Donald Rumsfeld is off in Singapore, at a conference of defense types, lecturing the Chinese on their military modernization expenditures. "Whadda ya need all that military hardware for?" he asks. "Who's threatening you? Some of your neighbors might take it the wrong way!"

The Chinese must be biting their tongues not to say, "We were wondering the same about you, with your plans to spend billions on "military transformation" and your precious "lily pads" sprouting nearby." Especially since the Bush Administration apparently expects the Chinese central bank to provide the financing.

Haggai accepted my offer to play the movie DVD game. Some similarities between his list and mine -- we both have a Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, 81/2. Looks like I've more of a taste for comedy. Of course, he's now got me rethinking my selections -- The Godfather, how could I leave it off a list, even if it is the number one film on IMDB!

I think we need to invent a "best in genre" game to deal with categories I didn't even think about, like animation. This is even harder than "what's your favorite dish" without being able to say "favorite Indian," "favorite Italian," "favorite Lebanese," etc. In the meantime, he-e-e-ere's Haggai...!

---

• Total number of films I own: About 165 DVDs
• Last movie I bought: Make that the last six movies I bought, five in one boxset. They were in an Amazon order that came in a few days ago: Steve McQueen Collection, and Jules and Jim.
• Last movie I saw: Jules and Jim. This category changes pretty much every day for me.
• Five favorites: My top five movies are fairly solid, but not the order they come in. With no particular order:
  • Casablanca
  • Lawrence of Arabia
  • The Godfather
  • The Empire Strikes Back
  • Rear Window
  Another five favorites:
  • 2001
  • Chinatown
  • The Searchers
  • 8 1/2
  • The Rules of the Game*
  * [ed. -- A surprisingly common title, so I'm assuming this is Jean Renoir's "La Regle du jeu"]

In terms of frequently watching things, I fall into odd patterns these days. I think the DVD in my collection that I've watched the most often has ended up being Kind Hearts and Coronets. I've been keeping a log of everything I watch since the beginning of this year, and there are two movies I've seen more than once since Jan. 1st: Bambi, and Days of Being Wild (first viewing of that one was in a theater).

Stygius passes me the DVD library movie meme. Just one small problem -- I don't own any movies on DVD (or on any other medium, for that matter). Culturally deprived luddite, and all that. And a few years back, when I had three back surgeries in a 10-month period, I sort of got out of the habit of sitting in movie theaters.

So I guess I'll just have to improvise, with apologies to Stygius and the meme originator.

• Total number of films I own: zero
• Last movie I bought: uh, never
• Last movie I saw: Pirates of the Caribbean (hey, my nieces were in town and brought it with them -- they couldn't bear to be parted from Johnny and Orlando for a week!)
• Five favorites: I suppose this should be translated as -- "what are the five DVDs you would own if you owned any." This sort of open-end exercise -- infinite possibilities and such a tiny number of answers -- is quite a challenge. I can't even do "what's your favorite in each genre," because there are certainly more than five genres. So here's a first crack at a list.

  • Bringing Up Baby -- the perfect ensemble "domestic" farce
  • The Producers -- on my "favorite" list a few decades before the stage show
  • Blade Runner -- "seminal" is too often used used with gay abandon, but Scott defined an aesthetic for an entire generation
  • Notorious -- my favorite Hitchcock, and yes, Cary Grant can show up twice on my top five any day of the week
  • 8 1/2 -- Fellini's masterpiece is either an overwhelming experience or it simply doesn't speak to you

  And I still haven't done any Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot) or an action-adventure (French Connection) or spy thriller (The Third Man) or stage musical (Cabaret) or social comedy (Alfie the original, puh-leez!) or historical (Gladiator -- yeah, I'm a Ridley Scott fan bigtime), or stage-to-screen (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) or political thriller (Z) or... yeah, I know, I'm cheating. I'm well into my third "top five" list, and there are more genres to go. Sigh.

  So to pass the virus along. First, to Haggai, who I know first-hand is the compleat film freak. I'm quite curious what his choices would be. Haggai's not been blogging much recently, but he's welcome to post his response here if he wants to play. And then:

  • Brad Plumer, who clearly needs a diversion from his current addiction.
  • Needlenose's Swopa -- maybe fubar will let Swopa feature a DVD list in the next installment of the SRIPOTW.
  • Eric Martin (Total Information Awareness -- I'm still hanging on to another baton he passed me earlier and Eric, I promise, I will get to it later this weekend).
  • My list is woefully light on foreign films, so let's go across the pond to Emmanuel of Ceteris Paribus, who can provide his list in the language of his choice. After the events of the past week, maybe Emmanuel also needs a diversion to maintain his Europtimisme.
  • And for a bit more geographic diversity, from down-under Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion.

There's hardly a spot in the political blogosphere where you won't find some commentary on the right-wing slime-fest over Mark Felt. I'm not sure which cri de coeur I've found more offensive -- so far it's a toss-up between Ben Stein and la Noonan, who equate Nixon's resignation with the unleashing of Pol Pot's killing fields.

Yet I find a certain sympathy for their all too evident agony. The frustrations they have suffered, for more than thirty years, are all gushing forth in one grand orgy of angst, resentment, fear and loathing. Because try as they might, they've lost the battle over the framing of one of the great pieces of American political mythology. As one of the commenters to a Josh Marshall post noted at the new TPMCafe:

I listened to some local wingnut radio on my way home yesterday and was surprised by the reaction. The majority of the callers in my 30 minute drive, not only rejected the false choice of hero/snake, but overwhelmingly agreed Felt did the right thing. Many also noted that most of the criticism was coming from members of the Nixon admin.

It must be profoundly gauling for the ex-Nixon gang to realize that the real battle for myth and memory isn't with their great political and philosophical enemies, the liberals and hippies. No, they're up against Hollywood, the home of their own myth-making hero Ronald Reagan. They know to their chagrin that when it comes to political mythmaking, Hollywood trumps all.

So when they dutifully pen their steaming op-eds or show up to foam on the cable shows, they're not fighting the Democrats of today, or even those of an earlier generation. They're taking on Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Hal Holbrooke, and Jason Robards. They're trying to erase the memorybanks of all those millions of cable and DVD viewers -- in both the US and international markets -- who have watched a clattering teletype announce the list of indictments and convictions amid the sounds and images of the unwinding Nixon presidency and the peaceful transition of power. They're trying to eradicate the emotional experience of sharing with Redford and Hoffman -- and with Deep Throat -- the bittersweet vindication of exposing the crimes of all the presidents' men.

That's a fight over American mythology that a bunch of over-the-hill speech writers and cable show pundits just aren't going to win.

Gene Sperling has penned the best simple explanation I've read of how a pension and disability system should be structured, and where private accounts would fit into such a system. His pre-obituary for the bamboozlepalooza, "Bush Private Accounts Are Dead Shark" (HT Woody Allen), will be read mainly for its assessment of GOP and Dem tactical maneuvering. But it is actually a tidy little essay on the principles of a "three-legged stool," which should underpin the logic of any scheme if it is to be supported by Democrats and reasonable Republicans.

Sperling expresses far more succinctly the key points I made more than three months ago, when last I took up the dreaded Social Security topic.

Social Security is simply the wrong vehicle for pushing the worthy and important goal of increasing ownership and savings among working Americans. In our three-legged retirement system [government benefits, employer-based pensions, personal investments]... Social Security is the only leg free of market and economic risk.

When communities were devastated by corporate scandals or bankruptcies in 2001 and 2002, many families saw not only their pensions dissipate, and retiree health benefits evaporate, but even their housing values decline as their hard-hit neighborhoods spiraled down.

The only part of their financial package that didn't join this spiral was Social Security. With privatization, those families would have seen their Social Security benefits drop, as well. That is why those of us who support new investment incentives like Universal 401(k)s should be the ones most adamant about the importance of keeping the Social Security leg of our retirement system completely risk-free.

Sperling then proceeds to outline why it's important for the three legs to be kept separate and distinct.

The second substantive rationale for a hard "no" on privatization is that virtually every private-account plan is designed to make Americans undervalue the social-insurance benefits of Social Security and overvalue their private accounts.

To see why, imagine a father who decides to invest $5,000 in the market and $5,000 in a combination of fire insurance, life insurance, and auto insurance. After one year, he happily notes that his market investment has risen 6 percent. Yet, because he neither died, saw his house burn down nor experienced a serious auto accident, he concludes he got a negative annual return on his $5,000 insurance investment and, therefore, cancels all of his insurance policies.

Of course, this father would be a fool. No rational person measures the value of insurance by an annual return. Yet, when Bush tells Americans to compare the return on their private account with the return they get with a Social Security system -- which provides valuable insurance against poverty, devastating disability, and the early death of a provider -- he encourages exactly that foolish comparison.

And here's the pernicious effect over time of Bush's political "optics" in action:

Bush leads Americans to ignore the value that goes to the recipients of survivor and disability insurance -- almost a third of all Social Security beneficiaries -- and the almost 100 percent of workers who can go to bed knowing that if such misfortune occurs, Social Security will help their families maintain a modicum of economic dignity.

Bush's plan is designed to even further exacerbate this false comparison. By requiring borrowed funds for private accounts to be paid back not from the accounts themselves but by reducing Social Security benefits, his plan is designed to make private accounts seem deceptively large and Social Security benefits appear deceptively small.

This absurd design serves only one purpose: to encourage the healthy and the well-off to misconstrue Social Security as a bad deal.

Now, you may say, it may or may not be a bad deal for the healthy and well-off. But isn't the real point that the current program is more than is necessary to provide a safety net to keep folks from really falling through the cracks. Wouldn't it do the trick to provide a means-tested small safety net for everyone, with a bigger private investment portfolio portion that varies for each individual by the size of his or her contributions? And I would respond, that depends what's happening with the other legs of the stool -- not merely from the vantage of individuals but for the overall structure of the economy.

We need to take Sperling's analysis one step further -- to what's happening with the second leg of the stool, employer-based pensions. This is the story of the rapid demise of the defined-benefit system. Business has been shifting to defined-contribution plans at an accelerating rate, leaving the financial risks with the employees. According to Business Week:

The number of defined-benefit pension plans has plunged from 112,000 in the mid 1980s to fewer than 30,000 today. The tally of workers earning a pension has fallen more slowly, but their ranks now total just 17 million, down from 22 million 20 years ago.

Where defined-benefit systems have survived, they are increasingly endangered species. Many plans are experiencing crises in funding, and they remain most common in "legacy" industries like the older airlines and autos. These industries simply cannot continue their previous levels of employee benefits and stay in business.

The result has been a growing crisis at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, where it is rapidly losing its ability to fund its liabilities from premiums. To compound the difficulty, as the GAO just reported this week, the government's current pension accounting rules allow companies to use techniques that can mask significant funding shortfalls. Any "cure" for the PBGC's own balance sheet will undoubtedly accelerate the move away from defined-benefit plans, even as the mopping up of old problems grows more expensive by the year.

Give the Bush Administration credit in one sense -- they have proposed to address the PBGC issue head-on rather than continue to temporize, despite screams from many industries. The PBGC problem is frequently described as an "S&L crisis" in the making, and the Bush Administration seems to have taken the lesson from the S&Ls to heart. Continuing to tinker with the rules to accommodate an arrangement that no longer makes much economic sense is simply running up the costs while delaying the inevitable. The PBCG isn't going to "grow out of" its dilemma any more than the S&Ls did. And make no mistake about it -- the outcome will be the same in both cases -- the disappearance of a type of financial service that has lost its economic logic as the structure of US competition has shifted. The only question is when, at what cost, and who will bear those costs.

The Bush Administration's approach to the PBGC is an implicit acknowledgment that global competition has made defined-contribution arrangements -- those that shift financial risk to employees -- the only realistic option for most individual employers. But when we look at this shift in financial risk from the view of American business as a whole, the picture is becoming far less attractive. A system without predictable levels of retirement income is a system in which a considerable portion of the consumer confidence and spending power of the American middle class would be subject to the volatility of investment portfolios. In three-legged stool terms, over the past few decades one of the legs of the stool has started to change length frequently and is coming loose -- making for a rather wobbly stool.

Now why would we compound this financial uncertainty, exacerbate business cycles, and reinforce financial crises, by cutting the size of the one leg that is fixed and steady? This is one of the reasons why most captains of industry and finance (other than the sell-side guys in the brokerage firms) have been noticeably missing in action on the score of privatizing Social Security. They understand that the health of the American economy and American business depend on a secure, confident middle class. They know full well that over the past decades financial risks have been shifting from business to individuals. Few but the true-believers see much virtue in shifting more risk onto individuals from a widely-accepted, easily administered government program.

Shouldn't Democrats, as well as US business and labor together, be supporting policies that strengthen both legs of the stool?

For the employer-based-leg of the stool, it's time to face up to the fact that defined-benefit plans are going to be phased out over the coming years. The costs to both individual employees and taxpayers may be extremely high if corporations and unions persuade Congress to delay the day of reckoning. Shouldn't we be pushing for the orderly conversion of existing defined-benefit plans to defined-contribution plans in the private sector?

And as the financial security of the employer-based-leg of the stool decreases, shouldn't we be strengthening, not weakening, the Social Security leg of the stool?

Well I'm back from an extended but unplanned break. I've been pretty much out of commission, other than an occasional appearance at praktike's Liberals Against Terrorism and my continued addiction to producing del.icio.us clippings (see sidebar).

I'd reached a point where posting here wasn't fun -- I found myself in a constant state of irritation with the blog's setup. Probably also reflected a lack of focus with what we should do with the site more generally, especially how to handle my predeliction for long-form blogging.

Guess I'm one of those folks who keep searching for the perfect combo. I want a system that's not super heavy-duty, with features I'll never need, or overly intimidating for the technology-challenged. It's not enough to have a basic publishing device that handles comments etc without constant spam hassles. I also want the blog to be a decent content management system that satisfies my magpie instincts, displays uniformly well in all browsers and sizes without requiring constant tending by a professional webdesigner, etc etc. Beauty, multi-functional, simple, and cheap. Like I don't want much, eh? So I've been off exploring lots of options, and we're now working on a better solution, probably WordPress.

In the meantime, however, I have succumbed to blog-envy, just looking at all the shiny new editions of my favorite old sites. So I decided that the least I could do was some quick remodeling of the old homestead with a reskin. I'm now in the process of tidying up the backend, which had gotten decidedly messy indeed -- like the upstairs linen closet where you stick all the odds & ends and suddenly one day can't find anything in it. The categories are partially reorganized -- still not finished but everything should be there -- and the old mammoth blogrolls are getting a major update and facelift. It's still a construction site, so mind your step.