George Dubya Bush

 the dumbest show on earth or Public enemy #1?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the website owner, they do not reflect any person or any business contained within this website.

For more depth check hyperlinks. More on Dubya visit page 2

Politicians are a lot like diapers, they need to be changed frequently and for the same reasons.

George W. Bush's entire life on planet earth has been one big lie and cover-up.

After 7 years as President Bush admitted on 3-8-08, the Country is in sad shape, and I'm holding the steering wheel

President Bush is refusing to take responsibility for any of the horrors happening on his watch

Bill Clinton received a sexual favor and lied about it, for which he was impeached.

George W. Bush has screwed an entire nation and lied about everything; Where are the impeachment papers?

Please visit BILL MOYERS JOURNAL  as it examines the reality of waste and abuse of power in Washington by the BUSH White House, with a look at the investigations being conducted by Congress's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Enough to make any American SICK to their STOMACH!

Bill Moyers recently featured the important new film "Body of War" a chilling true life documentary about the true face of war today. Meet Tomas Young, 25 years old, paralyzed from a bullet to his spine - wounded after serving in Iraq for less than a week.
 

For more on the War, it's costs on the economy, our youth and the Working Class click here.

Members of Congress! Be faithful to your oaths of office and to the traditions of your branch of government. Think of the country, not of your re-election. Assert your power. Stand up for the prerogatives of Congress. Defend the Constitution. Reject the arrogance--and the ignorance--of power. Show respect for your constituents--they require your honest judgment, not capitulation to the executive. Say no to empire. Affirm the Republic. Preserve the peace.                    

Here is what we've come to: A President blinded by power and privilege, oblivious to the devastation toward which he is pushing America and the world. An International corporate culture run amok, freed from restraints in every area from pollution control to health and safety standards to merciless price-gouging, even as the abuses slip quietly from the attention of corporate owned media. An economy trumpeted as "blooming" even while hundreds of thousands lose their jobs, slip into poverty, are left without homes or health care or enough to eat. A "Patriot Act" that makes all of us traitors if we speak out in any way the Washington thought militia deems threatening. Warrantless Wiretapping, Systemic Torture. Abuse of Detainees, Cherry-Picking Intelligence, Muzzling Truth tellers, Shredding our Constitution.

A true Patriot is a lover of his country, who rebukes and does not excuse its sins. If you love your country you rebuke it when its got to be rebuked, you don't excuse its sins. Frederick Douglass

Take Religion out of POLITICS and the Political debate..

In this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media — the beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for the fast food with emotional content. So the preacher starts with rational discussion and after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on the fire that will eventually consume everything it touches. He had help — people who for their own reasons set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who wasn't running for president with the man in the pew who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering Catholic-bashing Texas preacher who said the people of New Orleans got what they deserved for their sins. But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions, or thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican religious right. After 9/11 Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's judgment on America for having been driven out of our schools and the public square, but when McCain goes after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.

Jon Stewart recently played a tape from the Nixon White House in which Billy Graham talks in the oval office about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows in his heart that they are undermining America. This is crazy; this is wrong -- white preachers are given leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it? Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with children in Sunday school. What he does is to speak his mind in a language and style that unsettle some people, and says some things so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves Obama no choice but to end their friendship. We are often exposed us to the corroding acid of the politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen anything like this ? this wrenching break between pastor and parishioner before our very eyes. Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves. All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and prevents an honest conversation on race. It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said "beware the terrible simplifiers". For the rest of the story visit here.

4,000 Dead -End the War: Try Again

On the late afternoon of the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a grim, surreal procession made its way up DC's Capitol Hill. Down Independence Avenue alongside the House office buildings marched a single file of protesters, each clad in a black T-shirt, wearing a haunting white mask and holding a sign with the name of a civilian killed in Iraq. As they trudged up the Hill, a drummer rapped out a spare and mournful beat. Aside from several police escorts on bicycles, few were there to bear witness. Congress was in recess, the usual passel of commuters away or shuttered indoors, the streets empty under a misting gray sky. Like the real-life funerals for the Iraqi dead they represented, this re-creation, too, would pass with hardly a notice.

That morning in Washington, as protesters marched and danced and chanted, as progressives assembled for the Take Back America conference and as thousands of soldiers' families mourned their dead, Vice President Cheney gave an interview to ABC's Martha Raddatz. When she pointed out that two-thirds of Americans thought the war was not worth fighting, he answered: "So?"

"So?" Raddatz replied. "You don't care what the American people think?"

"No," said Cheney.

There you have it. To the millions who marched before the war began, to the hundreds of thousands who have protested since, to the tens of millions who voted for candidates in 2006 who pledged to end it, the Bush Administration says, more or less, Go fuck yourself.

We are now faced with two problems. One is a war that grinds on, subject only to its internal logic, each day further embedding an imperial occupation. The other is arguably even more profound, a terrifying breakdown in the basic mechanisms of democracy whereby the will of the majority is transferred into policy. We have two ostensible democracies (the United States and Iraq), each with a polity that wants an end to the war (the most recent polling from Iraq shows that 70 percent of Iraqis favor US withdrawal), yet the war does not end.

In the face of this official indifference to public opinion, it is tempting to succumb to despair. The antiwar strategy, after all, has not been static. In the run-up to the war, organizers managed to pull together the largest simultaneous worldwide demonstrations in history. That didn't work. Then the antiwar movement channeled much of its energy into electoral politics, helping to elect Democratic majorities in both houses. That hasn't worked either. So we find ourselves in the situation of Beckett's protagonist in Worstward Ho: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Although the electoral strategy has not yet borne fruit, it is still the most viable option, barring a draft or a radical turn in public opinion that would once again bring people en masse into the streets. (There are, of course, parallel strategies to be pursued. Passing a ban on mercenaries in Iraq would make the occupation untenable.) The question, then, becomes how to create the electoral conditions that maximize the power and representation of the majority who want the war ended. The antiwar caucus doesn't have enough votes to override a delusional President or enough members willing to bear the political risk of cutting off funding for the war. The solution to this impasse is, in the words of Congressional candidate Darcy Burner, to elect "more and better Democrats"--Democrats who have publicly committed to pursuing a legislative strategy to end the war.

So at Take Back America, Burner--a former Microsoft manager from the Seattle suburbs who narrowly missed unseating a GOP incumbent in 2006--with nine other Democratic Congressional challengers released A Responsible Plan to End the War. Developed in collaboration with retired military officers and national security professionals, the plan attracted the support of fifteen additional Democratic Senate and House challengers in the first week after it was unveiled (see ResponsiblePlan.com). Unlike the withdrawal plans offered by both Democratic presidential candidates, the Responsible Plan opposes any residual forces as well as permanent military bases. It flatly states, "We must stop counter-productive military operations by U.S. occupation forces, and end our military presence in Iraq." It looks toward restoring "Constitutional checks and balances and fix[ing] the ways in which our governmental, military, and civil institutions have failed us." It also addresses the need to take responsibility for a humanitarian crisis in which thousands of Iraqis who worked with US forces are in danger and millions are displaced across the region.

As an organizer working on the Responsible Plan stressed to me, it is an explicitly legislative road map, to be pursued by Congress with or without a President committed to withdrawal. Among other actions the plan calls for war funding to be brought into the normal budgetary process, as opposed to the ersatz emergency supplementals, which detach the cost of the war from the rest of the nation's discretionary spending. The plan also highlights more than a dozen bills that have already been introduced, like HR 2247, the Montgomery GI Bill for Life Act of 2007, which the signatories would support if elected. 

Meanwhile, in Iraq on March 23, the 4,000th US service member was killed (twenty-five died in just two weeks), at least fifty-eight Iraqi civilians died in attacks, the Green Zone was shelled, violence flared in Basra and Muqtada al-Sadr seemed to be toying with the idea of revoking his militia's cease-fire. American generals presented a plan to maintain post-surge troop levels through 2008, and George W. Bush continued to pursue an agreement with the Iraqi government that would keep US troops there well into the future.

At the plan's unveiling, Burner--articulate, impressive and infectiously energetic--refused to be pessimistic. Despite the White House's indifference, despite the war's diminished presence on the front page, the people want the war to end.

"We can do this," she said.

Ever tried. Try again.

Imagine the Bush Administration Without War

Recently, Mark Danner took stock of the President's failed War on Terror abroad in three words: "Fragmentation, Diminution, Destruction."

"Gaze for a moment at those three words," he suggested, "and marvel at how far we have come in a half-dozen years. In September 2001, the United States faced a grave threat. The attacks that have become synonymous with that date were unprecedented in their destructiveness, in their lethality, in the pure apocalyptic shock of their spectacle. But in their aftermath, American policymakers, partly through ideological blindness and preening exaggeration of American power, partly through blindness brought about by political opportunism, made decisions that led to a defeat only their own actions -- that only American power itself -- could have brought about."

One day, we will also need to take full stock of George W. Bush's War on Terror at home. After all, conceptually speaking, the War on Terror lay at the heart of everything he and his top officials hoped for in an administration -- in, as they called it, a "unitary executive" that would be unrestrained by the checks and balances of either Congress or the courts. The announcement (not declaration) of "war" was, in fact, a necessity for this administration, the only lever available with which to pry a commander-in-chief presidency out of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Without the President's self-proclaimed War on Terror, there would have been no "war" at all, and so no "wartime" atmosphere or "wartime" presidency to be invoked to cow Congress into backing Bush's future war of choice in Iraq. Without "war" and "wartime," it would have been impossible to bring the American people along so readily and difficult to apply "war rules" from the Guantanamo prison complex in Cuba and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Otherwise, as Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris recently pointed out in the New Yorker, how could American officials and commanders have designated those prisoners seized by the U.S. military in Iraq as "'security detainees,' a label that had gained currency in the war on terror, to describe 'unlawful combatants' and other prisoners who had been denied P.O.W. status and could be held indefinitely, in isolation and secrecy, without judicial recourse."

Every hope the Bush administration's top officials had of future power hinged on the War on Terror that preceded actual war anywhere. True, in World War I, not 19 hijackers, but a single assassin triggered the mobilizing of the armies of all the Great Powers of Europe, which did indeed lead to global war. But after 9/11, on the provocation of 19 men (and the scattered bands behind them), only one power mobilized, which meant, by the standards of history, there was no war to be had. Only aggression.

On the domestic power grab that the President and his men (and a few women) believed would lead not just to a global Pax Americana, but to a Pax Republicana at home, the equivalent of a National Intelligence Estimate has yet to arrive. But the recent, little noted loss of the previously safe Illinois seat of former House of Representatives Majority Leader Dennis Hastert -- a contest into which a strapped National Republican Congressional Committee poured $1.2 million (20% of the cash it had on hand) against a neophyte Democratic candidate--is a striking sign that Bush's Pax Republicana may prove anything but generational.

Is This the Big One?

For more than a decade, we Americans have been living on an economic San Andreas fault--a foundation of fracturing competitiveness covered by unsustainable consumer spending with money borrowed from foreigners. A financial earthquake was inevitable. We don't know how high on the recession Richter scale the current crisis will take us, but it increasingly looks like, as they say in San Francisco, "The Big One."

Since the last Big One, the Great Depression of the 1930s, we have had eleven small to medium recessions, lasting an average of ten months. The most severe--two back-to-back downturns that began in 1979--drove price increases and the unemployment rate to double digits.

We're not at those levels yet. But the structural supports underneath our shop-till-we-drop economy are considerably weaker. For starters, we have a historic depression in the housing market. Americans' total mortgage debt now exceeds their home equity, for the first time since 1945. Housing prices have dropped 10 percent since last spring, followed by record foreclosures. Most economists expect them to drop at least another 10 percent, which could leave more than 14 million households--at least 16 percent of the total--better off if they just walked away from their homes. Prices could go even lower.

Until last year, housing prices in most places had risen rapidly since the 1990s. This enabled middle-class homeowners with stagnant wages and maxed-out credit cards to keep spending by refinancing their mortgages. The housing boom also spawned the now infamous subprime mortgage--a scheme devised by Main Street realtors and Wall Street bankers to finance home buying with loans that let the borrower buy in with little money down but carried high interest rates. The expensive payments would be made later by refinancing the mortgage as prices continued to rise. These subprimes were sold to middle-class strivers upgrading to McMansions as well as to the working poor.

The increased demand pushed housing prices further into the stratosphere--until, inevitably, they fell back to earth. When the subprime borrowers could no longer make their payments, foreclosure signs went up, lowering the value of other houses in the neighborhood. The refinancing spigot shut off, retail sales sputtered and by January the economy was shedding jobs.

But it is not the squeeze on homeowners that is giving our central bankers nightmares. It is the blowback of housing deflation on the country's massively overleveraged financial markets, which has seriously constricted the flow of credit--the lifeblood of the world's largest debtor economy.

In a typical deal, subprime mortgages were sold to investment companies, where they were commingled with prime mortgages to back up new securities that could be touted as both safe and high-yielding. This new debt paper was then peddled to investors, who used it as collateral for "margin" loans to buy yet more stocks and bonds. At each change of hands, fees and underwriting charges added to the total claims on the original shaky mortgages. The result was a frenzied bidding up of prices for a bewildering maze of arcane securities that neither buyers nor sellers could accurately value.

Giant Ponzi scheme? Not to worry, responded the Wall Street geniuses. By spreading risks among more people, the miracle of "diversity" was actually turning bad loans into good ones. Anyway, banks were buying insurance policies against default, which in turn were transformed into a set of even murkier securities called "credit default swaps" and marketed to hedge funds, pension managers and in some cases back to the banks that were being insured in the first place. At the end of 2007 the market for these swaps was estimated at $45.5 trillion--roughly twice as large as all US stock markets combined.

This huge pyramid of debt was made possible by thirty years of relentless deregulation of financial markets, culminating in the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which had prohibited banks from dealing in high-risk securities. In effect, Washington regulators became passive enablers to Wall Street's financial binge drinkers. When they crashed--for example, in the savings-and-loan and junk-bond debacles of the 1980s, the Long-Term Capital Management collapse of 1998 and the Enron and dot-com crashes of the early 2000s--the government cleaned up the mess with taxpayers' money and let them go back to the bar.

So here we go again. When subprime homeowners stopped paying, the prices of the mortgage-backed securities used as collateral fell. Banks demanded that their borrowers pay up or cover their margins. Panicked selling by borrowers further lowered the securities' prices, triggering more margin calls and more defaults. Massive losses piled up at places like Citigroup, Countrywide, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, and cascaded back into the insurance companies. At the end of February, the huge insurer American International Group reported the largest quarterly loss, $5 billion, since the company started in 1919.

After some delay, the Federal Reserve Board last summer started lowering interest rates on loans to the banks. But in a phrase from the bank crisis of the 1930s, it was like "pushing on a string." The bankers' problem was not that money was too expensive to lend out; it was that they were afraid they wouldn't get their money back. When they did lend, they jacked up the rates to compensate for the higher perceived risks--even to solid customers. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey suddenly had to borrow money at 20 percent. The State of Pennsylvania couldn't finance its college student loan program. Fannie Mae, the fund created by the federal government to support perfectly sound middle-class housing, struggled to sell its bonds.

In mid-March, after anguished discussions between Federal Reserve officials and Wall Street moguls, the Fed agreed to provide $400 billion in new cash loans to banks and investment firms. Days later came the shock of eighty-five-year-old Bear Stearns going belly up. In an unprecedented deal, the Fed immediately lent JPMorgan Chase the money to buy Bear Stearns, taking suspect mortgage-backed paper as collateral. Bear's stockholders had already taken a hosing when the stock crashed. The big winners were the company's creditors and insurers, who were saved from the consequences of their bad business judgment.

We are now staring into the abyss. The Bear Stearns bailout has created a presumption of a safety net under any major stockbroker, in addition to any major bank. Rumors are that Lehman Brothers and Citigroup may be next. The Fed could handle a Lehman crash. But the collapse of Citigroup, the world's largest bank, would be catastrophic, bankrupting businesses, other banks and consumers and cutting off credit for state and local governments. And it could stretch the Fed to the limit of its resources.

There is a widespread assumption that there is no bottom to the pockets of the Federal Reserve. Not quite. The Fed has a finite amount of actual assets--mostly Treasury obligations backed by the "full faith and credit" of the government, which is a commitment to raise taxes if necessary to pay the debt. These assets total about $800 billion, some $400 billion of which have been obligated to back up loans. If the loans default, the Fed has to sell the Treasury notes in order to settle. If there are enough of these failures, the Fed could exhaust its assets. It would then have to resort to really "printing money"--issuing promissory notes not backed up by anything--or get bailed out by the Treasury, putting taxpayers further in the hole. Long before the Fed is down to the last of its stash of Treasury notes, more skittish domestic and foreign investors will flee the dollar. Interest rates would balloon and prices of oil and other imports would skyrocket. Credit would freeze, investment would plummet and tens of millions of Americans would be out on the street, with neither a job nor a roof over their heads.

Unlikely? Yes, still. Unthinkable? Not anymore. Estimates of Wall Street's losses already run well up to $500 billion. A 20 percent drop in housing prices would translate into a $4 trillion drop in the value of housing assets. A large chunk of that loss would destroy the value that underlies the mortgage-backed securities the Fed has now agreed to guarantee.

But well short of such a worst-case scenario, the country seems headed for major economic damage that will severely test whatever we have left of safety nets. It took five years from the time the recovery began in 1983 for the unemployment rate to return to pre-recession levels. Once we reach the bottom of this trough, it could be a very long time before American consumers, whose spending accounts for some 70 percent of our economy, crawl out of the debt hole and back into the shopping mall. The Japanese have still not recovered from their similar housing/debt crash in the early 1990s.

Virtually everyone who has studied Japan in the 1990s and the United States in the 1930s concludes that in both cases the government acted too late with too little in order to stop the debt dominoes from tumbling through the entire economy.

But the American political system seems as seized up as the credit markets. As the Federal Reserve tries desperately to put an overdosed Wall Street on life support, President Bush remains dizzily detached, periodically repeating his moronic mantra against government intervention in the free market. At a press conference that is impossible to parody, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the Administration "plan" to safeguard the nation against a future crisis. It boiled down to a hope that the finance industry would do a better job of policing itself and that individual states would see to any new laws that might be needed. In what the New York Times dryly reported were his "most extensive comments to date about the credit and market problems," Paulson, formerly co-chair of the investment firm Goldman Sachs, firmly told reporters that he was not interested in finding "scapegoats." No kidding.

In response to pressure from Democrats, the White House at the end of January did reluctantly agree to a fiscal stimulus. But Bush demanded that it be limited to the only economic policy he understands: tax cuts. Democrats caved, and the government started printing up $160 billion in a one-time rebate to consumers and businesses, which will be sent out in May. Too little, too late, and likely to be spent paying down debt and buying more Chinese imports.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid has proposed a second round of stimulus--this time through public investment, putting people to work rebuilding bridges, schools and other infrastructure. But no one is talking about a level of fiscal injection needed to counterbalance the drop in consumer and business spending.

If we use the 1979-83 experience as a guide, we'd need some $600 billion to $700 billion in deficit spending. But in those days, the United States was still a creditor nation. Thanks to three decades of trade deficits, topped by the costs of the Iraq War, we now depend on foreign lenders, increasingly worried about the value of their US bonds. As Lee Price, chief economist of the House Appropriations Committee, put it, "We need as big a stimulus as our foreign lenders will allow us to get away with."

To give some relief to those at the bottom of this tottering financial edifice, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd, chairs of, respectively, the House Financial Services and Senate Banking committees, are proposing updated versions of a Depression-era housing rescue program. The government would furnish $300-$400 billion to buy up existing home mortgages at prices marked down to reflect the current lower values. The plan could refinance 1-2 million homes. It may not be enough, but it probably represents the outer limit of what is possible in the twilight year of a White House whose economic competence is in the twilight zone.

Given the way Washington works, the Frank/Dodd proposal would need business support. Yet despite the fact that it would bring desperately needed trust back to the system, the capos of the Wall Street mob are unenthusiastic. Being forced to acknowledge losses on their books could toss a few more of them out of their jobs at a time when the supply of golden parachutes may be getting thin. Better to hunker down and whimper for more welfare from the Fed.

Some are already getting direct bailouts from big government. But it's not coming from the US government. Foreign-government-owned "sovereign wealth funds" are now buying sizable equity shares to shore up battered firms. Citigroup, where the Saudis are already the chief stockholder, sold roughly $20 billion of itself to Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Kuwait. The Chinese just bought 10 percent of Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch sold a 9 percent stake to Singapore. With oil above $100 a barrel, more of Wall Street is certain to wind up owned in the Middle East. Some members of Congress still warn that these countries are looking for political influence in America's financial heart, rather than optimizing their rate of return. They are probably right, but the nationalist fires that flared up against Dubai ownership of US ports in 2006 have largely been banked. Beggars can't be choosers.

Another hope is that the Europeans, the Chinese, whoever, will take over our role as the world's consumer of last resort. As the recession slows US imports, countries that have grown fat on exports to us will certainly have to shift more of their growth to their own domestic market. But to expect that the leaders of other nations would put their own economies at risk by running up trade deficits in order to save us Americans from the consequences of our own folly seems stunningly naïve.

So if this is not The Big One, it is likely to be A Big One--and a long one.

We could still get lucky, of course. Republicans facing re-election might persuade Bush to support a big fiscal stimulus and housing rescue. Home prices may miraculously stabilize. Tomorrow, bankers may wake up like Scrooge on Christmas morning and just start lending. The Chinese may start importing American-made cars...

Otto von Bismarck once remarked, "There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Let's hope it's still true.

Economic Chaos, Political Consequences

Bumpy is no word for it. The news coming out of Wall Street makes what the three presidential candidates are saying beside the point. Cancel the fun. The bad news also bids fair to change the daily lives of 300 million Americans. No, kidding, folks. What's going on in the business world is as serious as it can get.

Events unfolding this week on the lower end of Manhattan will cancel out all the projects John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been talking about. McCain will have to deal with the home truth that, though he may dig up enough soldier boys for the Middle Eastern wars, there is no money to pay for them. And thanks to the ever-shrinking dollar, other countries are not going to lend us more money to carry them on. We have run out of money: it's time to cut and run.

The billions that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would have had to spend to do the wonderful things they are dangling in front of the voters do not exist. Tradition has always allowed campaigning candidates to make promises they will not make good on, but this time they are bumping up against the limits of the plausible, let alone the possible. It might be helpful if they would ease off with the pretty pictures.

There will be no health insurance for everyone. No long-needed increases in teachers' salaries, no big infrastructure projects, no decent-paying new jobs for those laid-off workers in Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and nothing for single-parent (read mothers) households. There is no money. As things stand now we may have to spend hundreds of billions to prevent millions of people from being thrown out of their homes and billions more to prop our crooked, avaricious, heedless and duplicitous financial system so it does not come crashing down on all of us.

Just a couple of days ago the Federal Reserve Board committed a mere $200 billion to Wall Street to back up their rotten bonds. The news of that expensive move had hardly been digested when it was announced that the Fed would pledge untold billions more to keep the investment banking house of Bear Stearns from sinking with all hands aboard.

The floatation device was a hastily arrange purchase of the once prestigious, 85-year-old investment bank by J.P. Morgan for $2 a share, which a little more than a year ago was selling for $170 and as recently as a couple of days ago for $30. God only knows how much this will cost the government by the time the expensive, gory details are ironed out, something that will take months.

This news prompted the New York Times Gretchen Morgenson, one of the best business journalists around, to write, "What are the consequences of a world in which regulators rescue even the financial institutions whose recklessness and greed helped create the titanic credit mess we are in? Will the consequences be an even weaker currency, rampant inflation, a continuation of the slow bleed that we have witnessed at banks and brokerage firms for the past year?"

The answers to Morgenson's question may well be yes and even worse. As of now nothing is clear, nothing is certain and nothing can relied on. In the chaos which has taken over Wall Street, the Fed, the Treasury Department and the other organs of government concerned with managing the crisis, there comes a new announcement of a new remedy every hour.

Nobody knows if these remedies will blow off the hysteria and restore a modicum of order. Nor do we know who is being saved by our panicky federal officials. Are they saving some millions of jobs and homes, which may be in danger from the fallout stemming from this train of financial disasters? Or are they saving some of the most despicable rich guys to make an appearance in our society since the 1870s, when Jim Fisk, Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould roamed the earth?

We cannot answer that question any more than we can Morgenson's. We are in unknown territory facing situations that have never arisen before and taking measures that have never been tried. For the present we know that Bear Stearns/J.P. Morgan has been saved--sort of. We suspect that some thousands of Bear employees will lose their jobs in the near future; we know that the news of the latest Fed actions was quickly followed by a fall in stock prices in Asia and another dip in the value of the dollar.

In a few weeks this latest insult to the once-imperial Yankee dollar will express itself in higher gasoline prices. That will hurt, but it may be the least of our pain. No body, no government agency, no clutch of economics professors, certainly nobody on Wall Street can lay out a plan of action. We do not know the dimensions of the storm buffeting us but that it is huge and enormously dangerous there can be no doubt.

It would be dunderheaded to demand of our three presidential candidates that they and their campaigns do what nobody else can. We cannot expect them to offer a program of action. But it is not asking too much of them to cut down on the blue-sky promises and come on back down to reality. It would reassure some of the voters if they would acknowledge that we are teetering on one helluva big problem. It's going to be a bumpy night.

by Nicholas von Hoffman

Hothead McCain

If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He's erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me," wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.

You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.

And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.

First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse." Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran's nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA's coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to "meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war." And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse "an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors," Scheunemann told The Nation.

But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn't understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. "You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency," he says. "I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA.... All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA." Told about McLaughlin's comments, Scheunemann says, "Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does."

The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. "They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat."

McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy toward Putin's Russia. "I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist.

"We need a new Western approach to...revanchist Russia," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, "The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia [sic] and Poland, and I don't care what [Putin's] objections are to it." And he's all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia--and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo's declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain's goal of expanding NATO provocative, to say the least. "McCain says [NATO] ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government," says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. "Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia."

Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.

"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."

Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.

More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of "regime change." Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. Like his fellow neocons, McCain touted what proved to be faked intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq. Echoing Vice President Cheney, McCain said on the eve of the war, "There's no doubt in my mind, once [Saddam] is gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." He pooh-poohed critics who argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war plan was too reliant on technology and too light on troops, saying, "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw...back in 1991." When Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, a month before the war started, that occupying Iraq would require far more troops, McCain was mute.

Today McCain portrays himself as a critic of how the war was fought, but his criticism did not emerge until long after it was clear that the United States faced a grueling insurgency. From the fall of 2003 onward, against a growing chorus of critics who called for US forces to withdraw, McCain repeatedly called for more troops to secure "victory." By late 2006, when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for pulling out all combat brigades within fifteen months, McCain, Lieberman and a hardy band of neocons, led by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and joined by Cheney, persuaded Bush to escalate the war instead. Asked if McCain directly lobbied Bush to reject the ISG's recommendations, a McCain aide says, "There were many encounters with the President's senior advisers and with the President on this issue." Fred Kagan, the surge's author and Robert Kagan's brother, told McClatchy Newspapers, "It was a very lonely time. He went out there for us."

In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.

When The Nation asked Scheunemann why US forces would have to stay in Iraq so long, he explicitly linked their presence to the entire Middle East. "Iraq might be stable, but what about the region?" he responded. "Other countries could be in turmoil; other countries could be threatening Iraq. It could be an external threat that we need to have troops there for, à la South Korea, à la Japan." He added, "I understand your readers may think it's some sort of malevolent imperialist conspiracy." Conspiracy or not, it's clear that McCain sees our presence in Iraq as a permanent extension of US power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

McCain has made no secret of his belief that using force against Iran is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. "There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran," McCain said. "The regime must understand that they cannot win a showdown with the world." He supports tougher sanctions against Tehran, but critics note that implementing them would require Russia's consent. McCain's provocative anti-Russia stand, though, makes such a deal less than likely. And he rejects direct US-Iran talks.

In the end, McCain seems almost reflexively to favor the use of America's armed might. "He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options," says Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. Scion of admirals (his father and grandfather), a combat pilot in Vietnam who continued to believe long after that war that it might have been won if the US military had been allowed free rein, McCain presents the image of a warrior itching for battle. He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who'd like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.

"I'm an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson--I guess you'd now say Joe Lieberman--Democrat, and he's a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they're pretty close in their views, so substantively there's a lot of overlap between us," says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who's endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. "I think John's style is very TR-like. It's very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick."

We're still waiting for the "speaking softly" part. "There's going to be other wars," McCain warns. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars."

by ROBERT DREYFUSS

The Economy Debates

 Washington is broken. The system is rigged. Cronyism and corporate interests prevail over fairness and the best interests of the American people. Washington puts Wall Street before Main Street. Pharmaceutical companies before patients. Agricultural conglomerates before family farmers. If you want to think about all this in a very simple way, it's that Washington values wealth over work."

On the eve of the Super Tuesday primaries that would confirm him as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, John McCain joined two heretical members of a party that has made itself synonymous with orthodox conservatism--California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, both supporters of abortion rights, gay rights and reasonably functional government--at a solar technology plant in Los Angeles. They talked about their shared commitment to address global warming. And they reminded everyone that the Republican Party of John McCain is not the Republican Party of George W. Bush or Rush Limbaugh.

While Democrat Barack Obama's remarkable challenge to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment may yet be the essential story of 2008, McCain's march toward the Republican nomination is the year's more improbable journey. Since climbing out of the campaign coffin to which he was consigned last summer when his fundraising fell short, McCain has elbowed his way to the front of the Republican pack with a "coalition" that does not rely on the people who thought they ran the party, winning primary after primary with the votes of independents and self-identified GOP moderates, while the right has divided between country club conservative Mitt Romney and evangelical populist Mike Huckabee. Romney and Huckabee both promise to soldier on, but the former governor of Massachusetts is now widely perceived as having blown a personal fortune on a campaign that was overshadowed on Super Tuesday by the live-off-the-land campaign of the former governor of Arkansas. But Huckabee's win came with a footnote: although he prevailed in his native South, he was barely in the running elsewhere. He's still got Mississippi, but after that he's going to run out of states of the old Confederacy. On most maps, McCain looks inevitable.

That prospect enrages the celebrity conservatives, who thought the Grand Old Party was their affair. As the more theatrically than really maverick senator from Arizona began closing in on the nomination, Romney labeled McCain a "liberal" while radio ranter Limbaugh predicted a McCain win would "destroy the Republican Party." Cuckoo-con Ann Coulter said she would campaign for Hillary Clinton over John McCain, a declaration roughly equivalent to the Pope backing Beelzebub over a dissenting Jesuit. Are right-wingers crazy? What could they possibly find troubling about a self-declared "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution" who was the key campaigner for Bush's re-election?

The answer has more to do with that trip to the solar plant in LA than with the particulars of a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 82 percent, which ought to make McCain entirely acceptable to the right. What distinguishes the senator from other prominent Republicans is what horrifies the party's right flank and makes him the GOP's most viable November contender: McCain tends to accept the idea that there is a mainstream that extends beyond the Fox News Channel's viewership. To a party that has placed a premium on extreme purity--and to commentators who make their money enforcing ideological standards--McCain seems unsettlingly inclusive. He refers to the GOP as "a big-tent party" and signals that he is more interested in filling that tent than in joining the conservative commissars who guard the gate. Asked about Limbaugh's criticisms, this regular Letterman guest replied, "I don't listen to him. There's a certain trace of masochism in my family, but not that deep."

The Limbaughs, the Coulters, the editors of Human Events and the Wall Street Journal, the tanked thinkers of the Heritage Foundation and the myriad defenders of the right-wing franchise are not used to such disrespect, and they have responded with vitriol so intense that The Weekly Standard, which shares McCain's obsession with less jobs/more war policies, refers to the right's "McCain derangement syndrome." It's not an entirely irrational hatred, however. The professional conservatives are losing a fight for their party. Not since Gerald Ford narrowly beat Ronald Reagan for the GOP nod in 1976 has anyone gotten close to being nominated without bowing and scraping at the altar of social, economic and military-industrial conservatism designed by the high priests of the rigid right. Over time, the GOP's range of debate has narrowed so much that Barry Goldwater is now viewed as suspiciously liberal.

The Bush/Cheney years have been characterized by an unapologetic embrace of unyielding right-wing dogmas. Even if they did not govern with the consistency that their rhetoric suggested, the Administration and a pliant Republican Congress did their best to mainstream extremist notions. Along the way, they winked and nodded as a Republican Taliban pursued the ideological cleansing of the party. Senior Republicans deemed guilty of even minor deviations from conservative dictates were denied Congressional committee assignments, dismissed as liberal traitors, booed at state party conventions and even "primaried"--as were Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who narrowly survived, and Michigan Representative Joe Schwarz, who didn't.

No "Republican in Name Only" has been more consistently distrusted by professional conservatives than McCain. He was too popular in Arizona to challenge in a GOP primary--even if the state's conservative mandarins have campaigned against him this year--and too useful to Republicans in tight races, including Bush in 2004, to push aside completely. But for most of the Bush/Cheney era, McCain has been the definitional RINO, and conservative commentators have memorized his litany of sins: a partnership with liberal Democrat Russ Feingold to promote campaign finance reforms that constrained the gaming of the political process by corporate interests, a brothers-in-arms relationship with fellow Vietnam vet John Kerry, tax-the-rich votes, frequent fights with evangelicals who don't get his sense of humor but intuit that he's laughing at them rather than with them, off-message criticisms of torture, an alliance with liberal icon Ted Kennedy to promote immigration reform--and that break with the Administration on climate change.

McCain is no moderate. His record on social and economic issues was to the right of Romney's until recently, and the former POW's determination to wage wars that give new meaning to the term "quagmire" is striking. He can rant about "Islamofascism" and America as "a Judeo-Christian nation" with the craziest of his conservative comrades. Yet McCain remains a card-carrying member of the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership, which promotes "principled and pragmatic" moderation in a Republican Party where them's fightin' words. "McCain is still viewed by the moderate wing of the party as a savior at this point," notes political scientist Tom Schaller.

That would make his securing of the nomination--if and when he dispatches Romney and Huckabee, whose economic populism scares the "suicide voters" of the Limbaugh/Coulter faction more than McCain's maverick nature--not the end but the beginning of the fight for the soul of the Republican Party. Fully aware that their influence is under threat, political and media conservatives will dog McCain. The fantasy of a third-party challenge from the right will be floated. How McCain responds will be the critical question of the spring and summer. If he starts listening to Limbaugh, his campaign will not be "the end of the Reagan era" that conservatives bemoan but a continuation of the Bush era--and his candidacy will be easily characterized by Democrats as the antithesis of change.

On the other hand, if McCain assumes he will ultimately retain the support of the right--with which he sides on most issues and for which he is the only alternative to an Obama or Clinton presidency--the senator can position his campaign as a break with Bush and, potentially, forge a Republican Party that is more concerned with winning elections than perfecting its ideological pedigree. That's what professional conservatives fear, as they know their influence over such a party would be diminished. But it is, as well, what Democrats must fear. While a more moderate Republican Party might open up the process enough to give meaning to the word "bipartisan" and finally move some old dogmas--like denial of climate change--to the fringe, it might also be viable. The Republican Party as defined by George W. Bush and Rush Limbaugh does not stand a chance in 2008. Democrats may be enjoying that party's knives-out fight with McCain now, but they would be wise to hope that McCain makes his peace with the pros and runs as their candidate. A maverick McCain, portrayed however falsely as something other than a conservative, really is the best hope of a Republican Party that may not like the occasionally heretical senator but that cannot possibly win without him.

by JOHN NICHOLS