Month: April 2010

I am like a meteorologist for pant-shitting. Based on what I am seeing on the Tri-County Super Doppler Shit Radar, I have asked the National Weather Service, in cooperation with the Oversight Committee on Pantular Integrity, to issue a severe pant soiling watch for the next three days. As soon as Defense Secretary Gates announced some changes to our national nuclear strategy on Tuesday afternoon it was readily apparent that the forthcoming torrent of explosive wingnut diarrhea would have all of us seeking shelter and filling sandbags.

We can't show any weakness in front of the Russians!!!!!

111!!!

The changes are pretty prosaic, of course. The DoD will no longer pursue "next generation" nuclear technology, which essentially means smaller warheads made with more accessible materials. Imagine the horror of a world without the proliferation of smaller, cheaper nukes. We're also committing to refrain from using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations, although I'm sure the next Republican president will take care of that one. Overall the aim appears to be a more reasonably sized, less expensive stockpile rather than the Cold War-sized the-Russkies-are-acomin' arsenal on which we currently sit.

I mean, whatever nuclear threats we face would fall under the umbrella of terrorism, not World War III scenarios from Caspar Weinberger's wet dreams.

The funny thing about this is that the U.
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S. doesn't really have a nuclear weapons infrastructure anymore. We outsourced that years ago. Bechtel, the privately-held "engineering services" company that exists solely off of Federal contracts (bang-up job on the Katrina trailers, champs!) has the nuclear arsenal. The DoD merely gets access to it. In theory.

As has been the case since the Manhattan Project, nuclear weapons are developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, neither of which is run by the Federal government. Both are operated under contract by Bechtel. Our nuclear materials and waste reprocessing takes place at the Hanford Site in Washington, the Y-12 Complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the Savannah River Site in Georgia, which are run under contract by Bechtel, Bechtel, and Bechtel, respectively. Pantex, which is and always has been the nation's sole nuclear weapons assembly, maintenance, and disassembly facility, has been auctioned off to Bechtel (with an assist from Lockheed Martin, to whom Sandia National Laboratory was sold). And nuclear testing, which is all subcritical since the abandonment of nuclear testing in 1991, takes place at the vast Nevada Test Site controlled by…that's right. Congratulations, Bechtel, for being the first kid on your block to collect the entire industry.

You have to give the Boomers a little credit for consistency, though: when they decided to privatize everything, they didn't exclude the one government program they actually care about. Certainly the free market, and specifically a fiercely secretive, privately held conglomerate of former Bush/Reagan administration officials, can maintain a nuclear arsenal better than the military can.

Flying sucks.

I don't know if my relatively new found disdain for it has to do with me getting older (I am.) or if the experience is getting worse (It is.) but lately I look at the need to fly as an unwelcome necessity. In the past I looked forward to it and thought it was pretty cool. And let's face it, getting on a plane and being anywhere in the world in less than a day for a reasonable cost is amazing. This does little to mitigate the extent to which the experience blows these days.

We start with a long, traffic-filled drive to the airport, paying usurious fees to park a mile away from the terminal to which we are shuttled, bags in tow, in a malodorous bus. We wait in the first of many lines to pay for the privilege of having our luggage placed on the flight. Then we wait like cattle to be strip-searched by the TSA. After we finally reach Gate 47B we wait, visibly unhappy, to be packed away like sardines on ever-smaller planes.

Once on the plane we are essentially told to hurry up, cram into a 17" wide seat (seriously, that's the industry average) and shut the hell up once we are done mastering the live action Tetris necessary to fit anything in the overhead bins. Here we will spend between one and a dozen hours wedged between strangers with radically different ideas about personal hygiene. My favorite, and in my experience the most likely combination, is between the massively overweight person and the tubercular hillbilly. I get to battle the former's overspilling paunch while trying to guess the virus that the latter is communicating. Aside from the company of our fellow passengers, the only in-flight amenities are half of a can of Coke, a tiny bag of pretzels, and the open contempt of the flight attendants.

Life Magazine – which apparently still exists, by the way – recently posted this photo album entitled "When flying was fun." It shows a variety of aspects of flying from the pre-deregulation and pre-9/11 days. Under regulation, all of the prices were the same so the airlines had to compete with service and amenities. Some of the "amenities", like the flight attendants forced to do their jobs in hot pants, are dated to the point of inducing cringing. But others, like passengers being able to say goodbye to their departing friends without a SWAT team impounding their vehicle for daring to stop in front of the terminal, have given way to our paranoia and cynicism. The biggest changes, of course, have been motivated by cost. The white tablecloth food service has been replaced by the tiny bag of Anger Pretzels because, well, low fares are all that matter.

The changes in air travel illustrate quite nicely one of the basic dilemmas of living in post-New Deal, deregulated America. Of course the Life Magazine photos are idyllic and completely overlook the fact that flying was too expensive for many people during that era; the posh service reflected the mostly upper- and upper-middle class clientele who could afford to fly with any regularity. Deregulation has done two things to air travel. First, it has democratized it, driving down prices to the point that most Americans above the poverty line could afford a ticket if flying became necessary or merely desirable. Second, it has made the experience horrible. The unencumbered free market is only good at one thing: lowering prices. Everything else is sacrificed to that end. It will give you a $149 round-trip ticket from Chicago to New York, but it won't make much of an effort to hide the corner-cutting that makes it possible.

I see this debate in a lot of different social issues these days: do we want something made or done right if it means that many people won't be able to afford it, or do we want cheap shit that everyone can afford? Regardless of which one of those options we prefer individually or collectively, our system can only produce one of them.

The term "oligarchy" is bandied about in the public sphere with considerable frequency these days, more frequently than we have heard since the Progressive Era. People who write the kind of stuff I write love words like "oligarchy" or "plutocrat." They are shiny, phonetically pleasing, five dollar words with a distinctly nasty edge. Rarely are these terms used accurately, though. Oligarchy, for example, is often used generically to refer to a group of people who have a lot of power.

Oligarchy, as Webster's and any half-decent Intro to Government textbook will tell you, is "a form of government in which power effectively rests with a small elite segment of society." Perhaps a democratic theorist who studies these things for a living could pick nits with me, but I find this definition lacking. What does "power" mean in this context? Economic power? Political power? Cultural influence? Thousands of different groups or individuals could fall into those categories. Nor does size help us define things. Big and Powerful are often poorly correlated.

A better definition of oligarchy, I believe, is a group of social elites with sufficient power (economic, political, religious, etc.) to destroy the society by their actions. In other words, if society can function without you, you are not part of the club. If it can't, call the printer and get "Reigning Oligarch" added to your business cards. Wal-Mart is huge and certainly society would be affected by their collapse, but we'd be fine without them. We could shop elsewhere. So they haven't quite earned membership to the club yet. They can't credibly threaten to bring the whole society crashing down. You're not an oligarch until you can stare the country in the eye and say "I will fucking end you." And mean it.

For the first 75 years of American history, the landed plantation aristocracy of the South constituted a legitimate oligarchy. They controlled 99% of the nation's export economy (which prior to income taxation was essentially the only real source of revenue for the Federal government) and its food supply. This power was concentrated in an incredibly small number of hands but they controlled states large enough to exercise effective veto power over the entire political process. They kept slavery off the political agenda – and more generally got their way about, well, everything – for decades because the Federal government was weak and they could credibly threaten to secede and do serious harm to the North.

It is not a coincidence that Washington didn't call their bluff until the balance of economic power had shifted to the industrial North in the 1850s.
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After the Civil War the banks on Wall Street assumed this role.
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Their stranglehold on the country was made apparent in the Panic of 1907 when, lacking a central bank to inject liquidity into the economy, the embarrassed Federal government had to go to J.P. Morgan hat-in-hand and beg him to personally rescue the economy. Like, with his own money. It took the Crash of 1929, however, to shock the government into taking back some of that power from the financial industry.

Now we are right back in 1907. The giant banks, unencumbered by Glass-Stegall, that brought us to ruin have spent the last year and most of the billions in taxpayer bailout dollars getting even bigger. As any decent financial blogger has noted repeatedly over the past year, the bailout did not come with strings attached. Lacking any meaningful financial regulation, the crisis has produced nothing but bigger banks operating much the same as they have been for the past two decades. And when the next collapse comes a few years from now, Congress will bail them out again.

Because they have to. Because a small number of players control the banking and financial industries and their collapse means the collapse of our entire economy (not to mention the U.S. Dollar).

Thirty years of downsizing, privatizing, and deregulating have left the Federal government too weak to even administer TARP – they contracted that work out to Goldman Sachs. Let that sink in; Washington paid Goldman Sachs to administer the bailout plan for the industry GS helped bring to ruin, not because of crony capitalism but because Treasury simply lacks the power and resources to do it. The phrase "Too big to fail" is nothing more than a tacit admission of being on the short end of an unequal power sharing arrangement.