Monday, March 17, 2003

Words shouting inside my head

And not only because even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked...

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Temptation’s page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you’d just be
One more person crying.

So don’t fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing.

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An’ though the rules of the road have been lodged
It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge
And it’s alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you’re the one
That can do what’s never been done
That can win what’s never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he’s in.

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it’s alright, Ma, if I can’t please him.

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn’t talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer’s pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death’s honesty
Won’t fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only.

Bob Dylan
It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
from Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

Saturday, March 15, 2003

Another domestic stealth attack

Are your thoughts glued to Baghdad, the Azores, and the UN Security Council?  Are you worried about the outcome of the Bush-Blair-Aznar meeting, or considering the next diplomatic maneuvers by Chirac, Putin, and Schroeder, or wondering which bunker Saddam is hiding in tonight?  Are you counting the days and hours until all hell breaks loose in Iraq, when our brave soldiers (and orders of magnitude more Iraqis) begin dying in the desert?

Well, good!  That’s the way we like it! So say the ghouls operating the Bush administration’s stealth attack on that which is good, that which is positive, that which is noble in government. 

While our attention is riveted to the very scary, very important, and very immediate crisis in southwestern Asia—a crisis largely resulting from Dubya’s pathological obsession with crushing and humiliating a two-bit petty dictator who had already been defanged (but we needn’t go into that right now)—the onslaught on decency in governmental operations continues apace.  Even over the weekend.

This time, I’m not speaking about John Ashcroft’s overbearingly fundamentalist McCarthyism.  Oh, I’m sure he’s sharpening his talons somewhere in preparation for more outrages, but this time it’s an attack on America’s elderly and its disabled, an attack manifested through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Stumbling onto something?

Boy, who’da thunk it?  After reading Tuesday’s entry on the valuation of the euro relative to the dollar, my sister passed along a couple of interesting URLs, containing essays that amplify and perhaps explain the phenomenon I illustrated.  The sources of the two pieces are of particular interest. 

The first of the articles she sent me definitely doesn’t arise from the Democratic left, not by a longshot.

Why War With Iraq? Follow the Money was written by Richard Ebeling, an economist at Hillsdale College and a vice president of the libertarian Future of Freedom Foundation.  In this March 5 publication, Ebeling paints the background on the dollar’s importance as the world’s principal currency:

For all of the post-World War II period the U.S. dollar has served as the reserve currency for international trade. It is estimated that about $3 trillion is in circulation around the world. Almost all oil transactions and numerous other globally traded commodities are bought and sold with dollars. In some cases, dollars are hoarded by the citizens of other countries because of a lack of confidence or trust in their own governments. In Russia, for example, as much as $30 billion is held as cash money by thousands of people instead of rubles.

The world demand for dollars and the worldwide use of the dollar have served as an important cushion to maintain the value of the dollar on foreign-exchange markets, which has enabled the U.S. government to print money and run trade deficits that might otherwise have put downward pressure on the international exchange rate of the greenback.

The demand for dollars has also enabled Washington to fund the federal budget deficits of the past because foreigners have used the dollars they own to purchase U.S. Treasury securities. With so many dollars in use for so many international transactions, parking some of those dollars back in the United States in the form of U.S. government securities for a period of time has usually seemed the safest, easiest, and most logical way of putting one’s cash to work.

With that in mind, it’s plain that the implications of Ebeling’s next couple of paragraphs strike directly at the heart of Bush’s house of cards.  In a more internationalist/multilateral American administration, these potential changes might be seen as an opportunity for sharing and expanding mutually-beneficial collaboration.  To the America-firsters and self-anointed instruments of God’s will in the Bush White House, however, these are fightin’ words:

But a number of European newspapers, including the London Observer, have pointed out that the world has been slowly shifting into an alternative currency to use for international transactions: the euro. Not long ago, the Iraqi government made it official policy that Iraqi oil, two-thirds of which is purchased by American oil companies, had to be paid for in euros.

Last year, a senior Iranian oil representative suggested in a speech in Europe that European oil purchases might be increasingly traded in euros in the future. China and Russia have hinted that they may begin to hold more of their foreign currency reserve assets in euros in place of dollars.

If the euro were to increasingly become the alternative international currency of choice in competition with the dollar, the global demand for greenbacks would fall, the value of the dollar would decline, and the U.S. government would find it far more difficult both to export inflation and to finance its budget deficits. The financial clout and muscle of the American government would be dramatically undermined over time with the dollar increasingly no longer the only global reserve currency in town.

Ebeling goes on to suggest that one of the first actions by the post-war American regency in Iraq will be to revert to denominating Iraqi crude in dollars rather than euros.  Undoubtedly, macho American fists would be shaken in the faces of other members of OPEC and other petroleum producers to keep them in line too.

The second essay sent to me by my sister appeared in, of all places, EVWorld Update, a website for devotees of electric-powered vehicles.  (My sister recently bought a hybrid Honda Civic ... hmmm, on further thought, perhaps a site touting electrics over gas-guzzlers isn’t such an unusual place to see such an article.) In any case, the EVWorld essay turns out to be a reprint of an article that’s been circulating on the web for a month or two.  Written by one William Clark, who says he’s “currently working as a healthcare manager at a well-known east coast university” and is not an economist though he has an MBA, the entire essay can be found here.

Clark’s paper is quite long, and quite involved.  Suffice it to say that it goes over much the same ground sown by Ebeling, then extends and enlarges the analysis.  According to Clark, combat between the dollar and the euro for dominance of the world currency system may underlie the entire geopolitical structure of the modern world.  Iraq, then, is merely a pawn being shoved around the world’s economic chessboard by Grand Masters Bush, Chirac, Putin, Blair, et al.

In his short comment on my previous entry on the topic of euro vs. dollar, Scott alluded to this literature, though he didn’t reference anything specific.  As a non-economist, I’m not really competent to judge the full depth of these connections between the euro and the war.  If the world is truly a plaything to be cynically manipulated by bloodless powerbrokers, the scenarios laid out by Ebeling and Clark do make sense.  And even if the euro-dollar conflict is merely a sideshow, I don’t doubt for an instant that the connection has escaped the minds of all (any?) of the nations on this stage.

Monday, March 10, 2003

Another Dubya policy success(?)

First things first—I don’t pretend to know a thing about economics.  I signed up for a macroeconomics course once, in the spring semester of 1970; Kent State ended the course prematurely, and I happily accepted the “Pass” that my school gave for all courses that term.  Never tried econ again.

As I watched the US stock markets take still another tumble today, on the third anniversary of the NASDAQ’s all-time high, I happened to hear a news report that mentioned that the euro is currently valued at somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.10.  Somehow, that tidbit of information triggered something in my brain, which spurred me into a bit of web-surfing.

You see, I have an ex-sister-in-law and ex-brother-in-law who are in the business of international tourism.  They run group ski tours to Austria, enviro-tours to Central America, stuff like that.  I learned that a not-insignificant part of their profitability actually arises from what can only be called currency speculation.  When groups pre-pay for their airfare, hotels, and so forth, the tour operators have a good bit of leeway, often several months, in deciding when to move those funds from US dollars into local currency.  That decision can spell the difference between black numbers and red numbers on their company’s bottom line.

I recollected that when I discussed such matters with my ex-in-laws about a year ago, the euro was hovering somewhere below a dollar, so I was surprised to hear that it’s now about 20% higher than it had been the last time I noticed it.  That got me to wondering just what’s been happening to the exchange rate between the currencies of the United States and its European partners under the economic policies of our current regime.

A bit of googling took me to OANDA.com, The Currency Site, where I found downloadable data on the dollar-euro exchange rate.  I obtained and graphed those numbers for the time period of January 20, 2001 - March 11, 2003 ... in other words, during the presidency of George Walker Bush.

Mixed message

As the world lurches toward a crazy conflagration fueled by crazy people, fractures in common sense are everywhere.  Take, for example, today’s NY Times report from Texas, written by Peter T. Kilborn, which shows that even Dubya’s near-neighbors in the Permian Basin town of Andrews are conflicted and confused.

One of the Andrews resident interviewed for the story is quoted thusly:

But Jonnie Miller, 56, a hardy, crew-cut preacher and owner of L & M Backhoe, which specializes in cleaning up spills in the oil fields, worries about war and a loss of lives. “The Scripture says God placed President Bush in office to take care of us,” he said, “and my job is to pray for those in power to make godly decisions.

Wow!?! 

Now, I don’t profess to be an expert in Biblical scholarship, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that there are no references to George Walker Bush in either the Old or New Testament.  Nor is there anything in Scripture that particularly addresses the “job” of Americans in regard to their relationship with governmental decision-making.

Mr. Miller continues, still combining valuable insights with, ummm, unusual concepts:

"But who over there,” Mr. Miller asked, “wants us doing what we’re doing except us and Kuwait? All life is precious to me. I don’t want to see one Iraqi killed. I don’t want to see Charles Manson killed."

I say again… Wow!?!  What mental process could possibly have introduced Charlie Manson into Mr. Miller’s statement?  What on earth is he talking about?

In toto, there are more pro-war than anti-war Andrewsians quoted in the article.  Which is, I think, fair reporting in a West Texas oil town.  Of the anti-war residents quoted, however, none were quoted as extensively as Jonnie Miller.