Opinion-Columns.com

ONE MAN'S STRANGLEHOLD IS ANOTHER MAN'S MARKET-SHARE

Here we go again, reprising the old cold-war language of strangleholds and us against them communist-capitalist comparisons. Except for the fact that they no longer (if indeed they ever did) hold water.

Some very bad stuff has just transpired in Georgia and I’m not writing about Atlanta, but rather Tbilisi. Seem a long way from home? Yeah, five or six thousand miles, but surely I need not remind you the world is becoming smaller, if not more hospitable.

Russia's Strike Shows The Power Of the Pipeline, by Steven Pearlstein

It was surely not lost on Russia's bully in chief, Vladimir Putin, that the oil giant BP decided to shut down the pipeline that runs through parts of Georgia controlled by Russian troops. Indeed, that was one of the aims of the cross-border incursion.

Putin understands better than anyone that oil and gas are the source of Russia's resurgence as a military and economic power and his own control over the Russian government and key sectors of its economy. It is oil and gas that provide the money to maintain Russia's powerful military, along with a vast internal security apparatus and network of government-controlled enterprises that allow the president-turned-premier to maintain his iron grip on the levers of political and economic power.

Iron grips and who is bully to whom are a matter of definition. Steven Pearlstein seems not to feel that the illegal and vilified hounding of Iraq into a destroyed sovereignty is the result of anything other than Iraq's thirst for democracy satisfying itself at the well (or possibly wellhead) of American ideals. 

One could hardly call George Bush America’s bully in chief, at least not without a major helping of irony. It’s amazing and not a little unsettling that these similarities continue to be lost in the translation from Eastern (push) belligerence to Western (push, push) belligerence.

. . . Nabucco (a Western intervention pipeline) also became a top priority of the Bush State Department -- in particular, of Matt Bryza, a deputy assistant secretary of state, and C. Boyden Gray, a Bush family confidante who was named a special envoy for Eurasian energy, who began actively courting the leaders of Azerbaijan. (the plot thickens--these are my parentheticals)

. . . Putin, quite correctly, viewed Nabucco as part of a larger campaign by Washington to contain and isolate Russia and limit the expansion of its burgeoning energy empire. With Gazprom, the state gas monopoly, Putin launched his own competing proposal called South Stream to build a new pipeline to the Caucasus.

Well Steve, certainly no offense taken when, shortly after the boat ride and fishing in Kennebunkport, George Bush moved to isolate and limit Russia’s energy interests.

A campaign by Washington.

I’ll be that wasn’t on the agenda over hot dogs and hamburgers. How is it that George could look into Vladimir’s eyes, see into his soul and miss South Stream? And there was Dad, right there on the boat, grinning and baiting hooks.

Ah, those baited hooks.

. . . What we've been reminded once again is that Vladimir Putin is perfectly willing to sacrifice the rule of law and the good opinion of others to protect the Russian empire and the energy monopoly that sustains it. The techniques he used to bring Georgia to heel, while more lethal and destructive, have the same thuggish quality as the techniques Putin uses to silence domestic opposition and to expropriate the energy assets of Yukos, Shell and BP.

Ouch. Steven, you are my most admired economic writer, but the references here sound as though they came directly out of the administration media-machinery. It's becoming more apparent every day that Bush and Cheney encouraged Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to lean out over the abyss, whispering in his ear that they wouldn't let go of his hand. And, like countless U.S. promises to countless dissident groups, we were not there when they got nudged from behind.

C. Boyden Gray can put that in his diplomatic bonafides when he next represents Bush in Eurasian energy circles. George Bush's thumb on the scales suddenly seemed very evidently up an embarrassing part of his anatomy. And there he was, enjoying himself so much in China--another country he works overtime to alienate.

This man and his so-called foreign policy is unable to do other than stride the world in very muddy seven-league boots, staining diplomatic carpets and muddying up the international landscape for decades to come.

Oil--the obsession of this administration and the subject of still secret energy policy constructed in the silence and darkness of Dick Cheney's office--continues to

• stoke an American with-us-or-against-us belligerence,
• triple the cost of crude,
• depreciate our currency by half,
• spiral the nation into unending debt
• and set the stage for an American economic crash second to (possibly) only one.

This administration and (I would suppose by this article) Steven Pearlstein seem to think that sovereign Russia is incapable of protecting its interests in the sphere in which those interests reside.

That's a very dangerous bit of foolishness.

America has encouraged Georgia to shove a stick in the eye of the Russian bear a time too often. What in the name of god are American military advisors doing in Georgia--smack bang up against the border of Russia?

It's no surprise Russia reacted militarily. It's no surprise that thousands died and lost their homes because of our encouragement. It's no surprise (except perhaps to a very shaken Saakashvili) that we left him holding that stick and looking stupid. It's no surprise that this poisonous and dangerous administration continues to risk American blood, treasure and reputation for their own narrow self-interest and that of their crony war-profiteers.

It's no surprise that John McCain would fall into step and march to the same sad, failed, disproven and ignorant tune.

The worst of it is that it's no surprise to find a large part of the country feeling good about itself by following in those same muddy prints.

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Media comment:

• al-Jazeera-Qatar-Russian forces sink Georgian ships
• Reuters-Russian troops not going to Tbilisi: ministry
• United Press International-Georgian troops pull back
• Guardian-UK-Georgian villages burned and looted as Russian tanks advance
• ABC News-Georgia-Russia Shaky Cease Fire

ROBERT GATES, THE RIGHT MAN AT A VERY LATE TIME IN THE GAME

Bob Gates has done a great many things right in his brief tenure as Secretary of Defense. Not the least of those services has been to bring a sense of appropriate mission to the Pentagon, where once the Rumsfeld mission seemed in danger of replacing the Department of State.

War, as is correctly said, is failed diplomacy. Or was it ‘diplomacy by other means?’ No matter, the result is mostly the same, except for the profit to the military-industrial chaps, who are mostly living quietly at home, shooting a few quail and musing upon the assured future of their offspring.

(David Ignatius, Washington Post, Aug 7th) Defense Secretary Bob Gates has been talking recently about how to rebuild America's national security architecture so that it fits the 21st century. The next president should think about assigning Gates to fix what he rightly says is broken.

Gates is an anomaly in this lame-duck administration. He is still firing on all cylinders, working to repair the damage done at the Pentagon by his arrogant and aloof predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. Gates has restored accountability in the military services by firing the secretaries of the Army and Air Force when they failed to respond forthrightly to problems. And he has been an early and persuasive internal administration critic of U.S. military action against Iran.

Ignatius is right on. Either cause worthy enough to secure the man an honored place in the history of a dishonorable administration. One would hope that, if the Democrats nail down the next presidency, the thrown-out bathwater will not include this particular public servant.

Amazingly for a defense secretary, Gates has been arguing against the "creeping militarization" of foreign policy. In a speech last month, he urged more funding for the State Department and other civilian agencies, saying they have been "chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long." In Washington, that's almost unheard of -- sticking your neck out for the other guy -- and it's one reason Gates' reputation has been steadily rising.

Allowing that Obama (presume, presume) will be the incomer and that he will want his own choice of Defense Secretary, Ignatius makes the intriguing suggestion that Bob Gates would be the perfect man to overhaul the raggedy, shopworn, patched-together national security apparatus.

Why not appoint Gates to head a special commission to revise the basic framework of the National Security Act of 1947? He knows all the pieces of this puzzle -- having run the CIA and worked at the National Security Council earlier in his career. A hypothetical Gates commission would have two basic missions.

• Fix the NSC structure so that it is designed to deal with today's "soft power" challenges rather than the old Cold War problems. Specifically, a Gates commission should think about how to focus money and expertise on the nation-building problems that now fall between the cracks of the interagency system.

"Over the long term, we cannot kill or capture our way to victory," Gates warned last month. "What the Pentagon calls 'kinetic' operations should be subordinate to measures to promote participation in government, economic programs to spur development, and efforts to address the grievances that often lie at the heart of insurgencies.". . a (new) report notes, there are more people serving in military bands than in the entire State Department. Changing that balance will require a different kind of NSC architecture.

If you weren’t noticing (as I was not noticing) that the State Department has shrunk to the size of a band of trumpet-players rather than orchestrating upon the world stage, it’s time to smell the coffee.

No wonder Condi Rice seems to be ever airborne to ever less purpose. She is doing everything other than piloting the plane. Some wags would follow that by saying that piloting the plane of State is her actual job and they would not be far wrong.

• Fix      the half-baked reform of the intelligence agencies. The 2004 law that      created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was meant to      deal with the intelligence failures that led to Sept. 11, but it instead      has created more bureaucracy. Gates understands very well what's wrong; he      turned down the DNI job because he knew the structure was unwieldy. Gates      has cobbled together an interim solution by working with old friends --      DNI Mike McConnell, CIA Director Mike Hayden and Pentagon intelligence      chief James Clapper. But the current arrangement is too dependent on      personalities. A sign of continuing backroom friction is the rivalry over      who will brief the presidential candidates.

The FBI was arguably at its most effective under the iron-fisted and power-mad control of J. Edgar Hoover. A small structure, closely held, with very short reporting structures served Hoover well and the lesson there is not to expand our intelligence gathering community mindlessly, but to find a better man than Hoover.

Currently, in lieu of a ‘better man,’ we have sixteen agencies, 100,000 employees and almost $45 billion annual cost. They stand around, bump into the furniture, point fingers, argue over territory and are unable to get a single agent’s concern up the chain of (?) command in time to stop 9-11 from happening. And that was back in the ‘good old days’ before Mike Chertoff became unlikely head of an agency devoted to overlaying the standing, bumping, pointing and arguing with wondering, fretting, testifying and looking foolish in case after case.

By comparison, Condi Rice’s State Department has about 5,000 stateside employees. They are outnumbered 20 to 1 by the intelligence community’s spooks, which may shine a light on why our foreign policy is so spooky and unable to effect any other than belligerent confrontation.

Bob Gates seems to think that’s an unmanageable proportion in a modern-day world. Many of us eel he’s right and the challenge is to realize that men of his capability, experience, wide-ranging relationships and trust among partisans are few and far between. Far, so far and thus far, is counted in decades rather than years.

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Media comment:

• National Review-Testing Gates
• New York Times-Gates Plans the Post-Gates Pentagon
• Associated Press-Gates: Military's priority is to defeat extremists
• New York Times-Gates Wants to Shift $1.2 Billion to Bolster War Surveillance

In My Dreams, Google Takes Down Microsoft

I know, all the current speculation on the financial pages (that doesn’t have to do with speculators) is focused on Microsoft’s unrewarding and unsuccessful wooing of 2^nd rate search engine Yahoo. And, of course, how many multiples of billions they are willing to spend. Even Wired can’t avoid the reference to gluttony and greed.

(Wired, July 29) On February 1, Microsoft set the porcine tone by presenting itself as the new champion of choice, explicitly declaring that the (Yahoo) deal represented the best chance at avoiding a Google monopoly.

The message itself was credible, but the source was not. After all, wasn't it just a few minutes ago that Microsoft was the unstoppable Evil Empire? The reality is that most people do indeed want to see a counter-balance to Google's power ... but they're not particularly thrilled to have that balance come from Microsoft.

That’s an issue of little importance to me as a consumer. Someone will get stuck with Yahoo and thus 2^nd place will join 2^nd rate to keep the field honest enough for approval by our esteemed Justice Department. That’s a pretty low threshold these days (during a moribund caretaker Attorney General), but it fascinates me that the Michael Mukasey anti-trust division considers 90% market penetration (Google plus Yahoo) a no-no.

But Microsoft’s 90% strangle-hold on operating systems is perfectly OK on the trust-o-meter, even though it gives Europe fits.

Which would be alright, if it were any damned good. But Microsoft’s operating system underpins a whole menagerie of functionalities that don’t function—at least not well. What can be said about a system so vulnerable that it writes pot-hole filling patches at the rate of 60 last year alone? Five a month? You can choose to call them ‘security updates’ or any user-friendly name you dream up, but they’re still holes in the road.

An expensive road, one might add, seeded as it is by proprietary software that effectively locks in users.

(Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2008) The software giant (Microsoft)Tuesday unveiled a Web site called the Mojave Experiment, where unsuspecting people test an upcoming operating system – only to learn that it’s really Windows Vista. Why the shenanigans? Because most people think Vista is a dud. In fact, the people Microsoft filmed on hidden cameras universally panned Vista, calling it “horrible” and saying they’ve heard nothing but bad things about it. When asked to grade Vista on a scale of one to 10, some people gave it a zero.

You can guess how this plays out: People test the new “Mojave” operating system and rave about it. Then they laugh and make self-deprecating jokes when they find out Mojave is really the much-maligned Vista

Will the real Microsoft please stand up?

The reality of present-day computing doles out (essentially) three choices of operating system, the stuff under the hood that makes your computer compute. Microsoft, the bull in the china-shop and Apple, which has a near-cult following of adherents, but only 5% of the market. Linux runs third, although it runs best, with less than 3% desktop/laptop market share. Linux boasts an ‘open’ system, to which all are invited to write programs. (Nice touch, but most program-writers do it for money and the money is overwhelmingly at Microsoft.)

(Canada.com) The global embrace of the Internet and the capability to turn everything digital -- pictures, text and vital information -- has resulted in an ease of doing business and communicating. But it has also created a world that is capable of being exploited by the most malevolent of people.

"The bad guys are lurking in everybody's network. You're between six and 20 milliseconds from every creep and criminal on the Internet," Seitz said.

"When people ask me what the safest computer to buy is, I tell them one that you don't plug in. That's the current state of computer security for the average business and home user."

Anyone out there care to reinvent? Come up with an alternative?

Who wouldn’t welcome the appearance of a player who could produce a secure, accurate, problem-free and affordable alternate to Windows? Who wouldn’t love to have it buried somewhere in a cave or deep space, behind the kind of firewalls only the rich and powerful can afford? Who wouldn’t love to be able to access that security and power for a monthly fee—maybe five bucks?

Who wouldn’t love a new way to drive their drivers? Haven’t we been stuck for long enough behind the proprietary wheel of a car with the steering (when it steers) in the back seat?

So, here’s the plan—my plan—no one else has shown any interest in knocking down Microsoft. But they are so ripe for plucking. The ‘low fruit’ can’t get any more tempting than 60 security updates a year. Who possibly has the scope, knowledge and bankroll to take ‘em on?

Reports out of the Googleplex are purporting that Google's search database has hit a significant mark...it's finally tipped over the 1 trillion URL (web pages/files) mark.

Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, two Google software engineers from the web search infrastructure team, made the unexpected discovery. In an awe filled statement on the Google blog, the engineers shared:

"We've known it for a long time: the web is big...Our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs on the web at once!"

Google doesn't index "every" page and file on the web (to maintain relevance and avoid duplicate content), so the actual web is significantly larger. However, Google's database does represent the biggest index of all the search engines. As the team point out: "...we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data."

Google, with their name recognition and reputation for coming up with useful things that are inspired by what people need, leaves Yahoo to the vagaries of life and buys Linux. They take some time, because they are long-term players and have some time, to develop super-slick software that supports business needs as no one has done before.

Google is terrific at doing what no one has done before and open source is the way to go, but open-source that pays competitive development fees (or parts of fees or increments of fees). A company that can figure out how to place an ad on a specific website out of millions of similar sites can handle that.

They’re also good at looking at innovation through fresh eyes. Why not a system of satellites out there somewhere that power the Googlesphere and can be updated minute by minute, without annoying you and me. I don’t even know how it could be put together, much less whether it’s a good idea.

But I know the market would be instantaneous, huge and grateful.

Sign me up, Scottie.

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Media comment;

• Guardian-UK-Is Microsoft's 'new' Mojave better than Windows Vista?
• Wired-10 Dumbest Lies of the Micro-hoo-gle-cahn Saga
• Times-UK-Microsoft limbers up to fight for online future
• U Talk Marketing-Google continues to dominate European search spend
• ZDNet-UK-Red Hat chief: 'The clouds will all run Linux'

 

How Did ‘Investor Satisfaction’ Ever Get to be a Taxpayer Priority?

Who died and left the investors in charge of America’s future? When did manufacturers, airlines, investment banks, mom and pop shoe stores (if there are any left) and big-box retailers decide that business practice didn’t mean anything and business presentation was the whole ball game?

Oops, take mom and pop out of that equation. They are still providing the sweat equity that built America. It’s the rest of the business world that has given up sweat in favor of equity. Except for sweating out quarterly reports. Plenty of that goin' around, but even they no longer make sense; Google makes record profits and their stock drops; Merrill Chase doesn’t lose as much as they were expected to lose and their stock goes up.

Slowly, inevitably, unendingly over the past three or four decades, we have seen our American business model—the finest on the planet—hijacked by investors. Not customers or clients, but investors. They made themselves King of the Hill. If there’s an unwarranted Freudian slip toward that ‘hill’ being Capitol Hill, so be it. We deserve, under these maneuvered and contrived, massaged and outright lied-about circumstances to get sent to the back of the room until we better understand the free-market system that made us great.

Free markets are not those markets that abandon the security and welfare of their workers. Nor should they be free from all forms of government oversight, allowed to buy and sell Congress as suits their purpose. No section of the Bill of Rights empowers investors to pocket profits and off-load losses to the taxpayer. Short-term gains for corporations, manipulated by relieving themselves of that messy old habit of actually making things and, in place of that, dealing exclusively in the branding of things once was called cattle-rustling instead of merger.

Branding, without owning a herd, was a hanging offense in more sensible times.

A case in point is Larry Summers’ more-than-excellent assessment of the current rush to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, so that investors will not lose confidence.

Unfinished Business at Freddie and Fannie--What the Government Should Do if the Housing Giants Can't Stand on Their Own (By Lawrence Summers, July 28, 2008)

Anyone who cares about the health of the U.S. economy should welcome the enactment of the Treasury's rescue plan for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with other measures to support the housing market. While there is room for argument about details, the risks to the financial system were too great to allow delay.

OK, Larry, maybe I agree with the premise, ‘cause you’re a guy with street-cred, at least on Wall Street. Go on.

No one should suppose, however, that the issue is satisfactorily resolved, even for the short term. Emergency legislation was necessary because market participants were unwilling to buy Fannie and Freddie's debt; investors doubted that the government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, were healthy enough to repay . . . If their (Fannie-Freddie) debt proves easier to place now, it is only because this guarantee has been strengthened, not because anything has changed at the GSEs.

This, to put it mildly, is a highly problematic posture for policy.

Now I know this won’t make a whole lot of ‘investors’ happy, but suppose—just suppose—we let them take the losses they so richly deserve and wring the bathwater out of Freddie and Fannie’s tub? Presumably, what we would be left with is the baby.

If this preferred alternative (see the entire article) is, as I fear, not realistic given the state of GSE finances, the government should use its new receivership power to protect taxpayers and the financial system. In the process, payments to stockholders, holders of preferred stock and probably subordinated debt holders would be wiped out, conserving cash for the benefit of taxpayers. The GSEs' borrowing costs would fall considerably, helping prospective homeowners. (underlining mine)

I don’t know when the last time was that I heard anyone suggest that taxpayers ought to be protected and investors made responsible for their (essentially) gambling choices to win or lose at the great green table of Wall Street. Thank you, Larry Summers.

The likelihood of meltdown is great, no doubt about it. The pain of another ’29 style crash is even more painful to contemplate. But the alternative could be worse. The alternative may be to take a gamed system that has impoverished tens of millions for the enrichment of thousands—and extend it. The beast must be put down rather than encouraged to continually lower its head and turn on us.

America has become a vision of itself rather than an economic engine. We no longer make anything. Witness the overnight capitalization of Google to 25 times the value of General Motors, which has divisions on five continents, dealerships worldwide and a mix of product that ranges from Chevrolets to—ranges. Google (much as I love it and much as I value the direction American ingenuity allows in the creation of a Google) sells ads on the Internet.

Brand has replaced product. Product can be made anywhere—mostly in places you wouldn’t want to have to find a hotel room for the night. Nike doesn’t make anything! Nike pays Tiger Woods a hundred million a year to mate his brand with their brand. The result is the birth of a super-brand, whose incidental made-by-someone-else shoe cost $4 to make, $40 to brand and that creates (for the investor) $40 in profit.

Where in that mix is a meaningful American job upon which an American man or woman can support a family?

There is none.

The meaningful job upon which a man or woman can support a family has been massaged out of the business formula as companies learned that making stuff was not nearly as nifty and profitable as branding stuff. That, my friend, is the answer to how company after company can lay off thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of employees during a financial glitch. They are to a very large degree redundant and can be let go when the phones stop ringing—they don’t bloody make anything. When (and if) hired back, their benefits are gone, along with seniority and the wage they made at being let go.

Is this a great system, or what?

Now my premise, back three or four paragraphs, when I still thought I had a premise—was that the destruction of this glitz-based chimera of what business actually used to be, would bring us to our senses. The Harvard Business School (which we have largely to thank for a Pentagon that has lost its mission, a new paradigm for waging war, a currency in shambles, a series of ‘bubbles’ that periodically bring the nation to its knees, a quarterly-profit mentality that defines geed in place of purpose and—last but not least—parachutes its grads from disaster to disaster at a raise in pay) may finally be laid to rest as a business model.

What on earth would rise in its place? Old timey horses and carriages? The return of Ozzie and Harriet? Speaking in that vein to the narrower issue of Fannie and Freddie, Summers summarizes;

The stakes here are high. The choices made in the coming months will bear on the housing market, future taxpayer burdens, the credibility of U.S. financial authorities in times of crisis and the integrity of the political system. It is a time for decisive action.

The stakes are higher than that, Larry. Fred and Fannie are not the only credibility problems we face as a nation, as China becomes producer to America’s consumer and creditor to America’s debt. Congress seems unaware that it has a 14% approval rate—half that of the most unpopular president in memory. No Congress in history has stood at so low an approval rate, but these bozos have made themselves bullet-proof by gerrymandering districts and raking in the gobs of money from lobbyists that assure re-election.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, we are at the brink of tipping into fear and anarchy and Barack Obama was excoriated by the press for pointing out that obvious fact.

We need somehow to escape the bosom into which we have been flung—the clutches of investors. We must put resources once again into R&D in something other than the pharmaceutical industries and rebuild our infrastructure with jobs rather than selling it off to foreigners. Farming means more than absentee landlords raising crops and animals on lakes of sewage.

This country is too good to throw away and we are doing that as surely as God (or Safeway, who can tell the difference?) made little green apples.

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Media comment;

• Wall Street Journal-Notable & Quotable
• Bloomberg-Mortgage Debt Least of Bad Bets as Investing Sinks
• Bloomberg-Freddie, Fannie `Fair Values' Hardly Look Fair
• Washington Post-Who Got What in a Slowing Economy
• Reuters-UK-U.S. Congress approves housing bill

HANGING PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION BY THE NECK UNTIL DEAD

Public transportation (in the true meaning of public, instead of road-worthy) is in its usual stage of self-flagellation and it ain’t a pretty thing to watch. New York City’s no more guilty than most of running like mad after the wrong goal, but it’s recently in the news and makes a convenient target.

(NYTimes, William Neuman) July 22, 2008

So Soon? Fares and Tolls Rise in M.T.A. Plan

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will propose a substantial increase in transit fares and bridge and tunnel tolls next year to help close a widening budget gap of nearly $900 million, according to an official at the authority.

Though the precise amount of the fare and toll increase has yet to be determined, the authority will seek to increase the revenue it gets from those sources by 8 percent. If approved by the authority’s board, the increase would take effect next July and would follow a toll and fare increase in March of this year.

In the more than 100-year history of the subway, the fare has gone up in consecutive years only once before, in 1980 and 1981.

On Wednesday, the authority will unveil a preliminary budget plan for 2009 that calls for the fare and toll increases and outlines other measures to balance its budget, including more than $300 million in additional financing that the authority hopes to get from the city and state.

Contemplate (if you dare) a city that owns and operates the New York City Subway, Staten Island Railway, Long Island Rail Road, and Metro-North Railroad plus a network of 4,500 busses running across 200 routes. Make your head swim? Is there any reason why instead of looking at this mélange as an alternate to choked traffic, board members ought not just throw up their hands and raise fares?

The answer is a resounding yes!

MTA is the largest (and all-time champion) public transportation provider in the Western Hemisphere. 14.5 million people in the pool of actual and possible riders, already sitting on MTA seats almost 3 billion times a year. If, like me, you blur at the shaking of a billion in your face, that’s three thousand million rides a year.

Where do these 8 million a day go? Why are they on buses, trains and metro in the first place?

For the most part, they go to work (and home), shopping (and home) to school (and home) or out to Aqueduct Race Track to watch the ponies run. So, they actually go and come primarily from businesses. Yet business—in the grand, multi borough, 5,000 square mile circumference-of-commuters sense—pays not a dime to get their cleaning-lady or CEO to work.

Well, actually they may send a limo for the CEO, but you get my drift.

The authority faces steadily rising costs, particularly for fuel, as well as sharply declining tax revenues due to a slowdown in the real estate market. Just six months ago, the authority predicted that its shortfall for 2009 would be slightly more than $200 million, less than a quarter of its latest projection.

The budget plan, which the authority is required to produce in July, puts new focus on a state commission created by Gov. David A. Paterson to recommend long-term solutions for the authority’s chronic financial difficulties. The panel, which is headed by Richard Ravitch, a former authority chairman, is to make a report by November. The authority must pass a new budget for next year in December.

Long-term solutions are not the stuff of boards. Boards are good at meeting four times a year, looking at budget shortfalls, raising ticket-prices and adjourning to lunch at GILT over at The New York Palace Hotel. Having $10 billion income and $11 billion in expenses is a slam-dunk. Raise fares, defer capital expenses, reduce maintenance, cut services—meeting adjourned—what’s for lunch?

That’s no doubt unfair to the MTA board, but I’m willing to be unfair to make a point.

The answer to public transportation is not reduced services and increased fares. Crappy rides at more cost is only OK if you live somewhere other than a strap-hanger world. And, let’s face it, every single board member lives in that other world.

Ponder this; there’s $21 billion in retail clothing sales in NYC, another $29 billion in wholesale. It’s almost impossible to find out what the total business take is in NYC and surroundings, but a 20% tax on just the clothing business would run the whole pub-trans system. So, what would it be as a business tax? One percent? One half of one percent? These people are coming to clean your toilets, run your businesses, buy your products.

Nationwide, there are (and have been) two solutions to deteriorating infrastructure;

• Ignore it and hope it      goes away, until collapse occurs on someone else’s watch
• Privatize, selling it to      the Arabs or Chinese

Bill Clinton isn’t the copyright holder of record when it comes to ‘a third way.’ We have got to find a third way out of infrastructure collapse—particularly public transportation—as oil crisis after oil crisis shuts down our ability to rely on automobiles. Cities that can be delightful places to live and work are becoming uninhabitable due to gridlock, grime, diesel fumes, and parking dilemmas. The way forward is not to take a common solution and put it beyond the reach of all but the affluent.

The affluent are not on the bus, metro or light rail—except in Europe.

“We’re not fans of fare hikes,” said Gene Russianoff, staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group, “but my view about the hikes will turn largely on how much the city and the state will pony up to pay their fair share.”

City and State? That’s another word for the strap-hangers. What about business? How ‘bout GILT over at The New York Palace Hotel, or Madison Avenue, where world-wide advertising revenues grew by $22 billion last year?

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, said in a statement that while the city recognized the authority’s financial problems, “City taxpayers aren’t in a position to increase our subsidy over the billion-dollars-plus we already provide each year.” He added, “That’s why we are looking forward to hearing the Ravitch commission’s findings about how the M.T.A. can find new revenue sources on both the expense and capital sides.”

Anybody want to jump on the bus and go for groceries . . . ?

. . . and pay $4 for the pleasure?

I thought not. And yet isn’t it strange how when tobacco companies are fined hundreds of billions, they just add that to the price of a pack of cigarettes and go on their merry, profit-producing way—and we can’t find a way to provide decent public transportation by similar methods? Make no mistake, the grocery or ad-agency or private university s going to have to pass on that transport cost to you and me and Aunt Mabel.

But the result will be to move closer and closer to the goal of free (in the sense of no-fare) public conveyance, bicycle friendly city streets, outdoor cafes, cleaner air, way less noise and a sense of empowerment over the forces of crud.

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Media comment;

• Bay City Times-Backers of mass transit working to get streetcars they desire
• Associated Press-Renters go downtown to save on gas, commuting
• Santa Rosa Democrat-Report: More cities riding public transit wave
• CNN-Alternet Systems, Inc. Announces Mass Transit Wireless E-Ticket System
• Politicker.com-Mass disappointment

ONE OLD JEW AND A COUPLE SELF-INTERESTED GENERALS RE-CREATE THE EIGHTIES

Louis Rene Beres is the old Jew. Maybe even not that old, sixty-three is hardly ancient but he’s one of those guys who just can’t let go of the old days. Bagels and lox, missiles and shocks, they’re in his blood.

The rest of the cast is made up of two Fox News analyst generals, one a shill for defense contractors (Paul Vallely), the other claiming that the war on terror is a war between Islam and Judeo-Christianity (Thomas McInerney), saying:

"That's what's going on. If you don't understand that, then you don't get it."

Well, I had a hard time getting the Crusades as well. Eight centuries later and it seems my heart just isn’t in all this my god over your god stuff and maybe not getting it is a badge of intellectual honesty in place of self interest. There’s more than enough self-promotion in all three of these OpEders to go around. They write in a Washington Times (Reverend Moon, publisher) article;

McCain and Obama Must Take Note. Neither presidential candidate has made serious mention of what is clearly this country's most urgent policy concern — staying "alive" as a nation. Nuclear war and nuclear terrorism remain genuinely existential threats to the United States. In fact, their likelihood is increasing, not diminishing.

Existential threat? McCain and Obama are supposed to take note of this?Staying alive as a nation? What have you guys been smoking?

The United States has always drawn precise policies from strategic doctrine. Earlier, this doctrine was fashioned principally from the standpoint of countering the Soviet Union.

Well, we all know how well that turned out. The ‘fashion’ was to arm every rag-tag dictator we could wheedle into our camp, most of whom we have had to go back and fight, facing our own weapons. The present-day armed world of soldier-children and medal-encrusted dictators is a tribute to American Policy.

Gen. Paul Vallely (ret), Gen. Tom McInerney (ditto), McDonnel Douglas and the rest of the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned us of pretty much wrote that policy. We taught the ‘terrorists’ of al Qaeda how to fight a major power with nothing but what they could scrounge. Now they are fighting another major power and scrounging very successfully.

Thanks guys. What other advice do you have for us?

The new American president will need to understand that anti-U.S. threats should no longer be assessed according to antiquated "spectrum of conflict" thinking. He will also need to acknowledge plainly (and plan accordingly) that dedicated proxies may have ready access to weapons of mass destruction. Like states, sub-national enemies could soon imperil us with grievous harms. These would include weaponized pathogens, as well as nuclear explosives.

Wow, I’ll bet neither candidate has any idea.

Certain core matters of strategic doctrine will require re-examination. Our next president will need to consider both "counter value" (counter-city) and "counter force" targeting doctrines - this time with regard to both state and non-state proxies. These sensitive re-examinations could become divisive and acrimonious, but the issues concern nothing less than our physical survival.

Divisive and acrimonious are nothing compared to profitable and weapon-enhancing. Core strategic doctrine just demands we gotta get out there and bomb everyone back into the stone age.

I went a little light on Louie (Kablooie) Beres’ qualifications and, after all, he’s the guy who has his name up there in front of the generals. Louie is a professor of Political Science at Purdue University. If that seems a little Midwestern for a rabble-rouser of Louie’s caliber, he was also chairman of "Project Daniel," a think-tank of sorts advising Israel's Prime Minister, the old tank-commander, Ariel Sharon. Sharon was no small-timer among terrorists himself, but now he’s out of the picture and we can presume Louie is no longer flying first-class.

The next president will have to look closely at preemption. Present Iraq-war controversies notwithstanding, there are other major perils that may indeed require "anticipatory self-defense." There will be circumstances in which the only alternative to capable and lawful preemption could be an American national surrender.

Ah well, when there are no logical ghosts out there under the bed, they can easily be invented. Lockheed, Boeing and the boys can profit from bombing nations for no other reason than things that go bump in the night. Strangely (does it seem strange to you or am I being paranoid?) the recent target-list among the preemptives include oil-producing states such as Venezuela and Iran, perhaps even Saudi.

America is moving from super-power to super-brand. Branding is the thing these days and all the rage on the stock-markets of the world. Nike doesn't make anything anymore, it just whistles up Tiger Woods at however many millions a year and brands us with the swoosh.

We as a nation don’t actually make anything anymore either, we pay someone else to make it and then profit off the brand. The Constitution? Forget it. Bill of Rights? Gonzo with Gonzales.

The brand the United States is investing in these days is preemption. No one even thought of branding that until David Addington whispered in the ear of Dick Cheney, who summoned Bush the younger. Freedom and hope, opportunity and fairness, law and education are such a struggle to maintain.

Plus, there’s no real profit in people wanting to come to your country. It gets overcrowded and goes against everything Lou Dobbs stands for. When the going gets tough in sending us your poor, the tough get out there and take what they want.

Preemptively (adverb: Designed or having the power to deter or prevent an anticipated situation or occurrence). Take note of how inoffensive a word it is, in that it does not define what’s anticipated, just that it is.

·       Slow-down in defense contracts—we anticipated that.

·       Declining business profits—anticipated, babe

·       A little push-back from lesser (and they all are lesser now) nations—anticipated

·       Environmental shift of blame for our home-country extravagance—got it covered

How should we deter a nuclear Iran, both from launching direct missile attacks, and from dispersing nuclear assets among terrorist proxies? Should the new president do more to aid and empower the Iranian opposition? And for Deterrence Against Nuclear Terrorism (DANT), how should he compensate for the evident absence of "fingerprints," and for the pertinent operational limits of satellites and radars? A nuclear threat to American cities could come from cars, trucks and ships. Could we convince Tehran and its surrogates that any proxy act of nuclear terrorism would elicit a massive nuclear retaliation against Iran itself? Any useful answer will have to be drawn from a re-conceptualized and up-to-date U.S. strategic doctrine.

No fingerprints? No problem. The new and improved, iconic and brand-sensitive America needs only to anticipate fingerprints. It’s much easier than the old system. But of course, fairness (in leaving the starting-line at the same moment) demands that Iran actually has nuclear intent.

Louie, Tom and Paul tap-dance their way off stage with this final reminder;

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama already have a lot on their plates, but no issue is more important than up-to-date strategic doctrine. We now urge each candidate to give full and apt attention to this core issue: immediately, openly and seriously.

In other words, we now urge the candidates to seriously consider Louie Beres, who is no longer relevant enough to keep him down on the farm at Purdue; seriously enrich Tom McInerney, who profits from war; or seriously pursue Paul Vallely’s war between Islam and Judeo-Christianity.

You takes your doctrine of choice and your chances in this rush to rediscover the failed policies of the eighties. Add the Beres-Vallely-McInerney recipe, lightly fold in the opening disaster of this new millennium, stir over increasing heat, add a few spices and see if you can choke them down.

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Media coverage:

• Chicago Tribune-Change, Obama style
• Edmonton Sun-Canada-Peace dove better dive for cover
• LosAngeles Times-Among Arabs, disappointment over Obama's visit
• Dallas Morning News-Myth busting McCain's myth busting
• Washington Post-McCain Won't Back Down on Obama Critique

Saving Face in the Washington-Insider Pissing Match

Foreign policy is no longer about how America should react to events in the world. It has become a matter of ‘branding,’ a chance to hang a presidential catch-phrase on history and put the opposition party in a semantic box. “You’re either with us or against us” is so mindless a statement when made by the planet’s only remaining super-power, it’s hardly a surprise it brought down two hundred and fifty years of international reputation.

Terrifying the world is not the same as having a defined foreign policy, but it worked elegantly against any shred of moral opposition within Congress that might have saved us from the disaster of George Bush’s Middle East ‘policy.’ The world wasn’t the only entity terrified by terrorists and 9-11 rhetoric. The Democratic Congress curled into an eight-year fetal position, unable to raise a single objection for fear of being seen ‘weak’ on terror. Gotcha-politics raised to a new and unprecedented level.

(WashingtonPost, Kennan Had a Vision, by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier) . . . the Clinton team came to embrace the view that deeds mattered more than words. During the 1999 war over Kosovo, Clinton officials rebuffed pressures from the media and the foreign policy cognoscenti to couch the conflict in terms of a new foreign policy doctrine -- which senior administration aides referred to dismissively as the D-word. "We tried to establish common law rather than canon law," then-national security adviser Sandy Berger told us. "We set out to build a new role for the U.S. in the world by experience rather than doctrine."

The results were rather good -- the United States entered the 21st century with significant global support and respect -- but some conservatives argued that avoiding doctrinal vision showed indecision and weakness. When George W. Bush took office more than seven years ago, his new administration believed that Clinton's failure to define a clear foreign policy framework had helped squander U.S. influence.

Those were the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) guys, and a hell of a project it turned out to be. Its alumni include Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Don Rumsfeld. They all hungered for the old days of presidential power and confrontation. Of what benefit was it to enjoy global support and respect if you couldn’t set the rules?

(PNAC Statement of Principles) As the 20th century draws to a close, the United States stands as the world's pre-eminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge: Does the United States have the vision to build upon the achievements of past decades? Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?

A better question might be, does America have a historic mental image of dominance over other nations? We certainly didn’t used to and the annoying (and constant) reference to America’s defeat of communism merely adds to the tinder. We did not defeat communism. The wheels merely came off the European version because it was a total and complete failure in sustaining itself. Ronald Reagan happened to be the occupant of the Oval Office when that event occurred.

A clearer view of communism’s current condition can be drawn from China, where commercial activity and consumer gains are leading the word in percentages—a great deal of which is due to the rock-bottom point from which they began. Communism failed to evolve in the Soviet Union. In China, it may evolve itself out of existence.

Over the almost 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, foreign policy experts have all aspired to be the next Kennan.

Even Kennan wasn’t happy with what he believed to be an overstatement, over reaction and over reluctance to revise his original theory of containment. What ensued was fifty years of brinksmanship, war (Korea and Vietnam), arming of every dictator and miscreant who was bribable to our cause and the seeding of vast areas of the world with the discontent and armed conflict we are witnessing today.

Just because America is the last power left on its feet doesn’t mean the half-century of