"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures — in this century as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing people together."
Asked why Obama has been rising as the Wall Street crisis has dominated attention, McCain said with a chuckle on Fox News Channel: “Because life isn’t fair.”
“He certainly did nothing for the first few days,” McCain added. “I suspended my campaign, took our ads down, came back to Washington, met with the House folks and got on the phone, and also had face-to-face meetings.”
McCain went on to repeat his point: “Life isn’t fair, as I mentioned earlier in the program.”
Incredibly, he also said Sarah Palin has “more experience in leadership than Senator Obama and Senator Biden put together,” what with her job as mayor of a 7,000-resident town in Alaska, and her two years as governor of America’s 47th most populous state. With 680,000 people, Alaska’s population is 17 per cent the size of Puerto Rico’s, and just about on par with Winnipeg.
In contrast, Biden has been a U.S. senator for 36 years, and Obama spent eight years in the Illinois Senate before his three and a half years as a senator in Washington.
Chinese astronauts walked through space this week, the Russian and Venezuelan navies staged ominous joint war games, Myanmar freed 9,000 political prisoners, and a man flew across the English Channel with a jetpack and a parachute. But the only story in the news for the last few days has been the growing worldwide economic meltdown, and for once I’m not blaming CNN for reporting just one story at a time. This is bad, people.
The latest issue of Maclean’s, a Canadian magazine, has one of the best articles I’ve seen on the subject so far: “Why the Wall Street bailout — if it ever comes — won’t save America’s economy or ours.” The prognosis, it seems, is not good at all. Here’s an excerpt:
“Everybody keeps saying if we do nothing, there’s going to be a severe recession. Yes. There is. There’s no way around it,” says Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital in Connecticut. “We have to take our lumps. We’ve got to pay the price for all our reckless borrowing and spending.”
How painful will that bruising be? Worse than anything we’ve faced in our lifetimes, he says. He describes a depression that would forge a new world economic order, with sharply higher interest rates, a weaker American dollar, surging prices and shortages of consumer basics. These are the strains that can pull a society apart, and while not everyone believes it needs to get that bad, such warnings are fast gaining currency all over the world. There is no easy way out of the economic vice tightening around America, and all the many countries, like Canada, which rely on it for their own prosperity. Last week, with major banks failing, home foreclosures running at a rate of 10,000 a day and unemployment climbing steadily higher, it was clear that something big was happening. Something that is going to change the way we live for decades to come.
The article goes on to say that because of falling property values, 10 million unfortunate Americans have mortgages that are worth more than their houses. Since January, 605,000 American jobs disappeared, with more layoffs expected soon. U.S. credit card debt has reached $900 billion — 80 per cent more than it was 10 years ago. That’s $3,000 for every man, woman and child in America. More than half of Americans carry balances on their credit cards, and Citibank is so desperate to get people to stop using plastic that it’s matching credit card payments up to a maximum of $550 per person, in an effort to get their debts off its books. In June, America’s external federal debt topped $13 trillion — a little over $43,000 per American — mainly because each year it buy $700 billion more from other countries than it’s selling them.
Even the happy-go-lucky president knows the economy is hitting the fan:
“If money isn’t loosened up,” said President Bush of the U.S. economy, “this sucker could go down.”
Back in April, I wrote that if you have a secure job and you’re looking to buy a home, this impending recession may actually be good for you — particularly if property values fall back into a range that doesn’t require buyers to sell their organs. That silver lining still seems to be there, but whether you’re employed or not, the best course of action now is the same as it always was: save as much as you can, don’t use credit for things that will end up in a landfill 10 years from now, and don’t spend money you don’t have — even if you think you’ll have it soon. If it weren’t for people defaulting on their mortgages, credit cards and other debts — and the short-sighted lenders who kept shovelling them loans — we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Incidentally, a Google search for “Bad credit? No problem!” turns up 224,000 hits.
For a somewhat coarse but surprisingly informative explanation of the sub-prime mortgage crisis that started this whole financial disaster, click here. For a more conventional explanation, the New York Times has an excellent multimedia explainer.
Just as the world is starting to look for alternatives to “blood” diamonds, which are mined from African war zones and help fund violence, there’s also a movement to seek rubies outside of the “Valley of Rubies” in Myanmar, which provides 90 per cent of the world’s supply and has a dismal human rights record. Part of the answer seems to be in Greenland, where for ages Inuit villagers have plucked the precious stones out of the tundra. But according to True North Gems, a Canadian mining company, the rubies — including a huge half-million-dollar ruby “confiscated” from a villager’s home — are no longer theirs for the plucking.
On the third day, Madsen and his group heard the percussive thump of chopper blades bouncing off the stark mountains.
The helicopter landed close in and BMP officials jumped out with three armed police officers who encircled their group. Madsen described them as aggressive and intimidating in their tone.
[…] Madsen and his group observed the police scurrying about the ruby fields, collecting the red crystals and stuffing them into their own pockets.
The group was presented with a remarkable letter from the official with the BMP addressed to Madsen: he was not allowed to prospect or sell any mineral collected on Greenland.
This letter was the first of its kind in the history of the nation.
On a slightly related note, here’s a neat fact about rubies: among naturally occurring gems, only diamonds and moissanite (which is a lot like diamonds) are harder — and not by much.
While watching the two-hour Mythbusters “Supersize Special” yesterday, I saw the Discovery Channel’s “The World is Just Awesome” commercial for the very first time. It’s the most adorable thing I’ve seen on TV in a while, featuring the all the regular Discovery Channel personalities and all the quirkiness, silliness and little-boy wonder that a channel devoted to exploration ought to have. A house blows up, Stephen Hawking says “boom dee ya da,” Adam Savage sets Jaime Hyneman’s arm on fire, and everybody sings. It’s better than it sounds. And it actually makes me like the Discovery Channel just a little more than I already did.
I adore this song — don’t know why I didn’t post it earlier. The Mae Shi is a six-man band out of Los Angeles that creates its distinctive sound with a Buchla synthesizer. “Run to the Grave” was selected as NPR’s “Song of the Day” on August 26.
Check out their website (though it kinda hurts to look at) or just visit their MySpace page.
Google In Quotes is still in beta, but it’s an excellent tool for finding out where the candidates stand on specific issues like abortion, oil, Iraq, human rights, etc. The app also compares quotes from Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, and the usual cast of six-o’clock-news types in the American political spectrum.
For an up-to-the-minute update on poll numbers, news coverage ratios, and even blogosphere and Twitter mentions, check out perspectv, a tracker site that follows media coverage of McCain and Obama.
Nina Katchadourian creates very strange art. She does everything from mending tattered spiderwebs to projecting films onto her teeth, and though I don’t always get it, I almost always love it. Have a look at her book spine storytelling series, and then check out the rest of her site for a peek at such endeavours as “Talking Popcorn” and “Uninvited Collaborations With Nature.”
Next week the academic journal Language & Communication will publish the poetry of Osama bin Laden, as part of an article by UC Davis Professor Flagg Miller. “Bin Laden is a skilled poet with clever rhymes and meters,” Miller told the Times of London, “which was one reason why many people taped him and passed recordings around, like pop songs.”
Osama bin Laden’s poems were among more than 1,500 audiocassettes found in al-Quaeda’s Afghanistan headquarters in 2001.
But is it any good?
Here’s a sample of his writing, also from the L.A. Times, so you can decide for yourself. (If you’ve been brushing up on your Arabic, you can hear the audio recording via the Times of London. I wonder who gets the royalties?)
Tomorrow, William, you will discover which young man [will] confront your brethren, who have been deceived by [their own] leaders.
A youth, who plunged into the smoke of war, smiling
He hunches forth, staining the blades of lances red
May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent
Humans, should they fall, Djinn, should they ride
[And] lions of the jungle, whose only fangs
[Are their] lances and short Indian swords
As the stallion bears my witness that I hold them back
[My] stabbing is like the cinders of fire that explode into flame
On the day of the stallions’ expulsion, how the war-cries attest to me
As do stabbing, striking, pens, and books.
As I read those words, it strikes me how easily that same poem could inspire a young soldier in any army, fighting for any cause, anywhere. What fiery uninformed 18-year-old, pointed toward an arbitrary enemy and ordered to hate and kill, wouldn’t feel his blood boil in his chest after hearing or reading something like that? If you didn’t know who wrote it, you might swear it was beautiful.
In that spirit, and on only the slightest of tangents, here’s the original version of the exquisitely scathing “With God on Our Side,” sung by a young Bob Dylan.
If you didn’t know who he was, you’d swear he looked more like a merchant of used cars. Or plaid suits. Or kielbasa maybe. Anything but semi-automatic rifles, grenade launchers, helicopters, surface-to-air missiles, armour-piercing rockets, “ultra light” airplanes, unmanned aerial vehicles, anti-aircraft guns and armoured vehicles, with a client list that includes guerilla groups and despotic governments the world over.
If U.S. and U.N. allegations are true, Bout doesn’t care much for politics and never picks sides in a conflict, and has happily supplied factions that were at war with each other, as with the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
If extradited to the US and convicted he faces life imprisonment on indictments including conspiracy to kill US citizens and providing material support to terrorists.
The charges are based on conversations recorded at a Bangkok luxury hotel in March between Bout and US Drug Enforcement Agency agents who were posing as Colombian Farc rebels. Washington lists Farc as a terrorist group.
[…] Bout maintains he has been held unlawfully on “fabricated American accusations”. He stands accused of being a global gun-runner to Africa, the Middle East and South America, running a fleet of cargo planes since the early 1990s. His exploits were the template for the 2005 movie Lord of War, in which Nicolas Cage portrayed a Russian arms smuggler.
Bout’s backstory is apparently a mystery even to U.S. intelligence, and what little we do know reads like a real-life spy novel. Sorry for the long quote, but this is compelling stuff — Douglas Farah, who co-wrote a book about Bout’s exploits, says:
Viktor Bout was a unique creature born of the end of Communism and the rise of unbridled capitalism when the Wall came down in the early 1990s. He was a Soviet officer, most likely a lieutenant, who simply saw the opportunities presented by three factors that came with the collapse of the USSR and the state sponsorship that entailed: abandoned aircraft on the runways from Moscow to Kiev, no longer able to fly because of lack of money for fuel or maintenance; huge stores of surplus weapons that were guarded by guards suddenly receiving little or no salary; and the booming demand for those weapons from traditional Soviet clients and newly emerging armed groups from Africa to the Philippines. He simply wedded the three things, taking aircraft for almost nothing, filling them with cheaply purchased weapons from the arsenals, and flying them to clients who could pay. His background is difficult to ascertain. He is said by U.S. intelligence officials to be the product of an “immaculate conception.” He was not, and then he was. He has provided no stories of his youth, very few personal details. He was, according to his multiple passports, born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, the son of a bookkeeper and an auto mechanic. He graduated from the Military Institute on Foreign Languages, a well-known feeder school for Russian military intelligence, and is known to have a true gift for languages.
Bout is no small-time pistol-pusher, and is alleged to have sold weapons to governments and warlords in Afghanistan, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, the Philippines, the Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland and Uganda.
According to Farah, he was even hired by U.S. government contractors to run “hundreds, and perhaps a thousand” missions in Iraq:
Bear in mind most of these flights occurred after President Bush had signed an executive order making it illegal to do business with Bout, because he represented a security threat to the United States. […] The Air Force cut him off immediately, but other branches of the military continued to use him.
No way am I going to defend this guy, and if the allegations are true, the man deserves to rot. but if he serves his life sentence as everyone seems to expect, I wonder what happens to all the weapons that he would have sold? Do they get sold by smaller gunrunners instead? Whose hands do they fall into? Since another weapons smuggler (or several) will almost certainly step in to meet the international demand, and since the Taylors and Talibans of the world will find a way to buy their weapons anyway, might it actually have been better to let Bout do business, with the undercover D.E.A. agents tipping off the authorities when a terrorist group or a particularly despotic government places an order?
Maybe a better question is: would more lives have been saved by infiltrating his operation or by putting him behind bars? Or does it even make a difference?
A comment on America’s financial woes, as reported in the latest edition of Harper’s Weekly:
“The private market has screwed itself up,” said Representative Barney Frank (D., Mass.), “and they need the government to come help them unscrew it.”
A close second, also from Harper’s Weekly:
“My first instinct,” said President George W. Bush, “was to let the market work, until I realized, being briefed by experts… It turns out that there’s a lot of interlinks through the financial system.”
I think the word you’re looking for, Mr. President, is intertubes.
And a third one, just for fun:
A truck carrying 20 tons of money from the Philadelphia Mint to the U.S. Treasury in Miami crashed, killing one passenger and spilling 3.7 million nickels onto I-95. “It’s shiny,” said Florida Highway Patrol trooper Kim Miller.
If you’re not already signed up to Harper’s Magazine’s weekly round-up, you may want to give it a gander. It’s always clever, generally ironic, and a good source of obscure news that you wish you’d heard in the mainstream media.
