partisans of Mr. Romney, including PAC-genius Karl Rove, the man our previous president called “The Architect” ( as well, apparently, as “Turd Blossom”) will begin waving the flag to beat the band as they speak quickly of how the Bush administration saved us all from certain destruction by Al Qaeda (there was no second catastrophic terrorist attack on their watch, after all) and rewarded the job-creators by giving them even more incentive to create jobs.  

Then they’ll quickly change the subject, since George W. Bush, for all the good he did for his constituency, is not the poster child for smaller, smarter government, nor any kind of fiscal conservative.  And, if pressed, they might be tempted to concede that Mr. Bush did drain the record surplus and run up a record deficit like a car collecting trust fund baby in a Rolls Royce dealership buying one in every color, before helicoptering off to the Porsche dealer.

As Bill Moyers pointed out, during the excitement among many after Obama’s election as president, Barack Obama will disappoint.  Every president does, he continued.  No sadder, truer words were spoken about that election.  I have often wondered about the forces that constrain the president, a great salesman and educator, from educating and selling higher goals and policies than the ones he’s shot for.

“He doesn’t want to get shot,” says one friend.

“He doesn’t want to piss off his top supporters on Wall Street, he needs their millions for the billion dollar reelection campaign he’s going to have to wage,” says another.

“He is a pragmatist,” says another.

“He doesn’t stand for real change, he stands, like anyone with the backing to become president, for the status quo,” says another.

Be assured that Karl Rove will do everything in his considerable power to make Mitt Romney the next president of the United States.  His former protegee will be left quietly on the sidelines, since discussion of his record would cloud the primary issue: that radical Barack Obama is a weak and misguided president who got us into this terrible financial mess and then had only failed ideas for how to get us out of it.

Demographic mystery

As I’ve noted, I tend to look at the “stats” for this blahg a few times a day.  I see how many times my writer friend in Gaj, Poland appears as a dot on the map of Europe, how many of my countrymen have checked in.  The slope of readers is a sliding pond down, tapering toward the zero sum many see life as.

“And if I suddenly had 20,000 readers a day?” I ask myself, “how would that change my life?”  Then I realize, it would be succulent data I could provide to a publisher to show they could sell my writing.  How would that change my life?  A nice thought.  

But as readership clings to single digits I ponder another mystery.  I’ve had a few visits by strangers.  I don’t know how they find their way to the posts, but four have pressed the “like” button and invited me to their sites.  Each of those four was interesting.  But here’s the mystery:

Yesterday I wrote something about false dichotomies, Line and Color.  I hit “publish” sometime around 1:30 pm.  Shortly afterwards I had two emails informing me that two people, with blahgs of their own, liked the piece.  I was gratified, visited their blahgs, was pleased to meet them.  Yet, when I checked my stats later, neither of these Americans showed up.   Three views, all from Gaj and nearby Krakow, Poland, as my writer friend made his rounds with his laptop.

A demographic mystery, I would say.

The dog cries in the rain

The Chinese couple who live in the house behind the garden kept two watchdogs in an outdoor run.  The dogs were there in every kind of weather.  One of the dogs died about a year ago.  The remaining one is fairly quiet, not much barking comes from there anymore.  You occasionally see a feral cat perched on the top of the dog’s enclosure, he doesn’t seem to mind.

The couple came from China, literally escaped from China.  They’ve made a good life in America, working hard in a busy contracting business, they own two adjacent houses they have fixed up beautifully.   The dog run is behind the house they rent out.  They exchanged bemused smiles about Sekhnet’s and my attachment to the feral cats who used to live in the garden.  In hard times in China cat is good for a decent stew, not to walk around your house, seemed to be their attitude.

The sky turned grey just now and rain began pelting down.  I sat at the computer for my daily tapping, an hour or so where I feel in control in an out of control world.  As the cold rain began the dog in his coverless run began to cry.  He is crying as I write, piteous howling cries.  He is not barking, he is crying, inconsolably.  Moaning helplessly, the sobs really are terrible to hear.  He’s baying, imploring someone to let him in out of the rain.  He’s an old dog, soaked to the skin, and he’s cried continuously as I write these words.

“Don’t tell me about it,” said Sekhnet, on the verge of tears when I called to tell her about it.  “They must not be home,” she said.

A nice thought, that they aren’t home.  They’re such nice people, I’d hate to think they could ignore the cries of their dog, even if he is just a guard and something without a soul to them.

Meantime, anyone hearing the sorrowful song this dog is singing would know instantly about the soul inside, suffering like any sentient being and appealing helplessly for help.  I wish I had some way to help the poor guy, though he’d probably be too upset, and proud, not to bark at me and show his teeth if I approached through the wet leaves with a pancho for him.  Not that he’d wear a pancho anyway.

A Story About Politics

Humans are hungry for a story.  I’m not saying anything you don’t know.  A speaker who does not incorporate a few stories is a very dry speaker indeed.  When we hear even a lying politician say “let me tell you a story…” we are momentarily attentive.  Every ad we see tells a little story.  Stories are how we learn about life.

No less an expert than Adolf Hitler (no matter how we may hate the success he had, none can doubt the magnitude of that success) emphasized the importance of story in creating a community of believers.  He was constantly creating the myth, constantly reinforcing the worldview founded on that myth, a worldview that was the foundation for his actions.   That’s why he loved the work the unscrupulous fellows in the British, French and American War Departments did during the World War.  Give the folks at home, and the soldiers in the trenches, a vivid and horrible story they can sink their teeth into, digest, take to heart!  That the story is a lie makes no difference.  In fact, Hitler noted, a lie is often more powerful than the truth.

During a brief stint in a doctoral program in history I was determined to write the definitive study of how propaganda and marketing have shaped our world more than any other single force.  The professor I pitched the idea to, that the Nazis were the innovative pioneers of the modern marketing-driven use of a party controlled mass media to influence the citizenry, shook his head skeptically, scaled my project way back.  The hubris of my intended task seems obvious to me now too, as I think of it, but I believe as firmly now as I did back then that the Nazis showed how it was done, developed many of the techniques now standard for influencing public perceptions.   Events are increasingly supporting my thesis.  

The Big Lie, endlessly repeating useful untruths in the mass media, is now a familiar idea that doesn’t raise too many eyebrows.  It’s old hat.  “Yeah, yeah, Saddam bought aluminum tubes in Africa for his nuclear centrifuge.  Yeah, he had WMD.  Yeah, we don’t want ‘the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud’.  Yeah, Saddam was a big supporter of Bin Laden, even though Bin Laden wanted him dead.  Yeah, Muhammad Atta met with agents of Saddam in Prague before the September 11 attacks.  Yeah, Saddam was behind 9/11.  Yeah, we’ll fight them over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here.  Yeah, freedom’s on the march, combat operations are over, we have prevailed over Evil.  Yeah, so what’s your point?”

At the risk of seeming partisan I will make an observation others before me have made.  The Republican party is much more successful in telling (and selling) a coherent and moving story than the Democrats are.  The Republican story goes like this:

 Once upon a time this great, innovative country was greater still.   We had values that were a light unto the world, not least of them democracy, fairness, freedom.  We are now in a crisis, caused by Americans who take freedom for granted (0r outright hate our freedom), do not want to work, want to blame others, especially successful people, for their troubles.  And Big Government, and we all know how corrupt that is, is right in the middle of the problem.

The problem is all those illegal aliens getting free medical care and free college educations, old people expecting the rest of us to subsidize their rent and heating bills, pay for their fantastically expensive health care, young lazy people who feel entitled to take our money so they don’t have to work.  (We’ll leave aside the politically explosive, nagging, unspoken question of what those people we used to call niggers actually want.  Let’s stay on the high road and focus on getting America back to greatness.)  

We need to give complete freedom to the free market.  The free market is great because it’s free.  The leaders of the free market must be free to innovate, to take great risks for potentially enormous, unregulated rewards.  To regulate these rewards would hamper job-creating entrepreneurs in their enthusiasm to take the risks that have made this country the world’s leading innovator for more than two centuries.  Besides, Big Government, who would decide on and enforce regulation, is bad, part of the problem, not part of any solution.

Democrats have no counter-narrative, none.  At best they will quibblingly point out that big government is bad, except when it enforces the rights of former slaves not to be lynched, except when it gives women the right to vote, rescues flood victims, frees hostages, builds highways, bridges, tunnels, schools, firehouses, police stations, avoids foreign wars through diplomacy, guarantees that old people who’ve worked their whole lives don’t have to eat dog food too many times a week, that people who’ve lost their jobs in a trashed economy do not also automatically have to lose their homes.  It’s no story, it’s a yawn, however true it all might be.

Democrats, if they’re feeling brave, will point out that the terms used, like “free market”, are problematic, misleading.  If the free market is free to employ the cheapest laborers to be found in a global marketplace, to pollute air, water and earth as much as needed to make maximum profit, to pay the lowest possible taxes and exercise the greatest possible political influence by buying unlimited political advertising, maybe the price for that “free” market is a bit more than the rest of us can afford.

Or the “Death Tax.”  Shoot, everyone is against death and tax.  The Republicans control that debate right there, having coined the phrase that frames and decides the debate.  I don’t recall the amount of millions that trigger the “Death Tax”, I think it’s up to eight million, but it’s many more millions than 98% of Americans will see in their lifetimes, let alone have the chance to leave tax-free to their daughter, Paris Hilton.

Paris, there’s a story.  We can all picture her face, feel the emotions this rich girl inspires, be they the envy of those who call her a “celebutard” or the love of those, like me, who observed the true tenderness she displayed giving pleasure to her lover in that short video.  But, anyway, you see how much more interesting a story is than talking about “politics”?  A story speaks for itself, politics is an unbearable swirl of depressingly complicated detail that can best be understood by oversimplifying its complexities into a good story.

I love you, Paris.