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Skipping the Drive

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:04:13 GMT

The rapid spike in energy prices has led politicians, urban theorists and pundits to pontificate about how Americans will be living and working in new ways. A favorite story line is that Americans will start trading in their suburban homes, move back to the city centers and opt to change everything they have wanted for a half-century --- from big backyards to quiet streets to privacy --- to live a more carbon-lite urban lifestyle.

Yet, there has been little talk about what could be the best way for families and individuals to cut energy use: telecommuting. For more than a decade, the number of telecommuters, both full-time and part-time, has been growing rapidly, gaining more market share than any other form of transportation.

This seems certain to continue with the proliferation of broad-band technology -- as well as the effect of high gas prices. By 2006, the expansion of home-based work doubled twice as quickly as in the previous decade, and now is close to nine million, according to the National Highway Travel Survey of the Federal Highway Assn.

Nationwide, according to the Gartner Group, in 2007 13 million workers telecommuted at least one day a week, a 16 percent leap from 2004. That number was expected to reach 14 million this year. In addition, more than 22 million individuals, according to Forrester Research, now run businesses from home.

Last year’s skyrocketing energy prices appears to have pushed employers in this direction. A CDW survey of private sector employers this year found that 76 percent now provide technical support for remote workers, up 27 percent from a year earlier. Federal IT support, however, has lagged at roughly 58 percent.

In some regions, like the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, as many as one in 10 workers are part-time telecommuters. In the Greater Washington Area, more than 450,000 employees telecommuted at least one day a week in 2007, 42.5 percent more than in 2004, according to a survey by Commuter Connections, a regional network of transportation organizations coordinated by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The percentage of employees who telework surged to 19 percent from 13 percent during that time period.

Not surprisingly, home offices, particularly in upscale homes, have become a necessity for many buyers -- demanded ahead of security systems. A recent study by Rockbridge Associates suggests that more than one-quarter of the U.S. workforce could eventually participate full- or part-time in this new work pattern.

The potential energy savings --- particularly in terms of vehicle miles traveled --- could be enormous. Telecommuters naturally drive less, not only to work but for the numerous stops to and from work. According to the 2005/2006 National Technology Readiness Survey (NTRS), the United States could save about 1.35 billion gallons of fuel if everyone who was able to telecommute did so just 1.6 days per week. That calculation is based on a driving average of 20 miles per day, getting 21 miles per gallon.

A more recent study by Sun Microsytems, which uses telecommuting extensively, found that, by eliminating commuting half the week, an employee saves 5,400 kilowatt hours --- even accounting for home office use. They also can save some $1,700 a year in gasoline and wear and tear.

Related technologies, like teleconferencing, according to another survey, could save another 200 million tons of jet fuel, if 10 percent of air travel were reduced over the next 10 years. There are other signs of a shift to substitute the web for the road -- some college on-line classes report a 50 percent to 100 percent boost in enrollment over last year.

In comparison, the talk of a huge “surge” in transit riders as a result of rising gas prices, represents a welcome, but relatively minor, trend, since transit still accounts for under 1.5 percent of all travel. The vast majority --- perhaps as much as 98 percent ---- of the recent reduction in gas consumption came as a result of people simply reducing their driving, not switching to the rails.

Some of this is structural. Most metropolitan regions are simply not set up for efficient public transit; work patterns are increasingly dispersed as opposed to centralized. As a result, the ranks of telecommuters are greater in every metropolitan area in the country outside of the New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston areas.

This trend is particularly marked in growing regions in the South and West. In Portland, the mecca for light rail, there are nine telecommuters for every rail commuter. In 2008 Nustats survey, covering Austin, Dallas-Ft. Worth and El Paso telecommuting (at 12 percent) was cited four times as much as using public transit to reduce gas consumption.

Perhaps even more important, telecommuting and related technologies represent a potential sea change for the future shape of families and communities. Already women are well-represented among telecommuters, in part so they can stay home with their children. In a world with fewer permanent employees and longer hours, telecommuting could help mothers stay in the workplace even while rearing children. A growing number of fathers are also looking to work at home to participate in child-rearing.

In many ways, this represents a return to patterns that existed before the Industrial Revolution. In pre-industrial societies, members frequently worked at home or walked to work. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, with its need for mass standardization -- demanding the efficacy of office and factory. Marx, the ultimate chronicler and prophet of the Industrial age, saw how “agglomeration in one shop” was “necessary” for human progress.

Writing a century later, Alvin Toffler foresaw how the rise of the “electronic cottage” would return work to the home -- where it had been before. As he put it, “social and technological forces are converging to change the locus of work” --- back to the home, neighborhood and village. This is part of what Toffler envisioned in his “Third Wave” society, a breaking away from the “behavioral code” of “second wave” industrialism, where work and family were segregated

These trends will continue as economic relations between business firms become less constrained by proximity. Information inputs can come from any source, and increasingly, any place. Of course, there will be serious constraints to this development. Perhaps, most important, will be the reluctance of managers ---both private and public --- to allow this dispersed work

There are also interests, like urban office developers and real estate developers, who might find these trends troubling. Many new urbanists and environmentalists, who one would think would favor this energy-saving trend, tend to ignore or downplay the digital frontier -- preferring a return to the dense, transit-dependent patterns common a century ago.

Even telecommunications firms, which logically should be pushing this shift, seem unable to tailor their products for home-based work, according to a recent Forrester Research study. Morley Winograd, a former AT&T executive, says these companies have persisted in separating their “consumer and business customers.” As a result, they have been slow to abandon what he calls “the obsolete gene” in their corporate DNA, and target the home-based business

Yet in the future, Winograd, now executive director of the Institute for Communication Technology Management at USC's Marshall School of Business, says that developers, corporate executives and, presumably, telecommunications companies will be forced to focus more on this growing segment.

Indeed, new suburban developments, like Ladera Ranch in Orange County, have incorporated such mixed usage into their floor plans -- with separate entrances for business clients. Suburban historian Tom Martinson, believes that the Ladera plan will “be in the history books in 20 years” because it anticipates “an incredible change in the way we live and work.

Many leading companies also see the potential of full-time and part-time telecommuting. Particularly amenable to this trend are leading technology and business-service firms. At IBM, for example, as much as 40 percent of its workforce operates full-time at home. Other companies, including Siemens, Compaq, Cisco, Merrill Lynch and American Express, have expanded their use of telecommuting, with increased productivity

As more companies let go of their “command and control” approach to management, this practice seems likely to increase. Certainly the employee demand is there; one-third, according to one survey, would choose this option, even if it meant somewhat less pay. Teleworkers also generally show a higher job satisfaction

This is also being adopted in some states and cities. Georgia, for example, approved tax credits this year for creating and expanding telework.

But perhaps the biggest impetus, suggests Winograd, the former telecom executive, is the gradual ascendancy of younger workers. The millennial generation --- the subject of his recent book, "Millennial Makeover," co-written with Mike Hais --- “have grown up up with the Internet and stay connected to the world on their laptops or cellphones 24/7” and sees “distinctions between work and life as arbitrary and unnecessary.”

These younger Americans will likely see no reason to spend an hour in a car, bus or train to get from one computer screen to another. Once adopted by employers, this shift may do more to reduce the carbon imprint than all the current calls for largely unwelcome shifts in the daily lifestyles of many American

Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow at Chapman University and executive editor of www.newgeography.com

Swift Boat Author Smears Self

Bruce McCall — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:45:44 GMT

Right-wing attack-dog journalist Jerome Corsi, whose controversial book, "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," helped sink Sen. John Kerry's presidential hopes in 2004 and whose similarly incendiary attack on Sen. Barack Obama, "The Obama Nation," is now on sale, reveals in his new unauthorized autobiography that he liked pulling wings off flies as a boy, stole his grandmother's dentures on her deathbed and almost never changes his underwear

Corsi portrays himself as a secretive, dishonest, calculating physical coward who pretended to be the Count of Monte Cristo to avoid military service and once robbed a nun.

In the book's most sensational admission, the author claims that he has uncovered documents showing that he may have sold a used car to Osama bin Laden in 1986 -- a lemon, he admits, that might well have been what turned bin Laden so viciously anti-capitalist and anti-Western.

In another astonishing revelation, Corsi tells how he sold his baby sister to the gypsies to get money to finance a plot to sabotage his hometown 4-H Club. "I'm not proud of that," he says. "I way undercharged."

"My slime-ball, truth-twisting antics," Corsi writes in his epilogue, "disqualify me even as a shameless hack writer peddling dollar-a-page drivel. But the thing about me is, I'm an oily creep and I don't give a -----."

His next written effort, Corsi notes, involves hatchet jobs on all six of the most prominent Democratic vice presidential candidates, "just to be ready."

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

Haunted by Elizabeth

Anne Taylor Fleming — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:10:57 GMT

What what she thinking?

That’s the question that continues to haunt the painful saga of John and Elizabeth Edwards. Not that she loves him and stayed with him after he confessed to having an affair (and possible lust child; though whether he told her about that we don’t know).

If we have learned one thing watching Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, it is that marriages are complex, each and every one, with its bargains, and attachments, and wounds that run deep. After, of course, insisting she was not some little woman standing by her man, Hillary Clinton was in many respects just that. It was clearly what she needed to do, sailing on post-presidency into the Senate and her own fierce run for the White House.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

No, the question in Elizabeth Edwards's case is: Why in the world did she go ahead and let him run -- run with him, run hard all across the country, giving her all despite her stage four cancer and her two young children -- after she knew. After she knew about his dalliance with a bouncy, blond so-called filmmaker with a penchant for New Age spirituality.

In these days of her public humiliation, one wants not to add to it. He is the cad, the creep. Looking back at his charm, his expensively coiffed hair, his caramel-voiced defense of the poor --- while he built a palatial country estate. All this was a bit suspicious at the time. There were overtones of another Slick Willy.

But then there was Elizabeth Edwards. She was the moral anchoring point, the class act. So authentic, so warm, so unslick, so graceful, so brave. If a woman of such obvious depth and concern for the country, a woman who had lost a son and had faced cancer with openness and strength -- sharing it all but not in a sympathy-begging way -- if a woman like that loved a man like that, well then, he must be OK, too.

He must be, underneath the mediagenic voice and looks, real, too. Because he loved her. Because he was proud of her and said so at every turn. Because she was his sounding board, his best surrogate, his No. 1 campaigner.

The country needed her husband, she told us, with that wonderful smile, and she was willing to throw heart and soul into his run. Not just for him, not just to help him fulfill his ambitions -- but for us. She made believers of us all -- not about him, but about herself. She was the real deal, someone we could all emulate, want to get to know, want for a friend.

Yes, there was carping at the time from some quarters as they launched their White House quest, running side by side and hand in hand. What about the kids? They were little; they needed stability, a mom at home (what about dad?). And what about the cancer? Was she, the mother of such young children, jeopardizing her health by barreling around the county helping to humanize and sell her husband?

There was a bit of that, and the implication that her ego, too, might be involved -- that she wasn’t quite as selfless as she appeared. But, with her energy and accessibility, she made believers of just about everyone, especially after she announced the cancer was back and she -- they -- would still run full-tilt.

Amazing, touching and, perhaps in hindsight, a little nuts. Because she knew all that time about the affair. She had to know the tabloids were after the story and after her husband -- stalking him as he stalked the White House. It’s just a little bit bizarre, that disconnect, even from someone so special and admirable.

Somewhere in all this, she, too, put the blinders on. One can only assume she was thinking that he wouldn’t be found out. What if he had somehow gotten into more serious contention? What if he had actually won the nomination? What if had come out now, on the practical eve, of the convention? Would the media and the public just swallow hard and say, oh well, old news. None of our business.

Not this year. It would have been a mess, a bigger one than there is now.

That’s what is both troubling and sad. You can make the argument that this is private stuff, private pain. Many people clearly believe that would be a more desirable state of affairs -- where personal lives and personal indiscretions are not constantly fair game. But that is not the world we live in right now, nor the country.

Elizabeth Edwards, so spot on in every way, had to know that. It wasn’t going to be tucked under any rug in her nice, new house. She could forgive him and re-embrace him -- as she says she has. But the country might not be able to do that anymore. Bill Clinton seemed to get away with bimbo eruptions when he was first running for president, but the level of cad fatigue has geometrically increased. And, by running with her husband, Elizabeth Edwards, in effect, invited us all in -- yes, even those nasty tabloids who had been chasing him from day one.

I just wish she hadn’t. I don’t want to know. I didn’t want to see the requisite mea culpa from the latest cad, didn’t want to have to imagine the disgust and hurt of his wife and family.

At least, John Edwards made the repentance rounds on his own. Elizabeth Edwards did not have to stand by her man, like Silda Spitzer, her face etched in pain and humiliation. That’s something. But the bottom line is the same: if you want to keep it really private, you can't run for public office. Not today.

Anne Taylor Fleming is a novelist, commentator and essayist for "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." She is the author of a memoir, "Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey."

Mortgage Giants Need Dose of Reality

Charles R. Morris — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:09:42 GMT

Last week’s announcements of first half results from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exposed the dire straits they are in. By its own rosy fair-value accounting, Freddie is already insolvent. Fannie is in better shape, but a string of heavy losses may have left it fatally weakened. Since both anticipate falling house prices through 2009, their futures grow blacker by the day.

A collapse of Fannie and Freddie would be a huge blow to an already-comatose housing market, so Washington is in full panic mode. Last month, Congress and President George W. Bush pushed through emergency legislation authorizing Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson to supply federal cash infusions of up to $300 billion to the mortgage giants, in almost any form he chooses.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Paulson says he has no current plans to use that authority. But there is no possibility that he could allow a default on senior Fannie and Freddie debt. It is widely held by foreign central banks, and U.S. officials, including Paulson, have consistently reassured holders when doubts about the reality of the guarantee have surfaced.

But if the government is forced to bail out Fannie and Freddie, many other important decisions would have to be made. How do you treat the shareholders, or subordinate bond holders? How much can you curtail Freddie and Fannie without trashing the economy? Do we need a Fannie and Freddie at all? A fundamental question is why is the government propping up house prices amid a glut of unsold houses.

The bitter truth is that by conventional measures, like the ratio of house prices to rentals or to incomes, prices are still too high. Home prices nearly tripled over the eight years from 1998 to 2006, but have so far fallen only by about 18 percent.

There is a growing consensus that prices will fall by another 15 percent or so. The projections made by Fannie and Freddie economists, though they use different market indices, anticipate proportionally that level of decline -- bottoming out toward the end of 2009. Even generous federal refinancing programs for home mortgages make little sense when prices are dropping. Working people would be better off renting instead of being chained to falling assets.

Officially, we classify residential housing as an "investment." Sometimes that’s true. The shift of the nation’s economic center to the technically dynamic Southeast and Southwest in the 1980s and '90s was possible only with vast new housing and infrastructure construction.

But the "McMansions" at the heart of the 2000s construction boom look like economic millstones, their wraparound entertainment centers and multiple bathroom-spas monuments to conspicuous consumption. Big houses on large lots are energy hogs – both heating and driving – and impose heavy additional costs extending local sewage, sidewalks and other amenities.

A cold-eyed view of Fannie and Freddie suggests that they’ve long since outlived their usefulness. This is a country with low personal savings, extraordinarily wasteful consumption habits and big deficits in pensions, health care, roads and airports. Yet the new housing bill raises their permissible guarantee ceiling from $417,000 to $729,750 -- as if bigger houses were a national priority.

A realistic approach to a collapse of the mortgage giants might be: Federalize their outstanding senior debt, upholding the implicit guarantee. Recognize all their likely losses in fell swoop, which will wipe out current shareholders. (The taxpayer owes no obligation to investors who let their company run rampant.) Then create a new federal entity, with a high-quality board of directors, to run off the existing business in an orderly way, perhaps over the next 5-10 years, to minimize market disruptions.

The total effect would be to increase mortgage rates, and force new buyers to build more savings to become mortgage-eligible. Consumption of big-ticket furniture and electronic appliances would probably drop. None of those is a bad thing.

From 2000 through 2007, the United States spent 105 percent of what it produced. The resulting trade deficits have put some $5 trillion into the hands of foreigners, so the dollar has been falling and commodity prices spiking. Worse, a huge share of the overseas dollar trove is in the hands of states like Russia, China and the Middle Eastern petro-kingdoms -- which have little love for the United States, and often shadowy ties to terrorism.

Everyone knows that we have to change our ways. The way we deal with Fannie and Freddie will show how serious we are.

Charles R. Morris, a lawyer and former banker, is the author of "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash." His other books include "The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy" and "Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen.”

Mortgage Giants in Critical Care

Charles R. Morris — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , which have been almost single-handedly keeping the U.S. home mortgage markets afloat, announced their first half-year results last week. If they were cancer patients, the doctors would transferring Freddie into hospice care. Fannie is probably terminal as well, but is in better shape and might have a fighting chance.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Fannie and Freddie are "government-sponsored entities," or GSEs. (There is a third GSE, the Federal Home Loan Bank system, that has been almost the sole support of Countrywide Bank over the past several years.) Fannie and Freddie don’t originate mortgages directly, but create liquidity by either guaranteeing mortgages for other lenders or buying them up for their own balance sheets.

The chart below shows the lending and guarantee activity for the GSEs for the five quarters through March, 2008. For comparison, it also shows the volume of ABS, or "asset-backed securities," that are a good proxy for private, unguaranteed mortgage activity. By 2007, almost all such mortgages were packaged up and sold to investors as ABS, while most ABS were backed by mortgages.

Source: Federal Reserve Flow of Funds Report (June, 2008)

The chart shows how the GSEs leaped into the breach when the private mortgage markets collapsed in mid-2007. By the third and fourth quarters, they were virtually the sole support of the markets, but were digging deeper and deeper financial holes. The first-quarter 2008 tightening shown in the chart continued in second quarter. Both Fannie and Freddie say it will do so for the foreseeable future.

Why are they in such trouble? Fannie and Freddie were created to lubricate the home mortgage market by buying mortgages from lenders; wrapping them with a guarantee, and packaging them up as tradeable securities sold to long-term investors -- like pension funds and foreign central banks.

The guarantee works because there are strict rules about the credit quality of the mortgages they buy. "Conforming," or guarantee-eligible, mortgages must be well-documented, conservatively structured and held by borrowers with good credit. Default rates are low, so guarantee fees are modest.

Together, Fannie and Freddie guarantee $4.1 trillion in mortgages. The business is profitable, but not egregiously so, and almost everyone agrees that it works fine.

What got them into trouble is their other business, that wags call their "$1.6 trillion hedge fund." Because global investors assume that Fannie and Freddie debt is "implicitly" guaranteed by the government, they can borrow at below-market rates. After all, their executives reasoned, if Goldman Sachs can make so much money trading for their own account, why shouldn’t they? They had stockholders, they sincerely lusted after Goldman-scale paychecks and the implicit government guarantee would let them tap almost unlimited capital.

So, between the two of them, they have now borrowed $1.6 trillion to build positions in mostly mortgage-backed assets, including good dollops of risky subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and "structured" mortgage-backed securities. So, of course, the housing market collapse that is destroying careers and balance sheets all over Wall Street is wreaking havoc at Fannie and Freddie.

Freddie is already a walking corpse. It ended the half with its balance sheet leveraged up 68:1, or more than twice as high as Bear Stearns just before its collapse. And that’s only if you assume their books are truthful. Though that’s unlikely.

One item deep in their financial footnotes is especially ominous. Accounting valuation rules usually classify mortgages and mortgage-backed securities as "Level 2" assets. While they don’t have daily market prices, like IBM stock, they can be usually valued by a combination of "observable" market values and internal judgments.

When the market for complex securities backed by high-risk mortgages collapsed last year, many banks shifted their holdings down to "Level 3," which allows you value solely by "internal models." In real life, that means almost any way you please. Accounting standards bodies led a concerted drive to move such assets out of Level 3 back up to Level 2, for greater transparency.

Freddie has gone the other way. During the first half of the year, they moved $154 billion of securities backed by high-risk mortgages from Level 2 to Level 3. A reasonable guess is that they’re carrying them at 80 cents on the dollar, or thereabouts.

But these are the same class of instrument that Merrill Lynch recently cleared off its books for 22 cents on the dollar. At a minimum, Freddie may be sitting on another $30-$50 billion in losses. Freddie ended the half with only $13 billion in equity supporting $879 billion in assets. If a beam of sunlight hits those Level 3 assets, the walking corpse instantly shrivels into ashes.

Almost laughably, Freddie plans to solve its problems by raising another $5.5 billion in capital -– or will as soon as its investment bankers tell them the time is "propitious."

Don’t hold your breath. Freddie’s total stock market value is now only about $3.8 billion. What percent of a $3.8 billion company do you sell to raise another $5.5 billion? And, oh, by the way, their chief executive, Richard Syron, was paid $20 million last year.

Fannie has been pulling in its horns faster than Freddie and raised substantial capital in the first half of the year. Their overall leverage is now only about 22:1 -- or about a third of Freddie’s. But their future is still bleak. Like Freddie, their stated equity includes huge deferred tax assets, which they may never realize. Normal bank accounting rules would assign much lower values.

Fannie has absorbed $6 billion in net losses so far this year, and expect losses in that range to continue for the rest of the year. The losses should continue well into 2009, but they hope at a lower level. A normal company could not survive.

Is a rescue on the way? Congress recently authorized the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to lend as much as they want to bail out Fannie and Freddie. That is the topic for Part II of this article.

Charles R. Morris, a lawyer and former banker, is the author of "The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash." His other books include "The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy" and "Money, Greed, and Risk: Why Financial Crises and Crashes Happen.”

The American Way: 'Bigger, Stronger, Faster'

Arthur Allen — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 21:38:43 GMT

When Mike, Chris and Mark Bell, were striving to become champion iron pumpers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the brothers never dreamed that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hulk Hogan and their other idols were juiced. Steroids were for commies --like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV. Rocky himself was clean and sober. He chopped wood to get buff.

But, as they got older, the Bells learned the dirty little secret: their heroes were on ‘roids. The Bells would have to take them too, if they wanted to compete. Years later, Mark—who went by “Mad Dog” when he wrestled for World Wresting Entertainment, the WWE, and “Smelly” Mike – who can bench press 700 pounds-- are still using the stuff.

Chris, the middle brother, tried steroids for a few months, stopped and decided to make a movie about them instead. His documentary film, “Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Side Effects of Being American,” is a hilarious, poignant and thought-provoking look at the hypocritical culture of competition.

“I was brought up to believe that cheaters never prosper,” he narrates, over footage of President George W. Bush speaking against steroid use -- though his Texas Rangers used them. “But in America, they always prosper.”

With the Olympics beginning Friday and millions of kids primed to watch their U.S. heroes compete with the world, Bell sadly reflected on what he learned about the clandestine doping that goes on beyond the noble striving for national glory. Bell, 35, spent three years working on the film, which incorporates dozens of interviews and other footage.

“I used to think the Olympics had the best drug testing, but it’s a big façade,” he said in a phone interview. The Balco scandal -- in which a San Francisco steroid producer provided hundreds of baseball players with hard-to-trace steroid shots -- revealed some of the tricks that trainers use to evade testing. Olympic committees have done little to keep pace with the cheaters, Bell said. “You can skirt the rules on hormones. There’s no test for human-growth hormone. There’s an improved test for Epo [which increases oxygen in the blood], but it won’t be ready for the Olympics.”

“I don’t want to be one of those conspiracy-theory guys, but there are a lot of people juicing,” he said. “You’re never going to have a 100-percent clean Olympics. It’s sad. Kids look up to these people.”

News accounts indicate a certain vigilance against doping Olympic athletes. But the history of such scandals, Bell suggests, is that only the unlucky get caught. During the 1988 games, Jamaican sprinter Ben Johnson lost his gold medal in the 100 meters for steroid use. Carl Lewis, to whom the gold was awarded, had also tested for banned substances in his blood during training. Rather than disqualify him, according to Bell’s well-documented account, the U.S. Olympic Committee changed the rules.

Anabolic steroids became controlled substances in 1990, and are banned by most professional sports associations, but it’s an open secret that you can’t be the best bodybuilder, weight lifter or homerun hitter (or swimmer ?) without them. And so, people cheat.

Bell's film, which incorporates his own interviews, news footage and cartoons in a hilarious gallop through the issue, makes two main points about steroid use. The first is that steroids, as bodybuilder Gregg Valentino puts it during the film, "are as American as apple pie" -- that the American drive to win trumps the American sense of fairness every time. This, Bell is saying, is what really bothers Congress, which held more hearings about steroids in 2006 than it did on the war in Iraq. Steroids aren't nearly as dangerous as tobacco, alcohol or dozens of other legal substances, but their use reveals something ugly about America, and not just its athletics industry.

“There’s this assumption that steroids kill, but no one can find the bodies,” Bell said. Valentino has biceps that look like a python swallowing a pig. But Bell shrugs. “Some people just want big arms. If people want to look like freaks, why can’t they? Is it any worse than piercing strange parts of yourself?”

Or as Valentino himself puts it, “I wanted to be big. I couldn’t get taller, so I got wider.”

Bell may be underplaying the potential side effects of steroid use. While it's true that the scientific evidence of liver damage and hyper-aggressive "roid rage" is mixed, longterm steroid use definitely raises your bloodpressure and unhealthy cholesterol levels, shrinks your testicles and gives you "bitch tits," in the ineffable phrase of the Bell brothers. It probably also stunts the growth of teenagers. Bell, to be sure, isn't exactly promoting steroid use. “I know people who’ve been abused by steroids. If you think one minute my brothers are fine and not screwed up in the heads from fact they rely on steroids … when you rely on a drug to do anything, you’re looking for trouble.”

Too, juicing goes against the American sense of fair play. But if Tiger Woods can get laser eye surgery, and students can take legal speed to ace tests, why shouldn’t athletes improve their torque with chemistry? Bell manages to make even Barry Bonds look sympathetic, as the slugger tells the press, “All of you have lied. How would you like it if there were asterisks by your names?”

“Bigger, Stronger, Faster” united Chris Bell’s two obsessions: movies and body-building. A music video he made at community college got him from Poughkeepsie to film school at the University of Southern California. While studying there, he worked as a bouncer, lifted at the famous Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach,and later wrote for the WWE. A short film about tobacco addiction got the attention of the producers of "Farenheit 911" and "Bowling for Columbine."

The film achieves something unusual -- it manages to convey respect and affection toward subjects whose foibles are hilarious. The narration makes it happen. Bell is schlubby in a Michael Moore kind of way, but unlike Moore, he’s sincere, because the pain is personal. A regular guy in gym clothes and a backwards baseball cap, he depicts America’s identity confusion through his own family’s struggle with obesity, drug use and obfuscation.

In a section about how the wildly under-regulated dietary-supplements industry uses juiced lifters to deceptively sell its products, Bell hires some Mexican guys to make a supplement in his kitchen. “It was all perfectly legal -- except for the illegal aliens.”

His brothers are symbolic stand-ins for the conflict. “Smelly’’ is emotionally stable, a loving father who coaches high school football. “Mad Dog” is bipolar, has tried to kill himself, hates his job, drinks too much and takes drugs. They’re both lifetime steroid users.

Ultimately, in this film, we see steroids as just another substance that Americans use to fill emptiness. Bell’s mother is shocked to hear how dependent on them her boys are. “Why did our boys feel like they were not good enough?” she asks. “Mad Dog” responds that he can’t handle a life in which he’s just OK. “I need to attain greatness,” he says. “I know there’s something in here that the rest of the world needs to know about.”

“In my experience, bodybuilders are like little kids in a gorilla suit,” Bell told me. “They pack on armor so nobody can hurt them. When I was lifting weights, I thought I’d be the coolest kids in school if I could bench press the most. It felt good.

“But I found out from the film," Bell said, "that I’m a much better filmmaker than I am power lifter.”

Bush Takes Hard Line on China's Culinary Abuses

Bruce McCall — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:58:42 GMT

Meeting with high-level Beijing officials on his visit to attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, President George W. Bush wasted no time in acting on his recent vow not to let the Chinese government off the hook.

Bush immediately came down hard on China’s “scandalous, appalling and maybe even bad” handling of the global monosodium glutamate, or MSG, threat. Waving a sheaf of Chinese restaurant menus listing literally hundreds of MSG-laced items, Bush charged that despite widespread protests and warnings from eminent medical authorities, Chinese restaurants and MSG continue to conspire in a deadly “Axis of Eatin’" that is raising sodium levels to the danger point around the world.

Until Chinese kitchens show a genuine intent to destroy or sharply reduce their wanton MSG use, said the president, “Americans may be forced not to leave tips in Chinese restaurants or for their take-out delivery men – tips that simply mean more money for China to invest in MSG production, further accelerating the deadly sodium spiral.”

Bush had been widely expected to focus this meeting on other issues, like China’s controversial record on human rights. But the president said his attack on MSG was in no way evading that hot-button issue. “What’s a more human right,” he asked, “than to chow down on moo-goo pork and hot shrimp and all that good stuff?”

The president later attended a prison-yard crafts show; a 503-point explanation of the Dalai Lama’s Nazi connections, and an exercise program that teaches pollution-sensitive Chinese schoolchildren how to hold their breath until adulthood.

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

Obama Invites McCain to Celebfest

Bruce McCall — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:54:50 GMT

Shaken by celebrity-wannabe Sen. John McCain’s paranoid jealousy of his A-list address book, and the TV attack ad it recently generated, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, has invited the Arizona Republican to “get down” with a gaggle of luminaries who gather to goof around at his basketball/backgammon/pilates weekends at Oprah Winfrey’s place and other retreats.

“It might cheer the senator up to rub shoulders with Oscar winners and Nobel Prize laureates and some of my pals from the N.F.L.,” Obama speculated. “I think he’d get a special kick out of the Sarkozys. They rock!”

Obama aides have also sent out VIP passes for the likely Republican nominee and his posse to attend Mick Jagger’s baby shower for Angelina Jolie in Monte Carlo next week. Perhaps out of embarrassment, the McCain camp countered by inviting Obama to a round of golf with their candidate plus former Vice President Dan Quayle, the 1998 Miss Teenage Mormon and “a top pro bowler,” in a country club near Phoenix.

The Obama campaign is rumored to be pulling out all the celebrity hospitality stops, not only out of pity, but also in hopes that McCain will respond by canceling a second celebrity TV attack ad. This one alleged features Roman Polanski, Fatty Arbuckle and Pee Wee Herman.

A reflective Obama told the reporters traveling on his private Falcon Jet, loaned by best-bud Tiger Woods, “I guess I’d be jealous too if my posse was Dom DeLuise, Florence Henderson and Jim Belushi.” He put his Blackberry on hold – family-friend Jack Nicholson was checking in on crony Warren Beatty’s impromptu Vegas lounge act with the Dalai Lama and Cher the previous night – to express his sympathy for the elderly Republican.

“I’m sure all good Democrats feel for the old gentleman,” he added. “But I’m a man of hope. So I’d say to the senator, it’s never too late to get a life.”

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

Ends & Means in War Crimes Trials

Aziz Huq, Garth Schofield — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:58:38 GMT

In the hazy early hours of July 30, a special U.N. flight touched down at Rotterdam airport, bringing the former leader of Bosnia’s wartime Serb government, Radovan Karadžić, to stand trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, in The Hague. At the same time, proceedings in the trial of Osama bin Laden’s alleged driver, Salim Hamdan, which concluded today in a conviction on five of 10 charges, were reaching a crucial stage.

International reactions to the two war crimes trials, however, and their likely effects on future events, could not be further apart. The Karadžić trial signals the start of closure for the quasi-genocidal Balkans conflicts, which ended with the Dayton Accords in 1995; by contrast, the Hamdan trial offers no sense of closure and little succor to U.S. counterterrorism efforts. To the contrary, it will provide more grist to international claims about American hypocrisy and lack of moral authority. His conviction will do nothing to stem those criticisms, or the debate about the commissions' ethics and legality.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Karadžić’s recent arrest in Belgrade and his trial are the result of subtle European use of soft power: the European Union’s clever use of sanctions and incentives tied to EU membership to support Boris Tadic’s pro-European party and marginalize extreme nationalists led by Vojislav Kostunica.Without this careful diplomacy, the conditions for Karadžić’s arrest would never have arisen.

Certainly, Karadžić’s trial before the ICTY presents many challenges. Serbs have accused the ICTY of bias in its prosecutions, and that country's ultra-nationalists have scored points by casting scorn on the court.

More seriously, Karadžić has signaled that he may represent himself -- as Slobodan Milošević did. Milošević filibustered and grandstandedthroughout the proceedings, drawing them out until his sudden death. As a result, the ICTY’s reputation suffered, and the trial never successfully addressed the gravity of Milošević’s alleged crimes.

It is to be hoped the ICTY prosecutors learned their lesson, and now focus the Karadžić trial in ways that prevent a repeat of Milošević’s performance. One way of doing this would be to concentrate on the most serious crimes -- for example, the massacre of up to 8,000 unarmed civilians, mostly Muslims, at Srebrenica. To provide justice for the dead of Srebrenic -- a list of whose names provides sobering reading -- and to ensure that the proponents of violence in the Balkans are discredited, nothing else will do.

Proceedings against Hamdan, however, are unlikely to have the same salutary effect in the conflict with Al Qaeda. The proceedings can largely be viewed as grist for the propaganda mills of America's opponents. Commonly identified as bin Laden’s driver, Hamdan was captured during fighting in Afghanistan while transporting two surface-to-air missiles. He was charged with conspiracy to commit attacks against the United States and providing material support to a terrorist organization; he was convicted only on the material support charges. He has been held since 2002 at Guantanamo. After his lawyers successfully challenged President George W. Bush’s military commissions, established unilaterally by executive order on Nov. 13, 2001, he was one of the first to be indicted under the new statutory commissions scheme created by the 2006 Military Commissions Act.

Hamdan’s trial and conviction by a second-tier military justice system will probably never be regarded as fair or legitimate. The commission enables the military trial of offenses -- including conspiracy and material support -- that have never before been recognized as war crimes amenable to military jurisdiction. Hamdan is likely the first person ever to be convicted of material support as a war crime -- which did not even exist as an idea at the time of his capture.

Worse, the commission's rules allowed the introduction of evidence gained by coercion, as long as the judge decides it has “sufficient” probative value. (In Hamdan's case, evidence from his interrogations at Guantanamo was permitted; evidence from his interrogation in Afghanistan was kept out). The commissions, in other words, allow the administration to rid itself of the problem of tortured Guantanamo detainees by using the latter’s confessions to convict them.
Indeed, the very day that Karadžić was being flown to the Hague, Hamdan introduced evidence that he had been subjected to illegally coercive tactics at Guantanamo.

It is the height of ironies that the trial of an Al Qaeda suspect should furnish the terrorist group with evidence of arguments it uses to gain support for its violent activities -- that the United States tortures in violation of its own laws and its own ideals.

“The eyes of the world are on Guantanamo Bay,” wrote Judge James Robertson of the D.C. district court in June, as he allowed the Hamdan commission to move forward. What the world sees is American “hard power” -- military force in naked form -- being exercised. Advocates of the military commissions are already pointing to the split verdict for Hamdan as evidence of the system's intrinsic fairness. But no inference can be drawn from the partial acquittal since none of the charges are properly war crimes, and since Hamdan was certainly convicted on the basis of evidence gained by illegal coercion.

In the Hague, by contrast, an equally attentive world sees a threshold victory for European soft power that ensures an end to violence, not its encouragement. Despite the Bush administration’s contempt for “Old Europe,” it seems that the continent has some lessons for the New World after all.

It is not too late for a new administration to do better. To do so, it could go back to the wisdom of Justice Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice who was the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. “Any result that the calm and critical judgment of posterity would pronounce unjust,” observed Jackson, “would not be a victory for any of the countries associated in this prosecution.”

The same remains sadly true today.

Aziz Huq directs the liberty and national security project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. He is the co-author, with Fritz Schwartz, of "Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror." Garth Schofield is a Yale Law School student working this summer at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Candidates Maneuver for Edge in Debates

Bruce McCall — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:55:17 GMT

Candidates on both sides agree that it’s high time for that old tradition of conniving to rig presidential debates to favor one side or the other. The two major parties are again maneuvering for even petty advantages to undercut the fair and equal exchange that might help voters make intelligent choices.

Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic nominee, has gone on record to state that he will debate Sen. John McCain, who has clinched the GOP nomination, "one-on-one anytime anywhere -- as long as it’s on a basketball court.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

For his part, the Arizona senator declared, “I ask only that any debate be conducted on a 100 percent equal playing field. For example, fair play calls for the taller person -- in this case, Sen. Obama -- to stand on his knees at the lectern to negate the blatant stature gap.”

Democratic operatives are said to be pushing a rule that both debating candidates be made up to look like Frankenstein's monster, firmly squelching any potential appeals to racism created by one looking white and the other black. The Republicans, meanwhile, are pressing for a counter-initiative requiring both debaters to wear novelty-store Groucho glasses-and moustache disguises, canceling out Obama’s unearned edge of a more youthful appearance.

Still under discussion is whether the candidates’ wives should be hooded whenever on-camera, so as not to skew voter judgment based on irrelevant opinions of potential first ladies’ relative charm and attractiveness.

McCain’s handlers will almost certainly fail, however, in requesting that their candidate be allowed to debate while lying trussed on a cot in a simulated Vietnamese prison cell. It was they, after all, who earlier nixed the Obama side's plan to dress up their man to look like his fellow lanky Illinoisian, Abe Lincoln.

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

Military Leaders Make Weak Advisers

Lawrence J. Korb — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:45:28 GMT

Over the past 18 months, anyone proposing any policy for extricating the United States from the Iraqi quagmire has been told by critics that the proposal should be vetted by Gen. David Petraeus, who took command of the U.S. forces in Iraq in February 2007. For example, Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, criticized his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, for revealing his plan to end the war in Iraq before sitting down with Petraeus.

The assumption behind this line of thought is that political leaders should defer to the military commanders when it comes to issues of war and peace, especially in the middle of a war. But American history tells us that, in the postwar period, military leaders from Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Korea to Petraeus in Iraq have more often been wrong than right when it comes to dealing with threats to U.S.national security. In fact, America's civilian leaders have usually been better off ignoring their advice.

In October 1950, for example, President Harry S. Truman traveled to Wake Island to meet with MacArthur, the commander of the forces in Korea, to ascertain whether the U.S. military's headlong rush to the Yalu would provoke China to intervene. MacArthur assured him it would not, and predicted that the war would be over by Christmas. One month later, the Chinese launched a massive attack on the advancing, widely dispersed U.S. forces and sent them reeling back into South Korea.

MacArthur then advised Truman to attack the Chinese mainland with nuclear weapons, and surge hundreds of thousands more U.S. troops into the theater. In January 1951, MacArthur referred to the war in Korea as a crusade. He said that in Korea, Washington was fighting for a free Asia. Fortunately, Truman realized that Europe was the central front in the Cold War. He fired MacArthur and began negotiations with North Korea that ultimately restored the status quo ante bellum.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In 1954, when the French asked for U.S. assistance to bail them out against the North Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu, Adm. Arthur Radford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or CJCS, pushed hard for U.S. involvement and recommended attacking the North Vietnamese forces with nuclear weapons. President Dwight D. Eisenhower instead sent an envoy to Paris to work out the partition of Vietnam.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his fellow chiefs urged President John F. Kennedy to launch a full scale invasion of Cuba. We now know this would have produced a nuclear attack on the United States. Kennedy wisely chose a quarantine and sent his brother, Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy, to negotiate with the Soviet Union. His Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, had to intervene with the chief of Naval operations, Adm. George Anderson, to prevent the Navy from actually firing on Soviet ships.

In trying to win the “war in Vietnam” in the 1956-72 time frame, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the ground commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, recommended steps that included sending a million troops to Vietnam, bombing North Vietnam’s petroleum facilities and Hanoi’s locks, dams, and rail yards and, after the Tet Offensive, surging 206,000 more troops on top of the 525,000 already in the South.

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, on the advice of his new defense secretary, overruled these “military experts” and began negotiations with North Vietnam. President Richard M. Nixon continued the negotiations, undertook a policy of Vietnamization, and began the process of normalization of relations with China, North Vietnam’s main supporter.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush ignored the advice of then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin L. Powell, when it came to evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. Powell and the central commander, Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf, opposed the invasion and instead wanted to rely on sanctions. Powell became so outspoken in his opposition to the war that then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had to tell him to confine his advice to the subject of how to evict Saddam, rather than whether.

Over the past 60 years, U.S. military leaders often compounded their bad advice by presenting overly optimistic reports on our progress in winning these wars. The most famous example of this was Westmoreland’s address to a joint session of Congress in 1967, when he actually assured the legislators and the American public that there was light at the end of the tunnel in South Vietnam.

The mistakes of the military leaders in Iraq, from Gen. Tommy Franks onward, have been legendary. In March 2003, Franks and the majority of the chiefs (including Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Jack Keane, the author of the surge) told their superiors and the U.S. public we had enough troops to overthrow Saddam Hussein and secure the country. In November 2003, every division commander (including Petraeus of the 101st Airborne) assured Gen. John Abizaid, the central commander, that we were winning in Iraq.

In late September 2004, right before the presidential election, Petraeus, then in charge of training Iraqi forces, assured the American people, in a Washington Post op-ed article, that there was tangible progress in the training of Iraqi security forces and there were reasons for optimism. In March 2005, Abizaid said that he did not see civil war on the horizon. In June 2006, Gen. George Casey, Petraeus’ predecessor, said that by December 2007 the U.S. would only need 5 or 6 combat brigades in Iraq, instead of the 15 that were -- and still are -- there.

It is clear that had we listened to some of our military commanders, the United States may have gone to war with China in the 1950s; may still be in Vietnam trying to prop up a corrupt South Vietnamese government, and may have provoked a nuclear holocaust with the Soviet Union.

Moreover, by listening to our military commanders, the Bush administration sent too few troops to Iraq and, by ignoring the warning signs of the developing insurgency and civil war in that country, proclaimed mission accomplished more than five years ago.

It is important for our political leaders to keep these examples in mind when deciding what to do about Iraq. It is not surprising that Petraeus sees Iraq as the central front in the war on terror, just as MacArthur saw Korea as the central front in the Cold War. It is also not surprising Petraeus is opposed to setting a date to withdraw U.S. combat forces from Iraq, as Westmoreland was in Vietnam.

Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and the first President Bush were correct in ignoring the advice of flag officers like MacArthur, Radford, Westmoreland and Powell. The next president should keep this in mind when it comes to listening to military officers. As Clemenceau reminded us, war is too important to be left to the generals.

Lawrence J. Korb, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a senior adviser to the Center for Defense Information.

Fans Realize Obama Is Not Divine

Bruce McCall — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:45:56 GMT

Disturbing new evidence indicates that Americans by the millions are failing to deify Sen. Barack Obama, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, reflecting mounting fears among rabid early supporters that their charismatic Boy Messiah may not even be divine.

"It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” wept an Obama apostle. “Even in his native Chicago, you can’t find anybody building shrines or Baby Obama creches.”

Meanwhile, at the junior Illinois senator's recent campaign stops, stampeding throngs of Obama fanatics have not been observed attempting to touch the hem of his garment. In Cleveland, church ceremonies to commemorate the anniversary of the child Obama’s descent to America from Hawaii appear not to be scheduled – hard on the heels of the disclosure that biblical scholars’ painstaking searches of both the Old and New Testaments reveal not a single reference linking Obama with any aspect of the Second Coming.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Campaign insiders close to Sen. John McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, while careful not to be seen as sacrilegious, nonetheless expressed obvious relief. “The guy may be no mere mortal,” granted one top McCain aide, “but all this shows he’s still not on a par with Our Lady of Fatima or Joan of Arc. In other words, his victory ain’t preordained.”

Obama’s cause is not being helped by his campaign managers’ refusal to disclose exactly when their candidate intends to perform his next miracle. For example, no confirmation or denial has been forthcoming of a rumored Obama-led “Walk On Water” fund-raising marathon from the Chicago lakeshore to Benton Harbor, across the lake in Michigan.

“I’d say we’ve been had,” groused a longtime Obama acolyte. “It’s becoming ominously clear that Barack Obama never had any intention of using the White House as a stepping stone.”

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

McCain Bets on Off Shore Drilling

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:05:26 GMT

**Editor's Note: This piece has been updated to include the results of a new poll released July 30.

On a January afternoon in 1969, Paradise was violated and the modern environmental movement was born.

Six miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., a “blowout” erupted below a Union Oil Co. platform, spewing crude oil from drilling-induced cracks in the Santa Barbara Channel floor.

It took almost two weeks to cap the leak and, before it was plugged, the oil spill had grown to more than 3 million gallons. It spread across 800 square miles of ocean, spoiling more than 35 miles of Southern California’s coast.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Dead and injured sea animals and birds washed up along the beaches, covered in the black goo. Images of the devastation, transmitted around the world, helped galvanize environmentalists and triggered the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air Act.

In the wake of Santa Barbara’s calamity, the U.S. president, a Republican and a California native, observed, “What is involved is the use of our resources of the sea and of the land in a more effective way and with more concern for preserving the beauty and the natural resources that are so important to any kind of society that we want for the future. The Santa Barbara incident,” Richard M. Nixon concluded, “has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”

Offshore oil drilling became a “third rail issue” in California politics—touch it and you die. It’s remained so for nearly 40 years— particularly for state Democrats, who rely on environmentalists as a key constituency. And, by-and-large, the nation went along.

Then, with skyrocketing oil and gas prices, and increasing economic distress, President George W. Bush announced he was lifting the presidential moratorium on offshore drilling. He called on Congress to lift its ban as well. Offshore oil drilling has resurfaced as a hot-button issue on the national level. It is an issue that divides voters and the two presidential candidates.

When the 2008 campaign began, both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama opposed offshore drilling. Mc Cain had also opposed it in his unsuccessful 2000 presidential bid. Both McCain and Obama were—somewhat successfully — wooing environmentalists. McCain’s green energy stand was one way he could distance himself from an extraordinarily unpopular president.

Why then did McCain reverse himself and call for lifting offshore drilling restrictions —even before Bush lifted the presidential ban? His switch angered environmental groups he’d been wooing for years. In California, his switch irked many moderate Republicans, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had endorsed McCain, but who roundly criticized the Arizona senator’s new take on offshore drilling.

Taking a calculated risk that voter anger about high fuel prices would trump environmentalism in today’s economy, McCain positioned himself alongside to Bush on an issue that independents and Democrats -- as well as many suburban Republicans -- care about; McCain gambled on giving Obama an opening to link him to “the same misguided approach backed by President Bush,” as well as to “big oil companies.”

But McCain’s risk could pay off. Essentially, McCain has traded any likelihood of taking California in November -- a pie-in-the-sky assumption about this blue state, anyway -- for the possibility of gaining votes in crucial Heartland states, like Michigan and Ohio

In pivotal Florida, for example, Democrats and Republicans have long been united in their opposition to offshore drilling. But there now appears to be a shift in opinion favorable to McCain’s new stance. The state’s Republican governor, Charlie Crist, a V.P. prospect, changed sides to support McCain. In addition, a just-released Rasmussen survey shows that 57 percent of Florida voters now favor of offshore drilling, while only 32 percent do not. A slim majority of voters (51 percent) in this battleground state think reducing gas prices is more important than protecting the environment.

National polls reveal that voters might be ready to endorse lifting the ban. A Gallup poll in mid-May showed that 57 percent of respondents favored “[a]llowing oil drilling in U.S. coastal and wilderness areas now off-limits to oil exploration.” Tellingly, there were significant partisan differences in support. Only 38 percent of Democrats agreed with this, compared to 80 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of those coveted independent voters.

A Rasmussen survey from June--before McCain announced his support--showed 67 percent of voters now support oil drilling off the coasts of California, Florida and other states. Only 18 percent disagree.

This survey, too, revealed a significant partisan divide -- 85 percent of Republicans favor offshore drilling, compared to 57 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independent voters.

In California, on the other hand, a statewide Field Poll as recently as early July shows voters “remain opposed to the idea of allowing oil companies to drill more oil and gas wells along the California coastline.“ Fifty-one percent of Californians are opposed, and 43 percent approve. However, statewide opposition is down from a high of 62 percent in 1990 and 56 percent in 2001 and 2005.

There are partisan differences here, too. Republicans approve offshore drilling by 63 percent -- but that’s 17 points lower than their approval nationally. Democrats disapprove 61 percent to 31 percent (nationally their approval registers slightly higher, at 39 percent). Significantly, in the Golden State, 58 percent of independents disapprove of offshore drilling -- nationally that figure is 43 percent.

**However, a just-released survey by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) shows that Californians' support for offshore oil drilling has suddenly increased to 51 percent (up from 41 percent in 2007). According to the PPIC analysis, it's "the first time since 2003, when PPIC first posed the question, that more Californians favor offshore drilling than oppose it (45 percent), a shift caused in large part by a surge in support among Republicans (77 percent, up from 60 percent)." Six of 10 Democrats and half of independents still oppose offshore oil drilling to meet our energy needs. This shift in voter opinion, according to PPIC, is "one of many reactions to soaring gas prices."

Yet none of these numbers tell the entire story. They cannot gauge the intensity of public opinion. In the end, offshore oil drilling is an issue not unlike gun control. The passion is still on the side of its opponents. That could mobilize the environmental movement against McCain come the fall. For other voters the issue may have less importance, and be less motivating.

Both sides now think they can capitalize on the issue of oil drilling. Democrats are looking to gain ground with a flurry of ads attacking Republicans up and down the ballot for bedding down politically with Big Oil. At the same time, McCain is planning to assail the Democrats' inaction on oil independence, staging photo ops in front of oil wells.

It remains to be seen which strategy — if either — will pay political dividends. But it’s hard to imagine McCain striking an electoral gusher with his new embrace of offshore drilling for oil independence.

Sherry Bebitch Jeffe is a senior scholar at the University of Southern California's School of Policy, Planning and Development.

McCain Mistakes Arizona for Iraq

Bruce McCall — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:02:33 GMT

Sen. John McCain, who has locked up the GOP nomination, was chased down in the parking lot of a Phoenix shopping mall today and persuaded to remove his Kevlar helmet and body armor. He had been driving his SUV around this sprawling desert city all afternoon on a fact-finding tour in the belief that he was in Baghdad.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

"The hot sun, the flat desert terrain, those Latinos the spitting image of Sunnis and Shiites -- I naturally thought I was in Iraq," the Arizona senator explained. "Besides, Lieberman [campaign adviser Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.)] wasn't around today. Lieberman always knows where I am."

The war-hero-turned-lawmaker told reporters that his inspection tour was nonetheless highly useful. "I found Phoenix has many of the same problems as Baghdad," McCain said, "the terrorist hideouts are so well hidden you couldn't find a single one, for example. And the Al Qaeda operatives in our midst are as invisible here as they are over there. And the gas shortage is so acute that a gallon costs four dollars.

"But, all in all, I was greatly encouraged by the progress. I'd estimate Phoenix to be 99 percent pacified today. The city is so safe I could have shot a few baskets with the troops, if I'd found any. Must have all been shipped home. The car washes are up and running, I saw long lines at the Cineplex, and when I put my finger in a socket there was lots of electricity."

"I'd asked my wife Cindy to join me on the tour this morning," the jubilant senator added. "But she said she had a golf date. Maybe that should have tipped me off."

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

Race and the Housing Crisis

Mary Kane — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:30:00 GMT

When troubled borrower Diane McLeod's debt problems made the front page of The New York Times earlier this week, she ignited a debate over borrowers, lenders and personal responsibility that shows no signs of slowing down.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Op-Ed columnist David Brooks took the opportunity to point out that McLeod's money problems were caused, in part, by her own behavior -- she shopped at the mall to relieve the emotional pain of her divorce and spent thousands on home shopping channels while recovering from surgery. But mortgage companies and credit card lenders also saw her as an easy target, he noted, marketing loans to her they knew she couldn't afford and most likely couldn't repay.

This was something of a revelation to Brooks, who recently wrote an entire column denouncing financial decadence in America without ever mentioning Wall Street's role in foreclosures.

Now with a belief that both borrowers and lenders share equal blame, Brooks predicted a cultural shift in attitudes away from the easy acceptance of debt:

After the Depression, a savings mentality set in. After the dot-com bubble, a bit of sobriety hit Silicon Valley. Now it’s the borrowers’ and lenders’ turn. As the saying goes: People don’t change when they see the light. They change when they feel the heat.

If only it were that simple. On Tuesday I talked with borrowers waiting in the soaring temperatures and long lines outside the Capitol Hilton in Washington for a chance to get their loans restructured through the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America, a housing advocacy group based in Boston. The first three women I chatted with all were from Prince George's County, Md., which The Washington Post describes as the nation's wealthiest majority black jurisdiction. It also has more foreclosures than any other Maryland community.

Is that a coincidence? Of course not. Even when their credit scores were similar, blacks and Latinos were far more likely to get subprime loans than white borrowers during the housing boom, report after report has shown. In majority black and Latino communities, nearly half of all mortgages made in 2006 were high-cost subprime loans, according to research by the Local Initiatives Support Corp.

I asked the women outside the Hilton if they had felt targeted by lenders, and they all laughed in unison - doesn't everyone know that? Brokers didn't just make repeated cold calls in Prince George's. It went beyond that. Mortgage lenders came to you. They mingled at church, and they showed up in person at your house with loan papers, they said. They were always at your door. That's not how loans get sold in upper-middle-class white neighborhoods.

The women I talked with didn't take out those loans to buy McMansions. They were refinancing, and they'd been in their houses for more than 25 years. And their situations weren't unusual. Most of Prince George's County foreclosures involve refinancings, not new home purchases, according to John McClain, deputy director of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis who has studied the neighborhoods there.

Some people in neighborhoods like this will get help from housing advocacy groups or refinanced by a lender. But many won't. The damage done will last for years -- ruined credit, neighborhoods marked by vacant houses, once-stable communities upset by comings and going, future loans that will become harder and more expensive than ever to get, a falling homeownership rate, and fewer chances to build up net worth for the future.

Even if you accept that borrowers and lenders are equally responsible for the housing mess, that doesn't mean the price they'll pay for it will be the same.

Yes, there are plenty of failed lenders on the Mortgage Lender Implode-o-Meter. But as Michael Hudson, who authored the Center for Responsible Lending's report on the failed bank IndyMac explained, you could be a minimum-wage grocery clerk during the housing boom and then suddenly find yourself with a six-figure income as a mortgage broker.

So when it comes to borrowers and lenders, and their share of the blame in this crisis, let's not call it even, just yet. Brooks and others who decry the nation's culture of debt need to press the issue even more.

They need to acknowledge that we won't fully understand the mortgage mess until we investigate the interplay of race and credit that occurred during the housing boom. Until we question why minorities ended up with so many subprime loans, and why they paid so much more for their mortgages. And until we care about what will will mean for their financial futures.

That hasn't happened yet, and it's not clear that it ever will. For now, there are just the images of what happened in Washington earlier this week: The almost absurdly long line of anxious people clutching loan papers in the brutal heat, desperate to hang on to their houses.

All of it just a few blocks away from the White House -- in the capital of the most prosperous country in the world. The people who are paying the price.

McCain Announces Olympic Plans

Bruce McCall — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:44:42 GMT

Sen. John McCain has announced his intention to play on the U.S. women's field hockey team in the coming Olympic Games in Beijing, China.

The presumed GOP presidential nominee dismissed opponent Sen. Barack Obama's immediate charge that the startling move is "a cheap publicity stunt transparently meant to defuse McCain's age issue while also currying favor with the women's vote." McCain, 71, countered that he has actually been honing his field-hockey skills for weeks in the aisles of his Straight Talk Express bus and on roadside rest stops nationwide.

Asked to confirm or deny the claim, Mccain's close adviser, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) would only expressively wiggle his eyebrows as he affixed the the Arizona senator's bib for lunch.

Republican insiders evinced no ambiguity. "Nothing will show the senator's youthfulness, prime physical condition and virility better than wading in there among a bunch of chicks," said one senior G.O.P. official. "And yet he's got his feminine side. After all, he's married to a woman! And he has daughters!"

The Obama camp is denying sudden wildfire rumors that the athletic Chicagoan has been drafted by the U.S. men's Olympic basketball team after a recent secret tryout in Kuwait. His appearance in Beijing would cause a worldwide sensation, even if – as Obama has allegedly said – he would maintain the dignity expected of a Democratic presidential candidate by wearing his usual blue suit.

McCain, after his lunch, expressed confidence that he could "skate with the best of them" and seems to remember having seen a hockey game, though he asked that reporters check with Sen. Lieberman about the details. Reminded that field hockey is actually played on grass, he observed, "There is a lot of grass in Afghanistan, while my military friends there tell me that Iraq is mostly sand. So I wish the Iraq women's Olympic sand hockey team all the best."

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

Batman's 'Dark Knight' Reflects Cheney Policy

Spencer Ackerman — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:15:49 GMT

The thought of Vice President Dick Cheney in a form-fitting bat costume might be too much for most people to bear. But the concepts of security and danger presented in Christopher Nolan's new Batman epic, "The Dark Knight," align so perfectly with those of the Office of the Vice President that David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff and former legal counsel, might be an uncredited script doctor.

Insofar as it's possible to view an action movie that had the biggest three-day-opening in cinematic history as a comment on the current national-security debate, "The Dark Knight" weighs in strongly on the side of the Bush administration. Confronting the Joker, a nihilistic enemy whose motives are both unexplained and beside the point, the Batman faces his biggest dilemma yet: whether to abuse his power in order to save Gotham City. Again and again in the movie, the Batman's moral hand-wringing results in the deaths of innocents. Only by becoming like the monster he must vanquish can Batman secure a victory that even he understands is Pyrrhic.

Batman, the film's hero, played by Christian Bale, sees this as a morally devastating paradox. Dick Cheney and his ideological allies in the Bush administration, however, clearly view this as a righteous challenge. Cheney, Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and others can go to to this sixth Batman movie to see, in the Joker, as played by Heath Ledger, a perfect reflection of their view of Al Qaeda. He presents an enemy unbounded by any scruple; striking out for no rational reason; hell-bent on causing civilization-threatening destruction, and emboldened by any adversaries' restraint.

President George W. Bush, as Jane Mayer of The New Yorker writes in her recent book "The Dark Side," believed that the problem facing the U.S. was that Osama bin Laden "didn't feel threatened" by it. Attempting to understand Al Qaeda in order to confront it on its own terms was the stuff of the weak and the unsure -- part of the problem, in other words. The Bush administration instead set out, in a morally Manichean way, to ensure that the U.S. became as fearsome as possible.

When last Nolan left the caped crusader -- in 2003's "Batman Begins" -- playboy Bruce Wayne's menacing alter ego had begun to strike fear in the hearts of both the criminal underworld and the hopelessly corrupt power brokers of Gotham City. The structural problems of Gotham are exacerbated by punchable villains -- all stand-ins for fear. But the Batman was an iron will refusing to bend to fear, a symbol of hope emerging from the darkness, a predator upon those who prey upon the innocent. He struck an alliance with straight-shooting police lieutenant Jim Gordon based on their mutual incorruptibility.

[NB: Many 'Dark Knight' spoilers follow.]

"The Dark Knight" all but annihilates the premises of "Batman Begins." In addition to the avarice of Gotham, Batman finds himself in battle with a remorseless psychotic, the Joker. It is immediately clear that the Joker is playing a far different game than the Batman ever imagined. He kills erstwhile allies for pleasure, and in an exquisite performance by the late Ledger, enjoys a sexual frisson from shattering other people's lives. But the Joker's true motives are unexplained, unlike those of all previous comic-book villains. He tells his victims a story of his past abuse he suffered, but offers many permutations -- sometimes he says his father cut his face into a gruesome smile, other times he says he did it himself -- as if to underscore the foolishness of looking to the Joker as a reliable narrator. "Some men," says Batman's butler Alfred, the moral center of Bruce Wayne's universe, "just want to see the world burn."

Batman is powerless against such a villain. Faced with opportunities to kill the Joker, Batman refuses to sacrifice his moral code -- something the Joker exploits. Each time the Batman restrains himself, the Joker manipulates him into making choices that result in greater catastrophes. Most awful are the death of Rachel Dawes, Wayne's love interest; and the related mutilation of Harvey Dent, the pure-of-heart district attorney and symbol of Gotham's rebirth. Yet, each time, the Joker tells the Batman that the key to beating him is to become as nihilistic as he is.

That, in the final analysis, is what the Joker is really interested in: to deprive Gotham of its hero, its hope, and its soul. Batman, in other words, must "work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows."

That quote, of course, is Dick Cheney's only explicit statement of purpose to the American people about where he thought U.S. foreign policy needed to go in the post-9/11 world, delivered on "Meet the Press" on Sept. 16, 2001.

In the wake of that statement, Cheney and his allies created an unprecedented architecture of institutionalized abuse. The CIA would possess the power to kidnap suspected terrorists around the world, hold them indefinitely in undisclosed detention facilities -- or hand them over to partner intelligence services that use torture -- and torture them in the name of intelligence gathering. The Pentagon would enter the detentions business at Guantanamo Bay, freed of its obligations to abide by the Geneva Conventions, and would take the leading role in foreign policy by prosecuting "pre-emptive" wars of aggression and occupation. The National Security Agency, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, would wiretap the communications of U.S. persons without warrants.

Underlying these actions is a certain conception of the danger this is designed to confront. That danger is formless, limitless, uncontainable. Viewing civilization as inherently soft and vulnerable, it seeks to find restraint and punish the restrainer. Its motives, and even its capabilities, are less important than its desires for future disaster. Erring on the side of caution is the surest path to annihilation.

Such a threat creates an awful burden on those entrusted to protect others. "When Cheney spoke about it on national television a few days after the attacks," writes Ron Suskind, in his surprisingly sympathetic book explicating Cheney's weltanschauung, "The One Percent Doctrine," "he had given it a note of recognition -- this is what we must do, where we must live, like it or not."

That recognition is how Batman attempts to square his moral circle. He creates a surveillance technology that gives him limitless power, something that horrifies his ally Lucius Fox, and vows to destroy it after its first use. (In the comics, it's known as the Brother Eye, and it leads to disaster.) Only by abusing the trust of Gotham City can Batman redeem it. But through it all, he reassures himself -- at least implicitly -- that his awareness of his betrayal is what separates him from the Joker: intentions. It is this, and not consequences, that matter here. As part of his burden, he recognizes that he has become an outlaw, and accepts the ensuing persecution from the Gotham Police Department.

In so doing, Nolan's version of Batman is motivated by moral philosopher Michael Walzer's "dirty hands" argument. Walzer grappled with the problems on display in "The Dark Knight" and proposed, in an influential 1973 essay, that the key to engaging in morally dubious activities, like torture, during times of emergency is to acknowledge their heinousness and, once the emergency passes, accept legal sanction for the burden of saving the world.

One problem with Walzer's argument, as its many critics have noted, is that the results are still horrific -- torture, indefinite detention, assassination and other such practices incompatible with civilization. Another is that it presumes that once unlimited authorities are handed to an individual, that person can be trusted to relinquish them -- or even to determine, contrary to his or her interest, that the emergency has passed.

In the world of comic, that's easy. Batman is Batman -- he's conflicted, sure, but he's a hero. That's why in both movies, little children -- fellow incorruptibles -- are the only ones who neither fear nor hate him: they can see him as he sees himself.

But in the real world, this concept is ludicrous and anti-American.

First, it presumes an absurd omnipotence that the Cheneys of the world can even tell who is and who isn't a real threat -- a proposition shattered by the unreality of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda in 2003.

Second, it presumes that the emergency will pass at some point, though Cheney and his allies have repeatedly said they view it as open-ended and generational. In testimony earlier this month to a House panel, Addington hectored members of Congress for, in his view, suggesting that the danger from Al Qaeda had somehow diminished after seven years of the war on terrorism. Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld famously dubbed it "The Long War."

Third, it gives Al Qaeda exactly what it wants -- open-ended wars of occupation that deplete U.S. military and financial resources, increase Muslim discontent at U.S. policy and, ultimately, makes the the world a more dangerous place.

In "The Dark Knight Returns," the heralded 1986 graphic novel about retirement-age Batman, the writer Frank Miller offers another explanation for the Batman's behavior: he's a psychologically unhealthy man who cannot control himself, and masquerades his obsessions as a pursuit of justice.

Whether Nolan will mine that storyline in a third movie remains to be seen. Similarly, whether Cheney possesses the same degree of self-awareness as to who he is and what he has done to America remains, at the least, subject to debate.

When Antics on Trail Turn Ugly

Bruce McCall — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:26:07 GMT

Sen. Barack Obama's recent stopover in Kuwait where he "shoot a few hoops with the boys" is a rare instance of a presidential candidate engaging in harmless athletic fun on the campaign trail. Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, is lucky here; he can usually play pick-up basketball at any stop on the hustings. History is rife, however, with zany antics thought up by would-be commanders-in-chief to buck the boredom of a campaign's rigid schedules and formal duties – which all too often sadly backfired.

Still a Midwest legend is 1936 Republican candidate Alf Landon's penchant for galloping along atop the cars of his campaign train as it chuffed across the broiling Kansas plains. Landon would play Jesse James in a self-invented game of "Rob the Mail Car." A harmless diversion? Perhaps not: Landon's exhaustion from these exertions was widely blamed for a lackluster campaign wind-up and his ultimate landslide loss to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in November.

Candidate Obama's basketball jones ranks below the near obsession with tap-dancing secretively pursued by Richard M. Nixon in his l960 White House run. The hypertense Nixon dedicated every spare minute to ducking solo into handy closets or bathrooms to let off steam in furious buck-and-wing bouts. Emerging sweat-drenched from one such workout and rushed to a TV debate with John F. Kennedy, he may have lost the election then and there. Experts recently identified the rat-tat-tat of Nixon tap-dancing on his Oval Office desk as the "weird noises" heard on portions of the notorious secret White House tapes.

On the other hand, Al Smith, the 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, was not the least bit physical. The Happy Warrior's idea of relaxing amid the pressures of campaigning involved dropping water bombs from hotel windows. A harmless little prank, it might appear. But had Smith not always pointed to a hapless nearby aide or campaign donor when the police came knocking, he might have had a more loyal and hard-working staff. And a less humiliatingly lopsided loss to President Herbert Hoover.ll

Not all such didoes ended badly. For example, rolly-poly GOP presidential hopeful William Howard Taft used his own elephantine weight to break the tension on the campaign trail back in 1908. In any debate with a Democratic opponent, Taft would cross the platform after he had finished speaking and sit on him. The feeble cries for mercy coming from somewhere underneath convulsed his audiences, creating a wave of popularity that carried Taft and his 300-plus pounds straight into the White House.

Bruce McCall, a humorist, is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He is the author of "All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall" and "Zany Afternoons."

The New Boom Towns

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:00:42 GMT

The steep hike in gas and energy prices has created a national debate about the future of American metropolitan areas -- mostly about the reputed decline of suburbs and edge cities dependent on cars. But with all this focus on the troubles of traditional suburbs, one big story is overlooked: the rapid rise of America’s energy-producing metropolitan areas.

In many of the nation’s strongest regional economies, $5 a gallon gas is less a threat than a boon. From Houston and Midland in Texas, to a score of cities across the Great Plains, today’s energy crisis is creating new wealth and new jobs in a way not seen since, well, the energy crisis of the 1970s.

This reflects a global trend that is turning once out-of-the-way places, like Dubai and Alma Alty, into glittering high-rise cities. Other energy- and commodity-rich places are undergoing a similar boom -- from Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, to Calgary and Edmonton in Canada and Perth in Australia.

What all these places have going for them is control of what Kent Briggs, former chief of staff for Utah’s late Gov. Scott Matheson, once called “the testicles of the universe.” These cities base their wealth not on clever financial technology, cultural attributes or university-honed skills but on their position as centers of the global commodities boom.

In the process, there has been a shift in the balance of economic power away from financial and information centers like New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. These cities are deeply vulnerable to the national financial and mortage crises. New York, according to David Shulman, former Lehman Brothers managing director, faces upward of 30,000 to 40,000 layoffs in its financial sector. San Francisco in the last quarter gave away a Transamerica Pyramid’s worth of office space.

In contrast, things have never looked better for cities now riding the energy and commodity boom. By far the biggest winner is Houston, whose breakneck growth has been fueled by its role as the world’s premier energy city. As with Dubai, this is less a function of the city's proximity of actual deposits (though the Gulf of Mexico represents one of the most promising energy finds in North America), than to its premier role as the technical, trading and administrative center of the worldwide industry.

This prominence is, in historic terms, relatively recent. As late as the 1980s “oil bust," notes historian Joe Feagin, Houston’s energy sector remained “a colony of New York,” where many of key industry corporate and financial decision-makers still lived.

Yet, today, Houston’s national, even global dominance, of the energy business is palpable. With the lure of low-cost office space and housing stock, as well as myriad personal ties among executives and leading engineers, Houston managed to consolidate its position as the predominant center of the oil and gas industry. In 1960, Houston had barely one of the nation’s large energy firms, ranking well behind New York, Los Angeles and even Tulsa; today it has 16, more than all those cities combined.

High wages offered by energy firms -- annual salaries for geologists average $132,000 or more; while blue-collar workers make roughly $60,000 -- have attracted a new generation of skilled executives and technicians to the region, which also enjoys a far lower cost a living than many other major cities. Areas like River Oaks, Galleria and Energy Corridor are home to well-educated, upwardly mobile workers in their late 20s and 30s. The area is growing at a time when these workers are, according to recent census numbers, leaving places like San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Boston.

“People from other areas say that you guys don’t make much down there,“ said Houston executive recruiter Chris Schoettelkotte. “[But] the guys from L.A. make the same amount of money in the same field here. We pull them from Wharton, the Ivy League and Stanford and they get paid through the nose… Houston can get the talent.”

Houston’s status as energy capital is also propelling it into the ranks of first-tier cities. Today, Houston has the third largest representation of consular offices. It ranks behind only Los Angeles and New York, and has outstripped traditional commercial centers like San Francisco and Chicago.

It’s energy, along with the port and growing airport, that makes the Texas city a world capital. “When I go overseas people put Houston with New York and L.A.," said Houston salvage entrepreneur Charlie Wilson. “In many cases, Houston is considered to be at the top of the world class because of oil. If you’re in China, you’re looking at Houston because of the oil.”

But Houston is not alone in benefiting from the rising price of energy and other commodities. According to the new Inc./Newgeography.com job growth rankings other energy cities include Dallas -- home of Exxon Mobil –- as well as smaller Texas burgs like Midland, Odessa and Longview.

This is a dramatic turnaround for places like Midland. Until recently, said Midland oilman Mike Bradford, wildcatters had held back from drilling, because they feared the high oil prices would not last. Now they are convinced that the energy market has broken free of OPEC control and prices will remain high. "We think high [oil and gas] prices are for real — and we're going nuts," said Bradford, who also sits on the Midland County Commission.

But you don’t have to be in Texas to be part of an energy boomtown. Bakersfield, Calif., oil capital, is also thriving, despite the hard times throughout the Golden State because of the mortgage crisis. Alaskans, who now receive more than $1,600 per capita from the state’s Permanent Fund Dividend, twice what they received in 2005, are likely to see their wealth increase. If there’s an expansion of drilling there, look for Anchorage and other Alaskan cities to enjoy even flusher times.

Another hot spot is in the Great Plains. Energy production and high commodity prices are pacing the economies of regional centers like Des Moines; Billings, Mont.; Cheyenne, Wy., and Sioux Falls, S.D. In Bismarck, Grand Forks and Fargo, N.D., where incomes are surging, there’s a sense that these are the best of times. One sure sign: The energy boom -- coal, oil, wind as well as biofuels -- has produced a a billion-dollar state surplus for North Dakota.

The energy and commodity boom is changing the face of these small cities in key ways. Fargo, the butt of sophisticated jokes with the Coen Brothers’ movie, now boasts a first-class arena, fine restaurants, a luxurious boutique hotel and a thriving arts scene.

Grand Forks has a growing condo market. Scores of smaller cities -- like Bismarck and Dickinson – are also showing signs of a new quasi-urban sophistication. After decades of demographic stagnation, some of these towns are seeing healthy population gains.

Rising unemployment is not a problem here; a looming labor shortage is. In some markets, there are signing bonuses and $12-an-hour wages at fast-food business.

If energy prices hold firm, and particularly if the nation begins to ramp up energy production, we can see the boomtimes extend to energy-rich Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Louisiana. These can mean more growth in already healthy economies like Albuquerque, Salt Lake City and Denver; but also for long hard-pressed New Orleans and other Gulf Coast cities.

Finally there’s another group of potential winners: areas that have been selected to produce the energy-efficient vehicles of the future. Even as Detroit, Flint and Ft. Wayne, Ind.,-- producers of SUVs and trucks -- suffer, many cities in the mid-South, like Nashville, Huntsville and Chattanooga, Tenn., seem certain to gain as Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen and other foreign producers ramp up production.

Perhaps the ultimate example of “world turned upside down” by energy prices may end up being Mississippi, long a perennial loser in the economic sweepstakes. But this week, Toyota announced it would start building its popular hybrid Prius in Blue Springs, Miss., in late 2010. That’s just outside Tupelo, Elvis’ birthplace.

We may not see a reappearance of the King --- but for many people this resurgence is just as stunning.

None of this, however, suggests that San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York are about to be eclipsed by Houston -- much less Fargo or Tupelo. But if the history of cities tells us anything, places well-positioned for growth industries tend to emerge as ever more serious players.

It worked for industrial cities like Chicago, which emerged from obscurity in the late 19th Century; or later for high-tech centers like San Jose, Austin and Boston. If energy and commodity prices stay high for another decade, we may have to get used to a shift in the power of places across the American landscape.

Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and the author of "The City: A Global History." He is executive editor of the website www.newgeography.com