This is a film you should mark on your must-see list. Yes, it is a documentary but it is more. Yes, it is about the war in Afghanistan but it is not a war movie in the literary sense but in some other way. You get to tag along with a small group of grunts stuck on two different hilltops for their one year deployment. This is blue collar work of small units; hold a semi-permanent position and patrol from that strong point. Hunker down at night and creep around during the day.
There is no cheap sentimentality here, just raw footage of what is it like to be on the ground in the Korengal Valley. The 96-minute film was distilled from a year’s worth of video. As such it captures both the particular and the general about war. Fear and boredom. It certainly touched a nerve with me.
There are post-deployment interviews with the individual soldiers interspersed through the movie. All the men put on a brave face; no one tears up. But you can still see straight through them. Here is where you understand the experience, not from the brief fire-fights or common grab-ass on the outpost, but from reading those faces. And there is where this film shines. Do not miss this. (This work should be migrating out of theatres soon and it must be viewed on the big screen. In San Diego, it is only in one theatre downtown.)
I made my 18-year son go with me about a week before I dropped him off for his first year of college. I wanted him to see how some other teenagers were spending the last years of their childhood.
The picture. In case you missed it, I am referring to the cover of Time last week. The power of that picture will, in the annals of war and information, rank alongside other indelible photographs. Who has not seen the one with the young Vietnamese girl trying to run fast enough to cool her napalmed skin?
Magazine sit around and people will see this in waiting rooms, bus stations, news kiosks and other places. They seem to have a longer life as paper does not have to be plugged in.
This picture, unlike the others, is fodder for both sides of the war debate. Each will skillfully exploit it; at least the victim made it to this sane country to cure her disfigurement.
The discouraging part of all of this is the realization that some people have not evolved much past the cave. In my war at least the enemy, while brutal in the military sense, was fighting for a political and cultural system that evolved.
So goes the headline in a cheery article in the Union today. The prediction came from a real estate research firm that provides the raw data for the respected Case-Schiller Index. For those of you not familiar with that tool, the CSI measures the price per square foot of residental homes sold over a period of time. The twist is that they follow and report on specific houses so the results are very market accurate.
San Diego prices, using the common median price method and the Case-Schiller appraoch, show about a 10 percent increase this past year measured from July 2009 to July 2010. Now the experts are saying San Diego real estate went up too fast during the boom and therefore has more decline ahead. They explain the recent boomlet as resulting from the various state and federal incentive programs and since they are all but gone, rough times are ahead. Also, the hidden bank inventories are also anothe potential market problem.
Being in the business what I say needs to be evaluated carefully. I am a believer in the Sam Zell school of real estate. The billionaire real estate investor believe the this roughly put mantra: “Look to replacement costs”. There is no way to reproduce, at today’s prices, the real estate being sold in this market. That should tell you something about next year.
Please do not get the impression that I am completely opposed to trickle-down economics, the centerpiece of GOP tax policies under the post-1980 Presidencies. I recognize that our dynamic economy needs those with means and ability. Risk-taking is part of our national culture and without that I guess we might be like Switzerland or one of those other boring places.
The author of “Deliverance”, James Dickey, was interviewed a few years by the late William F. Buckley. The latter worked hard in the interview to bait the author into a discussion about taxing the wealthy. Mr. Dickey responded by saying society should be not be to hard on the losers but still at the same time reward the winners just enough.
Stockman’s article comes at a time when the debate over the expiring Bush tax cuts is beginning. Presumably Washington’s pols will duck the issue before the election. There will be rhetoric and bombast in huge quantities from both side but no one will be foolish enough to actually vote on the matter.
The debate, to be sure, will be interesting and perhaps be a proxy for just how much Obama’s stock has fared during his first two years. Those on left, many disappointed with the President, will have to check their ideology at the door if they expect anything meaningful to occur during Mr. Obama’s remaining time. Like their counterparts on the right, this has never been one of their strong suits.
In last Sunday’s New York Timesthere appeared an interesting Op-Ed piece from on of the Reagan economic insiders. Mostly identified with supply-side economics(or voodoo economics if you are an ardent Democrat), Mr. Stockman was one of the primary architects of the Reagan Revolution.
Now it appears he has some second thoughts. In his Op-Ed article Mr. Stockton does an historical review of how four key Federal decisions on economic policy have landed us in the current pickle. Here is one the few choice tidbits: “This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts. ”
His conclusion is frought with ill portends, “The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing — as suggested by last week’s news that the national economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter. Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever. ”
I have long believed that the psychology of the endless free lunch (maybe a good idea for a Vegas buffet) would lead to a bad spot. The debate is over and we are in this mess. Americans have responded by spending less and saving more. The national savings rate is now around 8%, a far cry from the real negative rate in the heyday of the equity line of credit.
I have had more conversations with friends and clients who all talk about the New Frugality. Everyone seems to be spending less and are, at least for the time being, proclaiming a certain sense of well-being and satisfaction. But does this new attitude spell disaster for huge segements of our economy? Can anyone re-purpose a mall?
The City Council approved by a 6 to 2 a measure to place a sales tax increase on the November ballot. Between this, the Tea Party and immigration this off year election is shaping up as high entertainment. Did I forget Sarah Palin? Oops.
Of course the Brown-Whitman race for governor will make the most headlines and that race of opposites will be high politics. In the end, the winner will be just as hamstrung as the current boss. California politics is mired in a structural coffin and without a Constitutional Convention the future smells like a perpetual stalemate.
Stay tuned after Labor Day.
It is hard for me to escape this issue of California state workers having to take pay cuts. My wife is a State worker bee and we have seen much in the way of deteriorating pay and forced furloughs. I recognize that these government workers are but pawns in the large budgetary chess battle now going on in Sacramento. As I mentioned yesterday, someone has to pay the bill for public services;there is little hope for additonal revenues give the sorry state of the job market.
Still, the furloughs are not a bad idea on certain levels. First, taxpayers have less access to public services and there is an implied you-get-what-you-pay-for message for tax cheapskates. Second, workers have extra time for that part-time job at Target!
San Diego voters are going to possibly be looking at two ballot measures coming this fall that will actually raise taxes. The proposed half-cent sales tax increase and the $98 per house(and $60 per apartment unit) is quite a shift of direction from the spirit of Proposition 13, enacted in 1978. We decided then not to pay for government services. Instead we rolled the dice and hoped that economic expansions would provide enough tax revenue to keep the municipal ship afloat.
This variant on the trickle-down theory worked well enough for several years, at least it appeared so. But the real truth was we just engaged in a giantic shell game. Governments just deferred maintaining the services and the infrastructure that had made California an economic gorilla in the post-war period.
Now the bill is coming due. The over-generous public pension system does not help matters. Like the Greeks, public servants are going to have to learn to work past the age of 55.
Either that or raise taxes. This should be a very interesting election.
I was watching the Sunday morning show on CBS and was taken aback by the network’s scanty coverage of the death of Daniel Schorr. Like his rough take-no-prisoners style or not, this guy was a giant in electronic journalism. Their brief three minute bio-pic was an insult in my view.
I remember him most vividly during the Watergate affair but listened to him on NPR very recently. I hope when I am 93 I can sound as lucid and convincing as he did when I last heard that unmistakable voice. You know that voice, always with tinged with incredulity; somehow he communicated to us with his prose and timbre this point, “can you believe what they are trying to sell us?”
As the Goldman Sachs drama unwinds it brings to mind another famous Senate hearing, the Army-McCarthy hearings that were held in 1954. In a single moment, Senator McCarthy was destroyed politically along with his political movement. For those not familar with the Senator from Wisconsin, he was the political leader in the fight to root out domestic communists and their sympathizers. In taking on the Army and its chief counsel, Joseph Welch, he unwittingly set the table for his own demise. (You can view this electric exchange on this link: YouTube)
I think the Goldman Sachs hearings, while lacking the one dramatic exchange, will have the same political impact. I believe these executives perfectly laid the ground work for a meaningful financial reform bill. I thought after the bruising health care debate there would be little stomach on the Hill for the President’s proposals. But the Goldman boys tilted the playing field. You can see this as the GOP is in full retreat on this issue. I am sure the calls and emails to their offices have been clear and concise. The public relations ineptness of this group of highly-paid executives is astounding. They provided a plethora of juicy sound bites that I am sure we will see in a few political ads this fall.
