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Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Historic Day! Barack - the Blessed and the Good!

So many emotions fighting to take control of this page!

The first, that America, the country, the institutions, the people have come through and made good. It still will not compensate for the many lives that have been lost or marred forever, it will not bring back the vast sums of money and resources squandered in terms of arms and munitions equipment that were built to merely destroy life and property, it will not bring back the economy that was used to deficit-finance this paranoia-driven conflict. But America has brought itself back from the brink!

The second, that it was achieved by this brilliant talented young man so appropriately named Barack Hussein Obama, as Juan Cole so beautifully explained it:

"Barack is a Semitic word meaning "to bless" as a verb or "blessing" as a noun. In its Hebrew form, barak, it is found all through the Bible. It first occurs in Genesis 1:22: "And God blessed (ḇāreḵə ) them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth."

Here is a list of how many times barak appears in each book of the Bible.

Now let us take the name "Hussein." It is from the Semitic word, hasan, meaning "good" or "handsome." Husayn is the diminutive, affectionate form."


The graceful way he carried himself, conducted his campaign, politically and strategically challenged his opponents through the primaries and the general elections, are so completely in synch that there is not one discordant note. All this while attending to the needs of his young family and holding on as much as possible to their privacy, while at the same time drawing on their support where possible... I'm just blown away by it all. My younger son, so presciently remarked - and he's just a human being after all. Well, he's a human being "with a righteous wind at his back."

This is what originally drew me to America. This is why I thought it would be a good idea to become a citizen. Only to be ruing the thought for the past 8 years!

But I have come back, come back from the brink myself! And I'm ready to believe in it again.

Saturday, November 1, 2008

Well its all coming down to Texas vs Taxes.

And this year Americans will be going for 'Taxes', 'lower taxes', that is. Out with Bush from Texas, and in with Lower Taxes. Wish it didn't have to just be that - but we don't look gift horses in the mouth.

What I would have really loved though, would have been if things could have been rolled back in the following order:

1. Americans had voted Al Gore in with a resounding majority in 2000, because they could see the real thing.
2. Gore would not have been left hanging with the chads in FL in 2000.
3. Failing that, the Supreme court had sided with Al Gore in Bush v. Gore in 2000.
4. Pre-9-11 Bush had taken the Clinton admin briefing on Al-Quaeda threats, read the August Intelligence briefing on the same, and along the way stuck to his principles of Compassionate Conservatism and not splurged the Clinton surplus on unneeded tax rebates for the wealthy, and Social Security privatization efforts...
5. Immediate post-911, Bush had not taken the "let's see if we can squeeze out an Iraq war out of this 9-11 tragedy" stand
6. Congress had not gotten hoodwinked by Bush and given him via the AUMF what he thought was a carte blanche on War, but what they thought was merely the power to make growling noises to threaten the other side with war.
7. Colin Powell and the CIA had not gotten hoodwinked by Bush and cheney into placing all risks of misrepresentation about the war into little asterisked footnotes in their UN and Intelligence reports. (which footnotes were ignored the very same way as the American people refused to read the footnotes on the IPO and hedgefund and sub-prime mortgage offerings from Wall Street - same modus operandi as used by the 3-card monte scam artists you find in any urban back alley!!)
8. Members of Congress had the gumption to call Bush on his overstepping the authority granted by their AUMF when he did go to war.
9. Members of the Congress had the gumption to impeach Bush for war crimes that were beginning to be committed in their name.
10. The Dems had a better candidate to offer the country in 2004 (McCain was correct - wish Obama could have run in 2004!)
11. The country could have seen that only the Devil's side would swift-boat a real war hero like Kerry.
12. The country would have spurned Bush unequivocally in 2004, knowing he took us to war on FALSE PRETENSES, against a country that did us no harm, killed half a million people (both US soldiers, and coalition soldiers and Iraqi civilians), displaced another few million ordinary Iraqis, all in ever-changing reasons to go to war (Al-Q, WMD, democracy, ME chaos...). That would be the Pro-Life stance!
13. In 2008, when Obama eventually ran on an anti-dumb-war, pro-people, pro-economy platform, people would without pre-condition flock to his anti-war message.

But the Lower Taxes message resonated.

Yes $1000 saving in annual taxes to your pocket resonates far louder today than all the other tugs to American heartstrings and pursestrings and sense of fairness and logic and outrage and...!

Why am I not surprised???

A beautiful comment on NYT

You will appreciate this comment below from someone on NYT (riffing off of one of loveliest Psalms in the Bible - "My Shepherd is the Lord, nothing indeed shall I want... "

"McCain’s experience is
defeat after defeat,
being captured,
crashing planes,
panickly picking Palin etc.
The Lord is Obama’s Shepherd,
He will not lack votes,
He makes him composed and not panicky;
The Lord leads him as like a Pastor tending great multitudes; The Roaring Crowds waving by;
Obama’s table hath the Lord furnished;
In the full glare of Palin and McCain;
As Abel’s Sacrifice was accepted by God in the full glare of ‘Cain!
Obama’s Vote boxes overflow with votes;
White house and Oval Office therein shall surely await Obama;
And he will dwell and reign there-from four years and four more;
To the pleasure of all Americans and all Men of Goodwill the World over"

Own 1/millionth of a chance to party in Chicago :) !!!

Today I succumbed one last time to Obama's plea for cash to outwit the OTHER One, the Maverick! The carrot (pshaw! I don't need no carrot!):

"As a bonus, any donation you make today means you could be selected for a trip to join Barack in Chicago on Election Night. We'll fly you and a guest in, put you up in a hotel, and make sure you have some of the best seats for our huge public event with tens of thousands of supporters"

Don't disturb me, I'm busy checking out the flight schedules...

Response to NYT on Taxes and Regulation

I wrote this originally in response to a letter from an NYT reader to their OpEd editorial by Egan on "Party of Yesterday". But NYT came back with an autoreply on their standard conditions for publication - less that 150 words (this was more like 570), and while I made a half-baked effort to edit it it meant cutting out 2/3rd of the meat and potatoes, so I found a next-best home for it as a comment on NYT's economix blog, and which I'm transplanting down here.

One of the Letters to the Editor on Egan’s “Party of yesterday” is typical of Americans attitude towards taxes, as well as regulation and anything government-done.
The writer (Cliff Johns, KY) claims “Demand for our products and services, not government programs, allowed us to create these jobs.”

I have been raised and lived all my adolescent/young adult life in India, during a period where there was a rampant black market i.e. tax-free parallel economy. Paucity of public revenues forced all then existing infrastructure to go to pot, and new ones were built on black-market cement to faulty codes bringing with it post-construction mishaps. Adulteration of everything from foods to cement along the lines of the chinese baby-food scandal, was rampant. Even an honest entrepreneur in the India of those times would have to pay “black-market” protection money to everyone up and down the line that would guarantee his company’s existence, and allow his product, compromised as it might be, to reach the hands of his consumers. Not because Indians lacked the intelligence or creativity or even honesty of Cliff Johns and the like, but because the infrastructure and the environment (labor, electricity, roads, you name it) conspired to weaken their products and their attempt to reach them to the market, and there but for the grace of God goes you Cliff Johns!

On the other hand during my lifetime here in the US I’ve seen upstart companies like Fedex, Microsoft, Walmart, incorporate, set themselves up in business, grow and themselves become the infrastructure upon which newer American ingenuity can foster and become commercially productive. Were it not for roads, rail, electricity, law enforcement, and each one’s personal integrity, this could not be. The UPS that delivers my e-bay purchase within 2 days of the click of the mouse would not reach me were it not for all these invisible layers of infrastructure, laws, regulations, public supervision, that we take for granted.

Americans, the Republicans (really or mostly), take for granted such foundations of a civil society, and at their peril. They falsely and childishly attribute all their (real or stock market) success entirely to their own smarts. We are already seeing the unravelling of civil society in the Wall Street and corporate dishonesty that has produced the bailout crisis. The illness has spread so far so deep. And I am not talking of lack of demand and economic woes, but the inability to differentiate between the private good and the good of those to whom you have a fiduciary duty whether your customer, your shareholder, your employee; I am talking of the inability to differentiate between the private good and the civic good whether it is to contribute your share of the infrastructure, environment, the parks, the very emergency funds from which the bail-outers are so wantonly dipping their hands into. This myopia was so rampant in India, but so rare in the America that I was first privileged to see. The argument that it is the “rich” that are helping create the wealth that is trickling down fails to see that it is the many hands of the middle-class that have helped build and maintain the infrastuctures that the rich have built their empires on.

It is not “giving money away” as Cliff Johns the letter-writer says - it’s just paying the piper, and when you forget to pay the piper don’t be surprised to find the music will stop.