Free Frank Warner

Vice President Joe Biden protected banks ‘too big to fail’

When we were told four years ago that the United States had a few banks “too big to fail,” many of us wondered why we weren’t breaking up those banks instead of bailing out the bankers.

Well, in his new book “The Payoff,” Vice President Joe Biden’s former staffer Jeff Connaughton has the answer: Those big banks have bought off the Democrats as well as the Republicans. Bribery keeps the big banks big.

With the threat of antitrust enforcement over their heads, the big bankers are only too happy to funnel campaign contributions to the top Democrats and Republicans in Washington, and the politicians are happy to accept the bribes. For members of Congress, desperate for the jackpot that flow from perpetual re-election, that funding is a lot bigger and a lot more reliable than small donations from average Americans. And with the government bought off, the bankers can rest assured their high-paying jobs are safe no matter how irresponsibly they run their banks.

Banking cover-up. Our leaders pretend to be tough on big banks, but watch how little they do about banks that do wrong. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac created a system that produced $1 trillion worth of reckless home loans, but did Congress and President Obama do anything to break up Fannie and Freddie? No. They’re still around, and we’re still paying for their bad bets.

The Democrats notoriously took over Fannie and Freddie in the 1990s and early 2000s, and pushed those mortgage giants to ignore banking standards and back loans to people who couldn’t possibly pay them back. That was bad enough and, except for Bill Clinton and Artur Davis, the Democrats still are covering up that crime.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Fannie and Freddie were buying off every major politician in Washington, from Democrat Rahm Emanuel to Republican Newt Gingrich. It’s no wonder that both major political parties tolerated the massive malfeasance of those two institutions.

Break 'em up. Connaughton was shocked that Joe Biden dropped from the “banking reform” bill a provision that would have knocked the monster-size banks down to size. I’m shocked he was shocked.

We’ll know our leaders have learned something when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are abolished, when the big banks are split up and when new laws put politicians to jail for accepting any special favor from a bank.

Frank Warner

Donald Rumsfeld: Anbar Awakening and time may have done more for Iraq than ‘the surge’

It is commonly said that “Time heals all wounds” and yet few historians give time credit for solving anything but the Ice Age.

Under Boris Yeltsin from 1991 to 1999, Russia was in economic chaos, desperately adapting to its new freedoms. Russia stabilized under Vladimir Putin. The result: Most Russians give credit for the calm to Putin, and not to the eight years of post-totalitarian adjustment.

Similarly, Iraq was in various stages of chaos from 2003 through 2006. Iraq calmed down dramatically in 2007 as President Bush introduced “the surge” of U.S. troops. “The surge” gets the credit. Few attribute the pacification to time itself.

Attitude change. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has just published his memoir “Known and Unknown,” believes “the surge” had a part in Iraq's success, but he argues that by 2007 time had changed Iraqi society enough to drastically reduce the insurgents’ opportunities for mischief and murder.

The Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Rumsfeld thus takes an unorthodox view of the significance of President Bush's surge, which began to take effect in early 2007. He argues that by 2006 things were, in fact, improving in Iraq. The Anbar Awakening—which Mr. Rumsfeld credits as beginning in the fall of 2006—“had convinced a lot of Sunnis they didn't want to be associated with al Qaeda,” and “the government of Iraq was evolving the ability to take on some of the radicals” with the help of Iraqi security forces that had become “very capable.”

As a result, he argues, the force of President Bush’s surge was as much “psychological” as anything else. “The president's decision galvanized the opinion in Iraq. It said: ‘Look, if you think it is going to go to the insurgents, you are wrong.’” The fact of the statement, argues Mr. Rumsfeld, mattered as much as did the increase of troops “tactically or strategically.”

Though viewed by many as the spear of Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” Mr. Rumsfeld also expresses misgivings about “nation-building.” He disagrees with the “Pottery Barn rule”—attributed to Mr. Powell—that “if you break it, you own it,” arguing Iraq was already broken under Saddam. While he acknowledges that the U.S. had security obligations to Iraq, he expresses discomfort with Mr. Bush’s broad promises for democracy, and he worries that countries too frequently develop an overreliance on the U.S.

Buying time. It’s true that time alone cannot cure everything, especially if you’re in a hurry. In the case of nation-building, a newly liberated population needs at least a decade free of chronic anti-democratic intimidation if it is to develop the good habits of freedom. (And considering the experience with Germany, Japan and South Korea, the average time might be much longer than a decade.)

Before, during and after “the surge,” the United States armed forces gave the Iraqis indispensable time to undo Saddam's damage. At great sacrifice, our GIs continue to expose Iraq to the great healer.

Frank Warner

Does 'Decision Points' have the answers?

I'll have to check President Bush's new book, "Decision Points," to see if it answers those 14 questions.

Frank Warner

The Mark Twain autobiography, un-‘expergated’

This blog already has taken a close look at Mark Twain’s once-secret words against America’s democratization of the Philippines, an operation as controversial -- and probably as necessary -- as the liberation of Iraq.

In comments recorded by his secretary in 1906, for publication long after his death, Twain called the American project in the Philippines “imperialism,” and he had only scorn for a U.S. soldier -- 1st Lt. Gordon Johnston -- who would be awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions there.

Twain died in 1910. Many of his private observations leaked out in 1924 in a work called “Mark Twain’s Autobiography.” But that was only the tip of the Samuel Clemens iceberg.

Full autobiography. Next month, the real Mark Twain autobiography comes out.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

In November, after six years of labor by a team of experts on four very full file cabinet drawers of papers and files, the 760-page first volume of the complete Autobiography of Mark Twain will be published by the University of California Press. Within five years, two more volumes will appear, and the entire work, with variants and notes, will be available online. Though about 90 percent of the first volume has seen the light here and there, more than half of the entire thing is previously unpublished.

‘Commercial morals.’ Twain takes shots at laissez-faire capitalism, as personified by railroad developer and gold speculator Jay Gould:

“The McKinleys and the Roosevelts and the multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould - that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died - have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that.”

He recalls meeting Helen Keller at a luncheon:

“I had to go away before it was over, and as I passed by Helen I patted her lightly on the head and passed on. Miss Sullivan called to me and said, ‘Stop, Mr. Clemens. Helen is distressed because she did not recognize your hand. Won’t you come back and do that again?’ I went back and patted her lightly on the head, and she said at once, ‘Oh, it’s Mr. Clemens.’

“Perhaps someone can explain this miracle, but I have never been able to do it.”

Fundamentally American. I want to see more of Twain’s political writings. It’s fascinating to see how noted authors respond to the problems of democracy and freedom. Too often, writers avoid proposals for improving democracy but instead to surrender recklessly to the ideas of oppression, which can only make things worse.

Of course, Mark Twain was not just any writer. He was a fundamentally American writer. So his words have special power.

Here’s how his daughter Susy described him, with misspellings, as he wrote “Huckleberry Finn”:

Ever since papa and mamma were married, papa has written his books and then taken them to mamma in manuscript and she has expergated them. Papa read “Huckleberry Finn” to us in manuscript just before it came out [in 1884], and then he would leave parts of it with mamma to expergate, when he went off up to the study to work.

And sometimes Clara and I would be sitting with mamma while she was looking the manuscript over, and I remember so well, with what pangs of regret we used to see her turn down the leaves of the pages, which meant that some delightfully dreadful part must be scratched out.

And I remember one part pertickularly which was perfectly fascinating it was dreadful, that Clara and I used to delight in, and oh with what despair we saw mamma turn down the leaf on which it was written, we thought the book would be almost ruined without it. But we gradually came to feel as mamma did.

Final chapters. We might never see what Olivia Clemens scratched out of “Huckleberry Finn.” But now we’ll see the rest of Mark Twain’s story.

Frank Warner

Mario Vargas Llosa, advocate of freedom in Cuba and everywhere else, wins Nobel Prize in literature

This is a surprise. Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, an eloquent advocate of freedom and opponent of Fidel Castro’s oppression, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

Reason reports:

His insistence that all aspects of liberty - political, economic, and cultural - are inextricably linked is as powerful as it is rare among writers of his stature.

Congratulations, Mr. Vargas.

Could the Castro mob be crumbling for lack of appeasers?

In 1995, Vargas wrote:

Prominent intellectuals continue to cast a shadow of doubt and skepticism on liberty and democracy, but this is an aberration. Liberty is nothing to be ashamed of. It ought to be cherished with the fervor of those who have lost it, or have just regained it. Like the young people of the former East Germany who in 1989 tore down the wall in Berlin, one of the tasks for men and women of the new generation is to tear down the ideological walls of the prison houses of thought and culture still prevalent in so many free nations.

And in 2001, he said:

Some governments are embarrassed to confess that [they have benefited from deregulating their economies], and others -- including some real Tartuffes -- cover their bases by spewing out volleys of rhetoric against neoliberalism. Nevertheless, they have no other recourse than to privatize businesses, liberalize prices, open markets, attempt to control inflation, and try to integrate their economies into international markets. They have come to learn -- the hard way -- that in today’s economic environment, the country that does not follow those guidelines commits suicide.

Individual resistance. In announcing Vargas’ Nobel Prize yesterday, Swedish Academy secretary Peter Englund said the honor was “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” Englund seemed to speak vaguely, as if he feared any candidly detailed account would reveal Vargas’ political incorrectness.

Vargas is one of those rare, genuine intellectuals who unmasks the self-deception of those who claim, against all evidence, that a benevolent elite can give us something better than freedom. There is nothing better than freedom.

Frank Warner

‘Obama’s Wars’: Bob Woodward cashes in again

We can be as sure that Bob Woodward’s “Obama Wars” is objective and fully in context as we can be that Deep Throat was only one man.

Woodward has attracted a lot of attention to his newest book by releasing a few comments by President Obama that, out of context, were guaranteed to stir new charges that the president is cold and cynical.

The two most-quoted of Obama’s statements:

“We can absorb a terrorist attack. We’ll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever ... we absorbed it and we are stronger.”

And on his Afghanistan pull-out deadline: “I can’t let this be a war without end, and I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”

‘Bizarre’ hucksterism. Woodward was on TV yesterday calling “bizarre” Obama’s assertion that “we can absorb a terrorist attack.” Woodward was clever enough to say Obama might have meant the terrorists can’t win, and Woodward even lets us see Obama saying we’ll do everything we can to prevent another attack. But by then throwing out the word “bizarre,” Woodward kept the talking heads talking about his book.

Obama’s worry about losing the Democratic Party looks worse at first, but even that comment has an innocent explanation. His point might have been that he already can’t count on the Republican Party; he can’t lose his fellow Democrats, too.

Woodward has never been interested first in sober, balanced reporting. He always has focused on making his stories sound a little more interesting than reality, and he has not been reluctant to reorganize facts for the sake of sales. Just ask Deep Throats.

Frank Warner

Does the president read books?

I recall columnist David Brooks telling us, during the 2008 presidential campaign, that Barack Obama could talk at length about the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian. And yet that was one of the few times we heard about something Obama reads. (We've heard even less about what he wrote before he wrote memoirs.)

So on June 2, when Paul McCartney was in the White House declaring “after the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is,” I wondered again whether President Obama had read much more than what he was required to read in college.

It turns out he doesn’t read many books at all. He just told a reporter he’s been trying to start a Philip Roth book ("The Plot Against America"?) for two months, but hasn’t turned a page.

Bush, the book man. Considering the fact that President Bush was a voracious reader (95 books one year), and his wife Laura a former librarian, McCartney might want to reconsider his quip. Yes, presidents are busy people. But this president has been described as the intellectual opposite of his predecessor.

We might expect a literary allusion once in a while.

Frank Warner

Cancer of esophagus cancels Christopher Hitchens' book tour

Christopher Hitchens has suspended his book promotion tour because he needs time to begin chemotherapy for cancer of the esophagus. It's a sad thing that this would happen to one of freedom's most powerful voices.

His new book: "Hitch-22: A Memoir."

And get well soon, Christopher Hitchens.

Frank Warner

Mark Twain to release new secrets

We already know Mark Twain's feelings, which were supposed to be kept secret, about the United States fighting insurgents who opposed Teddy Roosevelt's democratization of the Philippines a century ago.

Twain called TR's project imperialism.

In effect, Twain was willing to let the Filipino insurgents replace Spain's undemocratic rule with their own undemocratic rule. Roosevelt wouldn't have that. The war over democratization of the Philippines had many parallels to the recent Iraq war.

Less often noted, however, is that, by calling for the U.S. to leave immediately in 1898, when the U.S. won the Philippines from Spain, Twain also was willing to leave the Philippines, which had no navy, vulnerable to permanent annexation by the powerful, land-hungry Japanese.

'Massacre' of Moros. Twain's most bitter comments about American involvement in the Philippines are in his once-secret writings about a one-sided 1906 battle in which U.S. forces killed suicidal Muslim Moros by the hundreds. A "massacre," he called it.

Now, 100 years after Mark Twain's death, more of his secret thoughts are due to be released. I'm interested to see what he thought of the early Communists in Russia. We know he didn't like the Czar. Whom did he want to replace that dictator?

Frank Warner

Justice, Aristotle and Winnie-the Pooh

Michael J. Sandel writes in his book, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” that Winnie-the-Pooh illustrated well Aristotle's concept of justice and its relationship to teleology -- the study of the ultimate purposes of things.

The idea may help to explain why we have so many views of justice (or social justice or economic justice).

In the ancient world, teleological thinking was more prevalent than it is today. Plato and Artistotle thought that fire rose because it was reaching for the sky, its natural home, and that stones fell because they were striving to get close to earth, where they belonged. Nature was seen as having meaningful order. …

[T]he temptation to see the world as teleologically ordered, as a purposeful whole, is not wholly absent. It persists, especially in children, who have to be educated out of seeing the world this way. I noticed this when my children were very young, and I read them the book “Winnie-the-Pooh,” by A.A. Milne. The story evokes a childlike view of nature as enchanted, animated by meaning and purpose.

Early in the book, Winnie-the-Pooh is walking in the forest and comes to a large oak tree. From the top of the tree, “there came a loud buzzing-noise.”

“Winnie-the-Pooh sat down at the foot of the tree, put his head between his paws and began to think.

“First of all, he said to himself: ‘That buzzing-noise means something. You don’t get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something. If there’s a buzzing-noise, somebody’s making a buzzing-noise, and the only reason for making a buzzing-noise that I know of is that you’re a bee.’

“Then he thought another long time and said: ‘And the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey.’

“And then he got up and said: ‘And the only reason I know of for making honey is so I can eat it.’ So he began to climb the tree.”

Subjective justice. To Winnie, it was only justice that he get the honey. It wouldn’t dawn on him that the bees, which made the honey, might need or want the honey, or that other creatures also might claim the honey on an equally subjective basis.

The debate also is illustrated in the question, which is the best way to use a Stradivarius? Is it justice that only rich people have access to such an excellent violin? Among the rich who can afford one, is it justice if one buys one for display only, and never plays it? And if a Stradivarius were accessible to violinists of all economic classes, how would you decide who plays it most?

The variety of answers reflects the variety of ways we perceive what things are for, and what is fair, right, just. For Winnie, it was easy to decide who should get the honey. But even in the woods, real life is not so simple.

Frank Warner

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Hat tip to JJ Mollo.