Shabbir Safdar is a progressive activist in DC and, I know from personal observation, anonymous benefactor of good causes.
Part of the Pakistanian diaspora, over the holidays Shabbir revisited the ancestral homeland for the first time in 25 years, and he gives us a few tantalizing glimpses of the nation, and the cultural divides, plus some great photos, in Shabbir's Pakistan Diaries.
The US holds maybe hundreds of non-citizens, all captured abroad (we are told), incarcerated in Guantanamo and in other secret prisons around the world. The Bush administration plans to hold them up to forever.
Of course, there is a difference between the Soviet Gulag, which was aimed at saboteurs, dissidents, or people who somehow got on the wrong end of officialdom, and the US Gulag, which is we are told aimed merely at the foreign version of the same.
Whether the creation of a secret archipelago of prisons and coercive questioning facilities will inevitably fail to be deployed against US citizens is a question that one is not permitted to ask in public, as it is too far outside the permitted consensus. So put that issue aside.
Ask instead whether from a moral, political, or even legal point of view, the fact that only foreigners are incarcerated for life without trial (or indeed any rights, it appears), at the complete and unconstrained pleasure of the super-imperial presidency, gives us much in the way of bragging rights over the former Soviet Union.
What's that? Our gulag is much smaller? And our policy this week is not to torture people, the last two years notwithstanding? And that nice Mr. Bush (with Justice Thomas's endorsement, to his and the Court's eternal shame) promises that all the people being held really deserve it, so who needs complications like a trial?
Well, that's alright then!
It is true that the UM Crocodile (ver. 2.0) is taking a vacation just at the same time as I am.
But that is the only similarity. Any rumors that we are the same person, or related in any other way, should be disregarded.
Well, that didn't take real long, did it? Fresh from having hands slapped for ethics violations, but flush with the power of a larger majority, the House leadership, read “DeLay”, have decided to make ethics inquiries harder to begin and install a more pliant chairman to the House Ethics Committee. A few people have even noticed that this doesn't look good, but no doubt the votes are there.
Meanwhile, several weeks after being promised I'd get a letter telling me how she voted on the DeLay Rule, my Congresswoman has singularly failed to contact me. When I get back to the office next week, I'll be writing the Miami Herald about this sterling constituent service.
The good news is that ordinarily such arrogance brings parties down quickly. The bad news is that gerrymandering makes it harder for the democratic system to function. Florida, after all, is a 50/50 state but the Republicans have large majorities in the state legislature and the congressional delegation. And as the Soviets used to say “This is no accident.”
One of my pronounced character traits, some might call them obsessions but what do they know, is a certain devotion to comparison shopping. It started with computer equipment, even involving a two-year subscription to Computer Shopper in its big fat heyday, but now extends to quality and price comparisons when buying pretty much anything other than dinner for two that costs more than about $50. One of my wife's few imperfections is making fun of this noble devotion to social wealth maximization in which I do my bit to ensure that we have the toughest most competitive market for everyone's enjoyment.
I can sort of understand how this predilection might have seemed mildly annoying in days of yore: trooping to stores to look for models that were randomly in stock, perusing out-of-date Consumer Reports for reports that proved to be on models no longer sold, well, it took time, and sometimes we needed it now. Here as elsewhere, however, the Internet changes everything. Comparison shopping online is much efficient, although no faster since if the ease of information acquisition increases geometrically, the amount of information (and mis-information) increases exponentially. So it still takes a little while. But it's more fun. And I can do it late at night.
All of which is prompted by the observation that the vacuum cleaner is dying.
So as I'm starting up another round of happy hunting, I find this description of a vacuum cleaner, yes a vacuum cleaner, that kinda makes you want to run out and try one, and kinda makes you want to hide under the bed:
Via of all places the increasingly irrelevant Wonkette, this item from the Christian Science Monitor—One man's retirement math: Social Security wins:
For 45 years, the defense-industry analyst paid into the system until his retirement in 1994. But with all the recent hoopla over reform, Mr. Logue, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, decided to go back and check his own records. Would he have done better investing his money than the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration?
He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends).
To his surprise, the Social Security investment won out: $261,372 versus $255,499, a difference of $5,873.
Yes, it's partly a timing phenomenon (but people who depend on retirement income are less able to time than others), and yes, “Advocates of privatization point out – correctly – that Logue's analysis compares theoretical stock returns with what the Social Security Trust Fund earned – not what he himself would get from the system.” But not everyone has optimum earnings. And the transactions costs and fees of private plans are going to be much, much larger than what the efficient Social Security Administration (arguably the most efficient agency in the federal government) currently spends. Which is why Wall St. is salivating.
Indeed, as the Monitor points out, “The debate hinges considerably on what people want their retirement system to be. Social Security has always been an insurance program. It was never intended as an investment scheme.” And relying solely on private pensions means you inevitably get a cadre of very poor old people:
… under Britain's privatized pension system, so many retirees are doing so poorly at this moment that a commission warned this fall that widespread poverty among the elderly may be returning, which could require massive new government spending.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could get this sort of reasonable thinking into the mainstream.
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