Expanded offshore drilling means more risk of spills. And just as the economy begins to recover, families are losing more of their disposable income to rising gas prices. But hey, not everyone’s complaining!

Exxon Mobil said Thursday its quarterly profit increased 38 percent as oil prices rose in the first three months of the year.

The company reported a profit of $6.3 billion, or $1.33 a share, in the first three months of the year. […]

Exxon’s profit relied heavily on its exploration and production operation. Oil prices surged over the last 12 months, jumping from a low of $33 a barrel in the first quarter of 2009 to more than $80 a barrel this year.

It’s about time Exxon Mobil’s profits got back on track. After all, it’s been a whole 16 months since it posted the biggest profit of the history of the planet. Good to see them back on their feet!

We are now looking back 35 years.  Tomorrow, April 30, is the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, the images in our mind stark.  The evacuations by helicopter, as shown above.   And this, the image of those helicopters, like one might say of the mission in country, being abandoned, pushed overboard or ditched in the ocean:  

Tomorrow is the anniversary, of these events, of April 30, 1975.    

But today is also an anniversary:

on this day the last of our Marines (for I was a Marine, and once one, always one), were killed in Vietnam.  Records say that four Marines died in country this day, Darwin Judge of Marshalltown, IA; Charles McMahon, Jr. of Woburn, MA; William Nystul of Coronado, CA; and Michael Shea of El Paso, Tx.  !2 of the civilians we were evacuating also died.

Perhaps tomorrow, because that is the official’end’ of the U S endeavor in South Vietnam, there will be massive coverage.  There should be.  

We will see the panic in those Vietnamese being left behind.  

At one point during the evacuation Pres. Ford ordered the military to take out no more Vietnamese, because time was running short, Saigon was being overrun, the men and equipment was being taxed.   South Vietnamese flew their own helicopters out to the fleet but were not allowed to land, so they ditched with the crews jumping out as the birds ditched in water.

Now we are engaged in two ongoing conflicts overseas.  The total deaths of the two conflicts does not yet approach the American losses of Vietnam.  The length of the conflicts is still less than the period from when the Marines landed in Danang in 1965 to the final ignominious withdrawal.  We still do not know the cost of our endeavors in lives of people lost and broken.

The physical death toll is less – our skill at saving lives has improved, and we are not fighting a military organized by a national state.  The cost in broken lives may be greater, given figures of as many as 1 in 5 returning suffering from PTSD and worse.  

Neither conflict is yet completed, nor do we necessarily see a similar withdrawal under fire:  there is no organized resistance in Iraq on a scale to offer such a threat, and as far as we know the Taliban lacks the capacity (armor, for example), to roll into a major city and force our withdrawal.  

And yet, it seems as if we may have learned the wrong lessons.   We are much more efficient at killing and destruction.  Yet in the process we have not learned how to avoid “collateral damage” of property and deaths of civilians.  In Vietnam we doubled down and doubled down again, and it was only when Westmoreland wanted yet another large increase in troops that Johnson finally drew the line.  Yet the war went on for the better part of another decade.  Yes, the peak year for loss of American troops was 1968, with 16,592 lost.   Yet consider these figures:

1969  11,616

1970   6,081

1971   2,357

In 1972, the death toll finally dropped below 1,000, for the first time since 1964.  We would continue to account for deaths even after we left Vietnam, as we discovered remains of those listed as missing.

The toll of a war is always more than the lives of American servicemen, as important as those are.  Those lives also include the devastation on the families they left behind.  

There are deaths of those who fought on “our side” –  in Iraq and Afghanistan we have good figures for our partners in the “Coalition of the Willing” and the NATO forces respectively.  We rarely have good figures for those we fight, because the numbers of those killed are never merely enemy combatants, given that messy “collateral damage.”  And when we do count, it seems somehow obscene, that is, we seem to brag about how many we have killed, the phenomenon of body counts . . .

One result of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is that there are still mines left from that war that kill and maim.  Even if a minefield is marked, it represents a continuation of the war, a limiting of the freedom of movement of those who live near that field, if it is marked.  And if it is not, the terror that ensues when someone stumbles upon it.

The damage of the wars continue with those effected long after its end by the weaponry and other means used – think of those from Vietnam damaged by Agent Orange, and in more recent conflicts from depleted uranium.  

I make no predictions about how – or if – our current endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan will end.  Perhaps we will not have images like those so ingrained in the memories of those of us who lived through those times –  Vietnam was the televised war.   The military might try to censor images now, but the ability of handheld devices to record video as well as still photography probably means that images will eventually come out, as we discovered with Abu Ghraib.

No predictions, but a caution.   Winners get to write history.  We may look back at a particular war and call it good, but not be willing to examine the bad that it did, including atrocities by our own troops.  My Lai is not the only exemplar of American atrocities in wartime.  

War is hell.  And Robert E. Lee was right with his remarks at Marye’s Heights during the battle of Fredericksburg:  It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it.

Thirty Five years have passed.  The images still remain.  The damage to our national image still lingers.  And the harm that was done by our prosecution of that war may never go away, not for those who experienced it.  Some who fought it still seek to justify –  as they must, because how else can they justify their sacrifices, or the death and destruction they caused?

Should not we as a nation be willing to look back and not limit ourselves in what we learn?

Those images –  helicopters on roofs, people pushing against embassy gates desperate to be evacuated, helicopters pushed over board or ditched in the sea. . . .

Have we really learned any lessons?   I wonder . . . . .

And I hope that we never experience anything like that again, as I also hope that we find a way not to be engaged in ongoing warfare, even as I acknowledge that there are times and places where we must intervene with force, even deadly force, to preserve our own humanity.  

A monk I greatly admired who was on Mount Athos in Greece during WW II once wrote of his thoughts in the early 1940s –  he prayed that the less evil side might win.  I have written about this before.  To his words I add these –  I pray that when we do engage, we not be in the position of being the more evil side, and that the harm that is done be the least necessary to prevent greater evil from prevailing.

Peace.

I received this information in an email from Sen. Jim Webb’s office: Sen. Webb plans to reintroduce his Taxpayer Fairness Act as an amendment to the financial reform bill, S. 3217, when it comes up for debate.

“During this debate on financial regulation, nothing seems more fair or appropriate than to make the American taxpayers whole after they infused our financial markets with capital in 2008 and saw them to recovery,” said Webb.

Sen. Webb and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA)  first introduced their idea of a one-time tax on bonuses as an amendment to the bill passed in March which extended certain tax provisions. The amendment stated that there should be a one-time windfall tax on bonuses paid in 2010 to executives of financial institutions that received $5 billion or more from the TARP program.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the amendment would raise at least $3.5 billion. The proposal would assess a 50 percent tax this tax year on bonuses above $400,000. Any money raised will be returned to the Treasury to reduce the budget deficit. Sen. Webb stated that he does not favor any sort of recurring tax on bonuses for executives in the financial sector.

“Our political leaders should have the fortitude to require that excessive bonuses from these companies be repaid to the American people,” Sen. Webb said. “It is a targeted, sensible approach to ensure that the taxpayers who made possible the success of the biggest financial institutions benefit from that success – not just the executives of those institutions.”

Jim Webb and Barbara Boxer have contended that the TARP program, along with actions by the Federal Reserve, mitigated risks to the largest banks and financial houses. “These executives got lucky, to the exact degree that our middle-class taxpayers got the shaft,” Sen. Webb said.

There are even financial analysts who agree with the Boxer-Webb amendment. Sen. Webb quoted Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, who said in November of 2009: “Public finances will be devastated for decades: taxes will be higher and public spending lower.  Meanwhile, bankers are about to reap huge rewards. This damages the legitimacy of the market economy…’Windfall’ support should be matched by windfall taxes.”

I say “Amen” to that. However, I believe this amendment, which should pass with bipartisan support, may well fall short of 51 votes. We can expect the 41 Republicans to vote against it. We can add in some of the conservative Democrats. It’s still worth the effort, though.

(Update: The GOP must be doing some polling that shows just how dumb their refusal to allow financial reform to come up for debate actually is. They now have said they will drop their “filibuster” against S. 3217.)

How cathartic to listen to the alpha wolves of Wall Street explain themselves to their servants in Congress. How amusing to watch those servants nip at the heels of their disdainful masters. It is a masters class in gingerly executed subservience-on-a-leash. It is a masters class in bilking.

Bilking, it would seem, the universe, of which the wolves styled themselves The Masters.  Who were the bilkees? Begin with the immediate clients of the wolves, their fellow big investor-firms domestic and foreign,  who likewise imagined themselves to be super-experts in investing, their sophistication so far above the common herd, the sheep, that only they were capable of appreciating the clever, complicated artistry of the instruments peddled to them by the likes of Goldman Sachs, that pinnacle of pinnacles. Next came the customers of the salesmen of those firms, who can be called the running dogs of Wall Street that pretended to be wolves but were a tier or two (or three) down, in among the pack in offices around the globe, who sold these instruments to purchasers like municipal school boards, pension and retirement funds, local governments world-wide, and to individuals everywhere

Over and over we are told these clever, complicated instruments, called “derivatives,” are much too clever and complicated for us, the commoners to understand, but they are somehow necessary to sustain the free flow of capital required to grease the economic mechanism we call capitalism, and clumsy governments should never meddle with that free flow because such meddling (i.e., regulation) would throw sand in the gears of the mechanism and ruin everything, and we’d all be very sorry.

Baloney.

Without getting into the weeds about describing the many varieties of derivatives, how they were formed by clumping together mortgages, securitizing these clumps, slicing them into different categories called tranches, repackaging and selling them as triple-A rated, and without following the tortuous creation of instruments which were nothing more than bets on whether these new securities would rise or fall or go belly-up, all we really need to know is that the result was to create a gigantic casino which had nothing at all to do with encouraging the free flow of capital.  

What it did do was to create a paper world economy designed by algorithms on computers paying utterly incredible fees and commissions for those selling the instruments and, for buyers, what seemed to be utterly incredible rates of return, especially from AAA-rated securities. Somehow, the inevitable downside never quite was made as clear as the upside, and the total “value” of these derivatives grew beyond the GDP of the entire world economy, according to some estimates, but really, who could tell? Besides, the fees and bonuses piled up in the coffers of Wall Street and the mansions at The Hamptons as the CEO’s of the investment firms kept pushing the product, the derivatives, harder and harder on the sheep because, frankly, they lusted after the fabulous fees.

Risk-rating? Due diligence?  Ha, if you have to ask you can’t afford it. Besides, say the various heads of various Wall Street packs, (paraphrased) “we are all wolves here together, that is, we are all sophisticated smartasses who understood what we were selling, and they knew what they were buying.” The only fault the wolves could find in themselves was that they were maybe “too smart,”according to an analysis by Matt Taibbi of The Guardian(http://www.alternet.org/story/146611). As for the sheep down below, well, caveat emptor.

Whence came this lunacy (what else can you call it when the system which was, basically, designed from the getgo to provide capital to start or improve businesses enhancing the economy, but turned itself into a self-reflecting whirlpool churning money around and around, rewarding the inside churners handsomely, all without creating any actual product of useful value)? Taibbi says it all began with the so-called “objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous (Russian) emigre novelist Ayn Rand.” He is referring to the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, whose main premise somehow entered the American psyche and endured. That premise, says Taibbi, is:

“the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (ie, the rich) and ‘parasites’ who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force.”

Government as such had no “natural” role in society.

Sound familiar? Today’s Tea Baggers (unknowingly) recite the catechism of Rand every day. The catechism embedded itself politically during Reagan’s (“Greed is Good”) reign, and Alan Greenspan literally worshiped at Ayn’s knees, eventually putting her theses into practice as head of the Federal Reserve when he secured passage of the Commodity Futures Act in 2000 which prevented serious regulation of Wall Street, especially of derivatives.  

I contend that Rand’s ideas melded seamlessly with those of economist Milton Friedman, whose “Free Market capitalism” theory dominates the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and America’s two political parties, creating in the process “globalization” and what third world countries regard as the modern form of Western colonialism through finance.  What we have today, IMO, is the secular religion of Free Market Capitalism that has sanctified greed and demands the removal of all regulation and accountability, and, in fact, the subordination of government to the service of modern global corporations. To this end, Wall Street and corporations pour money into the pockets and PACs of elected officials, changing their customary donations to Republicans over to Democrats after Obama’s election, and now back to Republicans when Democrats did not prove biddable enough.

It is in this ambience of free-wheeling personal greed that Goldman Sachs operates, so when John Paulson, hedge fund financier, asked them to create a package of “synthetic derivatives” based on mortgages so he could bet against the mortgage market by shorting the package, GS was happy to oblige. GS would “sell the deal to suckers who would be told it was a good bet for a long investment.” The SEC says Goldman Sachs failed to disclose to the suckers, which happened to be European banks, that the entire deal was deliberately set up so the “vulture betting against them” could make money when their purchase tanked and they lost money. Pretty much the same thing happened in the “Greece deal,” when GS used swaps to help the country to mask its precarious finances, then immediately bet against Greece by shorting Greece’s debt (as Paulson shorted the mortgage package).

Both these deals were founded on bilking the suckers… deliberately, to make money by the bushel.

If you think these deals smell to high heaven, you should understand that no disciple of Ayn Rand, no acolyte of Milton Friedman, agrees. Indeed, every Wall Streeter, most of the bought-and-paid-for Senators, most top Republicans, the Tea Partyers, and a raft of pundits and economists all think (more or less privately) that Goldman Sachs deserve kudos for such clever schemes to enhance their own self-interest, which everyone equates with making as big a profit as possible. Remember, GS head Lloyd Blankfein told The Times that he was “doing God’s work.” He believes it. It is not that his greed overwhelmed his honesty or his religious compunctions. Greed is his religion. This religion forgives any amount of shady dealing necessary to bilk (swindle) the less clever. Short-term profits trump long-term planning every time. “If I don’t do it, I am a fool, and some one else will do it first, probably to me.”

Taibbi says the SEC suit against Goldman Sachs crystalizes an American debate between the jungle theories of Ayn Rand and, well, the whole idea of civilization.