Will President Obama End the War?

I just heard Obama on a 60 Minutes interview avow that his first executive action would be to call together the Joint Chiefs of Staff and develop a plan to end the war in Iraq. He used plenty of qualifiers like "safely" to describe how the war would be ended. I hope he means to end the war and the qualifiers don't stretch the war out another four or eight years.

I plan to vote for Obama if I'm still above ground in November. The first reason I voted for him in the primary election was that I thought he was the candidate most likely to end the war, at least after it was clear Dennis Kucinich would not be on the ballot.

But I think we must be clear that voting is not a substitute for anti-war organizing, argument, protest or war resistance. There is profit in war and, therefore, almost never can there be a political solution. Public opposition to war can bring a Republican war to an end. Without opposition, the Democrats may well wage war without end. The structural incentives for war are too tempting for any party in power to resist.

If popular opinion really mattered in policy to end war, the 2006 elections should have made a difference, but they didn't.

This is the first time in two years I have thought the Democrats might win the 2008 election. I have dreading, but predicting, a McCain victory since last summer when he was still in the tank in the polls. I thought he would beat Hillary in November. The main factor I misjudged was Obama's internet fund raising. I thought by now a Republican propaganda machine would have dumped a half a billion dollars smearing anyone who had the misfortune to get the Democratic nomination. If Obama ends October spending more money than McCain the smearing is neutralized, or at least equalized. The other factor appears to be the timing of the collapse of capitalism for this September. I am not sure that is what is happening, but whatever is going on, it can't be good for Republicans. Even with McCain now making noises like Paul Sweeney, it seems incredible that anyone would believe him.

Back to Obama and the war. With a McCain presidency the need for an anti-war movement was clear (if the war is ever to end). With an Obama presidency, we should know by the end of January if the war will end. If not, the anti-war community should not give him a break because he is a Democrat.

Ed Talks Money Management

For only the sixth time in its history, the Dow Jones lost more than 500 points today, dropping about 3% of its value. This is small potatoes compared to Black Monday in which it lost 22% of its value in 1987. Some of the other big drops were related to political fears such as the outbreak of War in Europe in 1914 and the 9-11 attack in 2001.

I called the children and assured them that we had lost not one penny in the crash, so I see no great change in the ability to pay tuition. We didn't lose anything on Black Monday in 1987, either. In fact, we haven't had any stocks since the kids were young in the early eighties.

I was born with stock. My grandmother used to say, "There are shanty town Irish and silk stocking Irish, but we're stock and bond Irish." She also used to tell me the first investment was in education, because when the market crashed, no one could take away the education.

I got rid of the stock I had inherited (and the very little I bought on my own) because I was suing corporations. I did not want any issue that I had a conflict of interest by keeping stock in companies I may want to sue. Beyond that, an incipient ill-informed Marxism made it harder and harder for me to own that stock.

I was a naive quite conservative Texas Democrat when I showed up in Chile in 1972. ITT's involvement in undermining and eventually murdering Salvador Allende was a story that unfolded both while I was there and then over the years. It was not the sort of thing to give you a warm and cuddly feeling about the corporations, and this was before I heard of the likely Heinrich Himmler connection to ITT. The more I saw of corporations, the more absolutely evil they looked to me. Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster pretty well sealed it in 1984.

Besides, I've always managed to spend about 110% of my income, no matter how high or low it is. It is helpful to be morally opposed to investing in stock when you can't make yourself save money anyway.

The kids are well-educated, though. So today I am gratified that I have not taken the foolish course of investing for retirement or our old age. Nothing ventured, nothing lost.

Sarah Palin--We've Done Worse

I  like this Sarah Palin choice.  Of course, I won't vote for her.  After all, she has confessed publicly to being a Republican.  But that aside, she rests well with me.

All those things McCain says about himself like "maverick" and "independent" that were probably true about him long, long ago, before he married into all that money and then got caught up in the Keating Five mess, may still be true about Palin.

First, is experience really necessary for the presidency or any other position of power?   I think choosing Congressmen based on who last won a multimillion dollar lottery in the district would be a good idea.  I think judges should be chosen randomly, a big drawing, say on the courthouse steps with ping ping balls, among the lawyers qualified to serve.  One big national drawing, with many, many ping pong balls, to choose the president based on all eligible voters would work for me.

Sarah Palin is about as close to a randomly selected candidate as we could get without throwing 250 million ping pong balls in a giant hamster cage.  She far more represents our demographics that the traditional rich, white, male, Yale, Skull and Bones vs. rich, white, male, Yale, Skull and Bones that was inflicted upon us in 2004.

She is a woman.  This is good.  The six years, six colleges including a junior college is endearing to me as well.  I like the basketball playing, the moose hunting, the beauty pageants and the marihuana sampling.  I like this messy bundle of kids of all ages and the Eskimo husband.  I also like that she drove everybody nuts when she got elected Governor.  I feel like I could be related to her or maybe she was the type of girl who could have had a thing with Uncle Tiger when he was a football star in high school.  

I see her as a wild, loose cannon who is too new and too little connected to be controlled.  I saw Huckabee much the same way.  If she can become president quickly rather than waiting until the lobbyists have an opportunity to give her some "experience," she could prove to be a surprising treat and a nightmare for the oligarchy.

I know she presents herself as an anti-environmentalist and a war-monger, but we seem to get those characteristics no matter who we elect.  

There are the only a couple of things that give me pause:

1.  I fear she doesn't believe in dinosaurs.  There are ways to reconcile dinosaurs with creationism and she may have decided upon one, but so far I cannot find it on the internet.   This should be her first major policy statement.  I would like a president who believes in dinosaurs.

2.  I still haven't heard if she has read Shakespeare and the Bible.  I understand that you can get a degree in journalism and miss these things.  Also, I don't mean reading the Bible in that "verse for a day" sort of way that you get at Sunday School.  I would like to think she has struggled with people like Lot, Onan and sick, crazy old David.  If she has not, rather than wasting a bunch of time with Joe Lieberman being "briefed," I urge she head out to the tundra with the Collected Works and that big Bible on the coffee table.

We could do, and usually have done, worse.

The Bundlers and Predicting Presidential Elections

Last summer when McCain's star had fallen, I had a feeling he would still win the presidency based on articles I was reading about his campaign support.   Early in Bush's second term, I began to read McCain had lined up the "Bush Bundlers."   The three best sources I have found for following the money are The Economist, The Financial Times, both conservative London newspapers filled with ads for expensive wristwatches and the International Socialist Review (no wristwatch ads at all).  The ISR quotes the Economist and the Financial Times often.   All three magazines seem to focus on the same information and believe the same subjects to be important.  I don't know why this amuses me so much, but it does.

At any rate, last summer, because these three sources assumed the race would be between McCain and Clinton and that McCain would ultimately win, I accepted this view.  And I have discovered the more I ignore issues, personalities, polls and the like and just watch the money, the better are my predictions.  Of course issues, personalities and polls can influence how much money a candidate receives, but the flurry of daily excitement about who has photos in drag and who has used cocaine and whose teenager is pregnant may impact polls, but money straightens all of that out.

I don't think McCain won the primaries because of his extraordinary personal story.  He had this same extraordinary story when he ran in the primaries against George W. (whose personal story is like Prince Hal's, but without the heroic ending) and it did him little good then.

Also, it is not nearly as important how much money you have as how much you know you will get.  That is why, when McCain was broke last summer, if he really had lined up the bush bundlers, we knew he would pull through.

So how did we go wrong on Clinton and why is Obama still alive even after the traditional August mauling designed by Lee Atwater?  My feeling is that bundlers are less of the picture this time around.   

For now, the bundler contributions to Obama and McCain are about even-- $75 million for McCain and $63 million for Obama.  Obama though has raised a total of $390 million to McCain's $175 million.   This Obama tally is a huge number.  Bush spent $367 million in 2004. The difference is Obama has received half of his money in contributions of $200 or less and McCain has received only 25%.  And Obama has twice as many small contributors, 187,000 to McCain's 94,000.

I suspect McCain will get a big contribution boost in these last two months before the election.  I still think McCain will be able to spend more in 2008 than Bush did in 2004.  Also, "independent groups" will muddy the waters and the RNC had about $70 million to spend at the beginning of July.  Some of the more disgusting campaign contributors will time the money for the last month so it does less damage to their candidate by being disclosed after the election.  Look for a couple of hundred million being spent to remind us that Obama is part Negro (not in those words, of course, but the message will be clear) in the next two months.