Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Is This the "Tipping Point" They Warned Us About?
I just stumbled across this in The Independent and, if it doesn't send a quiet chill through you, it probably should.
"The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age."
Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.
"The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age."
Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University in Sweden, one of the leaders of the expedition, described the scale of the methane emissions in an email exchange sent from the Russian research ship Jacob Smirnitskyi.
"We had a hectic finishing of the sampling programme yesterday and this past night," said Dr Gustafsson. "An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface. These 'methane chimneys' were documented on echo sounder and with seismic [instruments]."
Arctic seabed methane, as a greenhouse gas, is considered greater than the carbon locked up in the entire planet's coal reserves. Elevated levels of dissolved methane in Arctic waters have been detected since 2003. I wonder if this has any connection with the unexplained record ice melt last month despite our cooler summer temperatures?
Remember When We Worried About Global Warming?
Anybody notice how much attention has been paid to environmental problems since the housing bubble burst triggered the subprime mortgage crisis that triggered the derivative securities crisis that triggered the debt crisis that triggered the credit crisis?
The environment? Global warming? Go away kid, I'm busy saving banks here!
And so it goes. The Environmental News Network has a story today that shows how intractable the carbon emissions problem can be. Norway had plans to be the leader in curbing carbon output. Way back in 1991 Norway enacted a carbon tax. It also imposed powerful emissions regulation on its offshore oil industry. So where is Norway today? Carbon emissions are up 15%.
"Although the tax forced Norway's oil and gas sector to become among the greenest in the world, soaring energy prices led to a boom in offshore production, which in turn boosted overall emissions. So did drivers. Norwegians, who already pay nearly $10 a gallon, took the tax in stride, buying more cars and driving them more. And numerous industries won exemptions from the tax, carrying on unchanged.
Norway's sobering experience shows how difficult it is to cut emissions in the real world, where elegant theoretical solutions are complicated by economic changes, entrenched behaviors and political realities.
A few countries have cut emissions without injuring their economies. Sweden and Denmark, both of which introduced a carbon tax, have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 14% and 8% respectively since 1990 while maintaining growth. Their emission reductions can't be attributed to the tax alone, economists say. Additional moves to encourage energy efficiency and renewable energy, which are government-subsidized, played a part."
Wait a second, did I read that correctly? These countries have had carbon taxes since 1990 - almost two decades - and they didn't explode? What's that? Their economies remain strong? Didn't they get Stephen Harper's "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid" memo?
By the way, New Zealand has just enacted a "green shift" policy much like that proposed by Stephane Dion. Maybe our Furious Leader can let us know when the folks down under fall into the sea.
The environment? Global warming? Go away kid, I'm busy saving banks here!
And so it goes. The Environmental News Network has a story today that shows how intractable the carbon emissions problem can be. Norway had plans to be the leader in curbing carbon output. Way back in 1991 Norway enacted a carbon tax. It also imposed powerful emissions regulation on its offshore oil industry. So where is Norway today? Carbon emissions are up 15%.
"Although the tax forced Norway's oil and gas sector to become among the greenest in the world, soaring energy prices led to a boom in offshore production, which in turn boosted overall emissions. So did drivers. Norwegians, who already pay nearly $10 a gallon, took the tax in stride, buying more cars and driving them more. And numerous industries won exemptions from the tax, carrying on unchanged.
Norway's sobering experience shows how difficult it is to cut emissions in the real world, where elegant theoretical solutions are complicated by economic changes, entrenched behaviors and political realities.
A few countries have cut emissions without injuring their economies. Sweden and Denmark, both of which introduced a carbon tax, have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions by 14% and 8% respectively since 1990 while maintaining growth. Their emission reductions can't be attributed to the tax alone, economists say. Additional moves to encourage energy efficiency and renewable energy, which are government-subsidized, played a part."
Wait a second, did I read that correctly? These countries have had carbon taxes since 1990 - almost two decades - and they didn't explode? What's that? Their economies remain strong? Didn't they get Stephen Harper's "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid" memo?
By the way, New Zealand has just enacted a "green shift" policy much like that proposed by Stephane Dion. Maybe our Furious Leader can let us know when the folks down under fall into the sea.
Karzai a Human Shield for Taliban?
Speaking of futile gestures, Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai says he'll protect Taliban leaders from American and NATO guns if they want to pop by Kabul for a chat.
"Don't be afraid of the foreigners. If they try to harm you, I will stand in front of them," he said.
Great, now Karzai is offering to put a bullseye on his chest and his back!
Stiglitz Weighs In on US Meltdown
I was wondering when we'd hear from Joe Stiglitz on the US economic meltdown. Fortunately that happened today in the form of an opinion piece from the Nobel Prize winning US economist. As expected, Stiglitz brings some much needed clarity and insight to the problems:
"...the rescue plan that was just defeated was far better than what the Bush administration originally proposed. But its basic approach remained critically flawed. First, it relied – once again – on trickle-down economics: somehow, throwing enough money at Wall Street would trickle down to Main Street, helping ordinary workers and homeowners. Trickle-down economics almost never works, and it is no more likely to work this time.
Moreover, the plan assumed that the fundamental problem was one of confidence. That is no doubt part of the problem; but the underlying problem is that financial markets made some very bad loans. There was a housing bubble, and loans were made on the basis of inflated prices.
Even if a bail-out plan were implemented quickly – which appears increasingly unlikely – there would be some credit contraction. The US economy has been sustained by a consumption boom fueled by excessive borrowing, and that will be curtailed. States and localities are cutting back expenditures. Household balance sheets are weaker. An economic slowdown will exacerbate all our financial problems.
We could do more with less money. The holes in financial institutions' balance sheets should be filled in a transparent way. The Scandinavian countries showed the way two decades ago. Warren Buffet showed another way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public's downside risk and ensures that they participate in some of the upside potential.
This approach is not only proven, but it also provides both the incentives and wherewithal needed for lending to resume. It avoids the hopeless task of trying to value millions of complex mortgages and the even more complex financial products in which they are embedded, and it deals with the "lemons" problem – the government gets stuck with the worst or most overpriced assets. Finally, it can be done far more quickly.
At the same time, several steps can be taken to reduce foreclosures. First, housing can be made more affordable for poor and middle-income Americans by converting the mortgage deduction into a cashable tax credit. The government effectively pays 50% of the mortgage interest and real estate taxes for upper-income Americans, yet does nothing for the poor. Second, bankruptcy reform is needed to allow homeowners to write down the value of their homes and stay in their houses. Third, government could assume part of a mortgage, taking advantage of its lower borrowing costs.
Investment banks and credit rating agencies believed in financial alchemy – the notion that significant value could be created by slicing and dicing securities. The new view is that real value can be created by un-slicing and un-dicing – pulling these assets out of the financial system and turning them over to the government. But that requires overpaying for the assets, benefiting only the banks.
In the end, there is a high likelihood that if such a plan is ultimately adopted, American taxpayers will be left on the hook. In environmental economics, there is a basic principle, called "the polluter pays principle." It is a matter of both equity and efficiency. Wall Street has polluted the economy with toxic mortgages. It should pay for the cleanup.
There is a growing consensus among economists that any bail-out based on Paulson's plan won't work. If so, the huge increase in the national debt and the realisation that even $700bn is not enough to rescue the US economy will erode confidence further and aggravate its weakness.
But it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement crafted with the toxic mix of special interests, misguided economics, and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works – or whose failure doesn't do too much damage."
I think there's enormous merit in Stiglitz' approach. You don't buy bad mortgages. They stay with the outfits that were stupid and greedy enough to buy them. Instead you inject government money into those same companies to restore their liquidity, taking back a preferred share position that means the taxpayers' interest stands above all others. The taxpayers' money has to be repaid - out of the good mortgages if it comes right down to it - before the other investors see a dime.
"...the rescue plan that was just defeated was far better than what the Bush administration originally proposed. But its basic approach remained critically flawed. First, it relied – once again – on trickle-down economics: somehow, throwing enough money at Wall Street would trickle down to Main Street, helping ordinary workers and homeowners. Trickle-down economics almost never works, and it is no more likely to work this time.
Moreover, the plan assumed that the fundamental problem was one of confidence. That is no doubt part of the problem; but the underlying problem is that financial markets made some very bad loans. There was a housing bubble, and loans were made on the basis of inflated prices.
Even if a bail-out plan were implemented quickly – which appears increasingly unlikely – there would be some credit contraction. The US economy has been sustained by a consumption boom fueled by excessive borrowing, and that will be curtailed. States and localities are cutting back expenditures. Household balance sheets are weaker. An economic slowdown will exacerbate all our financial problems.
We could do more with less money. The holes in financial institutions' balance sheets should be filled in a transparent way. The Scandinavian countries showed the way two decades ago. Warren Buffet showed another way, in providing equity to Goldman Sachs. By issuing preferred shares with warrants (options), one reduces the public's downside risk and ensures that they participate in some of the upside potential.
This approach is not only proven, but it also provides both the incentives and wherewithal needed for lending to resume. It avoids the hopeless task of trying to value millions of complex mortgages and the even more complex financial products in which they are embedded, and it deals with the "lemons" problem – the government gets stuck with the worst or most overpriced assets. Finally, it can be done far more quickly.
At the same time, several steps can be taken to reduce foreclosures. First, housing can be made more affordable for poor and middle-income Americans by converting the mortgage deduction into a cashable tax credit. The government effectively pays 50% of the mortgage interest and real estate taxes for upper-income Americans, yet does nothing for the poor. Second, bankruptcy reform is needed to allow homeowners to write down the value of their homes and stay in their houses. Third, government could assume part of a mortgage, taking advantage of its lower borrowing costs.
Investment banks and credit rating agencies believed in financial alchemy – the notion that significant value could be created by slicing and dicing securities. The new view is that real value can be created by un-slicing and un-dicing – pulling these assets out of the financial system and turning them over to the government. But that requires overpaying for the assets, benefiting only the banks.
In the end, there is a high likelihood that if such a plan is ultimately adopted, American taxpayers will be left on the hook. In environmental economics, there is a basic principle, called "the polluter pays principle." It is a matter of both equity and efficiency. Wall Street has polluted the economy with toxic mortgages. It should pay for the cleanup.
There is a growing consensus among economists that any bail-out based on Paulson's plan won't work. If so, the huge increase in the national debt and the realisation that even $700bn is not enough to rescue the US economy will erode confidence further and aggravate its weakness.
But it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement crafted with the toxic mix of special interests, misguided economics, and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works – or whose failure doesn't do too much damage."
I think there's enormous merit in Stiglitz' approach. You don't buy bad mortgages. They stay with the outfits that were stupid and greedy enough to buy them. Instead you inject government money into those same companies to restore their liquidity, taking back a preferred share position that means the taxpayers' interest stands above all others. The taxpayers' money has to be repaid - out of the good mortgages if it comes right down to it - before the other investors see a dime.
Do As I Say, Not As I Did
I'm no historian when it comes to Israeli politics so bear with me. Remarks being attributed to outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert reminded me of an article I read not too long ago that claimed outgoing Israeli leaders tell truths they were never willing to embrace while they held power.
The main truth is the one coming from Olmert today, namely that Israel will never achieve peace with the Palestinians and Syria until it returns the lands it seized in 1967. From The Globe & Mail:
"In an interview published in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper yesterday, a week after his formal resignation, Mr. Olmert said that Israelis need to make a "supremely difficult" decision about whether or not they really want to have peace with their neighbours. If the answer is yes, he said, Israel will have to withdraw its soldiers and settlers from the Golan Heights and nearly all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."
What's radical about that? All Olmert is stating is what everybody knows. The profound part is that no Israeli leader has been willing to do what it takes.
Don't go spinning off into the usual uber-right diversions about Hamas or Hezbollah. Olmert, like his predecessors, didn't qualify his opinions with that nonsense because he knows that gets his country nowhere. That's Fox News drivel. Give Olmert and his Israeli predecessors a bit of credit. Maybe, just maybe, they understand their region's reality better than Sean Hannity and the rest of the rightwing rabble.
The main truth is the one coming from Olmert today, namely that Israel will never achieve peace with the Palestinians and Syria until it returns the lands it seized in 1967. From The Globe & Mail:
"In an interview published in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper yesterday, a week after his formal resignation, Mr. Olmert said that Israelis need to make a "supremely difficult" decision about whether or not they really want to have peace with their neighbours. If the answer is yes, he said, Israel will have to withdraw its soldiers and settlers from the Golan Heights and nearly all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem."
What's radical about that? All Olmert is stating is what everybody knows. The profound part is that no Israeli leader has been willing to do what it takes.
Don't go spinning off into the usual uber-right diversions about Hamas or Hezbollah. Olmert, like his predecessors, didn't qualify his opinions with that nonsense because he knows that gets his country nowhere. That's Fox News drivel. Give Olmert and his Israeli predecessors a bit of credit. Maybe, just maybe, they understand their region's reality better than Sean Hannity and the rest of the rightwing rabble.
Monday, September 29, 2008
A Gaffe Big Enough To Drive a Truck Through
Canadian prime minister Stephen "McSame" Harper says fear not, the Canadian economy is "strong."
“Today, we see more volatility in the financial markets due to the crisis in the United States. Remember, Canada is not the United States. The fundamentals of the Canadian economy are sound.”
Harper is right, in part. We're not the United States, not that he can claim a lot of credit for that. Harper's outspoken support for deep integration with the United States is on record and it speaks for itself.
Here's one fundamental of the Canadian economy that's anything but sound - our unhealthy reliance on trade with the United States. In trade, we've been putting almost all of our eggs in one basket, the one with all the stars and stripes painted on it.
It's the United States of America that creates our terrific balance of trade surpluses. It's the United States that generates our balance of payment surpluses.
The rest of the world, those countries that Harper has so often shown a cold shoulder? You don't find Canada enjoying a lot of balance of trade surpluses with them. In fact we're running a serious balance of trade deficit beyond the U.S.
So Harp needs a sharp one up alongside his goofy head. Our hull may not be leaking but when you're the rowboat tied fast to the Titanic, you've got a problem, one that you need to acknowledge and address and resolve.
The guy at the wheel of the Tory clown car doesn't want to talk about this. Harper is afraid that simply talking about what's in store for us could upset his plans when he's so close to an election win. Shouldn't we be afraid of a guy who acts like this?
So, Mister Dion, it's time to act like the leader of the Liberal Party. The Globe reports that a group of Toronto Libs are urging Dion to appoint a panel of prominent Liberals to, "...to study the situation and suggest ways Canadians can keep their life savings and deal with the Wall Street crisis."
They're touting names like Paul Martin, Frank McKenna, John Manley and Don Johnston - men whose financial talents are unheard of in the Tory ranks.
“We believe this task force idea would help Dion recover at the 11th hour, because at the very least, it would remind Canadians of the stellar Chrétien/Martin record on the economy,” one of the Toronto Liberals said. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, perhaps. This is not a desperate measure but a smart one.”
Harper has taken his stand. The economy is sound, nothing to see here, move on. It's a position that defies reality and would leave Canadians at severe risk to an American meltdown. Harper hasn't given Mr. Dion many opportunities as good as this and Mr. Dion can't afford to pass on this one.
“Today, we see more volatility in the financial markets due to the crisis in the United States. Remember, Canada is not the United States. The fundamentals of the Canadian economy are sound.”
Harper is right, in part. We're not the United States, not that he can claim a lot of credit for that. Harper's outspoken support for deep integration with the United States is on record and it speaks for itself.
Here's one fundamental of the Canadian economy that's anything but sound - our unhealthy reliance on trade with the United States. In trade, we've been putting almost all of our eggs in one basket, the one with all the stars and stripes painted on it.
It's the United States of America that creates our terrific balance of trade surpluses. It's the United States that generates our balance of payment surpluses.
The rest of the world, those countries that Harper has so often shown a cold shoulder? You don't find Canada enjoying a lot of balance of trade surpluses with them. In fact we're running a serious balance of trade deficit beyond the U.S.
So Harp needs a sharp one up alongside his goofy head. Our hull may not be leaking but when you're the rowboat tied fast to the Titanic, you've got a problem, one that you need to acknowledge and address and resolve.
The guy at the wheel of the Tory clown car doesn't want to talk about this. Harper is afraid that simply talking about what's in store for us could upset his plans when he's so close to an election win. Shouldn't we be afraid of a guy who acts like this?
So, Mister Dion, it's time to act like the leader of the Liberal Party. The Globe reports that a group of Toronto Libs are urging Dion to appoint a panel of prominent Liberals to, "...to study the situation and suggest ways Canadians can keep their life savings and deal with the Wall Street crisis."
They're touting names like Paul Martin, Frank McKenna, John Manley and Don Johnston - men whose financial talents are unheard of in the Tory ranks.
“We believe this task force idea would help Dion recover at the 11th hour, because at the very least, it would remind Canadians of the stellar Chrétien/Martin record on the economy,” one of the Toronto Liberals said. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, perhaps. This is not a desperate measure but a smart one.”
Harper has taken his stand. The economy is sound, nothing to see here, move on. It's a position that defies reality and would leave Canadians at severe risk to an American meltdown. Harper hasn't given Mr. Dion many opportunities as good as this and Mr. Dion can't afford to pass on this one.
Time For Straight Talk, Steve!
Steve Martin, sorry, he's that other comedian, - Steve Harper has been running an empty campaign. No issues, no platform. Vote for me because I'm better than the others. Don't worry about what I'll do with your vote, that'll be none of your concern after the election.
Harper has told us that there's a Bad Moon Risin' south of the border and therefore we should put our trust in him to do - well he doesn't want to say what he's got in mind.
That's just not good enough now that America's boiling pot of red ink and bad paper is threatening to spill over. C'mon Steve, what gives? Just what do you see coming? What is it likely going to mean for Canada and Canadians? What can we do about it? What are our options? What do you plan to do about it if you get another minority? What do you have in mind if you get a majority?
Steve, if you don't seek a mandate by giving us a clear platform, a plan of action to deal with what's coming, don't claim afterward that you've got a mandate. That'd be a goddamned lie and that's a serious sin for a pious man like yourself, Steve.
Listen Steve, what's that sound? It's something flying off the blades of the fan down America way. We'll need a lot more than sweater vests to get through this winter, Steve.
Time for some straight talk, Steve Harper. You called this scam election. You owe us that.
Harper has told us that there's a Bad Moon Risin' south of the border and therefore we should put our trust in him to do - well he doesn't want to say what he's got in mind.
That's just not good enough now that America's boiling pot of red ink and bad paper is threatening to spill over. C'mon Steve, what gives? Just what do you see coming? What is it likely going to mean for Canada and Canadians? What can we do about it? What are our options? What do you plan to do about it if you get another minority? What do you have in mind if you get a majority?
Steve, if you don't seek a mandate by giving us a clear platform, a plan of action to deal with what's coming, don't claim afterward that you've got a mandate. That'd be a goddamned lie and that's a serious sin for a pious man like yourself, Steve.
Listen Steve, what's that sound? It's something flying off the blades of the fan down America way. We'll need a lot more than sweater vests to get through this winter, Steve.
Time for some straight talk, Steve Harper. You called this scam election. You owe us that.
Red State, Blue State - Tale of the Tape
The rightwingnutjobs like nothing more than to promote the outlandish myth of conservatives as the guardians of fiscal restraint. That it's an outright lie doesn't trouble them because lies are the only thing that can hold their preposterous narrative together.The chart above shows, administration by administration, how American presidents have tackled America's debt. Debt is shown as a percentage of GDP represented by the lines - blue for periods of debt reduction, red for periods when debt was allowed to skyrocket.
Suffice to say the red line for George w. Bush will spike sharply upward this year as federal debt (exclusive of enormous unfunded liabilities) begins to approach 80% of GDP. ...And where it stops, Nobody Knows!
Watching America Stumble
Items I've posted on this blog and elsewhere in recent weeks have focused on certain themes:
1. The United States of America is now in the first major spasm of its decline as the dominant nation of the world.
2. America has surrendered much of its strength, even its sovereignty, through its dependence on foreign lenders.
3. Globalization and the evolution of America's rentier class, the richest of the rich, has powerfully undermined that nation's future prosperity in the pursuit of immediate, temporary gain. These have resulted in the investment of America's wealth into growing its rivals economies, rivals that are now its major creditors and key lenders.
John Gray restated these points in an excellent article he wrote for yesterday's Guardian. If you're concerned about what lies in store for the United States (and if you're Canadian you have every reason for concern) you should read his piece, "A shattering moment in America's fall from power."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/28/usforeignpolicy.useconomicgrowth
1. The United States of America is now in the first major spasm of its decline as the dominant nation of the world.
2. America has surrendered much of its strength, even its sovereignty, through its dependence on foreign lenders.
3. Globalization and the evolution of America's rentier class, the richest of the rich, has powerfully undermined that nation's future prosperity in the pursuit of immediate, temporary gain. These have resulted in the investment of America's wealth into growing its rivals economies, rivals that are now its major creditors and key lenders.
John Gray restated these points in an excellent article he wrote for yesterday's Guardian. If you're concerned about what lies in store for the United States (and if you're Canadian you have every reason for concern) you should read his piece, "A shattering moment in America's fall from power."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/28/usforeignpolicy.useconomicgrowth
Here is something to keep in mind while you're mulling this over. After the bailout, if it goes through, the American federal debt this year will swell to $11.3-trillion. That omits unfunded liabilities such as Social Security and Medicaire which would triple that figure.
America's Gross Domestic Product - the value of everything made in the country, comes in at about $14-trillion. So, even leaving out the lion's share of the government's red ink, the deferred and unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities, Washington is getting awfully close to a full year's GDP in direct debt.
But it's not just Washington's debt that has to be fed out of that GDP. You have to squeeze in all the indebtedness of other levels of government and the private debt - you know, mortgages and the like. The best estimate of the total American debt (excluding Social Security and Medicaire) is $53-trillion.
And only a small part of that $14-trillion GDP can go to debt. A lot of it goes into direct spending - people have to eat, they have to put fuel in their cars, they have to send their kids to school; businesses need to pay their employees and buy supplies; governments need to pay for bureaucracies and buy tanks and jet fighters for their military, states have to maintain highways, cities have to pay their cops and on and on and on. At the end of the year the Feds alone have added another $400-billion in debt that just goes right on top of the pile along with the accumulated deficits anyone else is running.
Geez, ask yourself what the United States would look like today if it actually had to balance all of its budgets - individual, corporate, municipal, state and federal? I'll bet there would be massive, widespread poverty to the point of provoking dangerous social upheaval. Wouldn't that be a gruesome spectacle?
The Death of Free Market Capitalism? You Must Be Joking!
The ongoing housing/mortgage/securities collapse south of the border is an unprecedented example of what can happen when a variety of bad things occur at the same time.
An economy driven by its housing market. What were they thinking? Homebuyers who believed that the value of their properties would increase forever on the back of near nil interest rates? What were they thinking? Mortgage lenders who were, in reality, mortgage bundlers and hawkers. What were they thinking? Securities giants who thought they could reap billions in buying and selling securitized mortgages. What were they thinking? Regulators who dismissed this as so much "froth" in the marketplace? What were they thinking? Congressional leaders who greased the wheels with legislation to keep this scam rolling. What were they thinking?
You see, this fiasco was delusional at every level. It was a society, a nation on full bore "TILT." From the homeowner/mortgage borrower to the mortgage lender/reseller to the bundled mortgage buyer/reseller to the investors who bought the securitized mortgage bundles to the economic watchdog regulators and to their political masters, they all bought into the same, rightwing laissez-faire ideology, the very same message of madness.
From the moment, eight years ago, that former Senate Banking committee chairman (and McCain advisor) Phil Gramm pushed through the legislation that permitted unrestricted warfare on America using securitized derivatives in lieu of torpedoes, TODAY has been not merely foreseeable. It's been all but inevitable. It's not that people couldn't see it coming, it's that they chose not to look. When a whole nation does that, it's scary. When it's the most powerful nation on earth that does it, it's pathetic and scary.
Okay, so now we have a trillion dollar "bail out" of Wall Street, the nationalization (pure socialism) of America's top economic sector, the financial sector, and the media are howling on about the end of "free market capitalism." Who says?
America has been a free market capitalist state since it invented the idea. It has remained a free market capitalist state even when, in the past, it had to resort to getting taxpayers to bail out bad capitalists - remember the Savings & Loan scandals? What happened in the wake of that sort of debacle? Not much, hardly anything at all.
You see, if this was going to be the end of free market capitalism there would have to be another economic model put in its place and the appropriate (and enormous) adjustments run through every stratum of society.
What new model is being ushered in to replace America's free market capitalism? A government bail out isn't an economic system like capitalism or socialism or communism. Heaping debt on future generations of wage earner-taxpayers isn't an economic system. Restoring (at least until the ruckus dies down) a healthy degree of essential regulation to the capitalism isn't a new system.
There is no new economic system for America on the horizon. All that's happening is the shifting of debt from failed economic giants to the shoulders of wage earning taxpayers. That's it. That's anything but the end of free market capitalism.
Until you hear John McCain say that America can no longer afford Bush's tax cuts for the rich, free market capitalism is very much alive and well in the United States. It may have been sent to its room for a little "time out" but that's about it.
An economy driven by its housing market. What were they thinking? Homebuyers who believed that the value of their properties would increase forever on the back of near nil interest rates? What were they thinking? Mortgage lenders who were, in reality, mortgage bundlers and hawkers. What were they thinking? Securities giants who thought they could reap billions in buying and selling securitized mortgages. What were they thinking? Regulators who dismissed this as so much "froth" in the marketplace? What were they thinking? Congressional leaders who greased the wheels with legislation to keep this scam rolling. What were they thinking?
You see, this fiasco was delusional at every level. It was a society, a nation on full bore "TILT." From the homeowner/mortgage borrower to the mortgage lender/reseller to the bundled mortgage buyer/reseller to the investors who bought the securitized mortgage bundles to the economic watchdog regulators and to their political masters, they all bought into the same, rightwing laissez-faire ideology, the very same message of madness.
From the moment, eight years ago, that former Senate Banking committee chairman (and McCain advisor) Phil Gramm pushed through the legislation that permitted unrestricted warfare on America using securitized derivatives in lieu of torpedoes, TODAY has been not merely foreseeable. It's been all but inevitable. It's not that people couldn't see it coming, it's that they chose not to look. When a whole nation does that, it's scary. When it's the most powerful nation on earth that does it, it's pathetic and scary.
Okay, so now we have a trillion dollar "bail out" of Wall Street, the nationalization (pure socialism) of America's top economic sector, the financial sector, and the media are howling on about the end of "free market capitalism." Who says?
America has been a free market capitalist state since it invented the idea. It has remained a free market capitalist state even when, in the past, it had to resort to getting taxpayers to bail out bad capitalists - remember the Savings & Loan scandals? What happened in the wake of that sort of debacle? Not much, hardly anything at all.
You see, if this was going to be the end of free market capitalism there would have to be another economic model put in its place and the appropriate (and enormous) adjustments run through every stratum of society.
What new model is being ushered in to replace America's free market capitalism? A government bail out isn't an economic system like capitalism or socialism or communism. Heaping debt on future generations of wage earner-taxpayers isn't an economic system. Restoring (at least until the ruckus dies down) a healthy degree of essential regulation to the capitalism isn't a new system.
There is no new economic system for America on the horizon. All that's happening is the shifting of debt from failed economic giants to the shoulders of wage earning taxpayers. That's it. That's anything but the end of free market capitalism.
Until you hear John McCain say that America can no longer afford Bush's tax cuts for the rich, free market capitalism is very much alive and well in the United States. It may have been sent to its room for a little "time out" but that's about it.
Fareed Zakaria - Sarah, Just Go!
The esteemed editor of NewsWeek International has joined the chorus of voices - left, right and in-between - urging John McCain's living, breathing, senior's moment - Sarah Palin - to pack up her moose hides and go home.
"Will someone please put Sarah Palin out of her agony? Is it too much to ask that she come to realize that she wants, in that wonderful phrase in American politics, "to spend more time with her family"? Having stayed in purdah for weeks, she finally agreed to a third interview. CBS's Katie Couric questioned her in her trademark sympathetic style. It didn't help. When asked how living in the state closest to Russia gave her foreign-policy experience, Palin responded thus:
"'It's very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of the United States of America. Where--where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to--to our state.'
"There is, of course, the sheer absurdity of the premise. Two weeks ago I flew to Tokyo, crossing over the North Pole. Does that make me an expert on Santa Claus? (Thanks, Jon Stewart.) But even beyond that, read the rest of her response. "It is from Alaska that we send out those ..." What does this mean? This is not an isolated example. Palin has been given a set of talking points by campaign advisers, simple ideological mantras that she repeats and repeats as long as she can. ("We mustn't blink.") But if forced off those rehearsed lines, what she has to say is often, quite frankly, gibberish."
Zakaria focuses on this Palin answer in response to a Couric question, "designed to see if Palin understood that the problem in this crisis is that credit and liquidity in the financial system has dried up."
PALIN: "That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the--it's got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that."
Nothing could make it plainer that Sarah Palin has no business standing as a potential "next in line" to the presidency of the United States. She is vacuous - an empty vessel from the neck up. She is Dan Quayle minus the intellect. The McCain people have been trying to groom her for weeks and yet she still has no grasp of even the most major issues of the day.
Okay, fairness demands that I acknowledge Fareed Zakaria is an elitist. Yes, he is well educated. Yes, he is highly experienced and very knowledgeable. Yes these are the qualities that fuel the righteous indignation of you fundamentalist nutjobs. There you go. Now, bite me.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Top McCain Aide Really, Really Outed
John McCain's problems with campaign manager Rick Davis just keep getting worser and worser.
First there was the problem of Davis serving as an influence peddler to the now ruined mortgage giant, Freddie Mac.
McCain's first line of defence was to claim that Davis had cut his ties with FMac long before he joined the campaign.
Then it came out that, right up to death's doorstep, Freddie Mac kept paying $15,000 per month to Davis' old "consulting" firm, Davis Manafort.
That's Davis (as in Rick) Manafort.
McCain's next line of defence was to claim that his campaign manager had also cut his ties with Davis Manafort before joining the senator's campaign. The reality there was that Rick Davis had supposedly resigned from Davis Manafot but.. there's always a but... he retained his equity interest in the firm.
McCain's people lashed out like cornered rats at The New York Times for leaking that one. But now the Rick Davis calamity is back, this time courtesy of Newsweek.
It goes like this. If Rick Davis severed his ties with Davis Manafort when he joined the McCain campaign, why did he ask that his $20,000 a month campaign salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort? From Newsweek:
"The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis "separated from his consulting firm … in 2006," according to the campaign's Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort's—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.
In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, a senior McCain official said that when the campaign began last year, it signed a contract with Davis Manafort 'in which we purchased all of [Davis's] time, and he agreed not to work for any other clients.'"
So which is it. Is John McCain no longer capable of discerning the truth or just incapable of telling the truth?
First there was the problem of Davis serving as an influence peddler to the now ruined mortgage giant, Freddie Mac.
McCain's first line of defence was to claim that Davis had cut his ties with FMac long before he joined the campaign.
Then it came out that, right up to death's doorstep, Freddie Mac kept paying $15,000 per month to Davis' old "consulting" firm, Davis Manafort.
That's Davis (as in Rick) Manafort.
McCain's next line of defence was to claim that his campaign manager had also cut his ties with Davis Manafort before joining the senator's campaign. The reality there was that Rick Davis had supposedly resigned from Davis Manafot but.. there's always a but... he retained his equity interest in the firm.
McCain's people lashed out like cornered rats at The New York Times for leaking that one. But now the Rick Davis calamity is back, this time courtesy of Newsweek.
It goes like this. If Rick Davis severed his ties with Davis Manafort when he joined the McCain campaign, why did he ask that his $20,000 a month campaign salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort? From Newsweek:
"The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis "separated from his consulting firm … in 2006," according to the campaign's Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort's—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.
In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, a senior McCain official said that when the campaign began last year, it signed a contract with Davis Manafort 'in which we purchased all of [Davis's] time, and he agreed not to work for any other clients.'"
So which is it. Is John McCain no longer capable of discerning the truth or just incapable of telling the truth?
Palin's Election Pump
This one is almost too good to be true. The Times of London speculates that Sarah Palin may be gearing up to give the McCain campaign a popularity boost by marrying off her pregnant daughter, Bristol, to her high-school dropout boyfriend, Levi, just days before the November 4th vote.
The paper claims the McCain camp sees this as a blessing to be milked for everything it's worth:
"It would be fantastic," said a McCain insider. "You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week."
Who would've imagined that a 17-year old's uterus could play a pivotal role in a US presidential election?
The paper claims the McCain camp sees this as a blessing to be milked for everything it's worth:
"It would be fantastic," said a McCain insider. "You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week."
Who would've imagined that a 17-year old's uterus could play a pivotal role in a US presidential election?
Dealing With the Taliban
Remember how we were supposed to be saving Afghanistan from the Taliban? Times change, ask Harpo. Two years ago he was wetting his panties, flying to Afghanistan, making rousing speeches to the troops and bagging photo ops galore. Lately he's dummied up. No more jingoism about what we are going to do to the Taliban or what we are going to do for the Afghan people. No more boasting about democracy or women's rights.
We may have begun this half-assed adventure believing we were going to save the Afghans from the Taliban but it seems we're now focused on saving part of Afghanistan for the Taliban.
The Guardian reports that the Saudis, backed by the Brits, are brokering high-level peace talks with the Taliban leadership.
"The unprecedented negotiations involve a senior former member of the hardline Islamist movement travelling between Kabul, the bases of the Taliban senior leadership in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and European capitals. Britain has provided logistic and diplomatic support for the talks - despite official statements that negotiations can be held only with Taliban who are ready to renounce, or have renounced, violence.
Last week the French Prime Minister, François Fillon, referred indirectly to the talks during a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan. 'We must explore ways of separating the international jihadists from those who are acting more for nationalist or tribal motives. Efforts in this direction are being led by Sunni [Muslim] countries such as Saudi Arabia,' he said.
This summer's fighting season in Afghanistan has been the most violent since the invasion of 2001. The deterioration of the situation has provoked a major review of strategy among the 40-nation international coalition pitted against an increasingly confident and effective insurgency."
At the moment it appears that Karzai is dragging his heels and yet he seems to understand quite well what the future may hold for him if this initiative fails.
We sure have lowered our sights on this one. It's only taken seven years for us to realize we're just going to have to settle for what we can get and, right now, that seems to amount to driving a wedge between the insurgents and their al-Qaeda terrorist brethren.
Don't get any fanciful ideas that peace in Afghanistan is just around the corner. It isn't. Even if a power-sharing deal was worked out with the Taliban it's not likely to hold for long. The Taliban and many Afghan warlords, want the West - NATO and the US - out of their country. At some point they're going to want to settle their differences themselves, their own way. Then there's the country's criminal elements - its drug barons, warlords and corrupt central government with its predatory security services.
Don't let this get you down. We were never in this to win in the first place. Afghanistan may go down in the books as one of the most thoroughly botched military adventures in Western history since WWI. Seriously, all those generals? Idiots. And those cheerleaders, Bush, Scheffer, Harper? Ditto.
We may have begun this half-assed adventure believing we were going to save the Afghans from the Taliban but it seems we're now focused on saving part of Afghanistan for the Taliban.
The Guardian reports that the Saudis, backed by the Brits, are brokering high-level peace talks with the Taliban leadership.
"The unprecedented negotiations involve a senior former member of the hardline Islamist movement travelling between Kabul, the bases of the Taliban senior leadership in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and European capitals. Britain has provided logistic and diplomatic support for the talks - despite official statements that negotiations can be held only with Taliban who are ready to renounce, or have renounced, violence.
Last week the French Prime Minister, François Fillon, referred indirectly to the talks during a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan. 'We must explore ways of separating the international jihadists from those who are acting more for nationalist or tribal motives. Efforts in this direction are being led by Sunni [Muslim] countries such as Saudi Arabia,' he said.
This summer's fighting season in Afghanistan has been the most violent since the invasion of 2001. The deterioration of the situation has provoked a major review of strategy among the 40-nation international coalition pitted against an increasingly confident and effective insurgency."
At the moment it appears that Karzai is dragging his heels and yet he seems to understand quite well what the future may hold for him if this initiative fails.
We sure have lowered our sights on this one. It's only taken seven years for us to realize we're just going to have to settle for what we can get and, right now, that seems to amount to driving a wedge between the insurgents and their al-Qaeda terrorist brethren.
Don't get any fanciful ideas that peace in Afghanistan is just around the corner. It isn't. Even if a power-sharing deal was worked out with the Taliban it's not likely to hold for long. The Taliban and many Afghan warlords, want the West - NATO and the US - out of their country. At some point they're going to want to settle their differences themselves, their own way. Then there's the country's criminal elements - its drug barons, warlords and corrupt central government with its predatory security services.
Don't let this get you down. We were never in this to win in the first place. Afghanistan may go down in the books as one of the most thoroughly botched military adventures in Western history since WWI. Seriously, all those generals? Idiots. And those cheerleaders, Bush, Scheffer, Harper? Ditto.
If you want to know just how screwed up Afghanistan has become, read the following article from BBC that explains who's arming the Taliban.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Will McCain "Disappear" Palin?
Maybe it's just one of those giddy ideas that gets a bit of traction yet some pundits are talking about whether the McCain organization has decided the only safe thing to do is ditch Sarah Palin.
Where was she after last night's debate when her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, was making the rounds of the TV networks? It turns out the McCain people wouldn't make her available for interviews - no live TV appearances for Sarah Palin.
The Huffington Post has this from radio talk show host Ed Schultz:
"Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is 'clueless.'"
Now, in fairness, Schultz is a progressive and he's said some pretty scathing things about Palin before. But what about the uber-uber-right, National Review? HoffPo links to this opinion piece by the NR's very conservative commentator, Kathleen Parker, who claims Palin should take a powder:
As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.
It was fun while it lasted.
Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.
No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.
Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there.
If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.
If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.
What to do?
...Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.
Do it for your country.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZiMDhjYTU1NmI5Y2MwZjg2MWNiMWMyYTUxZDkwNTE=
As if the McCainsters don't have enough problems without lugging about this anchor, Biden made it clear last night that Palin has no reason to expect any kid glove treatment from him when they square off in the vice-presidential debate. Conservative Kathleen Parker is right. Palin does exhaust your cringe reflex.
Where was she after last night's debate when her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, was making the rounds of the TV networks? It turns out the McCain people wouldn't make her available for interviews - no live TV appearances for Sarah Palin.
The Huffington Post has this from radio talk show host Ed Schultz:
"Capitol Hill sources are telling me that senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is 'clueless.'"
Now, in fairness, Schultz is a progressive and he's said some pretty scathing things about Palin before. But what about the uber-uber-right, National Review? HoffPo links to this opinion piece by the NR's very conservative commentator, Kathleen Parker, who claims Palin should take a powder:
As we’ve seen and heard more from John McCain’s running mate, it is increasingly clear that Palin is a problem. Quick study or not, she doesn’t know enough about economics and foreign policy to make Americans comfortable with a President Palin should conditions warrant her promotion.
It was fun while it lasted.
Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.
No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.
Palin filibusters. She repeats words, filling space with deadwood. Cut the verbiage and there’s not much content there.
If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.
If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.
What to do?
...Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.
Do it for your country.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MDZiMDhjYTU1NmI5Y2MwZjg2MWNiMWMyYTUxZDkwNTE=
As if the McCainsters don't have enough problems without lugging about this anchor, Biden made it clear last night that Palin has no reason to expect any kid glove treatment from him when they square off in the vice-presidential debate. Conservative Kathleen Parker is right. Palin does exhaust your cringe reflex.
Poor old Johnny McSame. He hired her for the bump and now he's stuck with the grind.
h/t Unrepentent Old Hippie
h/t Unrepentent Old Hippie
Round One- McCain v. Obama - Even
I expect that everybody was happy with the performance of their guy in last night's presidential debate. My assessment is that viewers saw that debate pretty much according to the leanings they had when they came into it. I can't see that it would have shifted too many voters one way or the other.
One network said Obama won their focus group of undecideds 60-40 but there's no way of knowing how reliable those numbers are, at least not until some serious polling is conducted.
McCain, as expected, took the low road and, at times, looked very much the wizened up Old Geezer, the kind who yells at the kids in the street from his front porch rocker. In my view, Obama wasn't nearly as aggressive as he ought to have been but, of the two, he alone seemed presidential. McCain didn't even look at his opponent. He couldn't look him in the eye as he told some genuine whoppers.
One network said Obama won their focus group of undecideds 60-40 but there's no way of knowing how reliable those numbers are, at least not until some serious polling is conducted.
McCain, as expected, took the low road and, at times, looked very much the wizened up Old Geezer, the kind who yells at the kids in the street from his front porch rocker. In my view, Obama wasn't nearly as aggressive as he ought to have been but, of the two, he alone seemed presidential. McCain didn't even look at his opponent. He couldn't look him in the eye as he told some genuine whoppers.
Then again, it was the "foreign policy" debate which the McCain camp maintains is their guy's real strong suit. On that basis it was probably up to McCain to trounce Obama - to put him away - and he didn't do it.
One of the Greats is Gone - Paul Newman, 83
Paul Newman, dead at 83 - lung cancer. A true progressive in the very best sense of the word.
Friday, September 26, 2008
EU Report Card on Afghanistan - F
The European Union's foreign affairs commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, warns that the Afghan insurgency is becoming increasingly dangerous and spreading into the once tame northern provinces. From Associated Press:
"We have seen that unfortunately the insurgency has come back," Ferrero-Waldner told a business forum on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
"Now some of the (troop-contributing) countries are going all to the south," she said. "But what about the north, the north is falling apart again."
What wasn't pointed out is that the insurgency is spreading beyond the Pashtun/Taliban regions as other Afghan warlords start to side with the insurgents to oust US and NATO forces. This is no longer just us versus the Taliban. This is on the cusp of becoming a much more generalized civil war and that ought to be of real concern to us given that we've never had more than a fraction of the troop strength necessary just to deal with the Taliban alone.
Some of the Taliban's former enemies, nasty characters like the warlords Hekmatyar and Haqqani, have recently thrown in with the insurgency.
What's most remarkable about this isn't the growth of the insurgency or its spread but the total refusal of our political and military leadership to even acknowledge what's going on. They can't be honest with us about it because that would force them to explain what they intend to do about it.
We know Canada's response. Harper announced just a couple of weeks ago that, come 2011, we're gone - period. My guess is that Harpo is praying this doesn't turn into a total shitstorm in the meantime.
"We have seen that unfortunately the insurgency has come back," Ferrero-Waldner told a business forum on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
"Now some of the (troop-contributing) countries are going all to the south," she said. "But what about the north, the north is falling apart again."
What wasn't pointed out is that the insurgency is spreading beyond the Pashtun/Taliban regions as other Afghan warlords start to side with the insurgents to oust US and NATO forces. This is no longer just us versus the Taliban. This is on the cusp of becoming a much more generalized civil war and that ought to be of real concern to us given that we've never had more than a fraction of the troop strength necessary just to deal with the Taliban alone.
Some of the Taliban's former enemies, nasty characters like the warlords Hekmatyar and Haqqani, have recently thrown in with the insurgency.
What's most remarkable about this isn't the growth of the insurgency or its spread but the total refusal of our political and military leadership to even acknowledge what's going on. They can't be honest with us about it because that would force them to explain what they intend to do about it.
We know Canada's response. Harper announced just a couple of weeks ago that, come 2011, we're gone - period. My guess is that Harpo is praying this doesn't turn into a total shitstorm in the meantime.
The Mighty Coquihalla - Free at Last!
British Columbia's invisible man, Premier Gordon Campbell, surprised everyone by announcing that, effective immediately, the Coquihalla highway is no longer a toll road. Jaws dropped throughout the province at the announcement.
The Coquihalla was built as a super expressway by the long vanished Social Credit government. It provided a high speed link between the lower mainland and Kamloops, allowing traffic to bypass the sometimes treacherous and always challenging Hope-Princeton highway.
It was built as a toll road with the promise that, once the construction costs had been recouped, the tolls would end. That, of course, never happened. Last I checked the toll revenues had paid for the thing twice over and then some.
The Coquihalla was built as a super expressway by the long vanished Social Credit government. It provided a high speed link between the lower mainland and Kamloops, allowing traffic to bypass the sometimes treacherous and always challenging Hope-Princeton highway.
It was built as a toll road with the promise that, once the construction costs had been recouped, the tolls would end. That, of course, never happened. Last I checked the toll revenues had paid for the thing twice over and then some.
Harper's Petro-Whopper
Yeah, right. Is this like fixed election dates, or accountability, or transparency in government?
Our Furious Leader has - get this - said that, "...if elected in October, the Conservatives will prohibit oil sands companies from shipping bitumen from Canada's oil sands to countries that do not have equivalent emission reduction targets." (National Spot).
So, let's see. I guess that rules out China. Australia is definitely out. Remind me how much of Alberta's bitumen they're getting anyway.
Oh yeah, but what about the States? Well, you see, that's where the hoax part comes in. What did he really say? If they have "equivalent emission reduction targets" they can have all the tar sludge they want. Nobody ever said anything about actual equivalent emission reductions. You just have to announce a "target" that sounds nice.
And, if you don't announce a nice-sounding target, why we'll always be happy to refine the damned stuff here. Harp will make damned sure that Canada's targets leave lots of room for bitumen upgrading plants galore.
One thing we know about Harpo is that he doesn't let things like his word stand in his way when he wants something and he wants the mantle of Energy Superpower so bad he'd say anything. So, given his impressive record of lying his ass off, this assurance is bound to be as empty as Harper's integrity.
Hey Steve, wasn't the election supposed to be next year?
Our Furious Leader has - get this - said that, "...if elected in October, the Conservatives will prohibit oil sands companies from shipping bitumen from Canada's oil sands to countries that do not have equivalent emission reduction targets." (National Spot).
So, let's see. I guess that rules out China. Australia is definitely out. Remind me how much of Alberta's bitumen they're getting anyway.
Oh yeah, but what about the States? Well, you see, that's where the hoax part comes in. What did he really say? If they have "equivalent emission reduction targets" they can have all the tar sludge they want. Nobody ever said anything about actual equivalent emission reductions. You just have to announce a "target" that sounds nice.
And, if you don't announce a nice-sounding target, why we'll always be happy to refine the damned stuff here. Harp will make damned sure that Canada's targets leave lots of room for bitumen upgrading plants galore.
One thing we know about Harpo is that he doesn't let things like his word stand in his way when he wants something and he wants the mantle of Energy Superpower so bad he'd say anything. So, given his impressive record of lying his ass off, this assurance is bound to be as empty as Harper's integrity.
Hey Steve, wasn't the election supposed to be next year?
Rossy Does It - Crosses Channel
It's the stuff of Greek mythology but now, more than two millenia after the Greeks wrote of him, we have a real, 21st Century Icarus - a man who straps on a wing and takes flight.
RocketMan Yves Rossy has successfully flown himself from France to the white cliffs of Dover. The former Swiss fighter jockey and Airbus pilot, strapped on his home-made jet wing and launched himself from a light aircraft over France before crossing the English Channel.
If you've never seen Rossy in action, you must check out this clip
RocketMan Yves Rossy has successfully flown himself from France to the white cliffs of Dover. The former Swiss fighter jockey and Airbus pilot, strapped on his home-made jet wing and launched himself from a light aircraft over France before crossing the English Channel.
If you've never seen Rossy in action, you must check out this clip
Arms Race Update - Russia to Upgrade Nuke Arsenal
The insanely bellicose Bush Doctrine continues to stoke the world's arms races (in case you didn't know, there are several underway).
Russian president Medvedev says his country will have a "guaranteed nuclear deterrent system" up and running by 2020. BBC reports that Medvedev is calling for a new fleet of nuke subs to go along with the missile shield programme.
He said it was necessary to build "new types of armaments", and to "achieve dominance in airspace", according to quotes carried by the Itar-Tass news agency.
"We plan to start serial production of warships, primarily nuclear-powered submarines carrying cruise missiles and multifunctional submarines," Mr Medvedev said.
Before he stepped down to become prime minister, Vlad Putin, announced Russia would develop its own new generation of nuclear weapons and an advanced missile designed to defeat the latest American anti-missile systems.
Russian president Medvedev says his country will have a "guaranteed nuclear deterrent system" up and running by 2020. BBC reports that Medvedev is calling for a new fleet of nuke subs to go along with the missile shield programme.
He said it was necessary to build "new types of armaments", and to "achieve dominance in airspace", according to quotes carried by the Itar-Tass news agency.
"We plan to start serial production of warships, primarily nuclear-powered submarines carrying cruise missiles and multifunctional submarines," Mr Medvedev said.
Before he stepped down to become prime minister, Vlad Putin, announced Russia would develop its own new generation of nuclear weapons and an advanced missile designed to defeat the latest American anti-missile systems.
Can somebody tell me why we're starting this Cold War thing again? Just who is getting precisely what out of this? Or is it just bloodyminded idiocy?
We Don' Need No Steenking Bailout!
Actually, that's where you're wrong.
Listening to both sides on this crisis, there's one thing conspicuously absent in their discourse - the rest of the world. Both sides on the bailout debate act as though this was an internal matter, no dirty linen to be aired in public. Americans - whether that be the elitists or the mob - will sort this out as they see fit.
They don't seem to understand that they forfeited that privilege a long time ago when they became so woefully dependent on foreign lenders to finance their wars, their tax cuts, their government and, now, their bailout options.
The United States government does not have a spare trillion dollars stuffed away under some mattress. That trillion dollars is sitting in a whole bunch of foreign banks in accounts belonging to a whole lot of foreign lenders. These guys are watching what's going on very, very closely because they'll be the ones to decide whether America gets the funding for this bailout and on what terms.
When you're feeding yourself from the begging bowl, it pays not to make your benefactors nervous. Right now, the United States of America, its government and its financial institutions are making foreign lenders very, very nervous.
If these lenders get too nervous and if they perceive America as too weak, too indecisive, there's two things they might do right off the bat - demand higher interest rates and, worse, lend to America in another currency or a basket of currencies, anything but unstable US dollars.
The currency swap issue has been a Sword of Damocles hanging over America's head for some time. An unnoticed live microphone at a recent OPEC meeting broadcast secret discussions about taking the oil market off the America dollar standard and moving it into Euros instead.
America gets huge benefits from being able to trade and borrow in its own currency. If its currency plummets against other currencies, its foreign debt obligations, all in American currency, have an offsetting decline in value. However if the US has to begin paying in other, stronger currencies, it will face some real economic problems.
So Johnny McCain can play electoral silly bugger if he likes and the American people can howl in rage and frustration but their country faces dire consequences if its leaders don't (as Krugman writes) start acting like adults and get a reasonable bailout plan in place and soon.
They really don't have any choice. I'll bet John McCain knows that too.
Listening to both sides on this crisis, there's one thing conspicuously absent in their discourse - the rest of the world. Both sides on the bailout debate act as though this was an internal matter, no dirty linen to be aired in public. Americans - whether that be the elitists or the mob - will sort this out as they see fit.
They don't seem to understand that they forfeited that privilege a long time ago when they became so woefully dependent on foreign lenders to finance their wars, their tax cuts, their government and, now, their bailout options.
The United States government does not have a spare trillion dollars stuffed away under some mattress. That trillion dollars is sitting in a whole bunch of foreign banks in accounts belonging to a whole lot of foreign lenders. These guys are watching what's going on very, very closely because they'll be the ones to decide whether America gets the funding for this bailout and on what terms.
When you're feeding yourself from the begging bowl, it pays not to make your benefactors nervous. Right now, the United States of America, its government and its financial institutions are making foreign lenders very, very nervous.
If these lenders get too nervous and if they perceive America as too weak, too indecisive, there's two things they might do right off the bat - demand higher interest rates and, worse, lend to America in another currency or a basket of currencies, anything but unstable US dollars.
The currency swap issue has been a Sword of Damocles hanging over America's head for some time. An unnoticed live microphone at a recent OPEC meeting broadcast secret discussions about taking the oil market off the America dollar standard and moving it into Euros instead.
America gets huge benefits from being able to trade and borrow in its own currency. If its currency plummets against other currencies, its foreign debt obligations, all in American currency, have an offsetting decline in value. However if the US has to begin paying in other, stronger currencies, it will face some real economic problems.
So Johnny McCain can play electoral silly bugger if he likes and the American people can howl in rage and frustration but their country faces dire consequences if its leaders don't (as Krugman writes) start acting like adults and get a reasonable bailout plan in place and soon.
They really don't have any choice. I'll bet John McCain knows that too.
Bev McLachlan - 1, Chuck McVety - 0
The Canadian Judicial Council has rejected out of hand a ploy by uber-right, religious nutjob Charles McVety to have Chief Justice Beverly McLachlan pulled from the bench for supposedly playing an inappropriate role in getting the Order of Canada for Dr. Henry Morgantaler.
The Council said the complaints - 11 in all, comprising copies of McVety's own letter signed by supporters - were utterly without merit and based on hollow allegations readily disproved by publicly available information.
McVety, greaseball to the end, couldn't resist taking a swipe at the Council. "When you're appealing to the very council that the chief justice is a part of, fairness is not to be expected and in my view fairness has not been delivered by the council." What a sphincter!
The Council said the complaints - 11 in all, comprising copies of McVety's own letter signed by supporters - were utterly without merit and based on hollow allegations readily disproved by publicly available information.
McVety, greaseball to the end, couldn't resist taking a swipe at the Council. "When you're appealing to the very council that the chief justice is a part of, fairness is not to be expected and in my view fairness has not been delivered by the council." What a sphincter!
Bush Blocked Israeli Air War on Iran?
The Guardian is reporting that George w. Bush derailed Israeli plans for air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year. Bush is said to have told Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, that Washington didn't believe that Israel could take out Iran's nuclear plants without a prolonged air campaign that would ignite a major Middle East war. He also said it would likely spark Iranian attacks against American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and on oil shipping in the Persian Gulf.
The newspaper's account is third hand. They're relying on statements from two aides of a European head of state who informed them of what Olmert had told him during a visit to Israel. So, Olmert reportedly revealed this to the European head of state who subsequently related the account to his aides who, in turn, let it slip to the English paper.
Does this rule out an American air campaign against Iran? That remains an open question. There is some speculation that, should Obama win the November election, Cheney might pressure Bush to take out Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office.
The McCain Gambit
America's credit crunch crisis is trouble for plenty but a golden opportunity for some - like Senator John McCain.
McCain, while he appears to be suffering in the polls due to voter discontent with the Republicans and their ways, has decided his way out may be to turn those lemons into lemonade. How? By positioning himself to claim that he is the guy who saved America's bacon in this emergency.
Forget all the Repug spin about this crisis being the fault of the Dems. The whole derivative scam was the handiwork of McCain's own cherished economic advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm, who, while chairman of the Senate Banking Committee instituted and pushed through two pet projects, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. "Commodity" "futures" "modernization" put'em all together and they spell poison for the masses.
Throughout his campaign, McCain has regularly revealed his avaricious, craven, manipulative and exploitative talents and they are powerful indeed. He's also shown a steady hand at the worst of Rovian tactics.
Credit crunch. Problem. Widespread public ignorance. Advantage. Populism factor. Enormous. Fear. Bonus.
Most Americans have a weak, incomplete or misguided understanding of just what's going on. It's hard to blame them, given the deterioration in the quality of their mass media which no longer bothers trying to understand or analyze but offers itself up as a repeating station for political messaging. What filters down are words like "greed" "700-billion dollars" "trillion dollars" "Wall Street" "bail out."
What's not explained to people is constipation. How is the American economy dependent on the free flow of credit and what risks does the economy face of America face if their country encounters credit constipation? This is a subject that doesn't have high drama. There are no heroes, no villains, no guilty faces to throw up on screen. Here's how Krugman sees it. From the New York Times:
McCain, while he appears to be suffering in the polls due to voter discontent with the Republicans and their ways, has decided his way out may be to turn those lemons into lemonade. How? By positioning himself to claim that he is the guy who saved America's bacon in this emergency.
Forget all the Repug spin about this crisis being the fault of the Dems. The whole derivative scam was the handiwork of McCain's own cherished economic advisor, former Senator Phil Gramm, who, while chairman of the Senate Banking Committee instituted and pushed through two pet projects, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. "Commodity" "futures" "modernization" put'em all together and they spell poison for the masses.
Throughout his campaign, McCain has regularly revealed his avaricious, craven, manipulative and exploitative talents and they are powerful indeed. He's also shown a steady hand at the worst of Rovian tactics.
Credit crunch. Problem. Widespread public ignorance. Advantage. Populism factor. Enormous. Fear. Bonus.
Most Americans have a weak, incomplete or misguided understanding of just what's going on. It's hard to blame them, given the deterioration in the quality of their mass media which no longer bothers trying to understand or analyze but offers itself up as a repeating station for political messaging. What filters down are words like "greed" "700-billion dollars" "trillion dollars" "Wall Street" "bail out."
What's not explained to people is constipation. How is the American economy dependent on the free flow of credit and what risks does the economy face of America face if their country encounters credit constipation? This is a subject that doesn't have high drama. There are no heroes, no villains, no guilty faces to throw up on screen. Here's how Krugman sees it. From the New York Times:
Many people on both the right and the left are outraged at the idea of using taxpayer money to bail out America’s financial system. They’re right to be outraged, but doing nothing isn’t a serious option. Right now, players throughout the system are refusing to lend and hoarding cash — and this collapse of credit reminds many economists of the run on the banks that brought on the Great Depression.
So the grown-up thing is to do something to rescue the financial system. The big question is, are there any grown-ups around — and will they be able to take charge?
...one non-rank-and-file Republican, Senator John McCain, is apparently playing spoiler. Earlier this week, while refusing to say whether he supported the Paulson plan, he claimed not to have had a chance to read it; the plan is all of three pages long. Then he inserted himself into the delicate negotiations over the Congressional plan, insisting on a White House meeting at which he reportedly said little — but during which consensus collapsed.
The Iraq War scam shows that an awful lot of Americans don't want to know. They get stirred up and then they react. That's what John McCain is counting on to turn his pig's ear into a silk purse. When the mob hits the streets with their torches and pitchforks, McCain knows the safest place to be is right in front leading them on.
He knows that it's critical for him to ride this wave. He has to be seen to be the voice of the American public's anger and frustration. If that means killing the deal, he'll do what it takes.
McCain realizes that, with the election just weeks away, he might just pull this one off. If he wins, kills the bail out, and it backfires on the American economy, the election will have come and gone before people start pointing fingers at him. By then he'll either be safely headed for the White House or drifting off to retirement.
If, however, he loses, he can claim the mantle of champion of all those upset Americans who are being ignored "as usual" by those damned politicians in Washington, those elitist bastards. Once again, he wins.
Will the American people see through McCain's gambit? I wouldn't bet on it. With his recent shenanigans about suspending his campaign and postponing debates he might have overplayed his hand. Then again, maybe not.
The Iraq War scam shows that an awful lot of Americans don't want to know. They get stirred up and then they react. That's what John McCain is counting on to turn his pig's ear into a silk purse. When the mob hits the streets with their torches and pitchforks, McCain knows the safest place to be is right in front leading them on.
He knows that it's critical for him to ride this wave. He has to be seen to be the voice of the American public's anger and frustration. If that means killing the deal, he'll do what it takes.
McCain realizes that, with the election just weeks away, he might just pull this one off. If he wins, kills the bail out, and it backfires on the American economy, the election will have come and gone before people start pointing fingers at him. By then he'll either be safely headed for the White House or drifting off to retirement.
If, however, he loses, he can claim the mantle of champion of all those upset Americans who are being ignored "as usual" by those damned politicians in Washington, those elitist bastards. Once again, he wins.
Will the American people see through McCain's gambit? I wouldn't bet on it. With his recent shenanigans about suspending his campaign and postponing debates he might have overplayed his hand. Then again, maybe not.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
An Issue We Can Still Fight an Election On
Steve Harper, echoing his American Idol, Mr. Bush and the Geezer McCain, says we have nothing to worry about, that the fundamentals of the Canadian economy are sound.
Does that sound familiar?
Then, yesterday, Merrill Lynch Canada released a report saying that we Canadians shouldn't get smug about what's happening in the U.S. and that we'll be next to face our own debt and housing price crisis. I found that pretty hard to believe but the more I thought about it the more I had to wonder what if they're right?
It may or may not be anecdotal but I recalled a recent study that showed that the average, first time home buyers in Vancouver were now paying something in the range of 75-78% of their combined, after-tax income on housing. A Vancouver starter home takes somewhere between three quarters and four fifths of a two income family's take home.
Back in my day it was considered not just prudent but essential to keep one's housing costs below 30% of net income. That got me wondering how this has changed so radically? How does a family get by while paying out three quarters of their disposable income on housing?
What if Merrill Lynch Canada is right? Don't we need a government that's on top of this now? If this danger is real, what measures, what policies do Canadians need to minimize the risks and impact? Is it really enough for Steve to tell us that the fundamentals are strong?
I don't know but it seems to me that when it takes nearly all of a two job family's net income to buy a house, maybe we are in an unhealthy and dangerous housing bubble. Why do I need to find that out from the Canadian subsidiary of a defunct, American securities giant?
In the greater scheme of things it's no skin off my backside. My house may have soared in price but it hasn't gone up a dime in value. It'll still buy me the house next door and that's about it. That's just fine for those of us lucky to be in a low debt/no debt position but the operative word there is "lucky."
What about the unlucky, the vulnerable? I'm talking about the new families that have just taken the plunge, hoping they can stay afloat long enough to get their debt down to something manageable. It's easy to say "that's their problem" except that it's not just their problem, it affects all of us. It affects the prosperity and stability of our communities among other things. It certainly affects their ability to contribute to our communities, to our societies. We benefit when we keep them healthy.
Have our politicians been asleep at the switch, blinded by our petro wealth to the gathering perils to our people?
Housing bubbles are economic cancer. Read my post on that subject from yesterday. It cavasses the approach some other countries have used to tame the destructive fluctuations in housing stocks, to recognize that housing can't be treated as just another commodity for speculation.
Don't look for any answers from Steve "the fundamentals are sound" Harper. I want to hear from the Liberals on this. If this problem is nearly as bad as claimed by Merrill Lynch, we need to identify it and come up with solutions. The Americans have shown us what happens if you don't deal with these threats promptly.
There's no better time to get this on the radar screen than right now, in the midst of a general election.
Does that sound familiar?
Then, yesterday, Merrill Lynch Canada released a report saying that we Canadians shouldn't get smug about what's happening in the U.S. and that we'll be next to face our own debt and housing price crisis. I found that pretty hard to believe but the more I thought about it the more I had to wonder what if they're right?
It may or may not be anecdotal but I recalled a recent study that showed that the average, first time home buyers in Vancouver were now paying something in the range of 75-78% of their combined, after-tax income on housing. A Vancouver starter home takes somewhere between three quarters and four fifths of a two income family's take home.
Back in my day it was considered not just prudent but essential to keep one's housing costs below 30% of net income. That got me wondering how this has changed so radically? How does a family get by while paying out three quarters of their disposable income on housing?
What if Merrill Lynch Canada is right? Don't we need a government that's on top of this now? If this danger is real, what measures, what policies do Canadians need to minimize the risks and impact? Is it really enough for Steve to tell us that the fundamentals are strong?
I don't know but it seems to me that when it takes nearly all of a two job family's net income to buy a house, maybe we are in an unhealthy and dangerous housing bubble. Why do I need to find that out from the Canadian subsidiary of a defunct, American securities giant?
In the greater scheme of things it's no skin off my backside. My house may have soared in price but it hasn't gone up a dime in value. It'll still buy me the house next door and that's about it. That's just fine for those of us lucky to be in a low debt/no debt position but the operative word there is "lucky."
What about the unlucky, the vulnerable? I'm talking about the new families that have just taken the plunge, hoping they can stay afloat long enough to get their debt down to something manageable. It's easy to say "that's their problem" except that it's not just their problem, it affects all of us. It affects the prosperity and stability of our communities among other things. It certainly affects their ability to contribute to our communities, to our societies. We benefit when we keep them healthy.
Have our politicians been asleep at the switch, blinded by our petro wealth to the gathering perils to our people?
Housing bubbles are economic cancer. Read my post on that subject from yesterday. It cavasses the approach some other countries have used to tame the destructive fluctuations in housing stocks, to recognize that housing can't be treated as just another commodity for speculation.
Don't look for any answers from Steve "the fundamentals are sound" Harper. I want to hear from the Liberals on this. If this problem is nearly as bad as claimed by Merrill Lynch, we need to identify it and come up with solutions. The Americans have shown us what happens if you don't deal with these threats promptly.
There's no better time to get this on the radar screen than right now, in the midst of a general election.
Kosovo - Who Didn't See This Coming?
There aren't many places that achieve independence and failed state status on the very same day. Welcome to Kosovo. More or less sovereign since February 17th, the notional state appears to be on the verge of itself breaking apart. According to the International Crisis Group, Kosovo is teetering on the edge of de facto partition:
“Major violence has been avoided but the calm is deceptive”, says Alexander Anderson, Crisis Group’s Kosovo Project Director. “Divisions between Albanian and Serb areas have widened. If de facto partition continues, Kosovo’s Serbs south of the Ibar River will be at risk, pressure will mount to redraw borders on ethnic lines throughout the states of the former Yugoslavia, and EU membership prospects for these countries will fade”.
Meanwhile Serbia is putting its own chances at EU membership at risk by, "pressing the UN General Assembly for an International Court of Justice opinion on the legality of Kosovo’s independence." Can't be having that now, can we?
Kosovo currently gets a staggering 30% of its GDP in the form of transfers from ex-pats living in countries that have functioning economies. Much of the rest comes in the form of foreign aid. As an independent state it just doesn't make much sense, except in fulfillment of Washington's foreign policy.
Curiously, in its 4 September, 2008 update on Kosovo, the CIA World Factbook has excised any reference to what had been one of Kosovo's biggest economic sectors - the smuggling of cigarettes and cement. Oh well, maybe they've all kicked the habit. With a per capita GDP of just $1,800, Kosovo has a fast lock on the title of Europe's poorest state.
“Major violence has been avoided but the calm is deceptive”, says Alexander Anderson, Crisis Group’s Kosovo Project Director. “Divisions between Albanian and Serb areas have widened. If de facto partition continues, Kosovo’s Serbs south of the Ibar River will be at risk, pressure will mount to redraw borders on ethnic lines throughout the states of the former Yugoslavia, and EU membership prospects for these countries will fade”.
Meanwhile Serbia is putting its own chances at EU membership at risk by, "pressing the UN General Assembly for an International Court of Justice opinion on the legality of Kosovo’s independence." Can't be having that now, can we?
Kosovo currently gets a staggering 30% of its GDP in the form of transfers from ex-pats living in countries that have functioning economies. Much of the rest comes in the form of foreign aid. As an independent state it just doesn't make much sense, except in fulfillment of Washington's foreign policy.
Curiously, in its 4 September, 2008 update on Kosovo, the CIA World Factbook has excised any reference to what had been one of Kosovo's biggest economic sectors - the smuggling of cigarettes and cement. Oh well, maybe they've all kicked the habit. With a per capita GDP of just $1,800, Kosovo has a fast lock on the title of Europe's poorest state.
Canadians Support Insite - Sort Of
An Angus Reid online survey has found Canadians support the Insite safe-injection programme by a margin of 38% to 23% with the remainder undecided.
The Tories, however, seem to have done their job in convincing a lot of folks that Insite actually provides drugs to addicts. Fully 19% of those polled by Angus Reid believe this nonsense.
In BC and Alberta, Insite's support numbers are better than 50%. It seems we're less apt to swallow that "drug pushing" drivel pumped out by the right.
https://www.angusreidforum.com/MediaServer/3/documents/2008%2008%2020_Insite_ARF.pdf
The Tories, however, seem to have done their job in convincing a lot of folks that Insite actually provides drugs to addicts. Fully 19% of those polled by Angus Reid believe this nonsense.
In BC and Alberta, Insite's support numbers are better than 50%. It seems we're less apt to swallow that "drug pushing" drivel pumped out by the right.
https://www.angusreidforum.com/MediaServer/3/documents/2008%2008%2020_Insite_ARF.pdf
Playing Electoral Hardball
This appeal to Democrats, published in The New Republic, holds an invaluable lesson for liberals everywhere:
One of America's quadrennial rituals is liberal shock. Again the Democrats are surprised by the brutality of the Republicans. They are lying. Yes, they are. They want very much to win. So should we lie, too? "We" already have. (John McCain did not say that America should stay in Iraq for a hundred years.) The Democrats believe that, by running roughly, "we" become like "them. " More grandly, the objection is that the moral character of a campaign is a premonition of the moral character of an administration. I do not see the correlation. The "missile gap" made possible the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The "Daisy Girl" was an indirect cause of the Voting Rights Act. And if, as a consequence of exaggerated or erroneous statements about John McCain, universal health care will be established by the next administration, well, the omelette will have been made. And "we" will not have become like "them," because "they" would not deliver this right and this relief to America. I apologize, of course, for my chilliness. I am not unmindful of the relationship of means to ends. I took Kant. But an election is not a seminar; and to worry the means so much more than the ends is also to distort the relationship. The air of ethical exquisiteness in which Barack Obama wraps himself has psychologically hobbled his party. It finds itself elevated and stunned. Yet there is nothing in the history of our democracy that warrants the belief that electoral politics should be elevating: in this regard, we have no height from which to fall. And there is the touchy question of whether the hope for consensus is not also the fear of conflict. Conflict is not--to use Obama's condescending language for whatever gets in his way--always "silly" and "a distraction." As the polls are again demonstrating, this is a divided country, and some of its divisions are honorable, matters of first principle, the effects of worldviews. Conviction is a hardening influence, a partisan thing. All the current talk about political syncretism obscures the fact that there is philosophical gridlock. That is why the "independents" will determine the outcome. Liberals must not perceive the world in the image of their pacific desire.
Another Way of Looking at Things
I heard a cogent point about the Bush regime's $700-billion bailout proposal last night. It's a telling point, one that should give everyone pause.
The keystone issue is that the Feds will be buying those bad debt mortgages at far above fair, actual value. In essence, they'll be paying the scoundrels who ran this awful scam, what John McCain calls a "Ponzi Scheme,"much more than the fair market value of the mortgages they pick up. They'll be paying "value plus a premium" to the very people who laid waste to the American economy.
So, why the largesse? Because these Wall Street predators are holding a gun to America's head. "We'll go down, sure, but we're taking you with us." For the American taxpayer it's a return to the Savings & Loans scandal bail outs only on a much grander scale.
Here's something that strikes me as curious. Even without this housing boom/derivative fueled scandal, the US government has steadily run deficits in the order of several hundred billions of dollars. Even before this current crisis, Bush had swelled the Reagan legacy - America's federal debt - to a staggering $9.7 trillion. Today's government is financing both Mr. Bush's war of whim and its tax cuts for the rich out of foreign borrowings.
So, in a nutshell, you already have a government that pretends it can levitate, pledging the good credit of generations yet to come in order to defy fiscal gravity. Now they're lining up to add another TRILLION dollars (yes it's a trillion plus when you add in Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG to the current bailout) to the obligations of future, wage-earning taxpayers.
DOESN'T ANYBODY THINK THAT AMERICA'S RICH FOLKS OUGHT TO BE TOLD THEIR NATION CAN'T AFFORD THOSE EXTRAVAGANT TAX CUTS RIGHT NOW? Especially given that now, those richest of the rich, have inflicted this very scam on the nation and its wage-earning taxpayers. How can these greasy pols scream "crisis" and "disaster" and blithely ignore the tax cuts for the rich issue? That's because they have no intention, not the slightest, of changing this outrage.
Now that the Repugs are going all socialist on us, effectively nationalizing America's largest economic sector, the financial sector, maybe it's time to talk about America's social compact with its working people. It strikes me this would be an ideal moment to explore the gaping and rapidly expanding chasm between rich and ordinary Americans. Maybe it's time to start closing that gap for the good of the American people and the good of their country.
Bush's "trickle down/top end tax cuts" dogma is nothing more than a revival of Reaganomics - pure Voodoo economics at its very worst. Even the guy who dreamed up this scam, Reagan's budget director Dave Stockman, later admitted it was all contrivance - a means to justify transferring tax burdens from the shoulders of the richest onto the shoulders of those beneath them.
Bush and Cheney have pulled this very same swindle on the American people. Remember how Cheney talked Bush into a second round of rich boy tax cuts by telling him that Reagan showed that "deficits don't matter?" Well they sure as hell matter now.
I suspect the loudly proclaimed "urgency" in getting this bailout in place is at least partly the result of wanting a done deal before little people start asking some very hard questions that these hucksters and fixers don't want asked.
And that's another way of looking at things.
The keystone issue is that the Feds will be buying those bad debt mortgages at far above fair, actual value. In essence, they'll be paying the scoundrels who ran this awful scam, what John McCain calls a "Ponzi Scheme,"much more than the fair market value of the mortgages they pick up. They'll be paying "value plus a premium" to the very people who laid waste to the American economy.
So, why the largesse? Because these Wall Street predators are holding a gun to America's head. "We'll go down, sure, but we're taking you with us." For the American taxpayer it's a return to the Savings & Loans scandal bail outs only on a much grander scale.
Here's something that strikes me as curious. Even without this housing boom/derivative fueled scandal, the US government has steadily run deficits in the order of several hundred billions of dollars. Even before this current crisis, Bush had swelled the Reagan legacy - America's federal debt - to a staggering $9.7 trillion. Today's government is financing both Mr. Bush's war of whim and its tax cuts for the rich out of foreign borrowings.
So, in a nutshell, you already have a government that pretends it can levitate, pledging the good credit of generations yet to come in order to defy fiscal gravity. Now they're lining up to add another TRILLION dollars (yes it's a trillion plus when you add in Bear Stearns, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG to the current bailout) to the obligations of future, wage-earning taxpayers.
DOESN'T ANYBODY THINK THAT AMERICA'S RICH FOLKS OUGHT TO BE TOLD THEIR NATION CAN'T AFFORD THOSE EXTRAVAGANT TAX CUTS RIGHT NOW? Especially given that now, those richest of the rich, have inflicted this very scam on the nation and its wage-earning taxpayers. How can these greasy pols scream "crisis" and "disaster" and blithely ignore the tax cuts for the rich issue? That's because they have no intention, not the slightest, of changing this outrage.
Now that the Repugs are going all socialist on us, effectively nationalizing America's largest economic sector, the financial sector, maybe it's time to talk about America's social compact with its working people. It strikes me this would be an ideal moment to explore the gaping and rapidly expanding chasm between rich and ordinary Americans. Maybe it's time to start closing that gap for the good of the American people and the good of their country.
Bush's "trickle down/top end tax cuts" dogma is nothing more than a revival of Reaganomics - pure Voodoo economics at its very worst. Even the guy who dreamed up this scam, Reagan's budget director Dave Stockman, later admitted it was all contrivance - a means to justify transferring tax burdens from the shoulders of the richest onto the shoulders of those beneath them.
Bush and Cheney have pulled this very same swindle on the American people. Remember how Cheney talked Bush into a second round of rich boy tax cuts by telling him that Reagan showed that "deficits don't matter?" Well they sure as hell matter now.
I suspect the loudly proclaimed "urgency" in getting this bailout in place is at least partly the result of wanting a done deal before little people start asking some very hard questions that these hucksters and fixers don't want asked.
And that's another way of looking at things.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
McCain Tries to Duck Friday Debates
You can't blame John McCain for wanting to put as much distance as possible between his campaign and the credit meltdown now underway. He damned near went apoplectic today when The New York Times revealed this his key campaign aide, Rick Davis, was getting money from Freddie Mac almost right up to the day it got taken over by the Feds.
The economic crisis appears to have broken the stubborn deadlock between Obama and McCain. Latest results have Obama up 9% and climbing while Captain Sound Fundamentals heads for the tank.
So McCain has announced he wants to postpone the debates scheduled for Friday evening. Sure he does. McCain claims America badly needs him in Washington to sort out this mess. Sure it does. Must "man the post" and all of that. Not that a guy who's shown such a weak grasp of "fundamentals" could make any difference anyway.
It's pretty obvious that, where his political survival is at stake, McCain is as good with the old "cut and run" as they come. Oh I so hope Obama doesn't let the Old Geezer off the hook.
The economic crisis appears to have broken the stubborn deadlock between Obama and McCain. Latest results have Obama up 9% and climbing while Captain Sound Fundamentals heads for the tank.
So McCain has announced he wants to postpone the debates scheduled for Friday evening. Sure he does. McCain claims America badly needs him in Washington to sort out this mess. Sure it does. Must "man the post" and all of that. Not that a guy who's shown such a weak grasp of "fundamentals" could make any difference anyway.
It's pretty obvious that, where his political survival is at stake, McCain is as good with the old "cut and run" as they come. Oh I so hope Obama doesn't let the Old Geezer off the hook.
Layton to Renegotiate Lumber Deal?
Pssst, Jack. Don't let on but the American housing bubble that drove our softwood lumber exports has burst. The less demand they have for Canadian softwood, Jack, the less likely they're going to give a hoot when you tell'em you're scrapping the lumber deal.
You also might find that the Americans aren't likely to react positively to an ankle-biter right now. They're dealing with some serious, homegrown problems and I don't think your yapping is going to impress these guys.
And then there's the raw log export business, Jack. Are you saying you're going to pull Canada out of the WTO and NAFTA? Unless you're a complete idiot, you must assume you're talking to complete idiots. You know full well that our hands are tied on the raw log export problem. We surrendered the right to require those logs be processed in Canada.
Are you an idiot, Jack?
You also might find that the Americans aren't likely to react positively to an ankle-biter right now. They're dealing with some serious, homegrown problems and I don't think your yapping is going to impress these guys.
And then there's the raw log export business, Jack. Are you saying you're going to pull Canada out of the WTO and NAFTA? Unless you're a complete idiot, you must assume you're talking to complete idiots. You know full well that our hands are tied on the raw log export problem. We surrendered the right to require those logs be processed in Canada.
Are you an idiot, Jack?
Just How Crazy is John McCain?
Is John McCain as crazy as the proverbial s__thouse rat?
The Old Geezer, it seems, has been caught again. He recently claimed that his top aide, Rick Davis, severed all ties with failed mortgage company Freedie Mac a long time ago, going on to add, "...and I'll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it".
Well The New York Times took Senator McSame up on it and discovered - why Davis had been getting paid by Freddie Mac right up to last month, just before it cratered. Now the $15,000 a month wasn't going to Davis directly but to his firm Davis Manafort. However the only thing that FM seemed to be getting for its money from RD was access to JM.
McCain hasn't disputed the Times' claims. No, McGeezer is choosing to attack the NYT, instead. From The Guardian:
"Today the New York Times launched its latest attack on this campaign in its capacity as an Obama advocacy organization," the statement began.
It continued: "Therefore this 'report' from the New York Times must be evaluated in the context of its intent and purpose. It is a partisan attack falsely labelled as objective news. And its most serious allegations are based entirely on the claims of anonymous sources, a familiar yet regretful tactic for the paper."
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny - if you want to slam the Times, at least say what they're claiming isn't true. You gotta say they're lying because, if what they've reported is true, you and Rick Davis are the liars. With your campaign teetering on the edge of abyss, this is no time to cast yourself as a liar - unless, of course, that's all you've got left.
Seriously, John, you're beginning to sound unhinged. And, by the way, it doesn't help to have Davis skip his press lunch today.
The Old Geezer, it seems, has been caught again. He recently claimed that his top aide, Rick Davis, severed all ties with failed mortgage company Freedie Mac a long time ago, going on to add, "...and I'll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it".
Well The New York Times took Senator McSame up on it and discovered - why Davis had been getting paid by Freddie Mac right up to last month, just before it cratered. Now the $15,000 a month wasn't going to Davis directly but to his firm Davis Manafort. However the only thing that FM seemed to be getting for its money from RD was access to JM.
McCain hasn't disputed the Times' claims. No, McGeezer is choosing to attack the NYT, instead. From The Guardian:
"Today the New York Times launched its latest attack on this campaign in its capacity as an Obama advocacy organization," the statement began.
It continued: "Therefore this 'report' from the New York Times must be evaluated in the context of its intent and purpose. It is a partisan attack falsely labelled as objective news. And its most serious allegations are based entirely on the claims of anonymous sources, a familiar yet regretful tactic for the paper."
Johnny, Johnny, Johnny - if you want to slam the Times, at least say what they're claiming isn't true. You gotta say they're lying because, if what they've reported is true, you and Rick Davis are the liars. With your campaign teetering on the edge of abyss, this is no time to cast yourself as a liar - unless, of course, that's all you've got left.
Seriously, John, you're beginning to sound unhinged. And, by the way, it doesn't help to have Davis skip his press lunch today.
Housing Bubbles - Economic Cancer
I ran a bankruptcy practice and so I've had plenty of experience of bubbles and recessions. I've seen a lot of people lose their homes, wiped out, their houses flogged off at distress prices.
I'm old fashioned enough to believe that a home is the essential core asset of any family. It's not like a car or a cottage or a stock portfolio. It's where you go to at the end of the day, where you raise your kids, it's where you live out your life.
Out here in the West we've certainly had our housing bubbles, albeit not as wild as the disaster now unfolding in the U.S. In B.C. they used to follow a 7-year cycle. Property values would escalate and then they'd slump. The more they escalated, the bigger and harder the slump that followed.
The wildest days out here were in the early 80's. We went real estate mad. Just holding an interim agreement was enough to generate a huge return. In some cases interim agreements changed hands several times before the property was actually bought and transferred to the "new" owner who was likely then to simply put it right back on the market.
I can remember taking the elevator with former real estate magnate Nelson Skalbania and watching him turn to the wall of the elevator so he could write cheques on his way up to his lawyers' offices. At the time he said there was no such thing as a bad deal. If you paid too much for a property you only had to wait a couple of months before it became a good deal. There was no bad property, there were no bad deals.
At that time, real estate agents got heavily into the housing market, buying properties themselves on spec. Between the developers and the realtors, they cranked the housing market into a frenzy.
What had happened is that these moneymen turned housing into a speculative commodity, not a basic essential. That led to inflated, runaway prices. Now, if you owned your own home it all looked grand. But if you were a young couple, eager to start a family, desperation set in. People who wanted homes were buying out of desperation, afraid if they didn't take "the plunge," prices would get totally out of their reach in a month or two. So they dived in and paid $450,000 for a $250,000 house.
Wait a minute. If a house is selling for $450,000 it's worth $450,000, not $250,000 right? Maybe if you're selling it but not if you're buying out of fear.
In a healthy housing market, a house is worth no more than someone willing to live in that quality of house can afford to pay for it. Today in Vancouver, with new home ownership requiring close to 75% of the typical buyers' combined takehome pay, that's all gone up in smoke.
Years ago I read about a Scandinavian country, Sweden if memory serves, that chose to recognize that housing was special and that affordable housing met a crucial, social need. So they found a way to make house prices reflect their actual value. They simply taxed away speculative profit.
Everybody got a deal - on one residence. If you owned your home for a set number of years you could sell it without a speculative profit tax. If you sold your house before then it was okay so long as you invested your takings in another residence. But, if you bought a house to flog it on spec, well then your profits would be taxed away on the sale. Obviously it was more sophisticated than that but this is the rough idea.
The policy recognized that houses are supposed to be homes and homes are an important part of a healthy society. Therefore they're to be treated differently than other assets. Stop allowing speculators to whipsaw the housing market and homeowners come out the winners.
In America, it was speculation that destroyed their housing market just as it was speculation in housing that drove the American economy during the Bush years. It was speculation in housing that triggered the credit crisis their government is wrestling with today. It was speculation in housing that accounts for the $700-billion bail out now pending in Washington.
Speculation in housing has undermined the very economy of the United States of America, forcing the most "free market" capitalist government to resort to nationalization of their country's financial sector.
Cut out all the middlemen - the subprime scam artists, the derivative-flogging hucksters of Wall Street - and you're left with housing speculation at one end and economic catastrophe at the other and a powerfully direct, causal link between the two.
Maybe if housing speculation is enough to bring the American economy to its knees, it's time to put an end to it.
I'm old fashioned enough to believe that a home is the essential core asset of any family. It's not like a car or a cottage or a stock portfolio. It's where you go to at the end of the day, where you raise your kids, it's where you live out your life.
Out here in the West we've certainly had our housing bubbles, albeit not as wild as the disaster now unfolding in the U.S. In B.C. they used to follow a 7-year cycle. Property values would escalate and then they'd slump. The more they escalated, the bigger and harder the slump that followed.
The wildest days out here were in the early 80's. We went real estate mad. Just holding an interim agreement was enough to generate a huge return. In some cases interim agreements changed hands several times before the property was actually bought and transferred to the "new" owner who was likely then to simply put it right back on the market.
I can remember taking the elevator with former real estate magnate Nelson Skalbania and watching him turn to the wall of the elevator so he could write cheques on his way up to his lawyers' offices. At the time he said there was no such thing as a bad deal. If you paid too much for a property you only had to wait a couple of months before it became a good deal. There was no bad property, there were no bad deals.
At that time, real estate agents got heavily into the housing market, buying properties themselves on spec. Between the developers and the realtors, they cranked the housing market into a frenzy.
What had happened is that these moneymen turned housing into a speculative commodity, not a basic essential. That led to inflated, runaway prices. Now, if you owned your own home it all looked grand. But if you were a young couple, eager to start a family, desperation set in. People who wanted homes were buying out of desperation, afraid if they didn't take "the plunge," prices would get totally out of their reach in a month or two. So they dived in and paid $450,000 for a $250,000 house.
Wait a minute. If a house is selling for $450,000 it's worth $450,000, not $250,000 right? Maybe if you're selling it but not if you're buying out of fear.
In a healthy housing market, a house is worth no more than someone willing to live in that quality of house can afford to pay for it. Today in Vancouver, with new home ownership requiring close to 75% of the typical buyers' combined takehome pay, that's all gone up in smoke.
Years ago I read about a Scandinavian country, Sweden if memory serves, that chose to recognize that housing was special and that affordable housing met a crucial, social need. So they found a way to make house prices reflect their actual value. They simply taxed away speculative profit.
Everybody got a deal - on one residence. If you owned your home for a set number of years you could sell it without a speculative profit tax. If you sold your house before then it was okay so long as you invested your takings in another residence. But, if you bought a house to flog it on spec, well then your profits would be taxed away on the sale. Obviously it was more sophisticated than that but this is the rough idea.
The policy recognized that houses are supposed to be homes and homes are an important part of a healthy society. Therefore they're to be treated differently than other assets. Stop allowing speculators to whipsaw the housing market and homeowners come out the winners.
In America, it was speculation that destroyed their housing market just as it was speculation in housing that drove the American economy during the Bush years. It was speculation in housing that triggered the credit crisis their government is wrestling with today. It was speculation in housing that accounts for the $700-billion bail out now pending in Washington.
Speculation in housing has undermined the very economy of the United States of America, forcing the most "free market" capitalist government to resort to nationalization of their country's financial sector.
Cut out all the middlemen - the subprime scam artists, the derivative-flogging hucksters of Wall Street - and you're left with housing speculation at one end and economic catastrophe at the other and a powerfully direct, causal link between the two.
Maybe if housing speculation is enough to bring the American economy to its knees, it's time to put an end to it.
Panic on Pennsylvania Avenue
Toles, Washington PostPaul Simon wrote, "...it's all happening at the zoo. I do believe it, I do believe it's true." He wrote that in 1967 but it's spot on to describe the denizens of Pennsylvania Ave. (N.W.) today.
America's fiscal crisis has swept Pennsylvania Ave., from the Capitol building at one end to the White House at the other, like a wildfire racing through a zoo. The beasts are in full panic.
I got the full measure of that last night watching, you guessed it, The Daily Show, when Jon Stewart laid out the conditions US Treasury Secretary, Henry Merrit Paulson Jr., has imposed on Congress before he'll accept their $700-billion bailout money.
Basically, Paulson has described he'll take their filthy lucre but only on condition that there's no oversight on what he does with the stuff. No accountability whatsoever. He even wants a condition expressly stated that how he doles it out - and to whom can't be reviewed by any court.
The beasts, hearing the crackle of flames and choking on the acrid smoke, appear willing to agree to anything if only someone will make this nightmare go away. Anything, anything, just ask and it's yours.
Of course it's not their money anyway, not really. The $700-billion doesn't exist, not within the United States. The government doesn't have it, they're already running multi-hundred billion dollar deficits funding wars of choice and tax cuts for the rich. But there are places to get it. China has that kind of money - and they have it in US dollar holdings to boot. You know, that Wal-Mart money they rake in from filling the shelves of America's top retailer.
It's not like they're going to stiff the taxpayers with it either. No, the Chinese offer easy-credit plans that let you pawn it all off on today's voters' kids and grandkids and their kids and grandkids. Since Bush showed up, that's practically become the American Way. Do whatever you like, just keep the pain out of the immediate voting cycle and hope it won't show up at the ballot box.
Make it go away - for now.
It looks as though the beasts will get their way. The Dems are trying to draw a couple of lines in the sand. They're balking at the zero-oversight demand and they want the bailout subject to conditions that taxpayers be compensated with an equity position in the firms bailed out.
America's fiscal crisis has swept Pennsylvania Ave., from the Capitol building at one end to the White House at the other, like a wildfire racing through a zoo. The beasts are in full panic.
I got the full measure of that last night watching, you guessed it, The Daily Show, when Jon Stewart laid out the conditions US Treasury Secretary, Henry Merrit Paulson Jr., has imposed on Congress before he'll accept their $700-billion bailout money.
Basically, Paulson has described he'll take their filthy lucre but only on condition that there's no oversight on what he does with the stuff. No accountability whatsoever. He even wants a condition expressly stated that how he doles it out - and to whom can't be reviewed by any court.
The beasts, hearing the crackle of flames and choking on the acrid smoke, appear willing to agree to anything if only someone will make this nightmare go away. Anything, anything, just ask and it's yours.
Of course it's not their money anyway, not really. The $700-billion doesn't exist, not within the United States. The government doesn't have it, they're already running multi-hundred billion dollar deficits funding wars of choice and tax cuts for the rich. But there are places to get it. China has that kind of money - and they have it in US dollar holdings to boot. You know, that Wal-Mart money they rake in from filling the shelves of America's top retailer.
It's not like they're going to stiff the taxpayers with it either. No, the Chinese offer easy-credit plans that let you pawn it all off on today's voters' kids and grandkids and their kids and grandkids. Since Bush showed up, that's practically become the American Way. Do whatever you like, just keep the pain out of the immediate voting cycle and hope it won't show up at the ballot box.
Make it go away - for now.
It looks as though the beasts will get their way. The Dems are trying to draw a couple of lines in the sand. They're balking at the zero-oversight demand and they want the bailout subject to conditions that taxpayers be compensated with an equity position in the firms bailed out.
Even some Republicans are now lining up behind Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd.
The Democrats have also decided to include a group left out of the Bush Bailout - struggling homeowners. Since the Feds are going to wind up owning a lot of these bad mortgages anyway, it actually may be better for taxpayers to find some compromise that keeps these people in their homes and gets them to make payments they can afford.
Now I know a lot of you right-wingers will recoil at the suggestion of writing down some little guy's mortgage debt and settling for what they can pay but let me tell you, from lengthy personal experience, that we've been doing that for businesses for years.
I was involved in a lot of receiverships in the early 80's. Back then the banks would appoint a receiver, trigger a bankruptcy and then just have the receiver-trustee firesale the assets. That led to recoveries of pennies on the dollar. It took a while but finally the banks figured out that the trigger they were pulling led to a barrel at their own heads too. That's when they started looking at work-outs, settlements. Better to write off 20% if it keeps the business going and recovers interest and principal on the remaining 80% than get 10-cents on the dollar right now. That's the same thing they're talking about with home foreclosures.
Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Barack's Next Ad
It doesn't get much better than this.
American voters are casting about trying to figure out just who to blame for the subprime mortgage/derivative/credit crunch/housing bubble scandal. The Repugs, naturally, have their spin machines in overdrive - trying to convince average Americans that both parties are to blame and their Repug followers that it's really the Dems doing.
Time for a photo montage. You can start with Reagan's "trickle down" genius David Stockman, now staring at 30-years in prison for corporate accounting fraud. Then, how about Bush Sr. and Silverado Savings & Loan. Next up, John McCain and Chales Keating and Lincoln Savings & Loan. Then George w. Bush and "Kenny Boy" Lay of Enron fame. Cheney and Haliburton. Finally a Rogues Gallery of the Republican's "look the other way" regulators and then a quick return to John McCain and Charles Keating. Fade to black.
Ouch, ouch, ouch and ouch.
Keep hammering away at four decades of Republican shenanigans that have repeatedly wiped out little folks' life savings while facilitating the skyrocketing wealth of the real elite, America's wealthiest. Bring up clip of George w. at that black tie dinner bragging about his friends, "the haves and the have-mores, my base." Close with clip of John McCain saying he's supported Bush on every important piece of legislation throughout his presidency and his pledge to even further deregulate the financial services sector.
You might have to break that down into a series of three ads. Then but the best airtime you can get and run them in successive commercial breaks.
Bingo. Bye, bye Geezer.
American voters are casting about trying to figure out just who to blame for the subprime mortgage/derivative/credit crunch/housing bubble scandal. The Repugs, naturally, have their spin machines in overdrive - trying to convince average Americans that both parties are to blame and their Repug followers that it's really the Dems doing.
Time for a photo montage. You can start with Reagan's "trickle down" genius David Stockman, now staring at 30-years in prison for corporate accounting fraud. Then, how about Bush Sr. and Silverado Savings & Loan. Next up, John McCain and Chales Keating and Lincoln Savings & Loan. Then George w. Bush and "Kenny Boy" Lay of Enron fame. Cheney and Haliburton. Finally a Rogues Gallery of the Republican's "look the other way" regulators and then a quick return to John McCain and Charles Keating. Fade to black.
Ouch, ouch, ouch and ouch.
Keep hammering away at four decades of Republican shenanigans that have repeatedly wiped out little folks' life savings while facilitating the skyrocketing wealth of the real elite, America's wealthiest. Bring up clip of George w. at that black tie dinner bragging about his friends, "the haves and the have-mores, my base." Close with clip of John McCain saying he's supported Bush on every important piece of legislation throughout his presidency and his pledge to even further deregulate the financial services sector.
You might have to break that down into a series of three ads. Then but the best airtime you can get and run them in successive commercial breaks.
Bingo. Bye, bye Geezer.
Rescuing Stephane Dion
It didn't have to be this way. If Keith Davey was still around, it wouldn't be.
Stephane Dion's Green Shift has been a disaster in its introduction and in its marketing.
We all know that the Green Shift stumbled at birth. Mr. Dion lost control of its introduction. It was uncloaked before it could be unveiled. It was released when it was most vulnerable to empty, alarmist attack and before it could be explained, defended and sold to the public.
Steve Harper was able to tie the Green Shift around Mr. Dion's neck and keep it there. After that, there was no separating the two which ensured that it would be Dion, not Harper, on the defensive in the critical opening weeks of the election campaign.
Everything we complained about Harper, every excess, every anti-democratic and authoritarian abuse, the scandals, every broken promise - it all got swept away. Harper hasn't had to defend his record at all, not even remotely. It's as though none of that stuff ever happened.
Harper's shield, his cloak of invisibility? Mr. Dion's Green Shift.
At no time since Mr. Dion assumed the party leadership have the Liberals been strong enough to launch an initiative of the scope of the Green Shift. It's much too big for a party to attempt from a position of relative weakness.
The Tories have held a huge financial advantage over the LPC throughout Mr. Dion's leadership and there was no sign he was ever making any inroads on that. That alone ought to have set the alarm bells ringing. The Liberals didn't have the luxury of launching a major and controversial initiative. They couldn't afford it.
The one thing the Liberals didn't have to buy was the litany of Harper's excesses. That was free. People had watched it all unfold - Cadman, Mulroney, Afghanistan, In and Out, accountability, environmental stonewalling, gagging the military, and secrecy, secrecy, secrecy.
So, why isn't Harper being forced to hop and dance around his own record right now? Why is he able to recast himself as an average guy in a sweater vest? It's because he grabbed the opportunity, back when the Green Shift unveiling was so terribly botched, to put Dion on the defensive and to keep him there.
The Liberals didn't have enough money to launch a Green Shift platform. They didn't have enough money or enough time. It's not a policy suited to an opposition party in any case. It takes a massive information campaign, meetings and discussions with the public and every key player, a building of consensus. That's a job only a government can tackle.
Dion needed sage advice and it seems he didn't get it. He needed to take the initiative and go on the offensive. He needed to frame the issues.
A - The first step ought to have been to assure the public that a newly elected Liberal government would absolutely not introduce Green Shift legislation unless certain key conditions had been met. In other words, Mr. Dion ought to have removed the Green Shift as an election issue altogether.
B - Mr. Dion should have promised broad consultations with the Canadian public and the most heavily affected sectors - transportation, energy, agriculture and so on. Mr. Dion ought to have made clear that his party would then seek to hone that input into the strongest possible consensus behind an effective carbon reduction programme. In opposition, the Liberals have neither the funding nor the time for an undertaking of that magnitude. Restating the obvious isn't a sign of weakness.
C - And then - the third condition - would have been to promise a plebiscite. Let the government come up with a policy, explain it properly to the public and then seek public approval. Promise the Canadian people that they would decide the Canadian response to global warming. After all, if you introduce policies they don't support, they'll do the deciding anyway in the next election.
The logic of this approach ought to have been obvious to any Quebecker. This issue shares a lot of the complexities of a sovereignty referendum. It's something that has to be sold to the voting public. They have to decide it's fate, they have to support it or send their government back to the drawing board.
Getting Dion and the cash-strapped LPC off Harper's hook ought to have been as easy as A-B-C. Then it might have been possible to make this election a verdict on Harper's greasy record of the past two years.
I'm not sure there's still time for Mr. Dion to drag himself out of the Green Shift hole that Harper has dug for him. But, damn, he's got to try!
Stephane Dion's Green Shift has been a disaster in its introduction and in its marketing.
We all know that the Green Shift stumbled at birth. Mr. Dion lost control of its introduction. It was uncloaked before it could be unveiled. It was released when it was most vulnerable to empty, alarmist attack and before it could be explained, defended and sold to the public.
Steve Harper was able to tie the Green Shift around Mr. Dion's neck and keep it there. After that, there was no separating the two which ensured that it would be Dion, not Harper, on the defensive in the critical opening weeks of the election campaign.
Everything we complained about Harper, every excess, every anti-democratic and authoritarian abuse, the scandals, every broken promise - it all got swept away. Harper hasn't had to defend his record at all, not even remotely. It's as though none of that stuff ever happened.
Harper's shield, his cloak of invisibility? Mr. Dion's Green Shift.
At no time since Mr. Dion assumed the party leadership have the Liberals been strong enough to launch an initiative of the scope of the Green Shift. It's much too big for a party to attempt from a position of relative weakness.
The Tories have held a huge financial advantage over the LPC throughout Mr. Dion's leadership and there was no sign he was ever making any inroads on that. That alone ought to have set the alarm bells ringing. The Liberals didn't have the luxury of launching a major and controversial initiative. They couldn't afford it.
The one thing the Liberals didn't have to buy was the litany of Harper's excesses. That was free. People had watched it all unfold - Cadman, Mulroney, Afghanistan, In and Out, accountability, environmental stonewalling, gagging the military, and secrecy, secrecy, secrecy.
So, why isn't Harper being forced to hop and dance around his own record right now? Why is he able to recast himself as an average guy in a sweater vest? It's because he grabbed the opportunity, back when the Green Shift unveiling was so terribly botched, to put Dion on the defensive and to keep him there.
The Liberals didn't have enough money to launch a Green Shift platform. They didn't have enough money or enough time. It's not a policy suited to an opposition party in any case. It takes a massive information campaign, meetings and discussions with the public and every key player, a building of consensus. That's a job only a government can tackle.
Dion needed sage advice and it seems he didn't get it. He needed to take the initiative and go on the offensive. He needed to frame the issues.
A - The first step ought to have been to assure the public that a newly elected Liberal government would absolutely not introduce Green Shift legislation unless certain key conditions had been met. In other words, Mr. Dion ought to have removed the Green Shift as an election issue altogether.
B - Mr. Dion should have promised broad consultations with the Canadian public and the most heavily affected sectors - transportation, energy, agriculture and so on. Mr. Dion ought to have made clear that his party would then seek to hone that input into the strongest possible consensus behind an effective carbon reduction programme. In opposition, the Liberals have neither the funding nor the time for an undertaking of that magnitude. Restating the obvious isn't a sign of weakness.
C - And then - the third condition - would have been to promise a plebiscite. Let the government come up with a policy, explain it properly to the public and then seek public approval. Promise the Canadian people that they would decide the Canadian response to global warming. After all, if you introduce policies they don't support, they'll do the deciding anyway in the next election.
The logic of this approach ought to have been obvious to any Quebecker. This issue shares a lot of the complexities of a sovereignty referendum. It's something that has to be sold to the voting public. They have to decide it's fate, they have to support it or send their government back to the drawing board.
Getting Dion and the cash-strapped LPC off Harper's hook ought to have been as easy as A-B-C. Then it might have been possible to make this election a verdict on Harper's greasy record of the past two years.
I'm not sure there's still time for Mr. Dion to drag himself out of the Green Shift hole that Harper has dug for him. But, damn, he's got to try!
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Cheney's Paper Trail Preserved
A US District Court Judge has forbidden the destruction of documents from Vice President Dick Cheney's years in the White House.
As you may have guessed, Cheney was opposing this. I suspect he'd like to leave a lot of his paper trail in the form of ashes. That seems to be what the judge thought too. From CBC.CA:
A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is suing Cheney and the Executive Office of the President in an effort to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.
The judge said the administration's legal position "heightens the court's concern" that some records may not be preserved.
In a 22-page opinion, Kollar-Kotelly revealed that in recent days lawyers for the administration balked at a proposed agreement between the two sides on how to proceed with the case.
She said the administration wanted any court order on what records are at issue in the case to cover only the office of the vice-president, not Cheney himself or the other defendants in the lawsuit: the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives.
The suit alleges that the administration's actions over the past 7½ years raise questions over whether the White House will turn over records created by Cheney and his staff to the National Archives when the newly elected administration takes over in January.
Now, all those who believe Dick Cheney is going to leave the paper trail intact, please raise your right hands and board the bus to Fantasyland.
As you may have guessed, Cheney was opposing this. I suspect he'd like to leave a lot of his paper trail in the form of ashes. That seems to be what the judge thought too. From CBC.CA:
A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is suing Cheney and the Executive Office of the President in an effort to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.
The judge said the administration's legal position "heightens the court's concern" that some records may not be preserved.
In a 22-page opinion, Kollar-Kotelly revealed that in recent days lawyers for the administration balked at a proposed agreement between the two sides on how to proceed with the case.
She said the administration wanted any court order on what records are at issue in the case to cover only the office of the vice-president, not Cheney himself or the other defendants in the lawsuit: the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives.
The suit alleges that the administration's actions over the past 7½ years raise questions over whether the White House will turn over records created by Cheney and his staff to the National Archives when the newly elected administration takes over in January.
Now, all those who believe Dick Cheney is going to leave the paper trail intact, please raise your right hands and board the bus to Fantasyland.
Bombs Don't Work
For the past seven years we've been playing a furious game of Whack-a-Mole with radical Islam. Even by conventional terms - tonnage of weapons dropped, etc. - this has been a major war.
What lies in the future may depend on who gets elected in the US in November. One guy looks pretty keen on keeping these wars ticking over and maybe adding one, perhaps even two, while stirring the embers of another Cold War to boot. The other guy - who knows? He doesn't appear as bellicose but there are no guarantees.
We're at the threshold of an era of multi-dimensional, global change. We've launched a massive expansion of Eastern economies, particularly the giant states of China and India.
There are a lot of problems looming that will eclipse Islamic fundamentalism. There's anthropogenic global warming and all the associated climate change issues - droughts, floods, storms; species extinctions and migrations (ours too); desertification; freshwater exhaustion; land, air and water pollution; the spread of insects and diseases. Then in an increasingly busy world we're going to have to tackle frictions over resources caused by the exhaustion of renewables and depletion of non-renewables. Add to that all the related problems associated with overpopulation and we've got a heaping plateful of existential challenges even without looking for wars to wage.
I don't think we can afford wars any longer, at least not like we used to in the 20th Century. They suck up too many resources and deplete the energies we need to deal with everything else that's knocking on our door at the moment. They're an unacceptable distraction.
Take Islamist terrorism, for example. That's "Islamist" as in radical Islam as in Wahabism. As the Muslim world goes, the Islamist movement is relatively small but we've done an awfully poor job at combating it.
Muslim kids go in the front door of these Madrassas and out the back door all fired up and ready for the Islamist training camps. Our approach has been to bomb'em into extinction once they've gone through this process. However to succeed in our approach, we have to wipe them out faster than they can come through the religious indoctrination level and we're not even coming close on that score.
If the Islamist movement has a fundamental vulnerability it lies in its inability to sustain itself. It needs money and the active support of sympathizers, most of whom are not Islamists. We need to sort out what drives ordinary, rank and file Muslims, the "Arab Street," to support these extremists.
I think there's no end of reasons for the ongoing support of this extremism. A very powerful one is historical. The West has been powerfully meddling in Arab affairs for more than a century - shaping the place to suit our interests with little regard for theirs. We bundled together places like Pakistan and Iraq and Syria out of the spoils we picked up from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following WWI. We even parcelled the Kurds out among at least six nations, sort of like sending the orphan kids off to live with various, distant relatives. In the process, we have persistently lied to and betrayed these people. We have persistently manipulated them to suit our purposes.
We've been astonishingly racist toward Arabs. We've treated them as though because they're Arabs or Muslims or something they don't need or aspire to the same things we insist upon - little things like human rights and democracy. Think I'm kidding? Look at the state of human rights and democratic movements in the West's two closest Arab states - Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Do you think it's just oversight that we constantly focus on the anti-democratic repression in Muslim states we don't like - places like Iran and Syria - but seem not to mind when the oppressors are on our side?
Do you think the Arab people don't see this? Do you think they don't see that we support the status-quo that keeps them down, just so long as the tyrants are our pals?
We've contributed to a state of affairs in which radical Islam is the only vehicle of change remaining to so many of these Arab peoples. Okay, so we've done our bit to narrow their options down to one. Why are we surprised when they're drawn to it?
The Islamists - whether you call them Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or any of the lesser groups - get a lot of their support because they stand defiant of the very order that oppresses these people. It's more a "my enemy's enemy" sort of thing than a genuine alliance of immersed interests. They know the Islamists aren't working for democratic change but they're also the only bunch that's taking a swing at their common foes.
For a while we gave the Arab Street reason to believe we were coming to spread democracy through their region. Now that's something we've promised them before and they're painfully aware of our past betrayals but when they did get a chance to exercise democracy we rushed right in to shut it down.
The Palestinians elected Hamas because they saw Fatah as atrophied, hopelessly corrupt and willing to sell them out to Israel and the US. They saw in Hamas their only real hope for change. And how did we react? We pretended like they didn't vote, as though they didn't choose. We acted as though Fatah had won. We even channeled money and arms to Fatah to stage a coup to oust Hamas.
Lebanese elections ended with Hezbollah winning a number of seats. We were outraged, it was unacceptable!
But wait a minute. Weren't many of Israel's early leaders key figures in its own, nationalist terrorist movements? Some of them were butchers, real murderers. Did that stop us from dealing with them? No, of course not. Now you may not have that little inconsistency in the forefront of your mind but you can bet the farm that it's always in the minds of the Arab Street.
We Westerners celebrate all the struggles our ancestors went through to create the democracies we supposedly cherish today. Why do we find those same aspirations so outrageous when they involve the Arab peoples? One reason is because we've been groomed to be blind to it. We're told, again and again, that all the Muslim people want to do is conquer the world - our world, that is - for Islam, for the Prophet. We're told they're on a suicide mission from their God to wipe us out because they can't stand our Western societies, our freedom, our very democracies. Okay, anyone believing that, line up on the right under the sign that reads "Morons."
Those arguments deny these people their essential humanity. This thinking presents Arabs as less than human. No, no, they don't want to raise families, send their kids to school, have a few nice things and live in peace. No, Johnny, only human beings want those things, not Arabs. Sure some of them live in concentration - er, "refugee" camps, but that's because they're okay with it.
If there is a Christian God, what must he think of his adherents who act this way?
But I digress. If we want to get Arab terrorism under control, we have to repair the Arab Street. We have to accept that the only real leadership they have - at the moment - is in the radical movement, just as the Israeli leadership was birthed.
Then, and here's the hard part, we have to believe in democracy and place our faith in its power. Yes, Arab peoples may begin electing outfits like Hamas and Hezbollah and, yes, the early years of their democratic experiment are apt to be uneven, at times even turbulent, but we have to believe that democracy will defeat extremism because it removes the common bond between Islamist extremists and the Arab Street without which the fundamentalists wither and die.
It's time to do some major arm twisting in Cairo and Riyadh. It's time we threw our support behind democracy movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia - economic and political support. If we can make change happen there, we really have the basis of spreading reform through the rest of the Middle East - by example, not by gunfire.
Or let's just keep doing what's worked out so wonderfully for us these past seven years. Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran.
What lies in the future may depend on who gets elected in the US in November. One guy looks pretty keen on keeping these wars ticking over and maybe adding one, perhaps even two, while stirring the embers of another Cold War to boot. The other guy - who knows? He doesn't appear as bellicose but there are no guarantees.
We're at the threshold of an era of multi-dimensional, global change. We've launched a massive expansion of Eastern economies, particularly the giant states of China and India.
There are a lot of problems looming that will eclipse Islamic fundamentalism. There's anthropogenic global warming and all the associated climate change issues - droughts, floods, storms; species extinctions and migrations (ours too); desertification; freshwater exhaustion; land, air and water pollution; the spread of insects and diseases. Then in an increasingly busy world we're going to have to tackle frictions over resources caused by the exhaustion of renewables and depletion of non-renewables. Add to that all the related problems associated with overpopulation and we've got a heaping plateful of existential challenges even without looking for wars to wage.
I don't think we can afford wars any longer, at least not like we used to in the 20th Century. They suck up too many resources and deplete the energies we need to deal with everything else that's knocking on our door at the moment. They're an unacceptable distraction.
Take Islamist terrorism, for example. That's "Islamist" as in radical Islam as in Wahabism. As the Muslim world goes, the Islamist movement is relatively small but we've done an awfully poor job at combating it.
Muslim kids go in the front door of these Madrassas and out the back door all fired up and ready for the Islamist training camps. Our approach has been to bomb'em into extinction once they've gone through this process. However to succeed in our approach, we have to wipe them out faster than they can come through the religious indoctrination level and we're not even coming close on that score.
If the Islamist movement has a fundamental vulnerability it lies in its inability to sustain itself. It needs money and the active support of sympathizers, most of whom are not Islamists. We need to sort out what drives ordinary, rank and file Muslims, the "Arab Street," to support these extremists.
I think there's no end of reasons for the ongoing support of this extremism. A very powerful one is historical. The West has been powerfully meddling in Arab affairs for more than a century - shaping the place to suit our interests with little regard for theirs. We bundled together places like Pakistan and Iraq and Syria out of the spoils we picked up from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following WWI. We even parcelled the Kurds out among at least six nations, sort of like sending the orphan kids off to live with various, distant relatives. In the process, we have persistently lied to and betrayed these people. We have persistently manipulated them to suit our purposes.
We've been astonishingly racist toward Arabs. We've treated them as though because they're Arabs or Muslims or something they don't need or aspire to the same things we insist upon - little things like human rights and democracy. Think I'm kidding? Look at the state of human rights and democratic movements in the West's two closest Arab states - Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Do you think it's just oversight that we constantly focus on the anti-democratic repression in Muslim states we don't like - places like Iran and Syria - but seem not to mind when the oppressors are on our side?
Do you think the Arab people don't see this? Do you think they don't see that we support the status-quo that keeps them down, just so long as the tyrants are our pals?
We've contributed to a state of affairs in which radical Islam is the only vehicle of change remaining to so many of these Arab peoples. Okay, so we've done our bit to narrow their options down to one. Why are we surprised when they're drawn to it?
The Islamists - whether you call them Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or any of the lesser groups - get a lot of their support because they stand defiant of the very order that oppresses these people. It's more a "my enemy's enemy" sort of thing than a genuine alliance of immersed interests. They know the Islamists aren't working for democratic change but they're also the only bunch that's taking a swing at their common foes.
For a while we gave the Arab Street reason to believe we were coming to spread democracy through their region. Now that's something we've promised them before and they're painfully aware of our past betrayals but when they did get a chance to exercise democracy we rushed right in to shut it down.
The Palestinians elected Hamas because they saw Fatah as atrophied, hopelessly corrupt and willing to sell them out to Israel and the US. They saw in Hamas their only real hope for change. And how did we react? We pretended like they didn't vote, as though they didn't choose. We acted as though Fatah had won. We even channeled money and arms to Fatah to stage a coup to oust Hamas.
Lebanese elections ended with Hezbollah winning a number of seats. We were outraged, it was unacceptable!
But wait a minute. Weren't many of Israel's early leaders key figures in its own, nationalist terrorist movements? Some of them were butchers, real murderers. Did that stop us from dealing with them? No, of course not. Now you may not have that little inconsistency in the forefront of your mind but you can bet the farm that it's always in the minds of the Arab Street.
We Westerners celebrate all the struggles our ancestors went through to create the democracies we supposedly cherish today. Why do we find those same aspirations so outrageous when they involve the Arab peoples? One reason is because we've been groomed to be blind to it. We're told, again and again, that all the Muslim people want to do is conquer the world - our world, that is - for Islam, for the Prophet. We're told they're on a suicide mission from their God to wipe us out because they can't stand our Western societies, our freedom, our very democracies. Okay, anyone believing that, line up on the right under the sign that reads "Morons."
Those arguments deny these people their essential humanity. This thinking presents Arabs as less than human. No, no, they don't want to raise families, send their kids to school, have a few nice things and live in peace. No, Johnny, only human beings want those things, not Arabs. Sure some of them live in concentration - er, "refugee" camps, but that's because they're okay with it.
If there is a Christian God, what must he think of his adherents who act this way?
But I digress. If we want to get Arab terrorism under control, we have to repair the Arab Street. We have to accept that the only real leadership they have - at the moment - is in the radical movement, just as the Israeli leadership was birthed.
Then, and here's the hard part, we have to believe in democracy and place our faith in its power. Yes, Arab peoples may begin electing outfits like Hamas and Hezbollah and, yes, the early years of their democratic experiment are apt to be uneven, at times even turbulent, but we have to believe that democracy will defeat extremism because it removes the common bond between Islamist extremists and the Arab Street without which the fundamentalists wither and die.
It's time to do some major arm twisting in Cairo and Riyadh. It's time we threw our support behind democracy movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia - economic and political support. If we can make change happen there, we really have the basis of spreading reform through the rest of the Middle East - by example, not by gunfire.
Or let's just keep doing what's worked out so wonderfully for us these past seven years. Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Sarah Palin's Welfare State - Alaska
Poor old Sarah Palin. She and the Geezer pitched her as the frontierswoman leader of a tough, independent, self-reliant frontier state, Alaska. Yessir, she was going to bring some of that self-reliant, "can do" attitude to Washington where it's so badly needed.
Except, as AlterNet inconveniently points out, Sarah Palin's Alaska is, in fact, America's number one welfare state:
Actually, much of Alaska long ago lost the tradition of self-help. Palin might be campaigning on an anti-government, do-it-yourself platform, but her state is the most dependent on the federal government of all 50 states. Washington sends Alaska more money per capita than any other state. Alaskans receive back from the federal government almost $2 for every $1 they send to Washington. It's a sweet deal.
And when it comes to government pork, Alaska is king. As USA Today noted back in March, Palin's state ranks number one -- no other state is even close. In 2007 Alaska received some 2.5 times as much as runner-up Hawaii and 15 times more than the national average.
Alaska has by far the most state government employees per capita as any other state and about five times as many as Obama's Illinois.
The part of Alaska not dependent on federal government largesse is dependent on big oil. Almost 90 percent of Alaska's general budget comes from royalties and taxes on oil, which explains how the state can be number one in state government spending while ranking far down the list in taxes its residents pay. Alaska has no income tax or sales tax. Recently, its legislature suspended the gasoline tax.
So, there goes the McCain campaign's narrative about Sarah Palin, straight into the dumper.
Except, as AlterNet inconveniently points out, Sarah Palin's Alaska is, in fact, America's number one welfare state:
Actually, much of Alaska long ago lost the tradition of self-help. Palin might be campaigning on an anti-government, do-it-yourself platform, but her state is the most dependent on the federal government of all 50 states. Washington sends Alaska more money per capita than any other state. Alaskans receive back from the federal government almost $2 for every $1 they send to Washington. It's a sweet deal.
And when it comes to government pork, Alaska is king. As USA Today noted back in March, Palin's state ranks number one -- no other state is even close. In 2007 Alaska received some 2.5 times as much as runner-up Hawaii and 15 times more than the national average.
Alaska has by far the most state government employees per capita as any other state and about five times as many as Obama's Illinois.
The part of Alaska not dependent on federal government largesse is dependent on big oil. Almost 90 percent of Alaska's general budget comes from royalties and taxes on oil, which explains how the state can be number one in state government spending while ranking far down the list in taxes its residents pay. Alaska has no income tax or sales tax. Recently, its legislature suspended the gasoline tax.
So, there goes the McCain campaign's narrative about Sarah Palin, straight into the dumper.
Are We Losing Pakistan to the Taliban?
It's no secret that anti-Americanism is spreading fast through Pakistan. American air attacks and special forces raids intended to strike at al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership seem to be backfiring by renewing both sympathy and support for the insurgents.
Put simply, the Pakistani people are outraged at the idea of American military strikes against their homeland. American justifications don't seem to make any difference.
A suicide bomber yesterday blew up the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad, killing about forty people. That atrocity didn't generate much anger toward the attackers.
BBC correspondent Owen Bennet-Jones has written a stark account of the shifting attitude of formerly moderate, pro-Western Pakistanis:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7623097.stm
This is a hell of a rotten outcome to the campaign Washington began seven years ago. A guy who knows this troubled region about as well as anyone is The Independent's correspondent, Robert Fisk. Today he questions why the US thinks it can win in Afghanistan:
As the Algerian journalist Hocine Belaffoufi said with consummate wit the other day, "According to this political discourse ... the increase in attacks represents undeniable proof of the defeat of terrorism. The more terrorism collapsed, the more the attacks increased ... so the stronger (terrorism) becomes, the fewer attacks there will be."
We, of course, have been peddling this crackpot nonsense for years in south-west Asia. First of all, back in 2001, we won the war in Afghanistan by overthrowing the Taliban. Then we marched off to win the war in Iraq. Now – with at least one suicide bombing a day and the nation carved up into mutually antagonistic sectarian enclaves – we have won the war in Iraq and are heading back to re-win the war in Afghanistan where the Taliban, so thoroughly trounced by our chaps seven years ago, have proved their moral and political bankruptcy by recapturing half the country.
Oddly, back in the Eighties, I heard exactly the same from a Soviet general at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan – yes, the very same Bagram airbase where the CIA lads tortured to death a few of the Afghans who escaped the earlier Russian massacres. Only "terrorist remnants" remained in the Afghan mountains, the jolly Russian general assured us. Afghan troops, along with the limited Soviet "intervention" forces, were restoring peace to democratic Afghanistan.
...And now? After the "unimaginable" progress in Iraq – I am quoting the fantasist who still occupies the White House – the Americans are going to hip-hop 8,000 soldiers out of Mesopotamia and dump another 4,700 into the hellfire of Afghanistan. Too few, too late, too slow, as one of my French colleagues commented acidly.
...The Soviet general at Bagram now has his amanuensis in General David McKiernan, the senior US officer in Afghanistan, who proudly announced last month that US forces had killed "between 30 and 35 Taliban" in a raid on Azizabad near Herat. "In the light of emerging evidence pertaining (sic) to civilian casualties in the ... counter-insurgency operation," the luckless general now says, he feels it "prudent" – another big sic here – to review his original investigation. The evidence "pertaining", of course, is that the Americans probably killed 90 people in Azizabad, most of them women and children. We – let us be frank and own up to our role in the hapless Nato alliance in Afghanistan – have now slaughtered more than 500 Afghan civilians this year alone. These include a Nato missile attack on a wedding party in July when we splattered 47 of the guests all over the village of Deh Bala.
Joseph Conrad, who understood the powerlessness of powerful nations, would surely have made something of this. Yes, we have lost after we won in Afghanistan and now we will lose as we try to win again. Stuff happens.
The Ghost of Ronald Reagan
America's current fiscal meltdown lies squarely at the feet of a man most Americans revere, Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan along with his budget director David Stockman who spawned "supply side economics" and the "trickle-down theory" that were subsequently merged into "Reaganomics."
Ronald Reagan was as powerful a president as America has known since FDR. He was seen as a fiscal reformer. In reality, however, he saddled his nation with voodoo economics. In 198o, when Reagan came to power, the US was the world's largest creditor nation. In just a few years of Reaganomics, America became the world's largest debtor nation.
To help you understand how this rot set in nearly three decades ago, I've linked to two articles from the Atlantic Monthly. The first, entitled "The Education of David Stockman" was published in December, 1981.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/classics/stockman.htm
By the time The Morning After hit the news stands, the future undoing of America had already been mapped out. It's really quite astonishing stuff.
After leaving Reagan's White House, David Stockman retreated to his family's dairy farm in Michigan. He subsequently entered the business world. As Wikipedia notes, the past few years haven't been pleasant for David Stockman and the next 30-years look even worse:
On March 26, 2007, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted Stockman in "a scheme ... to defraud [Collins & Aikman]'s investors, banks and creditors by manipulating C&A's reported revenues and earnings." At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil charges against Stockman related to actions he took while CEO of Collins & Aikman.[3] Stockman faces up to 30 years in prison.
Ronald Reagan was as powerful a president as America has known since FDR. He was seen as a fiscal reformer. In reality, however, he saddled his nation with voodoo economics. In 198o, when Reagan came to power, the US was the world's largest creditor nation. In just a few years of Reaganomics, America became the world's largest debtor nation.
To help you understand how this rot set in nearly three decades ago, I've linked to two articles from the Atlantic Monthly. The first, entitled "The Education of David Stockman" was published in December, 1981.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/classics/stockman.htm
The second, entitled "The Morning After," appeared in the October, 1987 edition of the magazine:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/budget/afterf.htmBy the time The Morning After hit the news stands, the future undoing of America had already been mapped out. It's really quite astonishing stuff.
After leaving Reagan's White House, David Stockman retreated to his family's dairy farm in Michigan. He subsequently entered the business world. As Wikipedia notes, the past few years haven't been pleasant for David Stockman and the next 30-years look even worse:
On March 26, 2007, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted Stockman in "a scheme ... to defraud [Collins & Aikman]'s investors, banks and creditors by manipulating C&A's reported revenues and earnings." At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil charges against Stockman related to actions he took while CEO of Collins & Aikman.[3] Stockman faces up to 30 years in prison.
Where Does a Country That's Already Broke Find 700-Billion Dollars?
First things first. The United States of America is broke. The government relies on hundreds of billions of dollars worth of foreign loans to prop up its national Ponzi scheme. It runs its foreign wars on borrowed foreign money. It finances its tax cuts for the very rich on borrowed foreign money. It finances its monthly balance of trade deficits on borrowed foreign money.
The last ten days has seen that same US government shove over a hundred billion dollars into propping up its astonishingly unregulated financial sector to prevent strategic collapses. The takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nationalization of AIG. Yesterday it announced $50-billion in loan guarantees for troubled money market funds. And now, the jewel in the crown - SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS or to you arithmetic types 700,000,000,000 dollars, all of it borrowed, to buy bad mortgages.
This floats the US national debt ceiling to $11.3 TRILLION dollars. (That's $11,300,000,000,000.00) Now that's some serious, serious money even at ridiculously low interest rates.
So, just how does the government get another 0.7-trillion bucks? Why the old-fashioned way, of course. It pledges the good credit (or what's left of it) of the American taxpayer. That'd be the working class and middle class wage earners and their children and their grandchildren. Some day all this will be transcribed into American family tree charts. Neat, eh? "Yes, it was in great-great-great-grandad Fred's time that you kids were sold down the river."
Before they're done they'll be looking at close to a trillion dollars siphoned out of working class wallets to make good the recklessness of the country's financial sector.
Talk about running on empty! But here's the 800-pound gorilla in the room - inflation. Can the American government pump all this additional borrowed money into the economy without triggering a wave of inflation? If inflation does set in, how does the US government meet its interest obligations?
Foreign lenders took a hit over the last two years with the devaluation of the greenback. As the US dollar tanked against all other currencies, their loans - and the interest they received - dropped in value substantially. Despite that these lenders held on to their belief that America was the safest place to invest their surplus cash. What remains to be seen is will they swallow another hit if these trillion dollar bailouts spark a wave of inflation?
Is America so far into these foreign lenders that they no longer have any choice but to keep propping up the US economy no matter how recklessly it's managed, no matter how inflationary the bailouts? I think we're going to see the answer to that question over the next twelve to eighteen months.
We could just be witnessing the decline and fall of the American Empire.
The last ten days has seen that same US government shove over a hundred billion dollars into propping up its astonishingly unregulated financial sector to prevent strategic collapses. The takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the nationalization of AIG. Yesterday it announced $50-billion in loan guarantees for troubled money market funds. And now, the jewel in the crown - SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS or to you arithmetic types 700,000,000,000 dollars, all of it borrowed, to buy bad mortgages.
This floats the US national debt ceiling to $11.3 TRILLION dollars. (That's $11,300,000,000,000.00) Now that's some serious, serious money even at ridiculously low interest rates.
So, just how does the government get another 0.7-trillion bucks? Why the old-fashioned way, of course. It pledges the good credit (or what's left of it) of the American taxpayer. That'd be the working class and middle class wage earners and their children and their grandchildren. Some day all this will be transcribed into American family tree charts. Neat, eh? "Yes, it was in great-great-great-grandad Fred's time that you kids were sold down the river."
Before they're done they'll be looking at close to a trillion dollars siphoned out of working class wallets to make good the recklessness of the country's financial sector.
Talk about running on empty! But here's the 800-pound gorilla in the room - inflation. Can the American government pump all this additional borrowed money into the economy without triggering a wave of inflation? If inflation does set in, how does the US government meet its interest obligations?
Foreign lenders took a hit over the last two years with the devaluation of the greenback. As the US dollar tanked against all other currencies, their loans - and the interest they received - dropped in value substantially. Despite that these lenders held on to their belief that America was the safest place to invest their surplus cash. What remains to be seen is will they swallow another hit if these trillion dollar bailouts spark a wave of inflation?
Is America so far into these foreign lenders that they no longer have any choice but to keep propping up the US economy no matter how recklessly it's managed, no matter how inflationary the bailouts? I think we're going to see the answer to that question over the next twelve to eighteen months.
We could just be witnessing the decline and fall of the American Empire.
By the way, if you're still unclear as to how the Reagan Revolution came crashing down, check out this item from The Globe & Mail. It's all pretty much there:
Friday, September 19, 2008
Sixes and Sevens and Nines...
Is John McCain the riverboat gambler of the 2008 US presidential elections?
He took a gambler's gut instinct roll on his choice of running-mate, Sarah Palin.
"Always in a hurry, I never stop to worry,
Dont you see the time flashin by.
Honey, got no money,
Im all sixes and sevens and nines.
Say now, baby, Im the rank outsider,
You can be my partner in crime.
But baby, I cant stay,
You got to roll me and call me the tumblin,
Roll me and call me the tumblin dice."
Good Money After Bad - NATO
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has put the NATO membership on notice that they'll be expected to pick up their share of the costs of expansion of the Afghan National Army.
I know, why don't we just declare the Afghan National Army a bankrupt US investment bank? In the long run it's about as stable and should pay off just as handsomely as, say, Lehman Brothers.
Sorry Bob but we're already $22-billion in the hole on this totally botched adventure. You can pick up this tab.
Meanwhile Brit PM Gordon Brown is passing the begging bowl to raise handouts for Georgia. Sorry Gord, I gave at the office.
According to the Associated Press, Germany and some other European NATO members intend to block further American efforts to get Georgia into NATO this year. Maybe the idea of President Palin slapping on a fresh coat of lipstick and then getting NATO into a shooting match with Russia over Georgia has made some people open their eyes.
I know, why don't we just declare the Afghan National Army a bankrupt US investment bank? In the long run it's about as stable and should pay off just as handsomely as, say, Lehman Brothers.
Sorry Bob but we're already $22-billion in the hole on this totally botched adventure. You can pick up this tab.
Meanwhile Brit PM Gordon Brown is passing the begging bowl to raise handouts for Georgia. Sorry Gord, I gave at the office.
According to the Associated Press, Germany and some other European NATO members intend to block further American efforts to get Georgia into NATO this year. Maybe the idea of President Palin slapping on a fresh coat of lipstick and then getting NATO into a shooting match with Russia over Georgia has made some people open their eyes.
America's Credit Crisis - What's In Store for Us?
The credit crisis now gripping the US appears to have come as a surprise, even to the rich and powerful. Now you have to ask yourself why and just what does that mean?
If you want to understand what's happening and where America, our economic Big Brother, is heading, a good place to begin is by reading Kevin Phillips book, "American Theocracy." I really believe that Phillips lays out how America got where it is today and what lies in store for the United States - and the rest of us - over the next two decades.
Kevin Phillips IS NOT a liberal. He's a Republican, through and through. He's an insider, a former Republican strategist. He's been a political and economic commentator for thirty years. He's written several books including, "The Emerging Republican Majority", "Staying on Top" and "American Dynasty." Kevin Phillips is about as red, white and blue as they come. He's not going to contaminate your pristine mind with any socialist dogma. All he's going to do is point out the truth that he knows today's Republicans simply don't want to hear.
The complete title of this book is "American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The 21st Century." It was written, I believe, in 2005 which actually makes it a lot more interesting today than it was just three years ago.
Here are just a few gems from Chapter 9 entitled "Debt - History's Unlearned Lesson."
Because the past repeats only in general resemblance, there is always something different, something new. This truth, together with the usual effects of the passage of time, makes it easy for later generations to dismiss any awkward precedents - and so it has been with the demobilization of manufacturing and embrace of debt in the contemporary United States.
...conductors of the orchestra of American hubris wave star-spangled batons and the chorus resounds: Washington rules, the world manufactures for the United States, and our current-account deficit reflects nothing more than global anxiety to invest in U.S. prosperity. Who knows, the Treasury may even be planning a statue of an American consumer supporting the world on his back.
However, if pride goeth before a fall, cocksureness about the manageability of U.S. public and private indebtedness may as well, given threats that range from debt crises to currency humiliation. Crippling indebtedness is like the ghost of leading world economic powers past, a familiar Shakespearean villain come to stalk the current hegemon.
...None of these hegemons [Holland, Spain and Britain] started with well-developed finance. They began with simpler vocations. Castile, the heart of Spain, was a culture of high-plateau wool growers and skilled soldiers who had spent centuries reconquering the Iberian peninsula from Muslim emirs before conquistadores found gold and silver in Central and South America. The Dutch, as we have seen, had a unique talent for vocations having to do with ships, seas and winds. The English pioneered coal development and superseded the Dutch as masters of the seas. But after several generations of success in soldiering, seafaring, or manufacturing, these peoples, in their respective heydays, were drawn farther in the direction of globalism, financial services and capital management.
...Excluding the unusual case of Spain, the leading economic powers have followed an evolutionary progression: first, agriculture, fishing and the like, next commerce and industry, and finally finance. Several historians have elaborated this point. Brooks Adams contended that 'as societies consolidate, they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to vent through the imagination and takes the form of capital.'
In 1908, ...Winston Churchill, then president of the British Board of Trade, vented a similar historical interpretation in finding 'the seed of imperial ruin and national decay' in 'the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor' and 'the swift increase of vulgar jobless luxury.'
...The word "rentier" - meaning a person living off unearned income - comes from the French, as do so many other words connected with money and plunder: financier, profiteer, buccaneer. Over the last four centuries, however, it was first Spain, then Holland and Great Britain, and now the United States that created the most notable rentier cultures. Each ultimately became vulnerable as a result.
...Because intermittent high debt ratios were so central to the evolution of each of the leading world economic powers, each became comfortable - too comfortable - with debt as a long-standing experience, practice, and tactic. Particular overconfidence was instilled by memories of how often previous debt problems had been surmounted, even at extreme levels (100 to 200 percent) of GDP or GNP.
...Understandable as this cockiness might be, history teaches a crucial distinction: nations could martial the necessary debt-defying high-wire walks and comebacks during their youth and early middle age, when their industries, exports, capitalizations, and animal spirits were vital and expansive, but they became less resilient in later years. During these periods, as their societies polarized and their arteries clogged with rentier and debt buildups, wars and financial crises stopped being manageable. Of course, clarity about this develops only in retrospect. However, even though war-related debt seems to have been part of each fatal endgame, the past leading world economic powers seem to have made another error en route. They did not pay enough attention to establishing or maintaining a vital manufacturing sector, thereby keeping a better international balance and a broader internal income distribution than financialization allowed."
Any of this sounding familiar?
American Theocracy is a "must read" if you want to understand the current economic crisis in the United States and the long-term consequences we all may be facing. It's a well-written book, well documented and full of clear logic and history.
Get a copy. Have a read.
If you want to understand what's happening and where America, our economic Big Brother, is heading, a good place to begin is by reading Kevin Phillips book, "American Theocracy." I really believe that Phillips lays out how America got where it is today and what lies in store for the United States - and the rest of us - over the next two decades.
Kevin Phillips IS NOT a liberal. He's a Republican, through and through. He's an insider, a former Republican strategist. He's been a political and economic commentator for thirty years. He's written several books including, "The Emerging Republican Majority", "Staying on Top" and "American Dynasty." Kevin Phillips is about as red, white and blue as they come. He's not going to contaminate your pristine mind with any socialist dogma. All he's going to do is point out the truth that he knows today's Republicans simply don't want to hear.
The complete title of this book is "American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, And Borrowed Money In The 21st Century." It was written, I believe, in 2005 which actually makes it a lot more interesting today than it was just three years ago.
Here are just a few gems from Chapter 9 entitled "Debt - History's Unlearned Lesson."
Because the past repeats only in general resemblance, there is always something different, something new. This truth, together with the usual effects of the passage of time, makes it easy for later generations to dismiss any awkward precedents - and so it has been with the demobilization of manufacturing and embrace of debt in the contemporary United States.
...conductors of the orchestra of American hubris wave star-spangled batons and the chorus resounds: Washington rules, the world manufactures for the United States, and our current-account deficit reflects nothing more than global anxiety to invest in U.S. prosperity. Who knows, the Treasury may even be planning a statue of an American consumer supporting the world on his back.
However, if pride goeth before a fall, cocksureness about the manageability of U.S. public and private indebtedness may as well, given threats that range from debt crises to currency humiliation. Crippling indebtedness is like the ghost of leading world economic powers past, a familiar Shakespearean villain come to stalk the current hegemon.
...None of these hegemons [Holland, Spain and Britain] started with well-developed finance. They began with simpler vocations. Castile, the heart of Spain, was a culture of high-plateau wool growers and skilled soldiers who had spent centuries reconquering the Iberian peninsula from Muslim emirs before conquistadores found gold and silver in Central and South America. The Dutch, as we have seen, had a unique talent for vocations having to do with ships, seas and winds. The English pioneered coal development and superseded the Dutch as masters of the seas. But after several generations of success in soldiering, seafaring, or manufacturing, these peoples, in their respective heydays, were drawn farther in the direction of globalism, financial services and capital management.
...Excluding the unusual case of Spain, the leading economic powers have followed an evolutionary progression: first, agriculture, fishing and the like, next commerce and industry, and finally finance. Several historians have elaborated this point. Brooks Adams contended that 'as societies consolidate, they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to vent through the imagination and takes the form of capital.'
In 1908, ...Winston Churchill, then president of the British Board of Trade, vented a similar historical interpretation in finding 'the seed of imperial ruin and national decay' in 'the unnatural gap between the rich and the poor' and 'the swift increase of vulgar jobless luxury.'
...The word "rentier" - meaning a person living off unearned income - comes from the French, as do so many other words connected with money and plunder: financier, profiteer, buccaneer. Over the last four centuries, however, it was first Spain, then Holland and Great Britain, and now the United States that created the most notable rentier cultures. Each ultimately became vulnerable as a result.
...Because intermittent high debt ratios were so central to the evolution of each of the leading world economic powers, each became comfortable - too comfortable - with debt as a long-standing experience, practice, and tactic. Particular overconfidence was instilled by memories of how often previous debt problems had been surmounted, even at extreme levels (100 to 200 percent) of GDP or GNP.
...Understandable as this cockiness might be, history teaches a crucial distinction: nations could martial the necessary debt-defying high-wire walks and comebacks during their youth and early middle age, when their industries, exports, capitalizations, and animal spirits were vital and expansive, but they became less resilient in later years. During these periods, as their societies polarized and their arteries clogged with rentier and debt buildups, wars and financial crises stopped being manageable. Of course, clarity about this develops only in retrospect. However, even though war-related debt seems to have been part of each fatal endgame, the past leading world economic powers seem to have made another error en route. They did not pay enough attention to establishing or maintaining a vital manufacturing sector, thereby keeping a better international balance and a broader internal income distribution than financialization allowed."
Any of this sounding familiar?
American Theocracy is a "must read" if you want to understand the current economic crisis in the United States and the long-term consequences we all may be facing. It's a well-written book, well documented and full of clear logic and history.
Get a copy. Have a read.
Palin Craters - Score One for the Blogosphere
At first Sarah Palin was a balloon lifting John McCain's stagnant campaign. Now that balloon has burst as people see Palin for what she is/was - a totally cynical ploy by John McCain and Americans are beginning to reject her with the same passion they so recently embraced her.
Markos Moulitas of Daily Kos credits the blogosphere for not letting McCain get away with it:
Bloggers and tradmed reporters took a hard look at Sarah Palin and began raking her over the coals for myriad transgressions. She is a liar with theocratic tendencies, sports an intellect that makes Bush look like a Mensa member, and features an obvious fondness for Cheney-style abuses of power. And that's not even the worst of it.
...we continued to focus on Palin. Republicans were busy trying to build a positive narrative about Palin -- the "hockey mom" who was so folksy she could "field dress a moose" and had "said no to the Bridge to Nowhere and other government waste" and was overflowing with "small town values." McCain had shot up in the polls because of Palin. Common sense dictated it would be hard to knock him back down as long as she consolidated her popularity."
Then he points to the numbers. In just one week Palin's approval numbers fell from 52 down to 42% while her disapproval numbers climbed from 32 to 46% - all in just one week.
"That's a shocking 21-point collapse in a single week. She went from being just about the most popular person on the top of the ticket, to the (lipstick wearing?) goat.
...Palin will continue to excite and energize the wingnut base. She was designed for that purpose, and won't fail at that task. But her cratering popularity now hampers McCain's efforts to expand beyond that core base.
All of this is happening because we did not relent on Palin, blocking Republican efforts to paint her in a positive light. The results are speaking for themselves."
Moulitas also points out that there's been a change in the latest McCain ads. A week ago they were "McCain-Palin." Lately they've gone back to just "McCain."
Palin is trending down and it's hard to see that she has any other way to go. Now even her husband is refusing to appear to hearings after being subpoenaed. Todd must've got the word that top Republicans - or their spouses - are above the law.
Krugman Explains Meltdown - More Coming?
For years, the Right has treated Paul Krugman as though he was Satan's retarded child. What was his mortal sin? He outlined the inevitability of the very meltdown that's happening now. Ooopsie!
So here is the Princeton economist and New York Times' columnists insight into where this is heading:
"...banks are normally able to borrow from each other at rates just slightly above the interest rate on U.S. Treasury bills. But Thursday morning, the average interest rate on three-month interbank borrowing was 3.2 percent, while the interest rate on the corresponding Treasuries was 0.05 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.
This flight to safety has cut off credit to many businesses, including major players in the financial industry — and that, in turn, is setting us up for more big failures and further panic. It’s also depressing business spending, a bad thing as signs gather that the economic slump is deepening.
And the Federal Reserve, which normally takes the lead in fighting recessions, can’t do much this time because the standard tools of monetary policy have lost their grip. Usually the Fed responds to economic weakness by buying up Treasury bills, in order to drive interest rates down. But the interest rate on Treasuries is already zero, for all practical purposes; what more can the Fed do?
Well, it can lend money to the private sector — and it’s been doing that on an awesome scale. But this lending hasn’t kept the situation from deteriorating.
...government takeovers may be the only way to get the financial system working again.
Some people have been making that argument for some time. Most recently, Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, and two other veterans of past financial crises published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal declaring that the only way to avoid “the mother of all credit contractions” is to create a new government agency to “buy up the troubled paper” — that is, to have taxpayers take over the bad assets created by the bursting of the housing and credit bubbles. Coming from Mr. Volcker, that proposal has serious credibility.
Thursday night Ben Bernanke and Mr. Paulson met with Congressional leaders to discuss a “comprehensive approach” to the problem.
We don’t know yet what that “comprehensive approach” will look like. There have been hopeful comparisons to the financial rescue the Swedish government carried out in the early 1990s, a rescue that involved a temporary public takeover of a large part of the country’s financial system. It’s not clear, however, whether policy makers in Washington are prepared to exert a comparable degree of control. And if they aren’t, this could turn into the wrong kind of rescue — a bailout of stockholders as well as the market, in effect rescuing the financial industry from the consequences of its own greed."
Now remember, it's the same clown car full of pols and regulators who allowed this to occur in the first place. And they're going to fix it? Remember back when we used to envy American taxpayers?
Hey, all you Right-Wingers out there. Remind us how great your free market economic theories are. I can't seem to remember how that goes.
World Rejoices As Washington Takes Over Wall Street
See, socialism isn't all that bad. Now that Washington has taken a page out of Fidel's book and begun nationalizing its mortgage, securities, investment banks and insurance industries, stock prices are on the rebound and worried investors are breathing a huge sigh of relief. And today they announced a starter (you watch) fund of $50-billion in loan money for money market mutual funds.
Ain't life grand.
Of course, as pointed out in a McClatchey Newspapers item recently, the American way is to privatize gains and socialize only the losses. That way the rich folk actually do get their cake and get to eat it too no matter how badly they've screwed up. And that's what makes America the greatest land of all.
I saw a pity piece in one of the American papers lamenting the downfall and suffering of the former head of Lehman Brothers. The article showed that this guy had lost too - big time. Why he used to get paid $34-million a year (that's just shy of $3-million a month) and now he's out of work. His holdings in Lehman were valued at $1-billion last month and now they're a million, tops. Of course nobody wants to point out that this guy raked in hundreds of millions of tax sheltered bucks while he was asleep at the wheel, driving his company's investors straight off a cliff. I might feel sorry for the guy - if an angry mob had actually flayed him alive - but it sounds to me like he's come out of this just fine.
Early on in his administration, George w. Bush realigned America's tax system to shift the burden of feeding his insatiable government off the shoulders of the investor class, the rentiers, and more directly onto the shoulders of the working people, let's just call them wage earners. He largely freed capital gains, the money made by investors, from Washington's tax grab - which shifted that little obligation over to the silly wage earners.
Now, did the little guy's taxes go up to reflect that new tax burden? Of course not. Why not? Because it was all floated on borrowed, foreign money. You might have had all those wage earners marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the middle of the night with torches and pitchforks if you were open with them and handed them the rich folks' tax bill. Best to get the foreigners to loan you the cash and not trouble the little people with these petty details. Don't worry, you'll find some of that money when you start trimming their Social Security cheques.
Remember that video clip of George addressing a black tie dinner when he got that grin on his face and scanned the crowd and said he saw "the haves and the have-mores - my base." He wasn't joking. He meant it and he's shown that repeatedly over the past eight years.
The past eight years have seen a powerful class war waged in the United States by the big and powerful against the little and weak. So why haven't the little people risen up? Why haven't they used their voting power to elect a government that serves their needs, their interests - you know, that government of the people, by the people, for the people deal?
Why? Because they've been blinded to it. You don't know that your savings are gone until somebody opens the vault door. Keep that door shut by using money borrowed from foreigners and they won't know the difference. And, if somebody does try to warn them, a latter day Paul Revere sort of thing, well you simply jam the message. You get the powerfully corporatized media and the blatantly partisan Fox News and all those angry, open mouth radio guys like Limbaugh and Savage and their ilk to denounce the left, the looney left. Americans have been subjected to propaganda on a level not seen outside the Communist world since the 30's.
Why has there been no action on global warming? Because that would interfere with wealth. Why has there been no attempt to restore fiscal sanity to government? That would interfere with wealth. Why are they blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia and rendering the valleys toxic waste dumps? I suppose that too would be about wealth.
Where is the public debate on these issues? You won't hear it from the Republicans, they know better, but why aren't the Dems using this obviously powerful stuff? One reason is that they're not far enough removed from this chicanery themselves. They've supported a lot of this stuff. Another reason is that anyone who talks about this is branded a "liberal" and, to many Americans, liberal = elitist = socialist = revolutionary = traitor. They get fed that nonsense every day.
To me, America resembles one giant, cheque-kiting scheme. I became familiar with those back when I did fraud work. They often start off quite small and then they build to a higher level, almost a plateau for a while, and then they tend to go full bore usually just before the police show up or the bad guy heads for the airport with the cops hot on his trail.
The American government and especially the Pentagon quietly let on that they see China as America's emerging strategic threat. They're not keeping it secret, they just don't go on about it. Now China, by all appearances, is set to become the world's next economic giant, outstripping the US.
The Bush Doctrine, the policy that Sarah Palin had never heard of, holds that America reserves the right to use its military muscle to subdue any nation or group of nations that rises to become as economically or militarily powerful as America. In other words, growing bigger than America will be taken as an act of war, a casus belli as it were. That would seem to put China on its way into America's crosshairs.
Okay, let's work this through. You've identified C as your looming strategic threat. You ship your industrial base to C and use your wealth to grow C's economy. Meanwhile you can't resist a pipeline of cheap money loaned back to you by C, putting your country in hock to your strategic rival. Then you financialize your economy which leaves you extremely vulnerable to creditors - especially foreign countries just like C - while you drive your country with its financialized economy steadily deeper into deficits, debt and unfunded obligations which is sort of like giving a box of Havana cigars to a lung cancer patient.
What gives? Here's a way to make sense of this. Years ago a psychiatrist explained to me that even when people do self-destructive things, they do it because they get something out of it. In other words, this may seem like madness but you have to realize that someone, some influential group, is getting something out of this no matter that, overall, it all seems harmful to the United States of America.
At least you can't say this is boring.
Ain't life grand.
Of course, as pointed out in a McClatchey Newspapers item recently, the American way is to privatize gains and socialize only the losses. That way the rich folk actually do get their cake and get to eat it too no matter how badly they've screwed up. And that's what makes America the greatest land of all.
I saw a pity piece in one of the American papers lamenting the downfall and suffering of the former head of Lehman Brothers. The article showed that this guy had lost too - big time. Why he used to get paid $34-million a year (that's just shy of $3-million a month) and now he's out of work. His holdings in Lehman were valued at $1-billion last month and now they're a million, tops. Of course nobody wants to point out that this guy raked in hundreds of millions of tax sheltered bucks while he was asleep at the wheel, driving his company's investors straight off a cliff. I might feel sorry for the guy - if an angry mob had actually flayed him alive - but it sounds to me like he's come out of this just fine.
Early on in his administration, George w. Bush realigned America's tax system to shift the burden of feeding his insatiable government off the shoulders of the investor class, the rentiers, and more directly onto the shoulders of the working people, let's just call them wage earners. He largely freed capital gains, the money made by investors, from Washington's tax grab - which shifted that little obligation over to the silly wage earners.
Now, did the little guy's taxes go up to reflect that new tax burden? Of course not. Why not? Because it was all floated on borrowed, foreign money. You might have had all those wage earners marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in the middle of the night with torches and pitchforks if you were open with them and handed them the rich folks' tax bill. Best to get the foreigners to loan you the cash and not trouble the little people with these petty details. Don't worry, you'll find some of that money when you start trimming their Social Security cheques.
Remember that video clip of George addressing a black tie dinner when he got that grin on his face and scanned the crowd and said he saw "the haves and the have-mores - my base." He wasn't joking. He meant it and he's shown that repeatedly over the past eight years.
The past eight years have seen a powerful class war waged in the United States by the big and powerful against the little and weak. So why haven't the little people risen up? Why haven't they used their voting power to elect a government that serves their needs, their interests - you know, that government of the people, by the people, for the people deal?
Why? Because they've been blinded to it. You don't know that your savings are gone until somebody opens the vault door. Keep that door shut by using money borrowed from foreigners and they won't know the difference. And, if somebody does try to warn them, a latter day Paul Revere sort of thing, well you simply jam the message. You get the powerfully corporatized media and the blatantly partisan Fox News and all those angry, open mouth radio guys like Limbaugh and Savage and their ilk to denounce the left, the looney left. Americans have been subjected to propaganda on a level not seen outside the Communist world since the 30's.
Why has there been no action on global warming? Because that would interfere with wealth. Why has there been no attempt to restore fiscal sanity to government? That would interfere with wealth. Why are they blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia and rendering the valleys toxic waste dumps? I suppose that too would be about wealth.
Where is the public debate on these issues? You won't hear it from the Republicans, they know better, but why aren't the Dems using this obviously powerful stuff? One reason is that they're not far enough removed from this chicanery themselves. They've supported a lot of this stuff. Another reason is that anyone who talks about this is branded a "liberal" and, to many Americans, liberal = elitist = socialist = revolutionary = traitor. They get fed that nonsense every day.
To me, America resembles one giant, cheque-kiting scheme. I became familiar with those back when I did fraud work. They often start off quite small and then they build to a higher level, almost a plateau for a while, and then they tend to go full bore usually just before the police show up or the bad guy heads for the airport with the cops hot on his trail.
The American government and especially the Pentagon quietly let on that they see China as America's emerging strategic threat. They're not keeping it secret, they just don't go on about it. Now China, by all appearances, is set to become the world's next economic giant, outstripping the US.
The Bush Doctrine, the policy that Sarah Palin had never heard of, holds that America reserves the right to use its military muscle to subdue any nation or group of nations that rises to become as economically or militarily powerful as America. In other words, growing bigger than America will be taken as an act of war, a casus belli as it were. That would seem to put China on its way into America's crosshairs.
Okay, let's work this through. You've identified C as your looming strategic threat. You ship your industrial base to C and use your wealth to grow C's economy. Meanwhile you can't resist a pipeline of cheap money loaned back to you by C, putting your country in hock to your strategic rival. Then you financialize your economy which leaves you extremely vulnerable to creditors - especially foreign countries just like C - while you drive your country with its financialized economy steadily deeper into deficits, debt and unfunded obligations which is sort of like giving a box of Havana cigars to a lung cancer patient.
What gives? Here's a way to make sense of this. Years ago a psychiatrist explained to me that even when people do self-destructive things, they do it because they get something out of it. In other words, this may seem like madness but you have to realize that someone, some influential group, is getting something out of this no matter that, overall, it all seems harmful to the United States of America.
At least you can't say this is boring.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Sarah Palin Doesn't Know What She Doesn't Know - And She Could Care Less
It's becoming increasingly plain that John McCain's chosen running mate, Alaskan governor Sarah Palin is grossly unprepared to serve as America's vice president.
The Washington Post published this interesting assessment of Palin by Chuck McLean of the Denver Research Group that produces the Global Power Barometer:
"The selection of another incurious, ill-schooled politician with no foreign policy judgment and a simplistic "the military can solve everything" view of foreign policy will continue the dramatic slide of the U.S.'s global influence. It will also dig us much deeper into a foreign policy hole that has already brought us to an international situation more dangerous than the darkest days of the Cold War.
As we've watched world reaction to the Bush administration over the years, the people and leaders of the world are not as much interested in "experience" per se as they are two critical human traits: 1) curiosity about the world, and, 2) a knowledge of the history and cultures of their nations. Governor Palin has neither and that's downright dangerous.
The Governor, who obtained her first passport less than two years ago, has traveled outside the U.S. only once, to visit Alaska National Guardsmen stationed in Germany and Kuwait. She claimed a visit to Ireland, but the Irish quickly pointed out that a refueling stop in which you don't leave the airport is not a "visit." In fact, she has never even visited Alaska's important next-door neighbor, Canada.
Consistent with a complete lack of curiosity about the world around her, Governor Palin has never had any formal education in history (of the U.S. or the world,) let alone any experience with global culture or politics that might serve as a substitute for formal education.
In the current crisis with Russia, an understanding of Russian culture, history and 20th-century experience (and, of course, the right judgment to apply the lessons of that history) would have avoided creating the situation in which Russia had little choice but to draw the line at South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The U.S. has a history as long as a blink of an eye in comparison to much of the rest of the world, so it may be understandable that we have little interest in world history. U.S. citizens are some of the least traveled among developed countries, so that may explain our lack of knowledge of other cultures. But in order just to protect ourselves and avoid mistakes that strengthen our enemies and weaken the U.S., we need leaders who are curious about the world, its history and its cultures. The nomination of Sarah Palin sends exactly the wrong message to the world and guarantees four more years of foreign policy and military mistakes in a world far more dangerous than it was eight years ago."
The Washington Post published this interesting assessment of Palin by Chuck McLean of the Denver Research Group that produces the Global Power Barometer:
"The selection of another incurious, ill-schooled politician with no foreign policy judgment and a simplistic "the military can solve everything" view of foreign policy will continue the dramatic slide of the U.S.'s global influence. It will also dig us much deeper into a foreign policy hole that has already brought us to an international situation more dangerous than the darkest days of the Cold War.
As we've watched world reaction to the Bush administration over the years, the people and leaders of the world are not as much interested in "experience" per se as they are two critical human traits: 1) curiosity about the world, and, 2) a knowledge of the history and cultures of their nations. Governor Palin has neither and that's downright dangerous.
The Governor, who obtained her first passport less than two years ago, has traveled outside the U.S. only once, to visit Alaska National Guardsmen stationed in Germany and Kuwait. She claimed a visit to Ireland, but the Irish quickly pointed out that a refueling stop in which you don't leave the airport is not a "visit." In fact, she has never even visited Alaska's important next-door neighbor, Canada.
Consistent with a complete lack of curiosity about the world around her, Governor Palin has never had any formal education in history (of the U.S. or the world,) let alone any experience with global culture or politics that might serve as a substitute for formal education.
In the current crisis with Russia, an understanding of Russian culture, history and 20th-century experience (and, of course, the right judgment to apply the lessons of that history) would have avoided creating the situation in which Russia had little choice but to draw the line at South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The U.S. has a history as long as a blink of an eye in comparison to much of the rest of the world, so it may be understandable that we have little interest in world history. U.S. citizens are some of the least traveled among developed countries, so that may explain our lack of knowledge of other cultures. But in order just to protect ourselves and avoid mistakes that strengthen our enemies and weaken the U.S., we need leaders who are curious about the world, its history and its cultures. The nomination of Sarah Palin sends exactly the wrong message to the world and guarantees four more years of foreign policy and military mistakes in a world far more dangerous than it was eight years ago."
Just Leave NATO Alone
One of Britain's top think tanks wants a halt to NATO expansion.
The International Institute of Strategic Studies warns it would be a "strategic error" to admit Georgia and the Ukraine into the Alliance. From The Indepdendent:
"The policy of Nato enlargement now, we believe, would be a strategic error," the head of the IISS , John Chipman, told journalists yesterday. Speaking at the launch of the organisation's annual review of world affairs, he criticised the 26-nation military alliance for viewing enlargement as an "institutional priority" - "as if riding a bicycle eastwards is necessary to keep the bicycle upwards."
The IISS noted that the West was divided on Nato integration and argued that "Europeans have a strong case to argue that it is in Nato's strategic interest to pause its enlargement policy." It accused the "irresponsible" Georgian government of having "weakened its case" for membership by ordering the 7 August assault on the South Ossetia capital which led to the "vindictive" Russian military retaliation. "It openly defied its main strategic patron, the US, by seeking to recover its lost territories" before calling on the West "to sort out the mess it created."
The Socialist People's Republic of America?
A couple of insights on the Wall Street meltdown from McClatchey Newspapers:
"Once upon a time, the average American had to make a choice to invest on Wall Street. Now, all the average taxpayer has to do is wait around for the government to take over the latest ailing financial behemoth.
Last week, the feds placed wobbling mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship — effectively nationalizing the housing finance business.
..We are entering a new and unsettling phase in the relationship between government and business, one that neither sector particularly wants but cannot avoid. One result is that the line between public and private interests increasingly is being blurred so much as to become unrecognizable.
Nowhere is that more obvious that at Fannie and Freddie, two massive enterprises that combined their government-sponsored creation and backing with publicly traded stock. Fannie and Freddie were perfect fodder for the sort of mischief that privatizes gains while socializing losses."
"Once upon a time, the average American had to make a choice to invest on Wall Street. Now, all the average taxpayer has to do is wait around for the government to take over the latest ailing financial behemoth.
Last week, the feds placed wobbling mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship — effectively nationalizing the housing finance business.
..We are entering a new and unsettling phase in the relationship between government and business, one that neither sector particularly wants but cannot avoid. One result is that the line between public and private interests increasingly is being blurred so much as to become unrecognizable.
Nowhere is that more obvious that at Fannie and Freddie, two massive enterprises that combined their government-sponsored creation and backing with publicly traded stock. Fannie and Freddie were perfect fodder for the sort of mischief that privatizes gains while socializing losses."
A Basket of Broken Eggs
America's biggest, and hence most important, economic sector isn't manufacturing or agriculture or resources, it's America's financial sector.
For better than 20-years the financial sector - stocks, bonds, insurance, banking - has been the real economic engine of the United States.
The America of my youth was a manufacturing powerhouse. The rest of the industrialized world had largely been bombed out in WWII but America (Canada too) had come through that with its industrial base intact, even thoroughly modernized as a result of the conflict.
I don't have the study at hand but, if memory serves, the US came out of WWII with something in the order of 70% plus of the world's entire manufacturing capacity. Detroit ruled unchallenged in the global automotive market. Airplanes? They were made all over the United States in plants from Wichita to Seattle, plants that had just a couple of years earlier been churning out warplanes en masse.
The whole thing made us really, really prosperous. Single income families with stay at home moms were relatively common. It was the birthing of Suburbia. The car companies changed the style of their cars every year because there were always buyers lined up to get the latest and greatest. No gasoline shortage, no shortages of any kind for that matter. Clean air, clean water (although we were unwittingly busy putting an end to that). No hole in the ozone layer. All this bounty and just a third of the population the earth wallows under today.
But all things must pass. It took a couple of decades but the rest of the industrialized world bounced back and global competition took on a whole new dimension. For a while we had a buffer in an enormous military-industrial sector but, in the long run, that really wasn't enough.
Like other societies before us we finally began looking for new opportunities. Manufacturing was virtually disparaged. Our future would rest not in making things but in providing services, in the financialization of our economies. Globalize production, outsource it. We would make our wealth in the trade in those outsourced products and commodities, we would move paper and manipulate data.
Remember the Dot.Com bubble? Can you recall how the believers preached the "new economy" which was to bring us all great blessings in the future? Anyone who clung to fundamentals was a dinosaur, lacking the grand vision to prosperity. Vision, yes indeed. The sort of vision that allowed one to see the Emperor's clothes were none existed.
When you produce cars it's very hard to delude yourself about what and how well you're doing. You have a huge lot where you can see what you've made and you can monitor the trucks and trains carrying your vehicles to waiting buyers. If the lot is full but the trucks and trains aren't moving, it's not hard to see you're in trouble. You can't delude yourself on that score (although Detroit has tried awfully hard to prove me wrong).
When it comes to paper and data, however, you're the kid in the toystore of delusion. Anything becomes plausible even if not remotely possible. Wealth and prosperity become mere states of mind. You're happy, you're rich.
Let's return to the Dot.Com bubble. Here, apparent wealth came to be as valid as actual wealth. Millionaires, even billionaires were created out of thin air. When that bubble burst there was wailing and moaning about massive wealth that had been suddenly wiped out. But, in the main, it was wealth that never existed except in people's minds, wealth that was nothing more than an entry in a ledger.
Wealth that never existed and yet people would sell you things on the strength of it. Banks would lend you money on it. Little people invested their life savings in it. Bill Clinton actually balanced his government's budget on tax revenues flowing out of this grand illusion.
You woulda thunk we'd have learned our lesson from the Dot.Com bubble but no, not really. It was barely over when our American cousins seized onto the bizarre notion that their houses were acutally machines that would generate bags of cash forever and ever amen.
Housing prices skyrocketed. There was going to be no end to it. Just a year or two back, two out of three new mortgages written in California were "interest only." There was no intention of paying down that debt, only to service it for a year or two while that house skyrocketed in value at the end of which you would sell it and grab your windfall.
There was no end to the games that were being played. Mortgages became commodities. Brokers lured borrowers into taking their mortgages with low, introductory rates. A year or two later that mortgage interest zoomed up. It was on the expecation of the return from that deferred, higher rate that these mortgages were bundled and flogged to major lenders. Meanwhile the home buyer had no intention of hanging around to pay that adjusted rate. The house, after all, would just keep soaring in value. Toward the end of the cheap interest period the homeowner would "re-fi" - get a new mortgage, again with a cheap introductory teaser rate, and so the game would go on and on and on.
Before long the mortgage brokers ran out of qualified borrowers, people who could actually make mortgage payments. That left them facing a dire shortage of paper to flog as derivatives - the place they now made their money. So they went to option B - the unqualified buyers, the subprime.
Everybody got into this game. Homeowners, those who arranged their mortgages, those who bundled and sold those mortgages, those who bought and traded in these bundled assets, those who insured the risks of those who bought and traded in these derivatives. It went right to the top - Wall Street.
This scam - and it really was a scam at all levels - bought America a decade of prosperity. It was tailor-made for a financialized economy but, as we're seeing today, it also played into the often unrecognized weaknesses and vulnerabilities of that financialized economy.
A decade of prosperity. Prosperity? How can a country have prosperity when it's saddled with massive debts and deficits? How can a country be prosperous when it's enduring murderous balance of trade shortfalls? How can a country and its people enjoy prosperity atop a mountain of unfunded obligations propped up by foreign borrowings? How can any nation, any people hope to remain prosperous when they're living wildly beyond their means?
What did Warren Buffet understand that Alan Greenspan couldn't grasp? Let's just call that "reality" for the purpose of this discussion. You see, it's bad enough having a financialized economy but it's downright lethal when that financialized economy isn't tightly bound to reality. You gotta tie it down. You have to sit on it. There's no letting up. It will constantly try to slip away into La La Land and, when it gets there, it causes boundless havoc.
America has become unbalanced, perhaps terminally so. In Canada we've been a bit more prudent. We've funded our social insurance plan. We've wrestled our government out of the red (we Liberals did that). We're not terribly reckless with debt. We have regular balance of trade surpluses and, best of all, we have a strong, resource-sector. Maybe we just never grew prosperous enough to do the same things our American cousins have done or maybe we are more comfortable with reality.
Can America get back to basics, restore its neglected economic sectors and reclaim its promise? It's possible but it would require a radical rethinking of just what America is and what it needs to become. I just don't see many encouraging signs that Americans are willing to give up their delusional thinking and, if they don't, their country's economic Mardi Gras isn't over.
But if Americans aren't yet ready to put their house in order, there's no excuse for us falling into their troubles. This is no time to be toying with continental integration. We need to keep our distance for the time being, wait to see if the fever passes.
Canada needs a healthy, vibrant America. We need an America grounded in reality. There are no guarantees that will come to pass anytime soon. In the meantime, let's keep our eggs dispersed in our own baskets.
For better than 20-years the financial sector - stocks, bonds, insurance, banking - has been the real economic engine of the United States.
The America of my youth was a manufacturing powerhouse. The rest of the industrialized world had largely been bombed out in WWII but America (Canada too) had come through that with its industrial base intact, even thoroughly modernized as a result of the conflict.
I don't have the study at hand but, if memory serves, the US came out of WWII with something in the order of 70% plus of the world's entire manufacturing capacity. Detroit ruled unchallenged in the global automotive market. Airplanes? They were made all over the United States in plants from Wichita to Seattle, plants that had just a couple of years earlier been churning out warplanes en masse.
The whole thing made us really, really prosperous. Single income families with stay at home moms were relatively common. It was the birthing of Suburbia. The car companies changed the style of their cars every year because there were always buyers lined up to get the latest and greatest. No gasoline shortage, no shortages of any kind for that matter. Clean air, clean water (although we were unwittingly busy putting an end to that). No hole in the ozone layer. All this bounty and just a third of the population the earth wallows under today.
But all things must pass. It took a couple of decades but the rest of the industrialized world bounced back and global competition took on a whole new dimension. For a while we had a buffer in an enormous military-industrial sector but, in the long run, that really wasn't enough.
Like other societies before us we finally began looking for new opportunities. Manufacturing was virtually disparaged. Our future would rest not in making things but in providing services, in the financialization of our economies. Globalize production, outsource it. We would make our wealth in the trade in those outsourced products and commodities, we would move paper and manipulate data.
Remember the Dot.Com bubble? Can you recall how the believers preached the "new economy" which was to bring us all great blessings in the future? Anyone who clung to fundamentals was a dinosaur, lacking the grand vision to prosperity. Vision, yes indeed. The sort of vision that allowed one to see the Emperor's clothes were none existed.
When you produce cars it's very hard to delude yourself about what and how well you're doing. You have a huge lot where you can see what you've made and you can monitor the trucks and trains carrying your vehicles to waiting buyers. If the lot is full but the trucks and trains aren't moving, it's not hard to see you're in trouble. You can't delude yourself on that score (although Detroit has tried awfully hard to prove me wrong).
When it comes to paper and data, however, you're the kid in the toystore of delusion. Anything becomes plausible even if not remotely possible. Wealth and prosperity become mere states of mind. You're happy, you're rich.
Let's return to the Dot.Com bubble. Here, apparent wealth came to be as valid as actual wealth. Millionaires, even billionaires were created out of thin air. When that bubble burst there was wailing and moaning about massive wealth that had been suddenly wiped out. But, in the main, it was wealth that never existed except in people's minds, wealth that was nothing more than an entry in a ledger.
Wealth that never existed and yet people would sell you things on the strength of it. Banks would lend you money on it. Little people invested their life savings in it. Bill Clinton actually balanced his government's budget on tax revenues flowing out of this grand illusion.
You woulda thunk we'd have learned our lesson from the Dot.Com bubble but no, not really. It was barely over when our American cousins seized onto the bizarre notion that their houses were acutally machines that would generate bags of cash forever and ever amen.
Housing prices skyrocketed. There was going to be no end to it. Just a year or two back, two out of three new mortgages written in California were "interest only." There was no intention of paying down that debt, only to service it for a year or two while that house skyrocketed in value at the end of which you would sell it and grab your windfall.
There was no end to the games that were being played. Mortgages became commodities. Brokers lured borrowers into taking their mortgages with low, introductory rates. A year or two later that mortgage interest zoomed up. It was on the expecation of the return from that deferred, higher rate that these mortgages were bundled and flogged to major lenders. Meanwhile the home buyer had no intention of hanging around to pay that adjusted rate. The house, after all, would just keep soaring in value. Toward the end of the cheap interest period the homeowner would "re-fi" - get a new mortgage, again with a cheap introductory teaser rate, and so the game would go on and on and on.
Before long the mortgage brokers ran out of qualified borrowers, people who could actually make mortgage payments. That left them facing a dire shortage of paper to flog as derivatives - the place they now made their money. So they went to option B - the unqualified buyers, the subprime.
Everybody got into this game. Homeowners, those who arranged their mortgages, those who bundled and sold those mortgages, those who bought and traded in these bundled assets, those who insured the risks of those who bought and traded in these derivatives. It went right to the top - Wall Street.
This scam - and it really was a scam at all levels - bought America a decade of prosperity. It was tailor-made for a financialized economy but, as we're seeing today, it also played into the often unrecognized weaknesses and vulnerabilities of that financialized economy.
A decade of prosperity. Prosperity? How can a country have prosperity when it's saddled with massive debts and deficits? How can a country be prosperous when it's enduring murderous balance of trade shortfalls? How can a country and its people enjoy prosperity atop a mountain of unfunded obligations propped up by foreign borrowings? How can any nation, any people hope to remain prosperous when they're living wildly beyond their means?
What did Warren Buffet understand that Alan Greenspan couldn't grasp? Let's just call that "reality" for the purpose of this discussion. You see, it's bad enough having a financialized economy but it's downright lethal when that financialized economy isn't tightly bound to reality. You gotta tie it down. You have to sit on it. There's no letting up. It will constantly try to slip away into La La Land and, when it gets there, it causes boundless havoc.
America has become unbalanced, perhaps terminally so. In Canada we've been a bit more prudent. We've funded our social insurance plan. We've wrestled our government out of the red (we Liberals did that). We're not terribly reckless with debt. We have regular balance of trade surpluses and, best of all, we have a strong, resource-sector. Maybe we just never grew prosperous enough to do the same things our American cousins have done or maybe we are more comfortable with reality.
Can America get back to basics, restore its neglected economic sectors and reclaim its promise? It's possible but it would require a radical rethinking of just what America is and what it needs to become. I just don't see many encouraging signs that Americans are willing to give up their delusional thinking and, if they don't, their country's economic Mardi Gras isn't over.
But if Americans aren't yet ready to put their house in order, there's no excuse for us falling into their troubles. This is no time to be toying with continental integration. We need to keep our distance for the time being, wait to see if the fever passes.
Canada needs a healthy, vibrant America. We need an America grounded in reality. There are no guarantees that will come to pass anytime soon. In the meantime, let's keep our eggs dispersed in our own baskets.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Don't Buy That New Atlas Just Yet
The way things are going today's Atlas might be out of date before you know it, at least from the Middle East to the Caucasus.
Georgia seems about to look a lot lighter with the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as "independent" republics under Russian protection.
Oh yeah, then there's the Crimea. Maybe you haven't read about this one but there's a move afoot by the Russian-leaning Crimean peninsula to say "no" to a Ukraine enlisted in NATO. That would, of course, leave Sevastapol, whose port is under lease to the Russian navy until 2017,under Russian control and eliminate any ideas of a viable Western presence in the Black Sea.
But wait, there's more.
Afghanistan, as we know from our Furious Leader's recent tacit admission of failure, remains very much in play. It's not just the Taliban any more. Other tribes are beginning to turn on Kabul as well. We've long since gone from "liberator" to "occupier" in the minds of the locals and, as Petraeus himself noted in his counterinsurgency field manual, once you lose your moral legitimacy in a guerrilla war, you've lost the war. Shit, oh dear!
It wasn't supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be a strong American military presence in Iraq and a strong American military presence in Afghanistan with Iran caught right in the middle. Like all half-assed plans, this one doesn't seem to have worked out as hoped.
You see there's Pakistan messing up the gears. Ah Pakistan, a classic example of a Western attempt to hobble together disparate tribes into a modern country. Ouch! Think I'm kidding? Look up the history behind the country's name.
Pakistan is somewhat less than the Western ideal of a stable, nuclear power. But we cannot sort out Afghanistan until we overcome the refusal of the Pakistanis to do our bidding in the untamed tribal homelands. Here's where we begin to run out of options.
One of these is to try to pursue al Qaeda and the Taliban into the agencies, particularly Waziristan, as US special forces have done a couple of times recently. It sounds like a plan except it infuriates the Pakistani people and turns them against us. That's why their military has issued orders to fire upon Western forces who show up inside Pakistan.
Maybe we should just wipe out the Pakistan military. Trouble is it's too large and far too well trained to be taken lightly. It's not at all a pushover outfit like Saddam's army was in 2003. And then there's that business about Pakistan's nukes. Add to that the inconvenient fact that America's ground forces have been all but trashed by the protracted nonsense in Iraq and you've got a problem, but that's just the start.
Pakistan, if pushed too hard, could jump into the other camp. I'm talking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO, the ascendant East's equivalent of NATO for the 21st Century. Guess who else is trying to get under the SCO's skirts? You're right - Iran. Best get that map out again.
Think of these numbers. Kabul to Islamabad - 374 km. Kabul to Tehran - 1614 km. Kabul to Moscow - 2,095 km. Kabul to Beijing - 4,183 km. Kabul to Washington - 11, 134 km. Get the picture?
Paskistan already has observer status at the SCO. So does Iran. That's sort of like the touchy-feely deal Washington is forcing NATO into with Georgia and Ukraine. Is this beginning to sound blurry? It is.
Back to the map. Take a look at Afghanistan. Now imagine it isolated, surrounded on all sides by decidedly anti-Western Iran, Kazakhstan and Pakistan under the protection of Russia and China. Do you begin to see the picture? Hell, all China would have to do is to announce it would refuse to buy any more American debt. It doesn't have to raise a gun barrel to inflict crippling damage on the West. We can hardly grouse about it, we put that little weapon in their hands.
For more than two centuries Asians and South Asians have borne the yoke of Western domination. If you were in that situation, how would you feel about that?
Sorry, folks, but I think we may must have screwed the pooch this time. The Atlas, the one we created, may be about the change.
Georgia seems about to look a lot lighter with the loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as "independent" republics under Russian protection.
Oh yeah, then there's the Crimea. Maybe you haven't read about this one but there's a move afoot by the Russian-leaning Crimean peninsula to say "no" to a Ukraine enlisted in NATO. That would, of course, leave Sevastapol, whose port is under lease to the Russian navy until 2017,under Russian control and eliminate any ideas of a viable Western presence in the Black Sea.
But wait, there's more.
Afghanistan, as we know from our Furious Leader's recent tacit admission of failure, remains very much in play. It's not just the Taliban any more. Other tribes are beginning to turn on Kabul as well. We've long since gone from "liberator" to "occupier" in the minds of the locals and, as Petraeus himself noted in his counterinsurgency field manual, once you lose your moral legitimacy in a guerrilla war, you've lost the war. Shit, oh dear!
It wasn't supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be a strong American military presence in Iraq and a strong American military presence in Afghanistan with Iran caught right in the middle. Like all half-assed plans, this one doesn't seem to have worked out as hoped.
You see there's Pakistan messing up the gears. Ah Pakistan, a classic example of a Western attempt to hobble together disparate tribes into a modern country. Ouch! Think I'm kidding? Look up the history behind the country's name.
Pakistan is somewhat less than the Western ideal of a stable, nuclear power. But we cannot sort out Afghanistan until we overcome the refusal of the Pakistanis to do our bidding in the untamed tribal homelands. Here's where we begin to run out of options.
One of these is to try to pursue al Qaeda and the Taliban into the agencies, particularly Waziristan, as US special forces have done a couple of times recently. It sounds like a plan except it infuriates the Pakistani people and turns them against us. That's why their military has issued orders to fire upon Western forces who show up inside Pakistan.
Maybe we should just wipe out the Pakistan military. Trouble is it's too large and far too well trained to be taken lightly. It's not at all a pushover outfit like Saddam's army was in 2003. And then there's that business about Pakistan's nukes. Add to that the inconvenient fact that America's ground forces have been all but trashed by the protracted nonsense in Iraq and you've got a problem, but that's just the start.
Pakistan, if pushed too hard, could jump into the other camp. I'm talking about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO, the ascendant East's equivalent of NATO for the 21st Century. Guess who else is trying to get under the SCO's skirts? You're right - Iran. Best get that map out again.
Think of these numbers. Kabul to Islamabad - 374 km. Kabul to Tehran - 1614 km. Kabul to Moscow - 2,095 km. Kabul to Beijing - 4,183 km. Kabul to Washington - 11, 134 km. Get the picture?
Paskistan already has observer status at the SCO. So does Iran. That's sort of like the touchy-feely deal Washington is forcing NATO into with Georgia and Ukraine. Is this beginning to sound blurry? It is.
Back to the map. Take a look at Afghanistan. Now imagine it isolated, surrounded on all sides by decidedly anti-Western Iran, Kazakhstan and Pakistan under the protection of Russia and China. Do you begin to see the picture? Hell, all China would have to do is to announce it would refuse to buy any more American debt. It doesn't have to raise a gun barrel to inflict crippling damage on the West. We can hardly grouse about it, we put that little weapon in their hands.
For more than two centuries Asians and South Asians have borne the yoke of Western domination. If you were in that situation, how would you feel about that?
Sorry, folks, but I think we may must have screwed the pooch this time. The Atlas, the one we created, may be about the change.
Saboteurs, They're Everywhere
Now, let me get this right. Steve wants Canadians to give him a majority so that the opposition parties don't sabotage his government's ability to deal with the coming economic crisis.
Sabotage? This, of course, coming from the guy who ensured that every member of his caucus had a manual on how to subvert parliament, especially parliamentary committees. A manual. A how-to-sabotage-government handbook. And this arrogant clown, without offering the slightest evidence, claims the opposition parties would do what only his party has done to date. What a sphincter!
So, no evidence of sabotage plans beyond Steve's word and he's shown us all we need to know about what his word is worth. He's not quite John McCain yet but he could get there.
But, better yet, why doesn't Steve tell us what his government plans to do about this looming economic crisis? He's had the reins of power these past two years, he's got all the experts working for him. He ought to be coming to the voters with a concrete plan. So where is it?
Nowhere to be seen, that's where it is. If a plan exists, he's not going to share it with the electorate. But, if he wins, he'll puff himself up and claim he's got a mandate to effect measures he wouldn't disclose to the voters during the campaign.
A sphincter, the guy's a sphincter.
OMG - The Old Fart IS Delusional
John McCain gets goofier by the day. He'll say anything that suits him at the moment and, to be charitable, he probably can't tell fact from fiction any longer. The guy who would be POTUS has completely lost touch with reality. Here he is discussing why Palin is capable to handle national security issues:
Palin knows more about energy than anybody else in America?
Last week, Sarah Palin told Charlie Gibson of ABC News that her state, Alaska, produced "nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." She only overstated that about six fold. Alaska actually produces 3.5% of America's domestic supply of energy, ranking ninth behind Pennsylvania.
This begs the question of the veep would-be's educational background. After all, she has precious little real experience and is astonishingly ignorant of her own government's policies. Well, relax, she has a degree. From WikiAnswers:
She received her bachelor's degree in journalism and attended five schools before graduating: University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, University of Idaho, Matanuska-Susitna College, and University of Idaho again.
Five schools to get a lousy journalism degree? My, that's certainly impressive. Of course look at the current veep - he scored five draft deferments to keep his ass safely out of harm's way in Vietnam. Is five their lucky number?
Palin knows more about energy than anybody else in America?
Last week, Sarah Palin told Charlie Gibson of ABC News that her state, Alaska, produced "nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy." She only overstated that about six fold. Alaska actually produces 3.5% of America's domestic supply of energy, ranking ninth behind Pennsylvania.
This begs the question of the veep would-be's educational background. After all, she has precious little real experience and is astonishingly ignorant of her own government's policies. Well, relax, she has a degree. From WikiAnswers:
She received her bachelor's degree in journalism and attended five schools before graduating: University of Hawaii at Hilo, Hawaii Pacific University, North Idaho College, University of Idaho, Matanuska-Susitna College, and University of Idaho again.
Five schools to get a lousy journalism degree? My, that's certainly impressive. Of course look at the current veep - he scored five draft deferments to keep his ass safely out of harm's way in Vietnam. Is five their lucky number?
NOW Backs Obama-Biden
The most influential women's organization in America, the 500,000-member National Organization for Women, has come out in support of Barack Obama and Joe Biden over McCain-Palin. From The Independent:
"The addition of Sarah Palin gave us a new sense of urgency," Kim Gandy, the head of NOW, told National Public Radio. "She is being portrayed as a supporter of women's rights... as a feminist when in fact her positions on so many of the issues are really anathema to ours.
"A lot of women think it's a great thing for a woman to be running for vice-president," she continued, "but they are completely dismayed when they find out her positions. The idea that she opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest – those kinds of positions are completely out of step with American women and once they find out about those positions, they get a little less excited."
In Alaska at the weekend, a Welcome Home rally for Mrs Palin was dwarfed by a demonstration organised by Alaska Women Reject Palin, which was held on the lawn of a downtown Anchorage library.
...Wasilla resident, Phil Munger, a music composer and teacher, says she pushed an evangelical agenda in the town. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the [school] board. I bumped into her after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God [a church]. I said, 'Sarah, how can you believe in creationism – your father's a science teacher.' And she said, 'We don't have to agree on everything.' I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."
Mr Munger also asked Mrs Palin if she believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. "She looked in my eyes and said, 'Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime'."
No wonder Palin doesn't flinch at the idea of war with Russia. She's a complete, Rapture-lovin' nutjob.
"The addition of Sarah Palin gave us a new sense of urgency," Kim Gandy, the head of NOW, told National Public Radio. "She is being portrayed as a supporter of women's rights... as a feminist when in fact her positions on so many of the issues are really anathema to ours.
"A lot of women think it's a great thing for a woman to be running for vice-president," she continued, "but they are completely dismayed when they find out her positions. The idea that she opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest – those kinds of positions are completely out of step with American women and once they find out about those positions, they get a little less excited."
In Alaska at the weekend, a Welcome Home rally for Mrs Palin was dwarfed by a demonstration organised by Alaska Women Reject Palin, which was held on the lawn of a downtown Anchorage library.
...Wasilla resident, Phil Munger, a music composer and teacher, says she pushed an evangelical agenda in the town. "She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the [school] board. I bumped into her after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God [a church]. I said, 'Sarah, how can you believe in creationism – your father's a science teacher.' And she said, 'We don't have to agree on everything.' I pushed her on the earth's creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she'd seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them."
Mr Munger also asked Mrs Palin if she believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. "She looked in my eyes and said, 'Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime'."
No wonder Palin doesn't flinch at the idea of war with Russia. She's a complete, Rapture-lovin' nutjob.
How Long Can a Country Run On Stupid?
I read an article recently speculating that the American people were in the grip of some sort of mass insanity - actual lunacy. You have to wonder.
What lies behind madness like the Dot.Com bubble or the subprime mortgage fiasco or the Iraq war?
Now greed has played a significant role in America's succession of bubbles but even the greedy don't have to be stupid. Imagine a startup company with a dozen employees that had never turned a dime in profit selling for millions upon millions of dollars. Imagine investing your life savings in that sort of "new economy" industry. You would have to be stupid.
The Enron/WorldCom fiasco was somewhat different. That was fraud effected through dodgy accounting.
The Housing Bubble, however, that in turn spawned the subprime mortgage disaster and the derivative meltdown was perhaps the most powerful example of greed blended with stupidity - at all levels of American society.
Homeowners actually believed the value of their properties would soar indefinitely, transforming the family home into a real life goose that laid the golden egg. Want a holiday? Refinance. New trucks and a fancy car? Refinance. Money was all but free anyway and, in the US, mortgage interest is tax deductible.
Free money, free money, free money. Who thinks that way? A lot of people, apparently. Now, of course, greed played a big role in it but there had to be a huge amount of stupidity fueling it too.
The banks rolled the same dice only they played in derivatives - asset backed commercial paper - bundled chunks of a mess of mortgages. So mixed up, in fact, that they weren't sure just who owned what. When that paper began to turn bad they couldn't even tell who was in how much trouble. Stupid, stupid and stupid.
And then there was the government, the people paid to govern the country, to keep its people safe and protect their prosperity. What did they do? Nothing. They were afraid to upset the apple cart. They were riding high on a country whose people had the appearance of comfort and prosperity from an economy dominated by people selling their homes to each other.
You know, when you're the ground crew of a hot air balloon and the balloon gets swept away in a gust you don't want to be the last guy holding on to the ropes and, if you are, you want to make sure you too let go before it takes you too far off the ground. In America, everyone was hanging onto the rope, leaving the ground (reality) further and further behind. Go on the internet and you can find videos of what eventually happens to people that stupid.
But it's not just in the stock market and housing market that Americans have been running flat out on stupid. Cheap foreign money has allowed Americans to literally wallow in debt. From the federal government down to the lowly taxpayer they've been steadily stumbling deeper and deeper into debt.
Imagine running deficits and then deciding you can wage an enormously expensive foreign war on borrowed money and create massive tax cuts for the rich. The clue is war on borrowed money. If you have to borrow money to kill people on the other side of the planet that means you'll also have to borrow money to cover the revenues lost by those tax cuts. How astonishingly stupid is that?
Then, as the US Comptroller General pointed out in a speech last year, there's the federal government's unfunded liabilities, IOUs if you like, that add $440,000 in debt to the average American household. By now that could be half a million. How do they get away with it? Simple, they haven't sent the bills out yet. Out of sight, out of mind.
Would you get into a car with a driver who was so drunk he couldn't stand up? If you would, find something else to read. If you wouldn't, though, apply all of this stupidity to the issue of continental integration - the deal that Harper is pursuing very quietly with the Americans.
Would you want to buy your way into a junior partnership where the majority partner is on the verge of bankruptcy or beset by an uncontrollable gambling addiction or is just plain stupid? No, there are better deals to be had and now's a good time to start casting about.
We've become much too economically dependent on the United States and that's a real vulnerability. We need to look elsewhere, to revitalize our trading relationships with Europe, Asia and South America. We can't save our American cousins from themselves but we can sure get dragged down with them if we're not diligent about protecting our own interests.
Now, if you ever needed a reason not to vote for Steve Harper, there it is. You see, he's hoping to get us running on stupid too.
What lies behind madness like the Dot.Com bubble or the subprime mortgage fiasco or the Iraq war?
Now greed has played a significant role in America's succession of bubbles but even the greedy don't have to be stupid. Imagine a startup company with a dozen employees that had never turned a dime in profit selling for millions upon millions of dollars. Imagine investing your life savings in that sort of "new economy" industry. You would have to be stupid.
The Enron/WorldCom fiasco was somewhat different. That was fraud effected through dodgy accounting.
The Housing Bubble, however, that in turn spawned the subprime mortgage disaster and the derivative meltdown was perhaps the most powerful example of greed blended with stupidity - at all levels of American society.
Homeowners actually believed the value of their properties would soar indefinitely, transforming the family home into a real life goose that laid the golden egg. Want a holiday? Refinance. New trucks and a fancy car? Refinance. Money was all but free anyway and, in the US, mortgage interest is tax deductible.
Free money, free money, free money. Who thinks that way? A lot of people, apparently. Now, of course, greed played a big role in it but there had to be a huge amount of stupidity fueling it too.
The banks rolled the same dice only they played in derivatives - asset backed commercial paper - bundled chunks of a mess of mortgages. So mixed up, in fact, that they weren't sure just who owned what. When that paper began to turn bad they couldn't even tell who was in how much trouble. Stupid, stupid and stupid.
And then there was the government, the people paid to govern the country, to keep its people safe and protect their prosperity. What did they do? Nothing. They were afraid to upset the apple cart. They were riding high on a country whose people had the appearance of comfort and prosperity from an economy dominated by people selling their homes to each other.
You know, when you're the ground crew of a hot air balloon and the balloon gets swept away in a gust you don't want to be the last guy holding on to the ropes and, if you are, you want to make sure you too let go before it takes you too far off the ground. In America, everyone was hanging onto the rope, leaving the ground (reality) further and further behind. Go on the internet and you can find videos of what eventually happens to people that stupid.
But it's not just in the stock market and housing market that Americans have been running flat out on stupid. Cheap foreign money has allowed Americans to literally wallow in debt. From the federal government down to the lowly taxpayer they've been steadily stumbling deeper and deeper into debt.
Imagine running deficits and then deciding you can wage an enormously expensive foreign war on borrowed money and create massive tax cuts for the rich. The clue is war on borrowed money. If you have to borrow money to kill people on the other side of the planet that means you'll also have to borrow money to cover the revenues lost by those tax cuts. How astonishingly stupid is that?
Then, as the US Comptroller General pointed out in a speech last year, there's the federal government's unfunded liabilities, IOUs if you like, that add $440,000 in debt to the average American household. By now that could be half a million. How do they get away with it? Simple, they haven't sent the bills out yet. Out of sight, out of mind.
Would you get into a car with a driver who was so drunk he couldn't stand up? If you would, find something else to read. If you wouldn't, though, apply all of this stupidity to the issue of continental integration - the deal that Harper is pursuing very quietly with the Americans.
Would you want to buy your way into a junior partnership where the majority partner is on the verge of bankruptcy or beset by an uncontrollable gambling addiction or is just plain stupid? No, there are better deals to be had and now's a good time to start casting about.
We've become much too economically dependent on the United States and that's a real vulnerability. We need to look elsewhere, to revitalize our trading relationships with Europe, Asia and South America. We can't save our American cousins from themselves but we can sure get dragged down with them if we're not diligent about protecting our own interests.
Now, if you ever needed a reason not to vote for Steve Harper, there it is. You see, he's hoping to get us running on stupid too.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
The Not So Northern Welfare State
Corporate welfare is alive and well in the home of free enterprise, the Deluded States of America. The New York Times reports the feds are prepared to put in place an $85-billion bailout loan for ailing American International Group, AIG. In nationalizing AIG, the feds will acquire an 80% ownership position.
Gee, Russia got rid of state ownership with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now it's America that is getting into state ownership. Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG - the question on everyone's lips is "who's next?"
Bush, having largely exempted the rentier class from taxation, gets to place this burden on the remaining taxpayers - the working classes and their kids - who can just add it onto the already enormous tab they'll face for funding the Iraq war and borrowings to support tax cuts for the rich.
Washington Mutual is eyed as the next giant to tumble. That would leave America down to just two independent investment banks - Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Merrill Lynch was bought out and Lehman Brothers collapsed into bankruptcy on the weekend. Does anyone still remember Bear Stearns?
This devastation has to end somewhere but no one can tell where that is or when the US will get there. Worse yet, no one is taking bets on what will be left when they get there.
Fortunately the White House and then Republican-dominated Congress saw fit to put the thumbscrews to unfortunate individuals who fell into bankruptcy. It simply wouldn't do to let the wee folk get away with the same thing Wall Street is trying to pull on such an enormously grander scale.
Welcome to the Afghan-Pakistan War
Wow, and we're right there to see it too, the Afghanistan-Pakistan War featuring cameo appearances by US Special Forces and maybe, before it's over, NATO too.
Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, talks about the terrorist bombing campaigns being waged against both Afghanistan and India by Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency.
Now Islamabad has announced that Pakistan's military has ordered its forces to open fire if US forces launch another air or ground raid across the Afghanistan border. From the Associated Press:
...army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press that after U.S. helicopters ferried troops into a militant stronghold in the South Waziristan tribal region, the military told field commanders to prevent any similar raids.
"The orders are clear," Abbas said in an interview. "In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire."
Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, talks about the terrorist bombing campaigns being waged against both Afghanistan and India by Pakistan's ISI military intelligence agency.
Now Islamabad has announced that Pakistan's military has ordered its forces to open fire if US forces launch another air or ground raid across the Afghanistan border. From the Associated Press:
...army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press that after U.S. helicopters ferried troops into a militant stronghold in the South Waziristan tribal region, the military told field commanders to prevent any similar raids.
"The orders are clear," Abbas said in an interview. "In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire."
McCain - Goofier By The Day
John McCain has turned into the guy who fell out of the Stupid Tree and hit every branch on the way down.
For weeks and weeks McCain has insisted that the fundamentals of the American economy are strong, strong enough in fact to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich despite the government's debt crisis.
Now that Fannie and Freddy have been nationalized, Merril Lynch snapped up and Lehman Brothers tossed into the latrine the Old Fool is dancing around trying to squirm out of it. From Salon.com:
On NBC's "Today" show, Matt Lauer, from the floor of the New "bloodbath" and asked Mr. McCain how he could say that "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" while his campaign released an ad saying that the economy is in crisis. "Clarify this for me," Mr. Lauer said. "It doesn't seem as if both things can be true."
Mr. McCain replied by saying that when he spoke about the fundamentals of the economy, he was referring to the workers -- which is different from how he has described the term before.
"Well it's obviously true that the workers of America are the fundamentals of our economy, and our strength and our future," he said. "And I believe in the American worker, and someone who disagrees with that -- it's fine. We are in crisis. We all know that. The excess, the greed and the corruption of Wall Street have caused us to have a situation which is going to affect every American. We are in a total crisis."
It's hilarious to see McCain rise up against the greed and corruption of Wall Street given that the late, great Merrill Lynch has been his Numero Uno campaign contributor. McCain is up to his Jockey shorts in Wall Street.
And just what has the crusty old bugger been smoking to make him believe that the workers of America are doing all that well? Their government has every American household in hock to the tune of $440,000 (read my earlier post "Right Wing Meltdown"). Savings are at all time lows, debt at all time highs, folks are losing their homes in foreclosures and their jobs to outsourcing.
John McCain is saying whatever comes out of his backside without even trying to reconcile the persistent contradictions. Jeebus, I sure hope the American people aren't dumb enough to put their country's future in the hands of this guy. He's like Dan Quayle minus the intellect.
Afghanisnam
I was mildly surprised that Harper got into the Afghanistan issue in the midst of this election cycle. He'd already neutralized the Libs on it and it was hard to see that he had much to gain by talking about the supposed, 2011 pullout of Canadian forces.
Will we have our combat troops out in 2011? I sure as hell hope so. Will we have contributed to a winning effort to create a viable Afghanistan? Not hardly.
We aren't there to win, never were. At best we've been babysitting an unresolved civil war.
I was doing some catchup reading this morning when I stumbled across this little gem in the September 8th edition of The New Yorker. It's from an article about Iraq and David Petraeus by Steve Coll entitled "The General's Dilemma."
Although not directed at Afghanistan, I was struck at how applicable were the comments attributed to former National Security Council senior director, Steven Simon:
...Unless the United States can craft a much more successful effort, reinforced by international diplomacy, to strengthen Iraq's central government, "we're midwifing the dissolution of the country," Steven Simon, a senior director of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration said.
He continued, "There are two things that every successful state in the Middle East has had to do to insure its viability. One is to stamp out warlordism, and the other is to suppress tribalism. Where that has not happened, you find unsuccessful states, like Yemen, for example - and now Iraq... We're creating dependencies in a decentralized state that will be at risk when we leave."
Stamp out warlordism? Suppress tribalism? In Afghanistan we handed the keys to the warlords. Thugs like Dostum run around Kabul shooting up the place and then standing defiant, surrounded by their militias, against the police. The warlords (guess what? they're Islamists too)dominate the legislature and ram through laws granting themselves amnesty for their barbarous crimes.
Without the backing of the warlords, Karzai would be hanging from a Kabul lamp post by now.
Tribalism? Afghanistan has never been more than a jury-rigged amalgam of tribalism. Do you think we've united the Uzbeks and Tajiks? Have we forged real bonds among the Pashtun, Hazara and Turkmen? Get real. We haven't even addressed that little terminal affliction.
Afghanistan is so hopelessly screwed up that it's far too late now to even hope for a successful outcome. Unfortunately we have another couple of years to keep feeding our soldiers into this gaping maw before we can get them out.
The one thing I want to ensure is that no one blames our soldiers for this failure. They've been set up, thrown into an unwinnable battle, from Day One. I expect five or ten years down the road there'll be a lot of justifiable bitterness among these veterans. We really ought to have stood up for them when it mattered. They didn't fail, we failed them.
Will we have our combat troops out in 2011? I sure as hell hope so. Will we have contributed to a winning effort to create a viable Afghanistan? Not hardly.
We aren't there to win, never were. At best we've been babysitting an unresolved civil war.
I was doing some catchup reading this morning when I stumbled across this little gem in the September 8th edition of The New Yorker. It's from an article about Iraq and David Petraeus by Steve Coll entitled "The General's Dilemma."
Although not directed at Afghanistan, I was struck at how applicable were the comments attributed to former National Security Council senior director, Steven Simon:
...Unless the United States can craft a much more successful effort, reinforced by international diplomacy, to strengthen Iraq's central government, "we're midwifing the dissolution of the country," Steven Simon, a senior director of the National Security Council during the Clinton administration said.
He continued, "There are two things that every successful state in the Middle East has had to do to insure its viability. One is to stamp out warlordism, and the other is to suppress tribalism. Where that has not happened, you find unsuccessful states, like Yemen, for example - and now Iraq... We're creating dependencies in a decentralized state that will be at risk when we leave."
Stamp out warlordism? Suppress tribalism? In Afghanistan we handed the keys to the warlords. Thugs like Dostum run around Kabul shooting up the place and then standing defiant, surrounded by their militias, against the police. The warlords (guess what? they're Islamists too)dominate the legislature and ram through laws granting themselves amnesty for their barbarous crimes.
Without the backing of the warlords, Karzai would be hanging from a Kabul lamp post by now.
Tribalism? Afghanistan has never been more than a jury-rigged amalgam of tribalism. Do you think we've united the Uzbeks and Tajiks? Have we forged real bonds among the Pashtun, Hazara and Turkmen? Get real. We haven't even addressed that little terminal affliction.
Afghanistan is so hopelessly screwed up that it's far too late now to even hope for a successful outcome. Unfortunately we have another couple of years to keep feeding our soldiers into this gaping maw before we can get them out.
The one thing I want to ensure is that no one blames our soldiers for this failure. They've been set up, thrown into an unwinnable battle, from Day One. I expect five or ten years down the road there'll be a lot of justifiable bitterness among these veterans. We really ought to have stood up for them when it mattered. They didn't fail, we failed them.
The Great Non-Election
I've decided not to post much, if anything, on the federal election. A couple of reasons for this: One, I live in an area where nobody really cares or even notices. The Reform/Alliance/Conservative incumbent doesn't even appear to have a challenger, Liberal or New Democrat. The second reason is that I don't want to say things about my party or its leader that may be discouraging to others.
So, instead of commenting on the election, I'll just keep on with my favourite axes - the hollow hypocrisy of conservatism, environmental issues and global instability.
See you when it's over.
So, instead of commenting on the election, I'll just keep on with my favourite axes - the hollow hypocrisy of conservatism, environmental issues and global instability.
See you when it's over.
Right-Wing Meltdown
True Conservatives worship at the altar of the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace. They believe if they just get government off the back of business, all will be well. Adam Smith told them as much in Book IV of his Wealth of Nations back in 1776.
The past century has shown that Smith's theory was about as realistic as Disney's castles. The economy does not function well when unregulated.
Brian Mulroney deregulated Canada's airline industry. That pitted two, reasonably good airlines against each other to the benefit of neither. They slashed themselves to ribbons, the winner being the one that bled out the slowest.
America has been hit with a succession of jolts since the Reagan era of deregulation: the Savings & Loan scandals (there were many in case you forgot); the "Dot.Com" bubble; the Enron/WorldCom et al meltdowns; and, now, the subprime mortgage/derivative fiasco that is already being felt around the world. In each of these disasters small investors got wiped out in droves and, in most, small taxpayers wound up saddled with the cleanup bills. In each case regulators looked the other way until it was too late. Their reliance on the Invisible Hand was misplaced.
The uber-right, including our own Furious Leader, often and loudly warn of "massive transfers of wealth" caused by the pernicious ways of those lefties. Where? When? The previous paragraph details four - count them, four - massive transfers of wealth that devastated the life savings and retirement funds of hundreds of thousands of little people - aided and abetted in each case by right-wing deregulation and lack of oversight.
Now, imagine what would have happened had George Bush succeeded in privatizing his nation's Social Security, funneling all those worker contributions into the very stock markets that are now in meltdown. Had he got his way this crisis could well have been both far deeper and more widespread.
The globalization hatched by Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney has likewise effected an enormous transfer of wealth. Western wealth stopped being invested in growing our own economies and, instead, was diverted into growing the economies of places like China. We surrendered the factories and the jobs that went with them in order that the rentier class could temporarily maximize their investment returns abroad.
In his book, American Theocracy, Republican notable Kevin Phillips outlines the inevitable collapse of American economic domination by illustrating how the changes underway in America since Reagan directly parallel the changes that led to the end of the Dutch, Spanish and British empires.
In each case the dominant nation outsourced its manufacturing sector and moved, instead, toward financialization. In the United States, the financial sector has long been the dominant economic engine. But, in outsourcing, what happens is that the dominant nation's wealth is gradually invested in growing another nation's economy. The dominant nation steadily weakens itself even as it strengthens its successor. This is another side of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. Short term gain, long term pain.
Globalization has taken on such a degree of fiscal intractability that no one dare challenge it, especially none from the conservative ranks where it was hatched. It stands as the fatal contradiction in conservative ideology. Surely conservatism is about preserving the status quo above all else. Since the Nixon/Reagan era that foundation has been perverted to make growth the dominant and guiding force. The status quo is founded on sustainability. Growth, by contrast, is not bound by any such criteria. It looks, instead, to immediate and short-term rewards while diminishing the significance or even ignoring long-term consequences.
Here's something to chew on. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House, America was the world's largest creditor nation. When he left, America had become the world's largest debtor nation. One president, two terms. Does that sound very conservative to you?
Since we've hitched our horse to America's wagon it would probably do us no harm to notice that all four wheels are beginning to fall off. These wheels are the four American deficits discussed by the United States Comptroller General, David Walker, in a 2007 speech given at the US Naval Academy. This is a bit long but it affects each of us directly and it's worth reading:
The truth is our country faces not one but four interrelated deficits. Together, these deficits have serious implications for our future role in the world, our future standard of living, our future domestic tranquility, and even our future national security.
The first is the federal budget deficit. Thanks to a combination of out-of-control federal spending, several major tax cuts, and expired budget controls, federal budget deficits have returned with a vengeance. Depending on which accounting method you use, the federal deficit last year ranged from $248 billion to $450 billion. The $248 billion number reflects the unified budget deficit—net of the Social Security surplus—which is the most commonly reported measure. This largely cash-based figure represents the difference between revenues and outlays for the government as a whole in a given year.
But it you look at the net operating cost of the federal government on an accrual basis, which is how companies report, you get a deficit of $450 billion. This number is more useful and, I would suggest, more realistic. Among other things, this number excludes the Social Security surpluses.
While these annual deficit numbers get a lot of press coverage, it’s the federal government’s mounting liabilities and unfunded commitments that pose the real threat. I’m talking about things like unfunded Social Security and Medicare benefits. In the last six years, the estimated total of these accumulating burdens has soared from about $20 trillion to about $50 trillion, primarily due to an increase in unfunded obligations associated with Medicare.
Fifty trillion dollars translates into an IOU of about $440,000 for every American household. Keep in mind that the median household income in this country is less than $50,000 a year. For the typical family, it’s like having a mortgage that’s 9½ times their annual income. And that mortgage doesn’t even come with a house! This burden is outpacing the net worth of most Americans and the growth rate of our economy.
The second deficit is our savings deficit. The savings rate among U.S. consumers has been falling for some time. In 2005, for the first time since 1933, the annual personal savings rate in this country reached negative territory. The savings deficit was even greater in 2006. We’ve returned to savings levels not seen since the depths of the Great Depression. In fact, America has among the lowest overall savings rates of any major industrialized nation.
Clearly, many Americans,like their federal government, are living beyond their means. This trend is particularly alarming in an aging society like ours. Obviously, those people who save more will live better in retirement. And given the problems plaguing our public and private retirement systems, personal investments will be even more critical to your retirement planning.
So if we aren’t saving here at home, who’s been underwriting our recent national spending spree? The answer is foreign players. And that brings me to America’s third deficit: our balance-of-payments deficit. America is simply spending more than it’s producing. As you’ve probably learned in economics classes here at the Academy, large government deficits translate into large trade deficits as well as a weakened dollar. So, it shouldn’t surprise you that in 2006, our trade deficit hit a record $763 billion and the value of the dollar has in fact declined.
While our own savings rates have plummeted, overseas savings rates have not. Overseas money has been pouring into the United States. Thanks to the high savings rates in China, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere, it’s been relatively cheap for Americans to borrow. But there’s a catch, and it’s a big one. Increasingly, we’re eating our seed corn and mortgaging our future. Furthermore, some of our leading lenders may not share our long-term national interests. Imagine what would happen to interest rates if some of these investors suddenly cut back on their appetite for U.S. Treasury notes.
Finally, there’s America’s leadership deficit, which is probably the most serious and sobering of all. At both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and on both sides of the political aisle, we need leaders who will face the facts, speak the truth, work together, and make tough choices.
http://www.gao.gov/cghome/d07600cg.pdf
Anyone who believes that the right is the party of sober, fiscal management would do well to review its record of the past four decades, both in the US and here in Canada. The record speaks for itself.
Mulroney, in his scant two terms, added 40% to Canada's national debt even though the economy was relatively strong during that period and his government had the added revenue stream of the Goods & Services Tax. The Canadian economy was left on the ropes and had to be turned around by Liberals John Chretien and Paul Martin. Common Sense Mike Harris left Ontario awash in deficit. Conservative Grant Devine left Saskatchewan on the verge of bankruptcy to be rescued by New Democrat Roy Romanow.
On both sides of the line the right-wing clown car keeps running around in the same circles and yet we keep buying the line that they're the ones who are responsible. And so we now find ourselves at the edge, staring down into the abyss of Right-Wing Meltdown. Oh when will we ever learn?
Monday, September 15, 2008
Chicken Licken and Carbon Tariffs
Business doesn't like the idea of carbon tariffs. So, what else is new? That didn't stop the National Spot from heralding the warning of falling skies received by the OECD from... why, from 36 business associations.
The Stain gleefully points out, in the first sentence, that carbon tariffs are favoured by the Libs in their Green Shift plan.
Apparently citing no particular evidence for the claim, Big Biz nevertheless warns that imposition of carbon tariffs aimed at punishing (make that "reforming") big emitters like China could lead to trade wars. Not quite the same sort of wars predicted by the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defence should global warming not be stopped but at least some sort of war, almost, - war by the seller against the buyer. Think that one through for a minute.
Now in the Fantasyland of globalization, the new home of Big Biz and the National Spot, the distinction between land of the buyer and land of the seller is heavily blurred. Vast confusion and boundless uncertainty. In the real world we know this is so much bunkum.
Carbon tariffs might just create jobs back at home again, levelling the playing field for domestic industries. Who knows, they might just compel countries like China, with their gigantic sovereign wealth funds, to invest a portion of their windfall on cleaning up their own industries.
Naturally, neither the one-dimensional business associations nor the equally one-dimensional National Stain championed any other means to achieve the same objective targeted by carbon tariffs. What they want is no action at all. Nothing that might impede the free flow of profit regardless of lasting environmental impact.
Dion is essentially right on the Green Shift and carbon pricing/carbon tariffs. It's too bad he's done such a lacklustre job of explaining and selling the policy that he's left it vulnerable to agitprop from second-rate outfits like the National Spot.
The Stain gleefully points out, in the first sentence, that carbon tariffs are favoured by the Libs in their Green Shift plan.
Apparently citing no particular evidence for the claim, Big Biz nevertheless warns that imposition of carbon tariffs aimed at punishing (make that "reforming") big emitters like China could lead to trade wars. Not quite the same sort of wars predicted by the Pentagon and British Ministry of Defence should global warming not be stopped but at least some sort of war, almost, - war by the seller against the buyer. Think that one through for a minute.
Now in the Fantasyland of globalization, the new home of Big Biz and the National Spot, the distinction between land of the buyer and land of the seller is heavily blurred. Vast confusion and boundless uncertainty. In the real world we know this is so much bunkum.
Carbon tariffs might just create jobs back at home again, levelling the playing field for domestic industries. Who knows, they might just compel countries like China, with their gigantic sovereign wealth funds, to invest a portion of their windfall on cleaning up their own industries.
Naturally, neither the one-dimensional business associations nor the equally one-dimensional National Stain championed any other means to achieve the same objective targeted by carbon tariffs. What they want is no action at all. Nothing that might impede the free flow of profit regardless of lasting environmental impact.
Dion is essentially right on the Green Shift and carbon pricing/carbon tariffs. It's too bad he's done such a lacklustre job of explaining and selling the policy that he's left it vulnerable to agitprop from second-rate outfits like the National Spot.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Cottle on Palin
Michelle Cottle is a powerful, successful woman. As senior editor of The New Republic, Cottle has made great strides in revitalizing her publication. She's also a strong, effective voice for feminism, something that's reflected in her take on Republican running mate Sarah Palin:
"...the strong, proud, fearless, gender-transcendent Hillary morphed into a disrespected, mistreated victim. Grievance feminism came roaring back with a vengeance. Clinton's supporters increasingly went from praising her gender-neutral success to celebrating her triumph over a male-dominated system and decrying the patriarchal forces still aligned against her. Obama wasn't just beating Clinton; he was behaving, as Hillary surrogate Geraldine Ferraro charged, in a "terribly sexist" fashion.
...just when you thought it was all over and the recovery could begin, Republicans handed us Sarah Palin.
The Palin pick is disheartening on so many levels. For starters, even what little we know about the Alaska governor's policy views is enough to make a traditional feminist weep. The staunchly conservative Palin not only opposes abortion rights (even in cases of rape or incest), she also supports abstinence-only sex education and takes a strict free-market approach toward health care.
Of course, these days, the feminist mantle is claimed by pro-life conservatives and pro-choice progressives alike. Palin herself is a proud member of Feminists for Life. Feminism seems no longer to denote a particular set of values or ideological agenda; it is merely a label appropriated to proclaim that one is committed to the best interests of women--whatever one believes those to be.
By far the most insulting aspect of Palin's candidacy is the McCain team's hope that placing a ballsy female on the ticket will attract some former Hillary supporters by stoking their gender-based resentments against Obama and the DNC. Palin has been happy to encourage this strategy by cheering Hillary's "eighteen million cracks in the glass ceiling" and offering herself up as a way to help women go even farther. Sadly, some Hillary dead-enders may be so blinded by bitterness that they fall for this nonsense. The rest of us should be outraged by a strategy so nakedly founded on the premise that Hillary gals were driven more by identity politics than by any interest in their candidate's values, ideology, or qualifications.
Am I suggesting that all of these setbacks for feminism are Palin's fault? Or Hillary's? Or that there is nothing at all to celebrate in their achievements? Of course not. Neither would I argue for a second that these smart, ambitious women shouldn't be pushing as hard as they can to get what they want out of life. But, as with any enduring movement, feminism has its shining moments and its discouraging ones. I just wish someone had warned me ahead of time that this election season would wind up falling with such a thud into the latter category."
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Lyin' His Ass Off Steve
Why does Steve Harper lie so damned much?
Steve knows that lying is the new political currency. It pays off big time with his committed supporters, who take pretty much everything he says as gospel, and with those just too dumb or lazy to see through him. Harper, as a student of his American Idols, Bush & Cheney, knows that lies work, if you tell them enough and get them in the media.
Politicians who rely on lies rather than sound policies and the persuasion of leadership are essentially undemocratic. They seek to win by manipulating voters, reaching through to their fears and prejudices and greed. That pretty much describes the schoolyard bully types like our own Steve Harper.
Now I don't expect Steve to come out admitting he's an absolute control freak with a blistering bad temper but his TV spots depicting him as just a humble, placid, regular guy are stomach churning. It's not as though he even wants to be that sort of man, anything but. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig!
The uber-right have embraced this idea that it's okay to pull the wool over the voters' eyes at every turn, in every way. Is it really that much different if you get a vote by lying than if you just straight out buy it? Surely one currency is the same as the other.
Steve knows that lying is the new political currency. It pays off big time with his committed supporters, who take pretty much everything he says as gospel, and with those just too dumb or lazy to see through him. Harper, as a student of his American Idols, Bush & Cheney, knows that lies work, if you tell them enough and get them in the media.
Politicians who rely on lies rather than sound policies and the persuasion of leadership are essentially undemocratic. They seek to win by manipulating voters, reaching through to their fears and prejudices and greed. That pretty much describes the schoolyard bully types like our own Steve Harper.
Now I don't expect Steve to come out admitting he's an absolute control freak with a blistering bad temper but his TV spots depicting him as just a humble, placid, regular guy are stomach churning. It's not as though he even wants to be that sort of man, anything but. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig!
The uber-right have embraced this idea that it's okay to pull the wool over the voters' eyes at every turn, in every way. Is it really that much different if you get a vote by lying than if you just straight out buy it? Surely one currency is the same as the other.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Stephane's Defining Moment
The challenge facing Stephane Dion is to prevent Harper from framing the election on neutral issues.
Harper is going to play on the economy, arguing that Dion's fanciful ideas would only kick us when we're already going down on an international downturn.
The downturn, call it a recession if you like, is a global phenomenon - not Harper's doing, not the Tories' fault. All the big headline stories have come out of the US or Britain. Just one of those things but a spillover crisis in any case that needs a down to earth leader to fend off. "Down to earth" as in none of that nonsense about global warming or carbon taxes.
How will Dion refute that in a way that resonates with the electorate? He's already allowed the Libs to be neutralized on Afghanistan. Not only are the Conservatives comfortably off the hook but they also get to boast about revitalizing the armed forces. The Conservative scandals have died down over the summer and won't surface again until well after the election - if at all. Harper is going to have the gullible scared crazy about economic hard times. The last thing on their minds will be ambitious programmes to fight global warming.
If Dion can't reframe the election on issues on which the Tories are vulnerable or weakest, he's left to whine about Harper's lies. We may find them outrageous but don't expect the voting public to turn on the Conservatives over them.
Should Mr. Dion not go on the attack and effectively skewer Harper it's hard to see how the Tories will be defeated. One thing I'm sure of - if the Libs try to wage their campaign on the Green Shift, they risk spinning themselves into a corner to the delight of Harper and Layton alike.
I've always had serious reservations about Mr. Dion but now, at least, he has a chance to prove his defenders and supporters right. I sure hope he proves me wrong.
Harper is going to play on the economy, arguing that Dion's fanciful ideas would only kick us when we're already going down on an international downturn.
The downturn, call it a recession if you like, is a global phenomenon - not Harper's doing, not the Tories' fault. All the big headline stories have come out of the US or Britain. Just one of those things but a spillover crisis in any case that needs a down to earth leader to fend off. "Down to earth" as in none of that nonsense about global warming or carbon taxes.
How will Dion refute that in a way that resonates with the electorate? He's already allowed the Libs to be neutralized on Afghanistan. Not only are the Conservatives comfortably off the hook but they also get to boast about revitalizing the armed forces. The Conservative scandals have died down over the summer and won't surface again until well after the election - if at all. Harper is going to have the gullible scared crazy about economic hard times. The last thing on their minds will be ambitious programmes to fight global warming.
If Dion can't reframe the election on issues on which the Tories are vulnerable or weakest, he's left to whine about Harper's lies. We may find them outrageous but don't expect the voting public to turn on the Conservatives over them.
Should Mr. Dion not go on the attack and effectively skewer Harper it's hard to see how the Tories will be defeated. One thing I'm sure of - if the Libs try to wage their campaign on the Green Shift, they risk spinning themselves into a corner to the delight of Harper and Layton alike.
I've always had serious reservations about Mr. Dion but now, at least, he has a chance to prove his defenders and supporters right. I sure hope he proves me wrong.
Sunday, September 07, 2008
More Conservative Campaign Slogans
Well, with an election called I thought I'd revive some of my campaign gags. So here are some more Conservative election signs I thought up. What are your favourites? Maybe we should get the best ones printed up as bumper stickers?
Cadman Said "No" But Why Let Principles Get In Your Way? Vote Harper
Steve Knows, So Does Brian - "Dead Men Tell No Tales" - Vote Harper
Gag the Canadian Forces, Because We're Winning In Afghanistan - Vote Harper
Steve Will Tell You EVERYTHING You Need to Know - Vote Harper
Gag Environment Canada and Global Warming Will Go Away - Vote Harper
Stephen Harper - the Reform/Alliance/Conservative/Republican Party of Canada - Vote Harper
America's Bound to Have More Wars Before Long - Don't Miss Out - Vote Harper
Steve's Got Canada Under Control, You're Next - Vote Harper
Democracy Is Just A State of Mind - In StevieLand - Vote Harper
Best Friends ARE Whipping Boys - Keep America Happy - Vote Harper
Cadman Said "No" But Why Let Principles Get In Your Way? Vote Harper
Steve Knows, So Does Brian - "Dead Men Tell No Tales" - Vote Harper
Gag the Canadian Forces, Because We're Winning In Afghanistan - Vote Harper
Steve Will Tell You EVERYTHING You Need to Know - Vote Harper
Gag Environment Canada and Global Warming Will Go Away - Vote Harper
Stephen Harper - the Reform/Alliance/Conservative/Republican Party of Canada - Vote Harper
America's Bound to Have More Wars Before Long - Don't Miss Out - Vote Harper
Steve's Got Canada Under Control, You're Next - Vote Harper
Democracy Is Just A State of Mind - In StevieLand - Vote Harper
Best Friends ARE Whipping Boys - Keep America Happy - Vote Harper
He WAS Created, His Kind Doesn't Evolve - Vote Harper
Tory Campaign Slogans
I've been thinking about the coming election. Maybe I'll switch sides and support the Harper Conservatives. I've even been working on some campaign slogans for them:
Help Steve Help Big Oil - Vote Harper!
Save the Endangered Tar Sands - Vote Harper!
Hang'em All - Vote Harper!
Screw Global Warming, Golf in February - Vote Harper!
It's Your Canada, Your Grandkids Can Damn Well Get Their Own - Vote Harper!
Preserve Everything the Bush Administration Stands For - Vote Harper!
Vote Harper - Dick Cheney Will Shoot You in the Face If You Don't!
Vote Harper - He Loves Dick!
Alberta Uber Alles - Vote Harper!
If He Was Any Further Right, He'd Fall Right Out Of The Tree - Vote Harper!
Hidden Agenda? Wanna See It? - Vote Harper!
Don't Let the Bush Legacy Die in 2008 - Vote Harper!
Earth? It's Just One Big Socialist Plot - Vote Harper!
We're Number One, That's Why They're the Third World - Vote Harper!
Help Steve Help Big Oil - Vote Harper!
Save the Endangered Tar Sands - Vote Harper!
Hang'em All - Vote Harper!
Screw Global Warming, Golf in February - Vote Harper!
It's Your Canada, Your Grandkids Can Damn Well Get Their Own - Vote Harper!
Preserve Everything the Bush Administration Stands For - Vote Harper!
Vote Harper - Dick Cheney Will Shoot You in the Face If You Don't!
Vote Harper - He Loves Dick!
Alberta Uber Alles - Vote Harper!
If He Was Any Further Right, He'd Fall Right Out Of The Tree - Vote Harper!
Hidden Agenda? Wanna See It? - Vote Harper!
Don't Let the Bush Legacy Die in 2008 - Vote Harper!
Earth? It's Just One Big Socialist Plot - Vote Harper!
We're Number One, That's Why They're the Third World - Vote Harper!
Mulroney Wasn't Really His Pal - Vote Harper!
The Environment is for Pussies - Vote Harper!
You Gotta Die Sometime - Vote Harper!
Afghanisnam - When You Missed The Real Fun In Iraq - Vote Harper!
Friday, September 05, 2008
Steinem on Palin
Another feminist icon has denounced McCain VP nominee, Sarah Palin. This time it's Gloria Steinem. Excerpted from Steinem's op-ed piece in the LA Times:
"This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters.
Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for - and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."
This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.
She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.
Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.
So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.
Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.
Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.
This could be huge."
"This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.
Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters.
Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for - and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, "Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs."
This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.
She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on "God, guns and gays" ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.
So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.
Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.
I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.
So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, "women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership," so he may be voting for Palin's husband.
Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.
Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.
And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.
This could be huge."
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Warner on Palin
At a time when merely questioning a candidate's qualifications for the job means running the risk of being branded a misogynist, I was relieved to read Judith Warner's rebuke of Sarah Palin in The New York Times. Here are some excerpts:
It turns out there was something more nauseating than the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate this past week. It was the tone of the acclaim that followed her acceptance speech.
“Drill, baby, drill,” clapped John Dickerson, marveling at Palin's ability to speak and smile at the same time as an indication of her unexpected depths and unsuspected strengths. “It was clear Palin was having fun, and it’s hard to have fun if you’re scared or a lightweight,” he wrote in Slate.
Thus began the official public launch of our country’s now most-prominent female politician. The condescension – damning with faint praise – was reminiscent of the more overt misogyny of Samuel Johnson.
“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs,” the wit once observed. “It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.”
Palin sounded, at times, like she was speaking a foreign language as she gave voice to the beautifully crafted words that had been prepared for her on Wednesday night.
But that wasn’t held against her. Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.
Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?
Why does this woman – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so “real”?
Because the Republicans, very clearly, believe that real people are idiots. This disdain for their smarts shows up in the whole way they’ve cast this race now, turning a contest over economic and foreign policy into a culture war of the Real vs. the Elites. It’s a smoke and mirrors game aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the party’s tax policies have helped create an elite that’s more distant from “the people” than ever before. And from the fact that the party’s dogged allegiance to up-by-your-bootstraps individualism — an individualism exemplified by Palin, the frontierswoman who somehow has managed to “balance” five children and her political career with no need for support — is leading to a culture-wide crack-up.
One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to. This need isn’t limited to women; it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn’t new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them.
But in the past, it was possible to fill that need through empathetic connection. Few Depression-era voters could “relate” to Franklin Roosevelt’s patrician background, notes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It was his ability to connect to them that made them feel they could connect to him,” she told me in a phone interview.
“This election is not about issues,” Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager said this week. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” That’s a scary thought. For the takeaway is so often base, a reflection more of people’s fears and insecurities than of our hopes and dreams.
We’re not likely to get a worthy female president anytime soon.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/the-mirrored-ceiling/?hp
It turns out there was something more nauseating than the nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate this past week. It was the tone of the acclaim that followed her acceptance speech.
“Drill, baby, drill,” clapped John Dickerson, marveling at Palin's ability to speak and smile at the same time as an indication of her unexpected depths and unsuspected strengths. “It was clear Palin was having fun, and it’s hard to have fun if you’re scared or a lightweight,” he wrote in Slate.
Thus began the official public launch of our country’s now most-prominent female politician. The condescension – damning with faint praise – was reminiscent of the more overt misogyny of Samuel Johnson.
“A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs,” the wit once observed. “It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.”
Palin sounded, at times, like she was speaking a foreign language as she gave voice to the beautifully crafted words that had been prepared for her on Wednesday night.
But that wasn’t held against her. Thanks to the level of general esteem that greeted her ascent to the podium, it seems we’ve all got to celebrate the fact that America’s Hottest Governor (Princess of the Fur Rendezvous 1983, Miss Wasilla 1984) could speak at all.
Could there be a more thoroughgoing humiliation for America’s women?
Why does this woman – who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so “real”?
Because the Republicans, very clearly, believe that real people are idiots. This disdain for their smarts shows up in the whole way they’ve cast this race now, turning a contest over economic and foreign policy into a culture war of the Real vs. the Elites. It’s a smoke and mirrors game aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the party’s tax policies have helped create an elite that’s more distant from “the people” than ever before. And from the fact that the party’s dogged allegiance to up-by-your-bootstraps individualism — an individualism exemplified by Palin, the frontierswoman who somehow has managed to “balance” five children and her political career with no need for support — is leading to a culture-wide crack-up.
One of the worst poisons of the American political climate right now, the thing that time and again in recent years has led us to disaster, is the need people feel for leaders they can “relate” to. This need isn’t limited to women; it brought us after all, two terms of George W. Bush. And it isn’t new; Americans have always needed to feel that their leaders were, on some level, people like them.
But in the past, it was possible to fill that need through empathetic connection. Few Depression-era voters could “relate” to Franklin Roosevelt’s patrician background, notes historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “It was his ability to connect to them that made them feel they could connect to him,” she told me in a phone interview.
“This election is not about issues,” Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager said this week. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.” That’s a scary thought. For the takeaway is so often base, a reflection more of people’s fears and insecurities than of our hopes and dreams.
We’re not likely to get a worthy female president anytime soon.
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/the-mirrored-ceiling/?hp
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Down'n Out For a Few Days
It's time to tackle the old computer/new computer tango. XP to the dreaded Vista. Files to transfer, etc. I'm told it may take a few days before all's well again. See you all soon.
MoS
MoS
Monday, September 01, 2008
Miss Perception
Oh John, Oh Sarah!
I'm beginning to wonder whether John McCain wasn't having another "senior moment" when he chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. McCain, never one to get caught up in trivial detail - such as Sunni versus Shiite or whether he's got five homes or seven - didn't seem to notice that Saint Sarah, hockey mom of America, has a few stains on her apron.
It seems that, so long as the woman is a political opponent, Mrs. Palin will laugh heartily enough when someone calls that other woman a "bitch", or a "cancer" or just plain fat. As the Huffington Post reports, the Repug veep nominee did just that during a talk show appearance earlier this year that the Anchorage Daily News called, "plain and simple one of the most unprofessional, childish and inexcusable performances I've ever seen from a politician."
"Early on in the conversation before Palin started to crack up, Lester referred to Sen. Green as a jealous woman and a cancer. Palin, who knows full well Lyda Green is a cancer survivor, didn't do what any decent person would do, say, "Bob, that's going too far."
But as the conversation moved on, Lester intensified his attack on Green.
But as the conversation moved on, Lester intensified his attack on Green.
Lester questioned Green's motherhood, asking Palin if the senator cares about her own kids. Palin laughs.
Then Lester clearly sets the stage for what he is about to say by warning his large audience and Palin. He says, "Governor you can't say this but I will, Lyda Green is a cancer and a b----." Palin laughs for the second time.
What were teenage boys thinking when they heard the governor laugh at someone being called a b----? How about the teenage girls who look up to Palin. What did they think when they heard her laugh?
But there is more. Lester then describes Green's chair as big and cushy. A clear reference to the senator's weight. Palin laughs a third time. She's just having a grand old time.
Palin was clearly enjoying every second of Lester's vicious attack on her political rival."
Mrs. Governor Palin later released a statement. "The Governor called Senator Green to explain that she does not condone name-calling in any way and apologized if there was a perception that the comment was attributed to the Governor."
It's sort of like how Mrs. Palin addresses the "perception" that two dozen phone calls from her governor's office to urge the commissioner of Public Security to fire trooper Wooten might be an attempt to twist arms, just because Wooten was in a custody battle with Palin's sister.
It doesn't take too many incidents like this before a real perception emerges and, in the case of this Repug, it's a perception that comes with its own odour.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
