Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein had switched from the dollar to the Euro as his oil trading currency. There are some who, looking to make simple of a complex situation, say that this was the motive behind the U.S. attack. And while it may not have been the motive, but it certainly did not help the Iraqis.

The dollar is on a perilous perch. But it has two things going in its favor – one that it is backed by the incredible military might of the United States, and the other that it is the reserve currency for trading oil on world markets. Any country than needs to buy oil needs to have dollars on hand. This keeps demand up. But if there is a move away from the dollar, we are in deep, deep trouble.

The question is, would the U.S. resort to military action to keep the dollar the world standard? There is a test available – it’s called a “bourse”, and the Iranians are running one right now.

I haven’t thought about the Iranian bourse in quite a while. I had read years ago that the Iranians wanted to set up a world exchange where oil could be traded in any currency. (The word “bourse” merely means a “trading floor”, or an exchange. The New York Stock Exchange is a bourse.) I looked it up again recently to see if it had ever come to pass – indeed it has. Since February 17 of this year the Iranians have been competing with the New York Mercantile Exchange and the International Petroleum Exchange in London, the primary trading platforms for world oil. The currency basis for the bourse is the Iranian rial, and of course, the Euro.

Vice President Cheney was recently in Saudi Arabia. Shortly after his visit the Saudi paper Okaz reported that they were developing “national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors.” (Apparently the Saudi press, under rigid control of the royal family, is a little more free to report on these matters than our own.)

Is Cheney’s mission to the Middle East to prepare them for an impending attack on Iran? Is the bourse part of the reason for that attack?

If the dollar ceases to be the world trading currency for oil, it becomes just another currency. Given our massive trade and budget deficits, it would not even be a desirable one to hold. So trading oil in Euros is a real and present danger to the economic well being of the United States. I don’t know how significant the Iranian oil bourse will be or whether or not it poses a real threat to us. But I do know this – if the United States perceives that the Iranian bourse represents clear and present danger, we will bomb them. I’ve seen it happen before.

And all Bush has to do is give the word – Congress has already authorized action. If they do bomb Iran, they will use “bunker busters”, or tactical nuclear weapons. Thousands of people will be killed, and millions more are downwind. We are a dangerous people, and these are indeed dangerous times.

Fascinating stuff, this – it gets even more interesting. It’s just a small example of how much news we miss living here in the land of the free. The Iranian bourse is internet-based – right around the time it was set to open, five undersea cables that carry Internet traffic to Mideastern countries were severed – one source says as many as nine. Millions of users were without service. One of the cuts was reported to have been caused by a ship dragging anchor dragging near Egypt, but after four other cables were cut (two of them in one day) people got suspicious. Read here and here and here and here for more.

Many possibilities – maybe multiple tankers worldwide forgot how to drop and bring anchors aweigh, all within a week of one another. Problem is, no ships were reported in the area of the cuts. Or, it could be Arab states harassing one another – we all know how emotional and irrational they can be.

Or it could be the U.S. preparing for war. We have the technology to engage in ocean-floor warfare, and have been doing it since the Cold War. It could be a not-so-subtle warning to the Iranians to shut down the bourse. Or it could be the real game – it could be step one in the attack. It could be that Cheney’s mission is to prepare our allies for yet another unprovoked attack on an oil-rich and uppity state.

PS: If there is an attack, watch the details to see if the Island of Kish is bombed. That is the physical location of the bourse.

There are times when leaders make events; there are times when events give us leaders. Events are clear to me, I see the rising tide, and will not stand in the path of history. I am not the one who will be nominated in Denver later this year. My time, our time, has come and gone. Bill and I want to take some time now to reunite, to travel, to write, to reflect.

I hereby withdraw from the presidential race, and offer my support to the candidacy of Barack Obama. For the good of the party, for the good of the country, it is time to step aside.

Her eyes were focused on some future point, her disposition sunny. All of the worry and planning was now over. She was free.

She left the room in silence, leaving all of us wondering if perhaps we had been too hasty, if maybe she was the right person in the right time. Maybe we had made a mistake.

The right wing noise machine now focuses on him. The Swift Boats are gunning their engines. In the dead of night? At dawn’s first light?

Is he up to it?

This much we knew last night as Hillary Clinton exited, stage left: She was up to it. She had been battle-tested. There was nothing new they could say. No slight or smear would harm her. As she left last night, Bill at her side, we realized that an era was passing as well. Clinton time was over. Politics would go back to normal now. No more dreaming, no more pulling liberal rabbits out of this right wing top hat they call DC.

Maybe it is not her time, this year, 2008. Maybe she needs some more aging, like a fine wine.

Our hopes are dashed. The progressive movement is stunned. Maybe she will approach us again in 2012? Maybe then we will listen?

Or maybe then we will go to her.

I couldn’t stop laughing as I watched this. I kept picturing Will Farrell doing a SNL routine.

And anyway, not commonly known, it’s easier to peel a banana from the bottom rather than the top. Try it sometime.

Now and then as I interact with conservatives on the blogs I come across bedrock principles that they hold to be self-evident. One of these is that corporations don’t pay taxes, but rather just collect them. By this logic, any tax on a corporation is just a hidden tax on consumers.

It’s logical, I guess, to think that. But it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. The underlying presumption is that corporations are free to pass on whatever costs they incur when they sell their products. Taken a step further, it also presumes that corporations are not maximizing profit potential, since when they arbitrarily pass along costs, they seemingly have the power to raise prices as they please, and have not done so.

It doesn’t quite work like that. Corporations are looking for monopoly pricing – that’s the whole game in a nutshell. But true monopolies are the exception rather than the rule. Most corporations selling goods to the public find themselves in a competitive environment, and are forced to do intense marketing to justify the prices they do charge. That’s the whole point of advertising – to create an aura around a product that justifies its price. So when I buy a bottle of shampoo at the drug store, I am paying every last dime that Proctor and Gamble thinks it can squeeze out of me for that product.

At a certain point, Proctor and Gamble will have maximized its revenue and created a profit pool. But they have to deal with one more expense on top of it all – taxes on those profits. Rates vary by jurisdiction – nationally, corporate tax rates are graduated and go up to 35%, or about the same level as individual rates. Here in Montana, corporations are taxed at a flat 6.75%, comparable again to our individual income tax.

Never mind that few corporations actually pay tax at stated rates. Conservatives say that the tax on corporations is really just a consumer tax, since the corporate profits started out as consumer dollars. But that’s true of everyone’s profit – every dollar passes through many hands – we only levy tax on certain (and arbitrary) events, as when employers pay wages, for example, or when corporations figure their annual bottom line. The corporate profit stream is split at that time, part to government, part to investors. If the tax were not imposed, the profit stream would go wholly to investors, and not back to consumers.

Investors pay the corporate tax, and not consumers. In fact, investors are unable to pass that tax along to consumers, and that’s why all the hubbub about reducing corporate tax rates. Investors don’t like paying taxes. Neither do I.

Here’s a fair point that conservatives make: Dividends paid to investors are not deductible to the corporation, and are taxed again when the investor receives them (though at a favored rate). That is indeed double taxation. It was once seen as a fair price to charge for the luxury of corporate status and all of the legal favors thereby bestowed.

But they are right – dividends are double taxed, and the practice ought to cease. I look forward to that day – the day that all double taxation ceases. But before we worry about investors’ double-tax problem, let’s first look at workers whose every dollar is taxed twice, once by income tax, again by payroll tax. Let’s be fair about this. Let’s eliminate double taxation for all of us. Workers go first. After all, they are producing the wealth that eventually ends up being called “dividends”.

Mel Gibson lands three of them.

http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/10mosthistoricallyinaccurate.html

A relative of ours is in the advertising business. That doesn’t give me much insight, as he doesn’t talk out of school much. But he has made a couple of revealing comments.

For one, he says that advertising people are in the business of changing our behavior. That may not sound like startling news – perhaps I could put it another way. “We’re subverting you.”

For another, he has spoken of the process by which an ad campaign is put together. First it goes to an inner circle – I assume that this is where they house their polling data and psychological consultants. Behavioral psychology is the mother’s milk of the ad game. People in the inner circle are the big-picture guys, the drivers. They identify critical factors in the ad campaign from which all else follows: The sublime message, and the target audience.

My favorite example is Bud Light Commercials. The ads usually contain some juvenile joke, like a refrigerator that opens on two walls. The message is more sublime than one would think, as the target audience is early teens – 13 and 14-year olds. It’s not that Anheuser Bush wants them to drink – they are doing something called “branding”. When these kids hit drinking age, they want them to be preselected for Bud Light.

Tens of thousands of people do advertising, and some are better at it than others. But successful advertising is not that which is funny or sexy – that helps. But the object is to change our behavior. Any means will do. It’s is an interesting profession – it has to deal with us on our two levels – our public selves, and our real selves. To change our behaviors, it has to talk to the real self.

American politics is nothing more than the ad business applied to a different product.

I added a little snippet to a previous post regarding Geraldine Ferraro’s nasty comments about Barack Obama, where she says that he is merely fortunate to be where he is because he is black. She’s mean and nasty, and after a respectable period of time, she quit the campaign, but is still swinging hard.

The question is, is she just a loose cannon, or is this calculated? The email I received asserted that Ferraro’s behavior was calculated, and that it contained a sublime message: blacks have it easy. The target audience is blue collar voters in Pennsylvania. Hillary is appealing to their base instincts, their real selves.

We’re all less than we present in public – we’re all a little racist, maybe a lot. Advertisers know this about us. Political campaigns are 75% sublime message, and only 25% concrete. Geraldine was on a sublime mission.

Race is a factor in the Democratic campaign. Someone is going to play the race card. But it can’t be done openly – that would backfire. It has to be done on a sublime level. The candidate that does it will be the most base and ruthless and ambitious one.

Hillary hasn’t wasted any time. She’s playing the race card. Why am I not surprised?

The fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq has passed without a lot of fanfare, as will the sixth, seventh … it will eventually be a non-event or one in which various fringe elements assemble on street corners to preach to a shrinking choir. The news media is currently in de-emphasize mode, hyping up other stories and virtually ignoring the conflict. It’s a testimony to how much they are in control of the agenda. We talk about whatever they put in our face. If there ain’t pictures, there ain’t news.

Foreign policy is mostly a staid affair attended to by the graduates of our elite schools. It’s neither fun nor pretty. The business of state and the business of corporate America are one. The world is full of crises, but only certain of them make the radar screen. Rwanda passes without notice (no American corporate interests threatened), while Iraq, a relatively calm place threatening no one becomes an emergency. We’re totally tooled up by the media and driven by the corporate agenda. The trick is to make an elite undertaking seem like a popular movement.

Iraq had been on the agenda for a long while, long before the fall of the Soviet Union, but not within our grasp until that event. Prior to 1990 Saddam Hussein had played one superpower against the other with relative skill, and there was deep resentment of him in Washington for that reason. We supported him when he invaded Iran, of course, as we are not the slightest troubled by invasions when they serve our interests. But we also made him strong – we gave him the weapons that we later claimed threatened us. Without us he would have had no chemical weaponry – the only thing that ever really threatened us (and the real reason why George H.W. Bush pulled back in 1991).

When opportunity presented itself in the post-Soviet world, as it did in 1990, we attacked, and rained hell on the country and its electrical grids and sewage systems. It was no accident – we meant to do that. They were a country with a first-world infrastructure, and we destroyed it. We spent the next ten years applying a vice, squeezing them hard, sanctioning food and medicine and killing their children while withholding the the tools necessary to repair their infrastructure. We meant to do that.

In the Clinton years we looked to get rid of those weapons and clear the way for an attack. It is here that Saddam failed his people, why he may in retrospect be seen as one of the biggest fools in history. He cooperated with weapons inspectors, canned his nuclear program, destroyed his chemical-bearing rocketry, and left his country basically defenseless.

It was then that the U.S. attacked, and it is now that we celebrate the fifth anniversary of that attack. I cited an article below that highlights how, seventeen years after the 1991 attack, we have still not managed to fix those sewers and electrical grids. It’s no accident. We mean to rain hell on them, we mean to impoverish them, we mean to make them suffer, scatter their factions, install our superbases that will permanently house 100,000 troops, control their government and watch and terrorize their internal factions as closely as Castro ever did his enemies.

We mean to be in power there. It was the goal in 1989, 1991, throughout the Clinton years and well into Bush’s term. When the weapons were finally gone, when the path to invasion and occupation was finally cleared, we moved. True, things didn’t go according to plan. It’s been costly, for us anyway. But clear heads in Washington realize that it’s a price that must be paid.

Some people marked the passing of the fifth anniversary of the invasion as if it were a significant milestone. It wasn’t. It’s no big deal. Presidents will come and go, but the troops will stay. Orators and pundits will prattle on about democracy and how we toppled an evil government – grist for the mill. It was a resource grab. It’s in its infancy.

There’ll be many more anniversaries.