Bob Herbert: Changing the World

Op-Ed Columnist: Changing the World: "Americans need to shake off their passivity in confronting today’s problems and believe that their actions can make a difference."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Where Our Money Goes

Where Our Money Goes: "So the next few days is going to be centered around the outrageous costs of providing healthcare. Democratic leaders will have to bend over backwards to explain that they are being as miserly as they could be attempting to fix the 'system' that allows tens of thousands of people every year to die from lack of coverage. Justification they and the White House never had to provide, remarkably, when providing funding for the war in Iraq even after it was abundantly clear that the war was baseless and being conducted in the most incompetent manner. "

(Via Daily Kos.)

And In the Other War...

And In the Other War...: "

When Obama was running for president last year, he chided Republicans for taking their eye off the ball in Afghanistan. Now that we’re all appropriately obsessed with each new installment in the AfPak saga, it seems Americans (and the media) are paying less attention to Iraq. So here’s a quick primer of the most recent developments in the United States other ongoing conflict, for those who are having trouble following more than one war at a time:

Oil--Although Iraq has vast reserves, its shoddy infrastructure has ensured that it’s still pumping oil at far below capacity. The country’s first effort in June to increase capacity (and, by extension, its shrinking government coffers) by rewarding outside contracts to oil companies was a disaster. A combination of continued instability and violence, high extraction taxes placed on oil companies, and an uncertain legal climate (the hydrocarbons legislation currently on the books is a Saddam-era holdover and may well be thrown out when a new oil revenue-sharing bill is taken up next year) was enough to scare off most investors. Now, however, Reuters notes that sweetened terms are making the next round of bidding in December look a lot more promising, while Bloomberg reports that Iraq may be close to signing a few big deals reached through direct negotiations.

Elections--Afghanistan’s recent election and its fallout have been fiascos, and now, Iraq is showing signs of trouble in the lead-up to its own national contest in January. The Christian Science Monitor reports that an election law scheduled to pass on October 15 is instead being held up in parliament. The brouhaha centers on two issues: Kurd-Arab disputes over representation for the city of Kirkuk, and whether the ballot should employ an open-list system that allows voters to choose individual candidates or a closed list, like the one employed in the last election, which only lists political parties.

Troops--For all the talk of shifting focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, The New York Times points out that, by the end of October, the United States will still have approximately 120,000 troops in Iraq (only a 23,000 decrease since January). Most of the big withdrawals are scheduled for next year and predicated on a successful election in January. Accomplishing the withdrawal by the end of 2010 will be a logistical nightmare, fraught with the perils of maintaining security while rapidly paring down troop presence. What’s more, the United States faces the difficult question of whether it is sufficiently safe and cost-effective to haul out of the country all of the equipment that we’ve imported to military bases there since the 2003 invasion. Military officials say that plans are on track, but, as in Afghanistan, a lot hinges on the upcoming election."

(Via The Plank.)

America Spends A Lot on Defense

America Spends A Lot on Defense: "

Yesterday, congress appropriated a $680 billion for the Department of Defense in FY 2010. Chris Preble observes that, shockingly enough, this $680 billion isn’t even the whole bill:

The defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.

All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.

Preble says that this enormous expenditure ‘flows directly from our foreign policy.’ But it’s worth also saying that our foreign policy flows from the vast scope of our defense spending. My biggest concern about the war in Afghanistan isn’t overblown feasibility concerns, but the failure to take seriously David Obey’s point that we should put this in some kind of cost-benefit framework. Arne Duncan doesn’t have a $700 billion per year budget to play with as he tries to help American kids learn. Jay Rockefeller doesn’t get to say ‘I could make this health plan really good by kicking the ten year cost up to $7 trillion.’ People are starving in Ethiopia for want of a fraction of the DOD’s daily budget in food aid."

(Via Matthew Yglesias.)

Dean Baker: The $200,000 Insult: Come to Chicago

Dean Baker: The $200,000 Insult: Come to Chicago: "

Kenneth Feinberg, President Obama's compensation czar for bailed out banks, appears to have taken some genuine steps to rein in excessive executive compensation at the basket case banks that received the most TARP money. He cut cash salaries by 90 percent in some cases and reduced overall compensation for the top executives at the seven institutions that received the most government money.

This is a good first step, but it is only a first step. The pay caps involve only a relatively small number of people in an industry where hugely bloated salaries are the norm. Even in these cases it is too early to know that the pay caps will actually prove to be binding. After all, Wall Street's main craft is evading regulations and taxes. It is entirely possible that those clever Wall Street boys will find a way to get around whatever pay restrictions Mr. Feinberg puts in place.

Whatever happens to the pay of this small group of executives the real problem goes much deeper. The Wall Street folks view the wreckage from last year as a minor distraction and are eager to get back to business as usual. This attitude was best expressed by 'a person close to A.I.G.'s board,' who said of plans to restrict pay at the AIG division that wrecked the company to $200,000: 'that's insulting ... why wouldn't anybody quit?'

Of course, this 'insulting' pay package would still give our AIG executives more pay than 99 percent of the work force. They would be getting more than three times as much as the average teacher, firefighter, or nurse. They would be getting more than five times as much as the average factor worker and more than ten times as much as minimum wage worker.

Furthermore, if anyone among these other groups of workers mess up so badly that they bring down their employer, they lose their job. They don't get to go somewhere else because a $200,000 paycheck is 'insulting.'

Wall Street badly needs fixing. Fortunately we have the tool to do the job. It's called a financial transactions tax (FTT) - a modest tax on trades of stock, futures, options and other financial instruments. Such a tax could easily raise $100 billion a year, while cutting the financial sector down to a manageable size.

An FTT is not an alien concept. We actually had a tax on stock trades until 1964. The United Kingdom still has a 0.25 percent tax on stock trades that, relative to the size of its economy, raises the equivalent of $40 billion a year in the United States.

If we follow the lead of the UK, we will a great revenue source that will barely touch most of the population. Investors who buy and hold stock for 10 years will barely be affected, as is the case of a farmer hedging her wheat crop. However, someone who buys stock at 2:00 with the intention of selling at 3:00 would pay a substantial price.

There are many other good arguments for an FTT, including that it is the fairest way to fix the damage to the budget caused by the recession and the bailout, but an FTT will not get an airing in a Congress where the banks continue to wield enormous power. Congress will only consider an FTT, as opposed to more regressive proposals like a national sales tax, if the public demands it.

The public will have an opportunity to express their outrage at the banks and the need to rein them in at the Showdown in Chicago beginning on October 25. If this protest proves successful, and there are hundreds more like it around the country, then Congress may start thinking more clearly about measures to change Wall Street culture and to get back our money."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Volcker Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy

Volcker Fails to Sell a Bank Strategy: "The former Fed chief said the giant banks must be broken apart and separated from risky trading on Wall Street, a view not shared by many in the White House."

(Via NYTimes.)

A Reality Check from the Brink of Extinction

A Reality Check from the Brink of Extinction: "

By Chris Hedges

The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe.

READ THE WHOLE ITEM

"

(Via Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines.)

Paul Krugman: The Banks Are Not Alright

Op-Ed Columnist: The Banks Are Not Alright: "While bank trading operations are highly profitable again, the part of banking that really matters — lending, which fuels investment and job creation — is not."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

From Defeat, Lessons in Victory

Op-Ed Contributor: From Defeat, Lessons in Victory: "The presidential decisions made during the Vietnam War remain relevant to Afghanistan today."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Frank Rich: Goldman Can Spare You a Dime

Op-Ed Columnist: Goldman Can Spare You a Dime: "The less we know about Goldman Sachs, the easier it is for reckless gambling to return to capitalism’s casino."

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Zachary Karabell: Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the Worlds Prosperity Depends on It

Zachary Karabell: Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It: "

The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades -- or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States -- more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivaled except by America.

The rise of China is hardly a secret, but because it is a complex economic that is constantly evolving, it gets less attention than hot-button issues. Absent a real crisis between the two, the relationship is more about the flow of capital and the nature of global business than it is about heated battles inside the Beltway or on Main Street. And while the rise of China and America's increased dependency on Chinese loans to fund its deficits certainly generates anxiety, it's mostly amorphous barring some specific issue to focus it.

How that relationship came to be is the subject of my new book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. While this economic fusion has taken more than two decades to evolve, with the crisis of the past year, it has become both a tighter embrace and one more fraught with tension. It's to the credit of both governments -- for now -- that those tensions have not boiled over.

For their part, the Chinese are concerned about the viability of the American economic system and about the long-term value of their more than $1 trillion of investments in American bonds. They are also dependent on the market even a recession-mired America offers, with exports to the United States still near $300 billion a year. Americans are worried about the effect of lower-cost Chinese labor on U.S. jobs, even though most of the lost jobs were lost long ago and have as much to do with the corrosive effects of technology on labor as they do with cheap production in China. Meanwhile, China offers turbo-charged growth for American companies, as the Chinese government turns to companies like Caterpillar and GE to help with the industrial build-out and as Chinese consumers buy more goods -- even a bankrupt GM sold 1.6 million cars in China this year, more than in the United States.

But tripwires abound. Yesterday, the Treasury submitted one of its many required reports to Congress, this one on currency and the Chinese currency especially. The Treasury, Secretary Geithner and by extension the Obama administration decided not to label China a currency manipulator, though the report did express serious concerns that the value of the Chinese currency pegged to the dollar left it undervalued and hence responsible for continued global imbalances.

These reports are dry in nature and are nothing if not wonky. But make no mistake: this was a delicate decision and a consequential one. If the Obama administration had labeled China a manipulator, the next step would be automatic sanctions. That in turn might have generated a domino effect of epic proportions. And given how entwined the U.S. and Chinese economies have become, any negative ripples threaten to halt what is for now a very delicate and incomplete global economic recovery.

For now, the relationship between the two economies is symbiotic, and is providing a degree of stability to both societies. In the absence of Chinese money, the Obama administration could not be spending its way out of recession, and without American companies operating in China and without Americans purchasing Chinese goods, China wouldn't have the money to lend and spend. But no country likes to see its sovereignty eroded and its ability to be master of its own fate undermined -- and that is precisely what the economic relationship between the China and the United States does to their respective governments. National sentiment in both countries is also strongly suspicious, and that is likely to intensify.

But for now and for many years to come, we are joined at the hip, China and the United States, and how that relationship is managed by both will determine whether the world ahead is one of increased prosperity or ever-more conflict between winners and losers, between haves and have-nots, and between powers on the rise and powers on the decline."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Wall Street Smarts

Op-Ed Contributor: Wall Street Smarts: "A theory about why the financial system nearly collapsed seemed too simple to be true, but it was hard to find any flaws in it. "

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

What Not Being Able To Buy Oil In Dollars Means

What Not Being Able To Buy Oil In Dollars Means: "The key break point, the end of the dollar hegemony, will come when the Chinese are able to move to a consumer economy. At that point, the Chinese will no longer need America as consumers, and they will let the Yuan float. The devastation this will wreck on the US economy is hard to overstate. Standards of living will crash. In the long run, being forced to live within its means, and no longer having to compete against massively subsidized foreign goods may turn out to be good for the US, but that won’t make you feel better as your effective income collapses or you lose your job."

(Via Crooks and Liars.)

Frank Rich: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco

Op-Ed Columnist: Two Wrongs Make Another Fiasco: "The most surreal aspect of the Afghanistan debate is the Beltway’s credence given to the blunderers who got us into this mess. "

(Via NYT > Opinion.)

Dylan Ratigan: The Cost of Corporate Communism

Dylan Ratigan: The Cost of Corporate Communism: "

Lately I have been using the phrase 'Corporate Communism' on my television show. I think it is an especially fitting term when discussing the current landscape in both our banking and health care systems.

As Americans, I believe we reject communism because it historically has allowed a tiny group of people to consolidate complete control over national resources (including people), in the process stifling competition, freedom and choice. It leaves its citizens stagnating under the perpetual broken systems with no natural motivation to innovate, improve services or reduce costs.

Lack of choice, lazy, unresponsive customer service, a culture of exploitation and a small powerbase formed by cronyism and nepotism are the hallmarks of a communist system that steals from its citizenry and a major reason why America spent half a century fighting a Cold War with the U.S.S.R.

And yet today we find ourselves as a country in two distinctly different categories: those who are forced to compete tooth and nail each day to provide value to society in return for income for ourselves and our families and those who would instead use our lawmaking apparatus to help themselves to our tax money and/or to protect themselves from true competition.

If you allow weak, outdated players to take control of the government and change the rules so they are protected from the natural competition and reward systems that have created so many innovations in our country, you not only steal from the citizens on behalf of the least worthy but you also doom them by trapping the capital that would be used to generate new innovation and, most tangibly in our current situation, jobs.

We are losing the opportunity cost of all the great ideas that should be coming from the proper deployment of that 23.7 trillion in capital. Everything from innovation in medical delivery systems to accessible space travel, free energy to the driverless car; all of these things may never come to bear because those powerful individuals who have failed, been passed over by technological advancements, innovation and flat-out smarts, have commandeered our government to unfairly sustain their wealth and power.

Unfortunately, they use our wealth and laws not only to benefit their outdated, failed companies, but also spend a small pittance of their ill-gotten gains lobbying and favor-trading with politicians so the government will continue to protect them from competition and their well-deserved failure.

The massive spike in unemployment, the utter destruction of retirement wealth, the collapse in the value of our homes, the worst recession since the Great Depression have all resulted directly from the abdication of proper government.

Even with all that -- the only changes that have been made, have been made to prop up and hide the massive flaws on behalf of those who perpetuated them. Still utterly nothing has been done to disclose the flaws in this system, improve it or rebuild it. Only true rules-based capitalism ensures constant adaptation and implementation of the latest and best practices for a given business, as those businesses that don't adapt fail, and those who deploy the latest innovations to their customers benefit, prosper.

The concept of communism is rightly reviled in this country for the simple reason that it is blind to human nature, allowing a small group of individuals near-total control, while sticking everyone else with the same crappy systems -- and the bill. America spent countless lives and half a century fighting against this system of government. So why are we standing for it now? "

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Harry Shearer: The Afghanistan War: Just Askin

Harry Shearer: The Afghanistan War: Just Askin': "

My, how times have changed. Remember way back in 2004, when John Kerry denounced the Bush administration for short-changing the Afghan war by diverting men, resources, and attention to Iraq and he was denounced as unpatriotic? Now, on the eighth anniversary of the Afghanistan war, major media proclaim it as fact, and the conservatives dont even rouse themselves to respond (Dick Cheney apparently hasnt seen his shadow, so its six more weeks before he resurfaces).

So, we fucked up, we took our eye off the ball, we got distracted. President Obama made that point to his advantage during his election campaign, and now hes cursed with getting what he wanted: the Presidency and the Afghan war redux, complete with a general saying publicly, 'Gimme more troops or else.' So, as the White House engages in deliberate debate on the matter--a debate which ostentatiously excludes the prospect of getting the hell out of there--some questions:

1. Is it sane, reasonable or prudent to pretend that, after six years of ignoring this struggle, we can just pick it up where we left off? Can we seriously act as if history in the area stopped and waited for us to re-engage? Has the passage of time been more favorable to this project, or less so?

2. We are told by war supporters that the Talibans return to power in Afghanistan would destabilize nuclear Pakistan. That would obviously be a bad thing, since nuclear Pakistan is not all that stable already. But, hasnt Pakistan funded and supported the Afghan Taliban all along, as a protection of their 'back door', so the country could devote all its military resources to the 'front door', the border with nuclear India? Would a Talibanized Afghanistan draw Pakistani Taliban across the border, where the power is, or energize them to ramp up their insurgency against the Pakistani government (which funded their cross-border brothers, but not them)?

2a. Hasnt al-Qaeda achieved all it could have dreamed of--suckering the United States into two protracted, expensive land wars in the Middle East and Asia while al-Qaeda itself morphed and decamped to Somalia and other hospitable climes?

3. I've just been reading a somewhat politicized but useful history of the country in question, Afghanistan: The Untold Story. Its clear that the country has seen all this before: not just foreign invasions (neatly repelled all the way back to Alexander the Great), but attempts at modernization, education for women, democratization, spreading literacy (as recently as the 1920s). Is it possible the intractability of these problems, their resistance to our favored solutions, is not the fault of the Afghan people? In the same way that Americas favored journey in the world was at least strongly influenced by our geography (protected by two oceans, a large agricultural heartland drained by a commerce-friendly river), is it possible that Afghanistans tortured history is at least somewhat dictated by its geography (most crucially, finding itself forever at the borders of competing empires)?

4. Will, therefore, Obamas war turn out to be an even more spectacular historic mistake than Bushs war? Will it be seen as the final step in the American empires exit stage right as the Chinese empire enters stage left?

Just askin'.

"

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Robert Scheer: A War of Absurdity

Robert Scheer: A War of Absurdity: "

There is no indication that any of the contending forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, are interested in bringing al-Qaida back. On the contrary, all the available evidence indicates that the Arab fighters are unwelcome and that it is their isolation from their former patrons that has led to their demise.

Every once in a while, a statistic just jumps out at you in a way that makes everything else you hear on a subject seem beside the point, if not downright absurd. That was my reaction to the recent statement of the president's national security adviser, former Marine Gen. James Jones, concerning the size of the terrorist threat from Afghanistan:

'The al-Qaida presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.'

Less than 100! And he is basing his conservative estimate on the best intelligence data available to our government. That means that al-Qaida, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan--so why are we having a big debate about sending even more troops to fight an enemy that has relocated elsewhere? Because of the blind belief, in the minds of those like John McCain, determined to 'win' in Afghanistan, that if we don't escalate, al-Qaida will inevitably come back.

Why? It's not like al-Qaida is an evil weed indigenous to Afghanistan and dependent on its climate and soil for survival. Its members were foreign imports in the first place, recruited by our CIA to fight the Soviets because there were evidently not enough locals to do the job. After all, U.S. officials first forged the alliance between the foreign fighters and the Afghan mujahedeen, who morphed into the Taliban, and we should not be surprised that that tenuous alliance ended. The Taliban and other insurgents are preoccupied with the future of Afghanistan, while the Arab fighters couldn't care less and have moved on to more hospitable climes.

There is no indication that any of the contending forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, are interested in bringing al-Qaida back. On the contrary, all the available evidence indicates that the Arab fighters are unwelcome and that it is their isolation from their former patrons that has led to their demise.

As such, while one wishes that the Afghan people would put their houses in order, these are not, even after eight long years of occupation, our houses. Sure, there are all sorts of angry people in Afghanistan, eager to pick fights with each other and most of all any foreigners who seem to be threatening their way of life, but why should that any longer have anything to do with us?

Even in neighboring Pakistan, the remnants of al-Qaida are barely hanging on. As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, 'Hunted by U.S. drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al Qaeda is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. ... For Arab youths who are al Qaeda's primary recruits, 'it's not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,' said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.'

It's time to declare victory and begin to get out rather than descend deeper into an intractable civil war that we neither comprehend nor in the end will care much about. Terrorists of various stripes will still exist as they have throughout history, but the ones we are most concerned about have proved mighty capable of relocating to less hostile environments, including sunny San Diego and southern Florida, where the 9/11 hijackers had no trouble fitting in.

There is a continued need for effective international police work to thwart the efforts of a widely dispersed al-Qaida network, but putting resources into that effort does not satisfy the need of the military establishment for a conventional field of battle. That is the significance of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's leaked report calling for a massive counterinsurgency campaign to make everything right about life in Afghanistan, down to the governance of the most forlorn village. The general's report aims not at eliminating al-Qaida, which he concedes is barely existent in the country, but rather at creating an Afghan society that is more to his own liking.

It is a prescription, as the Russians and others before them learned, for war without end. That might satisfy the marketing needs of the defense industry and the career hopes of select military and political aspirants, but it has nothing to do with fighting terrorism. In the end, it would seem that some of our leaders need the Afghanistan battleground more than the terrorists do."

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Obama Is "Incompetent" and the U.S. Is a "Madhouse": An Exclusive Interview With Gore Vidal

Johann Hari: Obama Is "Incompetent" and the U.S. Is a "Madhouse": An Exclusive Interview With Gore Vidal: "

In Russian, the phrase 'gore vidal' means 'he has seen grief.' As Gore Vidal is wheeled towards me across an empty London hotel lobby, it seems for the first time like an apt translation. In the eight years since I saw him last, he has lost his partner of fifty years, most of his friends, most of his enemies, and the use of his legs. The man I met then - bristling with his own brilliance, scattering witticisms around like confetti - has withered. His skin is like parchment, but the famous cheekbones are still sharp beneath the crags. 'It is so cold in here,' he says, by way of introduction. 'So fucking cold.'

Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his own fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America's greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists, and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got felated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and - finally, bizarrely - befriended and championed the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh.

Yet now, he says, it is clear the American experiment has been 'a failure.' It was all for nothing. Soon the country will be ranked 'somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs.' The Empire will collapse militarily in Afghanistan; the nation will collapse internally when Obama is broken 'by the madhouse' and the Chinese call in the country's debts. A ruined United States will then be 'the Yellow Man's Burden,' and 'they'll have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport.'

A Scotch is fetched for him as he is wheeled into the corner of the bar.

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected - optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated, but he's incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It's a pity because he's the first intellectual president we've had in many years, but he can't hack it. He's not up to it. He's overwhelmed. And who wouldn't be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away - and we're being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense.

The President 'wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember - the Republican Party is not a political party. It's a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It's full of hatred. You're not going to get them aboard. Don't even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He's too delicate for that.'

When he compares Obama to his old friend Jack Kennedy, he shakes his head:

He's twice the intellectual that Jack was, but Jack knew the great world. Remember he spent a long time in the navy, losing ships. This kid [Obama] has never heard a gun fired in anger. He's absolutely bowled over by generals, who tell him lies and he believes them. He hasn't done anything. If you were faced with great problems in chemistry - to find the perfect gas, to gas a population - you won't know for a long time whether it works. You have to go by what people tell you. He's like that. He's not ready for prime time and he's getting a lot of prime time on his plate at once.

Is there any hope? 'Every sign I see is doom. But then people say' - he adopts a whiny, nasal voice - ''Oh Mr Vidal, you're so negative, can't you say something nice about America? It's a wonderful country, everybody wants to live here.' Oh yes? When was the last time you saw a Norwegian with a green card who wanted to come here because of the health service? I'll pay you if you can find one.'

But there is, he says with sudden perkiness, some 'good news. Afghanistan will be terminal for the American empire, yes. Which is a happy way of looking at it. We'll be out of the empire game, rapidly. But it's too late for the country and the constitution.' He raises his drink, and smiles ironically. 'To a better republic,' he says, and drinks in one long gulp.

I. The Death of America

The current spasming death of America was foretold at its birth, Vidal says, and it can only be understood by whirling back there. It has been his mission to explain the past to the 'United States of Amnesia,' through his novels and essays. When he speaks, he sweeps over two millennia of history - from Caesar to Obama - as if he was there, forever spraying one-liners from the back row. Today, he was stopped time in Philadelphia, at the birth of the republic. 'Benjamin Franklin saw all this coming,' he says. 'I quote him because most Americans don't even know who he was now. You'll have to explain to your readers.' Franklin was a polymathic writer, scientist and soldier who became one of the founding fathers of the United States.

In Philadelphia in 1781, when the constitution was being put together, he was an observer. He didn't want to have any part of it, and as he was leaving the Constitution Hall in Philadelphia a couple of old ladies said, 'Ah, Mr Franklin, what is going to happen?' He told them: 'Well, you're going to get a Republic, if you can keep it. But every constitution of this sort has failed since the beginning of time due to the corruption of the people.'

So the American people are corrupt? Americans weren't good enough for America? 'Precisely. They were only good enough to be a restive colonial power - or the dregs of one.'

Vidal's politics began here - almost. He was born at the United States Military Academy in West Point to a wealthy family at the apex of American power. His grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, the Senator for Oklahoma. He was blind, so from the age of five, little Gore was reading letters and books for big Gore and guiding him discreetly through Washington D.C. parties. The Senator was a populist, fighting to rally the people against the concentrated power of Wall Street and Big Finance. He represented the cotton farmers who emerged battered from the Civil War, only to be destroyed by Wall Street financiers playing roulette with the global cotton price. Yet there was always a strange contradiction to his life: 'My grandfather couldn't stand his constituents,' Vidal says. 'And they loved him for it. Figure that one out.'

He was a populist with no faith in the populace - precisely what his grandson has turned into. Gore Vidal shares the populist belief that the people are being shafted by the rich - but he thinks the population is too cretinous and drugged by television and fast food to figure it out.

It is always to be hoped that the people will mysteriously be educated, somehow. Well, that's the link. But the people don't know anything. As soon as we became an empire, we stopped teaching geography in the schools, so nobody would know where anything is. It's not the people's fault - they have been perverted them into imperial ways of thinking so that they would be docile workers and loyal consumers. That was the dream and it has come true.

As a child, Vidal loved spending time with his Senator-grandfather, not least because it meant he could escape for a time from his alcoholic mother Nina. When I raise the topic, he adopts the whiny nasal voice of a mock-interviewer again and says: ''Oh Mr. Vidal, your poor mother can't have been as awful as you say [in your memoirs].' She was a lot worse. I don't go after other people's mothers, but my own was quite enough to attack.'

She was constantly drunk, and when she wasn't savaging him or threatening suicide, she would tell her son the full details of her life in an obsessive angry blather. When he was ten, 'she told me that rage made her orgasmic. I didn't think to ask her if sex did the same.' When he appeared on the cover of Time magazine years later, she wrote a long letter to the magazine denouncing him. The magazine headlined it: 'A Mother's Love.' Vidal seems to have inherited his bitter wit from her. Asked why she didn't marry for a fourth time, she said: 'My first husband had three balls, my second two, my third one. Even I know enough not to press my luck.' Does he think of her often? 'No.' He gives me an icy stare. After all these years, can he feel any compassion for her? 'No.' The ice becomes a glacier.

Does he think, at least, that she shaped his personality? His old friend Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic, wrote in his diaries: 'What superb and seamless armour he wears, as befits one for whom life is a permanent battle for (social and intellectual) supremacy. ... Gore could never surrender (i.e. expose) himself to anyone.' Could his mother's cruelty explain his life-long sweeping dismissal of everything around him - the constant goring by Gore? As soon as I ask this, I realize how Vidal has changed since I last saw him. Then, he would have responded with a witty put-down, or reasserted his supremacy with an obscure classical reference, quoted in the original Greek. Now he looks a little hurt - his eyes flicker sadly - and he says: 'Well, it's the last thing I'd like to think about.' Then he is silent. I suddenly feel rude, and cruel.

His grandfather became increasingly furious that Franklin Roosevelt was - he believed - dragging the United States into an unnecessary war against Germany and Japan. He was opposed to all foreign wars, which he believed were drummed up by Big Business to serve their interests. 'He thought that no foreign war was worth the life of any American,' Vidal says, with a smile of pride. But this - combined with his opposition to the New Deal - meant he was voted out of office. As a little act of revenge, Vidal says he has never visited Oklahoma.

He joined the army at the age of seventeen, glad to escape his mother. He spent the war posted in Italy and, for three years, Alaska. He is not surprised that this 'frozen hell' has produced Sarah Palin, 'the latest idol in America's long cult of stupidity.' Alaska was, he says, 'The place where all the crooks in America went to hide. And they produced her.'

He says he realizes now that he was part of an army sent to build a global Empire by 'America's Augustus, Roosevelt.' The old America was replaced by a military octopus with a metal arm on every continent, and the old constitution was replaced by a 'National Security State. I wouldn't have enlisted if I knew where it was going to lead,' he says. 'But there it was, and we ended [the war as] an empire and slammed the door behind us. Then we fucked it up.'

He left the army with no money. 'My father and grandfather, as self-made men, were not going to make any other man. I knew that,' he says. So he sat down and wrote a novel about the war called Williwaw. At the age of twenty, he was suddenly a hard-boiled realist best-seller. He was lauded as a tough young soldier, and his grandfather talked of setting him up with a Congressional seat - but Vidal wanted to write another, bolder novel, based on the only person he had ever loved. It pulled any hope of a political career down behind him - but made him a defining figure in American life.

II. An Interrupted Love Story

When Vidal was fourteen, a boy called Jimmy Trimble moved into Vidal's dorm at his Washington boarding school. He was a blond, built jock; Vidal was a bookish intellectual. 'His sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the Great,' he wrote years later in his memoir, 'Palimpsest.' They fell in lust and perhaps in love, and had sex in the forest at the edge of the school grounds. 'It was the first human happiness I had ever encountered,' Vidal wrote. He saw Trimble as his other half, the person who finally made him complete. Then Trimble was, at the age of nineteen, blown up by a hand grenade on the beaches of Iwo Jima.

For years, thoughts of Trimble still made Vidal tremble. I think they still do: his eyes turn distant and a little watery when we talk about him. So he wrote a novel - The City and The Pillar - imagining what would have happened if they had met again after the war. It's a dark, bitter book: the sex is a failure, and one kills the other. But in 1950s America, to show two all-American boys - manly, self-assured - having sex was wildly bold. He was subject to a blackout in the 'respectable' press and any hope of elected office died, but the book became a best-seller.

Vidal resolved that he would never again find what he had lost with Jimmy: 'It would be greedy to expect a repetition. I was aware of my once-perfect luck, and left it at that.' He says he had sex with more than a thousand 'anonymous youths' by the age of 25. He never saw them twice; he never pretended there was any affection there. He was what they labeled 'trade' - he did nothing (deliberately, at least) to please them. He was pleasured; that was all. 'When I got too old, I paid for it gladly.' After the death of Trimble, he seems to have emotionally cauterised himself. Even his closest friends have said there is an isolation at the core of his character. He once said: 'I have known so many people, but it seems I have known nobody at all.'

Strangely, though, Vidal has always resisted the idea that he is a 'gay' champion. 'I never said I was gay, because I don't think anyone is.' He says he finds 'these restrictions tiresome. In the centuries of Rome's great military and political success, there was no differentiation between same-sexers and other-sexers; there was also a lot of crossing back and forth. Of the first twelve Roman emperors, only one was exclusively heterosexual.' The US today is, for all the fussing, full of sodomy, he says.

Did you see [Colonel] Gaddafi [at the UN] complaining that American soldiers have been sodomizing Arab boys? I thought, well that's been the case since the very beginning of the republic. They blamed the sodomy on those great forests out there which they said made them horny. There was nothing else to do but bugger boys, they said.

So homosexuality and heterosexuality are fictions? 'Yes, of course.' He adopts a camp faggy voice and adds: 'But it makes a lot of girls happy.' Why do so many people believe it to be true about themselves if it's false? 'They believe in Jesus, and that's a much bigger fiction, with more money spent on it. Prettier clothes too.'

When he was 25, Vidal met a younger man called Howard Austen, and they settled down together, on one condition - they agreed to never have sex, nor be romantic in any way. He and Austen were together for fifty years. He died last year, in a hospital in the Hollywood Hills. 'He had lung cancer and he wouldn't stop smoking and then it went to his brain and he had brain cancer. That's... that's what happened,' he says. Once, in an essay, he quoted the critic Edmund Wilson, who said of his dead wife: 'After she was dead, I loved her.' Can he say that of Howard? He affects not to hear. 'Now I'm a gimp. I can't walk. I need hospitals. You know I have a knee made out of titanium.' He taps his knee. 'So you see, I need hospitals.' And he looks away, a little absently, as if thinking of something else.

III. Isolation

By his mid-twenties, Vidal was a best-selling author, and rich. He rented a property in Guatemala - far from his mother - and settled down to write his next novel. But in that small tropical central American country, he found he was going to have to dramatically reassess the country he had just fought for - and pull his grandfather's abandoned philosophy from the gutter of history.

Just before Vidal arrived, the poverty-wreathed Guatemalan people had elected a left-wing President called Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. They wanted him to introduce a minimum wage and start taxing the US mega-corporation the United Fruit Company that dominated the country's only industry, banana-growing. The outraged United Fruit Company acted to preserve its profits - by getting Washington to topple Arbenz and install a dictator. The phrase 'banana republic' entered the language.

'I was astonished,' Vidal says. 'I had known vaguely about our numerous past interventions in Central America. But that was the past.' He discovered that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was leading the charge, and, 'I didn't believe it. Lodge was a family friend; as a boy I had discussed poetry with him.' He says he realized then he had been fighting 'for an Empire, not a republic.' His grandfather, he resolved, had been right all along: wars only serve elites.

He rapidly became the leading left-wing critic of American foreign policy. He warned against every war from Vietnam to Iraq, often with extraordinary prescience. At the height of George Bush's post-9/11 popularity, he said: 'Mark my words - he will leave office the most unpopular President in history.' His essays on this subject are often great flares of truth and anger. His horror at US foreign policy can be summarized in one little scene. In the 1980s, the Sistine Chapel was being restored, and some VIPs were invited to view it on an elevated platform. He spotted that old serial killer Henry Kissinger inspecting the section depicting Hell, and said: 'Look, he's apartment hunting.'

Vidal started preaching his grandfather's gospel of isolationism. 'I am a patriot of the old republic that has slowly vanished during the expansionist years and disappeared completely in 1950 when the National Security State replaced it,' he says. 'I want us to go from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, and restore the constitution. We should leave the world alone, before they make us.'

The US is only menaced, he says, because it menaces others. 'In geopolitics as in physics, there is no action without reaction.' He stirs his Scotch and says: 'There was no 9/11. I mean - our policies were such that we were going to have a lot of crazy people out there in the Arab world who were going to try to blow us up, because of crimes they feel we committed against them. Any fool could see it coming. And I'm sufficiently a fool to have seen it.'

He sees his job as expressing 'the unacceptable obvious,' and says he is always ready to 'turn the other fist.' I tell him that while I agree with many of his criticisms of US foreign policy, it seems that to keep his isolationism pristine and pure, he has to go further than the truth. He has to imply every attack on the United States' power was provoked, and therefore justified - when some were not. He looks coldly at me. 'Okay - name one.' Pearl Harbor, I say. If the US can be an expansionist empire, so can other countries. The Japanese empire attacked the US, just as the US expansionists attacked Guatemala, Vietnam and others. It was unprovoked aggression.

His face tightens into a scowl. 'Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war!' he snaps.

He taunted the Japanese so they would have to hit us, at Pearl Harbor, and they did. ... We have conveniently forgotten because we don't teach American history to anybody, but he sent an ultimatum to the Japanese telling them to get out of China, which they'd been trying to conquer for years. He was laying down the law to them, [saying they had to] surrender their rather proud nation's empire. And they said fuck you. And the next thing we knew the fleet was moving towards Pearl Harbor.

That's not how most historians read it - but I move on to an even more contested example. He says the Soviet Empire was 'purely reactive' to American power, and only committed atrocities and invasions because the US 'goaded them.' Can that be true? Couldn't they be independently cruel, just as the US sometimes was? 'They had a whole continent to play with, they didn't need any more space,' he says, and changes the subject, rather oddly, to talk about the Dutch.

I try to pull him back. Yes, it's clearly the case that 9/11 was in part a blow-back response to US crimes in the Middle East, but he goes much further, and says the Bush administration was 'probably' in on it. Where is the evidence for this huge claim?

It would certainly fit them to a tee, so you can't blame the rest of us for starting to think on slightly conspiratorial grounds. They did steal the great election of the year 2000 and they somehow fixed the Supreme Court of the United States, that sacred place and got them to go along with it, with the selection, not the election, the selection of George W Bush as president. He wasn't voted for, people didn't want him. And were somewhat mystified that he ended up with it.

But there was an earlier attack on America that he wants to discuss now - one he says was carried out by a 'sane' and 'noble' man.

IV. A Noble Boy

On April 19, 1995, a former US soldier called Timothy McVeigh planted a massive truck bomb outside a government building in Oklahoma City, at the heart of Vidal's grandfather's old constituency. Some 168 people died, including a kindergarten full of children. McVeigh wrote to Vidal, saying he had been motivated, in part, by studying his work. He said he believed the US Constitution had been usurped by a National Security State that had to be defeated by force. Vidal wrote back - and they became friends. He started mounting passionate defenses of the bomber in public. He says now he was not crazy, but 'too sane for his place and time.'

'He was a dedicated student of the American way, of the Constitution itself,' he says.

You should read his writings - they're very good. Particularly on the Posse Comitatus Act of 1876, which forbids the Federal government ever to use its troops against the American people - but which they proceeded to do at Waco [at a compound used by a religious cult that was attacked by federal troops in 1993]. They killed more people than he managed to kill when he blew up that building in Oklahoma City. He was a noble boy.

Noble? The man who consorted with far right militia groups and blew up all those children? Vidal scowls again, and almost hisses:

He didn't kill them deliberately! But the American government killed all those people at Waco, men, women and children deliberately! It was his gesture against the government he loathed. You know, he swore to me he had no idea there were children there. He said - 'How would I know? I walked by the place once and I knew that there was some kind of dining room, families might be there, or they might not be there,' and he wasn't counting, he wasn't out for a big count. But he was trying to tell the government - look, you have done this arbitrarily, contrary to the Posse Comitatus Act, contrary to American law, you've killed American citizens. Remember he was an army boy, and he loved it, and he was longing to get back in the army and the army was longing to get him back, he was the best sharpshooter they'd seen in years. But it was not meant to be.

But he knew he would kill hundreds of innocent people: that was the point. Doesn't that show a callous disrespect for human life? 'So did Patton, so did Eisenhower!' he says angrily.

Everybody's rather careless about it once you start getting involved in wars. He saw this as a war to preserve the Constitution! You know what he said? But you don't, so I'm going to tell you. The judge [at his trial] quite liked him, and he was intrigued by the fact that this rather talkative kid who wrote tons of pieces for the press had not defended himself. So he said - Mr McVeigh, could we hear more from you? [McVeigh] said, 'Well, your honour, I will base my case on Justice Brandeis, one of our most brilliant jurists, in his opinion in Olmstead. There, he writes that when government ceases to lead by example and actually provides a bad example, anything can happen. Government is the last teacher. Everything I did, I learned from my government.

When did this happen to Gore Vidal? When did he go from righteous - and right - opposition to atrocities carried out by his own government, to justifying any atrocity against it, no matter how extreme? When I ask him, his scowl turns to a sneer, and he says I am ignorant and clearly haven't read anything. I decide to try a different approach. I ask him - if there were more people like McVeigh, would that be a good thing? There is a crack in his hauteur, and he says: 'It strikes me as a perfect nightmare. Of course I don't want more people like McVeigh. Since Americans refuse to think about anything, being incapable I suspect of thought, then they're not going to come to any conclusions except mistaken ones.'

I don't understand. I try again and again to tug him back and get him to say whether this means he thinks McVeigh was wrong to plant the bomb. He won't. Finally, he jeers: 'You are trying my patience,' and defies me - with a long stare - to change the subject.

V. Pale Moonlight

Vidal is one of the last of his generation of American intellectuals standing (or, at least, sitting). I ask him about some of his rivals, who have died recently - John Updike, William Buckley, Norman Mailer - and he interrupts. 'Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain.' Then he smiles to himself: 'You know, he used the word 'existential' all the time, to the end of his life, and never even learned what it meant. I heard Iris Murdoch once at dinner explain to Norman what existential meant, philosophically. He was stunned.'

There is a vulnerability to Vidal now that didn't exist eight years ago. Before, I felt like I was shouting questions up Mount Olympus: he conducted the interview from above and beyond me, impervious to anything I said. Now, when I laugh at his jokes, he looks pleased, and laughs too. When we argue, he looks genuinely thrown, and hurt, and angry. He seems keen to return to the calmer waters of his memories, and we paddle together in his Kennedy anecdotes. Jackie was really secretly in love with Bobby, he says. He used to call Jack the President-erect. Jack once had sex with an actress friend of his in a bath, and suddenly rammed her head underwater, so she would have a vaginal spasm, and he would have an orgasm. 'She hates him still,' he says. But when I ask him what he made of the late Teddy Kennedy as a person, he snaps: 'Who cares what they were like as people? That's just show business.'

He has had to abandon his second home in the high hills of Italy, and says he misses it. 'Italy is such a civilized country. Unlike America.' But is the gap so great? Is Silvio Berlusconi better than Barack Obama? He snaps again: 'Who cares? This is showbiz you're worried about. I don't care who's on television telling jokes on the Late Show.'

Vidal seems exhausted and alone, living out his days in the Hollywood Hills. After an amazingly full life - 'I have tried everything but incest and folk-dancing', he says - he has no more books gestating. He has traveled to London to receive applause on stage for providing the recorded narration for the new production of Mother Courage at the National Theatre, but all his old London friends - Tynan, Tom Driberg, Princess Margaret - are dead. I ask what it's like to be here, and he says: 'This isn't a country, it's an American aircraft carrier.' He starts to talk about his old friends again. He is swimming with ghosts now - from Jimmy Trimble to Jack Kennedy to his drunken, scolding mother. As he declines, he announces that everything around him is declining - America, literacy, humanity itself.

In one essay, Vidal said the author William Dean Howells at 84 'lived far too long.' He quoted a line Howells wrote to Henry James: 'I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cut down and the grass growing over me in pale moonlight.' Does he feel this about himself? I stare at him and don't have the heart to ask. He tells me he is unafraid of death. 'I'm the least primitive American you're going to meet, and you have to be pretty primitive to believe in hell. To me hell is the United States of today.'

After two hours, his carer - a beautiful long-haired French boy who has been reading Celine in the corner of the hotel bar - indicates that our time is up. I tell Vidal I hope I will interview him in another eight years' time. 'Another eight years? Oh, the monotony!' he exclaims, and begins to be wheeled away. The last thing I hear him say - as he vanishes across the marble lobby - is a curse to his carer: 'It's still so fucking cold in here!'

You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter by going to http://twitter.com/johannhari101

He is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here . You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read an archive of interviews by Johann Hari -- with everyone from Hugo Chavez to Salman Rushdie to Dolly Parton -- click here.

Gore Vidal is the narrator for Mother Courage, which is part of the Travelex £10 season at the National Theatre and continues in the repertoire until 8 December. For tickets go to www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

"

(Via Huffington Blog.)

Sanders Puts Pressure on Contractors

Sanders Puts Pressure on Contractors: "

"The sad truth of the matter is that virtually every major defense contractor in this country has, for a period of many years, been engaged in systemic, illegal, and fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money," the independent senator from Vermont explained in a floor statement last week. "We're not talking here about the $53 million that ACORN received over 15 years. We're in fact talking about defense contractors who have received many, many billions in defense contracts and year after year, time after time, violated the law, ripping off the taxpayers of this country big time. And in some instances, these contractors have done more than ripping off the taxpayers. In some instances, they have endangered the lives and well being of the men and women who serve our country in the armed forces."
Sanders came to the debate armed with weapons that the critics of ACORN lacked: facts, figures and a sense of proportion.
"According to the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan, widely respected organization focusing on government waste, the three largest government contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, all have a history riddled with fraud and other illegal behavior. Combined, these companies have engaged in 109 instances of misconduct just since 1995, and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion. Let me repeat that - these three companies, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman, have engaged in 109 instances of misconduct just since 1995, and have paid fees and settlements for this misconduct totaling $2.9 billion," said the independent senator."

(Via The Nation: Top Stories.)

Is Obama man or mouse?

Is Obama man or mouse?: "Asks the Beltway punditocracy, which treats foreign policy like a theater of machismo"

(Via Salon.)