The Positive Voices

Pretty much everyone (outside of the nutty “he’s the Antichrist” coalition) thinks President Barack Obama did the right thing in firing his Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Unfortunately, he did it for the wrong reasons. McChrystal got fired for shooting his mouth off about his disdain for our president, his civilian staff, and our allies within earshot of a Rolling Stone reporter. (Generals and high officials get so used to kid-glove treatment from the mainstream press that they’re often shocked when a real reporter shows up and actually reports.) Obama had to get rid of the guy lest he, Obama, be labeled a wimp and lose his already slippery standing with the military and our allies. He immediately won points, however, for naming Gen. David Petraeus as McChrystal’s successor. This, Obama assured us, would mean a seamless continuation of the strategy we’ve been following in Afghanistan. You know times are hard when keeping our Afghanistan War strategy is considered good news. I don’t know if you’ve noticed (with the World Cup and all, times are busy) but we’re not winning the war in Afghanistan; we’re not even tying. The strategy, whatever it is, isn’t working. There’s a reason for this: Strategies that depend on invading and pacifying Afghanistan, thereby bending it to the invader’s will, never work. Never. It didn’t work for Alexander the Great, for the Mongols, for the British Empire or for the Soviet Union, all of which considered themselves experts at invading and pacifying. They all came into the country with flags flying, and all left sadder but wiser--mostly sadder. It’s what Afghanistan does to invaders. Now it’s our turn. Whenever critics of the war bring up its parallels to the Vietnam Folly, supporters sternly admonish them with: “Afghanistan is not Vietnam.” Really? Let’s review: We’re trying to suppress an indigenous insurgency--albeit one augmented with troops, weapons and support from outside sources--in a faraway land of which we know little. We’re bombing the hell out of them, using $500,000 missiles and multi-million-dollar drones to destroy mud huts, and in the process killing innocent people and converting indifferent bystanders into angry, hate-filled militants. It is a policy of destroying villages in order to save them. In this effort, which is increasingly ours alone, we’re dependent for legitimacy on a corrupt, feckless Afghan government that lacks the support of its people. And, lastly, our success depends almost totally not merely on being able to reform that government, but on our ability to transform its largely unmotivated and illiterate army into a modern fighting force so that we can turn things over to them and desert the battlefield without seeming to. Sounds like Vietnam to me. And, like Vietnam, it will end badly. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, knows that. That wily man is already negotiating with the Taliban and its Pakistani sponsors. He knows we’re not long for this war. The Republicans would have it otherwise. Led by military geniuses like John McCain and Dick Cheney, they’re incensed that Obama has set 2011 as the sell-by date of this war. Apparently, they’re willing to keep fighting it forever. And when we do leave, they’ll blame the Democrats for “losing Afghanistan,” much as they used to blame Democrats for losing China. We’re not going to lose Afghanistan, for the same reason we didn’t lose China. We never owned it. The Bush-Cheney bunch had their shot at taming Afghanistan. They didn’t do it. Whatever their strategy, it didn’t work. If they get another try at it, it won’t work again. A Taliban spokesman recently said this of his country: “Before Gen. McChrystal, many strong military generals suffered defeat. The Americans know that Afghanistan is the Graveyard of Empires but even so, they invaded this country.” The reporter was reminded of a Taliban saying: “The Americans have the watches, but we’ve got the time.”

Who is to blame for the BP oil disaster that’s dominating the news? There are many answers. Texas Governor Rick Perry, known as the conservative’s conservative, provided my favorite. He thinks God did it. At least he called the spill “an act of God,” which is pretty much the same thing. An oil company goes out into the Gulf of Mexico to sink a well two miles into the bottom with a mile of water on top. When its equipment breaks down and the well starts sending vast clouds of oil into the environment, one of its bought-and-paid-for politicians blames God for the mess. Still, I give the governor’s answer high marks for originality. Texans must be proud. My second favorite answer came from Sarah Palin, Alaska’s gift to Tina Fey. She blamed President Barack Obama. Not for the leak so much as for taking “so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing.” Pretty much any politician can talk without saying anything, but it takes a kind of genius to make a statement that is so empty of meaning yet still works “doggone” into the sentence. It is a beautiful thing to see. She has the secondbest answer to almost everything. They’re both wrong. Blame spread is blame denied, and that’s what fingers are for--pointing. In that spirit, I accuse… You. Yes you there, wearing your complacency like a suit of medieval armor, proud that you only have three cars in your family and that you keep the thermostat at 70 degrees in the winter. BP is out there drilling in deep water to feed our oil addiction, just as the drug lords of Colombia and Mexico kill to feed our addiction to cocaine, pot, and heroin. As John Vidal, writing in The Guardian, a British newspaper, said: “If the industry were forced to really clean up the myriad messes it causes, the price would jump and the switch to clean energy would be swift.”

When I was in high school, I had a guidance counselor named Mrs. Cameron. She was a sweet woman, gentle of manner, soft of voice. She ruined my life. It was her job to give career counseling to the students in her charge. To that end, she would make us take an aptitude test, then go over the results with us. Part of the test was of the “Would you rather” variety. “Would you rather be a gardener or an engineer?” “Would you rather arrange flowers or build a garage?” And so on. It was hard for me. I wanted to be neither a gardener nor an engineer. Even less did I want to arrange flowers or build a garage. (I wanted to play shortstop for the Detroit Tigers, but I didn’t tell her that. She wasn’t much into foolish dreams.) So I faked the test, putting down answers I thought would please her--and they did. During her review of my test she said: “Well, you certainly have a wide range of interests, Mr. Kaul. I think you can be just about anything you want to be.” That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. (Nor was it true. I couldn’t be shortstop for the Detroit Tigers, for example.) What I wanted was to be told what I wanted to be. When I pressed her for specifics she went through the list of possibilities: doctor, lawyer, engineer, dentist, plumber, teacher, truck driver, policeman, fireman, accountant--the usual. None of it appetizing. Thus was I cast rudderless on the uncharted waters of higher education, where I drifted into journalism. I stand now before you a pitiful, ink-stained wretch, held in angry contempt by the yahoos of the nation, scorned by its intellectuals. I blame Mrs. Cameron. If only she had told me about other careers--like hedge fund management. Did you see that story the other day about the money hedge fund managers make? In 2009, the managers of the top 25 funds made an average of $1 billion. Yes, that’s what I said--billion with a “B.” Of course, that’s an average. Some made more. David Tepper of Appaloosa Management made FOUR billion. George Soros: $3.3 billion. And to make things even better (for them), they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us because they’ve been able to persuade (bribe) Congress to let them claim most of their earnings as “capital gains.” That allows them to pay only 15 percent, rather than the top income tax rate of 35 percent. Just a word from Mrs. Cameron and I could have gone to business school, studied hard, and wound up with my own hedge fund. What do hedge fund managers do, after all? They manage other people’s money. I’d be good at that. Buy low, sell high, that’s my motto. Works every time. Typically, managers take a healthy cut of the profits from their investment of those other people’s money. And should they lose this money? Well that’s too bad. They walk away looking for new investors (suckers) without fretting about losing those prior profits. (You’d be surprised how long you can make a billion dollars last if you economize.) Big-time bankers do almost as well, particularly if they get fired. The New York Times recently reported the sad story of Charles O. Prince III, chairman and CEO of Citigroup, who was fired in 2007 after presiding over a loss of $64 billion in the firm’s value. Yet, as a going-away present the board gave him a severance package of $12.5 million, along with an office, a car, and a driver for the next five years. That was on top of the $68 million the company had paid him through the years. Getting paid for failure. Isn’t that what we all want? Mrs. Cameron, you were my teacher. You shoulda looked out for me, just a little bit. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody.

A few weeks ago some frat boys at the University of California, San Diego, pulled what they thought of as a prank--just a fun thing. In mock honor of Black History Month they held an off-campus “Compton Cookout,” named after the largely black suburb of Los Angeles a few dozen miles up the road. The organizers invited guests to wear “grills,” those fake gold teeth favored by gangsta rappers and thuggish athletes, as well as the baggy athletic clothes worn by those groups. And, oh yes, watermelon was served. Well, you can imagine how funny the black students at the school found all of that. There’s nothing a rising African-American college student enjoys more than being branded with a demeaning racial stereotype. But that wasn’t all. After black student groups had protested the cookout, a campus television program (described as satirical) broadcast a feature on the party, complete with a vile racial epithet ridiculing the protesting students. In the midst of this, the administration opened up a website announcing a number of policy changes designed to mollify the protesters. It didn’t work. There were more meetings, more protests. Then someone hung a noose from a bookcase in the main library. That tore it for the black students and their allies. A multicultural mob of chanting, drum-beating students marched on the chancellor’s office and demanded action. The chancellor at long last was forced to confront the students. Standing in front of her office, using a bullhorn to address the crowd, she said: “We will not tolerate hate on our campus.” After which the students charged the building and occupied her office. A “suddenly it’s 1950” campus had been dragged kicking and screaming into the 1960s. Eventually things settled down and the issue became one of dueling Facebook pages. One, Solidarity against Racism and Compton Cookout, claimed over 1,100 members; the other, UCSD Students Outraged that People Are Outraged about the Compton Cookout, about 550. The latter group says it deplores the “political correctness” of the anti-Cookout group. I have two thoughts: First, being a kind of 1950s person myself, I don’t generally favor students taking over campus buildings. I didn’t like it in the 1960s anti-war protests. I don’t like it now. But in this case I’ll make an exception. An event like the Compton Cookout in the second decade of the 21st century is so egregious, and the university’s initial response so muted, that the situation demanded a dramatic response--a “we’re mad as Hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” sort of response. Under the circumstances, taking over the chancellor’s office was appropriate. The second thought is the next time someone calls me “politically correct” for taking offense at a crude, mean-spirited, hurtful word or gesture, I shall place one of my Ukrainian grandmother’s leprosy curses on them and their progeny. Shouting “PC” has become the right’s all-purpose defense, putting conservatism in danger of becoming the spiritual home of galloping yahooism. Not Yahoo! as in the Internet search engine, but yahoo as it appears in Gulliver’s Travels, meaning a base, savage creature of brutish sensibility. You hear examples all the time on right-wing radio: crude racist, sexist, or homophobic remarks delivered by Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of those clackers. And when you object to the garbage they accuse you of political correctness. Preferring civil discourse to ignorant vituperation isn’t politically correct, it’s simply correct. And don’t imagine that the Compton Cookout should have been of concern only to blacks. The event could as easily have targeted Jews, gays, Latinos, Asian-Americans, or women. Left unchecked, the forces that inspired that debacle will find other victims. That’s a given. You can’t isolate group hatred or ethnic prejudice. They’re like cancers that attack first one organ, then quickly metastasize to others until the entire body is shot through with the disease. And if that’s being politically correct, count me in.

The Obama administration did a brave thing, always a refreshing move for any administration. It issued a budget that had some resemblance to reality. That was the good news. The bad news is that our reality is bleak. The government foresees budget deficits for the next few years. And for the next few years after that. And for decades without number after that. The projected budget shortfall this year will peak at $1.6 trillion and “fall” next year to $1.3 trillion, or about 9 percent of our gross domestic product. This, economists say, is sustainable on a short-term basis (we’ve endured deficits like that before, during times of war) but over the long termabsolutely not. You’d like to keep deficits at 3 percent. According to Obama’s projections, the deficit will approach that percentage in the next 10 years but then, ominously, begin to rise again, threatening to usher in the Chinese Century. Did I mention that this is an optimistic projection? It envisions a cooperation between Democrats and Republicans that’s as likely as a reunion of the Beatles. To prove my point, here is Senator Mitch McConnell’s response to the budget: “More spending, more taxes, and more debt.” (McConnell, the leader of Republicans in the Senate, has become a windup doll. Turn his crank and he shakes his head “no” and says: “More spending, more taxes, and more debt.”) Just how ungovernable our country has become was illustrated last month, when the Senate tried to set up a bipartisan commission that would propose a plan to deal with the deficit. Congress would be required to vote on the plan without amending it. It went nowhere. Republicans were afraid the commission would suggest new taxes; Democrats, that pet programs would be cut. They were both right, of course. Therein lies the heart of the problem: Everyone wants a solution to our problems, but no one wants to pay a price. For example, pretty much everyone agrees that if Social Security and Medicare costs continue to explode, as they seem likely to do, they will swamp our economy and, indeed, our society. All of our energy (and money) will go toward taking care of old people, none to opening up opportunities for the young to succeed. This is perilously close to the case now. But let the president suggest reining in Social Security costs and Republicans cry: “He’s balancing the budget on the backs of the elderly.” Try reducing unnecessary or inefficient treatments and they shout: “Rationing of health care is not the answer.” And don’t get me started on “death panels.” What is the Republican answer then? “Malpractice reform.” Sticking it to lawyers is never a bad idea. But it alone won’t get the job done. Nobody wants government bailouts of financial institutions, but nobody wants to take responsibility for letting them fail. Everybody wants job growth, but not at the price of a stimulus package big enough to stimulate job growth. I don’t blame the politicians as much as you might imagine. They’re just trying to keep their jobs, by hook or by crook. It’s what politicians do. It’s the American voter who’s to blame for putting this collection of empty suits, yahoos, and tin-foil collectors in office. The New York Times recently published the results of a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that says something frightening about our political literacy. It found that only 26 percent of the public realizes that it take 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster and that only 32 percent is aware that not a singl e Republican voted for the recent health care bill. If you don’t know that, what do you know? How can you form an intelligent opinion on what’s happening in Washington when you don’t know the names of the players or the game they’re playing? Did I say the situation looked bleak? This makes bleak look like the good old days.

I don’t know why people, even smart people, keep saying that bankers and the rest of the Wall Street crowd don’t get it. Dana Milbank, writing in The Washington Post, said it just the other week after Lloyd Blankfein, the Goldman Sachs chairman, testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. It was a remarkably arrogant performance, even for a Wall Street prima donna. Blankfein’s firm, the very exemplar of the too-bigto-fail model, received a many-multi-billion dollar bailout from the federal government last year as the Obama administration struggled to save the economy from a 1929-style grave. It was also given permission to make itself into a bank holding company, thus avoiding the fate of Lehman Brothers, a too-big-to-fail firm that failed. Having passed through a financial Valley of Death with the aid of the federal government, you would think that Blankfein would be a little humble. Grateful even. Nope. He bragged, “we do a very, very good job,” and that “key attributes of our energy, culture and processes were validated” by the crisis. So good a job had he and his colleagues done that his company was setting aside nearly $17 billion to reward them. (Blankfein himself was paid $68 million in 2007, when the seeds of our current disaster were being sown.) The chairman of the commission tried to get Blankfein to take some sort of responsibility for something—anything at all. “I’m troubled by your inability to accept the probability or certainty that your firm would not have made it through the storm but for the vast array of federal assistance,” the chairman said. And later: “You were securitizing and underwriting packages of mortgages, and when it was clear the market was going bad…you kept moving this product.” Blankfein was still having none of it. “I know it’s become part of the narrative to some extent that people knew what was going to happen,” he said. “We did not know at any minute what would happen next.” Did I mention he made $68 million in 2007? My income is in the high four figures; I don’t know what’s going to happen next. When they pay you 68 million bucks, you should know. And there’s pretty good evidence that Blankfein and his gang did know. Goldman was selling mortgage securities to its loyal customers as good investments while at the same time making (winning) bets that those securities would fall in value. Yet Dana Milbank, one of Washington’s better reporters, began his otherwise excellent report (from which I borrowed shamelessly) by saying: “Goldman Sachs Chairman Lloyd Blankfein still doesn’t get it.” Dana, baby, they get it. We’re the ones who don’t get it. The only reason these guys aren’t (officially) crooks is that, for the most part, they can bribe politicians to legitimize their scams. They laugh in the faces of people like those on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. And they’d keep laughing all the way to the bank, except they are the bank. It’s been said that Bernie Madoff was, if nothing else, a clever scoundrel. He wasn’t. He was a fool. He broke the law. You don’t have to break the law to cheat people on Wall Street. Just play by the rules (which is easy when you make the rules) and the billions come rolling in. Which is why I hope President Obama is right when he says he’s going to be able to tax the big banks out of some of their “profits.” There wouldn’t have been any profits had the federal government not come to the rescue of the economy. Half of the now-prosperous banks wouldn’t be here. Instead of that bleak landscape, big banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their people about $145 billion in 2009, a record sum. In the name of justice—a word not heard much in Washington recently—those banks and financiers should pay something back to us to help ease the pain they caused.