Gymkhana Practice

This is just for fun. WRX, 530 hp. Have a look.

GW Bush at the G20 Conference

Here's a strange video. Quite interesting. Have a look

Foreclosure

This is becoming a common experience, particularly in California. This video gives a look at the aftermath of foreclosure in a way I hadn't seen before. It's not really ideological, but newsy. Have a look.

Originally appeared on brasschecktv.com.

The Five Most Wanted Men from Wall Street

Published originally in the Hightower Lowdown

Our economy didn’t melt down, it was taken down by ideological extremists

The five most wanted men from Wall Street and Washington

What the hell's happening here? Why is my bank in the tank? And my house and job? And my retirement money? Even my state's teetering on the brink of broke! Who did this to us?

Fair questions, but we're not getting honest answers. Last year, at the first signs of the global financial slide toward the abyss, we were told that it's just a little hiccup caused by something called subprime mortgages. Not to worry, the Powers That Be declared confidently, for we have the damage contained. And rest assured that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

Then, this spring, Bear Stearns cratered, requiring an emergency federal subsidy to cover billions in bad loans. Okay, admitted those in charge, that subprime stuff actually is leveraged on up the financial system, and maybe there's been a bit of greed among a few of the big players, but we really do have the problem contained now, and, hey, "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

But in September--Omigosh!--there went Lehman Brothers, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WaMu, Wachovia, and others. Well, yes, conceded the now-frazzled financial establishment, but gollies, we're throwing hundreds of billions of your tax dollars into sandbags to contain the problem, and remember: "The fundamentals of our economy are sound."

In October, the contagion rolled through Britain, Canada, and Europe; it spread to Brazil and across to China and Japan; and--Holy Schmoly--suddenly all of Iceland was melting in bankruptcy! Stay calm, cried an openly panicked chorus of Washington officials, for we're holding some big summit meetings soon and consulting our Ouija boards, and...uh...ah...um...y'all just keep clinging to the thought that "the fundamentals of our economy are sound."

Laissez Fairies

You don't have to be in Who's Who to know What's What, do you? The fundamentals are NOT sound.

Wall Street and Washington (excuse the redundancy there) want us commoners to believe that this viral spread of economic grief was caused by those lower-income homeowners who couldn't pay their subprime loans--merely an unforeseeable glitch in a complex and otherwise healthy financial system. Hogwash. The source of today's pain is the same as it was in America's previous financial collapses: the unbridled greed of economic elites, enabled by their political courtesans in Washington.

This unbridling has been the long-sought goal of a cabal of deregulation ideologues who dwell in laissez-fairyland. During the past two decades, they have relentlessly pushed their economic fantasies into law. Their theory was that (to use Ronald Reagan's simple construct) "the magic of the marketplace" would create an eternal rainbow of prosperity through financial "innovation"--if only the market was unshackled from any pesky public regulations. What the dereg theorists missed, however, is that magicians don't perform magic. They perform illusions.

Let's meet some of the illusionists who are directly responsible for hurling you, me, America, and most of the world into this dark and as-yet unplumbed economic hole.

Snide, sour, and sanctimonious, this former senator from Texas is now head lobbyist for the Swiss-based banking giant, UBS, as well as chief economic adviser for his old chum John McCain. A bathed-in-the-blood, footwashing, free-market absolutist, Gramm advocates a virulent brand of antigovernment, market-knows-best, Rambo capitalism.

In 1999, as chair of the Senate Banking Committee, he had the power to implement some of his cockamamie dogmas. First, he pushed through a bill to dissolve the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, a New Deal reform that prohibited banks, investment houses, and insurance companies from combining into one corporation. By keeping these components of our financial system separate, Glass-Steagall made sure that the crash of one of them would not bring down the other two. But a number of Wall Street banks, led by what would become Citigroup, saw a profit windfall for themselves if only they could scuttle the old law and merge banking, investment, and insurance into huge financial conglomerates. The senator was their ideological soul mate, and he was delighted to rig the system for them.

On November 12, 1999, a gloating Gramm celebrated having sledgehammered the regulatory walls that separated the three financial functions:

"We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers. We have learned that we promote economic growth and we promote stability by having competition and freedom. I am proud to be here because this is an important bill; it is a deregulatory bill. I believe that's the wave of the future, and I am awfully proud to have been a part of making it a reality."

But repealing Glass-Steagall was only step one for this free-market holy roller. In literally the dead of night, just before Congress's Christmas break in 2000, Chairman Gramm snuck a short provision into an 11,000-page appropriations bill. The item, which only a few lobbyists and lawmakers knew had been inserted, became law when the larger bill was signed by then-President Bill Clinton. Gramm's little legislative sticky note decreed that a relatively new, exotic, and inherently risky form of investments called "derivatives" were not to be regulated--or even monitored--by the government.

It should be noted here that Democrats were also butt-deep in the dereg orthodoxy. Such Wall Street sycophants as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had drunk deeply from the holy cup of derivatives deregulation, and Clinton's top economic advisors Robert Rubin (formerly with Goldman Sachs and now with Citigroup) and Lawrence Summers (also a veteran of Wall Street) were in harness with the Republicans on this effort.

By 2008, the freewheeling derivatives market, including derivatives based on those lowly subprime housing loans, bloated to a stunning $531 trillion. That's 531 followed by 12 zeroes! These little-understood, essentially secret investment schemes came to dominate our entire financial system--and when thousands of regular folks began defaulting on their subprime loans, the derivatives based on them essentially became worthless. Investment houses, which were up to their corporate keisters in these funny-money subprime derivatives, began collapsing, and the now-interlocked banks and insurance companies began tumbling down with them. Gramm's deregulatory "wave of the future" had become a financial tsunami.

This guy's mug should be on wanted posters in every post office in America. As Federal Reserve chairman from 1987 to 2006, he held the regulatory power to prevent the irrational inflation of the huge derivatives bubble that has now burst-- yet he fought fiercely through four presidencies to prevent even the meekest oversight by the Fed or any other agency. Nicknamed "The Oracle," Chairman Greenspan was inscrutable and arrogant, but he also possessed a detailed knowledge of financial minutiae and an air of superiority that simultaneously bedazzled and intimidated presidents, lawmakers, and other public officials.

However, not everyone was sanguine about the chairman's reliance on derivatives as the pillar of Wall Street's financial strength. Many wise heads viewed these financial "products" as speculative mumbo-jumbo. Billionaire financier George Soros says his firm never invested in them "because we don't really understand how they work." Investment banker Felix Rohatyn described them as "hydrogen bombs." Back in 2003, investment guru Warren Buffett called them "financial weapons of mass destruction" that were "potentially lethal" for our economy.

Derivatives: What are these things?

Derivatives amount to a casino game. They are pieces of paper whose only real value is derived from the anticipated value of some other tangible asset... [read more]

But Greenspan's voice was the most powerful, and he was both a determined bureaucratic protector and an exuberant cheerleader for derivatives. Meanwhile, wealthy investors worldwide were making a killing from their investments in these bizarre pieces of paper, and few in Washington were willing even to question The Oracle.

"I always felt that the titans of our legislature didn't want to reveal their own inability to understand some of the concepts that Mr. Greenspan was setting forth," said Arthur Levitt, a well-regarded Wall Street regulator under Clinton. "I don't recall anyone ever saying, 'What do you mean by that, Alan?'"

So the bubble kept expanding.

Why was Greenspan so insistent on no regulation? Because he is the hardest of hardcore laissez-faire ideologues, holding a blazing disdain for government. An avowed worshiper of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, he views public oversight of business as an evil force that deters the creativity of smart elites. He is so psyched by his religious-like faith in the "free market" that he fervently believes in what he considers to be the innate good will and moral superiority of investors and bankers. He asserts that these self-interested individuals can simply be trusted to do the right thing, and that government should not second-guess their decisions.

Even the faith of snake handlers is not as devout as Greenspan's. Unfortunately, however, he was able to hitch our nation's economic well-being to his own absurdist ideological fancy. The guy who was lionized as the smartest, most- stable economic thinker in the land essentially turns out to have been a quasi-religious nut.

A GOP member of Congress for 17 years, Cox was another deregulation diehard and a reliable advocate for Wall Street's pampered CEO class--a role he continued to play after Bush chose him in 2005 to succeed Donaldson as SEC chair. At the commission, he weakened the ability of the enforcement staff even to investigate securities violations by Wall Street firms, much less prosecute them. Also, in an act of pure ideological folly, he eliminated an office that had been set up specifically to watch out for future problems with such high-risk investments as derivatives.

In essence, he took the cops off the beat at the very time more cops were needed. In October, when the stuff was hitting the fan, a chagrined Cox offered this brilliant insight: "The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work." Thanks, Chris.

The Securities and Exchange Commission supposedly regulates

investment banks, and in 2004 it was headed by--guess who?--a Wall Street investment banker, Bill Donaldson. On April 28 of that year, he presided over a little-noticed SEC meeting held in the commission's basement to consider an obscure rule change urgently requested by the Big Five investment banks (including Goldman Sachs, then headed by Henry Paulson--yes, the same treasury secretary who just designed George W's Wall Street bailout). The bankers wanted an exemption from a sensible requirement that they keep a sizeable pool of money on hand to cover potential losses. Turn these reserve funds loose, pleaded the bankers, so we can put more of our investors' money into this opaque but lucrative area known as derivatives.

After less than an hour of discussion, Donaldson and his four SEC colleagues voted unanimously to do this favor for the bankers. As a bonus, the generous commissioners also decided to let the banks themselves monitor the level of risk they were putting on investors--and ultimately on the backs of taxpayers.

In this one meeting, which was not covered by the media, the dereg geniuses had struck another major blow for banker recklessness, and the likes of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and others were sent further down the giddy path to their--and our--ruin. "The problem with such voluntary [regulations]," said Roderick Hills, Gerald Ford's former SEC chairman, "is that, as we've seen throughout history, they often don't work." Duh!

As honcho of Goldman Sachs, Hank drew a $37 million paycheck the year before Bush waved him into the Treasury Department to oversee the whole U.S. economy. At Goldman, he was considered one of Wall Street's "smart guys" who had figured out how to make billions in brokerage fees by packaging and selling these wondrous pieces of wizardry called derivatives, and he came into government as an unquestioning believer in deregulatory doctrine. Now that deregulated derivatives have turned out to be so much hokum, Hank's in charge of the bailout--and his former firm is in line to get at least $10 billion from it.

The Paulson bailout plan is flawed in many awful ways, but start with this basic one: the money (some estimates now put the total taxpayer cost above $2 trillion) is being handed to the same schemers and finaglers who caused the crash. The public gets to contribute the funds, but it gets no seat at the table to decide how the system (and who in it) will be "rescued."

With typical antigovernment extremism, Paulson's plan makes the public passive investors in the banks we're saving, leaving all the say-so to the banks' current executives and directors. Our money is being given away by the Bush ideologues with no strings attached--not even a requirement that it go into new loans so credit can quickly flow into the American economy again! Excuse me? Unclogging that credit flow was Paulson's rationale for giving $125 billion to nine giant banks (Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of New York, and State Street). He now says he "hopes" the banks will use the money to make loans, but he refuses to require them to do so.

Meanwhile, bankers themselves say they are more likely simply to sit on the money for awhile or--get this--use it to buy up smaller competitors! Yes, that means that our tax dollars will go toward eliminating competition in America's banking market. Not only will this leave consumers and businesses with fewer choices, but this will also increase the size of poorly managed megabanks that have already been designated by the Bush-Paulson regime as "too big to fail."

Laissez-faire follies

One positive to come from this collapse is that it exposes the bankruptcy of several core ideas that have been pushed by free-market illusionists. For example, market infallibility--the notion that Wall Street investors, analysts, and bankers know more than anyone else, and the government (aka the public) should just get the hell out of the way and behold unfettered genius at work. So, behold. (And, by the way, these are the exact same people who only months ago were insisting that Americans would be so much better off if they would move their Social Security money from government hands to the more adventuresome wizards of Wall Street.)

Yet, those bankers and politicos who pushed this antigovernment ethos to today's disastrous conclusion remain delusional. They cry for trillions of our tax dollars, but they insist that the profiteers must control the bailout and remain free of public supervision. George W himself still sticks with fantasy over reality, claiming that the fundamentals of the system are sound and that it is "essential" that any reforms not interfere with the "free market."

It's been a scream to hear these devout market ideologues explain how they've just become Wall Street socialists. Having big, bad government buy up the failed investments, then partially nationalize America's financial system, is an unwelcome choice for Bush. "I frankly don't want the government involved," he said. "It was necessary." Bailout chief Paulson (dubbed "King Henry" by Newsweek) said, "We regret having to take these actions"--but they're necessary.

Why necessary? Because laissez-faire ideology is a crock. It failed. Americans are not being told the blunt truth, which is that the financial mess we're in today is a direct result of the laissez-faire fraud that Wall Street and Washington willfully imposed on our nation. CEOs and banking lobbyists, presidents and treasury secretaries, regulators and lawmakers (of both parties) failed to protect America from money-grubbing bankers, hedge-fund speculators, and other big players.

As we've learned in the past few weeks, there is no "free" market. Indeed, it's quite pricey when it trips and falls over the inevitable outcroppings of greed. That's why strong, vigilant, and aggressive public regulation is essential. Don't be fooled by claims that just throwing money at the hucksters will fix the problem. The only way to make America's financial system trustworthy is to return to the sound fundamentals of public oversight--starting with the bailout itself.

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn Speak Out

This is a Democracy Now interview aired on November 14th, 2008. It is the first public utterance from either person since Bill Ayers was used to target Barack Obama during the presidential campaign. As a contemporary of Ayers and Dohrn, and being one who actively opposed the Vietnam War and who recalls the SDS and the Weatherman Faction of the SDS, I think it's important to hear what these folks have to say. I think you might find them a bit different that what you expect. Perhaps not. Have a look.

Down the Republican Rabbit Hole

My friend Michael Bishop emailed this to me (and to a number of other folks as well) This is a nice description of how the credit default swap brought down the financial system, and a good outline and devastating attack on the Republican fairy tail about how this mess came about. Have a read

From the Daily Kos

by Devilstower

Sun Nov 16, 2008 at 07:00:03 AM PST

History may be written by the winners, but that doesn't stop the losers from wasting a lot of ink in the attempt. This time, it's the GOP revanchists who are busy trying to come up with a reason -- any reason -- for the economic crisis that doesn't point directly to their conservative ideology and the greedy green horse of the Apocalypse, deregulation.

There are dozens of letters percolating through Republican chain mail, and a matching number of posts on right wing blogs, all trying to spread the same message: Democrats loaned money to black people!

Here's an example plucked from my own mailbox.

We're on the brink of an economic disaster and another Great Depression. This was not caused by Republicans. This was caused solely by Democrats.

In 1977 Democratic President Jimmy Carter passed the Community Reinvestment Act to provide housing to poor people. In the 1990s Bill Clinton had Attorney General Janet Reno threaten banks under red lining rules into giving loans to people who could not afford them. Then in the last 8 years, the leftist group ACORN, which has ties to Barack Obama, went to banks and threatened them to relax their rules again. Banks had to give loans to people who had no jobs or no identification.

You have to hand it to them. In terms of bringing together the maximum number of Republican demons -- Carter, Clinton, Reno, Obama -- with the smallest amount of connecting narrative, this is a keeper.

It's a satisfying bedtime story for the right. They can snooze and dream of revenge, when the wonders of True Conservatism will pave the streets with a mixture of gold and liberal bones. Unfortunately for them, it's not only simplistic, not only demonstrative of deep prejudice, it's also dead wrong.

The Community Reinvestment Act and other red lining laws weren't passed to force banks to make loans to African-Americans and other minorities. They were there to make the rules consistent. Previous to the passage of the CRA, minorities were often required to have better credit, and make larger down payments to get loans equivalent to those awarded whites. Nothing in these laws required that banks lower their lending standards, only that they be fair, consistent, and operate in a "safe and secure" way. There was no evidence then, and no evidence now, that minorities with the same initial credit rating as whites tend to default on their loans at any greater rate.

Want proof? Mortgage failure rate in 2000: 1%. 2001: 1%. 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006? One (1) as in ONE percent. But wait! Everything that Carter, Reno, and Clinton could do was already in there. The nefarious community organizers of ACORN had already grown their little oak trees of pressure. Carter's poor people had been sitting in their new homes so long, that many of those initial mortgages were paid off and gone.

What does legislation passed 31 years ago have to do with problems today? Nothing. Neither do tweaks Clinton made to that legislation in the mid 90s. The real culprits require a much shorter trip down memory lane.

Subprime mortgages (and all mortgages, really) are a fraction of the current problem. The bailout would have been enough to buy out every subprime mortgage in foreclosure across the country. In fact, it was enough to do that several times over. So why not do that?

The reason is that the purpose of the bailout (at least as Treasury Secretary Paulson sees it) isn't to stop mortgage foreclosures, but to save the banks. And the banks have some self-inflicted problems that make those mortgages an afterthought.

For example, the wonderful credit default swap. In essence, credit default swaps are (or were) nothing but insurance policies for loans. And yet in 2007 the total number of credit default swaps traded far exceeded the value of all loans. In fact, it may have touched $70 trillion dollars, which puts it above the gross domestic product of the entire planet.

How is that possible? Come with me back to the primitive world of 1999, when SUVs ruled the roads and cell phones did not yet shoot video, and let's see how this clumsy bit of fiscal jargon conquered the planet.

The Evolution of the Credit Default Swap

Stage 1 (Perturbo mutans)
You have just made a loan to someone, and now you're nervous that this scoundrel might not pay. What to do, what to do? Ah, but you need not worry! I happen to have assets on hand that can easily cover your petty loan. What's more, for a small monthly fee, I'll be happy to provide you with insurance of a sort. Should the person to whom you've extended a loan prove unreliable, I'll shoulder the burden -- so long as you keep up the payments. Let's call this insurance a... credit default swap.

In 1999, these credit default swaps already existed, but they were a niche product. Only a fraction of banks employed them and then only on a fraction of loans. Without some knock to the system, swaps would probably have remained a relatively small player.

Stage 2 (Perturbo furtiva)
Knock, knock. In 2000 Republican economic hero, Phil Gramm, with the assistance of a small legion of lobbyists, created the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Along with ushering in the Enron disaster, this bill provided the one thing that credit default swaps needed to grow and mutate -- invisibility. Thanks to the CFMA, not only were credit default swaps unregulated, they were impossible to observe directly. Like black holes in deep space, you could only spot swaps by looking at how other things acted nearby.

So, now you've made a loan to someone, and you're worried about it. I want to offer you a credit default swap so I can collect the fee. Trouble is, I don't have the assets to cover your loan. So how can I... hold on, credit default swaps are so unregulated that no one says I actually have to be able to deliver on my promise. Hey, over here! Have I got a swap for you, and it's a bargain.

So now the CDS is a means of moving the risk, but the risk is still as high (or higher, since the original lender might have been better able to cover the loss). In fact, credit default swaps have gone from being a risk mitigator, to a risk magnifier.

Stage 3 (Peturbo veloxicresco)
You have a loan you're worried about. That's good, because lots of people want to offer you swaps. After all, you don't have to have any assets to issue a swap. The investment bank of First Me and The Change I Found In the Couch Cushions can offer swaps for all the debt at Morgan Stanley, and that's okay. I get free money for issuing the swaps, and the swaps have value on the books. So both me and my pal Mr. Stanley have values that are inflating faster than a tick in a blood bank.

Now you can get a swap for any loan you want, and with all the competition, the cost of these swaps is lower, and lower, and lower. Here's an idea: why not go out and make more loans, riskier loans. Why not offer anyone you can collar on the street a loan, no matter whether or not they can pay it off, not because some 30 year old law makes you do it, but because your friend the credit swap makes it perfectly safe!

So many people are offering these things that you could give a loan to Saddam while the bombs are falling without a care in the world. You can always get a swap.

Stage 4 (Fatum casus)
I have a swap. I really, really want someone to take my swap. Only even with every incentive I can offer, not enough people are loaning. Sure, there's a record amount of hypothetical money sloshing around the system thanks to me and my swaps, but it's still not enough. So what can I...

Wait a second. Swaps are unregulated. No one says I have to have enough resources to cover the swap, and even better, no one says I have to offer the swap to the person who actually made the loan! Hey buddy, see that loan over there? You may think it's iffy, but I think it'll hold up. In fact, I'm so sure it will, I'll sell you a credit default swap on it that pays off if it fails. You don't make the loan, you don't have to pay off on the loan, you don't have anything to do with the loan. You just pay me the fee. And if that guy loses his money, you collect. How sweet is that!

This mutation is enormous (see how the genera changed up there?). At this point, credit default swaps have become completely divorced from the original function. A single loan can be covered by multiple swaps. There's a complicated fiscal term for this. It's called gambling, and at this stage, that's all that remains of those little "insurance" policies. They no longer protect anyone from anything, they just offer a chance to place enormous overlapping side bets on everything.

Stage 5 (Fatum insanus)
I have swaps! Get your swaps here! Want a swap on a loan you made? Okay. Want to bet that the bozo in the next cube is making bad loans? We can do that. Want to bundle up some loans and bet on those? Buddy we can do better than that. I can give you a swap on the value of other swaps. Now we're really in business.

Who owns the original loan? Don't know, don't care. Who's actually responsible for the money if that loan should fail? Ehhh, can't really say. Has anyone noticed that a single bad loan could cause a cascade of swap calls that bounce around the system like a rocket-power pinball? Shut up.

Isn't anyone worried that this is the most massive house of cards ever constructed in human history? Lookit, what part of "we took 120 billion in bonuses out of this place in the last five years" are you missing?

Stage 6 (Fatum exicelebritas)
Hey, my loan went bad. Can I have my money from that swap, please?

Stage 7 (Fatum cerus)
Oh shit.

Now that people are paying attention, it turns out that the value of most credit default swaps is not just bupkis, it's Bupkis Plus. More computer power went into modeling these things than has been invested in predicting climate change, but everyone overlooked the giant "and then a miracle occurs" at the center of all the equations that allowed credit default swaps to generate revenue ex nihilo.

Trying to blame the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act for the current fiscal crisis is like blaming a spot on your windshield for engine failure while ignoring the gaping wound in you head gasket. Republicans are scribbling hard to create their new version of reality, and you never know what's going to sell. After all, people bought a "Book of Virtues" authored by Bill Bennet.

But in this case, even the Mock Turtle and the March Hare think the GOP line is too outlandish.

Hiroshima: The Lost Photographs

Hiroshima: The United States Strategic Bombing Survey Archive, 1945, International Center of Photography, Purchase, with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2006

One rainy night eight years ago, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a man was taking his dog for a walk. On the curb, in front of a neighbor’s house, he spotted a pile of trash: old mattresses, cardboard boxes, a few broken lamps. Amidst the garbage he caught sight of a battered suitcase. He bent down, turned the case on its side and popped the clasps.

He was surprised to discover that the suitcase was full of black-and-white photographs. He was even more astonished by their subject matter: devastated buildings, twisted girders, broken bridges — snapshots from an annihilated city. He quickly closed the case and made his way back home.

At the kitchen table, he looked through the photographs again and confirmed what he had suspected. He was looking at something he had never seen before: the effects of the first use of the Atomic bomb. The man was looking at Hiroshima.

In a dispassionate and scientific style, the seven hundred and one photographs inside the suitcase catalogued a city seared by a new form of warfare. The origin and purpose of the photographs were a mystery to the man who found them that night. Now, over sixty years after the bombing of Hiroshima, their story can be told.

On August 6, 1945 at 8:15am, a silver B-29 airplane called the Enola Gay (named after the pilot Paul Tibbets’ mother) dropped a uranium bomb. Although exact numbers have never been agreed upon, one hundred and ten thousand civilians and twenty thousand military personnel are said to have died in Hiroshima, many of them instantly vaporized in the heat of the blast or burnt to death by the fireball which immediately swept through the city. Thousands more would die in the following months and years as a result of sickness caused by radiation.

Thirty-one days after the blast, a team of U.S. scientists flew over the city. “There was just one enormous, flat, rust-red scar, and no green or grey” Philip Morrison told The New Yorker in 1946, “because there were no roofs or vegetation left. I was pretty sure then that nothing I was going to see later would give me as much of a jolt.”

The world has very few photographs of what gave Morrison that unforgettable jolt. This is no accident. On September 18, 1945, just over a month after Japan had surrendered, the U.S. Government imposed a strict code of censorship on the newly defeated nation. It read, in part: “nothing shall be printed which might, directly or by inference, disturb public tranquility.”

Hiroshima, photographer unknown, 1945, courtesy International Center of Photography

The U.S. government was ostensibly wary of the emotions of grief and anger that could be unleashed in Japan as a result of the circulation of images of the destroyed city; it was probably just as concerned to keep the physical effects of its new and terrible weapon a secret. But this suppression of visual evidence served a third purpose: it helped, both in Japan and back home in America, to inhibit any questioning of the decision to use the bomb in the first place.

Since the invention of the camera in 1839, photography has marched in lockstep with death, especially death experienced in war. Starting with Alexander Gardener’s and Matthew Brady’s images of the American dead at Gettysburg, through Robert Capa’s visceral images of the Spanish Civil War (made more immediate as a result of the camera having been freed from the restraints of the tripod), images of death and destruction have served to document war’s brutality.

World War Two witnessed the maturation of the newly mobile photographic technology and its ability to capture images of devastation. Think of Dresden after it was firebombed or London during the Blitz or the concentration camps of Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz after their liberation and a series of distinctive images flash in memory: powerful and haunting pictures of war’s destructive impact.

But think of Hiroshima and what comes to mind is the mushroom cloud. Awesome in its way, with its bulbous head and towering stem, it is nonetheless an abstract image freed from human agency.

The lack of visual evidence of the atom bomb’s effect has helped us to forget its devastating impact. To see is to remember. Up until now, there have been few publicly available images of what happened on the ground when the first atomic bomb exploded. As a result, Hiroshima has become, as the novelist Mary McCarthy wrote in 1946, “a kind of hole in human history.”

These images go some way towards filling in this hole in our historical memory. Taken during the weeks following the bombing, they show a landscape that is eerily vacant and quiet, like ruins from a vanished civilization. But why were they taken and by whom? And how is it that they ended up in a pile of garbage?

The man who found the photographs, Don Levy (no relation) lives and works in Watertown, a working-class suburb of Boston. Levy owns and operates the Deluxe Town Diner. It’s almost two o’clock in the afternoon and the lunch crowd is thinning out. He sits down for the first time that day and tucks into a Reuben sandwich, fries and a glass of water. He is wearing brown corduroy trousers, a dark blue pullover and horn rimmed glasses. His grey hair is cut short, with a fashionable tuft sticking straight up on top.

“When I opened the suitcase that night I knew what I was looking at almost right away,” he says softly. “Some of the prints had 'Hiro', short for Hiroshima, written on their edges.” He takes a bite of the sandwich. “I felt pleased to have found them but at the same time I was saddened by what I was looking at.”

Hiroshima, photographer unknown, 1945, courtesy International Center of Photography

Daryl, Don’s second wife and his business partner, sits down with us. “The thing that affects me most about the photographs is what isn’t there. The absences, like the photograph of the chalk marks of the feet on the bridge. People know what we did at Hiroshima,” she says pensively, “but we just don’t want to think about it.”

Levy is a connoisseur of found objects (he’s a collector of vintage metal toys, commercial packaging and fabric sample books, among other things). Finding the photographs was the peak of his trash diving career. But the problem is that he didn’t know what to do with them. They were in terrible shape — some were stuck together, others had been hole-punched and stuffed into binders. One of his customers is an antiques dealer; she recommended putting them in archival sleeves. He did so and then he put them in storage while he concentrated on the more pressing demands of his business ventures and the necessities of putting his six children through school.

Years later, while talking to a customer, he mentioned the photographs. She suggested a gallery in New York. Levy contacted Andrew Roth and an exhibition of the photographs was mounted at Roth Horowitz in 2003. Although it received some critical notice, the show was virtually ignored by the public.

Levy finishes his sandwich and we decide to take a drive past the house where he found the photographs all those years ago. Strangely, he has never tried to discover who lived in the house or how the photographs ended up there.

We turn down a leafy, quiet street, full of wooden framed houses. We slow down to pass a house that sits up on a small rise. The robin-egg blue paint is peeling, the porch is sagging and the bushes haven’t been trimmed. “I found the photos right there,” he says, pointing discreetly to an ordinary cul-de-sac at the side of the house.

Next, we visit the local Town Hall where we look up the names of all the residents who lived in the house, starting when it was last sold in 2000 and going back to the 1950s.

With the list in hand, we return to the diner. We thread our way through the bustling kitchen and descend some rickety steps to the cluttered basement room that serves as his office. In front of his computer, we Google the names. We quickly come up with a local phone number for the man who sold the house in 2000, just around the time that the photographs were found.

The voice on the other end of the line shakes with shock. “The photographs? Of Hiroshima? You have them? I thought they were in my basement! How do you get them?”

After an explanation, the voice is still quaking with disbelief. “This is wild! I must have thrown them out by accident when I was moving stuff out. I never would have purposefully gotten rid of those photographs. I’ve been carrying them around with me since 1972!”

The voice eventually calms down. “Look. I think there might even be more of them. I’m sure of it. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”

A few minutes later the phone rings. “Yes, there are more. I’ll come by the diner in an hour and show them to you.”

Six hours later an athletic man in his early 50s, with a salt and pepper goatee, enters the diner carrying two large pieces of cardboard. The pieces of cardboard are taped together with black electrical tape. Marc Levitt pulls at the tape and spreads open the pieces of cardboard. A musty smell of mold and damp drifts up from thirty 20x10 black and white prints, some of which are marked “Top Secret” and “Restricted.” They are aerial reconnaissance photos, clearly labeled Hiroshima, taken of the city before it was bombed.

A customer walks by the booth. He stops and does a double take. “Hey, guys whaddya got there?” We explain. “Wow! The original Ground Zero,” he says and walks on.

Levitt can’t get over the fact that Levy rescued the photographs, that they no longer belong to him. He had bought the house in 1983, lived in it for a number of years with his wife, and then rented it out. In 2000 he sold. Either he left the suitcase in the basement and the new owners had thrown it out, or he had inadvertently put it out on the street while he was clearing out his effects.

“I got the photos off a friend in the early 1970s, when I was living near New York,” says Levitt. “We had just graduated from college, and my friend was working as a house painter. I think he found them when he was working on a job. I don’t really remember. Anyway they were lying around. I was haunted by them, kept looking at them. Something about them overwhelmed me.”

He pauses. “This is hard for me to talk about.”

Does he want a cup of coffee, a slice of pie? He declines with a wave of his hand, scratches his head, tries again.

“We see death and disaster all over TV but these photographs are different, maybe because they are physical objects. They don’t represent the horror, exactly, because there are no bodies. They’re clinical. But the power of them is really intense. Why is that? I think it’s because I can’t help but place myself behind the lens. What was that guy feeling when he took the photos? He was clicking and whirling, clicking and whirling. These photographs seem real, connected to the event. They have a power in them. I never would have thrown away that suitcase on purpose.”

He sweeps the aerial photos back up into their cardboard housing. As he heads for the door, Levitt promises to try reaching his friend, with whom he hasn’t been in contact for over twenty-five years, to see if he can learn anything more.

Hiroshima, photographer unknown, 1945, courtesy International Center of Photography

Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 14, 1945. The next day, Emperor Hirohito, in a dramatic break with tradition, took to the radio for the first time to announce defeat. Speaking in formalized phrases, he urged his subjects to “endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable.” The enemy had “for the first time used cruel bombs to kill and maim…and the heavy casualties are beyond measure.”

On the same day, President Truman commissioned the United States Strategic Bombing Survey for the Pacific Theatre of War, whose mission was, in part, to quantify that which Hirohito believed was immeasurable. Their goal was to “measure as precisely as possible the exact effects of the two bombs — in other words, to put calipers on the problem so that people back home would have a factual frame of reference within which to draw conclusions about the bomb’s capacities as well as its limitations,” as Paul Nitze, the Vice Chairman and the de facto author of the Survey, would later recall.

As part of the over-all report, a special team called the Physical Damage Division was assembled. Drawn from the ranks of the Army, Navy and civilian population it was made up of one hundred and fifty men, including engineers, ordnance experts, interpreters, photographers and draftsmen. According to the U.S. War Department’s own history, now declassified, this division had “the most important and certainly the most spectacular task” of the Survey.

During late October and through November 1945, the members of the Physical Damage Division were billeted on board a converted battleship destroyer named the Sims, which floated off the coast of Japan. Every morning they would clamber aboard landing craft, sail to the mainland and then drive forty miles to Hiroshima, where they had set up headquarters on the second floor of a partially destroyed bank. They would then fan out across the city, working at their task of tracing blast paths, calibrating bomb damage and analyzing the physical destruction of the city.

It could be grim going. As late as November, members of the team still stumbled across human skeletons that not yet been cremated. “The cities of Japan in those dark autumn days were a manifestation of unspeakable gloom,” remembered John Kenneth Galbraith, who was a member of the economic section of the U.S. Bombing Survey. “…only ashes and gaunt, free standing chimneys.”

By examining these remaining physical traces — the chimneys, walls and re-enforced concrete structures that survived — the Physical Damage Division hoped to explain the blast’s effect: how metal and concrete and wood reacted to the intense pressure and heat of the atomic bomb. They noted the manner in which the awesome downward thrust “dished” roofs and how the blast wave distorted and twisted entire structures.

In order to document their findings, members of the team took photographs. These are the photographs that, via their circuitous route, ended up in the trash on a street in Massachusetts and some of which are published here. A few of these images were included in a special sub section of the Survey, called The Effects of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was published by the U.S. Government in a limited edition in 1946.

These photographs are significant not only for their visual message but also for their very existence as a group, for their cohesive documentation of an event of which we have few other still images.

Although the images taken by the Physical Damage Division don’t depict the human suffering of the atomic bomb they do provide a vital function. They say: this is what we, mankind, are capable of unleashing upon each other. Like ruins, they refer back into time (this is what we have done, are capable of doing) while simultaneously warning of a future we have not yet encountered (they give substance to our terror of the use of another nuclear weapon).

They are a contribution to what Robert Jay Lifton has called the “imagery of extinction,” images that keep alive in our imagination the consequences of another mass holocaust and, in so doing help, however tenuously, to keep us alive as well.

A week after meeting Levitt at the Deluxe Town Diner in Watertown, he is back on the phone. “I spoke with my friend last night,” he says breathlessly. “He remembered working on a house painting job where there had been a fire and the family was getting rid of stuff. He spotted a wooden box with Japanese writing on it. And he remembered bringing the box home, to the house we were sharing at the time. Inside the box were the photographs. He still has the box and I guess I got the photographs.”

Another week passes and an email arrives with jpgs of a wooden box. Levitt’s friend, Harlan Miller, has photographed it sitting on his kitchen table: the box is sturdy looking, more like a small trunk, with a heavy metal clasp and two rows of Japanese writing on it. On the front of the box, spelled out clearly, is the name Lt. Robert L. Corsbie. A check of through the War Department’s written history reveals that Corsbie was a Navy officer and a member of Physical Damage Division. He was stationed on board the Sims and was in Hiroshima from early October through the end of November.

Box in which the photographs were found

That a digital photograph of wooden box sitting on a kitchen table — looking for all the world like just another banal image on eBay — should be the proof that establishes these photographs with the work of the Strategic Bombing Survey seems oddly appropriate. It’s tempting to see the fate of these photographs as something close to metaphor. Twice abandoned, twice rescued; the photographs, like Hiroshima itself, is a subject we would prefer to discard but can’t. As one of the concluding acts of the last “good war” the atomic bombing of Hiroshima initiated a more morally ambiguous era, one of increased uncertainty and fear. With the looming threat of the use of another nuclear bomb in our collective future, it’s a landscape through which we are still wandering.

Adam Levy is a filmmaker and writer. He recently produced "Selling the Sixties," a BBC documentary about consumerism, advertising and culture of the early 1960s.

This is a longer version of an article that first appeared in the Guardian Weekend Magazine on July 16, 2005. All images used with kind permission from the International Center of Photography: "Hiroshima: The United States Strategic Bombing Survey Archive, International Center of Pho

The Iraq Civilian Death Toll

Here's an excellent Mother Jones article on how Johns Hopkins personnel did their famous study of Iraqi civilian war casualties, how the method began, how it has been used in the past, and why the results suddenly became controversial with respect to the Iraq war when they'd been used and accepted in the Congo, Sudan, Kosovo and elsewhere. It's the best thing I've seen on the topic. Have a read.

The Iraq Math War

Commentary: Why the CDC and the Pentagon sought to discredit the first scientific tally of Iraq's civilian death toll.

By Robin Mejia



in early 1999, Les Roberts traveled to Bukavu, a city of more than 200,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (drc). The country's brutal civil war was in full swing, and a nearby region, Katana, had been largely cut off from the outside world for nearly a year. Roberts, a former Centers for Disease Control (cdc) epidemiologist who'd taken over as director of health policy for the International Rescue Committee, wanted to see how the locals were faring.

Every morning for weeks, Roberts and his team rode into the jungle. After finding a spot they'd selected randomly on a map, they approached the people living in the area and asked them about recent deaths in their households. When Roberts finally crunched the numbers, he determined that the mortality rate in Katana was two and a half times the peacetime rate. The next year, using a similar approach, he concluded that the war's overall death toll in eastern drc at the time wasn't 50,000, as widely reported, but a staggering 1.7 million.

Roberts' results helped boost the reputation of conflict epidemiology, a fledgling discipline that applies the tools of public health research to the surprisingly difficult question of how many civilians die in war zones. Historically, soldiers and journalists have been the main sources of real-time casualty estimates, leaving the truth somewhere between propaganda and a best guess. Researchers are still revising death tolls for wars that ended decades ago; estimates of civilian deaths in Vietnam even now range from 500,000 to 2 million or more. The methods Roberts helped pioneer aimed to end some of that uncertainty.

Advocates and policymakers quickly discovered the power of scientifically valid mortality studies to spur leaders into action. After Roberts presented his Congo data on Capitol Hill in 2001, US aid to the country jumped tenfold. A cdc survey of mortality rates in Kosovo was used as evidence in Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trials at The Hague. Multiple such surveys in Darfur contributed to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's decision to condemn the Sudanese government for facilitating genocide. And Roberts' 2001 estimate of deaths during Sierra Leone's civil war has been widely accepted.

But when Roberts took on the challenge of tracking civilian casualties in Iraq, he was quickly reminded that, as with the use of sampling in the US census, statistical methodology can become highly politicized. He found his Iraq work misunderstood, misrepresented, even written off as propaganda. Lifting the fog of war, Roberts discovered, isn't a question of finding the most accurate number, but one people are willing to accept.

in september 2004, Roberts, then at Johns Hopkins University, arrived in Baghdad to supervise a nationwide mortality survey in collaboration with Gilbert Burnham, codirector of the university's Center for Refugee and Disaster Response. At first Roberts accompanied the Iraqi physicians who were conducting the interviews. But after police detained two of them, Roberts and the doctors decided he should stay behind. "They all realized that being with an American was something radioactive," he says.

So while Roberts sat in his hotel room, his research teams fanned out across the country, following the approach he had used in the Congo five years earlier. The technique, known as a two-stage cluster survey, works much like an opinion poll in which interviews with a random sampling of people are extrapolated to reflect the views of an entire population. Roberts' teams surveyed 990 households located near 33 randomly selected spots, more than the minimum number of "clusters" epidemiologists consider necessary to get an accurate picture of what's going on in a country.

Upon returning home, he and Burnham analyzed the data. They were floored: In the 18 months after the American invasion, the numbers suggested, roughly 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war, 60 percent of them violently. That dwarfed the figure from the widely cited website Iraq Body Count, which had tallied no more than 19,061 deaths by scouring press reports and official documents. The Iraqi government's numbers were also much lower. The researchers sent their study to the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, which published it in October 2004.

The unexpectedly large death toll elicited skepticism, and questions about the methodology. The study had a wide "confidence interval" of 8,000 to 194,000. "This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board," scoffed Slate military writer Fred Kaplan.

But leading epidemiologists and statisticians insist the study is valid. A confidence interval is structured like a bell curve, with the numbers in the bulging middle far more likely to be accurate than those at the tapering ends. It was a larger interval than Roberts and Burnham had hoped for—a consequence of their sample size and the uneven distribution of violence in Iraq. That didn't render their estimate meaningless, however, just easy to dismiss. "I expected to be criticized," says Roberts, who has since joined the public health faculty at Columbia University. "I was more struck by the lack of press coverage."

He didn't help matters by telling reporters he'd opposed the invasion, leading the AP to suggest that the study's timing was politically motivated. Critics, meanwhile, have questioned Roberts' decision, in the year following the Lancet article, to launch a short-lived congressional run in upstate New York as a pro-science, anti-war Democrat. Roberts resents the notion that scientists should stay out of politics. "Everyone who writes about public health problems wants them solved," he says. "No one who writes about measles is neutral."

Roberts' politics don't bother John Tirman, who runs the Center for International Studies at mit. "I thought it explained as few other things had the origins of the insurgency," he says of the study. "In a country like Iraq where there are very strong kinship networks, where if someone is attacked and killed it obligates a very large number of men to defend the community, this large scale of violence suggested that there were a large number of Iraqis that were essentially being drawn into the insurgency by the way the invasion and occupation was conducted."

Tirman (who—full disclosure—served as a board member for Mother Jones' parent foundation during the 1990s) helped secure funding through mit for a second, larger survey. In the spring and summer of 2006, the team's researchers canvassed the country yet again, visiting more than 1,800 households clustered around 47 sites. As of that July, Roberts and Burnham would later estimate, the war had claimed about 655,000 Iraqi lives, suggesting that about 1 in 7 Iraqi families had lost someone because of the ongoing violence. As in the first study, there was a wide confidence interval—plus or minus about 275,000 deaths. But even the low end of the range suggested a death toll far beyond anything previously reported.

That October, after the new findings appeared in The Lancet, the critics pounced, again honing in on what they called fuzzy math. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed Steven E. Moore, a pollster and former adviser to Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer, declared, "I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points."

"That's wrong," says Jennifer Leaning, a professor at Harvard University's School of Public Health. "You can sample very large populations with 33 clusters." Other epidemiologists I contacted agreed.

But there were some valid critiques: By their own admission, Roberts and Burnham had to rely on outdated population estimates to set up the Iraq study, which overlooked war-induced migration as a result. Michael Spagat, an economist at the University of London, argued that the way the interviewers chose their starting points­—they'd abandoned the handheld gps devices used in the first study, deeming them a security risk—would have led them to homes near main thoroughfares, where ied explosions would be more common. And because the lead authors weren't on hand to monitor the second survey, Spagat and others have suggested that the interviewers simply lied. (That the new results agreed with the team's earlier findings for the same period suggests that the doctors did their job properly.)

In any case, such problems are common in war zones, according to nearly a dozen leading survey statisticians and epidemiologists I spoke with. "Iraq is not an ideal condition in which to conduct a survey, so to expect them to do the same things that you would do in a survey in the United States is really not reasonable," says David Marker, a senior statistician with the research corporation Westat. Even if the outdated population data led the researchers to a 20 percent overestimate, Marker explains, the revised death toll would still be at least a couple hundred thousand. "These methodological concerns don't change the basic message."

The White House struck back with its own basic message: The study was bunk. Never mind that Roberts and Burnham had used methods similar to those employed for the Kosovo survey and others approvingly cited by the Bush administration. With the notable exception of This American Life producer Alex Blumberg, most reporters dutifully slapped Roberts' research with the "controversial" label. And when asked about the study directly, President Bush declared that it had been "pretty well discredited."

"By whom? By him and his political staff?" snaps Bradley Woodruff, who retired last year from his job as a senior cdc epidemiologist. Woodruff has conducted mortality surveys himself, and considers Roberts' research solid. But when cbs's 60 Minutes sought to interview Woodruff about the Lancet study in 2007, the cdc wouldn't allow it. And when Rep. Dennis Kucinich invited Woodruff to Washington to discuss the study, his bosses nixed that, too. "I never had this kind of censorship under previous administrations," he says.

more than two years later, the Iraq study remains mired in controversy. But other recent findings suggest that Roberts and Burnham were on the right track. In the summer of 2006, the World Health Organization conducted a large family health survey along with Iraq's Ministry of Health, interviewing about five times as many people as Roberts and Burnham had, and in a more distributed fashion. In August, Mohamed Ali, a who statistician, reported his preliminary results to colleagues at a Denver statistics conference: Nearly 397,000 Iraqis had died because of the war as of July 2006.

That number falls at the low end of Roberts and Burnham's confidence interval, which ranges from roughly 393,000 to 943,000. But while epidemiologists and statisticians are still pondering questions raised by differences between the two surveys, there's no longer much doubt among them that Iraq's civilian casualties number in the hundreds of thousands.

This grim statistic continues to elude most Americans. According to a February 2007 AP poll, Americans' median estimate of the number of Iraqis killed since the invasion was just 9,890. And while the Pentagon has presented limited estimates of civilian casualties, it has yet to release any numbers for the total toll since the invasion.

Roberts had set out to provide a legitimate number that might be used to inform public policy. For now, at least, that policy has been to keep the truth buried in academic journals—and beneath the sands of Iraq.

Correction appended: An earlier version of this story inaccurately stated that the Iraq Body Count had tallied no more than 23,000 deaths. We had estimated this figure using their published data, and did not obtain the more precise figure of 19,061 until after press time.

Robin Mejia has written for Science and Wired.

Photo: Andrew Hetherington

Exponentnial Growth and the Economy

Dr. Albert Bartlett, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder explains the consequences of exponential growth. This is a stunning lecture which starts slowly and then turns riveting. You won't see growth in the same light ever again. Have a look.

Victory Speech

Now this is a victory speech. I've heard a few, but this one is priceless. Obama has outdone himself with this. I'm sure his superb speech writers helped. Anyway, if you haven't seen it (or would like to see it again), here it is. Have a look.

How About Real Election Protections

As we race toward electronic voting that cannot be verified, and can be easily hacked, let's think about how to make these technologies work for us. The solution offered here only works if the voter verifies his receipt--which seems a reasonable assumption. As we move forward, we need to assure the security of the vote. Going back to paper ballots with bipartisan observers seems a fine outcome, but this is a high tech alternative.

If Obama Wins....

Here's a video that records comments from McCain supporters describing what they think will happen if Obama wins. These comments are simply amazing. One wonders what universe some of these folks live in. Hava a look.

WHAT IF OBAMA WINS