What Disasters Are We Creating Now? No one could have known. That’s what they always say after a disaster. Well, it’s what the establishment—a good ’60s word, let’s bring it back!—says. “No one could have known” is the perfect excuse. Don’t blame us, we did the best we could, but we’re not clairvoyant. But it’s rarely true. Most of the time, the people in charge—the people responsible for what went wrong—were warned in advance. They simply chose to ignore the warnings. Why? In the case of government officials and corporate executives, it’s typically because acting on such warnings would cost them money. Sometimes it’s because the man or woman who predicts the mayhem about to unfold doesn’t have the status, title or connections to make themselves heard. Mostly it’s because scum rises to the top. After hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff called the disaster “breathtaking in its surprise.” “That ‘perfect storm’ of a combination of…

The Case for Professionalizing the U.S. Military The number of new U.S. Army recruits who are high-school dropouts soared during the Bush years, peaking at 29.3 percent in 2007. The economic collapse made life easier for military recruiters. “Only” 17 percent of soldiers who joined in 2008 failed to graduate from high school. But high unemployment hasn’t resulted in enough new high-quality soldiers and sailors. Recruit quality is important. Uneducated or incapable soldiers are less likely to do well operating high-tech equipment. And they’re more likely to do stupid things, like beating up, robbing and raping civilians in U.S.-occupied territories. The U.S. military is bigger than ever. But it’s becoming dumber. It’s also getting meaner: in 2008 one in five recruits received a “morals waiver” because they had a criminal record, including felonies. “The main reason for the decline in standards is the war in Iraq and its onerous ‘operations tempo’—soldiers going back for third and fourth tours of duty,…

Anatomy of a Corporate Layoff One year ago, I was fired. Not laid off—fired. In a layoff, you go home until the factory calls you back to work. I got fired. Everyone knew there would be a bloodbath. Management tried to keep it secret. But we knew. Human resources experts say mass firings should take place on a Friday. Worker bees are used to going home for the weekend. Duh. Mine took place on a Thursday. Which was my fault. A couple of weeks earlier, when management still believed that their Big Layoff was a big secret, I had told my boss I wanted that Friday off. They rescheduled the firings for me. To my erstwhile coworkers: sorry about harshing your Friday. When it came, I knew there was a good chance I’d be on the death list. It wasn’t rocket science: my boss didn’t like me. “Painful as it may be, a layoff is a good time to terminate…

Obama Revives Clinton’s Disastrous Triangulation Strategy “It was Bill Clinton who recognized that the categories of conservative and liberal played to Republican advantage and were inadequate to address our problems,” President Obama wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope. “Clinton’s third way…tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of Americans.” Clinton’s “third way” was “triangulation,” a term and strategy invented by his pollster Dick Morris. Triangulation is a candidate’s attempt to position himself above and between the left and the right. A Democrat, Clinton insulated himself from Republican attacks by appropriating many of their ideas. Obama is even more of a triangulator than Clinton. Triangulation can work for candidates in the short term. Clinton got reelected by a landslide in 1996. (It failed, though, for Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004.) But triangulation hurts parties, which sell an ideological point of view. Clinton worked so hard to out-Republican the Republicans that he forgot he was a Democrat-. He also…

What Lefties Could Learn from The Party of No “Damn! I wish I was a man,” sang folksinger Cindy Lee Berryhill in the 1980s. Me, I wish I was a Republican. Conservatives dress frumpy, are all white and bland and suburbany, and don’t know much about history. But they have more fun than liberals. They stick together. And they fight for what they believe in (or, more often, they fight against what they’re against). Right-wingers are tough. Why can’t left-wingers be tough? Tough feels right. More importantly, tough works. Tough wins. So here’s a toast: to guts, glory, and the Party of No. May we learn from them. Consider where the GOP was ages and ages ago—OK, this is almost embarrassing to say—in November 2008. Republicans had lost control of both houses of Congress. Six months later, they were still in trouble, reeling from the defection of Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. The GOP, Jonathan Capehart wrote in The Washington…

Bill a Bailout for Insurers, Disastrous for Americans The details of Obama’s healthcare plan are finally starting to come out. They are ugly. (Some of the lowlights are revealed below.) This nightmare should be aborted. I am writing this as someone who wants socialized medicine. I am a leftie. I lost my medical insurance in December when my insurer, HIP, jacked up my rate to $920 a month. America desperately needs smart, strong opposition to ObamaCare. The worst part of this bad plan is its “mandate,” which requires the uninsured to buy insurance at hyper-inflated prices from greedy for-profit private corporations. We can’t count on so-called liberals to fight for us. Despite everything, they’re still sucking up to Obama. We need a passel of old-fashioned conservatives to come to our rescue. But old-fashioned libertarian conservatism is dead. What we’ve got instead are fools like David Rivkin. Rivkin, a right-wing lawyer who worked in the Reagan-Bush Justice Department, recently fired the…

“The Hurt Locker” Supports the Troops—and the Lies The Motion Picture Academy’s choice of “The Hurt Locker” as best film of 2009 is a sad commentary on the movie business as well as America’s unwillingness to face the ugly truth about itself nearly a decade after 9/11. “The Hurt Locker” is about a U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) unit operating in U.S.-occupied Iraq in 2004, one year after the invasion. They get called in to disarm improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of all shapes and sizes: homemade chemical explosives, old bombs looted from Iraqi military arsenals, even roadside bombs planted inside bodies. The EOD unit in “The Hurt Locker” also comes under fire from Iraqi resistance fighters. The setting is inherently political, yet director Kathryn Bigelow studiously insists that her movie isn’t. “Did you want to make sure that the film didn’t divulge into choosing a political stance?” an interviewer asked her. “I think that was important,” she replied. “There…

A Different Take on the Italian Google Verdict Should I be allowed to smear you? That’s the question journalists ought to be asking in the wake of an Italian court decision that found Google criminally responsible for content uploaded to one of its sites. (The case revolved around the video of an autistic boy getting beaten up in Turin. The father sued, successfully arguing that his son’s privacy had been violated. Three Google executives were handed six-month suspended sentences in absentia.) Instead, the story has been framed as an attack on freedom of speech. “The Web as we know it will cease to exist” if the ruling stands, claim Google’s lawyers. “It absolutely is a threat,” affirms Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If intermediaries like Google or the person who hosts your website can be thrown in jail in any country for the acts of other people and suddenly have a legal obligation to pre-screen everything anyone says…

In Defense of Tiger Woods and Good Fun Sex Why does Tiger Woods owe us an apology? Let’s assume that all the accusations of serial philandering are true. That no waitress was safe from his charms. What right do we, the public, have to be upset? Woods never presented himself as a pillar of moral virtue. He marketed himself as a great golfer. His job was to knock balls into holes—which he did. He didn’t cheat at golf. Nowhere in America lives a kid who looked up to Tiger because he thought he was faithful to his wife. Woods wasn’t some right-wing hypocrite. He didn’t preach. His church was the Chapel of Sports Excellence. Apologize? What for? I’m not even sure he owes his wife an apology. According to various reports (although I fathom not how said accounts were sourced), Woods’ wife lost interest in sex after having kids. If she turned colder, oh well. Things happen. Tiger didn’t have…

Time for Progressives to Reclaim Populism Huey Long would know what to do. Angry people were the Kingfish’s stock in trade. People dispossessed and victimized, pissed off at a government that only cares about them on Tax Day. The populist Louisiana governor channeled the rage of the poor into political support, wielded power on their behalf. And he delivered. Born of the Great Recession and ongoing economic collapse, the Tea Party movement is America’s latest contribution to a long tradition of populist agitation. The Tea Party doesn’t have a platform. Which makes sense, since it isn’t a party. The Tea Party movement is a loose, decentralized coalition of radical libertarians, Goldwater Republicans, Sarah Palin-loving populists, black-helicopter militia types, nativist Minutemen obsessed with the New World Order, members of the retro John Birch Society, even a group of sheriff’s who swear not to obey “stupid laws.” Some of them hate Obama. They say they hate his policies, but some use racist…