No Country for Old Men

Last May I found myself close to the grassy knoll at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas. I was a parent chaperone for a high school mock trial team which had made it to the national championship. A bunch of mock-trialers from Kentucky along with their coach were waiting with me to ride an elevator. When the elevator arrived, a young kid named Kevin stepped out and told his coach and team mates who were about to board the elevator, “I’ve left a little present for you. Enjoy.” The entire group scampered away, leaving me somewhat surprised and alone on the elevator going up. Nine floors later I realized that a pair of nose plugs would have been handy to deal with Kevin’s not-so-little present. Then it dawned on me that I needed a refresher course in the semantics of language.

There are many, including some of my good friends, who would argue that my education is sorely lacking. Not because I did not attend school or college, but because I ask the dumbest questions about some of the phrases in language that are widely disseminated by journalists (a.k.a. “infotainment-ists”) today. What others find crystal clear and easy to grasp, I find to be an assault on my senses (and sensibilities). I was chewed out a few years ago for not understanding that “wardrobe malfunction” actually meant “nipple exposé.” Although Kevin’s present is easy to handle with nose plugs, I am unable to find similar widgets to handle brain farts in print and broadcast media.

Take for example President Johnson’s “war on poverty.” Of course Johnson wanted to end the conditions that caused people to starve to death; but this is accomplished by giving to others, not fighting them. The very phrase runs counter to the idea of war.

President Nixon’s “war on drugs” created a significant rise in the number of African-American men in prison though white people were using the most drugs. It also provided the Reagan-Bush administration the military justification to fund and support the Contras in Nicaragua and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The war on drugs is a war that is being waged against US citizens by funding covert operations in other countries and passively facilitating them in trafficking drugs destined for the US market.

The post-9/11 “war on terror” or “war on terrorism” are phrases with no well-defined meaning. The reality is that terrorist groups and illicit drug producers tend to emerge in any area where there is abject poverty. In their book, “Collateral Language: A User’s Guide to America’s New War,” John Collins and Ross Glover write:

The United States constantly disregards the demands of impoverished countries, enforces its will on people with less ability to fight, and brutalizes the impoverished both at home and abroad . . . . The war on poverty has been operationalized through the war on drugs and the newly articulated war on terror (ism).

Another area where brain farts are freely distributed by presidential hopefuls and inhaled by journalists and media outlets is education reform. Candidates want everybody to receive the best possible education. But I am not sure what their intent really is. Yes, they would like you to receive an education to be able to guarantee that once every four years you would be gullible enough to understand and believe their rhetoric. But no, they would not like you to be so well educated that you would be able to think for yourself, or question what they say, or challenge the infotainment-speak of the best political team in the country. Unlike Collins and Glover, they do not want you to stand up and say, “Language is a terrorist organization, and we stand united against terrorism.” They want you to stand “with them” in the “war on BLANK” which elicits the customary fulsome fawning from the media (Note to Press Corps: “war on clean water” will be quite apt for the 21^st century).

Unfortunately for me, my friends are right about my education. My parents could only give me the best education possible, not the best possible education. Which is why I do not fully comprehend the nuances of language.

Admittedly this is no country for old men like moi. I wait unwearyingly for Javier Bardem to take me out. I only hope the end occurs on the lower floors of an elevator in Dallas.

A Vote for Huckabee: Is it really scary?

On a cold January night in Iowa, Mike Huckabee surprised the pundits by handsomely winning the Republican caucuses. His victory was analyzed ad nauseam by the “best political team in the country” and the nugget of wisdom which emerged was that Huckabee had won on the strength of the “evangelical vote.” It didn’t scare anybody in the media, but it did scare many in higher education.

Those who work in institutions of higher learning believe that we are a country at war with ourselves in science education, notwithstanding the fact that scientific advances are what drive the economy. A majority of the evangelical population believes that evolution is not the process by which “we got to where we are” as a species and that creationism also ought to be taught in high schools and colleges. This group recites heavily from scripture and bases its beliefs on concepts that are unverifiable through scientific experiments. If these “scary Huckabee” voters have a say in how public universities and schools are funded, then that becomes a source of worry for many administrators.

It has been widely claimed that public perception of the value of science is terribly lacking, but after Carl Sagan no one has been able to fire up the public’s imagination on scientific endeavors. Is the public’s perception of science and technology really lacking? Have scientists and technologists carved an elitist niche for themselves and ignored the more practical problems of society, thereby fostering “evangelical” beliefs? Let’s take a closer look.

Our tax dollars are funneled through funding agencies for research in science and technology that is supposed to improve the quality of our lives. Over the last three decades there have been virtually no advances in fundamental physics, despite the fact that a lot of federally funded dollars have been poured into research (for more details, please read “The Trouble with Physics” by Prof. Lee Smolin). Smolin argues that string theory makes no new predictions because it comes in an infinite number of versions. Thus, no matter what an experimental result shows, string theory cannot be disproved. But no experiment will ever be able to prove that it is true.

The paradox is succinctly stated by Smolin: “Those string theories we know how to study are known to be wrong. Those we cannot study are thought to exist in such vast numbers that no conceivable experiment could ever disagree with all of them.”

And how did this effort go on for such a long time? A small group of “evangelical physicists,” who utter hymns about “theories of everything,” or “ten-dimensional worlds and worm holes” have succeeded in controlling the purse strings of the federal funding agencies to such an extent that string theorists have turned into a cult, and newcomers with ideas in other areas are forced to work in string theory and publish (or perish if they choose to do something else more valuable and practical for society). The research in this area, which is unverifiable by experiment, would make Galileo and Kepler turn in their graves.

So it is not only the “evangelical Huckabee-ites” who are scary; the “evangelical physicists” are equally scary, if not even more so.

We live in an age where technological advances and the ubiquitous Internet are supposed to “simplify our lives and make us more productive.” These so-called advances do anything but what they are supposed to do in simplifying our lives. I’ll give you just one example; there are several others out there.

Let’s say you purchase a brand new IBM ThinkPad Laptop computer which has built-in hardware to support Bluetooth technology. What is supposed to happen is that you get a Bluetooth compatible headset, pair the headset with the computer, and possibly do a “Restart” to make everything hunky-dory. I guarantee that you will upchuck twice on the way to hell and back before you get this to work successfully on your computer. Try calling the so-called “Customer-Relationship-Management” CRM support line for some help, and they will bob you like a yo-yo before transferring you to a friendly consultant who demands a hefty hourly charge to help you with problems that were not supposed to be there in the first place!

The “evangelical technologists” who design these gizmos and chant mantras like “plug-and-play,” or “interoperability,” or various utterances meant to make things sound simple and easy will have their own scary day in hell to reckon with when the time for redemption arrives.

So who really are the evangelicals that we ought to be scared of: the Huckabee-ites, or the scientists, or the technologists?

I’ll leave you to figure out your own answer. My sensei, the late Mr. Natarajan of IIT Kanpur, would have been no help at all – he would have just replied “Mu,” which basically meant – unask the question.

Reason for Invading Iraq: A Second Look

In Fall 2007 former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan published his memoir titled “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.” A single 20-word sentence in his book about the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion proved to be the most controversial for the White House.

“I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

Greenspan believed that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of oil supplies in the Middle East. But the US and Britain have always insisted that the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam’s support for terrorism.

To counter this incendiary comment, the White House pressed the Washington Post to interview Greenspan in order to seek a “clarification.” Greenspan “spake” thus in his Post interview (Sept 17, 2007): “I was not saying that that’s the administration’s motive. I’m just saying that if somebody asked me, ‘Are we fortunate in taking out Saddam?’ I would say it was ESSENTIAL” (emphasis mine).

And to put more spin on the matter, the Administration sent out the Defense secretary to make the Sunday TV rounds instead of their usual attack-dog, Dick Cheney. Robert Gates said, “I have a lot of respect for Mr. Greenspan.” But he disagreed with Greenspan’s comment about oil being a leading motivating factor in the war. Gates added:

“I know the same allegation was made about the Gulf War in 1991, and I just don’t believe it’s true. I think that it’s really about stability in the Gulf. It’s about rogue regimes trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. It’s about aggressive dictators.”

Something doesn’t smell right about the allegation in writing by the perspicacious and taciturn Mr. Greenspan, who was the chairman of the Federal Reserve for over 18 years, and the Administration’s vehement desire to parse his sentence about the motive to invade Iraq. It is clear to anyone who is aware of the cost of the war (recent estimates put it at $720 million per day or $500,000 per minute), that it is not possible to recover this entire amount from oil revenues. There just isn’t that much oil in Iraq and Iraq isn’t our primary source of oil.

Why does the Administration then continue the war in Iraq? And why does it find enough votes in Congress to support the war? And why do people who have opposed the war from the very start suddenly start voting on continuing the funding for the war? Why does the Administration reject the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton? Has this Administration gone “completely crazy” or is there some “method to the madness” portrayed by our representatives in the House and Senate?

I stumbled upon some reports and books that have encouraged me to take a second look at the reason for invading Iraq and I will share them with you. The Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq states, in part, “Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region.” Whether we like it or not, Middle East oil is in the United States’ national security interest and if we take that away the world’s economy would grind to a halt.

William Clark, in his 2004 book titled “Petrodollar Warfare,” states that the war in Iraq is an oil currency war. His book was based on a report written by him in 2003 about the real reasons for invading Iraq [1]. Much of what Clark says has gone completely unreported by the U.S. media and the government. I will provide you some excerpts (and their sources) so that you can read for yourself and arrive at a conclusion.

Some historical background may be helpful, most of which I obtained from another recent book, “Thicker than Oil,” by Dr. Rachel Bronson, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. Bronson (no relation to Tough-Boy Charlie) discusses the nature and future of the US–Saudi relationship which began in 1945 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Red Sea. The two leaders fell into easy, warm agreement on three main issues, “Oil, Gold, and Real estate.” On the economic front Saudi Arabia invested largely in the US, and both were true allies in fighting communism.

Turning the clock back nearly a half century, the signing of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1945 established the dollar as the reserve currency of the world [3]. This was possible because during World War II, the US had supplied its allies with goods and demanded gold as payment, thereby accumulating a large amount of the world’s gold. However, with the “guns-and-butter” policy [2] of the 1960s and the Vietnam War, a lot of dollars were handed over to foreign countries in exchange for economic goods. In 1971, when foreign countries demanded payment for dollars in gold, the US Government defaulted on its payment. The popular spin was that the US had “severed the link between the dollar and gold,” but in reality the denial to pay back in gold was tantamount to an act of bankruptcy [3].

This was a time when Saudi Arabia came to the rescue of the US. In 1972 an iron-clad agreement was reached between the two countries. The US would support the power of the House of Saud and in return Saudi Arabia would only accept US dollars for its oil.

The rest of OPEC was to follow suit and also accept only dollars. Because the world had to buy oil from the Arab oil countries, it had reason to hold dollars as payment for oil. Even though dollars could no longer be exchanged for gold, they were now exchangeable for oil. The economic essence of this arrangement was that the dollar was now backed by oil. As long as the dollar was the only acceptable payment for oil, its dominance in the world was assured [3].

In November 2000, Saddam Hussein sealed his fate by demanding Euros for his oil instead of US dollars. He converted $10 billion of his reserve fund at the UN into Euros (when a Euro was worth around 82 cents). Clark [1] outlines what would occur if OPEC were to make a sudden shift to the Euro:

The effect of an OPEC switch to the euro would be that oil-consuming nations would have to flush dollars out of their (central bank) reserve funds and replace these with euros. The dollar would crash anywhere from 20-40% in value and the consequences would be those one could expect from any currency collapse and massive inflation (think Argentina currency crisis, for example). You'd have foreign funds stream out of the U.S. stock markets and dollar denominated assets, there'd surely be a run on the banks much like the 1930s, the current account deficit would become unserviceable, the budget deficit would go into default, and so on. Your basic Third World economic crisis scenario.

The United States economy is intimately tied to the dollar's role as reserve currency. This doesn't mean that the U.S. couldn't function otherwise, but that the transition would have to be gradual to avoid such dislocations (and the ultimate result of this would probably be the U.S. and the E.U. switching roles in the global economy).

Big Picture Perspective: Everything else aside from the reserve currency and the Saudi/Iran oil issues (i.e., domestic political issues and international criticism) is peripheral and of marginal consequence to this administration. Further, the dollar-euro threat is powerful enough that they will rather risk much of the economic backlash in the short-term to stave off the long-term dollar crash of an OPEC transaction standard change from dollars to euros. All of this fits into the broader Great Game that encompasses Russia, India, China [1].

So the claim is that the Iraq war was not about Saddam’s WMD, nor about spreading democracy. It was about defending the dollar and setting an example for anyone else who demanded payment for oil in currencies other than US dollars. Two months after the US invasion, the Iraq Oil for Food program was terminated, the Iraqi Euro accounts were switched back to dollars, and oil was once again sold for US dollars.

The real reason for the Iraq war was this administration’s goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the Euro as an oil transaction currency standard, and to secure control of Iraq’s oil before the onset of Peak Oil (predicted to occur around 2010). A lot of Gulf money was being invested in Europe and Asia and the US had to convince the people who were making decisions to invest elsewhere that it was still profitable to invest in the US. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they needed to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its second largest proven oil reserves [1, 3].

I am not sure whether all the sources I have cited are reliable, but this exercise has certainly piqued my interest and yours, too, I hope. Oftentimes political rhetoric leads us to believe that domestic economic security is antithetical to war which is a foreign policy issue, but we may be surprised to discover that the two are interwoven together in a complex web. There appear to be many factors at play in establishing global dollar supremacy – the oft-purported post-9/11 connection (by the current Administration) between Saddam and Al Qaeda, a deliberately manufactured case for war in Iraq, and the subsequent surge that went against all conventional wisdom including the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group. To some readers this may explain why Dubya paraded with swords and pleaded for less-than-$100-barrels of oil in his recent visit to the Kingdom.

The references I have provided have been largely ignored by the mainstream media, because they may be viewed as “conspiracy theories.” But when Greenspan also says that the Iraq war was about oil, the least we owe it is due diligence. Maybe Alan Greenspan still knows a thing or two! When Rachel Bronson publishes a scholarly treatise on the Saudi–US relation, it warrants a second look at the matter.

The invasion of Iraq may have been a necessary “economic” issue but its mismanagement after the first few months by the bumbling neocon nitwits, as described in “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "unstintingly depicts the stubborn cluelessness" of the current Administration. Given the present conditions, does anyone believe that our presidential hopefuls will get us out of Iraq before 2010?

I doubt that that will happen. We had the “surge” last year which was actually a troop escalation; some other metaphor will be invented to give us reasons to stay in Iraq well beyond 2010. Slogans like “ending the war,” or “supporting the troops,” or “victory in Iraq,” are all very good emotional sound bites, but the realities may be far more complex to deal with in what is an Economic World War in the global village that is home to six billion of us.

My background in economics is seriously lacking and discussion on this topic from more knowledgeable persons is strongly elicited. Thanks in advance to the cognoscenti for their comments.

My acknowledgments to Ashok Subramanian and Sree Nilakanta for pointing me to the reference by Petrov.

References

[1] Clark, William. 2003. The Real Reasons for the war with Iraq.

[2] Haynes, Anthony. 2004. On Guns and Butter.

[3] Petrov, Krassimir. 2006. The Proposed Iranian Oil Bourse.

The Obama Affair Must End

The speeches Barack Obama gives are peppered with comments such as “change will come to America,” or “I want to be the president of the UNITED States of America.” There is something very unsavory about his remarks, and I wasn’t able to put my finger on them until last night.

Obama has promised so many pretty things with his flowery language that he could easily be mistaken for Miss Daisy’s chauffeur, driving us into “peace and prosperity” or reaching up for “a hymn that will heal this nation and repair the world.”

Being in the neighboring state of Iowa, I recall how Obama got elected to Congress. His opponent dropped out of the race because of some nasty personal publicity; and Alan Keyes, a last minute replacement from another state, volunteered to substitute as his opponent. And on many occasions after that Obama promised, “I will serve out my full term.” But then he changed his mind – maybe his own ‘change’ mantra got the better of his promise.

In summer 2006, I was invited to the RainbowPUSH Coalition (RPC) organized by Rev. Jesse Jackson in Chicago. Many people from both political parties were present, including the “white” Senator – Dick Durbin of Illinois. The one star who was not present was Barack Obama. When I asked some people who voted for Obama why he was absent, the answer I got was that Obama is “a white person’s senator” and does not want to be associated with being an African-American senator. He does not want to commit “the same mistakes” that Jesse Jackson did in his presidential runs. And therefore he maintains his distance from such events, unless, of course, he needs the African-American vote.

Nowadays Obama unashamedly claims the mantle of Martin Luther King, even though he doesn’t associate with the RPC in fighting for social change. He does not accompany Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in their march for justice in the tiny town of Jena, Louisiana, where nooses were hung from a tree in August 2006. It seems as if Obama’s only connection with the Civil Rights movement was reading about it like millions of other folks.

His record in the Illinois legislature, which meets 60 days in a year, is also riddled with holes. In a presidential debate, he explained that in the Illinois legislature it was a “tactical matter” to vote Present on some bills instead of a Yes or No vote. The reason why he voted Present on more than 100 occasions was “to get some bills passed that otherwise would not have had a chance.” He has also been motivated by such personal calculations in his voting record in the U.S. Senate. Like several others, he trumps personal gain over matters of principle. By doing so, he cannot still remain a servant of the people who put him in office. But Obama understands that to pass bills you need to cultivate members of Congress who owe you favors, and one way to accomplish this is to cast convenient votes. To a large extent, the public also understands this concept.

About Obama’s position on the Iraq war – his views were private like millions of others who knew that going to war was a flawed idea. He did not have to vote on the issue. He was not briefed by the NSA or the Senate Intelligence Committee. He was not even in the senate at the time. To milk this private view of his, shared by millions of other people, into a MAJOR accomplishment shows how shallow his true accomplishments really are. He is a less-than-one-term senator and will have little clout in Congress if elected as President. He can’t even keep his own promises for more than a few months.

In November 2006, the public sent its strongest message to Congress to end the war in Iraq. But Obama missed this memo. Because he has continued to vote Yes on funding the war in Iraq after being against it “from the start.” Even if he had voted No, there were not enough votes to overturn the funding bill, so what better way to curry favors than by voting Yes. But the millions of others who thought before that the war was a flawed idea, and who continue to think that it is a flawed idea, and who sent a mandate to Congress to withdraw our troops – these people are not being listened to by anyone, including Obama. Have we heard Obama talk about “change” on this? Not a word. He continues to milk the issue like the rest of Congress about “troops needing our support,” that we should “stand by them,” and “my position before the war is not the same as after the war,” et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.

And the capstone of his unsavoriness occurred in a speech last night (he may have said this earlier, and I may have missed it): “We need a president who will be RIGHT from day one.” This clearly demonstrates that hot air rises to the top. Such statements are made by cult-like personalities, not presidents. Leadership is not about being right, but being humble enough to accept when you are wrong and to have the courage to change direction. Flowery words and the promise of a rosy future will not secure the peace in Iraq or fix a broken economy. It is time for the Democrats to swiftly put an end to the Obama affair.