McCain Gives Himself the Admiral’s Star He Never Earned

There’s plenty of evidence that John McCain retired from the Navy in 1981 at the rank of captain (0-6, equivalent to an Army colonel), in part because he knew that, with his extremely problematic service record, he would never be promoted to admiral, the rank held by both his father and grandfather.

Unlike them, he would never get to wear an admiral’s silver star on his shoulder.

But now McCain has given himself the star that the Navy would not.

The main logo of the McCain campaign features a silver colored star above the name “McCain.”

The star in the McCain logo is the exact same star worn by a rear admiral (0-7) in the U.S. Navy.

Now John McCain can finally feel that he has made his father and grandfather proud.

Like them, he has his star.

Even though it’s made of paper.

And he gave it to himself.

Disaster Capitalists Staking Out U.S. Banks

Disaster capitalists are staking out the U.S. banking industry. 

Private equity firms have long wanted to move into banking.  And given the financial crisis that many banks are now facing, isn’t this a good time to allow private equity firms, with their billions of dollars of available resources, to come riding to the rescue?

According to an editorial in the New York Times, “for the past month, some private equity firms have been promoting what they claim would be a relatively pain-free fix of the nation’s banks . . . Private equity firms say they are ready to invest huge amounts in ailing banks — provided the Fed eases up on the regulations that would otherwise apply to such large investments. The firms’ desire to jump in makes perfect sense. Bank shares are cheap now, but for the most part, are likely to rebound when the economy improves.”

What the private equity firms want in return for playing the role of savior are significant changes in banking regulations.  

“Under current rules,” the Times explains, “if an investment firm owns 25 percent or more of a bank, it is considered, properly, a bank holding company, subject to the same federal requirements and responsibilities as a fully regulated bank. If a firm owns between 10 percent and 25 percent of a bank, it is typically barred from controlling the bank’s management. To place a director on a bank’s board, an investor’s ownership stake must be less than 10 percent. The rules exist to prevent conflicts of interest and concentration of economic power. They protect consumers and businesses who rely on well-regulated banks, as well as taxpayers, who stand behind the government’s various subsidies and guarantees to banks.  To maximize their profits, private equity firms want to own more than 9.9 percent of the banks they have their eye on and they want more managerial control — and they want it all without regulation. They argue that because they tend to be shorter-term investors, problems that the rules address are unlikely to occur on their watch.”

The private equity firms’ grab for the gold is an example of what Canadian writer Naomi Klein calls the “shock doctrine” of “disaster capitalism.”

The basic idea of the shock doctrine is that corporations are able to remove regulations and operate without governmental oversight when citizens are in a state of shock from a traumatic event, such as a natural disaster, a war, a coup, or an economic crisis and are desperate for a solution and unable to mobilize effective opposition.  When these crises occur, corporations exploit them by promising a solution — the catch is that in return for their solution, the corporations demand the drastic reduction or elimination of regulation and public oversight.

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein identifies University of Chicago economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman as the ideological father of the Shock Doctrine: “In one of his most influential essays, Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as ‘the shock doctrine’. He observed that ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change’.  When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the ‘tyranny of the status quo’. A variation on Machiavelli’s advice that ‘injuries’ should be inflicted ‘all at once’, this is one of Friedman’s most lasting legacies.”

Examples of the application of the shock doctrine offered by Klein are the government-corporate responses to Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 attack, the war in Iraq, the oil crisis, and the global food crisis.  In each instance, Klein argues, corporations systematically exploited, and are still exploiting, the state of fear and disorientation that accompanied the shock and crisis to remove regulations and government oversight of their activities.

That’s exactly what’s behind the private equity firms’ solution to the banking crisis.  As the Times points out, “the private equity firms are exploiting the desperation of banks and regulators. They know that banks are desperate to raise capital and that doing so is a painful process bankers would rather avoid. They also know that regulators and other government officials, many of whom where asleep on the job as the financial crisis developed, want to avoid the political fallout and economic pain of bank weakness and failure.”

Giving in to the private equity firms’ offer to save the banks in return for fundamental regulatory concessions would be a serious mistake. 

As the Times explains, “Now, when there is great uncertainty about which institutions are too big or too interconnected to fail, is exactly the wrong time to allow less transparency and less regulation. And with confidence in the financial system badly shaken, it would be a mistake to signal to global markets and American citizens that the government is willing to put expediency above long-term stability.”

In fact, the responsible response to the current crisis is not less regulation, but more effective and focused oversight.  As economist Austan Goolsbee (also of the University of Chicago) said in a Dow Jones interview, “If you can borrow money from the U.S. taxpayer at a moment of crisis, that is a very sacred insurance policy underwritten by the U.S. taxpayer.  We have the right to oversee anyone who is accessing that insurance policy.”

It remains to be seen whether Congress will capitulate to the private equity firms’ demands. 

Most likely, this will be one of the issues that are decided by the November elections.

The Biden Doctrine: Joe Biden’s Call for U.S. Military Force in Darfur Offers Hope to the Victims of Genocide

Photograph by Brian Steidle

Anyone who has seen The Devil Came on Horseback, the heart-breaking documentary film about the genocide in Darfur, will recall ex-marine officer turned unarmed observer Brian Steidle’s comment that “If these photos were seen”  — that is, the photos that Steidle himself took of the atrocities committed against civilians, including women, children, and babies, by Sudanese forces and government-backed Arab militias – “there would be troops here in no time.”

What Steidle meant was that if the American people could see what was happening in Darfur, they would not allow the Sudanese slaughter of the innocents to continue, but would demand that America use its military might to force an end to the genocide that has already killed more than 300,000 people and displaced more than two million others into refugee camps where they are subjected to constant government attacks, rape, malnutrition, starvation, and disease.

Steidle now readily acknowledges that his belief in America’s willingness to put boots on the ground to protect Black Africans in Darfur was naïve:  “I honestly thought, as I wrote in an email home, that if the people of America could see what I’ve seen, there’d be troops here in one week…. Man, I am so naive. Because that’s not true at all. They’ve seen it now. And we’ve still done nothing.”

As Richard Just recently noted in a brilliant and disturbing essay in The New Republic on the ineffectual American response to the genocide in Darfur, “All the information – the dispatches, the websites, the columns, the books, the films – have not roused anybody with the power to stop this tragedy actually to stop it.”

Faced with the reality of genocide in Darfur, Steidle, the ex-marine, wished that he could take matters into his own hands. “If we had a mandate to defend these people,” he wrote, “and if I was looking through a scope instead of looking through the lens of my camera, these [Sudanese military] vehicles would be done. These people could return to their village, and they’d be safe.”

But there still is no international or American mandate to effectively defend the people of Darfur.

In Steidle’s words, the United States and its allies have “done nothing” to prevent the continued killing of unarmed Darfuri men, women, and children.

A village burned by the Janjaweed. Photograph taken by Brian Steidle.

The reasons for our impotence and inaction, according to Just, are many: “True, we were poorly served by a small-minded president and his bungling administration. But did liberals demand the right things of him? Did we push for what would really save the people of Darfur? Or did we get trapped by the inclinations of our worldview, and advocate for too little?”

There is at least one American political leader who is clearly on record in support of Steidle’s military approach to stopping the killing of Darfur’s innocents – Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden.

At an April 11, 2007, hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chairs, Biden said “I would use American force now. I think it’s not only time not to take force off the table. I think it’s time to put force on the table and use it.”

Biden argued that 2,500 U.S. troops in Darfur could “radically change the situation on the ground now.”

“Let’s stop the bleeding,” Biden said. “I think it’s a moral imperative.”

Biden’s engagement with the crisis in Darfur goes back to at least 2004, when he and Senator Feingold wrote to President Bush, urging him to take action to prevent the genocide unfolding in Sudan.  Biden visited the Oure Cassoni refugee camp on the Chad-Sudan border (after being denied a visa to go into Darfur) in March 2005 and met with refugees and African Union commanders. On his return, Biden called for NATO to send combat troops to Darfur.  In February 2006, Biden pressed his Senate colleagues to support NATO enforcement of a Darfur no fly zone to prevent air attacks by the Sudanese government against Darfuri civilians.

More recently, on April 23, 2008, Biden told the Foreign Relations Committee “Genocide is happening on our watch. What are we going to do about it? What we’re doing now is not working.”

Further chilling evidence that “what we’re doing now is not working” came this week with the news that Sudanese troops opened fire inside a Darfur refugee camp, killing at least 27 people.  Sudanese government troops in over 100 trucks with mounted machine guns surrounded the sprawling Kalma camp, home to more than 90,000 people who have been forced to abandon their homes and flee from Sudanese army and Arab militia attacks on their villages, and opened fire.

You can see a short film by Doctors Without Borders showing the atrocious conditions in the Kalma camp here.

In response to this most recent outrage, the Bush administration issued an appallingly tepid statement saying that the United States was “concerned by indiscriminate weapons fire by Sudanese government forces on the Kalma internally displaced persons camp” and calling on the Sudan government (which planned and committed the attack) to “thoroughly investigate this incident and ensure that such actions are not repeated.”

In his TNR piece, Richard Just reports the hands-off policy toward Darfur of “[current World Bank president and then United States Deputy Secretary of State] Robert Zoellick, who by that time had become Bush’s point man on Darfur: ‘It’s a tribal war. And frankly I don’t think foreign forces want to get in the middle of a tribal war of Sudanese.’ … If Omar Bashir [the president of Sudan] knew of Zoellick’s comment, then he would also have known that he would win in Darfur. And he has won.”

Despite the Bush adminsitration’s saber-rattling bluster aimed at other parts of the globe, it has been meek to the point of complicity in regard to the genocide in Darfur.

That meekness toward the regime in Khartoum is likely to change under an Obama-Biden adminsitration.

Before he was nominated for vice president, Joe Biden had vowed that he would use his Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairmanship to hound a president Clinton or Obama into real action on Darfur.

Perhaps as a leading voice in an Obama administration, Joe Biden will lead the United States to take the military action necessary to end the “genocide that is happening on our watch.”

UPDATE

"In Darfur" by Winter Miller, produced by Moving Target Theatre

Those who live in Southern California may be interested in the play In Darfur, written by Winter Miller, presented by  Moving Target Theatre in partnership with Orange County for Darfur.

"In Darfur" by Winter Miller, produced by Moving Target Theatre

For detailed information about the play, as well as performance times, dates and locations, see the websites of Orange County for Darfur and Moving Target Theatre or call (949) 300-4100.

Electing McCain Won’t Win the War in Vietnam

More than 30 years after the last helicopter carried the last American out of Saigon at 07:53 on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War is still being fought in the American media and the presidential campaign.

The subtext of the McCain campaign’s constant references to McCain’s Vietnam War service and his years as a POW is that by electing McCain, America will finally win the War in Vietnam and redeem our national honor.

While the logic of the claim is absurd, its symbolic and emotional appeal is powerful.

We have no national heroes from the War in Vietnam.

The US commander for the bloodiest years of the conflict, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, was vilified by both the Left and Right for his conduct of the war, libeled in the mainstream media, and could not even get the Republican Party nomination for Governor from his home state of South Carolina.

The war’s battlefield heroes, including the 246 servicemen who were awarded the Medal of Honor, are long forgotten.  I doubt whether a handful of Americans could name a single one.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., listing the names of more than 58,000 American dead, radiates sorrow and regret, not glory and redemption.

Yet a longing for a heroic conclusion to the Vietnam War lives on in the American psyche — as a hope for release from the deep national shame for our defeat and a yearning for an impossible,  long-after-the-fact, victory.

This longing needs a hero, someone who can embody the revisionist history of the war, and who can convert the war’s shame and loss into a belated (albeit imaginary) triumph.

So many years after the war, where could this hero be found?

Thus far, we have never had a president who served in Vietnam, let alone served with military distinction. Both Clinton and Bush avoided the war. Al Gore, who volunteered for service in Vietnam immediately upon his graduation from Harvard, was too removed from combat to qualify as a hero. Vietnam veteran John Kerry was far too outspoken in his subsequent opposition to the war to qualify as a war hero despite his Silver Star and Bronze Star for heroism and his three Purple Hearts.

But now we have John McCain, a man who even his political opponents hail as a genuine and incontrovertible hero of the Vietnam War.

With McCain’s candidacy, Americans for the first time are being offered the chance to elect as president a Vietnam War veteran who has always been unambiguously proud of his service and his conduct in the war.

The McCain message is: Here, at last, is our national hero of the Vietnam War.  Here, at last, is the symbolic means of declaring victory and redeeming our national honor.  Elect John McCain and we will have won the war we thought we lost so many years ago.

I am sick and tired of the War in Vietnam.

Friends of mine were killed there, and many more friends were wounded, in both body and soul, by their service.

Electing John McCain will not bring them back or heal their wounds.

Nor will it restore America’s honor.

It is time to end the Vietnam War, once and for all.