Gold closed at 634.20 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 0.4% from $631.60 at the close of the previous Friday. The dollar closed at 0.7791 euros Friday, down 0.6% from 0.7841 for the week. That put the euro at 1.2836 dollars compared to 1.2753 at the end of the previous week. Gold in euros, then, would be 494.08 euros an ounce, down 0.3% 495.37 for the week. Oil closed at 69.19 dollars a barrel Friday, down 4.8% from $72.51 at the end of the previous week. Oil in euros would be 53.90 euros a barrel, down 5.5% from 56.86 for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 9.17, up 5.3% from 8.71 at the end of the week before. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 11,464.15, up 1.6% from 11,284.05 at the close of the previous week. The NASDAQ closed at 2,193.16, up 2.5% from 2140.29 for the week. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 4.72% Friday, down five basis points from 4.79 for the week.
The monthly jobs report was released last week and the estimated job growth was 128,000, which cheered the analysts and the stock market. It was just large enough to convince people that the economy is not collapsing but small enough to keep inflation fears at bay. Lots of talk about "easing" growth and such:
Data Point To Cooler Growth, Steady Rates
By Tim Ahmann
Fri Sep 1, 4:18 PM ETU.S. employers added 128,000 workers to their payrolls in August, evidence of a cooler -- but still solid -- pace of economic growth that could let the Federal Reserve hold interest rates steady.
The closely watched Labor Department report, issued on Friday just ahead of the Labor Day holiday weekend, showed the unemployment rate dipped to 4.7 percent from 4.8 percent in July, suggesting the job market remains sturdy.
Other reports on Friday showed a slight slowing in factory activity last month and big drops in both construction spending and pending home sales in July that offered the latest evidence of the faltering U.S. housing market.
But consumer sentiment held up better in August than many economists had expected and analysts said the economy appeared to be decelerating, though not abruptly.
"It looks an awful lot like a soft landing, at least for now," said Dana Johnson, chief economist at Comerica Bank in Detroit. "It's an economy that is not firing on all cylinders -- it's got a clear concentration of weakness in the housing sector -- but, otherwise, an economy that is moving ahead at something resembling a trend-like pace."
The deluge of data left financial markets comfortable with bets that the U.S. central bank has finished raising interest rates and would turn to cut them next year, with bond prices and the dollar little changed.
Stock prices, however, got a boost, as investors welcomed the not-too-hot, not-too-cold economic picture. The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average closed up 83 points.
INFLATION TEA LEAVES
The closely watched employment report showed a slight pickup in payroll growth after an upwardly revised 121,000 job gain in July and was largely in line with analysts' forecasts.
Some details, however, were softer than expected.
Average hourly earnings rose a slim 2 cents, or 0.1 percent, last month. While that left the 12-month gain at a five-year high of 3.9 percent, economists had braced for a sharper monthly rise.
In addition, the length of the average work week dipped by 0.1 hour to 33.8 hours, pulling down an index of overall hours worked, in a potential sign of softer growth.
"All in all, it's a very inflation-friendly and Fed-friendly report," said Richard Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research in New York. "It doesn't suggest any economic frailty, but it supports a sidelined Fed."
After raising benchmark borrowing costs in 17 small steps dating back to June 2004, the Fed stepped to the sidelines at its last meeting on August 8 and held interest rates steady.
Interest-rate futures contracts put the implied chances of a increase in borrowing costs at the Fed's next meeting on September 20 at only about 6 percent after Friday's data.
A Reuters poll of 21 top Wall Street firms that deal directly with the Fed in the markets found only one expecting a rate rise later this month. Twelve said the Fed was likely finished raising rates.
FACTORIES COOLER, HOUSING ON ICE
Separately, the Institute for Supply Management said its index of factory activity slipped to 54.5 in August from 54.7 in July, showing continued growth at a slightly slower pace.
At the same time, the prices paid index fell to 73.0 from 78.5, a sign of receding price pressures.
Another report showed consumer sentiment falling in August, but by less than expected. The University of Michigan's sentiment index fell to 82.0 from 84.7 in July.
Two other reports combined to underscore the sharp weakening that has been evident in the U.S. housing market.
The Commerce Department said construction spending tumbled by 1.2 percent in July, the biggest drop since August 2001, as spending on homebuilding plummeted 2 percent.
At the same, the National Association of Realtors said its index of pending homes sales -- a gauge of contracted sales waiting to close -- plunged 7 percent in July to the lowest level in more than three years. The drop was the biggest on records dating to 2001.
The jobs report, however, showed construction payrolls expanded by 17,000 in August, with residential construction employment up marginally for a second straight month.
Today is Labor Day in the United States. The U.S. celebrates Labor Day in September rather than May 1, when the rest of the world does, because Communists and Socialists celebrate May 1, and we can't have any of that. The veterans group in the town I live in put up American flags on all the telephone poles. What nationalism has to do with Labor Day, I can't imagine, but some people can't imagine a holiday without nationalism or religion. But I have to say, fascist sentiment has almost completely drained away from the general public in the United States. Much of this is due to the clear and complete disaster of the Iraq war. Some of it also has to do with the public pessimism about the economy as housing values are falling, wages are stagnant, and job and pension security are practically non-existent, while the few at the top make out like bandits. The propaganda meisters will have their work cut out for them in convincing the public to attack Iran. If we survive Bush's presidency, maybe that will prove to be his achievement: completely discrediting fascist nationalism, fundamentalist Christianity and Republican economic policy by his extreme incompetence. A person can hope, anyway.
As for U.S. labor, Jason Miller points out that upper class gains have come right out of the pocket of workers, and that most people realize this:
Friday, September 01, 2006
In 1898, Samuel Gompers, one of the original founders of the American Federation of Labor, called Labor Day "the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed." This Labor Day, U.S. workers have many grievances that deserve attention. The New York Times reported recently that the median real hourly wage for American workers has declined two percent since 2003, despite the fact that productivity has been steadily rising. Worker productivity rose 16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, while total compensation for the median worker rose 7.2 percent. Among the reasons economists offer to explain this phenomenon are that workers' bargaining power is being slowly eroded and "trade unions are much weaker than they once were." The trends have left U.S. workers feeling bleak about the future. A poll of laborers conducted recently found that 63 percent of the workforce believes the country and the economy are on the wrong track; a majority now believe their children are going to be worse off economically than they are. The Progress Report details some of the problems facing today's workforce:
WORKING HARDER, EARNING LESS: "Wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947." A majority of today's workers say the number one issue they face is that the wages they are paid are not keeping up with the cost of living. Aug. 20th marked 10 years since the last time the federal minimum wage has been raised. Frozen at an unlivable $5.15/hour, the minimum wage is at the lowest buying power it has been in 51 years. Workers earning above the minimum wage are struggling as well. According to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, "Real median earnings for men working full-time and year-round were lower in 2005 than in 1973. In inflation-adjusted 2005 dollars, a typical man working full-time in 1973 earned $42,573. Thirty-six years later, this figure has fallen to $41,386." Yet, productivity -- as President Bush likes to frequently point out -- remains high. "What jumps out at you is the gaping hole between productivity growth and earnings," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). People are "working harder and smarter but not really seeing remuneration that they ought to be seeing." The wage crunch isn't affecting the entire labor force, however. The top one percent of earners -- including many corporate CEOs -- received 11.2 percent of all wage income in 2004, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than six percent three decades ago.
SICK ABOUT HEALTH CARE: According to new Census data released this week, the number of people living in the United States without medical insurance rose 2.9 percent -- 1.3 million people -- to a record 46.6 million over the last year alone as health-care costs climbed three times as fast as wages. The statistics indicate 6.8 million people have lost coverage since 2001, and this total has climbed every year since Bush has been in office. The Census Bureau also reports the percentage of uninsured children rose from 10.8 percent in 2004 to 11.2 percent in 2005 due to state budget struggles. This reverses a trend that started in 1998 of declining uninsured rates for children. "Due to the rising cost of health care and health-care insurance, you see a continued decline in workers accepting coverage when it's offered and employers offering it," said Emory University Professor Ken Thorpe. Indeed, three million people have lost employer-based insurance, while the rate of uninsured, full-time workers has increased by 13 percent since 2000. The bottom line is sadly simple: "Uninsured workers can't afford to get sick." Ultimately, this is a moral question -- it is wrong for anyone who works hard and plays by the rules to go without health coverage. "People who don't have coverage, can't afford preventive care, and don't see a doctor until a disease has progressed often suffer needlessly, drive up the cost of care, and lower the nation's productivity."
ORGANIZED VOICES BEING REPRESSED: In a recent report on the boom in profits, economists at Goldman Sachs wrote plainly, "The most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income." "If I had to sum it up," said Bernstein, "it comes down to bargaining power and the lack of ability of many in the work force to claim their fair share of growth." Wal-Mart, America's largest employer and heralded as the corporate model for today's economy, has opposed every effort of its employees to form a union. (Ironically, Wal-Mart has given its approval to its China-based workers organize.) "According to Cornell labor relations professor Kate Bronfenbrenner, at least 5 percent of workers involved in unionization campaigns are fired, which is both quite illegal and quite routine: Companies would rather pay the nominal fines than pay their workers higher wages and lose the absolute control they hold over the work lives of their employees." Today's labor movement faces union-busting law firms and consulting agencies which are increasingly enlisted by union-wary employers to keep labor from organizing. Today, the vast majority of union members -- 84 percent -- live in only 12 states, leaving workers with little organized power in much of the country. But despite internal struggles in the past, union leaders are now making moves to unite and mobilize workers around "pocketbook" issues.
While wages were up slightly (but not in inflation-adjusted terms) last week saw the release of some frightening personal saving data:
Personal saving -- DPI less personal outlays -- was a negative $83.5 billion in July, compared with a negative $67.6 billion in June. Personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income was a negative 0.9 percent in July, compared with a negative 0.7 percent in June. Negative personal saving reflects personal outlays that exceed disposable personal income. Saving from current income may be near zero or negative when outlays are financed by borrowing (including borrowing financed through credit cards or home equity loans), by selling investments or other assets, or by using savings from previous periods.
Negative saving rates are a trend that simply cannot continue forever. As The Roxylander in Flame blogger puts it:
The Hole In The Pants Gets Bigger
The consumer spending rose by 0.8% in July and personal savings are -0.9%, which means the average consumer is spending 0.9% more than his salary is.
As noted here, the 16-months period of negative savings is the longest since the Great Depression.
Do you like the news that a certain economic indicator is the worst since the Great Depression? So do I, my friends, so do I.
On the housing bubble front, the following piece by Mike Whitney was published on the Signs page last week but bears reposting:
Pop Goes the Bubble!
The Great Housing Crash of '07By Mike Whitney
August 30, 2006This month's figures prove that the so-called "housing bubble" is not only real, but that its cratering faster than anyone had realized. As the UK Guardian reported just yesterday, "the orderly housing slowdown predicted by the Federal Reserve will (soon) become a full-blown crash".
All the indicators are now pointing in the wrong direction. Consumer confidence is down, inventory is at a 10 year high, and the number of homes sold in July was 22% lower than last year. As Paul Ashworth, chief economist at Capital Economics said, "Things seem to be getting worse very quickly. Freefall is a strong word, but I think it's the right one to use here." (UK Guardian)
The housing bubble is a $10 trillion equity balloon that will explode sometime in 2007 when more than $1 trillion in no-interest, no down payment, adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) reset; setting the stage for massive home devaluation, foreclosures and unemployment. ("By some estimates housing activity has accounted for 40% of all the jobs created since 2001". Times Online) July's plunging sales are just the first sign of a major slowdown. The worst is yet to come.The blame for this rapidly-approaching meltdown lies entirely with the Federal Reserve, the privately-owned collection of 10 central banks who cooked up a way to shift wealth from one class to another through low interest rates.
Sound crazy?
Well, just as high interest rates cause the economy to slow down; low interest rates have the exact opposite effect by stimulating the economy through increased spending. It's all pretty clear-cut.
When the stock market nose-dived in 2000 the Fed lowered rates 17 times to an unbelievable 1% to keep the economy sputtering-along while the Bush administration dragged the country to war, gave away $450 billion a year in tax cuts, and awarded zillions in no bid contracts to their friends in big business. All tolled, the Bush-handouts amounted to roughly $3 trillion dollars, the largest heist in history, and it was carried out under the nose of the snoozing American public.
At the same time, America's debts and deficits have continued to mushroom behind the smokescreen of low interest rates.
Rather than face the recession which should have followed stock market crash, the Fed chose to increase the money supply (which doubled in the last 7 years) and lower the qualifications for getting mortgages. (I read recently that 90% of first time home buyers not only lie on their mortgage applications, but that 50% of them say that they earn TWICE as much as they really do. The applications are not cross-checked with IRS statements) Now, tens of thousands of Americans live in $400,000 and $500,000 homes without a penny of equity in them and with loans that are timed to increase dramatically in 2007. (Many of the monthly payments will double)
So, how can we blame the Fed for the reckless and irresponsible behavior of the average homeowner?
Well, because they knew the effects of their "cheap money" policy every step of the way.
First of all, the Fed knew exactly where the money was going. Greenspan endorsed the shabby new lending-regime which put hundreds of billions of dollars in the hands of people who never should have qualified for mortgages. They were set up to fail just like the victims in the stock market scam who kept dumping their life savings in the NASDAQ when PE's were shooting through the stratosphere.
Secondly, the Fed knew that wages had actually regressed (2.3%) since Bush took office, so they knew that the soaring value of real estate was entirely predicated on debt not real wealth. In other words, home values increased because of the availability of cheap money which inevitably creates a buying-frenzy. It had nothing to do with real demand or growth in wages.
And, thirdly, according to the Fed's own figures, "the total amount of residential housing wealth in the US just about doubled between 1999 and 2006, up from $10.4 trillion to $20.4 trillion". Times Online.
UP $10 TRILLION IN 7 YEARS! That is the very definition of a humongous, economy-killing equity monster. In other words, the Fed knew the ACTUAL SIZE OF THE BUBBLE and chose to steer it towards the nearest iceberg without warning the public.
This is what Greenspan called "a little froth".
There is no real growth in the American economy. Figure it out. Last year Americans saved less than 0% of their net earnings while they borrowed a whopping $600 billion from their home equity to piss-away on a consumer spending-spree. Once home prices begin to retreat, that $600 billion will evaporate, real GDP will shrivel, and the economy will begin flat-lining. (Consumer spending is 70% of GDP)
The Federal Reserve's plan is so simple; we shouldn't dignify it by calling it a conspiracy. It's merely a matter of hypnotizing the masses with low interest rates while trillions of dollars of real wealth is diverted to corporate big-wigs and American plutocrats.
It might not be rocket science, but it worked like a charm.
Now, the trap-door has been sprung; the country is dead-broke and all the levers are in place for a police state. As the housing-balloon slowly limps towards earth, the new Halliburton detention centers are up and running, the National Guard is in Rummy's control, the Feds are able to listen-in on every phone call we make.
The noose is beginning to tighten.
New Orleans was just a dress rehearsal for the new world order; 300,000 million Americans reduced to grinding poverty while the economy explodes into sheets of flames.
Now that it is too late, publications such as Business Week are sounding the alarm about risky mortgages:
They promise the American Dream: A home of your own -- with ultra-low rates and payments anyone can afford. Now, the trap has sprung
For cash-strapped homeowners, it was a pitch they couldn't refuse: Refinance your mortgage at a bargain rate and cut your payments in half. New home buyers, stretching to afford something in a super-heated market, didn't even need to produce documentation, much less a downpayment.
Those who took the bait are in for a nasty surprise. While many Americans have started to worry about falling home prices, borrowers who jumped into so-called option ARM loans have another, more urgent problem: payments that are about to skyrocket.The option adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) might be the riskiest and most complicated home loan product ever created. With its temptingly low minimum payments, the option ARM brought a whole new group of buyers into the housing market, extending the boom longer than it could have otherwise lasted, especially in the hottest markets. Suddenly, almost anyone could afford a home -- or so they thought. The option ARM's low payments are only temporary. And the less a borrower chooses to pay now, the more is tacked onto the balance.
The bill is coming due. Many of the option ARMs taken out in 2004 and 2005 are resetting at much higher payment schedules -- often to the astonishment of people who thought the low installments were fixed for at least five years. And because home prices have leveled off, borrowers can't count on rising equity to bail them out. What's more, steep penalties prevent them from refinancing. The most diligent home buyers asked enough questions to know that option ARMs can be fraught with risk. But others, caught up in real estate mania, ignored or failed to appreciate the risk.
There was plenty more going on behind the scenes they didn't know about, either: that their broker was paid more to sell option ARMs than other mortgages; that their lender is allowed to claim the full monthly payment as revenue on its books even when borrowers choose to pay much less; that the loan's interest rates and up-front fees might not have been set by their bank but rather by a hedge fund; and that they'll soon be confronted with the choice of coughing up higher payments or coughing up their home. The option ARM is "like the neutron bomb," says George McCarthy, a housing economist at New York's Ford Foundation. "It's going to kill all the people but leave the houses standing."
Because banks don't have to report how many option ARMs they underwrite, few choose to do so. But the best available estimates show that option ARMs have soared in popularity. They accounted for as little as 0.5% of all mortgages written in 2003, but that shot up to at least 12.3% through the first five months of this year, according to FirstAmerican LoanPerformance, an industry tracker. And while they made up at least 40% of mortgages in Salinas, Calif., and 26% in Naples, Fla., they're not just found in overheated coastal markets: Through Mar. 31 of this year, at least 51% of mortgages in West Virginia and 26% in Wyoming were option ARMs. Stock and bond analysts estimate that as many as 1.3 million borrowers took out as much as $389 billion in option ARMs in 2004 and 2005. And it's not letting up. Despite the housing slump, option ARMs totaling $77.2 billion were written in the second quarter of this year, according to investment bank Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc.
The First Wave
After prolonging the boom, these exotic mortgages could worsen the bust. They also betray such a lack of due diligence on the part of lenders and borrowers that it raises questions of what other problems may be lurking. And most of the pain will be borne by ordinary people, not the lenders, brokers, or financiers who created the problem.
Gordon Burger is among the first wave of option ARM casualties. The 42-year-old police officer from a suburb of Sacramento, Calif., is stuck in a new mortgage that's making him poorer by the month. Burger, a solid earner with clean credit, has bought and sold several houses in the past. In February he got a flyer from a broker advertising an interest rate of 2.2%. It was an unbeatable opportunity, he thought. If he refinanced the mortgage on his $500,000 home into an option ARM, he could save $14,000 in interest payments over three years. Burger quickly pulled the trigger, switching out of his 5.1% fixed-rate loan. "The payment schedule looked like what we talked about, so I just started signing away," says Burger. He didn't read the fine print.
After two months Burger noticed that the minimum payment of $1,697 was actually adding $1,000 to his balance every month. "I'm not making any ground on this house; it's a loss every month," he says. He says he was told by his lender, Minneapolis-based Homecoming Financial, a unit of Residential Capital, the nation's fifth-largest mortgage shop, that he'd have to pay more than $10,000 in prepayment penalties to refinance out of the loan. If he's unhappy, he should take it up with his broker, the bank said. "They know they're selling crap, and they're doing it in a way that's very deceiving," he says. "Unfortunately, I got sucked into it." In a written statement, Residential said it couldn't comment on Burger's loan but that "each mortgage is designed to meet the specific financial needs of a consumer."
The loans certainly meet the needs of banks. Option ARMs offer several payment choices each month. Among Burger's alternatives were one for $2,524, about what a standard fixed-rate mortgage would be on the new amount, and the $1,697 he pays. Why would his bank make the minimum so low? Thanks to a perfectly legal accounting practice, no matter how little Burger pays each month, the bank gets to record the full amount.
Option ARMs were created in 1981 and for years were marketed to well-heeled home buyers who wanted the option of making low payments most months and then paying off a big chunk all at once. For them, option ARMs offered flexibility.
So how did these unusual loans get into the hands of so many ordinary folks? The sequence of events was orderly and even rational, at least within a flawed system. In the early years of the housing boom, falling interest rates made safe fixed-rate loans attractive to borrowers. As home prices soared, banks pushed adjustable-rate loans with lower initial payments. When those got too pricey, banks hawked loans that required only interest payments for the first few years. And then they flogged option ARMs -- not as financial-planning tools for the wealthy but as affordability tools for the masses. Banks tapped an army of unregulated mortgage brokers to do what needed to be done to keep the money flowing, even if it meant putting dangerous loans in the hands of people who couldn't handle or didn't understand the risk. And Wall Street greased the skids by taking on much of the new risk banks were creating.
Now the signs of excess are crystal clear. Up to 80% of all option ARM borrowers make only the minimum payment each month, according to Fitch Ratings. The rest of the money gets added to the balance of the mortgage, a situation known as negative amortization. And once balances grow to a certain amount, the loans automatically reset at far higher payments. Most of these borrowers aren't paying down their loans; they're underpaying them up.
Yet the banking system has insulated itself reasonably well from the thousands of personal catastrophes to come. For one thing, banks can sell some of their option ARMs off to Wall Street, where they're packaged with other, better loans and re-sold in chunks to investors. Some $182 billion of the option ARMs written in 2004 and 2005 and an additional $83 billion this year have been sold, repackaged, rated by debt-rating agencies, and marketed to investors as mortgage-backed securities, says Bear, Stearns & Co. (BSC) Banks also sell an unknown amount of them directly to hedge funds and other big investors with appetites for risk.
The rest of the option ARMs remain on lenders' books, where for now they're generating huge phantom profits for some lenders. That's because, according to generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, banks can count as revenue the highest amount of an option ARM payment -- the so-called fully amortized amount -- even when borrowers make only the minimum payment. In other words, banks can claim future revenue now, inflating earnings per share.
For many industries, so-called accrual accounting, which lets companies book sales when they contract for them rather than when they receive the cash, makes sense. The revenues will eventually come. But accrual accounting doesn't apply well to option ARMs, since it's more difficult to know if unpaid interest will ever cross a banker's desk. "This is basically an IOU that may never get paid," says Robert Lacoursiere, an analyst at Banc of America Securities. James Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer recently wrote that negative-amortization accounting is "frankly a fraudulent gambit. But what it lacks in morality, it compensates for in ingenuity." The Financial Accounting Standards Board, which is responsible for keeping GAAP up to date, stands by its standard but told BusinessWeek in a written statement that it is "concerned that the disclosures associated with these types of loans [are] not providing enough transparency relative to their associated risks."
Camouflaged Losses
Risks or not, the accounting treatment is boosting reported profits sharply. At Santa Monica (Calif.)-based FirstFed Financial Corp. (FED), "deferred interest" -- what an outsider might call phantom income -- made up 67% of second-quarter pretax profits. FirstFed did not respond to requests for comment. At Oakland (Calif.)-based Golden West Financial Corp. (GDW), which has been selling option ARMs for two decades, deferred interest made up about 59.6% of the bank's earnings in the first half of 2006. "It's not the loan that's the problem," says Herbert M. Sandler, CEO of World Savings Bank, parent of Golden West. "The problem is with the quality of the underwriting."
In the middle of one of the hottest U.S. markets, Coral Gables (Fla.)-based BankUnited Financial Corp. (BKUNA) posted a $14.8 million loss for the quarter ended June, 2005. Yet it reported record profits of $23.8 million for the quarter ended in June of this year -- $20.9 million of which was earned in deferred interest. Some 92% of its new loans were option ARMs. Humberto L. Lopez, chief financial officer, insists the bank underwrites carefully. "The option ARMs have gotten a bit of a raised eyebrow because we generate and book noncash earnings. But...it's our money, and we do feel comfortable we'll get it back."
Even the loans that blow up can be hidden with fancy bookkeeping. David Hendler of New York-based CreditSights, a bond research shop, predicts that banks in coming quarters will increasingly move weak loans into so-called held-for-sale accounts. There the loans will sit, sequestered from the rest of the portfolio, until they're sold to collection agencies or to investors. In the latter case, a transaction on an ailing loan registers on the books as a trading loss, gets mixed up with other trading activities and -- presto! -- it vanishes from shareholders' sight. "There are a lot of ways to camouflage the actual experience," says Hendler.
There's no way to camouflage what Harold, a former computer technician who asked BusinessWeek not to publish his last name, is about to face. He's disabled and has one source of income: the $1,600 per month he receives in Social Security disability payments. In September, 2005, Harold refinanced out of a fixed-rate mortgage and into an option ARM for his $150,000 home in Chicago. The minimum monthly payment for the first year is $899, which he can afford. The interest-only payment is $1,329, which he can't. The fully amortized payment is $1,454, which his lender, Washington Mutual (WM), gets to count on its books. WaMu, no fly-by-night operation, said it couldn't comment on Harold's case, citing confidentiality issues. A spokesman says the bank "accounts for its option ARM product in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles." WaMu has about $12 billion in loans negatively amortizing right now, up from $2.5 billion in 2005, estimates CreditSights' Hendler. In a written statement, WaMu said "borrowers who request an adjustable loan with payment options should understand those options and potential adjustments throughout the life of the loan. We make detailed disclosures to customers that are designed to develop a more informed consumer of mortgage products and ensure that our customers are comfortable with the loan products they select."
Hard SellTo get the deals done, banks have turned increasingly to unregulated mortgage brokers, who now account for 80% of all mortgage originations, double what it was 10 years ago, according to the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. In 2004 banks began offering fatter sales commissions on option ARMs to encourage brokers to push them, says Gail McKenzie, assistant U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who is investigating mortgage brokers for improper practices.
The problem, of course, is that many brokers care more about commissions than customers. They use aggressive sales tactics, harping on the minimum payment on an option ARM and neglecting to mention the future implications. Some even imply verbally that temporary teaser rates of 1% to 2% are permanent, even though the fine print says otherwise. It's easy to confuse borrowers with option ARM numbers. A recent Federal Reserve study showed that one in four homeowners is mystified by basic adjustable-rate loans. Add multiple payment options into the mix, and the mortgage game can be utterly baffling.
Billy and Carolyn Shaw are among the growing ranks of borrowers who have taken out loans they say they didn't understand. The retired couple from the Salinas (Calif.) area needed to tap about $50,000 in equity from their $385,000 home to cover mounting expenses. Billy, 66, a retired mechanic, has diabetes. Carolyn, 61, has been caring for her grandchildren, 10-year-old twins, since her daughter's death in 2000. The Shaws have a fixed income of $3,000 a month that will fall by about $1,000 in November after Billy's disability benefits run out. Their new loan's minimum payment of about $1,413 is manageable so far, but the fully amortized amount of about $3,329 is out of the question. In a little over a year, they've added some $8,500 to their loan balance and now face a big reset if they continue to pay only the minimum. "We didn't totally understand what was taking place," says Carolyn. "You have to pay attention. We didn't, and we're really stuck here." The Shaws' lender, Golden West, says it routinely calls customers to ask them if they are happy and understand their mortgage loan.
Then there's the illegal stuff. Mortgage fraud is one of the fastest-growing white-collar crimes in the nation, costing $1 billion in 2005, double the year before. A slower housing market could foster more wrongdoing. "With a tighter market, you are going to find there is more incentive to manipulate," says Tim Irvin of Irvin Investigations & Research Services in Spring, Texas. "Brokers are having a harder time getting business, so they're getting creative..."
The practices of the mortgage industry, and indeed the whole financial system, expose a system much worse than merely "flawed" as the Business Week reporter put it. It should be clear to anyone with a working conscience that the neoliberal economic system, like most others, has been set up by and for psychopaths. The fact that the article details case after case of morally repugnant behavior by the lenders BEFORE getting to the "Then there's the illegal stuff." That means of course that a whole array of conscienceless lending practices are legal. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of people wrote these laws?
What do the banks say when challenged?
Analyst Frederick Cannon of Keefe Bruyette & Woods says most banks don't apologize for their option ARM businesses. "Almost without exception everyone says [the option ARM] is a great loan, it's plenty regulated, and don't bug us," he says. In an April letter to regulators, Cindy Manzettie, chief credit officer for Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati, said it's not the "lender's responsibility to help the consumer determine the appropriate payment option each month.... Paternalistic regulations that underestimate the intelligence of the American public do not work."
I suppose Ms. Manzettie thinks that banks that precisely estimate the intelligence of the American public and devise products to that public do "work." As usual, the psychopath is skilled at using words with a twisted meaning. Surely these practices work in a selfish sense for those using them. But they don't work for society as a whole, and it is time for those in the Anglo-American world to question the big lie of neoliberalism: that that which benefits a few psychopaths at the top benefits us all.
In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.
Ethnically Cleansing the Entire Middle East
Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavor designed to correct past errors. "Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East," he observes, but then adds wryly: "Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works."
Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale, he insists that unless it is implemented, "we may take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own." Among his proposals are the need to establish "an independent Kurdish state" to guarantee the long-denied right to Kurdish self-determination. But behind the humanitarian sentiments, Maj. Peters declares that: "A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan."
He chastises the United States and its coalition partners for missing "a glorious chance" to fracture Iraq, which "should have been divided into three smaller states immediately." This would leave "Iraq's three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn." Meanwhile, the Shia south of old Iraq "would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf." Jordan, a US-Israeli friend in the region, would "retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan." Iran too would "lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today's Afghanistan." Although this vast imperial program could be impossible to implement now, with time, "new and natural borders will emerge", driven by "the inevitable attendant bloodshed."
As for the goals of this plan, Maj. Peters is equally candid. While including the necessary caveats about fighting "for security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy", he also mentions the third important issue -- "and for access to oil supplies in a region that is destined to fight itself".
The whole thing sounds disturbingly familiar, especially to those who have read the musings of then Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon.
Keeping the World Safe… for Our Economy
Despite trying to dress up his vision as an exercise in attempting to selflessly democratize the Middle East, in a contribution to the quarterly US Army War College journal Parameters almost a decade ago, he acknowledged with some jubilation that: "Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar -- professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority." This minority will inevitably conflict with the vast majority of the world's population."For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is ‘nasty, brutish ... and short-circuited.'" In "every country and region," these masses who can neither "understand the new world", nor "profit from its uncertainties … will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States." The coming clash, then, is not really about blood, faith, ethnicity, at all. It is about the gap between the haves and the have-nots. "We are entering a new American century", he says, in a veiled reference to the Bush administration Project of the same name founded in the same year he was writing. In the new century, "we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent."
In predicting the future course for the US Army, Maj. Peters argues that: "We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends." In this context, he says, "we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves," and therefore, "terrorism will be the most common form of violence," along with "transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars." Meanwhile, "in defense of its interests", the US "will be required to intervene in some of these contests." And then he sums it all up in one tidy paragraph:
There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.
So what's prompted Maj. Peter's decision to air his vision for the Middle East in the Armed Forces Journal at this time in the wake of the latest Middle East crisis? A number of critical developments.
Source: Imminent Global Crises Converge
According to an American source with high-level access to the US military, political and intelligence establishment, Western policymakers are in no doubt that the world faces the imminent convergence of multiple global crises. These crises threaten not only to undermine the basis of Western power in its current military and geopolitical configurations, but also to destabilize the entire foundations of industrial civilization.
The source said that the latest petroleum data indicates that "global oil production most likely peaked two years ago." This is consistent with the findings of respected geologists such as leading oil depletion expert Dr. Colin Campbell, who in the late 90s predicted that world oil production would peak in the early 21st century. "We have come to the end of the first half of the Oil Age," said Dr. Campbell, who has a doctorate in geology from the University of Oxford and more than 40 years of experience in the oil industry. Similarly, Kenneth Deffeyes, a geologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University, estimates the occurrence of the peak near the end of last year.
The source also said that leading US financial analysts privately believe that "a collapse of the global banking system is imminent by 2008." Although the warning is consistent with the public findings of other experts, this is the first time that a more precise date has been estimated. In a prescient analysis drawing on highly placed financial sources, US historian Gabriel Kolko, professor emeritus at York University, concluded in late July that:
All the factors which make for crashes -- excessive leveraging, rising interest rates, etc. -- exist... Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus now exists between those who endorse it and those, like myself, who believe the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, and we should, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises.The source also commented on the danger posed by rapid climate change. Although most conventional estimates suggest that global climate catastrophe is not due before another 30 odd years, he argued that the multiplication of several "tipping-points" suggested that a series of devastating climatic events could be "triggered within the next 10 to 15 years." Once again, this is consistent with the findings of other experts, most recently a joint task-force report by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Center for American Progress in the US, and the Australia Institute, which said in January last year that if the average world temperature rises "two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution", it would trigger an irreversible chain of climatic disasters. In its report, the task force says:
The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 meters over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon.The source also revealed that US generals had repeatedly war-gamed a prospective conflict with Iran, but consistently found that the simulations predicted "an absolute nuclear disaster", from which no clear winner would emerge. The scenarios gamed were so dismal, he said, that the generals briefed administration officials to avoid such a war at all costs. However, the source said that the Bush administration is ignoring the fears of the US military.
In this context, it would seem that the musings of Maj. Peters issue less from a concerted confidence in US power, than from a sense of growing desperation and unease as the political, financial and energy architecture of the global system is increasingly fragmenting under the weight of its own inherent instability. Despite the seeming gloominess of the situation, however, there is clearly fundamental dissent about the current trajectory of American and Western policy at the highest levels of power. The source remarked that "humanity is on the verge of a precipice, and either we'll all just drop off the edge, or we'll evolve. I'm not sure what that new human being might look like, but it will clearly have to involve a completely new set of ideas and values, a new way of looking at the world that respects life and nature."
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry. He teaches courses in International Relations at the School of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, where he is doing his PhD studying imperialism and genocide. Since 9/11, he has authored three other books revealing the realpolitik behind the rhetoric of the War on Terror: The War on Freedom, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq and The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism. In summer 2005, he testified as an expert witness in US Congress about his research on international terrorism.
Dear Lew, the Honorable Ron Paul’s piece on why Americans are angry really stirred me to respond. Mr. Paul’s piece speaks about many issues facing Americans today.
I am a 51-year-old woman. I have been married to the same man since 1976. I am the secretary/office manager for a small legal firm in the D.C. suburbs. My husband manages a wine and spirits store. I have two sons, aged 26 and 22. After realizing it wasn’t possible to support themselves and the government at the same time, both returned to the nuclear nest. Along with most people in my economic situation, I believe I am living what is supposed to be the American dream. I know why I am an angry American. I am frightened because America isn’t the same country it was when I was my children’s age. Allow me to share with you some of the reasons why I am an angry American.
I am angry because my government has been taken over by liars, thieves, thugs, deviants, and micromanagers. The propaganda it produces rivals that of the most fascist dictatorship.
I am angry that my government perceives my intelligence to be that of a jar of pickles incapable of making the smallest decision.
I am angry that my government takes it upon itself to shove its clucking nose into my pantry, medicine chest, bedroom, family room, doctor’s office, workplace, and everywhere else it thinks I need guidance to keep me safe from myself.
I am angry that the will of the American people is ignored on every issue imaginable. If voting really mattered, it would have been outlawed long ago.
I am angry that I am called a conspiracy theorist because I dare to think on my own and question authority and its lies.
I am angry that the more I read about 9-11 the more it looks like an inside job that was allowed to happen, enabling the Patriot Act to be conveniently enacted into law with the ensuing "war on terrah" following closely on its heels.
I am angry that the evil puppets in power think laws are created for the peon masses and it is their right to ignore the ones that get in the way of their agenda.
I am angry that the media has sold its soul to the evil forces running the world.
I am angry that my "leaders" have taken to calling my country the "homeland." It reeks of socialism.
I am angry that my government has invaded yet another sovereign nation and caused untold death and destruction based on a flimsy lie. I am expected to believe that weapons of mass destruction threatened my freedom and then I am told several years and billions of squandered dollars later that a massive intelligence network got the wrong information. A select group of businesses profit enormously from war. When Bush announced his intention to save Iraq from itself and that its oil would pay for the overthrow of Hussein, I laughed so hard I nearly choked. I remember the instability in the Middle East during the 1970s and the gas "shortages" that followed. I knew which direction gas prices would go. How stupid does Mr. Bush and his cronies think I am?
I am angry that the world stands silently by while my government bombs foreign lands with weapons containing depleted uranium and the news magazines wonder on their front covers why lung cancer has increased six-fold in the last year.
I am angry that Americans accept as gospel the propaganda that is routinely cranked out of the Washington lie machine. The lies become more transparent and brazen with each passing year, yet the only thing that seems to matter in living rooms across America is who will be the next American Idol.
I am angry that I am punished with high energy and gas prices and the resulting inflation because tree-hugging terrorists masquerading as environmentalists have handcuffed my country’s ability to produce its own energy. It would be easy to tell the Middle East what to do with their oil if restrictions on exploration and production were lifted in our own backyard.
I am angry that I am constantly admonished by minimalists for being a greedy consumer because I live where I choose, drive the vehicle of my choice, eat meat, and use tin foil to cover my leftovers.
I am angry that my life doesn’t belong to me anymore.
I am angry that I am required to obtain permission, fill out mandated paperwork in quadruplicate, and obtain the correct license or permit for just about everything imaginable. The tentacles of government are strangling my freedom, choice, and privacy at an alarming rate. The wrath of the machine is a constant threat should I dare do anything without leaving a neon paper trail and of course ignorance of the law is never an excuse.
I am angry that property rights are a thing of the past thanks to court-approved eminent domain theft.
I am angry that the Constitution is routinely declared irrelevant making it easier for a fascist police state and new world order to take over.
I am angry that legislation is in the works that will require me to carry "papers" to "prove" who I am. Another coming law I will ignore.
I am angry that my right to own and carry a firearm is drastically regulated and restricted.
I am angry every time I see a young person detained on the side of the road while cops paw through their possessions looking for anything that could enable them to be arrested and dragged through the criminal justice system. This has become so commonplace it is now the accepted norm.
I am angry that roadblocks are set up under the guise of keeping roads free of drunk drivers. What has happened to my right to travel freely? Why am I presumed guilty without probable cause? I am afraid to have a few drinks when I go out to dinner for fear I will be pulled over and end up in court-ordered drug rehabilitation.
I am angry when I read stories of Americans terrorized in airports and treated like common criminals by government minions after they have paid for the right to travel within a private system, yet pilots are blocked from carrying firearms.
I am angry that America has become a nation of busybodies. We are constantly bombarded with messages to be on the lookout for terrorists around every corner, report "suspicious activity," and rat on our neighbor whenever the opportunity presents itself. Is this not how the Nazis gained control of Germany and then most of Europe?
I am angry that the government requires me to sign a form every time I purchase a prescription. Whose business is it that I choose to take a thyroid medication, an antibiotic, a painkiller, an appetite suppressant, or any other substance? Am I dying of cancer? Am I facing debilitating chronic pain? Do I simply want to get HIGH? Heaven forbid someone out there might get their hands on something that might make them FEEL GOOD! No substance should be illegal or unobtainable. If a person wishes to self-medicate, that is their right. The government should not be in the business of criminalizing personal choices of any kind as long as those choices don’t infringe on another’s rights.
I am angry that my government meddles in the lives of people all over the world but looks the other way on the catastrophic issue of what to do about the millions of illegals who have crashed the gates of this nation. My country’s laws are ignored and mocked, yet I am told I must accept with open arms those who are here illegally. My taxes are used to educate their children in their native language. Hospitals are overrun with indigent people seeking medical care. Untaxed dollars earned in the underground economy are sent to the family back home while social services here are stretched to the limit. I read job want ads stating if you aren’t bilingual don’t bother to apply. What would happen to me if I placed an ad that said don’t bother to apply if your English isn’t understandable? Marches are conducted in my cities’ streets waving their countries’ flags as they shamelessly demand their "rights." I am told they deserve the same opportunities that brought my forefathers here. I am scolded that it is un-American to ask why they are not sent home. I am told that the term "illegal alien" offends them and that they prefer to be called "undocumented workers" and that my economy would die without them. I will happily pay more for fruits and vegetables if it means enforcing sensible immigration laws. But immigration isn’t about the cost of lettuce. It is another facet of an agenda that is bent on changing the face of America. When America is no longer a wealthy country of white European descent, it will be a place worse than anything Orwell could have imagined.
I am angry that my country is the only nation on earth who declares that a baby born on its soil is automatically an American citizen.
I am angry that the thugs that run my country don’t have the guts to declare English my nation’s official language.
I am angry that I have to search a package for English and push a button on every telephone system and ATM machine to continue in English.
I am angry that Washington, D.C.’s Metro is now being pressured to replace every station sign with bilingual verbiage to the tune of millions of dollars. Are bilingual road signs going to be the next mandated law of the land? I am currently forced to pay for voting ballots printed in 15 different languages and my tax dollars pay for interpreter services for people who are summoned to court for breaking laws. If English is the international language of the world, why isn’t it good enough to be the official language of the United States?
I am angry when I am told I am a bigot when I thumb my nose at political correctness.
I am angry when I wonder whether an expressed belief or opinion could land me in litigation if someone doesn’t like what I said and wants to silence my voice.
I am angry that diversity and sensitivity training is being forced on people whose only crime is to dare to speak freely.
I am angry that the symbols, customs, and roots of my Judeo-Christian country are being systematically outlawed because my culture offends newcomers. When we freely choose to go somewhere, are we not accepting the customs and cultures of that place? I am weary of being made to feel guilty for being an American.
And finally, I am angry that after working my entire adult life, I don’t see retirement in my life’s picture. My husband and I earn over a hundred thousand dollars a year, but by the time we pay federal taxes, state taxes, social security taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, energy taxes, telecommunication taxes, savings taxes, fees, permits, etc., there isn’t much left. But please don’t think that I mind supporting every deadbeat and down-and-outer with his hand out for a piece of my pie that I worked so hard for. I love supporting the world. After all, it’s the American way, isn’t it?
July 5, 2006
Susan Fassanella [send her mail] was born in Washington, D.C. and resides in Frederick County, Maryland with her husband and two sons.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."
"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover."
ST. GILES-ON-THE-HEATH, England
Through a deep and tangled wood lies a glade so lovely and wet and lush as to call to mind a hobbit's sanctuary. A lichen-covered statue rises in a garden of native grasses, and a misting rain drips off a slate roof. At the yard's edge a plump muskrat waddles into the brush.
"Hello!"
A lean, white-haired gentleman in a blue wool sweater and khakis beckons you inside his whitewashed cottage. We sit beside a stone hearth as his wife, Sandy, an elegant blonde, sets out scones and tea. James Lovelock fixes his mind's eye on what's to come.
"It's going too fast," he says softly. "We will burn."
Why is that?
"Our global furnace is out of control. By 2020, 2025, you will be able to sail a sailboat to the North Pole. The Amazon will become a desert, and the forests of Siberia will burn and release more methane and plagues will return."
Sulfurous musings are not Lovelock's characteristic style; he's no Book of Revelation apocalyptic. In his 88th year, he remains one of the world's most inventive scientists, an Englishman of humor and erudition, with an oenophile's taste for delicious controversy. Four decades ago, his discovery that ozone-destroying chemicals were piling up in the atmosphere started the world's governments down a path toward repair. Not long after that, Lovelock proposed the theory known as Gaia, which holds that Earth acts like a living organism, a self-regulating system balanced to allow life to flourish.
Biologists dismissed this as heresy, running counter to Darwin's theory of evolution. Today one could reasonably argue that Gaia theory has transformed scientific understanding of the Earth.
Now Lovelock has turned his attention to global warming, writing "The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity." Already a big seller in the United Kingdom, the book was released in the United States last month. (He will speak in Washington, at the Carnegie Institution, Friday at 7 p.m.) Lovelock's conclusion is straightforward.
To wit, we are poached.
He measured atmospheric gases and ocean temperatures, and examined forests tropical and arboreal (last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming). He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive-feedback loops -- from air to water, everything is getting warmer at once. The nature of Earth's biosphere is that, under pressure from industrialization, it resists such heating, and then it resists some more.
Then, he says, it adjusts.
Within the next decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees. Earth, he predicts, will be hotter than at any time since the Eocene Age 55 million years ago, when crocodiles swam in the Arctic Ocean.
"There's no realization of how quickly and irreversibly the planet is changing," Lovelock says. "Maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1,000 years to recover."
Such dire talk no doubt occasions much rolling of eyes in polite circles, particularly among scientists in the United States, that last redoubt of global-warming skeptics. Lovelock's so intemperat e, and more than a few of his peers distrust his preference for elegant nouns and verbs served with no crusting of jargon. His grim predictions tend to be twinned in the press with those of the skeptics, each treated as a radical diversion -- purveyors of "climate porn," an English think-tank called them recently -- from a moderate mean.
Lovelock's radical view of global warming doesn't sit well with David Archer, a scientist at the University of Chicago and a frequent contributor to the Web site RealClimate, which accepts the reality of global warning.
"No one, not Lovelock or anyone else, has proposed a specific quantitative scenario for a climate-driven, blow the doors off, civilization ending catastrophe," writes Archer.
The headline on Archer's essay, which is in fact respectful of Lovelock's science, calls the Englishman a "renegade earth scientist." It's a curious description.
Lovelock works independently on various biochemistry projects, in a lab in an old barn behind his farmhouse in Devon. He often quarrels with the scientific establishment, which he sees as crippled by clubby orthodoxy. (Nor does he hesitate to tweak environmentalists -- Lovelock is a passionate backer of nuclear power as a carbon-clean palliative for global warming.) But it's difficult to see Lovelock, an inventor with 50 patents to his name, a fellow in the Royal Society -- England's scientific society -- as a Gaian bandito.
What's perhaps as intriguing are the top scientists who decline to dismiss Lovelock's warning. Lovelock may be an outlier, but he's not drifting far from shore. Sir David King, science adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, saluted Lovelock's book and proclaimed global warming a far more serious threat than terrorism. Sir Brian Heap, a Cambridge University biologist and past foreign secretary of the Royal Society, says Lovelock's views are tightly argued, if perhaps too gloomy.
Then you dial up Paul Ehrlich, the eminent Stanford University biologist, at his cottage in the mountains of Colorado, where he's been meeting with other scientists. Three decades ago Ehrlich wrote "The Population Bomb," a best-selling jeremiad in which he warned that the Earth's population was expanding much too fast.
Disaster did not arrive precisely as Ehrlich foretold, and he was treated as a doomsayer debunked. Maybe Ehrlich just was too early to the party.
Today Ehrlich sees global warming and population growth, with its attendant pressures on natural resources and demand for oil and gas, as menaces dancing in tango step. "Technically speaking, most scientists I know are scared [expletive]," Ehrlich says. "Lovelock and I are doomsayers because I'm afraid we see doom."
"Like the Norns in Wagner's Der Ring des Niebelungen, we are at the end of our tether, and the rope, whose weave defines our fate, is about to break."
You read such lines in "The Revenge of Gaia" and ask this wiry Jeremiah: Why so gloomy? Lovelock grins, his face a web of smile lines, and demurs: No, no, no. You have him all wrong. He started a family in the darkness of the London Blitz -- he has nine grandchildren, whom he loves, and a country of which he's very proud.
"I'm an optimist," he says. "I think that after the warming sets in and the survivors have settled in near the Arctic, they will find a way to adjust. It will be a tough life enlivened by excitement and fear."
That still sounds a tad short of good cheer.
Lovelock and Sandy, whom he married after the death of his first wife, take afternoon walks in Devonshire, and he quotes Shakespeare on the joy of finding oxlip by a stream. Lovelock finds too much delight in the mysteries of the universe to call himself an atheist. But he remains at heart a biochemist, a rigorous empiricist who refuses to shrink from the reality of hard times.
Lovelock grew up in working-class London. He could not afford Oxford or Cambridge and so attended at night. During World War II Lovelock walked sentry duty with professors on the roof of the lab. They watched the twinkling lights of German V-1 missiles draw close.
"A missile would veer off and explode and the professors would feel an immediate need to impart their wisdom." Lovelock chuckles. "It was like a graduate course. Terrible to say, but war makes us more alive."
Lovelock was a prodigy, earning degrees in chemistry and medicine. In the 1950s he designed an electron capture machine, which provided environmentalist Rachel Carson with the data to prove that pesticides infected everything from penguins to mother's milk. Later he took a detector on a ship to Antarctica and proved that man-made chemicals -- CFCs -- were burning a hole in the ozone.
"Gaia, shmaia," says Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist, who has been critical of Lovelock's latest theory. "If Lovelock hadn't discovered the erosion of the ozone, we'd all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun."
In 1961 Lovelock worked with NASA. The space agency wanted to design a lander to search for life on Mars. That, Lovelock thought, was silly. What if a lander set down in the wrong spot? What if Martian life wasn't bacterial?
Lovelock took a conceptual leap. If Mars bore life, bacteria would be obliged to use oxygen to breathe and to deposit their wastes as methane. Lovelock found that Earth's atmosphere contained massive quantities of oxygen and methane, gases that are the very signature of life. Mars's atmosphere was thick with carbon dioxide, the calling card of a dead planet.
That discovery changed his life. He came to see Earth as a self-regulating biosphere. The sun has warmed by 25 percent since life appeared, so Earth produced more algae and forests to absorb carbon dioxide, ensuring roughly constant temperatures. In 1969, Lovelock lacked only a name for his theory. He took a walk with novelist William Golding.
A big concept needs a big name, Golding said. Call it Gaia.
Gaia proved controversial, and not just because the name made New Age priestesses go weak in the knees. ("Gaia's not 'alive' and I'm afraid I'm not a very good guru," Lovelock notes dryly.) Biologists nearly choked -- they argued that organisms cannot possibly act in concert, as that would imply foresight.
Lovelock recalls being denounced at a conference in Berlin.
The intolerance gave him a pain. Lovelock said that the world's biomass can act without being "conscious." "The neo-Darwinists are just like the very religious," Lovelock says. "They spend all their time defending silly doctrine."
Forty years later, talk of an interconnected planetary system is the lingua franca of Earth science. The queen has handed Lovelock a prize, Oxford has invited him to teach, and his small forest lab had more government contracts than he could handle. (In his lab, the octogenarian scientist follows few safety protocols save the dictates of self-preservation. "I can kill only myself; it's a splendid freedom," he says.)
But friends say he's restless.
"Maybe Jim thinks the world has gotten too comfortable with his theory," says Lee Kump, a prominent geologist at Penn State. "He sees Gaia treating us as a body does an infection -- it's trying to burn us out."
"The meltdown of Greenland's ice sheet is speeding up, satellite measurements show."
-- BBC, 2006
"Dr. Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world's top forest ecologists, says the research shows that 'the lock has broken' on the Amazon ecosystem. She adds: T he Amazon is 'headed in a terrible direction.' "
-- CNN, 2006
How will our splendid Spaceship Earth so quickly become the oven of our doom? As we sit at his table in Devon, Lovelock expands on his vision.
It begins with the melting of ice and snow. As the Arctic grows bare -- the Greenland ice cap is shrinking far faster than had been expected -- dark ground emerges and absorbs heat. That melts more snow and softens peat bogs, which release methane. As oceans warm, algae are dying and so absorbing less heat-causing carbon dioxide.
To the south, drought already is drying out the great tropical forests of the Amazon. "The forests will melt away just like the snow," Lovelock says.
Even the northern forests, those dark cool beauties of pines and firs, suffer. They absorb heat and shelter bears, lynxes and wolves through harsh winters. But recent studies show the boreal forests are drying and dying and inducing more warming.
Casting 30, 40 years into the future, Lovelock sees sub-Saharan lands becoming uninhabitable. India runs out of water, Bangladesh drowns, China eyes a Siberian land grab, and local warlords fight bloody wars over water and energy.
Lovelock sees the look on your face and pauses.
"Look, this is why it's a gloomy book," he says. "Would you care for some more tea?"
The mind reels off objections. Doesn't this amount to a great piling up of what-ifs and could-bes? "The Day After Tomorrow," "On the Beach," Helen Caldicott, Nostradamus, a thousand tipping-point predictions of doom fade into the mists of human history. We humans are clever. We'll send a space shade into outer space to deflect sunlight (as a couple of California professors have proposed)?
Lovelock nods, weary; he's heard this before.
"We like to think of Hurricane Katrina, or a killer heat wave in Europe, as a one-off," he says. "Or we like to think that we'll come up with a technological fix."
Lovelock reminds you that the Mayan seers, to name another maligned bunch of doomsayers, were spot on. Their great civilization died of an environmental apocalypse. He's not romanced by the primitive. Across the world, from the American Indians to the aborigines of Australia to European hunters, research is suggesting that native peoples played a key role in the burning of forests and the extinction of thousands of species. Today the environmentally conscious seek salvation in solar cells, recycling and ten thousand wind turbines. "It won't matter a damn," Lovelock says. "They make the mistake of thinking we have decades. We don't."
Lovelock favors genetically modified crops, which require less water, and nuclear energy. Only the atom can produce enough electrical power to persuade industrialized nations to abandon burning fossil fuels. France draws 70 percent of its power from nuclear plants.
But what of Three Mile Island? Chernobyl? Lovelock's shaking his head before you complete the litany. How many people died, he asks. A few hundred? The radiation exclusion zone around Chernobyl is the lushest and most diverse zone of flora and fauna in Eurasia.
Sir Brian Heap accepts this. But he worries that South Asia and Africa are about to suffer the terrible consequences of First World excesses. What of our responsibility to them? "The poor aren't our problem," Heap says. "We're their problem."
Lovelock acknowledges the moral conundrum. But he sees no we-are-the-world solutions. The heat waves that kill millions, the powerful typhoons, the droughts that suffocate cities, will force a retreat to nationalism.
After a couple of hours, you wonder about his own good cheer. His internal combustion engine shows few signs of flagging; he wakes up 5:30 a.m. and reads, writes and tramps through the countryside. The studiously polite Lovelock seems a touch annoyed only at the suggestion he's frivolous about what the future holds.
"People say, 'Well, you're 87, you won't live to see this,' " he says. "I have children, I have grandchildren, I wish none of this. But it's our fate; we need to recognize it's another wartime. We desperately need a Moses to take us to the Arctic and preserve civilization.
"It's too late to turn back."
Michael Coren, a sort of spin-off on the lunatic Michael "Savage" Weiner, the beatnik fascist hate radio host, demands the United States nuke Iran immediately.
"Put boldly and simply, we have to drop a nuclear bomb on Iran," argues Coren in the Toronto Sun. Doing the unspeakable-or, that is to say, the unspeakable for normal, sane people not afflicted with murderous psychopathy-requires "a basic understanding of history, politics and the nature of fascism."
Obviously, Mr. Coren has a tenuous grasp on these subjects, for if he did have a grasp he would realize the nation of Iran is not a threat to "world peace." Rather, the neocons pose a threat to world peace, as they have at their command the Pentagon and its mighty and destruction potential, including thousands of ready-to-go nukes.
"Not, of course, the unleashing of full-scale thermo-nuclear war on the Persian people, but a limited and tactical use of nuclear weapons to destroy Iran's military facilities and its potential nuclear arsenal," continues a deluded Coren. "It is, sadly, the only response that this repugnant and acutely dangerous political entity will understand."
Even more sad is the lamentable fact Mr. Coren knows not of what he is talking about. If the United States nuked Iran, no doubt they would use low-yield "mini-nukes," for instance the earth-penetrating nuclear bunker buster, as the alleged diabolical Iranian nuke labs are below the surface in hardened bunkers.
"Our findings unequivocally refute the contention by the Bush administration and the Pentagon that nuclear bunker busters could be used in Iraq or anywhere else with minimal so-called collateral damage," writes Victor W. Sidel, MD, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "The nature of that 'collateral damage' would be fatal doses of radiation to anyone within a kilometer of the explosion and acute radiation sickness for potentially thousands of people who would die excruciating deaths over several days to a week or more." In a densely populated urban area such as Tehran, this would result in hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million dead people.
"The tragedy is that innocent people will die," Coren continues. "But not many. Iran's missiles and rockets of mass destruction are guarded and maintained by men with the highest of security clearance and thus supportive of the Tehran regime. They are dedicated to war and, thus, will die in war." As will, naturally, those not "dedicated to war," those of collateral status who are, the neocons tell us, less innocent than others-namely, Israelis and Americans-and thus of peripheral consideration.
"Frankly, it would be churlish of the civilized world to deny martyrdom to those who seem so intent on its pursuance. Most important, a limited nuclear attack on Iran will save thousands if not millions of lives."
Coren is so blinded by the neocon ideology, with its Manichean, dualistic core of cartoonish good versus evil, he is sincerely incapable of comprehending the indisputable and horrific fact that a "limited nuclear attack" would certainly not be limited, would not be contained. For as science reminds us, "unfissioned nuclear material, and weapon residues which have been vaporized by the heat of the fireball will condense into a fine suspension of very small particles 0.01 to 20 micrometers in diameter. These particles may be quickly drawn up into the stratosphere.... They will then be dispersed by atmospheric winds and will gradually settle to the earth's surface after weeks, months, and even years as worldwide fallout," although this danger is somewhat reduced with bunker buster mini-nukes. "Atmospheric winds are able to distribute fallout over large areas" (Nuclear Weapon Radiation Effects, Federation of American Scientists).
"From a technical perspective, critics of mini-nukes argue that it would be impossible with existing technology to adequately limit the damage of the weapon," writes Benjamin Friedman for the Center for Defense Information. "Dr. Robert Nelson, of the Federation of American Scientists, has argued that a mini-nuke could not penetrate the earth deep enough to avoid creating a huge crater above the target and spreading harmful radiation for miles-the kind of damage you expect from a nuclear weapon," including the above noted atmospheric dispersal.
"The spasm of reaction from many will be that this is barbaric and unacceptable," Coren admits. "Yet a better response would be to ask if there is any sensible alternative. Diplomacy, kindness and compromise have failed and the Iranian leadership is still obsessed with all-out war against anybody it considers an enemy."
But how is this possible, considering the United States has not communicated with Iran along diplomatic lines for nearly thirty years? Moreover, Coren refuses to put the conflict between Iran and the United States into its proper context.
A brief trip to the National Security Archive, readily and easily available online, reveals the history of the CIA's operation TPAJAX, engineered to overthrow the democratically elected leader Mossadeq in Iran, circa 1953. "Perhaps the most general conclusion that can be drawn from [the National Security Archive] documents is that the CIA extensively stage-managed the entire coup, not only carrying it out but also preparing the groundwork for it by subordinating various important Iranian political actors and using propaganda and other instruments to influence public opinion against Mossadeq," explains Mark Gasiorowski.
In addition to deposing the elected leader of Iran for the crime of nationalizing the country's oil, thus denying British Petroleum exclusive rights, the CIA installed a tyrannical monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (Shah-an-Shah, or King of Kings), and his brutal Gestapo, SAVAK, founded in 1957 with the assistance of the CIA and the Israeli Mossad.
"SAVAK increasingly to symbolized the Shah's rule from 1963-79, a period of corruption in the royal family, one-party rule, the torture and execution of thousands of political prisoners, suppression of dissent, and alienation of the religious masses," notes GlobalSecurity.
"Over the years, SAVAK became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest and detain suspected persons indefinitely. SAVAK operated its own prisons in Tehran (the Komiteh and Evin facilities) and, many suspected, throughout the country as well. SAVAK's torture methods included electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails. Many of these activities were carried out without any institutional checks."
From Mr. Coren, we hear no mention of these brutalities and injustices, thus prompting the conclusion Coren and the neocons either approve of such behavior or cannot be bothered to care, as it stands in the way of their clash of civilizations ideology. For Coren and the neocons, it is irrelevant the current government of Iran, admittedly a militant version of Islam, is the direct result of the 1953 coup and the installation of the Shah and his CIA and Mossad tutored thugs.
Next, Coren expends a lot of verbiage complaining about Iran's Shahab 3ER and BM25 missiles, "which are so powerful that they can hit targets in Europe," as if the Iranians actually plan to do this, thus expecting us to believe the Iranian leadership is insane and suicidal.
Of course, for Coren and the neocons, the development of such missiles reveals a nefarious desire to kill all infidels, especially the Israelis, never mind Israel has more than 400 nuclear bombs and is stocked with the latest military technology from the United States.
For Coren, the mullahs are worse than the Nazis. "Comparisons to the Nazis in the 1930s are unfair-to the Nazis. Hitler had the French army, the largest in Europe, on his border and millions of Soviet infantry just a few hours march away. Iran has no aggressive enemies in the region." Except Israel, conveniently left unmentioned, is a nation that routinely calls for attacking Iran.
"Its fanatical leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, controls a brutal police state, finances international terror and provokes bloody wars in foreign countries." Of course, Coren is making reference here to Hezbollah and Hamas, two self-defense organizations completely legitimate under the charter of the United Nations, as Israel has invaded Lebanon on numerous occasions and continues to occupy Palestine and subject the Palestinian people to unspeakable brutality and violence. As for provoking "bloody wars," the United States has done a heck of a job in neighboring Iraq.
"A conventional attack would be insufficient because Iran and its allies seem only to listen to power and threat. Better limited pain now than universal suffering in five years."
A bit of translation is in order here: conventional shock and awe, as proposed by at least some of the neocons, is "insufficient" because it would not inflict the required degree of "pain" on the people of Iran, that is to say nuclear bombs would be more effective in destroying the country's infrastructure and thus ushering in the sort of massive and criminal chaos unleashed on the people of Iraq and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Afghanistan. Indeed, if the neocons use nukes against Iran, there will be "universal suffering," not only for Iranians but for millions of others exposed to radiation, delivered by way of the closed system of the planet's biosphere.
Michael Coren and the neocons are criminally insane. In a prefect world, they would be duly arrested, outfitted in orange jumpsuits, tried by a jury of their peers under the rule of law, and punished accordingly.
However, as it now stands, we live in a less than perfect world and these psychopaths are allowed to espouse their murderous nonsense in corporate newspapers, thus infecting those of lesser discerning capacity to the sway of their hateful and nihilistic pathology.
Editor's note: I took the opportunity to email Michael Coren and the editor of the Toronto Sun in which this piece of hate speech appeared. I wrote simply:
Re: Article of 2nd September 2006: 'We should nuke Iran' by Michael Coren TORONTO SUNAll readers please consider taking the few minutes required to express your contempt for this type of psychopathic journalism by writing to Coren and his editor at:A repugnant article from a repugnant and clearly brainwashed person who reads too much of his own US-government-inspired rhetoric and apparently revels in the idea of the murder of innocent people.
You disgust me and all right-thinking normal human beings.
mcoren@sympatico.ca,
editor@tor.sunpub.com
Comment on this Editorial
"the commission was charged with explaining not only what happened, but also why it happened. In looking into the background of the hijackers, the staff found that religious orthodoxy was not a common denominator since some of the members "reportedly even consumed alcohol and abused drugs." Others engaged in casual sex. Instead, hatred of American foreign policy in the Middle East seemed to be the key factor. Speaking to the F.B.I. agents who investigated the attacks, Hamilton asked: "You've looked [at] and examined the lives of these people as closely as anybody. . . . What have you found out about why these men did what they did? What motivated them to do it?"
These questions fell to Supervisory Special Agent James Fitzgerald. "I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States," he said. "They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States." As if to reinforce the point, the commission discovered that the original plan for 9/11 envisioned an even larger attack. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the strategist of the 9/11 plot, "was going to fly the final plane, land it and make 'a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East,'" Kean and Hamilton say, quoting a staff statement. And they continue: "Lee felt that there had to be an acknowledgment that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was vital to America's long-term relationship with the Islamic world, and that the presence of American forces in the Middle East was a major motivating factor in Al Qaeda's actions."
Given the Bush administration's current policies in the region, another 9/11-style attack is less a matter of if than when."
"The book usefully details the administration's willful misrepresentation of its incompetent actions that day, but makes the shocking admission that some commission members deliberately wanted to distort an even more important issue. Apparently, unidentified commissioners wanted to cover up the fact that U.S. support for Israel was one of the motivating factors behind al Qaeda's 9/11 attack. Although Hamilton, to his credit, argued for saying that the reasons al Qaeda committed the heinous strike were the U.S. military presence in the Middle East and American support for Israel, the panel watered down that frank conclusion to state that U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy on Iraq are "dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world."
Some commissioners wanted to cover up the link between the 9/11 attack and U.S. support for Israel because this might imply that the United States should alter policy and lessen its support for Israeli actions. How right they were. The question is simple: if the vast bulk of Americans would be safer if U.S. politicians moderated their slavish support of Israel, designed to win the support of key pressure groups at home, wouldn't it be a good idea to make this change in course? Average U.S. citizens might attenuate their support for Israel if the link between the 9/11 attacks and unquestioning U.S. favoritism for Israeli excesses were more widely known."
"We did however, have some disagreement over foreign policy issues. Much of it revolved around the question of al Qaeda's motivation. For instance, Lee felt that there had to be an acknowledgment that a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was vital to America's long-term relationship with the Islamic world, and that the presence of American forces in the Middle East was a major motivating factor in al Qaeda's actions. Similarly, several commissioners pointed out that we had to acknowledge that the American presence in Iraq had become the dominant issue in the way the world's Muslims viewed the United States.
--- This was sensitive ground. Commissioners who argued that al Qaeda was motivated primarily by a religious ideology - and not by opposition to American policies - rejected mentioning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the report. In their view, listing U.S. support for Israel as a root cause of al Qaeda's opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy. To Lee, though, it was not a question of altering support for Israel but merely stating a fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was central to the relations between the Islamic world and the United States - and to Bin Laden's ideology and the support he gained throughout the Islamic world for his jihad against America. ... We ended up agreeing on language that acknowledged the importance of the two issues without passing judgment:
America's policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world. That does not mean U.S. choices have been wrong. It means those choices must be integrated with America's message of opportunity to the Arab and Muslim world. Neither Israel nor the new Iraq will be safer if worldwide Islamist terrorism grows stronger.
* "The staff found that religious orthodoxy was not a common denominator since some of the members "reportedly even consumed alcohol and abused drugs." Others engaged in casual sex."
* By 1992, Bin Ladin was focused on attacking the United States. He argued that other extremists, aimed at local rulers or Israel, had not gone far enough; they had not attacked what he called 'the head of the snake,' the United States. He charged that the United States, in addition to backing Israel, kept in power repressive Arab regimes not true to Islam. He also excoriated the continued presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War as a defilement of holy Muslim land.
MR. SNELL: Atta was chosen as the emir, or leader of the mission. He met with Bin Ladin to discuss the targets, the World Trade Center, which represented the United States economy, the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military, and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel.
...
MR. HAMILTON: But what have you found out about why these men did what they did? What motivated them to do it?
MR. FITZGERALD: I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States
* "when someone asked why he and Atta never laughed, Shehhi retorted, 'How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?'" p 162
* "By his own account, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel." Chapter 5
* Abdulaziz Alomari, one of the hijackers aboard Flight 11 with Mohammed Atta, said in his video will, "My work is a message those who heard me and to all those who saw me at the same time it is a message to the infidels that you should leave the Arabian peninsula defeated and stop giving a hand of help to the coward Jews in Palestine."
* Ahmed Al Haznawi, a hijacker aboard Flight 93, said in his video will, "Here is Palestine for more than a half-century, its wound has continued to bleed."
"We swore that America wouldn't live in security until we live it truly in Palestine. This showed the reality of America, which puts Israel's interest above its own people's interest. America won't get out of this crisis until it gets out of the Arabian Peninsula, and until it stops its support of Israel." -Osama bin Laden, October 2001
"... the Mujahideen saw the black gang of thugs in the White House hiding the Truth, and their stupid and foolish leader, who is elected and supported by his people, denying reality and proclaiming that we (the Mujahideen) were striking them because we were jealous of them (the Americans), whereas the reality is that we are striking them because of their evil and injustice in the whole of the Islamic World, especially in Iraq and Palestine and their occupation of the Land of the Two Holy Sanctuaries." -Osama Bin Laden , February 14 , 2003
A series of polls taken over the last few weeks of August show that support for the war in Iraq among Americans is at an all-time low. Almost two-thirds of Americans in each of three major polls say that they oppose the war, the highest totals since pollsters starting asking Americans the question three years ago. Many of the polls were conducted in advance of the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York.
A new Associated Press/Ipsos poll that surveyed the country, and more specifically residents of Washington and New York, shows that many feel the cost in blood and money in Iraq may already be too high and that Osama bin Laden will never be found. The poll also showed that 60 percent of Americans believe that the war in Iraq has increased the chances of a terrorist attack in the US.
"I think there's a fatigue about the price of doing these activities," said Robert Blendon, a specialist in public opinion at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "There's also a concern about the competency of how well we're doing them."
Some of the divisions are from political differences. For example, Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to think the cost of the terror fight may be too high and twice as likely to think Iraq is making terrorism worse. And this comes when the nation has gone five years without an attack ? possibly making the terror war seem less urgent to some.
Popular support for the war on terror helped neutralize opposition to the Iraq war for a long time, said political analyst Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. "Now the negative effect of Iraq is dragging down support for the war on terror," he said.
On the question of which political party can do a better job of protecting the US, both parties lost support since an April poll. But in another sign of trouble for the Bush administration, the AP/Ipsos poll also shows that more Americans believe the Democrats will do a better job than Republicans, 47-40 percent.A new CNN poll shows that only about one-third of Americans now support the war in Iraq, with 61 percent opposed. Fifty-one percent of Americans see President Bush as a strong leader, although he doesn't do well in other areas of the survey.
Most Americans (54 percent) don't consider him honest, most (54 percent) don't think he shares their values and most (58 percent) say he does not inspire confidence. Bush's stand on the issues is also problematic, with more than half (57 percent) of Americans saying they disagree with him on the issues they care about. That's an indication that issues, not personal characteristics, are keeping his approval rating well below 50 percent ...Bush dismissed a question about his popularity during a news conference Monday.
"I don't think you've ever heard me say: 'Gosh, I better change positions because the polls say this or that,'" he told reporters. "I've been here long enough to understand, you cannot make good decisions if you're trying to chase a poll." He added, "I'm going to do what I think is right, and if, you know, if people don't like me for it, that's just the way it is."
A Princeton Survey Research Associates International poll conducted Aug. 24-25 for Newsweek shows that 63 percent of Americans disapprove of the way the president has handled Iraq. A CBSNews/New York Times poll conducted Aug. 17-21 shows 65 percent of Americans disapprove of the way the president is dealing with Iraq. Among those who identified themselves as independents, 67 percent disapprove.
Finally, a survey by Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found that 60 percent of Americans believe screening of people who look "Middle Eastern" at airports and train stations is OK.Quinnipiac's director of polling, Maurice Carroll, said he was surprised by the apparent public support for racial profiling. "What's the motivation there -- is it bigotry, or is it fear or is it practicality?" he said.
The Quinnipiac poll also found that Americans considered the 9/11 attacks of more significance than the attack on Pearl Harbor. But the findings varied considerably among age groups, with 9/11 being the most important event among those 35 and under, but with Pearl Harbor being more important those 65 and older.
"People have fresh memories of 9-11 and many don't have any memories at all of Pearl Harbor, and those who do don't have fresh memories of it," said Bruce Schulman, a Boston University professor of history and American studies. "We also feel pretty confident that we know how the results of Pearl Harbor turned out, and we certainly don't know what the consequences of 9-11 are going to turn out to be.
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Merkel overtakes Rice as world's most powerful woman: Forbes
AFP
Thu Aug 31, 2006
NEW YORK - German Chancellor Angela Merkel has overtaken US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the world's most powerful woman, according to a Forbes Magazine list.
This time last year, Germany's first female chancellor was riding high in opinion polls as leader of the then-opposition conservative Christian Union but did not even feature in the ranks of Forbes's top 100 most powerful women.
And besides Chinese Vice President Wu Yi, who slid one place this year to number three, the rest of the top 10 are business executives, topped by the chief executive-designate of PepsiCo, Indian-born and educated Indra Nooyi.
The magazine's third annual list sees talkshow host
Oprah Winfrey dropping to 14th place and New York Senator