| Thursday,
December 20, 2007 My phone rang at breakfast.
When I said "Hello," Kathy began telling me she was calling from Small
Business Services or some such, and that I was preapproved. I didn't listen
long enough to find out what I was preapproved for. I'm now listening to
radio advertisements telling me I can can financial independence. There are
several ways. One is to buy a stock market investment system. A grocery
clerk tells how he put in a put play and made a quick $1700, and he'll soon
be able to quit his job. Another tells me how I can learn to flip houses and
make a fortune in real estate.
Now I am not sure that the government has a guarantee
system for those who get in too deep in the stock market, but I do know that
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were set up to do that for real estate investors.
Sure, that wasn't the original idea. The original idea was to make it
possible for more Americans to own their own homes. It had worked when the
VA guaranteed housing loans for veterans; why not for everyone who wanted a
house? The result was injecting massive amounts into the market, driving
prices up, and making real estate investment look safe, so they could
package a pile of loans and sell them off to other investors, thus freeing
up more money to be put into the loan system, thus driving up prices and
sustaining the bubble.
Of course anyone with a quarter of a brain could have seen
this coming, which makes for an interesting question about our political
leaders. Napoleon Bonaparte said one should never assume malice when
incompetence is an adequate explanation.
We are now playing the same games with college tuitions,
thus assuring that there will never again be an American middle class in the
usual sense. One may inherit an education from wealthy parents; or one may
be so damned deep in dept that the notion of independence never comes up.
Debtors are not middle class.
One of the factors in the fall of the Roman Republic was
the concentration of wealth in a few hands, while more and more of the
voting populace became debtors and had to become clients to wealthy patrons.
The great corporations became employers (and bought slave contracts as
debtors sold themselves into slavery over debt). Of course nothing like that
could ever happen here. Our government would never manipulate all those
student loan contracts.
But the effect of injecting all this money into the
college system, combined with the destruction of the public school system so
that college becomes a minimum education in order to survive and do your
income taxes, has what effect? Why to raise demand for college, inject more
money into the system, and -- why what to you know?! The colleges are able
to absorb all that money and raise the prices again and again while offering
less and less actual education!
And they never catch wise.
====================
Subject: McCaffrey's Iraq AAR
PDF,
Jerry
I received this as part of an enormous named
distribution list from a source I trust. It purports to be Gen. Barry
McCaffrey's summary of the current situation in Iraq. It is consistent with
the non-MSM reports I have been reading, so I think it is genuine.
Basically and ironically, it reinforces much of what
you have been saying for years. It also reinforces something I have been
proposing for decades: when you have to build a nation (as undesirable as
that is), start with local governments and build up. That is what is
happening in Iraq now. Soon they will need to scrap the showcase national
"government" and get a real one.
What really rankles is his proposal at the end for $3B
per year for five years to build an Iraqi government. We should make them
pay for that out of their oil revenues. There are limits.
Ed
I have received copies of this report from multiple
sources. It is posted here:
McCaffrey
Report
Readers will understand that I said shortly after the
invasion that our only chance in Iraq was to restore local government and
rule by consent of the governed, and that could come only by building up
from the bottom: including restoring land to historic holders and negating
much of the Arabification of Iraq by Saddam.
Not only didn't we do that, but we allowed the destruction
of many of the groups such as Iraqi Christians and Jews who had been in
Mesopotamia for two thousand years. Bremer came in and dismissed the central
army which was the only central governing institution over which there was
much control, and after that the chaos was predicted and predictable by
anyone but a State Department Career Foreign Service Officer chosen to go in
and Do Something. Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained
by gross incompetence. Keep telling yourself that.
I remind everyone that the US began in 1943 to build
Auxiliaries, called Military Government Units, for the occupation of Germany
when the War ended. The neocons apparently had not remembered this; or
perhaps they really believed that Chalabi the Thief would be welcomed not
only in Baghdad but all across Mesopotamia in every hamlet and village.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by gross
incompetence. Keep telling yourself that.
What we cannot do is continue to pin the Legions down in
Iraq.
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